Red Harvest stepped into the apartment, head swiveling until he caught sight Ruby Quartz, who laid still sprawled in a heap on the floor, her hind leg still occasionally twitching. Some kind of acrid, sour smell wrinkled my nose. He gazed down at her and raised one hoof with purpose.
“No,” I said. “She’s not involved. Leave it be.”
He turned towards me, but his hoof dropped back down. “Fine.” He took another look at my hooves securely tied to the bedposts and shook his head ruefully. “Didn’t think you’d be into this kind of thing, Slate.”
“Ha ha. Extenuating circumstances.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.” His feathers ruffled slightly and I saw the glint of something beneath them. “But we’ve got more important things to discuss.” A thin smile spread across his muzzle “I suppose this is the part where I ask you to cooperate so this goes easier for both of us.”
“Right, the part where I tell you to go to hell. I’ve always liked that part.”
“Don’t be heated. This is just business.” He trotted closer, but halted barely out of reach. “I’ve got a client who’d like very dearly to speak with you.”
“Look Red, just let me walk this time, and I’ll be good for whatever you need. This is too big. Believe it or not, the future of Equestria’s at stake.”
“Oh, I believe it,” he said. “I just don’t care.”
I ran my tongue across my teeth. “I see. So that’s how it is?”
"Just business,” he repeated, taking one step further as a crystal slid out from his feathers, riding across the leading edge of an unfurling wing with that unsettling dexterity that pegasi possessed.
It wasn’t a question of seeing a good chance as much as it was feeling that I wouldn’t have better. I lashed out, throwing as much of my body forward as I could as I kicked awkwardly at his midsection. It was close. If he hadn’t leaned back at the last moment, I would have gotten a piece of him. Instead, my body jerked against the bindings, sending a fresh wave of pain lancing through my abused back as it voiced loud complaint at the motion.
“Nicely done,” he said. “Almost worked.”
I ground my teeth together as the flashing pain subsided. “Worth a try.” My eyes didn’t leave the crystal as it curved to the tip of the wing, in position to be flicked in my direction. That would be game over. I didn’t know what it’d do, but it’d be nasty. “Actually…”
He paused, eyes narrowed. “Hm?”
“Maybe it worked out well enough after all.”
He snorted. “You never change, Slate. I would call you the perennial optimist, but that’s selling you too high.”
“Guy’s gotta aim for something.”
“You’re just stalling for time, like always.”
I smiled. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
Ruby Quartz swung the pan and landed a home run right on Red’s skull. The sound was less a gong and more a sickening thwack, but Red felt it just fine. He fell like a puppet with its strings cut.
She stood over him, chest heaving as she gulped for breath. I noticed a tinge of green in her face.
Enough years on the DEqSec beat and you picked up on a few bits of useful trivia. Like how changeling anatomy differed from a pony’s. You don’t use electricity against a bug, for one. They’ll go down, alright, but shake it off just as fast.
“Good job, kid,” I said.
She gingerly prodded at Red, making sure he was down for the count. “We need to get out of here.”
“Then you’ll need to untie me.” She nodded sharply and moved out of view to my side to work on the knots. My eyes flickered over to the folder on the table. “Now do you trust me?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said without hesitation.
“At least we’re on the same page, then.”
My right hoof came free and then my left. I rubbed at the rawness in my coat where the rope had been.
Red Harvest’s arrival had underscored the dangers of our situation. The guards wouldn’t be too far behind. “We split up,” I said.
“No way.”
I rolled over and off the bed, landing on my hooves. I had to stifle a groan and gingerly stretched out my complaining muscles.
“They’ll be looking for us. Better to keep apart. Pencil? Paper?”
She nodded to the counter, and I trotted over. My mouthwriting wasn’t the best, but I scrawled an address on the back of a grocery receipt.
“Here,” I said. “Do you know where this is?”
She glanced down and then back up, a frown still creasing her face. “Yes.”
“We regroup there. It’s a friend of mine, just tell him I sent you and that I’m calling in a favor. It’ll be safe.”
“And then we’ll figure out what to do?”
“Yeah.” I glanced over to the folder. “I’ll take the evidence for now.”
“Okay.”
I was surprised she didn’t fight me on it. But you don’t buck a horse’s gift in the mouth. Or something like that.
“Then let’s go.”
“Wait,” she said. I stopped at the door to look back at her. One of her hooves rubbed her other foreleg as she bit her lip. Her mouth opened and closed. “You’ll be there?”
“Thirty minutes. An hour if I run into trouble.”
She exhaled slowly. “Okay. Good luck.”
I felt a little bad about having to lie to her.
Twenty minutes later I stood outside of the old PHAIR headquarters in the market district. I could have made the trip in ten but I had come too far to risk accidentally rounding a corner into a guard patrol. I took the back streets, kept a low profile.
As soon as I saw the grocer’s, I knew Raven was there. Her muscle stood in the doorway, his beady eyes scanning the crowds more in boredom than vigilance. The passing ponies afforded him plenty of space.
I wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone. Not even Raven, honestly, but necessity’s the mother of strange bedfellows. If it was all the same, I preferred to leave her tough out of the conversation.
I took a side-alley a few stores down and followed it until it hit an intersection with another smaller service road. No foot traffic there, no glass storefronts, just unpainted doors and garbage bins. PHAIR had to be a pretty big operation, so I assumed they had the majority of the second floor of their building. And one of the windows was open a crack.
It only took a stack of two garbage bins to climb that high. Unsteady, but serviceable. I squeezed through the window and into the offices.
They were cleared out, completely. Not a stick of furniture. Even the wallpaper had been ripped out in huge chunks. When the Royal Guards investigated a scene, they took to it with the enthusiasm of a foal and the finesse of a drunken minotaur.
I heard voices, and kept my hoofsteps light as I slowly crept towards a doorway.
“—don’t have anything, what exactly do you expect me to do?”
That was Raven, sounding annoyed. Which was to say sounding normal, from what I knew of her.
“There’s another way we bring this all to light.”
The second voice I immediately knew I had heard before. It threw up all kinds of alarm bells in my head, but I couldn’t quite put my hoof on why.
“Oh?”
“Create a big enough mess that the whole department has to be turned upside down.”
I couldn’t source it for the life of me. It was a griffon talon on the chalkboard of every instinct I possessed. They weren’t in the next room. I kept moving, staying silent as I proceeded onwards, the voices growing louder.
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“Rogue detective goes mad, rampages throughout the city. What horror, what tragedy! How could this happen? A full investigation is demanded, and in the process, certain irregularities are discovered.”
A heavy pause. I was close. They had to be just ahead, and I was a few feet from the door.
“What exactly are you saying?”
I leaned forward, peeking through the door as the two ponies came into view.
“That there’s one more thing I need from you. Thanks in advance for your cooperation.”
It was Raven. And me.
That’s why I knew the voice, even if I had never heard it not filtered through my own head.
The realization came too late. I saw the blade float through the air in a magic aura that matched my own, only to plunge forward into Raven’s chest with lethal precision.
She didn’t scream or shout or cry as her head tilted down to see the red rose blooming around a steel stem. Her mouth just moved, lips framing an unheard “Oh.” There was a thump as her knees hit the floor, and then a louder thump from her falling to her side.
The knife pulled back with a sickening wet sound and the doppleganger casually floated it over to wipe the blood off on Raven’s light coat.
“Hold it!” I yelled. I called upon my magic and the fog was still there in my head, but permeable. I could do— I had to do something.
My double turned, and the slight smile on his face only grew as he saw me.
“This is a pleasant surprise.”
“Get away from her!”
From the red stain pooling around her, she was bleeding out fast. Her eyelashes fluttered and then went still with a chilling suddenness.
“I think it’s a little late for Raven.” He trotted over to a window, reaching down to unlock and open it.
I fired a blast at him. I didn’t have the presence of mind to know what it was, suppressive or downright lethal. It didn’t matter. A glimmering shield flashed around him and he grinned back at me.
“I’ll leave you to handle the rest,” he said. “Thanks for all the help.”
Green flames flashed around him and then he was a pegasus, grey, nondescript. I fired again and it crackled across his shield. He had to have some kind of lasting enchant, some kind of good shielding. I could have broken through if I was fresh, but at the moment managing attack spells felt like trying to tie a pair of bootlaces with my tail.
He was through the window, and I galloped across the room to Raven’s body.
One look at her and I knew he was right. She was already gone, far too still, not breathing at all. I moved to the window.
I could see him taking wing, keeping low and fast over the rooftops, already almost out of view. The anger burning inside was something cold and remote, as I analyzed the situation.
I knew he was a changeling. And if I believed Raven herself, there weren’t too many in the city. Ruby Quartz, of course, but she had been locked up for most of this. Five others? Unless the imminent plans meant there were more moving in now. But I had met one other changeling in the past few days. Had met him twice. And I had left him a present on his right foreleg.
It was stupid. I could have used it to track him down, to play it smart, do it right. But Raven lay dying on the floor and I had gone blood-simple. I wanted to make him pay. No. To make him hurt.
With all of the power I could muster, I flooded that circuit with an overload of raw magic. I felt it as the tracking ring burst around his foreleg, and heard the crack over the noise of the market. The mid-air explosion knocked him out of his flight path and I saw him tailspin into the top of a building.
I couldn’t afford to hope I had really taken him down, but it was a crash he would have a hard time walking away from. At least on all four legs. See, changelings were tough, but enough concentrated force? A detonation like that? I knew from past experience just what it took to crack through exoskeleton like a twig, leaving that limb limp, a useless wet noodle.
A hard smile crossed my face. I noted the location. I could make it there, try to track him down. It wouldn’t be easy but he would be moving slow, and I had been hunting changelings for years. For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I felt good about it.
Then two tons of bricks slammed into my side. I was thrown across the room, flying into the next wall with enough force to leave a dent. My ears rang and I had to shake my head to get the room to stop spinning. When it did I saw Raven’s bodyguard bending over her body.
“You killed her!” he screamed out, rage mixing with pain in his voice.
A flash of movement directed my attention from the elephant-sized pony in the room. Over his shoulder, I could see straight out to another window on the back side of the building. Red Harvest hung in the air, wings beating to keep him aloft. His eyes were wide with surprise as they met mine, then his mouth jerked open in a grimace.
I realized the ringing in my ears hadn’t stopped. Then it clicked. It wasn’t just being thrown into a wall. The siren was one member of a unicorn guard detachment running a klaxon spell as they rushed to the scene of a crime. Not a common sound, not in this part of the town.
The specifics of my situation crystallized in my mind. The jaws of the trap closing around me.
An expletive rose to mind. I decided the circumstances deserved punching it up a notch.
“Fuck,” I muttered, as the huge stallion charged across the room with murder in his eyes.