It does seem that way, I admitted to Sindari and threw the switchblade.
The clunky weapon wasn’t weighted for throwing, but enthusiasm and good aim did wonders. It thudded into the gunman’s shoulder, and he dropped his pistol.
A meaty orc fist flashed in from the side as one of the wolves crept in from the other side. I whipped my head back as the blow breezed past my nose and caught my assailant’s wrist. Gliding into him, I thrust with my hip and threw the orc over my shoulder. He smashed into the wolf.
As I readied myself for another opponent, a thunderous boom sounded just a few feet away—a weapon firing with the oomph of a howitzer. Everyone in the bar halted to stare at the gunman. The gunwoman.
Nin had unwrapped her “ogre hunter” and fired it at the ceiling. The pump-action shotgun had left a sizable hole in the tin tiles and probably in the floor above. Hopefully the coffee shop and restaurant up there were closed for the night.
“It is time now to put an end to the fight,” Nin said calmly but as loudly as her little voice could manage, “or I will blow your fucking heads off.” She grinned and winked at me.
Cute, quirky Nin swearing was like a Disney character swearing, and it usually startled people into paying attention. It had that effect this time—or maybe the booming gunshot had.
“Enough,” growled the troll owner, stepping out from behind the bar. Eight feet tall and half as wide, he waded toward us, pushing patrons aside with his meaty hands. “Go back to your drinks, everyone. I’ll handle this.”
He glared at me, glanced at the hole in the ceiling, and gave Nin an exasperated look.
“I bought indestructible tables for this place,” he said in a voice like a bear’s growl. “I didn’t know I’d need the ceiling to be indestructible.”
Even though Nin had fired, the troll continued to glare at me.
“What do you want here?” he demanded.
“I am here to meet a client and sell this fine weapon.” Nin patted the big gun and nodded toward a back table where a hyena-headed gnoll dropped his face into his hand in a very human gesture.
“Go.” The troll pointed Nin toward her contact, then pointed at me. “You came here to kill a werebear three years ago. I told you to stay out then.”
“He was a murderer and a rapist.”
“This is a safe place for our kind.”
“This is a bar, not some holy sanctuary. Besides, no place should be safe for murderers.”
“If the law guardians come, so be it, but you are an assassin. Mongrel scum.” He spat on his own floor. Maybe someone else handled cleanup at the end of the night. “You’re worse than the dark elves.”
My ears would have perked up like a cat’s if they could. Dark elves had been here? My employer, Colonel Willard, and I were looking for information on the dark elves hiding out somewhere in the city. Hiding out and plotting nefarious schemes and creating dangerous artifacts.
Sindari, his opponents having backed away after the gunshot, padded silently up behind the troll. Shall I bite this hulk in the ass?
No. I’m negotiating with him.
Are you sure? He looks like he’s about to throw you out.
That’s because I haven’t turned on my charm yet. I smiled at the troll, raised my eyebrows in a friendly manner, and nudged my duster open enough to show the curve of my breasts.
“Dark elves, you say? Would you be interested in telling me what you know about them for a few dollars?”
He threw a punch at my face.
I hadn’t expected it, and I barely dodged in time. His fist slammed into the doorframe, leaving it cracked and smashed.
When will you start turning on your charm? Sindari asked blandly.
I’ll let you know.
As the troll pulled his fist out of the doorframe, I grabbed his wrist and looked into his stone-gray eyes, then said words sure to charm any business owner. “Tell me about your dark-elf visitors, and I’ll pay a few dollars to have your ceiling fixed.”
He glared at my presumptuous hand wrapped around his tree-trunk wrist, but Sindari growled from behind him, poised to take a bite out of his butt—or spring and snap his jaws around the troll’s neck. I wasn’t smiling now, and even though I was female, blonde, and not bad looking, few people dismissed me as a non-threat. I’d been in the business long enough to earn a lethal reputation.
The troll squinted as he considered Chopper, the hilt visible behind my shoulder, and then me. His eyes narrowed further in contemplation. Of what? Something shifty?
“If you pay me a few hundred dollars for the ceiling and handle a problem the dark elves left me, I will consider letting you walk out of here alive.”
I almost pointed out that he wasn’t in a position to keep me from leaving, but his gaze flicked to the sides. The entire establishment was watching this confrontation, including the shifters and orcs I’d been fighting. They were poised to spring at me if I tried to walk out.
It didn’t matter. This had started as a favor to Nin, but now I had a lead. I wouldn’t leave before learning what I could about the dark elves.
“What kind of problem?” I couldn’t imagine what an eight-foot-tall troll couldn’t handle on his own.
He yanked his wrist out of my grip—with his strength, I couldn’t have kept him from doing that even if I’d wanted to.
“Follow me.”
Sindari stepped aside so the troll could head toward a corridor in the back. I do not trust him, Val.
I don’t either.
You’re still going to follow him, aren’t you?
Yup.
2
Sindari stuck close to my side as I followed the troll owner deeper into the establishment. Nin, who’d taken a seat with her gnoll client, watched me pass, her face tight with concern. I gave her a thumbs-up, even though I suspected the troll was leading me into trouble.
That feeling didn’t go away as we entered a windowless cement hallway with rooms opening up to the sides full of couches littered with orcs, trolls, kobolds, goblins, and even a ten-foot-tall giant. The eclectic patrons were talking, making deals, or making out. Or all three.
I’d never seen this part of the establishment and wouldn’t have guessed all this was under the Capitol Hill coffee shop where hipsters got their cold brews and avocado toast in the mornings.
Dull green and blue lightbulbs mounted on the walls glowed behind cages. Rather than creating some appealing ambiance, it turned everyone a sickly gray-green. The air smelled of mold. How mold could grow on cement walls, I didn’t know, but my sensitive lungs objected to the scent, and I would need to use my inhaler if I was down here for too long. Just the kind of weakness I loved to show off in front of a basement full of enemies.
“What’s your name, boss?” I asked my guide.
Maybe it wasn’t too late to establish a rapport with him.
He glared daggers over his shoulder at me, his blue lips rippling back to show gold-capped teeth and fangs.
One of his staff called him Rupert, Sindari informed me.
A terror-inspiring name.
On their world, trolls are usually moss and peat farmers.
He has a lot of fangs for an herbivore.
They also battle and eat the alligator-like creatures that live in their swamps and prey on their people.
I don’t want to meet the alligator large enough to prey on trolls.
They’re smaller than dragons.
I don’t want to meet any more dragons either.
Is that so? Why did Sindari sound so skeptical?
As the troll—Rupert—slowed down, Sindari murmured, Familiar magic, into my mind.
What do you mean? My senses were bombarded by the auras of so many magical beings in one establishment that I couldn’t pick anything specific out of the miasma.
And a familiar door. Sindari’s green eyes pointed toward the end of the hall.
Rupert had stopped, and it was hard to see much around his hulking form, but I could make out shiny steel in a thick metal frame set into the cement wall. When he stepped aside, the spinning circular latch of a bank vault door was visible.
My gut twisted. This vault door was identical to the one that had been under the panther shifters’ house in Bothell.
You can sense magic through it? I asked Sindari. The same as before?
I hoped not.
Yes. The door is a magic sink and is muting it, but my senses are sublime. I detect something similar to that dark-elf orb.
Another time, I would have cracked a joke about his sublimeness, but memories of that night flooded my mind, and I relived my battle with the shifters and the dragon Dobsaurin. I’d been so proud to leap on Dob’s chest, drive Chopper through his heart, and kill him before he could kill me—or force me to kill the injured Zav. Until Zav had gotten angry with me for slaying a dragon and warned me that there could be repercussions from the Dragon Justice Court. I hadn’t seen him again since that night, but Dob’s body had disappeared from its impromptu morgue, and I had little doubt Zav’s people had come for it. For a burial or an investigation? Maybe both.
“This is the problem.” Rupert spun the latch.
As soon as he pulled open the door, lavender light and tangible magic poured out. Familiar magic, as Sindari had promised.
Like a heavy mist, it flooded the hallway, wrapped around us and called to something deep inside me. More than one curious magical being came to the doors of the side rooms and peered toward the open door.
One of the wolf shifters I’d been fighting, now back in human form, strode down the hallway, his eyes glazed. He didn’t see me, Sindari, or Rupert as he stepped through the doorway to be swallowed by the lavender light.
He was pulled by the magic, the promise of pleasure. As was I.
Once again, images flashed into my mind, a mixture of carnal pleasures—what would I have to do to keep Zav from featuring in these things?—and then less salacious desires, such as to hang out with my daughter on her trip over to Idaho this summer, and to share my home with friends and family, rather than living alone out of the fear that enemies would target people I cared about.
Val? Sindari bumped my hip.