Gremlin Night, Dale Smith [easy books to read in english .txt] 📗

matter, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. I remembered that the Arcane Security Agency’s operatives were simply trained not to swear, which explained why they were so tightly wound.

“Very cute, having that manifestation snatch me off the Ducati,” I told Dara. I frowned. “That was a waste of an excellent bike. You’ll be paying for that.”

Dara didn’t answer, just stared at me.

“You know,” I continued, “you missed your chance to make the villain riff, ‘nice of you to drop in,’ when your manifestation set me down.”

“You’re not funny,” Dara replied, then made silencing gesture at Riley behind me.

Something hard and cold pressed against my neck.

“Hey,” I blurted. Then the world tilted ninety degrees and smacked me in the head.

When I came to I was sitting in a hard metal chair, my arms handcuffed behind me. My shoulders hurt like Hades. I opened my eyes, blinking against harsh overhead lighting. I was in an interrogation room, a battered wooden table in front of me, Dara sitting on the far side in what looked like a far more comfortable chair. Riley stood in a corner behind her. An obvious one-way mirror covered the upper half of the wall next to him, opposite me. I caught my reflection. I looked terrible.

My muscles were sore, and my bones ached. I had no artifacts, I’d used up practically all my spells, I’d lost my chief suspect, and I was out of touch with my partner.

Time to make a desperation play.

“We have a problem,” I said.

Dara arched an eyebrow. “I’d say you have a multiplicity of problems.”

“And then some,” Riley chimed in.

“Look, the gremlin outbreaks are being consciously coordinated.”

“We agree,” Dara said. “By you.”

My mouth dropped open. I must have looked like a fish right then, gaping at the world. Then I laughed. It echoed harshly off the walls. “That’s beyond ridiculous. What makes you think I coordinated the gremlin outbreaks?”

“Simple,” Dara replied, voice cool. “You’ve been using proscribed magic.”

If my hands were free I would have slapped the tabletop in protest. Instead, I settled for a glare. “Really. Now you’re just being idiotic. In case you didn’t notice, and I know you spy on us when you get the chance, we were investigating the gremlin outbreaks.”

Dara’s eyebrow went up again. “We believe you used a trickster, in violation of the Compact, to experiment in creating chaos magic, and that that experiment went out of control. It caused repeated gremlin outbreaks, which you struggled to contain.”

“And of which you neglected to notify us, violating the inter-agency protocols,” Riley added.

“You jeopardized hundreds of lives, and created ripples in the Hidden, which led to a dragon incident in Seattle, which took away Director Farlance and his team, as well as R.U.N.E. assets from other cities.”

I shook my head. That was nuts. “You’re crazy, why would we do that?”

She leaned forward. “Because you are seeking advantage. R.U.N.E. resents the arcane technologies the A.S.A. has created, as well as the bargains which we’ve struck with ancient manifestations.”

“Oh, please. We have more important concerns than how much money and time you sink into pointless attempts at creating magic-tech hybrids.” I gave her a smug smile.

She sighed. “We have you dead to rights.”

“This isn’t a game!” I snapped. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “Listen, there’s a wizard out there, someone we didn’t know about before tonight, a man named Rudy Gott. He’s responsible for the outbreaks. He bound an ancient trickster, forced it to aid him. He’s using some sort of super-artifact that possesses multiple capabilities.” I started to mention that he’d compromised the secret teleportal network, but caught myself in the nick of time.

Dara actually tsk-tsked me. “You can surely come up with a more convincing story than that.”

I leaned back in my chair, raising my chin. “Fine, ask my partner, John Tully.”

“Tully, now that’s also interesting,” she said. “Where is your partner?”

“We split up, to deal with separate issues.”

Her eyebrow shot up. “Why?”

I rolled my eyes. “We had a lead that needed to be investigated right away before we lost the trail, and we also needed to deal with an outbreak. Oddly enough, there wasn’t another arcane agency we could partner with. Something about paranoid refusal to cooperate in interagency operations.”

She ignored my dig, gazing flatly at me. “That’s your story?”

“That’s the truth.”

“No, Ms. Marquez, that’s a lie.” She held up my blood amulet.

I blinked. Of course, they’d found it. I could lie, say I’d found it, but no doubt they’d already spelled it and discovered my blood aura. My stomach had turned into a ball of lead.

She dangled the blood amulet in front of me.

“Nothing to say? The girl who is always running her mouth is quiet.”

I stared past her head at the ceiling.

She leaned over me, twirling the blood amulet. “Does your partner know you‘re using a banned artifact to fuel forbidden magic?”

I kept silent.

“I didn’t think so,” Dara said, her tone acidic. “For an obvious reason--you killed your partner because he learned about your using forbidden magic.”

I laughed. “That’s absurd.”

She cocked her head. “The penalty for using blood magic is severe. Imprisonment.”

She was a hypocrite. “We know the A.S.A. has done blood magic, too,” I said.

Her face hardened. “Not on my watch. And two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said. “That project was ended some time ago. Just like your career should have been. But you have a protector, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

She smiled at me coldly. “Oh, you can act like you don’t know. But we have detailed files on you.”

No surprise there, the A.S.A. loved to squirrel away information, no doubt they had detailed files on all of R.U.N.E. Well, at least they thought they did. I suspect much of it was conjecture and ridiculous assumptions.

Dara went on. “We know that you were reassigned to R.U.N.E.’s Silo prison complex in North Dakota, because you’d used blood magic. You were released six months later, and then given a field assignment. We strongly suspect