//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10: Blind-sided 
// Story: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers (Enhanced & Augmented) 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

Streak turned out to be the name taken by Running Mead's pegasus spy and messenger. The pale blue pony's mane was carefully spiked today; each of the various different shades of blue formed a separate shaft of color. The whole outrageous 'do vibrated as she fluttered down before me, giving me an eye-level view of her cutie mark: a real head-scratcher. It was an oval brown donut with two brass spikes at 11 and 1 o'clock, each spike topped with a ball.

I had just exited the university and trotted through the adjacent restaurant and bookseller district of Canterlot. She looked like a punked-out thug, considering the gaudy gold chains she also wore (likely gold-plated by the way they lightly lay against her neck and the clinking sounds they made). I felt justified as I lifted my nose and walked right on by as if she were invisible.

Streak didn't take the hint. I heard her hooves clatter on the cobblestones behind me, as the scent of caramelized alfalfa from two hay burger joints competed for the attention of the empty stomachs of the scholastically-challenged textbook set. At least she waited for the cloud of students around us to thin–entirely her fault—before she said, "There's work for ya."

I considered whether to cast  Don't Look Don't See Don't Hear or Teleport, queuing quick draw transforms for both, but activating neither. As she suddenly trotted up on my left, I turned right onto Ponyville Way and headed toward Cliffside and the Strand. A plenitude of late afternoon deliveries left me in traffic surrounded by clattering ponies pulling creaking and squeaking wagons, taxis, and vans. Streak fluttered off; I heard her wings whoosh behind me as she leapt away. I didn't mind the rattle of tack or the huff and puff—or the smell of the sweaty predominantly earth pony livery class. Every city had its life blood.

Blood was a part of everypony's life—mine especially, though I did everything I could to minimize its flow. Work, Running Mead, and morbid thoughts attracted one another… I walked, determined to think happier thoughts.

"I know!" I said to myself suddenly, tapping a hoof hard against the pavement and attracting the glance of a black-suited yellow unicorn. She walked beside a cart of clattering bottles of red wine rolling by itself in her violet magic. I tasted the magic, which was probably Motivation, a mathematical self-reciprocating derivative of Levitate and yet another spell I hadn't mastered. "The Fell Swoop," I finished.

The skin around hauler's violet eyes crinkled. "A good restaurant."

"I know!"

"I have a delivery there later, but this is my turn."

I slowed and let her cut ahead of me, thinking of oat shell pasta stuffed with cheese and pesto. My last silver bit might cover it and gird me for my next job later tonight. Already in Cliffside, two blocks from the Strand, with the traffic thinned to one lone work pony hauling construction materials and a chatting unicorn couple, Streak dive bombed in front of me, startling everypony including me. 

I reflexively quick-draw-teleported seven pony lengths and dangerously close to the brick wall of a brownstone. Worse, I materialized a pony length in the air.

I landed, not flexing my knees in time, and hurting my right rear leg as a result. My bad one. The jolt turned everything from my postern to my frog to pins and needles. The injury from Hooflyn had all but healed, but I still wore a prosthesis in my horseshoe to protect my frog from stones I might not feel cutting into me. 

I glared as Streak approached on my right and noted the other ponies hastening away. I knew she didn't know what she'd done, and she didn't act on her own accord. 

I huffed, redirecting my anger at a certain gangster boss, and trotted left down the side street.

I heard her thrash the air and go airborne. To my disgust, her flying made me think of Sunburst. In saving me from being crushed by a tower of tomes and grimoires, he had suddenly discovered a new spell (besides learning he could levitate a hundred books at once): self-levitation. I thought enviously of what I called Pegasus Simulation. One day I would figure out that heretofore unknown spell and wished I had it now. The restaurant was four blocks away. I increased my gait to a canter, trying not to limp as my leg threatened to stiffen up.

Streak landed with a clatter of hooves as I passed an alley on a street of whitewashed warehouses and fancy loft apartments, currently—neigh I say it—deserted.

In my anger, my deeper Grimoire voice asserted itself. "You're herding me!"

"You were ignoring the boss's orders." Her indigo eyes gleamed with amusement.

I wasn't going to blurt was not. Instead, I affected a tired sigh and said, "Don't you know better than to contact me in a good part of town?"

"What?" she asked, then continued in a pouty voice, "Ya trying to protect your secret identity like some comic book hero?" She embellished it with a musical, "Wah, Wah."

"Not original." I hadn't thought of Citron since he'd disappeared—my fault... but then he had followed me against my wishes to protect me, and had volunteered to do the dangerous thing while injured. He'd had a crush on me, had been a kid even if older, and was a delinquent, but intensely professional when it mattered. I'd taught him my best tricks and he'd been my bodyguard when I could only pay attention to Carne Asada. The geeky nerd loved comics. Her evoking my personal ghosts didn't make me more malleable! In a low voice, I added, "You ruin my ability to do what I am here in Canterlot to do and I'll leave town, and good riddance. The boss won't be happy with you."

"The boss told me where to go and to fetch you as soon as ya showed up."

"Then he's a foal."

She smirked. "I'd watch your mouth wuz I you."

This time my sigh was pure exasperation. "Fine. What's this high priority job, anyway?"

"There's this mauve unicorn irritating the boss real bad that goes by the name Fellows. He's got a double unicorn-bust cutie mark and lives at 233 Canton. The boss wants you to eliminate the two-faced son of a dragon."

"Did you mean eliminate as in eliminate?"

"Yes, pissy Missy prissy filly." Baby talk? "Da K word."

"I don't sell product and I don't—" I couldn't even say kill ponies. That didn't mean I wasn't responsible for plenty of deaths—indirectly by my actions and directly by my indecisiveness and gullibility. I would never forget what I'd seen, nor the tally in kept in my head I wanted never to grow again. Again, evoking ghosts! My rage grew like a summer storm, hot and quick.

"But ya'd be so good at it," she said, smiling but looking slightly away, obviously avoiding my angry glare.

"I won't do it; not negotiable!"

"The boss insists."

I cursed. One of my team as a bodyguard for Carne Asada, Broomhill Dare, had made a game of teaching me intricate profanity because none would escape my lips thanks to my upbringing. This foul order, however, deserved it. I proceeded to spew most of it—despite the unlikely familial relationships and impossible physical geometry issues it proposed—as I turned toward the narrow alley behind me. 

I knew Streak's wingspan would prevent immediate pursuit.  I remembered queuing Teleport—