The question was rhetorical for anyone who had seen one of these pamphlets before. The whole trifold was a warning how the Portal was a threat to my immortal soul and a gateway to hell itself. The inside showed a crude graphic of Satan lording over it the Cleveland skyline, surrounded by half a dozen quotes from “Leviticus” and “Deuteronomy.”
“
Give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek after them, to be defiled by them: I am the Lord your God.
”
I looked around at the other cars parked down the street. All had Day-Glo flyers tucked under the wipers. I wondered if the author was independently motivated, or was part of Washington’s base. Attitudes might be shifting, but I was pretty sure that the voters in this city were still a few steps away from condemning the Cleveland Growth Association to “the lake that burns with fire and brimstone.”
I pocketed the evangelical pamphlet and got into my car.
The drive back to the
Press
offices was a little rougher than usual. In addition to a short flurry of lake-effect snow that unloaded during the rally, an accident on the Shoreway tied up pre-rush hour traffic downtown in both directions. A semi had jackknifed on Dead Man’s Curve trying to avoid a griffin. The guy on the traffic report speculated that the griffin had been a brand-new arrival out of the Portal, which was pretty close by, and it didn’t know about interstates, and that a semi wasn’t a good choice of prey.
While it was true that the griffins that had been here any length of time knew enough to hang out in the Metroparks and thin out the deer population, the idea that the victim of the accident had just popped from the recently federalized Portal implied that the Feds didn’t have as tight a lid on things as the Port Authority had had, which was kind of scary.
I passed by the mess, where the cops had traffic downtown narrowed to one lane. Not pretty. The griffin carcass had been removed, but the signs remained. Blood and feathers covered the eastbound lanes like a voodoo ceremony gone horribly awry. Police wreckers were still trying to remove the semi, the front of which was caved in as if it had run into the business end of God’s own place kicker.
The driver had probably taken the curve going fifty, and from the looks of things, the ill-fated heraldic beast had been diving in the other direction, from the lake, just on the wrong side of an overpass for the driver to see him in time.
As I inched by the scene, the radio informed me that the driver had lived, and had been life-flighted to Metro Health Medical Center.
Well, I knew what the lead Metro story was probably going to be. The driver’s miraculous survival cinched it. The Portal might have killed local television and TV journalism, but the ascendance of blogs and print hadn’t changed the dynamics of local news coverage all that much—and the only thing better than a gory accident, was a gory accident with survivors. Gave you someone to interview.
Back at the office, I wrote my piece on Washington’s political destiny. I even managed to work in a bit of evangelical politics, a nod to the serendipitous pamphlet. I would probably be the only reporter to give even a passing mention to the born-again vote, given the fact that Cuyahoga County was one of the most aggressively liberal pieces of real estate between Boston and San Francisco, but there’s always something to be said for the organization and passion of a vocal minority in the political process.
As I typed, I heard with half an ear people talking about griffins. Someone walked up to my desk and said, “Say, Maxwell, who’s the prof at Case, the guy you used on the dragon story?”
I kept typing. “Shafran, Dr. Newman Shafran.”
“Thanks.”
I muttered something polite, keeping my annoyance in check. I was a political reporter, but one story about a dragon’s murder and I was the expert on any supernatural critter that met an untimely end. I had been dealing with this for the past two years.
Even if it had been, arguably, the biggest story to break out of the Portal after the Portal opening itself, I didn’t want to be the dragon expert, or the elf expert, or the talking frog expert.
We supposedly had a reporter on the “fuzzy gnome” beat. It was unfortunate for me that the position had a high turnover and the people Columbia Jennings, my boss, tended to pick for the job tended to creep out the other reporters.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
Speak of the devil.
I looked up to see Nina Johannessen standing next to my desk. The current
Cleveland Press
journalist on the supernatural beat. She was a Nordic blonde suitable for a Wagner opera, or a lite beer commercial during the Superbowl. The only disconcerting note were eyes that were nowhere near shallow enough to make the average male comfortable talking to a woman that attractive.
“Please tell me that you don’t want to talk about griffins . . .”
She gave me a puzzled look and shook her head. “Why would I?”
“I wouldn’t know . . .”
She reached over and picked up the neon-green pamphlet off of my desk. I felt slightly embarrassed when she opened it. Considering the kind of sources she used for her stories, it was sort of like having one of my Jewish coworkers pick up a neo-Nazi tract from my desk.
She stared at the devil picture for a long time and I mentally prepared a long explanation about Washington’s candidacy and changing attitudes toward the Portal.
She set the pamphlet devil faceup on my desk. “Has anything strange happened to you lately?”
“No, what?” I was left conversationally disoriented by a question I wasn’t expecting. She looked at me deeply enough that I had the uncomfortable sense that she was seeing much more than I was saying. “What do you mean?”
“Unexpected changes or influences? Anything new or threatening?”
I was suddenly looking for sinister influences in every part of my life over the past few days. It took a bit of an effort to rein myself in. As a reporter I was naturally paranoid, but that impulse did quite well enough without outside help.
“Nina, the only thing I can think that might match that description is that question.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“The only thing disturbing me is wondering why you’re asking in the first place.”
“A vision.” She tapped the pamphlet. “It wasn’t completely clear, and I thought it might involve you.”
“Might? You don’t know?”
“Sometimes the Oracle is unclear.”
“And how would you know?”
She shrugged. “Have you seen Death or the Devil recently?”
I had the feeling she wasn’t kidding.
CHAPTER TWO
I
SHOULD have known better.
Hell, I
did
know better. At quarter to seven I was staring up at the vast glass canopy that roofed the Old Arcade and telling myself that I never really expected anything to come from my anonymous caller. I sat back in one of the chairs lining the railing of the first mezzanine level and looked at my little neon-green pamphlet.
The author had certainly gotten his money’s worth out of me. Something about it had me thinking about the backlash coming against the Portal. What exactly would happen when the author’s point of view became a majority position, or even a plurality?
Federalization might be the least of our worries.
A shadow glimpsed out of the corner of my eye brought me back to the here and now. A very
tall
shadow. I looked up and saw an elf standing by my table. Not just any elf either.
“Maelgwyn Caledvwlch,” I said, still butchering the name after two years.
“
Commander
Maelgwyn Caledvwlch,” he responded with none of the irritation that a human would lend to the correction. His voice was cultured and much too light for someone eight-and-a-half feet tall. His accent carried a hint of the West Indies, though the magical influence of the Portal would keep him from ever traveling any farther south than the edge of Columbus before the life drained out of him.
When I first met him, under less pleasant circumstances, he was a senior detective in the Special Paranormal Unit. He had since graduated to running the whole SPU, which made him probably the highest ranking nonhuman in the city government.
But his suits were still cheap, and they still didn’t fit right.
“What can I do for you?” I asked. I reached over and picked up my coffee, trying to remain casual in front of Caledvwlch. It took an effort. Not just because he was physically intimidating; he ran tall even for an elf, and his eyes were featureless metallic reflections that hid any slight emotion that might pass over his impassive face. What really made me ill at ease was the fact he was a cop, the SPU commander, and in two years he had never once said one word to me that was not part of some official communication.
For one brief moment I thought that he might have been my anonymous caller. But that wasn’t Caledvwlch’s style, and he certainly would not have any issues contacting me whenever he wanted.
“I wish to ask you some questions in connection with a police investigation.” He drew the seat away from the other side of my small table. He folded into the seat without asking my permission. Even seated, I had to look up to see his face.
Reading his expression was hopeless. I took a sip from my coffee and asked, “Am I a suspect, a witness, or a victim?” I told myself not to be too worried. For the past two years my brushes with the law had been largely benign, limited to two speeding tickets, contempt of court for not revealing a source, and one bogus trespassing charge brought by a councilman who felt I shouldn’t be spending time watching city employees unload kegs of Miller Lite behind a bar owned by the councilman’s brother.
“Witness, Mr. Maxwell. I need to know what you know about a gentleman named Ossian Parthalán.”
“The name doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Perhaps, then, you may recognize his face.”
Caledvwlch reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a picture. His long fingers covered it as he slid it facedown across the table.
I looked down at the white glossy back of the picture as his hand withdrew. Fresh inkjet print on cheap paper, still curling a little, as if it had just come out of the printer.
I set down the coffee feeling a little trepidation as I lifted the picture, half expecting what I saw.
Cops, even elven ones, are nothing if not predictable. If Ossian Parthalán had meant anything to me, looking at a picture of his mutilated corpse probably would have provoked some incriminating reaction. I was very aware of Caledvwlch watching me stare at the gruesome crime scene picture.
Someone really did not like Mr. Parthalán. They had cut out his eyes, sliced his mouth open, and chopped off his hands, among other things. The blood was so bad that it took a moment for me to realize that Parthalán wasn’t human.
I lowered the picture to the table and said, “Dwarven?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Look again, please. Mr. Parthalán knows you.”
I lifted the picture reluctantly. “Dwarves,” in this case, referred to the humanoid race that came over from the other side of the Portal. Dwarves weren’t squat humans. Their skin was different, wrinkled, thick, the color and texture of weathered leather. Their skulls were flatter and wider, a thick jaw usually hidden behind a thick beard. There were a whole litany of subtle differences in internal organs and skeletal structure . . .
“Who’d do this to someone?” I whispered.
The body was sprawled on a hardwood floor. Blood had spattered everywhere. The camera looked straight down, framing the body. There were few other details visible. I looked up at Caledvwlch and asked, though I already suspected the answer, “How does he know me?”
“The last time we know Mr. Parthalán contacted anyone while he was alive was one phone call he made at 12:45 PM today.”
“And you know who he called?”
“You, Mr. Maxwell. He called your cell phone.”
I looked back down at the body. This was the person I had come here to meet. The person who knew why Council President Dominic Lloyd Mazurich put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
What did you know? What were you going to tell me?
“I got a call,” I said.
“What did Mr. Parthalán talk to you about?”
“He wanted to meet with me. He didn’t give his name.”
“Why did he want to meet with you?”
I looked up at Caledvwlch and felt a little uneasy. I had been dis missive about conspiracies involving Mazurich’s suicide, but the dwarf’s death lent substantial weight to whatever suspicions he did have.
However, while Caledvwlch was one of the few cops in the city I could say for certain wasn’t crooked, that didn’t mean I trusted him.
“How did you find him?” I asked. “What happened?”