Grilled Cheese and Goblins

by Nicole Kimberling

  The sudden change of mood puzzled Keith, as it went against Gunther’s usual equanimity. He stepped forward and put a hand on Gunther’s shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  Gunther didn’t reply. He moved closer to the window until his forehead pressed right against the glass and his breath fogged the pane. Though his lips moved, Keith couldn’t hear what he said.

  Keith glanced around the workout room. They were hardly the only agents present. Eight or nine other agents occupied the space. A couple of Gunther’s strike force buddies gathered at the back, pumping iron. One of them noticed Gunther’s dejected posture and gave Keith the stink eye.

  His name was Haakon and he was half dark elf, though Keith would never have used the word “fae” to describe him. He always stood too close to Gunther in the cafeteria lunch line and Keith suspected him of unnecessarily flexing his big black 3-D delts while using the free weights. To Keith, Haakon always seemed to be thinking something like, “How does a scrub like you keep a stone-cold fox like Gunther? He could definitely do better.” Or at least that’s what Keith assumed Haakon thought, since they were the only two sentences Haakon had ever spoken to him.

  Keith ignored Haakon’s glower and turned back to Gunther. Quietly, he said, “Hey, what’s up?”

  Slowly Gunther turned to face him. His blue eyes shone with tears.

  “I have to get out of here,” Gunther whispered.

  “Out of DC?” Sure, the city could be dreary at this time of year, but he thought Gunther might be overreacting a little. Could it be homesickness?

  “Out of here!” Gunther’s voice rose with each word. “I have to get out!” He spun to face the window and smashed his fist directly into a window designed to withstand a mage blast. Blood exploded across the glass as his knuckles split and popped against the unyielding surface.

  Gunther howled with rage and threw himself at the glass, thrashing against it like an eel caught in a net. Keith lunged forward and caught him around the waist, pulling him back from the impenetrable barrier.

  “I need some help here!” Keith bellowed.

  Gunther fought him, throwing an elbow that caught him like a clubin the gut. Keith curled over in pain, but managed to keep hold of his boyfriend long enough for Gunther’s strike force buddies and a couple other agents to get across the room. While Keith tried to stand, Haakon tackled Gunther like the high school linebacker he’d probably been. Someone hit the alarm. A red light coalesced in the center of the room, spinning and flashing like the light atop an old-time cop car.

  Gunther struggled against his opponents, wailing and writhing on the gray carpet. His already injured hand smashed against the pedal of an elliptical trainer. Blood spattered across the device. Being goblin inside, Gunther easily overwhelmed the men restraining him. He kicked Haakon back against a weight rack, sending dumbbells crashing down.

  On-duty security came through the door, stun guns drawn.

  “Clear off!” one shouted.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Keith rushed forward, but not in time. The point man leveled the gun and fired. A silver bolt of magic flared from the muzzle, slamming into Gunther’s chest. Gunther went still.

  Completely still. Keith couldn’t even see the rise and fall of his breath.

  For Keith all time stopped. Though he knew that the security guy had fired a stun gun, he also knew that stun guns could kill, especially when fired at close range.

  Keith dropped to his knees, leaning forward to listen for breath, and heard nothing. Suddenly he felt hands on his shoulders urging him away from Gunther’s unmoving body. Blind with rage, Keith shook them off and launched himself at the shooter, screaming, “I’ll kill you, you stupid fuck!”

  Two on-duty agents caught Keith by both arms and held him back. One of them was shouting something in Keith’s ear.

  “. . . he’s been compromised. That’s what happens when you stun a goblin. Calm down. He’ll be fine.”

  Keith stopped struggling as he saw a medical team also coming through the door. They crowded around Gunther’s fallen form so densely that all Keith could see were Gunther’s feet. One of his running shoes was missing—lost in the struggle.

  “Let me go,” Keith growled. “I want to see him.”

  “No, you’ll just get in their way.” Haakon came forward, rubbing his shoulder as he did so. “You need to let them do their job.”

  “Where are they taking him?”

  “To the medical unit.” Haakon did not actually look at Keith as he spoke, which did nothing to soothe Keith’s nerves. But he stopped fighting and the two security guards holding him loosed their grip.

  “What the hell just happened?” Keith tried to mute the panic in his voice, but he couldn’t.

  Haakon finally met his eyes and said, “I think he just became the eighth agent to get pixie-dusted.”

  Chapter Two

  Keith went to the medical unit but wasn’t able to enter, as Gunther had been quarantined until he regained cognizance. The witchdoctor in charge shook a couple of rattles around Keith’s head to make sure he was clear of magical influence, then said, “We’ll call you when you’re allowed to visit. Would you like me to inform Agent Heartman’s family?”

  “I can call them,” Keith said quickly. He knew Mr. and Mrs. Heartman would react badly to any official NIAD phone calls.

  Phoning Gunther’s family with bad news was harder than Keith had imagined possible. It had been a long time since he’d been a contributing member of a family and he’d forgotten how it felt to participate as an insider. Now he would have to tell them that their son had been attacked, while he stood by, powerless. But at least he knew that Gunther’s parents were the only two people in the world who loved Gunther as much as he did.

  Despite Keith’s delicate wording, Gunther’s mother, Agnes, broke down right away, crying and handing the phone to Gunther’s bewildered father, Gerald, who seemed certain that Gunther had been killed.

  Once Keith managed to explain that Gunther was at the hospital under sedation and was expected to make a full recovery, he had to wait while Gerald explained this to Agnes. Finally, Gerald finished by saying, “We’ll be there in five minutes. We’ll just have to tell our supervisor what’s happened.”

  Since Gerald and Agnes worked in the translation office of the San Francisco NIAD branch, they had access to the travel portals that connected all the offices. This proved convenient during the holiday season, but could be overwhelming as well.

  “You don’t have to rush,” Keith said. Even he hadn’t made it into the medical unit yet. “They won’t let you in to see him anyway. Not until he starts to come around. And I still have to go be debriefed about the incident.”

  “Agnes and I would rather be there just in case,” Gerald said.

  “At least go home to pack a bag,” Keith said.

  “No need. Gunther keeps a suitcase of ours in the closet of the spare room. We’ll have everything we need for a few of days.” Gerald had the tone of a man announcing an obvious fact that Keith should have already known.

  “Right.” Keith sagged against the wall. Of course Gunther would have an emergency suitcase for his parents. He’d only moved out of their place to move in with Keith. “Look, I’m not at home right now. But I guess you probably have your own key.”

  “That’s right. You just get on with what you’re doing.” This last came from Agnes, who had apparently just found the extension handset.

  On the one hand Keith was relieved to know that someone understood how he might feel about Gunther, but he also felt a twinge of annoyance at how easily the not-even-in-laws-yet decided to invade his space. He pushed it aside. He had work to do, so he said, “Thanks, you too.”

  Clad all in black and seated around a circular table of the dim, circular room beneath the Lincoln Memorial, the twelve men and women in charge of maintaining the magical barriers surrounding NIAD DC headquarters looked like they’d come directly from some big funeral for a corpo
rate incense manufacturer. Thin, perfumed trails of smoke coiled against the ceiling and swirled into the recessed lighting fixtures like gravity-defying serpents.

  For a group of people who had all decided to wear the same color to work, the mages varied wildly in their personal style in that they appeared to have chosen to survey the entirety of fashion history. One man looked like he’d stopped moving forward with fashion in the midseventeenth century. The female closest to Keith wore latex pants that were arguably inspired by the dystopian necro-future. She held a lit cigarette that smelled like cloves.

  Keith thought, Things to bring up to my union rep: mages being unfairly exempt from dress code and flouting citywide indoor smoking ban.

  The joke helped calm his nerves.

  Taking turns, the mages quizzed him on his and Gunther’s actions leading up to the event. As he spoke, spells moved the smoke in the air to re-create his actions in a three-dimensional representation.

  “And you did nothing unusual?” another mage asked. She was a dead ringer for Morticia Addams, and Keith wondered whether she imitated the costume ironically to creep people out, or if the character herself had been the inspiration. “No one contacted Gunther or handed him any packages, for example? Tapped him on the shoulder, maybe? Was there anyone smoking a cigarette on the street nearby that Agent Heartman could have inhaled the smoke from?”

  “Not that I know of,” Keith replied. The mention of this caused a twinge of anxiety about the amount and contents of the smoke he currently inhaled.

  The Morticia clone steepled her fingers and leaned back in her chair. Another mage, an elderly man whose neat Savile Row suit contrasted sharply with the jewel-encrusted crown he wore, leaned forward to take his turn as interrogator.

  “You said Agent Heartman was looking through his phone messages just before the attack? Did he receive any calls?” As the King spoke, Keith thought he caught a whiff of formaldehyde.

  “I don’t think so. But I have his phone here. You can check.” Keith slid the device across the table toward the King. The man removed a silver pen from his pocket and used that to manipulate the phone while murmuring a string of incantations. Finally he said, “There’s nothing here,” and pushed the device back to Keith, who caught it just before it spun off the edge of the table.

  Morticia straightened in her seat. “That will be all. You may return to your duties, Agent Curry.”

  As one, the mages turned from him. Without speaking, they stretched out their arms and linked hands. Then, following some unknown cue, they began a loud, slow chant in what sounded like Latin, but could have been anything.

  Keith didn’t know if he’d ever experienced such a summary dismissal in his life. He’d wanted to ask questions—find out if they had any real leads. But they just kept chanting as if he didn’t exist.

  Dejected, he mounted the stairs and climbed back up into the chill winter air and headed returned to his office. By the time he got there, his coworkers had both already gone on their assignments, so he was left alone in his undecorated cubicle.

  As an agent, Keith specialized in investigations involving contraband food items. Everything from illegal unearthly fruit importation to busting human protein rings fell within his purview. Among the new cases in Keith’s inbox were fresh allegations of glycerin adulteration of vampiric meal supplements. He also needed to finish up the paperwork on what had turned out to be spurious allegations of mermaid flesh dealers working the Florida Keys. After a cursory investigation, Keith had determined that the mermaid flesh was really manatee—also illegal, but not his department—and passed the case along to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

  He needed to file paperwork for both but he couldn’t just file reports knowing that the person who had caused Gunther to break his own hand was just waltzing around somewhere free and happy.

  He considered asking his supervisor, Nancy Noble, to reassign him to Gunther’s case, then realized it would be quicker and easier to just reassign himself, as his supervisor had stepped out to lunch.

  Gunther had said that the magic was pixie-pure, and the biggest known dealer of pixie dust just happened to be an associate of the Heartman Clan. Her name was Buttercup and she, like a lot of fairies, spent a lot of time dressed up like an insect—a moth, to be precise. She lived in the Elysian Fields, a former paradise that now served as a kind of way station en route to the Grand Goblin Bazaar. Keith could have easily traveled there via the official system of NIAD portals, but he would have had to file a travel plan, so he elected to use the goblin market transportation system instead.

  The Grand Goblin Bazaar existed over many different realms simultaneously, linked together by portals that allowed a shopper to move from one market to another via a system of entry points.

  Prior to being associated with the Heartmans, Keith had disliked this method of travel, fearing both uncertainty and ambush. But since becoming close with Gunther’s family, Keith had lost nearly all fear of goblins. More than that, he wore a tooth-shaped pendant affiliating him with the Heartman Clan, which had helped a lot on the one occasion he’d gotten lost.

  The only market currently open in DC in March was the fish market at the wharf, so that’s where Keith headed. He donned his spectral lenses, which allowed him to see objects concealed by magic. These might include living creatures who altered their appearance to blend better with human society, or signs and symbols written in spectral ink. In DC, as with the entire Eastern Seaboard, leprechaun graffiti covered the bottom foot of most walls.

  He walked through the lunchtime crowd, heading toward the bathrooms. There he found an out-of-order stall marked with a sign whose plain block letters glowed vibrant green when viewed through the spell-revealing lenses and changed from reading “out of order” to “Elysian Fields.”

  Unfortunately the glasses also revealed the presence of a line of six leprechauns forming a blockade in front of the stall. Standing shoulder to shoulder with their arms linked, they formed a barrier the approximate height of a rabbit fence. Easy to step over? Not if a guy wanted to come out of it with his nutsack intact. After glancing at the urinals to make certain no other guys were present, Keith pulled out his ID and said, “Official business. Step aside.”

  The leprechauns looked at each other with expressions of such exaggerated incredulity that Keith thought it might have been faster to file the paperwork to use the NIAD portals after all.

  “He’s from NIAD, don’t you know?” The leprechaun whose crinkly orange beard poked down toward his pointed shoes like a fuzzy carrot spoke not to Keith but to a compatriot, whose green felt hat sported not one but three decorative buckles.

  “NIAD, you say?” Three Buckles said. “Doesn’t that stand for something?”

  “Nasty, idjit, arsehole, dingleberries, I think it is,” Carrot Beard replied.

  “Oh no, them letters means nosy, insulting, arrogant, dickholes,” a third leprechaun, who was clean-shaven but sported a nose the relative size and shape of a toucan’s beak, chimed in.

  Keith remained unmoved. Years of experience had proved to him that he couldn’t out-insult a leprechaun. Instead he pocketed the ID and crouched down to as close to their eye level as possible.

  “What are you doing here, guys? What’s the point of hanging out in this shitter all day?” He tried to sound reasonable rather than frustrated, as the wee men tended to thrive on conflict and general strife.

  “We’re committing an action!” Carrot Beard cried, his ruddy face reddening even further.

  “It’s our right to demonstrate,” Three Buckles said.

  “So this is a protest?”

  “That it is.” Carrot Beard nodded. “Against them damn union-busting scabby pixies, may they rot in eternal hell forever.”

  “May their wee heads be squashed like grapes and may goblins suck the marrow from their tiny broken femurs,” Toucan Beak added solemnly.

  “I don’t think it’s wise for professional wish-granters such as yourselves to be
cursing anyone aloud. It could constitute a criminal threat,” Keith remarked. He kept his tone calm, and resisted the urge to crack his knuckles, an action that he tended to perform unconsciously when irritated.

  “I was merely speaking figuratively.” Toucan Beak pulled an obsequious pout.

  “Look, I’m not here to bust you. I just need to use this portal. Do you have any literature I could take? A pamphlet maybe?”

  “Yes, sir, we do!” Three Buckles reached into his small waistcoat and pulled out an even tinier piece of paper. From what Keith could make out, the leprechauns had been on strike against their employer, Taranis Inc., for several weeks. The leprechauns claimed that the pixie scab labor had been brought in by NIAD itself, to ensure production would continue uninterrupted.

  “It’s an interesting theory,” Keith said.

  Carrot Beard grinned. “How about a monetary donation to help our cause then?”

  “How many wishes do I get for it?” As Keith said it, he realized that this was how people fell for the wish racket. He knew if the little bastard said yes that he would pay up and wish for Gunther to be better.

  “None. Ha! We wouldn’t grant a dirty badge’s wishes even if we weren’t on strike, which we are, so fuck off, ball bag!” Carrot Beard said.

  Keith didn’t know if he was happy or sad about the wish being denied, because whatever emotion he felt was immediately subsumed by a wave of overwhelming anger. His hand was around the butt of his mage pistol before he even registered that he’d made a decision to draw it.

  Five leprechauns scattered, but Carrot Beard stood his ground, spitting, “You don’t have the guts!”

  Keith’s finger tensed around the trigger, but some part of his mind that had remained free from homicidal rage stilled his hand.

  “Don’t count on that,” Keith said. “I’m an East Coast chef. I’ve killed more living creatures on a busy Friday night than most agents grease in a lifetime. But I don’t want to kill you. I just want you to know that I’m serious about going through this portal.”