Free Rites of Passage by Annie Reed Page B

him.
    Another car drove by, its bass-heavy music rattling the windows. Different song, same beat. Finn preferred classic rock.
    He moved closer, his katana a comforting weight in the sheath against his back.
    “Got one of those for me?” he asked, pantomiming taking a drag off a cigarette.
    The creep studied him for a moment before it shrugged and reached down beside itself toward the floor.
    Finn tensed. He didn’t draw his blade, not yet, but he had a feeling the creep had noticed his reaction.
    He also had a feeling the creep was enjoying this.
    Instead of drawing a weapon, the creep merely tossed a pack of cigarettes in Finn’s direction. “Knock yourself out,” it said.
    The cigarettes landed on the floor a few inches in front of Finn. He didn’t bend to pick them up, just arched an eyebrow at the creep.
    “That’s not very hospitable.”
    “My aim sucks,” the creep said. “So sue me.”
    Finn ignored the cigarettes. He still didn’t see any hint of green light, not even in the windows. Eyes might be the windows to the soul, as the old saying went, but real windows made for easy places to frame a portal to another world.
    Or dozens of portals.
    This whole thing was downright weird.
    “So what’s the deal?” Finn asked. “You’re just hanging out, having a smoke?”
    “No law against it,” the creep said.
    That wasn’t quite true. While no laws prevented this world’s magic folk from moving freely about the city—provided they didn’t practice magic without the proper licenses and permits—the creeps weren’t from this world.
    The creeps were basically illegal aliens, and hostile ones at that. Finn was within his rights to kill them. He even had a license to prove it.
    Take that, 007.
    “No law against me taking your head,” Finn said.
    The creep went very still, the cigarette still in its mouth. Smoke swirled around its head. “You see a portal here?” it asked.
    “You’re here. That’s all I need.”
    “Not very sporting of you. Guardian.”
    Outside another car drove past the plant. More window-rattling music. Finn was starting to yearn for a good Aerosmith song to break up the monotony.
    He’d had enough of the creep, too. It was sparring with him. It might not have opened a portal yet, but it would. Finn had never met a creep who lived for anything else.
    “Who said this is a sport?” Finn asked.
    He started to draw his katana from its sheath when something popped behind him, and an unseen fist slammed into his left shoulder.
    The impact nearly knocked him to his knees.
    “We do, asshole.”
    The new voice came from a broken window in the back of the plant. The voice was grating and guttural and unmistakable.
    A goblin.
    Not only a goblin. A goblin with a gun .
    How was that even possible?
    The creep laughed as more guttural voices took up the words and turned them into a chant.
    “We do, asshole!”
    Another pop.
    Finn felt more than heard a bullet speed past his head.
    He dove toward the closest wall, trying to make himself as small a target as possible. His injured shoulder was on fire.
    In an instant he’d gone from hunter to hunted, being shot at by goblins with guns, his katana his only weapon.
    Goblins who could see better in the dark than he could.
    Goblins who knew as well as he did that in this empty shell of a building, he had nowhere to hide.

 
     
     
     
     
    2
     
    “I still don’t know why we can’t just shoot them,” Finn said.
    He’d been practicing with a katana for hours. The weapon was elegant, the blade incredibly sharp, but it seemed like such an old-fashioned, dangerous way to kill anything. With a katana, he had to get up close. A bullet could kill from a distance. The creeps weren’t fairies, so why couldn’t he shoot them?
    Finn’s master gave him an indulgent look. “You telling me your lily-white ass is too good to learn the blade?”
    Movies always portrayed martial arts masters as tiny, wizened old Asian men. Finn’s master was a