Magic World (working title): Chapter 9 part 18

At a gesture from Henry, Jackie went to Bernard and took the sawed-off, and gestured for the Goats-Head biker to start walking, then pulled out his phone, and started sending a text, following along behind, gun still pointed at the thug.

Henry turned back to the pink-haired girl, looking her over in a calculating way. Though there was a sense of appreciation as well, he mostly seemed impressed that such a girl could take down two much larger bikers so very quickly. He looked at the skinny guy too, but dismissed him almost immediately.

Bernard almost did too, but a little voice in the back of his mind asked why he should do so. In a nearly empty street, and with so few people involved why should anyone be beneath notice.

Walking toward them, he glanced at the skinny man, then noticed a little bit of pointy ear jutting out from his hair. An elf, he realized.

The elf turned to look at him, noticing that Bernard was noticing. His face betrayed nothing, a perfectly blank mask.

"So," Henry was saying. "Why would a cute little thing like you..." she visibly brightened at the word cute, "...want to take down a couple of crack-pipe-hitting ass-beating dip-shit meth-head mother-fuckers like these two? Not that I'm not grateful mind you. But uh... Well let's just say; my curiosity is aroused." He looked her up and down again, but more in a challenging way than a lascivious way.

She rolled her eyes and sighed, as if preparing for a task, then launched into a long story involving an IED, some old guy who made her a prosthetic leg, which Bernard had to look twice at or he would never have believed it, then coming into town, talking to an art dealer, and how she led her here, to the little halfling dancer, Pearl. When she mentioned the explosion though, Bernard took more notice.

“Bloody Hell!” he exploded suddenly. “You’re here for Raul too?”

Both the elf and the girl turned to look at him, an incredulous look on the girls face, the elf as always was inscrutable.

“Aha, so she’s not full of shit,” said Henry as if the coincidence of their meeting was entirely commonplace. “Well then, I owe you all a favor , so if we can finish the job we started, we can get things rolling on that.”

"Yeah, about that," said Bernard dubiously. "I believe you mentioned something about  High Explosives?"

Jackie grunted. He had zip-tied all the Goats-Head MC bikers. "He was kidding about that."

"Aw, come on Jackie," said Henry, sounding disappointed but smiling. "Let me have a little fun huh?"

Jackie rolled his eyes and started toward the van motioning for Bernard to follow. They opened the back and looked inside. Lying on the floor of the van was a small body, about the size of a child, but the proportions were all wrong. His hands were zip-tied, and he had a hood over his head. Jackie helped him sit up and pulled the hood off, the started on the zip-ties.

The gnome looked around dazedly, blinking in the sudden light. "Jackie?" he said to the biker. "About time... I wasn't sure I was going to make it much longer...."


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 Bernard stopped at that point and looked at Gary. So did everyone else.

Gary didn't seem to notice.

"Gary?"

"No I haven't found the car yet. I think someone disabled the GPS, either that or it's been stripped for p..." he slowed to a stop as he realized everyone was looking at him. He looked back confused. "What..?"

Bernard repeated himself. "I said we found a gnome in the back of the van, who says he wasn't going to make it much longer."

"It's your turn cutie," said Miranda, making Gary blush.

Davin was glad to see he wasn't the only one.