CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THE WORLD KNOWS

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"So... coding sure has changed," Rio said pointedly.

For a second, I didn't know what she was talking about. Then I remembered my lie about selling code segments and flushed.

"It's gotten pretty hands-on, yeah," I joked feebly.

Rather than let that conversation continue, I threw out the portal stone and was pleased to see the familiar blue hole in reality appear in the air when the stone shattered.

“Holy fuck, my husband is a wizard,” Rio said, her tone playfully hysteric. I didn’t think she was trying to make me laugh. No. This was a desperate grasp for normalcy in a world turned upside down. What had happened to her down here?

“So that’s what that stone did,” she murmured, poking the portal as she walked around it. “Huh. It faces you no matter how you look at it. Weird…”

“You found one of these down here?”

She nodded, but her expression dimmed. “The imps… they destroyed it before we could get our hands on it.”

“We…?” I asked.

She didn’t respond. Instead, she turned to me and wrapped her hands around my neck in an embrace. She didn’t linger there long as the sounds of goblins were becoming more noticeable down the tunnel.

“Imps… what are those?” I asked, desperate to change the subject. “Are they different from the goblins we were just fighting?”

She shook her head. “No. Same thing. I just called them imps because of the red skin.”

“Ah…” I said. In retrospect, she was right. They did look more like imps than goblins. I mentally decided to try to start correcting that in my head. We had more important things to deal with.

“This ah… It should lead us back home, but I’ve got no idea what to expect when we get there,” I said awkwardly. “There was a cop there already. Maybe… five hours ago? I’ve been fighting down here for ages. When I realized you were missing, I asked Seok to get the cops involved.”

Rio nodded. “That’s… good. We’re probably going to need them. We’ve got to come back down here. I… I abandoned people so I could escape. I’ve got to get them out, somehow.”

What!?

“Well… uh. You better go first. I don’t know what causes these things to fade or how long they last,” I said, deliberately setting that statement aside while inwardly my mind was racing.

She wanted to come back down here!? It had been sheer stupidity when I’d done it, and I’d only survived so long because my skills were exceptionally effective against the goblins. Er… imps.

I knew her, though. When she had that tone, there was no arguing. Better to distract her rather than confront that lunacy head-on. If there were other victims down here, then the cops should handle it. It was their job, after all. I just wanted her safe.

She stepped through the portal, and I followed right behind her. Blue lights danced in my eyes before the world rematerialized with a familiar scene filled with many unfamiliar people. Guns were trained on Rio already, and half immediately turned to train on me as I appeared behind her.

“Drop your weapons and get on the ground!” came a sudden shout that neither of us wanted to fuck with. This was not the same half-terrified cop from before, and I didn’t dare disobey this man.

We both slowly lifted our hands and dropped our weapons before getting to the floor of our living room. To the best of my knowledge, we weren’t under arrest. Neither of us had done anything wrong, but the cops had to be on edge. They’d probably found the goblin bodies and weren’t taking any chances, especially when magic portals were opening up.

I noticed something odd once I lay flat on the ground, feeling a little humiliated as the cops came up to us and took all of our weapons.

Our television was turned on.

“A-are we under arrest?” Rio asked during the pat-down. “What... why are there so many people here?”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Are you Rio and Theodore Tande?” the cop asked when he stood over us. We still hadn’t been cuffed.

“Y-yes, sir,” Rio replied. I held my thumb up.

The cop sighed as my bag was taken from me, and the cops finished searching my body for hidden weapons. There weren’t any.

“Alright… alright, get them up. They’re the victims, not the perps…” the cop said, his tone becoming much more reasonable as the cops started to pull us back to our feet.

We stood on unsteady legs, neither of us exactly the best socially.

Rio took a tentative seat on our couch before jumping to the most critical matter. “Wh-where’s our dog? Genji?”

The cop sat opposite us on our old recliner as I joined Rio on our couch.

“Dog’s fine, Ma’am. Mister Min brought her to the overnight vet when they realized she’d been injured,” he said.

“Oh, thank god,” she breathed. “She… she was hurt when I got home. They were attacking her…”

“Hold on,” the man said. He gave off a senior officer vibe. He was older, his hair greyer than it was black. He looked fit, with a sharp, pointed nose. He was thinner than me, though that wasn’t surprising. Everyone was thinner than me. I thought he was about my height, too. Despite the situation, his harried expression made me like him almost immediately.

“Alright. First off, I’m Terry O’Keeves, Chief of Police here in Boyerton,” he said. “We’re glad to see you both safe despite the circumstances. We were not looking forward to going down into that cave.”

“You know about the cave?” I asked.

The man gave a long-suffering sigh.

“Mr. Tande, tonight has been an absolute clusterfuck,” he said. “First, I get reports of a man and a girl appearing out of nowhere, scaring the hell out of one of my beat cops. Then, the man vanishes out of thin air, leaving the girl who’d apparently been kidnapped from Florida.”

I winced as he glared at me, but didn’t back down.

“They took my wife,” I said. “I had to get her back.”

“Yeah… yeah, I get that,” the man said, leaning back before continuing. “Well, now I do. At first, we thought you were some magician kidnapping people from other states. If not for the media break, you would’ve received a very different greeting, Mr. Tande.”

I gulped.

“Media break?” I asked.

He pointed towards the TV. The volume was low, but I saw it was showing a news channel. A reporter was showing a blurry cellphone video of some familiar red-skinned creatures dragging a person away into an alley. Bits of snow on the ground told me this wasn’t local news. Only the North could still have snow in early April.

“So… this is happening everywhere?” I asked.

“Seems so. When I called and reported that we had a dead imp, the state cops laughed at us. Half an hour later, they called us back and said the feds were coming. By then, we’d found the cave,” he said with disgust. “I have never seen anything like that. Still wish I hadn’t.”

We both sighed, digesting that.

“We… we still need to go down there,” Rio said hesitantly. “I wasn’t the only one. There were more people.”

“Shit. So there are more. We thought there had to be with how many kidnappings were being reported. After the story broke, dozens of videos started showing up online.” Terry said before focusing back on Rio. “Did you know anyone down there? What were their names?”

“Uh… y-yes. Well, no. I learned their first names, but they were from all over,” Rio said with a shiver. “Montana, here in Missouri, Florida… I think one woman said she was from Honduras…”

“Well, we might be able to tie them to some missing-persons cases, at least. Hopefully, we can get them all out. What were the names of the people from Missouri?”

“There was only one. Todd. Todd, definitely said he was from Boyerton,” Rio replied.

My eyes widened. “Todd!? Dane told me today that a kid named Todd didn’t show up for work at Dowells yesterday! Or… fuck, was it two days ago?”

“Joel! You getting this down?” Terry shouted out behind him.

“Yes, sir!” came the reply from one of the cops at our kitchen counter, typing away into a cell phone.

“Good!” he called out before turning back to me. "Anyone else?"

Rio seemed to wrack her brain for a moment but shook her head. "No one else was from Missouri... though there was someone missing from my job the other day, that was really unusual. Her name is Nora. Nora Hargis. I didn't see her down there, but now I'm worried. Still, there were seventeen other people down there..."

Rio's silence said more than I thought the cop could pick up on. I had the distinct impression that whatever had happened to her down there had been more traumatizing than even being stabbed in the lung had been for me.

“Jesus... Do you know what they’re doing with people down there?” Terry asked.

Rio turned pale. “You… don’t want to know.”

He sighed. “Yeah. I definitely don’t. But I also need to.”

“H-human sacrifice,” I said. “Like… fucked up rituals. They’re burning them alive with lava. I… don’t know how or why. Magic, I guess.”

“Magic…” Terry sniffed. He seemed to struggle to come up with something to say before he just scoffed again. “Fucking portals…”

“I can prove that it's real if you need me to,” I said. “When I killed one of them – uhh! It was self-defense, I swear.”

Terry chuckled. “No one doubts that at this point. So you killed one of them, and now you can do hocus pocus? Reza shit?”

Reza was a famous magician from Branson, and I chuckled at the comparison. “Kind of, yeah?”

“I can confirm,” Rio piped in, her business voice coming out. “I killed one of them, too, and when I did, I was given options. A group of… classes. Like from video games. Or D&D.”

The man’s head sagged into his hand again. “God help me. You’re telling me that these things give magic powers when you kill them? Fucking hell, if that gets out, we’re going to have nuts from all over the state here. Even if you are lying. But… well…”

He eyed my breastplate pointedly and spared a glance at the bloody glowing morning star in one of the evidence bags. “There’s certainly something supernatural going on...”

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