by M. D. Massey
Minutes later, Elmo the ogre came clambering back out of his burrow with a dirty Tickle Me Elmo doll in one hand and a threadbare quilt in the other. He set the truck bed back down, staring at the entrance to his burrow with a sigh. Then, he wiped his nose with the blanket and slowly walked over to me with his shoulders slumped and head hung low.
“I know it’s rough, big guy. But it’s just not safe for you around here right now.”
Elmo exhaled heavily, plopping down on the ground clutching his binkie and his doll. For lack of any more appropriate response, I patted his head gently with one hand as I dialed Maureen’s cell phone with the other. Finnegas rarely used technology, but his assistant would know how to track him down.
“Yeah, Maureen? Can you get Finnegas to borrow one of the flatbeds from Ed, and send him out to the corner of East Yager Lane and Cameron Road? Yeah, I know it’s out in the middle of nowhere, but he knows where it is. Tell him I’ll explain when he gets here. Uh-huh, thanks, Maureen. I owe you one.”
With the liberal application of druid magic to disguise the ogre’s appearance, Finnegas and I got Elmo back to the junkyard without causing a scene. Once there, we dressed his wounds and hid him in the depths of the yard, near the rusted van where Finn had camped out before he got clean and sober.
The old man shook his head as he checked the ogre’s wounds for the third time. “If I’d known what he’d be walking into, I’d have just let him stay here at the junkyard,” he muttered. “Damned fae are so stupid sometimes. They’re a danger to their own existence. As if an ogre would attack a defenseless teenage girl!”
I yawned and stretched where I sat in the open side door of the van. “Way I figure it, Elmo must’ve seen the murder going down on his way back to his burrow, right after you dropped him off. Then he stepped in, trying to save her. I think the girl was probably already dying or dead at that point, but he got some nasty cuts for his trouble just the same. Killer probably didn’t have time to finish Elmo off before the commotion drew the attention of the local residents. So, the perp split and covered his or her tracks, leaving Elmo to take the rap.”
I grabbed a beer from the cooler Finn kept in his van and popped the tab with a hiss. The old man didn’t sleep here anymore, so the beers were warm. I didn’t mind. It was a little early to start drinking, but it had been an eventful twenty-four hours. I needed something to calm my nerves and settle my gut.
Or, rather, something to make me forget Jeretta’s mangled corpse.
Shit.
Finn finished fussing with the ogre and took a seat on an upturned plastic bucket cater-corner to me. “What do you know about the girl who was killed?”
I sniffed and scratched my nose with a knuckle. “Not much. She was clairvoyant, to an extent. Couldn’t control it, but from what I understand she occasionally received visions.”
Finnegas nodded slowly. “That could be significant. If her gift had revealed something about the killers, well… that could speak to a motive for her death.”
“I thought the same thing. I’ll need to ask around the trailer park to see if Jeretta spoke to anyone.” I thought back to the evidence, or lack of it I’d found in the field. “Finn, what kind of magic do you think they used to hide their tracks?”
“Meh, it’s hard to say. Something modern, more than likely. New magic.”
“You mean technomancy?”
The old man pulled out his tobacco pouch and started rolling one up. “Yup.” He licked the paper and finished rolling the cigarette, pointing it at me for emphasis. “So, you be sure to be on your guard. Whoever’s behind these killings, they probably won’t take it kindly if you start getting too close to exposing them.”
“Fat chance of that. I’ve been at this case for weeks, and I’m still no closer to finding a killer.” I glanced over at the ogre, who had his nose in the dirt, watching a dung beetle push piece of dog turd across the yard. “If I only I could get Elmo to finger the killers. Too bad he doesn’t talk.”
Finn stroked his beard, allowing the ash from his cigarette to lengthen as he considered the situation. “Well, we could teach him sign language.”
“Who, Elmo? That’s…”
“Crazy?” Finn interjected with a wry grin. “You’re just upset because you didn’t think of it first.”
I scratched my head as I considered his suggestion. “You’re right, I do wish I’d thought of it. If scientists can teach gorillas, chimps, and orangutans sign language, then I suppose we can teach Elmo here how to do it. There’s just one problem—I don’t know how to sign.”
Finnegas took a long drag on his cigarette, blowing it out through his nostrils. “Meh, don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. You don’t live on this earth for two millennia without picking up the odd language or two. I’ll start working on it, and I’ll weave a more permanent glamour to hide his appearance from Ed and the yard crew.”
“That sounds like a plan. In the meantime, I’ll head back to the trailer park to see if Jeretta knew something that might have gotten her killed. Let me know if you make any headway with Elmo.” I poured out the dregs of my beer and started walking back to the main building to clean up before heading out.
“You’re welcome!” Finnegas shouted at my back sarcastically.
“I’d have thought of it eventually!” I yelled over my shoulder, just to get his goat.
Four
I spent the afternoon canvassing the trailer park without much to show for it. Most of the fae wouldn’t speak to me, and those who did were none too friendly. I had several doors slammed in my face, got spat on twice, and an old spriggan tried to run me over with his riding lawnmower.
Overall, I’d say it was quite a productive afternoon.
After I’d knocked on every door in the neighborhood, I decided to drive by a few of the other murder scenes, just to see if there might be some bit of evidence or a pattern I’d missed. Thus far, there’d been over a dozen killings, all fae, but each murder had followed a different MO.
One had been strangled, another drowned, another overdosed on heroin… the way the victims had died read like a script from that T.V. show, 1,000 Ways to Die. Pedestrian-motor vehicle accidents, falling off buildings, electrocution, fire—heck, one poor shmuck had even fallen into a vat of lye at a wild game processing facility. And in every single instance, the killer or killers had left nothing behind to indicate who was responsible.
At first, nobody had put the killings together, and they were written off as accidents. But as more and more fae kept dying, everyone had started getting scared.
And that’s when Sal had tracked me down, while I’d still been recovering from Maeve leaving me to starve to death. She hadn’t taken kindly to being double-crossed, and if frying me on the spot wouldn’t have meant that she’d have been trapped herself, I doubted I’d be alive today. Instead, she’d left me for dead in a cavern deep underground, where I’d languished for weeks on end until Finnegas had finally found me.
Understandably, I had mixed emotions about catching this killer. Truth was, I really hadn’t put much effort into catching the persons responsible for the killings. There were damned few fae I could stand, and even fewer I’d call friends. Maeve’s punishment for my betrayal was just one in a long list of insults my friends and I had suffered at the hands of the fae. In my experience, the faery folk were a cruel and heartless people who completely lacked empathy, at least where humans were concerned.
We were like some mundane species of wildlife to them—often intriguing, sometimes amusing, on rare occasions useful, but ultimately expendable. For millennia, the aes sídhe had treated humans like playthings, using their superior skill in and knowledge of magic to meddle in our affairs and cause all manner of havoc. Once, humans had even worshipped them as gods—capricious, callous, malevolent deities who were just as likely to curse you as they were to answer your prayers.
Thus, my current moral dilemma. It wasn’t just for shits and giggles that I’d decided to cut the earthbound fae off from
that vast pool of magic called Underhill. Naw, those fuckers had it coming.
In fact, a couple of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the most ancient and powerful of the fae, had conspired with me to make that happen. And yes, they’d been trying to save Underhill from its eventual destruction, more than they were trying to lend me a hand in getting out from under Maeve’s thumb. But far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’d offered me the opportunity to knock the earthbound fae down a peg, and who was I to refuse?
So, if the fae wanted to kill each other off, or if some third party had taken it on themselves to pare down their numbers, why should I be the one to stop them?
But seeing Jeretta all cut up in a pool of her own blood, well… that had shaken me up a bit. Not that I’d known her all that well, and I doubted if any of those trailer park kids would piss on me to put me out if I was on fire. Still, she was just a kid, and even if she belonged to a race of sociopaths, it didn’t make it right that somebody had sliced her up like a paper snowflake.
Despite my sympathy for Jeretta, I still wasn’t feeling particularly enthused about working this case. And as I drove from murder site to murder site, I couldn’t help but think that I was helping the fox instead of the farmer by tracking down this killer. Fae had been killing humans indiscriminately since time immemorial, and honestly, I had better things to do than save the fae from a fate they deserved.
Shit, have I really become that damned cynical?
The answer was yes, yes I had. The fae had made me kill the love of my life, leaving her spirit to haunt me until we fulfilled some cosmic destiny together. Or, at least, that’s what she’d told me not long ago. Plus, they’d tried killing me, more times than I cared to count. And during my career as a hunter, I’d seen their gruesome handiwork firsthand.
Sure, most fae were just trying to blend into human society and survive, but their fundamental nature was to take what they wanted from us by any means necessary. And if that meant cheating, lying, stealing, raping, or killing, well… there were always going to be fae willing to cross that line.
Maybe I was just feeling cross because I was bone tired and my shoulder was aching like a motherfucker, or maybe I just didn’t give a shit because deep down I would always hate the fae. Regardless of my reasons, I decided I’d call Sal when I got home and tell him I was being stonewalled by his people, so it was pointless to continue the investigation. I didn’t feel right about reneging on our deal, but I figured it was high time I stayed away from the fae, for good.
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
Sal was disappointed at the news, but he said he didn’t blame me—which made me feel like even more of a heel for quitting on him. But I had rescued his son from a fae sex trafficking ring, so I didn’t allow myself to feel too bad. I spent the rest of the afternoon running through the work my uncle had left me, which mostly consisted of diagnosing cars he wanted to flip and pulling parts in the yard. That helped me get my mind off my conversation with Sal, and the knowledge that none of the fae could bother me inside the junkyard helped cheer my mood considerably.
Part of the reason I’d decided to live in my uncle’s junkyard was because iron was anathema to the fae. I’d moved to Austin from my hometown after my girlfriend Jesse’s death, because everything back home had reminded me of her. This was supposed to be a new start, and the junkyard provided me with the perfect way to isolate myself from the fae. All that iron and steel, combined with the extensive network of wards and spells I’d placed on the metal fence around the yard, served to make the junkyard a fae-free zone.
And that was exactly how I liked it. In the few years since I’d taken up residence here, I’d spent considerable time and effort shoring up the wards so nothing supernatural could enter unless I wanted it to. The junkyard was like my own private island, a place where I could let my guard down and escape all my worries.
Some people liked to golf, some liked to hang out at the park, and others liked to go to the lake to relax. Me? I preferred to wrench on old junked cars, in the only place where I knew I didn’t have to watch my back.
I was up to my elbows in grease, pulling the heads off an engine from a VW Bug, when I heard someone clear their throat behind me.
“Are those heads OEM or aftermarket?”
I grabbed a rag and stood up, wiping my hands as I turned around to match the voice with a face. I didn’t like being interrupted when I was working, which was why I did a lot of my work deep in the bowels of the yard. Still, it kind of went with the territory.
A lot of gearheads liked to pull their own parts from the yard to save money. Ed charged less for those parts since he didn’t have to pay an employee to remove them, so occasionally I’d have to help our DIY customers find what they were looking for in the yard. I didn’t make anything off it, but it helped Ed keep the doors open, which was all that mattered.
What freaked me out about this guy was that he’d managed to sneak up on me. Had I been so caught up in my work that I just hadn’t noticed?
I did my best to plaster a smile on my face, my efforts at good humor stalling when I saw the guy. He definitely wasn’t dressed to go diving under the hood of some junker, that was for sure. For one, he didn’t have any tools with him. Second, he wore neatly-pressed tan slacks, a blue polo shirt, and a black casual jacket that said he probably spent his spare time on the links, and not working on a project car in his home garage.
The guy had aviators on, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but his too-friendly smile set me off immediately. That, and his hundred-dollar haircut. Nope, this guy definitely didn’t belong here, that was for damned sure.
I finished, wiping my hands off just as I made up my mind about liking the guy—I didn’t. Still, he might have been a legit customer, so I couldn’t be outright rude to him either.
“They’re oversized heads, aftermarket—designed to fit ninety-four-millimeter pistons. This engine came out of a souped-up Bug that some kid wrecked in a street race. His loss, your gain, if you’re interested in them.”
I could tell the guy’s eyes were darting around the yard, even though he kept his head level and fixed on me. “I might be, I might at that. I actually came out here looking for parts for a ’67 Stingray.”
“Three-twenty-seven, or three-ninety-six?” I asked. It was a trick question, because Chevy didn’t offer either of those engines in the Corvette that year.
“Oh, you’ll have to ask my mechanic that,” the man said as he scratched his nose with his thumb. “I’m just the money man, you know.”
Dodged that bullet, didn’t you? The guy was cagey, that was for sure.
“Yeah, I get it,” I responded noncommittally. “You just want to enjoy the end product. Nothing wrong with that… if you don’t want to get your hands dirty.”
The man’s smile turned cold. “Well, if you have people to do those things for you…” He paused in mid-sentence, doing a double-take at something or someone behind me. “My goodness, but he’s a big fella!”
I turned to see Elmo, glamoured to look like a very tall human and dressed in coveralls that were three sizes too small, carrying another VW engine over his shoulder. Finnegas had put him to work in the yard—with Ed’s consent, of course. Ed was always taking in strays, so it wasn’t that big a deal, and we’d been keeping Elmo busy in the far reaches of the yard where he couldn’t get into too much trouble.
“Just set it down over there, Elmo,” I said as I pointed to a wooden pallet close by.
The man was a bit too interested in the ogre, which made me nervous. Though it was rare, some mundane humans possessed magical gifts of which they were unaware. Sometimes that meant they’d see glimpses of the world beneath, even through a decent glamour. The last thing I needed was some yuppie freaking out in my uncle’s junkyard, so I sent Elmo on his way.
“Strange name, Elmo. Don’t hear that much these days.”
“Yeah, it’s a nickname,” I replied, wishing I could get back to my work.
“Does he talk much?”
I sighed internally. “No, not at all. Although he is learning sign language. Anyway, sir, is there anything I can help you with?”
The man stared after Elmo, then shook his head. “No, as it turns out that was all I needed.” He turned and walked off without so much as a “have a good day” or wave goodbye.
Fucking entitled yuppies.
I cracked my neck as I watched him leave. Something about the guy was just familiar, but hell if I could figure it out. I put the strange conversation out of my mind, and went back to losing myself in my work.
A few nights later, a tremendous roar that came from the depths of the yard woke me from a deep sleep. Since Finnegas had gone back to Éire Imports for the night, the only people left in the junkyard were me and Elmo.
Shit.
I pulled on some jeans, grabbed my Craneskin Bag, and sprinted barefoot through the yard, casting a minor cantrip to protect the soles of my feet along the way. It was past midnight and the sky was overcast, so I drew the flaming sword from my Bag, both for a source of light and as a “just in case” measure.
As I ran, the ogre’s roar grew louder and more intense. I also heard a lot of banging and crashing—obviously Elmo was putting up a fight. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck were standing up, which told me someone was working some major magical juju nearby.
Several thoughts ran through my mind, starting with, Who the fuck is mucking around with magic—in my junkyard, no less—at this ungodly hour? And, more importantly, Why are they attacking Elmo? I put on more speed as I raced toward the commotion.
I was still running when Elmo’s roars turned into a cry of pain, which then morphed into a high-pitched whine. I turned the corner around a stack of cars at top speed, only to find the ogre pinned to another stack of cars by several large lengths of pipe and scrap metal piercing his chest.
As I ran up to the gentle giant, I looked left and right for any sign of his attacker or attackers. I spotted a fleeting shadow, just as it ducked around a corner fifteen yards away. I pivoted on heel to give chase, but the ogre’s labored breathing and soft whines stopped me in my tracks. Kicking myself for not having a projectile weapon or suitable long-distance spell handy, I thrust the sword into the dirt and focused my attention on helping Elmo.