I stood there a moment. The caps knocked frantically against the glass right toward the house’s front door. The place looked way too…normal…for a goblin’s home.
I pulled the plastic wrap off the top of the glass and tipped the opening toward the house. The caps shot out like a pair of angry bees. They moved so quickly, I lost sight of them until I heard them tick against the yellow door. From the sidewalk they really did look like a couple of black bugs. They futilely twisted and jigged to get through the barrier between them and their owner.
What an awesome trick, Grandpa.
Maybe someday I’d pick it up.
The yards here weren’t fenced off, probably because that would reveal how small the lots really were. One yard blended into the next, the most distinguishing feature among them the size and shape of their back decks. And every deck seemed to have a gas grill the size of a compact car.
The stairs up to Fleischhacker’s back deck creaked under my feet. A sliding glass door led directly into a dining room. Peering in, I could make out a small, round table with four matching shellacked chairs, and a bowl of fruit in the center. Judging from the brown spots on the bananas, the fruit was real instead of that weird wax stuff. A marble counter sectioned off the kitchen from the dining room.
The whole setup looked terribly mundane. Not at all like where I imagined a goblin would live. Maybe the caps had it wrong. Or maybe this was another customer’s house—though I hadn’t seen his bike out front.
I decided to trust Grandpa’s magic. Just had to figure out a way to get at Fleischhacker before he could touch his damn nose.
I tested the glass door. It slid open a few inches when I pressed at the handle. It rolled easily on its tracks, barely making a sound.
I was about to push the door open wide enough to slip through when a woman entered the kitchen. Not just any woman. A pregnant one. Her belly stuck out with at least nine months worth of baby inside, making her white, sleeveless summer dress drape wide from her porcelain legs. She had long black hair and a heart-shaped face only a little puffy from baby weight. She was damn pretty, too.
I jerked back, pressing against the wall beside the cracked door. If she glanced over, she would likely notice the door open. She might come over to investigate, then catch me standing there like an amateur cat burglar (instead of an amateur demon hunter).
Time to split?
This couldn’t be the right place. Not with a pregnant woman in there.
Then I heard her laugh, a hearty one with a musical lilt. She said something I couldn’t make out. Another voice answered, low and growly. A weird impossibility struck me. I had to take a peek, no matter the risk of getting caught. I eased forward and titled my head just far enough to see inside.
I almost shit myself.
The woman was down on her knees, bringing her eyes level to Fleischhacker’s, who stood before her, hooked nose, pointy-toothed grin, and all. But this didn’t stop her from softly kissing him on his grayish lips, the passion between them unmistakable.
Had I stepped into the Twilight Zone or something? All the weirdness of the paranormal world shrank to a mere oddity compared to what I saw going on in that kitchen.
Another crazy thought hit me.
Was the baby his?
I had heard about human and supernatural relationships. Of course. But I pictured shifters or even vampires—things that could look human under normal circumstances. Not…goblins.
My shock had made me forget about stealth. I had unconsciously moved further out from the wall to openly stare at them. When they finished their kiss, Fleischhacker spotted me from the corner of his eye and whirled to face me. After seeing the tender moment he had shared with the pregnant woman, the fear in his eyes made me feel a little guilty.
But I couldn’t let my emotions get in the way of my job. He was still responsible for the deaths of three mortals. I had to stay professional. Had to push out any thoughts about what the woman would think when I immolated the father of her child. Or how that child would always wonder about what happened to their father because her mother couldn’t bear tell them the truth.
Get that shit out of your head, Sebastian.
Fleischhacker’s surprise melted quicker than my moral haggling. He brought his finger up to his nose. I had only a second to wonder what hex he might throw my way. I didn’t waste that second wondering, though. I twisted away from the glass door just in time.
The glass exploded outward with a sound like crashing cymbals. Shards sprayed across the deck like spilled diamonds. One small piece cut my cheek.
I should have jagged away from the wall and thrown a fireball in through the smashed slider. But I kept seeing the woman on her knees, the kiss, the way her pregnant belly pressed against her squat lover. And he had hugged that belly, hadn’t he? Had run his hands along the sides with a loving touch. A proud father-to-be.
I couldn’t make myself do it. I just couldn’t.
Instead of marching in on the attack, I held my hands out so they could see them. “Wait,” I shouted. “Truce.”
A moment of silence followed. A couple of robins bickered on the branch of a nearby maple. A lawn mower growled in the distance. Twilight had started to fade in. I could smell the flowers in a hanging basket a couple feet away from my head.
“Frazier, don’t,” I heard the woman say.
He responded with a gurgled sigh. “Go away,” Fleischhacker said. “Then I won’t have to hurt you.”
The next words came out of my mouth all on their own without any thought on my part. “There will be others hunting you,” I said. “If I can find you, so can they.”
“So what?”
Yeah, Mr. Light. So what?
I gritted my teeth. I could not believe what I was thinking. It went against every oath I had sworn to get my license. I had yet to collect on a bounty, and here I was, contemplating not only letting my first contract go, but…
“I can help you.”
That earned me another long silence. I still had my hands out in plain view, but they were getting tired. As a show of good faith, I stepped away from the wall, glass crunching under my boots, and stood in the open, facing them through the frame of the shattered door.
The woman had gotten to her feet. She stood twice as tall as Fleischhacker. An inappropriate curiosity about the physical mechanics of their relationship crossed my mind. I pushed it back before I started imagining possibilities.
Fleischhacker had his small fists clenched at his sides. He wore a plaid shirt over a pair of jeans and a pair of sneakers, all probably purchased from the kids’ section. Despite his goblin features, his attire made him look almost normal. Especially in such domestic surroundings.
“Why would you want to help us?” he asked.
The woman absently ran her fingers through his curly black hair. Otherwise, she remained rigid, and her eyes shined with fear.
I decided to go with the honesty policy. “Frankly, I don’t know. I guess I’m not cold-hearted enough to kill you in front of your pregnant…wife?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “Wife.” He took a few short steps forward and tilted his head while studying me. “That still doesn’t explain why you want to help. Or even what you could do to help.”
Another good point. What the hell did I think I could do for them that they hadn’t already tried themselves?
“I…I don’t know.”
“What do you know, you little twat?”
The woman whapped him on the back of his head. “Frazier.”
He ducked his head. “Sorry, dear.”
“I think we should hear him out,” she said.
Fleischhacker glowered, but he nodded. “Take your boots off and leave them on the mat.”
To one side of the entryway lay a rubber mat with a collection of shoes and boots lined up against the wall. “Seriously?”
He pointed at the floor of the dining room. “You see that carpet? It’s brand new. Leave your boots on the mat.”
I stepped inside and did as instructed. Fleischhacker and his wife led me in my stocking feet into the living room. This room looked as normal as the dining room. Modern furnishings, some framed abstracts on the walls, more spotless carpeting. An incense burner sat on an end table by the TV, the wisp of smoke rising from it filling the room with woodsy scent.
The woman offered me her hand. “I’m Carrie.”
I took her hand. Her skin was soft and warm. “Sebastian.”
Fleischhacker and Carrie sat on a loveseat that had the legs removed so it sat lower to the floor. Carrie’s knees bent up a little, while Fleischhacker’s feet touched the floor evenly.
I took a seat in a puffy leather armchair which threatened to swallow me if I leaned back. I doubted Fleischhacker spent any time in it.
“Why haven’t you moved away?” I asked right off the bat.
Fleischhacker scowled. “When the housing market crashed, we ended up with a house worth half of what we owed on it. And when Carrie tried to take maternity leave from her job, they figured out a legal way to fire her. Some horseshit about restructuring.” He made air quotes when he said that last word. “We can’t afford to move. And with the baby almost here…” He threw up his hands. “The medical bills aren’t going to pay themselves.”
“How have you dodged the Ministry for this long?”
“They didn’t put open season on me until a few days ago. I thought I was being careful enough. But you still managed to find me.”
“Others will, too.” I looked him straight in his solid black eyes. I doubted I saw the same thing in them that Carrie did. Love truly was blind. “Your financial issues. Is that why you’re dealing the dust?”
He held out a hand to stop me, but the question was already out of my mouth.
Carrie turned a quizzical eye toward her husband.
Uh oh. I guess the wife hadn’t known about her hubby’s little side job.
“What’s he talking about?”
I shrunk back from the immediate tension that bloomed between them. Nothing worse than getting stuck as a witness to a domestic squabble.
Fleischhacker fumbled for words while he gazed around the room as if one of the walls might have the right thing to say painted on it. Without a straight answer coming from him, Carrie did the worst possible thing I could have imagined at that moment.
She turned to me.
“What are you talking about? Dealing? Dust?”
Okay, there was something worse than witnessing a tiff between lovers—getting dragged into the middle of it. “I…uh…I don’t think it’s my place to say.”
Her cheeks turned a soft pink. She blasted me with a glare that would have made an ogre tremble in his oversized boots. I hunched my shoulders up, wishing I could pull my head in like a turtle and wait for this painful awkwardness to blow over.
No such luck.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You said you wanted to help us. Start by telling me the truth. If you can’t do that, you’re no help at all.”
“Carebear,” Fleischhacker said in a small voice. “It’s really nothing.”
She smacked his knee. “Shut up. Sebastian is trying to talk.”
I am?
Her pointed look spurred me on. I gave Fleischhacker an apologetic shrug. “Your husband is selling fairy dust to mortals. There’s this Ministry that governs—”
“I know all about the Ministry. And I know they’ve sent out people like you to murder him.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “And your husband didn’t tell you why?”
He lowered his gaze and cringed.
“He told me,” Carrie went on, “that he’d been wrongly accused of using magic in a public place.”
I frowned. “That sort of thing doesn’t warrant a death sentence. The Ministry put a bounty on him because his reckless dust dealing resulted in three mortal deaths.”
Carrie looked back and forth between us. “Is this true?”
The goblin sneered in a crooked way only a goblin could. “No. No one I’ve sold to has died. I delivered to all my buyers just today.”
“Then why is the Ministry claiming otherwise?” I asked.
“Because they’re lying!” His cheeks turned more green than gray. “In their eyes, we’ve broken the wall in the worst way. But their laws, such as they are, won’t permit them to kill us outright.”
“I find that really hard to believe.”
“That’s because you’re a young, naive dolt.”
I let the insult roll off. There were plenty of political machinations to the Ministry I didn’t understand. And I’d heard Dad complain about them. But what Fleischhacker claimed seemed… What? Farfetched? I only had to look at my nation’s history to know the heights bigotry could reach.
“So you’re dealing the dust to fund an escape.”
He gave a sullen nod.
“What on earth are you thinking?” Carrie shouted and whapped his arm with the back of her hand.
“I was desperate. I am desperate.” He looked up at his wife with pleading eyes. “If we don’t get out of here soon they’re going to find us. They’ll…” He rested his small hand on Carrie’s swollen belly.
I frowned. “No one is going to hurt your child,” I said. “The contract is on you alone.”
He snorted and waved a hand at me. “I’m not talking about your stupid lot.”
“Then who?”
He folded his arms and turned his face away from me. With the kids’ clothes, he looked a lot like a spoiled kid getting his first real scolding.
Carrie watched her husband for a handful of seconds, then she shook her head and turned to me. “There’s this group,” she said. “They call themselves Purifiers.”
She didn’t have to say more. I could figure out the rest myself. Apparently the paranormal world had its own version of the KKK.
“You need to get out of here,” I said. “Now.”
Fleischhacker rolled his eyes. “We know that, idiot. But like I told you, we—”
“There has to be somewhere you can go.” The desperation in my voice startled me. Here I’d gone from wanting to turn Fleischhacker into a wick, and now I found myself invested in saving his life. I looked at Carrie’s belly.
Not just his life.
Carrie said, “Neither of us have family to go to. Our friends are here, so going to them would only put them in danger without making us any safer.”
I hung my head and pinched the bridge of my nose. I wanted to help them, but I couldn’t think of anything I could offer. I didn’t have any money to loan them. Of course, if I killed Fleischhacker, I’d have a nice chunk of change. How was that for irony? Anyway, one contract’s payout wouldn’t last long enough to get them in the clear.
“Well, we can’t hang around here much longer. There’ll be more hunters coming for you, and I doubt many of them will care what your family situation is.”
Carrie’s eyebrows drew together. “Where will we go?”
Another stupid idea popped into my brainless head.
“I know someone who can help.”
Fleischhacker sneered. “Who?”
“Someone who’s been in this business a lot longer than I have.”
While the Fleischhackers gathered some things to take with them, I put my boots back on, headed out the front door to get my car, and nearly got an arrow punched through my eye. It hit the doorframe instead, but only about a foot to my left. The thwack sound it made sent my heart into my throat. I jerked to the side and glanced out toward the street to see where the hell it had come from.
Twilight had settled in and night wasn't far behind. There weren't any streetlights on this stretch of street so plenty of shadows crawled in under the maples and oaks planted in various front yards.
But I could see the small car that looked like a shoebox with wheels, and the gleam of someone’s eyes in the driver's seat staring out at me.
I also saw a glint of what remained of the dayli
ght on something metallic inside the window.
"Hey," I shouted.
The door popped open and a little waif of a girl stepped out. She was dressed in a pair of white high top sneakers, a frilly black skirt, and torn black nylons underneath. Her shirt looked like a spatter of random colors on a black background, as if Jackson Pollock had collaborated with someone puking paint. She had an Asian cast to her wide face and a sharp pointed chin. A lot of black makeup, too.
But the whole look wouldn't have been complete without the crossbow held at her side.
"Who the fuck are you?" she asked.
I stammered, heartbeat still out of control from the shock of nearly getting my skull skewered. "Who the fuck are you?" I threw back like a grammar school kid on the playground.
She snorted like that was the dumbest question in the whole wide world. Then she crossed the street. I took an instinctive step back. The girl couldn't have been much older than twenty. Maybe she could get into bars, but she sure as heck couldn't rent a car. Yet she had a hell of a presence. Even from halfway across the street, I could feel it press closer as she closed in.
I reached back and absently drew the door shut.
When she stepped up the curb, she jerked her chin at the house. "What were you doing in there?"
It didn't take long for me to figure out who this girl was. Or, rather, what she was. Another hunter. And she had sniffed the trail to the Fleischhackers’ house same as me.
"I was taking care of business," I blurted. Great. I was speaking in cheesy song lyrics. What an interesting stress reaction.
She raised one of her dark eyebrows. "Business, huh?"
“Yep,” I said. "You know. Hunting stuff."
"Stuff?"
I felt my face flush. I was sounding like a total dork. I needed to get rid of this girl, damn it.
"Yes," I said with some force—maybe too much. I swallowed, tried to straighten my expression as much as possible, showing her how serious I was. "Goblins, to be specific. That ring a bell with you?"
"You're really a hunter?"
Full Metal Magic: An Urban Fantasy Anthology Page 20
