Read Online Traveler by Melanie Jackson - Free Book Online

due to the idiot gargoyles etched in the glass of the front doors, and the marquees advertising cosmetics. The rest was the geometry of the architecture. It was as close to a grand public building as the goblins had yet built.
    Jack looked quickly up and down the street. There were some parked cars—mostly Hondas and Toyotas. Goblins didn’t buy American because they had trouble reaching the pedals of most models. There was talk among the young and ambitious goblins of reopening the old GM plant and producing custom autos. However, ambition didn’t have them out that morning. Other than the dirty wind and the swaying junkie, nothing else moved.
    “Time to go,” Jack thought he heard Io whisper.
    “Yeah.”
    He walked boldly toward the ravaged girl, who stopped wailing long enough to ask in a slurred voice, “Do you have any?”
    “Yes, I have something for you,” he answered,kneeling down. He took her chin in a hard grip and looked into her mindless eyes. “Who called you to the feast, girl?”
    “Odyr and Binns,” she answered. Her mouth slackened even as she spoke the names of her seducers.
    Standing in the cold gray shadow of the old church, Io felt rather like the morning after the night before. Only she hadn’t had anything to drink, so the hangover dawn seemed unfair.
    She watched Jack go to the addict and take the demented creature’s chin in his hand. Immediately the girl stilled, her face drooping.
    Curious, Io ventured closer. She stopped before actually touching either Jack or his patient. She didn’t need to get any closer; she could feel them both, even over the magic pulsing along just below the pavement. Jack gave off an aroma of earth and enchantment that somehow managed to evade her nose filter. It upset her breathing and hurried her pulse. Her attempt to steady her heart was for naught.
    She stiffened at the names of Odyr and Binns. They were known to H.U.G. as pushers of goblin fruit. Neither was on the most-wanted list since they didn’t recruit outside of Goblin Town, but they weren’t on anyone’s step-on-the-brakes-if-they-got-in-front-of-your-car list either.
    Jack murmured something to the junkie Iocouldn’t hear, and the last little bit of consciousness slipped away from her. He eased the girl’s body onto the ground and she lay there like dropped laundry.
    “Is she…?”
    “No.” Jack stood. “But she will be before sundown. At least she isn’t in pain.”
    Anger licked at Io. “We should just burn this whole place down. It would be a public service. We could have a giant weenie roast. We could toast marshmallows in Neveling Lutin’s building. That alone would be a cause for celebration.”
    Jack laughed at her. “A girl after my own heart—how my father would have loved you!” His face stilled as suddenly as it had animated. “But you know we can’t do it. We’d only be killing people. Addicts are all that are left up here above ground. The real goblin infrastructure is below. Horroban has seen to that. We wouldn’t do anything more than annoy him.”
    “Horroban! How I’d like to see this creature.”
    Jack shrugged. “Wouldn’t we all. But here in Goblin Town, trouble travels in pairs and even packs. And our goblin warlord has the biggest and baddest pack of trouble around. No one has ever gotten close. We don’t even know what he looks like.”
    And that was the problem. Goblins were flesh-and-blood creatures—but whose flesh and blood was always a question. The monsters swapped tissue and fluids and magic with several species—often ona whim—changing their appearance more often than Paris changed hemlines.
    Which made finding Horroban near impossible. Word from one of his rare surviving victims was that looking at the goblin warlord was like staring at a colorless mask with empty holes for eyes. Everything about him was bleached and ghostly—as if he suffered from a sort of goblin albinism. But that report had come last week. There’d been plenty of