Cunning Devil

by Chris Underwood

  My silver pendant pointed me to the rear service door on the other side of the dumpster. A touch of the handle told me it was locked, but at least this door didn’t have a big thick chain on it. I crouched down in front of the door, took out my lock picks, and got to work.

  I was a little rusty, but after a couple of minutes the lock gave way under my tender ministrations. The legacy of a misspent youth.

  The handle turned. Silently, I eased the door open. It was pretty damn dark inside. I peered into the gloom for a few seconds, letting my eyes adjust. And then I stepped inside.

  If a patrol cop showed up now, I’d have a hell of a time explaining myself. I’d gone from petty trespassing to full-blown breaking and entering. In my defense, I was here to remove another trespasser from the premises. You could even say I was a hero.

  All right, maybe that was pushing it.

  The service door had brought me into the kitchen. I could just make out the shape of the central bench top and the appliances set along two sides of the narrow room. A long, empty window looked out at the counter area and the cafe itself beyond.

  I felt along the wall beside me until I found a set of light switches, but I didn’t flip them yet. I held my breath and opened my ears. I couldn’t hear anything moving, not even a rat.

  Where are you hiding? I silently asked the hobgoblin.

  The kitchen was the most likely place. Slipping off my shoes, I padded quietly to the center of the kitchen. The floor was disturbingly sticky.

  I took the chain of silver bells and coins out of my pocket, letting them jingle as I laid the chain in a rough circle on the floor. In the center of the circle I put down the sealed written charm I’d prepared earlier. The charm was designed to make the chain irresistible to feeble-minded creatures like hobgoblins.

  I retreated back to the service door and rested my fingers on the light switches, ready to flip them. I waited.

  For a minute, maybe two, nothing moved. I stayed where I was, as still as the rest of the cafe.

  And then I heard something shuffling in the darkness.

  “What is it?” a voice whispered, on the edge of hearing. “Where’s the jingle-jangle? Ah!”

  A shape moved in the corner of the kitchen, in the space between the oven and the wall. So small I barely noticed it. But as I watched, the shadowy figure slid out of the darkness, moving cautiously toward the chain of bells.

  The creature would be lucky to be a foot tall. It walked hunched over, its long nose leading the way. It was impossible to make out details in the dark of the kitchen, but I could see long, stringy hair dangling from its head, nearly touching the ground. As its head snapped back and forth, searching for danger, large yellow eyes flashed, reflecting what little light there was.

  “Mmm,” the creature muttered. “Look at the jingle-jangle. Pretty jingle-jangle.”

  My charm was doing its job. Not that it was particularly difficult to trick a hobgoblin. Frankly, they were so damn stupid it almost wasn’t worth wasting the ink.

  The creature was dragging something along behind it. A small sack about the size of a sock. Something inside was rattling.

  I smiled in the dark. The rattle.

  With one last glance around, the hobgoblin let go of the sack and reached out a long arm as thin as a chicken’s leg. It took hold of the chain and lifted it. As the bells rang, the hobgoblin giggled with delight.

  “Look at it jingle! Look at it shine! Look at it—”

  Something in the creature’s demeanor changed as it fell silent. It whipped its head around, suddenly nervous.

  Guess the charm had worn off. Maybe this creature wasn’t quite as weak-minded as the other hobgoblins I’d dealt with in the past.

  Still, it had seen the trap far too late.

  I flipped all the switches at once. The kitchen was flooded with light. Screeching and shielding its eyes, the hobgoblin staggered back, dropping the chain of bells and grasping blindly for its sack.

  But I was already halfway across the room. As the creature turned to run, I grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and lifted it into the air.

  The hobgoblin screeched in fear. It scrambled and twisted, trying to shake itself out of my grip. Poor bastard never stood a chance.

  “No!” it screamed. “Leggo! Leggo!”

  “Oh, pipe down,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  If it understood what I was saying, it gave no sign. I sighed and held it aloft, getting a better look at it.

  It was a female, I think. Kind of hard to tell. It was wearing some scrap of fabric that had been turned into a poncho. There was a big letter “E” on the front and part of an “M”, but the rest of the word was back with whatever was left of the T-shirt.

  She looked about the same as all of her kind: wrinkled, gray-skinned, and ugly as hell. The creature’s ears, eyes, and nose were all too large for her tiny proportions. The rest of her was rail-thin—I could make out the shape of tiny bones beneath her skin. In between screams and the nonsense she was babbling, her yellowed teeth chattered like a roomful of typewriters.

  As she tried to wriggle free, I tugged the sack out of the hobgoblin’s grasp and upended it on the floor.

  “No!” she screamed. “Give it!”

  I ignored her. Among the coins and crumbs of bread and cheese that fell out of the sack, there was my prize. The baby’s rattle.

  Just picking it up, I could sense the history and memory that the silver held. The bells jingled softly as I shook it.

  “Give it!” the hobgoblin screeched.

  “It’s not yours,” I said. “It’s going back to the person it belongs to.”

  “No! No, no, no!” She kicked wildly, her big eyes seeming to grow even bigger. “Can’t! The blood! The blood!”

  “What?” I could barely understand her. “What blood?”

  “Blood and boiling and death and silver. Can’t have! Give it!” She pulled herself up and bit the flesh of my thumb.

  “Ow.” I shook her and she dropped down, dangling from my fingers once more. “Quit it. What are you talking about?”

  “Blood! The blood!”

  I rolled my eyes and pocketed the rattle. That’d teach me for trying to talk to the damn creature.

  You know, I was starting to revise my opinion on hobgoblins. Maybe they were as bad as goblins after all.

  I reached down to pick up my coin and bell chain, but just as I was pocketing them my phone started buzzing. While the hobgoblin continued to struggle in my grasp, I fished my phone out of my pocket and pressed it to my ear.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Ozzy. It’s Lilian.”

  “Lilian. Hey.” I straightened a little, like maybe she could sense my poor posture through the phone. I had the sudden urge to check myself in a mirror, make sure my hair looked okay. “Let me guess, this is a booty call.”

  “You wish.” She wasn’t half-wrong. But her voice said she wasn’t in the mood for joking around. “You find people, right? That’s a thing that you can do?”

  “There’s a lot of things I can—ow!” The hobgoblin had used the distraction to sink her teeth into me again. “You bite me one more time I drop you into the garbage disposal.”

  “Who, me?” Lilian asked.

  “No, I’m talking to… You know what, never mind. Long story. What do you need?”

  “You know how Alcaraz sent me to trade with the hag?”

  “Yeah, I seem to remember the good doctor talking your ear off about that.”

  “Well, the hag’s not here,” she said. “I dropped by about an hour ago, knocked on the door, no response. Didn’t want to go home empty-handed, so I hung around for a while. Something didn’t feel right, so I started snooping. Found the back door unlocked, so I went in.”

  “Hell, you must have a death wish,” I said, but Lilian ignored me.

  “I’m still here now. No sign of the hag. But I think someone’s been searching the place.”

  “Yeah? Why do you say
that?”

  “Just a feeling. Her place is always a mess, but there’s usually a pattern to it. Now things seem out of place.”

  “That’s not a lot of evidence to send out the search party.”

  “I know, I know. It just…it feels wrong. I think you should come have a look.”

  I’ll be honest, that sounded like the worst idea I’d heard in a long time, and I was old enough to remember the Super Mario Bros. movie. Getting involved in a hag’s business was a good way to spend the rest of your life as a toad.

  Hags and witches have forever been confused with each other, but they’re not the same thing. Witches are human. They made a deal to obtain their powers, just like I did.

  Hags are decidedly inhuman. They can pass as human—they are the undisputed champions of glamour magic, after all. But they are Strangers. They are powerful. And they are not to be trifled with.

  Going into the hag’s house uninvited and poking around the place sounded…well, like I said, I kind of like not being a toad.

  I was trying to think it over, but it was hard to concentrate with a squirming hobgoblin in my hand. She’d started getting even more agitated, squealing and babbling so loud I had to hold her at arm’s length to keep her from drowning me out while I was talking to Lilian.

  “The light!” the creature was screaming—or at least that’s what I thought she was saying. It was hard to tell. “Leggo! Give the silver and leggo! Gotta run! Gotta fly! The blood!”

  “What’s that noise?” Lilian asked. “Are you watching Alvin and the Chipmunks?”

  “I never wanted to murder the chipmunks this much.”

  I started carrying the hobgoblin toward the exit. I didn’t want to put her down until I was about to leave—I had a sneaking suspicion she’d take the opportunity to try to steal the rattle again, and I didn’t like my chances of catching her twice.

  “Listen,” I said to Lilian, “I’ve had a hell of a day. I need to sleep for a very long time. And if you can’t find the hag, I’m willing to bet it’s because she doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Maybe.” She sounded unsure. “What if someone did something to her?”

  “I doubt it. The hag’s more powerful than you know.”

  “You’re probably right. I just…I don’t know what to do.”

  I knew what she meant. It wasn’t like she could go down to the police station, file a missing person’s report. Not for the hag. We couldn’t risk stirring up trouble in Lost Falls.

  “Look, go home and get some sleep,” I said. “That’s what I’m planning to do. If the hag still hasn’t shown up by morning, I’ll come take a look. Sound good?”

  She sighed. “I guess so.”

  “All right. I have to go deal with something. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Ozzy.”

  The fact that she hung up without insulting me once told me that the whole thing was still troubling her. I paused, staring at my phone, and considered calling her back and telling her I’d changed my mind.

  She knew the hag better than me, after all. Maybe trusting her instincts wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “Oh, no!” The hobgoblin’s screams reached a new, even more painful pitch. “No, no! He here! Hafta run! Run!”

  “Goddamn it. Just be quiet for a second,” I said. “I’m trying to think.”

  “Not the curse! Not the curse! The blood!”

  I stopped by the back exit and shot the creature a look. “Curse? What curse? What are you—?”

  A shoe scraped against concrete outside. Before I could move, a figure filled the doorway, blocking my exit.

  The light from the kitchen fell on the face of my client, Brandon Mills. Somehow, he was looking even shabbier than he had this afternoon. He let a pair of bolt cutters clatter to the ground beside him.

  And then he raised a pistol and pointed it at my chest.

  12

  “Stay where you are, Mr. Turner,” Brandon Mills said. “Do exactly what I say.”

  There was desperation in his eyes, desperation mixed with the pain of a deep-seated sadness. But the hand that held the pistol was steady, experienced.

  A cold dread spread through my gut, freezing me solid. All I could do was stand there, gaping like an idiot. It took me a moment to realize the hobgoblin was still in my grip, weeping and wailing.

  “Drop the phone,” he said.

  I did what he said. I know when to pick my battles.

  “Listen,” I said. My voice came out a rasp. I tried again. “Brandon—”

  “You have it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The rattle. You have it?”

  “In my pocket,” I said.

  He held out a hand. “Slowly.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. Doing my best not to agitate him, I pulled out the rattle with my thumb and forefinger and handed it to him. He glanced at it quickly and shoved it in his pocket.

  “All right, Brandon,” I said, swallowing thickly. “You’ve got the rattle. Now how about you put down the gun, huh?”

  The pistol remained pointed at me. It was worth a try.

  I’d been running on automatic since I saw the gun, but now my brain was slowly rebooting, and it had some questions about this whole damn situation. How had Mills found me here? And what the hell had I done to make him think he needed to bring a gun to get the rattle back?

  “Now that thing,” Mills said, twitching the gun toward the hobgoblin.

  “What about it? It’s just—”

  “Hand it over.”

  I hesitated. My mind flashed back to earlier that afternoon, to the look Mills had had in his eyes when he said he wanted to confront the thief. I saw the same look in his eyes now, burning twice as bright.

  The hobgoblin was annoying, but it was sentient. I didn’t want to see what Mills would do to the poor creature.

  “Brandon, just calm down, okay? I can explain.”

  His face twisted. “Give me the hobgoblin!” he snarled.

  “I… You know what she is?” I rearranged the pieces in my head, trying to make the puzzle fit together. It wasn’t working. “All right, all right, just wait a second. I don’t know how much you know about hobgoblins, but they’re not exactly little Einsteins, okay? She’s no master criminal. She saw a shiny thing, she took it. But you’ve got it back now. No harm, no foul.”

  Mills took a step forward, and for a moment I saw a hint of the man he used to be. A hard, tough man. No stranger to violence. Not the broken, shambling mess of a man I’d met this morning, but a man to be afraid of.

  Cop? Soldier? Gangster? I didn’t know.

  “I won’t ask again, Mr. Turner,” he said, leveling the pistol at my head.

  The hobgoblin had given up trying to squirm free. She hung limply from my hand, crying silently. Every now and then she muttered something, but the only words I could make out were: “My insides.”

  I considered my options. I considered them carefully.

  My truncheon was hanging from my belt. One good hit with that and Mills would go down. But one good hit would be awful hard to come by.

  Mills was maintaining a few feet of space between us, just close enough that if we both stretched out our arms we could touch fingertips. Not far, really. If he hesitated, maybe I could close in before he got a shot off.

  I didn’t think he would hesitate.

  Maybe you’re thinking: “Ozzy, you dumbass, just do some magic. Blow him away.”

  Trouble is, magic doesn’t work that way, at least not the kind I do. I can’t shoot fireballs from my hand. This isn’t Dungeons & Dragons. I needed time. I needed to prepare potions and charms and fetishes.

  And besides, I was a cunning man. I used magic to help people. I was no witch.

  That gun was as deadly to me as it would be to you. And I don’t care how brave you are, there are few things more terrifying than staring down into the dark of a gun barrel, knowing there’s a bullet inside waiting to aerate the back of
your head.

  I handed over the hobgoblin.

  She didn’t fight. She had no fight left to give. Mills grabbed her roughly in his free hand, crushing her arms to her side. She gave a grunt, like she couldn’t quite get enough air.

  Mills eyed her as I handed her over. A look of profound relief spread across his face, like he’d just been acquitted of murder.

  With his gaze fixed on her, I let my other hand slide into my pocket.

  “All right.” He took a breath and waved the gun at me. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside. Move.”

  He backed out the door, giving me room to follow. I watched for my chance to make a break for it, but it never came.

  “Turn off the lights,” he said. “Close the door.”

  I did what he said, and the door locked behind me with a click. The first cloudy fingers had begun to snuff out the moonlight, but I could still make him out as he gestured for me to move.

  I complied, walking ahead of him, past the overflowing dumpster and out through the gate he’d unlocked with the bolt cutters. I started to head toward the parking lot, but he stopped me.

  “This way,” he said, and he gestured to the forest.

  My chest grew colder. “Why?”

  “Just walk.”

  I took another look at the gun. Then I did what he said.

  My shoes crunched on the dirt as we walked a couple dozen yards away from the cafe, away from the street lights. Mills was always behind me, too far away for me to jump him, too close for me to make a break for it.

  When I was just about to reach the tree line, my foot caught an exposed root. I stumbled and went down, just managing to get my hands out in front of me. I panted, breathing in the earthy smell of moss and dirt and fallen leaves.

  “Get up,” Mills said.

  I pushed myself up onto my knees, but I didn’t stand. I mean, what was the point?

  “Tell me,” I said, looking back at him. “Was it all a lie? Just a sob story? The crib. The dead son.”

  I don’t know what compelled me to speak. Fatalistic apathy, maybe. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could incite him to anger, distract him enough that he’d drop the hobgoblin. No need for her to die too.