Frostbite (Modern Knights Book 1)

by Joshua Bader

  “Hold it right there, big guy. Federal agent.” Agent Devereaux displayed her gold shield as if it were a cross of faith and Kerath was a marauding vampire.

  I jogged to catch up. “It’s all right, Kerath. She’s a friend…right?” I looked at her for reassurance.

  She just kept eyeing the troll nervously. He was actively suppressing his trollishness, but he was still mammothly intimidating. At last, Devereaux said, “Yeah, a friend. I just came by to let you know about Salazar’s condition.”

  Kerath offered her a small bow. “My apologies, then. I did not mean to frighten you. Mr. Fisher and I have been engaged in some rather important business negotiations all evening.”

  “Business negotiations?” She shook her head. “No, no, I’m off duty. I don’t want to know.”

  I resented the implications that my business was, by definition, criminal. “Hey, it’s not like that. We were just...”

  “Shut up and run.”

  “What?”

  “No questions, just run.”

  I grabbed Devereaux’s arm and pulled her out of the way, just as my mind registered the rumble of the engine. A large black van burst out of the night, barreling straight down on us. Devereaux resisted, the momentum clash throwing us both down to the ground, dead center of the van’s path. Rather than swerve away, the van accelerated. Its chrome bumper glimmered with the promise of death.

  I really wished I knew how to throw a fireball.

  7

  There was a loud metallic shriek of impact, but no pain. The van slammed to a stop three feet from my face. In a matter of seconds, Kerath had grown a foot taller and two feet wider. The front end of the vehicle collapsed against his oversized ham-hock fists. The van’s momentum stopped completely, but the troll didn’t even budge.

  “What the hell? I knew all those luck...”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Devereaux was yanking me up to my feet. My shoulder, still tender from my last dance with the wendigo, protested. “Run,” she said, echoing my subconscious.

  My feet obeyed, though I didn’t understand. My hearing was ripped away by a massive explosion. After sound left, my connection to Earth was broken: the force of the blast flung me ragdoll style. For a moment, I hurtled effortlessly through space, before a sudden and harsh reintroduction to the ground.

  I wanted to pass out, rather than feel the pain, but my body refused to cooperate. Instead, I lay there wishing the ringing would leave my ears alone. When it had died down to a loud roar, I rolled over to find Devereaux. “You okay?”

  She nodded a little, but didn’t try to stand up.

  “Thanks…how did you know it would blow?”

  With effort, she forced herself to sit up. “Explosives wired to the undercarriage. Got a pretty good look at them after you tripped me.” Devereaux grunted as her hands explored her ribs. “Are people always trying to kill you or is it just when you’re within shouting distance of an FBI agent?”

  I shook my head gingerly, still not wanting to stand. “Just feds and faeries, I guess…oh crap.” I forced myself to stand then, as I remembered Sir Kerath. His body lay fifty feet off, full troll now. What little of his clothing hadn’t been torn apart by the sudden growth had been burnt off by the blast.

  I rushed over to him and knelt, feeling for a pulse. Mercifully, troll wrist anatomy was not vastly different and I soon found his weak, but present, heartbeat. I heard Devereaux’s footsteps behind me. “What on Earth…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Troll,” I answered. “Unseelie Court ambassador, he just saved our lives, and I don’t have time to explain right now.” I patted Kerath’s cheek. “Kerath, come on, wake up. I don’t know what to do here.”

  His wounds were extensive. He may have stopped the runaway vehicle with little effort, but the fiery explosion had caught him at ground zero. I heard Devereaux behind me, pushing buttons on what I could only pray wasn’t a cellphone.”

  I glanced back, saw that it was, and yelled, “Devereaux! Put that damn thing down and help me get him back inside…or do you want to explain to the Boston PD what a troll is?”

  That caught her and she pulled the phone down from her face. “But I don’t even know what a troll is.”

  “My point exactly. Now help me get him inside and I’ll explain it to you. Leave him out here and you can handle explanations to all the first responders.”

  “But they’d want to talk to you…you’d have to explain,” she stammered.

  I grinned. “Can’t talk to a Valente employee without a warrant.”

  Her look was thunderous, but she bent over and hooked her arms under Kerath’s knees.

  8

  Getting Kerath back upstairs and inside my apartment was rough work, but Agent Devereaux, despite her petite frame, was in much better shape than I was. I cleared the dinner table with a dish-scattering back arm sweep and laid him on top of it, just as the first sirens pulled into the parking lot.

  Devereaux was frantic. “What do I tell them?”

  I looked over Kerath’s wounds. I remembered stories of trollish regeneration, but his had only stabilized, not improved. I had to hope whatever vital force let him go toe to toe with a van would hold him a little longer. “Stick to the facts. A van charged us, tried to run us down, then it blew up.” I paused for a second. “Do we have to tell them anything?”

  “I’m a federal agent, Fisher. I can’t just hide behind a Valente lawyer.”

  I wanted to call Duchess right then, but I had no desire to explain to my boss why an FBI agent was making midnight house calls any more than Devereaux wanted to explain what a troll was. “Look, just tell them what you have to and keep them out of here. I’ve got to do something to save him.”

  “Right.” She nodded, as if battlefield triage was an everyday thing. “But you owe me an explanation.” With that, she disappeared, closing the front door behind her.

  Turning back to Kerath, I wondered what would happen if I let an Unseelie Ambassador die during a diplomatic meeting. I was certain the fae would want reparations far more dire than a single mortal child or a hundred years of slave labor. Again, I frantically whispered in the troll’s ear, “Sir Kerath, if you can hear me, I really need you to pull through this.”

  His voice was raspy, as scorched as his skin. “Fairy...Get to…fairy ring.”

  It made sense. He needed to get home. In the safety of Fairy, he could heal…but how? I wasn’t intimately familiar with any fairy rings in the area…or in the real world, period. Certainly, I believed such things existed, but...

  “Quit thinking, start wizarding.”

  “For once, you’re right.”

  “How about twice? Who told you to run?”

  “Okay, so what do I do?” I wondered.

  “Get him back to Fairyland. If he dies there, it’s not on us.”

  “And it might help heal him, too, right?”

  “Sure…as if that were the important issue.”

  I made a whirlwind tour of the lab, scooping up everything I could that I even vaguely thought would help. I had the permanent silver circle, but there was zero chance of me being able to get Kerath from my table to the circle without help. If a circle was needed, it would have to come to him. I grabbed a bag of sugar from the kitchen, tore open its top corner, and began pouring it in a clockwise ring around the dining table. It wasn’t a perfect circle, but it would have to do.

  I stepped in and deposited my tools on one of the chairs. I noticed, with dismay, that I’d forgotten my athame.

  “Whoa, whoa, shouldn’t we have a plan here?”

  “You were the one who said to start wizarding. It’s a little late to pull back now.”

  “I meant ’grab the Necronomicon and find a spell’, not ‘start slinging magic helter-skelter.’”

  “No Necronomicon needed. I can do this. I’m a professional wizard, remember?”

  I pulled the chaos blade from my pocket and willed it into the shape of a ritual dagger. From the in
side of the circle, I paced the sugar ring, holding the blade tip over the circle, trying to visualize the whole process in my mind.

  I felt the circle snap shut, sealing the magical energies inside with me and Kerath. I placed a half-eaten chocolate bar on his chest and laid both massive hands on top of it, one at a time. The wrapper stuck out from underneath like a lily in the grasp of a sleeping Snow White from a very fractured fairy tale. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to kiss Kerath to save him.

  I knelt into genuflection, still uncertain what I needed to do. I briefly prayed first, “God, I haven’t always been the best Catholic, but I could really use a little divine guidance right now. Help me know the right words to use.”

  “And let’s be honest: YOU owe their kind for the whole Inquisition thing.”

  I found myself humming a few bars from an old Mel Brooks movie, stopped myself in horror when I realized what it was, then started again as a plan began to hatch in my addled brain. The Inquisition had undoubtedly wiped out hundreds of fae living in mortal disguise, forced them back into Fairy, even as it had forced many Jewish families into hiding or conversion. But a little Jewish humor might just do the trick…I would just have to improvise a few lines at the end. I tried to picture Mel Brooks dressed as the Inquisitor Torquemada before breaking into full out song.

  “The Inquisition, what a show!

  The Inquisition, here we go!

  The Inquisition, watch ‘em go!

  We’re the Inquisition and we’re here to stay.

  Oh, the Inquisition’s here and we’re here to stay!

  Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!

  Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!

  Oh, the Inquisition’s here, but you’re not here to stay!”

  I belted it out at full volume, including a dance number that I am glad there were no conscious witnesses of. If no one saw me doing chorus girl kicks, I could retain my wizardly dignity. I could feel the energy growing with each line and by the time I stopped singing, the air was thick with power…but Kerath was still lying on the table. My inner voice may have been right about needing a plan before starting to use magic at random, but I was trapped now.

  As I breathed in the crackling, energetic air, I recalled that initial image of Mel Brooks as Torquemada. I tried to breathe that in, to let the Torquemada persona cover me, visualizing myself as the Spanish Grand Inquisitor. In my most solemn voice, I intoned, “Sir Kerath, by order of the Grand Inquisition, you are hereby banished to the Fairy realm for a term of no less than one day!” I slashed out behind me with the chaos blade, breaking the flow of the circle, visualizing it as a judge’s gavel banging down.

  Something did bang down, with a knock-knock. The power rushed out of the circle, the rustling air momentarily blinding me. When I could see again, Kerath was gone…along with my dining table. The knock-knock came again and this time I placed it as coming from my front door.

  9

  I thought of putting myself back together before answering, but decided the disheveled, traumatized look might help increase the believability of my story. I reshaped the chaos blade, put it away, and grabbed an empty red wine bottle from the kitchen for prop use. I opened up my front door, expecting to see an apologetic Devereaux and a half-dozen angry police investigators. Instead, the swinging door revealed just Agent Devereaux.

  She stepped past me into the apartment, pushing the door closed as she passed. “All right, I think that’s taken care of. I need to stop being around you; I’m getting spoiled by how efficient your boss’s name is. They suddenly decided it would be easier to tell the media that someone wants to blow up a bunch of housing for sex offenders than to…wait, where’s the troll?”

  “Back in Fairy, I hope.”

  She shook her head like a dog with a chew toy. “No, no, I mean, where is he? Like a secret panel or a closet or...”

  I slid one of my now-table-less chairs towards her, motioned for her to sit, and went towards the kitchen. “He’s gone. I cast a spell and opened up a portal back to Fairyland for him. You can either sit down, accept that, and I’ll try to explain in more detail.” I rummaged around for a pair of glasses, then pulled a gallon of milk from the fridge. “Or you can reject that as the ramblings of a crazy man and nothing I can say will help you make any sense of this.”

  When I came back into the main room, she was indeed seated. I handed her a glass of milk and pulled up a chair opposite her. I sat down and waited for her to say something, anything. After a long minute, she gave a harsh nod, wordlessly telling me to go on.

  “Anything you repeat outside this room will likely earn you a trip to the loony bin, but I assure you it’s the truth. I am Lucien Valente’s personal wizard. He hired me to deal with the thing that was eating his employees back in Oklahoma. He liked my work, so he’s kept me around.” I took a sip of my milk and was pleased to see she did the same. “Does that fit? Can you wrap your mind around the idea of corporate wizards?”

  “Wizard? And not as a euphemism for problem solver, creative acquisitions, or assassin?”

  I almost snarked that no, that would be my girlfriend, but decided some details were better left out. “Wizard as in Merlin-stuff…magic, plain and simple magic.” She was dazed and confused, wanting to believe, but not quite there. I pointed across the room. “See that case? Those jewels belonged to a nineteenth century spiritualist, who claimed they were the key to the success of her séances. Those spears over there are replicas of the one that pierced the side of Christ, made by the Nazis. The prayer rugs hanging on the back wall are all a way of disguising old teachings during the spread of Islam: the craftsmen hid names of djinns and the basic instructions on how to summon them within the weave of the fabric. You think Valente would drop big bucks on all the stuff unless he was absolutely certain that there was something to it?”

  Devereaux’s eyes slowly snaked around the rest of the apartment, seeing for the first time all the other display cases I hadn’t mentioned and row upon row of bookshelves. “What is this place?”

  “My home…and my lab.” I paused. “Stay with me, Agent. I need to make sure you understand exactly what you’re dealing with.”

  “Magic. Got it,” she mumbled. “Like men who turn into trolls and can stop speeding vans with their bare hands.”

  “Not exactly. Kerath was born a troll, but he can disguise himself as a man. I was born a man…”

  “Ate an old girlfriend to get some power.”

  “…and learned how to use magic.” I was at a loss for how to proceed. Normally this was the part where I would downplay my skill and pretend like I couldn’t do anything more impressive than a birthday party trick. The vanished dining table and missing troll said otherwise. In the back of my mind, I thought it couldn’t hurt to let an FBI agent think I was a tad more powerful than I actually was.

  She slowly recovered from the shock of it all, the color returning to her cheeks. “So you and the troll were discussing company business, Valente business, tonight? And somebody tried to run you over with a backup plan of blowing you up. No driver, police are thinking robotic device…but it could’ve been magic, couldn’t it? A magic assassin van?”

  I nodded. Based on what I had seen this afternoon at the ATM, I suspected it was a little more mundane than that, but it didn’t matter. At the heart of it, magic was a technology, same as robotics. The only difference was that people had forgotten how to use one of them, even as they were excelling at refining the other. I was about to say something when my brain snagged on something funny. For the first day in over a month, I was without the benefit of my demon-spawn bodyguard…and somebody had tried to kill me twice since she’d left. I shuddered and downed the rest of my milk in one shot.

  “And the slime in the parking lot this afternoon? Did they try to attack you with some kind of acid golem or...”

  I cut her off. “Actually, that was me. There were three assailants. The puddle was what I did to one o
f them.”

  “And it wasn’t a stray bullet that just happened to hit their gas tank, either, was it?”

  “Guilty as charged, though I had a little technological assist there.”

  She sat straight up in her chair and handed me her glass. “All right, Mr. Fisher. I’m ready to hear what really happened in Oklahoma. And I could probably use a glass of something stronger than milk.”

  10

  “So this wendigo thing was some kind of ancient beast and the Old Ways shaman had managed to whip it up into a murderous frenzy?” Andrea Devereaux shook her head slowly. “You know, I think the hardest part for me to believe is that Valente’s company played the part of the hero in killing the wendigoes off.”

  She was catching on quicker than I had at first. “See what I mean about telling you the truth, but not giving you anything you can type up for a report? I’ve held the stuffed and mounted heads of all three wendigoes and it still feels unreal to me at times.”

  “I think the bureau is just glad it’s over: 61 bodies in Oklahoma, 1 in Joplin, and 2 in Saint Louis. That’s a heck of a body count to just sweep under the rug, but they’re doing it. They don’t know anything about wendigoes and wouldn’t believe me if I told them…but they know it’s not natural, either. Official word says it’s over, so it’s over.”

  The night was drawing closer to morning and I had consumed more than my fair share of alcohol since the sun had set, but my mind wasn’t that dull yet. Still, I didn’t want to alarm her if I didn’t have to. “Did you bring Salazar’s file with you? I would like to take a look at it if I could.” I fumbled for a plausible excuse. “Maybe he came up with something on the Old Ways I missed, some background on what pushed the old woman over the edge.”

  I don’t think she bought it entirely, but she stood up anyway. “Yeah, it’s out in my car. I’ll go grab it.”

  After I let her out, I tried not to process any of the extras. They were words not easily unheard, though: one in Joplin, two in Saint Louis. Had those happened before we killed them? Maybe the wendigo had woken up there and used those as stopovers to get breakfast en route to its destination in Oklahoma. But, either way, why hadn’t I heard about them?