Emerald City Dreamer

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Emerald City Dreamer Page 5

by Luna Lindsey


  Jina felt like she often did around Sandy. Their friendship had mutated, and Sandy had become a domineering authority figure. It made some kind of sense; after all, Sandy had an organization to run. But she missed the old times.

  Jina was torn between standing up for herself and caving to Sandy’s orders. “If you’re going to ask me to be someone I’m not–”

  “Just don’t ruin it. Anything else?”

  “This guy described a faerie recently in the alley by Trader Joe’s. The kid had horns and had been digging in the dumpster. He rode off on his bike.”

  Jina considered carrying a knife with her at all times. Opportunities were starting to arise… Maybe Hollis could show her how to use a sword. He had made all kinds from iron. In the armory there was a light Japanese-style blade she’d always liked the look of; although it wasn’t the sort of thing you could carry everywhere. It was against the law to take any kind of weapon into a bar, so she wouldn’t be able to even carry a knife at concerts. Not legally.

  At the very least, she should have an arsenal of spells at the ready.

  “We’re getting more opportunities,” Sandy said. “Three faeborn on the loose. We need this faesight guy on our team. We can’t hunt what we can’t see.” Sandy jotted a few notes in an overstuffed notebook. “He’s the most important one. Find him, and we find this horned kid. Good work today, you two.”

  Jina smiled and stood, waiting a moment for Gretel to walk out. “Sandy… You sure you’re okay after that encounter? It must have been triggering.”

  “Trigger, what does that mean? Is that part of the lingo you learned so you could fake that support group?”

  Good, Sandy was talking. “It’s not just lingo. It has meaning. When something traumatic happens, you don’t process the memory correctly. Your body and emotions are put on alert, looking for any sign of danger. When something reminds you of the trauma, that’s a trigger. The reaction can be very strong, like a racing heart, panic, anger–”

  Sandy leaned forward in her chair. “I was in perfect control of the situation.”

  “You sure? You could have stalled him, rung up Hollis on the Bat Phone, and captured him right there on the doorstep.”

  “I did all of those things. He surprised me and I made some snap decisions. Anything else?”

  “Yeah… I worry about you. Remember how we used to go out? Dance clubs and shows? Parties?”

  “We’re grown up now, Jina.”

  “Grown up, not old. I understand that we have to keep the world safe from faeries. I want it as much as you.” Then, quietly, she said, “There comes a time when determination becomes obsession.”

  Sandy sighed. “You still don’t understand what it was like, Jina. He made me want it, ask for it. He crawled inside my head and left an oily residue I can never scrub clean. And I’m still married to the bastard. I won’t be free until he’s dead.”

  “It’s good to talk about it like that. Get those feelings out. That’s the kind of thing we share in group.”

  Sandy rolled her eyes.

  “Look, I just don’t want you to burn out. Maybe… Do you want to go to lunch sometime soon?”

  Sandy started shuffling the papers on her desk, then paused. “Actually… I could use a break.”

  Jina grinned. “When?”

  “I’m not sure… with all these people to track down—”

  “In a couple of days? How about Sunday evening. We could go to dinner?”

  Sandy hesitated.

  “Come on. It won’t be hard.” Jina put on her best coaxing voice. “Just commit.”

  “Okay, Sunday for dinner then,” she said.

  “Sweet.”

  Jina walked out into the library, triumphant. These days, it took so much to get Sandy out of the house.

  It was almost enough to make her forget about Scarf. He would be back, and this time, Jina would make sure he didn’t get away.

  CHAPTER 6

  *

  SANDY DESCENDED INTO THE DUNGEON.

  She hated that name. Jina had started calling it that, and it stuck. She wondered briefly where Jina was. They were going to have dinner, supposedly. Sandy worried if she’d have enough time.

  Most of the basement had been converted into a lab. Metal lamps hung from the ceiling and brightly lit the clean tiled floor and walls. There were a number of tables covered with scientific equipment and measuring devices, both modern and arcane. The blink of lights and electronic readout screens reflected from candlesticks and crude iron devices.

  She smiled proudly. She’d brought these people together, and she’d made all this happen.

  “Hey Hollis.” He sat at his computer typing something. Sandy could only see the back of his head.

  “Hey.” He didn’t turn to look at her, but continued typing. “I’m just making some corrections to this Wikipedia article on limonite. Sorry, I got a little distracted. I was researching photoreactive iron hydroxide in the hopes of making this toradh detector more accurate.” He clicked the mouse and then whirled around and she could see that his shirt said, ‘You have the right to remain silent, so please shut up!’

  “No need for excuses, Hollis. I know you work ten hours a day on this.” She glanced around the Dungeon hoping to see where Jina was hiding. Nowhere. She wasn’t in her room, either.

  Hollis wheeled his chair to the table, grabbed a stack of printed pages and wheeled his chair back to her. Today he was wearing pants like a respectable human being, instead of that weird kilt.

  “Check this out,” he said. “I found some interesting research papers. I’m thinking it might be more effective if we try enzymes. Enzymes are complex protein structures, almost living things. They convert organic chemicals, so they may also react to glamour or toradh better than the inorganic photoreactive compounds we use now. Life seems to react better to hocus pocus than dead chemicals.”

  He flipped through the pages showing charts, tables, molecular chains, and paragraphs of text. He pointed at a line graph. It looked like the printer was running out of toner.

  Sandy tried to pay attention, but her neck hurt. It was important information, but couldn’t he just build the damn thing?

  “Did you get all that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, you did a good job explaining it, I think,” she said. “Let’s give it a try. Anything you need, just put it on order. These materials are all legal, right?”

  “Oh course. Most of them.”

  “Good. Do it.”

  “No one has the guts to hunt faeries except you, Sandy. Though I am itching for some action.”

  “You’ll see some action, soon enough. Where’s the redcap?”

  “Stupid motherfucker is over there.” He motioned to a spot across the room where a small iron cage, about 2 feet on a side, held an apparently empty large glass jar with a stainless steel lid. A couple of tubes and wires grew out of the lid, leading to a small panel with a blinking red light outside the cage. A lit candle flickered in front of the jar.

  Redcaps were one of the easiest types of fae to identify, once she could actually see them. Using the old lore, she had classified and reclassified all the different types of fae and spirit beings from around the world, with a focus on European fae. Some defied classification, so she hesitated to call them “breeds” or “species”. Pygsies and pixies, brownies and hobgoblins had enough traits in common that it was conceivable for one specimen to be a pixie-hobgoblin-brownie.

  Perhaps the lore wasn’t reliable enough. After all, the tales were told by uneducated farmers in the backwaters of Wales and Brittany, remote villages of Switzerland and Romania. How would they know the technical difference between puca and cait sidhe?

  One old anonymous writer claimed that the fae themselves referred to the types as “ilk”, though Sandy had never become comfortable with that term, probably because it was as shifty a word as the fae themselves.

  Some fae were unique, and didn’t fall into any ilk. There was only one each of Grindylow, Jen
ny Greenteeth, and Maggie Molloch. And thankfully, only one hideous Nuckelavee haunting the Scottish seas.

  Sandy had searched for commonalities between all cultures, and she had found some. Some ilk only appeared in specific local areas, so she theorized that cultural dreams affected which fae were born, or even that fae might change over time to fit the expectations of the people who lived nearby.

  But to understand it all, she needed more data. If it meant spending her entire life in this lab, that’s what she’d do.

  “What’s with the candle?” she asked. “Is it some kind of experiment?”

  “The redcap kept bothering me so I gave it something to do.”

  Sandy stepped over to the apparatus and practiced what she had before, remembering what the redcap had looked like, and trying to believe it was real.

  And there it was. It stood about a foot and half tall, pressing his hands against the glass, and trying, with a great deal of effort, to blow the candle out. Of course the glass prevented it, and all the iron and spells prevented his magic from escaping. As she approached, it turned toward her.

  Sandy fought an urge to strangle it. The burn marks from the trap that still crisscrossed his face gave her some satisfaction.

  “I’m pretty sure it can’t escape; the candle distracts it from even trying,” Hollis said. He wheeled closer.

  “Maybe it thinks blowing out the candle will set it free.” Sandy had some idea of how it might feel, struggling under false pretenses, if it had feelings, which of course it didn’t. “The iron should be sufficient if it happens to get past the glass and wards.”

  Through their experiments on previous, now dead, fae spirits, they found that wrought iron worked best on faeries. Cast iron had some effect, and most types of steel didn’t even leave a rash. At first they thought it has something to do with the iron content of the alloy, since wrought iron is 99.0-99.8% ferrous. However, when they tested mild steel, which has almost as much iron, it might as well have been plastic. Cast iron had the least iron content, and it made the faeries uncomfortable.

  It didn’t entirely make sense, but then, they were talking about faeries. Just when they thought they’d found some consistent pattern, the pattern would be broken.

  Wrought iron was the hardest to find. None had been made since the reduced price of steel forced the closure of the last ironworks in 1973. So they bought up antique and scrap which Hollis simply reworked. The other large room in the basement served as Hollis’s workshop for forging.

  Sandy bent over and blew the candle out. Immediately the faerie looked up at her and snarled. The sight of its teeth made her finger throb beneath the bandaid. Its eyes made her remember Haun’s eyes, how he had caressed her, the blue butterflies…

  She held herself tightly and walked over to the hook where her lab coat hung. She slipped it on.

  They’d been working on the concept of a glamour generator for months. They had ample supply of toradh, but that did them no good. They needed a faerie to make glamour, and glamour to make spells.

  The jar rocked back and forth as the redcap slammed against the glass.

  “It was quieter in here when the candle was lit,” Hollis said, dangling a pen over its head. It scrabbled at the top of the jar trying to get at it.

  “Obviously. It’ll tire out.”

  “Where’s Jina?” he asked.

  “I wish I knew. Probably making out with a stranger or at one of her music things.”

  There was no end to the work that needed to be done. Sandy looked at her watch. Only one in the afternoon. It would be nice to just sit and relax, talk about whatever random subjects Jina happened to think of.

  It was so taxing, having to be the one everyone looked to.

  “Gretel is on her way down,” Sandy said. “Hopefully her eyes can tell us if this thing is converting toradh. Speak of the devil.”

  Gretel moved slowly with a small bowl in her hands, filled completely to the top with milk. A bead of honey encircled the rim.

  “Do not be so accusing of Jina,” Gretel said as she walked slowly towards the cage, “She is out looking for the man from the meeting yesterday.”

  Ah, Sandy thought. How was I supposed to know?

  Gretel answered in that invasive way she had of reading minds. “She left a note on the fridge. She works hard. You could, how does she say it, cut slack?”

  “Right. Slack.”

  Gretel had reached the cage. “Can someone open this?” she asked.

  Sandy unlatched the outer cage with the redcap still locked safely inside the jar. It pressed its paws against the glass and snarled.

  “If this works,” Sandy said, “the glamour will be stored in there indefinitely, right?”

  “That’s the idea,” Hollis replied.

  The redcap watched intently from within the jar as she removed the candle. A long string of spittle hung from its lip to its foot.

  Gretel carefully set the bowl on the floor inside the cage in front of the jar. She closed and locked the door, and Sandy went to the panel. She pressed a button, and the glow which had been surrounding the jar disappeared. It was the kind of glow that wasn’t noticeable until it was gone.

  The redcap instantly relaxed a little and mushed its nose into the glass with its tongue hanging out. Nothing seemed to happen to the milk, but in a few moments, it slumped back in the jar and burped. Sandy flipped the switch and the imperceptible glow resumed.

  “That milk is empty. If you drink it now, it will be as water,” Gretel said. “Many a time was I served food that had already been drained of its toradh. Or perhaps it was illusionary food. I never could tell; always I felt hungry, no matter how much I ate.”

  “What do you see?” Sandy asked.

  “His aura is much more vibrant. He digests. Once it converts, he won’t have anything to spend it on, trapped in that jar the way he is. So the glamour will remain trapped in there with him.”

  “When could we expect output?”

  “Over the next few hours. Could be a day.” Gretel picked up a notebook. “You don’t have to wait here. I will record my observations.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve got till Jina gets home.” Sandy picked up a notebook of her own and sat down in another wheeled office chair.

  “Well, I’m going to get back to enzymes and photoreactive iron hydroxide. And fixing Wikipedia.” Hollis pushed off a table and sent his chair spinning across the smooth tile floor back to his desk.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Sandy said. “Next time Jina goes out, I want you to follow her. You said you’re good at that, right?”

  “I know exactly what you want,” Hollis said. He wheeled away from the desk and looked at his phone, punching at the screen. “In fact, I can start now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  *

  THERE WERE FOUR TRADER JOES’ in Seattle proper. If you count the three on the Eastside, the one in Lynnwood to the north, and the one in Burien to the south, that made a total of nine.

  By process of elimination, Jina had to assume her Mystery Man spent most of his time in Seattle, since he had seen the flyer and attended the meeting in the city. So he either lived here, or worked here, or both. Few people on grocery store wages would live in the city and work in a suburb, so he probably worked at one of the four Seattle stores.

  Actually, she only needed to concentrate on two. The Capitol Hill store already received her regular patronage, and she’d never seen him there. The University District store didn’t have anything remotely like an alley; they kept their dumpsters in the attached parking garage. The Ballard store also didn’t have an alley, unless you counted the driveway that connected the parking garage to the store. And there were no dumpsters there for a faerie to jump out of.

  That left one store: Queen Anne.

  How many trips to TJs would it take to find him? She didn’t know his name, and she couldn’t just walk in and ask for the guy who could see faeries. Which meant she would need to visit repeatedly until she foun
d him. Upon a random visit, he may or may not be on shift. Then, assuming he was on shift, he could always be on break, be working in the back, or otherwise out of sight. He could work part-time. Worse, he may be a stocker, only on shift afterhours.

  It would take a lot of visits to find him. They would be eating frozen spanakopita, raspberry chutney, and Thai lime almonds for a very long time.

  She had already attempted one visit, with no luck, and now she pulled her reliable old maroon Toyota into the parking lot for another try. There were no scarf-wearing stalkers in sight, so she left the iron sword in the backseat. If the faerie did show his face, the small knife she carried in her right combat boot could at least hold him off.

  Jina crossed her fingers, walked past the fragrant display of spring flowers out front, and stepped into the store. She made a scan of the front checkout stands. And there he was. The Mystery Man.

  A little cuter than she’d remembered. He wore the traditional Trader Joe’s uniform: a Hawaiian shirt and khakis. He rung up bottles of fire roasted bell peppers and hand-crafted ale for a woman who looked to be getting ready for a Sunday afternoon BBQ. He placed her items in a paper bag, as she laid a plastic card on a stand originally intended for writing paper checks, decorated in metal coin currency from around the world.

  Jina grabbed a bottle of Charles Shaw red wine and stood in his line.

  “Hey,” she said when it was her turn.

  “Did you find everything you n… Oh, it’s you. Hi.”

  He had trouble making eye contact and seemed embarrassed.

  “I found everything I was looking for. Two-buck-chuck,” she said as she handed him the bottle, “and you. Where did you run off to?”

  “Well, after everyone laughed, I didn’t want to stay… and I was late for an appointment.” The register beeped as he scanned the bottle.

  Jina wondered if they were talking about the same thing. “No one laughed.”

  “They did, after I told my story.” He seemed avoidant as he placed the bottle in a narrow paper bag.

  Jina gave him a puzzled expression. This was not how she’d envisioned this going at all.

 

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