CineMagic

  **

  Gremlins are the worst.

  They aren't the deadliest creatures ever; the biggest gremlin you'll ever see is about a foot tall and physically resembles what you'd get if a chimpanzee had a baby with one of those Chinese crested dogs, and then that baby had a baby with some kind of lizard. Ugly, yes, intimidating, no. Nor are they particularly durable. A plain lead bullet would do the trick nicely. You could just step on the stupid thing if you wanted. Manage to catch one out in the open, and you could just punt the little twerp, no problem.

  Despite this, I still hate hunting them more than almost anything else. Why, you ask? Because they are fucking annoying. They aren't big, or strong, or hard to hurt, but they are fast as Hell, they blend in with the background better then chameleons, and they are annoyingly smart. A gremlin doesn't just stand and fight. They run off, hiding in walls, slipping into every little nook and cranny, all while somehow taking the time to sabotage every vaguely mechanical thing they pass as they go.

  Really, chasing a gremlin around a darkened building was just a good way to end up with half a movie projector embedded in my skull, so I could not be doing that. You need to outsmart the little bastards, get them out in the open. This is not easy. Not impossible, but not easy.

  “So how, pray-tell, do you suggest we do it?” Lydia asked in response to my informing her of this.

  “We need something that the gremlin will be drawn to. They love screwing around with machines, making them violently malfunction to cause random chaos. The movie projectors, obviously, but anything will do: planes, boats, traffic lights, trains, even low-key stuff like cellphones or microwaves. Anything that could possibly ruin someone's day if it violently malfunctioned,” I said. “Not sure what, but I bet we could find someth-”

  “Eric Margrave! I have come to warn you of great danger!” screamed an annoyingly familiar female voice from the theater's main lobby.

  “Really? Again?” I asked of nobody in particular. Leaving the theater, Lydia and I went back to the lobby to find, of course, Connie. Still mousy, still gothy, and still, well, Connie.

  “There you are!” she said, looking very proud of herself. “I was able to use my magickal skills to find you, so I strongly suspected you would be here!”

  “You only suspected?” I asked.

  “It is possible that I have not practiced that particular locating spell very often,” Connie said, with as much dignity as she could muster. “I couldn't be certain it would work.”

  “Apparently it did. Very good work,” Lydia said warmly.

  “Away, dark spirit!” Connie shrieked, raising her hands in what was either a magical warding gesture, or just plain an expression of fear. “Eric Margrave, step away from that creature! She may well be a spiritual minion of Michelle, my dark sister bent upon revenge!”

  “Why did you feel the need to add that 'dark sister' part? I know who Michelle is. You told me,” I said mildly.

  “I just thought it was polite to remind you, is all,” Connie said. “Also, beware the dark spirit!”

  “Um...” I said, looking at Lydia. “She's actually more of a peach-color. Not very dark at all.”

  “You do not seem worried by the presence of the dark spirit.”

  “She's actually a pal, if we want to be honest,” I said.

  “I am a valued co-worker,” Lydia said, just a tiny bit smugly. “Far more necessary to the work process than anyone else. Certainly in no way aligned with the forces of evil, save in the sense that I am aligned with Eric and he occasionally lapses into moral ambiguity. Still, I try to keep him on the path of righteousness. With mixed results.”

  I glared at her. “You just had to add that last part, didn't you? I swear, you can never just leave it at the first part. You always have to keep going and make me look bad.”

  “It does not take much effort.”

  I sniffed. “Fine. Next time I go out for a fun night, you can stay home.”

  “This was supposed to be our night of having fun,” Lydia said. “And instead, you managed to find the one theater in a thousand mile radius that actually had a creature of darkness in it. Being left at home no longer seems like any sort of punishment.”

  “Eh, your tune will change the next time you get bored of hanging around with nobody to turn on the TV or turn the pages of the book,” I said dismissively. “Connie, you were saying something?”

  Connie blinked a few times, snapping out of the apparent trance that watching Lyd and I talk about had put her into. It's a bit odd how many people just seem to tune us out when we go at each other. “Oh! Um, yes, I was here to let you know that, while my dark sister's initial curse—”

  “You could just call her 'Michelle', y'know.”

  “—has failed, she is continuing to work her black incantations!” Connie finished, the righteous passion filling her voice. “I'm here to help you deal with her, facing her down once and for all in an all-out battle of good versus evil!”

  Then a light fixture detached from the ceiling and landed on Connie's head, dropping her to the floor with a surprised shout of pain.

  “Hehehehehehehehehehehehehe,” came that barely audible, scathing giggle, along with a brief scratching from within the ceiling. I fired a shot into the ceiling and was rewarded with a terrified screech; I doubted I'd hit the damn thing, but at least I could make it have second thoughts about being such a blatant prick.

  “Connie? You okay?” I asked, walking over to the girl and poking her with my foot.

  “Her dark powers... grow!” Connie muttered a trifle deliriously. “Even now she seeks to bar me from aiding thee!”

  “Um, actually, the theater has a gremlin,” I said. “That wasn't your sister's curse. It was just a douche-baggy prankster creature having fun hurting people.”

  Something that looked like a gorilla with extra mouths where his hands should have been melted up out of the floor, roaring in fury. “Eric Margrave! Your final doom is at SQUAAAAAAARKZ!” it said, before Lydia annihilated it.

  “That was your sister's curse,” I informed the wide-eyed girl.

  “Oh. Wow. She's been practicing, I see,” Connie said.

  “Look, your sister is really kind of a secondary priority at the moment,” I said bluntly. “She's a lot of flash, and less than a Lydia-worth of substance.”

  “I have quite a bit of substance,” Lydia said proudly. “I do my job quite stunningly well.”

  “She's humble, too,” I said. “But she does have a point. So far, this curse is not doing all that well against my gal. So we were honestly going to handle the gremlin first and hunt down Michelle later.”

  “But... but her dark powers,” Connie whimpered, looking for all the world like a kicked puppy. “I drove a long way to warn you about them. It was really boring.”

  I sighed. She wanted to help, and there was a thin stream of blood running down her face to make her look extra pathetic, and she really seemed like she was about to cry, and... God dammit. Putting on a fake smile, I said, “Connie, would you like to help us fight the gremlin? They are super-hard to find, so if you wanted to try some magic...”

  “I'll do it!” Connie squealed, a gigantic smile on her face at the prospect of facing down the forces of darkness. I winced. I had kind of been hoping she would have been concussed or something and would want to go to the hospital.

  Lydia smirked knowingly at me. She didn't say anything out loud, but her voice sounded in my mind, You are just a big softie at heart, aren't you?

  Oh, shut up.