Authors: S. Andrew Swann

Dragons & Dwarves (57 page)

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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Pretty good for someone who was only close to the top of the Org chart, and one of the only humans in the rarefied upper atmosphere of the Magetech hierarchy. All the higher executives, and the board, were dwarven.

Oddest of all was where Mr. Lucas listed his residence.

All his financial records that Quint had been able to access, including some tax forms released to the SEC, listed Simon Lucas’ residence on Whiskey Island.

According to all the man’s records, he resided in the middle of the dwarven enclave, where the mana was so dense that human beings couldn’t work there without going mad . . .

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
GOT my wake-up call at five in the morning, and I was relieved to look out the hotel window and see a clear sky. I figured we had more than enough time to make it down to Akron and have some sort of breakfast at the airport before I put her on the plane. I dressed quickly, skipping a shower and a shave, figuring to let Sarah have the run of a clean bathroom before we left.

Dressed, I steeled myself for a tearful argument and knocked on the door to her bedroom.

“Come on, Sarah. Wake up, we have a plane to catch.”

She didn’t answer me.

“Sarah?” I pushed the door open.

The bed was empty.

“Oh, no.” I stepped in. She wasn’t here. Neither was her bag. “Shit, you’re kidding me. Sarah?”

I ran out and threw the door to the bathroom open. “Sarah?”

Nothing.

She wouldn’t just walk out . . .

“Why not?”

How the hell could I be that stupid? She as much as told me that she was running away to Cleveland, not to her father. She’d done everything but come out and tell me she would bolt.

I ran out into the hall, dashing the hope that she had just stepped out of the room. I was in the elevator, halfway down to the lobby, when I realized that my car keys were gone.

Better and better.

I walked out of the elevator and through the lobby, looking for her. No sign.
Christ, she doesn’t even have a winter jacket.

I found the concierge by the Euclid exit. “Pardon me, did you see my daughter leave?”

“Pardon.”

“My daughter, she’s seventeen, blonde, probably wearing a leather—”

“Oh, yes, an hour ago, I directed her to the garage.”

I ran to the garage, dialing the police as I went.

“Hello?”

Margaret yawned and I realized that it must be three in the morning on the coast.

“It’s Kline,” I said.

“Oh,” she was too calm. She must have been too asleep to hear the stress in my voice. “Are you at the airport already?”

Yeah, she was expecting me to call, wasn’t she?

I looked around, for a moment too numb to say anything. I was sitting on the rail where my Volkswagen had been parked. A pair of police cars was here, which was a bonus for your average runaway case. I was lucky in that I had one string that I’d pulled as hard as I could.

“Kline? You
are
at the airport.”

“She did it to me, too . . .”

“What?”

“Right up to lifting my car keys.”

“Oh, my God.”

I shook my head. “I was an idiot. She came out and told me she thought she was missing part of her past—”

“Yes, you.”

“No, Margaret, this isn’t about me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She didn’t bolt from the hotel because she was desperate to see me. She ran here because she has some weird idea that this city is part of her heritage.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“She told me that she thought you were ‘walling off part of herself. ’ I don’t think she was planning to see me at all.”

“Where would she go?”

“I don’t know. Does she know anyone out here? Any boyfriends?”

“Kline?”

“This is serious. Our daughter has just stolen
another
car and now I have no idea where she could be going. She has to have left some sort of clue. Something on her computer, email, letters, a diary?”

“What do you think—”

“I don’t know what to think, but ransack her room and call me back when you find something—The police are here, I’ll call you back.”

“But—”

I cut her off as one of the strings I had pulled unraveled in front of me. Walking up the ramp of the parking garage, toward me and the two police cruisers, was the tall gangly form of Commander Maelgwyn Caledvwlch.

One of the hazards of name-dropping to a police dispatcher, the name in question might actually show up.

“Mr. Maxwell,” he greeted me in his semi-Jamaican monotone.

“Commander Caledvwlch.”

“I have become interested in your assessment of my priorities.” He waved a long hand, encompassing the empty parking space and the pair of police cars. “I understand that your child removed your vehicle without your permission. But my understanding of human reasoning falls short when I discover that this requires SPU involvement. Can you enlighten me?”

I shook my head and put my cell phone away. “I got two answers for you, neither of them very good. Can we go somewhere private and talk?”

Caledvwlch took me to the back of a mostly-fiberglass minivan, which passed for an unmarked patrol car for the SPU elves. Not that any of them ever went undercover. It all had to do with headroom and iron content.

I eased into a seat with a groan and Caledvwlch managed to fold himself in next to me. I looked at him, the alien angles of his face framed by a ruff of hair and convoluted pointed ears. He watched me with metallic eyes with no visible iris or pupil. Behind the impassive expression I knew sat a sense of duty and fealty that made a fourteenth-century Samurai look like an anarchist.

I didn’t know how he’d react to a father who was just freaking out and didn’t know what else to do.

“The first answer,” I looked at him. “Hell, it isn’t one. I know how police prioritize things in this town. Runaway—especially one an hour old—isn’t going to make it to the top of the list.” I looked at Caledvwlch’s face, no reaction. “If I just let it go with my daughter swiping my car, I’d be lucky if someone came and took a statement within the next twenty-four hours.”

“The human phrase, I believe, is, ‘to light a fire under someone’s ass.’” He said it with no discernible emotion, and I wondered if it was possible he was mocking me.

“I am part of your investigation, however tangential. I just made sure everyone knew it.”

Caledvwlch nodded and seemed to be lost in thought a moment or two. Then he asked me, “There was an incident, yesterday, with a colleague of yours.”

I swallowed. I probably should have reported it to the cops. “Yes, Nina Johannessen—”

“She is in a coma. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I told the doctors what I could . . .”

“She is a seer, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did she see something about your daughter?”

I looked at Caledvwlch as I wondered exactly how much he knew. As usual, he didn’t provide me any external clues. The elf would provide the play by play for the apocalypse with all the passion of a golf announcer.

“That was the other reason . . .”

I unloaded on Caledvwlch, probably the way any parent would unload on an available cop, even without any overt displays of sympathy. I didn’t need his encouragement. I was prepared to hand everything I had over to him, however tangential, if it might have some distant relation to where my daughter might have gone.

I went over Nina’s visions, the tarot cards, my nightmares, and how Nina said it was tied to my daughter. I told him about Nina’s possession, and how whatever had taken control had the same voice as the Devil in my dreams.

“You should have reported that,” Caledvwlch said quietly. “Possession of an unwilling victim is a first-degree felony.”

“I know, but I called my ex after that, to check on Sarah, and that’s when I found she’d slipped out of the house and got on a plane.”

“You understand that you have just admitted to a criminal act?” Caledvwlch said. “At this time it is my duty to advise you of your rights.”

“You’re arresting me?”

“I am taking you to the station for a more formal questioning,” Caledvwlch said. “A full statement now and I will not be prompted to take you in for failure to report a crime.”

“What about my daughter?”

“Mr. Maxwell, as you informed the dispatcher, this is part of an ongoing SPU investigation.”

Caledvwlch took me to an interview room only a few blocks away at police headquarters. While I’d suffered a few arrests in my career, I’d never been brought to the Special Paranormal Unit’s interrogation room. Even when Caledvwlch “rescued” me from Blackstone, Caledvwlch just used a spare office to question me.

I didn’t think it was a good thing that I now rated special treatment—and when a uniformed cop let me in, I was very glad that Caledvwlch hadn’t felt the need to actually arrest me.

The room was constructed specifically to suit the needs of the Special Paranormal Unit, and those needs were, well,
special.

First off, the room itself was designed like an operating theater, rather than a standard soundproof interrogation chamber—a cylinder with concave walls, with observers stationed behind one-way glass at the top of the room, looking down. The walls weren’t layered in acoustical tile, but were concrete with gold symbols inlaid flush with the surface. When the foot-thick door shut behind me, the inlay formed multiple concentric circles ringing the wall from floor to ceiling.

In the center of the room was what looked like a dentist’s chair. Looking at the heavy straps, I was rather glad that they didn’t have me sit there. I got to sit at a more normal office chair that was one of a half dozen places at a metal table that formed a donut around the chair of honor.

When I sat, I said to Caledvwlch, “Nice setup you have here.”

“Sometimes we must conduct difficult interviews.” He waved at a plainclothes human who had joined us in the room. “Dr. Singh will be observing here, and may have some questions of his own.”

Dr. Singh was a bald, white-mustached Indian man. He nodded a slight acknowledgment to me. I wondered who he was. I guessed that he was a forensic mage of some sort.

Caledvwlch sat down as well, “Shall we take your statement from the beginning?”

“Well, I talked to Nina—”

“Ossian Parthalán,” said Dr. Singh. “Begin with his phone call.”

“What?” I asked. “I went over this already, my daughter—”

“From the beginning,” Caledvwlch said.

I looked from one to the other. “This has nothing to do with my daughter. It’s the damn dwarves again. Damn it, we need to find her. What happened with Nina—”

“Mr. Maxwell,” Caledvwlch raised his voice only slightly, but it was enough to cut me down in my tracks. The elf had held a gun on me before, but he had
never
raised his voice.

Caledvwlch stared at me with those cold metallic eyes, “This has everything to do with your daughter. Now,
from the beginning.
”

He didn’t need to provide me with any more encouragement.

I ran down everything, step by step, since Ossian Parthalán called me to question why Councilman Mazurich shot himself. What scared me was when they had me back up and asked questions about my daughter.

“You received a call from California that evening,” Caledvwlch said.

“Yes, Sarah.” I repeated the conversation as I remembered it.

“Did she say anything odd?” asked Dr. Singh. “Possibly about her trip here?”

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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