Gremlin Night

by Dale Ivan Smith

  Riley pointed a rod at us. It was copper, and had a basilisk twining along the body. I could tell because the whole thing glowed with orange.

  “What part of hidden don’t you get?” I demanded. “If an ordinary sees us, the secret is out.”

  “Our magic items are cloaked, like all artifacts.” Dara’s voice oozed with scorn. “I’d think you’d realize that.”

  I felt like I was back in the fifth grade, arguing with Cindy Macklin, the rich kid in our otherwise middle-class school who always had to be right, because being right was her privilege, thanks to mom’s money.

  “Listen, what’s your deal?” I asked her.

  Dara’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I think you are using a prohibited magic item. It failed to nab the boggart.”

  “That’s crazy,” Tully said, and he wasn’t hiding how he felt.

  Dara kept her hand up, twiddling her fingers, her spell ready to be cast. “Ask your partner.”

  I snorted. “We’re wasting time, we have to catch that boggart.”

  Dara laughed and nodded at Riley. He reached inside his suit and pulled out the bag still brimming with jewelry and pearls that the boggart had been carrying. Riley’s suit must have a Deep Pocket, which was a very proscribed magical artifact. Those were demonically tricky to craft, too, since you were bonding an extradimensional manifestation to an inanimate manifestation.

  “We did catch the boggart,” Dara said.

  How in Hades had they managed that? I thought. They’d swooped down on us awfully fast. Which meant, they’d been nearby, very likely monitoring the outbreak at the strip mall. But Dara would deny it, if asked. The A.S.A. also played their cards very close.

  I ground my teeth, then forced a smile. “Good. I’d like to interview it.” I tried to peer past her into the SUV, but the darkened interior and tinted windows made that impossible. “The Inter-Agencies Accords grant me that right as a member of one of the Agencies.” Sometimes supernatural rules and bureaucracy were your friend, annoyingly detailed and anal-retentive though those rules and bureaucracy could be.

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Dara said, still twiddling her fingers, keeping whatever spell she had ready to throw at us on speed cast.

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Because we destroyed it,” Riley said.

  I let out my breath, gave a little head shake. “You killed it.”

  “No reason to waste time on a ritual that would have resulted in the same thing,” he said, smirking, “only taken a lot more time. We in the A.S.A. aren’t inefficient blunderers like you R.U.N.E. people.”

  “We’re done here,” I said to Tully. “Let’s see about getting the car running again. The spell effects should have worn off about now.” I glared at Dara. “I’m filing a complaint with the A.S.A. about your conduct.”

  She giggled. “Really? That’s rich. You filing a complaint against me when you’re the one using prohibited magic.”

  “That again.” I asked, gesturing at myself. I held up my pendant. Drew my binding knife. All legal artifacts for a sorcerer to carry. “My partner carries a standard-issue wand. It hasn’t been used tonight.” Not yet, I thought. I kept my gaze level. Sure, there was the amulet inside my jacket, but wasn’t a standard magical artifact, as such, it didn’t have mana in it. The idea of it, blood sacrifice, was what made it potent. She’d have no way of knowing I carried one. She couldn’t. Besides, if she did, she’d just come out and accuse me, and so far, she hadn’t. My lips were dry but I forced myself not to moisten them. I didn’t want her thinking I was nervous.

  “My money is on an accidental misfire of her binding magic,” Riley said.

  I swallowed back a retort.

  “No, always bet on stupid,” Dara said. “It causes more accidents.”

  “No, accidents cause more unintended consequences,” Riley replied.

  “How long have you two been married?” I asked them.

  Riley gave me a flat look.

  Dara’s lips curled up into a humorless smile. “How amusing.”

  Tully watched the three-sided back-and-forth without comment.

  “You really should join in,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know the players like you.”

  “There’s a place waiting for you at the A.S.A.,” Dara reminded him. She glared at me. “You, on the other hand, I’m starting an investigation into your conduct. That begins with taking you in for an interview.”

  I laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You have no cause to ‘take me in.’ I’m not going anywhere with you.” I turned to Tully and jerked my head at the Continental. “Come on, let’s see if we can start the battleship.” I started to turn my back on Dara.

  “Schlaggen!” she commanded in German. Strike.

  A spinning ball of blue light flashed into existence between her fingers. She hurled the spell at me. I tried jumping out of the way, but blue light engulfed my vision and a force like a mallet wrapped in velvet crashed into my skull.

  The next thing I knew I was on the pavement, with a killer headache.

  “Hold!” Tully said to Dara and Riley. “That’s enough. He had his phone out. “I’m calling Director Farlance.”

  “You can’t,” I groaned. “He’s busy.” I groaned again and sat up. My head rang like a bell.

  “He’ll want this call,” Tully said. He began dialing.

  “Hold on,” Dara said. She pinched her lips. “That won’t be necessary.”

  I managed to get to my feet, and shook my head to clear it. “I should file charges under the Compact against you for assaulting me with a spell. There was no provocation for that.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We still have our suspicions,” Riley said.

  “Fine, you can have them,” I replied. “Everyone does. Now back off and let us do our jobs.”

  Both of them looked like they’d been sucking on lemons. Dara’s glare could curdle milk, it was that ugly.

  Tully and I got back in the car. Tully turned the key in the ignition. The Continental started up and we drove off.

  “What a jerk,” I said, massaging my temples. My headache was a killer. Spell-induced ones were the worst.

  “Where to?” Tully asked. He managed to look concerned and annoyed with me at the same time, quite an accomplishment in my book. The annoyance faded when I didn’t answer right away.

  The thing was, I had no idea where to go from here.

  I sat in my seat for a minute, just staring out the window.

  “Marquez?” Tully asked me.

  I didn’t answer. My headache had given birth to daughter headaches.

  “Marquez,” he repeated. “Elizabeth, how are you?”

  “I’d say, take me to urgent care, but how do you explain spell-induced concussion?” I asked. I wasn’t sure where we were driving just then, just like I wasn’t sure at that moment where we were in Portland.

  Tully pulled over and parked the car in a darkened church parking lot. The clouds overhead had thinned and I thought I glimpsed Jupiter shining high in the southern sky above the church.

  He unbuckled my seat belt, looked me over.

  “Usually I ask for dinner before getting serious.”

  Tully didn’t react to my latest attempt at humor. He continued checking me. He held up two fingers. “How many fingers do I have?”

  “Well, normally five, but I know you want the answer to be two, so, two fingers it is.”

  “Do you always have to make a joke out of everything?”

  “It’s how I deal with chaos, stress, and deadly danger.” I tried to smile.

  He shook his head. “Even there you had to try and make a joke out of your answer.”

  I closed my eyes. My head was down to a dull ache. “Okay, so what I’m wondering about is where we go next.”

  “We certainly aren’t any closer to getting to the cause of the gremlin outbreaks,” Tully pointed out.

  “No,
we’re not. I wish I could joke about that but, the truth is, we don’t have any suspects or arcane interviews. I really wanted that boggart.” I would have insisted that Dara and Riley let us talk to it, but they’d already executed it.

  Tully watched me closely, listening without comment.

  “I’m not concussed, really. Let’s review what we know. There have been five gremlin outbreaks now, as well as the boggart. The manifestations have taken place in a variety of locales. Only the last one involved theft.”

  I thought for a moment. These outbreaks were very atypical. Why?

  “What else do we know?” I asked Tully.

  “The amount of mana drawn to these areas, and then consumed seems to be enormous, and even with the potency of the manifestations we’ve encountered, can’t be accounted for.”

  He sounded like an academy textbook on magic, but he was right. “Something is siphoning off the mana,” I said. I slapped my head. Pain shot through my skull. “Ouch. That was stupid.” I blinked. “But we haven’t seen the siphoning in action. Why?”

  Tully’s eyebrows shot up. “Good question. Why haven’t we?”

  I thought for a second. “Maybe because someone’s using a cloak.” A magic cloak hid the use of magic as well as the presence of mana, which would be swirling around a sorcerer or wizard under normal arcane circumstances.

  “A cloak?” Tully asked. “But those are highly restricted. Not to mention extremely rare.”

  I smiled grimly. “But cloaks do exist. It’s entirely possible someone could steal one.”

  “But we’d have heard about it if they had.” Tully squinted at me. “Wouldn’t we?”

  “Oh, my young apprentice, if only that were the case,” I replied, rubbing my temples.

  Tully looked at the window. “The more things change,” he muttered.

  “Afraid so,” I said. “I wish things were different.”

  I rubbed my eyes, and checked my watch. It was just after ten o’clock.

  “Anything else the outbreaks have in common?” I asked.

  “Not that I can think of,” Tully said after a moment.

  That was the problem, I couldn’t think of anything either, except maybe for one thing.

  I massaged my temples. “The outbreaks all developed very quickly. Normally they take more time. One manifestation congeals from the interplay of mana and the collective human subconscious, almost always a fleeting level one. If it manages to stick around, thanks to the collective subconscious and its own luck at being able to siphon off enough mana, then another of the same type could be born. But that isn’t automatic.” There was so much mana and magic in these outbreaks, it was unbelievable. Impossible, really. Unless…I jerked. “Curses aplenty, it’s in plain sight.” I laughed.

  Tully’s eyes narrowed in concern again. “Are you all right?”

  “No, but that’s a different story.” My headache was gone. “Something is siphoning the mana. Storing mana is really difficult, it takes dragon-grade mana wells, and those aren’t portable.”

  “So, where’s it going?” Tully asked.

  I stretched, trying to unkink a stiff back muscle. “Exactly, my young apprentice.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I’m older than you,” Tully pointed out.

  “In years, not experience,” I replied.

  Tully snorted.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “it turns out there is somewhere the mana can go.”

  “Where?”

  I stopped smiling. “Into the manifestations themselves.”

  “Is that possible?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never heard of being done, but I’m not a conjurer. My guess is it would have to take a dragon-forged artifact.”

  Tully rubbed his chin. “We’re multiplying impossibilities here. We have a magic cloak, likely an artifact. We have a siphon, also likely an artifact. We have something that transfers siphoned mana into manifestations to make them more potent. That would take an artifact, too. That’s a lot of rare artifacts.”

  A shudder ran through me. “Or one very rare artifact.”

  Tully shifted in his seat to face me full on. “Impossible.”

  “Or just very unlikely.”

  “I was told artifacts did one thing, and only one thing. Isn’t the Principle of Single Purpose ironclad? ‘Each artifact has a purpose.’ How do we go from there to an item which can do three things?”

  “Maybe we don’t,” I replied. It actually made sense, now that I thought about. An insane kind of sense, but still. “Maybe we just don’t know exactly what it’s purpose is.”

  “That seems like a Hades-deep stretch, if you ask me.”

  I liked the expletive he came up with just then. I’d have loved to learn how he came up with it, but that would have to wait. I shrugged again. “You’d think so, right? But that appears to be the simplest explanation.”

  “But, even if such an artifact existed, what is the purpose here? Just creating mayhem?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Or perhaps it’s about theft. Maybe the boggart was a test run.”

  “Seems like a lot of impossible for some cold cash.”

  It did. It did. “We don’t have enough information. We need to visit Therese Sprig and ask a few questions.”

  “But Director Farlance said the Portland sentinel was on medical leave,” Tully pointed out.

  I hated myself for pressing this, but we needed information, immediately. “We need to visit her home and ask for her help. Get a look at her records and logbook.”

  Tully didn’t look happy at this, but he didn’t argue.

  We had to start putting the pieces together.

  9

  It was ten-thirty by the time we arrived at Therese Sprig’s. She lived up in the West Hills in a brick Tudor on a quiet street lined with maples, set back behind a tall hedge.

  We walked up the drive to the locked gate. Tully stopped, frowned, staring at the posts on either side of the gate. Marble statues of fairies perched on each post.

  “The house wards are activated,” he said.

  After staring at one of the fairy statues for a long moment, I could make out a nimbus of green light around it. The same for its counterpart.

  Very faint glowing green lines spread from each statue to surround the house and the yard around it. The wards protected the house from arcane intrusion, which meant something supernatural had attempted entry.

  “Not good,” I said. We needed to unlock the wards. The easiest way to do that was to use a wand. “I need to borrow your wand,” I told Tully.

  He sighed, but handed it over. The wand thrummed in my hand, filled with energy, unlike the loaner wand I’d been given.

  “Show me which of these magic lines is the strongest,” I told Tully. I could only see them. He, on the other hand, could tell precisely which one was strongest.

  He pointed it out. I waved the wand in a little circle around the line, then tapped it. It glowed brighter. A start, at any rate.

  “I’ll unlock you, you’re willing, I’m in the right,” I began in a sing-song, in English.

  Tully joined in.

  This wasn’t going to be too bad at all.

  “Respond and open,” I finished, and snapped the wand with a final flourish.

  The spell hummed in the air.

  The fairy statues and the lines of force turned dark, and my stomach heaved.

  I threw up. Tully retched, too, but managed to keep his cookies.

  “What in the wide world?” I swore. The wand had two charges left. “That should have worked.”

  “You rushed it,” Tully said.

  I shot him a look. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you rushed it, plain and simple.”

  I stepped up to him, craning my neck to look him in the eyes. “Oh, and now you’re the expert on binding magic.”

  “I do study,” he said. “Not just my own sorcery.”

  I took a deep breath “Fine. Glad to hear it. You have
an alternate idea?”

  “What about releasing the wards, rather than controlling them?”

  I rubbed my forehead. He had a point, as much as I hated to admit it. It would mean essentially dismantling the wards, and that wouldn’t make the sentinel happy. It would also leave the house and us unprotected.

  “Very well,” I said, “I accept your proposed course of action.”

  “You don’t have to get all formal,” he replied.

  I grinned. He didn’t smile back.

  There were three ways to go when releasing a ward. One would be a version of the spell I’d just tried and failed at casting. A second attempt would require a lot more mana and energy from me. The third would be using a sympathetic approach.

  “You have a manifestation on tap?” I asked Tully. “I’m fresh out.”

  It would be far easier if we had a conjurer on hand, but we didn’t.

  He held up a silver tube sealed with a jade cap. “I have this.” He opened it, saying a command word in Spanish.

  A tiny feathered snakelike form flew out and fluttered in the air. I didn’t recognize it.

  “A quezzie.” Tully sounded disappointed that I didn’t recognize it. “From Quetzalcoatl,” he added.

  “Ah, the Aztec serpent god.”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  The manifestation’s eyes glittered like rubies at me as it hovered. It was beautiful. For an instant, I saw myself through its eyes, a small woman, rooted to the ground. The air crackled with energy that land-bound-me couldn’t sense.

  I blinked and the quezzie did a somersault.

  I cast a linking spell, in Nahautl, classical Aztec. The manifestation had been ready for it. I could see clearly through its eyes now, see the mana flowing around us and the lines of magical force in a barrier around the house. Lines that flowed from the twin fairy statues, statues that boiled with magic, that were alive even as they were inanimate. Sympathetic sorcery connected one manifestation to another.

  The quezzie flew around the statues, settling on one, and stretching out its body until its tail bridged the gate and coiled around the other statue.

  The fairy statues trembled faintly with magic as the quezzie touched them.

  Release the magic and withdraw the ward, I chanted silently. The air cleared of mana and the lines of magical force withdrew into the statues.