“Just as well,” the hound said.
Jessie said, “After fifteen hundred years, he was weary of his duties in Hell, and he began to roam the Earth, seeking the unique and the titillating, anything short of the reincarnation which was his due.”
“It’d be a drag to be human again,” Brutus said. Galiotor Fils looked from the man to the hound, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.
Jessie said, “Nine years ago, a year after you people first made contact with Earth, I quit my job as a narcotics agent with Interpol, and I advertised for a supernatural partner to go halves in the establishment of a detective agency. Brutus answered the ad.”
“And we’ve been busy every since,” the hound said. He chuckled, deep in his throat. “You people caused more trouble than a thousand detectives can handle.”
Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his chair, laced his twelve tentacle-fingers together, unlaced them, blinked his amber eyes and said, “I hope you aren’t—well, prejudiced against the maseni race. I am aware that some of you people feel you would have been far better off—”
“No, no,” Blake said. “You misunderstand my colleague’s meaning. We are glad you came to Earth; we thrive on the chaos. Ordinary detectives, those who work on cases involving only human beings, make very little money, but those of us specializing in human-alien and human-supernatural cases do well. Quite well.”
“I see,” the maseni said.
“Not everything, you don’t,” Jessie said. “Mr. Galiotor, my pleasure with your people’s arrival on Earth is not strictly financial in nature. You see, before that time, ten years ago, I was twenty-seven years old and bored to tears with nearly everything: my job with Interpol, food, liquor, books, films, getting up, going to bed…. The only things I wasn’t bored with were marijuana and women; I smoked the former and balled the latter, and I was an enthusiast of both. However, it was a shallow life. Then the maseni came, and everything changed. Mind you, life would have been lively with one set of aliens to deal with—but you brought two, yourselves and your supernatural brothers. And you introduced us to a third set of aliens that had been with us all along, our own supernatural brothers. In the following decade, I have not only earned considerable money, but I have suffered very damn few dull moments.”
“Until recently,” Brutus added.
“Yes,” Blake said. “Until recently. Recently, it seems one case is like the last—a wife trying to run off with a vampire; a husband ignoring his own wife but taking a contract with a succubus; banshees involved in real-estate swindles, trying to scream down the value of a house or tract of land; A ghoul interested in robbing graves unsanctioned by the government… Both Brutus and I need a change, and we’re hoping, quite frankly, you’re the one to give it to us.”
“Well, it may be nothing, sir,” the maseni said.
“Whatever it is,” Blake said, “it’s obviously unusual. So far as I know you’re the first maseni ever to contact a human detective, for aid.”
“Most likely,” Galiotor Fils agreed. He looked at both man and hound, in turn, while he played six tentacles over his open mouth. At last, he dropped his hand to his lap and said, “I am most distraught, sir. My brood brother has died, and there has not been a proper ceremony.”
Blake and Brutus exchanged a glance, and the detective rose from his chair to pace behind his desk. “Brood brother?” he asked. “That would mean another maseni, like yourself, born in the same brood hole on the home world, in the same familial mud as yourself?”
“Even more than that,” the maseni said. “In this case, Tesserax was of the same Birthing as I, from the very same egg batch. We were the same age, by a hatching day, and we were close.” Fat, yellow tears hung at the corners of the alien’s eyes, trembling like liquid jewels, and the corners of his lipless mouth turned down.
“Tesserax? That was his name?”
“Galiotor Tesserax,” the maseni said, nodding.
He was barely able to control his grief, but he held back the threatened tears and covered up the sorrow in the line of his mouth by raising a hand and playing six small tentacles there.