“Oh don’t worry,” I snapped, tossing my head. “I have no intention of setting foot into the cesspit you call a home ever again. Enjoy the rest of your day, Chieftain Baine.”
Fuming, I hopped down the porch steps and got back on my bike, wanting to put as much distance between myself and that horrid house as possible. By Magorah, but couldn’t the woman at least pretend to be civil? And people wondered where I got my bitchiness from. Shaking my head, I urged my bike down the hill and toward the Shifter Courier’s offices, which were only a few minutes away. I doubted the editor would be any more cooperative than my aunt, but I was a lot more confident I would actually get something productive done by visiting him.
The Shifter Courier looked a lot more dilapidated than the round, pristine white structure that housed the Herald in Maintown. It was a tall, narrow rectangular building, maybe five stories high, but each of those stories was small, maybe one and a half times the size of my one-bedroom apartment. The ornate molding that lined the facade of the building was crumbling in places, and the windows were filthy, several of them even boarded up. Guess they really had fallen on hard times.
I walked into the lobby, which didn’t look much better than the outside – there were framed newspapers from the Courier’s better days hanging from the walls, but the white paint behind them was flaking off in places, and the grey carpet beneath my feet was threadbare. A female rabbit shifter sat behind a rickety looking reception desk, her slender fingers tapping away at a typewriter. Her powder-blue eyes widened at my approach.
“H-hello,” she stammered, tucking a wisp of pale brown hair behind her ear. I pegged her as a new hire, and gathered she probably wasn’t used to visitors. “How can I help you?” Her small, rounded nose twitched nervously, and I imagined that if she was in beast form her whiskers would be quivering.
“My name is Sunaya Baine, and I’m with the Enforcer’s Guild.” I held up my wrist so that she could see my bracelet. “I need to speak with your Chief Editor.”
“Oh.” The receptionist bit her lip, exposing two large front teeth – a common rabbit shifter characteristic, even in human form. “I’m not sure he’s available.”
“Well if he’s not, he needs to make himself available.” I tried to curb the annoyance in my voice, wanting to take pity on her, but I wasn’t going to let this rabbity female turn me away – I needed answers. “You do know that if he refuses to speak to me that’s considered obstruction of justice, and I’m within my rights to arrest him and take him with me to the Enforcer’s Guild for questioning. I’m sure your boss wouldn’t want that, would he?”
“No!” she squeaked, her eyes widening. “No, of course not. Let me just tell him you’re here. One moment.”
She snatched up the phone on her desk, and I waited patiently for her to speak to the Chief Editor. “He said he’ll see you in his office,” she said when she hung up. “It’s on the third floor, room –”
“I know where it is,” I interrupted, already moving past her to the stairwell on her left – I’d been here before. There was an elevator, but the thing was so rickety I didn’t dare trust it, so I trotted up the three flights of stairs to the executive offices.
Of course, that sounded a lot more impressive than it was – the floors were small, and there were maybe three offices total in this space. Faron Gor, the Courier’s Chief Editor, had a corner office that boasted some of the only windows that weren’t filthy or boarded up, so he had a decent view of the city from his desk. Like the lobby, his walls were covered in old framed newspaper clippings, and his frayed carpet was in desperate need of replacement. The space was cramped, taken up by shelves and file cabinets, with room for only a single wooden chair in front of his desk.
“Enforcer Baine!” Faron exclaimed as soon as he noticed me waiting at his open doorway. He stood up quickly, and rounded the desk to greet me. He was a wolf shifter, with dark coarse brown hair cropped close to his square head, rugged features, and a stocky frame. The grey suit he wore looked cheap, but clean. “Please, come in.” He held out a hand for me to shake.
I blinked, caught off guard by his genuine manner, but I shook his hand. “Thanks for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”
“Of course.” He sat down behind his desk again, and I made myself as comfortable as possible in the wooden visitor’s chair. “What can I do for the Enforcer’s Guild today?”
“I’m here regarding a series of kidnappings that have occurred over the last year.” I pulled a notebook from the inside of my jacket pocket, where I’d scribbled down the names from Sillara’s list, and read them off. “Do any of them sound familiar to you?”
An uncomfortable look flashed across Faron’s face. “They do, yes.”
I scowled at the admission. “Then why were so many of them unreported by the media? If you knew about them, surely your reporters did too, or you would have told one of them.”
Faron sighed. “I wanted to print those stories, I really did. They would have been good for business. But there was pressure from one of our major advertisers not to do so. They said that if we did they would take their business elsewhere, and we caved because we would have to close our doors without their income.”
“I see.” I wanted to berate Faron for giving in so easily, but given the precarious state of his business, I couldn’t blame him too much. His first priority was keeping his ship afloat, and if that meant catering to his advertisers then that’s what he had to do. “You know, that kind of suspicious activity is really something you should report to the Guild.”