Chapter 1
With a loud snapping sound, a bullet struck the column I was hiding behind blasting sharp fragments of concrete past my face. I stayed put, keeping the barrier between the shooters and me.
My name is Rebecca Samuelson and I work for Zulu division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP for short. Now you’re probably thinking that explains why I’m being shot at but it doesn’t. You see I’m not a cop. I’m a translator. As a translator, my job should entail sitting in a cubicle in front of a computer, the biggest threat to my life being paper-cuts and hangnails. A shoot-out in an abandoned building in eastern Montreal should be the furthest thing from my normal workday imaginable. It should be, but it isn’t.
A rapid series of firecracker reports sounded as Andrew returned fire from behind the neighbouring pillar. That’s Sergeant Andrew Bradford of the RCMP. He’s a little over six feet of ruggedly handsome cop, tucked into an off the rack suit. I don’t know how often he shaves but he has a nearly permanent five o’clock shadow on his face. Technically, he’s assigned to protect me but in all honesty, my friend the concrete pillar was doing most of the protecting at the moment.
Our attackers responded with a fusillade of gunfire. The gunshots echoed off the bare walls of the building so loud that I could feel the sound in my guts. Bits of concrete went flying off Andrew’s pillar forcing him to duck back before he was hit.
We were in a large building, I don’t know what it was originally used for but now it was four floors of empty and we were up on the fourth floor. Our attackers were about fifty feet away at the far end of a big open space that had a cracked and leaking ceiling held up by the concrete pillars. A nest of blankets and old coats near an empty elevator shaft served as mute evidence that they had been spending their nights here.
This was supposed to have been a simple meeting. A chance to say ‘hello, we know you’re here’, nothing more. I should have known better. Nothing about my job was ever simple. As soon as we showed ourselves, everything went sideways. They weren’t supposed to have had guns, where the hell had they gotten guns?
A whistling sound drew my attention to the door leading to the stairwell we had come up. A group of men had slipped up behind us and were using the door frame as cover. They were wearing midnight blue fatigues, body armour and helmets. They had assault weapons in their hands and various bits of military gear hanging from their body armour.
“Took you long enough Tobin,” Andrew yelled.
“Bite me Bradford,” Tobin replied flashing his characteristic smile.
Master Corporal John Tobin and his friends were our backup. Just because the job was supposed to have been simple didn’t mean that we hadn’t planned for the worst. The guns were still a surprise though.
At that point, our attackers noticed Tobin and started shooting at him. Okay, well they started shooting in his general direction at least. After the first couple shots plinked off the doorframe he and his men ducked out of sight. He didn’t go far.
“Okay Samuelson,” he said using my last name, “I need you to do a couple things for me.”
“I don’t really feel like moving right now Tobin,” I replied.
“We’ll fix that in a moment. First though I need you to tell them to put down their weapons and surrender.”
“That isn’t going to work,” I said.
“I know, just do it anyways.”
“Throw your weapons down and surrender,” I called out in Sylvan. The only reply was an increase in bullets hitting the pillar I was hiding behind. I’m not even sure if they heard me.
“Now what?” I asked switching back to English.
“Now plug your ears,” Tobin replied stepping into the doorway and throwing a cylinder the size of a can of hairspray past me towards the shooters.
As soon as he finished his throw, he ducked back behind the doorframe and out of sight. Across from me Andrew put his hands over his ears, closed his eyes, and hunched up as if he was about to be punched in the stomach. It took me a moment to figure out what was happening. As soon as I did though, I covered my ears and tried to curl into a ball standing up. The object Tobin had thrown past me was a grenade.
A dazzling flash of light accompanied by a massive sound reverberated in the room leaving me momentarily stupefied. The air reached out and slapped me from every direction as a cloud of dust blew past my friend the concrete pillar. I suddenly found myself on my knees even though I couldn’t remember falling down. Dazed by the blast I watched as shapes ran past yelling words that I was too stunned to understand. It was Tobin and his team attacking through the confusion caused by his concussion grenade. A ringing sound filled my ears through which I was able to hear a series of gunshots followed by a short high-pitched scream.
It took a couple moments for me to regain my bearings. God, I was stunned from being halfway across the room when the grenade went off and there had been a pillar between it and me. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to be next to it when it detonated.
“Samuelson we need a translation over here,” Tobin said, his voice chasing away the last of the ringing sound.
I poked my head around the corner to find out what was going on. Of our four attackers two of them were down, their bodies crumpled where they had fallen. Smoke was already starting to drift upwards from one of the bodies. Tobin’s men were restraining the other two.
They were all similar in appearance. Short with slight builds they wore ragged, torn, and scavenged clothing. They had long hair and oval shaped eyes that seemed too large for their faces. As one of them babbled in Sylvan, I could see that his canine teeth were pronounced which matched perfectly with the tips of his pointy ears peeking out from under his hair. Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t mention it earlier. The people who had been shooting at us weren’t human.
They were fey, otherwise known as elves or faeries. From the looks of them, these four were probably refugees that had fled the fighting in Elfhame. What’s that? You don’t believe in faeries. Yeah well neither did I until about three years ago. They are real though, dangerous too.
The fey were supernatural creatures that came from what was essentially another dimension. As a species, they had been around since the dawn of human civilization, crossing the barrier between worlds over the centuries for purposes both benign and malignant. They had made their mark on mythologies and religions worldwide, serving as the kernel of truth for most of the myths and legends about magical creatures. The most powerful amongst the fey had access to magical powers that treated the laws of physics like mere suggestions.
These four weren’t powerful creatures out of mythology. They were regular everyday elves, the low men on the mythological totem pole. They were essentially the same as human beings except for their life spans, physical appearance, and some other minor differences. Using guns was a new trick.
“Rebecca you Ok?” Andrew asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” I replied.
“Then we need your help over here. Can you get him to calm down?”
One of the elves was still struggling. Tobin and two of his men had wrestled him to the ground but he kept twisting and bucking preventing them from pinning him. While he fought, he was babbling in Sylvan, saying something about not wanting to die by cold iron and begging for a clean death. He was scared out of his mind and quite frankly, he wasn’t making much sense.
“Hey elf,” I yelled in Sylvan. “Quit fighting, they aren’t going to kill you.”
“What? How?” he said twisting to look at me. He seemed surprised that I was speaking to him in Sylvan.
“I promise that if you stop fighting you will not be killed and you will not feel the touch of cold iron.”
He stopped struggling at that point. I’m not sure if it was because he believed me or just because he was shocked at hearing me speak Sylvan. Either way he stayed still long enough for Tobin to pin him and slap a pair of flexible plastic handcuffs around his wrists.
Sylvan is the language of the fey. Well, at least it’s the most common language amongst the fey. That’s why the RCMP hired me as a translator. I’m fluent in a language spoken by a group of semi-mythological creatures from a different dimension. Unless you hadn’t guessed, that isn’t exactly a common skill.
I learned the language while spending a little over a year trapped in their world. It’s a long story but essentially, I lived with a group of them; drinking their water, eating their food, immersed in their culture. In the process, I learned their language. If you’re picturing a French immersion program in Paris then you’re off the mark, more screaming and blood, less bistros and pastries.
Suddenly my instincts started telling me something was wrong. Yeah, I know, I was in the middle of an abandoned building with a group of police arresting mythological creatures. There was nothing ‘right’ about the situation, nevertheless, something was wrong. I found myself rising up onto the balls of my feet and baring my teeth. I was missing something, something that was getting my subconscious mind excited. I scanned the room looking for what it was, instinctively falling into a crouch in the process. It didn’t take me long to figure it out.
It was one of the elves lying motionless on the ground. I had thought they were both dead, I was wrong. One of them had just moved. Through luck or cunning, he had gotten through the chaos of the grenade and subsequent assault by playing dead. Everyone must have assumed that someone else had shot him. Now he was moving though and that was what had my heart racing. He was subtly changing his posture, getting his limbs underneath him, and getting ready to flee.
I opened my mouth to call out a warning but I was too slow. The elf exploded into motion, springing to his feet. He started running before he was even fully upright. Surprisingly he wasn’t going for the door. He was running for the empty elevator shaft. Andrew made a lunge for him but was too slow and ended up grabbing nothing but air. The rest of the team didn’t react fast enough either, they weren’t going to be able to stop him.
Without conscious thought I started running, my feet taking me out of my crouch into a sprint behind him. Unfortunately, he had the advantage. He was closer to the elevator shaft than I was and he was already moving faster than I was. I wasn’t going to be able to catch him.
The elevator shaft was an open pit with no doors, elevator, or cables, essentially a fifty-foot drop to jagged machinery in the basement. The elf jumped into that pit. At first, I thought he was committing suicide but then I saw him catch the side of the shaft. He hung there for a moment and then threw himself across the shaft towards the opposite wall, falling out of sight. As I got closer, I was able to see what he was doing. The shaft wasn’t sheer concrete. Aside from the openings every twelve feet where it accessed the floors, there was a series of ledges along the walls. They weren’t much, little more than an inch wide, probably some sort of artifact from the construction process, they were enough though. The elf was flinging himself back and forth across the shaft, catching the ledge and then kicking off to the opposite side, dropping half a floor at a time. It was a nearly superhuman barehanded climb requiring split second timing and damn good reflexes, a nearly impossible feat for a human but not overly surprising for certain types of fey.
He was getting away. Intellectually I knew that was okay. We hadn’t been trying to catch them, just to say hello, a friendly encouragement to move on. It should have been fine for him to get away, but it wasn’t. My blood was pumping, adrenaline was singing through my veins and I was chasing him. I was the hunter. He was the prey. I couldn’t let him get away. I slowed my sprint just long enough to time my jump and then flung myself into the pit after him.
Have you ever realised that you’re doing something stupid when it’s too late to do anything about it, yeah well it happens to me way too often. As I flew through the air straight at the concrete wall of the elevator shaft, I realised that I might not have thought things through properly. I hit the side of the shaft hard, face first. My fingers caught the concrete lip arresting my fall. There wasn’t much of a lip though and my fingers started to slip. I only had one option. Craning my head back, I spotted the opposite side of the shaft and pushed off with my legs. Twisting in midair, I fell a good six feet before hitting the opposite wall. This time I caught the impact with my arms instead of my face. Tucking my legs beneath me, I pushed off again, not waiting for my fingers to start slipping off the lip. Back and forth I jumped, side to side. The elf I was chasing was doing the exact same thing about twelve feet below me, our bodies crossing back and forth in a deadly game of acrobatic chase. I didn’t have time to pay much attention to him though. All of my focus was taken in timing and executing my own jumps. One error and I would be in for a painful and potentially deadly fall. I made no effort to use the same handholds as the creature I was following. I found my own route down, confident that we would end up in the same place. Eventually the elf jumped through the elevator opening on the first floor, scrambling to his feet and taking off at a run. I landed seconds behind him, twisting my body into a shoulder role that propelled me up onto my feet and into pursuit.
“Rebecca, damn it, wait,” Andrew called out from the top of the shaft. I ignored him, focused on my quarry.
What I had done wasn’t just amazing it was also incredibly stupid. Given practice and training, an Olympic class gymnast could have pulled it off, but I hadn’t trained or practiced and I certainly wasn’t an Olympic gymnast. Following that elf down the pit should have been suicide, and it probably would have been for any normal person. I haven’t fit the category labelled ‘normal person’ in three years.
Once he was clear of the elevator shaft the elf made a beeline for the front door. There was nobody there to stop him. In situations like this Tobin and his team would typically have been at the main entrance ready to stop anyone from getting away, but they had come up the stairs to help us when the shooting started. The elf ran through the double doors into the parking lot beyond. Scampering across the lot towards the street, he hit the sidewalk and accelerated. I was right behind him.
We were in a run-down part of eastern Montreal that consisted mostly of low-rise buildings, many of them with ‘À Louer’ signs standing in front of them. Smokestacks from the nearby refinery poked up over the buildings and no more than token effort had been expended on landscaping or greenery. The place had industrial sector written all over it. There wasn’t much in the way of street traffic and the sidewalks were empty, which was good because I was chasing him down the sidewalk. He was moving fast, taking long strides with his head up and pumping his arms as he ran. I matched him stride for stride.
The elf hit a side street where cars were parked perpendicular to our direction of travel. He dodged between two of the parked cars and ran out into the street. With a screech of tires and the blaring of a horn a small pickup truck slammed to a stop barely missing him. He didn’t even look back, ignoring the truck and continuing to run. Reaching the cross street I forced myself to take a moment and look both ways before crossing behind the pickup, falling behind a little bit in the process.
He was getting away. My prey was escaping. Every fiber of my being was screaming at me to run as hard as I could and catch him, to take him down. I found myself snarling as an ache started to form in my muscles, an ache that had nothing to do with being tired. Part of me wanted to stretch out that ache and take on a different form, a form far more suited to run down and kill fleeing prey. At that point I knew I was going too far, I had to stop chasing him before I completely lost control.
I started to slow down, continuing to run but no longer putting any effort into it, allowing myself to slow naturally. My instincts were screaming at me to pick up the pace but I ignored them. The creature I was chasing looked back, an insolent grin on his face, he was getting away and he knew it.
His path took him to another side street, this one busier than the last, with more cars and two lanes of traffic going in both directions. Reaching out his arm, he grabbed a telephone pole near the street corner. Leaning away from the pole he started to turn the corner, using the pole to help him turn.
That’s when things went horribly wrong. I was over two dozen paces behind him but even at that distance, I could hear the sizzle of his flesh burning. He screamed in pain, letting go of the pole and stumbling away. There was visible damage to his hand, as if he had touched acid or superheated metal. He stumbled away from the pole screaming in pain and clutching at his hand. Unfortunately, he still had a lot of momentum and he hadn’t turned far enough before letting go of the pole. He left the sidewalk, stumbling out onto the street.
With a loud meaty crunch, a semi-truck drove through him. One moment he was stepping backwards onto the street and the next he was gone, replaced by a large tractor-trailer, its air brakes squealing as it slid to a halt. I slowed to a stop and stared in horror as the underside of the trailer started smoking. Somewhere underneath the big vehicle, the body of the elf was pinned against the metal undercarriage. I could only hope he was already dead. Within moments, I could smell the awful combination of burnt copper combined with searing meat wafting up from the smoke.
A quick glance at the telephone pole was enough to confirm my suspicions. A mass of rusty staples were imbedded in the wood, left over from months of people posting flyers at the busy intersection. There was nothing special about the staples, they were simple steel. Of course the fey didn’t call the metal steel, they called it cold iron.
It was the one weakness universal to all fey. No matter how powerful they were something about steel interacted poorly with their magic. Fey magic couldn’t affect steel and the mere touch of something made out of steel would cut through their most powerful spells. It was worse than that though. Due to the physiology of the fey their magic was part of them, it was in their skin and in their blood. As such, the mere touch of steel was enough to burn their skin as if they were touching molten metal.
When the elf I was chasing had touched the steel staples with his bare hand they had burned his flesh, probably to the bone. Now he was wedged under the semi-trailer his skin in direct contact with the steel undercarriage. Whether or not the impact had killed him, he was definitely dead now.
Flames started licking around the bottom of the vehicle. The driver jumped out of the cab and cars began stopping as a crowd rapidly gathered. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number from memory. Andrew picked up after the first ring.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Ummm, street sign says ‘Sherbrooke E’ if that means anything to you.” I said spotting a sign.
“Did you catch him?”
“No,” I replied backing up so that I wouldn’t gag on the smell of burning flesh. “He stepped in front of a truck.”
“Damn it!”
The smoke coming from the trailer started to turn black, oil or grease from the vehicle had ignited and now the vehicle itself was on fire. There was a crowd of people standing around watching, drivers who had stepped out of their cars, as well as a few people who had just wandered up to the intersection. Some of the people in the crowd were on cell phones while others were talking and gesturing. More than a few of the gestures were in my direction. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that I had been chasing the guy who had stepped in front of the truck. In the distance, I started to hear sirens approaching.
“There are fire trucks on the way,” I said into the phone, “Probably cops as well. I should leave before I have to explain to the Montreal police why I was chasing him.”
“Okay,” Andrew replied with a sigh, “Get back here then. I’ll alert Villeneuve as to what happened and have the body diverted before they do an autopsy.”
“All right,” I said hanging up.
It was time to leave. The last thing I wanted was for some overzealous Montreal police officer to try to put a pair of steel handcuffs on me.
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