Grilled Cheese and Goblins

by Nicole Kimberling

  He walked back down the hall to the front door and found he could see the same distortion in the front of the building. He also noted that the asphalt outside had crumbled away to reveal a chasm that seemed to be bubbling a glowing, amoeba-like slime. The slime contained still more eyeballs.

  He returned to the kitchen and said, “I think we’re in some kind of alternate reality bubble.”

  Gunther shot him a look comprised equally of outrage and confusion. He placed his hand over the receiver and said, “What?”

  “We’re in a different space or something. The lights still work.” Keith flipped them on and off. “I think that dickhole Jax has put us into some kind of protective bubble until he gets his breakfast made.”

  “So?”

  “So I think we can wait the half an hour to get it done right.”

  “I sincerely hope that you aren’t wrong,” Gunther said. “Because I just heard Haakon die.” Gunther’s hand shook a little.

  Keith reached out to squeeze Gunther’s fingers. “It’s okay, baby. I’m going to make it right again. Or rather, I’m going to make that jerk in the living room breakfast and then he’s going to make it right again.”

  They stood in silence for the next, agonizing ten minutes watching as the world outside, the very sky, was devoured. Keith fought to be calm. There were only nine minutes left to go, then he could make the food. All the while his thoughts raced and roiled with agitation against the magical beings of the world.

  “How fucking unjust is it that the fate of everyone in the world should be decided this way? By one really shortsighted guy?” Keith whispered.

  “Sometimes life’s just not fair like that,” Gunther responded. “Once this is all over we’ll file a complaint.”

  “Against who? Life?” Keith demanded. “And what if it doesn’t work? How can this be made right?”

  “Let’s just finish our mission here,” Gunther said. “And then we’ll see what happens.”

  Finally, the timer on Keith’s phone pinged and he made six crepes, assembled them into blintzes and baked them an additional ten minutes while the filling set. After this, he transferred them onto a warmed plate and went to deliver them to Jax, who had fallen into a light doze.

  It took all Keith’s self-control not to break the plate over the man’s head. He nudged the most powerful warlock in the world in the shoulder instead.

  Jax’s eyes fluttered open. “Oh wow, that smells great. Thank you.” He took the plate and dug in.

  With each bite Jax took, Keith could see the light from the window growing less red. He glanced back to Gunther, who moved forward to the front window and pulled the curtain aside. Keith went to join him. As they watched, the eyeball-filled slime had begun to reverse—not withdraw, but actually reverse. The collapsed street sprang back up from the depths and reassembled itself. The neighbor who had been blown apart came back together.

  The hounds that had attacked the grocery delivery woman at the door arrived, put her savaged body back together, and retreated down the street.

  Jax was reversing time.

  He showed no sign of strain or even interest in anything but his breakfast. Yet clearly he had the godlike ability to make the world’s clock run backward.

  Keith’s mind boggled at this insane notion—but it could be nothing but true. As Jax finished the last bite, the rupture in the sky healed itself and the morning stood as pure and blue and true as Keith remembered it being before hell descended upon him.

  Jax held out his clean plate and Keith took it without a word. Then the most powerful warlock on Earth spoke.

  “You’ll be wanting to find Emily Parker of Wilmington, Delaware,” Jax said, resettling himself in his chair. “She’s sixteen years old today and will surreptitiously open up one of her birthday presents in about half an hour. Somebody needs to take that Ouija board away from her and get her into mage training, ’cause otherwise that girl is going to do some damage, am I right?”

  Gunther was on his phone before Keith could even finish saying, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

  “No problem,” Jax said. Then, more thoughtfully, “You know, it’s always the ambitious ones who fuck everything up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This Parker kid—she’s probably been listening to some extra-planar spirit who’s been telling her about how she’s the chosen one who can bring peace to the planet or claim rightful dominion over the Earth or some such shit. When you’ve got power like that they start on you young—trying to convince you to create a rift between the planes for them.” Jax paused to open a small wooden box in front of him. It became clear to Keith after a couple of seconds that this was where he kept his weed. As he packed the bowl of a small glass pipe, he continued his rumination. “I was really lucky to have my grandma.”

  “How so?”

  “She started raising me after my dad got himself and Mom turned inside out while trying to claim dominion over the Earth.”

  “That’s terrible,” Keith said. “Your parents’ death, I mean.”

  “Well, it was the eighties, so megalomania was really popular. Or at least that’s what Grandma said. She sat me down and told me about all the men in my line who had had these big ideas who just ended up getting themselves killed because they couldn’t be happy with a normal life.” Jax paused to take a long drag off his pipe. He then silently offered it to Keith, who demurred.

  “I’m still technically on the clock right now,” Keith explained.

  Jax nodded, shrugged, then let out the smoke in a long plume and said, “What was I talking about?”

  “Being happy with a normal life?” Keith supplied.

  “Oh, right. Now if I want to try and become god-king of the planet I just go play a video game or something like a normal person,” Jax said. “Anyway, the time distortion is stable now, so you and your partner should be able to reenter your natural time-stream without too much of a problem.”

  “But how does that work? If the girl is stopped, we never come here in the first place,” Keith said.

  Jax chuckled. “It’ll be all right. There are all kinds of little cul-de-sacs in the time-stream. When you leave my house you’ll just return to where you were half an hour before the shit started happening. If you remember coming here at all it will seem as if it were a dream.”

  “More like a nightmare,” Keith muttered.

  “Whichever,” Jax replied, with great equanimity.

  From across the room Gunther said, “I’ve finished filing our verbal report. They’ve given us permission to withdraw.”

  Standing alone in the kitchen of his Washington Square townhouse, Special Agent Keith Curry pondered his breakfast. He held in his hand a carton of eggs, from which he had been about to choose a victim to hard-boil as was his habit.

  But suddenly—he didn’t know if it was gratitude toward the unexpected beauty of the morning or just a Sunday whim, but the perfunctory breakfast seemed inadequate.

  He walked into the bathroom, where Gunther, his live-in lover and all-around sweetheart, stood in the shower, humming some goblin song as he soaped.

  “I’m going to run to the store and get stuff to make blintzes,” he said.

  “That sounds great,” Gunther replied. “I was just thinking that with our schedules, we’d been missing out on brunch recently.”

  Bring Out Your Best

  Wednesday morning found Special Agent Keith Curry assigned to receptionist duty, which annoyed him. Not because he disliked answering phones. Among the various office duties, phone answering was his favorite. Sitting in the center of the circular reception desk at the DC NIAD office, rolling his chair from phone to phone, Keith felt a little like a one-man mission control. But he didn’t like being demoted to a receptionist—or any other sort of demotion, especially of the punitive variety.

  Such as being relegated to cover the phones on Wednesday after having been reprimanded for some tiny breech of protocol such as using the NIAD expense accou
nt to buy a novelty phone charger for one of his extra-human informants.

  The usual receptionist, Olympe Tremelot, was well liked for her pink pompadour, delightful grin and general joie de vivre. She was also seven and a half feet tall and always brought cookies. Keith wasn’t a bad looking guy. Midheight, brown hair, compact muscles, interesting tattoos—but he couldn’t compare with Olympe, who had won employee of the year for fourteen years running. The surprise sight of him slumped, cookie-less in Olympe’s reception desk chair seemed to sadden the other agents. And that hurt Keith’s feelings.

  It was just after lunch when he got the first complaint for his own department.

  “I need to report some bad blood,” the caller said. She had a very smooth, neutral accent. Probably calling from out west.

  “I’m assuming you mean the red fluid of life rather than someone you have beef with,” Keith rejoined. This won him a brief laugh from the caller. Keith warmed to her for it. “Let’s start with your name.”

  “Balderas, Lupe Balderas.” The caller went on to give her NIAD ID number, which Keith keyed in to bring up her file. She was listed as a blood-dependent extra-human called a tlahuelpuchi. She worked as an aerial surveyor for the USDA.

  So a fellow government employee.

  “I’m not familiar with your extra-human designation.” Keith thought it was best to come out and say it. “Actually I can’t even pronounce it.”

  “T’la-h’well-poochi,” Lupe said slowly.

  “Got it. And you reside in Denver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you already contacted the regional office there?”

  Silence. A heavy pause, then, “The Denver office is more on the law enforcement side of things. I thought it might be best to go right to Food/MED. The blood my meal service sent was bad. Really bad. It tastes very strange and made me very sick. I called my meal service provider to complain but they blew me off.”

  “Which service is that?”

  “SSA.”

  “Sanguine Service of America?”

  “That’s right.”

  Keith resisted the urge to audibly sigh. SSA more or less ruled the blood distribution game. And every week at least one extra-human creature dependent on their services called to complain about their products; but the problem with shutting them down for a proper inspection—even for a day—was that if he did he knew people would go hungry.

  And Keith’s department didn’t want any human-blood drinkers to go hungry ever.

  “And did you happen to save the remainder of your meal?” Keith didn’t hold out a lot of hope here. None of them ever did. Lupe shocked and delighted him by saying that she had.

  “I thought you might want to test it,” she said.

  Keith sat up straighter.

  “I do indeed. I can be there first thing tomorrow morning to collect it—or evening if you’re nocturnal.”

  “Morning is fine. I’m not light sensitive. I look forward to seeing you.”

  The following morning, Keith took the official NIAD portal straight from DC headquarters to the tiny Rocky Mountain Region Field Office, located in the Colorado State Capitol building. Because of the time difference, no one was there when he arrived, so he let himself out into the grandiose rose onyx atrium to meet his hired car.

  Outside the sky was bright agate blue and sharp shafts of morning light cast hard shadows. Behind him stood the building itself—a big, ornate neoclassical building topped with a golden dome that must have seemed artificial and alien surrounded by little wood houses and open prairie at the time that it was built. It still looked weird flanked by the modern skyscrapers of downtown. Before him on the western horizon, the Rocky Mountains loomed monolithic from north to south as far as the eye could see.

  His destination was in LoHi, an upward-trending neighborhood of gentrified warehouses at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. The dry climate allowed for many a swank rooftop bar, which triggered Keith’s nostalgia for his old career as a chef.

  Not that he wasn’t doing good work as a food inspector, but it wasn’t the same as the daily battle and glory of his old days, when his life had been utterly consumed by the act of creating beauty on a plate. Life in NIAD offered perks, though. For one thing, he could get from DC to Denver in one minute. Plus he met a lot of interesting people and didn’t end every single day drunk.

  Just the days he felt like it.

  Lupe Balderas’s file stated that she had been born in Mexico and immigrated to Colorado as a teenager. She was a rare kind of shapeshifter, born most often in her home country and thought by NIAD’s Mexican office to be the result of extra-human hybridization arising from a long-ago portal that had opened there in Mayan times.

  Most tlahuelpuchi (and a few unlucky human women) had been systematically executed, with witch hunts occurring as late at the 1970s. Despite decades of research since then, little was known about which plane of existence the original shapeshifters might have come from. Lupe was one of three of her kind residing in the United States.

  Keith found her sitting beneath a large photo of a starry night sky at an upscale coffee shop. She looked around thirty years old, with a clear, brown complexion with wide-set eyes and perfectly chiseled eyebrows. Her hair fell in two braids that easily reached past her waist. She wore a pencil skirt, a red polka-dot blouse and very high red heels but still only came up to Keith’s shoulder when she stood to shake his hand.

  It was only as they were exchanging IDs that Keith noted that his NIAD-issue extra-human detection watch was doing something interesting: nothing.

  Normally it would have buzzed to indicate he was in proximity to an extra-human, but Lupe’s presence went undetected.

  So maybe there was something to the theory that tlahuelpuchi were humans—people with a condition that made them easy to mistake for otherworldly monsters, but really no stranger than any of the mages or witches than NIAD employed.

  “So tell me about this defective meal you got,” Keith said, once they’d seated themselves. “You said it made you sick—what kind of symptoms did you have?”

  “Well . . .” Lupe leaned closer and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I felt really shaky, you know? So I thought it might help me to go get some exercise—go for a fly.”

  “In the form of . . .”

  “A vulture. But when I started to push out my feathers, I noticed they were much bigger than normal, and my muscles looked bigger than before. I grew big—really big—like California-condor big. And I got really agitated. I couldn’t think and I started pecking everyone. My aunt, my little cousin. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t turn back into a woman. I felt so bad.”

  “Were you the only person in your household who ate the tainted meal?”

  “Yes, I’m the only one in my family who needs them,” Lupe said.

  “Okay, so what happened then?”

  “My aunt pulled the blackout blinds so I’d fall asleep. I shrank down again a couple of hours later. After that I was able to get back to normal.” Lupe reached into her tote and pulled out a crumpled brown paper bag. “The remainder of the blood is in there. I made sure to include the paperwork with the lot number.”

  “Good thinking.” Keith glanced inside. Thick bands of red streaked the collapsed plastic blood bag. Lupe had consumed maybe half the portion. According to the label the material had only been donated a couple of days ago. If he was quick he’d be able to get back to DC in time for the magical forensics lab to have a look at the blood sample before they closed. Then he’d know whether he needed to call SSA to issue a recall or halt deliveries altogether. “Looks like there’s enough left to test.”

  “Have you had any other complaints?” Lupe sat forward. She was so small Keith wondered if her feet would have hit the ground without her high heels.

  “Not about this batch but from the date on the packaging it seems like you might have been the first person to receive it. So, did the packaging you received show any signs of
tampering?”

  “Not that I saw,” Lupe said.

  “Did SSA refund your money?”

  “They said I’d have to return the unused portion, and I wanted to keep that for you,” Lupe said.

  “Then you’ve ordered a replacement?”

  “They’re really expensive, and insurance doesn’t cover it.”

  “Of course not.” Keith wasn’t surprised. Insurance couldn’t cover a medical condition that wasn’t supposed to exist. “Do you have any other meals on hand?”

  Lupe shook her head. “I only need one prescription meal once a month, so no.”

  “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to take this evidence with me and have the Denver office bring you a replacement meal from our supply. Can you give me an address for the delivery?”

  Lupe blinked at him, cocking her head to one side in a way that revealed her birdlike qualities. “How much will it cost?”

  “Nothing.” Keith packed the sample into his bag. “Ensuring food security is just one part of our continuing mission at Food/MED.”

  Lupe gave another laugh. “Spoken like a true company man.”

  “No can do,” Special Agent Gavin Nash said with an exaggerated shrug. Blond and tan, he stretched his big frame out in his chair like he was lying back in a hammock. Though he struck Keith as too young to effectively pull off such an insolent pose.

  “What do you mean, no? No you can’t bring Ms. Balderas a replacement meal or no you won’t?” Keith glanced around the small office, searching for anyone else who might be able to help him. This branch was laughably small for the square miles the agents here were supposed to cover—just a reception area, two interior offices and the closet-like space that contained the portal.

  “Both. There’s no blood supply kept at this office,” Nash said. “And being meals on wheels isn’t our job even if it was here.”