Chapter 628 | You’re Shorter In Real Life [GT BONUS]

Chapter 628: 628 | You’re Shorter In Real Life [GT BONUS]

The first call on Saturday came in at 9:14, and it was a fire on Delancey again, because apparently that street had a personal grudge against the concept of intact drywall.

Dralun was out of his chair before the dispatcher finished the address. I grabbed my jacket off the hook and followed him down the black stairs, past Grandma Lin, who shoved a pork bun into my hand without looking up from her cleaver.

The building was a narrow three-story brick walk-up two doors down from the pawn shop that I was now morally certain Lamia had cased from every rooftop in the district. Smoke rolled out of a second-floor window in thick grey curls. A tiny woman in a quilted pink housecoat stood on the stoop with her arms wrapped around the railing, and two firefighters were trying to peel her off it.

"I am not leaving without Pasha and Duchess and Little Boris," she shouted at the nearest firefighter in a heavy Armenian accent. "You go get them, or you carry me inside with you."

"Ma’am, the stairwell is compromised."

"Then you should have come faster!"

Dralun walked up the steps, and the firefighters stepped aside for him like he was the tide coming in. He crouched in front of the woman until his chipped horn was level with her curlers.

"Mrs. Petrosyan, how many are there?"

"Seven cats in total, and Boris is the orange one who bites."

"I’ll bring every one of them out." He stood and pointed a claw at me. "Belmont, you hold the door."

The front door had a busted closer that kept swinging shut and choking off the hose line, so I planted my shoulder against it and became a doorstop. This was, I noted, an extremely glamorous use of the third-ranked entrance score in the country. The interface agreed with me.

\[Current Activity: Holding door. Hero Rank impact: 0. Scumbag Points generated: 0.\]

\[Observation: The door is winning.\]

Dralun came down the smoking stairwell six minutes later with two cats tucked in the crook of each arm and a fifth riding his tail like a furious orange surfboard. That was Boris. Boris bit him on the way past me, and Dralun didn’t even blink. He went back in twice more, and when the seventh cat came out, Mrs. Petrosyan let go of the railing and grabbed my arm instead.

"You’re very handsome for a door," she told me, patting my bicep and letting her hand linger on it. "The dragon is handsome too, but he never smiles."

"He smiles on the inside, ma’am."

"That’s a lie, and I like you for it."

Back at the office, Dralun sat down and pulled a pair of tweezers out of his vest to dig cat hair out of the scales on his forearm. Ophelia watched him from behind her parasol with an expression of deep aesthetic suffering.

"You smell like a litter box that caught fire," she said.

"Boris was nervous."

"I don’t care about Boris, and I’m deducting points from you for tracking him in here."

"I’m not on your scale."

"Everyone is on my scale, including the dragon," she said, kicking one platform shoe. The sole left a faint black scuff on the desk that she didn’t bother wiping off. "You’re at plus four hundred because you pay me."

"That’s incredibly generous."

"I know."

The second call came in after lunch. Missing juvenile flagged by the Eastside Plaza security desk. Dralun handed the radio to me and said, "You talk to the mother, and I’ll check the river path." That was the longest sentence he had spoken to me all week, and I was touched in a way I planned to deny in court.

The mother was a nurse named Tanya who had come straight off a double shift in pale blue scrubs that were creased at the knees and smelled faintly of antiseptic. Her daughter was a twelve-year-old named Dani who had stormed out after a fight about a phone. Tanya kept saying "She’s never done this before" in a voice that told me Dani had done this at least four times before, maybe six.

I found her at the Eastside transit terminal forty minutes later. She was sitting on a bench under the departures board with a backpack clutched tight on her knees and a ticket to Fresno that she couldn’t afford to use. She had braids with pink beads at the ends that clicked when she turned her head, and the flat stare of a kid who has decided every adult is a cop. Her sneakers were untied. Her phone was sitting face-down on the bench next to her like she’d thrown it there and didn’t want to look at it.

"I know who you are," she said before I sat down. "You’re the gold guy from the internet."

"That guy is way cooler than me, trust me."

"You’re shorter in real life," she said, and I felt that one land in my soul.

I went to the vending machine and came back with a turkey sandwich wrapped in crinkly plastic and two cans of orange soda. She stared at the sandwich like it was a trap, then ate it in about six bites because she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I didn’t lecture her or ask why she ran, and I didn’t tell her that her mother was scared. I just sat there and let her complain about her math teacher for twenty minutes until Tanya came through the glass doors at a dead run.

Dani stood up and set her jaw, ready for a fight. Tanya hit her like a linebacker and held on, and I got up and walked away, because nobody needs a stranger watching that.

"You’re going to write that one up with a lot of words, aren’t you?" Dralun asked when I got back to the office.

"The IHL requires two hundred words."

"Write fifty, and make them true," he said, and went back to his coffee.