Chapter 1

Gemma wasn’t even supposed to work tonight.

She was at home when the Bureau sent a message and told her that there’d been a failed summoning on Earth and could she please step into a portal as soon as possible?

The message sat in front of her then burned itself up in a little puff of smoke.

That was from the Bureau alright.

It wasn’t like she could say no. It was her job to supervise the messes that humans left behind And while she liked her job well enough, it was always a hassle to return to Earth. Time passed differently there and you never knew what to expect when you left the Void, what exactly had happened on Earth.

But Gemma needed the job and in theory she liked it.

So she collected her briefcase and her favorite pen– bright pink, with a puffball on top. Upper management didn’t like her collection of pens, but since they gave her the jobs no one else wanted and sent her into the field in the middle of the night, they let her have this one quirk– and headed out to the office to catch a portal to Earth.

The Void had its problems. Didn’t everywhere? But despite its flaws, it was home. And the things that lived there did not take kindly to being ripped from their lives and forced through a sigil but an overeager group of humans, chanting mispronounced Latin and hoping for some being that would grant their wildest dreams.

The Interdimensional Management Bureau took care of the messes that humans left behind, and as a head supervisor, it was her job to make sure that happened.

So she stepped through the bright white portal on the bottom floor of the office building– the security guard was a scaly, snake demon, who flipped through a magazine and waved her through without even bothering to look at her identification card.

That was technically against regulation, but it was the middle of the night, and it was only a minor infraction.

Gemma stepped out of the portal and directly into the scene of the crime.

“Hello Gemma,” the head of the recovery team called. It was a large spirit, whose name was an indecipherable screech that felt like hearing nails on a chalkboard. She’d never asked it again.

“What’s the situation?” she asked, setting her briefcase down on the nearest table.

The sigil left behind by the humans was lopsided and made of blood. They always used blood. Usually pigs. For some reason, that mattered more than if the sigil was correct enough for the being to actually successfully make the jump between dimensions.

“The being was not successfully summoned,” he informed her. “It was gone when we got here.”

The Recovery team was always first on the scene. Their job was to collect as much evidence as possible, count the casualties, and ensure that anything that did make it through the sigil, was returned safely before it could cause any harm.

Not everything that lived in the Void was as charming and hard working as Gemma, after all.

“Fourteen dead,” he said. “Plus an extra arm. We don’t know who that belongs to.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” she sighed and ran a hand through her hair. Everything unaccounted had to be noted in her mountain of paperwork.

Fourteen people.

It wasn’t the largest summoning scene that Gemma had ever seen, but it was a big one.

Did humans think that the more people they got involved, the easier the summoning would go? It was like the candles. More candles didn’t necessarily indicate that the situation would go any better?

“Got much more to do?” Gemma asked.

“Half an hour maybe,” he said.

The Recovery team consisted of four spirits. They were vaguely corporal, capable of picking up things and moving them around. Their nature made it easy for them to show up immediately after the summoning. Spirits didn’t need portals to travel.

Still, they had a habit of plummeting the temperature of any room they were in.

Gemma looked around. She hadn’t quite studied her surroundings beyond the sigil on the floor. It was an office building she thought, a bit like her own, with the mundane-ness of human architecture.

The lights above her were all turned off, and the desks were thrown around, probably when the summoning failed. Files and paper were strewn all over the floor and the glass windows were cracked and shattered in places.

Gemma wondered what this office did? It looked like the humans just sat around and typed on their computers all day.

Then again, that’s mostly what she did when she wasn’t out in the field.

“Good work,” Gemma said. She hopped up on the desk and checked her watch. It had no numbers, only the movement of the moon and planets. She preferred this way of keeping track of time to the human methods. This was how Elves did it anyway, and while Gemma’s career was not traditional for an Elf, she still enjoyed most aspects of Elf culture.

All members of the Recovery team and Gemma froze at the sound of the portal opening.

“Who’s that?” one of them called.

“I don’t know,” Gemma replied. She sighed and pushed herself off the desk. When was the last time this job was easy?

The portal yawned and sputtered and out came three stone sprites.

The clean up team.

They were all stone sprites, a short race made of granite and marble, and bright eyes like shining gems.

Gemma was very familiar with these three. Willow, Barker, and Teach. Between them, they were managing a cart that was twice their size.

“You are early,” Gemma said. She motioned to the spirits behind her and their piles of charred miscellaneous body parts, and frowned. “You know you’re supposed to wait for the Recovery team to return.”

“It’s alright,” Willow said.

Willow was actually Gemma’s neighbor, which means that they were sort of friends, alongside being co-workers, but that didn’t mean she was willing to give the little sprites any sort of leeway.

There were regulations to follow. The Bureau was very strict. They could not risk drawing too much attention– too much human– attention.

“We’re here now,” Barker said. He beamed at her.

Sprites often selected names from random human words. It was some habit they picked up generations ago and kept.

Gemma sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. She returned to the leader of the Recovery crew.

“Can you work around them?” she asked.

“We usually do,” he replied. If spirits could grit their teeth, that’s what he would be doing.

Gemma shook her head. “Just do what you can. I don’t really want to report them again. They do a good job, even if they’ve all got a roundabout way of doing it.”

He shrugged. Gemma watched as Teach took a broom and retreated to the windows to start cleaning up the pieces of glass on the ground. Willow and Barker were arguing over a small brush.

Gemma was certainly going to go home with a headache tonight.

“Hey, Gemma!” one of the spirits called. He waved her over quickly and she grabbed her clipboard, stepping over the blood on the ground. It used to make her queasy to see it, but nowadays it was more superstition than anything else. She didn’t like getting blood on her boots.

“What is it?” she asked, removing her pen from behind her ear.

“Look,” he leaned forward. “It’s not my business. You know that. But I’ve been watching that Barker. He’s hiding something.”

“What?”

“I felt like it was my duty to report it.”

Gemma winced. This was already complicated enough with the fourteen dead bodies, the location of the summoning– and the arm without a body.

Now the sprites were going to cause even more paperwork. Really she wanted to look the other way, but if the Recovery team saw it, then someone back in the Void would find out, and if she didn’t have all her facts straight, she was going to pay the price.

Besides, she was looking to move out of her apartment. She needed this job.

“I’ll take care of it,” she assured him, clapping him on the shoulder. Her hand went right though him, feeling like she’d just dunked it into ice cold water.

Gemma crossed the office and stood in front of Barker.

“Hello Gemma!” Barker said. “How’s things? Didn’t you go on a date last week?”

“What are you hiding?” Gemma crossed her arms over her chest. The sprite only came up to her knee, even though she was rather short for an Elf.

“Hiding? Why would I be hiding anything?” Barker laughed and started sweeping the floor with the wrong side of the broom.

“I don’t know. Why would you?”

Gemma heard a noise. Barker quickly looked back at his pile of cleaning rags.

It moved.

“I’m going to ask again,” Gemma said. “Because if you’re honest, then this whole situation will be a lot easier. What is in that bundle?”

“Nothing,” Barker assured her. “You worry too much.”

The hard way then. Gemma shrugged. She dug into the pile of rags, wary of whatever might have been moving in there. She didn’t really think that Barker would bring something dangerous. The sprites weren’t malicious, they were just difficult and argumentative– some of them more than others.

But they might have done something very foolish and since Gemma was in charge of this scene, it would fall on her to figure it out.

Gemma was met with the sight of a small goat. A baby, she thought. It seemed unbothered by her sudden appearance over it, and chewed slowly on the end of one of the rags.

“What?” She asked. Words were failing her. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing?” Barker said.

“Who’s goat is this?”

“What goat?” Barker asked.

“You came from the Void,” she said slowly. “You know that transporting living creatures between dimensions is a serious offence. Not to mention enough to cost you your job. I may not be an expert in animals, but this is not a goat from the Void. It doesn’t have enough eyes.”

Barker opened his mouth and then closed it again.

“I don’t want to have to do a report about this,” Gemma said. “So why don’t you do the right thing and return this goat to whatever farm you stole it from?”

“I didn’t steal anything,” Barker said, crossing his arms.

“I would imagine you didn’t go into a store and purchase it, so let’s not argue over the right word. Let’s also not give me another hour of reports to do because you wanted a pet or something.”

“It’s not fair!” Barker exclaimed, stopping his foot.

Willow dropped her broom with a clatter. Gemma hardly registered it.

“I’m sorry you can’t keep your pet,” Gemma tried. The sprites were always pocketing things from their clean ups. Usually Gemma turned the other way if they stole some rocks or trinkets. So long as it wasn’t alive, it was kind of a gray area.

“Why can’t I keep my goat when Willow can keep her-”

Barker slapped a hand over his mouth. Teach slowly sunk down behind a desk.

“Willow can keep what?”

“Nothing,” Willow said quickly, launching herself at Barker. The two tussled for a moment on the ground. “Willow’s not keeping anything.”

“Her baby!” Barker said, breaking free of Willow’s grasp for long enough to say it. Clearly he was not happy at being assaulted like this.

The coldness she’d felt when she touched the spirits was nothing compared to the feeling in her stomach right now.

“What baby?”