Gremlin Night Dale Smith (comprehension books txt) 📖

crime scene, a murder involving the arcane, how it was a puzzle Tully and I had to solve by finding evidence and anything that could serve as a witness to Therese’s death.

Evidence was the key. Books had been taken, that was evidence. The stained sheets were witness. I closed my eyes, raised my arms over my head, took a deep, yoga breath, then pulled my hands down to my chest in prayer pose, and emptied my mind of the emotions raging in it.

A long, silent moment passed.

I opened my eyes, and began my search.

Across the hall was a second bedroom. Inside, a forest-green futon in a mahogany frame stood beneath a water-color painting of a pine-tree lined pool. Dust covered the back of the futon frame, the top of the painting, and the windowsill.

A bathroom was at the end of the hall, next to a winding stair heading up toward the roof.

Drugs filled the bathroom’s medicine cabinet. I recognized a few of the names—two were used to help with side effects from cancer treatment. The bathtub had rails, the kind to help people who were frail or who had mobility issues.

The last room was up in the little turret above the second floor. It had a single chair, a nicely padded high-backed office type in the center of the room. It faced three large windows. Full-length mirrors were mounted on the walls to either side of the door.

This had to be the room where she did her sentinel duty. Clairvoyance sorcery required isolation. A view helped, for the sympathetic part of the magic. Therese would have sat there while she worked her spells.

The chair had been overturned, and lay on its side. The wooden floor had scuff marks from boots. They looked recent, too. The wind gusted outside and the windows rattled.

Wood scraped somewhere nearby. I froze, straining to hear. I peered out the windows, trying to see if it were branches scraping against the window. No branches nearby, I remembered that the front yard had no tree in it.

More scraping. It was at the base of the wall, below the mirror on the right side of the door. I knelt, heart pounding. Cold settled in the pit of my stomach.

A crack showed in the wall, no, not a crack. A gap. A tiny square of wood had been slid back at the baseboard, revealing a duct of some sort.

A golden eye looked at me from inside the wall.

A tiny gasp followed. The eye disappeared. Something ran, footsteps echoing in the wall. It sounded like they were descending now.

I raced down the stairs and stopped at the second floor, listening. The faint running sound continued downward.

I dashed after it, and collided with Tully coming up the stairs. He reached out and kept me from falling on my backside. He held me with the easy grace of a strong, athletic man.

My breath was ragged from all the sprinting, but my heart other reasons as well. “There’s something in the walls,” I gasped, pushing myself to focus on the thing I’d been chasing, and not Tully’s closeness.

His eyes widened, then he cocked his head and listened.

“I hear it,” he said after a moment. “Still heading down.”

“Basement,” I gasped again. Whatever it is must be headed there.” We barreled downstairs. Tully flicked a light switch at the top of the stairs. Lights came on below. We ran down the stairs. The basement had a storage room, a sitting room and a place to exercise. There was also an examination table off to one side and a collection of acupuncture needles.

Tully gestured, murmuring in English, casting a locate spell.

Something yelped below the examination table, and there was a flash of green fabric. I bent down. A brownie cowered beneath the table. It wore brown linen trousers and shirt, with a little pointed green felt hat.

“An ancient,” I said to Tully.

He shook his head. “It’s a Level Three. Resident, but new.”

I knelt beside the brownie. “Hello there, we won’t hurt you.”

It edged back toward an opening in the wall behind it.

“Halt,” I said. “Otherwise I’ll have to bind you, and that will hurt.”

Resident manifestations, the law-abiding kind, didn’t want to run afoul of the Laws, so such an order usually had quick results.

This did, but not the way I expected.

The brownie whirled around and sprinted behind the wall.

“Heading up!” Tully said.

“Thanks, I figured that.” Curses.

We ran back upstairs, Tully listening all the while. We ran into the trashed living room, as the brownie scrambled behind the wall there. A little wooden panel closed. It became obvious there mustn’t be an exit outside.

“It’s a house brownie,” I said.

We ran back upstairs.

Tully stopped at the top of the stairs, and I practically plowed into him, catching myself at the last moment.

“What is it?” I hissed.

He stepped carefully into the hall and motioned at me to follow, a finger to his lips. I tip-toed onto the landing, listening. He pointed up, in the direction of the room. So, the house brownie was back up in the monitoring room. But if we went back up there, blundering in, it would just run back down, and we’d be ping-ponging up and down the house for the rest of the night. We needed to know what was going on.

Therese had been murdered. Perhaps there was no connection between her murder and what was going on tonight. But our sentinel had been killed, just before the outbreaks. That struck me as a highly unlikely coincidence. Therese would have been able to detect the outbreaks, and what had caused them.

My supervisors liked to say I jumped to conclusions, but this one seemed blindingly obvious. There had to be a connection.

The brownie was a witness. We had to speak with it. But it wasn’t letting us get near at the moment.

I drew my binding knife from my jacket.

For once tonight, there wasn’t a gremlin around to mess with my spellcasting, nor a ward to overcome, nor an immediate threat of electrocution from a