Grimstone: A Croft and Wesson Adventure

by Brad Magnarella

  “But he was a mortal, right?”

  “As far as we know, yeah.”

  “Then how’d he pull it off? I mean, those types of summonings get you a demon ninety-nine times out of a hundred. I’m having to deal with that crap at the communes every other day, it seems.”

  “Myrtle also mentioned the Great Quake of 1902,” I said. “Big seismic events have been known to disrupt the interface between worlds, making them more permeable. That could explain Sten’s success in calling up a god. The permeability we talked about last night would explain why the god’s back.”

  “A zombie god,” James said, shaking his head. “So, what’s our move, Prof?”

  “We still have to find the idol and destroy it. That much hasn’t changed.”

  James’s cell phone began to whistle. He checked the number, smiled, and raised the phone to his ear. “Hey there, Myrtle,” he said in a smooth, country voice. “Huh?” He glanced over at me with a sudden frown. “He’s actually busy right now, is there something I can pass on?”

  I grasped for the phone. Myrtle’s search may have turned up something. James pushed my hands away and switched ears. He listened for the next minute, brow furrowed in concentration. I strained to hear what Myrtle was saying, but the roar of the motor drowned out her voice.

  “Are you sure?” James asked. “All right, I’ll let Everson know.” He ended the call and turned toward me. “Good news. It took a while, but she was able to find the records dealing with the auction of Sten’s property.”

  “And…?” I asked, almost breathless. Whoever had acquired Sten’s property would also have acquired the idol.

  “Does the name Brunhold ring a bell?” he teased. “Brunhold Development, specifically?”

  “The dwarves?”

  James nodded. “Myrtle thinks they were interested in a mining claim Sten held, but they bid on everything—house, personal property, you name it. And there’s more. You remember that guy we met on the way to the library, the one who had words with you?”

  “Taffy?”

  “He’s the one who signed the certificates of title.”

  “Meaning he took possession of the idol,” I concluded.

  I thought about that. If Taffy had learned what the idol could do, he might have had no compunction about sacrificing young women to deepen his family’s fortunes. Dwarves had an innate lust for riches, after all—as well as a natural ability to handle powerful magic.

  “I’ll call Marge,” James said, already scrolling for the number, “fill her in.”

  I slapped the phone out of his hand.

  “Hey! What was that for?”

  “I know what I promised Marge, but listen. We denied the zombie god his sacrifice, but remember what happened to Sten? If the perp wants to survive the full-moon cycle, he’s going to have to find Gorr another young blond. That means we have to get to the idol, like thirty minutes ago. And we have a good idea where it is now. But if we let Marge in the loop, everything grinds to a halt. She’ll call us off while she requests a search warrant from a judge who may or may not believe in god summonings. We can’t take that chance. No time.”

  “Do you know the kind of crap you’re going to land me in?” James asked, rooting a hand between the door and seat where his phone had fallen. “I’m on her shit list as it is.”

  “Not if we nail the perp and stop the killings tonight.”

  James retrieved his phone. He looked from the glowing screen to the full moon, then sighed and pushed the phone into his pocket. “I thought I was supposed to be the one who broke the rules.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s smart rule-breaking and dumb rule-breaking. If I can get you committing more of the first than the second, I’ve done my job. I never claimed to be a saint.”

  “I’m the one who has to live out here,” he complained.

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m on plenty of shit lists back in Manhattan.”

  James shook his head, then snorted a laugh, which told me he was on board.

  “You won’t regret it,” I said. “Now, what can you tell me about the dwarves’ compound?”

  “That’s the thing, it’s huge. Looking for the idol in there will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack … if that haystack were full of battle axes and pissed-off dwarves.”

  “That’s where Taffy’s desperation to appease Gorr becomes an advantage,” I said. “We find Taffy, and there’s a really good chance we’ll find the idol.”

  “And how are we gonna find Taffy?”

  “We’ll use his fluid to cast a hunting spell.” When James frowned at me in question, I showed him the shoulder of my coat. “Remember when he grabbed me through the window? His palm was soaked in sweat. Meaning his essence is in the fabric. It’s just a matter of drawing it out.”

  James chuckled. “Man, you are definitely no saint. In fact, you could be the devil himself.”

  “And the devil loves company,” I said, punching him in the shoulder.

  13

  “That place is huge,” I whispered.

  “I tried to warn you,” James whispered back. “The dwarves don’t mess around. Took them decades to build, and they’re always adding to it. I’ve heard the compound extends underground too.”

  From between the boulders that concealed us, I peered up at the stone fortress dominating the desert bluff. The walls that rose five or six stories were windowless, with stark cornices and powerful square pillars carved from the gray stone. From our vantage point partway up the bluff, we had a good view of the main gate. Its metal doors were closed. We had stopped at James’s place en route, and the hunting spell I’d prepared tugged in my hand now, insisting our target, Taffy, was inside. The only question was how to get to him.

  I checked my watch. Almost eleven. “Do you think they’re all in for the night?”

  James shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, though I’ve seen them out and about at all hours. They like to drink.”

  “Any others entrances?”

  “No doubt, but good luck finding them.”

  He was right. Dwarves were notoriously good at creating doors that blended into the stone around them. Not even a reveal spell could expose them. And dwarves often disguised their most important doors further with old enchantments. I eyed the fortress again. When faced with a similar obstacle recently, I’d used a force invocation to vault up to a rampart, but this fortress had no rampart. The compound was completely enclosed.

  But we had to get inside, dammit.

  I was considering our options when the revving and grinding of an engine grew in my hearing. James and I peered down. A pair of headlights was swerving its way up the winding road to the compound.

  “Bottoms up?” James asked, reaching inside his vest for the stealth potion we’d cooked and funneled into water bottles the night before. I nodded quickly and grabbed my own potion.

  “Might be our best chance.” I unscrewed the cap on my bottle and forced down the sludge-like liquid while James alternately gagged and swore. In his defense, it was an acquired taste.

  “Let’s go,” I said, gripping my cane and maneuvering around the boulders in a low stoop.

  James followed me up the bluff toward where the paved road met the front gate. Emphasizing that this was a stealth mission, I had discouraged him from carrying his guns and absolutely forbidden explosives, which I’d caught him stowing in the Jeep. As we climbed now, I could hear his empty holsters slapping against his hips, though the sound grew fainter, as if he were falling behind. When I glanced around, James was still at my back but nearly indistinguishable from his surroundings. The potion was doing its job.

  We arrived at the gate ahead of the car and hunkered on the side where the headlights wouldn’t hit us.

  “This is wild,” James said, his voice seeming to arrive from a great distance. Against the stone wall, he was practically invisible. I could just make out his outline, but only because I was looking for him.

  “It won
’t last,” I reminded him. “We’ll need to be in and out in roughly thirty.”

  I hunkered lower as the car, a yellow Hummer, swung into view. It approached us crookedly, then slowed while great locks clunked inside the gate. As the gate’s two doors began to open inward, I tugged James’s vest. Staying low, we stole into the compound just behind the Hummer.

  While the vehicle continued along the drive, I pulled James into an especially dark shadow beside the closing gate. I needed a moment to take stock of the compound’s layout.

  The Hummer entered what looked like a courtyard, headlights shining over a central pool. Handsome buildings of stone rose around it, some as high as the compound itself. I felt like I was inside a cave, which I supposed was the point. The only lights to be seen were in an occasional narrow window.

  “Where to?” came James’s barely audible voice.

  I refocused on my cane. The hunting spell was tugging us toward an especially large building on the far side of the courtyard. I withdrew my coat strap, knotted it around a belt loop, and handed the other end of the strap to James, something I’d meant to do outside.

  “Stay close,” I said.

  I made my way down the drive, James right behind. Loud laughter sounded from one building and arguing that was just as loud from another. Someone on a top floor blasted metal music. It wasn’t until we’d reached the courtyard that I noticed a pair of red eyes glowing faintly halfway up the side of a building.

  James grunted as I shoved him against a wall. From the deep shadows, I squinted back at the eyes until a slender, six-foot silhouette took shape around them. Crap. A giant lizard. And it wasn’t alone.

  More lizards scurried up and down the sides of buildings, pausing to bob their heads and grunt to one another. Dwarves were known to employ the creatures for mountain transport, but in this case, they were probably being used as night sentries. The lizards possessed a range of keen senses—hopefully all accounted for by our stealth potion.

  “We cool?” James asked in my ear.

  I felt over James’s face until I found his lips and pressed a finger against it.

  One of the lizards had cocked its head. I looked from it to what seemed a growing number of their kind. Were they converging on us? Or was I just noticing them all for the first time?

  I gauged our distance to our target building—about thirty yards away—and tugged for James to follow.

  We set off at a fast walk, my eyes jumping from building to building. The lizards grunted back and forth and scurried lower. It was as if they knew something was in their midst but couldn’t make out what or where.

  One dropped into the courtyard in front of us. I veered left and felt James stumble to keep up. The lizard raised its spiny head. A tongue thick enough to fell a man flickered from its mouth, revealing a set of impressive teeth. I didn’t want to find out what those felt like.

  As more lizards dropped into the courtyard behind us, I seized James’s arm and broke into a run. We reached the building and raced up a short flight of steps. Behind us, the lizards’ grunts rose into high, echoing calls. Padded toes raced toward us over the flagstones. I tried the door handle—unlocked, thank God—and James and I pushed our way inside.

  We closed the heavy oak door just as a tongue thudded against it. Silver light flashed from James’s wand, sealing the entrance with a locking spell.

  “Sweet Jesus,” he breathed.

  More thuds hit the wood, but the spell held. Getting out of the compound was going to be another story, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it—as James would say. Right now, we had an idol to destroy.

  We’d arrived in a large room with an array of pedestals, on top of which stood busts of long-bearded dwarves. No doubt Taffy’s lineage.

  The hunting spell pulled me toward a pair of stone stairways that climbed to a second story galley. At the top of the steps, my cane pivoted to the right where, at the end of a hallway, light glowed beneath a door. My cane began jerking like a live wire.

  Taffy was inside.

  Tapping James’s shoulder for him to cover me, I crept forward past mounted axes and shields. The doorknob turned in my hand, and I eased the door open.

  The room was a large, messy office. At the far end, Taffy sat at a desk, his broad back to me. He’d stripped down to a white tank top, the jacket I’d seen him wearing earlier that day draped over the back of his chair. In the light of a desk lamp, his hairy shoulders bulged as he muttered over something.

  The idol?

  Before I could steal forward to find out, the phone on his desk rang. Taffy lifted the handset, grunted something in a Dwarfish dialect, listened, then grunted again.

  Hanging up the phone, he took the thing he’d been muttering over and stuffed it into a pocket, then pushed himself from his chair and reached down to grasp a leather-bound handle. It was attached to a war hammer. As he raised it, silver light flashed in my peripheral vision.

  “Wait!” I shouted at James, but the faint warning was too late.

  James had unleashed an invocation, binding the dwarf in a net of silver energy. Until that point, Taffy hadn’t been aware of our presence. The phone call had likely been to inform him that the lizards had picked up what might or might not have been an intruder around his building and to suggest he investigate. We’d still had the advantage of stealth.

  “Had” being the operative term.

  Taffy roared as the silver cords bound his arms. The hammer dropped from his grip and landed on the stone floor with a resounding clang, sending out a massive shockwave. I was blown backward, past toppling furniture and books cascading from shelves. I landed beside the door we’d entered, sharp pain flaring through my left arm. Rotating the shoulder to make sure it hadn’t dislocated, I turned to where James was groaning. Besides being able to hear my partner, I could see him a little more clearly. He winced and rubbed the back of his head.

  “The hell was that?”

  “Take a wild guess,” I said.

  While Taffy struggled against his restraints, the war hammer at his feet warped the surrounding air with energy.

  “Enchanted weapon?” he ventured.

  “Yeah, and it just blew a chunk of the stealth magic from our systems.”

  Which meant there wasn’t any time to lose. Recovering my cane, I rose to my feet and stumbled toward the lump in Taffy’s pants pocket. (Not that one, you pervs.) It was the same size as the idol around Sten’s neck in the newspaper photo.

  But I’d only made it a few steps when the silver light dissolved from Taffy’s body. I swore. Dwarves and their damned resistances to magic. Taffy lifted the huge hammer. Red-faced and shaking, he scanned his office.

  “Who the devil are you?” he demanded. “Show yourself!”

  His short-sightedness was compensating for our fading potion. I stopped and drew my sword slowly from my staff. If I couldn’t get to the idol, perhaps a precise force invocation could.

  But Taffy didn’t give me a chance. With a roar, he swung the hammer in a blind arc.

  Throwing up my staff, I shouted, “Protezione!”

  The shield that bloomed from the staff met the hammer’s shockwave in an explosion of sparks. Jarring pain shot down my staff arm, and I skidded back several feet. James wasn’t as lucky. Still recovering from the last wave, the force lifted him partway up the wall and dropped him on his head.

  I turned back to Taffy. He’d yet to draw an exact bead on us, but it would only take one more shockwave to expose us, even with his poor vision. It was now or never.

  I aimed the tip of my sword at his bulging pocket and drew the sword back with a shouted “Vigore!”

  But instead of tearing the pocket open as I’d hoped, the force invocation broke his brass fasteners, and his pants dropped to his ankles. Taffy looked down at his tighty whities and back up. Tears of rage shone in his eyes, and his apple-red cheeks deepened to a furious shade of scarlet.

  Yanking his pants up his stubby legs with one hand, he brou
ght the war hammer against the floor with the other. Even with my shield in place, the shockwave lifted me from my feet.

  “Aw, crap,” James complained as he was upended again.

  “Y-you!” Taffy shouted, looking from James to me. “And you!”

  Yeah, we were fully visible now. Taffy stalked forward, one hand balling up the side of his pants.

  “We know about the idol,” I said quickly while backing away. “We know that the god got out of your control, that you didn’t mean for those women to be hurt. If you give us the idol, we can end this tonight.”

  Casting the perpetrator as the victim sometimes worked, but Taffy was beyond reason, beyond words even. He let out a barbaric cry as he drew his war hammer back.

  Before he could swing it again, four silver bolts corkscrewed in, landing with explosive force against the dwarf’s head and chest. I followed up James’s assault with a force blast that sunk his paunch. Taffy grunted, but rather than slow him, our magic only seemed to infuriate him further. Spittle flew from his ginger-bearded lips as he reset his slipper-clad feet and charged.

  With a rapid incantation, my light shield encircled Taffy’s head. If I can cut off his air, I might be able to stop him.

  The dwarf’s red-flecked eyes bulged, but he kept coming. He swung again. This time, James arrested the war hammer with a silver net of energy. Taffy struggled against it, his face turning from scarlet to blue. I gritted my teeth to maintain the shield, which was starting to waver around the dwarf’s neutralizing energy. But before my magic could come apart, Taffy ran out of oxygen.

  He mouthed a string of choice words, most of them directed at me, then collapsed.

  I released the shield while James moved the war hammer out of Taffy’s reach and bound him in silver cords. At the dwarf’s slumped body, I dug into his front pockets. My fingers closed around something smooth and wooden.

  Salting and burning the idol would destroy Gorr and close the portal to the Norse underworld—our mission would be complete—but when my hand emerged, it was holding a wooden pipe. I turned out his other pockets in disbelief, then rifled his desk. I found notebooks and transaction records with the Brunhold Development and Realty logos, but nothing even remotely cultish. There was only carbon dust and a metal reamer on the desktop.