Grilled Cheese and Goblins

by Nicole Kimberling

  “And I’m telling you no! I know what you really want.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “To buy the dust from Big Wings. Her and her mob are the reason we’re here protesting instead of working. Why can’t you badges shut her down?”

  “By Big Wings I assume you mean Buttercup?” Keith said. “What do you know about her customers?”

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Three Buckles shouted from behind the toilet.

  “I’m no squealer,” Carrot Beard yelled, as much at Three Buckles as at Keith. “You’ll get nothing out of me.”

  “But I think we can both agree that I caught you, so you do owe me three wishes,” Keith said. “So for the first, I wish you would tell me everything you know about pixie dust being used for terrorist attacks on NIAD agents.”

  Keith watched Carrot Beard’s face writhe and contort, but he had the little man dead to rights. “I only know that nobody’s claimed responsibility. Nobody knows who’s doing it. What’s your second wish? For me to know the answer? The magic doesn’t work like that. Even if you wished it into me, chances are I’d be whisked away and changed into one of the villains doing this and then I wouldn’t be interested in telling you, and owe you nothing. The magic does what it wants and takes its own payment. It obeys your words the way it wants to.”

  Keith considered this. He’d often wondered why leprechauns were so consistently obstructive in their wish-granting. He hadn’t considered that magic might be capable of creating perverse manifestations of its own accord.

  “All right then, I wish you’d step aside and allow me to go though the portal.”

  “Fine, you may.” Carrot Beard did as Keith asked and beckoned him forward.

  Keith holstered his pistol and took a step inside.

  “Wait, what about the third wish?” Carrot Beard rushed up and caught the leg of Keith’s pants.

  “I’ll keep it for when I need it,” Keith replied, shaking the little creep off.

  “Careful, badge-boy, one slip of the tongue and your mother’s on the surface of the moon.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  Then he stepped inside the portal.

  The experience of travel through portals was unnerving because of its lack of drama. There was no sense of vertigo or travel at all, just a slight tension in the air and a strange bending of the light, and then Keith’s surroundings changed from the dingy bathroom stall to the interior of a blue plastic port-o-let. Opening the door, Keith squinted at the intense light flowing in from the vast green meadow outside.

  The wind smelled sweetly of flowers and hay. A brilliant sun shone in a blue sky. Keith had been to this realm three times now and it always seemed to be the same time of day—around three o’clock, when the shadows lengthen slightly.

  Maybe it was the only time the portal opened there. Then again, maybe time held still in this realm. Who knew?

  He scanned the verdant grass for his target.

  Finally, about fifty feet away he saw a large yellow moth fluttering toward him. As it drew near it fluttered in a circle around him, then hovered in the air around his belt. A swirling ribbon of yellow light shimmered through the air as Buttercup expanded her body. When she was finished she stood about belt height. She wore nothing, and her small breasts jiggled as she put her hands on her hips. He was crotch to face with Buttercup, the undisputed master of this realm.

  “Well met, badge,” she said. As she spoke Keith could see that her tongue, like her lips and hair, was a vibrant yellow.

  “Well met, Miss Buttercup.” Keith produced the badge of which she spoke, just as a formality. Obviously she’d already pegged him as a NIAD agent.

  “Spooky to see a human badge wearing a goblin pendant,” Buttercup said. She flapped her wings to bring herself closer to his throat, twisting her head this way and that as if looking at hidden dimensions in the jewelry, which, for all he knew, she could see. Finally she squeezed her eyes closed and crinkled up her nose to take a long sniff. “You smell like kerosene kisses and forbidden love! How romantic . . .” She rolled back in a little flip, as though bowled over by the wonderfulness of it. Tiny yellow hearts manifested in the air between them.

  “There’s nothing forbidden about my love,” Keith said. It wasn’t true. Not by a long shot. But he wasn’t going to let some half-pint fairy yank his chain again. He’d already committed a major infraction drawing a mage pistol on civilians engaged in a legal protest. Even if they were leprechauns, they still had rights.

  “Love between a goblin and a human? Only as much as the adoration of a cat for a mouse.” Buttercup’s face went serious. “You want to watch out if she brings home a pot big enough to hold you, badge-boy.”

  Keith considered correcting any of Buttercup’s erroneous assumptions, but decided that, on the whole, it wouldn’t be worth it. Instead he pulled out his notebook.

  “I came to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  “It took you long enough.”

  “Oh? Why would you say that?”

  “I’ve sent hundreds of letters,” Buttercup said.

  “Letters?” Keith couldn’t help glancing around for any sign of even a building, let alone a post office box, on the broad, green expanse of the fields. The lone structure was the blue port-o-let that he’d stepped out of minutes before. As he gazed at it, wondering where the letter slot could be, the port-o-let vanished as the layover ended. The sight of the gate fading caused a cold stab of anxiety to move through his gut.

  It will reappear in three minutes, he told himself. And then disappear again three minutes after that. It’s the way the gates work.

  Still, he checked his watch.

  “You said you’ve sent letters?” he prompted.

  “Every day. Hundreds and hundreds of messages. I’ve written about it on every single leaf and flower petal I could find, but no one answered.” Buttercup raised a sorrowful hand to her forehead, then added, “Until you! Forget what I said about your forbidden love. I’m sure she’s very nice. And you! You must be a great knight! Pray, illustrated stranger, find my little pixies, I beg you. They are so tiny. And cats are everywhere in the earthly realm.”

  The “illustrated” took him aback until he realized Buttercup was staring at the tattoos on his forearms. Keith resigned himself to missing several cycles of the gate. He sighed and said, “Okay, describe what happened.”

  “I was just fluttering over there by the riverbank when I saw three men come through the port-o-let. They wore white paper clothes and smelled like bleach.” Buttercup wrinkled her nose. “One of the men began to sprinkle wondrous delights on the ground.”

  “Do you know what they were?”

  Buttercup nodded vigorously. She leaned forward, venal desire showing in her yellow eyes. “Pop Rocks.”

  Of course, Keith thought. He wondered how Buttercup would respond to the string of Zotz he had in his pocket, but decided not to play that card yet.

  “And these attracted the pixies?”

  “I knew it was a trap right away,” Buttercup said. “No one just throws magical marvels such as those on the ground! I yelled for my little girls to stop, but they were already there, swarming. Then out came the butterfly nets. I tried to stop them, but they had a hateful orange cat, and then in an instant they snatched my girls away through the stinky toilet door.”

  Keith finished writing this down, as well as the names of each of the pixies: Butterbur, Artemesia, Lorraine—the list went on and on.

  “I don’t suppose you have any pictures of them?”

  Buttercup cocked her head, then swept her hand over her heart and pulled away a bit of gray dust. This she cast into the air, where it became a glittering image of a small woman with wings like a dragonfly and shimmering azure hair and lips.

  “That’s Lorraine,” Buttercup said.

  Keith pulled out his phone and took a photo. From the corner of his eye he saw the port-o-let begin to coalesce into existence. Knowing he w
as about to leave, he said, “So the leprechauns say that you deliberately sent your girls into the earthly realm to eliminate competition for sales of your pixie dust.”

  Buttercup looked aghast. She jumped back and flitted up into the air. “That’s a dirty lie! What do they know? Little finks.”

  Keith pressed the issue. “But you do sell pixie dust, right?”

  “To my friends,” Buttercup conceded. “Or to people with candy.”

  “When was the last time you sold dust?”

  “You’re not a knight after all, are you, fish-foot? You’re another nasty badge trying to put your laws on my body.” Buttercup zipped into the air. “What I do with my dust in my kingdom is my own business.”

  “Wait!” Keith whipped the Zotz out of his pocket and waved the string of candies in the air. “I didn’t say I believed them. I was just telling you what they said.”

  Buttercup circled just out of reach, eyes never leaving the Zotz. She dived in and snatched at them, but Keith pulled them away.

  “Give it!”

  “Tell me who you last sold dust to.”

  “Another badge called Half-Dead. He used it to disguise a boy who smelled like Half-Dead’s semen.” Buttercup’s humor seemed to have returned.

  “I remember the case. The guy was in protective custody,” Keith said, nodding. Half-Dead was a veteran NIAD agent and also Gunther’s godfather, so chances of him being the kidnapping culprit were slim. “But no one else since then?”

  “No one.”

  “But there’s been a lot of illegal dust around DC recently,” he said. “Where do you think it could be coming from?”

  “How would I know?” Buttercup came back to the ground, crossing her arms in a sulk. Then her expression changed to one of total distress. “Those bleach men. What if they’re taking it from my little girls?” She threw back her head and let out a wail that filled the air like a siren and grated like the screech of an owl. It reverberated through the air, shaking the petals from the yellow flowers nearby.

  “We don’t know anything for certain,” Keith said, shouting through the terrible noise. Buttercup did not relent. In desperation he pressed the strip of Zotz into her hand. It took her a moment to notice them, but when she did she tore open one of them and thrust it into her mouth, sucking it violently as saffron-colored tears streaked her cheeks. Keith glanced at his watch. He had one minute. He said, “I’m going to file a report. And I’ll make sure that another agent contacts you with an update. Don’t worry. We’ll do everything we can to find your girls and bring them back safely.”

  Chapter Three

  As he walked back through the fish market to the Metro, Keith took stock of what he’d learned. A group of humans—or at least humanoids with human candy—had kidnapped more than twenty pixies. That meant that there was more than enough contraband power of illusion floating around the earthly realm to perpetrate the intrusions on NIAD. But who had those so-called bleach men been? Few humans knew how to use the port-o-lets to travel, and fewer still would be so familiar as to know that one of them had a layover in Buttercup’s realm.

  As he stood, swaying with the motion of the subway car, Keith pondered the circumstances of Gunther’s attack as rationally as he could.

  What if it had been an inside job? A mole in NIAD was hard for him to imagine. The pledges of loyalty, secrecy and disclosure an agent took when being instated were magically binding. But pixie dust was powerful stuff—strong enough to allow an infiltrator to cast a glamour on himself and appear to be any agent.

  The key would be to review the security camera footage, he decided. He should look at every single agent entering the building that morning and establish that they were really there, as well as scanning for duplicates. He entered NIAD headquarters with the plan firmly in mind.

  The moment he stepped past the security door, two agents escorted him straight back to the Lincoln Memorial, where he once again descended into the vaulted chamber beneath the scrotum of Honest Abe to meet Morticia and the funereal fashion of the mage gang.

  They did not seem happy. And neither did Keith’s direct superior, Nancy Noble. She stood just inside the doorway, arms crossed and eyes narrowed.

  Usually Keith liked Nancy. Though she was in her early forties, she shared his taste for metal music. He found her boxy pantsuits and perennial frosted eighties mullet soothing. But Nancy’s adherence to rules could sometimes cause a rift in their relationship.

  “Agent Curry has arrived, Mage Melchior,” Nancy intoned.

  The mage who Keith had dubbed “the King” slowly turned to face him, looking for all the world like an animatronic figure in the world’s creepiest theme park.

  “What can I do for you?” Keith asked, trying for a pretense of nonchalance.

  “We have received a complaint from a member of the extra-human community regarding your conduct.” As Melchior spoke, a coil of smoke slithered down from the ceiling and wormed its way into Keith’s nose.

  Keith sneezed and tried to rub away the tingling sensation it left behind.

  “Now please tell us how you’ve been spending your morning.” Melchior smiled as he spoke. Keith took a breath to collect himself and to figure out how to put the most positive spin on his actions. While he was thinking, he heard a voice begin to relate his actions. With mounting horror, he realized that the voice was coming out of his own mouth. The mages had put a spell on him. Rather than being able to choose his own words, the spell drew an account that sounded like court testimony, as if his subconscious had been duped into giving evidence.

  He could do nothing to stop speaking long enough to collect his thoughts and nothing to stop himself from cracking his knuckles, one by one, as he grew more and more furious.

  “And then I returned to the office with the intention of reviewing the security footage to scan for the presence of doppelgangers,” Keith heard himself finish.

  Melchior gave him a long, appraising look and then, with the expression of a man who has been offered chicken gizzards when he expected foie gras, he said, “Agent Curry, your job is to act as a food inspector. You are neither cleared nor qualified to investigate security breeches. If you persist in making incursions beyond your station I will ask for your dismissal. Is that clear?”

  Still under the influence of the smoke, he said, “Yes, I understand. And just for the record, you don’t need to put the whammy on me to get me to tell the truth, you ridiculous old mummy. I’m an agent, not an offender.”

  The mage’s eyes flashed wide. Keith thought he could see tiny lightning bolts flashing across them. Necro-future girl snickered, then took a hasty drag of her cigarette to cover it.

  “We’re within our rights to use enhanced interrogation,” Morticia said. “So long as your superior officer is present.”

  “And I’m within my rights to file a complaint about it anyway,” Keith said. “Which is what I’m going to do.”

  The King narrowed his eyes and said, “Agent Noble, please escort Agent Curry back to his desk.”

  Nancy nodded, caught Keith by the elbow and guided him out of the room. Once they’d reached the chilly winter air of the mall, he expected her to turn to him and crack a joke—possibly about which archeological dig the King might have been unearthed during. Instead she stalked silently alongside him. Keith spent the walk sneezing over and over, causing his abs to ache like hell by the time they reached the NIAD building and climbed up to their floor.

  Nancy remained wordless as they returned to their department, not even giving him a single gesundheit. She motioned him to follow her to her private office.

  “Shut the door behind you,” she said.

  “So . . . ,” he said. “Am I in big trouble?”

  Nancy turned to face him. At that point he noticed her right eye twitching slightly.

  “If you embarrass me like that again I will rip off your dick and shove it right into your disrespectful, permission-avoiding rectum,” she said. “Do you hear me?”
/>   “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I don’t like apologizing to those creepy old fossils,” she said.

  “Right. I get that. I’m sorry.”

  “And I hate being summoned to their underground lair. Now I’m going to smell like I threw a séance at an undertaker’s all goddamn day.” Nancy flung herself into her rolling chair and unbuttoned her suit coat.

  Nancy had never been this angry with him before. He felt hurt and slightly scared, which was weird for him. Normally being admonished by his employers evoked sensations of rage and personal affront.

  Maybe worrying over Gunther’s condition was affecting him more than he knew.

  “Do you want me to pay for your dry cleaning?” Keith didn’t know if it was appropriate to offer but needed something to say.

  “No,” she said, sighing. “But you are going to have to hand over your mage pistol.”

  “What?” Here comes the affronted rage, he thought, with grim satisfaction.

  “Your weapons privileges have been revoked pending the investigation into allegations that you brandished it at innocent civilians.” Nancy held out her hand to receive the weapon.

  Keith left it snuggled into his holster, protesting, “Those were not innocent. They were leprechauns.”

  “What the hell were they doing? Jacking your Lucky Charms?”

  “You and I both know those little runts are dangerous.”

  “One of those little runts also claims that you extorted three wishes from him.” Nancy leaned back in her chair. “Did you?”

  “Not extortion, exactly. I caught him, fair and square.”

  “Agents soliciting or accepting magical items from extra-humans is expressly forbidden!” Nancy said, eyes wide. “You know that, Keith.”

  “It happened in the heat of the moment,” Keith said. “I just wanted to find the people who attacked Gunther.”

  “Listen, I know you do, but unfortunately Mage Melchior is right. You don’t have any authorization to investigate anything outside of this department. Now give me your pistol.”