Dragons & Dwarves

  “You don’t know what you’re doi—”

  I slammed his face into the ice.

  “Tell me where my daughter is!”

  “You can’t—He will kill us.”

  I pulled back on his hair while holding the back of his neck with my opposite forearm. “I’ll kill you.”

  “No,” Teaghue sputtered.

  I slammed his face down again, hard enough that my wrist made unpleasant noises. I ignored the spasm of pain and repeated, “Tell me where my daughter is!”

  “He has her!”

  “Who?”

  “The one I cannot name!”

  “Don’t fuck with me!” I was shaking, and if I had a gun, I would have killed him.

  “No, he knows when you speak of him. There’s no protection here. None. A thought could bring him—”

  Teaghue choked and sputtered. I felt his muscles tense, and he began bucking against me as if he was having a seizure. I let go of his head, and he began slamming his own face into the pavement.

  “Teaghue!”

  I got off of him and rolled his body over. His back arched and he started groaning. The atmosphere around us darkened.

  A bolt of energy arced from Teaghue to the fence, and I could smell an awful mixture of static and brimstone.

  Teaghue sat up facing me. His eyes were open, but they were dead and sightless. His cracked lips smiled and he opened his mouth to speak in a voice that was too familiar.

  “Good help is so hard to find.” Teaghue laughed, spraying gobbets of blood and mucus.

  “What have you done with my daughter?”

  “If they hadn’t tried to warn you, this all would have been much less unpleasant.”

  “What are you? Where is my daughter?”

  “She is quite safe, and quite unaware of what is happening.” Teaghue laughed again. “But, Mr. Maxwell, when I come to ask something of you, it would be good to remember what I am capable of.”

  Still grinning, Teaghue reached up to his face. Before I realized what he was doing, he had hooked his fingers into the orbits of his skull. His laughter quickly turned to screams.

  “Great work, Maxwell,” Blackstone fumed as a medic taped my injured hand. “Tell me one thing, did you save my life just so I could witness how you screwed up my investigation?”

  Another set of medics was busy zipping Teaghue’s remains into a body bag.

  “Blackstone,” I said, “my daughter is missing.”

  “Yeah,” Blackstone watched them take Teaghue away. “And you think this helped her? What the fuck do you think you were doing? You, of all people, ought to know better. Corner a suspect with no backup, no kind of protection. Not even a goddamn rabbit’s foot. You’re damn lucky he didn’t kill you.”

  I rubbed my bandaged hand. “Yeah, lucky.”

  “If you’re not careful, you’ll make me think you took him out on purpose.”

  “Blackstone, can we cut the crap? Am I disappearing into your little federal black hole? Or am I free to go?”

  Blackstone paced around me, his shoes making sucking sounds in the slush. “As much as I’d like to put you on ice for the next decade or so—I think the people we want are going to try and contact you again.” He waved over a couple of suits. “So I’m letting you go with an escort. Special Agent Francis, and Special Agent Levi,” he indicated the two new people.

  “Mr. Maxwell,” they both said in unison. If it weren’t for the fact that Francis was black, they could have been clones of each other.

  “Follow him to his hotel room and sit on him.” Blackstone turned toward me. “And don’t worry about your apartment, we have a few agents keeping an eye on it for you.”

  I sighed.

  “Oh, if you’re wondering about local police,” Blackstone handed me a sheet of paper, a copy of a fax stamped with a time early this morning. “I made a point of getting all the paperwork nice and tidy. We trump Caledvwlch’s little circus of sideshow freaks.”

  I handed the warrant back and looked at my new federal baby-sitters.

  My federal escort took me back to my hotel room. It was about this time that I had the sick realization that I hadn’t called Margaret. There’s only one thing worse than having to tell your ex-wife that your daughter might have been kidnapped—and that’s not being the first to do so.

  “How could you not tell me!”

  Margaret was hysterical, and I wasn’t doing the greatest job of keeping my own composure. I stood in the bedroom while my bookend Feds stood in the suite’s living room doing a lousy job of pretending not to overhear us.

  “What was I going to tell you? I had evil premonitions—”

  “There are FBI agents in my house!”

  “I know, they’re here, too.”

  “Why would someone take Sarah?”

  “We don’t know for sure that anyone’s taken her.”

  “Bullshit, Kline. You’re a terrible liar.” There was a pause. “I’m coming down there.”

  “Margaret, I know how you feel—”

  “I want my daughter back! I’m getting on the next flight.”

  I rubbed my temples. “I don’t think the FBI will think that’s a good idea.”

  “Fuck the FBI.”

  “Please, Margaret, they’re trying to find her.” I almost choked on the phony sincerity of that line. I knew, intellectually, that Blackstone was trying to find Sarah, if only because of her tie to his investigation. But I didn’t believe in it any more than Margaret did. “They’re going to want you to stay there, in case they try and contact you.”

  “What if there’s no ransom? If it’s some psycho predator? You have black mages and Satanists—”

  “I don’t think that’s what happened.”

  “How the hell do you know?

  I swallowed. “I think they’re trying to get to me.”

  “They? Who are they?”

  “I wish I knew.” I looked off into the living room. Francis, the black one, caught my gaze and quickly looked away. “But I think they’re trying to blackmail me.”

  “Kline, if anyone hurts her because—”

  “You should probably keep your phone line clear.”

  “In case they call,” she said flatly.

  “Or Sarah,” I said, exhausting every remaining fragment of optimism.

  She hung up.

  I sat on my bed and stared at the receiver. I don’t know what I expected . . .

  We used to be married; shouldn’t we be able to comfort each other?

  I felt empty, used up, and helpless. I didn’t know if my daughter was alive or dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Worse, what I had done only seemed to have made things worse.

  Margaret was right. Sarah was gone because of me, and if anything happened to her . . .

  “Mr. Maxwell,” Special Agent Levi stepped into the bedroom doorway. “Are you okay?”

  “What do you think?” I slammed the hotel’s receiver back on the cradle hard enough to set my hand and wrist hurting again.

  “Can we get you anything?”

  “No,” I snapped.

  As he turned away, I got a better grip on myself. “Hey—”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry for the outburst,” I told him. “Not your fault.”

  “No problem, you’re entitled.” He shook his head. “If I thought that dwarf had taken one of my kids—believe me, I know where you’re coming from.”

  “You have kids?”

  “Six and nine.”

  “Around here?”

  Levi shook his head. “A little too crazy for my wife, I’m out of Pittsburgh.”

  “Oh, been gone long?”

  “Too long. I was hoping to be back for Christmas,” he shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”

  He must have noticed my odd look.

  “Oh, I am Jewish, my wife’s a good Irish Catholic. We had to give our mothers grandchildren just to keep them from killing each other.”

>   That made me feel guilty about my own divorce. Did Margaret and I have any issue that compared to that? Maybe Sarah was justified in wanting to be rid of both of us.

  “Well, I hope you get back for your kids,”

  “Me, too.”

  “And on second thought, can you order something from room service? I just realized I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

  “Sure, what do you want?”

  I lay back on the bed, groaning as the muscles knotted in my back. “Doesn’t matter.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I SPENT the next few hours running through every conversation I had with Sarah, trying to figure out exactly when I should have known, at what point I could have intervened to prevent this.

  Damn it, Margaret, didn’t you notice something? I wasn’t there, you saw her every day.

  Yeah, that was really fair, especially when it looked as if my daughter was enticed into something because she was my daughter.

  Hell, if I wanted to backtrack blame, we could go all the way back to when the Portal first opened. At the time it had seemed reasonable that I would want to stay and cover the story of the millennium—and with every passing year, hindsight told me that it was Margaret who had been the reasonable one.

  The times I wanted to feel better about the divorce, I told myself it was inevitable. I was too work-centered for the marriage to work. When I was being honest, I told myself that I had just let it happen. It had been what I really wanted, Margaret and Sarah far enough away that I could concentrate on what I was doing without worrying about them. Jump into my career full tilt, guilt free, and my only family concerns the periodic phone call . . .

  Payback’s a bitch.

  Just waiting was killing me. I knew that I wasn’t the first father to go through this, and that this wasn’t the FBI’s first experience with kidnapping, but it felt all wrong to me. They should be out there doing something. I should be out looking for my daughter, not waiting here for some sort of contact that might never come.

  Besides, I doubted that I’d receive any contact while the Feds were baby-sitting me.

  “I’m not doing myself any good,” I whispered to myself. If I couldn’t do something productive, I should do something distracting. I got out of bed and opened the door. Agent Francis was flipping through a magazine.

  “Mr. Maxwell?”

  “You think one of your guys at my condo could bring me my laptop? I should probably try and get some work done. I have a column due tomorrow.”

  Francis nodded. “If the forensic team’s done with it, I don’t think that will be a problem.” He picked up the phone.

  “And I think I left some of my notes on the coffee table.”

  “Sure—Hello, this is Francis, I’m with Mr. Maxwell. Yeah, he wants a couple of things from his condo if you’re done with them . . .”

  With my hand wrapped up, I was reduced to a two-finger hunt-and-peck. That was okay. That was the speed my mind was working at. I was lucky that what was due was an op-ed piece rather than anything hard. I just wasn’t mentally up for that kind of fact-checking at the last minute. My notes from home might have a feature story on Mazurich buried in them, but I wasn’t up to digging it out.

  Instead, I fleshed out a half-written piece about the rising star of Gregory Washington and his apparent inevitable ascension to the mayor’s office. It was only eight hundred words, but it was close to midnight before I finished it.

  At least Columbia will be happy.

  I e-mailed the story to her.

  I almost logged out, but I saw an unfamiliar e-mail address in my inbox.

  Thinking it was news of my daughter, I opened it.

  “Someone wants to help you. Midnight at the Superior Viaduct.”

  “What?”

  I glanced at the clock by my bed, and the digital numbers flashed 12:00 at me. “Great timing,” I whispered. “Maybe tomorrow . . .”

  I looked back at my laptop, intending to respond to the offer of assistance, letting them know I wasn’t going to be able to attend any clandestine midnight meetings . . .

  The e-mail was gone.

  I tried to find the window on my desktop, I searched through the inbox, and the trash, and even tried downloading messages again, but it was gone.

  The message didn’t exist, but I knew I had read it.

  “Shit.”

  “You okay in there, Mr. Maxwell?” Levi appeared in my doorway. The agents must have switched shifts.

  “Yeah, I just deleted something by accident.” What was I supposed to do? Tell the Feds about it? And what if the guy contacting me was gun-shy? If someone really had help to offer, could I screw that up?

  Then again, what if I imagined it?

  Right now I couldn’t even prove that I had been sent anything. It could easily be fatigue catching up with me, granting me a little wishful thinking. I’d only seen it thirty seconds ago, and it was already too easy for me to dismiss it. Why should anyone else take it seriously—

  Give it a break, you just don’t want to tell them.

  I was sure that I had read the message. And going to the trouble of sending me a self-erasing e-mail strongly suggested that the sender only wanted to deal with me. Given what I was involved in, it was likely that I hadn’t been looking at an e-mail, strictly speaking. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that it was some sort of disguised enchantment, made up to look as if it was a normal e-mail. Mages had managed to send me messages that way, through electronic channels. It allowed some layer of camouflage—the mage can cast something on a server, or a switch box, or even wire conduit and the communication can go off at some preset time when the caster is nowhere near the site of the spell or the recipient.

  The message had said midnight but didn’t specify a date.

  So I had two options. Either the proposed contact was past and I was SOL, or the instruction was a general communication protocol, and any date I visited the site at the specified time, something or someone would present itself. It was easy enough to set up some standing enchantment that would reveal itself at the specified time.

  Twenty-four hours.

  If there was even a fraction of a chance, I was not going to allow Blackstone’s little army to screw it up. My daughter was a lot more important than his investigation.

  “You should get some sleep,” Levi told me through the door.

  “I know.” I yawned. Fatigue was finally starting to win over stress. Besides, I needed to get some rest if I was going to lose these guys and get to the Superior Viaduct for this meeting.

  I shut off my laptop and tried to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  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 the image of my daughter, Sarah. Her body is naked, battered, and covered in gore.

  “Dad,” she manages to whisper.

  “No.” I run toward the Devil, but he pulls his clawed hand back and Sarah is gone.

  “Show me to my adversary.”

  I begin to object, I don’t know who the adversary is. But then the mists clear, and I see a tower hovering over the city, greater than any skyscraper.

  “There!” I point.

  A booming, inhuman laugh resounds. “Your service will be rewarded.”

  The Devil rises from his throne, and walks toward the tower. Moments later, after losing sight of the Devil, the tower begins to crumble.

  “Sarah!”

  I sat bolt upright in bed, plastered with sweat. Heart racing.

  Daylight filtered through the drapes. And for a moment I allowed myself to relax. Then I heard the noise.

  It came from the living room of the suite, a high-pitched electronic whine. It twisted and vibrated, and found just the right frequency to set my teeth on edge. My skin felt prickly, in a sensation that was becoming all too familiar.

  I got out of bed, calling, “Agen
t Francis? Agent Levi?”

  I slowly pushed the door open.

  The two Feds were nowhere to be seen. The shades were all drawn, so the only light was a blood-red glow from the television. What was on the screen was no normal broadcast. Somehow, despite all the redundant data transmission and all the built-in filtering, the television was picking up pure mana interference. The image was twisting and surreal, faces melting into a flaming blood pudding.

  “Agent Francis? Agent Levi?”

  One face emerged from the chaos on the screen, the goat face from the tarot, and my dream.

  “Look upon my face.”

  Not a great idea, but I couldn’t help myself. I locked eyes with the Devil-image and felt a shuddering wave of vertigo as the hotel room was wiped away by flames and blood as the Devil took my throat and pulled me into his presence.

  He threw me to my knees and I faced the ground, coughing blood and staring at dirty brown soil.

  “Behold, Mr. Maxwell.”

  I got to my feet and gasped. I was in a vast floodlit chamber, obviously underground. Behind me were vast spaces with unfinished walls, but in front of me the stone—the salt—was carved into incredible pillars, vaults, and arches.

  Statues climbed over each other, toward the ceiling, and—like a cathedral—central to it all was a vast rose window that glowed with stained glass.

  “The salt mines . . .”

  “The lair of the dwarves.”

  I stumbled forward through a vast Gothic doorway. Before me was a great hall, with benches to seat hundreds. It was empty except for a single high chair next to an altar at the opposite end of the hall.

  “Sarah!”

  I ran toward her. She sat, eyes closed, hands folded in her lap. I almost reached her before a clawed hand yanked me back. “No. Do not wake her.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Me? Nothing.”

  I reached for my daughter.

  “Her conscious mind could not bear the sea of mana she sleeps in here. Should she wake, she would go mad.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What you want, Mr. Maxwell? Publish your tale. Make public the dwarven trade in the substance of mana itself. Let it be known that they traffic it beyond the shores of the Portal. Tell how your politicians profit . . .”