The ogre roared, spun, and flung himself at me like a sumo wrestler. His rage gave him speed, and I barely escaped his grasp as he smashed chest-first to the dock. Sturdy cement pilings shuddered, and it felt like an earthquake. Had I been caught under him, he would have crushed every one of my ribs.
Before he could rise, I rushed in and jabbed Chopper’s point into the side of his neck.
“Stop,” I growled, keeping myself from digging in too deep. “I just want to question you.”
“Fuck you,” he snarled in Russian and grabbed for my foot, determined to pull me down with him.
I jumped over the grasping hand. I might have leaped away again, but with the ogre flat on his belly, the troll in the rowboat had a clear line of fire at me now. He hefted a Dragunov sniper rifle with both arms and took aim at me.
These guys did not want to talk.
I slashed into the back of the ogre’s neck, knowing I couldn’t trade blows with him when the troll was shooting at me, then dove and rolled across the hard dock a split second before the troll fired. As I rolled, I yanked out Fezzik. Bullets sprayed the air where I’d been and cracked against the breakwater beyond the docks.
Coming up on one knee, I fired three times at the troll, magical rounds leaving a blue trail in the air as they slammed into his chest. Even from my knees, my aim was true. The Russian rifle tumbled out of the troll’s hands as he pitched backward, almost falling out of the rowboat.
Tires squealed in the parking lot, startling me until I remembered the two men in the car. Had they been contacts here to meet the troll and ogre?
The car peeled through the fog toward the marina exit. I sprang to my feet, but there was no way I would catch it.
Or so I thought. Sirens wailed and police lights flashed to life. Unmarked cars drove in, heading off the vehicle attempting to flee. Tires squealed again as the civilian car wheeled and roared deeper into the lot. I gaped as the police cars chased after it.
What the hell had I stumbled into? Or what had Michael stumbled into?
I thought about disappearing, but I’d helped the police numerous times with magical criminals they didn’t have the resources to capture, so they should believe me if I told them I had acted in self-defense. And I had—sort of. I felt a twinge of guilt since I’d started the confrontation by threatening the ogre with my sword, but it was clear they were involved in something criminal.
The fleeing car crashed into a parked car. Its doors sprang open, and the two men raced out.
Between the fog and the distance, I didn’t have a shot at seeing their faces, but the police were sure they wanted them. More car doors opened, and uniformed officers raced after them as the two men sprinted toward the buildings of the marina. One policeman shouted the customary Stop. Seattle police, but to no avail.
Curious about what was in the box, I climbed into the rowboat to take a peek. If it held another note in a language I couldn’t read, I would kick it overboard.
Instead, it was full of dozens and dozens of small round cans, tuna-fish sized, stacked twelve deep and surrounded by dry ice. They weren’t labeled, but I pried one open. Then wrinkled my nose at the fishy scent.
“Fish eggs? Caviar?” I poked my finger into one in disbelief, then shined my flashlight onto the little black eggs to verify that I wasn’t wrong.
There had to be fifty pounds of the stuff in the box. My stomach started to sink as I realized this had to be some kind of smuggling operation. It was probably good that I’d helped stop it, but I seriously doubted this was the kind of thing Michael would be wrapped up in.
Gunshots fired over by the buildings. Another police car rolled toward the dock I was on and stopped.
The thought of disappearing popped into my mind again, but there were probably cameras around that had caught the fight, so I walked out to talk to them. Maybe they would trade information with me.
A male and female officer got out of the car as I stepped onto land.
“Ma’am.” The woman held up a hand. “We’ve got an arrest in progress. We need you to go back to your boat.”
They looked me over but didn’t see my weapons. Both the sword—which I’d won in a battle with a zombie lord—and the gun—which a weapons-crafter acquaintance had made—were enchanted so that mundane humans didn’t see them as long as they were on my person. I could remove them and show them off, but I rarely did.
“Caviar smugglers?” I asked.
“Yes.” She glanced at her partner in surprise. “Beluga. It’s illegal to harvest and import.”
“The smugglers left their fishy booty on a rowboat back there.” I tilted my thumb over my shoulder; the fog hid the bodies. “And there’s a barge out past the breakwater.” Or there had been. My senses told me those other trolls, and presumably the barge they came on, were moving off now. “I stumbled onto a troll and an ogre bringing the caviar in.” I showed her the tin. “But I’m actually looking for a friend, Michael Kwon. We may need to file a missing-persons report. His sister is out on his boat.”
The officer started to tell me that they could help once they were done, but a call for backup came in over their radio. They jumped into their car and raced over to where the others had parked, lights still flashing.
They hadn’t taken the tin from me. What was I supposed to do with illegal fish eggs?
The trolls on the barge sailed out of range of my senses. I hoped I wasn’t wrong about Michael’s involvement in this and that he wasn’t a prisoner on that barge, because I doubted the police would ever find it.
“Shit,” I said as disappointment settled over me like a cloak.
Because my work was so dangerous, I avoided making new friends, and after years of ignoring old friends, I didn’t have that many of them either. I didn’t want to lose one of the few I had left.
I sensed a magical being approaching before the plaintive “merow” sounded. The cub padded toward me, still glowing a faint silver.
“Did Julie let you out, or are you an escape artist?”
She issued another sad sound.
It was probably a crime that came with a fine and up to ten years in jail, but I was feeling peevish, so I set the caviar tin down on the ground for the cub. I had no idea if she was old enough for solid foods or was missing her mother’s milk. Did silver tigers from other worlds drink mother’s milk?
The cub came forward and sniffed the tin, but she only sat in front of it and looked up at me with sad green eyes.
“That’s my opinion of it too,” I said, though it worried me that she wouldn’t eat. Had she drunk any of the water in the boat? I hadn’t seen her do so. “Hard to believe people would pay for it, much less risk their lives smuggling it.”
The cub stood up and stuck her paw in the tin, then lifted it out, sniffed it, and shook it off. Some splattered my jeans.
“Thanks. I always wanted to carry around a thousand dollars in fish eggs on my pants.”
Julie walked cautiously off the other dock as she glanced toward the police cars. She spotted me and ran over.
“How’d he get out?” She pointed at the cub.
“It’s a she, and that was going to be my question for you.”
“I don’t know. You shut the door and he—she—was inside. I’m sure of it. I called my parents to let them know we hadn’t found Michael, and when I turned around, the door was open and she was gone.” Julie stared down at the cub. “Tigers can’t open doors, right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe magical tigers can.”
“What are you going to do with her? You can’t take a tiger to the Humane Society.”
“What am I going to do with her?” The cub swatted more caviar out of the tin. I was on the verge of pointing out that Michael was Julie’s brother and that her family had a house with a yard—the landlord of my one-bedroom apartment didn’t even allow dogs—but what did the Kwons know about taking care of magical animals? Michael’s parents ran an office-supply store. “Take her with me, I guess.”
“With you, where? Are you going to find Michael?”
“I have to.” I didn’t admit that Michael was not only one of my few friends but still the person I trusted the most—Julie would probably call that pathetic. I pulled the two notes out of my pocket. “As to where I’m going, first thing in the morning, I’m going to find someone who can translate these notes.”
And I would cross my fingers that the foreign scribblings held the secret to where Michael had been taken and weren’t simply an ogre’s grocery list.
4
Early the next morning, as I pulled up to the government building that held the offices for the army unit Colonel Hobbs commanded, I debated between taking the cub in with me or leaving her in the Jeep. In the scant hours I’d been home the night before, she’d shredded the end of my couch, destroyed my canvas grocery totes, torn the frame off the bathroom door, and left fang marks in three pairs of my boots. She was currently nibbling on the passenger-side seatbelt.
Since the Jeep was new and I’d barely started paying off the loan, I was disinclined to leave her loose inside. Besides, Colonel Hobbs or one of his people might know what world she came from and who could take care of her.
“Let’s go for a walk, kid.” I grabbed a backpack I’d selected for cat-carrying purposes and went around to the passenger-side door. The night before, I’d modified the opening so it was large enough for her head to stick out, and I’d lined the interior with the burlap sack that had been in Michael’s boat. I opened the door, using my body to block it, and held the bag sideways so she could climb in. “Any chance you’ll hop in here and we don’t have to play games?”
She didn’t try to spring past me and out of the car, but she did hold up a paw, her little brown claws on display.
“Is that a threat? Because I can take you to the dog groomer and have them trim those to nubs.”
So far, she hadn’t lashed out at me, but I remembered Julie’s bloody chin and knew even domesticated cats could shred people’s hands to avoid being stuffed into cat carriers.