He squinted at me. “You made the opekun go off.”
“If that means cat detector, there’s a reason.”
He glanced at the door hanging. “The guardian. It detects magic.”
“There’s a bunch of it in the car. My mom? Did she move or what?”
He went back to squinting at me. I couldn’t tell if this guy was slow or only looked slow. “You say you are Sigrid’s daughter, but I have lived here six months, and you’ve never visited. She’s spoken only rarely of you.”
“Yeah, we’re not that close.” I wasn’t about to explain to the Neanderthal why I stayed away from the people I cared about.
“The opekun tells me not to trust you. You may be a demon in disguise.”
“Does it talk to you often? I know a therapist, if you need a referral.”
The uproarious squawking of geese interrupted whatever his response was going to be. I whirled in time to see my silver tiger bounding through the trees and springing for his prey.
“Sindari!” I yelled as the birds flew away en mass, feathers fluttering down in their wake.
Only when he hit the water did I realize the geese hadn’t been his target. He could have caught one if he’d wished to. He landed in the river with a great splash, then proceeded to frolic like a kitten in the shallows.
“Is that a tiger?” my mom’s nutty houseguest asked.
“Really more of a service animal. I’ll be right back.” I jogged toward the bank, glancing at the house visible through the trees to the right. A dog was barking through a fence at Sindari.
“What are you doing?” I wrapped my fingers around the cat figurine, prepared to send him back to his realm.
Cleansing my nostrils. Sindari flopped on his side below the bank, water lapping at his hips.
“What? Cats don’t like water. What are you doing?”
I am a tiger, not a cat, and swimming is joyous. I have webbed paws. He stuck one into the air, demonstrating his soggy webbing. But I had to clean myself because that dreadful pet urinated in its cage and stank up the air. And those sitting in the air. I do not believe it is pleased to have been left in a box in the car with a tiger.
Ugh. I dropped my forehead into my palm. When I find the crazy elf that tried to blow up Colonel Willard’s building, I’m going to slice her in half with Chopper. I don’t care if she’s the last elf on Earth.
Leaving Sindari to clean himself, I headed back to the front door. A squirrel chattered angrily at me from a tree branch. It was possible I shouldn’t have called Sindari out for my road trip.
The houseguest was staring back and forth from me to the tiger, a smart phone raised to his ear. Who was he calling? The police? Given the dubious way I’d acquired my current vehicle, I didn’t want to deal with the law.
“Could you put that down, please?” I offered my most polite smile while resisting the urge to knock the phone from his hand.
He lowered it, but I had a feeling he’d already made his call.
“Police?” I glanced toward my bathing tiger. “Or animal control?”
The squirrel cursed me in his chatty tongue. No question which he would prefer.
“Deschutes County Search and Rescue,” he said.
I almost asked if my mom was missing, but then I remembered she’d been training her golden retriever for the program the last time I’d been here. And that it would be shocking if my mom of all people got lost in the woods.
“Are she and Rocket out volunteering?” I asked, hoping to prove to this guy that I wasn’t some trickster trying to pass as my mother’s daughter with plans to do nefarious things to the cabin. Or the yard art.
His shoulders did grow a little less hunched when I used the dog’s name. “Yeah. They found the guy. Some idiot who flipped his ATV on an old logging road in the mountains.”
“It wasn’t found twenty feet up in the trees, was it?” I remembered the dragon flying past the rest stop.
“What? No.” There was that squint again. This guy was positive I was shifty.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you, and why are you hanging out in my mom’s house?”
“Dimitri, and I live in the van, but she lets me come in for showers and to use the kitchen.”
“Do you pay her?” I couldn’t imagine my mom letting some charity case intrude on her life. She’d risk her ass in a snowstorm to rescue a drunken idiot in the mountains, but that wasn’t the same as having someone in her personal space.
“Three hundred a month. It’s less than an RV park, she lets me use the shop for my projects, and it’s got a great view—usually not as weird of a view as now.” He pointed at the river. Sindari was now sunning himself in a sunny patch of grass, hopefully one devoid of goose droppings.
I wished I could let Maggie out to explore here, but she would probably take off and get eaten by a mountain lion or a coyote.
I have excellent hearing, Sindari informed me without looking over. I heard you call me a service animal and that man call me weird. You’re both in danger of having your feet gnawed off.
Will that be before or after you dry off while napping in the sun?
After.
“I’m saving up for my own place,” the guy—Dimitri—went on, “so it’s good not to spend money on an apartment. I do some work for a landscaping company and sell my art at the farmers market.”
“Does my mom need the money?” I cared less about his life aspirations than the fact that my mom had felt compelled to take on a renter. “She didn’t have to get rid of her apartments, did she?”
Was I a bad daughter because I hadn’t been sending money home? I already knew I was a bad daughter for other reasons, but guilt tramped into my heart. I’d assumed Mom did fine with finances. She’d won a settlement back in the nineties and used the money to buy an eight-unit apartment building. The last she’d told me, the rents had gone up enough to pay off the mortgage and give her enough to live on.
“I don’t know anything about apartments, but she said the property taxes have gone up a lot.” Dimitri scratched his cheek with the corner of his phone. “Maybe if I take a picture of the deadly tiger on the bank and send it to the county, they’ll adjust the land value down a few hundred thousand dollars.”
“He’s a guard tiger. He would add to the value, not detract from it.”
For that astute comment, I’ll spare your foot, Sindari told me.
Thank you.
“He does look really cool. Is it legal to have a tiger?”
The rumble of a vehicle turning onto the gravel driveway saved me from having to come up with an answer. Ah ha, there was Mom’s old green Subaru. The cat yowled as it drove past. The car was parked in the shade, and it wasn’t that hot, so I was sure Maggie wasn’t in distress—especially with Sindari out of the vehicle—but I felt bad about her being cooped up. I hoped my mom would let her out in the house.
A furry dog head thrust out of the car window and barked. Sindari sat up.
You may want to head back to your realm for a while, I told him, hoping he was listening. I had no power to project my thoughts, so he had to be monitoring me through our link for him to hear me.
It is getting tediously crowded here.
I think the geese and the squirrels feel that way, yes. I touched the charm and whispered the word to dismiss him.
Mom parked, got out of the car, and let the dog out while giving me a peculiar look. Probably a what-are-you-doing-here look. If she’d been off on her volunteer mission for more than a day, she wouldn’t have heard my phone message.
Rocket, a handsome golden retriever of four or five, shot into the trees to investigate the place Sindari had been lounging. I had no idea if Sindari smelled like a real tiger or not. He was warm when I petted him, and he felt real, but maybe to a creature with a better-than-human nose, he smelled like fire and brimstone. But not, thanks to his bath, like cat pee.
“Hey, Mom.” I lifted a hand as she approached, a backpack slung over one
shoulder.
She wore faded blue hiking pants, a camp shirt, and nothing but dirt on her feet. Tall and rangy with blonde hair gone to gray and bound back in a braid, she was how I imagined I would look in thirty years—though I had a fondness for shoes. I’d been told my eyes were a more emerald green than was typical and that my facial features were finer, but it was hard for me to see my father’s influence. As I now knew, human genes were dominant, at least to mixed-species children born on Earth, and usually won out. That was good, I supposed. I’d seen the time-travel-to-historical-Earth Star Trek episodes where Kirk had to explain Spock’s ears.
“Val.” She stopped in front of me, and we stared at each other. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
This was the part when normal mothers and daughters hugged, but as Mom had told me long ago, there was no need to hug when a handshake would do. She always said Norwegians weren’t touchy-feely. I’d stopped pointing out that her mother had been the real Norwegian and that we had both grown up in the States.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard my message—” I pointed a thumb toward her open door, “—but I have a problem and was hoping you could help.”
“You don’t need money, do you?”
“No.” Not unless Colonel Willard didn’t make it and the snotty lieutenant talked the army into cancelling my contract… No, even if that happened, I could get work as an independent. I was sure of it. But I liked my gig with the army, and I liked working for Willard. I had to figure out how to heal her. “Just your elven expertise.”
Her eyebrows arched.
Instead of saying more, I tilted my head toward Dimitri, hoping Mom would take a hint and send him off to his van or her shop. He was watching our exchange with a curious expression—or maybe a puzzled one. Maybe his mother hugged him when they saw each other, though he looked like someone who would be easy not to hug.
“Dimitri is a quarter dwarf,” Mom said. “He knows about things.” She waved a hand.
“Dwarf?” I looked him up and down. “Are you sure?”
“Grandpa was a big dwarf, I hear,” Dimitri said.
“Either that or the rest of your family were giants.” That put a strange image in my head, as far as how copulation would go. I pushed it aside and dug out the vial, painstakingly wrapped in papers so it wouldn’t break.
“What happened to your Jeep?” Mom asked.
“A dragon.”
This time, her eyebrows flew upward instead of merely arching.
I took out my phone, flipped to the pictures of the wreck, and handed it to her while I unwrapped the vial.
“A dragon did this? Is this what you’re here about?”
“No. As crazy as it seems, the dragon is the least of my problems this week.” I glanced upward, half-expecting to see him flying over the trees. “This vial may have held a potion that was dumped into my boss’s coffee or juice or something in her house. There’s a sigil on the bottom that appears when it’s heated up. I think it’s elven, and I’m hoping you can identify it.”
She held the vial up to the sun, then shrugged off her pack, pulled out a lighter, and used the flame to heat the bottom.
“You’ve given up on flint and steel and embraced modern technology?” I asked.
“I still practice making fires from scratch, but this is easier if you’re stuck out looking for someone. It gets dark fast in the mountains.”
Loud snuffles came from Sudo’s car—Rocket had followed his nose back to it and had his feet up on the rear passenger window that Sindari had opened. Maggie, no doubt alarmed by the appearance of another predator, yowled a complaint.
Mom held the vial up to the sky.
“Can you see the sigil?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it Elvish?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She lowered the vial and handed it back to me.
I looked at Dimitri. “Do you enjoy similarly monosyllabic conversations with my mother, or am I special?”
“I just met you, but I think you might be.” He glanced to where Sindari had been before he disappeared back into his realm.
“Guess the therapist was right.” I stared down at the vial in disappointment.
Mom might be wrong—she wasn’t a scholar of the subject, just an obsessed and abandoned lover of an elf. But either way, it looked like I’d wasted my time coming all the way down here.
“I’ve got some language books we can check,” Mom said. “Just to be sure. But if you’re trying to figure out more about that symbol, I might know someone who can help. If you don’t mind a short walk in the woods.”
I almost answered immediately that I didn’t mind, but past experience made me give her a wary squint. “How short is short? Will we be crossing a state line on foot?” I waved at her dusty bare toes.
I hadn’t forgotten the summer vacation I’d spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with her. A rite of passage, she’d assured me, while speaking about how her parents had taken her on days-long hikes through the mountains. I mostly remembered being bored out of my gourd and trying to hide my face behind my hair to protect against mosquitoes.
“Just a few miles,” she said. “Shoes are optional.”
Maggie yowled in the car, reminding me that she needed attending. Or that she didn’t like the big yellow furry head sticking in the window.
“Is that a cat?” Mom asked.
“Colonel Willard has assured me she is, though it’s possible she’s a demon or nefarious shapeshifter in disguise. Can you watch her for a while? Willard is… in the hospital. And her apartment building burned down.”
“Burned down?”
Rocket, having finished sniffing every part of the vehicle and ground that Sindari had touched, came over and nosed my hand in greeting before giving Dimitri a vigorous tail wag. He squatted down to pet the dog.
“I don’t know that for sure,” I admitted, “but the entire side of the building was heartily on fire when last I saw it. An elf threw a Molotov cocktail at it.”
“An elf? Elves all left the world decades ago.”
“And dragons left centuries ago, and yet…” I pointed to my phone full of crash photos.
“Huh. The world is getting interesting again.”
Before I could debate what that meant, Mom added, “Get the cat, and let’s see what we can find.”
9
We had to wait until morning to head off on Mom’s “short walk in the woods,” since, as she’d informed me, we didn’t want to be caught out in the national forest after dark. New residents had moved into the area, which made nocturnal travels a bit dicey. I asked what kind of residents were allowed to move onto government land but didn’t get much of an answer. By then, she’d had her head buried in her language books, flipping through old yellowed pages full of symbols. To my untrained eye, they were similar to the one on my vial, but I reluctantly admitted that none of them were identical. Also, there were two angry slashes on the top and bottom of mine that didn’t look anything like the flowing symbols in the books.
Now, we were on the highway in my borrowed government car, heading south toward Paulina Lake. Dimitri had the day off and had volunteered to watch Maggie while we were gone. She’d been set free to roam the log cabin after Dimitri had returned from the pet store with a litter box, an obvious thing that I, a non-pet-owner, hadn’t thought to buy. No wonder the cat had been crabby on her trip.
“There’s the turn.” Mom pointed.
I took a left onto Paulina Lake Road, a paved route that meandered up to an extinct volcano. Paulina Lake, along with a smaller one to the east, was in the crater. From a previous trip, I remembered a couple of old stores up there to service the campers, kayakers, and hikers but not much else. Rocket, who was riding in the back seat, thumped his tail and milled about, as if turning off the highway meant a fabulous adventure was imminent.
“Does your friend work in one of the store
s?” I glanced at Mom, her bare feet up on the dash.
She had brought socks and hiking boots, perhaps a testament to the length of the short walk waiting for us. “No, and she’s not so much a friend as an acquaintance I met while on a mission.”
“An acquaintance who will want to see you or one who might shoot us on sight?”
Her eyebrows rose. “I’d ask if that’s typical of your acquaintances, but you showed me your Jeep, so I’ll assume so.”
“The dragon is not an acquaintance.” I glanced skyward, though I hadn’t seen him again since that rest stop, and it was silly to believe he would be loitering in the area.
He had criminals to collect, or so he said, and I hadn’t heard of any magical beings wreaking havoc around Bend. Of course, my number-one resource for letting me know about such things was in the hospital. That lieutenant probably wouldn’t tell me if he’d successfully found his own ass in the shower.
We drove on in silence, except for the occasional thump of Rocket’s tail on the seat. Lieutenant Sudo’s car was getting nicely fur covered. I wondered if we would find any mud up by the lake that I could drive through to ensure the exterior needed a wash and wax when I returned it. He deserved it for doubting Willard. Doubting me was irritating, too, but it was a more understandable affront. I was used to skepticism from people who hadn’t had run-ins with the magical themselves. Half the world still seemed to think they were like UFOs, something only nuts believed in. If only they knew how many magical beings camouflaged themselves to blend into our society. Ninety percent of them weren’t any trouble and never came onto my radar. It was the other ten that kept me employed.
“Amber and Thad came up this past winter,” Mom said as we rounded a bend, ponderosa pines stretching up to the blue sky on either side.
“Oh?” I asked neutrally. Carefully. Mom had lectured me on my relationship with my daughter before, and I couldn’t imagine anything but judgment coming out. “To ski?”
“Yes. They were going to stay in some overpriced vacation rental, but I gave them the loft and the spare bedroom.”
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