Tara steps out of the university into a chilly Chicago night. The air is wet and misty, and she has a hood pulled tight over her hair and an umbrella for good measure. She crosses through the small courtyard garden to the archway that leads to the street, and almost plows into a man in a druid costume. She sighs. It’s one of the City of Gods tour guides. She sees his converted school bus idling on the street. The archway was the scene of a troll “visit” and it’s been an “attraction” ever since.

“If Odin is so just and wise,” a tourist says, “why did he let Loki come to Earth? Why doesn’t he stop the trolls?”

“Why did he blame us when his eight-legged horse ran off with a bunch of unicorns,” someone else mutters.

Someone murmurs, “There were innocent people caught in some of the crossfire in Eastern Europe … They attacked embassies.”

Another person dressed in druid-like clothes says, “Thousands of completely innocent people died here because those countries gave them aid! Odin went after the leaders, not the common people.”

The druid raises his arms and his voice rings with conviction. “People prayed in fear when Loki and Dark Elves nearly destroyed the city. Odin sent his son Thor to defend us, and he rounded up the Dark Elves and their collaborators in Eastern Europe. You want a personal god? You can’t get more personal than Odin.”

Tara huffs. Hunching her shoulders, she walks quickly past him. She’s probably as invisible to him as she is to Dean Kowalski.

Twenty minutes later, Tara is wondering if maybe Odin does see her, has a nasty sense of humor, and might be trying to punish her.

Dr. Eisenberg’s voice is filling her car, just barely audible over the sound of her windshield wipers. “I got your email just after I opened the gif, Tara.”

Tara winces. Another victim of the computer virus going around the department. After saving the world—or at least the L line—she’s done nothing but clean up viruses. As brainy as the researchers in the University of Illinois’s new Department of Dark Energy are, they have an amazing susceptibility to opening viral attachments, and to cats. Not surprisingly, a viral attachment called, “Cute-Cats.gif” is spreading like an evil enchantment on the department hard drives.

Keeping her eyes focused on the road, Tara says, “You know, Christine is there, right?” She’s certain that the hopefulness in her voice comes through loud and clear.

There’s a moment of silence, and then, “Can’t you come back?”

Tara glances at the clock in her dash: seven o’clock. Also, she’s hungry. “I would, Dr. Eisenberg, but you know by the time I get back to the university and into the lab, it will be past seven thirty.”

“I can wait for you.”

Trying to keep her voice cheerful, Tara says jokingly, “But you know how the gremlins come out after seven thirty.”

Another moment of silence, and then, “Really? That happens sometimes?”

Tara’s lips purse. She supposes it’s not crazy that he believes her. Dr. Eisenberg is new to the city. He doesn’t know gremlins aren’t among the usual visitors. Does she take the high road and tell him that? Turning down the street onto her block, she sighs. “Not really, but I’m almost—” Tara hits the brakes, and the tires skid on the wet pavement. Ahead there’s people running across the street—they’re long-haired white kids and young adults—dozens of them being chased by cops. Somewhere far off she hears gunfire.

“Tara, what’s wrong?” Dr. Eisenberg squeaks. “Gremlins?”

Something is very wrong. The neighborhood is dangerous, but her little block is an oasis. Also, there just aren’t that many white people in her neighborhood to chase. She finds her heart beating too fast. “I don’t—” Tara’s breath catches as a cop’s club comes down on a little boy, his hair that had been strawberry-blonde going dark.

Before Tara knows what she is doing, she’s jumped out of the car. “Stop!” The scream rips out of her and she finds herself running toward the boy, now sprawled out on the wet pavement, dark ooze pooling around his head. Someone grabs her from behind and she expects the club to come down on her too, but there is something about seeing a child, limp as a rag doll, being dragged away that makes her lose all sense of fear. “Stop!” she screams again, pulling at the arms that are holding her.

“Madam, calm down,” says whoever has her arms pinned. “They’re only Dark Elves.”

And it’s that moment that she sees the pointed ears, but she still struggles, like she’s possessed. “He’s a little boy! He’s a little boy!” she shouts as other cops drag him away.

A female cop runs in front of her and says, “Madam, madam, be calm!”

Tara jumps and tries to peek around her but there are other cops in the way. “Madam, I must insist,” says the man behind her.

Madam? Insist? Tara feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Breaking free, she manages to barge past the woman … and the road is empty.

The little boy, the “teenagers” who might all have been elves, are gone. All that is left is a single police officer standing in the middle of the road and echoes of a struggle she can’t see … or did she imagine it? Tara pulls her coat tighter, distractedly noticing the rain is falling harder and that her hood has fallen back. Her teeth chatter. Just a bit colder and the rain would be snow.

“Madam,” says the woman again. For the first time, Tara looks at her. The woman’s got the sort of lithe musculature Tara associates with dancers. Her skin is a lovely bronze shade, her eyes are wide, worried, and concerned. Tara’s eyes slide to the man who held her. He’s Caucasian, with eyes that might be green, and his frame is slight. Tara’s five foot ten and change in socks, and nearly six foot two in the stacked heeled boots she’s wearing; she’s used to being tall, but these two cops are short. Tara feels a shiver run down her spine. They’re not as broad in the shoulder as the cops she knows, either.

“What’s your name, madam?” the man asks. His voice musical, his words compelling … Tara shivers again, and it isn’t just the cold. She keeps her lips sealed.

“You must not worry about this,” says the woman, waving a hand. “Missus—? Why don’t you tell me your name? Your full name.”

Over the woman’s shoulder, Tara sees the taller police officer, the one she’d seen standing in the middle of the street, and she feels like her whole body has turned to ice. She suddenly has to get away.

“You’re right, I don’t need to worry about this. I’ll just go now.” Spinning on her heals, she runs and slides into her car. She looks back and sees the last officer is walking toward her. If she had to paint a picture of African perfection, she would paint his face. His eyes are nearly black and wide, but have a delicate angle to them, his nose is flat but not too broad. His skin is dark and smooth over striking cheekbones, and his lips are generous. He also has long, black, beautiful braids, which she’d wouldn’t expect on a police officer and that would humanize him, but his expression is flat, and his eyes are hard.

Slamming the door, she smiles nervously through the window. His lips part as though he is about to speak, and she’s terrified of what he will say. Her hands tremble as she pulls on her seat belt, which makes her knock the steering wheel with her elbow, which sets off the horn. The man’s eyes widen comically at the sound, his mouth snaps shut, and he jumps back. Feeling like she’s just dodged a bullet, and not waiting for the order she’s sure he’ll issue, Tara guns the engine and the tires squeal. A few heartbeats later, she looks in the mirror. They’re not following.

Dr. Eisenberg’s voice cracks over her phone, and she jumps in her seat, surprised that he didn’t hang up.

“Tara, are you all right?”

“I …” She swallows.

“Tara?”

“I … never thought …” she whispers. She knows police officers, good guys she and Chris flirt with over gyros in Greek Town. But she’s in Chicago and she knows the other kind exists—the city owes several hundred million dollars to victims of Chicago police officers’ “overzealousness.” She’s never seen that “overzealousness” up close, but it is a nagging fear that is always there. And now she’s seen it … and this time, the victim had been white … and an elf? She squeezes the steering wheel. The victim had been a child. She feels a lump in her throat and her vision starts to go blurry.

“Did you see gremlins?” Dr. Eisenberg asks. “A troll?” He sounds way too excited.

“I …” She remembers the faces of the police officers—they’d looked too perfect, and they’d called her “madam.” FBI? Someone else … something else? “Maybe.”

“You sound shaken up,” says Dr. Eisenberg.

“I saw …” Tara has seen a lot of things. She’s seen a man get shot in front of her. She’s had guys expose themselves to her. She’s seen fights, and blood spilled on the pavement afterward. But she is shaken.

It was a little boy …

“You’re shaken. Listen, go home … and don’t come in tomorrow.”

Tara blinks. “What?”

“I’ll tell everyone that you’re working on a special project for me.”

Tara’s brow furrows. Actually, that would probably work. Dr. Eisenberg is a grant machine and the highest paid researcher in the department. His whim is practically law. Also, he often goes off-site with lots of electronic equipment and Tara to patch it up when he drops it, or find it when he loses it, but why would he—?

“I’m going to bring my gear over and we’ll check and see if what you saw left a Dark Energy signature,” he finishes.

And that’s the flighty, self-interested, mad genius she knows. “I might have imagined it,” she says. And now she’s beginning to wonder if she did.

“Too good to miss if it was real!” Dr. Eisenberg says, sounding absolutely gleeful. “Now I’m going to pack up, just in case those gremlins come.” The phone line goes dead.

She glances in the rearview mirror and sees only a lone pair of headlights, no cops. She suddenly feels very alone.

Alone in the cold, misty dark, Lionel jumps at the sound of fireworks a few hundred paces away. He cranes his neck, but doesn’t see any bright bursts of flame. Was it the sound of human weapons?

He lets out a breath, and sucks in another fast as the wall behind him starts to groan. Spinning, Lionel finds it rising, beams of light bursting from beneath. Backing up, he blinks into the blinding bright eyes of one of the possibly sentient human chariots. He’s invisible, but he can still be flattened. Lionel darts to the left, out of its line of vision, but the thing turns in his direction with a honk. It either has sensitive hearing, or smell, or both. Spinning again, Lionel runs. Looking back, he sees the thing speeding up. He sprints through a narrow open gate and slams it behind him. The chariot honks again, but passes by, and Lionel sighs in relief.

He looks around and finds himself in a small yard with a hulking brick building at the far end. From the door of the building comes a bark and a scratching noise. An instant later, the door opens, and a dog erupts from inside, growling and lunging directly at him. Lionel scampers over the gate, just in time for the dog’s body to impact against it. Someone shouts in the native tongue. With magic, Lionel feels the meaning of the words. “Buster! What are you doing? Chasing ghosts, you crazy dog?”

Humans can’t see Lionel, but dogs can smell him. A rat across the alley pauses, stands up on its haunches, twitches its whiskers, and then goes about its business. Rats can also smell him; they just apparently don’t care.

The gate behind Lionel thumps again, and he hears the human shout, “Get out of the rain, dog!”

Lionel feels a flare of magic on the side of his face, in the direction of the World Gate. There are shouts in Elvish and Lionel peers down the narrow roadway and his eyes go wide. The elves arriving aren’t wearing the livery of the queen. Their garments are mismatched and dark. He can tell even at this distance that some have scared faces and the silvery hair of mortal beings. He swallows. Dark Elves … but if they came through the gate, it must mean that the Light Elves at the other side were overwhelmed. Lionel counts four, five, six pairs emerging through the Veil … and more keep coming.

“Buster” goes ballistic. Other dogs begin to howl on either side of the roadway. Doors open; somewhere a siren wails. The Dark Elves start down the alleyway at a jog in Lionel’s direction.

Checking to see he’s still invisible, Lionel breaks into a run, not bothering to hide the sound of his footsteps, just trying to not slip on the rain-slicked cobbles. At the end of the roadway, a man and woman in blue appear. Feeling the warmth of magic on his face, Lionel gasps … they are his companions! Behind him, he hears shouts in Elvish and the crack of fireworks. He feels a sharp pain in the back of his leg, and goes sprawling. He rolls out of the way just in time to miss being trampled by a seeming army of Dark Elves sprinting past. Warm wetness soaks his trousers and his invisibility slips away in a frisson of electricity along his skin. Grasping the key tight, he uses its magic to reach inside himself. He is able to close a nick to his femoral artery just in time.

Somewhere far away he hears, “Damn gangs … can’t even take out your garbage without their nonsense.”

Something slick, bulky, lumpy, and odorous crashes on top of him and everything goes black.

Tara’s still shaking when she pulls into the alley that cuts between the Greystones on either side of her block. From a few houses away, she sees that the auto-timer has turned on the lights of her duplex down. By their lights, she sees that the just-out-of-law-school couple who bought the place upstairs is already home.

All her cousins, aunts, and uncles have moved off with their degrees to Oak Park and Evanston—they’re always trying to convince her to move. “It’s still diverse but safer, Tara, and you have more than enough money!” they say. But her Greystone is such a welcome sight. The last building her father and she had remodeled before his death, it glitters in the rainy night, and looks as beautiful and stately as anything on the Gold Coast.

She releases a long breath, willing her madly beating heart to be still, and notices her next-door neighbor has thrown his garbage bags over the fence again. Somehow it always winds up in front of her garage. It’s still raining, and her hair will be ruined. She shivers and realizes for the first time she’s already drenched, and her hair is hanging in long damp clumps, soaking her shoulders. Her hood had fallen back when she’d seen … well, whatever it was she really saw.

Shaking her head, Tara gets out of the car and lifts the first enormous bag. She carries it over to the bin, turns around, and screams. There’s a skinny white guy lying on the ground where the garbage bag had been. His eyes are closed, and he has long, nearly white-blonde hair.

She takes a deep breath. Probably a junkie passed out or something. She gulps, remembering the probably-maybe-elves being chased and bludgeoned by the maybe-probably-FBI-or-possibly-cops. She approaches the man slowly, and finds herself whispering, “Please be a junkie, please be a junkie.”

Leaning over him, she gulps. The guy is dressed in dark, Renaissance faire clothing. A black tunic goes all the way to his thighs. It’s belted at the waist with a black cord. He’s wearing pants that match the shirt and black boots. Over his shoulders, he’s wearing a short black shruggy thing. He’s clutching a yellow silk rope with a key ring and a single key in a death grip. His ears are pointed.

Rain drops slide down her neck. Tara pushes her hair, now a sodden mess, over one shoulder. She should call the police … the FBI … She bites her lip. Dark Elves were supposedly behind Chicago’s recent destruction, but the elves she’d seen running across the street hadn’t looked like warriors, they looked like kids. She thinks of the little boy and the blood pooling on the pavement and feels like she will be sick. This guy doesn’t have any weapons … Does he deserve that same treatment?

A few minutes later, Tara’s dragging Elf Guy by the arms through her garage. It’s the shortest path to her back door. “This looks easier in the movies,” she mutters, dropping him with a huff. He’s heavy, and she’s never getting him up the back stoop, not without causing him even more injury. She sighs. “You’re going to have to sleep here.”

There isn’t a response.

Now that she’s inside and has better lighting, she can see there is a wound on his thigh, but not a lot of blood. The femoral artery is in that region, but if it had hit that, he’d be dead. Still, maybe she should take him to a hospital? She exhales, thinking of the experiments they might do to him, and the rumors of Dark Elves being taken to Guantanamo Bay. She tilts her head. For a Dark Elf, he’s very white. He looks like … she doesn’t know, young Eminem with long hair, maybe? Except his features are smoother, more finely chiseled, and then there are the ears. She reaches out and touches the point of one, hoping they’re fake, then she’d be able to call 911. But the tip is warm, the skin is delicate and soft, and for a moment, she is mesmerized. Snapping from her fascination, she pulls her hand away and weighs her options. Is he more likely to live if she turns him in?

The garage fills with the sound of her mother’s ring tone. Tara scrambles to pick it up. “Mom!” she cries, desperately wanting to confess, I found an Elf Guy, and Mom, I don’t know what to do! Up until she had an unconscious man in her garage she thought she was an adult, but now she’s not so sure.

“Tara, Steve Rogers is on the television! Oh, he is so handsome. You know he’s single, right?”

Tara has a moment of disconnect. This is a frequent conversation between her mother and her. Director Steve Rogers of the FBI is the Savior of Chicago. He stood up to bureaucrats and to Loki, the Norse God, when he nearly blew the whole place down. Everyone says he’s going to be mayor, even though he’s black and Chicago, well, Chicago hasn’t had a lot of black mayors. Her mother thinks Tara should marry him because she needs a “smart man.”

Normally, Tara’s response is “Mom, he’s almost ten years older than me and divorced!” Also, there’s rumors that he’s a Republican. To which her mother usually tells her she is too picky, and how can she ever find her soulmate if she isn’t going to just put herself out there?

The banality of the familiar script catches Tara off guard. There is an elf in her garage, possibly dying, but they’re talking about her love life, or lack thereof. She really needs her mom’s advice, or at least to tell someone. But then she thinks of how her mom, a legal first-generation Mexican American, didn’t tell her that her grandparents were illegal because, “The less you know, the safer it is for everyone.”

Her eyes slip to the elf. Maybe she shouldn’t drag her mother into this. “Um, yeah, Mom, he is a handsome man.”

“I met his mother today! She came into Costco when I was …”

From behind Tara comes a soft, “Lllew wellan leee …”

Tara looks down and finds light blue eyes meeting her own. The tips of his ears are trembling.

“Hello?” he says in a lovely voice that is deeper than she would have suspected for a man so slight.

Her mother’s voice is loud in her ear. “Is that a man? Where are you? Are you still at work?”

“No, Mom, I’m home,” Tara whispers. She’s only seen elves from afar. Even as drawn as his face is, and after lying on the ground under garbage bags in her alley, he’s luminous. She notices a bit of dirt on his cheek and has the urge to wipe it away.

“You have a man over, and you’re commenting on Steve Rogers? Tara!” There is an exasperated sigh, and then her mother says, “Try to be nice,” and hangs up.

And then it’s just Tara and the elf staring at each other in silence.