Gremlin Night Read online

  Tully nodded. “That did it,” he said. He drew his lockpick and opened the gate.

  The quezzie flew past us toward the house.

  “That was easy,” I said. “Thanks for the loan.” I handed him back his wand and pushed open the gate. Tully followed me up the drive. The quezzie darted across the yard in front of us, twisting and looping in the air. Its joy in being free filled me in an exhilarating rush that made me want to skip.

  Something hurtled earthward from the sky, followed by the sudden snap of stone wings beating the air. A gargoyle landed on the house’s roof top beside the chimney, wings folding onto its back. Its eyes glowed red and blue-white lightning crackled around it.

  Tully and I hit the dirt. An instant later lightning shot from the gargoyle and into the quezzie. The quezzie made a high keening sound in my mind and died in a cloud of black smoke, dissolving back into mana. Its final agony washed over me in a burning wave and I cried out.

  “Marquez!” Tully shouted. He gestured, and a gold ring on his right hand flashed. Air pushed at us.

  Lightning shot from the gargoyle but bounced off an invisible shield between it and us. A sulfurous stink filled the air, and Tully and I coughed. The gargoyle unfolded its wings and soared into the air.

  Sparks trailed from the gargoyle as it flew over us. Tully raised his arms, turning to follow the gargoyle. Silver flickered around the edges of Tully’s defensive shield, six feet in front of us.

  The gargoyle spun around and hovered beside a pine tree thirty feet from us, its wings beating the air. Lightning began playing around its stone skin. Even at this distance, I heard the sharp hiss of mana becoming magic.

  I glanced around, scanning the gate and the street beyond, trying to see if anyone was there. Lightning flared overhead. I glimpsed a tall, slender figure in a hoodie watching from the gate, silver rings flashing in the actinic light.

  The air crackled and snapped with electricity. I jerked my head around to look up at the hovering manifestation in time to see it send a ball of lightning smashing into the ghostly outlines of Tully’s magical shield. The shield flared, becoming a disk of silver light, then dissolving into a swarm of sparks showering down on us. I covered my face with my arms. Needles of pain shot through me and I shrieked. I’d forgotten just how much magic sparks could hurt a sorcerer.

  The sparks dissipated. I shook my head to clear it, wincing. Beside me, Tully had collapsed against the ground, head down, unconscious.

  The gargoyle roared in triumph, beating its wings faster, rising above the crown of the pine tree. Lightning began crackling again around it. Our shield was gone. The next bolt would kill us. So much for my becoming a field agent for good. Tully and I would end up six feet under.

  I grabbed at the blood amulet beneath my shirt, pressed my wrist against it. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to think through the agony. I blinked away hot tears. My hand glowed with silver light tinged with the purple of mana. The spell I was about to cast needed sacrifice if it were to work fast.

  “Bind thee to me,” I said, looking at the gargoyle. A nimbus of lightning crackled around it now. Its stone face twisted into a gleeful grin.

  “Die,” I said in English, the word booming in the air. The gargoyle screamed and spasmed, falling in a tangle of limbs and wings, crashing through the pine’s branches until it slammed into the ground, and broke into pieces that smoked and flared blood red before dissolving. I looked back in the direction of where I’d seen the hooded figure, but there was no one there, now.

  I put a heal patch on my wound, then checked on Tully. He breathed, and his pulse was good. Okay, there was nothing for it but to wake him up.

  He groaned, and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. His eyes widened when he saw the smoldering stain on the grass, all that was left of the gargoyle. His Seer’s vision would tell him the story.

  “I thought the gargoyle was going to kill us, but you managed to destroy it. How?” He looked at me, puzzled.

  I hated it when people deliberately distorted the truth, hated it when they baldly rearranged facts to save themselves from the consequences of their own actions, hated it when they omitted certain things. But most of all, I hated it when someone made a naked lie, one that betrayed who they were just to save their own skin.

  I didn’t look away or blink. “I was able to use my connection to the ward to bind and destroy it,” I said. My mouth was dry but I didn’t lick my lips or swallow.

  “Lucky for us,” he replied. He stared at me, obviously trying to gauge the truth of what I said. After a long moment he nodded. “That must have been some pretty amazing spellcasting that I missed.”

  Guilt churned in my stomach, but now wasn’t the time to tell him I used blood magic. There would never be a time, a small voice said inside me. I ignored that voice.

  I reached down to help him stand. I pushed the guilt back into my subconscious as far as I could. I hadn’t had any other choice. Tully and I would have been crispy dead if I hadn’t used the blood magic. There hadn’t been time for anything else.

  And, I could stop at any time. Really.

  “Are you sure you saw someone watching from the sidewalk?” Tully asked me.

  We had stood there in the yard for a couple of minutes, catching our breath, and letting the heal patch do its thing on Tully’s wound.

  “It was only for a fraction of a second, but, yes,” I said. It struck me then. I’d been a forgetful fool. I’d seen that figure before. When I arrived in Portland, tumbling out of the misplaced teleportal. Then, at the Winter Market.

  Tully crossed back to the sidewalk, scanning the area while he walked. I followed in his wake.

  “No sign of anyone,” he said after we’d reached the sidewalk.

  “I saw him, the same dude in a hoodie I’d seen twice earlier tonight.”

  Tully cocked his head. “You didn’t mention it before.”

  “There was a lot going on.”

  His lips set in a grim line. “Apparently there was, too much in fact to bother mentioning a potential suspect.”

  I jabbed a finger up at him. “Listen, mister, I thought it was just a bystander. I had bigger things on my mind.”

  “We have to record and log them,” he reminded me.

  “I know that!” I shouted. I took a deep breath, lowered my voice. “In case you didn’t notice, it’s just the two of us. We don’t have back up, and we have been running from outbreak to outbreak since I’ve arrived. Things can get a little sloppy. It happens.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Just let me know if you see any other bystanders.”

  I bit back a retort. “I will.”

  My heart was still pounding when we reached the door to the house.

  Tully stared at the stoop, the entryway, and the door. “No more traps or wards,” he pronounced after a moment.

  He produced his lockpick and went to work opening the door.

  “Three uses?” I asked him, trying to lighten the mood by asking about something minor.

  “Yes. I don’t rate anything more than that. Do you?”

  The sudden sharpness in his words stung. He looked back to his normal sharp, observant self. Had he seen through my lie about using the ward to destroy the gargoyle?

  I made a dismissive noise. “Me? No way.”

  He was clearly still angry about my forgetting to mention the figure in the hoodie.

  The lock clicked softly.

  I tensed.

  Things had been piling up like a snowstorm so far. This wasn’t how assignments normally went, but tonight it seemed like everything was happening at triple speed.

  I raised my hand to knock on the door, hesitated. It was the polite thing to do, but Therese’s place had been in lockdown mode. What if she were being held hostage? I didn’t want to give any potential captors warning. I opened the door and went in. Tully watched from the doorway.

  The inside looked like a cyclone had hit. A mirror that must have hung on t
he wall facing the doors had fallen and lay shattered on the hardwood floor. In the living room beyond, bookshelves had been overturned, scattering books like leaves across the floor and sofa and chairs. There was no place for a television or stereo. A writing table with drawers sat beside a curtained window in an alcove. The drawers had been opened, obviously rifled.

  “Therese?” I called out.

  Tully stepped into the entryway, closing the outside door behind him.

  “Therese, are you here?” I asked. “It’s Sorcerer-Agents Marquez and Tully.”

  Nothing. I looked at Tully with a question in my eyes. He gave a little headshake.

  I walked into the living room, and around an overturned chair.

  Just past the living room was a darkened room. I reached inside, fumbling around until I found the light switch, and flipped it.

  White walls gleamed back at me, as did white appliances, and a gleaming marble countertop in the narrow kitchen. It was an old house, but still a weird layout, having the kitchen between the living and dining rooms. The kitchen looked like it had been remodeled not too many years ago. Recipe books in alphabetical order lined a wall-mounted bookshelf on the opposite side of the kitchen from the oven. There wasn’t a speck of dirt or dust anywhere.

  Past the kitchen was a dining room, also as neat as a pin. Through French doors lay a hall with stairs nearby that led up. There were two doors in the short hall. One opened to a laundry room. The other, at the end, led to stairs going down to a basement.

  We went upstairs.

  Upstairs were bedrooms. From the bedroom farthest from the stairs came the rotten stench of death days old.

  I looked at Tully again, and saw my own fear mirrored in his eyes. We walked down the hall, slowly, carefully, listening. But there was only silence.

  We found Therese spread-eagled on the queen-sized canopied bed, her lifeless eyes staring up at the stars painted in the canopy.

  She was about forty, and nude. Marks like those from a whip covered her breasts and abdomen. Her once white skin had gone gray, where it could be seen through the dried blood that caked nearly every inch of it. Dried blood pooled on the bedspread beneath her.

  I swallowed back bile and looked away, sucking in big gulps of air.

  Tully stood in the doorway, taking the scene in. A muscle in his neck throbbed and his eyes glistened.

  I forced myself to turn back around and examine Therese.

  Aside from the whip marks, she had scratches from claws on her arms and legs, hundreds of scratches. The whip marks had barbed edges to them, and then it hit me, and I gagged.

  The whip had been a barbed tongue. A manifestation of some sort. I fought back the bile that rose in my throat.

  Tully walked around the bedroom, examining shelves, his face pinched. He looked like he wanted to retch, too.

  Murdered. Our local sentinel had been murdered. I forced myself to take a closer look. The claw marks and barbed tongue lashings pointed straight at manifestations.

  But how had they gotten past her ward?

  “Shall I check the rest of the house?” Tully asked quietly.

  I nodded. “I’ll go over this room and the body.”

  He left, and I turned to the rest of the room. A crystal ball balanced on a silver tripod perched on a writing desk in the far corner of the room. Pens filled a jade cup off to one side of the desktop. There was an honest to gods fountain pen, in a holder, next to it, and a yellow legal pad beside it. Five leather-bound journals filled a shelf above the desk. None had any writing inside.

  That was odd. I checked the nearby bookshelves. One whole shelf was empty. No books, and nothing else. No knickknacks, or artwork, nothing. It stood out like a sore thumb.

  There was a cot next to the wall opposite the foot of the bed, with a woolen blanket.

  I opened the drawer in the nightstand beside the desk and found a box filled with hypodermic needles. The pharmacy label said Alkeran. I checked my phone. That was an injectable cancer treatment for multiple melanoma. Skin cancer that had metastasized.

  I went to her closet, opened the door. There were three pairs of blue jeans, and some worn t-shirts. Blouses that looked like they’d been there for some time. Three sets of medical scrubs.

  She’d been sick and wanted something comfortable to wear, and thus the scrubs?

  Then I remembered she’d been on medical leave.

  My stomach clenched at the death stench.

  I went to the door, glanced back at her blood-covered corpse, and closed my eyes, trying to concentrate. My eyes still watered from the stink, but I wanted to be close to Therese’s body. To think.

  She’d battled cancer when someone murdered her. I thought for a moment, trying to concentrate what I’d just learned going over her room, trying to think of anything else.

  Therese had been a writer, with a desk in her bedroom. A shelf that had nothing on it. I narrowed my eyes. Where were the journals?

  Answer: someone had taken them. Presumably the murderer.

  I left the bedroom. My stomach was in knots, and sweat ran down inside of my shirt. I struggled to push the horror of Therese’s death to the back of my mind. I had to focus, so that I could figure out what had happened here, and why she had been killed.

  One of the things they teach you at the R.U.N.E. academy is detachment. There’s actually a series of three required classes dealing with the topic of detachment. We had to study Buddhist texts, Stoic philosophy, and meditation, with the goal of being able to detach ourselves from the emotion of the moment we were in and look at the situation objectively.

  At least, that’s what we were supposed to accomplish in those three classes.

  I nearly washed out of the Academy, thanks to those three classes.

  I hated detachment. Hated the idea of it, the practice of it. I cared, so sue me. I cared a lot about things, about the arcane, about the ordinary, about people, about manifestations. I cared about right and wrong. Sure, everybody at the Academy did, or at least said they did. But I didn’t want to let go of that care and the emotion that went with it.

  I stood just outside the room where Therese Sprig had died, in blood and pain, and remembered all those exercises on detachment I hated so much. “Reframe how you look at it,” that was how Professor Myles had put it. She had emphasized that to us over and over again. So, I thought about how I had walked into a crime scene, a murder involving the arcane, how it was a puzzle Tully and I had to solve by finding evidence and anything that could serve as a witness to Therese’s death.

  Evidence was the key. Books had been taken, that was evidence. The stained sheets were witness. I closed my eyes, raised my arms over my head, took a deep, yoga breath, then pulled my hands down to my chest in prayer pose, and emptied my mind of the emotions raging in it.

  A long, silent moment passed.

  I opened my eyes, and began my search.

  Across the hall was a second bedroom. Inside, a forest-green futon in a mahogany frame stood beneath a water-color painting of a pine-tree lined pool. Dust covered the back of the futon frame, the top of the painting, and the windowsill.

  A bathroom was at the end of the hall, next to a winding stair heading up toward the roof.

  Drugs filled the bathroom’s medicine cabinet. I recognized a few of the names—two were used to help with side effects from cancer treatment. The bathtub had rails, the kind to help people who were frail or who had mobility issues.

  The last room was up in the little turret above the second floor. It had a single chair, a nicely padded high-backed office type in the center of the room. It faced three large windows. Full-length mirrors were mounted on the walls to either side of the door.

  This had to be the room where she did her sentinel duty. Clairvoyance sorcery required isolation. A view helped, for the sympathetic part of the magic. Therese would have sat there while she worked her spells.

  The chair had been overturned, and lay on its side. The wooden floor had scuff marks fro
m boots. They looked recent, too. The wind gusted outside and the windows rattled.

  Wood scraped somewhere nearby. I froze, straining to hear. I peered out the windows, trying to see if it were branches scraping against the window. No branches nearby, I remembered that the front yard had no tree in it.

  More scraping. It was at the base of the wall, below the mirror on the right side of the door. I knelt, heart pounding. Cold settled in the pit of my stomach.

  A crack showed in the wall, no, not a crack. A gap. A tiny square of wood had been slid back at the baseboard, revealing a duct of some sort.

  A golden eye looked at me from inside the wall.

  A tiny gasp followed. The eye disappeared. Something ran, footsteps echoing in the wall. It sounded like they were descending now.

  I raced down the stairs and stopped at the second floor, listening. The faint running sound continued downward.

  I dashed after it, and collided with Tully coming up the stairs. He reached out and kept me from falling on my backside. He held me with the easy grace of a strong, athletic man.

  My breath was ragged from all the sprinting, but my heart other reasons as well. “There’s something in the walls,” I gasped, pushing myself to focus on the thing I’d been chasing, and not Tully’s closeness.

  His eyes widened, then he cocked his head and listened.

  “I hear it,” he said after a moment. “Still heading down.”

  “Basement,” I gasped again. Whatever it is must be headed there.” We barreled downstairs. Tully flicked a light switch at the top of the stairs. Lights came on below. We ran down the stairs. The basement had a storage room, a sitting room and a place to exercise. There was also an examination table off to one side and a collection of acupuncture needles.

  Tully gestured, murmuring in English, casting a locate spell.

  Something yelped below the examination table, and there was a flash of green fabric. I bent down. A brownie cowered beneath the table. It wore brown linen trousers and shirt, with a little pointed green felt hat.