“I evoke the Law of Compliance!” I hissed.
“Hee hee!” the gremlin chortled, streaking past a plastic Rudolph covered in lights.
The lights exploded. I threw up my hand to shield my face and my spell died before I could finish casting.
I ran into a gangly man in a hoodie and jeans, and fell backwards, landing on my butt. The man staggered but didn’t fall. A tangle of brown hair framed a face covered by a big woolen scarf, which only exposed his narrow-set eyes.
For a moment, I thought I glimpsed a stunningly beautiful blond woman beside him, in a too-thin dress, but when I blinked, the image vanished. Gremlin chaos magic wreaked havoc with the interplay between mana and human subconscious. The image might have been a level zero manifestation.
I shook my head to clear it.
The man looked me over, hooded face in shadow, but his eyes glittering, lingering on my breasts. He blinked and reached down to help me up. Silver rings flashed on the fingers of both hands. Two of the rings had rubies in them. For an instant, I thought I saw mana swirling around the rings, but it vanished. Must have been my imagination. I wasn’t detecting anything magical from him. The gremlin must have been messing with my magical perception, such as it was.
“Sorry,” I said, and scrambled up, ignoring his attempt to help me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was a silken tenor.
“No worries.” I strode away from him, rounding the corner of a booth and reaching an intersection between rows of booths.
A singing Christmas tree suddenly began belting out a metal tune, something by Slayer, I think. People winced at the driving thunder of the music. Tully was nowhere to be found. Great, I’d lost the rookie already.
I reached into a shoulder pocket and pulled out a pair of R.U.N.E. issue earplugs, that looked like silver jewelry, a whorl pattern worked into the metal. I jammed them in my ears, and took a deep breath.
“Quietude.” I said the command word in English. The music dropped in volume and I could think again.
I needed to fix things, and save everyone else’s hearing.
“I’m three aisles over,” Tully said in my ear.
He’d put his magicked earplugs in as well. They worked as a two-way communication set-up, for a short while. Like all artifacts, you couldn’t use them nonstop. Otherwise we’d wear them all the time. And like all artifacts, the silver earplugs were alive, and like all living things, would need to recover.
I dodged around people holding their heads, eyes shut. Curse that gremlin. He’d put a lot of people in jeopardy.
A snowman statue glowed red in the third aisle. The gremlin was nowhere to be seen.
A hand tapped my shoulder and I jumped.
Tully knelt beside an overturned table.
“We need to turn off those speakers,” he said.
“You think?” I replied.
Sparks erupted another aisle over, and suddenly things went silent.
“Looks like the little annoyance blew the works,” I said, looking around. “We need to find it before it decides to see how far it can break Murphy’s Law.”
“What goes wrong, makes things worse,” Tully said, quoting a R.U.N.E. saying. “The mana threads are all snarled over by Santa’s sleigh. Snarled and pulsing.”
“That can’t be good,” I said, trying to keep things light. I know, stupid, but if I didn’t, I’d be in a corner screaming.
We sprinted in that direction, running past a candy cane vendor.
A Santa statue sat in the classic Christmas sleigh. The gremlin squatted on Santa’s head. “Hee-hee-hee!!! Its chortle echoed off the tents.
“All right, pal, you’ve had enough fun for ten solstices,” I told it.
All the shoppers in the vicinity had cleared out, except for a little girl who cowered under a table. Her eyes were wide. She’d see everything. Worse, she shook with fear, face strained, eyes wide. Her heart had to be pounding. Mine was in my throat.
“Hee-hee!” The gremlin gestured, and a space heater two stalls down began sparking. We had to end this, now. I wanted to tell Tully to take her away, but he could point out the mana lines, guide me, making the binding spell more powerful, and more accurate.
“We’ll make everything right,” I told the little girl. “I promise.”
I grabbed Tully’s arm. “Guide me, please.”
Tully put his strong hand on my shoulder, and began whispering directions, helping me see the mana swirling around the chortling gremlin, and the way that the mingling purple mana and golden magic glows both began sparking redly. Red was the color of chaos, gremlin magic. Mana was the fuel for magic, chaos screwed with both.
The words of a banish spell flowed from my lips in Catalan, and tumbled into the air like leaves, faintly glowing in my Tully-augmented magical sight. The closeness of Tully, his warmth, the smell of him, all helped ground me as I chanted, weaving my spell. The first gremlin I’d encountered tonight threw my spellcasting for a loop, but this time, with Tully’s presence and his sight, I was able to weave around the sparking chaos.
The frightened little girl would still be watching, eyes now huge, but I couldn’t look. I had to keep focused on the gremlin.
It began shuddering, and a howl burst from its mouth.
Got you now, Buster! My outstretched fingers tingled from the gremlin’s writhing essence. Chaos magic, good only for destruction. Haywire magic, really. The gremlin was very powerful for a level two manifestation, but now, aided by Tully’s sight, it started to look transparent. My breath caught. I’d never seen a level two’s impermanent nature that vividly before.
I closed my hand with a snap. “Begone!” I commanded.
The gremlin squeezed its eyes shut, let out a little moan, and faded away to nothing. Tully released my shoulder.
The mana strands became purple-blue again, and then faded away from my arcane sight. The space heater shut down, and, overhead, the strung Christmas lights stopped strobing and returned to normal. “Rocking around the Christmas Tree” played happily in
