by Debra Dunbar
His brothers. Even Gabe? If even the stodgiest of angels could come around to view this change as unpleasant but necessary, couldn’t the other angels too? They just needed to see what I’d seen—see what Gregory and his brothers had seen. This was all terrifying to an angel locked in Aaru for a billion years. They needed to walk among the humans, converse with a few demons, learn that this could work if they just put aside their fear.
“If we win, do you think the other angels will eventually come to embrace a unity between the demons and angels?”
He saw the despair on my face and gathered me close. “It can happen, Cockroach. I used to feel the same way these other angels do. I was even more bitter and rigid, farther entrenched in my ideas of what constituted balance and growth than any of them.”
“But you changed. And you didn’t do it by locking yourself away in Aaru, abandoning the humans, and closing the gates to Hel. You did it by heading the Grigori, assuming physical form for the last ten thousand years and walking among the humans.”
“No, I changed because I met you. I took the position to head the Grigori out of duty, because I felt we owed it to the humans after what had happened with the tenth choir. It was distasteful to leave Aaru and live this life, but it gave me a different perspective. And when I met you…you are the catalyst, Cockroach. You are the Iblis and you’ve been one long before you got the sword.”
“So we need to bring all the angels down here for ten thousand years of service in physical form,” I said, half teasing. “Then subject them to the torturous attentions of demons. It worked for you. It worked for Asta.”
“Asta is the youngest of the angels,” he said. “She doesn’t even remember the war. But yes, her service here in corporeal form among the humans did influence her thinking. And that demon brother of yours most definitely did.”
Asta wasn’t the youngest of the angels any longer. And I needed to do everything I could to protect that baby.
“So how do we force all the angels down here? Is there some lever that would flush them all out of the toilet that is Aaru and down the pipes into the ocean? Some kind of eject button? We’d need to lock them out too, so they couldn’t go right back. Ten thousand years here should be plenty.”
I felt his muscles stiffen, heard him inhale sharply. “No, Cockroach. Unfortunately not. We’ll just have to negotiate the best terms we can, and hope that in time the rest of the angelic host is willing to take a more moderate view.”
I looked up at him, at his guarded expression and wondered what he was hiding. I got the feeling that he had little hope of the angelic host ever taking a more moderate view, but something hit me as soon as he spoke. He lied.
He’d lied. There was some kind of eject button. I got the feeling that what the angels in Aaru needed most was a walk on the human side of things. Just a few months here in physical form, and they’d be rethinking their stance on vibration levels.
An eject button. If only I knew where it was.
Chapter 17
Once Gregory left I cleaned up and went out to check on my elves. There was a note on my door indicating that there had been a complaint against me for a zoning violation. It looked suspiciously unofficial. I should know, I’d spent the last forty years being cited for every code violation the city and county could throw at me. Being a slum lord had its privileges. Besides, I doubted the local government officials were in on the weekends, and a camping party of pointy-eared dudes in my field hardly constituted an emergency. Still, I ripped the paper off and tromped through my pasture.
The three horses were grazing by the little tent village, Diablo watching the elves with interest. Every now and then one would approach him. Once they got close, he’d snort and vanish, appearing at the other side of the enclosure. He’d been caught in Hel by some elven scouts and held in Wythyn as they tried to train him to be a proper elven mount. In his case I was better at horse-whispering than the legendary elves. Diablo was a half-demon, a hybrid, and as such he’d been a difficult horse to train. We had an understanding. The elves and he did not.
As I watched, one elf snuck up closer and closer. Diablo put his head down to eat some grass, a red glint in his eyes. Suddenly he spun around and kicked, sending the elf flying backward. Before the elf could launch a counter attack, the horse was gone, back on the other side of the tents and grazing with his fully equine buddies. Too funny.
“Hey!” I called out. The elves walked toward me and I held out the paper. “Have you guys had any run-ins with my neighbors? They were over earlier today to ream me out about your camping in the field.”
One elf nodded. “They were watching us across the fence. It was very nosy of them. Are humans all like that? Staring and rudely watching everything we do?”
“Only because you guys have clothing styles not normally seen this side of the gates. And you’re starting fires with a dragon. Can you possibly leave Little Red alone? I was hoping to keep his presence here a bit of a secret. I’m surprised the neighbors aren’t doing more than posting notices on my door when you’ve got a dragon playing fetch with arrows. And now you’re annoying my hybrid horse so he teleports around. I’m gonna have an exorcist out here if you all don’t cut it out.”
One elf snorted. “Like an exorcist is going to do anything to us. We’ll just shoo him away. We’re not hurting anybody. And the dragon needed to get out. It’s not good having him cooped up like that. Poor thing.”
I guess the good news was they didn’t have Boomer out here too, feeding him bits of long dead corpses or something. Seems my whole freak show of a life was now on display for neighbors or any passerby to see.
“Lysile, Cliey and Swyllia went out to get food,” another elf commented. He was tall and thin with a long light-brown braid that went past his waist. It made him look like a pointy-eared male Pocahontas.
I counted. For fuck sake. There were supposed to be forty-four of them and sure enough there was now forty-one. I bought food. How much did they need after all?
“Where did they go to get food?” I asked. “And more importantly, how did they get there? You guys don’t drive. In fact, you seem to be highly allergic to human automobiles.”
“We run very fast,” Pocahontas announced proudly. “We could get our own groceries even quicker if we could manage to catch this hybrid horse of yours. He teleports! That’s amazing. How much do you want for him?”
“My horse isn’t for sale,” I shot back. Diablo nickered in agreement. “And where did they go to get food?”
I was panicking a bit. Not only were these three elves very likely to get run over by someone, they were equally likely to get shot or wind up in jail. Or the hospital. Any of those scenarios would result in quite a lot of explaining from me—just as much explaining as a dragon catching arrows midair, a horse teleporting across a field, and a bunch of elves camping out and singing songs in my pasture. Fuck.
I didn’t really care if they died. In fact it would be a whole lot easier for me if they did die. Except for the fact that Gregory had put me in charge of them until Elf Island was up to speed, and I wasn’t sure if that meant I would be needing to do 495 reports for each death or not. Did Rafi and Gabe know about the elves? Damn it all, I had enough paperwork as it was with the fucking humans. I didn’t need this.
Okay, I lied. I did care whether they died or not. I’d rescued that Lysile woman from the mob in Hel and I really didn’t want her to get flattened by a pickup truck less than twenty-four hours later. And the rest of these elves seemed like a pretty nice bunch. They were a pain in the ass, but they were becoming my pain in the ass.
“Where?” I shouted. Three fucking elves missing. They could be anywhere. They could be dead.
“I…I don’t know.” Pocahontas backed up. “We don’t know where the markets are around here, and these fields either carry toxic plant life, or they produce plants we’re not certain are edible. They headed up the busy roadway in search of food.”
Busy roadway. Route 26? Di
d they somehow get onto I-70? Or in their lack of knowledge about human customs, did they consider some back road to be “busy” and head toward Westminster.
“You.” I pointed to one of the younger elves. “You’re coming with me and we’re going to find them.”
The elf blanched. The others ran to their tents, a blur of speed as they hid lest I pick them to come too.
“We’ll take Diablo.”
The elf brightened at the prospect of riding my hybrid horse. Diablo didn’t appear as pleased at the idea. Too bad. I couldn’t very well take him in my car or SUV. He’d wind up with the same burns as the Icelandic elves. And as fast as I could run, I couldn’t keep up elven speed as long as he could. Horse it was.
The elf chatted away, admiring the saddle, my barn, the pool, the metal boxes of death parked in my driveway. Poor thing was nervous. I don’t know why I felt sympathy for him, but I did.
“What’s your name?”
“Ppppptellia,” the elf sputtered.
Telly it was. “Okay, Telly. This saddle isn’t exactly meant for two people, so you’ll need to ride behind and hold on. Keep your heels out of his sides or we’ll both be on the ground. Got it?”
He nodded emphatically. “Got it. I’ve been riding horses as long as I can remember. I won’t fall off.”
As much experience as he had, he’d not been riding half-demon horses at all. And I wasn’t all that great of a horsewoman. There was a good chance I’d come off Diablo a few times during this journey, and if so, the elf better hope he came off too. Diablo was giving him the evil eye and I wasn’t sure exactly what would be in store for poor Telly if he wound up on top of the horse without me.
“Oh I hope we find them. Lysile is my mother,” he chattered on. “I was scared when she went with you back to Hel, and then she volunteered to go on the food journey… We weren’t sure when you’d be back, and supplies were running low. When she threw in her marker for the drawing to go, I nearly cried. She’s brave. So much braver than me. I wanted to stay in Hel. She thought this would be a great chance for us, though. And besides, our land would be worthless once the High Elves left. It was scary, us living there all alone with the demons—more scary than living here among all these humans. How many humans are there? So many. And they have scary things too. That neighbor of yours pointed a box at us and we all screamed and ran. We had no idea what it was going to do. I was afraid it would hit us with those burning little balls of metal, but it just made a click noise.”
A camera. Great. And leave it to the Philipses to have some old click-noise camera when everyone else would be taking pictures with their cell phones.
“So you think they would have headed this way?” We were out on Route 26. I pointed toward Frederick.
“No, that way.”
Baltimore. I got on Diablo and gave Telly a hand up. Then I estimated how fast an elf would move at full speed and figured in when they’d left. And…that put them in Baltimore. Somewhere. Unless they stopped at a grocery store along the way and got lost.
Diablo transported us to the closest grocery just six or so miles down the road. Telly cringed as we materialized in the parking lot. “No. They wouldn’t have shopped here. Not with all the metal death-boxes.”
Great. All places had metal death-boxes. That was the joy of human transportation. A grocery store without a decent parking lot or one that was far off the main roads wouldn’t have much in the way of gross revenue. I needed to find something more like a farmer’s market.
If they had traveled along the roadway edges where they could stay as far away from the cars as possible but still remain on the “path,” then they would end up in Owings Mills. So I next had Diablo take us to a spot off Security Boulevard. Here instead of a highway, the road became more of a busy city street, running beside parks and flanked by a long, narrow, winding creek surrounded by trees. It was an ideal spot for elves to travel, so I urged Diablo up into the woods and we walked along, keeping our eyes open for the three.
“Do you see any signs that they traveled by here?” I asked. “Any healed trees or, I don’t know, blessed shit that might indicate elves passed this way?”
He shook his head. I continued to hold Diablo to a walk, worried that if he teleported, we might jump past the elves. There had to be somewhere near here they’d go for food. A local corner store that was less intimidating? We were entering the Druid Hill neighborhood. Elves were kind of like druids, weren’t they? Maybe they were raiding community gardens as we spoke.
Suddenly Tully lifted up his head and sniffed. “What is that?”
Fuck if I knew what he was referring to. “Barbeque? Car exhaust? Someone put their garbage out a day early?”
“Animals.” He sniffed again. “Really odd animals. Not deer—we have deer that smell the same back in Hel. This smells like maybe a durft crossbred with a mountain salva?”
Diablo nodded then abruptly teleported, nearly toppling me from the saddle. When we appeared, we were in front of a long winding drive ending at wide metal gates that announced the Maryland Zoo.
“Here? Seriously?”
He nodded. “That groc-erey store would have been too scary to go get food, so hunting is our next choice. Unless there was one of those smaller market things along the way, the elves would have smelled these animals and decided to bring one back.”
Oh hell no. I’d been worried about elves getting plowed over by trucks or arrested when I should have been worried about them shooting a lion in front of a bunch of tourists and dragging it back to my house to eat.
Is it wrong that I was glad they hadn’t made it home with their illegally killed prey? Zoning violations would have been the least of my worries if the cops found my house guests eating a lion from the zoo in my back field.
I tied Diablo to one of the iron gates, fully aware that he could untie himself and go wherever the fuck he wanted. Still it was better than having my horse roaming around Baltimore. Maybe he’d stay put. Or teleport back to his buddies in my pasture, leaving Telly and me to hoof it home.
First stop through the gates was the information center where I shoved Telly in front of me. The woman eyed him curiously. “Costume day is Wednesday.”
“I know.” I didn’t know, I just didn’t care. “Have you seen any other kids, errr, people that look like this? Wearing this costume? I’m supposed to meet a group here and they’re all costumed like this.”
She shook her head slowly, then paused. “There was one. I remember because he tried to steal a bag of cheetah food, then we later caught him climbing in the tortoise enclosure and taking their lettuce leaves. We tried to escort him out of the zoo, but he’s fast and keeps getting away.”
Great. “Any idea where he might be? I’ll get him off the property for you.”
The woman spoke into a walkie-talkie. There was a crackle of noise, then an unintelligible voice. “Over by the lions.”
I ran. Telly ran. Elves are stinking fast, but when I wanted to pour on some demon speed I could keep up. The elf was easy to find. He was balanced on the top of the fencing separating the lion enclosure from the visitors. The only thing between him and the lion was the steep drop, a water-filled ditch, and a half acre of dirt and rock. The tourists watched, fascinated as the elf tight-rope walked along the top of the fence, his balance perfect. I was grateful he didn’t have a bow and arrow to shoot the lion, but that made me wonder what his intentions were. Did he plan on jumping in and wrestling the thing into submission? If so, he was in for a big surprise.
I didn’t get to see the elven massacre. Tully shouted, “Cliey, get down.”
The elf spun about, his eyes wild and crazy. “Ptellia? By the Lady, go back. There are killers in this town. Murderers.”
Like cars and trucks? Or farmers with shotguns? Cliey jumped down from the fence and stumbled, going down on one knee. That’s when I realized that more than mud stained his clothing. He was hurt.
“Did the zoo staff injure you?” I couldn’t imagine
it. Attempting to steal a bag of feed would get him kicked out. Climbing into a tortoise enclosure would get him hauled off by the cops. I just couldn’t see the zoo staff catching an elf, let alone stabbing him, or beating the shit out of him.
“No.” He sobbed, staggering to his feet and hugging Tully. “We went farther into the city, worried that hunting was somehow regulated here or that these animals belonged to a human with one of those magical sticks that shoots fire and death.”
“But you were about to try to grab that lion,” I countered. “That does belonged to someone else, and if you’d survived then the humans would have put you in a metal box.”
He shuddered. “I couldn’t return empty handed, especially after losing the other two.” Cliey made a choking noise. “They caught them, and I ran. I was a coward and ran. I couldn’t double my shame by coming back with no food.”
“Who caught them?” Telly’s voice rose in pitch. “Where’s my mother? What happened to her?”
Cliey swallowed a few times and composed himself. “There was a man standing outside a building and when he saw us he shouted for his friends and they chased us. They were fast. I’ve never seen humans that fast, or that strong.”
Olympic sprinters/bodybuilders? But what grudge would they have against a bunch of weirdly dressed, pointy-eared people who didn’t speak English? Why chase them down and beat them up? Or cut them?
“Did you insult them? What did you say to them?” I demanded. All I could come up with was they’d somehow offended the drug dealers on a Baltimore corner and gotten their asses handed to them.
“Nothing,” Cliey squeaked. “I swear we didn’t say a word to them. The guy just looked at us and yelled. Next thing we knew a bunch of them were running after us.”
I rubbed my face, wishing I’d stayed in Aaru. Or in Hel. “Okay, what was the address of the building? Where was it?”
“I’m n-not sure,” Cliey stammered. “I just ran and didn’t pay much attention to directions. The building had a sign was the human language. There was the music coming from the open doorway and the picture of a wine bottle in the window.”