Castes Book 1: The Prestige, Page 2

  Chapter II

  When they had settled in New York, the dwarves had set up a small community in the Bronx. As their numbers grew, they took more and more land. Dwarves were people that are considered low to the ground and it had nothing to do with stature. They were craftsman. They were hunters. They were people of nature. They understood the balance of the world. As a result, the Bronx was the only borough of New York City that was still rich with lush forested lands. The Bronx was one of the only places in the world where dwarves actually sat on a government council. The borough president was a human, but she lived in the community and her children went to a predominantly dwarf school. With all of their work to protect their environment, however, the dwarves had only marginally stopped the tide of progress that encroached upon the rest of the land. Highways like the Major Deegan and the Cross Bronx Expressway still cut great swathes across the land. Some dwarves operated motor vehicles. They were designed by dwarves for dwarves. They were fuel efficient and built to withstand even the worst accidents while protecting their passengers. Most dwarves, however, took buses, trains, and ferries to get where they needed to go.

  Owen lived in a small town called Foxhurst. He lived in a house that stood in a row with twelve other houses. Across the road, which was made of dirt and cobblestone, were thirteen more houses just like it. Around the town were more and more rows of these houses. The boundaries of individual land were blurred. Between the backs of the rows there was woodland. Sometimes there was as much as an acre between the rows and sometimes it wasn’t more than a few yards. Unlike the humans and their barbecue grills, dwarves had giant fire pits in their backyards. Three or four families would share one pit and often ate together outside during the spring and summer months. Again, unlike humans, dwarves didn’t shelter themselves in screen houses. They didn’t have hay fever and the bugs left them alone. Dwarf hides were too thick for the flimsy proboscis of a mosquito or the stinger of a bee.

  A big fan of the color yellow, Owen had painted his house a golden hue. The house also stood taller than the two on either side of it because he and his brothers had built an extra floor when he’d gotten married. He’d been married now for seventeen years. Esmerelda, his wife, had been introduced to him by his uncle. She was Scottish born, but had lost most of the accent during her time in the States. Their children sounded like New Yorkers through and through. Joi was the oldest. She was sixteen years old and a tremendous disappointment. Any time her mother tried to teach her how to wield a weapon or get her blood boiling, Joi would whine about how this was the twenty first century and no one did that stuff anymore. Still, she was Owen’s first born, his princess, the apple of his eye. The boys were much younger than she was. Gusty, the older of the two, was just ten years old. He was a feisty boy with enough boil in his blood to take on an army of devils. Roland was eight years old. He wasn’t much of a fighter but he was mischievous. If you put a weapon in his hand, he would find a way to use it that you would never have considered. The two boys were an inseparable pair, which was fine with Joi. She had given up interest in them almost the moment they’d tossed off their diapers.

  The boys were asleep by the time Owen got home. It was close to 1:00 am. Esmerelda was sitting in the living room in front of the fireplace carving something. She loved to carve, Esmerelda. They had totems all over the house that were the product of her work. Owen liked most of them, but his wife was a bit progressive at times. Like their daughter, she was fascinated with the humans and their lust for entertainment. She often carved symbols from pop culture or even celebrity likenesses. It was disconcerting for Owen to walk into his house and see a tiny bust of rapper I.M. Fresh on his end table. At the top of the stairs, he could see a light glowing from underneath one of the bedroom doors. That would be Joi. She was a teenager and teenagers went to bed late. She was probably on the internet.

  “What happened?” Esmerelda asked as he shut the door behind him. She sounded Scottish. That meant she already knew what had happened. Or at least most of it. She might have seen some of it on the news. They didn’t have a television in the living room. Owen forbade it. But there was a small set in the kitchen that she watched while cooking.

  The house was dim. Esmerelda had shut off all of the electric lights and was carving by firelight. It was a bit late in the season for a fire, but she liked the flickering glow of a blaze. Owen took his gun out of its holster and unloaded it. He didn’t really have a place for it in the house, so he just put it back in the holster. Then he put the bullets in his pocket. Usually, he locked it up at work after his shift. Dwarves didn’t carry guns.

  “I’m not even sure,” he said to her, taking off his belt and tossing it on the sofa. He sank into his easy chair with a sigh.

  “Did they fire you?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “I hate it that you’re a cop,” she said.

  “I know,” he replied.

  “But I’ll not have you going off for months at a time working on an oil rig.”

  “It’s not an option,” he told her. “If they don’t throw me in jail, I’ll find some security work.”

  She nodded. Lots of dwarves worked private security. They preferred high crime areas where they could get their hands dirty once in a while, but most security jobs were boring. Dwarves hated it so they would make up stories in the pubs about how they’d defended the company holdings from gangs of humans, hordes of beasts, and swarms of demons. It passed the time.

  They sat in silence for a while, Esmerelda chipping away at her sculpture. It looked like a dolphin, smooth and graceful except for the unfinished portions. Esmerelda loved the sea. Owen thought she must have a death wish.

  Owen dozed off in his chair and was startled awake by the sound of her voice. “What?” he asked.

  “I wanted to know why they sent you, of all people, after that elf.”

  “It was my idea.”

  She snorted. “That figures. Leave it to you to go off half cocked. And against an elf.”

  “They’d have left it otherwise.”

  “There’s no glory in playing politics,” she said to him. “You don’t need to go fighting battles that you can’t win.”

  “My whole life is about battles I can’t win,” he replied.

  “So, you’re a martyr now? Well you’ve done plenty, Owen. You wanted to be a cop and you’re a cop. You’ve got nothing more to prove.”

  “He was murdering dwarves!” he shouted at her.

  She fell silent then, her eyes on her sculpture, her hand clenched tightly around the knife. There was the sound of footsteps upstairs, then all went quiet. Esmerelda put the knife down on the table, which meant that she was now going to give her full attention to Owen. She got to her feet and stood over him.

  “Don’t you shout at me, Owen Keefe.”

  He stood as well, locked eyes with her. “Listen to me, woman,” he said. “I didn’t take this job to prove anything to anyone. I took it so that I could do exactly what I did tonight.”

  “Sometimes you are such a fool,” she said.

  With only a fraction of the force of his anger, he backhanded her across the face and sent her sprawling over the sofa. It tipped over backwards and she knocked her head on the hardwood floor. For several long moments, he stood there glaring at her, waiting for her to right herself.

  When she came up, her hair was tousled and there was a line of blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. She patted it with a knuckle and stared daggers at him. “I’m not in the mood, Owen. If you start this with me now, all you’re going to get is a fight.”

  He harrumphed and sat back down in his chair. She righted the sofa with one arm and also sat back down. All at once, she began whittling away at her carving again.

  “Are you working tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I was told not to report,” he answered.

  Shaking her head, she mumbl
ed, “You’re a damned fool.”

  But Owen had already drifted back off to sleep.