Dragons & Dwarves

  “What do you mean?”

  Teaghue backed to the edge of the circle. “We have done what good by you we can. Any further would do you ill.” He muttered something and the blue around us dissolved, leaving me nearly blind in sudden darkness.

  “Wait!” I said, getting to my feet again.

  From a distance I heard Teaghue respond, “Abandon your path, Mr. Maxwell, it will only bring you sorrow.”

  Afterward, everything was quiet.

  I stood and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. For a while it seemed that the rest of the world was reluctant to reveal itself. Slowly, as I listened, I started to hear the wind and blowing snow around the bridge, a distant siren, a lone car crossing the bridge on the deck above me.

  When I could see well enough to feel safe taking a step, everyone was gone. The only sign of my strange interview was a white circle on the concrete, and a quintet of black candles outside its perimeter.

  I looked at the circle on the ground and knelt by it. It echoed, on a larger scale, the circle drawn around the body of Ossian Parthalán. It was probably a stupid thing to do, but I ran my finger through the white crystals marking the circle, and touched it to my tongue.

  Salt.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I TAKE a step forward, naked, bleeding, and sliding on my own blood.

  I am thrown back as a quartet of horsemen erupt from the Portal. Upon the pale horse that tramples me, I see a skeleton wrapped with raw flesh stitched together with steel wire.

  The figure of Death leans toward me, opens its mouth, and in it I hear the death rattle of Ossian the dwarf.

  I turn and see the dwarf, spread-eagled and mutilated, lying on a vast mountain of salt. The dwarf ’s blood seeps into the grayish white crystals, turning them orange, then crimson.

  Live dwarves work at the base of the mountain, shoveling the bloodstained crystals into ore carts. They are all shackled to a large chain that is bolted to the base of a massive throne. I grab one and see the face of Teaghue.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “It must be fed!” he says.

  “What must be fed?”

  The dwarf points his shovel at the throne.

  I look, and the goat-faced Devil looks directly at me. Reaching out with a clawed fist, he says, “Behold the cost of defying me!”

  The Devil opens his fist and I see . . .

  I sat bolt upright in my bed, my whole body clammy from the sweats, my heart racing. I didn’t remember what I had seen. I didn’t want to remember.

  I think I knew . . .

  My phone rang.

  I turned and looked at the handset, sitting in its cradle. It was still dark outside, and the little red LED cast an infernal glow over the whole bedroom. It blinked slowly with the insectile buzz, giving me intermittent views of my apartment, still devastated by the law enforcement invasion last night.

  I don’t get premonitions, but I didn’t want to answer the phone. I sat in my bed and stared at it as the clock next to it blinked 6:01 AM at me.

  It stopped. I don’t know why, but I’d been holding my breath.

  I slowly exhaled. If it were important, they’d leave a message.

  The way my heart was racing, there was no way I was getting back to sleep. I got up and stretched.

  The phone rang again.

  “Oh, hell,”

  I reached down and grabbed it. “Hello?”

  “Kline? Thank the Goddess. I’ve been trying to reach you—”

  She sounded severely stressed out, but I wasn’t in a very forgiving mood. “Nina, it’s six in the morning and I’ve only had three hours of sleep. Can this wait?”

  “No, you’re in danger. You can’t let your daughter come to Cleveland.”

  “Look, me and my ex have dealt with that—”

  “I’ve found out . . .” She trailed off.

  “Found out what?”

  “I can’t over the phone. It’s too dangerous.”

  “What’s too dangerous?”

  “Don’t ask me any questions. Come to my house, where it’s safe to talk.”

  “Nina, you have to tell me—” The receiver clicked and I was talking to a dial tone.

  I rubbed my chin where Teaghue had hit me. I still tasted blood when I sucked on my lip. In Nina’s protests, I had heard an echo of the dwarf: “Do not ask that question.”

  What could be so dangerous that to even ask about it was threatening?

  Given the past three days, I couldn’t readily dismiss Nina’s warning. I just thanked God that Sarah wasn’t going to be showing up today.

  However, I almost called Margaret just to make sure. The only thing that stopped me was the fact it was three in the morning on the coast. Calling now would take concerned parenting to a passive-aggressive extreme.

  So I didn’t call.

  I should have.

  Instead, I turned on the light and surveyed the damage. “Real glad you’re staying home, baby,” I whispered.

  Between the Feds and the local cops, the place had been devastated. Every drawer and closet had been opened, the contents piled at random on the furniture and the floor. The furniture had all been pulled away from the walls, cushions removed and stripped, and the less said of the kitchen the better.

  I was in as bad shape as my condo. I had slept in my clothes, which were dotted with dime-sized splatters of blood from my busted lip. I stood up and went into the wreckage of my bathroom, hoping for enough unmolested toiletries to clean myself up.

  West 25th and Vega was probably a decent neighborhood before the Depression. Now it was just one of those odd urban corners of Cleveland that gentrification and economic recovery had yet to reach. Vega itself was easy to miss—it was a one-way street that sat right on top of the I-90 on-ramp. Nina’s house faced the Interstate.

  I would have thought a full-time staffer would have been able to afford better.

  Nina’s address wasn’t as run-down as its neighbors. The windows had glass, the paint had been done in the last quarter century or so, and the wrought-iron fence around the property was intact and relatively new.

  Squinting through the blowing snow, you could almost ignore its neighbors and imagine how it looked when this area was upper middle class.

  She met me at the door and pulled me inside. She looked as bad as she’d sounded on the phone. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, her eyes were red, her hair frizzy and yanked back in a severe ponytail. She looked more strung out than I felt, and I wondered if she’d had any sleep at all last night.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said as she pulled me into the house. I didn’t get much of a look at the place. Victorian decor, lots of hanging fabric, lots of plants, the smell of incense.

  “What about?”

  “Shhh . . .”

  She pulled me up a flight of stairs, past framed portraits of Buddha and Krishna, past a little statue of Shiva dancing, and into one of the upstairs bedrooms.

  I stumbled in a few steps as she closed and bolted the door. She hung an amulet on the doorknob and said, “There.”

  Her voice echoed in the windowless room.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  The room was empty. No furniture, no carpet, only a bare bulb in a light socket in the ceiling. Even the closet door was gone, leaving the closet an empty niche in one corner of the room.

  On the hardwood floor was a large circle of glyphs drawn in a cursive feminine hand. “We should be safe in here,” Nina said.

  “Safe from what?”

  Instead of answering, she pulled a tarot card out of her pocket and handed it to me. The Devil . . .

  “What is this?” Fragments of my nightmare came to mind, looking at the card. The massive stone throne, the dwarves chained to its base.

  “Behold the cost of defying me!”

  “The visions are worse,” Nina said to me. “They keep coming. They’re warning you . . .”

  “Warning me? What do you mean?”

&n
bsp; Nina grabbed me. “They’re your visions. Now, you’re seeing them yourself. I saw them first because I’m sensitive, and I work close to you.”

  I backed up and shook my head. “Whoa, Nina, I’m no seer. I’m the most thoroughly mundane man you’ll ever meet. I normally don’t even report on the stuff.”

  She stared at me, “You’ve seen them.”

  I swallowed and looked down at the card.

  “The Oracle can reach anyone, and being exposed to high concentrations of mana can bring on a sensitivity . . .”

  “I haven’t been . . .”

  Bullshit, Kline. The dwarf mailed you a package of salt intense enough to throw Kawata’s spectrometer out of whack. That ring at the Nazgûl probably wasn’t cornstarch, and you tasted a sample of what the dwarves were using last night, you Brainiac. God himself only knows what kind of power was flowing through Magetech corporate headquarters . . .

  I must have zoned out because Nina was shaking me. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “What?”

  “You cannot let your daughter come here. Not before the Tower falls.”

  The Tower? I hadn’t seen that yet.

  “Fine, fine.” I held up my hands.

  “What?”

  “I’ve told you, it’s under control. We’ve already postponed her visit.”

  Nina’s face went white. “She was going to . . .”

  “One o’clock flight this afternoon.”

  “So close . . .” She turned away from me and started shaking.

  “It’s all right, we bumped her trip.”

  She kept shaking her head. “No.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right.”

  She spun around and said, “No, it isn’t. Call her.”

  “What?”

  “Call her and tell her not to come.”

  “What is this, Nina? What does my daughter have to do with it?”

  “She won’t be safe as long as he—”

  She stopped talking and the only sound was the house creaking and settling around us.

  “As long as who? What?” I looked around. “We went over this yesterday. You said you discovered something. What was it?”

  She stepped away from me, shaking her head. “No.” She looked up at the corners of the room. The creaking was getting worse. Small trails of dust drifted down from the ceiling. It suddenly began to feel very warm in the house.

  Nina’s muscles went tense and her eyes rolled back in her head.

  “Nina?” I reached for her.

  Bad move.

  My hand touched her shoulder and I felt a shock as if someone laid a two-by-four across my face. I slammed all the way backward into the far wall, cracking the plaster and bruising my kidneys.

  “Annoying little bitch.”

  The voice coming out of Nina’s throat was deep, masculine, and somehow, familiar.

  The room darkened as the single light bulb began to fail. The light turned red as the glyphs on the floor burst into flame. “Maxwell is mine, and you cannot keep me from him.”

  I tried to push myself upright, but I felt a spasm of pain in my lower back and my legs slid out from under me. “Who are you?” I managed through clenched teeth.

  “You know who I am. I am the answer to your question.”

  “What have you done to Nina?”

  “Only accepted her invitation.”

  “Show yourself.”

  The laugh was inhuman and soul wrenching. “I will show myself to you soon enough, when you come begging to serve me.”

  “Let her go.”

  The thing laughed again, and the room was plunged into darkness as the flaming glyphs died out. The lightbulb flickered back on in time for me to see Nina collapse on the charred protective circle.

  “Shit.” This time I managed to get myself up on my hands and knees to get over to her. She was breathing okay, and my rudimentary knowledge of first aid allowed me to find a pulse.

  “Nina? Can you hear me?”

  She stared straight ahead, at the ceiling. I shook her shoulder gently. No response.

  “God damn it.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  Not wanting to deal with the Emergency Room, I didn’t tell the paramedics about literally throwing my back out. I watched, more or less helplessly, as they examined Nina, and carried her out to a waiting ambulance. I called Columbia, knowing full well I’d get her voice mail on a Saturday, and left a message for her about Nina.

  Then I called HR at the Press, hoping they had the right emergency contacts for her.

  I didn’t even know if she was married.

  I sat in the Volkswagen for a long time before I could get my head around what had happened. This wasn’t just Mazurich and a dead dwarf. Somehow this was tied to me, and my daughter.

  It took a long time for Margaret to answer the phone.

  “Hello?” Her voice was cracked and hoarse, I could tell that I hadn’t woken her up. I heard someone in the background. I heard her stage whisper to someone, “It’s her father.”

  I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach. “Margaret? What’s wrong?”

  “Kline, my God, I was going to call you—I’m still talking to the police.”

  No.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She was whispering again, “No, he’s my ex-husband, and he’s in Cleveland.”

  “Margaret, what’s the matter? Is Sarah all right? What happened?”

  “We had a fight, a bad one . . .”

  “Is she all right?”

  “I think so, but—”

  “But what?”

  “She ran away.”

  My hand was shaking. This couldn’t be happening. We had safely dealt with it.

  Margaret was still talking. “. . .while I was asleep. I thought it was all settled. But she took the car. I don’t know where she went. The police are here.”

  I felt like Macbeth watching the trees walking toward the rampart walls. “I know where she went,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Send the cops to the airport.”

  “I don’t understand. I canceled the flight myself. She couldn’t—”

  “Trust me,” I said. “She’s going to try and come here.”

  Margaret suddenly sounded suspicious. “How are you so sure?”

  “Because that would be the absolutely worst thing that could happen.”

  “Kline?”

  “Get the cops to check the airport. If we’re lucky, the flight hasn’t left yet. You can’t let her come here.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  You should be scared.

  “I have to check some things on my end here. Call me immediately once you find anything, okay?”

  “She didn’t tell you anything, did she?”

  “I wish she had.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks.”

  When I hung up, all I could think about was the last image from my nightmare; the Devil’s hand opening, revealing the bloody, broken body of my daughter . . .

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I FOLLOWED the ambulance to St. Vincent Charity Hospital. I had a desperate sick feeling that I was somehow responsible for what happened to Nina. When I came in asking about her, they stuck me in a little waiting room filled with hotel paintings, a phone, a box of tissues, and a Bible.

  Great . . .

  I called the Press again, but they hadn’t had any luck contacting Nina’s family. They’d already left several messages, but her only emergency contacts were her parents, who lived in Minnesota.

  Another émigré to the exotic mana-soaked shores of Lake Erie.

  I didn’t know much about Nina’s background, but I could guess at it. Mana likes ritual and pattern, and has a habit of infecting, or adapting to, existing codes and patterns. Anyone who had studied magic or the occult before the Portal opened had a leg up. A lot of people came here because their old magical st
udies suddenly had practical applications.

  Nina had probably gone through the obligatory New Age experimentation in college. A little tarot here, a little cabalism there, some Golden Dawn everywhere . . .

  Made me think of the students Dr. Shafran complained about.

  I sat in a plaid lounge chair, picked up the house phone, and tried to call Dr. Shafran. I figured if anyone knew what the hell I might be dealing with, he’d be the guy.

  No such luck. Of course he wasn’t in the office. And I ran his voice mail out of tape three times trying to explain what I wanted. At the end of the third message, I tried to get a grip on myself.

  “Okay,” I said to myself, “panicking won’t help anything. Act like a damn professional.”

  If the guy wasn’t at work on Saturday, I’d get his home number.

  Easier said than done.

  The guy wasn’t just absent from normal directory assistance, even the people I knew in the phone company couldn’t pull a listing for him.

  In the end, I needed to call Quint anyway.

  “What you got for me?”

  “Kline, your doctor has a long file. You want the long version or the short one?”

  I looked up at the clock and shook my head. “I have time.”

  Magetech wasn’t a public company, but the pile of money Quint was able to trace was two zeros beyond what Mazurich had been hiding. Magetech had more patents than a Catholic schoolgirl convention, and the guy’s name was on every one.

  However, for someone researching the effects of magic on the world, Dr. Pretorious located himself safely outside its influence. He bought a house in a golf community south of Columbus about three years ago and secluded himself there. I had an address, as well as the market value of the residence—seven figures, and it didn’t start with a one.

  After Quint had worked backward through Pretorious’ employment history, and a background check that the CIA would call anal, I asked him, “Could you do a quick look up of another doctor for me?”