“You can’t take my weapon. It’s not fair. It’s the only thing I have against all that magic. When I’m killed out there by some shitty vampire, my blood will be on your hands.” Keith felt his face flushing. His hands shook with rage.
“Don’t be so dramatic. It’s only temporary.”
With the reluctance of a drowning man letting go of a life preserver, Keith handed over his weapon. He knew he’d broken the rules, but why did that mean he had to part with the sole piece of equipment that gave him any chance of surviving a magical encounter?
“When do I get it back?” Keith asked, abandoning all pretense at civility.
“It could be as long as a week, presuming you get it back at all.” Nancy stood and locked the pistol into the office armory cabinet. “Until then you can help catch up on permitting paperwork.”
Keith had thought that NIAD could not insult him any further. “You aren’t seriously confining me to the office, are you?”
“Not confining, but without your weapon all you can safely do is permits and recertifications.” Nancy spoke as though everything she said was perfectly reasonable, rather that salt in his open wound.
“So that’s it? For trying to find the bastards who attacked my boyfriend, I really have been busted down to being some kind of food safety inspector?”
“Now you know why the rest of us don’t wave our pistols around in public bathrooms,” Nancy said with a shrug. “Now get back to your desk. Or better yet, go visit your boyfriend at the hospital.”
“He isn’t allowed visitors yet.”
“Apparently the situation has changed. He called while you were gallivanting with the fae folk. When you see him, give him a big hug from me.”
After a brief detour at Gunther’s locker, Keith made his way back to the elevator and up to the on-site medical unit, which took up an entire floor of NIAD’s primary office. While standing in the hallway waiting to be admitted his phone rang.
“Curry speaking,” he said.
“I prefer my curry silent and in a bowl, but we can’t have everything we want.” The voice on the other end had a lilting accent—distinctly reminiscent of an Irish Spring deodorant soap commercial.
“Okay, who is this?”
“Never you mind my name, let’s just say we have some unfinished business—a matter of an unfulfilled wish.”
Carrot Beard, then.
“So why are you calling me?” Keith leaned against the wall, scanning the hallway from behind his mage-enhanced spectacles, wondering if he would spot the leprechaun hiding out behind a chair leg, whispering down his sleeve. The only knee-high creatures he saw were a couple of brownie orderlies dressed in white smocks.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t mind going ahead and making your wish now to settle the business between us,” Carrot Beard said.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t run tattling to my boss like a little snitch, but we can’t have everything we want.” Keith wouldn’t normally have antagonized one of the fae folk like this, but the loss of his mage pistol left a raw mark on his pride and temper. “But you did, so why would I do you any favors?”
“That wasn’t me! I was against it! The others forced me against my will,” Carrot Beard protested. “Listen, Agent Officer Curry, sir, you’ve got to help me out. My nerves are shot. The magic wakes up and listens every time you say a word. It’s driving me fucking bonkers! Just close out your wishes, for the love of God.”
“You can hear everything I say?”
“Not me, the magic,” Carrot Beard said. “It’s giving me the mother of all headaches.”
“Good. I think I’ll let it go a little longer then.” Keith hung up, despite the continuing protests coming from the phone’s tiny speaker.
He got directions to Gunther’s room. As he went, Keith passed other, stranger rooms. One held what looked like an incubator full of sparkling red smoke, while another room, completely blacked out, had a sign that read “CAUTION! VAMPIRIC PATIENT! ADMIT NO NATURAL LIGHT!”
Gunther lay on a regular-sized hospital bed, near a window in a regular room designed for the more human-looking of NIAD’s extra-human agents.
He looked surprisingly well. He reclined casually, wearing a faded blue-and-white checked hospital gown. His hair was tousled but still silky and black as a raven’s wing. His right hand had been extensively splinted and bandaged, so that only the tips of his fingers were visible. And those looked swollen.
Keith went to him immediately. Gunther’s expression lit when he saw Keith approaching.
“Hey there, how was your day?” Gunther spoke with such casual ease that Keith simply told him, ending with Nancy’s revoking his gun privileges.
“So, I guess Haakon’s right,” Keith finished. “I’m a fuckup and you could definitely do better.”
“That’s just mean.” Gunther reached out to pat his hand. “And it’s not even true.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.” Keith stroked Gunther’s long fingers. Then, remembering he’d brought a gift, he dug into his pocket and produced Gunther’s half-finished pack of Lucky Strike filterless. “But I did remember to bring your smokes.”
Gunther’s eyes lit up. He snatched the pack with his good hand, shook a bent white tube out, folded it in half and popped it in his mouth. Gunther chewed and then swallowed the entire thing, paper and all. His eyes closed in bliss as he leaned back against the pillows.
“Thank you so much,” he said. “All those little brownie orderlies only eat Drum shag.”
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Keith remarked. As surreptitiously as he could, he took stock of Gunther’s body as he could see. He didn’t appear to be hooked up to anything but a pulse monitor, which Keith found infinitely relieving. “So you ready to talk about what happened to you yet?”
“Well, one minute I was in the gym and the next I was tripping and then I woke up in here,” Gunther said, shrugging. “The witchdoctor said I recovered from the hallucinations more quickly than the fully human agents on account of my goblin blood. But that didn’t help my hand at all. I broke almost every bone in it. It’s going to have to be magically reconfigured once the swelling goes down.”
Keith winced. “I am so sorry. That’s awful. You must feel like shit.”
“I don’t know about shit. More like really weird.” Gunther shifted on the propped-up pillows.
“When they took you away, I didn’t know what to think,” Keith admitted. “I thought the security guys had killed you.”
“I heard you unleashed your fury on them,” Gunther teased.
“Don’t laugh about it,” Keith said, still feeling raw over the incident.
“I’m not. I’m touched. I’m pretty sure you could have taken at least one of them out before the rest of them started tasing you.”
“So everybody’s talking about how I lost it?”
“No, just Haakon. He told me when I came to.” Gunther smoothed the pale yellow blanket that lay over his lap.
“He was waiting here?” Keith tried to keep the outrage from his voice, but seriously: Did the guy have no shame? Trying to bird-dog Gunther in a hospital bed?
“No, they paged him because he’s my team leader. They paged you first but you were still out pounding the pavement.” Gunther gave him a warm smile, as if proud that Keith would be so dogged in his pursuit of justice.
“It was mostly standing around in a lush, green, sweet-smelling field,” Keith said.
“Yeah,” Gunther said, closing his eyes. “It smelled pretty green where I was, too.”
“Where? In your hallucination?”
“That’s right. I can’t really remember too much about it but it smelled really green—like grass or something. And there was this big pile of gold coins. It was so weird.” Gunther opened his eyes. “I was really scared, but there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Like how in a nightmare sometimes blue is terrifying.”
Keith gripped his good hand harder. “I haven’t ever been scared of blue, but I get what you mean. Do
you remember what you were saying when you were first attacked?”
“Not at all.”
“You were saying that you had to get out.”
Gunther shrugged. “I don’t remember anything about that.”
Keith thought a moment. “But you did see a pile of gold coins?”
“Right.” Gunther peered into the middle distance as if trying to access the hallucination again.
“Like a pot of gold, maybe?”
“If it was a pot of gold, I definitely don’t want to go to find the end of the rainbow again,” Gunther said. He flashed a smile, then his expression dimmed. “You don’t think leprechauns had anything to do with this, do you?”
“When I met them this morning they said they were committing an action. Maybe attacking you was part of that action.”
Gunther lay quiet for a moment, staring silently out the window, which caused a thrill of alarm to go through Keith. His face had the same sad expression that had crossed it moments before he’d flung himself at the exercise room window.
Then he said, “I don’t like that word.”
“What word?” Keith spoke as gently as he knew how.
Gunther looked right at him, “Attack. What happened to me didn’t feel like an attack. It didn’t feel like I was being targeted to be hurt. It felt like . . . like I stopped being me.”
Keith did his best to hide the intense relief he felt at Gunther’s lucidity.
“Did you tell that to Haakon?”
“Sure. Him, the medic, the witchdoctor, that mage who looks like Elvira—”
“I thought she looked more like Morticia Addams.”
“Oh, yeah, right, I see that. Anyway, I told everybody who came to question me.”
Keith sighed, and lifted Gunther’s good hand to his lips. He pressed a kiss against Gunther’s skin.
“Do you know how long they’re going to keep you here?” he asked.
Gunther cocked his head as if he didn’t understand Keith’s question, then said, “They’re not keeping me. It’s voluntary. I can check myself out whenever I like.”
“Then why are you still here?”
Gunther hunched slightly and whispered, “My parents came.”
“I know they came. I called them.”
“They’re going to be at the house when we get home.” Gunther’s expression went furtive.
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“I just hoped I could avoid talking to them about what happened.” Gunther looked miserable, then sat up straight and rang the bell to summon the nurse. “I guess I just have to face them like a man.”
“We could always run away to a motel. Dye our hair. Buy fake beards.”
Gunther gave him a tired smile and slid his hand across Keith’s now-stubbly jaw. “It wouldn’t work. My mom would just hunt us down by scent. Her nickname used to be Bloodhound back when she was a mercenary in the old country. Best to just go home.”
Chapter Four
Even before Keith reached his front door, he could tell Agnes was making dinner. And not just any dinner. She was making a good old-fashioned goblin dinner to help her little Gunther regain his strength. Keith’s eyes began to water preemptively as he imagined the capsaicin-laden steam that would be filling his house.
It wasn’t that Gunther’s mother was a bad cook—indeed, in goblin circles she was considered a model homemaker—it’s just that she wasn’t human and therefore did not cook to human tastes. She didn’t stew meat so much as weaponize it by use of fistfuls of hot peppers.
On the day that Gunther had moved in with Keith, she had taken Keith aside and pressed a small spiral notebook into his hand. Written on the pages were her precious, famous and well-guarded recipes for goblin favorites such as Cracked Hot-Pepper Marrow Bones, Sheep Skull Surprise (the surprise turned out to be extra eyeballs sewn into the sheep’s mouth), and Goblin-Style Pig Trotters, which were traditionally served raw in a bowl of vinegar and garnished with whole bulbs of garlic cut crosswise and seared on the edge of a heated scimitar. On the first page of the notebook she’d made a special note that Gunther, like all goblins, was sensitive to salt and could only abide the smallest amount on special occasions. Then she’d drawn a little, anatomically correct heart.
When she’d handed over the book, Agnes had made him pinky swear to never reveal the secret blends of peppers, and Keith had done so without even crossing the fingers on his other hand. He had been touched by the gift and, after reading it through, dutifully hid it in a locked filing cabinet, where it remained unconsulted to this day.
As he turned the key in the lock of the front door he glanced over to Gunther, whose worn-out expression lifted as he obtrusively sniffed the air.
“Mom’s making knucklebones,” he said with a grin. Then, anticipating Keith’s reaction he added, in a whisper, “Maybe we should order you a pizza?”
Keith shook his head. “I’m sure she’s made me something too.”
As they crossed the threshold into the living room, Keith sneezed. Gunther’s father looked up from his seat on the new sectional couch that Gunther had purchased specifically with his parents in mind.
Like Gunther, Gerald’s body had been reconfigured to appear more human. Gunther had once told Keith that the magician who had chosen his parents’ human appearances had been a big fan of romantic comedies and that was the reason that they closely resembled Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyk. Gerald was an older version of the great screen actor now, but not less formal, wearing shirtsleeves and a tie while watching television.
Gerald appeared to be using the television’s screen-within-a-screen function to watch two separate curling tournaments simultaneously. He stood when they entered and embraced his son with an affection that Keith found embarrassingly dorky, yet couldn’t help but be jealous of Gunther for inspiring. Keith’s own father had given up dispensing hugs the second Keith had acquired secondary sex traits, as was the way in his family. So when Gerald next turned to embrace him, Keith found himself paralyzed in confusion. Gerald didn’t seem to notice. He turned his attention back to Gunther.
“Your mother went straight to the butcher shop from the hospital,” he said. “There’s no stopping her when she’s in a cooking frenzy.”
“I guess I’m the lucky one today,” Gunther replied. Gunther’s father’s expression faltered as Gunther passed by him on the way to the kitchen. There, Gunther’s mother had every one of Keith’s six burners cranked up to high. The blue flames heated stockpots full of bubbling liquid. Keith did a quick volume calculation and decided that it would be a tight squeeze, but yes, he could have fit into the biggest pot. Bones protruded from the top of one, while another held a tangled knot of simmering chicken feet so big it could have been mistaken for a tumbleweed.
Agnes smiled at them as she shoved a bobbing organ that Keith thought might be a lamb’s heart back under the simmering broth with a long wooden spoon. The end of the utensil she used was stained vivid orange from peppers and grease. The kitchen table had been set with the plain white plates that Keith preferred. In the center of the table sat a heaping dish of peeled raw onions.
“Dinner’s almost done, so you boys should go wash up,” she said.
“Thank you, Mom.” Gunther kissed her on the cheek.
“You’re welcome, sweetheart,” she said. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten you, Keith. I bought those veggie burgers. They have . . . carrots. I hope you don’t mind.”
“I have no beef with carrots,” Keith said.
“Oh thank goodness,” she replied.
For reasons that Keith had never discovered, snow goblins like Gunther’s family despised the carrot above all other vegetables. Rabbit food, they called it, with a look of extreme disgust.
Keith took the upstairs bathroom, while Gunther used the one on the ground floor. He considered losing his shoulder holster and mage pistol, then, with a dismal, sinking feeling, remembered that he was no longer in possession of his mage pistol. He dives
ted himself of the impotent holster immediately.
Back in the kitchen Agnes used tongs to heap hunks of meat and bone down onto three plates. The fourth contained eight veggie burgers and a party-sized bowl of potato chips. Keith noted that she’d drawn the curtains, and failed to put out any utensils.
This dinner would be fully goblin style. There was no getting around it. But Gunther needed it. Keith would just have to man up and endure the spectacle.
Though Gunther and his parents had been transmogrified to appear to be human, they were still magical creatures who retained certain qualities and abilities. They could and did consider substances like kerosene to be beverages, for example. And they could crush and eat bones with their deceptively human-looking teeth.
True goblin dinners were hands-on affairs full of chomping, gnashing and splintering of bone. Gunther tucked into his bowl of ribs with gusto, chomping the slender bones as one might eat a french fry, alternating with bites of raw onion, which he ate as though it were an apple. Agnes elected to start with a whole heart, which she bit and shook as though it were still alive. Her gold earrings glinted with the motion.
Gerald seemed unusually reserved as he slowly munched a chicken foot.
“You okay, Gerald?” Keith asked.
“Well, no, Keith, I guess I’m not,” he replied. “Not after what happened today.”
“I’m completely fine.” Gunther rolled his eyes like an exasperated teenager.
“Your father’s not talking about the pixie dust attack,” Agnes said.
“He isn’t?” Gunther glanced askance at Keith, who could only reply with a shrug. “What’s up, Dad?”
“I guess I’m just hurt, Gunther,” the older Heartman said.
Keith took a bite of his veggie burger in order to completely preclude his entry into the conversation. Gunther’s parents, despite their frightening eating habits, were nice people.
“Why are you hurt?” Gunther’s immediate guilt showed on his face.
“You fibbed.” Agnes did not look up from her bowl.
Gunther froze, then hung his head in shame, which caused Keith to nearly choke. What could Gunther have possibly been lying about? He couldn’t imagine. The veggie burger went thick as concrete in his mouth. Finally, he managed to swallow and ask, “What did Gunther fib about?”
Grilled Cheese and Goblins Page 14
