Floodlight

by Reba Birmingham

Flipping a magazine, I asked Juniper out of the side of my mouth. “Do you recognize that guy over there? I think he’s following us.”

  “No,” she said out of the side of hers, mocking me, then laughed and pretended to hit my arm. “Stop it.”

  “I’m going to the gate,” I said, and decided to read Eat Pray Love. Val was due to follow us in a couple of days, and along with everything else, I was hoping things were going well for her and her elderly charge. After a couple of minutes, I heard a commotion behind me. Security was handcuffing the strange man, who was shooting daggers at me with his eyes. Juniper came over and sat by me. “Strangest thing. He was overheard talking about a bomb. They don’t take kindly to that kind of thing at the Aero Puerto.”

  “Did you...how...whaa?”

  “I reported him. Close your mouth, darling. Of course, they’re going to believe the middle-aged business class traveler, clutching a copy of Eat Pray Love over that of a suspicious looking young man with a German accent.” She fanned herself. I grinned and shook my head.

  “I told you he was following us.”

  I used the next fifteen or so hours, when I wasn’t fitfully sleeping, to make a mental list of things I needed to find out. Where was Mitzi? Who had her? Was she being tortured while I lay on this flat bed 35,000 feet in the air? What was she eating?

  How were the taxes going? Could Babs keep a secret? I had to remember to call Mitzi’s mom, too. She’d left a message, and it was strange for the two of them to go more than a week without talking. Did my cell phone even have international calling? Did I have enough clothing? Was it warm enough? It went on and on.

  When I did sleep, there were nightmares. Images of a great, dark cloud rising up from the Black Forest, and then it split into a million dark birds headed for all four corners of our planet. I woke up in a sweat and stared at the plastic ceiling.

  It was hard to talk to Juniper because each little sitting area was semi-private. We would have had more of a chance to plot and plan in economy. When I did get up, Juniper was chatting with the flight attendant and checking out the Duty Free. I probably would have enjoyed the flight more if my other half wasn’t in danger. As it was, I used the time to rest. We would need to hit the ground running once we landed.

  Baden Baden, Germany

  April Tenth

  FORTY-FIVE DEGREES Fahrenheit is cold, but the Celsius sign at the airport said 7.222, which somehow seemed even colder. We landed first in Frankfurt, and then took a tiny plane to the Baden-Baden airport, which catered to the upper-class spa crowd like the erstwhile Madame Dresser. After retrieving our luggage, I went into the bathroom and changed into a fluffy parka, previously worn only once, that my sister sent me from Tibet. It had a paisley pattern and was many shades of Indian orange.

  “Wowzers!” Juniper twirled me around. “That’s some jacket.”

  “It’s warm,” I said, feeling very conspicuous. “Now what? Stand here and look like cheerful tourists some more?”

  “Now we wait.” She seemed to be enjoying this. “I’ve always wanted to see Germany.”

  “Being extorted into someone else’s war is hardly seeing Germany. It’s like being in the middle of someone else’s bad divorce.”

  “Well, if you believe that Heloisa hologram, it’s our war too, or soon going to be.”

  “True.” I rocked on my heels and tucked my arms in my armpits.

  Fairly soon a Volkswagen Touareg pulled up, and a sturdy man jumped out and apologized in thickly accented English for being “the late.” We piled in and were whisked off to parts literally unknown.

  Chapter Five

  Back in Merryville

  “HELLO, IS THIS the police?”

  “Yes, our non-emergency line, how can I help you?”

  “It’s my neighbors, the Fowlers. They’re both women who are married to each other. That’s legal now, I guess. Something’s not right over there. I mean, not the fact that they’re gay. I guess we just need to adjust. It’s something else.”

  “Do you want a welfare check, ma’am? Any reason to believe there’s a need for police involvement?”

  “Well, I hate getting in other people’s business, but there have been some strange comings and goings of late. I got up this morning at two-thirty. Sometimes I can’t sleep with Frank’s snoring, and I saw Panda Fowler leaving alone with luggage. I haven’t seen her wife for days.”

  “What is the wife’s name?”

  “Mitzi Fowler.”

  “Maybe they just went on vacation.”

  “I don’t think so. My neighbor told me Panda Fowler was going around the neighborhood a couple of days ago asking if anyone had seen Mitzi.”

  “Ok, we’ll send a car around to check on it.”

  IN AN UNKNOWN location, Mitzi pounded on the rough wooden door. “Hey! It’s freezing in here. Somebody answer!”

  All five-foot-six of her was vertical and super pissed. After waking in this cell, she realized that Madame Dresser, who probably wasn’t Madame Dresser at all, had drugged her.

  At first, the woman seemed nice. She was shrouded in scarves and could have been the lady she met all those years ago in grad school. She seemed in a hurry and became irritated when Mitzi wasn’t wearing the pendant her mother had given her as a child. But then she smiled again and hugged her. Once inside, Mitzi took her to the kitchen and made tea. The tea! She must have put a sleeping draught in the tea, the old witch.

  Mitzi beat on the door again. “I know you can hear me. Let me out, now!” She kicked the door for good measure, but it only made her foot hurt.

  She heard jangling keys. It reminded her of Panda and the ridiculously large circle of keys she kept. She said it was a key ring that had belonged to her granddaddy who was a janitor. Feelings caught in her throat that she had no time to deal with; she let her anger burn away anything that would deter her from getting out of here.

  “Hey!” Bang, bang, bang.

  THE TOUAREG WAS fast, and the driver expert. Before we could speak further to him, an elf turned and introduced herself. I hadn’t seen her at first because of her diminutive size. She had a cherry blossom face. That was my first impression. I didn’t know why, other than the woman’s cheeks were rosy red.

  “I’m Elsa and will be guiding you through your orientation.”

  “This is like a World Spree adventure tour,” I said to Juniper, having had a thoroughly satisfactory trip to Vietnam a few years before with that organization.

  “I’m Juniper and my rather stunned friend is—”

  “Panda, yes I know. We’ve been expecting you.”

  With that, she turned and sat facing forward. We could no longer see her but could hear her cheery little voice.

  “There has been some pretty intense fighting where we’re going to enter the forest, so tonight you’ll be staying at the hotel Der Kleine Prinz.”

  “Nice,” Juniper said. I had never heard of it.

  Elsa added, “The owners of the hotel are friendly to our cause. While there, you will be met by an operative who speaks very good English. I cannot join you, for obvious reasons.”

  “I want to comment on that,” I said, poking my head into the front-seat area. “You speak of intense fighting, and I look around and see pristine countryside.”

  Elsa thought for a tick then answered, “There are many rules that we in the Hercynian Forest abide by. One is to keep the conflict hidden. Another, and this is really strange”—her accent made it sound like schtrange—“is that we can only use weapons that existed at the time of the last dog sun.”

  I shook my head and said almost to myself, “You’re also as real as can be, I mean, since we’ve met Ekk.”

  Elsa’s eyes lit up. “You met Ekk? Is he okay?”

  “Yes, he’s watching my tax practice.” My eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you know that?”

  Her big eyes became watery, and she turned to the front again. I felt mean.

  Her voice was still sweet. “I failed in my mission, and I
’m relegated to earning back the trust of my comrades. You see, it’s my fault Mitzi was kidnapped.”

  “What?” My head popped back in her area. The driver gave me a gruff look.

  Tears rolled down her doll-like face. “The coalition sent me and Ekk to watch you both and intervene if necessary. This was a fluid situation, and we didn’t know if the enemy would even reach out as far as California in your world. Clearly, they did.”

  Juniper handed me a granola bar, no doubt worried I was what we call “hangry.” The whole thing was just crazy. “What happened?”

  She blushed. “You and she have a nice relationship. I saw you feeding her candy on the couch.”

  Juniper smiled and looked sideways at me.

  “Those were mini-eclairs,” I said in my most dignified voice. “And?”

  “Nothing much happened until yesterday. I fell asleep. Odilia’s dwarf, one of the bad ones, tied me up and left me in your shed until I disappeared.”

  “They starved you!” I cried, a truly horrible way to go.

  “Yes. And I failed. I’m really sorry.”

  “Do you just appear back here when you fade from our world?” Juniper asked, always wanting to know how things worked.

  “Something like that. Oh, here we are. Your contact will meet you at dinner. Go to the dining room at seven p.m.”

  “But wait.”

  “I can’t. Lots to do. Please go and be patient.”

  Before we knew it, Juniper and I were checking in to the sumptuous hotel. “I’ll see you at dinner,” I said to Juniper. “In the meantime, I plan to see if my phone works here.”

  A guest came up and asked Juniper, in German, if I was her Sherpa. My Tibetan parka was quite ethnic looking I suppose, and I didn’t look like the typical spa client I guess. The English-speaking concierge intervened. After embarrassed apologies and heavy tipping, I was safely ensconced in my room, where I lay on the bed and fiddled with my phone. Without meaning to, I fell asleep on the soft comforter and began to dream.

  BACK IN MERRYVILLE, Detective Potts was having a slow day. When the call for a welfare check came through, he said he’d take it. All the black-and-whites were out in the field, due to the annual Merryville Flower show and the Mayor’s Skeet Shoot going on simultaneously this weekend. Besides, it was a nice day and he wanted to get out of the office and smoke.

  The grizzled veteran drove down Thistle Drive to number nine. He parked and, before getting out, decided to run the address to see if there had been any past domestic disturbances. Not expecting anything really, he enjoyed a cigarette, his guilty pleasure. His cop instincts went on high alert when a record of a 9-1-1 call popped up, from just two days before.

  Potts ground out his cigarette and gave the home his full attention.

  MITZI SUNK TO the stone floor and was really freezing when she heard a key turn in the lock. Pale light filled the cell, and a rather large dwarf appeared in the doorway and said, “Folge mir,” which in English meant, “Follow me.” Somehow she understood.

  She didn’t need to be asked twice. She jumped to her feet and followed. The dwarf led her down a stone passageway and into a castle-like structure. The temperature gradually warmed until she was deposited in a room with a roaring fireplace. There were weapons on the wall and floor-to-high-ceiling red drapes. It smelled of old cooking odors and like it hadn’t been dusted in a considerable period of time. A long wooden table was set with pewter dishes. Only one person sat at the table.

  At first she didn’t even see him. In his brown robe and utter stillness, she thought him part of the landscape. Only now, as he took his hood down with skinny, white, blue-veined hands did she say, “Hey, will you tell me what the hell is going on?”

  He flinched at “hell” and motioned her to sit beside him. She did.

  “Your mother said you were fiery.”

  Whatever Mitzi had been expecting, it wasn’t that. “Who are you? What do you know about my mother?”

  “I know a great deal about you, young woman. A great deal.”

  “I was drugged, kidnapped, and apparently you or someone brought me here. I want to know why. By the way, where is here?”

  He sighed an old man’s sigh. “You are in the dining room of Der Schwarzvald Castle, high in the mountains of Germany.”

  Mitzi blinked. The cold, the architecture, all fit what she’d been experiencing.

  “How did you get me on a plane unconscious? Surely Homeland Security would have been all over that.”

  “You were brought here in a somnambulant walking state with your caregiver.” He said this without irony or guilt.

  “A zombie? You made me a zombie? Let me tell you something, sir. People will miss me. People will come to get me. The trail can’t be that hard to follow. Just let me go right now, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

  “You are hardly in a bargaining position, Ms. Fowler, or, let me call you by your real name, Mitzi Winters.”

  Mitzi started to speak, but the old man waved his hand and her lips wouldn’t part. She was going to say her maiden name was Schadt.

  “I’ve heard enough from you right now. It’s time for you to listen. You are the child of an abomination, a griffin and a fairy contributed sperm to your mother, the surrogate. Apparently you are part magical creature, although you look human like your mother. I need to know how infected you are and if you can even be saved.”

  Mitzi thought the man was crazy. He kind of sounded like some of the fundamentalists back home, except for the part about magic. She stared at him in horror, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  Several monks entered the room. Most were young men, but a couple appeared to be dwarves, same brown robes, chanting in German. Somehow, Mitzi understood them.

  “Begin the awakening,” the still unidentified man with the white hands said to the assembly. In harmony, the masculine voices chanted:

  “Wolves are always followed by ravens”

  “Scavenging for the kill”

  “Eat fast, ravening wolf”

  “Ravens follow five and twenty”

  “Cleansing the world of unworthy prey”

  “Taking out the weak”

  “Consuming the meek”

  “Wolf-Raven cycles this world to the next”

  Mitzi jumped up. Everything within her told her to run. She had a strange sensation in the pit of her gut as the monks sang.

  Strong arms held her, and the voices rang out again and again with the same awful song.

  Hotel Der Kleine Prinz

  HAVING GIVEN IN to jet lag, I had the same dream as before. Only this time there was a castle in the forest that sent out the clouds of ravens. I was very cold, looking up as the sky turned black. In the distance, I heard the howl of a wolf, and a different kind of chill went down my spine. I tried to run to the castle, to people and warmth, but snow grabbed my boots like quicksand. To make matters worse, I could see Mitzi in between trees. I opened my mouth to yell for her, but nothing came out. The alarm in my room woke me, and for that I was glad.

  It was a little while before dinner, and I was dying to talk to Ekk or Babs or Val, but I couldn’t get through. Instead, I used the time to dress as well as I could, given the unexpectedness of our tony surroundings.

  The Prinz dining room was a study in blue, white, and gold and was the height of European elegance. I had dressed in my best white-collared shirt and wore the octopus pendant that Mitzi gave me after we’d been together awhile. It made me feel close to her. Black pants and boots completed my outfit. While not stunning, at least I felt appropriate.

  Juniper entered not too much later and had on essentially the same outfit as before, only trading her sandals for boots and adding a scarf for warmth. “Any idea who we’re meeting yet?” she asked.

  “No, I just sat down myself. Did you call Val?”

  “Yes. She was sleepy. Her client is still alive, but she said it can’t go on much longer.”

  “I hope not. Today, what
’s left of it, is the 10th—only two more days until the deadline at midnight.”

  “She knows. Even if her client doesn’t die, I’m sure she’ll be here.” She picked up the menu. “What looks good?”

  Again amazed my friend could be semi-enjoying herself, I followed suit and looked for something appetizing. Both of us lifted our heads in unison as we heard a familiar voice.

  “Of course, darling, I’m here to meet two friends from over the pond. Oh, there you are!”

  I sat stunned as Fiona Castlebaum air-kissed me. She plunked herself down without attempting that with Juniper, correctly reading she might get her eyes scratched out.

  “You.”

  “Yes, me,” Fiona said and motioned to the wait staff. “We’ll start with the tuna and follow it with the pesto crusted lamb.” She looked at our stunned faces. “You do eat lamb?”

  Juniper nodded

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

  “Oh yes, that is part of the lesbian cachet in California, no?” She turned back to the server and said, “And a salad.”

  I was too startled to be offended. “Are you part of this?”

  “The Little Prince? No, I just eat here. The other? Yep. The Coalition we call it. And some Earl Grey, hot,” she added absently to the server, handing him the menus.

  “I lost my job at the museum because of you,” Juniper said, still not taking her eyes off the older woman.

  Fiona held up her hand, and we waited to hear what she had to say.

  “We will see. When I come to town, it’s always for a very specific purpose. In this case, to scope out Mitzi’s people and to poke the mayor a little. Once you were identified as a BFF, I needed to meet you, too.” Her knowledge of American colloquialisms was impressive. “I had to test your mettle.”

  Juniper glared as she sipped her water.

  Fiona raised her eyebrows and swallowed. “You passed.”