Gremlin Night

engaged in human trafficking. Yet Burt managed to stay free. Someone in one of the arcane organizations that dominated the Hidden world must be in his court.
R.U.N.E. had been after him for a long time, but he had always eluded us.
That changed tonight. I knew he had young women, maybe young men, too, in the basement of his nightclub. R.U.N.E. blew me off when I brought that up, saying there was no evidence. But, the thought stealer I’d spelled yesterday when we “interviewed” a middle-aged man who frequented Burt’s nightclub gave me a glimpse of young women chained to a wall. R.U.N.E. forbid us from using thought-stealers on ordinary “normal” humans. The Compact stated such thought reading was only to be used on magic-using humans accused of crimes. Come on, a creepy perv visiting Burt’s night clubs was an accessory to magic crime as far as I was concerned.
Burt brushed snow off his jacket, rings flashing on his huge fingers. He said something in a low rumble, and the whorl-kin nodded.
She was going to be a problem.
Just then, my scamper returned from its mission at the other end of the alley.
It looked like a cross between a ferret and a monkey, with bat ears, wearing a silver collar with a milky arcane pearl. The scamper was a loaner from R.U.N.E. Midwestern Resident Manifestation office.
The scamper slunk up to my hand. I stroked its sinuous neck with one finger while another touched the arcane pearl. The fresh memory of its journey flashed into my head. The scamper had snuck into the back of the nightclub, and down into the basement.
The basement was a labyrinth of rooms, a perfect place for criminal activity. If I could get in the back way, I could ambush Burt and company. Okay, so I was one five -foot- two twenty-five-year-old human woman versus a hulking ogre and his private army. Crazy, but doable.
My phone stirred in my pocket again. Had to be Nancy, but I left the phone where it was. I didn’t have time to waste.
I gave the scamper a peanut, then followed it out the far end of the alley and around to the back of the club. “Thanks for the help,” I told the scamper. Time for it to head back to its nest at the Chicago castle. I hadn’t exactly asked for permission to take it with Nancy and me, and I’d kept Nancy in the dark about it. Simpler that way, for everyone.
The scamper nodded at me, then whirled around and darted into a drainpipe. Being a scamper manifestation meant it could take a secret way back to Chicago. I’d have to take a train, plane, or an automobile since I’d already used the teleportal there tonight, and it was one way. Rules. The arcane, which included we sorcerers, lived and died by them.
The street behind the club was filled with dumpsters and overturned shopping carts. There was a small loading dock off to one side. The door was a steel job with three locks and a little viewing window, currently shut.
Luckily for me, I had a magical lockpick, also on loan from R.U.N.E. Chicago. Okay, I borrowed it without permission, but I’d return it as soon as this assignment was completed.
The lockpick was a telescoping silver rod that expanded from two inches in length to a foot. It shivered and clicked into place. Like all magical artifacts, it was alive in its own way, trembling and hungering to fulfill its purpose. I stroked the lockpick with my pointing finger. “Descuia,” I said, unlock in Romanian.
The lockpick shuddered. The three locks clicked open, one by one, followed by a rattling sound. I opened the door.
Hopefully the back door was unguarded.
It wasn’t.
A surprised looking man in an ill-fitting suit, holding a sub-machine gun, stood there, staring at me wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Magic will do that to ordinaries, if you’re lucky.
My luck wasn’t going to last long.
I pointed my left fist at him. I wore a silver ring with a tiny sculpted silver bullfrog mounting it, mouth yawning open.
“Sleep,” I told the guard. Blue-tinged vapor visible only to a sorcerer gushed from the bullfrog’s mouth and into the man’s nostrils.
He raised his submachine gun, just in time to drop it as he slumped to the floor, the gun clattering beside him. He’d be out for a couple of hours, and nothing could wake him. The sleep ring should be standard issue, but they were difficult to craft. Policy stated that only Burners could use them, not Binders like me. We tried to avoid tangling with normal humans, but sometimes you had to, despite policy.
Lucky for me I’d found a sleep ring in the armory when no one was looking. Too bad it only had the one charge.
One guard down. Who knew how many after that. Actually, the plan was not to go through many, because there’s no way I could, and still get Burt. The ogre was the point of this exercise.
One of my trainers back at R.U.N.E.’s Academy had told me if you train enough, you can act without fear taking over.
I was trying to do that here. I swallowed, and pushed back the worry, the fear, and pants-wetting panic. I had to keep moving.
My stomach churned at the thought of the women being held here, treated like meat at a butcher shop. Heaven only knew how long they had before they were auctioned off, or worse. I’d heard rumors that Burt liked human flesh, particularly young women, but R.U.N.E. had nothing on file. Proof of that would have brought the roof down on the ogre, but there was nothing.
I slipped around a kitchen area. Now I could hear the thudding bass from the dance party above. The club proper occupied floors two and three, with private rooms above it, while the lair was below this floor.
The door to below was off to my right, at the end of a short corridor. Old-style light bulbs shone inside wire ceiling