Gremlin Night Read online

  The frightened little girl would still be watching, eyes now huge, but I couldn’t look. I had to keep focused on the gremlin.

  It began shuddering, and a howl burst from its mouth.

  Got you now, Buster! My outstretched fingers tingled from the gremlin’s writhing essence. Chaos magic, good only for destruction. Haywire magic, really. The gremlin was very powerful for a level two manifestation, but now, aided by Tully’s sight, it started to look transparent. My breath caught. I’d never seen a level two’s impermanent nature that vividly before.

  I closed my hand with a snap. “Begone!” I commanded.

  The gremlin squeezed its eyes shut, let out a little moan, and faded away to nothing. Tully released my shoulder.

  The mana strands became purple-blue again, and then faded away from my arcane sight. The space heater shut down, and, overhead, the strung Christmas lights stopped strobing and returned to normal. “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” played happily in the background.

  “I’ll miss the metal, but it was way too loud,” I said. I turned to look under the table.

  The little girl stared at me with huge eyes, wonder and fear warring there.

  I knelt and touched her arm. “It’s okay. We made it all better.”

  “You made the monster go away.” Her voice was tiny, like a terrified mouse.

  “We did. It’s gone for good,” I said. Tully stood nearby, gaze scouring the area.

  An adult version of the young girl rushed up. It had to be the mother.

  “Are you okay? Honey, I was so worried!” She looked up from the girl to me and Tully. “Who are you?”

  I flipped open my wallet and showed her my R.U.N.E. omni-badge. “Portland Police. We happened to be nearby when the electrical malfunction occurred.”

  Tully raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Maybe not the best use of the badge, but I still had two more uses tonight. The omni-badge was a first-order artifact, unlike the other kind. Three uses, and only three uses. Limiting to say the least, but I’d take it over the alternative. Besides, Tully’s badge still had three uses.

  Relief washed over the woman’s face. “Thank God!” she said. “I was so worried!” She hustled the little girl away.

  Tully walked off to one side, placing a call. He spoke in a low voice, but I could hear everything he said, thanks to the earplugs. He was calling the power company, and verifying that there was a power outage. He said he was a concerned citizen.

  Then, his voice ceased speaking in my ear.

  The earplugs had been exhausted. They’d not reset until tomorrow night. Dusk to dusk, dawn to dawn, that was the rule.

  “The embed is on the way,” Tully said. “That’s who I was contacting, as per procedure.”

  “Good.” Nice to know he wasn’t a complete newbie. A poster at the edge of the Winter Market caught my eye. It had a photo of a man and woman, dressed to kill, standing beneath tinsel. Next to the couple were the words, Solstice Charity Ball Tonight, followed by the name of a ritzy downtown hotel. I sighed. Sometimes being a normal, and being able to go to a fundraiser, sounded good. I shook my head. I’d just be bored.

  A moment later fire engines and emergency vehicles arrived, followed by an unmarked brown sedan, and two Portland General Electric trucks.

  Rescue personnel fanned out, while the PGE trucks drove over to the nearest power pole.

  The sedan pulled up to the curb. A middle-aged, balding black man in rumpled clothing emerged from the driver’s side and ambled over to us.

  “You must be Marquez and Tully,” he said.

  “That obvious?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He frowned. “You stand out like a sore thumb, but that’s typical for R.U.N.E. agents.”

  Gee thanks. “And you are?” I asked, trying to keep my cool. Annoyance reached in under sixty seconds. Tully didn’t bat an eye, he just looked at me to take the lead. Fine.

  “Clinton Simms,” he replied. “Portland contact.”

  This was the embed, the local contact between us and everyday world authorities.

  “You going to run with an electrical malfunction?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “It’s the obvious choice.” He stepped closer, looked around conspiratorially. “These gremlin whatsitzs are getting out of hand, folks.”

  “We’re dealing with it,” I said.

  “There’ve been two more in the past half-hour.”

  My eyes widened. Tully’s eyebrows shot up.

  “You didn’t know.” He whistled softly. “Didn’t your sentinel keep you updated?”

  “She’s currently on medical leave.”

  “Wow, talk about a case of bad timing. How are you keeping on top of things?” He asked.

  “Not very well,” Tully admitted.

  I frowned. That answer was only going to worry Simms.

  “What do you mean?” Simms crossed his arms over his chest and squinted.

  “I mean we are using a backup protocol for this, which has an inherent time delay.” Tully sounded like a technician sorcerer, one of those bookish types who spent all their time in an arcane research library-lab.

  Simms rolled his eyes and glanced at me. “Could you translate?”

  “He means we’re using a spirit that can only work so fast, and has to send us messengers.”

  “Be quicker to call,” he said. “Can’t someone just stay with the spirit?”

  I cocked my head, keeping my voice low. “Follow me,” I said, and led the two men away from the fire and rescue action.

  “It’s an air spirit. We can’t just walk to it,” I told him.

  Simms grunted. “You made a big production of pulling me aside just to tell me this?”

  “No. There’s a major arcane crisis going down in Seattle right now. Tully and I were left here to find out what’s caused the gremlin outbreak.”

  “You’re not doing such a great job so far,” Simms groused.

  I forced myself not to snap a reply. “We’ve only been on this for--,” I pulled out my watch, “--less than two hours.”

  Simms’ eyes narrowed. “Isn’t there some urgency to finding out what is going on?” He looked at me like I was a sixth-grader with overdue library books.

  That did it. “Listen, pal,” I snapped, “we’re working on it, okay?”

  He shrugged. “Fine. But I seem to recall that outbreaks that cross over into daytime are very bad. You want to end this before sunrise.”

  “We are aware of that. But we still have lots of time. Ten hours easy.”

  Simms gave a little head shake. “I hope you do.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Tully said.

  “Trust us,” I said. “Meanwhile, maybe you can keep us up to date on any arcane problems you run across.”

  A muscle twitched in Simms’ face.

  “You know that’s not my bailiwick,” he said. “I keep things in order on the ordinary side. You people deal with the supernatural stuff.”

  I nodded. “All I’m asking is to let us know when more weird stuff happens.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. For a second, he actually looked guilty. “I wish I could help you, but honestly, I’d only be telling you where things had already gone all supernatural and the damage was done. After all, it’s not like you tell me what is going on. My job is to deal with the aftermath.” He nodded at the assembled fire trucks and emergency vehicles. “I’d better get on with this.”

  It had to be weird to be an embed. He wore multiple identities, all “ordinary”—FBI agent, City of Portland, County Sheriff, even reporter, depending upon what was needed. An Embed could draw on the resources of the Hidden to help keep ordinary people in the dark. But that was as far as it went.

  “Okay, fair enough,” I said. “We’ll get back to our work.”

  “Good luck,” he said. “Really.”

  He strode off, head down, hands in his trench coat.

  A gust of wind blew. I shivered, and zipped up my biker jacket all the way.r />
  “I could use some coffee and a donut,” I said to Tully.

  He smiled faintly. “Isn’t that a bit on the nose?”

  “I like coffee and donuts. Besides we are magical cops. Sort of.”

  He snorted. “Not really, but some coffee does sound good about now.”

  “And donuts,” I added. “Don’t forget about the donuts. Most important part of a balanced late supper.”

  Suddenly, it felt like the two of us were in synch and ready to solve this outbreak assignment.

  I was wrong on both counts.

  7

  I took Tully to the nearest Donut Magic, which wasn’t too far away.

  We grabbed a booth in the back. He had a glazed old-fashioned donut, while I went the extra mile and ordered the Witches Delight, a chocolate covered moon-sized concoction filled with chocolate crème, and some of their star-shaped donut holes to go with. I was partial to the purple ones. Tully went with a sixteen-ounce latte, whereas I ordered the biggest Americano I could get my freezing little hands around.

  "What do you think is going on here?" Tully asked me.

  I finished off the Witch's Delight, wiped my mouth with a crumpled napkin. "Well, let's see, there's the gremlin outbreaks."

  Tully closed his eyes. "Sarcasm isn't going to make this better," he said. "It needs to be productive, and that isn't productive."

  The napkin stuck to my sticky fingers, and I concentrated on peeling the bits of paper off. Tully didn’t deserve flippancy. He had helped a lot tonight while I cast that spell. And sarcasm wasn’t going to help.

  "Something that doesn't fit the norm for the supernatural," I said. "I guess. I mean, normally, we'd have an obvious marker. At least, you could see it, right?"

  "I can see the link to the manifestation from the catalyst. Only, I'm not seeing any catalysts right now. What I'm seeing is just the manifestation, pulling at all the available mana.”

  "Maybe you're just missing it." That came out harsher than I intended. Curse it.

  Tully lifted his chin. "You think that's what this is, a newbie mistake? I may be new, but I wasn't born yesterday. And unlike you, I can see the links, like I said. I've seen them before."

  I swallowed, hard. “Where?” I asked, my voice quiet.

  Tully’s eyes suddenly looked through me. “When I was in the army.”

  I leaned forward. “You served?”

  He nodded. “Two tours in Afghanistan. I was military police. It was during my second tour, when I was stationed at a forward operating base in Helmand province.” He looked at the ceiling, remembering. “I’d been assigned to help guard a fuel convoy coming down from the north to Camp Leatherneck. MPs do a lot of road escort.”

  I wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans. “Must get tedious.”

  “We used to joke about it being routine danger. I was mid-convoy, riding shotgun in a Humvee, two hours short of reaching Camp Leatherneck, when the lead Humvee at the head suddenly flipped, dirt and sand billowing up around it. We hit the brakes, figuring the Taliban had detonated an improvised explosive device. The sand and dirt began swirling, faster and faster, becoming a dust devil. The sky grew dark, and suddenly we were in the middle of a howling sandstorm. We couldn’t see more than a foot past the window, the sand was so thick.”

  He glanced down at his hands, clenching his coffee cup. He let go, looked me in the eye. “That was when I saw it, inside the sand storm, floating in the air. A nude man-thing.”

  “A djinn,” I whispered. Ancient manifestations that roamed deserts. “What did you do?”

  He laughed softly. “I hunkered down in my seat. My driver and the third soldier in the back didn’t see it. No one else saw it. Hades be cursed,” he finished. “I thought I’d gone nuts.” That was the first time I heard Tully swear, and in the arcane way, like sorcerers were supposed to. Words mattered for us, especially curse words. We had to keep our thoughts focused on the arcane.

  “Tough way to learn about the supernatural.”

  “Are there any easy ways?” He asked.

  He had me there. There certainly hadn’t been for my sister and me.

  Tully watched me, obviously waiting for me to spill my origin story with the arcane. But there wasn’t time. Instead, we needed to get back to the matter at hand.

  "Look,” I said, “I don't want to be a jerk about this, but you are the new guy."

  "So, rookie failure, is that it?"

  He never raised his voice, it just grew taut, like a bow string.

  So much for the renewing power of coffee and donuts.

  "Listen, that's not what I meant."

  "Oh, what did you mean, then?"

  I took a deep breath, tapped the table, thinking. We needed to focus. "I'm, I'm sorry," I said. Yeah, that was like pulling teeth for me. Apologizing didn’t come easy, not for me. It’s just the way I'm built. You might like it, you might not, but it was who I was.

  He nodded. "Just take this seriously, that's all I ask. Please."

  I swallowed. "Sure thing," I mumbled. Shame was also a feeling I didn't like experiencing. "So, what do you think is going on?" Suddenly, I was the rookie asking the veteran.

  "Something we can't see," he said. That much is clear.

  I ran my fingers around the blood charm in my jacket pocket. Even now, the edges felt sharp against my skin. I wasn't wearing it, and yet it continued to hunger for my blood. "We need more intel." I said.

  A golden light fluttered outside.

  "Looks like we have another crisis." I nodded at the window.

  His eyes narrowed. "Another outbreak.”

  "Yup. Let's roll."

  It was the same goggled sprite. Its aura flickered as it spoke. "Not much time is left," it proclaimed. "The air spirit is nearly out of mana and must recharge soon." The sprite gave us the location where a new gremlin outbreak was underway.

  "What about you?" I asked.

  "I will cease to be soon," the sprite said, voice small. "I do not wish to dissipate, but that is my fate."

  The sprite was a level three manifestation, so a permanent one. But too much magic in too short a time could dissipate any manifestation short of a level five, an ancient.

  "I don't understand," Tully said. "You should be able to restore yourself."

  "There is not enough mana nearby for me to be able to do that.”

  I wished there was something we could do, but it would take a great deal of time and energy to restore the sprite, and we had neither.

  I blinked my suddenly watery eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “I existed.” The sprite’s voice was frail now. I could see through the tiny body now. “The template I sprang from will continue. Another will be born.” It collapsed in a tiny heap and faded away until nothing remained.

  I lifted my chin, looked at Tully. “We need to get to the bottom of what is going on before more damage is done.”

  He returned my determined look with one of his own.

  Chaos cavorted at a tiny strip mall on the east side of the city. The stores lined up along a well-maintained parking lot, the white lines fresh and crisp. Of course, a marijuana dispensary wouldn’t choose a seedy strip mall to set up shop. Even the Digital Palace Electronics store looked like it did good business.

  Tully parked across the street. The LCD screen on the strip mall marquee flashed blue and showed gremlins dancing through a store.

  “Cheeky jerks,” I muttered, peering into the night to see if I could make them out.

  There was lots of action at the strip mall. The stores had closed for the night, but they were open for business now, so to speak.

  A crowd of people milled around outside. Ordinaries. A big man in a hoodie appeared from the electronic store, hauling a big screen TV. Right behind him came a string of people hauling more TVs, laptops, speakers. The marijuana shop also had people coming out, carrying bags of weed. Looters also pranced out of the wine shop holding bottles and laughing.

  I glanced at the sign again. S
till looking weird.

  The jewelry store lights strobed redly. But, the looters ignored the store.

  Faint silver flashes came from inside the jewelry store.

  I glanced at Tully. He peered at the store, face tight with concentration.

  “Three gremlins inside, and something else. Something that moves very fast, is wrapped in shadow, and…” His voice trailed off.

  “And what?” I asked. “Why can’t you tell what sort of manifestation this is?”

  “The gremlins are making it difficult to get a fix on the other creature.” His brows furrowed. “I can barely see the gremlins.”

  “Why are the looters ignoring the jewelry store?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m having a tough time making out the arcane in that store.”

  We had an insta-mob of looters running riot next door to a shop being rifled by an unknown manifestation, and gremlins messing with Tully’s magical sight and stuff in general.

  “We’ve got to put a stop to the magical mayhem before the cops arrive,” I said.

  Tully shook his head. “I can’t believe you put it that way.”

  “What other way is there to put it?” I replied. “Come on!” I heaved open the Continental’s door and strode across the street toward the tree-lined mall parking lot.

  “Hold on,” Tully called after me, his voice low and urgent. “We need to plan an approach!”

  I crossed the street. “No time for that,” I replied over my shoulder. “We have to get these looters—"

  I slammed into someone huddled against a tree planter on the sidewalk. I stumbled, and fell backwards, landing on my backside for the second time that night.

  I yelped. The man I’d smacked into was sprawled on the cement.

  How had I missed him standing there? Sure, it was dark, but he was right there.