Exodus (Imp Series Book 8) (12 page)

“I don’t want a dragon.” He eyed the elves in the car. They didn’t look very noble or tourist-worthy at the moment, twisting their faces into grotesque expressions as they threw themselves about the vehicle.

“Okay, tell you what. We’ve got some Klee elves that will be coming over in a few months. They’re very nice. Very cooperative. They might even marry some of you. You’ll like them. Let me take these elves back to Hel—the not-Norway Hel— and I’ll send you six Klee elves to replace them. Deal?”

“Well…” He pursed his lips.

“Okay a dozen. That’s twelve. My final offer. I take these assholes off your hands and send you twelve well-behaved Klee elves.”

“Deal.”

Perfect. Well, perfect except I couldn’t manage to transport the car and the elves all together. I tried three times and nothing happened. Guess it was going to be two trips of three—which meant I’d need to rely on the police to help me hold the group I needed to temporarily leave behind.

As soon as I opened the car door I realized that this whole plan was doomed. The elves tumbled out, screaming and flailing as they rolled on the ground. Their hands were red and raw. The smell of burned flesh hit my nose.

“What’s wrong with that car?” I shouted over the noise of screaming elves. “Is it
that
hot in there? Should I have cracked a window or something?”

The officer’s eyes widened. “Metal. How could you have done such a thing? You stuffed six fae in a car where they would have no way to avoid contact with metal.”

“Torture!” one of the elves shouted. The others took up the chant and soon the whole lot were screaming and rolling around as they accused me of the worst crimes against elvendom.

“Metal my ass,” I countered. “There’s tons of metal in Hel. They’re fine. Nothing a little antibacterial cream won’t take care of.”

Actually the elves should have been able to take care of this problem on their own. They were second only to the angels when it came to healing ability. I had no idea why they still had burns on their hands. Drama queens. Fakers.

“Iron. They’re sensitive to iron,” the suited man told me. He didn’t look very happy and I had a feeling the pepper spray might soon be pointed at my face once again. “Steel is iron and carbon, so they’re bound to have a reaction to it too.”

What the fuck? Did this guy moonlight as a chemist or something? “The frame is steel,” I countered. “Cars are mostly aluminum and fiberglass now. And besides, they were inside. It’s all vinyl and fake-wood trim. Plastic city.”

Were elves sensitive to plastic? Damn, I had no idea on that one. Maybe they were. And maybe the iron and steel here was different then what we had back in Hel. I’d never thought to scrutinize the sub-atomic particles with that level of detail. Actually, I’d never scrutinized them at all. I was more interested in DNA than metals stuff.

“There’s metal,” suit-man insisted. “You trapped them in a car full of metal. It’s as if you locked Superman in a crate of Kryptonite.”

Was not. I didn’t have any further chance to argue though as suit man and the officers were treating the elves like they were survivors of an epic-scale natural disaster. One officer ran to his car and came back with a medical kit. They began to smear gel from a tube on the elves’ hands as suit guy called for an ambulance.

An ambulance. I kid you not. And the elves were lapping this all up, staring at the humans with big tear-filled eyes. There were expressions of gratitude, laced with horrible accusations of what an elf-torturing monster I was. The only good point to all this was that the humans couldn’t understand them.

“They need to go back to Hel,” I repeated. Everyone ignored me. “We can treat them in Hel. They’ll be with other elves who have magical medicines to heal them. I’ll just take them back…”

The suit-man stopped me with an outstretched arm. “No. We don’t want them angry at us. You and I stood here and discussed their deportation while they suffered in that car. We need to show them that we love elves, that we have nothing but respect for them. We’ll give them medical attention, then set them up to live here with us. Keep your dozen Klee elves. We’re going to take care of these ones. They chose to come to us. It’s the least we can do to make sure they realize that they are welcome here among us.”

Yeah. And the tourism shit too. Fine. I was crossing Iceland off my go-to list as of right now. And once these elves took over and made them sleep in garages, they could cry all they wanted. I wasn’t going to help them.

“Have fun with your elves,” I told them, hearing the siren of the ambulance in the distance.

“We will, we will,” he replied, completely missing the sarcasm in my voice.

I teleported back home, and in the seconds it took me to get there and boot up my laptop they’d already changed their tourism site. Iceland was now home of the elves, and some Photoshop wizard had taken the beautiful photo of the lava fields and superimposed a pointy-eared, eighteen inch tall smiling man on the landscape.

T
he next spot was in the north of France. I didn’t get to resume my nap. I didn’t even get time to make that pot of coffee. I felt like I’d barely gotten back from Iceland when Bob was barging through my back door again with the high alert. Nyalla took one look at him and stomped upstairs to lock herself in the bedroom. Maybe it was a good thing this was all occurring in a short time-frame, because the sooner I could get Bob away from my house and my girl the better.

Remembering the fiasco in Iceland, I decided I needed some backup, so this time I took Little Red thinking that a dragon might be of use. If he couldn’t help me round up the elves and hold them for transport, then maybe I could trade him to the French. If not in exchange for the elves, then for some decent wine and cheese.

I was dreading the French would have the same weird affinity for the elves as I’d just encountered, but I had obviously underestimated them. They had already done my work for me, hauling the dozen elves away to jail. And unlike the humans in Iceland, these ones seemed absolutely unconcerned that the elves’ wrists were red and blistered from the handcuffs, and that they were now huddled against the far wall of their jail cell, staring in horror at the metal bars.

As soon as I realized the local police had the elves, I told Little Red to stay put, stashing him behind a dumpster. Hopefully nobody would decide to take out the trash and see a juvenile dragon cowering at the end of the alley. I didn’t want to have to rescue my dragon in addition to bailing out some elves. Although with the French, there was no guarantee how they’d react to Little Red. They might be more likely to shoo him down the street like a stray cat instead of trying to harm him.

I eyed the terrified group in the jail cell. Huh. Maybe suit-man was right. Maybe elves
were
allergic to iron and steel. I was still hoping for plastic, though. The modern world was made of plastic. Nothing would send the elves running back to Hel faster than a sensitivity to petroleum products.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. I noticed the elves sat on seats with some polyester covering on them, and that they weren’t shy about holding onto the PVC pipes that connected the crude porcelain toilet to the sewer lines.

“You are their lawyer?” The woman at the desk asked. Magistrate? Clerk? Sargent? This was a tiny town and I had no idea how the law enforcement in France was structured. The only reference I had was the poor dude from the old Pink Panther movies.

“Yep.” I must be getting better at lying because the woman didn’t bat an eye. “What are they here for?”

“They were defacing statues. They also stole a crate of wine. I think they are Irish. I cannot understand a word they are saying but I have the impression they were trying to take the wine back home for some Lord or another.”

That was high praise indeed if elves felt it was good enough to take back to Hel where they had great pride in their own spirits. “Do you have the crate of wine? Can I buy it?” I wasn’t a fan of wine, but Gregory was, and so was Nyalla. I might even share with Bob if I was feeling particularly generous.

She shrugged. “Sure. Once we deal with these Irish, you can buy the wine. There is no sense in keeping it in the evidence locker when someone could be enjoying it.”

“So, what do I need to do to get them out of here?” I figured it would be money. Nobody wanted a bunch of hung-over tourists in their jail. I’d pay their fine, then I’d ensure they returned home—to Hel, not Ireland.

The woman named a sum that had me stifling a gasp. Fucking exchange rate. If the dollar was stronger against the Euro I wouldn’t have to practically bankrupt myself bailing these elves out of jail.

“In addition, they need to do community service. Those statues must be repaired. If they cannot do it, then they will need to pay a sculptor to do so.”

These elves were turning out to be more of a headache than I’d ever thought. I would rather be up in Aaru, getting stabbed with swords and in the middle of a life-or-death battle than standing around while these elves cleaned up graffiti and fixed broken statues.

Although, come to think of it, breaking artwork was an odd thing for elves to do. They normally revered the creative process and all artistic products. Yes, they were snobs, but not to the point that they’d go about smashing statuary. Plus the French were similar in their artistic appreciation. Not just the classical stuff either. I was pretty sure that elves would appreciate even abstract artwork.

“What exactly did they do to deface these statues?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but I wanted to get this whole thing over with so I could return these elves to Hel and deal with the next wave of migration, which was probably happening right now.

She waved her hand in a movement that seemed so stereotypically French. “They changed them. Moved arms, altered the angles on the faces and bodies. Personally, I think that they look better, but the statues have been in the town square for over one hundred years and people want them as they originally were.”

Great. I shelled out the cash to spring the vandals and led the dozen elves out of the jail, quickly accomplishing their subdued compliance with the threat of handcuffs and a return to the cell. Once free, I made the elves lead me to the scene of the crime.

It was a lovely park of about four acres, with trees and a fountain, and a set of three statues. Cherubs. All of them pouring water into the fountain from marble ewers. I’d never understood humans’ fascination with or representation of angels. These statues were the usual fat, smiling babies with wings. I had no idea what they’d looked like before, but they looked fine to me as they were.

“Okay, whatever you did, undo it,” I commanded.

At my words the elves unleashed a torrent of complaints, telling me that they’d only improved upon the artwork as a gift to the humans. It hadn’t been completely symmetrical, and the cherub’s arms were bent in a fashion that shouldn’t have been possible given what they knew of human anatomy. They loved humans. They wanted to stay and teach them how to create beauty, because these humans here clearly needed help. Desperately needed help. And these elves were just the ones to help them.

I let them rattle on for a while until they ran out of things to say and fell silent. Honestly these elves didn’t seem all that horrible. They weren’t flogging humans in the streets, or demanding they turn over their homes. The worst these elves had done was improve some statuary and steal wine. I’d done far worse. If I’d let six elves stay in Iceland, maybe I could let these twelve stay in France.

No. I couldn’t. Six here and a dozen there didn’t sound like much, but if I got all soft and started allowing them to stay, it would quickly add up to hundreds of elves and then Gregory would kill me. And judging from their first few hours among the humans, they would be constantly getting into trouble. The angel would find out in a matter of days with these guys running around repainting the Mona Lisa and camping out in a vineyard. No, they needed to go.

I sighed, feeling a tad bit sorry for these guys and their enthusiasm. “Change them back, or I return you to the prison with the metal cuffs and metal bars. You’ll stay there forever. No one will come for you. No one. You’ll die in that horrible cage. Or you can return the statues to their former imperfect state, I’ll take you back to Hel, and then you can tell all the other elves about the horrible human artwork, as well as the bracelets of pain and cages that burn. Sound good?”

It must have sounded good, because they got right to work with a minimal amount of grumbling. When they were done, I made them clean the graffiti off a nearby stone wall. And then they lined up and I called Little Red.

“Is that a dragon?” One elf squeaked. They didn’t seem particularly afraid of Little Red. More wary and fascinated. He preened, soaking it up as the elves stroked his scales and complimented his appearance.

“Yes. He’s young which means he doesn’t have much control over what he sets on fire. He’s going to watch you because I can only take a few at a time with me to Hel. If anyone comes by, claim he’s a pet, like a dog, or a Komodo dragon, or something.”

Little Red seemed offended at the idea that he might be mistaken for a dog, but perked up at Komodo dragon. I wondered if they really were related. I’d need to take Little Red on a field trip to the National Zoo sometime soon to see if there was any long-lost connection there. Of course, I’d need to find time to do it in the next six months, before he returned, though.

I’d started getting tired after the first trip, and my location skills were slipping. Which meant the elves were getting dropped off in the swamp, or out in the middle of a swarm of angry pteries. I didn’t care. I did care that after the third group I returned to France to find the remaining two were teaching my dragon to roll over and sit-up and beg.

Not cool. In spite of what I’d said earlier, he wasn’t a dog. And I wasn’t sure the fruit and bread they were feeding him as a reward was good for him. Didn’t Sparky tell me dragons were carnivores? That’s all I needed was Little Red puking all over my house. In frustration, I grabbed both remaining elves.