“Commuters? They’re goblins. What the heck are they commuting to?”
An enormous goblin, who was so large that he took up the entire carved out interior of the Lincoln next to us, shoved his middle finger out the window. He resembled a giant toad with sunglasses. He waved an Uzi with one hand and shoveled donuts into his mouth with the other. Hey—donuts! This place couldn’t be all bad if they had donuts, right? Then I noticed that the donut he chomped was moldy and those in the box crawled with ants.
I leaned out my window. It had no glass anyway. The whole door was attached with duct tape.
“Hey, you!” I shouted at him. “Where are you in such a rush to get to?”
“My fucking job, you bitch! Gotta make a buck if you want cash, gas, and ass!”
I wrinkled my nose. “So poetic.”
His yellow eyes bugged. He licked his cheese-puff powered lips. “Hey, are you a human?”
Cormac stepped on the gas and darted into the miniscule space between two trucks in another “lane.” (I use the term loosely.) The toad disappeared from view.
“Roxy, please.” Cormac sounded pained. “Don’t antagonize the damned.”
“I just don’t get it. Even after you die and respawn as a goblin, you still need to commute to work?”
“Hello? It’s hell for a reason,” Bryn said. “Of course they still have to work.”
We made it all the way to downtown with only two fender benders. Big, mostly dilapidated skyscrapers loomed overhead, dropping pieces of window and office supplies down on us just for fun. Also, not sure if that was water or some other liquid that guy on Floor 67 rained down on the sidewalk below. I tried not to think about it. The urban rot could have been the set of a documentary: Life After Manners. Imagine one day all good manners disappeared from the world at the same time. Imagine the chaos that would ensue and how long it would take the world as we know it to fall apart….
That’s when things got bad.
Streets turn to viscous tar. The sticky black pitch stank. I mean, sure, everything stank so far in Wreyth, but this was a whole new stink. If you’ve ever been on a new street being poured, this smelled like that, plus three old eggs and a chili fried until burnt then vomited by a dog. The tar mucked up the tires of the cars, and traffic sank to a halt.
“That outreach program by the La Brea tar pits is paying off, I see,” I said.
Bubbles of tar belched and farted stink. The car lurched.
“We’re sinking,” Bryn said.
“That’s depressing,” Cormac said. She elbowed him.
All around us, goblins scurried from their vehicles like rats from rafts. They didn’t scurry far, though. The liquefied asphalt swallowed them to the knees, or the waist, if they kept floundering, or to the neck if they still kept struggling. A few went completely under.
If you’ve ever been to the La Brea Tar Pits, you may have heard of something called a Predator Trap. Twenty thousand years ago some happy mammoth was rambling along and stepped in the tar. Stuck, he trumpeted and whined. Helpless, noisy mastodon meat attracted dire wolves and saber tooth tigers. They jumped in to the tar to dine on a mammoth meal; instead they fed the appetite of the tar pit.
The same thing happened now, goblins apparently being no smarter than saber tooth tigers. The first wave of goblins who tried to run away from their cars attracted a second wave of goblins, less panicked but more predatory, who crept out of their cars to rob the first guys. The predators found easy pickings. Their prey couldn’t fight back, and the robbers easily shot or stabbed them and picked their pockets.
Then the criminals tried to make off with their loot, and found themselves just as stuck as their victims.
Leaving was not a viable option. Neither was staying. Our car kept sinking. Tar oozed over the duct-taped window next to me.
“We have to get out,” I said. “Onto the car roof.”
It was tricky. We had to climb out one at a time, and we had to be careful not to rock the car too much, or it would upturn into the tar. We made it onto the top of the car just as black sludge oozed into the seats.
A big mob of goblins headed toward us. More saber tooth tigers come for easy pickings? Or something worse? They looked like a lynch mob if I’d ever seen one. Which I hadn’t, outside of movies, but still. When a thousand people hate in tandem, it hits you at a visceral level. A growl inside your animal brain flares to life and screams wordlessly RUN.
They didn’t carry pitchforks, at least. Just flame throwers.
“I don’t like this,” Cormac muttered.
The goblin leading the mob looked vaguely familiar to me. She wore a brightly colored muumuu.
Holy hotdog with mustard, it was Meredith Gorm!
She cackled when she saw me in the sinking car. “Harry told me you’d be here! You destroyed my chance to return to Midgard, Hood! You’re going to pay for that! You’re on my turf now!”
“Roxy,” Bryn broke off my name like cracking china. “Do you know that woman?”
I opened my mouth.
“And don’t you dare lie to me!” added Bryn.
I closed my mouth.
Meredith Grom pointed right at us. She opened her mouth wider than a watermelon to shout: “HUMANS!”
Every single goblin, even those stuck in the tar fighting over wallets, went apeshit. Every warty, green face snapped toward us. They burst into curses, screeches, and wordless ululations. For the first time since we’d arrived in Wreyth, we saw goblins succeed in cooperation on a single, unified goal: killing us.
The tar that trapped us also slowed them, but their intent was clear. The horde swarmed toward us from all sides.
Meredith gave me the middle finger, and then turned on her flamethrower and set fire to the river of tar.
The fire spread on the tar. Astonishingly, the fact that they were burning to death only impelled the goblins stuck with us to struggle harder to reach us. From their garbled shouts, I realized they thought if they grabbed us?—killed us?—ate us?—they could get back to Midgard. None of them seemed to really know how that was supposed to work, but they wanted it so bad, they’d chew our bones to find out.
We started shooting, picking off the nearest goblins flambé. I ran out of guns. All I had left was my Spirit Gun and the two grenades. Cormac and Bryn had already run out of ammo.
I could feel the heat from the flames press against me, but the smoke was probably more dangerous. Black as tar itself, the oily smoke slicked the inside of my throat. I coughed harder than a four-packs-a-day smoker.
“Ladies,” Cormac said. How he managed to keep his voice so calm, I don’t know. If I’d tried to speak right then, I’d have peed in my words. “I’d just like to remind you that this would be a good time to pull in any favors from mysterious fairies whose lives or honor you may have conveniently saved in the past…. Any magic tokens to invoke? Any mystical names of grouchy yet good-hearted dwarves to command?”
“I’m fresh out,” Bryn said.
The car, still sinking, tilted precariously, knocking Bryn off balance. Cormac caught her and braced her before she slid into the burning tar.
“If we die, we’ll respawn here, as goblins,” Cormac said. The strain finally showed under his light tone. “But probably not together.” He held Bryn tight and stared into her eyes. “I swear, though, I will find you, Lady Bryn. You and your sister both. I won’t care what you look like on the outside, I’ll know your soul.”
He bent to press his lips to her in one first and last kiss…
“Hey!” I shouted.
They jerked apart.
I pulled a crumpled black card from the pocket of the Clogyn.
“I do have a token. Sort of. I have no idea what it will do or if it will work…’
“Roxy! Just try it!” Bryn said.
I remembered his exact words as he’d handed it to me: If you ever need my favor, call my name. I’d been miffed there was no phone number, but in fairytales, names had power in and of themsel
ves.
I held aloft the card. “Domitian Drake!”
Above us the gray sky, streaked with black smoke, resounded with a deafening… nothing.
Bryn snatched the black card from my hand. “You’re trying to invoke a magic business card? Is that even a thing?”
“I didn’t see you invoking any other thing—”
A black dragon appeared in the sky overhead and grabbed us all into his talons.
Chapter 11. How To Pay Your Dragon
“Where do you wish to go, Little Red Hood?” a cavernous voice asked.
I gave my street address.
Would this work? Bryn and Cormac were staring at me as if I’d grown scales and wings myself.
“Roxy,” Bryn said, “I’ve always suspected you had dealings with unsavory people, but I never dreamed that group included a fucking dragon.”
“Kinda news to me as well, Bryn.”
Did the dragon belong to Domitian Drake? Or was the dragon Domitian Drake? I didn’t quite dare ask. I didn’t want to offend the mighty beast while we were however the heck high we were flying over the city.
The dragon’s talons were so big, we were held inside the curled claw as if inside a cast iron cage. It wasn’t comfortable, but I felt perfectly safe. It reminded me of paragliding more than riding in an airplane, because the wind hit us, fierce and cold, through the talons. Below us, the houses and streets looked like toys on a train board.
“With our luck,” Bryn said, “The dragon is taking us to feed to its brood of babies.”
“I doubt it,” said Cormac. “Creatures from the other Echelons don’t have offspring. New souls are born only in Midgard.”
“Do you know which echelon dragons come from?” I asked. “Are dragons good or evil?”
“Dragons spawn in several different echelons. Some are from Avalon, in Faerie, and are considered good. Others are from Abbadon, in Hades, and are definitely evil. What about this one? No idea. All dragons look alike to me.”
“Then how do you tell them apart?”
“The good ones don’t eat you.”
Like a banking plane, the dragon curled over a sour version of my neighborhood. The bright beach cottages looked like a street of haunted mansions. A huge stone tower, surrounded by a moat, dominated the street.
Goblins in baggy jeans and wifebeater t-shirts lurked on the corners, smoking joints, and casually taking bets on a fight between two more goblins. They all scattered before the black dragon.
An empty cavern opened in my mind into which the primal voice poured again. “I can’t land on the tower itself, of course.”
The dragon landed before the moat of the tower. The drawbridge (yes, it had one) was drawn closed. The swill in the moat held more trash than water, but it didn’t invite casual bathing. The dragon loosened its talons and the three of us scrambled free of the claws, though not of the dragon’s shadow. It’s immense wings shaded everything.
“Where’s our house?” demanded Bryn. “I can’t see it with that tower in the way.”
“That tower is your house.”
“How many goblins live in there?” I imagined a whole garrison.
“Goblins cannot enter it any more than I can.”
A single tower with a single window at least five stories up. “Bryn, doesn’t this tower remind you of…”
“A lifeguard tower? A little, but this one is taller. Also, it’s made of stone, it has a moat, and it’s not on the beach. It’s nothing like a lifeguard tower, actually, why would you say that?”
“I was going to say, Rapunzel’s Tower.”
“Ugh.” Bryn shuddered. “Hang all fairytales.”
The black dragon drew itself upright on its haunches. In the air it had the wingspan of a 747. Sitting up like a Doberman, it was nearly as tall as the four-story tower. The dragon’s emerald eyes glittered.
“Will you also help us defeat the werewolf?” I asked. I still wasn’t sure whose side the dragon was on, what its motive was, or who it really worked for.
“You already owe me for one favor,” the dragon said. His mouth opened but the words didn’t really seem to come from there, but emerged from deeper within him. It was creepy. “I saved your lives. Pay me.”
“What do you want?”
“The Clogyn.”
“What? Hell, no!”
“You owe me whatever favor I name. I name the Clogyn!”
“Roxy,” Bryn whispered behind her cupped hand, “He may be right. You called on the favor without negotiating the price first, so now he can demand whatever he wants.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s how it works in fairytales.”
The black dragon lashed his tail. The force knocked over a garden shed half a block away. Steam hissed out of the dragon’s nostrils.
“Besides,” Cormac said. He had his hand on his gun but took care not to aim it. “It’s not smart to piss off a dragon.”
“Well, then, Bryn is right. This fairy’s tail needs some breaking.”
“Wait, I never said…” Bryn began, but I didn’t hear the rest.
I looked up into those hypnotic emerald eyes, and everything and everyone else around me might as well have melted away into a fog. All I could see was green fire, luring me, enticing me, consuming me. It wasn’t even lust. The connection went deeper than that. It was temptation. It was damnation.
Not in a hundred thousand hells, heavens, or faerie worlds could there be two creatures with such compelling jeweled eyes.
I put my hands on my hips and tossed back my hair.
“I’ll pay you $100,000 instead. Since you offered $100,000 to me for the Clogyn, that’s what this favor is worth to you, by your own admission, Mr. Drake.”
The dragon—Domitian Drake—narrowed his brilliant emeralds. Then he roared with laughter. “My lawyer will be in contact with your lawyers. I expect to be paid. If you survive the Wolf.”
The dragon flew away. His wings whipped up a small maelstrom of trash in the process. We all hacked and coughed until the bear cans and potato chip bags settled into the gutters again.
“He must be the evil kind of dragon,” Bryn said.
“Ya think?”
“I’m not so sure,” Cormac said. “It’s true he just charged you $100,000 dollars to save us from certain death. I consider a third of that debt to be mine, by the way. But he did save us. Also, he didn’t eat us, which is always a bonus in my book.”
“No, he has lawyers to do that.”
“Good point. So… definitely the evil kind, then.”
A beautiful winged fairy princess appeared in the tower window. I could tell she was a fairy by her wings, that she was a princess by her crown, and that she was from LA by her bikini top. She also had a braid of long, long hair, which she dropped from the tower. She glanced nervously at a silver Mercedes pulling up the street.
“Climb up, quick!” the fairy princess called down to us. “Before it’s too late! The werewolf is coming!”
The Mercedes roared between the tower and us.
“We’re going to have to fight him,” I said in a low voice to Bryn and Cormac. “Are you prepared?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have been so quick to reject the dragon’s offer,” Bryn said. Cormac subtly placed himself between her and the silver Mercedes.
The car door opened and Granny Rose, or rather, the Wolf who occupied her body like a puppet master, emerged, full of smirk and swagger.
“I’m afraid it’s already too late, my dear,” Granny Wolf sneered. The old lady body looked human again, devoid of fur or jaws. The top of her gray hair came to about Cormac’s chest, and she wobbled on furrowed cankles.
I couldn’t look away. The monster inside the innocent old-lady body snarled to be let loose. Its hunger was sadistic and insatiable.
Granny Wolf bared yellow teeth at me. I shivered, sure that the beast could sniff my fear as easily as I could hear its snarls.
“Granny, what a big car you have,” I said.
“The better to crush you like a bug on a windshield, my dear. You should have accepted the dragon’s offer. Now, you and your sister and your lumberjack friend will die.”
“I’m not a lumberjack,” said Cormac. “I oppose deforestation!”
“Granny, what a big ego you have,” I said.
The Wolf guffawed. “You’re sweet, Roxy. I will devour you, but that’s hardly an accomplishment. You’re nothing but a chicken nugget to me.”
“Stay away from my sister!” Bryn said.
“Ah, and there’s the sour one. Sweet or sour, though, I’ll barbeque you both.”
Granny Wolf strolled up to me and stroked my cheek with a wrinkled old-lady finger. “Unless you want to make other arrangements, sweet Roxy?”
“Ugh, you do remember you’re in the body of my 1400 year old grandmother, don’t you?”
“See?” Cormac murmured to Bryn. “That’s a pervert.”
“Why, so I am!” Wolf glanced down in surprise. “Easily changed, my dear, easily changed! That’s what’s so wonderful about this soul receptacle. It’s not a puny human body, but a fairy body, imbued with all sorts of powers and magicks! I can be anyone I want. I can even take the shape of my last host before this one, the human form in which you met me.”
The body shifted, elongated, and widened. Hair retreated in places, extended in others. Muscles bulged, beer belly protruded. Granny Wolf underwent a sex change that would have been the envy of any female-to-male tranny.
“He’s not so scary,” Bryn and Cormac said at the same time. They turned to each other and said, again at the same time, “Jinx!”
In every sense of the term. I knew that face.
“Harry Wood. And also, ‘hairy1855’, I presume.” I slapped my forehead. “I should have seen it—1855 really is your birth year!”
“Correct on all three counts, my dear. I have to thank you, Roxy. I learned of you through Meredith Gorm, who learned of you through your incompetent necromancy.”
“You said you knew my dad!”
“I lied.” He smirked. “I assumed you were just a petty psychic. When you refused to do the Blazing Sunset job, my only plan was to hold your granny hostage until you agreed.”
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