Dragons & Dwarves

  Not the best time of my life to be thinking about right now. The last couple of days held uncomfortable echoes, and it made me realize that I didn’t want my daughter anywhere around here. Not now, maybe not ever.

  Margaret was right.

  Sarah was going back first thing in the morning, even if I had to drive to the Pittsburgh airport to get her out. As my paranoia worsened, I doubled back twice, just to make sure no dwarven taxicabs were tailing me.

  When I finally felt safe, I took an exit and drove downtown on surface streets.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Tower City Hilton.”

  Sarah frowned, squinting out at the office buildings flanking us. “I thought I was staying at your place?”

  “You aren’t vacationing, young lady. This is just to put you up until I get you on a flight back to your mother? Understand.”

  “But I thought, now that I was here—”

  “Sarah, you didn’t think, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  She gave me the silent treatment as I checked us in. I didn’t try to press her. In the end I was simply too relieved to have her with me, safe. The crap happening around me was just too threatening, enough so that I had the unprofessional urge to follow through on my threat to Margaret and book my own ticket back with her.

  In the end, given the weather and the glut of outbound passengers, I was lucky to find one seat available on an outbound flight that was leaving anytime soon. I was really proud of myself when I found an 8:30 AM flight out of Akron. I reserved her a seat, somewhat fraudulently, with my Press AmEx card.

  When I hung up, Sarah was leaning against the doorframe to her bedroom, staring at me.

  “Dad, I’m sorry . . .”

  I looked at her, and my dad sincerity detector wasn’t quite working. I sighed. “You really need to think things out before you act, honey.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “Sit down, Sarah.”

  She dropped into a lounge that faced me. “Dad—”

  I held up my hand. “Let me give you the obligatory parental speech first.” I leaned forward. “I’m not going to tell you that you aren’t old enough to make decisions for yourself. That’s the nature of the age you’re at. This is the point where you make decisions that will affect the rest of your life.”

  “Dad—”

  “Before you pull stunts like this, you need to decide if you’re willing to live with the consequences. If your mother was the troll you make her out to be, it could have been a cop picking you up at the airport. Car theft, credit fraud, flight across state lines. Felony convictions don’t make your life easier.”

  “Come on, Mom wasn’t going to—”

  “Call the police? Who do you think found the car at the airport? To be honest, if she went as far as pressing charges, I don’t think I could blame her.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at the carpet.

  “For the life of me I can’t understand why you seem to go out of your way to antagonize your mother.”

  “You don’t live with her,” Sarah said.

  “No,” I said, “and in less than a year you don’t have to either.”

  “Dad, I feel as if she’s trying to wall off a whole part of my life. Part of me.”

  “What do you mean? We talk almost every day—”

  She slammed the arm of the chair she sat in and stood up, shouting at me. “Damn it, Dad! This isn’t about that! It isn’t about you.”

  I leaned back. I was speechless for a moment, allowing my ego to absorb the statement. Not that I was dad of the year here, but I had been thinking . . .

  “What is it about, then?”

  Sarah shook her head, and I could see the tears starting. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault.” She ran to her room and slammed the door.

  “Sarah?” I walked up to the door. “What is it?”

  I could hear her crying.

  I hesitated a moment and opened the door. She was splayed out, facedown on the bed. I could hear her say something like, “I’m sorry.”

  “What is the matter? Why did you run away here? Is there something at home I don’t know about?” At this point I was visualizing nightmare scenarios that had been forbidden territory until now. “Is someone abus—”

  She raised her head, sucking in an offended breath. “My God, Dad!”

  “What am I supposed to think?”

  She flopped back down on the bed. “I was born here,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Mom doesn’t understand. This all is part of my life, who I am.”

  I sat down on the foot of the bed. “So you run away here?”

  “Don’t I have a right to know where I come from?”

  “Maybe there’s a better way to deal with that, and your mother.”

  She sighed. “Maybe.”

  I placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to comfort her. She shrugged me away.

  “Can I have some time alone?”

  “Okay.” I stood up. “Let me know if you want to talk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Apparently, she didn’t want to talk. After about fifteen minutes of quiet sobbing, the jet lag caught up with her and she started snoring. I went in and took her shoes off and threw a blanket over her.

  I had no right to, but I felt a little like crying myself. Not happy news when you find out that you’re not the epicenter of your little girl’s world any more. For all my attempts to be practical and realistic, the fact was that I still saw her as a twelve-year-old girl.

  It just never occurred to me that anyone could feel that sort of connection to this place. The whole situation seemed too new for this to be anyone’s ancestral homeland . . .

  Sarah was what, five years old, when the Portal opened?

  Another five years, there’d be a whole generation that had been born since the Portal. What kind of point-of-view shift would that make?

  Case was going to need another Dr. Shafran or three.

  These were the thoughts running though my head when my cell phone rang, a little after seven.

  “Maxwell,” I barked into the phone.

  “Well, you like to get your money’s worth, don’t you?”

  “Quint? You got me something about Simon Lucas?”

  “Mr. Lucas is a busy little beaver. He’s one of those guys that get a one-dollar salary on the books and gets paid options up the yin-yang.”

  “Worth a lot?”

  “I counted easily over 150 publicly traded companies where his investment is into eight figures or higher.”

  “150 . . .” I tried to do the math in my head, but it had been a long day.

  “All seems aboveboard. Including his immigrant status.”

  “Immigrant?”

  “Yes, another one from the other side of the Portal.”

  “Great. It seems that Magetech has been very good to people.”

  “Mr. Lucas seems to have done the best, though he doesn’t seem to figure largely in any paperwork Magetech had filed with any government agency. This guy is easily the highest compensated executive in the state of Ohio.”

  Pretty good for someone who was only close to the top of the Org chart, and one of the only humans in the rarefied upper atmosphere of the Magetech hierarchy. All the higher executives, and the board, were dwarven.

  Oddest of all was where Mr. Lucas listed his residence.

  All his financial records that Quint had been able to access, including some tax forms released to the SEC, listed Simon Lucas’ residence on Whiskey Island.

  According to all the man’s records, he resided in the middle of the dwarven enclave, where the mana was so dense that human beings couldn’t work there without going mad . . .

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I GOT my wake-up call at five in the morning, and I was relieved to look out the hotel window and see a clear sky. I figured we had more than enough time to make it down to Akron and have some sort of breakfast at the airport before
I put her on the plane. I dressed quickly, skipping a shower and a shave, figuring to let Sarah have the run of a clean bathroom before we left.

  Dressed, I steeled myself for a tearful argument and knocked on the door to her bedroom.

  “Come on, Sarah. Wake up, we have a plane to catch.”

  She didn’t answer me.

  “Sarah?” I pushed the door open.

  The bed was empty.

  “Oh, no.” I stepped in. She wasn’t here. Neither was her bag. “Shit, you’re kidding me. Sarah?”

  I ran out and threw the door to the bathroom open. “Sarah?”

  Nothing.

  She wouldn’t just walk out . . .

  “Why not?”

  How the hell could I be that stupid? She as much as told me that she was running away to Cleveland, not to her father. She’d done everything but come out and tell me she would bolt.

  I ran out into the hall, dashing the hope that she had just stepped out of the room. I was in the elevator, halfway down to the lobby, when I realized that my car keys were gone.

  Better and better.

  I walked out of the elevator and through the lobby, looking for her. No sign. Christ, she doesn’t even have a winter jacket.

  I found the concierge by the Euclid exit. “Pardon me, did you see my daughter leave?”

  “Pardon.”

  “My daughter, she’s seventeen, blonde, probably wearing a leather—”

  “Oh, yes, an hour ago, I directed her to the garage.”

  I ran to the garage, dialing the police as I went.

  “Hello?”

  Margaret yawned and I realized that it must be three in the morning on the coast.

  “It’s Kline,” I said.

  “Oh,” she was too calm. She must have been too asleep to hear the stress in my voice. “Are you at the airport already?”

  Yeah, she was expecting me to call, wasn’t she?

  I looked around, for a moment too numb to say anything. I was sitting on the rail where my Volkswagen had been parked. A pair of police cars was here, which was a bonus for your average runaway case. I was lucky in that I had one string that I’d pulled as hard as I could.

  “Kline? You are at the airport.”

  “She did it to me, too . . .”

  “What?”

  “Right up to lifting my car keys.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  I shook my head. “I was an idiot. She came out and told me she thought she was missing part of her past—”

  “Yes, you.”

  “No, Margaret, this isn’t about me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She didn’t bolt from the hotel because she was desperate to see me. She ran here because she has some weird idea that this city is part of her heritage.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “She told me that she thought you were ‘walling off part of herself. ’ I don’t think she was planning to see me at all.”

  “Where would she go?”

  “I don’t know. Does she know anyone out here? Any boyfriends?”

  “Kline?”

  “This is serious. Our daughter has just stolen another car and now I have no idea where she could be going. She has to have left some sort of clue. Something on her computer, email, letters, a diary?”

  “What do you think—”

  “I don’t know what to think, but ransack her room and call me back when you find something—The police are here, I’ll call you back.”

  “But—”

  I cut her off as one of the strings I had pulled unraveled in front of me. Walking up the ramp of the parking garage, toward me and the two police cruisers, was the tall gangly form of Commander Maelgwyn Caledvwlch.

  One of the hazards of name-dropping to a police dispatcher, the name in question might actually show up.

  “Mr. Maxwell,” he greeted me in his semi-Jamaican monotone.

  “Commander Caledvwlch.”

  “I have become interested in your assessment of my priorities.” He waved a long hand, encompassing the empty parking space and the pair of police cars. “I understand that your child removed your vehicle without your permission. But my understanding of human reasoning falls short when I discover that this requires SPU involvement. Can you enlighten me?”

  I shook my head and put my cell phone away. “I got two answers for you, neither of them very good. Can we go somewhere private and talk?”

  Caledvwlch took me to the back of a mostly-fiberglass minivan, which passed for an unmarked patrol car for the SPU elves. Not that any of them ever went undercover. It all had to do with headroom and iron content.

  I eased into a seat with a groan and Caledvwlch managed to fold himself in next to me. I looked at him, the alien angles of his face framed by a ruff of hair and convoluted pointed ears. He watched me with metallic eyes with no visible iris or pupil. Behind the impassive expression I knew sat a sense of duty and fealty that made a fourteenth-century Samurai look like an anarchist.

  I didn’t know how he’d react to a father who was just freaking out and didn’t know what else to do.

  “The first answer,” I looked at him. “Hell, it isn’t one. I know how police prioritize things in this town. Runaway—especially one an hour old—isn’t going to make it to the top of the list.” I looked at Caledvwlch’s face, no reaction. “If I just let it go with my daughter swiping my car, I’d be lucky if someone came and took a statement within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “The human phrase, I believe, is, ‘to light a fire under someone’s ass.’” He said it with no discernible emotion, and I wondered if it was possible he was mocking me.

  “I am part of your investigation, however tangential. I just made sure everyone knew it.”

  Caledvwlch nodded and seemed to be lost in thought a moment or two. Then he asked me, “There was an incident, yesterday, with a colleague of yours.”

  I swallowed. I probably should have reported it to the cops. “Yes, Nina Johannessen—”

  “She is in a coma. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I told the doctors what I could . . .”

  “She is a seer, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she see something about your daughter?”

  I looked at Caledvwlch as I wondered exactly how much he knew. As usual, he didn’t provide me any external clues. The elf would provide the play by play for the apocalypse with all the passion of a golf announcer.

  “That was the other reason . . .”

  I unloaded on Caledvwlch, probably the way any parent would unload on an available cop, even without any overt displays of sympathy. I didn’t need his encouragement. I was prepared to hand everything I had over to him, however tangential, if it might have some distant relation to where my daughter might have gone.

  I went over Nina’s visions, the tarot cards, my nightmares, and how Nina said it was tied to my daughter. I told him about Nina’s possession, and how whatever had taken control had the same voice as the Devil in my dreams.

  “You should have reported that,” Caledvwlch said quietly. “Possession of an unwilling victim is a first-degree felony.”

  “I know, but I called my ex after that, to check on Sarah, and that’s when I found she’d slipped out of the house and got on a plane.”

  “You understand that you have just admitted to a criminal act?” Caledvwlch said. “At this time it is my duty to advise you of your rights.”

  “You’re arresting me?”

  “I am taking you to the station for a more formal questioning,” Caledvwlch said. “A full statement now and I will not be prompted to take you in for failure to report a crime.”

  “What about my daughter?”

  “Mr. Maxwell, as you informed the dispatcher, this is part of an ongoing SPU investigation.”

  Caledvwlch took me to an interview room only a few blocks away at police headquarters. While I’d suffered a few arrests in my career, I??
?d never been brought to the Special Paranormal Unit’s interrogation room. Even when Caledvwlch “rescued” me from Blackstone, Caledvwlch just used a spare office to question me.

  I didn’t think it was a good thing that I now rated special treatment—and when a uniformed cop let me in, I was very glad that Caledvwlch hadn’t felt the need to actually arrest me.

  The room was constructed specifically to suit the needs of the Special Paranormal Unit, and those needs were, well, special.

  First off, the room itself was designed like an operating theater, rather than a standard soundproof interrogation chamber—a cylinder with concave walls, with observers stationed behind one-way glass at the top of the room, looking down. The walls weren’t layered in acoustical tile, but were concrete with gold symbols inlaid flush with the surface. When the foot-thick door shut behind me, the inlay formed multiple concentric circles ringing the wall from floor to ceiling.

  In the center of the room was what looked like a dentist’s chair. Looking at the heavy straps, I was rather glad that they didn’t have me sit there. I got to sit at a more normal office chair that was one of a half dozen places at a metal table that formed a donut around the chair of honor.

  When I sat, I said to Caledvwlch, “Nice setup you have here.”

  “Sometimes we must conduct difficult interviews.” He waved at a plainclothes human who had joined us in the room. “Dr. Singh will be observing here, and may have some questions of his own.”

  Dr. Singh was a bald, white-mustached Indian man. He nodded a slight acknowledgment to me. I wondered who he was. I guessed that he was a forensic mage of some sort.

  Caledvwlch sat down as well, “Shall we take your statement from the beginning?”

  “Well, I talked to Nina—”

  “Ossian Parthalán,” said Dr. Singh. “Begin with his phone call.”