by J. A. Pitts
The metal was heavier than it looked. The chain was an alloy, much younger, and hadn’t tarnished. I recognized two of the runes: Othala and Kenaz. The first meant ancient obligation and protection. The second meant fire, passion, creativity, knowledge. Kenaz was imprinted on my left calf and on my sword.
“And this lets you call the kobolds?” I asked, letting its weight settle into my palm.
“Just one, and I don’t call him. He just shows up whether I like it or not.”
She sat on the chair opposite me and picked up her beer, taking a long draft.
“Sucks,” I said. “Sorry I killed him.”
She laughed. “He’s not from here. He’ll re-form in a few hours. This has happened before, although never quite as flamboyantly.”
“The way he ate,” I said, shuddering. “And all those teeth. He’d have had me for dessert.”
“Not beyond possibility,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “Although the plan was to see how you handled yourself.”
“Nice,” I said, feeling the heat return. Anger is fire, no two ways about it. The amulet in my hand began to glow slightly as my anger surged.
Interesting.
“He can be pretty helpful,” she said. “If I thought things were going to get out of hand, I wouldn’t have sent you to Kelly’s place.” She looked up at me, a half smile on her face. “Didn’t figure on him getting so aggressive.”
“He wanted to kill me,” I said flatly.
She studied her beer a moment longer, scratching a fingernail through the label. “Perhaps.” There was a far-off look in her eyes, as if she were remembering other incidents, other tests.
“It is not beyond his capacity,” she said finally. “He also protects the forge. He has claimed it as his territory, his and mine.”
“But would he really have killed me?” I asked, sitting up straighter in my seat.
She thought a long moment. “I’ll ask him when he gets back. But you have to understand. He’s old. Like a couple of centuries old, and there has been no dragon slayer as far back as I’ve ever heard. Kobolds are kindred to dragons, brothers of the scale, or so he claims.”
Makes a sort of twisted sense, I guess. Scales, flame. I could see the connection.
“But when I killed Jean-Paul he didn’t just melt away like your little buddy.”
“No, true,” she said. She walked across the room, her bare feet whispering across the carpet. Once she’d retrieved another pair of beers, she returned, handing me a fresh one.
I took it. It was only three in the afternoon, but it was one of those days.
“Anyway,” she continued, sitting back in her large cushy chair and slipping her feet under her bum, “he’s from the land of fire. As far as I can tell it’s another dimension. Dragons are born here, in our world.”
The beer cap dug into my palm as I twisted it off. I took a long pull, letting the rich flavor of chocolate and hops hit the back of my throat. I usually preferred something lighter, but the porter she offered definitely had a kick.
“Okay, so you have this kobold, like a familiar, that helps out around here?”
She nodded. “He sleeps in the brick forge.”
Of course he did. How silly of me to not make the connection earlier. “So what now? I proved I could kill him with condiments and foam. Where’s that leave us?”
She took a long draw on her beer and belched loudly, not unlike her kobold friend. “I say we call some of the farms and set up some time to work them. Line up farms for the whole week.”
I had to think about it for a minute. Was I comfortable around her? It all came back to Julie in the end. I needed to keep her safe, keep her customers happy for when she got back on her feet.
“Okay,” I said. “Excellent.” I got up, set my beer down on the glass and worked-iron coffee table, and fished my keys out of my jeans. “I’ll get my pack from the car.”
“Good, bathroom break,” she said, hopping up from the chair.
I made it to the door when I realized I had the amulet in my hand. It had taken on my body temperature and somehow I’d forgotten I held it. The glow had mellowed out now that I wasn’t angry, but it had a distinct strobing pulse that matched my heartbeat. Creepy.
I turned and Anezka was just closing the bathroom door. I looked down at the amulet in my hand. No way I was taking that out of the house. I crossed to the fireplace and opened the shadow box. The glass front opened with a touch and I looped the chain back over the peg. Once the door was closed again with a quiet snick, the amulet stopped pulsing.
Besides, it was obviously another test.
The disk’s markings showed in the palm of my hand. As I watched, they began to fade. Nothing permanent, thank goodness, but I had the sickening feeling it wanted to meld into my body.
By the time I was back in with my laptop, Anezka had changed into a pair of shorts and an oversized T-shirt advertising some biker bar in California.
While my computer booted, I sat back in the chair I’d been using and drank more of my beer.
I glanced over at the helmet she had sitting on her bookcase. “How do you like riding a motorcycle?” I asked.
“Not much of one,” she said with a snort. “I think my blender has more horsepower than that little rice burner.”
“Dirt bike?”
“Yeah. Good enough to get me back and forth to town. I don’t need to go far.”
“I haven’t ridden one since I was a kid,” I said. Back in … what? The early nineties? “My cousins had dirt bikes. I got to ride them one weekend while my folks were off to some couples’ encounter group.”
She took a sip of her beer and watched me.
“My Da flipped out. Not proper for a girl, or so he said.”
There was something in her eyes, at that. Some mischief or other I couldn’t peg. “How you like that Taurus?” she asked finally.
“Hate it, but it’s temporary, until I can afford something better. My car was smashed the night I fought the dragon.”
“Heard rumors,” she said, watching my face. “Read between the lines and such. Not much got out, but we knew. Those of us who care about such things.”
She wanted me to confirm details, answer questions. I wasn’t ready for that, not with her. Killing Jean-Paul was not news to her, but details—who was involved, how had it gone down, et cetera … that I was not ready to dig into.
“Did someone else work here?” I asked, changing the subject. “I noticed the forge had once been set up for a second smith.” Not too worried about rudeness at this point, and the beer had loosened up my internal editor.
“Different story,” she said with a deep sigh. “I don’t know you well, but considering how today has gone…” She shrugged. “My last lover decided to go back to his wife.”
There were no tears in her eyes, not that it surprised me.
“Oh, I knew about her, if that’s what you were wondering. Hell, she and I were lovers.” She watched me for a reaction.
I just sipped my beer and waited. I read enough articles in The Stranger to know about alternative lifestyles.
A smile flirted with the right side of her mouth, and she pressed onward. “Polyamory is a difficult arrangement. We’d met at Burning Man a few years ago, hit it off, and formed a triad.”
“Sounds like work to me.”
“Not really work so much as scheduling. It suited us for the first two years. I loved them both, but Flora didn’t like living here. Claimed the mountains and the rain kept her depressed. She wanted to go back to the desert. Justin hung out another six months, but in the end he was only interested in learning smithing skills.”
“So, he was the second smith?”
“Yep.”
“How’d your kobold buddy like him?”
“Hated him, frankly.” She rose from her chair and crossed over to the credenza. After rifling through a pile of papers, she pulled out a picture and walked over to me, dropping it onto my keyboard. The three of them were lou
nging, totally naked, under what looked like Stonehenge.
“Nice,” I said, handing the picture back. “Naked in England.”
“Oregon, actually. There’s a replica there.”
Flora and Justin were in their thirties, maybe. About a decade younger than Anezka seemed to be.
“I fell in love with Flora first,” she said, staring at the picture. “She was doing crazy chainsaw carving in nothing but a thong, a leather apron, and leather work gloves.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
Anezka smiled. “Wicked, more like it. Girl rocked my world. But Justin, oh my. He was smoking. Had a power to him that just made your panties fall off.”
I didn’t get the feeling it would take that much with Anezka.
“They were into some bizarre shit,” she went on. “He’d done taxidermy at one point, and their trailer was full of stuffed animals. Weird stuff. After a while, it started to creep Flora right out. When they moved up here, he started getting even darker, and she took to carving all the exposed beams and such with the scenes from her nightmares.”
There was a look there, in her eyes. A yearning and, maybe, a hint of fear.
“So, Justin was a creep?”
She shrugged. “Creepy, at least, but good in the sack.”
“And he picked you over Flora?”
“Other way around.”
“Meaning?”
“Flora picked me over him. Only when he wouldn’t leave, she decided I should pack the whole thing in and follow her. She was pretty angry that last night, said some harsh things about Justin and how much he’d become a sick fuck.” There was definitely pain in her eyes. Loss, sorrow.
“Why didn’t you go with her?” I asked.
“This is my place,” she said, somewhat indignantly. “I wasn’t abandoning my life because some art chick got her panties in a bunch.”
She looked down at the picture for a long while, and then dropped it on the coffee table. “Anyhoo … Bub hated Justin particularly. Flora he didn’t give two shits about.”
“Bub? That the kobold?”
“Yeah, short for Beelzebub, like the demon?”
Duh. That was a name I recognized from Da and his particular brand of crazy. “Cute.”
“Justin took me for several thousand dollars, a truck that was in his name, but I’d been making the payments.” Her voice was getting bitter. “And several different moulds we’d built to make some pretty intricate cast-iron pieces.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
For a moment, I thought maybe she was going to throw her now-empty beer bottle across the room, but she kept her cool and let out a stuttering breath.
“His stuff, technically,” she said angrily. “Bastard. My work, my designs, but we made the moulds together and I let him have them. Of course, I thought he was coming back. Still could, I suppose; he was here in the spring.”
“So now it’s just you and Bub rattling around the old place?”
“Which is why I’m looking forward to working with you for a few weeks. Hell, if you’re interested I’ll even sell you Justin’s old bike.”
Man, I hated that damn Taurus. “Well, I can’t really see getting around on a dirt bike.”
She laughed, loudly, nearly choking with the ferocity of it.
When she calmed down she got up and motioned me to follow her out to the carport. I leaned against the doorway with my arms crossed over my chest as she began moving boxes, two doors, and a slew of odds and ends to unbury what was quickly becoming a motorcycle. Once she’d dug deep enough she whipped off a large tarp to reveal a Ducati 998.
Damn, that was one hot bike.
“She needs work,” Anezka said, turning to me with a flourish. “But she ran the last time I had her unburied.” She walked over to a tall cabinet and began rummaging through coffee cans of various doodads: bolts, nuts, nails. After a minute she produced a key and walked back to the bike.
The moment was anticlimactic. She turned the key and nothing happened.
“Probably the battery,” I said.
“Yeah. I haven’t started it in six months or more.”
She pulled the tarp over the bike, and we walked back into the house.
“Bastard left the papers here and everything,” she said with an evil grin on her face. “I’ll sell it to you for three hundred dollars.”
I eyed her, looking for a catch. “No idea what that runs for normally, but I would bet you a dollar that three hundred is dirt cheap.”
You ever have one of those moments where you connect with a person, get them on a deep-down level? There was a flash, and suddenly I understood. She didn’t give a shit about the bike; she just wanted to hurt Justin, even if she never saw him again.
“You could work it off here, helping me work on the installation.”
It would be cool, learning new things, sculpting, creating art. “You sure?”
“He loved this bike,” she said. “I want to see the look on his face if he ever saunters back in here, sweet-talking and looking for a booty call.”
My left eye twitched at that. Booty call? Really? But I let her go; she was on a roll.
“Think about it,” she said. I could tell the idea was really working her. “Imagine cruising over the mountains with that powerful Italian bastard vibrating between your thighs. It would be like riding an orgasm.”
I snorted. Seriously? She didn’t really notice in her fevered state.
“I think this is a stellar idea,” she said with a quick nod.
“I have a friend who’s familiar with bikes,” I said. “Let me talk to him, maybe get him to come out and look at it. Would that be okay?”
“Yeah, great!” This had her more animated than I’d seen her.
“You’ll like Gunther,” I said. “He rides a Harley and owns his own jazz store in Seattle.”
She tightened her mouth into a not-frown and nodded her head, in that interesting news sort of way.
“Is he gay?”
“Nope.”
“Excellent. See if he’ll come out.”
We went back into the house, and I spent the next hour calling around to the farms we normally worked. I lined up the Triple Loop Ranch for tomorrow and Broken Switch Farm for Thursday and Friday. That would make Julie happy, and we’d get a good amount of shoeing in.
Monday we’d do more work here at Anezka’s place and I’d learn more of her world. It would be fun. But I wanted to clear it with Julie. Learning from another master was cool, but I didn’t want her to feel like I was cheating on her.
As I was packing up my laptop, I thought back to the amulet that now hung in the shadow box.
“Make sure Bub is fine with me coming back,” I said. “If he’s not, I’ll just meet you out at the farm.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll have a whole new respect for you.”
Yeah, I thought. Or fry me while I’m not watching.
“Wait,” I said as I realized the flaw in the plan. “We need a truck, gear, anvil … Can’t get our gear out on that dirt bike of yours.”
“I have a truck,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just meet you at the farm. Leave me the address and I’ll look it up online.”
I wrote down the address —“I thought you didn’t have a license” —and handed it to her.
She shrugged. “Not your worry, is it?”
“I guess not.”
As I was crossing the perennially empty road to the Taurus, my cell phone buzzed. It was a text from Jennifer. They wanted me to swing by the studio tonight.
Glad I got this before I was back in Bellevue or, worse, at Katie’s in Kent.
I texted her back, threw my gear in the car, and waved at the house.
Anezka stood on the porch, gave me a head nod, and walked into the house to await the return of her demon lover. Okay, maybe not lover, but they definitely had a bizarre relationship.
There was one lonely woman. I hoped we got along over the next fe
w days. So far it had been an ignominious beginning.
Twenty-eight
I called Katie and gave her the quick and dirty about my day. She was sympathetic, and we agreed to get together for dinner on Wednesday. Would be good to compare notes.
She agreed that I should have Gunther look at the bike. Better to engage an expert, she said. Funny girl.
I showed up in Everett much earlier than normal, and the security guard was just setting up his card tables. Carl had kept him on even after Frederick had stopped coming up and taking such a heavy hand in the day-to-day running of the studio. Nathan was a good guy. He’d forgiven me for my transgressions back in the spring, and I was getting to like the guy. Always quick with a smile and a kind word. Ex-military, Jennifer told me, and single. But too damn young for Anezka, and I sure wasn’t looking.
“Evening, Ms. Beauhall,” Nathan called as I walked up the stairs. “Looks like we’re getting back into the swing of things around here.”
I stopped at his little table and signed in. I thought it was a waste of time, but it made him and Carl happy.
“About damn time, if you ask me,” I said cheerfully. “Nothing like starting a new movie to disrupt the sleep patterns.”
He smiled and nodded. “Just glad to be getting a steady paycheck,” he said. “Temping just isn’t cutting it.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re around,” I said honestly. “Back in the day, we’d walk out of here in the wee hours of the morning. Never knew when some freak was going to jump you.”
“Hey, about that.” He held up a clipboard with several newspaper articles attached. “I read how you tried to stop that singer from being kidnapped up in Vancouver.”
I rolled my eyes. “Wrong place, right time.”
“You betcha,” he said seriously. “After what you did in the spring, saving all those people from that burning barn.”
Was that awe painting his face … maybe the beginnings of hero worship? I punched him lightly in the arm. “Dude, you were in Afghanistan. You’re a hero. I’m just lucky.”
Now he blushed and stepped back. “Maybe,” he said. “Still, I’m pretty impressed that you’d just mix it up with creeps like that.”