Once in a Blue Rune: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Dwarf for Hire Book 2)

by J. B. Garner

  “Yes, you did,” I acknowledged, running my fingers through my beard as this all percolated through my brain. I was still a mess, a fact you’d think would be easy to ignore as we rode towards what was sounding like an arcane catastrophe in the making. I couldn’t, though. “Though I must ask why you think Patches would follow through with this ritual, and what harm it would do to let it happen anyway?”

  My imagination started conjuring various answers to my own question, ones that started spilling out of my mouth. “Maybe Patches is under some magical compulsion laid on the jewel and is forced to follow the last commands of some ancient Garou of the past! Oh, perhaps the Star is a conduit to the extradimensional entity of the ritual, and now Patches is possessed, forced to carry out an elaborate ritual to unleash an eldritch horror from beyond the pale!”

  “Ah, well, I suppose any of those things could be true,” Aelfread said after a moment’s pause.

  Bunny rolled her eyes and took on a severe countenance. “Flights of fancy aside, the core problem isn’t that Patches is possessed or some nonsense like that. It’s that he’s a good dog that has now found out that his employer is a crime lord. I’m sure Patches realizes what that means for his family now that he’s gone AWOL with the stone.”

  The Huntress let out a deep sigh before continuing. “Now, the ritual’s purpose for the Garou was to beseech the lunar spirits or goddess or whatever you want to call it for greater shapeshifting magic and Mother explained that the ritual used a moonstone as a focus. We also know that the Star itself has a lot of power, power that is also attuned to Garou magic. Now, if I was responsible for the safety of my family, hunted by a ruthless criminal, and suddenly handed the key to a tremendous amount of power, I know what I’d consider doing.”

  While the baser reality of the situation looked far less ‘end of the world’ than my wild imaginings, that reality was no less dangerous. “You believe he is going to call up all this power and then go after Frizzoli?”

  Bunny’s eyes glanced at me in the mirror. “You said it yourself. Patches is a cornered animal, and he might see this as his only out. He can’t flee anymore, and now he has the possible means to fight.”

  “Considering the amount of magic he may be about to unleash, it could be too much for him to control,” Aelfread added onto the crap burger we were contemplating eating. “This ritual was no doubt meant to be undertaken with a normal, natural gem, not this supercharged artifact of antiquity. You have experienced what can happen if someone of incredible talent runs out of energy, my dear, but what can happen when one of lesser talent is given too much energy is, well, potentially far messier.”

  Logic took over from there. Despite what you might think, there was a form of logic in the magical arts, no matter what discipline. So, if exhausting the available magical energy in me made me pass out with the potential to snuff me out like a candle, channeling more energy than I could control would make me, well, explode with raw magical power.

  “It’d be a magical supernova,” I gasped. “The force would be more than the channeling vessel could contain and then …” I let my voice trail off. No more words were necessary.

  “We’ve got to talk him down before he gets the ball rolling,” Bunny said as we took the exit ramp off the bridge. “And if we can’t do that, we’ve got to disrupt the ritual or get the Azure Star away from him before he pops.”

  “No pressure, huh?” I murmured.

  “I don’t know,” Aelfread grinned as he settled back in his seat. “Compared to facing down an enraged Drake with murder upon his mind, this should be relatively simple.” Gods bless him, he was trying to put forth a calm, collected air, but I could tell under that, he was as worried as the rest of us.

  Silence settled over the car as I pulled out my rune book. Bunny should be able to talk to Patches, make him see reason. They had known one another for years. Sure, for part of that time, they had been romantic rivals, but surely that wouldn’t be a problem … would it?

  If worse became worst, I could try using the platinum runeword again. Instinctually, I flipped to the page and stared at it. But could I? Would it even work against such immense sources of magic? Would I live through it if I tried?

  No, I promised Aelfread I would be careful. Closing the book, I put it away. We’d find another way if things went wrong. After all, I wasn’t alone in this.

  Still, I won’t lie. I almost pulled out my phone and started calling every problem-solving Figment I knew to ask for help, regardless of Bunny or Aelfie’s wishes.

  Before I knew it, as the sun slipped below the skyline and the glorious full moon began to peak above the city, Bunny pulled the rental car into a parking spot right in front of the Blue Moon head shop.

  For what was about to be the site of a sacred rite to the moon spirits, the place looked remarkably mundane. To be honest, it was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the small businesses and restaurants on this particular block. At a distance, I would have assumed with its red-brick exterior, bay windows, and blue neon sign, that the Blue Moon was a bookstore or maybe a coffee shop.

  It was only when you were passing by it would you have known better. Instead of an eclectic variety of books in the windows or a cute display of pastel-iced pastries, an array of glass pipes, bongs, and vaping pens were set out on blue velvet cushions. Roiling smoke, no doubt from customers sucking on vaporizers themselves, diffused the light from inside the shop and obscured what, if anything, was going wrong inside the store.

  At least there wasn’t screaming or crying that we could hear and the neon ‘Open’ sign was still brightly lit. I happily took that as a good omen, even if I knew I was never that lucky.

  Bunny cracked her neck and took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Aelfie and I nodded, me with more confidence than him, and the Huntress led the way through the front door with purpose. A billow of fragrant vapor washed out over us, and it took some effort on my part to not cough. Not that it irritated my throat and nose as heavy cigarette smoke might, not at all. It was the cloying mixture of multiple overpowering scents and tastes that almost made me lose it.

  Still, it was a little easier to see inside the shop than through the windows. Bunny had a hand over her face, trying not to do the same as I, while Aelfread seemed utterly unaffected by the clash of sweet smells. Arrayed around us were glass display cases, like the kind you would find in a jewelry store, displaying more of the head shop’s wares against blue velvet. It was your standard fare, mixing tools and implements from regular tobacco pipes to roach clips to hookahs with novelty items and stuff you would find a New Age herb shop.

  Along the right wall was the sales counter proper, an extended display case with the most expensive items like gold-plated lighters and diamond-fitted vape pens locked in it and the register atop it. The sales attendant on duty, fitted with a blue polo with the Blue Moon’s logo stitched on it, paid us no mind, instead focused on the far-right corner of the room.

  There, three or four other ‘customers’ sat on bean bags and a beaten-up sofa, taking pulls off their vaping pens in lieu of actually smoking, and laughing about, well, something. With the wild mix of fragrances, I wasn’t sure if they were genuinely stoned or just really goofy and happy people by nature. They could have set a bag of marijuana on fire in here, and you couldn’t have smelled it.

  What we didn’t see through the mist was Patches or the Azure Star. Still, I knew, we all knew, we were in the right place. The tingle of a nearby Figment was itching at my spine, mixed with a singular thrum of magical power somewhere near. It was as strong as Klaus’s entire magical arsenal if not stronger, concentrated on one point. Unfortunately, that point was so intense, it made it impossible to pinpoint, like trying to stare at the source of blinding light.

  Aelfread, both immune to the onslaught of scents and the obscuring shine of the Star’s magic, strode right up to the counter and nonchalantly leaned an elbow on it. “My good man, might you be able to help me?”


  “Whoa, man,” the attendant cried with a start, so wrapped up in whatever the circle of vapers was doing that was so damn funny that he didn’t even notice the Elf. “Oh, sorry, sir. Uh, welcome to the Blue Moon, and if it’s about smoking or vaping, we can help you.”

  He was probably a college kid, curly hair tied into a man-bun, a vaping pen of his own dangling from a lanyard around his neck.

  “Other than your friends there,” – Aelfread gestured towards the laughing party – “have you entertained any other customers lately? You see, I am supposed to be meeting a friend here tonight, and I fear they are not answering their phone.” He laughed, oozing charm all over the place. “He’s a bit forgetful, you see, and likely forgot to charge the damnable thing.”

  The kid smiled and took a hit off his pen. Blowing out a heady stream of rose-flavored vapor, he shook his head at Aelfread. “Sorry, friend. The poetry club’s the only folks I’ve seen since the noon rush.” He shrugged apologetically and was about to suck in another cloud of vapor when he chuckled. “Only company I had before they showed was a stray Corgi that was scratching at the door. Poor guy looked like he hadn’t had a good bite to eat for days, so I took him in.”

  “Where is he?” Bunny was at the counter beside Aelfie in a flash, her hands flat on the glass and voice strident.

  The attendant was startled by her sudden movement and forceful tone, taking a step back from the counter, but Aelfie covered for her in a split-second. “Oh, you must excuse my dear friend here.” His soothing countenance and words put the kid at ease in a second. “You see, Reba lost track of her poor, sweet Corgi just the other day and it may be by sheer luck that we have stumbled upon him. Might we take a look?”

  “Oh, well, I guess so,” the clerk mumbled. He blinked as he looked at all three of us, lingering on me for a long moment before shaking his head. “Uh, because the boss will kill me if he saw a dog on the store floor, I put the little guy in the basement with some food and water. He’s down there.” The kid pointed towards a back door that had an ‘Employees Only’ sign posted on it. “The boss would also kill me if I left the store unattended so, uh, can I trust you not to mess up anything if you go look?”

  “As the responsible one of our little trio,” I lied convincingly, “I promise we won’t mess up a single thing.”

  Yeah, like that was going to happen. I felt a little guilty as the clerk smiled, nodded, and let us through the locked door to the basement. I only hoped that he somehow kept his job, assuming there was even a store left after we were finished.

  20

  The clerk closed the door behind us as we started down the stairs, pushing a final waft of vaping fog after us. The poorly-lit stairwell was made even worse by that cloud, but we pressed on, barely able to see past our faces. What was strange was when the sweet scents of the vaping fluid passed, the veiled mists didn’t.

  The air took on a clammy quality as our footfalls began to sound less like soles on wood than boots on stone. Time and distance became frustratingly hard to judge and even though we never strayed more than a few feet from one another, there were times when Aelfread, Bunny, or both would disappear entirely from my sight. Reaching out to either side, beyond the boundaries of the steps, revealed nothing but empty air.

  None of this brought me any comfort whatsoever.

  “I do not wish to sound fretful,” Aelfread said from somewhere behind me, “but I have the distinct feeling that we are not precisely in the Blue Moon’s basement anymore.”

  Bunny’s shadowy shape rippled and expanded, the mists roiling as she grew into her wererabbit form. “What clued you in, Aelfson? The fact that we’ve been walking for ten minutes straight or the endless mysterious fog we’ve been trudging through?”

  “Shush now,” I hissed. “I swear I hear something.”

  Well, it was more that I felt something, a vibration in my bones, because Bunny had me beat in hearing by a country mile in her rabbit form and Aelfie’s senses were always sharper than mine. Shafts of blue light shot through the clouds, pulsing in time to the thrumming I felt. The silhouetted rabbit ears ahead of me perked up a moment after I spoke, and Bunny’s pace slowed.

  “I understand your wish for caution,” Aelfie called out, “yet I would like to say that we should instead hurry! That rhythmic beat is undoubtedly the ritual beginning.”

  So much for Aelfread usually being the cautious one. With that bit of spurring, we picked up the pace, taking what turned out to be the last curving flight of stone stairs into what had formerly been a smoke shop basement, assuming we were even in the same dimension as the Blue Moon anymore. Though we knew things had become extremely strange at this point, none of us were prepared for the full extent of what we saw.

  Mossy rocks and scattered pine needles covered the ground of the grove we stepped foot into. Yes, I do mean a grove, as thick, bushy pine trees shot up around the perimeter of the clearing. The mists we had been tromping through rose out of a natural spring in the center of the whole thing. Sparkling, clean water burbled out into a basin of stone, shaped and polished by the running water over what had to be centuries.

  It was no coincidence that the basin looked to be entirely moonstone. Speaking of the moon, it shone down from above, unnaturally large and full, lighting up the entire place almost as brightly as true daylight. The pulsing blue light, however, had an entirely different source, bright enough to cut through the moonlight with every beat.

  That came from the Azure Star, hanging on by a literal thread tied around it and the thick, leather collar fit around the largest Corgi I had ever seen. Now, that doesn’t seem too intimidating at first blush, but when I mean the largest, I say it in the most exaggerated fashion you can imagine. This Corgi was as tall as Bunny’s upright ears at the shoulder and had to mass at least a ton of furry, bright-eyed muscle, the pulsing artifact no more than a bauble in comparison to it.

  “Hunter’s moon,” Bunny gasped out as we stared in shock. “Patches, what happened to you?”

  The Corgi’s huge eyes, glowing in the moonlight, focused on us, on Bunny, as he woofed and growled in what sounded like the Garou language. For a moment I despaired at once again being lost in a conversation but like an echo, words formed in my mind, the voice of a man I judged to be around Bunny’s age, plain spoken and open in tone.

  “Reba, are you here for the ritual as well?” Patches seemed to shake his head as if to discount that. “No, no, you never were one for the old ways. Mother sent you, didn’t she?”

  “She did,” Bunny nodded. As the giant Corgi of doom didn’t seem about to jump at us to tear our heads off, I relaxed some as did Aelfread beside me. “You disappeared, and she was worried. Everything’s fine now, Patches. We know everything that happened to you. You’re safe now.”

  He sniffed the air deeply, taking a step or two closer to us. I think the ground shook with each step or that might have been the increasingly powerful echoes from the Star. “I smell her on you, on you all.” His head quirked, and it would have been so damn adorable if my mind wasn’t doing the calculations on how easily he could chew my head off like a squeaky toy. “I wish you were right. I wish I were safe, but Councilman Frizzoli is a very bad dog. He made me a very bad dog too, by association.”

  “We confronted Mercutio,” I said, finding my courage when I realized that this was too big a job for any one of us to handle. “We forced him to back off of you, of your pack. He won’t bother you again.”

  Was he getting bigger? Already, my sense of scale was all sorts of disrupted and the same waves of distortion that had made the descent down the stairs so trippy were still messing with my brain. Yes, that’s what was going on, or at least that’s what I told myself.

  Patches was growling now, his throaty rumble mingling with the Star’s pulses. “Frizzoli is a liar. He lied to me for years, making me think I was a good dog.”

  The bark that punctuated that was as far from an inside-voice bark as possible, and it hurt my ears. It
was worse for the others. Aelfread had to clap his hands over his long, pointed ears while Bunny’s swiveled back against the side of her head and down her neck as she instinctively cowered from the noise.

  “He lied to you too. The only way to make sure that he doesn’t hurt my pack, my mate, is to kill him.” No, it wasn’t any trick of the mists, Patches was getting bigger, though slowly, almost imperceptibly. “I know that won’t make me a good dog, but Mother and the pups are the only important things right now.”

  No doubt every animal instinct in Bunny’s, well, bunny heart wanted her to flee. Most of my Dwarven instincts wanted me to do the same, so I couldn’t blame her. Still, she managed to hold her ground, forcing herself back to her full height.

  “You won’t help them like this, Patches,” she countered. “They need you like you normally are, not like this, and not in chains, which is what will happen if you murder Frizzoli!”

  Even Aelfread managed to find the bravery to speak out against the giant dog. “Not to mention the danger you are currently in, my good man! If you invoke too much power from above,” – he gestured up at the moon, which was growing to almost fill the unnatural sky above us – “you will never even make it to that vile villain. You will either die from the power or be taken over by it!”

  I think Aelfie was going to say more but Patches cut him off with a growl and snap in his direction. It wasn’t an attack, not exactly, because I doubt anything could have stopped that cuddly beast from snatching the Elf in his jaws, but it did make Aelfread jump back a clear foot.

  “I may not be the smartest Garou, Elf, but don’t patronize me,” Patches growled, his eyes starting to blaze red with fury as his snout whipped over to face Bunny. “And you, don’t play games with me, pretending to want me to be safe and sound with my mate. You still love her, I smell it on you every time the two of you are together, and you would love to steal her from me. That would be easy if you put me in the Pens, wouldn’t it?”