“How many gremlins did you encounter here?” I asked Farlance.
“In the immediate neighborhood, four, including the one you encountered. There have been nine all told in Portland since sundown.”
“Abyss be cursed,” I whispered. “The compound chaos effect?” I asked him.
He thought for a moment. “It’s possible, but even nine gremlins wouldn’t be enough to cause the dragon-forged teleportal to malfunction. It would take a lot more power than that.” He stroked his chin, eyes taking on a faraway look.
His assistant, the woman suit, listened, but said nothing, instead tapping and stroking her arcane phone’s screen. A tiny techno-sprite appeared just above the screen. The woman tapped out a command on the screen. The sprite nodded, vanished. My arcane phone most definitely could not summon a techno-sprite. I had to settle for messenger sprites, who traveled in normal space like we humans, though they could fly on their own.
A high trumpet sounded. I glanced around.
“Sorry.” Farlance reached into his coat and pulled out his phone. “Call from Seattle.” He thumbed it on. “Director Farlance,” he answered. He listened. “That bad?” He listened a moment longer. “That escalated quickly. I understand. Thanks for the update. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes with my team.”
He thumbed his phone off and put it away. He turned to me, his face serious. “I’m afraid I don’t have the time to assist you with your investigation, Elizabeth.” My toes wanting to curl even more at his earnest tone. “A crisis has erupted in Seattle. My response team and I have to teleportal there to deal with it.”
“What crisis? I didn’t hear anything back in Brooklyn.”
“That’s because we’ve kept a lid on it, until now. It involves provocateurs from the Iron Circle stirring up conflict among the Pacific dragons.”
“The Iron Circle is operating again?” I thought R.U.N.E. had finished them, three years ago. I’d been part of the small army of agents that had gone after them, in L.A. My jaw tightened at the memory. We’d lost a lot of people, and allied manifestations.
“It seems like it. We’re not sure, but this has all the signs of one of their plots. Worse, this crisis has become a matter of Draconic pride.”
The Iron Circle had a real knack for intrigue and stirring the fires of jealousy between individuals and groups. Dragons were a supremely proud bunch, and the surest way to upset them would be to do something that would make their pride an issue.
“We should be helping you,” I said. They’d killed the one friend I’d made in R.U.N.E., Hanna. She’d been a binder, like me.
Tully’s expression was still unreadable.
“Come on, don’t you agree?” I asked him, my face pinched.
“He’s the Director, and I’m a sorcerer-agent. He knows the situation better than I.”
“I appreciate that you want to help, Agent Marquez,” Farlance said, smoothly. Something in his velvet voice made me tremble. It also got under my skin. For a moment, I was torn between wanting to melt and being annoyed. Annoyance won out.
I couldn’t help myself. “So, you’re going to leave us here to pull clean-up duty while the rest of the short-handed Pacific Northwest R.U.N.E. force takes on the Iron Circle.”
Tully’s eyes narrowed, but he kept silent. He should be backing me up, asking questions, supporting my concern, but, that was the problem with having a newbie as a partner, they were overly deferential to the so-called chain of command.
Farlance didn’t miss a beat in his smooth performance. “R.U.N.E. needs this problem tracked down. Just because we’ve dealt with these outbreaks doesn’t solve the mystery of what caused them.” Another man would have made that sound patronizing, but Farlance just sounded earnest. “The California office is sending sorcerer-agents and burners to Seattle as well, as is the Rocky Mountain office.”
That was a lot of personnel. “It’s that serious?”
Farlance nodded. “Yes, it is.”
“Which means you need all the help you can get!” I scowled at him, willing him to understand how important my help would be. A dragon crisis would spell disaster.
Farlance remained calm. “Regardless, we still need to learn what caused the gremlin outbreak here in Portland before it happens again. This is Winter Solstice.”
Winter Solstice. The longest night of the year, when the nocturnal arcane had the most hours of darkness to concentrate mana, create manifestations and set loose magics from those manifestations. What had caused the gremlin outbreaks? Was there a pocket of chaos magic? Was there a neighborhood where the collective subconscious was disturbed-warped even-in a way that led to creating gremlins? Was it something else?
I took a deep breath. “Sorry, Director. You’re right of course,” I said. “We’ll find out what’s behind the outbreaks.” Good thing my old partner Tomlinson was retired—he’d have been stunned, or convulsed with laughter, to see me so quick to agree.
It wasn’t glamorous, but such investigations went with the job. Field assignments were about getting to the bottom of arcane matters and included what caused the disruptions. Moreover, gremlin outbreaks usually didn’t last, and didn’t involve as many of the little pointy-headed irritations as this one apparently had. That made this outbreak different.
Tully continued to annoy me, sitting there silent, watching the show. Always watching.
“Can I ask you a question? What do you think about us figuring out what caused this outbreak?” I asked him after the silence got to be too much. “By the way, what is your specialty?”
He raised an eyebrow. “That’s two questions, Ms. Marquez.”
“Just Marquez,” I said. I didn’t want to grant him the privilege of calling me Liz, not if and until he’d proven himself.
“Okay.”
I couldn’t tell if that was a prickly okay, or an easy going okay, or something else. I settled for matter-of-fact, but who knew. My dad thought I worried too much about the inflection in someone’s words, but with the arcane, inflection and tone could make all the difference. Dad didn’t know about the arcane. Inflection always made a difference, be it spellcasting or figuring out
