Dragons & Dwarves (55 page)

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Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves
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The doctor sighed. “There’s no physical damage. She has suffered feedback from some magical event. I need the exact history of what happened—”
“Can’t you transfer her out of the Portal’s influence?” I asked. That was what they did with her predecessor when he was infected with semiconscious tumors that started sprouting little eyes.
“That’s not a trivial treatment decision. Without analysis of the enchantment binding her, the effect of taking her out of a mana dense area could be unpredictable. Can I have that history?”
I gave him what I knew, which wasn’t much.
“Thanks.” He put his hand on my shoulder, “We’re doing what we can.”
It didn’t make me feel better.
When he left, I heard a small tinny voice say, “You bitch!”
I picked up the receiver, “Quint, you still there?”
“Tell me, Kline, are you just trying to make my life interesting?”
“Pardon?”
“Dr. Newman Shafran? Home number? The man doesn’t exist.”
“What, I’ve talked to him . . .”
“No phone, no credit report, address a PO Box. I can’t even find the university records to match his doctorate.”
“I don’t understand. He works at Case. He’s published scientific papers.”
“Sure, dozens—but I swear he walks off the campus and ceases to exist. If I didn’t . . .” he trails off. “I am such an idiot.”
“What?”
“I was going to say, ‘If I didn’t know better,’ but, of course I don’t know better, do I?”
“Know what?”
“The man’s an émigré from the Portal. Of course, no birth certificate, no paper trail prior to a dozen years ago. Hell, even his publications don’t go back more than a decade.”
“But he has a doctorate?”
“Threw me, too. This will be a little weird, you want me to keep digging?”
I shook my head, feeling a little uneasy about Dr. Shafran. I couldn’t believe the man was from the other side of the Portal. He seemed way too much of the world I lived in. But all that was beside the point anyway. I didn’t need to be going off on tangents. “No, Quint, leave it for now. There’s another man who’s more important. The name’s Simon Lucas . . .”
 
When I left the cell-phone-free bubble of St. Vincent’s, I had missed half a dozen calls. All from Margaret.
I called her back from the parking lot. Once I was in the Volkswagen, out of the snow.
“Where have you been?”
“The hospital, I had to turn off my cell—”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, it was a coworker. Did they find Sarah?”
“Kline, our daughter has a future as a con artist.”
I leaned back in the seat. “I was right, wasn’t I?”
“The police found my car in the airport parking lot. She used her boarding pass—the one we thought I canceled.”
“Thought?”
It turns out that my daughter was nothing if not resourceful. Margaret had, in fact, changed the flight dates. But she had done it via email, and apparently Margaret had never bothered to set the password on her e-mail. Sarah was able to look through all her email and pull up confirmation numbers and credit card info—enough to actually place a phone call to the travel agent last night, undoing Margaret’s changes.
Apparently, doing everything on-line made it even easier for Sarah to impersonate her mother, since the agent had never actually talked to Margaret.
Once her boarding pass was valid again, all Sarah had to do was slip out early enough to make the flight. By the time the cops had caught up to the missing car, the plane had already been boarded.
I shook my head. “What is she thinking?”
“I don’t know, Kline.”
“You have the itinerary? Any layovers?”
“The cops already asked, no. It’s a direct flight.”
“What does she expect me to do? She has to know I’d put her right back on the next flight out, even if there weren’t—”
I was about to say “
doom-laden prophecies.
”
“Weren’t what, Kline?”
“A . . . a teenage susceptibility to self-delusion and denial. She really should have known better.”
“Something else . . .”
“There’s more?”
“She unplugged my alarm clock.” She paused, and when I didn’t immediately grasp the significance, she elaborated. “If I hadn’t gotten up at four to go to the bathroom, if I had slept in, I might not have been able to get to you before the plane landed. She’ll be there in less than two hours.”
I exhaled.
“Well our little con artist is going to be lucky if I don’t get my own ticket next to her on the way back.”
 
Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, the weather had to screw things up.
I was lucky to make it from St. Vincent’s to Hopkins Airport in under an hour and a half. What had started as a light flurry managed to turn into a full-fledged blizzard before I had completely merged onto I-77 South.
Ten minutes before my daughter’s plane was scheduled to arrive, I was just one of hundreds of people staring out the windows at Hopkins International Airport. Like everyone else, I was watching the sheets of white pounding the tarmac, and explaining to a cell phone just how the weather had screwed up everyone’s life.
“Nothing?” Margaret said.
“No,” I told her. “Pretty much every outbound flight’s been canceled. I think I’m going to be lucky if they don’t divert Sarah’s flight to Akron or Columbus.”
“That bad?”
“Bad enough that all the hotels around the airport were booked solid before I got here. I was lucky to get the Tower City Hilton.”
“You couldn’t just put her up in your condo like we originally planned?”
“Not a great idea, right now. Long story.”
“It’s what you’re working on, isn’t it? Are you getting death threats again?”
“In any case,” I said, changing the subject, “our daughter has to know that things aren’t business as usual. I’m not going to reward her by pretending this is okay. She’s going to a hotel with me, and back out once the weather is clear.”
“You’re right,” I heard her sniff over the phone. “I just can’t help thinking we might have been too hard on her. It isn’t like Sarah to do this—”
I know.
“Suite 1123, Tower City Hilton. I called in the reservation when I was fighting this crap on the freeway.”
“Okay,” Margaret sounded uncertain. “I still wish she could stay with you.”
“She
is
staying with me. It’s a suite, two bedrooms.”
“Look, that hotel must be expensive at the last minute. You should let me pick up part of the bill.”
“Don’t worry, I can afford it. If anything, we should take it out of Sarah’s allowance.”
“Kline?”
“What?”
“I know you’re angry, but remember, she wanted to see you.”
I rubbed my face. My jaw still hurt from where the dwarf had slugged me. “I know.”
“Call me when her plane comes in?”
“Sure.”
I hung up and looked up at the flight schedule. Twenty-minute delay so far.
“Sarah, what the hell were you thinking?” I whispered to myself as the delay rolled over to forty minutes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
W
HEN she walked out the gate, I think she almost seemed surprised to see me.
 
“Dad?”
I walked up to her. “I think you have a bit of explaining to do, young lady.”
“I tried to call you.”
“Uh-huh, so you resort to car theft and fraud?”
“She wasn’t going to let me come!”
I frowned. “Don’t take that tone.” I took the bag she was carrying. “Did you check anything? Do we need to go to baggage claim?”
“No.”
“Then come on, let’s get back to my car before the weather gets any worse.”
She nodded and followed me through the terminal. After a few minutes she said, “I was looking forward to this trip for a year, then she said I couldn’t go . . .”
“
We
said you couldn’t go. Your mother does talk to me, you know. We bumped your visit to January because you needed to cool your jets for baiting your mother.”
“It wasn’t fair after planning—”
I stopped and turned to face her. “Do you have any idea what you just did? This wasn’t breaking curfew, or pushing your mother’s buttons. You broke the law, young lady. If your mother and I were more estranged than we are, I would be counted as an accessory. The only reason you aren’t on a flight back to California right now is because there aren’t any. I’d take you to a Greyhound station if I could trust you not to bolt at the first rest stop.”
“Dad?” she was starting to tear up.
I sighed. “You have no conception how disappointed I am in you right now.”
The floodgates were open now, and she pulled out the A-bomb of emotional blackmail. “I just wanted to see you, Dad. It just got so bad I had to go.”
Uh-huh, you have the mother from hell.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “Well, lucky for you, you’re going to have about twenty-four hours to get over it before I can send you back.”
By the time we got to the exit, I realized that Sarah was not dressed appropriately. She wore jeans, a short-sleeved blouse, and a little leather jacket that existed solely to be a fashion accessory.
I tried offering her my trench coat, and she just folded her arms and said,
“I’m okay!”
But even as she shook her head, I could see her staring out the glass at the layers of white falling down on the parking lot. She probably hadn’t seen snow in person since she was five.
“You really need to wear something heavier than that. Did you pack something?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I bit my tongue. I knew enough to realize how easily a detail like appropriate winter wear might have been lost in the midst of the apocalyptic decision for her to come here.
She looked up at me. “You know, I saw a fashion show on satellite and they had a designer here who makes these killer jackets. It moves, like it’s alive, and it changes color to whatever you think of . . .”
Great, and how much does that cost?
“Honey, I don’t think we’re going to go shopping. Besides, you couldn’t take something like that back home. It wouldn’t work outside the influence of the Portal, and if it’s heavily enchanted, leaving the influence of mana would probably destroy it.”
I pushed through the door into the blizzard.
“W-well. If I got anything l-like that, you’d keep it safe for me? T-till I came back?”
“I said we’re not going—” I looked at her, and saw eyes red from crying. I couldn’t be a hard ass anymore. “Sure, honey.”
I told myself that she was going to be safely in my sight from now up until I put her back on a plane home.
“D-Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Give me your j-jacket.”
I set down her bag and pulled off my trench coat and draped it over her shoulders. Doing that made it sink in exactly how much my girl had grown. I didn’t feel distant from her, since we talked on the phone at least every other day, but I only actually saw her a few times a year.
Giving her my jacket made me realize that she was only a hair shorter than I was now. She could easily be one of the college interns at the
Press
—or a hostess at the bar where the old men of the paper went to talk about the interns without causing a hostile working environment.
Sarah must have heard me sigh.
“What is it?”
“Just thinking about work.” I picked up her bag and gestured toward the lot. “I’m parked over there.”

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