The burlap sack was empty save for a few short pale hairs—tiger fur?—and a crumpled note at the bottom.
“You don’t think Michael stole it, do you?” Julie was eyeing the cub. “He wouldn’t steal an animal. He’s not hard up for money. Omma and Appa check on him. His investments do well, even if he’s not making much of himself.” She glowered at me, the suggestion hanging in the air that it was my fault.
More interested in the note than her speculations, I didn’t answer. It had a scattering of symbols. Words?
I opened my phone’s translator app, selected detect language, and pointed the camera at the note.
Unknown language, the app flashed.
“I figured that would be too easy.”
“Val?” Julie faced me, now holding the cub to her chest. It was struggling and didn’t look like it wanted to be held. “Do you know anything about this?”
“I know that’s not a house cat and that you might not want to try to snuggle it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I haven’t talked to Michael for a couple of weeks and don’t know what he’s up to right now, no. But if he’d stolen the tiger and someone had come looking for her, you’d think they would have taken the tiger back, not him.” I couldn’t even imagine where one would steal a magical tiger cub from.
If I couldn’t find any better clues, I was going to have to call Colonel Hobbs, the army officer who commanded a secret unit posted in an anonymous government building in Seattle. He and his soldiers quietly researched and dealt with magical beings that caused trouble in the Pacific Northwest. Hobbs had agents who did nothing but gather data and collate it into handy slide presentations for superior officers and government officials.
Up until a few months ago, Hobbs had hired me regularly for contract jobs, but for some reason, I hadn’t heard from him lately. As my bank account keenly knew. Freelance gigs were few and far between, unless one was willing to branch out to assassinating humans, which I wasn’t.
Hopefully, I hadn’t been blacklisted for being a sarcastic smartass. Hobbs had tolerated my acerbic wit, since I was no longer active duty, but the army as a whole wasn’t always into that.
“Ouch,” Julie blurted and dropped the cub, flinging a hand to a cut on her jaw.
I dropped the sack and lunged, catching the cub an inch above the floor. Not wanting a swat of my own, I released her promptly. She’d twisted so she would have landed feet-first, as one would expect from a feline, but I wasn’t sure how durable cubs were.
As soon as I released her, she darted away. I swore and lunged to shut the door—she and the note were my only clues right now—but she went to the sack and tried to burrow into it, kneading the burlap with her claws.
Julie lowered her hand, frowning at the blood on her fingers. “I’m going to try calling Michael again.”
It wasn’t clear if her reason was to see if he answered because she was concerned about him, or if she wanted to complain about the cub and her claws.
“Can you watch the cat for a minute?” I tucked the note in my pocket, intending to visit Hobbs to see if one of his people could translate it.
A phone rang, and Julie frowned at me. It took me a second to realize it wasn’t her phone that was ringing.
She climbed across the mattress, stuck her hand between it and the wall, and pulled out a black phone. Michael’s phone.
“Do you know the code to unlock it?” I asked. “Maybe he’s got some voicemails or notes about what weird things he’s been doing this week.”
I eyed the cub. She had moved from kneading the sack to investigating the strings on one of my black combat boots. They had been tucked inside. Now, they were in danger of being shredded.
Julie tried a couple of guesses and shook her head. “Don’t you know it? I’m just his sister, not his lover.”
“We’re not that anymore.”
Something she ought to know, though maybe I was glad that he hadn’t given her all the details. Not that it had been messy or mean. Just awkward. We’d managed to remain friends, but it had never been quite the same as before we’d started sleeping together. Life. Always complicated.
“No? He still talks about you a lot.” Her lips twisted with distaste, and she looked dismissively down my form again.
“That’s because I’m interesting. Watch the cub, please. I’m going to search the ogre for clues.” And maybe figure out a way to get to the boat anchored outside of the breakwater.
The cub tried to follow me out of the cabin. Maybe she thought I could conjure up something more interesting than water.
“Cats are supposed to be independent,” I told her, though I felt bad shutting the door in her face.
Earlier, I hadn’t checked the ogre’s pockets. I did so now, as well as patting him down for weapons beyond the obvious club. He had a dagger stuck through his belt—on a human, it would have been more like a sword—but no firearms, nor any magical artifacts that I could detect. I found a note in his pocket.
“What are the odds that you hold the cipher for decoding the other one?” I muttered, running my flashlight over it.
Three rows of large chicken scratches were all I got for an answer. They looked nothing like the symbols on the other note, and I was fairly certain I’d seen this language before. Ogre. I tried my translation app in case I was wrong, but once again, it did not recognize the words.
“Hobbs needs to get one of his people to make an app that detects trollish, elven, ogrish, and the like.”
A grunt wafted over the water, my keener than average hearing picking it up over the lapping of waves. I also heard what sounded like oars dipping rhythmically into the water. My senses told me the ogre and a troll were heading to the marina.
I pocketed the ogre’s note and drew Fezzik. It was time to get some answers.
3
The troll and ogre were cutting through the fog in a rowboat, as if this were 1820 and motors hadn’t been invented yet. Maybe they didn’t want to make any noise.
Before I could see them, my senses told me they were angling for another dock, not the one where Michael’s boat was. That might mean they had nothing to do with him. It might also mean they couldn’t see where they were going in the fog and planned to dock at the closest spot and then walk.
Why they would be coming back, I didn’t know, but I had questions for them. I left Julie and the cub on the boat and trotted soundlessly back to land, then headed to the last dock that jutted out into the harbor.
A car was idling in the parking lot with its lights off. That almost made me pause, but neither of the men smoking inside, the red tips of their cigarettes visible in the dark, registered as magical to me. Right now, I was far more interested in ogres.
The rowboat was coming into an empty slip. I ran out on the dock, tapping my cloaking charm as I went. I also activated the charm dangling next to it, one that would translate anything they spoke in their native tongues into English. Too bad it didn’t work on written text.
From this dock, I could make out the dark outline of a barge beyond the breakwater. The fog still shrouded it, but my senses told me it was where the other trolls were. As I’d suspected, they were running with their lights off. These guys were definitely up to no good.
The ogre clambered out of the rowboat first, the craft rocking wildly as his smaller companion cursed at him. Smaller was relative. The blue-skinned troll was more than seven feet tall with the shoulders of a defensive lineman.
Because he was lifting a box out of the boat, the ogre had his back to me. I swapped my firearm for my sword and glided in to rest the blade against the back of his neck while his hands were full. The side of his neck against his jugular would have been better, but he was too tall for me to reach that without standing on a stepladder.
The ogre dropped the box and started to turn, but I pressed the tip of my sword in and drew blood. Chopper’s blade always glowed a faint blue, but it flared brighter at the promise of battle.
The ogre froze, and the troll lunged to his feet, spotting me through the magic of my charm. But even if he had a weapon, I’d placed myself fully behind the ogre.
“Don’t,” I warned him, then addressed both. “What did you idiots do with Michael Kwon?”
Most magical beings who took refuge on Earth learned enough of the local language to get by, but the ogre only cursed again and barked, “Who the fuck are you?” in his native language.
No, I realized as my brain caught up to what I was hearing and what my charm was translating. That was Russian, not ogrish.
“It’s a woman,” the troll said—he was speaking in his native tongue. “With a sword.”
“No shit,” the ogre said, switching to the troll language. These guys could be translators for the UN if they turned their efforts to good instead of evil.
“Where’s Michael Kwon?” I repeated, though I was starting to fear they didn’t understand English. If they’d come over from Russia, that would make sense.
The ogre spun. Before I could decide if I wanted to cut him further and risk killing him, he lunged and threw a punch at me.
I had some of my elven father’s agility and dodged the powerful blow. A good thing because an ogre punch could knock a person’s head off.
He snarled and drew a knife. I swept Chopper up to defend against a stab, annoyed with myself for hesitating and letting him take the offensive. But I hadn’t come to kill these guys, just talk to them. Unless the bastards had killed Michael. Then all bets were off.
The clangs of our blades meeting rang out in the night, though the mist muffled the sounds. He pressed me back, trying to angle me off the dock on the far side, but I danced away, not letting him trap me.
He was stronger than I was but slower, and it wasn’t difficult to evade his reach. Getting past those long arms and close enough to strike a blow was another matter. When his arm was extended toward the end of an angry slash at my head, I ducked and flowed under his arm. Chopper sliced through his leather jerkin and cut into his side as I ran past.