Dragons & Dwarves

  I turned back to Elf One. Even with me standing, I still had to look up at him sitting on the arm of my couch. “You mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “As I have told you,” he stood up, towering over me and stooping slightly to avoid the track lighting, “we are not here to answer your questions.”

  We walked down the stairs, I think because the elves didn’t like the elevator. Being enclosed in a solid steel box must be somewhat unnerving to them.

  This time of night, Willie was long gone. There were supposed to be a half-dozen wards blocking unauthorized access to the building, but my escort walked through each magical barrier as if it wasn’t there. The fact that they didn’t trip a single alarm reinforced the idea that these were cops who had access to the talismans that allowed them free passage. My own talisman for the building was on my key chain, currently sitting on the kitchen table.

  Elf Four was idling in a minivan out in front of my building. Probably not enough steel in it to bother these guys, mostly aluminum, plastic, fiberglass, and an acre of tinted windows.

  I was hustled into the back, flanked by two elves, while Elf One took shotgun. I saw his head brush the roof. These guys needed the headroom of a van. In a normal car, Elf One would be looking out the windshield from between his knees.

  As promised, none of my questions were answered, which didn’t stop me from asking—occupational hazard. They didn’t show any irritation, even though I was expecting a prod from the Glock at any moment to remind me who was in charge. Apparently, the elves didn’t think like that.

  We drove through the processed quaintness of Shaker Square, a yuppie haven of upscale restaurants, chain stores, and the occasional art gallery. Like my condo, it was built in the nineteen-thirties, and had about seventy years as a nice piece of local color before the developers got hold of it. I’m waiting for them to put in the Disney Store.

  We drove through the square and took a turn north up MLK. We stuck with Martin Luther King Boulevard to where it hit Case Western Reserve University, and University Circle. Up until this point I was pretty sure that we were going to be heading deeper into Cleveland proper. I had just about assured myself that these were detectives from the SPU who were going to take me downtown for some clandestine questions.

  I was physically prepared for some inconvenience, but I wasn’t particularly scared . . .

  Not until we made a wrong turn.

  We hit the messy intersection where MLK feeds into Chester—one of the main East Side arteries downtown. We were caught at the light, and the area had a surreal feeling at this time of the morning. There were no cars anywhere, no people on the street, and the streetlights gave the whole place the feeling of a recently abandoned stage set.

  The campus of Case Western loomed off to our right, the sprawling campus an aesthetic jumble of architectural styles, ranging from the Gothic church closest to us, to nineteen-sixties institutional. Floodlights illuminated the fluted stone sides of the church, and as I looked up at it, one of the gargoyles yawned.

  The light changed, and instead of heading west down Chester, toward downtown, the van turned east, down Euclid. This wasn’t a good sign.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Silence.

  We rolled down Euclid, the only vehicle on the street. We drove under the Conrail tracks and passed the downhill side of Lakeview Cemetery, then we came to a rather inauspicious signpost.

  It said, “Welcome to East Cleveland.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EAST Cleveland is an object lesson of what not to do in the face of demographic change.

  Around the 1900s, East Cleveland was a high-rent bedroom community for the Cleveland elite that couldn’t quite make it to Millionaire’s Row. There are still quarter-million dollar homes in some East Cleveland neighborhoods—the catch being that they’d be five to ten million anywhere else.

  The 1960s changed that. During the end of that decade, middle-class blacks started buying a lot of homes in the inner ring eastern suburbs. In Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights—neighboring communities to East Cleveland—there wasn’t a panic among white homeowners, despite the attempt by real estate speculators to inflame passions.

  Due to that one outbreak of sanity, both Shaker and Cleveland Heights have some of the most desirable—and expensive—real estate of any inner ring suburbs. Which sinks that oft-used chestnut linking “changing neighborhoods” and falling property values.

  East Cleveland suffered no such restraint. White flight broke the sound barrier. In the space of two years, most of the existing residents sold at a loss rather than face a black face across the driveway.

  The crash in property values and the exodus of population nearly bankrupted the city government, and the plummet in city services continued the collapse in property values. Abandoned properties proliferated, the crime rate rose, businesses moved out. . . .

  By the time the Portal opened, East Cleveland was fighting a standstill battle against urban rot.

  The Portal nailed the coffin shut and put a shotgun to the corpse. All the absentee landlords—who, even if they did nothing to keep up with the property, gave tenants and the city someone to sue—disappeared. The twelve months of chaos after the Portal opened gave everyone with a stake in East Cleveland legal ground to claim it as a loss, dumping the property on the city. The government suddenly found itself in possession of over half the property in East Cleveland, much of it uninhabitable. Everything collapsed.

  In the decade since, everyone—at least everyone human—with any sense had left the floundering suburb. Some to Euclid, some to Cleveland Heights, but most back into Cleveland, where the Portal was becoming an investment magnet, and money was going to actually rebuild many of the city’s neighborhoods.

  Not so for the urban purgatory that was East Cleveland. The vacuum created by the city’s depopulation was filled with other things. There’s no accurate census. But any brave soul who’d stop to do a random head count would find that three out of five of those heads weren’t human—or even humanoid.

  Most of the streetlights were out, so as we drove down Euclid the buildings on either side were little more than looming shadows. Occasionally a storefront would be illuminated by torches or glowing braziers, and the boards over the shop windows would be scribed with arcane symbols written in paint, or blood, or branded into the surface of the wood.

  Here were the mages who couldn’t operate in the face of public scrutiny. Necromancers, assassins, wizards who worked with blood and bone and did not inquire about the source of their raw material. Here were also the night creatures who supplied the mages. . . .

  From what I’d heard, the street value for a healthy undamaged human cadaver around here was five to ten grand.

  If the elves noticed me tensing up, they didn’t show it.

  Two excruciatingly long minutes into East Cleveland, the elves turned the minivan off Euclid Avenue. They drove a short distance down a street that was more pothole than asphalt, and pulled to a stop outside a Victorian frame house that huddled under the shadow of the railroad tracks. When the van’s headlights brushed by it, I saw clapboards whose paint had long weathered away to leave dead gray wood.

  I thought I saw movement behind one of the blind, glassless windows.

  Elf One got out and slid the side door open. I didn’t leap at the chance to get out, and for the first time the elf next to me prodded me with the Glock. I scrambled out into the street.

  The air here felt several degrees cooler than it should have. A suffocating morguelike silence muffled everything. The only sounds to break the night were twittering creatures—I forced myself to think of them as birds—whose distant calls were like insane giggles. If I concentrated, I could just make out an irregular liquid sound, almost a slurping . . .

  I stopped concentrating.

  If they wanted to kill you, they could have put a bullet in you before you woke up. The thought wasn’t that comforting. I really couldn??
?t read their intentions. With regular strong-arm types you could get a sense if the guys wanted to rough you up, talk to you, or finish you off. These guys could be going to a wedding, or casting a snuff film.

  The three who escorted me from my condo escorted me up to the house. The driver stayed with the van. As we ascended the steps, the large oak door that led into the house swung inward releasing the moist odor of mildew and rotting wood. It made me sneeze.

  I could still see the nail holes in the door where it had once been boarded over.

  “You’re late,” came a voice from within the darkness.

  I caught what might have been the flash of an ironic smile on the face of Elf One. “Our apologies. You were paid enough to wait.”

  “Why do you think I waited for you Keebler bastards?”

  If the racial slur bothered my companions, they didn’t show it. I think, though, that the human concept of a word being derogatory didn’t register with them.

  I still couldn’t see the speaker. My escort led me into a hallway that was in almost complete darkness. All I could see was a dim sense of movement on all sides of me. The air was thick and musty, and I felt sweat rolling down between my shoulder blades. Under the mildew and rot, I could catch a hint of smoke, as if this place had burned a long time ago.

  Ahead of us, a heavy curtain drew aside, revealing a bare room illuminated only by candlelight. Heavy black drapes marked the walls, and facing us was a massive granite fireplace, its mantle supported by a pair of griffins, the firebox blackened, cold, and dead.

  The candles formed a circle on the hardwood floor, and complex symbols surrounded the circle. The writing was drawn in either ash or salt, it was too dim for me to tell.

  I was really scared now. I did not want to be the centerpiece in some necromantic ritual. I turned, my fear now having fully counterbalanced my conscious knowledge of being outnumbered, out-gunned, and being in the middle of East Cleveland. It speaks to either my dexterity, or the elves’ confidence, that I got four steps toward the hallway before a thin, long-fingered hand put a very firm grip on my upper arm.

  “Being uncooperative is not an option, Mr. Maxwell.” I felt the Glock at the back of my neck. “We can get the information just as readily from your corpse—”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” I finally saw the other speaker. He didn’t fit my profile of a freelance necromancer. He was shaved bald, and wore a black leather jacket and blacker denim pants. His hands shone with rings, and gold chains hung from his neck. “You smoke that guy here, you blow the vibe in this room—”

  “I am sure you can accommodate us if that is necessary—”

  “Three grand more,” the bald mage said. “Above and beyond. Ain’t what you paid me for.”

  “—but it will not be necessary,” Elf One concluded. “Will it?” he asked me.

  At this point I wasn’t one to argue. The elf with the Glock led me to the center of the circle, walking a careful path that was left through the symbols on the floor. The bald mage berated him twice for straying off the center of the path. I was left standing in the center of the circle of candles.

  The elves stepped back to a shadowy corner of the room, so I could barely see them. The mage stepped forward, took a small pouch, and completed the break in the circle I had walked through.

  Doing that, he looked up at me. “The mojo’s been building here a couple hours. You break the pattern, boy, and it’ll be like someone shoved a stick of dynamite up your ass.”

  He grinned as if daring me to make the attempt.

  The air was heavy with the smell of melted wax and incense as he gradually filled in the pattern, walking away from me. Most of the pattern seemed to consist of Greek and Hebrew letters, and as he backed away, he was chanting softly in Latin.

  I had some time to reflect on the opportunistic nature of the powers the Portal released. Magical energy was drawn to patterns and complexity—from physical form, to the abstractions of human ritual. That meant that it wasn’t just rituals imported across the Portal that worked. The Portal had affected everyone from neo-Pagans to the Catholic Church.

  I had no idea what this guy was doing, but even I could tell he was home-grown. I wondered why these elves had hired a local to do their dirty work. I would think that they’d be more comfortable with a mage from their own stomping grounds. Might cost more, but Elf One didn’t seem overly concerned with the price of service.

  The mage stood up in his own circle, drawn at the periphery of the symbols that surrounded me. He began chanting.

  Despite living here, I’d never seen a magical ritual up close. I was expecting something dramatic; candles flaring, the symbols glowing, the floor cracking open over a fiery pit. Conditioning from movies and TV, I suppose.

  What happened was a lot of incomprehensible vocalization in the mage’s somewhat sardonic voice. I couldn’t tell that anything was happening at all, at least not initially.

  As the chanting progressed, I became more and more uncomfortable. At first the nervousness and the nausea seemed to be only reasonable physical reactions to the situation I found myself in. It wasn’t until I felt my legs giving way under me that I realized that what I was feeling was abnormal.

  Then he shouted something and clapped his hands three times.

  My body jerked as if someone had just strapped me into Old Sparky and pulled the switch. I lost all motor control. My body froze, leaving me resting on my knees and the tips of my toes, my back arched, arms splayed backward. My neck craned back so far that my field of vision was limited to the ceiling of naked lath dotted with fragments of an elaborately molded plaster ceiling.

  I should have been in awful pain, but my whole body had gone numb, the only sensation flickering ripples of pins and needles. My mind seemed severed from my body, watching from inside. In a panic, I tried to move my body, escape, breaking the pattern be damned. I couldn’t even speak.

  Voices seemed very far away.

  “Who are you?” Elf One asked, or maybe it was the mage.

  “Kline Maxwell.” My voice sounded so eerily similar to the elf’s that I had trouble realizing that I’d spoken.

  “Who do you work for?”

  “The Cleveland Press. My editor is Columbia Jennings.” My voice was distant, almost into nonexistence. My thoughts had retreated to the calm irrationality that one usually only finds in dreams. I was wondering if I was having a near death experience—and if those carried any more weight this close to the Portal.

  “No one else pays you?”

  “No one else pays me.” I was too disoriented to find the questions as interesting as I should have.

  “You were at the Hope Memorial Bridge early yesterday. What were you doing there?”

  “A dragon fell into the river. I’m doing the story.”

  “You are a political reporter, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am told that you have a talent for unearthing scandals.”

  There was a prolonged silence, during which I could gather some semblance of thought. I didn’t know what the mage was doing, but it was damned scary. I couldn’t even move my eyeballs, and all I could feel was that rippling numbness. I had a panicked thought that what they’d done might be permanent—a bullet in the head would be preferable.

  “Why is he silent?”

  The mage’s voice responded, the tone of exasperation cutting through the distant fog I was listening through. “It wasn’t a question, was it? You’re not having a fucking conversation here. You ask, he’ll answer—and we got about ten minutes before we drain him dry.”

  “Time enough,” Elf One’s voice. “Now listen, Mr. Maxwell. You do have a talent for scandalmongering, do you not?”

  “It’s called investigative journalism.” I was left wondering if my words were tinged with irony or sarcasm.

  “Indeed. So what is your interest in the dragon, Aloeus?”

  “It’s news.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It’s a major s
tory.”

  “But not political?”

  “Of course it’s political.”

  “How?”

  “Aloeus was a major behind-the-scenes figure in all the legal and political ramifications of the Portal. He acted as an advocate for the nonhumans that came out of the Portal. He’s tied into the Rayburn administration. He’s had business dealings with Leo Baldassare. Nesmith oversaw the cleanup, and Adrian Phillips was on the boat towing the corpse out to sea.” I spoke in a dull monotone, each syllable as dead as the last. My distant brain registered surprise at mentioning Phillips. At the time it seemed just a footnote establishing how deeply Aloeus seemed tied to the Rayburn administration.

  For the first time I heard the other elves speak. There was a whispered conversation in a language that didn’t belong on this planet. It lasted a few seconds before Elf One said something harsh. The closest thing to an emotion I had heard in his voice.

  “You believe that there is more than the story of the dragon’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “There are major winners and losers. Who gains from the dragon’s death? Who’s losing something? If there’s a power vacuum in the paranormal community, who’s going to fill it?” Something in my gut turned sour hearing myself voice things so starkly. I had told myself that I was interested in Aloeus for his own sake. I didn’t like the fact that, when it came down to it, I wouldn’t have been so interested in him if he hadn’t cut so wide a swath both literally and figuratively.

  “Do you believe Aloeus’ death was an accident?”

  “No.” My answer was flat, final, and a complete surprise to me. Whatever spell bound me was digging deep into unexamined areas of my own mind. The elf had plucked a suspicion out of my head that I wasn’t even aware I’d been harboring.

  “Why?”

  “Aloeus should have been able to avoid it, whatever it was. I have a natural suspicion whenever any public figure dies in a freak accident.”

  More elvish talking then, “Does the name Faust mean anything to you?”