Hard Hand (Incidental Inquisitors Book 4), page 1
HARD HAND
INCIDENTAL INQUISITORS™ SERIES BOOK FOUR
AARON D. SCHNEIDER
MICHAEL ANDERLE
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2023 LMBPN Publishing
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Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
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LMBPN Publishing
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Version 1.00, February 2023
ebook ISBN: 979-8-88541-228-5
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-88878-222-4
THE HARD HAND TEAM
Thanks to our JIT Team:
Rachel Beckford
Zacc Pelter
Christopher Gilliard
Paul Westman
Peter Manis
Jan Hunnicutt
Editor
SkyFyre Editing Team
To Danny and Mel, one more time: I've seen you walkin' down in Chinatown, I called you but you could not look around, Why can't we be...
— Aaron
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
— Michael
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As good as any story is we still know so many people judge a book by it's cover so I'd like to take a second to acknowledge Kelly and Moonchild for their incredible work in helping make fantastic art to wrap around my humble offerings.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Author’s Notes - Aaron D. Schneider
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Other Books by Aaron D. Schneider
Connect with The Authors
Books By Michael Anderle
PROLOGUE
Glav Furst inspected the final section of wiring, knowing what he would find but hating to be proved right. It was another tangled rainbow, a rat’s nest of electrical components. “Typical Olwynor shit,” he muttered as he fiddled with the cancerous mass, checking the inputs and outputs with his current reader. The screen flashed green and a cheery ding! sliced at his tired spirit. He sighed and checked “pass” for electrical safety on his clipboard.
“Fruitful Mother, have mercy on them.” A trickle of doubt tickled Glav’s brain as he sent off his prayer. He repeated it under his breath and tried to squash the uncertainty. He prayed a third time. Maybe his plea would keep the future residents of this building safe. Humans.
If the times were normal, on his goblin honor, Glav would only check pass when he one hundred percent trusted the construction. Wires, plumbing, foundation, all of it. Yet it was the season of un-normal. The humans’ introduction to the Quadras required legions of housing the city didn’t have. No matter how many shanty towns went up, the human horde continued to shamble in.
Glav already had four times his normal workload, and the bosses kept stacking it on. Now they were pressuring him to stop being so “particular.” He had lodged countless well-reasoned complaints with evidence to support the faulty, corrupt construction companies he was dealing with. The bosses had shrugged and pointed him to the door. Glav knew if he left, they’d put someone else in charge. Someone who didn’t give a brownie’s ass about the humans’ safety.
He stared at the clipboard and hovered his eraser over the checked box. The top of the sheet read Dwarven Quarter, Clan Olwynor, Site 633B. He shook his head.
Shitty, but it works. Choose your battles. Only a few more night shifts and he would have the Olwynor contracts finished.
With the electrical finished, Glav had technically completed his mission. Yet if technicalities didn’t concern him, he would have gone home after eight hours and marked “pass” on the unvisited sites. Part of him wanted to quit. He was one goblin in a vortex of chaos. What could he truly accomplish? Still, he had nothing but a perpetually pissed-off missus at home waiting for him. Why not stay late?
He had always been obsessed with work. His mother claimed the Fruitful Mother had blessed him with mending hands. Glav clung to those and urged his tired body to unfreeze, unlock, and climb the stairs to the final destination. Another Clan Olwynor nightmare.
The upper-floor plumbing could have inspired a horror film for building inspectors. A niche market but full of uninspected potential. His joke gave birth to a chuckle. The shrill noise echoed in the half-finished hallway and chiseled a line of unease down his back.
He had noticed the issue with the piping during his inspection but waited to take a closer look until now when he could devote the time needed. After half a glance, he scoffed and took out his marker. Improper angle, he wrote on the sloppily aligned system. It wouldn’t handle the required amount of waste water. Connection too narrow, he slashed onto the central sewage access.
That would back up in a matter of months. Sooner if a resident plopped something a little wider than average down the tubes. Or if, Fruitful Mother have mercy, a brownie crawled up and busted the connection. A backup there would cause complete septic overflow. Waste dripping from ceilings and oozing down the walls. That was an unpleasant makeover to wake up to.
Of course, Clan Olwynor’s maintenance arm would happily repair the shit-vomit of a mess. For a price.
A shrill cling-a-ling-ding! erupted from Glav’s jacket. He reached for his shard and declined the call with a firm thumb press. Probably Rezy. You’d think she’d know by now that I finish when I finish. He waited to see if she’d call again, but the shard stayed silent.
Early in their marriage, Glav had answered every call. The dream of love soon gave way to reality. Work seduced Glav back into its tender embrace, and he came home later and later. Their marriage became troubled. It didn’t help that Rezy was as obsessed with having kids as Glav was with work. She wanted the usual goblin horde of them. That was the crux of their problems and the reason Rezy had filed for divorce.
The pipes called to Glav, mocking him. We might be ugly, the metal said, but our plumbing ain’t nearly as shitty as yours, buddy boy. They laughed. The cold, hollow noise sent another tingle through his body.
His anger roused to meet the imaginary assault. He focused and attempted to banish the possessed sewage system, but he needed something to take its place. After a look around, he spotted Olwynor toolboxes on a temporary shelf.
He grunted and commandeered a kit.
The narrow connection would need to be replaced with a wider one, but the other pipes…those, he could fix. Mending hands, he thought as he loosened the assembly. A nudge here, a yank there, and the pipes were straightened. If only my own body were as easy to fix. Maybe then my marriage would have a chance. Glav laid his forehead against the cool metal and tried to calm his lungs. He was breathing hard, but not because of the labor.
In the stillness and the dark, the voices returned. This time, they were his bosses. They railed against him. How dare he stop construction! All because of a single narrow fitting. You’re wasting our money, and our time, they cried. Then Stop moving, bitch. The more you move, the more it hurts.
Glav sat up. Real voices brushed his ears. The voices weren’t in his head. Not all of them. He waited, and the voices returned. They filtered up through the construction site, followed by a scream.
He took his time creeping down the unfinished stairwell to follow the noises. With his ears as a guide, he reached the apartment building lobby. A scene from a true horror movie awaited him there. He covered his mouth to contain his scream.
The dwarfess had no such luxury. She screamed for all she was worth, which seemed to be a lot. A pristine white dress adorned her body. It was beautifully made but torn at the shoulders and across her waist, the damage probably incurred during her struggle. She banged on the drywall and managed to dent it before the ogre reached her. She turned and threw a stone at the brute.
From the back of the room, a peal of laughter broke free of the shadows. It belonged to an elf. He stood to the side, the lit cigarette between his lips puffing reams of sticky fumes into the air.
“You’ll tell us one way or another.” The elf looked more bored than someone ought to while committing a violent crime. His expression chilled Glav’s soul. With the dwarfess trapped, the elf moved in. “I’ll ask you a final time, then we shall become truly brutal. Why pull funding from the SCF? Hmm?”
The acronym tugged at Glav’s brain. It was the Sojourners Charity Fund. He’d heard the name bandied about for months. The organization started as a way to shore up the city’s funding gaps for human integration, but an ocean of support flooded the SCF with massive pools of money and resources.
He knew the dwarfess as well. Another look confirmed it. Despite the frayed hair and washed-out makeup, she was clearly well-to-do. Maybe from the upper echelons of a clan. She wasn’t one of the Olwynor bigwigs who’d come around the construction sites for the odd publicity stunt, but that didn’t mean much. Though it wasn’t polite to say, the fact was most dwarves looked the same to him.
The elf repeated his question to the quaking dwarfess. She banged on the drywall and screamed at the frequency of a dying pixie. The elf gestured, and the ogre clapped his meaty hands around the dwarfess, pinning her arms and eliciting another piercing scream.
Her scream ended in time for another noise to take its place.
Glav’s jacket jingled, and the happy music radiated around the quiet lobby. Elf, ogre, and dwarfess looked up and bumped gazes with him. He clawed at his shard to turn it off, but it was too late.
His wife would be the death of him.
In less than a second, the elf had an ARC pointed at him. “Join us, why don’t you?” he mused. The end of his lit cigarette looked like a red mole on his cheek, exactly where Rezy had one. Her worst feature, she called it and got up early each day to trim the long black hair that stubbornly kept sprouting from it. Glav actually thought it was cute, like another rosy cheek. Yet when he told Rezy that, she started bawling. She thought he was mocking her. No matter what he said, she didn’t believe him and wouldn’t stop crying until he begged for forgiveness.
If he asked the elf for forgiveness, would it stop a bolt from splitting his skull in half? Glav doubted it. He was a goblin of few words. He couldn’t talk his way out of this situation. His greatest strength was useless here. What good could mending hands do for him now?
A surge built inside him, starting at his feet. He felt the floor through his soles, a cheap sheet of plastic film over a plywood board. The smallest grains of sand and dirt that peppered the ground sent vibrations through his boots. His lungs swelled, and his body followed suit.
Glav was tired. Tired of opening his eyes in the morning and feeling no different than the day before. Tired of the daily commute, how it never changed except in meaningless ways. A black truck cut him off instead of a hot pink micro car or a trio of bikers. He half-listened to a podcast about something old or new. And his job…what a noxious burrito to munch on day after day.
Mending hands, but he couldn’t mend the tangled mess of pipes inside him. Couldn’t fix his marriage. Glav was tired…but maybe mending hands could also un-mend. Maybe mending hands could destroy.
The elf fired at the swelling goblin, but Glav felt nothing. No pain, no emotions. He trolled out to ogre size and broke the balcony apart, spraying fractured timber across the room. The elf covered his face and ducked back, but the ogre stood still and took the splinters without complaint. The brute even smiled.
Glav smiled, too. He leapt to the ground floor, tearing out support pillars as he went. He raked the drywall with his claws and ripped out the piping and wires he’d labored so hard to inspect on previous days. Relief filled him as he charged the ogre with his rage burning free, not locked in his chest as it had been a week ago. It was hard enough learning he was infertile. It was a whole other sack of shit for Rezy to accuse him of knowing, of hiding it from her and manipulating her like…like some soapy drama villain.
Everything inside him swelled. His rib cage opened up and hardened. His lungs expanded and released a lifetime of anger in a thunderous roar. The noise ripped through the construction site and shook it all the way to its sloppy foundations.
The ogre’s smile faded. His expression stiffened as he prepared to meet the goblin’s charge.
Glav was beside himself. When Rezy accused him, he was torn between trolling out and trashing their apartment or laughing in her face until she did the same. Now he did both, laughing as he bounded toward the stone wall of an ogre, swiping at the wrapped furniture that stood in between them. With a single, serotonin-fueled swing, he upended a couch and launched it at the ogre.
The brute brushed it aside, yet Glav was euphoric. His naked feet cracked the tiles with each stomp. He imagined they were the awful kitchen mosaics his wife had picked out when the landlord remodeled and asked their opinions. Glav didn’t offer his then, but he was offering it now. He was offering everything that had ever been locked inside him to the destruction of that lobby. If not for the dwarfess in peril, he would have danced through the entire Olwynor construction and laid it to ruin. He had trolled out for a reason, though.
With a final few feet to spare, Glav pushed off the floor and launched into the ogre. He shoved him back, but the ogre fought him off with one hand. Glav swiped it aside and clocked the ogre across his slavering jaws, scattering teeth to the floor.
The ogre worked himself into a blood rage. He threw the dwarfess against the wall, and she collapsed, blood dripping from her head. With both hands free, the ogre wrestled Glav and picked apart his defenses. Glav had no talent for fighting. Only the magic-fueled rage kept the ogre at bay.
That power was fading.
Glav struck the ogre’s head again, hoping for a one-two knockout to save the day, but it was not to be. The ogre dodged the swing and swiped away the rest of Glav’s defenses. He wrapped his meaty paws around Glav’s neck, hefted all two tons of him, and squeezed.
Glav could not break the grip. The surge drained from his limbs and into his feet. He could no longer feel the floor, but the pain returned. Bloody bruises marked his body where the ogre had battered him. Cuts covered his feet from the glass table he’d destroyed on his approach. Worst of all was his sore heart, which had massively swollen but was now fading back to a pitiful goblin organ.
Mending hands… Mending hands…
Glav’s vision darkened at the edges, and the shadows crept closer. Any second now, his trolling would vanish, and the ogre would snap his neck. For the first time in years, a profound peace settled on his spirit. He snuggled into the grip and closed his eyes, ready for a good, long rest.
CHAPTER ONE
Esselliar
Inquisitor Esselliar VorKluvaith sat erect in the passenger side of the Street Behemoth while his partner Doughas madly drove after a gang of baddies escaping on motorcycles. Vor wasn’t exchanging his usual banter with Doughas as the dwarf narrowly steered them into and away from death. Instead, his shard was glued to his ear as he talked to his girlfriend.
A few days ago, Vor had strapped it to his head during a firefight. Doughas made him swear never to do that again, and Vor did promise. He’d started to learn that chat time with Areal didn’t mix with official Inquisitor business. Then again, what harm could a quick call do while he waited for Doughas to catch up to the motorcyclists?
“Esselliar,” Areal mewled seductively through his shard. “Will I be seeing you tonight?”
Vor’s body flushed with special fire. “Oh, you’ll see me tonight. You’ll see me real good.”
Areal giggled like an elf half her age, which would still be older than Vor. “Aren’t you the cutest elf in the Quadras?”
“No, you’re the cutest elf in the Quadras,” Vor replied, wishing he could do a video call instead. Although imagining her did have certain benefits. In the past, they had done some video calls, but that function gobbled up Vor’s data like a brownie in a dumpster. The calls alone had already doubled his bill twice in the past two months. He couldn’t afford another price jump in addition to the expensive dinners and shiny gifts. The other requirements of keeping a girlfriend happy. Doughas wouldn’t lend him any more money, either.
