Chapter 23

The docks were as I always remembered them. The wood was silvery gray and the piers were covered in Other Side barnacles, which had a nasty habit of not being the nice, passive little creatures you find over on Earth.

Killian stuck close by my side, close enough that occasionally we would bump into one another. I didn’t complain.

We got to Pier 67. The warehouse’s windows were all blacked out and a heavy chain locked the door closed. I didn’t see anyone, so I pulled a crowbar out of the back of my trunk and made my way to one of the windows.

“Do you think it is wise?”

“Nope,” I replied as I jimmied up the window. If there was an alarm, we had minutes before security arrived. If there had been magical protection, we’d already be dead.

But when I popped open the window, I didn’t see or hear anything.

“Give me a lift up, will you?”

Killian stuck his head between my legs and picked me up like we were at a concert on the 4th of July instead of breaking into a warehouse.

“You could have just given me a lift with your hands,” I muttered.

“Your shoes have stepped in every manner of Other Side muck,” he replied. “Plus, this is more fun.”

I kicked him lightly in the ribs. Fun. Totally my thoughts on the day.

“Do you see anything?” he asked.

The inside of the warehouse was filled with crates, floor to ceiling. There was some sort of writing on each of them. Looked Chinese, but my eastern character identification skills were not particularly honed.

I pulled myself up, Sweating to the Oldies eat your heart out, and dropped inside.

“Want to find something to pull me over?” Killian called.

I couldn’t believe this elf. Not knowing what was in here and shouting like that. Yes, we were probably okay if jimmying open the window and crawling inside hadn’t set off any alarms, but just because something appeared to be too easy didn’t mean it actually was. Sometimes people made it easy by booby-trapping a place. And, yes, sometimes they were just idiots.

“Stand watch!” I hissed.

I heard a loud rumble ricochet through the warehouse. I pressed myself flat against the wall. The coast clear, I somersaulted across the concrete and hid behind a stack of crates.

The sound came again.

And then I realized what it was.

Snoring.

Someone was frickin’ sleeping on the job. I crept towards the center of the warehouse and the glow of an industrial scoop light. Slumped in some old, battered chairs by a wooden desk were three beef-headed trolls, the club-first-ask-questions-later type. They were out so cold they were drooling on their shirts.

By their snoozing bodies were six empty pizza boxes. I lifted one of the lids. Someone had spiked it with toadstools, a fact three hungry trolls would have overlooked. That’s the problem with interspecies security. Yah, they could crush a car with their fist but they are dumb as a box of rocks.

But speaking of dumb, I would be an idiot if I ignored the fact someone had drugged a gaggle of trolls. Said people probably had an interest in what was going on at Pier 67, and, most likely, would be along shortly to take advantage of said window of opportunity. You know. If they weren’t already here.

I started riffling through the papers on the desk. Packing receipts, invoices, bladdity blah. And then I came across one that gave me a little shiver down my spine. “Stacked cold storage units” and the name of the funeral home I had set on fire. Good times.

I looked over at the massive canyon of crates surrounding me. None of them appeared to be big enough to hold units like we saw in the morgue. I muttered a silent prayer that the powers of dark hadn’t invented a shrink ray and squished a bunch of mini-vampires into the boxes.

I just about came out of my skin as a hand rested on my shoulder.

“Maggie?”

“WHAT THE FUCK KILLIAN! YOU DO NOT SNEAK UP ON ME EVER AGAIN!” I whisper-shouted at him. I swear to god, I may have had a heart attack. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“The back door was open.”

Great, I went breaking and entering when I could have just wandered in the back door. It answered my question about whether the visitors were already here or on their way. Looks like we just missed them.

“Listen,” I said, “you go search around the warehouse and see if you spot trouble. I’m going to keep looking through files. Hoot like an owl if we’re about to die.”

The trolls appeared to still be sawing logs like W.C. Fields after too many cups of eggnog. Still, I carefully tiptoed as I continued my paper search.

“What do we have here?” I mused as I looked at an invoice. “Lion. Jade. Arrival time 10:45AM.”

That was about a half hour before we showed up. It had been signed for, too.

I looked over at the trolls.

“Who knocked you out…” I wondered out loud.

I heard the owl hoot and took off at a sprint.

Turned out to be a false alarm.

“I told you to hoot like an owl if you were in trouble.”

Killian grimaced, “This, my dear Maggie, is most definitely trouble.”

He pointed to a circle of intricate designs laid out in the ground like the one in the church.

“An illegal portal,” I said as I crouched down. I scuffed my foot across the brimstone dust, breaking the circle and rendering it useless.

“Probably trying to move some goods over to Earth. Specifically, this,” I said as I held out the invoice.

Killian took it out of my hand, “Jade lion. It appears the vampires were telling the truth.”

“But from the looks of things, someone double crossed someone.”

“How do you know that?”

I pointed at a note that had been stabbed into the side of a wooden crate with a nasty looking knife.

“I’m guessing that’s not a love letter.”

Killian reached up to take it.

“STOP!”

He raised his hands in apology.

“We want the bad guys to be mad at the right people. We just need to glean what info we can before they show up.”

Killian stood on his tiptoes, “It reads, ‘Your reign of terror is at an end’ and then it has a symbol.”

I ran back to the desk and stole a quill and the ink well. I ran back to the crate and sketched the symbol on the back of my hand. Satisfied I pretty much captured the gist of the mark, I turned to Killian, “I know a guy who is an expert in symbols.”

“Back to Earth?”

“Back, my friend, to Earth.”