Mark kept talking. “Maggie’s in danger. We think Penelope has her. Edgar saw it happen, and he went to John for help. I need to take you over to their place right now.”
The mountains! Frank thought with all his might. Penelope is taking Maggie to the mountains!. He was desperate for Mark to hear him.
All Mark saw was the cat brace for a fight. He sighed. “ Look, old man, I understand, and normally I wouldn’t bother you – but we have a real emergency here. We don’t know where Penelope is. She has tried to destroy the shop twice now. Do you want to be sitting here alone if she makes a third attempt? Maggie would never forgive me if I let Penelope turn you into a cat-kebab.”
Frank appeared to be wavering.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Mark said. “You weigh, what? Five pounds?” Mark spread his arms wide to display his massive bulk. “Do the math, Frank. You’re going with me. Your only decision is: is this going to be easy, or is it going to be hard?”
Frank did the cat equivalent of rolling his eyes. Oh, fine, he muttered to himself. Discretion, as Shakespeare wrote, is the better part of valor. He rolled onto his back and put his paws in the air in surrender. Get on with it, then.
♦
Four vehicles left the parking lot behind Pentacle Pawn just before sunset. Mark lead the convoy in his massive, brand-new, fully-tricked-out Range Rover. Lissa and Orion followed in Orion’s black pickup. Daisy sat in the front passenger seat of Stella’s Prius, and Asia rode shotgun in Barry’s battered rodeo pickup. Mark clipped his cell into the hands-free mount so he can keep an eye on the GPS app as the small convoy hit the southbound 101 freeway five minutes later. By the time they took the curving overhead ramp to the eastbound 202, they were cruising at 75.
The Scottsdale to Apache Junction trip takes forty-five minutes in light traffic. The convoy did it in thirty. As they transitioned off the freeway to the state route that would take them towards the Superstitions, Mark queued the phone.
“Heads up – text Maggie John.”
The smartphone screen lit, and Mark’s texting app opened to a new conversation.
“Type: any change GPS?” Mark said to the screen. He kept one eye on the road while he watched the app type out his words.
Mark’s hands gripped the wheel while he waited for his reply. He sighed deeply when the app read John’s reply out loud: Same.
“Type: thanks nearly there – close text,” Mark instructed. He ordered the phone to call Orion in the truck behind him.
Once they connected, Mark told his phone to bring up the GPS app and glanced over to check that the coordinates he had copied from Maggie’s app were still displaying. “It hasn’t moved,” he confirmed. He mirrored the screen to Orion.
“Still up in Gold Canyon,” Orion said the truck behind.
“Confirmed,” Mark said.
“Gold Canyon?” Mark heard Lissa say. “My dad has a place up there. Do you have an address?”
“The mapping is unreliable up in the canyon,” Mark replied to the hands-free, “but you can see it on the topographic.”
He heard Lissa draw in her breath as she zoomed the app in. “That’s it,” she said excitedly. “That’s Alex’s house.” She looked at her new husband. “I don’t understand. Why is Maggie’s phone at my father’s house?”
“We’re about to find out,” Mark said, his voice grim as he turned left into Gold Canyon.
♦
There was plenty of room for all four vehicles in the convoy to park on the concrete pad in front of Alex’s garage. Lissa was the first one out, with Orion right behind her. She ran to the front door and pounded on it.
“Dad! Open up!” she yelled, but there was no answer.
Mark emerged from his Range Rover with his phone in his hand. “Maggie’s phone should be right around here somewhere,” he said, waving the phone in front of him like a Geiger counter as he moved across the parking pad.
“Why won’t he answer?” Lissa whined.
“Are you sure he’s here?” Orion asked.
Lissa pointed at the open parking bay where the Lamborghini sat, still covered by its tarp. “If his car’s here, he’s here.” She pounded on the door again. “Dad!” She sank.down on the marble bench, about to break into tears. “Where is he?”
Orion sat next to Lissa and put his arm around her, and she sobbed into his shoulder. Mark, never good with women’s tears despite his career as a famous romance writer, looked away.
His eyes fell at Lissa’s feet. Maggie’s phone was wedged between the foot of the bench and the wall. He snatched it up, startling Lissa.
Mark held the phone next to his own and saw that the GPS locations were exactly the same. The phone was here; Maggie was gone.
Lissa jumped again as the front door of the mansion opened behind her. Alex stepped out, holding a washcloth to his head.
“Lissa! What are you doing here?” Alex said, looking around at Mark, Stella, Daisy, Asia, and Barry, arriving back at Lissa and Orion. “What are you all doing here?”
“We’re looking for Maggie,” Lissa snuffled, starting to cry again. “We think maybe Mom has her.”
Alex slumped back against the door frame.
“What happened to your head?” Asia asked, gently pushing the washcloth down to get a look at wound underneath.
Alex shook his head. “She surprised me.”
“Penelope?” Mark asked.
Alex nodded. “I held her here all those months – she knows how secure this house is.”
Mark saw it. “So she wanted to turn the tables.”
Alex grimaced. “She tried to kill me.”
“I still don’t understand,” Mark said. “What’s the endgame? What’s this all about?”
Asia took the washcloth from Alex and dabbed at his forehead. “This looks worse than it is. You’re going to have a nasty headache, but I don’t think you need stitches.”
Daisy was rummaging in her purse. “A little of my tea and the headache will be fine.”
Orion had been listening quietly. “This isn’t about Maggie, is it?”
Alex grimaced. “Only as a means to an end. Oh, Penelope’s jealous, all right, but this is about something down in that vault of Maggie’s. Penelope used to rant about it in her less lucid moments.”
“And now she has it,” Orion said. It wasn’t a question. “So why does she still want Maggie?”
Alex gave him a weak smile. “Maggie is the only one who has been able to stop her, whatever this is she’s working on. In Penelope’s mind, Maggie is some kind of superhero who has to be taken out before her final victory. Penelope’s victories are never meaningful to her unless she takes them away from someone else.”
“That’s nuts,” Barry said.
Alex just shrugged. “Nuts or not, it’s true if Penelope believes it. We have to find Maggie.”
Daisy glanced down at the phone in Mark’s hand. “It’s too bad she dropped it,” Daisy said. “We could still follow her.”
Mark shook his head. “I don’t think she dropped it by accident.” He turned Alex. “Can you get any bars up in the mountains?”
Alex’s eyes went wide. “I know where they’re going,” he said.
♦
Daisy agreed to wait at Alex’s house, using Maggie’s phone to keep John in the loop.
“Will you be okay?” Lissa asked anxiously. “ I mean... If my mother comes back...”
Daisy patted her hand. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m old, and that’s my superpower. I’ve dealt with a lot of witches in my time – I’ve seen things you could never imagine.” She kissed Lissa on the cheek. “You and your young man there... You just go find Maggie. I’ll be fine.”
Barry and Asia headed out in Barry’s pickup to the trailhead. The plan was that they were going to come in from the Apache Junction side, hoping to meet Maggie on the trail.
Alex looked at the empty bay. The only vehicles left in the five-car garage were the van and his beloved Lamborghini, both
useless for off-roading. “If she’s up behind the Massacre Ground, somebody needs to come in from behind the mountain. It’s a nasty road, but we’ve had that Jeep up in there a couple of times.”
Alex turned around and grinned at Mark’s very new, very expensive Range Rover. “You ever had that beast off the pavement?”
Mark grinned back. “There’s a first time for everything.”
♦
Everyone was looking for Maggie, but Orion and Lissa were hunting Penelope.
Alex had been sure that Penelope was headed for the massacre grounds. That gave them a general direction, but left them with thousands of acres to search.
Orion had a secret weapon. More accurately: he was their secret weapon. On their wedding night, he had explained to Lissa exactly whom she had married.
Lissa knew that Orion was from Greece, but kept his family purposefully vague while they were dating. Lissa was so much in love that she accepted him at face value. What she learned that night in the mansion on the mountain was that her new husband was a Greek god.
Not exactly, of course, but close enough. Orion was the direct descendant of his namesake, going back one hundred and fifty generations in a straight line to the original Orion of Greek mythology, the earthborn son of the sea god Poseidon.
When he was a young man, the modern Orion and Maggie had talked long into the night as he came to grips with his heritage. He didn’t want to be different. The attention drawn to him by his good looks was bad enough. He didn’t want to be a god.
Maggie helped him see that his inherited powers were no different from his perfect teeth and riveting eyes; they were all part of the genetic package that made him who he was. Was the original Orion a god? Maggie explained that all mythology has some basis in fact, and showed them how to look for clues in his own nature. The modern Orion was an instinctive tracker; his ancient ancestor was the fabled hunter in Homer’s Odyssey.
There were lessons to be learned from his ancient ancestor, Maggie taught him. The original Orion was a huge man with huge appetites. He treated women badly; he drank too much. He was killed by the Earth herself when he threatened to hunt down and destroy every living creature.
Orion came to understand how both sides of his nature had made him who he was. The excesses of his ancestor could instruct him, or they could end him. He chose to learn.
On their wedding night, Orion gave Lissa the giant pearl that he had always kept as his talisman. She refused it at first, but he insisted that she hold it for safekeeping. The pearl had come, indeed, from Atlantis, he said, given to the original Orion for services rendered to the Atlantean king. It had been handed down through the centuries to the first son of each generation. Orion asked that Lissa hold it for their own son, and – tears in her eyes – she finally agreed.
♦
Orion drove a black pickup truck with just the base accessories package – but like Orion himself, the truck was more than it seemed. The body was a few years old and showed every one of its hundred thousand miles. The vehicle had four-wheel-drive, of course: a requirement for a professional tracker. To the world, it was just one more beat-up four-wheeler out tearing up the trails for the day.
It was a whole different story under the hood. Orion’s truck had been completely customized, nose to tail, with high-end shocks and suspension, a super-quiet engine, and a transmission geared to climb straight up a mountain. The headlights had been upgraded to state-of-the-art LEDs. It was the ultimate tracking machine.
Lissa and Orion drove into the Superstition Mountains, but instead of veering west toward the massacre ground, they headed northeast. If Penelope came back out the way she’d gone in, she’d run right into Mark and Alex. If she came out of the mountains on the western edge, she’d be intercepted by Barry and Asia.
Orion was betting she’d gone north.
They bumped along a maintenance road scraped into the desert that looked like it hadn’t seen any maintenance for quite a while. Just before the top of a rise, Orion killed the headlights and stopped the truck. A broad plateau spread out below them in the moonlight. To their left was a row of crags on the backside of the massacre grounds.
Lissa dug in the glove compartment for a map, but Orion just smiled. He touched the giant pearl set into the ring on her right hand.
Lissa kissed him as she removed the ring and handed it to him. She got out and walked to the edge of the rise, gazing out over the moonlit plateau to give him some privacy.
Orion turned the ring over and released a hidden latch. The pearl fell out into his palm. He placed the silver setting on the dashboard.
Orion cleared his mind of everything, just as Maggie had taught him to do. The pearl was a focusing tool, nothing more; the magic was in Orion himself. He held it in the cup of his hands and looked deep into its opaque center.
He sat motionless for three minutes. Lissa was just starting to get worried about him when Orion raised his head and smiled his dazzling smile at her. Her heart flipped over.
“That way,” Orion said, nodding at the crags in the distance.
Chapter Sixteen
It was the Fourth of July, but I was pretty sure that those weren’t fireworks I was hearing. Something very wrong was happening up near the waterfall.
I ran – or, to tell the truth, mostly stumbled in the dark – the last mile. Every few minutes, a dirty blue-violet ball of flame would rise from the top of the cliff and burst high in the sky.
I was terrified. I had no way of knowing how many people were up there at the foot of that cliff, but I was pretty sure one of them was Penelope. Anyone with half a brain would run in the opposite direction. So, there you are.
On the other hand, it would take hours for me to get down to the trailhead and summon help. By the time the guys with the helicopters got up here, whatever was going on would be over. Penelope would be long gone.
I was pretty sure Penelope wasn’t roasting marshmallows up there. There was magic involved – serious, deadly magic. Penelope wouldn’t hesitate to use a spell on an ordinary person, and they would have no defense.
I’ll admit it: I was also thinking about the conversation I’d be having with those rescuers after the dust settled. This wasn’t going to be my friendly cousin Jim; it would be county sheriffs, maybe even state police. How was I going to explain all this to ordinary cops after Penelope left me holding the bag?
It was up to me. So I ran.
This part of the Superstitions is a roller coaster of ancient lava flows. You can almost imagine you are standing at the bottom of a long-dead volcano, its rim still visible as the weathered cores of ancient outflows sticking straight up out of the tops of the mountains like monuments.
I was running into the bottom of a box canyon. Think of it as a big horseshoe, and I was coming in at the open end. The canyon walls were like a bowl around me, straight up three thousand feet. In front of the sheer walls were enormous sections of the cliffs that had cleaved away over millennia and now stuck up like jagged teeth on the canyon floor. Some of these fallen rocks were as big as houses.
Something was moving in the rockfall. Something big.
I stood very still and watched. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. But then, I saw a bright yellow hang glider, crashed halfway up the cliff. That was a terrible place to get stuck.
I was thinking that we might need search and rescue after all– when the hang glider launched from the cliff face. But instead of soaring down into the valley, it flapped its wings and flew straight up.
It flapped its wings?
That was no hang glider. It was some sort of bird, but not like any bird I’d ever seen before. It had a long neck, tiny seagull feet and a head like a giant alligator clip, the kind you see on electronics. That sucker was big –its leathery bat wings had a span of at least twenty feet.
A word popped into my mind: an impossible word, but there it was. Pteranodon. I was looking at a bloody dinosaur, extinct since the late Cretaceous.
Or, apparently, not.
The winged terror rose to the top of the cliffs and then dove back in my direction, riding the wind currents in the canyon. As it soared closer, I could see tiny hands sporting nasty hooked claws at the elbow along the upper edge of each wing. I dove behind a boulder.
It banked to the south as it passed thirty feet above me. Its body was between me and the moon, and I could see the blood vessels inside the glowing wing membranes. I’d be seeing that again in my nightmares for a long while.
The pteranodon circled and made another pass, coming even lower. Just as it reached my hiding place, it was distracted by noise up on the cliff. It caught an updraft and rose, and as it approached the cliff face, it made a resonant noise deep in its throat, part rumble, part ticking.
Another voice, high on the cliff, answered back. A second pteranodon, an orange one, had levered itself to the edge of the cliff.
This one appeared to be walking on its feet, with its folded wings extended in front and bent at the elbow. The wingtips stood straight up; its clawed hands scraped the ground. It looked like a very creepy, very big dog that had been told to sit.
But it didn’t. It launched itself off the cliff and joined the yellow one in the air. Together, they circled around and headed back in my direction.
This was not going to end well.
“Keep your head down,” a voice whispered at my elbow. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
♦
Mark stood next to me, his book bag at his side. Alex crouched behind him, watching the soaring dinosaurs with wonder.
“How on earth did you find me?” I gasped.
Mark pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Alex.
“This used to be Penelope’s favorite sandbox when she had some new magical toy,” Alex said.
Two more figures were moving into the mouth of the canyon, keeping close to the foot of the wall. The figures stayed low in the shadows so they wouldn’t be observed from above, where the dinosaurs were – what? Playing?
Pentacle Pawn Boxed Set Page 42
