Read Online Written in Red by Anne Bishop - Free Book Online Page A

held a fierce kind of friendliness that could reassure or frighten the person meeting those eyes across a desk.
    In the moments before Burke gestured to the seat in front of the desk and opened a file folder, Monty figured his measure had been taken: a dark-skinned man of medium height who stayed trim with effort and tended to bulk up when he ate bread or potatoes for too many meals in a row, and whose curly black hair was already showing some gray despite his being on the short side of forty years old.
    “Lieutenant Crispin James Montgomery.” Giving Monty a fierce smile, Burke closed the file and folded his hands over it. “Toland is a big city. Only Sparkletown and two other cities on this entire continent match it in population and size. Which means people living there can go their whole lives without knowingly encountering the Others, and that makes it easy to pretend the
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aren’t out there watching everything humans do. But Lakeside was built on the shores of Lake Etu, one of the Great Lakes that are the largest source of freshwater in Thaisia—and those lakes belong to the
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. We have a few farming communities and hamlets that are within thirty minutes of the city boundaries. There is a community of Simple Life folk who farm on Great Island. And there is the town of Talulah Falls up the road a piece. Beyond that, the nearest human towns or cities are two hours by train in any direction. All roads travel through the woods. Lakeside is a small city, which means we’re not big enough to forget what’s out there.”
    “Yes, sir,” Monty said. That had been one of Elayne’s objections to moving to Lakeside: there was no way to believe social connections meant anything when you couldn’t forget you were nothing more than clever meat.
    “This Chestnut Street station covers the district that includes the Lakeside Courtyard,” Burke said. “You have the assignment of being the intermediary between the police and the Others.”
    “Sir . . .” Monty started to protest.
    “You’ll have three officers answering to you directly. Officer Kowalski will be your driver and partner; Officers MacDonald and Debany will take the second-shift patrol but will report any incidents to you day or night. Elliot Wolfgard is the consul who talks to the mayor and shakes hands with other government officials, but you’d be better off becoming acquainted with Simon Wolfgard. For one thing, he manages a
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store that has human employees and tolerates human customers. For another, I believe he has a lot more influence in the Courtyard than our governing body thinks he does.”
    “Yes, sir.” Deal directly with the Others? Maybe it wasn’t too late to go back to Toland and find some other kind of work. Even if Elayne wouldn’t take him back, he’d still be closer to Lizzy.
    Burke stood and came around his desk, gesturing for Monty to remain seated. After a long look, he said, “Do you know about the Drowned City?”
    Monty nodded. “It’s an urban legend.”
    “No. It’s not.” Burke picked up a letter opener from his desk, turned it over and over, then set it back down. “My grandfather was in one of the rescue teams that went to find the survivors. He never spoke of it until the day I graduated from the police academy. Then he sat me down and told me what happened.
    “From what was pieced together afterward, three young men, all full of loud talk, decided getting rid of the Others would put humans in control, would be the first step in our dominating this continent. So they dumped fifty-gallon drums of poison into the creek that supplied the water for that Courtyard.
    “The Others caught the men on land that was under human control, so they called the police. The men were taken to the station, and their punishment should have been handled by human law and in human courts.”
    Burke’s expression turned grimmer. “Turned out that one of those young men was the nephew of some