“You’re sure you know how to drive, know the rules of the road, and what route to follow?”
“I have observed carefully.” Calm confidence radiated from him.
Rolling my eyes, I shrugged. “Eh, what’s the worst that can happen. I mean, other than death in a fiery crash.”
His mouth twitched into a smile. “Trust me.”
Apparently I didn’t have much choice. I tried to put out of my head the scene from the movie Starman, where the alien is driving and thinks that a yellow light means Go Very Fast, since he’d seen the human woman speed through a yellow.
“You do know that a yellow light means it’s about to turn red, and you have to stop, right?” I asked, just to be sure.
His only response was a low chuckle.
I allowed myself to relax as we made it to the interstate without any sign of police vehicles following us, and without any crashes, fiery or not. After about ten miles I had to admit that Mzatal knew as much about the operation of a motor vehicle and the rules of the road as the average human, and he certainly had better instincts and reflexes.
Since I still had too much adrenaline pumping through me to sleep, I snagged up one of Tracy’s spiral notebooks from the stack on the back seat and pulled a flashlight out of my bag, propped my feet on the dashboard and began to flip through. It was the notebook with no cover that had all the date and time info for the warehouse node. I’d never actually finished going through this one, since Eilahn and I had raced to the warehouse the instant we realized the “event” was that same day.
Then again, it didn’t look as if I’d missed much. More ritual configurations, some of which looked completely wrong to me. A doodle of an elephant beside another one of the weird tree sketches. A convoluted twisting sigil that didn’t seem to have any logical structure.
I began to toss it back to the stack, then stopped, flipped it open to the page that had all the dates and times for the warehouse node. My pulse did a stutter-step.
“Fucking shit!” I dropped my feet and wheeled back toward the stack. “I need the leather journal with the blue cover.”
Bryce quickly fished the correct one out of the pile and handed it to me. “What’s going on?”
“Node emissions.” I flipped through the fragile pages of the old journal as quickly as I dared. “Idris told Rasha he was following node emissions,” I said. “Tracy tracked the one at the warehouse, which is why we were there when you got shot.”
After a few seconds I found the pages I needed. “Here.” I held the journal and flashlight so they could see. “Six more lists in a really similar format to the warehouse one, so I think those might be for tracking node emissions too. Tracy’s grandparents started these lists, and then Tracy continued and added to them.”
Bryce and Paul leaned forward to peer at the odd lists. Paul frowned and opened his mouth to speak, and I jerked up a hand to stop him.
“Yes, I know there are no fucking locations for any of these,” I said. “All we have are the number series from grandma with dates from her time period, and then Tracy’s cryptic Peter-Piper-picked-a-peck-of-pickled-peppers shit along with the dates he filled in.”
Bryce’s eyes skimmed over the numbers and odd phrases and dates. “If he was tracking so meticulously, then it stands to reason the location is encoded in all of this somehow. He wouldn’t want to get mixed up and put a date and time on the wrong list.”
“Right, and he kept it coded because he didn’t want to risk anyone else finding the nodes and blocking his use.” I tapped the page. “We figure it out, and we might know where they’re going next with Idris.” Might being the operative word, I thought with a grimace. We had no way of knowing if Idris was tracking any of the same locations. Still, we had to try.
I looked back at Paul and put on an encouraging and confident smile to hide my fear that we were chasing shadows. “Okay, Wonder Boy, you up for the challenge?”
“You got numbers, I got answers,” he replied with a bright smile. “Well, y’know, probably,” he added. “I’ll do my best.”
“Your best is pretty damn awesome,” I reassured him as I handed over the journal.
Paul took it and settled in to work. I reached over and stroked Mzatal’s hair. He hadn’t said a word during all of this, but I’d felt his tension and hope for the possibilities rise right along with mine. We’re getting closer, Boss. Yes, we were chasing shadows, but they were beginning to take on more substance.
Mzatal slid a brief look to me, gave me a soft smile along with a mental caress that seemed to lift the anxiety from both of us. I closed my eyes, willed myself to relax.
Sleep slowly slides, I thought with a silent snort. Tracy didn’t have that one in any of his weird lists. Hell, I could play that silly game too. Maybe gas guzzles green for how much it cost to fill the damn tank of the SUV, and deputy debates demon for the mega-tense encounter at the gas station.
My eyes popped open. Tracy didn’t have G or D or SL alliterative sounds in any of his three-word phrases. I swung around in my seat. “Paul! The three word phrases—what letters do they start with?”
He jerked his head up. “Uh . . .” He blinked, frowned, and dropped his eyes to the journal. “Sick sirens sink, thick thread thrives, old over out, every eaglet ejects—”
Excited, I waved at him to stop. “The lists have one long phrase at the top—five or six words or so—but then how many three-word phrases are there in each one?”
Brow creased in bafflement, he quickly tallied. “Three of them have fourteen and three have fifteen.”
A giggle bubbled out of me. “And let me guess, there’s a phrase in the middle and at the end that start with N, S, E, or W, right?”
The bafflement on his face deepened to comical proportions. “Only N’s and W’s. One of each in each list. Naughty Nantucket nuns, Nancy needs nookie, woman weeds wagon—”
“It’s coordinates!” I crowed. “Latitude and longitude! The first letters of the words correspond to the first letters in the word for a number. Like ‘sick sirens sink’ is six. The exceptions are the phrases for North and West!” For longitude and latitude, the letters for direction always followed the numbers. I did a giddy little dance in my seat. “Oh, yeah, I’m awesome. Uh huh, I’m awesome. Go, Kara! Go, Kara!”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Degrees, minutes, seconds.” His face split into a grin, and then his fingers flew over his keyboard. “The first list, the one with ‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ at the top . . .” His eyes flicked between the journal and the laptop. “Thirsty thieves thrive, forlorn foxes fold, finicky fire fizzles, sick sirens sink, zygote zucchini zings, eat ears early, night noise nears. So that would be thirty-four degrees, fifty-six minutes, zero-eight seconds, North.”
“Well?” I demanded. “Where is it?”
He shot me a withering look. “Hang on, lemme get the longitude.” He mumbled to himself while I jiggled impatiently, and Bryce looked on in bemusement.
“Got it,” Paul finally announced. “‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ is a location near the town of Rock Creek in the Texas panhandle.”
A smug smile spread across my face. “The titles are clues and hints for Tracy so he knew which list was for which node without having to look up the coordinates each time he tracked an emission, but the cryptic phrases kept it from being obvious to anyone who didn’t know the code.” A thought abruptly speared its way to the surface, and I sucked in a sharp breath. “What about the dates? Was there something at that Cowboy Creek node in the last few days?”
Paul nodded. “A couple of days ago.”
I bit down on a shriek of delight. “That’s when we had video of him getting off a plane not far from Amarillo in the goddamn Texas panhandle!”
Bryce straightened. “Hot fucking damn,” he murmured. “We might be able to anticipate where they’re going next.”
“Right, though now we have to hope to hell that Tracy knew about the same nodes that Katashi and his crew are checking.”
I wagged my hands at Paul and the journal. “Work, Wonder Boy. Work!”
Paul grinned and quickly sank into processing the data. I faced forward again and tried to chill while he worked, but could only fidget.
“Whoa,” he said a few minutes later.
I twisted around in the seat. “What is it?”
“Here’s what we have.” He tapped a few more times. “The ‘Mountains mean multiple mergers’ one works out to near Basalt, Colorado. ‘Ashes are always around’ is about seventy-five miles outside of Austin. And ‘Wet wilderness wonder waxes’ is in Oregon. ‘Weird wondrous wares waver wildly’ is the warehouse. But the last one . . .” He blew out a breath. “‘Boss-boy breaks boss’s balls,’ is smack dab in the middle of the Farouche Plantation.”
Adrenaline surged through me even as Mzatal’s aura flared. “Let me see the journal,” I said and practically snatched it as Paul held it out. I quickly skimmed the dates. There were only three—one from over a year ago and one more than a year away. But the third set my heart pounding. “There’s one in three days.” I heard the tremble in my voice and didn’t care. “Idris will be there. I know he’ll be there.”
“And we will retrieve him.” Mzatal stated with dark determination. He’d made the same claim about me once and followed through against impossible odds.
“Damn straight,” I said. We had yet to come up with even the slightest inkling of a plan, but I had the ultimate faith that we would.
With the rush of excitement over, we fell into a comfortable silence. I mentally brainstormed various plans with myself, each more outlandish than the last, and finally decided to stop before I thought too seriously about the one where we all swooped in on hang-gliders.
I glanced toward a low snore to see Bryce with his head tipped back and his mouth open. Paul remained head down, his entire focus on his laptop, face weirdly lit by the screen. I relaxed in my seat and finally let myself think about the encounter with Rasha. The visit had unsettled me on numerous levels, and not all related to Idris and Amber. Rasha had been summoning for almost fifty years, living a life of careful isolation to keep it secret. Paul’s information showed that she’d married at eighteen and had a set of twins a few years later. Her husband had been killed in the Suez crisis, and at some point in all of that she’d become a summoner. And for what? To end up old and alone, used by others who sought power? She barely even saw her family. The most she could do was surround herself with pictures of them.
Propping my feet on the dashboard again, I watched the moon flicker through the trees that lined the interstate. I understood being so lonely that summoning a demon for a game of chess was a reasonable choice. I’d been there before. I wasn’t there anymore, but what about in thirty years? Fifty?
Mzatal reached over and took my hand. “I will not abandon you, beloved,” he said softly.
Tears pricked my eyes. I gave his hand a light squeeze. “Thanks, Boss.”
I drifted off to sleep with my hand in his.
Chapter 35
When I woke the sky ahead of us glowed with the pinks and blues of sunrise. I sat up, rolled my head on my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. Mzatal looked over from where he still sat in the driver’s seat and gave me a fond smile.
“Hey, Boss,” I said as I rubbed the gunk out of my eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Six hours and twenty-two minutes,” he replied.
A glance at the backseat showed the other two men still sleeping. “Have you been driving this whole time?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
I groaned. Damn it, the last thing I wanted was for him to wear himself out again. “You’re majorly stubborn, you know that, right?”
“Zharkat, it is much less confining this way,” he reassured me. “I am well.”
I peered at him and had to admit he did look much less stressed than on the trip to Austin.
“All right.” I ran fingers through my hair and tried unsuccessfully to bite back a yawn. “You want me to drive for a bit now, or are you good?”
“I will continue,” he said. “Have you need to stop elsewhere before journey’s end?”
I shook my head. “I just want to get home.”
“Not long now,” he said. “Sleep more.”
And I did.
• • •
The abrupt silence of the engine woke me the second time, and I opened my eyes to see trees bordering a parking lot. “Are we home?” I asked.
“We have but the short walk through the woods,” Mzatal replied. “And you are more rested.”
Bryce roused and prodded Paul awake and out of the SUV. We made quick work of unloading our stuff, then tromped through the woods, over the fence, and back to the house, where a bouncing and burbling Jekki greeted us with delight. After reassuring the faas he was indeed well, Mzatal went straight to the mini-nexus. Bryce bundled the still sleepy Paul off to bed, then headed to the kitchen to scrounge breakfast while I went to join Mzatal.
We sat quietly for a while, facing each other in the center of the mini-nexus, the potency tickling like the nibble of minnows as we listened to the chirp of sparrows and drone of insects.
“Boss,” I said after some time, “we need to do something about your aura. If you’re going to function here on Earth without causing chaos, we need to figure out how to tone it down. A lot.”
He grew contemplative, reading the implications behind the words. “It is a marked problem while among humans,” he admitted.
“Perhaps Szerain could help,” I ventured. “No one feels his aura.”
Mzatal’s frown deepened. “He is submerged. I cannot mimic that.”
“Yes, I know. But I’ve been around him unsubmerged, as well as when he’s expressing way more through Ryan. It’s as if he’s able to keep a lid on his aura projection. Maybe you could talk to him about it and see how he does it?”
I felt the resistance in him. He frowned, as if looking for any other alternative, and it was a long moment before he spoke. “It is the best and most expedient solution,” he said, though his tone was certainly grudging. “I will speak to him.”
There was something going on between those two, but I didn’t have time to deal with it now. At least he’d agreed to talk to Szerain.
I yawned, still tired. Even though I’d slept quite a while in the car it wasn’t the same as sleeping in a proper bed. I frowned. Why had I been in the car for so long?
“Kara!” Mzatal said sharply.
I jerked and blinked at him. “Shit.” My pulse lurched. “The implant containment.”
He laid one hand on my shoulder and the other against my cheek. “We are joined at the hip, beloved, as you have noted,” he said, calm and placid. “I will reinforce it again.”
He went still and quiet for only a few minutes, but it was enough time for me to go through plenty of worry. “I need to get some real sleep for a couple of hours,” I told him. “Could you give me a little of your magic sleeping mojo?”
He smiled and kissed me. “It is done. Be in your bed in five minutes or you will find yourself napping on the floor.”
I laughed, kissed him back, and headed inside. Yet as I passed the dining room I had to stop and do a double take. The elves had been at work expanding Kara’s Kafé while we were in Austin.
The dining room hadn’t been an actual room for dining in the entire time I’d lived in the house as an adult. But now, storage boxes, miscellaneous items, and cobwebs had been cleared away, and a simple but lovely eight chair dining table occupied the middle of the hardwood floor. Nostalgia tugged hard as memory filled my senses of the last Thanksgiving before my dad died: family and friends and food.
I smiled. I still had family and friends, and they were helping me turn my house back into a home.
I continued to my room, crawled into bed, and fell asleep with a smile on my face.
• • •
Three hours later I stretched awake with no remembered dreams and no sense of time hav
ing passed. After a quick shower and a cup of coffee, I felt more than ready to get back into the hunt.
My first move was to transfer case files and Tracy’s journals from the living room to the dining table. I doubted the guys had meant for me to christen the new table with work, but it was loads better than the sofa or kitchen table for spreading out.
I worked and munched on Jekki-made finger sandwiches while I tried to glean more useful information from Tracy’s notes. After about an hour my eyes started glazing over, and I pushed back from the table with a groan. Out in the living room I heard Bryce and Jekki talking.
“Hey, Bryce,” I called out. “You busy with anything right now?”
Bryce came in through the kitchen, looking sharp and dangerous in his polo shirt and shoulder holster. “Nope. Paul’s up and working, and there’s no more I can do on the camera system until we get those quotes back. Whatcha need?”
“I need another set of eyes,” I told him. “I’d like to know if there are any more references to locations in these journals. Anything is good, but particularly Texas and the Southeast.”
“I can handle that.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “Slide the pile this way.”
I shoved one of the stacks toward him, a miscellany of notes, case files, journals and photos. “Go wild.”
We worked in silence for a while, each absorbed in our own world, neither of us announcing any great discoveries. I finally sat back and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Damn it. This shit gives me a headache.”
Bryce tossed the journal in his hand aside and picked up the next one, then put it down again. Frowning, he tugged an overflowing photo folder from mid-stack and slid an eight by ten from it. “Shit,” he murmured.
I glanced over. “Got something?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said, his brow furrowed. “What are these drawings?”
I took a closer look at what he held: a crime scene photo from over a year ago of the office of murdered Greg Cerise, with sketches of people, demons, and other-worldly settings plastering the walls. “Greg Cerise drew all of those,” I told him. “He had a knack for finding people who were arcanely gifted.” I pulled out some photos that had better views of the sketches. “I think he either visited the demon realm at some point or he was awfully damned prescient, because his drawings are dead on.” I made a face. “His dad, Peter Cerise, turned out to be the Symbol Man and used Greg’s drawings to find his victims.”
Fury of the Demon (Kara Gillian) Page 38
