The Curse of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  Froggy—We all knew he loved music deeply. But we also recently found out that he was somewhat of a horror movie buff, too. He’s seriously seen or at least knows about every horror movie ever created. He made us all watch this obscure (and very gory) Italian movie (it’s even poorly dubbed in English and everything) from the 1970s called Zombie. It was mostly just gross, but there was one very cool scene where a zombie fought a tiger shark underwater!

  Glam—She didn’t talk about herself very much, so it was harder to find out more about her aside from that she loved smashing things, eating meat, and checking out all the “cute” Dwarven boys in class. But just recently, I found out that Glam played hockey. She used to sneak out at night on Tuesdays in the winter and go to the outdoor rink on Midway in Hyde Park to play pickup games (sometimes even former and current Blackhawks players would show up). She wasn’t the best puck handler, but apparently more than held her own on defense, where she could violently crash into other players until her heart was content.

  Lake—Because of Lake’s insistence on using an English translation of ancient Dwarven, he might have been the hardest of all to get to know. But just a few weeks ago, when everyone else but Lake and I was busy after class with a variety of other duties, I discovered that he loved chess! Ever since, we’ve tried to play at least one game every Sunday. It wasn’t the same as it was with Edwin. Partially because Lake was, quite frankly, terrible. However, it was still fun to play again and to have something unique to bond with Lake over.

  “Well, anyway, we will try to do better at the MPM tomorrow,” I said, as I continued racking the pool balls.

  “We have to do better,” Ari said. “The Humans need us, even if they don’t know it.”

  Glam nodded and proceeded to break the racked balls with a thunderous CLACK.

  “So why do you guys think Dunmor needed to talk to Eagan?” I asked.

  “Oh, so you’re the only one Dunmor ever needs to talk to privately?” Ari asked. “Do you think you’re special?”

  “No, of course not, I just—just . . .” I stammered. “I mean—I thought—I guess—”

  “Relax, Greg!” Ari grinned. “I’m only messing with you.”

  I forced out some nervous laughter.

  They teased me a lot for being a “Chosen One.” So far, the Bloodletter was the only recovered magical relic from Separate Earth that had “awakened” and selected a new owner. It was said that many of the powerful, enchanted weapons from Separate Earth had this ability—almost as if they had minds of their own. But only the Bloodletter had confirmed these legends thus far. I was definitely getting the feeling lately that my friends were secretly jealous. The Bloodletter had even suggested as much (quite frequently, I might add). Which of course just made me uncomfortable. I’d never asked to have a telepathic talking ax as a friend, after all. In fact, most of the time, Carl (as the Bloodletter referred to himself), could be quite annoying. He was always trying to talk me into destroying things just for fun and whatnot.

  “Haply Eagan receiv’th companions anew?” Lake suggested.

  “No, why would they assign him new classmates?” Ari said. “That wouldn’t make any sense. We make a really good team, surely the Board of Dwarven Education can see that.”

  “Yeah, no way,” Glam agreed. “He’s probably just thinking about turning vegetarian and Dunmor wants to talk him out of it. They’re all worried Ari’s propaganda is finally getting to him.”

  Ari made a face, but didn’t say anything. She and Glam were always going back and forth about eating meat. Glam would constantly find ways to eat meat in front of Ari (like the time she sat right next to Ari and gnawed on a massive smoked turkey leg during our Dwarven Civics class). But to Ari’s credit, she would simply pretend it didn’t bother her. Most Dwarves agreed with Glam that plants were actually more sacred than meat, which only made the whole thing more intense, and almost made me want to take Ari’s side, even though I personally loved meat. But I really respected how much she stuck to what she believed, no matter how unpopular it was among her peers.

  “Nope, that’s not it,” Eagan said from the doorway. “And I don’t really appreciate the implication!”

  Glam’s face turned a shade of red I’d never seen before.

  “I didn’t mean it, like, literally,” she said quickly.

  “It’s fine,” Eagan said, striding into the room.

  I couldn’t help but notice that he was walking differently. Like, he suddenly had more purpose than before. I know that sounds dumb, but it’s hard to explain.

  “So what was it, then?” Ari asked.

  “Well, first, that I can’t go with you on the mission tomorrow,” he said.

  “No!” Glam said angrily, gripping the pool cue like she was about to stab it into the solid wall of stone behind her.

  “That’s not fair,” Ari said. “We need you.”

  “Wherefore wouldst those gents doth yond?” Lake nearly shouted.

  Eagan paused, then a smile slowly spread across his face. I figured it was because he’d only been kidding around, but then I realized it was something else. Something a lot more exciting.

  “It’s not what you think,” Eagan said. “I can’t go with you tomorrow because I’ll be getting officially sworn in.”

  “Sworn in?”

  “Apparently I’m the newest elected member of the Dwarven Council,” he said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Boz Brightfinger Eats Seventy-Four Swiss Cake Rolls

  I can’t believe Eagan is on the Dwarven Council!” Ari said for maybe the tenth time in the van the next morning.

  I couldn’t blame her. It was a big deal. I mean, there were lots of smaller Dwarven Councils all across the world (called Dwarven Committees), but those only had local jurisdiction, like State Legislatures or something. The Dwarven Council in Chicago was the universal, official governing body for the entire Dwarven World. It was an even bigger deal than if a fourteen-year-old Human kid became a U.S. Senator or Member of British Parliament or something.

  “It was a controversial decision to let the vote stand,” Bosgroli Brightfinger said from the driver’s seat. “He’s now officially the youngest Council member in modern recorded history.”

  Bosgroli “Boz” Brightfinger was the chaperone Dunmor sent with us to Wisconsin for our second Monster Pacification Mission. He was also charged with driving us there, in an old gray minivan, our cache of weapons stowed in the back.

  For nearly the entire three-hour drive, we’d been excitedly chatting about Eagan becoming one of the presiding 125 members of the Dwarven Council.

  Most of our information had come from Boz, since Eagan had been too excited (and still sort of in shock) the day before to really tell us much. Also, shortly after breaking the news, he’d had to run off to start preparing. He said it was going to be a lot more work than any of us would have guessed (and definitely way more work than our Dwarven studies classes).

  But basically the story was this: Eagan had been anonymously nominated for the Council seat left vacant when his dad died in the Dosgrud Silverhood Assembly Hall Troll attack a few months ago. Per Council rules, all nominees had to be put forward for voting. And Eagan somehow won the most votes among the twenty-three nominees, becoming the youngest-ever member of the Council by seven years, breaking the previous record of age twenty-one (held by my very own father, funnily enough).

  “He’s going to be great,” I said, though I still wasn’t sure about that.

  My doubts had started the night before when I was lying awake in bed listening to my dad snore.

  It should be you, the Bloodletter had said, his voice cutting through the darkness directly into my brain. You should be on the Council, not Eagan.

  No way, I thought back. Eagan is the smartest kid I know. And logical and honest and kind—almost to a fault. Plus he’s a full year and a half older t
han me, which I know isn’t a lot, but definitely matters somewhat. And he’s lived his whole life learning about Dwarves and our culture. I only just found out what I was less than four months ago! I barely know anything compared to him.

  Yeah, but he’s not destined for greatness the way you are, the Bloodletter insisted. There’s a reason I didn’t choose him. I mean, I like Eagan, too, even though he’s a little soft for me. But you could, can, and will change the world someday. It should be you.

  I didn’t respond, letting my mind go blank. The truth was, I wasn’t sure I really wanted the gig anyway. Too much responsibility for a kid like me: someone prone to setting his own pants on fire and accidentally getting his (former) best friend’s parents killed. But I did know I was going to miss having Eagan with us on this MPM. He was always so logical and knowledgeable about everything. He kept us from panicking when things went south, as they invariably did, us being Dwarves and all.

  “Eagan will probably be an Elder before he’s eighteen!” Glam said proudly from the backseat of the van.

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Boz said, wiping his brow with his sleeve.

  Boz Brightfinger wasn’t much older than us. If he were a Human living in the modern world, he’d probably still be in college. He was a round guy, barely fitting into the driver’s seat, the steering wheel pressed into his solid gut. He had an exceptionally long black beard (for being so young) that was tied into twin braids that hung nearly to his belt. Boz seemed like a nice guy, but he also produced enough sweat in an hour to turn Lake Michigan into a saltwater sea. And he ate Swiss cake rolls like they were going extinct. Which, shortly after pounding down his fifth package, he reminded us they were.

  “I’m going to miss these,” he said as dry crumbs of chocolate fell into the tangles of his black beard under his lower lip. “Soon after magic fully comes back, they’ll be just another dying remnant of the modern world. A tragedy.”

  In addition to sweating and eating Swiss cake rolls, he also really liked to talk about all the doom and gloom that he thought the New Magical Age would bring. Or at least that’s how I perceived it. I found his stories of freeways packed with motionless, rusted-out cars and roving bands of Humans with torches and shovels battling giant scorpions (savage Separate Earth creatures that he called Jattemawr) dark and terrifying. But I think Boz found this vision of the future exhilarating (except, of course, for the inevitable demise of Swiss cake rolls).

  We’d been hearing stories like this from older Dwarves for weeks now. Stories of what the new world would look like. How scary and dangerous it would likely be. But many of them also seemed excited, because they saw a world where Dwarven magic would put us back on top. They saw a future that was terrifying, yes, but also one where Dwarves would once again be in control. We would be the people who rose up and defended the weak, slayed the evil beings, and made the world a safe and wonderful place to live (in theory).

  To me, this all felt too grand, too different from what I’d known my whole life—even counting the past few months—to consider it possible. It all still felt like a story they were telling us at bedtime to give us nightmares, and not like something that would actually happen someday soon. I mean, four months ago I’d thought I was just a relatively happy kid, a nobody, another face in the crowd going on with his life as best he could. A life very few people would ever know about. But now I was embroiled in (and to those Dwarves who still believed in prophecies, involved in) a world-changing series of events as a fantastical, magic-wielding Dwarf. It was more than I could wrap my head around, telepathic ax aside.

  Eventually Boz exited the van off Interstate 90 onto a rural highway.

  We were in the Wisconsin Dells now, an area full of forests, lakes, and rivers in the middle of Wisconsin that drew tons of tourists every summer. In fact, I’d once heard some of my old classmates at the PEE call it the Las Vegas of camping. I’d never actually been out here before, except to drive through. My dad had never had time for camping in the past because of the store (and, you know, his lifelong hunt for magic).

  Boz drove us past the main town, filled with impressive themed hotels (like Mt. Olympus Hotel or Polynesian Water Park Resort). He drove us nearly an hour deeper into the woods and then finally pulled over on the side of a two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere.

  “We’re here,” he said, cheerily wiping away more sweat from his brow.

  “Uh, where?” Ari asked.

  “At the site of the last reported sighting of whatever creature is roaming these woods,” he said. “Yesterday morning something in the forest threw a deer carcass at a passing car right in this very spot. The car managed to avoid an accident, but the driver told police he saw a dark shape running off into the shady cover of the trees. The county sheriff department dismissed it as a hoax. But since we all know that monsters are, in fact, real, we also know it likely wasn’t a hoax. Okay, then, out with you, go find the beast!”

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

  “Negative,” Boz said, carefully unwrapping another Swiss cake roll. “My instructions were to drive you here and monitor the situation. Only to intervene in case of emergency. This is a test of your skill, remember? To see if the Council was right to enlist the help of Dwarven youth for MPMs. If I come with you, it won’t really be a valid test, will it?”

  “Pfft, we don’t need your help anyway!” Glam scoffed, pulling the van’s sliding door open. “Come on, everyone, let’s go crush this beast into bone powder—if it even has bones!”

  Boz grinned and shook his head at Glam as we all climbed out of the van.

  “Someone please try to control her,” he said, but we could tell that he didn’t mean it—he clearly rather enjoyed her zest for destruction the way most other Dwarves did.

  “Yeah, we’ll try!” Ari said, sliding the rear passenger door shut.

  We retrieved our weapons from the back of the van.

  Greg and Carl: together again! the Bloodletter said in his best movie-narrator voice as I placed him into the battle-ax sheath on my back. Who will perish this time? Will it be another Gargoyle? Or perhaps a whole village of Wood Sprites? Either way, no one can save the large pepperoni pizza they will destroy afterward to celebrate!

  I rolled my eyes, but couldn’t suppress a smile. I will say this about my talking ax: Despite its penchant for death and destruction, it was surprisingly cheerful. A welcome change after having spent so much time around Dwarves. Not that my time around Dwarves was all bad. In fact, quite the opposite. In spite of some of our less pleasant characteristics (the negativity, the funky body odors and general refusal to shower more than twice a week, the crass and blunt way we often talked to one another, etc.), I still had to admit that I’d never felt more at home. Living among Dwarves was just so much, well, easier, than existing in the modern world above.

  For one thing, Dwarves didn’t worry about image—we were genuine almost to a fault. Status and wealth generally meant nothing to Dwarves. We were notoriously hard to impress and so nobody really bothered trying. There was no point. Dwarves are who we are as individuals, for better or worse. What you see is what you get. But more than that, I’d never felt like I’d had so much purpose in life since moving to the Underground. The training, the classes, it all felt so much bigger than anything I’d learned at the PEE. And now MPMs gave me an even more specific purpose, an application for my new skills and knowledge: We were helping to keep peace and order in the world. And I never could have imagined how fulfilling that would feel.

  Which was why I was so eager to hop out of this van and do it all over again no matter the dangers ahead (need I remind you of the flaming-pants situation?).

  After we geared up with our weapons, we turned toward the dark forest, standing in a line in the ditch by the minivan. We weren’t sure what we were about to face. But at least this time we were in such an isolated spot that we didn’t need to worry
about rule number two: Don’t make a scene. Then again, should things go awry way out here, our only hope of rescue was a particularly rotund and sweaty Dwarf currently sitting in a minivan putting away Swiss cake rolls and listening to popular-music hits from the 1980s.

  So what? the Bloodletter said, reading my mind again. Let’s just storm on in there and chop up everything that moves.

  Geez, Carl, I thought back. Calm down.

  Hey, just trying to get you all riled up, the Bloodletter said. Like a fiery coach from a cheesy sports movie.

  How many cheesy sports movies can an ancient Dwarven ax possibly have seen?

  Hey, you forget how much time I spent in the living room of that couch-potato Buck.

  Fair enough, I thought with a grin.

  While I wasn’t about to kill a bunch of innocent animals, the Bloodletter was right that I didn’t need to be afraid. After all, we’d already infiltrated a secret Elven base and rescued my dad together. We’d just destroyed a supposedly indestructible Gargoyle less than forty-eight hours ago. Surely we could handle whatever this was as well.

  I was about to make a rousing, inspirational speech to the group to urge them to follow me into the dark and scary woods when I realized my companions were no longer next to me. They were already several feet into the thick of the trees, picking their way fearlessly forward.

  “What are you waiting for, buttercup?” Glam called back to me. “A nice walking path to a picnic spot? Come on, let’s go!”