This is the short story I wrote, poked at, and have finally made available.  I’ll be releasing it in bits throughout the week, but if you are impatient and just want to read the whole thing, I have it available here: Dr. E versus Da Goblinz.

If Carmelo had been an action hero, he would have said, “Sorry to rain on your parade,” as the first drops of the weedkiller sprayed across the bushes.  Instead, it was a manly grunt and a hissing sound as the acidic drops touched the quivering plant army.

He looked up at me.  Dare’s cousin had come in the gate, no crawling over the wall, no concern over the strange light emanating from his cousin.  Just a bunch of chemicals and a hose, and, well, a grin.

“Some cut back,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I responded.

It’s the little mundane, everyday bits you forget when working the magic angle.  The gun Dare waved brought it to mind. See, Dragons, and vampires, and wizards, I’ve gotten too used to those.  I still had money from a bunch of Russian sorcerers paying my bills, so I was thinking about hexes and death curses, not about metal and bullets, and the fact that Colorado has this “Make My Day” law that meant while Dare couldn’t quite shoot us with full impunity, no one was likely to ask too many questions.

He couldn’t hold the gun and the sunlight, though.  It had gone dark, and the scattering creatures began to grow quiescent once more.  I waited for someone to move.

He said something in Spanish that I recognized a rude word from, and Carmelo grunted.

“Who are you?” he asked me.  “What are you?”

“I’m no one, really.”  I shrugged, unable to help myself.  He didn’t take the movement well, but I’ll be honest, he also didn’t hold the gun the way my friends with experience did.  Being shot by someone inept was still going to get holes in my hide, but it meant more of a chance of his missing, or being talked down, or anything but having him shoot, right?  “Just your friendly neighborhood Portal Doctor.”

“What does that mean?  What do you want with my garden?”

Melo said another thing I didn’t understand, but Dare ignored him.  He gestured with the gun as if I was supposed to answer.

“I close doors,” I said.  I watched as flowers wilted in front of me, as the acidic rain of whatever it was Carmelo used melted bits of my adversaries.  As they lay down, sleepy, in the moon’s silvery light, the world seemed to turn from color to black and white.

“I do not understand,” he says.  “I should shoot you.  Many things grow well in the blood of wizards.”

“I’m not one of those,” I caught myself before I laughed.  “You’d be disappointed.”

“A… dryad?  Venganza de… espíritus de los arboles?”

Carmelo actually chuckled.  “He is no spirit of the trees.  Why, Dario?” he rolled the ‘r’ almost sarcastically.  “Are you afraid?”

“You carry herbicide. You are not from them.”  He looked away to talk to Carmelo, which gave me a moment to step closer.  I didn’t know what to do, but it seemed to be what everyone in the movies did.  Dare noticed and pointed the gun at me.

Melo sprayed his cousin with the nozzle, and Dare screamed.  The sound of the shot was louder than I expected, and it missed widely.  Before Dario could get off another round, I did the only thing that made sense – I closed my eyes and ran into him with my right shoulder, getting a good whiff of the chemicals and knocking us both over into a stone planter. I’m glad my eyes were closed because the impact was enough to see a flash of light.

A flash of light that doesn’t fade isn’t properly indicated as a flash.  My neck hurt and I rolled off Dare while seeing that Carmelo had dropped the spray and instead stood in a circle of sunlight.  A circle that slowly expanded to fill the design Dare’s garden had been built to summon.

“Wait, no!” I shouted.

Carmelo smiled at me the way he did when he said, “Rain tomorrow.”

Dare was struggling while I tried to pick myself up using the edge of the planter.  I hurt in places I forgot I had, well, except whenever they hurt.  I wiped off some blood that had pooled on my neck with unpleasant surprise.  Yeah, yuck.  Or at least, yucca.

Dare had been pinned by some no-longer somnolent goblins.  His gun rested in the grass, where he had managed to drop it in my surprise rush.  Well, it surprised me, although it shouldn’t have surprised anybody who had ever seen a film.  I was guessing he didn’t understand what was happening.  Probably was expecting espíritus de los arboles, whatever those were.  Or nymphs.  He seemed the kind who enjoyed a diversion of nymphs.  (That may be the official venery.)

The glow continued, the warm gold of a summer’s day.  I needed to try these guys against vampires and trolls, if I could be sure they’d be on my side.  It felt like I was getting a dose of vitamin D.  Altogether, that’s not all that difficult to produce, and in fact, I knew more than one brewer who could bottle it up as a liquid, but this was still pretty amazing.

Choices, choices.  Help Dare, a known bad guy, or stop Melo, possibly a bad guy.  Dario was being dragged along the ground by the goblins, a mass of them gnawing and sliding and enough of them that having been pushed prone (by me), they overwhelmed him.