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“Well, that’s good; it saves time. Has he told you what we need you to do?”
    “No, ma’am,” she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. Honestly, I
was just relieved to hear her speak. If she’d turned out to be a Little
Mermaid, I think I would have screamed.
    “Okay, Demi, here’s the situation: we have a Sleeping Beauty in that
building.” I pointed to the hospital. “Her particular story takes the form of
an airborne infection. I need you to play your flute and lure in rats from as
far away as you can manage. Once you have them here, I need you to send them
into the hospital, pipe the sickness into them, and then pipe them into the
sewers to drown. Think you can do that for us?”
    Demi stared at me. Finally, in the tone of someone who was just starting
to catch up with the rest of the class, she said, “You people are insane.”
    “Probably,” I agreed, without malice. “We fight fairy tales for a living.
We’re the definition of ‘people who go among mad people.’ But whether we’re
insane or not, my proposal is a simple one. I think you’ll like it.”
    “What’s that?” asked Demi, with natural, understandable wariness.
    I smiled. I know how creepy I am when I smile. Whoever came up with “skin
as white as snow, lips as red as blood” and thought people would find it
attractive really wasn’t thinking things through. “Pipe the rats into the hospital,
and we’ll let you leave.”
#
    “Agent Marchen!”
    The shout wasn’t a surprise. If anything, the surprise was that it had
taken so long to come. I swallowed my irritation and pasted my best expression
of bland obedience across my face as I turned to face the officious-looking
little man who was storming in my direction, dark clouds and thunder virtually
visible above his head. Deputy Director Brewer was thin as a whip, with dirty
blond hair that had probably been thinning years before he pissed off the wrong
person and got himself reassigned to the ATI Management Bureau. Probably. I mean, we were pretty aggravating before you got
to know us—and more aggravating after you got to know us—but I didn’t think we
had the power to make a man’s hair fall out.
    According to Sloane, the deputy director not only
wasn’t on the ATI scale, he was so far from being a fairy tale that he
practically came out the other side to become an anchor to the “real” world. I
found that reassuring, somehow. It meant that he was one man who’d never stand
up and announce that he’d discovered his inner Prince Charming. His inner
bureaucrat, maybe, but in his case, “inner” was right up on the surface.
    And oh, did he look pissed .
    “Yes, Deputy Director?” I asked.
    “What’s this I’m hearing about a civilian?”
    I resisted the urge to glance back to the van where Demi was going over
sheet music options with Jeff, who was absolutely delighted to have an excuse
to download half the great composers of Europe on work’s time. They were
focusing on pieces composed during the Black Death, since they were more likely
to match up with the timeline on our Pied Piper variant. “I’m afraid you’ll
have to be more specific,” I said. “There are a lot of civilians involved in
this action.”
    “Yes, but as most of them are currently unconscious, I think you know
damn well which one I mean. Where’s the girl?”
    I raised both eyebrows, emphasizing the fact that the whites of my eyes
were almost the same shade as the white of my skin. “Do you mean Demi Santos,
by any chance?”
    My expression had the desired effect. The deputy director stopped in his
tracks, actually rocking onto his heels for a moment before he recovered and
pressed on, snapping, “Yes, I mean Demi Santos. I have several eyewitnesses who
claim that a woman who sounds suspiciously like Agent Winters entered Miss
Santos’s music class without invitation and physically removed her from the
premises. The police were called.”
    “Uh-huh. Did you call them off? Because