Page 25 of A Brighter Yellow
“Yeah,” said Anna. “I don’t like to wear short chains.” She took the necklace out of Aubrey’s hand and pocketed it. She flipped the notebook open on the desk. Inside the notebook was a list of dates and a few brief sentences next to each one. “What do you know about this?”
Ochre and Aubrey looked over her shoulder at the entries.
“Don’t recognize it,” said Aubrey.
Came out of bookstore. Elliot was waiting across the street from my car. I photographed him and posted it to my Instagram. I emailed the cop, but he said it wasn’t illegal. Emailed response has been forwarded to my lawyer.
All of the entries were similar.
“I don’t suppose you know where Elliot,” Anna felt her lip lift in a snarl of rage around his name, “works now?”
“Yeah,” said Aubrey. “That shithead went to work for Encana Oil and Gas.”
“Great,” said Anna. “Thanks.”
“You’re really worried about Charlie, aren’t you?” asked Aubrey looking from Ochre to Anna.
“No,” said Anna. “Because I’m going to go get her back.”
“Back?” asked Aubrey, but Anna was already heading back for the front desk.
Anna made it out to the parking lot without wolfing out, but it was a near thing.
“She should have told me about this,” she said, shaking the notebook at Ochre. He took it out of her hand, and Anna took a few deep breaths and took a lap down to the grass strip at the other end of the lot and back.
“OK,” she said when she got back to Ochre. “You really should leave.”
“Why?” he demanded, and she was surprised by how hard his face looked.
“Because I’m going to find this guy, and I’m going to rip his intestines out. I understand that human killing wasn’t what you signed up for, but that’s what I’m going to do. So it’s probably best if you leave now.”
“Yeah, that might be more difficult than you think,” said Ochre.
“Nope,” said Anna. “Pretty sure he’ll be as easy any other animal.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’ve run into a few Encana Oil and Gasemployeesbefore.”
“And?” demanded Anna when he didn’t continue.
“They weren’t human,” said Ochre.
Episode 13
Encana Oil & Gas
Ochre
Ochre led the way out of a park they’d traveled to—of course, the Encana offices weren’t located anywhere near anything green.
“So tell me,” said Anna, pausing to orient herself to the map on her phone. She did it with barely a glance. Ochre could orient himself by the magnetic poles, but he wondered how Anna and the other shifters did it. “How did you meet these people or whatever they were?” she asked.
“I frequently examine and certify environmental clean-up operations,” said Ochre. “Encana has a habit of buying older refinery plants and infrastructure that other larger companies don’t want to pay to upgrade. As a result of the older equipment, they have had multiple spills and incidents. At the last clean-up I went to for an Encanaincident, I met a division manager and his assistant. One was a vampire, and the other was a goblin. Neither were nice people.”
Anna appeared to be processing that information as she walked. From the moment they’d gone into Charlie’s house, she’d shut him out. Ochre could feel her boiling rage, but it was as though from a distance. He had signed up to help. He couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly on the outside, and it was pissing him off.
“I only smelled humans at the house. But you think it’s possible that Charlie’s stalker isn’t human?” she asked after a moment.
“All I really know is that Encana hires non-humans and has many destructive policies,” said Ochre. “I’m not sure it matters if the stalker is human or not. Either way, we still need to find Charlie and this guy seems like the best lead.”
