Grilled Cheese and Goblins

by Nicole Kimberling

  Flamethrower . . .

  He shoved his hand into Gunther’s inside pocket, groping for the flask of lighter fluid there. He got the top off and sprayed the vampire with it, straight into the eyes and down its undulating throat. The vampire released its grip and sprang away out of range of any lighters. Keith brought his mage pistol up immediately and fired. Three spell-inscribed bullets spiraled out, leaving blue tracers. The first shot went wide, but the next two found their target.

  The vampire shrieked as the bullets penetrated its flesh, writhing against the ceiling like a vortex of angry smoke. Then, abruptly, the sound ended and a ring of plastic dropped to the floor. Carefully, keeping his mage pistol trained on the traces of lingering smoke overhead, Keith bent to read the name.

  He stood and turned back to Gunther, who stood with one hand pressed against his shoulder to stanch the blood trickling out.

  Keith holstered his pistol and phoned the ambulance.

  Chapter Twelve

  PPB apprehended the fake vampires within a mile of the warehouse. Although the transformation from human to vampire was technically impossible, all three fake vampires claimed to have been made Nosferatu by Sounder. None of them was anything but a misguided human.

  “Sounder really did a number on them,” Gunther said. “He used the administration of methotrexate to induce photoallergic reactions when any of these kids went into sunlight. He let movie mythology do the rest of his convincing. After that he had himself a nice little set of minions.”

  “And we got this from the remaining concubine?” Keith glanced at the clock. Ten minutes till checkout. Not enough time to have one last hurrah with Gunther. Not that Gunther was in any shape for sex. His shoulder was a mess of stitches and bandages. Keith gathered up the last of his clothes and shoved them into his suitcase.

  “She made a deal. Her lawyer claims that she was acting with Sounder under duress. I believe her.” Gunther shifted in the stiff-backed hotel chair.

  Keith nodded. “Well, we saw what happened to the concubine who didn’t cooperate.”

  “Exactly. Administration at the Portland Saturday Market confirms that Azalea Point Creamery was next on the waiting list for a market booth. It’s hard to believe that Sounder would do all this just for money.”

  “People have done worse for less,” Keith commented. “Ultimately, Sounder only ever saw humans as prey.”

  “That doesn’t explain why Bullock went ahead with it.”

  “She was just sick, like every other gourmet looking for the ultimate thrill. PPB managed to round up a couple of people associated with Forbidden Pleasures. They’ve been handed over to NIAD. I’m pretty sure at least one of them will be willing to talk, once they’ve found out what kind of death sentence they’re looking at.” Keith zipped his suitcase. Time to check out. Time for him to head back to DC.

  “Want to ride to the airport with me?” Keith squared himself, assembling his expression into professional cool. Gunther didn’t appear to be fooled. He reached out, smoothing Keith’s lapel.

  Gunther said, “So it’s over, just like that?”

  “I already saw housekeeping lurking in the hallway.” Keith knew that wasn’t what Gunther was asking, but he’d never been good at saying goodbye.

  “There are literally dozens of portals between DC and San Francisco,” Gunther said. “It would be easy to pop over there. Maybe you could make me dinner sometime. Or even breakfast, if you’re in the mood.”

  Keith caught Gunther’s hand and pulled it to his lips.

  “I think I could be in the mood.” He heard the creaking of a disinfectant-laden trolley outside in the hallway. “Time to hit the road.”

  They made their way down to the parking lot, passing by a line of food carts just opening for lunch. Keith felt a familiar pang of loss as he watched them open. He missed that world. He missed it a lot. But then again, being an Irregular wasn’t so bad. It had its perks. And watching Gunther slide into the passenger seat beside him, he thought maybe he’d found a regular customer to cook for again.

  Gunther folded a smoke into his mouth, then unwrapped the Carnivore Circus CD he’d left on the dashboard.

  “Want to find out what they sound like?”

  “Why not?”

  Massive, heavy beats exploded out of the speakers. Growls and screams like the howling of the damned pounded through the rental. Bombastic blasts of sheer sound vibrated from the speakers.

  Above the noise, Gunther shouted, “I kinda like it.”

  Keith nodded. “Me too. What’s the track called?”

  Gunther searched the homemade packaging a moment, then said, “‘Chunderfuck.’ Next one is: ‘Thy Doom Approacheth, Shithead.’”

  They listened to the song. It didn’t take long, being comprised of only seventy-two seconds of bowel-jangling guitar. Keith turned the volume down. Gunther gave him an inquisitive look.

  “I’m not a nice goblin boy,” Keith said, then added, “I’m not even nice.”

  Gunther gazed out the windshield, smiled in that slow way he had, and replied, “I know, but you sure can cook.”

  Cookie Jamboree

  A Christmas Coda from the world of NIAD

  Despite having once been a professional chef, Special Agent Keith Curry didn’t know a lot about cookie cutters. He understood that they were used to cut sturdy dough into decoratable shapes—generally circles, unless it was a holiday—and that was all.

  But Gunther knew all about them.

  “These are the collectibles.” Gunther waved his hand over a box of tin shapes as if he were a presenter on some home shopping network. Granted, with his dark hair and long, toned body he was handsome enough to be on TV. But the gleam in Gunther’s blue eyes as he displayed his precious beauties held a hint of mania. “Sometimes I think they’re my only addiction—apart from kerosene and cigarettes.”

  Really, Keith wasn’t sure which was worse. Neither the kerosene nor the cigarettes could do Gunther, a transmogrified goblin, much damage.

  Collecting cookie cutters, on the other hand, represented a foray into dorkville that somewhat detracted from Gunther’s mighty sex appeal. Insofar as Keith now considered Gunther long-term-relationship material, he had to weigh things like cookie cutter collections against his own ideas of what should be in a home kitchen. Not that Gunther and he were swirling around the vortex of inevitable cohabitation. Far from it. Like most trans-goblin children, Gunther still lived with his parents.

  Keith’s reluctance to have sex in the garden-level bedroom of a ranch house in Marin County while his boyfriend’s parents slept overhead had been the source of many tense conversations and one genuine argument. Gunther didn’t understand why Keith didn’t want to transfer from DC headquarters to the West Coast. Keith couldn’t explain how uncomfortable Gunther’s extra-human family made him without sounding like a racist.

  So they’d argued and made up and gotten a little stronger every time—understood each other better as the days went on. Keith was pretty sure he was in love with Gunther. He’d have to be to willingly attend this awkward Christmas party after having gone so far as volunteering to work for the winter holidays just to avoid having to celebrate so many other holiday gatherings.

  Gunther delved into the box and pulled out a tiny tin rocket and held it up. “I really love this one. You can make it look dirty really easily.”

  “Are you sure we want to bust all these out?” Keith rustled through the box. “It’s supposed to be a Christmas cookie party. Don’t we just need a star and a gingerbread man?”

  “A lot of the returnees don’t have a very fixed idea of Christmas and I like to give them a lot of options.” Gunther continued setting the cutters out in lines. “Who says Christmas can’t be celebrated with rockets?”

  “Or muscle cars, apparently.” Keith nudged a vehicle-shaped cutter back into line. “I always thought modern Santa would drive a red Cadillac.”

  “I don’t really know what car Santa drives these days,”
Gunther replied. “Probably something Swedish.”

  That’s the trouble with working for NIAD, Keith thought. You mention some guy you think is fake and he turns out to be real. Never fails . . .

  “Does your family make a big deal of Christmas?” Gunther asked.

  “Sure, I guess.” Keith finally found the gingerbread man. It was a good-sized cookie cutter. Eight inches high.

  “Are we going to go visit them?” Gunther kept his eye on the cookie cutters. “Or do you think it’s too early for me to meet them?”

  In the six months that he and Gunther had been seriously dating, Gunther had never once inquired about Keith’s family, which had been odd, given the close connections in the trans-goblin community, but also relieving, since Keith hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

  “We don’t really communicate,” Keith said. “They weren’t stoked about me turning queer on them.”

  “I see...” Gunther flashed him a smile. “I guess it’s good I spent their present money on you then.”

  “You bought me a Vitamix 5200?”

  “How much do you think I was planning to spend on them?” Gunther asked, with a laugh. “I’m just a civil servant, after all.”

  With four hours till the party started, they still had a lot of work to do, so Keith put on some tunes and fell into the rhythm of rolling dough and cutting out shapes. They used every single cutter, no matter how odd or seasonally inappropriate. The only criteria that needed to be satisfied were that he had four hundred cookies at the end of it and that twenty-six of them were gingerbread men. Keith had no idea why they needed such a specific number of those, but he complied.

  As the cookies were cooling and Keith was mixing food coloring into icing, other agents from the San Francisco office began to arrive. It was still early—an hour before the weirdos would show up to try and become more human-socialized via application of frosting, silver dragées and red and green sprinkles.

  Not to mention the assortment of edible glitters.

  He didn’t remember so many agents being there the previous year, but then he figured maybe he hadn’t been as able to distinguish the guards from the inmates—so to speak—back then.

  Even Gunther’s retired ex-partner, Rake, showed up. A hulking, dark-haired man, he looked like he should be clumsy, but moved with the grace of water. He wore a sticker that read “VISITOR” in large letters and had a devious expression on his face.

  But he was an actual demon, so Keith supposed he would. Still, Keith was about to go over and see what he might be up to when he caught Rake sneaking a handful of chocolate jimmies.

  Mystery solved.

  Keith went back to baking while Gunther greeted the arrivals with volleys of enthusiastic hugs, handshakes and high fives.

  As Keith transferred the final sheet of gingerbread men into the oven, he noticed Gunther’s godfather, Henry, lingering near the tall cooling rack. How any man who looked and acted so much like a dirty old hobo could have snagged such a hot boyfriend as Jason Shamir, Keith would never know. To Keith, Henry looked like a grizzled blond scarecrow who had hopped a train in 1933 and somehow ridden it all the way to the twenty-first century. The last time he’d had Henry over for dinner, the guy had pronounced the appetizer, Gunther’s favorite salmon tartare dressed with lemon confit, to be “the best cat food I ever ate.”

  Unaware of Keith’s watchful eye, Henry reached into the pocket of his stained and battered trench coat and removed a handful of white iridescent powder, which he started to sprinkle over the freshly baked cookies.

  Keith felt certain that nothing pulled out of that guy’s pocket should be applied to food. He started forward, but was stopped by a hand on his arm.

  “Don’t worry. It’s part of the plan,” a male voice whispered in his ear. From the lingering scent of chocolate jimmies, he guessed it was Rake before he turned around. “He has to get this done while they’re still hot and pliable.”

  “What crazy shit did you put on those?” Keith glared at Henry, who just grinned.

  “It’s edible . . . I think.” Henry licked his finger, then after a moment of contemplation said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  The powder he’d sprinkled on the gingerbread men shimmered and twinkled like starlight glinting off newly fallen snow. Then one of the cookies began to twitch. At first Keith thought it was a trick of the light and shifting parchment paper; then the little guy sat up. It twisted from side to side as if cracking its back.

  Keith’s reaction was immediate. He brought the spatula down hard. The gingerbread man caught it, struggling against him with strength and will that should have been impossible in a cookie.

  “Ease up, kiddo, you’ll squish him,” Henry chided.

  Keith relaxed his grip on the utensil and the gingerbread man shoved the spatula away. It stood up, teetering on its rounded legs. It hopped from the cooling rack to the table, gave Keith the bras d’honneur, then gave Rake a more military salute.

  Rake handed the gingerbread man a small roll of paper. The cookie accepted the banner before marching, drill-sergeant style, toward the end of the table.

  As it strutted, others began to rise as well, moving clumsily, like baby cartoon pandas awakening from nap time. The scent of hot ginger and molasses saturated the air.

  One by one the guests started to notice. They pointed and smiled, but were much less surprised than he would have expected even NIAD agents to be.

  Gunther broke out into a wide smile as he watched the gingerbread men line up on the counter. Then they unfurled the paper Rake had given them. In large block letters it read “Good Luck, Gunther!”

  “You guys!” Gunther looked around, grinning.

  Keith looked around too, but he was more baffled.

  “We just thought you should have a good send-off,” a dark-haired agent said.

  Keith leaned toward Rake, who had left the jimmies behind and was applying himself to a saucer of heart-shaped candy confetti.

  “What is going on?” Keith whispered.

  “Gunther’s transfer came through. He’s headed for DC.” The big man’s voice rumbled beneath the congratulatory noises made by the agents who surged around Gunther.

  Rake daubed a finger into a nearby bowl of pink icing. “Maybe it’s supposed to be your Christmas present.” He licked the icing from his finger with a tongue that was too long, too agile and too red. Forget tying a knot in a cherry stem—this guy could make a whole macramé-owl wall hanging with his lingual appendage.

  Keith snatched up the icing before Rake could double dip. Rather than being deterred, Rake simply grabbed a gingerbread man and bit its head off. The cookie’s arms and legs flapped and flailed, but nothing could stop the progress of Rake’s teeth through its torso.

  As Rake noshed, a strange, blissful expression lit his face. Catching Keith watching him, he shoved the gingerbread man’s kicking feet into his mouth, swallowed and then murmured, “Just like the good old days.”

  Rake sauntered toward the group of agents who surrounded Gunther, shouldering through them easily.

  The rest of the gingerbread men were slowing down now, gradually hardening as they cooled.

  “Are they alive?”

  “Nah, they’re just animated. Like puppets. See, the pixie dust is already wearing off. Wouldn’t want to scare the new returnees.” Henry took a swig of something from a flask and then stuck his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. “So I guess you’re getting a new roommate.”

  “If you mean Gunther, he hasn’t said anything.”

  “Seems like the classy thing to do would be to invite him then. Meantime I’ve gotta run. Gunther asked me to break the news to his parents for him.”

  “You aren’t going to stay to decorate cookies?”

  “Not this year. I think I made enough of a mess of it last year.” Henry looked chagrined. “In hindsight I can now say spiking the punch was a bad idea. Look at that—Carrera is already giving me the evil eye.” He saluted the San Francisco
bureau chief. She neither smiled nor waved back. Behind her stood a few of the guests—all humans, all with the fashion sense of recently released mental patients. One young girl wore what looked like a live lobster on her head as if it were a tiara. Another, a middle-aged man, wore candy-cane pajama bottoms, a sweater with Santa’s face knit into it, and a tangle of battery-operated LED lights around his neck. The festive, flashing necklace failed to hide a Frankenstein-like scar.

  Time to get this party started.

  Keith went to greet them, meeting up with Gunther along the way. All in all thirteen returnees attended. Though their number swelled to fifty once all the agent-volunteers, handlers and integration liaisons had been accounted for—fifty-one if he counted the girl’s symbiont crustacean, which Gunther said they should not, since it would be surgically removed the following week.

  After two hours of unparalleled weirdness with frosting, the guests retreated to the NIAD residence facility, the room emptied and only Keith and Gunther remained to do the last of the sweeping up.

  “I think it went pretty well,” Keith said, just to break the silence. Gunther seemed unnaturally preoccupied with getting every last rainbow jimmie into the dustpan, so Keith continued, “What are you going to be doing in DC?”

  “Same as here. Assault team. Volunteer goblin community liaison.” Gunther still hadn’t looked up at him. “I thought it would be nice to be in the same city as you.”

  Diplomatic as always, Gunther left it open for him to decide whether or not they’d live together. Keith could almost feel Henry’s breath on the back of his neck whispering, “Now’s the time, kid. Don’t blow it.”

  He knew it wasn’t true. Or at least it probably wasn’t really the old bum’s voice—just the sound of his own conscience. He felt his face reddening. How was it possible that he could be nervous? Gunther had made it just about as easy as it could be. Still, he’d never lived with any boyfriend before and he knew that to Gunther’s family, this step was the first on an inevitable road toward marriage. Goblins were just conservative that way.