The Curse of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  No, wherever Edwin was, whatever he was doing, we were likely still enemies.

  But now, out in Evanston, despite having pants scorched down to a few tattered, blackened shreds, I was otherwise, quite surprisingly, unharmed. I figured the fire being of my own magical doing had something to do with that. It sort of fit with everything Fenmir Mystmossman had been saying about the purity of Dwarven magic and how it’s rooted in need, not desire, and in protection, not harm (including to oneself).

  My five Dwarven friends ran toward me, their expressions a combination of worry and glee. Lake, once he saw I was okay, basically busted a gut giggling over the whole thing. Glam peered down and smirked at my bare legs.

  “You call those legs?” she scoffed playfully. “My three-year-old nephew has more muscle than that.”

  I felt myself blushing, but just shook my head.

  She’s right, you know, the Bloodletter said. You’ve got remarkably skinny chicken legs. Sort of makes you look like a huge lollipop.

  “Man, you’re worse than the kids at the PEE,” I muttered at the Bloodletter under my breath.

  Don’t ever compare me to Elves! he said. Take it back!

  I ignored the ax as Glam took off her still-soaking deerskin jacket and handed it to me.

  “Here you go, Princess,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said with a grin, as I wrapped the soggy sleeves around my waist like an apron.

  “Greg, you did it!” Ari said. “You took down the Gargoyle!”

  “How did your pants catch fire?” Eagan asked, as he gingerly poked at the now inanimate Gargoyle with the tip of his shortsword. “Gargoyles aren’t supposed to be able to create fire.”

  “Umm . . .” I said, struggling to come up with an answer that wasn’t I stink at Dwarven magic.

  Eagan grinned as he waited for me to admit it was my own fault my pants caught fire, but thankfully Ari kept us on track.

  “Guys, sorry to interrupt,” she said, looking up at a nearby high-rise apartment building, where curious faces were peering down at us from several windows. “But we need to get out of here.”

  Sirens wailed to life in the distance, punctuating her point.

  “What are we supposed to do with this thing?” Eagan asked, kicking at the stone Gargoyle. “We can’t just leave him here, can we?”

  “Whence shall ye rival fiend realizeth reanimation?” Lake asked. “Or henceforth nevermore?”

  “I guess I don’t know if or when they come back to life,” Ari said. “Eagan, do you know?”

  He shrugged desperately.

  “Gargoyles can and will come back to life,” Froggy said, startling us all. “But only if they’re on their stoop. And, of course, only with more magic.”

  “So if he never gets put back on his building, then he’ll never come back to life?” Eagan asked.

  Froggy nodded.

  “Whoa, wait,” Ari said. “You’re not suggesting we just leave him here? After all that?”

  “What else are we supposed to do?” Eagan asked. “The cops will be here any minute. We can’t just take him back with us on the train! We’ll be seen carrying him away for one. Plus, we won’t be able to stay out of sight and flee from the cops lugging around a huge statue. If we can even lift it at all . . .”

  “But you know as well as I do that more magic surfacing around here is inevitable,” Ari argued. “It might not be tomorrow, or even this month, but it will happen again eventually. So if the city mounts him back on his building, then it’s only a matter of time before he comes back to life again and all this was for nothing.”

  “Yeah, but by then the Humans in Evanston will have bigger problems than a single Gargoyle,” Glam argued.

  “Guys, Froggy said it would also have to be back on its perch,” I said.

  Froggy nodded.

  “So?” Ari asked, looking up in a panic.

  By then there were at least a dozen faces staring down at us from the nearest buildings, and the sirens sounded like they were just blocks away.

  “So we can solve this permanently if we make sure the city doesn’t even bother trying to remount it,” I said.

  “But how?” Ari asked. “It’s nearly indestructible.”

  “I think that was only in the presence of magic, while alive,” I said. “After it became a statue again, the horn and wingtip snapped off pretty easily when it fell.”

  “He’s right,” Froggy confirmed.

  He was apparently a way better student than we all realized. At least when it came to learning about fantastical creatures.

  “Okay, yeah, okay.” Ari nodded. “So we just need to find a way to destroy this thing?”

  But Glam was already a few steps ahead of us. Eagan cried out in surprise, stepping quickly out of the way as she charged over toward the Gargoyle. Her fists had already magically transformed into two massive boulders.

  “Glam smash!” she squealed gleefully.

  The rest of us dove for cover.

  CHAPTER 4

  The One Place Where Wearing Wet Deer Pants Gets You Ignored

  You’d think that a kid wearing a hunk of damp deer hide around his waist like a kilt would draw a lot of stares and funny looks.

  Well, not on a commuter train in Chicago at two in the morning. If anything, most of the people riding the Chicago METRA trains at that time of night actively avoided looking at one another, no matter how unusual someone was acting. In fact, the weirder you seemed, the more likely you were to get ignored.

  “You really did a number on that poor Gargoyle,” Eagan said as we settled on the top floor of a mostly empty train car. “I don’t think there was a single piece of the statue left bigger than a baseball.”

  Glam blushed and ran a finger along her feathery mustache. Her hand then trailed to the dozens of braids dangling around her head. She flicked them back off her shoulders casually.

  “I like smashing,” she said.

  “Clearly,” Ari added, but I could tell that she, too, was impressed with the way Glam had basically gone berserk on the stone Gargoyle.

  Without her, we’d never have been able to destroy the thing with enough time left over to slip away into a dark alley—all before the cops showed up.

  WE could have done better, Greggdroule, the Bloodletter said. You and I could have made the stone BLEED.

  I rolled my eyes and tried to ignore it. I didn’t want to talk to the ax in front of the others again. I had a feeling it sort of annoyed them. So instead, because I knew it would read my mind anyway, I shot back a thought: Yeah, just like you were able to break through Mullet’s skin when he was flying at my face with his claws! And here I thought my talking ax was sharper than any object on earth.

  Ouch, Greggdroule, that hurts my feelings!

  “I still wonder if it was worth coming all the way up here to Evanston at all,” Eagan said. “I mean, you could argue that we caused the city more damage than we did good. We destroyed a car and a piece of a historical building, and surely at least twenty eyewitnesses saw some part of that.”

  “No, it was definitely still for the greater good,” Ari said. “I mean, who knows how many people the Gargoyle might have harmed had we just left him there to his own devices.”

  “We’d be better off simply revealing the truth to Humans now,” Eagan said. “Dwarves shouldn’t be shouldering the burden of suppressing all the monsters cropping up across the globe. I overheard my uncle and Dunmor talking the other night: In some areas of the world, the local sects are stretched so thin for combat-ready Dwarves that they’ve already recruited some Humans to train—after being sworn to secrecy, of course. And in a few places, like Peru and New Zealand, they’ve simply let the monsters roam unchecked for weeks now!”

  “I know,” Ari said. “But the Council voted. And the side that won were those who want to minimize the
damage caused to the Human world rather than tell them what’s really going on. So for now, our job is to neutralize the danger of these monsters around Chicagoland as much as we can.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Eagan said. “In time, the Humans will need to know the full truth, but for now we have to trust that the Council will know when that time is.”

  “Yeah, just like they trusted us when I told them I knew where the Elves were holding my dad captive,” I said, knowing it was petty to still be upset about that.

  After all, that was months ago now, ancient history (relatively). I should have been over it. But I wasn’t. Had the Council sent a team of fully trained Sentry warriors to save my dad, things might have gone differently. Perhaps Edwin’s parents would still be alive and hope for our friendship would still exist. But I’ll never know because they didn’t trust me. Or maybe they just didn’t trust in themselves as Dwarves?

  Ari shrugged. I knew she hated taking the Council’s side, but ultimately she believed in the system.

  “We all know this decision was about more than just protecting Humans,” Eagan added. “We’d be naïve to believe as much. It’s so obvious—the Council is determined to try and make allies of the monsters before the Elves do. It has more to do with that than with protecting Humans—as harsh as that sounds.”

  Ari nodded reluctantly.

  “I just wish I knew what those greasy Pointers were up to!” Glam said, slamming her fist into an open palm.

  “I thought we were going to stop stooping to their level,” I reminded her.

  I’d been trying lately (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the Dwarves around the Underground to stop calling the Elves by any derogatory slang names. I often used the argument of how offensive we found it when they called us Gwints, and how Edwin hadn’t quite understood just how offensive the word was to us. And likely the same was true for our derogatory words for Elves (like Pointer, Langey, and Bowster, to name just a few).

  “Sorry, Greg,” Glam said half-heartedly, even though I could tell she was more sorry for disappointing me than for actually calling them a disparaging name.

  But what she had said was still true: Nobody quite knew what was going on with the Elves. They’d been mostly quiet as a group since our attack on the former Hancock building (an event that had come to be known among Dwarves as the Battle of Hancock Tower). A lot probably had to do with their leaders, Locien and Gwen Aldaron, perishing during the chaos of that attack. And their son and heir apparent, Edwin, disappearing entirely in the meantime. All things that weighed quite heavily on me. I was, after all, part of the reason those things had happened. Even though I hadn’t been directly responsible for their deaths, if I hadn’t initiated the attack, his parents would almost certainly still be alive. And despite their not exactly being the nicest people, I still never would have wished for their deaths in a million years, even after finding out they were responsible for abducting my dad and destroying our family store. Plus, Edwin would still be around—and as hard as this is to imagine now, we might even still be friends.

  I’m not really supposed to know this, but secrets are hard to keep in the Underground (likely due to Dwarves being bad and unwilling liars): Recently, Dwarven spies reported back that the Elves were in complete disarray without unified leadership. Several different factions were vying for power and the infighting was making them weak and disorganized. It seemed as though the Elves had never considered losing their leadership a remote possibility, and so few contingency plans were in place. But many Dwarves suspected they would eventually regroup, find a new leader, and come back as strong (and angry) as ever. So the more monster allies the Dwarves could accrue in the meantime, the better.

  At least, that was the prevailing logic among many Council members.

  Which was why, despite having taken out the Gargoyle, stopping it from hurting any innocent Humans, I still was going home feeling a bit like a failure. We’d broken both of the rules on our first MPM, and had failed to bring back a potentially powerful ally. It felt good to have prevented possible violence against Humans by the Gargoyle, but it wasn’t enough to make up for failing the MPM’s main objective.

  I just hoped my dad—who, though not completely okay, was actually still alive, in case you were wondering—wouldn’t be as disappointed in me as I was.

  CHAPTER 5

  Why You Should Always Bring a Piano with You in Python Country

  Greg!”

  My dad greeted me the next morning with a huge smile the moment I opened my eyes.

  He’d been snoring when I’d gotten back to our small Underground apartment the night before, and I had decided not to wake him for a number of reasons.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “You made it back alive,” he said. “And on a Thursday! What a feat.”

  “Yeah, well, technically the mission ended early Friday morning,” I said.

  “Of course!” he said dramatically. “We Stormbellys do our best work on Fridays.”

  “I just wish we’d been more successful with our mission.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked as he turned toward our small kitchen to pour me some tea.

  My dad was still just as obsessed with tea as ever. Even after everything that had happened since the time he drank Galdervatn-spiked tea in front of me, unwittingly setting off the crazy chain of events that (at least in part) led us here. And though a lot had changed with him (which I’ll get to), it was still amazing to have my dad back even if he wasn’t quite the same. Because he still loved tea and still loved chess, and he was actually around a lot more now than he used to be. Our store was gone and there was no need for him to gallivant all over the world in search of our lost magic since, you know, he’d already found it.

  “I mean, our mission was to befriend the monster,” I said, sitting down at the table. “Not destroy it. Which is what ended up happening.”

  “Well, that’s okay, Greg,” he said, setting a teacup in front of me. “You did your best, I’m sure, and that’s all that matters. At least it won’t be able to hurt anyone now.”

  He sat down and took a swig of tea. The table was already covered with a nice spread for breakfast: a pan of scrambled eggs laced with brisket and cheese, half a roasted ham, several pounds of homemade bison sausage, a platter of maple-glazed bacon, and a small bowl of grapes.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, taking a sip of tea before scooping a generous portion of food onto my plate.

  “But some advice for next time,” he said, quickly standing back up like he had something so important to say, it couldn’t possibly be said sitting down.

  I groaned.

  “If you’re going to dance with the beast, make sure you bring it a sandwich first!” he declared without any trace of irony. “Preferably pastrami, but anything will do, really.”

  “Dad, you have to know that doesn’t make any sense!” I said, almost pleading with him to be reasonable for once.

  “Sure it does, Greg,” he said, patting my hand as he sat back down. “Sure it does. When you really think about it.”

  He took another sip of tea and proceeded to stare dreamily up at the stone ceiling of our Underground studio apartment.

  That’s the thing about my dad now: he may have survived the Elven poison, but he’s not exactly completely okay. Let me go back and tell you what happened (though, really, there isn’t much to tell).

  Right after I defeated Edwin on Navy Pier, then got over the shock of seeing almost all of downtown without power (an incident a city official later dubiously explained away to the public as “a circuit malfunction”), I hurried toward one of Edwin’s parents’ houses. It was the main reason I’d just left Edwin out there in the lake—my dad had been poisoned and was perhaps just minutes from death. I ran nearly the whole way, almost four miles. Or, at least, I would have if I hadn’t stolen borrowed a bike about half a mile in. (Hey, yo
u’d probably borrow a stranger’s bike, too, if your dad’s life was on the line!)

  Anyway, after getting there and finding the house deserted, I looked right where Edwin had told me I might find the antidote to the ancient Elven poison. Inside a small compartment behind a huge Chuck Close painting in his parents’ bedroom was a stash of Separate Earth Elven artifacts: scrolls and potions and the like. I grabbed everything, stuffed it all into a bag, and then hurried back to the Dwarven Underground.

  Foggy Bloodbrew, who was my dad’s friend, a Council Elder, and the Chief Dwarven Physician of the Underground, examined all the contents I’d brought back. She determined two small vials of strange liquid to be the possible antidote. But there was no way to be sure which was the antidote and which was something else, and there was no more time to spare. My dad could have died literally any second. So I gave her the okay to give him both substances.

  And, to this day, we don’t know if the change was a side effect of the antidote, of the poisoning itself, or of the mysterious, unknown third substance. But either way, the antidote technically worked and he made a remarkably quick recovery from the poison. Except, of course, for the aforementioned change.

  See, since then, my dad has been kookier than ever. I mean, for the most part he can function and have normal conversations. But at the same time, roughly every hour or so (on the good days), he suddenly feels the need to share what he calls Kernels of Truth. Which is something he’s never done before.

  First, he’ll get all mystical and announce some grand bit of advice to anyone who will listen. Then his eyes fog over and he just stares longingly at nothing for five or ten minutes, before finally snapping out of it. It wouldn’t be so bad if the advice was good advice, or made any sense at all. But the fact is, 100 percent of the time it’s total nonsense.

  And it wasn’t just me noticing the effects either. My dad was still a Council Elder, after all. And it’s hard not to notice something’s up when one of your elected leaders keeps finding the need to interrupt the middle of Council Sessions to announce: