Gremlin Night

from the back door.
“See, I told you we could bring him down,” I told her.
“I’m surprised Tomlinson lasted as long as he did as your partner,” she said acidly.
I ignored the remark. “We got the job done. The front office will appreciate that.”
Nancy held up a parchment scroll. I gulped. Even rolled up, the glowing blue characters of the message were visible. The R.U.N.E. pentagram seal had been broken. She’d read it.
“The New York front office wants to speak with you. You are to report to the Brooklyn castle at once.”
“We’re not finished here,” I said. “We need to search the place.”
“Oh, we’re not finished, but you are,” she retorted, looking down her nose at me. “You need to take the teleportal to the Brooklyn castle. Enjoy the ride. I suspect it will be your last as a field agent.”

2
Teleportals are simple enough, a super-secret arcane way to jump between two cities in an instant. The vast majority of humanity had no idea dragons actually existed. That spells were real. They certainly didn’t know you could step through a dragon-crafted door in Peoria and wind up in Brooklyn a heartbeat later. Like my hippy grandmother would say, it would blow their minds.
The teleportal opened into a small, windowless room with a pair of overly serious-looking guards in body armor, standing at a counter behind high-impact diamond-glass. Behind them a slender man in a bespoke suit wearing gold-framed glasses sat at a desk beside a closed door, reading a scroll. Kenji Akimoto. He looked up as the teleportal finished playing Vivaldi’s “Winter.”
I waved a hand. Kenji adjusted his glasses, smiled at me.
“State your name, please,” one of the guards ordered. He was a big white guy with a shaved head and a coiled serpent tattoo around his neck.
I ignored him. “Hey, Kenji, I didn’t know you were here.”
Kenji didn’t answer. I thought I detected a very slight headshake, but it was hard to tell at this distance.
“Please state your name,” the guard repeated, stony face turning annoyed.
His companion was an even bigger Polynesian-looking man. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
“I know you,” I told him.
He smiled for an instant, then went back to being impassive.
“We can do this all night if you’d like,” the first guard said. “Please state your name.”
“Elizabeth Anna Marquez.”
He stared into a brass-rimmed glass magnifier on a brass arm set into the counter in front of him. “Please state your mother’s maiden name.” The magnifier made his eye appear huge.
“You know who it is,” I said.
“Ma’am, please state your mother’s maiden name.”
Tweaking guards used to be more fun.
“Fiona Kelly.”
He nodded. “You may enter.” A bell rang. The familiar looking Polynesian guard tapped the counter in front of him. The diamond glass door swung open.
It came to me. “Guardian Tua, isn’t it?” I asked him.
Tua grinned. “That’s me.” The other guard gave him a dirty look, which he ignored. “Good to see you again, Sorcerer-Agent Marquez.”
“You were at Sacramento last time I saw you.” That was a tiny R.U.N.E. office. A downer of an operation, with Tua being the one bright spot.
He flashed white teeth. “Now I’m in the big time.” We both laughed.
The other guard was doing his best impression of a stone troll. I didn’t want to get Tua in trouble.
“Hang in there, Tua,” I said.
“Always.” He leaned down, gesturing at the other guard. “Don’t worry about Michaels. He just needs more fiber in his diet.”
I snorted.
Kenji rose to greet me. “You’re in hot water again, Elizabeth.”
I shrugged. “Some things never change.”
He stepped closer, lowered his voice. He still limped. “I think it may be serious this time.”
“It always is.”
“Director Wu wants to see you in her office immediately upon your arrival,” he said.
That wasn’t necessarily a bad sign. I needed to be debriefed after all. “Which is now. Got it.”
Kenji bowed slightly. He was good man and an excellent sorcerer. He’d been a great field agent, too, until the Sapporo incident. He’d been an exchange officer when I met him after I’d graduated from the Academy.
“Glad to see you here,” I said. “Hope you aren’t just stuck in this room the whole time.”
He laughed softly. “All personnel must do a shift each week in the guard room. Including the Director.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”
“Really.” He motioned at the door behind him. “She’s waiting.”
“I’ll bet she is.” I opened the door. “Thanks, Kenji. See you around.”
“I hope so.” He sounded sad.
The Brooklyn castle was the staging area for R.U.N.E. operations in the greater New York area. The arrival room was below ground. The castle originally had been a stone keep built in the Middle Ages, then shipped to America in the early 1970s, when R.U.N.E. first set up shop. Dismantling a stone keep, transporting it on a ship and then reassembling it in Brooklyn didn’t come cheap. Fortunately, magic made it livable, and that was the twisted genius of the move—castles being stone made them more grounded, magically speaking.
I took a winding stair, the narrow kind with high stone steps that were tripping hazards, up to the great hall on the ground level. Fancy woven tapestries hung on the stone walls. The tapestries had classic medieval scenes: a unicorn and a maiden, a knight and a dragon, a wizard in a tuxedo and top hat speaking with a troll in a three-piece suit. Okay, that last wasn’t medieval, it was a gift from another secret magical organization, and you don’t refuse those sorts of gifts. Not if you want to keep things together.
The Aquarian Circle had given that particular tapestry to R.U.N.E. It was just the sort of thing my grandma and her friends would create. It reminded me of those eye-stabbing oil paintings you’d see at a pop-up roadside stand, it was that bad.
Next to it was a plaque, engraved with a motto in four different languages: “Perception determines reality.” The languages were human, draconic, goblin, and elvish. I could read all of them, thanks to being forced by