“Oh, wow, is that a dwarf?”
I silently thanked God that her hands were too busy holding my coat on her shoulders for her to point. She was looking over at a taxi stand where a cab was idling, the driver waiting for a fare.
“Don’t stare . . .”
It couldn’t be, could it?
Cabs in this town were evenly divided between Jamaicans, Arabs, and dwarves—and no, I don’t know why Jamaicans drive cabs in Cleveland, but they have since before the Portal opened. So we’re at the airport, a dozen cabs lined up, of course there’d be dwarves.
It was pushing it to assume I really recognized this dwarf. No way this was Samanish Thégharin, I was just being paranoid . . .
Our eyes locked and I told myself that I had only seen a bad digital photo on a hack license. That and the back of his neck.
The dwarf in the cab smiled at me.
Shit.
“Dad, you were telling
me
not to stare.”
The cab pulled away, without a fare. He seemed to make a point of driving right past us, as if Mr. Thégharin wanted me to know for certain who he was.
“Sorry, just happens that I know him.” The sense of dread and urgency fell on me redoubled. I grabbed Sarah with my free arm and led her toward my car. It was an effort to keep from breaking into a run.
“
You
know dwarves?”
“Only a couple. I was just surprised to see him here.” I tried to push the conversation away from Mr. Thégharin. “I know quite a few more elves.”
“Yeah?”
“There’re a few in the police department. They’re an interesting bunch.”
The drive back was agonizingly slow, because of the weather. Sarah was obviously disappointed. I guess, even under parental house arrest, she’d expected to at least
see
something of the mystic kingdom known as Cleveland, Ohio. And after all her planning, her first views were little more than swirling white and the occasional ODOT snowplow trying to keep the Interstate clear.
I was torn between thinking it served her right, and feeling sorry for her.
She made up for it by peppering me with questions, some of which I’m pretty sure she already knew the answers to. I guess it was her way of having a conversation with me, without talking about how she got here, or how much trouble she was in.
So most of the drive I spent answering questions about everything from the Portal to the local unicorn population.
“Fact is, most of the legitimate mages in town are employed by the government.”
“So what do they do?”
“Mostly? They protect the public from the mages who aren’t. There’s a large black market around for all sorts of nasty enchantments. One of the priorities, ever since the Portal opened, is to try to keep a step ahead of the bad guys. From mass-producing protective charms to keep buildings and vehicles secure, to tracking down counterfeiters.”
“Counterfeiters?”
“With the right materials, even a half-assed mage can easily make a physical copy of any small inanimate object. Such as a DVD or a twenty-dollar bill.”
“There’s a lot of that going on?”
“One of many reasons for a strain between the federal and local governments here. We’re number two as far as IP piracy goes, right after China.” I shrugged. “Fortunately, as long as the good guys catch the property before it leaves the Portal’s influence, a forensic mage can detect the history of the material.”
“What if it does leave?”
“Then you have a problem.”
“I never really thought about that . . .” She looked out at the snow.
“Well the movies and TV shows don’t usually focus on the run-of-the-mill stuff.”
“What about monsters? Griffins, dragons, that sort of thing? Are there a lot around, do you see any?”
I almost winced when I thought about griffins. I shook my head. “There’re only about thirty dragons around, and they tend to be too busy to accommodate journalists.”
“What are they busy
doing?
”
“Nothing particularly sinister—not unless you’re a left-wing Democrat.” I looked across and saw Sarah’s blank expression and elaborated. “Dragons are fundamentally capitalists. They’re into money and power, and they’re rather adept at acquiring it. They came through the Portal, set up shop, incorporated, and started buying companies.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You’re picturing a dragon sitting on a mound of gold and gems? These creatures are intelligent enough to know that a pile of stock portfolios and board memberships mean a lot more in twenty-first century America, even if they can only legally sign contracts and own property in the state of Ohio. They may be huge and menacing, and breathe fire, but an army of well-financed lawyers can be a lot more intimidating. And can venture a lot farther afield.”
“You met a dragon, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “Theophane. She bought out the top few floors of the BP Building.”
“What was that like?”
“Intimidating . . .” I talked on for a while about my meeting with the dragon Theophane, two years ago. That was the last time my job had gotten me involved deeply in nonhuman politics. And while I kept my voice light, I couldn’t help but be apprehensive.
That time, when I dug into the history of elves and the death of one supposedly immortal dragon, I almost got myself killed. And the mess that resulted ended up killing a half dozen others, including a fellow reporter, and Caledvwlch’s predecessor as head of the Special Paranormal Unit—the latter decapitated by an eight-foot-tall stone gargoyle in the middle of my living room.
Not the best time of my life to be thinking about right now. The last couple of days held uncomfortable echoes, and it made me realize that I didn’t want my daughter anywhere around here. Not now, maybe not ever.
Margaret was right.
Sarah was going back first thing in the morning, even if I had to drive to the Pittsburgh airport to get her out. As my paranoia worsened, I doubled back twice, just to make sure no dwarven taxicabs were tailing me.
When I finally felt safe, I took an exit and drove downtown on surface streets.
“Where are we going?”
“The Tower City Hilton.”
Sarah frowned, squinting out at the office buildings flanking us. “I thought I was staying at your place?”
“You aren’t vacationing, young lady. This is just to put you up until I get you on a flight back to your mother? Understand.”
“But I thought, now that I was here—”
“Sarah, you didn’t think, or you wouldn’t be here.”
She gave me the silent treatment as I checked us in. I didn’t try to press her. In the end I was simply too relieved to have her with me, safe. The crap happening around me was just too threatening, enough so that I had the unprofessional urge to follow through on my threat to Margaret and book my own ticket back with her.
In the end, given the weather and the glut of outbound passengers, I was lucky to find one seat available on an outbound flight that was leaving anytime soon. I was really proud of myself when I found an 8:30 AM flight out of Akron. I reserved her a seat, somewhat fraudulently, with my
Press
AmEx card.
When I hung up, Sarah was leaning against the doorframe to her bedroom, staring at me.
“Dad, I’m sorry . . .”
I looked at her, and my dad sincerity detector wasn’t quite working. I sighed. “You really need to think things out before you act, honey.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Sit down, Sarah.”
She dropped into a lounge that faced me. “Dad—”
I held up my hand. “Let me give you the obligatory parental speech first.” I leaned forward. “I’m not going to tell you that you aren’t old enough to make decisions for yourself. That’s the nature of the age you’re at. This is the point where you make decisions that will affect the rest of your life.”
“Dad—”
“Before you pull stunts like this, you need to decide if you’re willing to live with the consequences. If your mother was the troll you make her out to be, it could have been a cop picking you up at the airport. Car theft, credit fraud, flight across state lines. Felony convictions don’t make your life easier.”
“Come on, Mom wasn’t going to—”
“Call the police? Who do you think found the car at the airport? To be honest, if she went as far as pressing charges, I don’t think I could blame her.”
“Oh.” She looked down at the carpet.
“For the life of me I can’t understand why you seem to go out of your way to antagonize your mother.”
“You don’t live with her,” Sarah said.
“No,” I said, “and in less than a year you don’t have to either.”
“Dad, I feel as if she’s trying to wall off a whole part of my life. Part of
me.
”
“What do you mean? We talk almost every day—”
She slammed the arm of the chair she sat in and stood up, shouting at me. “Damn it, Dad! This isn’t about that! It isn’t about you.”
I leaned back. I was speechless for a moment, allowing my ego to absorb the statement. Not that I was dad of the year here, but I had been thinking . . .
“What is it about, then?”
Sarah shook her head, and I could see the tears starting. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault.” She ran to her room and slammed the door.
“Sarah?” I walked up to the door. “What is it?”
I could hear her crying.
I hesitated a moment and opened the door. She was splayed out, facedown on the bed. I could hear her say something like, “I’m sorry.”
“What is the matter? Why did you run away here? Is there something at home I don’t know about?” At this point I was visualizing nightmare scenarios that had been forbidden territory until now. “Is someone abus—”
She raised her head, sucking in an offended breath. “My God, Dad!”
“What am I supposed to think?”
She flopped back down on the bed. “I was born here,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Mom doesn’t understand. This all is part of my life, who I am.”
I sat down on the foot of the bed. “So you run away here?”
“Don’t I have a right to know where I come from?”
“Maybe there’s a better way to deal with that, and your mother.”
She sighed. “Maybe.”
I placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to comfort her. She shrugged me away.
“Can I have some time alone?”
“Okay.” I stood up. “Let me know if you want to talk.”
“Uh-huh.”
Apparently, she didn’t want to talk. After about fifteen minutes of quiet sobbing, the jet lag caught up with her and she started snoring. I went in and took her shoes off and threw a blanket over her.
I had no right to, but I felt a little like crying myself. Not happy news when you find out that you’re not the epicenter of your little girl’s world any more. For all my attempts to be practical and realistic, the fact was that I still saw her as a twelve-year-old girl.
It just never occurred to me that anyone could feel that sort of connection to this place. The whole situation seemed too new for this to be anyone’s ancestral homeland . . .
Sarah was what, five years old, when the Portal opened?
Another five years, there’d be a whole generation that had been born since the Portal. What kind of point-of-view shift would that make?
Case was going to need another Dr. Shafran or three.
These were the thoughts running though my head when my cell phone rang, a little after seven.
“Maxwell,” I barked into the phone.
“Well, you like to get your money’s worth, don’t you?”
“Quint? You got me something about Simon Lucas?”
“Mr. Lucas is a busy little beaver. He’s one of those guys that get a one-dollar salary on the books and gets paid options up the yin-yang.”
“Worth a lot?”
“I counted easily over 150 publicly traded companies where his investment is into eight figures or higher.”
“150 . . .” I tried to do the math in my head, but it had been a long day.
“All seems aboveboard. Including his immigrant status.”
“Immigrant?”
“Yes, another one from the other side of the Portal.”
“Great. It seems that Magetech has been very good to people.”
“Mr. Lucas seems to have done the best, though he doesn’t seem to figure largely in any paperwork Magetech had filed with any government agency. This guy is easily the highest compensated executive in the state of Ohio.”