Free Bite Marks by Jennifer Rardin

all-time favorite place to visit is Monaco. Have you ever had a dog?”
    “I prefer crab. And yes, I have owned several dogs. But I grew tired of burying them every decade or so. Thus, my only pets are the tigers carved into my cane.”
    “There, was that so hard?”
    Jack had begun to tug at his leash hard enough to make my shoulder ache, so I stopped resisting and followed him toward the northwest corner of the schoolhouse. Concrete steps led down to a basement entrance that had been both boarded and padlocked shut. But that wasn’t the part that interested him.
    His nose led him to the side of the steps, to a gray brick wall so ordinary I’d never have given it a second look if not for him. I took a knee.
    “What’s that on your nose, dude?” A smudge of powder, the same color as the wall. I reached out to rub the spot he’d sniffed it from. Yanked my hand back. Because my fingers hadn’t touched the rock-hard surface my eyes had registered. It had felt more like membrane, giving like Jell-O at the contact.
    “We’ve got something over here,” I said.
    “Be casual,” Vayl reminded everyone.
    I looked up as Bergman reached the top of the steps and clicked off a couple of shots. Cassandra joined him, exclaiming over the viability of using this spot in our movie’s murder scene. And then Vayl split the two of them in the middle, Astral sitting at his feet like a real cat, which was when I realized that was exactly the kind of pet he needed. Battery-driven. Likely to outlast even him.
    Now that I had my audience, I flicked the barrier with a finger. It wiggled, pulling an excited gasp out of Bergman. He ran down the steps, jumping the last two in his rush to get a closer look.
    “What kind of technology are we talking about here?” he asked himself as he poked at the fakeness. He gasped when his finger went through. Sagged against me when it came out whole, if dusty.
    “I doubt if it’s mechanical so much as chemical mixed with magic,” said Cassandra as she and Vayl descended the steps. “But as soon as I touch it I’ll be able to tell you a great deal more.” Jack and I backed toward the boarded door to give her room to work while Bergman pulled Astral out of the way. Vayl leaned on his cane, watching with interest as she knelt, steadying herself with one hand on the bottom step. She gently pressed the other against the Jell-O wall, squeezing her eyes tight as images filled her mind. Her lips flattened, like she’d just taken a bite of bad potato salad but couldn’t spit it out, because her auntie had made it special, just for her.
    Finally she nodded and stood. “This is a new doorway into a gnome warren. It’s the one Pete told us about. N’Paltick.” Nobody said anything, but the silence was full of unspoken speculation. She went on,
    “It was built for ease of access to these apartments. I also See gnomes swarming out of this entrance.
    They are quite excited, but I can’t tell why.”
    Though the answer seemed obvious, Vayl still had to ask, “Is this the same warren that took Ruvin’s family?”
    She nodded. “A woman and two boys are sitting in a candlelit room. They seem all right. They’re looking at the door in surprise.” She glanced up at him. “In my vision they believe they’re about to be rescued.”
    His eyes, bright blue with the intensity of his thoughts, wandered to mine. As I read the question in them I shrugged. We both knew we’d never find a better chance to humiliate the shaman than this one. A people blinded to their leader’s whacked ways had to start questioning how tight he and the almighty Ufran really were when their god let common kidnappers make off with the bargaining chips—er, I mean—the midwife’s family.
    You know I’m for it , I told him silently. Especially considering how much safer Cassandra will be down there.
    Gnomes and demons entered into a blood feud right after Lucifer’s Fall. By now the gnomes were so far ahead they’d stopped