Now Jesus, he knew his price tag. 30 pieces of silver hung on his hide. But that Devil in your smile is so divine I’ll play Judas and I’ll pass out for 29.

This would be the part of a movie where they’d go into a training montage. The reasons for that are basically that learning a new job or skill is boring A. F. Also because people love a montage.

The next couple weeks were like that. Punch in, punch out. Anwyn walked me through the most terrifying part of the job (paperwork), introduced me to L.O.A. (the Logical Occult Analysis program) which was basically our actuary table for quoting policies, and gave me some training in the use of the tranq rifle.

That last part was kind of exciting since she did it by taking me paintballing. Turns out our tranq guns use the same propulsion system as paintball weapons do. I got pretty good at it by the end of the third day getting myself hit really fucking hard by small pellets driving into my hide at 30 miles per hour.

Most of the time Anwyn was all business, but occasionally she’d surprise me with little affectionate gestures like patting my hand or a lingering touch on my cheek as she passed my chair. Once she even played with my hair while discussing something on the computer. Hindsight is always 20/20 but looking back I’m not sure what I could have done differently. Yeah, I was a dense motherfucker, but thing probably wouldn’t have turned out as well as they did if I’d picked up on the frankly obvious signals she was laying down.

After an interminable period of time engaging in a bizarre mixture of mundane tasks and inanely ridiculous ones (one day I’d be filing paperwork, the next I had to watch five very specific episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer), we got another call. You might have noticed that not all of our clients were extranormal (Leon and Red aside), so it wasn’t too much of a shock to get a call from a clued in normie. No, the shock was that that particular normie was the medicine man for the local Ojibwe band.

Red Lake, Minnesota is… strange. The seat of the largest res in the state, the Red Lake Chippewa were one of the only First Nations groups to refuse the land allotment treaties that the US government tried to **** on the native population with the Dawes Act (one of the most despicably racist legal maneuvers ever) thus remaining one of the only two “closed” reservations in the country. What this means is that unlike other reservations all of the land is owned by the tribe rather than individuals. On some rezes as little as 10% of the land is actually owned by the tribe that lives there, with ownership getting even more confusing due to fractionation. The end result of this is that the tribe at Red Lake has near total control of movement of outsiders on their territory. They’re isolated, only abandoned the original chief-led structure for an elected parliamentary council in the 1950s (without term limits) and the group was originally spawned by the more war-like members of the Chippewa (so they’re also sorta badasses). All this is saying that they usually handle things in-house. What happens on the res, stays on the res.

So it was sort of odd for them to be calling us. As far as clued-in people go, natives are up there with the Rom and the Catholic Church, with the tribal medicine men being able to hold their own with a Kabbalist Rabbi or a Jesuit Templar when it comes to magic (of course there are exceptions… The Brotherhood of Hebrew Champions are some scary motherfuckers). Calling in outsiders either meant that the shit had really hit the fan or we were getting fucked with.

I of course didn’t know any of this stuff back then. Only that Anwyn fielded the call and told me we were going to be driving for three hours after making a stop downtown at the Urban Office. The band maintains a tribal office in downtown Duluth and we were stopping there first to get a briefing.

(Title: “Wingless Angels” by The Asylum Street Spankers)