Live and Let Fly

by Karina Fabian

  Live and Let Fly: From the Case Files of DragonEye, PI

  By Karina Fabian

  Introduction: A Drake Called Vern

  Once upon a time, people entered the dragon's lair at their own peril. I try not to get too nostalgic for those days. That was back when dragons were dragons, virgins were snacks I took because the townsmen were too stupid to toss out a nice, plump cow, and the knightly entertainment was delivered to my cave entrance in full armor-clanking glory. I was top of the food chain and happily snoozing on my hoard of gold and precious jewels—and valuable artifacts, I was something of a connoisseur then—in an abandoned dwarf mine in the mountains of Caraparavelenciana. The High Elves consulted me for my wisdom and didn't mind tarrying for a week or two for storytelling. Humans gasped in awe and fear as I flew high over their lands, and even if they didn't get my take-out orders right, at least they kept me well fed. Mages of all races sought my magic, and occasionally, when one was smart enough to trade or inept enough to amuse me, I'd grant them the spare scale or let them fill an ampoule with my blood. The human religion of the Risen Christ had grown strong and united throughout the known world, and Satan and his minions had retreated for the most part. Life was overall pretty peaceful. As an undying creature of God, I was feeling lazy and looking forward to a quiet millennium.

  However, an upstart holy mage named George trapped me in a spell and conscripted me into service in his Church. Maybe blackmail is the better term. By the time his magic worked through me, I'd lost my size, my strength, my knowledge, flight and fire, and most of my magic.

  I wasn't much more than an attractive iguana when he laid a doozy of a geas on me: I could earn everything back by becoming a faithful servant of the Church. So instead of relaxing in the Golden Age, I worked as the Pope's pampered pet, a bodyguard, scribe, mascot, and David to many a pagan culture with a Goliath for a god. When Satan decided to assert himself again, I got drafted into the Inquisition for the Great War, taking on supernatural baddies I never want to see again and getting into scrapes I was never sure I'd get out of. Yeah, the gig has been depressing and brutal at times, yet interesting overall. We immortals do enjoy novelty.

  But at least people understood I was a dragon; they knew what I was and what I would become. Further, our world was still magical and more importantly, self-contained.

  Until a combination magical mishap in my dimension and a nuclear accident in yours opened a stable link between our worlds, that is. Call it what you want: wormhole, portal, gate.

  We call it the Gap, and yes, the clothing retailer wept with joy when the scientists slapped that moniker on it. Less a cause for shouting are the names of the dimensions: Faerie for us and Mundane for you. Must have been chosen by committee.

  Magic and technology do not always mix well; and despite the best efforts of the United States government (Mundane), the Duchy of Peebles-on-Tweed (Faerie), and Faerie Catholic Church, some nasty things happened. And who do you think God sent over to straighten things out?

  Not the Church. God. For the first time in my unending life, I'd felt a Calling.

  It led me to the Mundane city of Los Lagos, Colorado, home of the Gap, where I found myself unappreciated by the authorities and treated with suspicion or disrespect by a disproportionate amount of Mundane inhabitants. Even worse, the Duke decided to exile me here as a practical joke. Now I live in a cleaned-up part of a bad neighborhood—cleaned up by Yours Truly, thank you—with a run-down warehouse for a lair, eking out a living as a professional problem solver.

  Not that it's been all bad. I've actually earned back more of my dragoness in a few years on this side of the Gap than I did in centuries in Faerie. Plus, I've made some real friends here—

  the kind who offer you dinner, and it's not their first born, but the first born wants to know if you'll come to his school for Show and Tell. Those kinds of friends. Then there's Grace, whose part-siren heritage made her a wonderful singer, an incredible magical talent, and a long-lived being. Although a mage of the Faerie Catholic Church, circumstances led to her partnering with me in my detective agency. DragonEye, PI. That's us.

  Like I said, I try not to be nostalgic for my pre-George days. After all, what I'm doing now's not a bad way to spend a few hundred years.

  And sometimes, I get to do something I'd have never gotten to do otherwise...

  Chapter One: Kick of Evil

  If there's anything worse than getting a panicky call from a teenage star, it's getting one from her high-strung assistant.

  "Oh, Vern!" Roscoe's squeaky tenor assailed my ears. "You've got to come to the set!

  Right away! Oh, it's too awful! I thought I was going to faint—"

  "What's too awful?" I demanded, exasperated. "Is Heather all right?" Heather, a.k.a.

  Rhoda Dakota, pop star and the Power-babe for the latest Guy Powers spy movie, Live and Let Fly, was a good friend and one of the select humans I considered "mine."

  "What? Yes, fine. Thank God—and I mean that the right way, really—"

  "Then what? Spit it out."

  From the kitchen, Grace, my partner, dropped the basket of strawberries she'd been picking through into the sink and joined me in the office. She glanced a question at me; I shifted my wings in a shrug. Together we listened to Roscoe blather over the speakerphone.

  "It was so horrible! Okay, so they were filming, and I thought, 'A little me time,' right? I was going for my smoke break—yes, I know, filthy habit, shame on me, shame—and I heard this moaning from behind the dumpster, and I thought it was someone playing a joke, but then I saw his legs. I mean, who can mistake those tights? And I ran over, of course, and there was all this blood—"

  Tights? "Charlie? Something happened to Charlie Wilmot?"

  "Isn't that what I just said? Charlie was attacked. You've got to come right away. Heather is so upset—and I think he was hit by black magic."

  * * * *

  "Who would attack Charlie?" Grace wondered aloud as she signaled for the turn onto the lot of Live and Let Fly. Reporters lined the entrance. Not surprising, really; when the herald of the Duchy of Peebles-on-Tweed gets mugged on the set of his fiancé's first movie, it's bound to make the news. Fortunately, our battered old car didn't draw much notice; although I saw Ronnie Engleson, entertainment reporter of the Los Lagos Gazzette, jerk his chin up in a quick nod.

  Even if Grace could have seen me shrug, there wasn't enough room in the back for me to flex my wings. I said, "How should I know? We'll find out in a minute." For the most part, we both disregarded Roscoe's wild claim of black magic. Roscoe came from California and knew very little about the Faerie. His view of the magic and creatures from our dimension oscillated between Disney and Stephen King.

  The security guard leaned toward the window as Grace rolled it down. Tom Thatcher had been an actual thatcher, right up until a few years ago when his allergies got the better of him, and he crossed the Gap from the Faerie to the Mundane universe looking for a different job. He enjoyed the glamorous and exciting career of road construction while working on a GED. Once he passed the test, he joined the local private cops just before the studio set up filming here.

  "Where's your sign?" I asked him. My head, as usual, was stuck out the sun roof. Grace doesn't mind my putting my head out of the car nearly as much as our friend Bert does.

  "That joke's almost as old as that job, Vern. You need new material."

  I grinned. Tom had held the "Go Slow" sign to guide traffic around the construction crews. He'd also held a real fear of me, which, while completely understandable, had made him hard to work with—like shriek-and-pass-out hard to work with. The studio psychologist had recommended a sedative combined with aversion therapy; Grace had suggested treating him gently; I decided the
continual application of lame commentary worked for me. Even though it took a little longer, I had more fun. Eight hundred years ago, St. George took my dignity along with everything else that made me glorious, but it's only been in the past few years I've loosened enough to enjoy it.

  "You're picking up the Mundane idioms," I said, letting my admiration show in my voice.

  I can be nice, too, after all.

  "No way to avoid it here," he said but smiled at the compliment nonetheless. His voice grew serious. "They're back behind Studio Three. No one's used that set for anything except a short cut for a couple of weeks. Roscoe found him out cold behind some dumpsters. Looked like he'd been slammed into one a time or two—I mean into the side of it. Let the ambulance in 'bout fifteen minutes ago, but the studio EMTs were taking care of him, and they said he'll be okay.

  Checked the wards; they're all intact, so no one crossed them to break in. Inside job, if you ask me. Gave Captain Santry a copy of everyone who'd come in and out." He handed Grace a sheet with the same information. Smart man.

  We didn't ask about security cameras; there weren't any where unused sets were stored.

  No one was going to be carrying off panels of scenery without getting noticed elsewhere, and the cost-benefit analysis said it'd be cheaper to paint over graffiti than to bother with cameras. Not that this was a high-crime area, anyway.

  Which made Charlie's mugging all the more suspicious.

  Of course, the show went on, and as Grace drove us past the various sets, I saw a couple of guys in T-shirts and paint-splattered khakis tearing down Number Ten Downing Street. The Prime Minister wouldn't be too happy about that. A few yards away, a couple of dwarves and a Filipino dressed in a flowery loincloth and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt had pulled a couple of cheap plastic chairs in front of a façade of a French bistro and were smoking.

  I called to one dwarf. "Hey, Kent! How's Brunhilde?" He and Bruni had met at the Mundane Mensa convention we'd chaperoned. People expected the typical cliché of interspecies True Love, but they ended up only good friends. Just as well, with him acting and her splitting her time between Valhalla and her business of designing lingerie for large women.

  Kent waved and hollered, "Griping about her sweaty men, but she's taught them to brush their teeth. She starts working on her fall line next month. I'll probably see more of her then." He wagged his eyebrows at his smoking buddies, and they shared a laugh.

  Grace stopped to let a truck loaded with tropical plants that would never survive a Colorado winter pass by. Live and Let Fly, the latest in the Super-Spy movies, starred Dirk Everett as Secret Agent Guy Powers and our own little Rhoda Dakota as his spunky sidekick.

  While not the first movie to feature Faerie folk, it was by far the biggest. Director Gar Abernath (known as Y2 to his friends because he dropped the letter from the ends of his names) wanted this movie to cover the entire world and then some, and the producers, encouraged by his last three blockbusters, agreed.

  He didn't stop there, however. He wanted Interdimensional! Unfortunately, his script included too much adultery and glorifying of sin. The Faerie Church put its foot down on filming there, so they set up shop in Los Lagos.

  Why not Hollywood or Vancouver? Magicals such as myself don't much care to stray far from the Interdimensional Gap that links our two universes. Elves and dwarves have been known to make exceptions for a short time—"short" meaning decades for High Elves, of course—but most of the creatures that you humans think of as creatures—pixies, unicorns, and the like—are not comfortable in the non-magical world. Aside from the way they're treated (varying from sideshow freak to a human's personal wish come true), the enormous amount of metal (iron-sensitivity is more an allergy than a poison, but a problem nonetheless), and the general pollution, there's the simple fact that Magicals don't feel right if they get too far from the Gap and Faerie. I've experienced it myself: a kind of general malaise combined with achiness, slight nausea... You know—flu-like symptoms. The folks at the Colorado State University branch at Los Lagos think it might be tied to the slight flow of magic from the Gap. At any rate, if anyone wants to do anything involving Magicals—from study, diplomatic negotiations or having them star in a film—he or she is stuck with coming to Los Lagos, Colorado, USA. This caused quite an uproar—both from other nations who think the U.S. isn't sharing nicely and from the folks of Los Lagos who liked their town the sleepy backwater it was pre-Gap—but things are settling down.

  Doesn't mean we don’t have more than our fair share of excitement, however. Keeps Grace and me employed.

  * * * *

  We found the ambulance sandwiched between the foot of a volcano and the fake storefront of Gloria Quattrinis. Even without the neon lights, the store’s name, flanked by gaudy platform shoes with stiletto heels, demanded attention. Never understood how humans walked in those. Great scene, though: Rhoda stares longingly at some six-inch heeled silver sandals with rhinestones just before Dirk's motorcycle comes crashing through the glass. Swarming around the ambulance, and occasionally getting pushed back, were about a dozen of the cast and crew of Live and Let Fly. Tuxes and gowns—must have been doing the casino scene. A cameraman was hanging out, his equipment on the ground beside him and his back against the ambulance.

  Wonder what his story was?

  Yellow police tape made border crossings down the narrow alley. Santry lounged in one corner, watching as Officer Kelly, the crime scene investigator, paced the area, methodically stopping to pick up a stray something and put it in a bag. I got the feeling that if she found a straw, she'd grasp at it. Kelly was good at her job; her feeling perplexed this soon in the investigation gave even more evidence that this was no ordinary theft.

  Santry looked up as we exited our car. He jerked his head toward the ambulance. Talk to Charlie first. Like we needed his permission.

  Or maybe it was a request because we heard Charlie shout, "For the last time! I will not lie down like an old granny when I can bloody well sit!"

  "Party's over," I called in a voice that out-directs a director, out-commands a commander, and even out-shouts Santry. "Ed, get your people back to work so we can do ours."

  The crowd pushed apart some, and Grace squeezed through.

  Ed, the assistant director, peeled himself out of the group to complain. "You don’t think I've been saying that? We're losing valuable light so Miss Dakota can swoon over her wounded beau. Not that it wasn't beneficial," he added, turning his head toward the crowd, and I assumed, Heather. "We got some wonderful footage, and if she can recapture the same emotion in the scene with Dirk... But come on, people. Get your make-up fixed, and let's move on. They should be done with the stunt scene by now."

  Footage. I snorted. Leave it to Ed to take advantage of situation.

  Charlie was sitting on the stretcher, his legs covered with a blanket, his chest bare but for the bandages, an ice pack wrapped in a towel held to his face.

  I glanced at the Halloween orange and lime green shirt and tabard that made part of his uniform. They were ripped, and blood stained the already nasty boar's head on a pike which was the duke's symbol.

  Everyone trailed back to the filming area except Heather, who sat next to Charlie in the ambulance, at once trying to comfort, be comforted, and keep from spoiling her silver sequined dress. Her co-star, Dirk Everett, stood at the door, where he could place a comforting hand on her knee. She, of course, held Charlie's hand, the one not pressing the ice pack against his nose.

  "I want to stay."

  "Go on, luv," Charlie urged, his voice muffled and stuffy sounding from the swelling.

  "I'm fine, more embarrassed than anything. Falling off a horse hurts worse." He kissed her hand before making a little shooing motion. She let Dirk lift her from the steps and leaned on him as they walked away.

  I overheard him whisper to her, "Three cracked ribs and a broken nose, and he says he's fine. Oh, that Faerie machismo—and the accent! I'm sooo jealous of you, darling!" She giggled.
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  One of the ambulance attendants stopped her to ask a question. I turned my attention to Charlie.

  "'Falling off a horse,' eh?" I asked.

  "So I've heard." He groaned. The swollen, purple bruise on his nose extended to his forehead and cheeks, and one eye was partially closed. He held himself unusually straight, as if slouching would hurt.

  "Here. Stay still and pray," Grace said as she took the ice pack from him. She crossed herself then let her hands hover over his nose as she sang a song of healing. After a moment, she set a hand over his right side.

  "Oh, much better," he murmured and swayed. Grace caught him. "Just the relief, just the relief," he protested.

  "You still need to come in and get x-rays," the EMT protested. Grace agreed.

  "Soon as I tell you what happened," he insisted. "Please, you've got to find my pouch.

  Without it, I—" His plea ended in a wince as he leaned toward us.

  "Something important in it?"

  "The most important thing I've ever carried—Heather's engagement ring."

  * * * *

  We got the full story from Charlie and watched the ambulance attendants carry him off.

  He'd finally acquiesced to lying down, in part, I'm sure, because of the pain killers they'd stuck in his IV solution. I saw the one attendant show his clipboard to the other: it was full of autographs.

  In triplicate. Humans.

  We crossed the police tape, and Grace started walking her own pattern, eyes half-lidded, and humming a tune that was both spell and prayer. I joined Santry, who was growling in low tones to Officer Kelly.

  She shrugged and shook her head. "I know the difference between trash and evidence,"

  she told him, "and what we've got is trash. This was no random mugging; this was a professional hit, and I'd say a magical one as well. Or by a Magical, although I don't see any heavy footprints, or hoofprints, or anything to indicate a particular species."

  Santry rubbed at his eyes with one hand but didn't yell at her. Amanda Kelly knew her job. She'd keep digging, no doubt, but if she said the place was clean of traces of the attacker, odds were she was right.