Demon and baby poop.

If demons are breeding I need to follow my cute little nose and find them so my dahling Tess can wipe them out. After I find some bleach to clean up after them.

Screaming draws my attention along my line of smell. This is sounding ominous. My spine shivers and stretches. I need to transform into the Celestial Blade. Where is Tess when I need her?

Off to a fencing tournament so she can avoid work.

I’ll gather information before I summon her to my side. Then the two of us can lash and lunge, slice and stab. Such a wonderful way to end the domination of a demon.

My nose leads me to a strange room within a hospital. Locked doors that need codes to get in or out. Triple locks on the drug stashes that are carefully disguised behind normal cupboard doors. Casually clad nurses dash about, converging on a gurney where a hysterical woman thrashes about, trying to push away the newborn baby on her tummy. But her hands are lashed to the sides of the portable bed with thick layers of bandage so she can’t reject her child.

The child looks human. But it stinks of demon, demon laced with astringent pinesap.

A bit of scaly bark clings to the baby’s feet. His (oh, yes, he is male) fingers look a bit like twigs, too long and skinny for such a tiny morsel of life.

Even as I watch the abnormalities fade along with the demon stink. Just an afterthought of pine cleaner, that might be part and parcel of a hospital, clings to him.

The woman still screams. A doctor in blue surgical scrubs approaches with a big syringe hidden behind his back. “Hold her arm, Nurse,” he commands in that all too calm and soothing voice of one who has dealt with this before.

“Third case this year,” the squarely built nurse with disastrous blunt cut hair mutters. She too wears blue scrubs. “This is looking like a new postpartum syndrome.”

“Strange one. I wonder what triggers it,” the doctor says as he stabs the patient with the syringe and depresses the plunger. “I think I need to research a new paper.”

I’ve found our next mission. Tess isn’t gonna like this. She has a thing about babies. She’ll want to give the infant a chance to grow up normal and human, not letting me take it down until after its demon half inflicts unnamable horrors on humanity.

Five thousand plus acres and over seventy miles of hiking and biking trails. One nasty little dark elf had lots of places to hide. Lots of places to ambush weary hikers, joggers, and mountain bikers. Too many victims had fallen into his traps lately. He probably ate the homeless pets that got dumped here too.

So why had he avoided me for over a year?

“Where are you little Nörglein?” I asked sweetly as I jogged slowly along the well-beaten path. “Tonight the moon will show a waxing quarter. That’s the time of a demon’s greatest power. You should be out trolling for victims.”

Tonight was the time a goddess showed her face in the skies, the sickle moon defining her cheek like the scar on mine. The starscape behind the moon revealed her face and the Milky Way became her hair blowing in a celestial wind.

I’d seen the goddess a couple of times and felt her power infuse me with the strength to fight demon hordes.

Not tonight. Even a goddess can’t break through the thick clouds and rain the weather service predicted.

“Scrap, do you smell anything that doesn’t belong here?” I called to my otherworldly imp companion.

It’s a forest, he shot back at me. I smell green—trees, shrubs, and moss. That’s what forest denizens smell like.

“How do you know that?”

“If you say so.”

I do say so! Scrap landed on my shoulder with more clumsiness than usual. I barely felt his weight, just a bit of dandelion fluff. That’s because he lives only partway in this dimension and is invisible to everyone but me, or another Warrior of the Celestial Blade.

“He won’t come near me if you are this close,” I complained. Only another mile to the trailhead. Another day wasted searching for our quarry.

I passed a couple hiking uphill with daypacks and water bottles slung on their belts. They wore sensible low cut boots, matching black shorts, and bright red Tees that complemented their chocolate and café au lait skin nicely. They also had black sweatshirts slung over their shoulders. The sunny Saturday morning in mid-September had warmed up, but this late in the year, the weather could turn wet and/or chilly with only a moment’s notice. The equinox didn’t have a lot to do with determining the actual season change in Portland. Next week could be bright and beautiful and ninety degrees.

Don’t like the weather here? Wait a minute.

Don’t like the forecast? Change the channel.

This is the Pacific North Wet, after all. Great coffee, wonderful microbrews, and frequent rains sweeping in from the Pacific Ocean.

The couple hurried a little faster than normal hikers out for a Saturday morning walk.

I sweated heavily from my five mile run—mostly uphill—in my loose shorts and tank. My sweatshirt was tied around my waist and my light running shoes felt every imperfection in the dirt trail.

I felt naked without my mother’s pearls around my neck. The strand was too short to hide beneath the tank top. Pearls while jogging? Even I knew that was a fashion disaster.

The hikers and I nodded in mute acknowledgment of fellow travelers in the wilderness. Never know when you might need help. Or if one of us turned up missing, we’d remember seeing each other and the basic location when searches began.

Too often in the last year solitary hikers got “lost,” then walked out the next morning, dazed and mumbling about the ugly little guy who sheltered them overnight.

That shelter and directions came with a price.

The Nörglein had a bad reputation in the Italian and Swiss Alps. His reputation in the western hemisphere was nastier.

I looked to either side of the trail into the thick ferns, underbrush, and moss-covered fallen tree trunks crowding around tall Douglas Firs. A million shades of green melded into each other, shifting with each breeze whispering through. Ripples and mounds showed just how uneven and precarious I’d find the footing off the beaten path.

I saw faces in the whorls of bark and moss. Images of the Green Man so popular in forest lore popped into my head. I shook myself to get rid of a fear that every plant and tree embodied a malicious creature peering out at me.

“High noon and not a lot of sunlight penetrating.” I slowed to a walk. Time for a cool down.

Perfect for a dark elf.

Put the emphasis on dark in that description of the Nörglein. Nothing tall and elegant or beautiful in this critter. Nothing honorable or enchanting either. This was the real thing, not High Fantasy fiction.

Take that little game trail on your left.

“That’s not a game trail, that’s a runoff channel.” It meandered down a really, really steep hill. Portland has built up from the river plain across numerous cinder cones and volcanic ridges. It was the only city I’d ever visited that you had to climb uphill both directions of any trip. Nothing was ever downhill for very long unless it was really steep and scary.

A light wind that smelled of salt and damp riffled the ferns to my right. A single frond continued to wave at me several seconds after the air had paused for breath. The scar on my face grew warm.

I veered off the trail onto a slight separation in the underbrush barely as wide as one of my size six shoes.

Scrap took himself off into the top of a Douglas fir two hundred feet up. His gray-green skin blended perfectly with the short evergreen needles. Even I couldn’t see him. And we were so closely bonded I could find him anywhere. He could find me anywhen, across five dimensions.

He waggled his butt at me, showing off his seven warts. Imps won those—er—beauty marks in battle.

A tiny hint of pink on his wing tips told me that something less than nice lurked close by. My scar was a less accurate alarm system. Maybe he’d earn another wart today after all.

The sparse sunlight disappeared beneath a cloud. Uh oh. Maybe the weather critters on TV got it right for a change, predicting afternoon showers and a twenty-degree drop in temperature.

Autumn in the Pacific Northwest is rarely predictable. About the only certainty is the presence of good coffee on every other corner and a decent brew pub on the corners in between.

I could do with a drink of either about now. I gulped a long swig of water from my sports bottle hanging on my belt pack and took three more cautious steps.

Ten paces away a fern beckoned. Scrap turned hot pink in the tree directly above me, the same color as his favorite feather boa.

“I think we’re on to something, buddy.”

“What’s he look like?”

Okay, not easy to spot.

That about summed it up.

With my eyes on the slowly advancing movement through the underbrush, I stepped forward and ...

Snagged my foot on a blackberry vine stretched taut across my path. The spiked tendril came alive, coiling around my ankle and tugging.

My face met the dirt. I came to my knees spitting out crushed fern fronds and gagging on something sluglike.

Then the vine tugged again and I flailed forward.

A ragged, moss-covered stump caught me across the middle, taking my breath away.

I heard evil chuckles off to my left.

I yanked my left foot free of the entanglement and threw myself further off-balance.

Was that an alien hand pushing against my back?

Bracken and sword ferns crumbled beneath me as I rolled and tumbled downhill. I tried desperately to grab hold of something. Momentum pushed me faster and faster.

Sticks dug into me. Reaching shrubs scratched my face.

And still I rolled. The world twisted and spun. My eyes couldn’t focus. Dizziness robbed me of any sense of direction.

Then with a back-numbing thump, I fetched up against the base of a tree.

Every inch of my body ached inside and out.

Each desperate attempt to draw breath met with knife sharp pain.

“Hhuh,” I mumbled, not yet comfortable with consciousness.

You can wake up now, babe. Bad guys have gone bye-bye, Scrap sneered at me.

I couldn’t ignore my imp’s mental jab. It felt somewhere between a migraine and a shrill whistle. Or maybe both at the same time.

With a wince and a groan, I opened my eyes and tried to raise myself to my elbows.

Wrong move.

Fire demons raced around and around my chest, pressing tighter and tighter.

“Lay still, miss. You might have broken ribs.” That intrusive male voice again.

Nah, you’re not broken, just bruised and sprained. Had the breath knocked out of you. Scrap landed on top of the jagged stump. He conjured a black cherry cheroot from the ether, lit it with a flame on his fingertip, and blew a smoke ring in my face.

I had to cough. I couldn’t cough. Each breath hurt worse than the last.

The man I heard but couldn’t see dribbled some water across my face. The urge to cough the smoke back at Scrap eased.

The impudent imp waggled his eyebrows at me. See. If you’d broken something you wouldn’t have coughed at all.

“Easy now. I’m a paramedic. Let me see if we need to get a crew up here or if you’ll be able to walk out.” The man must have been crouched at my head, uphill and out of my line of sight.

He pressed gently on my ribs and neck with dark hands. Nothing hurt any worse.

“She’s not walking on that ankle,” a female said from behind him.

The man sucked in a whistling breath. He moved around to my side. I recognized him then as the African American who’d passed me going uphill a little while ago. Another shrill breath through a gap in his front teeth. “That needs an X-ray, miss.”

“Scrap?”

No answer from my buddy.

“It’s crap all right,” the woman said. “Raquel Jones.” She sort of offered me a hand to shake, then realized I’d have to sit up to reach it or she’d have to move downhill onto uncertain footing. So she looked at her hand as if at an alien being, then stuffed it into the pocket of her shorts.

“I’m Jordan Jones,” the man said, putting his hands to better use assessing the damage to my left ankle. “JJ to most people.”

“Tess Noncoiré,” I said on a sharp inhale as he touched the rapidly swelling and bruising ankle. My lightweight shoes felt six sizes too small.

Raquel gasped. “Tess Noncoiré the writer? I’ve read all your books. What are you doing in Portland? Research?”

“I live here now,” I ground out. What a horrible, ignominious way to meet a fan! I tried brushing twigs out of my short sandy blonde curls to fix some of the damage. “I bought a condo in John’s Landing last year.”

“I’m so proud to meet you. Oh.” She put a hand over her mouth. “Sorry it has to be under these circumstances. I’m just glad JJ and I can help.”

“It won’t be comfortable with those bruised ribs, but I think I can carry you over my shoulder to the trailhead,” JJ said, oblivious to his wife’s gushing, fan girl chatter. “We’ll drive you to the emergency room. It’s only a few miles across the river.” Middle height and wiry, he didn’t look big enough to carry me two steps, let alone one hundred yards to the parking lot.

I’d fallen far enough downhill to almost meet the snaking path again. Could I crawl that far?

Not with those ribs, dahling. Scrap informed me.

Obviously, Raquel and JJ had no idea he was there.

“If you can just get me to my car, I’ll drive myself,” I replied to JJ. If Scrap said I hadn’t broken anything, I believed him.

“Not a good idea, Tess.” Raquel shook her head emphatically. “I’m a nurse and I can guarantee you’ll feel dizzy and maybe nauseous from the pain. Then there’s shock, which will set in as soon as the adrenaline wears off. How about if I follow you and JJ to the ER in your car? That way it’ll be available when you can safely drive home.” She efficiently relieved JJ of his daypack, placed it and her own on the path, then returned to help get me upright.

“You’ve had the breath knocked out of you,” JJ said as he shoved one of his hands beneath my shoulders to heave, while Raquel grabbed my hands with her own to haul. “It’s gonna hurt, but I promise you, things will look better once we get you back to the cars.”

That was not fun. Nope. No way in hell.

About halfway up, balancing on my right foot, I passed out. As a tidal wave of blackness washed over me, I heard a demonic chuckle in the far distance.

Round one to the Nörglein.