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

you have a highly-placed backer in R.U.N.E., possibly your own mother.”

I snorted. “Give me a break. My mother is the last person I’d work directly for.” This whole thing was absurd. “We’re wasting time. We only have--” I glanced at where my watch would be, “--how much longer until daylight?”

Dara glanced at Riley, who looked at his watch. “Ninety minutes.”

I jumped up, or rather, I tried to, but the handcuffs restrained me. “Curses, don’t you get it? You must have sensed the mana building up, and all the chaos magic, as well.”

“Of course, let loose by you.”

“Did you find a mana siphon on me? For that matter, did you find any artifacts on me?”

“No, but that’s because you’ve made bargains with criminal manifestations, which are storing the magic.”

I sighed. “You’re just spinning absurdities, you realize that?”

Dara started to answer, then a buzzer sounded. She got up, went to the door, and left the room. Riley stared at me, his eyes flat.

“You are just a bundle of fun, you know that?” I told him. No reaction.

No surprise.

We stared at each other for a while, then I looked at the one-way mirror. The minutes crawled by. Riley watched me, his face expressionless.

I fidgeted. Where had Dara gone?

“Time’s wasting,” I said, finally.

Riley kept staring.

At last, the door opened, and Dara re-entered the room, followed by a familiar figure.

Tully.

15

“Nice of you to show up,” I said, forcing a grin. Relief washed over me in a wave, and for a moment, my shoulders untensed.

Tully didn’t smile back. “I needed to not die, first,” he said. His hands weren’t cuffed. He carried a slim leather-bound book.

I raised an eyebrow. “Obviously you managed that feat,” I quipped, trying to keep my relief going in the face of his grim look.

“It wasn’t easy,” he replied.

Dara pointed at a chair and Tully sat, she beside him. I got a good look at him then as he sat down. A massive bruise covered one side of his face, from chin to jaw, and cuts and scrapes pockmarked his hands. His knuckles were bloody.

My chest tightened. He looked like he’d gone three rounds with a troll. I should have been there.

“Mister Tully informed me that we face a crisis that threatens the secrecy of the Hidden and the arcane world,” Dara said.

“Oh, he shows up and you immediately believe him,” I mock-groused, trying and failing to shake the guilt over not being there.

“We don’t have any time for your antics,” Dara retorted. “Tully’s words and his actions carry weight. Yours don’t.”

“Fine,” I said. It killed me to admit it to myself, but she had a point. “Fine,” I repeated. “We need to act, now. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re running out of time.”

She frowned at me. Sweat rolled down my arms. Was she going to bring up the blood magic?

I raised my eyebrows. “Well?”

She nodded stiffly at Tully. “Mister Tully has convinced me we face a crisis, but he couldn’t be more specific as to details.”

“What happened?” I asked him. “You must have found Sylvas.”

He nodded, face suddenly bleak. “I did. I found him in a hideout. One that had a ravager ensconced there, waiting to come out and attack.”

Ensconced was a magical command. “But why did someone leave a ravager there? Why not just kill Sylvas?”

Tully looked at his hands. “Sylvas had somehow summoned the ravager, I believe to protect himself.”

I shook my head. After Therese’s sacrifice, he’d summoned a ravager. Then it hit me. “He turned it. One had been chasing him, and he turned it. That would be easier than summoning one. It would protect him.” The irony was bitter—to make the very sort of supernatural killer that had besieged Therese into a guardian of sorts.

I looked at Tully. “Sylvas is dead, isn’t he?”

Tully nodded. “He was in a state of almost-dissolved when I discovered him, after defeating the ravager.”

Almost-dissolved, that was the edge of existence for a supernatural.

“He’d taken a delay potion. He’d been poisoned. He pointed me to a spot on the wall before he dissolved.” Tully held up the book he carried. “I found this at Sylvas’s home.” It was one of those leather-bound journals you could buy at fairs and nerd craft expos. The image of a pine was worked into the cover.

Magic gleamed faintly in a golden halo around the book.

My heart rose. “What was inside?”

He crossed his arms and looked down at the floor. “I can’t read it. I only know a little Draconic, and this isn’t Draconic. And it’s not like standard Elvish, either.”

“I can read it,” I said. How about that, the excruciating set of classes on deciphering magical scripts at the Academy my mother insisted I take might actually come in handy. It still didn’t make up for all the extra work I’d had to put in, and I wasn’t about to thank mom, but this was a way to make myself more obviously useful to Dara and get out of these cuffs and back into action.

“How can you be so sure?” demanded Dara. “You haven’t even seen the book.”

“Call it an educated guess. Sylvas was a high elf, for one thing.”

“But this isn’t high elvish script. Doesn’t seem to be even remotely connected.”

I looked at her. “You haven’t had the training I’ve had.”

Her lips tightened. “So you say.”

I snorted. “Can’t you take my word, for once?”

She shook her head. “I don’t trust you, Marquez.”

My mouth fell open. “Come on, you need every asset,” I said.

Dara raised her eyebrows. “Mister Tully is certainly an asset. I’ve known that for some time. You, on the other hand, are a liability.”

I shot Tully a pleading look. “Come on, tell her I can help.”

“She can,” he said after a pause. Not exactly eloquence in action, but he had to be feeling the effects of whatever had worked his face over. Another pang of guilt ran through me.

I licked my lips. I needed to know what was in that book. There’d be plenty of time to feel guilty later.