Gremlin Night

by Dale Ivan Smith

  The gremlin stood stock still, obeying my Command, but its eyes were huge and its mouth pulled back in a look of abject terror.

  One of the suits with Farlance drew a scroll case from inside a suit coat.

  “What’s he doing?” Kyle babbled, pointing at the suit. The sorcerer had unrolled the scroll, and began read a Law spell in Russian to the Gremlin.

  I felt sorry for the officer. He’d probably just been out on a routine patrol in Portland’s industrial district, which was quiet after dark, especially in December when there were lots of other things going on, elsewhere.

  “Officer Kyle, you’ve understandably been under considerable stress,” Farlance said smoothly. He held a silver flask. I wondered where that had come from. The flask glowed with a purple tinge. It held a potion, but what sort? “We’re here to help.” Farlance’s words were soothing. He deftly unstopped the flask.

  My eyes narrowed. Was that a persuasion potion in the flask? Was Farlance going to attempt to magically persuade Kyle? Given Kyle’s state, that was dangerous, and it wouldn’t last. Kyle had seen way too much.

  “Sir,” I told Farlance. “What can I do to help?”

  Surprise and disapproval crossed the big black man’s face, but Farlance didn’t miss a beat. “You’re doing fine as you are, Agent Marquez.”

  I crossed my arms and tried not to look too annoyed. Patronizing types could take lessons from him in how to be subtle.

  He ignored my annoyance and turned back to Kyle. He handed him the flask. “Drink this, Officer.”

  Kyle looked at it with dazed surprise. “What is it?”

  “It will help you focus,” Farlance said.

  There was no way in Hades that the cop would go for it. Drinking something offered by a stranger, and while on duty. What in the whole wide world was Farlance thinking? Here, and I thought wizards were clever.

  But Kyle did as Farlance asked. He lifted the flask and sipped it.

  “Tastes like honey,” he said. “This isn’t drugged, is it?”

  I rolled my eyes. A bit late to ask that, wasn’t it? I’d have to give Farlance credit, he was persuasive.

  “Go ahead and finish it,” Farlance urged. Kyle did as he was asked. Farlance wasn’t just persuasive, he was a master persuader.

  Spinning sprites, I was slow. Farlance’s hand had been resting easy on the gold dragon figure topping his walking stick.

  Dragons were masters at persuasion. The walking stick must be an artifact, a manifestation bound in the gold and wood. It was alive, like all magical artifacts, and permanent. It had been cast by a dragon or dragons.

  I shuddered. You didn’t mess with dragons, or artifacts crafted by them. The bad guys, and there were many, would love to get their hands on such an artifact. I was shocked that R.U.N.E. allowed it. I was even more surprised that a dragon or dragons had agreed to create it.

  Kyle’s face relaxed, and he smiled.

  Meanwhile, the burners each gripped one of the gremlin’s arms with iron tongs and lifted the manifestation into the iron cauldron, while the suit continued reading the Law spell, in Russian. There was no spell as long-winded as a law spell. The suit finished. The gremlin’s crimson eyes turned coal black. It whimpered softly, and then melted into a glittering blue goo that sank into the cauldron.

  One of the burners capped the cauldron, the iron lid making a metallic clank. Done. The gremlin had been executed. Within a short while, the oozing residue would vanish, leaving only mana for them to harvest. The iron contained the gremlin’s residue, shielding it from interacting with humanity’s collective subconscious so that something else didn’t manifest.

  Executing a class II manifestation was relatively quick, but not the easy “zap it” process of dealing with a fleeting class I.

  “Things are better already, aren’t they?” Farlance asked Kyle. “My team and I appreciate your help in getting things under control, officer.” he said.

  Kyle nodded.

  “We don’t need people getting the wrong idea,” Farlance continued

  Kyle nodded again.

  “After all, nothing happened here except a traffic control malfunction that affected three blocks and caused some accidents. You should report in,” Farlance told Kyle.

  Farlance snapped his fingers three times.

  Kyle’s expression became one of cordial professionalism. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I will.” He walked briskly to his police cruiser, got in, and began speaking on his radio.

  A white paneled truck drove up, coming from the opposite direction of the traffic snarl, and pulled to a stop.

  “That’s our transport,” Farlance told me. He led us to the vehicle. One of the suits rolled up the rear door and we all clambered inside. A low bench was mounted on the inside of one wall. The other had a tool rack, a monitoring station, and a gear locker.

  I finally let out my breath. The last fifteen minutes had been way more of a pulse-pounding reunion with Portland than I’d bargained for.

  Farlance gestured at the bench. “Please sit down, Elizabeth.”

  The truck pulled out and began driving away from the traffic jam.

  I planted myself on the bench, next to the black man I hadn’t been introduced to yet, and unkinked my neck. Farlance perched on my right, legs crossed, giving me room. The black man tried to give me room, but his big, muscular thighs brushed up against me on the crowded bench.

  “Thanks for trying to give me room,” I said. The van swayed and I elbowed him. “Whoops. Sorry.”

  He shrugged, but didn’t say anything. His silence was irritating.

  I peered around him at the traffic jam slowly receding in the distance. “People will wonder how that happened so suddenly, with all the sparking and weird imagery on the signs.”

  “That’ll sort itself out,” Farlance explained. “A near-critical malfunction of a normally well-functioning traffic system. Such outages are rare, but not unheard of.”

  “I wouldn’t call traffic signals that start flashing oddball images mundane,” I pointed out. “Same goes for the way the lights strobed.”

  He shrugged. “The people there won’t remember any of that.”

  Memory alteration was R.U.N.E.’s go-to-play when ordinaries got an eyeful of the arcane.

  The black man’s silence was irritating. “Do you ever speak?” I groused.

  He raised an eyebrow. “When the situation calls for it.”

  I couldn’t tell if he teased me or not. His expression was utterly deadpan.

  “My apologies, Elizabeth,” Farlance said. “This is Sorcerer-Agent John Tully.”

  I didn’t recognize the name. “I don’t know you,” I said.

  “I’ve read your file,” Tully replied. I couldn’t tell if he were joking or being serious, and that was even more irritating.

  “You will know him,” Farlance said drily.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “He’s your new partner.”

  5

  “New partner?” I blinked.

  “R.U.N.E. field sorcerer-agents always work in pairs,” Farlance replied, his face threatening to break into a grin.

  I knew that, I just hadn’t expected my new partner to be a chiseled giant of a man. Someone more like Nancy, who I could easily outrun if I needed.

  I shot Tully a look. He crossed his arms, leaned against the van wall. Of course, he knew. The thing was, I could smell a new guy from a mile away. Call it experience. Call it intuition. Didn’t matter that they were a confident, seemingly-relaxed-type like this giant in a leather duster. Tully had all the hallmarks of a rookie. Exuding relaxed confidence typically hid a lack of experience in my book. Sure, he wasn’t the classic nervous rookie, but R.U.N.E. didn’t have nervous rookies. We had cocky-as-they-come rookies.

  Farlance’s lips trembled, but he managed to keep a straight face. “You will be helping us track down the cause of tonight’s gremlin outbreak.”

  I shook my head. “I have to shepherd the newb
ie, is that it?”

  Tully’s eyes narrowed for a second, then the professional mask slipped back over his handsome features.

  “Sorcerer-Agent Tully is fully trained, and already has experience in the field with the arcane.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so this isn’t your first rodeo, after all?” I asked. I had guessed wrong. My muscles relaxed. I didn’t know the situation yet, and had jumped to conclusions. Besides, Farlance and his team would no doubt take the lead on this. If nothing else, this would be an easier assignment than tracking down Burt the Ogre.

  “I’ve been confronted by the arcane before,” Tully said.

  His reply made me suspicious.

  “Where?” I demanded.

  Farlance didn’t miss a beat jumping in. “Prior to joining our organization.”

  That was just great. I tilted my head at Tully. “So, you were a spark. Me, too. That doesn’t count.” A lot of us in R.U.N.E. had been sparks, people who’d experienced the arcane up close and personal before being recruited. My sister and I had been sparks. That had changed both of our worlds forever. That went with the territory. In fact, it was a practically a requirement. I’d had worse than just being a spark, like a mother who knew my sister Clara and I had sorcery, because she possessed sorcery, and that she kept that secret from us when we were growing up. And even worse, what had happened to my sister. But, I couldn’t think about that now.

  So, Tully being a spark? No big deal. Okay, so I was being a jerk in my own right. I didn’t want to babysit a new guy.

  Farlance caught my eye. He arched an eyebrow, and looked at me with a prompting gaze. He had long eyelashes, long eyelashes shielding achingly blue eyes. He smiled faintly. Even for a faint smile, it made him even more stunning. My stomach fluttered.

  Down, girl, I told myself. Just because the man was GQ handsome was no reason to get all hot-and-bothered.

  “Don’t you have something for me?” Farlance inquired.

  I nearly bit my tongue. Was my internal swooning over his looks that obvious?

  “Not anymore,” I said. I locked up all the indecent thoughts his long eyelashes had inspired.

  The faint smile vanished. “What happened to the fly-by-night?”

  “I had to use it when the teleportal put me two hundred feet above the pavement.”

  Surprise shot across Tully’s face, his eyes widening.

  “It did?” Farlance asked, his voice sharp with concern.

  I explained what had happened.

  This would normally be the time after a pear-shaped incident like this where the new guy would look astonished and start asking all sorts of questions. But Tully just listened as I explained having to use the fly-by-night, and then the chaos that followed.

  Farlance clenched his walking stick, then relaxed his grip and leaned in close. “I’m relieved you survived, Elizabeth,” he said. The way my name sounded when he said it made my toes want to curl. Hey, I’d been away from handsome men for far too long, so sue me.

  “Thanks, me, too,” I stuttered. Tully watched the whole thing in silence.

  I tapped my foot. His silence was beginning to really bug me.

  “What do you think about this, rookie?” I asked him.

  “I think you acted quickly, as a R.U.N.E. agent needs to when their life, or someone else’s, is on the line.”

  “Thank you,” I said, trying to sound sincere. His quiet confidence was definitely turning me into a jerk. He had just agreed that I’d acted correctly, after all.

  I turned to Farlance. “I’d never heard of a teleportal malfunctioning like that before,” I said.

  “How many gremlins were nearby?” Farlance asked.

  “Just the one.” That little pointy-headed irritation by the traffic light.

  “That shouldn’t nearly be enough to disrupt the teleportal,” Farlance said.

  He was right. The teleportal was an embodied manifestation, in other words, an artifact. In simple terms, it was alive, just like a resident manifestation. It just didn’t walk around. So, when I stepped through the teleportal in the Brooklyn castle, and came out two hundred feet in the air above Portland, I had traveled via a manifestation that existed in two places at the same time.

  “Can gremlins affect a dragon-forged artifact?” Tully asked.

  It was a good question.

  “Not normally,” Farlance said. “It would take a large concentration of them and a tremendous amount of mana to boot, as well, in order to boost their chaos-generating magic to the point where it could affect a teleportal.” He didn’t say impossible.

  I’d have thought it would have been. But Farlance was a wizard, able to work multiple sorceries with the truckload of arcane knowledge that went along with that ability, so he’d know.

  “How many gremlins did you encounter here?” I asked Farlance.

  “In the immediate neighborhood, four, including the one you encountered. There have been nine all told in Portland since sundown.”

  “Abyss be cursed,” I whispered. “The compound chaos effect?” I asked him.

  He thought for a moment. “It’s possible, but even nine gremlins wouldn’t be enough to cause the dragon-forged teleportal to malfunction. It would take a lot more power than that.” He stroked his chin, eyes taking on a faraway look.

  His assistant, the woman suit, listened, but said nothing, instead tapping and stroking her arcane phone’s screen. A tiny techno-sprite appeared just above the screen. The woman tapped out a command on the screen. The sprite nodded, vanished. My arcane phone most definitely could not summon a techno-sprite. I had to settle for messenger sprites, who traveled in normal space like we humans, though they could fly on their own.

  A high trumpet sounded. I glanced around.

  “Sorry.” Farlance reached into his coat and pulled out his phone. “Call from Seattle.” He thumbed it on. “Director Farlance,” he answered. He listened. “That bad?” He listened a moment longer. “That escalated quickly. I understand. Thanks for the update. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes with my team.”

  He thumbed his phone off and put it away. He turned to me, his face serious. “I’m afraid I don’t have the time to assist you with your investigation, Elizabeth.” My toes wanting to curl even more at his earnest tone. “A crisis has erupted in Seattle. My response team and I have to teleportal there to deal with it.”

  “What crisis? I didn’t hear anything back in Brooklyn.”

  “That’s because we’ve kept a lid on it, until now. It involves provocateurs from the Iron Circle stirring up conflict among the Pacific dragons.”

  “The Iron Circle is operating again?” I thought R.U.N.E. had finished them, three years ago. I’d been part of the small army of agents that had gone after them, in L.A. My jaw tightened at the memory. We’d lost a lot of people, and allied manifestations.

  “It seems like it. We’re not sure, but this has all the signs of one of their plots. Worse, this crisis has become a matter of Draconic pride.”

  The Iron Circle had a real knack for intrigue and stirring the fires of jealousy between individuals and groups. Dragons were a supremely proud bunch, and the surest way to upset them would be to do something that would make their pride an issue.

  “We should be helping you,” I said. They’d killed the one friend I’d made in R.U.N.E., Hanna. She’d been a binder, like me.

  Tully’s expression was still unreadable.

  “Come on, don’t you agree?” I asked him, my face pinched.

  “He’s the Director, and I’m a sorcerer-agent. He knows the situation better than I.”

  “I appreciate that you want to help, Agent Marquez,” Farlance said, smoothly. Something in his velvet voice made me tremble. It also got under my skin. For a moment, I was torn between wanting to melt and being annoyed. Annoyance won out.

  I couldn’t help myself. “So, you’re going to leave us here to pull clean-up duty while the rest of the short-handed Pacific Northwest R.U.N.E. force takes on t
he Iron Circle.”

  Tully’s eyes narrowed, but he kept silent. He should be backing me up, asking questions, supporting my concern, but, that was the problem with having a newbie as a partner, they were overly deferential to the so-called chain of command.

  Farlance didn’t miss a beat in his smooth performance. “R.U.N.E. needs this problem tracked down. Just because we’ve dealt with these outbreaks doesn’t solve the mystery of what caused them.” Another man would have made that sound patronizing, but Farlance just sounded earnest. “The California office is sending sorcerer-agents and burners to Seattle as well, as is the Rocky Mountain office.”

  That was a lot of personnel. “It’s that serious?”

  Farlance nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “Which means you need all the help you can get!” I scowled at him, willing him to understand how important my help would be. A dragon crisis would spell disaster.

  Farlance remained calm. “Regardless, we still need to learn what caused the gremlin outbreak here in Portland before it happens again. This is Winter Solstice.”

  Winter Solstice. The longest night of the year, when the nocturnal arcane had the most hours of darkness to concentrate mana, create manifestations and set loose magics from those manifestations. What had caused the gremlin outbreaks? Was there a pocket of chaos magic? Was there a neighborhood where the collective subconscious was disturbed-warped even-in a way that led to creating gremlins? Was it something else?

  I took a deep breath. “Sorry, Director. You’re right of course,” I said. “We’ll find out what’s behind the outbreaks.” Good thing my old partner Tomlinson was retired—he’d have been stunned, or convulsed with laughter, to see me so quick to agree.

  It wasn’t glamorous, but such investigations went with the job. Field assignments were about getting to the bottom of arcane matters and included what caused the disruptions. Moreover, gremlin outbreaks usually didn’t last, and didn’t involve as many of the little pointy-headed irritations as this one apparently had. That made this outbreak different.