by Tanya Huff
“Rings.”
“What?”
“It’s wearing rings!” Paul expanded, not sure he recognized his own voice. “It’s not an animal.”
“Of course not.” Eineen rocked back up onto her feet, impossibly gracefully, still pointing the headlamp down the shaft. “It’s a Goblin. A type of Goblin, anyway. And they shouldn’t be here.”
“No shit!”
“A gate has been opened.”
Paul sagged against the side of the elevator, only barely managing to stop himself from clinging, raising both feet up into the air. The air still seemed fine. The sea had hidden depths and the earth wanted to kill him, but the air, it hadn’t changed. That was comforting.
Eineen leaned against him, her back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and anchored himself in the one thing that really mattered. Laid his cheek against her hair and breathed in the faint scent of fish.
When they were outside, when the system had been shut down and the lights turned off and all the doors locked behind them, when the stars were shining overhead and he was standing drenched in sweat beside the very normal, very solid bulk of his car, he asked the other question. “What was the big thing coming behind them?”
Eineen shrugged. “Demons. Demons in the dark.”
“Demons? Are you serious?” At this point, he had no trouble believing in demons.
“Shhh. It’s okay!” Her voice calmed him enough he could remember to breathe. “I meant I didn’t know. It’s a movie quote, from The Two Towers.”
“The what?”
She tucked herself up against him, one arm around his neck, head on his shoulder and murmured, “I think I’ve spent more time out of the water than you have these last few years.”
Her sympathy almost undid him. “My job keeps me busy.”
“I know.”
They stood there for a moment, regrouping, then he lifted his head and said, “What now?”
Her body moved against him as she sighed. “We’re not fighters . . .”
Paul wasn’t sure if she meant him and her or her people. Didn’t matter, he supposed. He’d never been in a physical fight in his life.
“I know someone who is, though.”
“Will they help?”
“That depends on how I ask him.”
The festival had reserved a section for the bands off to the left of the stage. Some of them used it, but more of them sat with their families.
“Where is everyone?” Jack asked as Charlie handed him a wrapped package of fish and chips.
“Shelly’s trading out her current A for a jazz string, for what I’m sure are very good reasons, Mark and Tim are in the beer tent . . .” Stacking two cans of cola on top of the second package and holding them in place with her chin, she dropped to the ground between Jack and her guitar case. “. . . and Bo is trying to get Tanis to stop crying.”
“Again?”
“Still.”
“I kind of feel like we should do something about that.You know?”
“I know, but they don’t need us.” Charlie’d thought she’d been called/ sent/annoyed east to help the Selkies, but she’d started to believe that Jack learning how to be of the family rather than within it was the primary not the secondary reason. She tossed him a cola. Hers had been charmed to keep it from spraying after the hazardous journey from the United Church W.I. trailer. Jack’s had not.
His eyes narrowed. Then he opened the can, took a long swallow, and sighed the long-suffering sigh of the put-upon teenager. “You’re watching me.”
“You used sorcery to keep your soda from exploding. Last night you used it to soften the ground.”
“Yeah, but that’s . . .”
“It’s not a problem, Jack.” Holding onto his ear, she shook his head until he swatted her arm away. “You use sorcery the same way the rest of the family uses charms. To smooth out life’s little bumps. It’s not a big scary different thing, it’s just a ‘remove the middleman’ thing.”
“The aunties say I could use it to take over the world.”
“Do you want to?”
“Do I want to what?”
“Take over the world. They’ve never asked you, have they? They just assume you’re going to.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to and I don’t want to. When you take over the world, you have to run the world and that’s way too much work plus everyone else who wants to run the world tries to take you out.” The can dimpled in his grip. “I had enough of that back ho . . . back in the UnderRealm.”
Charlie watched him cram a half a piece of fried cod into his mouth and wondered if they could keep Gale boys with too much power from going darkside by trying to kill and eat them in their formative years. Jack’s early upbringing certainly seemed to have created a perspective that the indulgent life the Gale boys lived did not.
The aunties would probably be all for it.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“Why don’t the aunties try to take over the world?”
“You’re not the first to ask this, young Padawan.” She stretched out her legs, kicked off her flip flops, and crossed her ankles. “We all ask.”
He waved a french fry at her. “And the answer?”
“The aunties are all about family. As long as the world leaves the family alone, they leave the world alone. Something interferes with the family, they cut a metaphorical willow switch and deal.” After a moment’s thought, she added, “Usually metaphorical anyway.” Auntie Catherine had thrown Allie at Jack’s mother in an entirely actual way.
They’d lost the light by the time Captain Wedderbrun, the second festival band, took the stage, but it was a Friday night and no one was in a hurry. Although it had to be past their bedtime by Charlie’s nonmaternal estimate, kids still ran around the grounds watched over by extended family—she saw Neela’s charge past in a crowd and then back again in a different crowd. A soccer ball slammed into Jack’s side and when Charlie nodded, he took off to join the game. All through the audience, friends and family stood shoulder to shoulder, music moving feet and hands and smiles. Even the tourists were starting to relax.
If this were a Stephen King book, this is when the monsters would attack, Charlie thought. An old friend from another band kicked her legs as he passed, and they exchanged genial and complex insults.
Captain Wedderburn was good and, more importantly, knew how to play to the crowd. Their fiddler subscribed to the Natalie McMaster school of step-and-play and their keyboard player—an older woman no more than five feet tall—perpetually appeared to be about to join in. Nine members strong, they were the largest band in the festival and likely to be one of the top three.
At 11:09, the crowd demanded and got the single encore the competing bands were allowed. At 11:21, they were still screaming for more.
Then they were just screaming.
At one end of the field, the stage rocked back and forth as though subjected to its own personalized earthquake. A couple members of the band jumped free, but it looked like the keyboard player and the drummer were caught in their gear. Or refusing to leave their gear.
Charlie could see small dark figures shaking the supports under the stage but it appeared no one else could.
“No way! Boggarts!”
No one else but Jack.
At the other end of the field, a food trailer crashed over onto its side and went up in flames.
Grabbing Jack’s arm, Charlie pointed toward the fire. “I’ll get the ones under the stage, you put that out.”
“How?”
“Hello! Sorcery!”
“Hello! Dragon!” He twisted out of her grip. “Not big on putting fires out. I could . . . I don’t know. Drop a whole bunch of water on it?”
“Yeah, and a random water bomb would be a little hard to explain. Contain it. Keep it from spreading. If the grass catches . . .”
“It’d be big trouble, right!” He squared his shoulders. “I got it.”
He turned to stare at her. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“If you have to lie, make sure it’s one they’ll believe.”
“Right.” A quick thumbs up, then he turned and ran.
Charlie scooped her guitar out of the case and wrestled the strap over her head as she pushed through people running the other way. Besides being squat, hairy, and smelly even at a distance, evidence suggested the Boggarts were among those Fey who were disproportionately strong. There were only three of them, all just under a meter tall, but they were rocking a stage built to hold up under multiple dancers with more enthusiasm than skill. Music may have charms to sooth the savage breast, but it seemed unlikely these three would be soothed quickly enough to keep those members of Captain Wedderburn being flung about on the stage from injury.
As Charlie rocked to a stop, the left side of the stage buckled, nails ripping free, plywood cracking. A two by four snapped. The front corner of the roof dropped half a meter, shaking free a light that smashed against the corner of the stage, spraying glass and sparks. The immediate area plunged into shadow.
No time for anything but quick and dirty.
Eyes narrowed, Charlie put her fingers to the strings.
Music could empty a room as fast as fill it.
Bagpipes could empty whole neighborhoods.
Charlie wished she could play Jack’s song on the bagpipes—it’d serve the destructive little shits right—but, as she couldn’t, she hit the top E so hard it buzzed against the frets like an angry wasp. Then she bent the buzz.
Heads turned.
At least, she thought they turned. In all honesty, there wasn’t much to choose from between the back and the front.
She didn’t so much play Jack’s song as wield it like a club.
Hey, Boggarts! Don’t make me go Draconis on your ass! I have a dragon in my pocket, and I’m not afraid to use him. Okay, not actually in my pocket because he’s way too big. And hungry. Big and hungry!
Mouths open, eyes wide—or if not mouths and eyes then facial features in approximately the same position—the Boggarts shrieked like middle-aged women at an Adam Lambert concert, and ran for it. Charlie closed the last two meters between her and the stage, reached out as the corner began to collapse and sketched a quick charm in the dust. Timbers creaked but held.
It wouldn’t hold long, but the keyboard player had gotten her foot out from under her pedals and Captain Wedderburn’s fiddler was hauling the drummer, clutching his bass drum, down to the grass.
Stage secured, Charlie spun around, hoisted her guitar up under her right arm, and ran for the other end of the field. She’d taken no more than a dozen strides when something exploded.
Those who’d been unsure of how to personally take part in the growing panic suddenly decided, charging away from the column of fire now rising ten to fifteen meters into the night sky. Half a dozen Boggarts ran with them, shoving, pinching, and spraying beer around.
Charlie pivoted without breaking stride. If she could plug into the sound system, she could clear the Boggarts off the . . .
The empty stage shuddered as a dangling cable scraped across the charm, then the whole thing fell in toward the collapsing corner. Cables ripped free. The sound system gave one last bleat of protest, and died, taking the stage lights with it.
“Okay, then.” Another pivot. Dodging through a dark mass of hysterical tourists, Charlie ran for Jack. “Plan B.”
Having spent the evening watching the action on a well-lit stage, she hadn’t bothered with night-sight charms. If she had it to do over, she’d say screw the ambiance and sketch them on. At least the Canadians apologized as they careened off her.
She finally got close enough to see it was the Lions Club chip wagon that had gone over; the three double deep fat fryers the genesis of the blaze. Charlie couldn’t see bodies and she couldn’t smell pork so, since the food court had closed at ten, it seemed the club’s volunteers had been long gone before the Boggarts showed up. The good news: it was only the Lions Club chip wagon burning. Papa Dog, previously tucked up snug to the left, was now about six meters away. Given that the paint on the side closest to the fire had blistered and peeled, it looked like Jack had stepped in and shoved it clear. A dozen or so people worked to carry everything even vaguely portable away from the heat, and a dozen or so more had their phones up, recording. The beer tent continued doing brisk business.
Charlie didn’t see Jack until a second explosion slammed the shadows back.
“Propane tanks,” he said as she stopped, coughing, beside him. “I fixed it so they shoot up into the air and any bits of metal fall straight back down into the fire. Is that okay?”
“That’s great.” His T-shirt had started to scorch. She licked her finger and charmed it cool. “Now roar!” The remaining Boggarts were still working the crowd. So far, in spite of the shrieking and the swearing, it didn’t look as if anyone had gotten seriously hurt, but as long as the Boggarts kept ramping up the levels of hysteria, that wouldn’t last. “If you can talk while you control this, you can roar. We need to let the Boggarts know you’re here!”
She’d told the Boggarts to run. To be afraid. Very afraid even. Hopefully, since Jack couldn’t roar for the Boggarts’ ears alone, Human brains would refuse to acknowledge the information as he announced his presence with authority. Where the authority came from being a dragon.
When Jack opened his mouth, Charlies stuffed her fingers in her ears and watched the crowd split into three. The Boggarts and the pureblood Selkies ran. Humans with Selkie wives and Humans with Selkie blood turned to stare—and a lot of the locals had a touch of Fey. Seemed the Selkies had been getting busy over the last couple hundred years. Those in the crowd who were nothing more or less than Human, froze as their hindbrains screamed, OMG DRAGON! and an instant later carried on running and shouting as their forebrains added, NO SUCH THING AS DRAGONS, DUMBASS! FIRE, THOUGH, THAT’S REAL!
When Jack closed his mouth, Charlie unplugged her ears. Her bones were still vibrating, and she had a certain amount of sympathy for the Fey who’d run. Half of her wanted to get the hell out of Dodge before scaled death arrived to rend and tear, the other half muttered, Please, it’s a Gale boy. What’s he going to do, sulk at you?
“How . . . ?” Oh, great, she was deaf. She’d formed the word. Said the word. Couldn’t hear the word.
Another propane tank exploded, and her ears popped.
I’m not sure it works that way . . . She swallowed hard, then forced a yawn . . . but what the hell. “How many more tanks in there?”
“How should I know?” Jack rolled golden eyes. “It’s not like I have propane sense or something.”
“Fair enough. Listen, when the last tank blows, you need to go after those Boggarts. Catch one alive if you can.”
“Why?”
“They’re small scale. They can’t open a gate, so someone invited them in; I want to know who.”
Jack cocked his head, frowning. “You think it was Auntie Catherine, don’t you?”
“Yeah, well, she’s here.” Charlie flicked up a finger. Then another. “She’s already screwing the Selkies.” And a third. “And you know what Chekhov says.”
“Um . . . Wictor, wictor, seven?”
“If you hang an auntie on the wall in act one, she’ll be a pain in the ass by act three.”
“Is that in the extras? Because I didn’t watch the deleted scenes.”
“That was . . . never mind.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged and waved a bit of flame back into the bulk of the burn. “Charlie, why didn’t the Boggarts know I was here? I mean, before I told them.”
“They weren’t ignoring you, Your Highness. You’re wearing skin, surrounded by skin, and they can’t have had a lot of experience with Humans. Also, you were close to the fire; it was probably masking your innate dragon-ness. Plus . . .” She bumped his shoulder with hers
. “. . . they would have been able to tell that I’m a Gale and they didn’t seem to care. That makes them not too smart.”
Another tank blew, then one more immediately after it.
Charlie tried to count to ten, got to seven, and said, “Okay, I think that’s it.” Some of the lingering ringing in her ears turned out to be sirens in the distance. At least they’d gotten rid of the Boggarts before the Louisburg Fire Department had shown. The whole thing—encore to roar—had taken just under fifteen minutes. Auntie Catherine—and where the aunties were concerned, Charlie believed in guilty until proven innocent—had to have known how the Boggarts would run from a Dragon, so why had she gone to all the trouble of opening a gate for such a minor bit of vandalism?
“You need to catch one of those little shits and find out why they attacked the festival.” She shoved Jack past the burning trailer toward the darkness on the other side and the masking bulk of the Visitor’s Center. He could change behind it, so she wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the night saying, What dragon? “And you need to do it before they run wee wee wee all the way home.” If she were Auntie Catherine, she’d have left the gate in place but set it so it only worked one way, allowing the Boggarts to return to the UnderRealm on their own, but preventing anything else from coming through. However, given that she wasn’t Auntie Catherine and Auntie Catherine was at best unpredictable and at worse really fucking unpredictable, the gate could just as easily be swinging wide for anything who wanted to come visiting. “Find out where the gate is so we can close it.”
“Couldn’t you just sing your way to it?”
“Probably. But the last time Auntie Catherine didn’t want me to get somewhere, I ended up in Brazil. And, if the gate is guarded, I’d rather the large, fire-breathing, nearly indestructible dragon discovered that first.” Another shove. “Now go.”
“You want a coffee, too?”
“No, I’m good. Fly, my pretty!”
Jack dug in his heels.
Given how far they were dug in, Charlie suspected he was using dragon weight. The sweat on his T-shirt was drying out fast in the heat rising off his skin. “I’m sorry I called you pretty.”
