Dragons & Dwarves

  “What?” I asked. “I went over this already, my daughter—”

  “From the beginning,” Caledvwlch said.

  I looked from one to the other. “This has nothing to do with my daughter. It’s the damn dwarves again. Damn it, we need to find her. What happened with Nina—”

  “Mr. Maxwell,” Caledvwlch raised his voice only slightly, but it was enough to cut me down in my tracks. The elf had held a gun on me before, but he had never raised his voice.

  Caledvwlch stared at me with those cold metallic eyes, “This has everything to do with your daughter. Now, from the beginning.”

  He didn’t need to provide me with any more encouragement.

  I ran down everything, step by step, since Ossian Parthalán called me to question why Councilman Mazurich shot himself. What scared me was when they had me back up and asked questions about my daughter.

  “You received a call from California that evening,” Caledvwlch said.

  “Yes, Sarah.” I repeated the conversation as I remembered it.

  “Did she say anything odd?” asked Dr. Singh. “Possibly about her trip here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did she ever mention contact with anyone from Cleveland?” Dr. Singh frowned.

  “No . . .”

  Caledvwlch continued. “So you examined this envelope, describe what you found.”

  But Sarah . . . I looked at both of them and couldn’t tell if I should push it or not. How the hell could my daughter be involved in some sort of conspiracy here. It didn’t make sense.

  “This is the first time you’ve been contacted by dwarves?”

  “Yes . . .”

  Unless it wasn’t Sarah.

  What if it was me?

  Blackstone had mentioned a connection to California. Thor’s Hammer had a car in the shop with California plates. Dr. Shafran had said that dwarves, unlike elves or dragons, would be able to travel beyond the influence of the Portal, and he had even mentioned California.

  She clearly wanted to come to Cleveland for reasons beyond visiting me. And Dr. Singh had practically repeated my own question to Margaret verbatim.

  Did she have contact with anyone from Cleveland?

  What was it she said in the parking lot? “You know dwarves?”

  “You took pictures at Thor’s Hammer?” asked Dr. Singh.

  “They were garbage . . .”

  “Yes, from the mana saturation.” Dr. Singh looked at me. “Have you erased those pictures?”

  “No.”

  “May I see them?” He held out his hand.

  I cued the pictures up on the screen and handed my cell phone over. Caledvwlch soldiered on while Dr. Singh looked at my mana spoiled pictures. He grilled me on my visit to the Nazgûl and when I mentioned taking pictures there, too, Dr. Singh looked up at me.

  “Yeah, right after the others, just as useless.”

  Even as I recounted the story, I kept fixating on what Sarah had said.

  “You know dwarves?”

  It was exactly the way a teenager might phrase “You listen to hip-hop?” Or “You play video games?” All the inflection was on the bizarre concept that someone as old and out of touch as I was might have contact with something hip and new.

  Dwarves?

  What if Ossian Parthalán had more than one reason for contacting me?

  Paranoia was running away with me. I had exactly zero evidence that my daughter had contacted any dwarves, ever. She was just upset. She’d come back within a few hours. All she wanted was to see this damn city . . .

  Bullshit.

  Even without the visions and Nina’s collapse, I would have known that something was wrong. This wasn’t how Sarah acted. Something serious had gone wrong with her life.

  Caledvwlch walked me through my visit to Magetech, with Dr. Singh asking pointed questions about my blackout, and my catastrophic meeting with Nina. He grilled me on that, and on the subsequent arrival of my daughter, with no mercy. We went over what I remembered of each conversation over and over. Enough that I almost felt ready to break down the third time we went over my last drive with Sarah.

  What kept me from losing it was the fact that Caledvwlch’s questions about Sarah confirmed that he was operating under suspicions very similar to my own. He dwelled on her comments about the dwarf cab driver almost as much as I had.

  When Caledvwlch drained me of just about everything I had, Dr. Singh stepped in. “You said you had nightmares, visions akin to what Mrs. Johannessen had told you about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  “What I remember . . .” I told him about Death galloping from the Portal, and the Devil enthroned above the dwarves.

  Dr. Singh nodded and handed me my cell phone. “I took the liberty of messaging these pictures to the Cleveland Police server. I think you might want to look at them again.”

  “Huh? They’re just random . . .”

  No.

  They weren’t random. My heart leaped in my throat as I recognized the landscape of my dreams. The swirling mirrored glass and mounted Death. The mountain of bloody salt twisted around Ossian’s corpse.

  What did Dr. Shafran say? There’s some slight evidence that such static is not wholly random, and is responsible for what some New Age victims refer to as the Oracle.

  “Your own visions, are they?” asked Dr. Singh.

  I nodded, unable really to speak. I had scrolled to the last distorted image. In the final picture, the goat-faced Devil leered at me, holding something broken and bloody in his outstretched hand.

  Oh, God . . .

  It took a moment to notice, but the last picture had a date-stamp that placed it well after my shots at the Nazgûl.

  I had taken a picture of the Devil while I was at Magetech.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BY the time Caledvwlch and Dr. Singh were done with me, it was already eleven. Caledvwlch and Dr. Singh disappeared into some authorized personnel only section of the SPU, cutting me loose in the lobby of Police Headquarters.

  The first thing I did was call back to the Hilton in the vain hope that Sarah had come back while I’d been with the cops. No such luck. I did what I could to quiz the cops on the duty desk about where things were with finding my daughter, but somehow, once my daughter was involved, I had lost my ability to finesse information from people. The questions I pounded the cops with had all the subtlety of a kick to the groin.

  “Do you know anything?”

  Predictably, all I got were half a dozen ways to phrase: “Go home, we’re working on it.”

  That, and the fact that no one had spotted my car yet, was all I got. As I calmed down, I was rational enough to be thankful that they didn’t have anyone escort me out.

  I walked outside, squinting in the daylight, and called for a rental car. I didn’t want to deal with any more taxis, though the dwarf in question was nowhere in sight. I sat on a bench outside the police station, feeling worse than useless.

  Damn it, Sarah, how could you do this to us?

  As if cued, my phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number, but a California area code.

  “Maxwell,” I answered.

  “Kline.”

  “Margaret?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside the police station waiting for a rental to show up. Where are you?”

  “I’m with William Jackson. You don’t know him, but he’s the father of one of Sarah’s friends.”

  “You found something?”

  “I don’t know. But she talked about Cleveland, and magic, with Beth, William’s daughter. They actually talked about rites and rituals, and a lot of other stuff I don’t understand. It scares me.”

  Christ, Sarah . . .

  “They talked about forming a coven. Beth had hidden all these books about the cabala, the seal of Solomon—That doesn’t make any sense, does it? They live in California.”

  “There’s probably more of that going on there now t
han there was before the Portal opened. The Portal is the best recruiting tool these New Age types have ever had.”

  I kept remembering the pamphlet, “God’s Plan or The Devil’s Handiwork?” and Club Nazgûl. I’ve worked in this town enough to know the taxonomy of mages better than the pamphlet’s author. I knew that a wiccan coven was spiritually on a completely different planet than a Satanist.

  Somehow, when it was my daughter, I didn’t find the thought at all reassuring.

  “She was planning this for a long time,” I said.

  Of course she would want to go to a college around here. She was one of those people who wanted to be on Dr. Shafran’s waiting list. My daughter wanted to be a mage. “Does Mr. Jackson have any idea where Sarah might have run off to?”

  “No,” Margaret said, “but Beth has had a history of trouble. She broke down when we confronted her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “They were ‘practicing,’ they wanted . . .” Margaret broke up, couldn’t go on.

  “They wanted what?” I asked. “Were they going to move here?”

  A male voice came through the phone, “Mr. Maxwell? I’m Bill Jackson, Beth’s father.”

  “Yes, thanks for helping my wife—ex-wife,” I rubbed my temple. “What did Beth tell you?”

  “They wanted to emigrate.”

  I dropped the phone.

  That had never occurred to me. Even though that was the reason for the Portal, to travel between here and Ragnan.

  For all the people that came through to our side, at least two of our own went the other way.

  Even though the Feds tightened up immigration to our side of the Portal, thanks to an elimination of the worst price gouging by the city, there wasn’t a shortage of people who had decided they didn’t want to deal with this particular universe anymore.

  Given the narrow aperture, it was rare to ever hear anything from our ex-pats again.

  No, it didn’t make sense. She’d need a passport, over two grand for passage . . .

  And she turned eighteen next year and wouldn’t need to have us sign off on a passport, or even tell us about it. If she was a student here, she might just buy a ticket with student loan money. Hell, Visa practically threw free credit at college students. And, when it came to that, over the past two days my daughter had shown no reluctance to steal credit card numbers.

  Why?

  Why would she want to abandon her mother, me, the entire planet, for a place that was literally medieval? I didn’t know a lot of what was currently going on on the other side of the Portal, but of what I did hear, the words egalitarian, progressive, tolerant, and democratic were just the first on a long list of descriptive terms that did not apply.

  Maybe I was just close enough to see the warts.

  “Mr. Maxwell.”

  I dug my phone out of the snow with numbed fingers. “Yes, sorry.”

  “Margaret said you wanted to know if they had talked to anyone from there?”

  “Cleveland? Yes.”

  “Beth says that someone visited their coven circle—a couple of times. A short old man, she thinks his name is Parthalán?”

  “Parthalán.” I whispered.

  A pair of cars drove up in front of me. The first car was a sky-blue Solara. The driver got out and approached me. “Mr. Maxwell?”

  “Mr. Maxwell?” Jackson echoed in my ear.

  The driver walked up, keys in hand. “I’m from Enterprise—”

  “I have to go,” I said into the phone, “but do me a favor and ask Beth for everything she remembers about Mr. Parthalán.”

  “I hope you find Sarah.”

  “So do I,” I said as I hung up.

  “This is Dr. Newman Shafran, I’m not in right now . . .” I was getting sick of the doctor’s voice mail. I decided that once I was done with Teaghue Parthalán, I was going to Case to hunt up the professor in person.

  I sat in my rented Solara, parked about halfway up a cross street, just in sight of The Dwarven Armorer. The suit of plate still stood posed in mid-stroke, making me wonder how often Teaghue cleaned the salt off of it.

  Shafran’s voice mail beeped at me.

  “Dr. Shafran. This is Kline Maxwell, and I need to know exactly what you’ve heard about dwarves going to California.”

  I hung up.

  “Parthalán,” I whispered.

  He knew. He had to have known. It didn’t matter if the dwarf that visited my daughter’s coven—My daughter’s coven? Wrap your long-distance parenting head around that one. In the end it didn’t matter if that dwarf was Ossian, Teaghue, or some dwarf as yet unnamed. It strained coincidence to the breaking point to believe that it wasn’t all connected.

  Teaghue was the one dwarf still living who had made an effort to contact me. Even if it was a half-assed attempt to frighten me off a story.

  I intended to return the favor.

  My timing, however, sucked.

  Before I’d even opened the door on my Solara, a trio of black Chevy vans shot by my car, skidding to a stop in front of Teaghue’s shop, splattering gray slush all over his front display.

  The doors slid open before they had fully come to a stop, and a dozen men in full Kevlar riot gear poured out of the two leading vans. As they rushed the building, I saw the letters “FBI” emblazoned in bright yellow across their backs.

  Above us, a helicopter swooped down and started circling so low that I swore I could feel the downdraft from the rotors.

  Ahead, beyond the vans barricading the shop, I heard the sound of wood breaking, then a small explosion. I couldn’t see much past the vans, but white smoke began drifting up from the building. The door on the last van slid open, and Blackstone stepped out, talking on a cell phone. He stepped around the rear of the van, looking past the three vans at a commotion I couldn’t quite see.

  “You bastard.”

  In the best of times I didn’t like Blackstone. Now he was stepping all over the one lead I had to where my daughter might be.

  I jumped out of my car and started running toward him. I can honestly say I had no clue what I was planning to do when I got there. Events made up my mind for me, just before I reached him.

  Something exploded out of the scrap heap next to Teaghue’s shop. I saw a flash of motion, and then something large flew toward me, Blackstone, and van number three. I dove, knocking Blackstone out of the way, as a V-8 engine block slammed into the front driver’s side of the van. The entire front end of the vehicle crumpled inward in a shower of safety glass. The whole van rocked back on its tires, the impact driving it back a foot or two.

  “What the—” Blackstone started talking, spitting slush out of his mouth. I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said, because gunfire erupted from every corner around me. It came from inside the building, and from all three vans.

  The focus of all the gunfire was another zombie. The same wire-sewed flesh that had been in my nightmares. Like the thing that had wrecked Thor’s Hammer, it was wearing a trench coat. It could have been the same one.

  While bullets slammed into and through the thing’s body, it picked up a wheel rim from the debris around it. It threw the rim like a lethal Frisbee, catching one of the armored Feds full in the face.

  Blackstone had completely forgotten about me. He pulled himself up behind one of the vans and grabbed a walkie-talkie. “Use the phosphor rounds! Burn the thing!”

  Phosphor rounds? That sort of thing was military ordnance, not standard SWAT equipment, even for federal counterterrorism units.

  The gunfire stopped and I was able to hear a hollow thump. The sound was followed by a glowing trail that ended in zombie-boy’s chest cavity.

  The trench coat went up like a sheet of flash paper and the skeleton stood there, backlit from inside. The smell was horrible, like a cannibal hibachi grill.

  However, zombie-boy wasn’t easily discouraged. It actually reached inside itself, fished out the glowing round, and threw it back toward the building. Its throw wa
s short and I could see several half melted wires dangling from its throwing arm.

  Several more thumps.

  I glanced back at the building, and saw a short silhouette climbing out of a window on the side opposite the scrapyard.

  “Teaghue!”

  I didn’t even wait to see if anyone paid attention to me. I got up and ran.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TEAGHUE ran straight for an alley, and I was right behind him. Above me I heard the helicopter.

  I dodged trash bins and old tires as he led me behind several old industrial buildings. In the half minute or so it took me to catch up with him, I had time for one main thought.

  The guy makes weapons for a living and is strong enough to coldcock me bare-handed. What do I do when I catch up with him?

  Answer? Fight dirty.

  Teaghue ran up a frost-covered pile of broken concrete, and jumped onto a chain-link fence ahead of me. He managed to grab the twelve-foot-high fence almost halfway up. He started scrambling faster than anyone with his length of limb had a right to. I ran up the concrete after him, knowing I had no hope of scaling the fence or making it over the barbed wire on top.

  So, instead, I reached down and grabbed a chunk of concrete the size of a two-liter bottle. It was so cold it numbed my fingers.

  I brought it down as hard as I could on the back of Teaghue’s right hamstring.

  He cursed something vile and guttural in his native tongue as he slammed into the fence. I brought my concrete-laden fist up into where a human kidney would be.

  “What are you doing? You misbegotten bastard!”

  He was hanging only by his hands now, scrambling to get a foothold. I jumped up and struck him on the side of his head.

  He fell off of the fence, rolling, stunned, facedown, at the base of the pile of concrete. I fell down on him, before he could recover. I put my knee down in the small of his back and stopped with a jolt that sent the concrete sailing from my hand.

  It had become slippery, mostly from my own blood. At this point, I didn’t feel much from my gore-stained hand as I wrapped it in Teaghue’s hair.

  “Tell me where my daughter is.”