Dragons & Dwarves

“Did you know him?”

  “The dwarf? No, never talked to him and he wasn’t a regular.”

  “You get a lot of dwarves?”

  “A few, the little motherfuckers can get tanked . . .” Christian shook his head. “Anyway, this guy gets his room—”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah, that’s the weird bit. Those rooms are to party, you know? Hard to party alone.”

  But they’d be a good place to meet someone. Private, but in a public place. I wondered why the dwarf in question didn’t ask me to meet him here.

  Considering his fate, it was probably a good thing he didn’t.

  “What happened?”

  “Place was just filling up at six, 6:30, then we start hearing the dude screaming. I mean nasty. Worst thing I ever heard.” Christian leaned toward me. “The fucking Feds were already here.”

  “Undercover?”

  He nodded. “Five guys pull guns and yell, ‘FBI,’ and run upstairs and find this guy chopped to pieces.”

  “How long between the scream and when they found him?”

  “What, a minute. Less.”

  That was a lot to do to someone in a short time.

  “Anything else, man? I got to clean up around here.”

  “Yeah, can you let me take a look at where they found him?”

  The room Christian showed me was still sealed off by the cops. However, since they’d destroyed the door getting in here, the only barrier was some strategically placed yellow tape. That gave me enough of an opening to look inside and see the final resting place of Ossian Parthalán.

  The room itself was designed for some ugly scenes. Chains dangled from walls and ceiling, waiting someone’s bondage scenario. The table in the room also seemed to be a functional rack, right out of the Tower of London. One corner had a five-by-five metal cage, in case someone wanted to play Vietnamese POW.

  All of it seemed a little tacky in the face of the real blood, and the outline marking the middle of the floor.

  A white circle had been drawn on the floor, the outline of Ossian’s body crossing a broken edge. Dwarves might not deal in magic, but this one had been trying to cast some protective spell. Apparently it didn’t work.

  I tried to take a picture, but my camera phone was having glitches again.

  “I suppose it’s too much to expect any security cameras up here?”

  Christian laughed. “No, man, only in the parking lot, and the Feds got all of that.”

  I nodded. Not only was that kind of security expensive to maintain around magic-heavy sites, I suspect that it would kill a good part of the Nazgûl’s business. The kind of party they were set up for wasn’t meant to be recorded—except by the parties involved.

  I carefully pushed the yellow ward-tape back so I could lean in a bit and get a better look.

  “Careful there, man.”

  “I know what I’m doing.” In theory, as long as I didn’t actually break the line formed by the seal, I was okay.

  I don’t know exactly what I was looking for. I don’t pretend I’m a crime scene investigator, and anything beyond the patently obvious was going to escape me. I needed a look at the actual case file, but since the Feds were involved, the chance of me getting someone to leak it were slim to none.

  I looked at the doorframe, and one of the patently obvious deductions I was able to make was the fact that the Feds did, in fact, bust down a locked door. I could still see a size-twelve footprint next to the doorknob where the door had been kicked in. Kicked in hard enough to splinter the doorframe.

  “No other way in or out?”

  Christian shook his head. The upper floor was so quiet I heard his piercings rattle.

  “This bothers me.” I looked around the party room, at all the S&M gear. It took a second for me to pick up on exactly what it was. “You said everyone heard the dwarf scream, right?”

  “Damn straight.”

  I stepped back from the opening and let the barrier swing back to a natural rest position. “Considering the kind of partying that goes on in these rooms, aren’t they soundproofed pretty well?”

  Christian’s eyes widened as if I had just performed some mage sleight of hand. “Hey, that’s right . . .”

  “And the dance floor gets kind of loud, doesn’t it?”

  “Shit, then what the fuck was that noise?”

  “Don’t know, but I suspect that our dwarf was dead a while before you heard it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “CALEDVWLCH, you bastard,” I cursed as I drove back to the office. The elf cop never really lied to me, but he had a habit of leaving out critical information. Information, such as federal involvement in whatever was going on.

  While it might be coincidence that the FBI was staked out at the Nazgûl, I had a strong suspicion that the “unrelated matter” the Feds were investigating was unrelated only in so far as they weren’t on a murder investigation.

  Caledvwlch can be very literal when he wants to be.

  And, if I needed anything more to convince me that the elf wasn’t completely forthcoming—which I didn’t—there was a matter of timing.

  If Christian was right about his time line, then the Feds were busting down the door at the Nazgûl, about the time I was sitting down at the Old Arcade.

  Caledvwlch was on my case with a crime scene picture within the hour. Even with a forensic mage and the authority of the Feds, no one could have identified the corpse, traced the phone log, and found me at my table in the Arcade in that space of time, unless the dwarf was under surveillance and his phone was already tapped.

  So Ossian Parthalán was involved in something that the Feds were interested in. And to me it looked as if he was meeting someone in the bowels of the Nazgûl. Someone who scared him enough to attempt some sort of protective circle, however ineffective. The meeting goes badly, and if I trusted Caledvwlch’s offhand estimate of the time of death—two hours ago when he caught up with me at seven—then Mr. Parthalán is eviscerated sometime shortly after five.

  It’s not until an hour later that someone—or something—screams, and the FBI breaks in and finds the dwarf’s body.

  You can do a lot in an hour, especially if you’re adept at any black arts and have a sacrifice to work with. At the very least I suspected some highly illegal necromancy, especially when I thought of zombie-boy wading through the Thor’s Hammer garage.

  None of which explained the Feds’ involvement.

  And let’s not forget zombie-boy . . .

  When I got back to the office, Nina Johannessen was there, and I wasn’t sure whether I was thankful or not. Her desk was off in one corner of the pressroom.

  “Nina? You asked if anything strange happened to me lately?”

  She looked up at me as I walked up to her desk. She set down a pen with which she was making some incomprehensible chicken-scratches on a notepad. I’d say it was all Greek to me, but there were clear traces of Latin and Hebrew around some of the symbols she was jotting down.

  “Yes, I’m sorry about bothering you yesterday.” She looked up and smiled. “Sometimes I feel a sense of urgency, and—”

  “I don’t know if it counts as Death or the Devil, but I’ve certainly scored one for ‘new and threatening’ since I talked to you.”

  “Oh.” The smile left and her already pale skin lost whatever color it had to begin with. The sudden concern in her expression gave me the same sense of unease as hearing the word “Oops” in an operating theater. “What happened?”

  “Well, I have a dwarf as the victim of a ritualistic homicide, and I had the bad fortune of running into an extra from the set of Night of the Living Dead when I checked out his place of business.”

  Nina leaned forward. “You ran into what?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t follow paranormal crap that closely. I wouldn’t know what to call this thing.”

  “Describe it.”

  “A skeleton held together with raw meat and piano wire.”

  Nina frowned
. “It did concern you, what I saw.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Three trumps from the tarot.”

  Nina opened a drawer and pulled out an oversized deck of cards and after searching through it, placed three cards on the desk in front of her. One looked like a lighthouse snapping in half and tumbling a victim to rocks below, the next was a goat-legged demon framed by a pentacle and squatting on a rock where a pair of damned souls were chained, and the last was a skeletal figure in black armor, mounted on a horse.

  The cards were labeled “The Tower,” “The Devil,” and “Death.”

  “The vision I had, was these cards—or embodiments of these three cards—”

  I picked up the death card.

  “That one, Death, isn’t as bad as it looks, really.” She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself. “It mostly represents change. The Tower is a much worse omen—”

  “You use these to tell fortunes, right? If you were reading this,” I tapped the desk with the card and put Death back with the doom sayer’s triumvirate. “What would you tell me?”

  “Death traditionally means change, the end of something and the start of something else. The Devil is pretty much a symbol of material desire, money and power. The Tower . . . ruin, destruction. A three-card spread tends to be past, present, and future.” She looked down at the cards. “If I were reading this for someone, I couldn’t leave out the net effect of the more mundane negative connotations. They’re not good to see together like this.”

  “In a nutshell?”

  “Someone with this spread has undergone a life change, one that set him or her on a path to pursue money, power, or lust, and that path is going to lead to destruction . . .”

  The interpretation Nina just gave me could fit Mazurich. Possibly the late dwarf. I didn’t like the thought that it might apply to me.

  She was shaking her head as she stared at the cards.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Visions are never entirely what they first appear to be. That’s the nature of the Oracle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Reading it like a normal spread, it doesn’t seem right to me.” She shuddered slightly. “The skeletal apparition you described, it makes me afraid that what I saw was something more . . . literal.”

  I laughed, “I don’t think I’m going to run into the Devil.”

  “But you’ve already seen Death in at least two forms, haven’t you?”

  I looked at Death in his suit of armor, and thought of the zombie that had cleaned my clock, and of my friend, the dwarven armorer. A skeleton wrapped in metal . . .

  Touché.

  She gathered up the cards and replaced them in the drawer in her desk. “Tell me what’s going on with you. I think you may need help.”

  “If you tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “Why did you think the vision was about me?”

  Nina looked up and hesitated a moment. “I just had a sense it was tied to you.”

  Now I’m not one to dismiss gut feelings, especially those of someone who made her living tied into the psychic network that wrapped this city. However, I am pretty good at telling when someone was flat-out lying. Most people just aren’t that good at it.

  “Come on, Nina, I know bullshit when I hear it.”

  “Part of the vision. In the Tower. I saw you.”

  “And that isn’t good.”

  She shook her head. “No, it isn’t.”

  I got the sense that she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. However, whatever she had seen had obviously been disturbing. I could see the stress in her eyes, and to be honest I suspected she was avoiding something just because she found it too painful to go over. I made a decision not to press her on it, since she seemed more than willing to help me in the here and now.

  That would turn out to be one of the worst mistakes of my entire life.

  “Okay,” I said, “see if you can help me make sense of what I’m dealing with here.” I gave her the Cliff Notes version of the last thirty-six hours. She took her pad and made quite a few notes as I talked.

  “So,” I finished, “does any of this ring any bells? Have you come across anything that might connect with this?”

  “I think you’re right.” She looked at her notes and frowned. “What you describe indicates someone trying to cast a protective circle. The circle was either unsuccessful or subsequently broken.”

  “You sound unsure about that.”

  “Dwarves do not cast magic—”

  “That’s what I thought. But there’s a first time for everything, right?”

  “It’s not that simple. It isn’t that dwarves don’t. They can’t.” She shook her head. “Their nature makes them a suppressive force, diminishing the power of everything cast in their presence. For a dwarf to cast something, even the simplest protective spell, it would require energies beyond the ability of most mages.”

  “Well, apparently it didn’t work.”

  “The point is, he thought it would, or why bother casting it?”

  “Can’t some rituals focus energy—”

  Nina laughed. “Our dwarf would have to build up ritual potential for a week or two to cast anything—” She stopped laughing.

  “What?”

  “Well, if someone else cast a ritual, and embodied the power in some charm or fetish. That could give enough potential for him to make an attempt.”

  “I hear a ‘but.’”

  “Well, not only would such an object be inherently dangerous, it would require weeks of work by some mage simply to amass undirected power. A legal mage isn’t going to do that, and I can’t even imagine what the cost of that would be on the black market.”

  I wondered if something like that would be enough to interest the FBI. Maybe, but it didn’t seem likely. While there was a thriving industry of black market mages around town, the nature of the crime made it inherently local. The nature of the radiation through the Portal meant that those mages’ influence stopped outside the boundaries of northeast Ohio. The Feds tended to be more interested in things that might leave the state.

  She shook her head. “No, it makes more sense if someone else cast the circle—maybe he met with someone besides his killer?”

  “That’s as plausible as anything else I have . . .”

  “Now you sound unsure.”

  “If there was someone besides his killer around, why aren’t there two bodies?” I shook my head. “Not enough information. Can you tell me anything about zombie-boy?”

  “That name seems an accurate description, flesh animated by some necromancer—but there are some oddities about it.”

  “Only some?”

  “The more decayed a body is, the more energy is required simply to have it move. Your zombie not only moves quickly, but shows more strength than I’d expect in even a freshly animated corpse. What you describe is certainly not fresh. And the wires and metal you describe are completely new to me.”

  “Any idea what the wires might be for?”

  “A framework? A matrix to focus additional power? Armor, perhaps.”

  I wondered if she was intentionally referencing the Death trump.

  She kept looking at her notes. “I can do some research on both of those. Find out if there are some magically plausible explanations I haven’t thought of.”

  “Thanks.”

  She reached out and touched my hand. “Please, be careful.”

  “I always am,” I lied.

  I hadn’t gotten out of the office before my extension rang. My mind was still churning with images of Death, the Devil, and the Tower when I answered.

  A familiar voice told me, “My office, Maxwell. Now.”

  My boss, Columbia Jennings, wasn’t the Devil, but she could give the witches from Macbeth a run for their money. She lorded it over the Metro editor’s desk from an office filled with a chain-smoking haze, and if anyone ever had the balls to tell her this was a no
nsmoking building, I hadn’t heard of it.

  When I walked into her office she looked at me and shook her head. “First off, don’t shut off your cell phone while you’re working. It makes me feel like you’re avoiding me.”

  “What?” I pulled out my phone. “I didn’t—” I looked at it and the screen was dark. Apparently I had. “Damn it. This thing’s been acting up all day.”

  “Fix it.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “I had that feeling.”

  “Shut the door.”

  When I did, she asked me, “Now, do you mind telling me how a story on the Washington mayoral campaign became involved with the SPU, a ritual murder, and the trashing of a crime scene?”

  I shrugged. “Things got a little sidetracked.”

  “I gather.”

  “The dwarf was trying to pass me some information before he was killed. I’m just trying to follow up on it.”

  “Information about the Washington campaign?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “What, then?”

  I hesitated a bit before I said, quietly, “Mazurich.”

  “I didn’t quite hear that.”

  “Mazurich, damn it. The dwarf claimed he knew the motive behind his suicide.”

  Columbia rolled her eyes at me. “I didn’t figure you for chasing conspiracy theories.”

  “The dwarf was killed. That’s a story in itself.”

  “And you became a crime reporter . . . when?”

  “Look, I just want—”

  “Maxwell, don’t tell me what you want. You’re one of the best paid reporters on the staff, you have a hell of a lot of latitude, but you don’t get to make ad hoc decisions like that while you’re on the payroll. This isn’t some random op-ed piece. If the city public safety director starts calling me and asking what my reporter is doing, I should know why, at least.”

  “You’re ordering me off this?”

  “Please, lay off the journalistic martyrdom. You know you have to run this by me.” She waved at a chair. “Now sit down, and convince me you should be doing this story.”

  She was right, of course. And she kept me there for ninety minutes, more, I think, to punish me than because she needed any convincing.