“What’s in the sack, Danielle?” she asked, tilting her head in a very bird-like way.
“A dead goblin,” I said. Only Penelope and my grandmother called me Danielle, and my grandmother was dead.
“I thought you were working for the Lady Rowena,” she said, tilting her head the other way.
“I was. This was incidental. I’m going to drop it off at the Watchers, let it be their problem.”
I waited for her to tell me why that was a bad idea. She didn’t disappoint.
“Won’t they wish to know how you came to hold a goblin’s body in a...what is that? A garbage bag?”
My shoulders slumped. They would want to know, and that meant they’d toss me into an interrogation room until I told them enough to satisfy their curiosity.
“Killing the fae is against the Accords,” Penelope continued.
“I didn’t kill him,” I said, a little too defensively. “Not the first time around, anyway.” But my sword was covered in his gross coagulated zombie blood and I didn’t know if the Watchers would believe me. The Watchers were the Magic Council’s police, largely made up of demon hunters and rule enforcers and other folks who fancied themselves cops. Most of them were indifferent to my existence but a few resented that I freelanced as a PI, often doing jobs they felt should be under Council purview.
Penelope frowned. “The first time?”
“He was dead when I found him. Then he sort of came back to life.”
Saying it out loud made me realize just how messed up that was. Zombies were not common in the supernatural world. Necromancy had long been frowned upon by the Magic Council, though they’d only recently taken steps to outlaw it, and even then there was discord on that point. Some people argued that necromancy was a magical tradition and trying to ban it was akin to banning all magic.
But regardless, zombies were rare and weird and usually not found abandoned at a bus stop. A zombie goblin was downright messed up and pointed to something bigger going on. I’d been happy to pawn that problem off on the Watchers, but Penelope was right: they’d never let me dump the body and go. They’d want answers. Answers I sure as hell didn’t have.
And the last thing I needed was scrutiny from the Council. If they learned I had demon magic, they’d arrest me and probably worse. Using demon magic was punishable by death. Having demon magic was... well... something a witch like me shouldn’t have. But there were members of the Council who’d happily hold up my having it as proof of my wrong doing, even though it wasn’t my fault.
A few years ago, I’d been possessed by a malicious demon for three agonizing days. It was hell. I’d managed to fight the demon out of me, but somehow I’d been left with powerful demon magic. That might have been kind of cool, like a consolation prize for my suffering, but according to the Magic Council, using demon magic was pretty much an automatic death sentence.
So no, I really didn’t want to spend the next three days in a holding cell being interrogated by the Council about why I had a dead zombified goblin in a bag. The less attention they paid me, the better.
I groaned. “Where should I take him?”
Penelope shrugged. “That’s not my problem. I’m just here to let you know Silas is looking for you.”
“Of course he is.” Silas was my vampire landlord, who had apparently realized I owed him money and was now looking to collect.
Penelope lifted her arms over her head and thrust them down. And just like that, she turned into a crow and took flight, leaving me with a zombie goblin in a bag in the wee hours of the morning.
“YOU NEVER BRING ME a pizza,” Adam complained with a pout. He was a scrawny guy in a too-big black shirt, his pink-dyed hair falling into his dark eyes. He had a matching pink stud in the left side of his nose.
“It’s almost two in the morning. Where the hell would I even get a pizza?” I asked, setting the bag of goblin parts on the silver slab. The funeral home did not officially conduct autopsies. That was Adam’s little hobby, one the funeral home owners probably wouldn’t be thrilled about.
“I’m just saying, I get out of bed and drag myself to work in the middle of the night, I should get something.”
“You have my gratitude,” I said. He rolled his eyes. With a sigh, I pulled the wad of cash Lady Rowena had given me earlier and peeled off a hundred dollar bill. Thankfully, Adam seemed satisfied with that, because any more and I was back to not making my rent. As it stood, I’d just handed him all my grocery money and witches still had to eat.
He stuffed the money into the back pocket of his skinny jeans and pulled his toolset out of the black messenger bag he’d hung on a hook near the door. The prep room, as Adam called it, smelled of bleach and formaldehyde, which was only a slight step up from goblin rot. As soon as Adam opened the bag, the rotting smell joined the party and I was very glad there was no pizza in the room for the foul odor to spoil.
Wearing plastic gloves, he pulled out the torso and then the head, making a face when he saw it. Adam wasn’t a supernatural but he’d been freelancing as a supernatural medical examiner for years. He’d seen victims torn apart by stray werewolves, mutilated by angry trolls, and frozen solid by winter faeries. But his expression at seeing the goblin’s hideous, rotting face was easily the most horrified I’d ever seen him.
“This is gross,” he said, and set the head down. “Just how long ago did this thing die?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” I said.
Adam looked dubious.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a shot of the goblin’s face.
“What’s that for?” Adam asked, making a face.
“Identification purposes.”
“Sure, whatever.” He started to cut the clothes off the goblin’s body so he could get to work. I opted to wait outside.
An hour later, Adam opened the door to the prep room and ushered me back inside. The foul odor had managed to get worse and I coughed, trying very hard to only inhale through my mouth.
The goblin’s body lay on the slab, but it had been covered by a white sheet and I didn’t have to look at it. Smelling it was bad enough.
“Well?”
Adam lifted a chain. Suspended on it like the jewel of a necklace was a bit of bloody bone.
“Gross,” I said.
“Tell me about it. It’s a reanimation charm. It was in the goblin’s chest.” He extended it out to me but I didn’t take it so he set it on the metal tray. “Looks like this fella died about a week ago. Run through the heart with iron.”
“He was killed with iron?” I whistled. Iron was poisonous to the fae, and from what I’d heard, a very painful way for them to die. “That’s low.”
“Flecks of it were in his chest.” Adam swallowed uneasily, as if a faerie might jump out and attack him for daring to say it. The fae were immortal and liked to pretend that made them impervious to death, but they could be killed by iron, beheading, or fire, a fact they would love to keep quiet, as if it were some deep, dark secret.
“Okay. So someone killed him and then shoved that bone in his chest to bring him back, only to discard him at the bus stop,” I said. “Why?”
“Beats me,” Adam said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d love to get this cleaned up and go back to bed.”
It was almost three a.m. I felt ready to collapse myself. But there was something so wrong about the whole situation that I couldn’t let it go.
BRANCHES WAS, BY FIRST appearances, a total dive bar. A tiny room with smoke-stained walls, torn vinyl stools, and a beat up wooden bar that had seen its best days before the Great Depression. The shabby dive was only a front for the real bar behind it that extended deep into a faerie hole, meaning it existed outside of the human world and in some pocket dimension.
I slipped through the door hidden between two unplugged, out-of-order pinball machines. The real bar was outside with fairy lights strung over tree branches that surrounded the square patio. A pink twilight sky hung overhead. It was permanently
a warm summer evening in Branches.
The few mortals who’d been tricked inside lounged around on cushions on the floor, drunk on faerie wine.
Hot tip: don’t drink faerie wine. It’s highly addictive and so powerful that you’ll lose actual days of your life to a watery, strange drunk. And that’s assuming you’re ever allowed to sober up, which, when surrounded by giggling, dancing faeries, is kind of unlikely.
At the moment, a few fae sat around the fire pit in the center of the patio, laughing at their own jokes while two mortals languished on the floor below them. I did my best to ignore the mortals, resisting the urge to go over and drag the humans outside and dump buckets of ice water over their heads.
The bartender had milky pale skin and white blond hair. She wore a green dress with a deep v neck that hugged her waist and ended mid-thigh, and sported a crown of leaves on her head. She gave me a dark look.
“Your kind is not welcome here,” she said stiffly.
Witches and faeries didn’t get along for a myriad of reasons, though the biggest one was that witches tend to have more resistance to faerie glamor and way less desire to follow them into the woods for a naked dance party that was totally a trap than normal humans did.
“I’m not here for a drink. I’m here to talk to Ohzor.”
Her lips curled into a frown of distaste. “In the back,” she said, opening the wooden partition to let me behind the bar and through to the backroom.
Goblins were the ugly cousins of the fae. They weren’t pretty but they tended to be better with finances and business licenses. If there was a fae business thriving in the human world (or using a human business as a front for one in a faerie hole), chances were a goblin was helping run the show.
Ohzor was the only goblin I knew by name. I’d done a minor job for him locating a missing employee a year ago. He was short, maybe three feet tall, though you couldn’t tell when you saw him seated at his desk. His green skin was lined and dotted with wiry black hairs that grew out of moles. His pointed ears stuck out of his head like horns and a small tuft of dark hair sat square in the center of his scalp.
His large, blue eyes fell on me as he glanced up from his computer. “What?” he asked, in a craggy voice.
“I found your friend,” I said. I showed him the photo I’d snapped on my phone of the dead goblin’s face.
He glanced at the photo and then back at me. “Not all goblins are friends.”
“Did you know him?” I demanded.
“Why should I tell you?” he countered.
I sighed. “Because he was left for dead at a bus stop, only he wasn’t entirely dead. He tried to eat my face.” Okay, he’d only tried to eat my sword, but given the chance, I was pretty sure he’d have gotten to that point. “Who was he?”
Ohzor clamped his mouth shut, his lower teeth sticking out slightly over his lip.
“Fine. Forget it. I’m not getting paid to deal with zombie goblins anyway.” I turned to go.
“He was Draak, of the Northern Clan,” he said to my back. “He was not a friend but I knew him. What happened?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” I turned back and took a seat in one of the chairs in front of Ohzor’s desk. “None of your kind knew he was dead?”
“Do you know what every witch knows?” He glared for full effect. I ignored the jab. He knew perfectly well what I meant. “I had not heard of his passing or... that.” He gestured at the phone in my hand. “Several of our numbers have vanished in the last two weeks. I had considered calling you in but then I learned a new portal had been discovered.” He turned his hands palm up as if to say, “So you see.”
Portals were gateways in and out of the Summerlands. Only the most powerful fae could open them from our dimension, meaning a lot of fae creatures got stuck in the human world, unable to get back unless they stumbled across an open portal or paid a greater faerie to open one for them. When one was found, there was often a mass exodus of fae who were sick of hiding in the shadows of the mortal world.
“Where?” I asked.
“I cannot tell a witch that,” he said. “That information is for the goblins only.”
Irritation flared through me. I pulled out the wad of cash and peeled off another hundred, slapping it on the desk. “Where?” I repeated.
He gingerly peeled the money off the desk. “The mall.”
THIS PARTICULAR MALL wasn’t a traditional mall. Maybe it had started that way but it had gradually sprawled out into several buildings spanning many blocks and was now more like a series of strip malls. The main building did have the old fashioned “mall” structure with the indoor walkways between stores, and it had once been home to a popular department store, though it was currently being renovated into something else. Scaffolding and wooden support beams sat on top of the old structure, ready to be built into a grand new entrance way for whatever store was moving into the space.
I had the Uber driver drop me off in the empty parking lot in front of the building that was under construction. Construction was one of those things that tended to uncover or break open portals to the faerie realm so it was a safe bet that’s where I’d find the portal, if it existed at all. At the very least, I might find a clue as to what happened to poor, dead Draak.
What I was going to do then, I didn’t know. But it was almost four in the morning and I didn’t have any other clues to follow. And as someone who didn’t want to wake up to a city overrun with tiny goblin zombies, I felt the need to follow the threads until they ended.
I picked the lock on the front door. Inside, the old department store had been gutted. Walls had been torn down to support beams and the floor stripped to the bare concrete below. Sawdust and debris littered the ground. It looked like the demolition portion of this project was nearly complete and soon they’d rebuild this place into whatever it was going to become. Probably some swanky department store full of clothes I couldn’t afford.
My heavy boots echoed as I made my way across the concrete. I saw no sign of a portal or anything of interest at all.
The mall itself was cut off from the store by one of those rolling metal gates. Whatever doors might have stood in place had been torn out with everything else but the metal security shutter was closed tight.
I bent down to pull one of the pins holding the gate closed and silently thanked my summer stint working at a mall accessory store for knowing how these things worked. Usually they had locks but this one didn’t.
A shuffling sound came from the other side of the gate. Like impatient feet shifting on the ground. I stood slowly and inched my way over to the middle pin, pulling it out as a blood-curdling moan pierced the air.
My heart pounded. Another zombie?
Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get the gate open. But if there was another zombie loose in the mall, I couldn’t leave it behind.
I pulled the final pin. Sounds of shuffling and ragged breathing got louder. And multiplied, like it was more than one zombie. Blood thrummed in my ears as I drew my sword. I took a deep breath and wrenched the gate open. It flew up into the ceiling with a metallic clank. And then a dozen pairs of huge, beady eyes landed on me.
I actually gulped. It might have been funny if I wasn’t face to face with an actual undead goblin horde. The goblins sniffed the air and one in front moaned again, sending shivers down my spine. But they shuffled in place and didn’t attack, giving me time to formulate a plan. So far I had “whack their heads off.” I took a tentative step forward. The goblins did not rush at me. They snapped their teeth and emitted low moans, but held the line.
I swallowed, my throat dry. A small army of zombie goblins was weird enough but the fact that they weren’t rushing to attack was discombobulating. Not that I was complaining.
I lifted my sword to bring it down on the first goblin’s head. A slow clapping echoed through the mall. I froze, a chill sinking into my bones, sword held high above my head.
“My apologies. I wasn’t expecting a
visitor.” The voice was full of amusement and echoed through the cavernous space. A man came around the corner at the end of the hall. The goblins didn’t acknowledge him. They kept their hungry red eyes on me. “Do you like my collection?”
My stomach roiled. I let my sword drop, since my arm had started to ache. “Your what?”
As the man came closer, I could make out his jeans and denim jacket and his shaggy hair cut in a trendy side swoop. He looked like he’d fit in at any college mixer. His face was scruffy and he wore a digital watch whose screen glowed blue on one wrist.
“My collection of undead goblins. I’ve made them all from scratch! Aren’t they wonderful?” He smirked. His teeth gleamed in the dim light, so white they might have been marble. He gestured to the goblins like a game show host displaying a prize.
My insides squeezed until bile shot up my throat. I swallowed it back. “I found one of your goblins at a bus stop.”
He frowned. “Ah, yes, well, I lost track of one. It happens.” He studied me, sizing me up. He did not look impressed. In my defense, it had been one hell of a long night. “You don’t look like the usual Council peon.”
“I don’t work for the Council,” I said.
He looked upward, toward the ceiling, and a smile crept across his face. “Well, isn’t that a relief! Here I thought I’d been discovered before I could create my zombie army and unleash it on the Watchers. But it’s just... who are you?”
“Dani Warren, P.I.” I glowered. “Who are you?”
“Edgar Moore, necromancer.” He actually bowed. What a piece of work.
“Necromancy is illegal.”
Street Spells: Seven Urban Fantasy Shorts Page 4