Autumn Bones

“Scatter!” he shouted.

I lunged forward to grab him . . . and promptly went sprawling as someone clipped me hard behind the knees. Damn. Apparently, there was a fourth hobgoblin. I caught myself on my hands on the piece of cardboard they were using as a gaming table, which promptly slid out from under me, sending me to my belly. The air went out of my lungs with a whoof sound and my sunglasses clattered to the dock.

“Thanks!” The Bieber-goblin vaulted over me, stooping to snatch up my sunglasses with one gnarly, long- fingered hand. “I’ll take these.” Someone let out a startled shriek as he put them on his face. In the heat of the moment, he’d dropped his glamour. “Oops.”

Spinning on the cardboard like an old-school break-dancer, I took him down with a leg sweep and pinned him to the dock. “Gotcha.”

Behind me there was more shrieking and a loud, angry buzzing sound interspersed with oohs and ahs. I barely had time to wonder what the hell was going on before someone grabbed my ponytail and yanked it hard enough to make me yelp. The buzzing sound was right at my ear, vibrating the air like a hummingbird on steroids.

“Loose him, you churlish, ewe-necked trollop!” a voice shrilled. The Bieber-goblin squirmed out of my grip and broke into a run.

“Dammit, Jojo!” I scrambled to my feet. A dozen cameras went off as I confronted the hovering fairy. “I’m working!”

Jojo didn’t even deign to reply, just gave an indignant sniff and winked out of sight.

“Aw, man!” one of the tourists complained, fiddling with his camera. “Why’d you have to scare her off, lady?”

My temper stirring, I gave him a look that shut him up, then scanned the area. Three of the four hobgoblins were nowhere to be seen. They couldn’t vanish into thin air like fairies, but they were fast, and they could camouflage themselves as rocks or bushes in the blink of an eye. As long as they held still, it was hard to spot them.

Lucky for me, the bagman-goblin wasn’t as speedy as the others; when the Bieber-goblin yelled scatter, he’d taken off down the dock, where there was nowhere to hide for a good hundred yards.

I raced after him, my Keds thudding against the wooden dock. Hearing my footsteps, the bagman-goblin turned on the jets. If I’d had a clear shot, I could have caught him, but there were tourists strolling along and that little bugger was agile. He scooted underneath a distinguished-looking Great Dane being walked on a leash and bounded over a baby stroller being pushed by a young couple.

I had to go around them, apologizing breathlessly. I should have caught up to the bagman-goblin in the park with the gazebo, but by the time I reached it, he’d gone to earth, hiding.

“Where are you, you little creep?” I looked around. “C’mon, I know you’re here.” A group of tourists gave me an odd look.

I ignored them. There was a hedge of boxwood around the base of the gazebo. And unless I was mistaken, that bit of shrubbery on the end was trembling. Squinting, I peered through the camouflage glamour to see the bagman-goblin trying very hard to hold perfectly still, his narrow chest heaving with exertion.

So lazy hobgoblins could get out of shape. Who knew? I tackled him before he could run again.

“Oof!” Lying on his back, he raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay! I give.” He batted his beady, lashless eyes at me. “We were just having fun.”

“I know.” I plucked a crumpled wad of twenties from his clutches. “And I’m just doing my job.”

“Spoilsport,” the hobgoblin grumbled.

“Uh-huh.” I sorted through the bills, separating the real ones from the fairy gold counterfeits.

“We’ll give you half our take,” he said in a wheedling voice.

“No can do.” I dropped the false twenties on his chest, where they turned to dry, brittle oak leaves. “And I’d like my sunglasses back.”

“Yeah?” The hobgoblin smirked. “Good luck with that.”

I got off him and stood, patting my messenger bag. “You know, I could have drawn steel on you and I didn’t.”

A hint of fear crossed his face. “You wouldn’t. Not for this.”

“Don’t push me,” I said sternly. “You know you’re not supposed to break mundane laws. Do you want me to report you to Hel?”

“Over a pair of cheap dollar-store sunglasses I didn’t even take?” Now the hobgoblin sounded incredulous.

“No, you nitwit. For defrauding tourists. What’s your name?” I asked him. He didn’t answer. Reaching into my bag, I unsheathed a few inches of dauda-dagr, enough to let him see the hilt. “On pain of cold steel, what’s your name?”

Although they’ve developed a higher tolerance in the last few centuries, most of the fey retain an aversion to iron and its alloys. They can be around it, but they can’t bear its touch. “Tuggle,” the hobgoblin said sullenly. “Name’s Tuggle. You really going to tell her?”

There was no way in, well, hell, that I was going to bother the Norse goddess of the dead by reporting on a relatively harmless hobgoblin scam—and Hel has her own ways of keeping tabs on what’s going on aboveground in the mundane world—but Tuggle didn’t know that. I thought about forcing him to rat out his accomplices and decided against it. I was here to keep order, not make enemies. “We’ll see,” I said to him, easing dauda-dagr back into its hidden sheath. “Tell the others to consider this a warning. And I really would like those sunglasses back.”

Tuggle shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Tuggle.” I gave him a hand up, which he accepted. “No hard feelings?”

He shrugged again. “Eh.”

“Hey, lady!” a concerned voice behind me called. “You okay?”

I turned around. “Fine. Why?”

It was a teenaged kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, out wandering the town with his girlfriend. They were doing that thing where they had their arms wrapped around each other’s waists and their hands in each other’s back pockets. All the cool couples in high school used to stroll the halls that way. Of course, Jen and I had made fun of them, but secretly I was always a little envious of them. I’m pretty sure Jen was, too.

“It’s just that you’ve been talking to that bush for a while,” the kid said in an apologetic tone.

His girlfriend blinked. “Wait a minute. What bush?”

Apparently, Tuggle the hobgoblin was skilled at maintaining a glamour and had a knack for timing a getaway. Glancing behind me, I saw he’d made his escape, probably shifting back to his freckle-faced-kid guise when no one was looking.

Oh, well. At least I’d made my point.

“Welcome to Pemkowet,” I said to the teenagers. “Where weird shit happens.”

Ten

I backtracked along the dock to see about refunding the actual money to the hobgoblins’ marks, but the crowd had already dispersed. Unless the marks had checked their wallets, they probably didn’t realize they’d been ripped off yet.

So I swung by the police station to log my time and fill out a report for the X-Files, leaving the money I’d retrieved in the desk clerk’s keeping in case anyone came to claim it. At the risk of courting avarice, I hoped no one did. What can I say? Working irregular hours on a part-time basis, I was always short of cash. I’d collected two hundred and forty dollars from Tuggle, and if no one claimed it in three months, it was mine.

Upon returning to my apartment, I found my sunglasses placed neatly on the doorstep in the alley, each lens cracked into a perfect spiderweb. That’s what you get for messing around with hobgoblins; and I’d taken it easy on them.

“Ha ha,” I said aloud to thin air. “Very funny.” It got me more peculiar glances from a trio of middle-aged