9

I thought of putting myself back together before answering, but decided the disheveled, traumatized look might help increase the believability of my story. I reshaped the chaos blade, put it away, and grabbed an empty red wine bottle from the kitchen for prop use. I opened up my front door, expecting to see an apologetic Devereaux and a half-dozen angry police investigators. Instead, the swinging door revealed just Agent Devereaux.

She stepped past me into the apartment, pushing the door closed as she passed. “All right, I think that’s taken care of. I need to stop being around you; I’m getting spoiled by how efficient your boss’s name is. They suddenly decided it would be easier to tell the media that someone wants to blow up a bunch of housing for sex offenders than to…wait, where’s the troll?”

“Back in Fairy, I hope.”

She shook her head like a dog with a chew toy. “No, no, I mean, where is he? Like a secret panel or a closet or...”

I slid one of my now-table-less chairs towards her, motioned for her to sit, and went towards the kitchen. “He’s gone. I cast a spell and opened up a portal back to Fairyland for him. You can either sit down, accept that, and I’ll try to explain in more detail.” I rummaged around for a pair of glasses, then pulled a gallon of milk from the fridge. “Or you can reject that as the ramblings of a crazy man and nothing I can say will help you make any sense of this.”

When I came back into the main room, she was indeed seated. I handed her a glass of milk and pulled up a chair opposite her. I sat down and waited for her to say something, anything. After a long minute, she gave a harsh nod, wordlessly telling me to go on.

“Anything you repeat outside this room will likely earn you a trip to the loony bin, but I assure you it’s the truth. I am Lucien Valente’s personal wizard. He hired me to deal with the thing that was eating his employees back in Oklahoma. He liked my work, so he’s kept me around.” I took a sip of my milk and was pleased to see she did the same. “Does that fit? Can you wrap your mind around the idea of corporate wizards?”

“Wizard? And not as a euphemism for problem solver, creative acquisitions, or assassin?”

I almost snarked that no, that would be my girlfriend, but decided some details were better left out. “Wizard as in Merlin-stuff…magic, plain and simple magic.” She was dazed and confused, wanting to believe, but not quite there. I pointed across the room. “See that case? Those jewels belonged to a nineteenth century spiritualist, who claimed they were the key to the success of her séances. Those spears over there are replicas of the one that pierced the side of Christ, made by the Nazis. The prayer rugs hanging on the back wall are all a way of disguising old teachings during the spread of Islam: the craftsmen hid names of djinns and the basic instructions on how to summon them within the weave of the fabric. You think Valente would drop big bucks on all the stuff unless he was absolutely certain that there was something to it?”

Devereaux’s eyes slowly snaked around the rest of the apartment, seeing for the first time all the other display cases I hadn’t mentioned and row upon row of bookshelves. “What is this place?”

“My home…and my lab.” I paused. “Stay with me, Agent. I need to make sure you understand exactly what you’re dealing with.”

“Magic. Got it,” she mumbled. “Like men who turn into trolls and can stop speeding vans with their bare hands.”

“Not exactly. Kerath was born a troll, but he can disguise himself as a man. I was born a man…”

“Ate an old girlfriend to get some power.”

“…and learned how to use magic.” I was at a loss for how to proceed. Normally this was the part where I would downplay my skill and pretend like I couldn’t do anything more impressive than a birthday party trick. The vanished dining table and missing troll said otherwise. In the back of my mind, I thought it couldn’t hurt to let an FBI agent think I was a tad more powerful than I actually was.

She slowly recovered from the shock of it all, the color returning to her cheeks. “So you and the troll were discussing company business, Valente business, tonight? And somebody tried to run you over with a backup plan of blowing you up. No driver, police are thinking robotic device…but it could’ve been magic, couldn’t it? A magic assassin van?”

I nodded. Based on what I had seen this afternoon at the ATM, I suspected it was a little more mundane than that, but it didn’t matter. At the heart of it, magic was a technology, same as robotics. The only difference was that people had forgotten how to use one of them, even as they were excelling at refining the other. I was about to say something when my brain snagged on something funny. For the first day in over a month, I was without the benefit of my demon-spawn bodyguard…and somebody had tried to kill me twice since she’d left. I shuddered and downed the rest of my milk in one shot.

“And the slime in the parking lot this afternoon? Did they try to attack you with some kind of acid golem or...”

I cut her off. “Actually, that was me. There were three assailants. The puddle was what I did to one of them.”

“And it wasn’t a stray bullet that just happened to hit their gas tank, either, was it?”

“Guilty as charged, though I had a little technological assist there.”

She sat straight up in her chair and handed me her glass. “All right, Mr. Fisher. I’m ready to hear what really happened in Oklahoma. And I could probably use a glass of something stronger than milk.”