Free Trolls in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome

humans, one held the eldritch, and they were never to mingle again except in ancient memory. Hence all the tales of pixies and sea serpents and sorcerers. If, by some chance, humans caught a glimpse of the magical realm, they would not recognize what they saw.
    â€œThey’d see trains and trolleys and flying bowls instead.”
    â€œExactly.”
    I frowned. “That’s mind control. Mass hypnosis.”
    â€œIt’s better than mass hysteria, isn’t it? Think of witch burnings.”
    All right, his story might explain some of what happened. “But then how come the line got crossed?”
    â€œNot everyone obeys the rules, do they? But there’s more.”
    Before the split, he explained, as if giving a history lesson, not a theory of high fantasy, there was some inbreeding, experiments if you will, an effort to assimilate the poor weak humans into the magical world. The mixed breeds were not successful. Some could not reproduce; others were pitied by the glamour folk, feared by the clannish humans. Some of them got to stay in Unity as halflings, some stayed with the humans.
    â€œMost of what we consider psychic powers comes from those mongrel ancestors. Some of those who trespass now and again are remnants of the mixes. They come from curiosity. Or worse.”
    My creation was a hero, not a plunderer of lesser universes. I knew it in my heart. “Fafhrd is not evil.”
    â€œTrolls seldom are. You do not want to mess with ogres. And fairies can be impossible to deal with, their minds flitting as fast as their wings. Trolls are not usually curious creatures. either.”
    â€œSo how did Fafhrd get here, and why?”
    â€œWe think an EG called him up. An Evil Genius from this side, a descendant of the interbreeding, someone with enough talent and understanding, and ambition. There’s great power in the Unity world, great wealth, too.”
    â€œYou do not think I am the Evil Genius?”
    â€œNo, you are the Visualizer. Somewhere there is the Verbalizer. But there’s a villain, too, taking your talents and combining them with his as an Enhancer. Maybe he is not acting intentionally, and maybe he is just experimenting. We have no way of knowing.”
    â€œWait a minute. I do have talents. I win awards and get paid for them. I can draw and tell stories, a better one than this bullshit. Fafhrd is my creation.”
    â€œAh, but your ancestors were some of those half-breeds. Many settled in England and Ireland. A large group eventually came to the colonies. They preferred living together, to avoid those witch hunts and the like. A branch of a famously psychic English family emigrated to Long Island.”
    I knew what he was going to say, so I said it for him. “To Paumanok Harbor.”
    â€œExactly.”
    That would explain my crazy grandmother Bess who talked to spirits, and my mother’s mother with her herbs and predictions, and my own mother’s uncanny dog-whispering. Then there was Mrs. Terwilliger at the library who always knew what book I wanted before I asked. And Susan, who knew if I’d gotten into mischief. Mrs. Ralston could guess the sex of an unborn baby, and the harbormaster warned boats of coming storms long before they showed on radar. And it never, ever rained on the Fourth of July parade.
    Yeah,Agent Grant’s fable explained a lot. Or it would if I believed half the manure he was shoveling.

CHAPTER 9

    I WASN’T BUYING IT. Grant told a pretty story, and God knew he had a pretty face to go with it. As my grandmother Eve—who was not a witch—always said, handsome is as handsome does, and this one had crossed the line when he or his ridiculous agency had put spyware on my computer. He expected me to swallow hogwash about an Evil Genius? That was straight out of one of my books, no, out of a lot of them. I often used that title as a placeholder until I constructed the perfect bad guy. This charlatan was using my