The Grendel Affair

About half of the desks and chairs had been brought up from the loading dock area, but were presently on the side of the bull pen that was the farthest from where welders were repairing various levels of the catwalks and railings.



I’d never considered welding to be that loud of a construction-type activity, but then I didn’t have the preternaturally sensitive hearing of a werewolf.



Nor had I made the mistake of trying to drink the entire SPI Scandinavia team under the bar at the Full Moon on New Year’s Day.



When Rolf Haagen had said he wanted to go, kill, and return to drink to our victory, he wasn’t kidding—and apparently the bionic Viking had the liver to back it up. Wouldn’t have surprised me if his liver had been man-made, too. Nancy and Bill had opened the Full Moon just for us yesterday, and SPI’s agents from both sides of the pond had put an impressive dint in their single-malt scotch inventory—again, courtesy of cashed-in dragon hoard trinkets. The Scandinavians had invited us to Oslo for a Nordic-style monster hunt, and to consume vast quantities of aquavit. Hopefully they intended to wait and consume the latter until after we’d done the former. Though with that group, there was no telling.



Yasha gingerly rested his elbows on his desk and carefully placed his head—still wearing sunglasses—in his upraised hands. The sound he made was a mix of soft mournful howl and puppy whimper.



“You did it to yourself,” I reminded him.



I’d come into the office today because Ian had promised to start my training.



Kenji had CNN and the Weather Channel streaming live on two of his computer screens—his being one of the few undamaged areas in the bull pen. I would have asked him to turn it up, but decided to be sensitive to my coworker’s self-induced suffering and walked over to Kenji’s desk.



“Amazing how people can explain away anything,” the elf tech said, when I’d gotten close enough for him not to yell. I guess he was being considerate of Yasha, too.



I watched and listened, and was just as amazed. Jim Cantore was busy explaining how a nearly tornado-force downdraft could form on a virtually cloudless night with no major weather system within a hundred miles. Over on CNN, the earthquake that thousands had felt in Times Square and Midtown Manhattan on Saturday night was being blamed on a buildup of steam that had inexplicably released. Workers had been dispatched below the streets to find the culprit. Good thing our folks had cleaned up after themselves in the grendel nursery and old Forty-second Street station. And last, but certainly not least to the people who had been standing underneath it, the exploding section of Times Square billboard had been a short in electronics caused by yet another downdraft—or a large bird. They didn’t have that one nailed down yet.



Conspicuously absent was any mention of monsters or giant dragons.



I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye at my desk.



Ian. Putting something over the back of my chair.



He saw me see him and stepped back with a crooked grin.



As I got closer, I saw what it was and laughed out loud.



“For the fastest tagger in the West . . . Side,” Ian said.



I groaned at the bad pun.



Yasha groaned, too, but not for the same reason.



I had a new piece of desk flair. Slung over the back of my office chair was a Wild West–style gun belt, with an oversized holster on each hip; but instead of a pair of six-shooters, the holsters each held a can of spray paint.



I grinned like an idiot. “I love it.” I felt myself blush a little. “Thank you.”



“There’s also that.” Ian indicated a pink box with a gorgeous silver bow. “That wasn’t there a few minutes ago.”



“Moreau,” Yasha said. He was sitting upright now, but he didn’t look inclined to take off his sunglasses anytime soon.



There was a smell coming from the box—a really nice one for a change. And familiar. I smiled and bit my bottom lip.



There wasn’t a card or a note, but I knew who it was from.



I looked up at the newly repaired windows of the executive suite. Vivienne Sagadraco, the dragon lady, founder and director of SPI, and my boss, stood framed in the floor-to-ceiling glass, her cane now more of a fashionable accessory than an orthopedic necessity. She smiled and bestowed upon me a single nod of her regal head. Her dragon aura did likewise.



I returned the smile and opened the box.



Cookies.



Iced and not iced, nuts and no nuts, and all with some form of chocolate. Except in one corner, separated from the others were delicate cookie confections, completely coated in . . . you guessed it, powdered sugar.



Needless to say, I ate one of those first.



I held out the box to Ian. “Want one?”



“I believe I will.”



“Yasha?” I asked.



He held up both hands.



“Understood. Why don’t I go put these on the break room table to share?”



“Is good idea.”



“Three whole words,” Ian said, impressed. He clapped the Russian on the shoulder. “Looks like you’ll make it, buddy.” He walked with me to the break room. “Heard from Ollie?”



“Oh yeah. He made it to the Full Moon just fine, and got home yesterday morning to find Detective Burton from the First Precinct waiting for him.”



“I supposed it’d be too much to ask that he arrested Ollie?”



“Yeah, it would. Burton just took him in for questioning. In the end, he couldn’t charge Ollie with anything other than being inconveniently absent for forty-eight hours.”



“How’d Ollie explain that one?”



“House-sitting for a friend who was out of the country. Ollie was extra helpful and gave him the name and number of said friend, Humphrey Collington, for verification.”



“Let me guess, one of Ollie’s aliases.”



“His favorite. And since the police had completed their lab work in Ollie’s office, he was free to open his shop.” I put the cookies on the break room table, the official permission and invitation in office kitchens everywhere to “eat these.”



I chuckled. “Remember when I said that if Ollie hadn’t been kidnapped, he’d be giving tours of the monster murder scene at twenty bucks a pop?”



“He’s not.”



“He is. Assured me that while he agreed that it was disgusting, he was just trying to make up for lost revenue.”



“Yeah, right.”



“Apparently money—at least for Ollie—is the best therapy of all.”



“Did you tell him we had his rug?”



“Yeah, he doesn’t want it back.”



“Good choice.”



“Not really. He’s having another one made just like it.”



There was an awkward silence as I knew what I wanted to ask, but not how to bring it up.



“Vivienne doesn’t know anything about the ghoul,” Ian said simply. “Either what it is or where it went, other than it was probably Tia’s second in command, her boots on the ground, so to speak. Our interrogators haven’t managed to get any good leads from Charles Fitzpatrick. Either he’s good at being questioned, or he simply doesn’t know anything. The boss thinks, and I agree, that he was only told what he needed to know. The rest of the organization has gone to ground. No sign of them. Vivienne thinks that since she carried off and killed the grendel, and that she runs the group that destroyed all the others, Tiamat will be back. She’ll want revenge and not just from her sister.”



I’d learned that the boss had badly wounded Tia out over the Hudson River, and to make it back to Times Square in time, she’d been forced to let her escape. Glad didn’t even begin to describe how I’d felt about that decision.



“The boss told me that if there’s anything her sister has, it’s time,” Ian was saying. “So we shouldn’t expect immediate retaliation.”



After Ian had agreed to stay behind with the ghoul in exchange for my and Yasha’s freedom, he’d tried shooting the creature, only to have his silver bullets bounce right off. He fell back on the only other weapon he had.



Rolf’s sword. The family heirloom.



Ian had never used swords before coming to work at SPI. But he’d gotten plenty of training since then. Since we fought some old-fashioned monsters, like Rolf said, sometimes Old World weapons worked best. The creature had closed distance, and Ian had waited until the last instant to strike.



Rolf’s sword had cut into the thing like hot butter. If it’d been any other night than New Year’s Eve, all of Midtown Manhattan would have heard its screams.



The creature vanished, disappeared, ran back to whatever dimension it’d come from with its either figurative or literal tail between its legs.



Turned out that Rolf Haagen’s family heirloom was one of those swords that had a name.



Gram.



His ancestor had quite a name, too.



Sigurd.



Lars Anderssen confirmed the bloodline. Dang.



I didn’t know whether to be really impressed that I knew the descendant of a legendary hero of Norse not-mythology, or to be really worried for the safety and continued well-being of the Norse gods.



“Gram can kill dragons, right?”



Ian nodded. “The boss said she knew the moment Rolf brought it into the complex. Apparently that was one of the things Lars Anderssen was talking to her about when they first arrived. Letting her know it was here, and that he wouldn’t have allowed Rolf to bring it except that it’d proven to be effective against grendels.”



“And mystery ghouls.”



“Thankfully.”



“That makes two times you’ve hurt him bad,” I said quietly.



Ian shrugged. “I’ll just look over my shoulder more often.”



Ian’s tone was casual, but I knew he had to be more worried than he let on. The creature had been hungry for revenge after the first time. Now, vengeance had probably become its new life goal, if the thing even qualified as living.



“You can look over your shoulder,” I told him. “But I’ve got your back.”