Key to Conspiracy

by Talia Gryphon

  Gillian was scanning the area as Trocar worked. She didn’t fancy any uninvited entities sneaking up on them. While she was preoccupied, Trocar’s hands moved swiftly to place wards over the site. Anyone tampering with it magically would be in for a nasty surprise. He didn’t share that with Gillian, though he doubted if she would have minded. If a child or other innocent found the stones, the spell would have no effect. Grael Elves had their own concepts of Karma, and Trocar didn’t want any innocent blood on his hands.

  When he was through, they headed back toward the car until Trocar caught the sense of more of the fluctuating thrumming of magic gone awry. He moved to retrieve his knife then shifted toward the feeling. Gillian felt it through him again and automatically adjusted her direction to keep up with him. Feeling more apprehensive than she would have admitted, she held the Glock against her thigh as she walked. Something wasn’t right. She could feel it but couldn’t yet identify what it was.

  Big, fat raindrops began to fall on the pair as they crossed the moonlit road and headed up the mountain into the forest. The sharp odor of wet macadam hit the air. Trocar glided smoothly. Gillian paced herself; her legs were shorter and she compensated by zigzagging up after him. Her skin prickled; whether just from Trocar’s aura, the chilly rain hitting her, the darkness after the moon disappeared into the heavy clouds or from the dampening field, she couldn’t tell. The prickling was familiar somehow. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Something during her graduate studies on identification and mollification of species via empathy. What was it? Irritated with herself, she trudged after Trocar, seeing him stop by a cairn similar to the one below them in the field.

  Without warning, the side of the mountain opened with a dull clanging sound. Trocar was faster and moved back, suddenly producing a wicked-looking Elven knife from somewhere in his robes. Gillian barely had time to bring her gun up when she heard a distinctive “flap, flap, flapping” noise.

  That, combined with the prickling feeling, snapped her memory circuits on and she knew. So did Trocar because they both half turned to the other and hissed, “Goblins!” at the same moment before a mass of the underground horde burst out of the opening and were growling and snarling at the pair, complete with armor and very sharp pointy lances all leveled at her and Trocar. An advance guard of Goblins. How festive.

  Cronus, they were hideous or they would have been if she could have seen in the dark better. Goblins came in all shapes and sizes, all of them ugly as hell and twice as nasty. It was rumored that Goblin royalty were actually beautiful beings but with the same charming disposition as the rest of their horde.

  Bipedal and ranging from about Gillian’s height to very tall, the Goblins sported grayish green skin with assortments of warts, pustules, facial anomalies and scars. Their eyes were oversized and would have been luminous except they ranged in color from ragged spider web, a dull corpse gray to the flat matte black of the Abyss. Their eyes were completely uniform in color, no whites showing, and their pupils were vertical slits instead of round as with the rest of Fairies. Ugly as they were, Goblins were card-carrying members of the Fairy Realm and made sure no one forgot that.

  Shit, there were about twenty of them, Gillian thought. There was no way in hell the two of them could take them all in a direct fight. Okay, time for diplomacy. Yeah, diplomacy. The art of saying “Nice Goblin” until you found an incendiary device and blew their ugly butts to Kingdom Come. Mentally she shook herself; she was a psychologist, dammit, not a soldier anymore. She would solve this through her professional skills and empathy, not firepower.

  “Greetings, dwellers of the deep places,” she began, trying like hell to remember cultural diversity with regard to Goblins who had a mind-set toward potentially gutting someone. “To what do we owe the honor of a Goblin Guard?”

  Pouring her empathy toward them, she reflected a non-hostile attitude and concern for their collective welfare, with a bit of badass thrown in. No sense in seeming defenseless. She carefully kept her face and tone neutral, not wanting to belie the feelings she was projecting. It wasn’t easy. The Goblins were ugly as vultures on a manure cart and smelled about as enticing.

  There was an icky-sounding collective grunting and chittering among the unsightly assemblage. The shortest, thickest and ugliest one spoke in a voice that was deep and gurgling. “Why does a Human and an Elf come near our doorway?”

  Goblins. Why did it have to be Goblins? She liked them about as well as she liked Pixies. Not! At least they spoke Common English because her Goblinese sucked. “Well, we were just . . .” Gillian began, frantically thinking about a plausible excuse for them to be there. Trocar’s silky arm and silky voice surrounded her.

  “I think that the reason would be obvious to such connoisseurs of Human delicacies.” Trocar leered at her suggestively as she pondered whether to be a good bitch and cooperate or a bad bitch and shoot him in the knee again. Diplomacy. Right.

  She decided to cooperate and leered back at Trocar for emphasis. “The Dark Elf made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Gillian added helpfully, wondering just how deep in shit they were at the moment.

  The Goblins decided for them. “You lie!” gurgled the short one, who appeared to be the leader, rattling his spear and repositioning his crotch. Goblin weenie grabbing must have been a signal of some kind because they collectively yelled and rushed the pair. Twin knives leaped into the Elf’s hands.

  How the hell did he do that? Gillian wondered, crouching slightly and rapid firing with the Glock at anything ugly that moved. The Dark Elf always appeared unarmed, producing weapons of deadly force in a heartbeat. It was one of the reasons he was so effective as an assassin. No one noticed that he was literally bristling with hidden weapons until they were looking down at the bleeding wounds or felt the garrote tighten about their throat. Any further pondering about Trocar’s abilities would have to wait; they had problems.

  The Goblins were vicious, heavy-handed fighters who tried to surround you before they sliced you up into snack-sized bits. Trocar and Gillian fought back to back, knowing each other’s style from years spent together in the Marines. They stayed out of each other’s way, fighting silently and with deadly efficiency. Gill did a quick mental assessment. Goblins: five down, about fifteen to go. Bad, very bad. She and Trocar: still standing, fighting and uninjured at this point. Good, very good. Her gun clicked empty and she dropped it, snatching a spear from one of the dead Goblins and wielding it like a quarterstaff.

  Swinging upward with the business end of the spear while bracing the haft against her thigh, she managed to tear the throat out of the closest Goblin warrior. He gurgled and went down but she was already stepping over him to block the hacking blade of another one who was going for Trocar’s back.

  An unearthly howl sounded and was echoed around the valley. Everyone froze for a heartbeat, then resumed hostilities in earnest. Trocar was swearing in High Elvish, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Gillian added her own voice when a spear nicked her arm as she was blocking a particularly strong thrust. It was too dark for her to see anything clearly so she was operating on instinct and her slightly enhanced senses. Aleksei’s blood must be responsible for that. She’d thank him later.

  Trocar managed to gain enough space for the few seconds it took him to throw a spell. Lightning crackled from his fingertips and took down several other Goblins, leaving smoking holes in their bodies. The rest of them, including Gillian, shrieked at the sudden burst of light that unfortunately illuminated the mountainside for a brief second. Dead Goblins were under her feet and around them, counting the pile of bodies that Trocar had just contributed, but more were pouring out of the hole in the mountain. This was very, very bad.

  Temporarily blinded by the flash of white light, Gillian was swinging frantically with the spear, hoping to nail something by sheer luck if nothing else. Fortunately for her, the original Goblins who had been in close proximity to them were also blinded by the white flash and were staggering an
d swinging, much as she was.

  Unfortunately, the new Goblins had no such problem and were swarming over their fellows to get to the Elf and her. The howl sounded again, very close now, and Gillian had a brief joyful thought that they might just live through this.

  Sure enough, moments later Cezar’s pack descended on them, snarling and snapping. One Werewolf against twenty Goblins is not a fair fight. The Werewolf always wins. An entire pack of them, about twenty-five to thirty Wolves, against a hundred was a slaughter. Crunching, snapping and ripping sounds clashed with howling, barking, screaming and yelling for supreme sounds of the night. The mixture of dialects was confusing: Goblinese, Elvish, Common Tongue or English and deep guttural Wolf noises filled the air. Thunder, lightning and the pattering sounds of rain on the forest floor added to the cacophony.

  Part of the pack inserted themselves between Trocar and Gillian, forming a tight circle with them in the middle, surrounded by furry butts and tails, jaws and teeth toward the Goblins. Each Wolf weighed between four and six hundred pony-sized pounds; a circle of teeth, muscle and bone kept the Goblins from reaching them. The rest of the pack was driving the Goblins back into the dark hole in the mountain. It didn’t take long. Goblins were ugly, foul-tempered beings, but they weren’t altogether stupid. Most of them high-tailed it back into the hole in the ground, leaving the dead and injured to the jaws and claws of the Wolves.

  As soon as the last mobile Goblin backed into the hole, Trocar snarled something magical in his oh-so-lovely voice and the gate slammed shut with another dull clang. The Wolves swung back and gathered around Gillian and Trocar. Gillian recognized Cezar and Pavel as they shouldered their way to the pair.

  Unsure what she should do, she tentatively reached toward Pavel’s neck ruff and patted him. “Thanks, Pavel.” She turned to the pack Alpha. “Thank you, Cezar.” The massive head dipped once in acknowledgment then he moved back, barking sharply at the others to give them room. Werewolves weren’t mindless killers as everyone thought. If they were young or new, there was a lack of control at first. An Alpha like Cezar and a budding Alpha like Pavel had more control than most, but the pack attended to their leader and moved away, positioning themselves to scan for any further threats.

  Trocar wiped his knives on the nearest Goblin carcass and went to finish what they came to do. Again, he unraveled the spells then rebuilt the little cairn, warding it as he did so. When he was finished, he turned to Gillian. “You are undamaged?”

  “Yup. Just fine.”

  “Good. Then let us go to your Vampire’s meeting and inform the Fey that the Goblins have grown bold.” He moved as gracefully as ever, no hint of the exertion from fighting a bunch of Goblins, Gillian noted ruefully. She was going to be sore later; she just knew it. She followed him, but at a slower pace, the Wolves flanking them even after they got into her car.

  She drove slowly, letting the pack keep up, until they reached the meeting hall in the village. Once they were at the door, Cezar barked sharply to the pack. With a final nod from himself and Pavel, they melted into the night.

  They walked into the large room, bringing gasps and scornful looks from the assembled parties as they collectively turned to see who was entering. Aleksei was seated at a long table in the center of the room. With him was an assortment of Fey: Elves, Fairies—probably from all three Courts—Brownies, Demi-Fey, Sluagh and Shifters of some sort who were in Human form; all seated, standing or hanging from the walls and ceiling. Even Noph and Montu were there, standing behind Aleksei. The leaders were at the table, their various entourages scattered throughout the room. They all looked clean, lovely or unlovely, depending on species, composed and shocked.

  Gill and Trocar looked each other over. The Dark Elf looked fine. Not a hair out of place, only a small tear in his cloak and some Goblin goo on his boot. He smiled at Gillian and she knew she must look a tiny bit worse than he did. Oh well. Glancing down, she saw blood spatter down her shirt and pants, she had defensive cuts on her hands and arms and mud up and down one leg where she’d slipped during the fight.

  “Bellissima!” Aleksei’s marvelous voice crawled up her spine.

  The voice sounded horrified. Still deep and black velvet but horrified. Shit. She looked up and watched the tall beautiful Vampire leave his place at the table and cross the room toward her in moments in the gliding, graceful way only a Vampire or some of the Fey could have managed.

  “Hi, Aleksei,” she began. “I’m fine. We just ran into an unfriendly Goblin group.” She brushed ineffectively at the mud on her pants.

  When he reached her, he held her at arm’s length, quickly scanning her with his eyes to determine that she wasn’t seriously hurt, then gathered her to his chest and hugged her tightly. Gillian made an “oof ” sound as he squashed her against his hard frame.

  “Aleksei, you’re breaking my ribs,” she pointed out with a squeak. He released her enough so she could breathe and she hugged him back.

  Ice gray eyes met hers as he pulled back enough to look at her. “Truly? You are uninjured?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little muddy and have a few scrapes. Nothing major.” Looping her arm around his waist, she let him tuck her under his shoulder and lead her back to the table with Trocar following. Montu, one of the Egyptian Vampires named for the ancient God of War, brought them chairs, winking at Gillian as he went to seat her. She was too tired to argue about chauvinism in multispecies assemblies and sank into it gratefully.

  “Goblins! Their stench covers you!” one of the Fey hissed at her.

  Gillian couldn’t tell if he was Light Court, Dark Court or Twilight Court. He was about six foot two, very slender, ethereally beautiful with shimmering blue-white skin, hair that was so dark a purple it looked black and sparkling with violet highlights. His eyes were the glittering midnight blue of the Aegean shot with silver sparks. He looked delicate, almost feminine in his deep purple, skin-tight, velvety togs. His slender hand caressed the jeweled sword on his hip. The entire picture was deceiving. All of the Fey were much stronger than their fragile appearances often belied, and Gillian had no doubt that he would be counted as a badass among any company.

  The Courts of Fey and Fairy were also very class conscious among themselves and outsiders. Problem was, their differences weren’t always obvious nor was their class structure. Since blood feuds had begun due to an unrealized insult, she didn’t want to offend him by saying the wrong thing so she nodded.

  “And Wolf,” one of the Shifters announced, sniffing Gillian. She couldn’t tell what he was, but he moved with the springy confidence of a Lycanthrope.

  She batted at him. “Stop it!” He receded, smiling with a toothy grin.

  Trocar apparently had no problem distinguishing between Fey varieties. “They are overseeing the dampening fields which have been placed around this village, dweller of the Twilight Court,” he said, casually stretching booted legs out in front of him. He was the very picture of contempt and let it show.

  The tall, purple-haired Fairy became paler. “And how might we have prevented this, Grael?” he sneered back at Trocar. No love lost between the Fey and the Elves.

  Aleksei and Gillian exchanged a brief glance. This wasn’t going to go well if they couldn’t keep The Purple Prince and Trocar from sniping at each other.

  “Enough,” Aleksei ordered, in his marvelous, magical voice. “We are not here to cast blame nor fight among ourselves.”

  There were nods of assent from all the beings. Purple Hair suddenly yelped and jumped backward. “Do you seek war with the Twilight Court?” he snarled, reaching down to rub his foot.

  Gillian, Aleksei and Trocar couldn’t see what was happening, but the rest of the Paramortals snickered and a tiny, accented voice shrilled, “Fairy Big will not insult Gillian Big!”

  “Shit, now the horror is complete,” Gillian moaned, her hands covering her eyes. Afraid to confirm what her ears were telling her.

  Aleksei looked at her anxiously. “Are you all right, pic
cola?”

  Something occurred to her and she rose to walk round the table, ignoring Aleksei, and glared at the Brownie who had stuck his small sword into the purple Sidhe’s foot. “You can’t be the same Brownie Clan from Russia!”

  “No, indeed, Gillian Big. We are not. The Brownies have a most complex system for information sharing,” the little being said proudly.

  Prince Purple Hair sniped to Gillian, “You consort with this vermin?” His tone was venomous. Great, now she was pissed but she bit back a smart-assed retort and looked the Fey straight in his gorgeous eyes.

  Gritting her teeth, she focused on psychology, logic and being rational. All this fighting and stress had been refocusing her in the wrong direction. She let out the breath she’d been holding, and aimed for polite.

  “The Brownies stepped forward without question to save over a hundred Human children in Russia, before the need for an alliance had been realized. This Clan is here to show support and are valued allies, as are you all. They will not be referred to in any derogatory manner.” She took the two steps that closed the gap between herself and Prince Purple. “Have I made myself clear?”

  There was a collective intake of breath at this scruffy little Human facing down an obviously Titled Fey. Before he could answer, she turned on the Brownie. “And as for you, don’t start arguments with the others. They are here to help all of us so no more sticking people, understand?”

  The tiny figure nodded sullenly and drew back. Gillian resumed her seat wearily. “Look, we all have got to cooperate, pool our knowledge and resources. We are fighting a common enemy, everyone. Fighting each other isn’t going to accomplish anything.”