"I'm going to need you to start from the beginning."

In the chair across from the desk of Deputy Vayu Sharma, a man fidgeted. It was an unusual expression, even for those who knew next to nothing about the man himself. He was not the sort of man one could easily imagine fidgeting, or even being nervous at all; from the breadth of his shoulders to the height of his frame he was a large man, and from the spring-green of his eyes to the craggy lines of his face a handsome one. In short, he had the blunt, cheerful look of a man who had spent all forty-five years of his life gleefully subduing life's woes with a club, and still had more than a few swings left in him.

"It's these fucking kids, Vayu," Tony Katicus lamented. "They're gonna cost me every date for the next year, maybe more. I just know it."

Vayu sighed and ran his fingers through neatly cut black hair. "You said that already. What kids specifically? Not mine, I would hope."

Tony snorted. "Your kids? Come on. Viola would never think to ruin her auntie's night, and Sanjit...well. Sanjit would at least be too afraid of getting caught. No, I'm talking about my students."

Vayu frowned and leaned back in his chair. This, he had to admit, was puzzling; if he had taken the time to poll the students of Cedarville Junior/Senior High School, Vayu strongly suspected that Tony would be among the most popular adults in the building. He had a knack with children that few could equal, an instinct for bringing genuine fun into his gym class, and sort of good humor which endeared him to everyone almost despite himself. Even Vayu's own half-sister, Sheriff Divya Sharma, who served parking tickets to literal gods without so much as hint of hesitation, hadn't known how to say no when Tony offered to buy her dinner nearly ten years ago.

"What exactly do you think your students are going to do?" Vayu asked.

"I don't know," Tony replied, sounding miserable. Vayu resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of nose.

"In that case, why are you worried? What happened?"

Tony made a face entirely too young for his age. "All right, fine. So you know my anniversary with Divya is tonight, right?"

"That's right," Vayu replied. "She's been happy all week. Well. She's been happier all week. At least, she hasn't been quite so harsh on the litterbugs. I think I even saw her smile a couple days ago."

Tony visibly brightened at that news before returning to the subject. "Well, the other day, I was chatting with my students about the many benefits of being awesome like me--"

That was enough to earn a snort from Vayu. Tony adopted a wounded expression. "Hey, don't laugh! Look at me: dashing, handsome, strong enough to bench a small car...plus, even without the handy super-strength, how many guys can say they're literally half god?"

Vayu, himself a demigod and married to another demigod, raised an eyebrow. "Half god is a loaded phrase. All that means for certain is one of our parents had more power than humility."

Tony waved away the criticism. "I'm not getting into an argument about gods with you again. Anyways, the students and I were teasing each other, and I started bragging about how I was charming enough to snag the sheriff herself. Then I went a little farther, and told them about how our anniversary was the only day of the year when she was sure to take the night off. All true," he added hastily, noting how Vayu's face rapidly lost humor. "And I would never say anything bad or even inappropriate about my relationship with Divya. But I think my students got the wrong impression."

"And what impression would that be?"

A pause. Eventually, Tony sighed. "That tonight is the one night of the year when the eye of the law won't be looking for them. Any other time, if they misbehave they know Divya might come and scare the shit out of them and their parents. But if she's on a date with me...all they have to do is steer clear of Tig's restaurant and they're golden."

Vayu raised an eyebrow. "They do realize that it isn't my night off, right?"

"They do. But let's face facts: you don't scare the little shits. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, necessarily; you're the mediator. You can turn a tense situation into a peaceful one with a little sense and encouragement, and we absolutely need that in a cop. But this is Cedarville. The kids here take their broken computers to a bloodthirsty vampire, hang out in parks where the ranger is a werewolf, and vote for a city council made up of political exiles from wizardry. The only reason the town doesn't devolve into chaos is that everyone, from the demons to the doctors, knows not to push their luck with the sheriff. When those five warlocks from the Other Side came to try and kidnap Eli and Eden Karam, it was Divya who fought them with a sword and a pistol in the streets."

"Three," Vayu corrected. "She only fought three. I took the fourth, and I'm pretty sure Ezra Karam literally ripped the fifth into pieces."

"Maybe so," Tony conceded. "But you're a demigod. She isn't. She's just the sheriff, and the kids around here grew up with stories about her. So if the sheriff is taking the night off..."

"...the local troublemakers think they can get away with some ruckus." Vayu sighed. "I see your point."

Tony nodded. "If Divya finds out about trouble on the one night she always reserves for us, I'm never gonna get her to ease up again. No more date night, or things that come after date night. I don't want to give up the things that come after date night, Vayu. After-date-night-things are fun, and a bit kinky, and--"

Vayu grimaced and lifted a hand to cut Tony off mid-sentence. "If I promise to take care of whatever antics happen before Divya catches wind of it, will you swear to never discuss my sister's sex life with me again?"

A toothy smile was his reward, and Vayu resigned himself to the horrors of an interesting afternoon.

~*~

Vayu was certain that he didn't inspire the same sort of intimidation in the people of Cedarville that his sister did. Generally speaking, he was fine with that; there were far more important things than being feared, in his opinion. Beyond that, however, years of being the approachable deputy had given him an instinct for real investigation. If he didn't know exactly what was going to happen, he had a knack for guessing who would and how to talk to them. In this particular case, he was certain his best source would be the one closest to home--so close to home, in fact, that she had probably already gotten back from school.

Sure enough, when he knocked on the door to his daughter's room, he was rewarded with a distracted "Come in," and immediately stepped inside.

Viola Sharma was most definitely her father's daughter, from the jet-black hair in a plain braid hanging down her back, to the piercing brown of her eyes, to the stubborn jut of her chin, giving her an air of contrariness even with the most innocuous activities. She hadn't yet changed out of her school outfit into exercise clothes, so it was in a plain black T-shirt and jeans that she sat on her bed, dutifully filling out a worksheet in French. As Vayu entered her room, she glanced up, eyebrows furrowing in moderate confusion.

"Dad? I thought you were at work until six today."

"I am," Vayu replied, taking a seat on her bed. "I needed to talk to you about something you might have heard about in school. You know it's your Auntie Divya's anniversary tonight, right?"

As he watched, Viola's expression changed from confusion to suspicion. "Yeah, I remembered. Picked up a present for her at the craft shop. What's going on?"

"That's what I wanted to ask you, actually. See, Uncle Tony thinks that some of the kids from your school might take the opportunity to go a little crazy. This wouldn't be very smart of them, of course. I'm still going to be here, after all."

"That wouldn't be very smart of them at all," Viola agreed carefully. "I hope Uncle Tony's mistaken."

"I do too." Vayu watched her carefully, then extended the bait: "After all, if things get too rowdy, your auntie might have to interrupt her anniversary dinner to come get things under control. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one responsible for ruining her good mood."

Viola got the message, that much was clear. Her face flickered with indecision as a well-trained desire to spill her guts warred with the classic teenage instinct to avoid snitching on her peers. She clearly knew something, and Vayu decided to sweeten the deal. "Now, if I knew what was happening, I might be able to head things off before things escalate that far. Maybe the kids involved never even realize I found out."

Preserving her reputation was a powerful incentive, and Vayu smiled inwardly as his daughter's resolve crumbled.

"It's probably just gossip," she began. "Nothing I would ever take seriously or think about joining..."

~*~

"A party out in the woods?" Asked Elswyth Idessadottir, absentmindedly administering a thermostat to her patient. The patient in question let out a high-pitched bark as the cold plastic slid into its rectum, but was quieted by a reproachful glance from Elswyth. "Deputy, when you came in here in full uniform, I figured one of my patients had bitten a child or something. Why all the fuss about some party?"

The Shi Tzu on the examination table gave Vayu an evil look, only somewhat undercut by the beeping thermometer sticking out of its ass. Elswyth checked the readout and nodded approvingly before flicking a lock of long brown and grey hair over her shoulder. Standing in the eco-conscious LED illumination she looked perfectly ordinary: a slender, middle-aged woman in stain-resistant clothes. Likewise, there was nothing immediately eccentric about the veterinary clinic around them; if anything, the brightly painted walls and framed pictures made it seem homier than one might expect of a vet's base of operations.

Appearances, Vayu reflected, were frequently deceiving. An outsider was unlikely to guess that Elswyth was one of the most skillful animal magi alive, and this place was her sanctum. In that way, it was very much a microcosm of Cedarville itself, with the additional advantage of being tidier.

"Because these kids have found out that my sister won't be around to stop them, at least at first," Vayu replied. "Lack of oversight will give rise to some risky behavior that I don't think is wise, and I have to think ahead as well. Even if they don't get caught this year, what about the next? I want my family to enjoy their anniversary without worrying about a one-night Rumspringa by kids who should know better by now."

Elswyth pulled the thermometer from the dog's ass and ejected the plastic cover into the trash. She sighed. "Look, deputy--Vayu. It's not that I'm not sympathetic, but what exactly do you expect me to do about this? I'm a vet. Busting up parties is your job, not mine."

"I don't want to bust the party, or do anything that will compromise your reputation as a fun-loving, free-spirited vet," Vayu assured her. "I have a...subtler approach. One that uses your skills beyond ordinary veterinary practice. Maybe ones you don't have an opportunity to use every day."

The key to persuasion, Vayu had found, was insight. At its base, he needed to know which of the townsfolk's own drives might lean towards his side in the first place and play it up, subverting opposing forces with gentility instead of force. For his daughter, it was honor, both internal and external: to get Viola on his side, he needed to show her how her sense of internal honor could be obeyed without damaging her external reputation. For Elswyth, he needed to indulge her appreciation of chaos in such a way that order was preserved. On its face it was a tricky feat. However, there was one way to be sure of her cooperation--

Elswyth gave him a sharp glance. "Deputy Sharma, it sounds like you're describing sabotage."

Vayu gave her an innocent smile. "Sabotage is such a loaded term. I much prefer stealth parenting."

--and that was to give her an excuse to cause some havoc of her own.

Elswyth patted the Shi Tzu on the rump and gave Vayu a grin with far too many teeth. "Well. I wouldn't want anyone to think I was slacking off on my duties as a parent. What exactly did you have in mind?"

~*~

Cedarville's harbor was barely worthy of the title; a short line of docks came nowhere close to surrounding the entire bay, itself only a couple of miles in diameter. It was charming in its own way, if unimpressive; a handful of fishing boats were interspersed with more leisurely sailboats and the occasional motorboat. The gray cobblestones of the dockside street were hell on the suspension, so cars in this particular area were few and far between. In the afternoon sunshine, the brick and wood of the buildings and gray-green of the bay seemed taken straight from a New England postcard.

Vayu surveyed the scenery with a smile. He was fond of days like this, when late spring warmth was only just starting to bleed into summer heat. In fact, one of the sailboats docked belonged to his own family, and were it a weekend he might be tempted to spend the remainder of the afternoon with the wind in his hair on the water.

Alas, he mused, the call of duty is a heavy burden.

Vayu closed his eyes, enjoying for a moment the summer sunshine as he sat on a public bench overlooking the arena. Then, he turned from the pleasant sensations inward.

Semantics aside, Tony hadn't precisely been wrong when he called himself a demigod. Vayu's father, like Tony's, like his wife's father, was not even remotely human. Vayu wasn't sure what he wanted to call that being, if not a god; once he got the pejoratives out of the way, there were a definite dearth of appropriate terms. Vayu's father did not obey the world around him. The world saw the force of his father's vitality, and obeyed.

Vayu focused inward and inward, his breath slowing and deepening. He sank through the depths of his mind as though diving into deep water, swimming through cold currents of thought and emotion and into his own living world. Things were not quite human this far deep inside himself. There was too much energy here, a jangling force which in Tony manifested in astonishing strength. In Vayu, the power was not over himself, however, but over the lightest, most ubiquitous of the elements. There, deep within the recesses of his mind, he kindled power and let it swell until it colored every though and emotion--

And then, he was no longer Vayu. He was Air.

It was not magic, not the way that Elswyth or Tig would describe magic. It wasn't a psychic force either, the way Cedarville's local librarians understood such things. It was something he was instead of something he did; he felt a cool breeze caress the branches of a tree behind his body as much as he felt sunlight upon his skin. For a long minute, Vayu delighted in the sensation of the swirls and eddies of the air upon the town, the tickling sensation of speech and the warm heaviness of air laden with moisture.

The moisture was what reminded him of his purpose, eventually; he extended himself over the bay and into the sun-warmed moisture. It was almost child's play to stir the warm, heavy air into action, spiralling in a column that tugged a breeze towards the bay from every direction. Vayu soared on the updraft, replenishing himself as sunlight reached the waters and stroked the waves. Up and up the column went, until the air began to cool and condense. It was then that the gentle lift became too little for Vayu's purposes; the breezes of his body turned into a frenzy, stirring cold and dry with cooling and wet. Round and round he went until he felt the edges of himself bleed away into static, where the air ceased to be mass and began to be flashing, uncontrollable ions--

A long breathe in, and out. He had perhaps overdone it, Vayu noticed as he opened his eyes. The jangling energy had bled away from his mind, leaving him human once again, and surprisingly weary.

Still, he reflected as he walked towards his car under a rapidly darkening sky, I've got one stop left.

~*~

The clouds had ushered in a premature nightfall by the time Vayu opened the sturdy door to Tig's. The eponymous Tig was standing behind the bar, examining three bottles of wine with unnerving intensity. He glanced up and flashed a bright smile. "Deputy! My favorite customer! What can I do for you?"

"Don't fib, Tig," Vayu chided. "Everyone knows that the mayor is your favorite customer."

"With a cat as adorable as his, who else could be my favorite customer?" Tig admitted with good cheer. "So what brings you to my humble establishment? Surely you don't mean to sit in on your sister's date before she returns home to peg her beau?"

Vayu very carefully purged that image from his mind. "I was actually hoping for a bit of assistance before they got in. Assistance only you can provide."

"As flattering as this is, my dear deputy, I'm afraid tonight is rather short notice--I have no lube on hand, and I've just run out of butter."

A deflection. Vayu had anticipated as much. Fortunately, he had yet to play his trump card.

Fixing Tig with a sly smile, Vayu lowered his voice to a secretive, half-intimate register. "Want to troll a bunch of teenagers?"

There was a long pause as Tig attempted to look like this wasn't the most appealing offer he'd heard in years.

"Well," he answered with a dramatic sigh. "I suppose civic duty is a heavy burden to bear, but one required of us all."

~*~

The party in the woods behind the school to celebrate the momentous occasion of Sheriff Sharma Finally Taking The Stick Out Of Her Ass At Least A Little Bit had, at least briefly, an impressive showing. The major personalities from freshman to senior classes as well as their attendant were most prominently in attendance, as well as a smattering of eighth graders. At the onset, it had the potential for a night that none would ever forget, assuming their nervous systems survived the festivities: the beer flowed freely, as did substances more illicit, procured for the occasion with the enthusiasm of a holiday.

Once a critical mass was reached, however, things began to go very wrong.

The first thing most noticed, was the surprising quantity of mosquitos. The party was nowhere near standing water; nevertheless, the air nearly hummed with the density of insects. And not just any mosquitos, either, but mosquitos defiant of bug spray and citronella torches, insatiable and devouring. A few students managed to erect charms to banish the mosquitos from their person; others of a less human variety stolidly ignored the insects. Most however, grew increasingly uncomfortable within minutes, either unsuccessfully swatting at the uninvited guests or retreating themselves.

A few of the more magically inclined students, if they were paying attention, might have noticed a very quick, very subtle hex, even if it was far beyond their capacity to prevent it. It would not be until the alcohols of varying origins were opened that the students of Cedarville discovered that their refreshments had soured. It was nothing so mundane as turning to mud or water; wines had grown just a bit to close to vinegar to be enjoyed, vodka acquired out of nowhere an absolutely disgusting aftertaste like the start of a hangover. The beer received the brunt of the damage--something in it had coagulated into absolutely disgusting clumps.

It was only when the students fully grasped that their supplies were undrinkable and their environment parasitic that it began to rain.

The mass exodus from the woods observed that night would have struck Sheriff Divya Sharma as most suspicious. That is, if she had not been most pleasantly occupied at Tig's with a bottle of Merlot, a surprisingly edible interpretation of Greek gyros, and Antonius Katicus.

~*~

Vayu sat on the porch of his house, watching the rain pour upon a quiet evening with distinct satisfaction. He briefly considered extending his senses once more to see if his ploy had ben successful, then dismissed it. He had done as much as possible without tipping his hand, and he had promised Viola he would be subtle. If he received any complaints, that would be that; he would have to be overt. Still, he thought the job hadn't been poorly done at all, given how little warning was given.

Behind him and to the right, the front door opened, and soft footsteps padded to his side. After a moment, the warm alto of Sailee Sharma was added to the sound of rain on shingles: "Rainy evening, dear."

"Yes," Vayu replied, seeing no need to elaborate.

"Funny thing, the weather. They thought it would be clear tonight, then all of a sudden a front sweeps in from the ocean."

"It had some help," Vayu admitted, finally turning to look up at his wife. She gave him a little smile, radiant in an old T-shirt and her favorite sweatpants. Hair still as orange as the sunrise was pulled back into a loose ponytail, and sharp green eyes softened as he met them. "I thought it might do the town some good to have a bit of inclement weather."

That seemed to amuse her. Sailee raised an eyebrow in mock interrogation. "Were we in danger of a drought? I know it's been a whole three days since our last thunderstorm."

"We were in danger of children making poor decisions," Vayu answered. "I thought...mm. Hard to say exactly what I thought. Maybe I thought I could help them choose more wisely. Sometimes it doesn't take much to make a difference."

"I think you're right on that count," Sailee agreed. "Not something everyone appreciates, though."

Vayu raised an eyebrow. Sailee turned to watch the rain before continuing: "Sometimes instead of watching, you need to listen."

The rain rattled against the roof and street. The streetlight at the end of the street flickered. In companionable silence, the two of them listened to sounds of water, wind, and earth.