Dragons & Dwarves

  “Name?”

  “Dr. Newman Shafran, he works at Case Western.”

  “Hmm. You shopping around, Kline? These guys are probably too old for you.”

  “I’m just looking for a home phone.”

  Quint made a melodramatic sigh. “If you insist. Give me a moment.”

  I heard typing, then a muffled curse. “Can you spell that name for me?”

  I did.

  “Give me a moment.” Quint muttered something unpleasant. As he muttered, a doctor walked into the room.

  “Hold on,” I said to Quint, who wasn’t listening. I looked up at my visitor. “How is she?”

  The doctor was an Indian man about ten years younger than I was. “Medically she’s in no danger at the moment. I understand you were present during the attack?”

  I nodded, lowering the phone. “Is she awake?”

  The doctor shook his head, “I’m sorry. She’s unresponsive.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  The doctor sighed. “There’s no physical damage. She has suffered feedback from some magical event. I need the exact history of what happened—”

  “Can’t you transfer her out of the Portal’s influence?” I asked. That was what they did with her predecessor when he was infected with semiconscious tumors that started sprouting little eyes.

  “That’s not a trivial treatment decision. Without analysis of the enchantment binding her, the effect of taking her out of a mana dense area could be unpredictable. Can I have that history?”

  I gave him what I knew, which wasn’t much.

  “Thanks.” He put his hand on my shoulder, “We’re doing what we can.”

  It didn’t make me feel better.

  When he left, I heard a small tinny voice say, “You bitch!”

  I picked up the receiver, “Quint, you still there?”

  “Tell me, Kline, are you just trying to make my life interesting?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dr. Newman Shafran? Home number? The man doesn’t exist.”

  “What, I’ve talked to him . . .”

  “No phone, no credit report, address a PO Box. I can’t even find the university records to match his doctorate.”

  “I don’t understand. He works at Case. He’s published scientific papers.”

  “Sure, dozens—but I swear he walks off the campus and ceases to exist. If I didn’t . . .” he trails off. “I am such an idiot.”

  “What?”

  “I was going to say, ‘If I didn’t know better,’ but, of course I don’t know better, do I?”

  “Know what?”

  “The man’s an émigré from the Portal. Of course, no birth certificate, no paper trail prior to a dozen years ago. Hell, even his publications don’t go back more than a decade.”

  “But he has a doctorate?”

  “Threw me, too. This will be a little weird, you want me to keep digging?”

  I shook my head, feeling a little uneasy about Dr. Shafran. I couldn’t believe the man was from the other side of the Portal. He seemed way too much of the world I lived in. But all that was beside the point anyway. I didn’t need to be going off on tangents. “No, Quint, leave it for now. There’s another man who’s more important. The name’s Simon Lucas . . .”

  When I left the cell-phone-free bubble of St. Vincent’s, I had missed half a dozen calls. All from Margaret.

  I called her back from the parking lot. Once I was in the Volkswagen, out of the snow.

  “Where have you been?”

  “The hospital, I had to turn off my cell—”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, it was a coworker. Did they find Sarah?”

  “Kline, our daughter has a future as a con artist.”

  I leaned back in the seat. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “The police found my car in the airport parking lot. She used her boarding pass—the one we thought I canceled.”

  “Thought?”

  It turns out that my daughter was nothing if not resourceful. Margaret had, in fact, changed the flight dates. But she had done it via email, and apparently Margaret had never bothered to set the password on her e-mail. Sarah was able to look through all her email and pull up confirmation numbers and credit card info—enough to actually place a phone call to the travel agent last night, undoing Margaret’s changes.

  Apparently, doing everything on-line made it even easier for Sarah to impersonate her mother, since the agent had never actually talked to Margaret.

  Once her boarding pass was valid again, all Sarah had to do was slip out early enough to make the flight. By the time the cops had caught up to the missing car, the plane had already been boarded.

  I shook my head. “What is she thinking?”

  “I don’t know, Kline.”

  “You have the itinerary? Any layovers?”

  “The cops already asked, no. It’s a direct flight.”

  “What does she expect me to do? She has to know I’d put her right back on the next flight out, even if there weren’t—”

  I was about to say “doom-laden prophecies.”

  “Weren’t what, Kline?”

  “A . . . a teenage susceptibility to self-delusion and denial. She really should have known better.”

  “Something else . . .”

  “There’s more?”

  “She unplugged my alarm clock.” She paused, and when I didn’t immediately grasp the significance, she elaborated. “If I hadn’t gotten up at four to go to the bathroom, if I had slept in, I might not have been able to get to you before the plane landed. She’ll be there in less than two hours.”

  I exhaled.

  “Well our little con artist is going to be lucky if I don’t get my own ticket next to her on the way back.”

  Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, the weather had to screw things up.

  I was lucky to make it from St. Vincent’s to Hopkins Airport in under an hour and a half. What had started as a light flurry managed to turn into a full-fledged blizzard before I had completely merged onto I-77 South.

  Ten minutes before my daughter’s plane was scheduled to arrive, I was just one of hundreds of people staring out the windows at Hopkins International Airport. Like everyone else, I was watching the sheets of white pounding the tarmac, and explaining to a cell phone just how the weather had screwed up everyone’s life.

  “Nothing?” Margaret said.

  “No,” I told her. “Pretty much every outbound flight’s been canceled. I think I’m going to be lucky if they don’t divert Sarah’s flight to Akron or Columbus.”

  “That bad?”

  “Bad enough that all the hotels around the airport were booked solid before I got here. I was lucky to get the Tower City Hilton.”

  “You couldn’t just put her up in your condo like we originally planned?”

  “Not a great idea, right now. Long story.”

  “It’s what you’re working on, isn’t it? Are you getting death threats again?”

  “In any case,” I said, changing the subject, “our daughter has to know that things aren’t business as usual. I’m not going to reward her by pretending this is okay. She’s going to a hotel with me, and back out once the weather is clear.”

  “You’re right,” I heard her sniff over the phone. “I just can’t help thinking we might have been too hard on her. It isn’t like Sarah to do this—”

  I know. “Suite 1123, Tower City Hilton. I called in the reservation when I was fighting this crap on the freeway.”

  “Okay,” Margaret sounded uncertain. “I still wish she could stay with you.”

  “She is staying with me. It’s a suite, two bedrooms.”

  “Look, that hotel must be expensive at the last minute. You should let me pick up part of the bill.”

  “Don’t worry, I can afford it. If anything, we should take it out of Sarah’s allowance.”

  “Kline?”

  “What?”

  “I
know you’re angry, but remember, she wanted to see you.”

  I rubbed my face. My jaw still hurt from where the dwarf had slugged me. “I know.”

  “Call me when her plane comes in?”

  “Sure.”

  I hung up and looked up at the flight schedule. Twenty-minute delay so far.

  “Sarah, what the hell were you thinking?” I whispered to myself as the delay rolled over to forty minutes.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHEN she walked out the gate, I think she almost seemed surprised to see me.

  “Dad?”

  I walked up to her. “I think you have a bit of explaining to do, young lady.”

  “I tried to call you.”

  “Uh-huh, so you resort to car theft and fraud?”

  “She wasn’t going to let me come!”

  I frowned. “Don’t take that tone.” I took the bag she was carrying. “Did you check anything? Do we need to go to baggage claim?”

  “No.”

  “Then come on, let’s get back to my car before the weather gets any worse.”

  She nodded and followed me through the terminal. After a few minutes she said, “I was looking forward to this trip for a year, then she said I couldn’t go . . .”

  “We said you couldn’t go. Your mother does talk to me, you know. We bumped your visit to January because you needed to cool your jets for baiting your mother.”

  “It wasn’t fair after planning—”

  I stopped and turned to face her. “Do you have any idea what you just did? This wasn’t breaking curfew, or pushing your mother’s buttons. You broke the law, young lady. If your mother and I were more estranged than we are, I would be counted as an accessory. The only reason you aren’t on a flight back to California right now is because there aren’t any. I’d take you to a Greyhound station if I could trust you not to bolt at the first rest stop.”

  “Dad?” she was starting to tear up.

  I sighed. “You have no conception how disappointed I am in you right now.”

  The floodgates were open now, and she pulled out the A-bomb of emotional blackmail. “I just wanted to see you, Dad. It just got so bad I had to go.”

  Uh-huh, you have the mother from hell.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “Well, lucky for you, you’re going to have about twenty-four hours to get over it before I can send you back.”

  By the time we got to the exit, I realized that Sarah was not dressed appropriately. She wore jeans, a short-sleeved blouse, and a little leather jacket that existed solely to be a fashion accessory.

  I tried offering her my trench coat, and she just folded her arms and said, “I’m okay!”

  But even as she shook her head, I could see her staring out the glass at the layers of white falling down on the parking lot. She probably hadn’t seen snow in person since she was five.

  “You really need to wear something heavier than that. Did you pack something?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  I bit my tongue. I knew enough to realize how easily a detail like appropriate winter wear might have been lost in the midst of the apocalyptic decision for her to come here.

  She looked up at me. “You know, I saw a fashion show on satellite and they had a designer here who makes these killer jackets. It moves, like it’s alive, and it changes color to whatever you think of . . .”

  Great, and how much does that cost? “Honey, I don’t think we’re going to go shopping. Besides, you couldn’t take something like that back home. It wouldn’t work outside the influence of the Portal, and if it’s heavily enchanted, leaving the influence of mana would probably destroy it.”

  I pushed through the door into the blizzard.

  “W-well. If I got anything l-like that, you’d keep it safe for me? T-till I came back?”

  “I said we’re not going—” I looked at her, and saw eyes red from crying. I couldn’t be a hard ass anymore. “Sure, honey.”

  I told myself that she was going to be safely in my sight from now up until I put her back on a plane home.

  “D-Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Give me your j-jacket.”

  I set down her bag and pulled off my trench coat and draped it over her shoulders. Doing that made it sink in exactly how much my girl had grown. I didn’t feel distant from her, since we talked on the phone at least every other day, but I only actually saw her a few times a year.

  Giving her my jacket made me realize that she was only a hair shorter than I was now. She could easily be one of the college interns at the Press—or a hostess at the bar where the old men of the paper went to talk about the interns without causing a hostile working environment.

  Sarah must have heard me sigh.

  “What is it?”

  “Just thinking about work.” I picked up her bag and gestured toward the lot. “I’m parked over there.”

  “Oh, wow, is that a dwarf?”

  I silently thanked God that her hands were too busy holding my coat on her shoulders for her to point. She was looking over at a taxi stand where a cab was idling, the driver waiting for a fare.

  “Don’t stare . . .”

  It couldn’t be, could it?

  Cabs in this town were evenly divided between Jamaicans, Arabs, and dwarves—and no, I don’t know why Jamaicans drive cabs in Cleveland, but they have since before the Portal opened. So we’re at the airport, a dozen cabs lined up, of course there’d be dwarves.

  It was pushing it to assume I really recognized this dwarf. No way this was Samanish Thégharin, I was just being paranoid . . .

  Our eyes locked and I told myself that I had only seen a bad digital photo on a hack license. That and the back of his neck.

  The dwarf in the cab smiled at me.

  Shit.

  “Dad, you were telling me not to stare.”

  The cab pulled away, without a fare. He seemed to make a point of driving right past us, as if Mr. Thégharin wanted me to know for certain who he was.

  “Sorry, just happens that I know him.” The sense of dread and urgency fell on me redoubled. I grabbed Sarah with my free arm and led her toward my car. It was an effort to keep from breaking into a run.

  “You know dwarves?”

  “Only a couple. I was just surprised to see him here.” I tried to push the conversation away from Mr. Thégharin. “I know quite a few more elves.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’re a few in the police department. They’re an interesting bunch.”

  The drive back was agonizingly slow, because of the weather. Sarah was obviously disappointed. I guess, even under parental house arrest, she’d expected to at least see something of the mystic kingdom known as Cleveland, Ohio. And after all her planning, her first views were little more than swirling white and the occasional ODOT snowplow trying to keep the Interstate clear.

  I was torn between thinking it served her right, and feeling sorry for her.

  She made up for it by peppering me with questions, some of which I’m pretty sure she already knew the answers to. I guess it was her way of having a conversation with me, without talking about how she got here, or how much trouble she was in.

  So most of the drive I spent answering questions about everything from the Portal to the local unicorn population.

  “Fact is, most of the legitimate mages in town are employed by the government.”

  “So what do they do?”

  “Mostly? They protect the public from the mages who aren’t. There’s a large black market around for all sorts of nasty enchantments. One of the priorities, ever since the Portal opened, is to try to keep a step ahead of the bad guys. From mass-producing protective charms to keep buildings and vehicles secure, to tracking down counterfeiters.”

  “Counterfeiters?”

  “With the right materials, even a half-assed mage can easily make a physical copy of any small inanimate object. Such as a DVD or a twenty-dollar bill.”

  “There?
??s a lot of that going on?”

  “One of many reasons for a strain between the federal and local governments here. We’re number two as far as IP piracy goes, right after China.” I shrugged. “Fortunately, as long as the good guys catch the property before it leaves the Portal’s influence, a forensic mage can detect the history of the material.”

  “What if it does leave?”

  “Then you have a problem.”

  “I never really thought about that . . .” She looked out at the snow.

  “Well the movies and TV shows don’t usually focus on the run-of-the-mill stuff.”

  “What about monsters? Griffins, dragons, that sort of thing? Are there a lot around, do you see any?”

  I almost winced when I thought about griffins. I shook my head. “There’re only about thirty dragons around, and they tend to be too busy to accommodate journalists.”

  “What are they busy doing?”

  “Nothing particularly sinister—not unless you’re a left-wing Democrat.” I looked across and saw Sarah’s blank expression and elaborated. “Dragons are fundamentally capitalists. They’re into money and power, and they’re rather adept at acquiring it. They came through the Portal, set up shop, incorporated, and started buying companies.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You’re picturing a dragon sitting on a mound of gold and gems? These creatures are intelligent enough to know that a pile of stock portfolios and board memberships mean a lot more in twenty-first century America, even if they can only legally sign contracts and own property in the state of Ohio. They may be huge and menacing, and breathe fire, but an army of well-financed lawyers can be a lot more intimidating. And can venture a lot farther afield.”

  “You met a dragon, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Theophane. She bought out the top few floors of the BP Building.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Intimidating . . .” I talked on for a while about my meeting with the dragon Theophane, two years ago. That was the last time my job had gotten me involved deeply in nonhuman politics. And while I kept my voice light, I couldn’t help but be apprehensive.

  That time, when I dug into the history of elves and the death of one supposedly immortal dragon, I almost got myself killed. And the mess that resulted ended up killing a half dozen others, including a fellow reporter, and Caledvwlch’s predecessor as head of the Special Paranormal Unit—the latter decapitated by an eight-foot-tall stone gargoyle in the middle of my living room.