Gremlin Night

by Dale Ivan Smith

  “An ancient,” I said to Tully.

  He shook his head. “It’s a Level Three. Resident, but new.”

  I knelt beside the brownie. “Hello there, we won’t hurt you.”

  It edged back toward an opening in the wall behind it.

  “Halt,” I said. “Otherwise I’ll have to bind you, and that will hurt.”

  Resident manifestations, the law-abiding kind, didn’t want to run afoul of the Laws, so such an order usually had quick results.

  This did, but not the way I expected.

  The brownie whirled around and sprinted behind the wall.

  “Heading up!” Tully said.

  “Thanks, I figured that.” Curses.

  We ran back upstairs, Tully listening all the while. We ran into the trashed living room, as the brownie scrambled behind the wall there. A little wooden panel closed. It became obvious there mustn’t be an exit outside.

  “It’s a house brownie,” I said.

  We ran back upstairs.

  Tully stopped at the top of the stairs, and I practically plowed into him, catching myself at the last moment.

  “What is it?” I hissed.

  He stepped carefully into the hall and motioned at me to follow, a finger to his lips. I tip-toed onto the landing, listening. He pointed up, in the direction of the room. So, the house brownie was back up in the monitoring room. But if we went back up there, blundering in, it would just run back down, and we’d be ping-ponging up and down the house for the rest of the night. We needed to know what was going on.

  Therese had been murdered. Perhaps there was no connection between her murder and what was going on tonight. But our sentinel had been killed, just before the outbreaks. That struck me as a highly unlikely coincidence. Therese would have been able to detect the outbreaks, and what had caused them.

  My supervisors liked to say I jumped to conclusions, but this one seemed blindingly obvious. There had to be a connection.

  The brownie was a witness. We had to speak with it. But it wasn’t letting us get near at the moment.

  I drew my binding knife from my jacket.

  For once tonight, there wasn’t a gremlin around to mess with my spellcasting, nor a ward to overcome, nor an immediate threat of electrocution from a gargoyle slinging lighting around. This spell was going to take energy and time but I’d burn more energy, including some of my own, to save on the time. I closed my eyes and remembered what the observation room looked like. Fixed it in my mind. The mirrors on either side of the door, the little table with the basket of yarn and the knitting needles, the window.

  The brownie must have gone back there because that was a special place for it. Probably where it had spent a lot of time with Therese.

  I drew in mana, streams of it appearing in the air around me, until my binding knife glimmered red-gold, and the reflected light actually cast shadows around us.

  The air smelled of cinnamon and heated metal, yet the knife’s hilt remained cold to my touch. It began trembling, reaching its limits. In a moment, it wouldn’t be so cold at all. It would suddenly heat up until it burned my skin.

  My bones began to ache.

  Alright, Liz, I told myself, time to cast.

  I pointed the knife up the stairs, where the brownie lurked.

  "You and I are bound together," I proclaimed, the Dutch words sounding harsh in my ears.

  I twisted my wrist and released the spell. Golden light shot from the blade’s tip and through the wall. For an instant, the brownie was silhouetted in the brilliant golden light. It stiffened.

  "Wait for me," I said, and led Tully upstairs to the observation room.

  The brownie stood stock still in the center of the room, staring out the window.

  I circled around until I faced it.

  It was trembling.

  "There's no reason to fear us," I said.

  "Therese died." The brownie's words were a high soprano squeak.

  "Who killed her?" I asked.

  The brownie shook with fear. Brownies were very fearful creatures to begin with. I felt its horror at Therese’s death, seeing its human mistress murdered in her own home. It had experienced her agony and suffering.

  I blinked tears away and knelt down beside it. We needed answers. All I had to do was tug on the mana binding us together, and I could have compelled it to speak. But the brownie wasn’t a criminal. It was a gentle soul confronted by wretched horror.

  “Please, can you help us?” I asked. “Help us learn what happened to Therese.”

  The brownie nodded, its bangs fell over its eyes. Its little pointed cap bobbled and threatened to fall off its tiny head.

  “Ravagers,” it said.

  I froze.

  Ravagers were particularly nasty and brutal newer manifestations that lived only to cause pain and death. The product of the modern subconscious, a noxious stew of modern nightmares, brutality, the internet and hatred of the other. We hunted them down wherever we encountered them.

  I shuddered. "Who commanded them?” Ravagers were thankfully rare, and when they occurred, were conjured. I couldn't remember if I'd ever heard of ravagers appearing without conscious manipulation. That was the thing – directly conjuring a permanent manifestation worked by teasing out the dreams, nightmares, and folklore of the collective subconscious, which on its own, could spawn fleeting manifestations, invisible to everyone but those like Tully and me who could see the arcane reality.

  The brownie’s answer was almost too quiet to hear. “I saw no one,” the brownie said.

  “Why would someone want to kill Therese Sprig?” Tully asked.

  The brownie huddled down, looked at me, brushing its brown hair away from its golden eyes.

  “Please answer him,” I said.

  “She knew many things. She worried so much. She worried about me, about the house, and especially about Sylvas.”

  “Who’s Sylvas?” Tully asked.

  I nodded at the brownie.

  “A great elf. Friend of Therese, and of me. He took care of us.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “Do not know. He had gone out on errand for Therese, to get special medicines. Two sunrises ago.” The brownie lowered its head, rubbed its face. It was crying. I rubbed my wet face with the back of my hand.

  I bent down. “She was dying.”

  “Yes. She called it, mmm, can-cer. She took human medicine, so much of it. She said she didn’t have much time to live. Sylvas and me-self didn’t want her to die. Ever. She cared about us. Cared about all creatures.”

  “But she was dying, and that must have hurt you.”

  The brownie jerked its head up, eyes suddenly blazing. “Therese the best of you. Wrong that she should die when so many bad humans go on living and hurting, hurting us and hurting yourselves.”

  “Life’s so not fair,” I said, “not by a million miles. It is very unfair most of the time.” Suddenly there was a lump in my throat, and I swallowed heavily. “I’m so sorry.”

  The brownie looked at its hands. “Therese told me to hide. Said bad things outside. She turned wards off.”

  “Why?” I asked. The wards were tuned to Therese’s command, of course.

  The brownie rubbed its eyes. “She said she was sorry, but she had to trap the ravagers.”

  Tully and I exchanged puzzled looks. That didn’t make sense. Why would she want to trap the ravagers? And why hadn’t she asked for help from R.U.N.E.? And the wards were turned back on when we arrived. How could that have happened if Therese was dead?

  “Trap the ravagers?” I shook my head. It was crazy. Again, why would she want to trap the ravagers? The brownie saw things in a very particular way, even more so than many other sorts of manifestations. Probably because it was a house brownie, and was bound to this place, and the person who had lived here. Depending upon who lived here next, the brownie’s world would change. If no one lived here, it would become “furtive,” almost like a ghost, waiting for someone to come. Bro
wnies were rare these days, despite the influx of mana in the world since the 1960s.

  Trying to get information from it was hard, because it just didn’t see things the way we did, nor ask questions. It accepted the reality it found itself in. It was a helper, a companion, but mostly, it was a denizen of the domicile it found itself in, as the old sorcerer’s saying went. I shook my head again. I sounded like my grandmother Mary.

  “She said she wanted to protect Sylvas, and was sorry she couldn’t protect me the same way.”

  “None of this makes sense,” Tully said. He was right. It didn’t. Why would she let her killers inside? And what had happened to them?

  It hit me then and my mouth went dry. Therese had cast a ritual sacrifice spell. She’d set a trap for the things that apparently lurked outside her house.

  “We need to check Therese’s room again,” I said.

  The brownie shook its head. “No, bad place now.”

  “You don’t have to come,” I told it.

  Tully raised an eyebrow.

  “She’d prepared a trap. A sacrifice spell, I’m sure of it.”

  “But I didn’t see any evidence of a spell.”

  “Sacrifice spells are different.” They were banned for a reason. Therese using one was an act of desperation, and crazy, literally, since it was a different sort of spell. She was a clairvoyant, not a sacrifice sorcerer. Taking on two different kinds of sorcery could start you down the road to either wizardry or madness, and only a very few sorcerers had the potential to become wizards, capable of casting more than one sort of sorcery. Sacrifice spells could be dark, or gray. Dark was when you sacrificed others. Gray was when you sacrificed yourself.

  Blood magic was a way to boost sorcery, but it was the opposite of the complex rituals that sacrifice spell-casting needed. I did blood magic because I had to. My mind wandered down the rabbit hole of blood magic, and why I needed to do it.

  “Marquez?” Tully asked.

  I blinked.

  He and the brownie both stared at me.

  “Are you alright, Marquez?” Tully asked.

  I shook myself. “Sorry, just thinking.” I couldn’t let on what I’d been brooding about just then.

  He didn’t look convinced. The brownie just looked uncertain, but Tully and I were new to it, so it didn’t know us, or know what our actions meant.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s get this done with.” I strode down the hall back to Therese’s room, breathing through my mouth to try and minimize the stench. Poor Therese.

  Tully stepped into the room, while the house brownie huddled behind my leg. I glanced down. It watched Tully, keeping my leg between it and a view of the bed. I didn’t blame it. I strained to see the mana in the air. There wasn’t any. None. That was weird. There had been traces a few minutes ago.

  Tully slowly swept his gaze over the room. Up, down, left, right, fast, slow. Then in reverse. Then in a counter-clockwise circle. He peered up at the ceiling, watching something, then looked down at the floor.

  All I could see were cobwebs on the ceiling, and dust bunnies. Weird place for dust bunnies.

  The floor had more dust bunnies. Strange, because the rest of the house was spotless.

  A terrified little moan came from my ankle. The house brownie starred at the dust bunnies on the floor.

  “Bad things,” it said. “Very bad!”

  My eyes narrowed. The sacrifice magic had worked.

  Tully bent down. “All that’s left of the ravagers.”

  Residue. I shuddered. Therese’s ritual took a great deal of mana to fuel it, to destroy the ravagers, which meant blood, and more than that, pain.

  She was dying of cancer. But she would die for a purpose, something worth dying for.

  Tully plucked a scrap of paper out of the largest dust bunny. Faint embers of mana rose like sparks from a dying fire and glittered for an instant in the air before vanishing. How had we missed that before?

  It was a small piece of parchment paper, with crimson writing on it. He held it up, reading it. I watched his dark eyes scan the paper.

  His jaw tensed.

  “What is it?” I asked him. “Where did it come from?”

  “From one of the ravagers.” His voice sounded stiff. He held out the paper.

  I stepped into the room, the brownie still clutching the back of my leg, riding it like a child might ride the leg of a parent. My fingers trembled as I reached for the paper. I brushed Tully’s hand. It was so warm. It felt like connecting to the bones of the earth, reassuring and solid. I wanted to grasp his hand and hold it.

  I breathed in deeply and took the paper. It had been crumpled into a ball from the looks of the surface.

  I smoothed it out, discovering two pages of parchment. The writing was liver-colored. Bile rose in my throat. It was blood. You’d think blood wouldn’t bother me so much, since I spilled some of my own once or twice recently, but my stomach roiled at the sight of it.

  The words had been written in blood.

  The words stung my eyes.

  I, Therese Sprig, acknowledge the great elf, Sylvas Highspire, to be my companion and lover. He means more to me than anything else in the world. I want him to live forever.

  He is guilty of no wrong in my eyes. What he has done I accept, because I love him. The Councils of the Hidden, from the Lodge of the Ancient Ones to my own R.U.N.E., are wrong to ban this love.

  My heart is with him, my soul is with him, no matter what happens to this frail body.

  The cancer is taking me slowly, so I will go quickly.

  But I will not die in vain.

  The darkness wants to claim my knowledge for its own foul ends.

  A wizard came to me, demanding that I give over Sylvas. A wizard whose identity was cloaked from me, both physically and magically.

  I refused the demand. The wizard left me, telling me I would die and Syvlas would be destroyed, all for naught, unless I gave him up. Then the wizard conjured the ravagers, and set them outside my house, saying they would be released to ravage on Solstice eve.

  That was a day ago. Solstice is tomorrow.

  I give my body, my soul, my life, to save the ones I love, from the darkness, and my lover from himself, for he will blame himself for his actions, but he is blameless.

  The little one I place in the charge of the first good souls to find it, to aid and care for it, not matter what new form it takes. For all creatures, human and manifestation alike, possess souls, no matter what the Councils claim.

  I die to banish the darkness here.

  I closed my eyes. Even after it had been discharged, even after the parchment had been emptied of mana, the power of her sacrifice magic thrummed through me, and made my guts churn and my bones ache.

  The brownie cried out, a wail that built to a high, piercing sound. It clung tightly to my leg.

  “I don’t want to go!” It wailed. “This house is all the world. Must stay here.”

  “We will protect you!” I reached for it, trying to reassure it. A golden glow grew around it, like when you see the glow from a blazing fire behind a hill. My hands tingled, and the tingling became an electric shock. I pulled it back.

  The brownie opened its little mouth for one last scream, but blurred into the golden aura. The golden light swirled around, a little tornado of mana. It spun out of the room like a cartoon character. Tully raced after it.

  I ran after him.

  We reached the ground floor. The tornado spun up, through the ceiling and outside.

  “What was that?” I asked Tully.

  He looked sad. “A transfiguration. The house brownie has become an elemental manifestation, waiting to take on a new form.”

  An elemental. Of course. The house brownie had been freed, but was no longer a house brownie. That’s what Therese had meant when she wrote, no matter what new form it takes.

  Therese had been convinced that manifestations had souls like us humans. Me, I didn’t know. What I did know was that Therese h
ad loved that brownie and wanted to save it from being bound to the house. A final gift to her little friend.

  “I thought Therese said whoever found the brownie would help it,” Tully pointed out.

  “Maybe she just meant our presence would help it become an elemental, get it ready for whatever new manifestation it might become.” Or maybe Therese had merely hoped that would happen. The house brownie obviously had cared for her, and unless I had massively misread the letter, Therese had cared deeply for the brownie.

  I rubbed my eye and forced myself to focus on what we needed to do next.“A wizard was here,” I said. “Therese’s last testament said the wizard was cloaked, both physically and magically.”

  “That’s possible, but very difficult.”

  “Our magical super artifact?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, but it still seems pretty close to impossible.”

  “Pretty close to impossible isn’t impossible, though,” I pointed out.

  Just then, the front door opened. A stunningly beautiful woman wearing a gossamer-thin body veil stood there, and smiled a welcoming smile at Tully and me.

  “Playthings, you are mine,” she said.

  10

  The nymph had blond hair like spun gold, wide, green eyes, a heart-shaped face, and an amazing figure.

  I backed up and brandished my binding dagger. “Not so fast, nymph.”

  The nymph’s smile widened. “That will not bind me,” she said and sashayed into the house.

  Tully drew his R.U.N.E.-issue revolver. The iron-tipped bullets would destroy the manifestation. It would be an ugly end, but effective.

  “You cannot resist me,” the nymph said.

  The air hummed with her power and whispered an echo of her words.

  “Love this woman,” she told Tully.

  “Love this woman,” echoed the air.

  Tully froze in mid-aim. Sweat broke out on his forehead. His arm shook.

  “You are strong, young one,” she said. “But not strong enough. Do as I command.” Tully’s pistol clattered on the hardwood and he turned to face me.

  I ran at her, stabbing with my binding knife.

  Strong arms reached out and grabbed me. I struggled to slip out of Tully’s grasp, but failed. Tully was even stronger than he looked.