by Jenn Bennett
The waitress excused herself as an elderly couple entered the diner.
Lon watched her saunter off before pulling out a couple of bills and sliding them under his water glass. We raised our hands to thank June on our way out. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut until we got into the SUV.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.
“They found him in early January, and he was killed two weeks earlier. That would be right before—”
“Dare.”
“Wouldn’t be the first person he killed to keep quiet,” Lon agreed. “And if the PI had all that information on you, maybe Dare didn’t want others finding out.”
“But if this is our guy, and Dare killed him, what are the chances Dare left any information behind?”
“I doubt he did the deed himself. Probably hired a gun,” Lon said. “But you’re right. They wouldn’t have been sloppy. And the cops have probably gone over every inch of the house.”
We sat there for a moment. “But we’re still going to break in, aren’t we?”
A slow smile lifted the corners of Lon’s mouth as he turned the car’s ignition. “Damn straight.”
It took us a few minutes to find Diamond Trail on the GPS and another half hour to drive the length of it, but the two-story house was exactly where the waitress said it would be, half hidden by oak trees in a secluded area. It must have cost a few hundred thousand dollars to build, which made it less like a cabin and more like a house that had gotten lost in the woods and given up.
Lon drove up the steep driveway and parked on the side of the house, where we couldn’t be seen from the road. Leaves crunched underfoot as we trekked to the side door. It was sort of pretty here, with the craggy mountain rising in the backyard. Lon knocked, just in case, but no one answered. Shades covered all the windows.
“Can you hear anything inside?” I asked.
Lon glanced around, peering off into the woods and up the mountain. We hadn’t seen a single car once we turned off of Main Street. Guess he was thinking that, too, because a moment later, the horns were spiraling out. Super. Now I had to guard my thoughts.
“It’s good practice,” he said. “You’re supposed to be learning to guard yourself against your mother if she ever tries to tap into your head again.”
I glared at him. “Just tell me what you hear.”
“Nope,” he said, fishing around in his pockets for leather gloves. “Empty.”
“What if there’s an alarm on the door?”
“You feel any electricity?”
Oh. I reached out for current, and apart from some weak sources in the house and the SUV—all batteries, most likely—the nearest substantial cache of it felt far enough away to be in the lines at the road.
“Wouldn’t be surprised if got shut off for nonpayment,” Lon said, reading my thoughts. “The backup for alarm systems usually only lasts a day or two.”
Assessing our options, we hiked around the house and stopped in front of sliding glass doors, where Lon shielded his eyes to peer into shadows.
“How’re we going to get inside, anyway? Break the glass?” I pulled the handle to make sure it was locked and felt something give way. The door cracked, jerked, and slid open. Didn’t expect that. I stumbled, and when I looked to see what had happened, I saw the damage. “Shit.”
“Christ, Cady.”
The metal framing was bent. I’d torn the whole damn lock off.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” For a moment, I remembered the table leg in the diner and panicked. “Maybe whoever killed him tried to break in here and damaged it already.”
“Maybe,” he said as he shifted down from his transmutated form.
“Let’s just get this over with.” Taking off my sunglasses, I led the way inside and whistled. “Nice pad. Being a PI pays well.” The whole rustic-cabin thing was a false front. Inside, it was all modern and sleek, straight out of an architecture magazine.
“God only knows what Dare was paying him.”
A large open living area with high ceilings spilled into a kitchen almost as nice as Lon’s but with much less personality. From there, we quickly went from room to room on the bottom floor, then headed upstairs when we found nothing of interest.
“Bingo,” Lon said when we strode into a home office. An oversized world map hung next to a calendar over an L-shaped desk that looked as if it had been stripped.
Lon ran his fingers over a bundle of limp cable cords sticking out of a hole in the desktop. “All his equipment’s gone. Either the guy who killed him took it for safekeeping, or the police seized it for evidence.”
We opened up all the drawers in the desk and two freestanding filing cabinets. Apart from some loose change, gum, and a few pens, nothing was left. “It had to be Dare,” I said. “We’d probably have more luck knocking on his widow’s door and asking her for help.”
“Already tried while you were in the hospital. She didn’t know anything. I went through two warehouses looking for anything he had on you. Didn’t find a thing.”
I closed an empty file-cabinet drawer and glanced at Lon’s face, feeling self-conscious and . . . odd. Why did he go to so much trouble to help me? I wasn’t sure I deserved it. When his gaze rose to meet mine, I quickly looked away. “Seems crazy that a man like Wildeye—or Wilde, whatever—could be so good at gathering information even the feds couldn’t find on my parents, but all it took was him dying for everyone and their brother to walk in and steal it.”
Lon grunted, surveying the empty room. “He would’ve had a backup. Somewhere safer.”
“Another house or a warehouse?”
“Maybe.”
“I kept all my medicinals locked up in my bedroom closet . . .”
“They’re all in a safe in my closet now.”
We looked at each other before making a beeline to Wildeye’s bedroom. It was too dark with the power out, so I raised the shades on a wall of windows. Sunlight spilled in over the quiet room, giving us a stunning view of the mountain rising in the backyard. A nice little retreat. Neat. Tidy. But when we pulled open his dresser drawers, it looked as if someone else had already searched through their contents.
We checked the walk-in closet next. Nothing but clothes and shoes, I thought, peering into the dark space. It was hard to see without electricity, and I was about to ask Lon if he had a flashlight. Glad I didn’t, or I might not have noticed the faint white glow behind a row of hanging shirts.
I parted the shirts, sliding the coat hangers along the rail. “Hello, secret door.”
It was hiding magick, a nice two-by-three-foot ward. Same thing we’d seen on the yacht in November. An old spell that grizzled old magicians had used over the centuries to hide treasure and grimoires and secret sex chambers. Other humans wouldn’t see the telltale white Heka that kept the ward charged; other humans didn’t have the same supernatural sight that Earthbounds had. That I had.
My heart raced with excitement. Please let this be worth it.
“Haven’t seen an Earthbound since we got into town,” Lon said as he pressed around the wood paneling, looking for a way inside. “Maybe the murderer was human, too. Here we go.”
He pulled his hand away, and a hidden door in the paneling popped open. Shelves lined the dark space. Lon flicked on a penlight and moved the beam of light over the contents. Two guns. Bullets. A long metal box filled with cash, IDs, and passports. A few fat black organizer cases filled with USB drives. A box of files, which Lon hefted from the closet to the bed, and a skinny pocket notebook, which I grabbed.
I strolled to the wall of windows for light. The guy had terrible handwriting and some sort of shorthand I could barely decipher. Dates. Times. Names all seemed to be condensed to three capital letters. I flipped to the middle of the notebook, where the writing stopped: dates in December.
At first look, nothing seemed to pertain to me. A few of his scribbles looked to be street addresses—no cities. One block of text from late September c
aught my attention. The initials here were “DUV/BEL.” My real surname, Duval, and Bell? Had to be. Below it, he’d crossed out several words, variations on spellings. The last variation was ringed several times in looping inky circles: “NAOI NAAS.”
Odd. Sounded vaguely occult, but I couldn’t place the name.
The pages shook.
I stilled.
The fringe at the edge of the rug jumped. Earthquake? But it wasn’t steady. It stopped and started again.
Something rumbled in the distance, like a cosmic bear waking from a long winter nap.
I lifted my gaze to the wall of windows and the mountainside beyond.
Not an earthquake. Landslide.
“Lon!” I shouted, turning to run. But there wasn’t time. The sunlight behind me was eclipsed by a growing shadow that increased in size until it blotted out all the light in the room.
Then it exploded.
Splintered wood and dry earth.
I caught the scent of both as the massive boulder smashed through the wall of windows and turned Wildeye’s bed into kindling before ripping through the floor in front of us as if it was made of butter.
“Cady!”
Lon rammed into me. Boards cracked. The room tilted. For a moment, I thought we were going to slide into the hole. Then a joist snapped in two, and the entire floor collapsed, along with my stomach. One second I was upstairs, and the next I was rocketing downward with Lon through a cloud of dust.
A sofa broke Lon’s fall. Lon broke mine. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Everything seemed to be vibrating inside—my nerves, bones, teeth. Wood and plaster and glass rained over my back as he covered my head with his arm. When it stopped, we both gasped for air at the same time.
My ears rang. I coughed up plaster dust while attempting to stand, but Lon was holding on to me like grim death. I was terrified he’d broken his back or neck. “Lon—”
“I’m okay,” he said through a cough.
I barely had a chance to feel relief as another rumble shook the house. It sounded like the whole damn mountain was coming down. Adrenaline fired through my limbs. We pushed off the couch and stumbled over broken boards into the kitchen.
Another rock roared through the living-room wall.
“Out!” Lon shouted, grabbing my arm to shove me toward a door.
I didn’t even think. Just shouldered into it like a human battering ram and broke the whole damn thing down. Believe me, I couldn’t have been more surprised when it exploded off its hinges, but I didn’t have a chance to wonder how.
Morning sun blinded me as we burst from the rubble into open air. It took me a second to get my bearings. We’d exited through the cabin’s side door, where Lon’s SUV was parked—I almost ran into it. And by some miracle, it was unharmed. But not for long.
The driveway quaked. I glanced past the car toward the mountain. Nothing but dust and cascading rocks. A wave of destruction tumbling from the heavens and blanketing Wildeye’s backyard in stone.
The driver’s door swung open, and a hard hand shoved me into the SUV. I half sailed, half scrambled over the center armrest, banging my head in the process. I’d never seen anyone start an engine so fast. Dirt flew from the wheels as Lon threw it into reverse and swung the car around. Metal crunched. I yelped as my head bounced against the headrest.
“Shit!”
He’d hit a boulder. Or a boulder had hit the SUV. Either way, it was in back of us—not in front—and the back window was still intact. Teeth rattling, I twisted in my seat in time to see a giant oak crack and sway toward the back of the house. It crashed into the roof with a massive boom!
“Go, go, go!” I shouted.
Lon slammed the SUV into gear and tore down the driveway like a bat out of hell. In seconds, we were speeding onto Diamond Trail, away from Armageddon.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Lon repeated several times, staring wide-eyed at the road ahead. After sobering up a little, he asked, “Are you okay?”
“Considering? Yes, I think so. What just happened?”
“Hell if I know. Did we set off a ward?”
I knew what he was thinking: the putt-putt golf course last fall. But that was strange Æthyric magick etched in pink light, not earthly white Heka. I would have definitely noticed something like that in Wildeye’s house. The warding magic he’d used in the closet was an oldie-but-goodie spell, nothing all that special. A kindergartner could cast it—at least, I could when I was that age.
“I didn’t see anything. And no warning whatsoever,” I said. “Are there a lot of landslides out here? Could it have been a coincidence?”
“You don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I’m willing to start now. Slow down. I see a car over that next hill. I don’t want it to look like we’re fleeing a crime scene.”
“We are.”
“But we didn’t do that!”
He grumbled and slowed to a speed barely under a reckless-driving violation. The car I’d spotted was now cresting the hill and turned out to be a truck. The truck belonged to a park ranger. Orange warning lights flashed as it sped toward us, sending a fresh flood of panic into my brain. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the ranger had zero interest in us. He passed us and continued on his way. Headed to the landslide, I supposed.
Lon banged the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “All of that for nothing.”
“You didn’t see anything in the files?”
“They were all several years old.” He flashed me a glance. “How did you knock down that door?”
“Adrenaline?”
“You snapped a fork in two, and you ripped the lock off the patio door.”
And nearly knocked the leg off the table in the diner, but I didn’t say this. “You think it might be part of the moon magick, some kind of Superman strength?”
“You aren’t experiencing other demonic abilities, are you?”
“Not that I know of.” Just to ease my mind, I tried to manage the most common of knacks—telekinesis—by willing something to rise into the air, a pen rolling around an open compartment in the console. Nope. Nothing.
“Are my eyes . . . ?” I pulled down the visor mirror. Still had the elliptical pupils. Great.
Lon gestured at me. “What’s that you’re holding?”
I glanced down and was surprised to see my hand balled into a fist. My fingers were stiff, locked around a couple of scraps of paper. I loosened my grip and flattened out the wrinkles against my knee. “It’s from Wildeye’s notebook.” I must have lost the notebook itself in the landslide, but by some miracle, I’d managed to hang on to three pages. The tops were torn off, and the bottom two pages were empty. But I’d snagged the one I’d been looking at when the mountain smote us.
“Looks like coded notes from September,” I explained to Lon. “But I think these could be my initials.”
“He was investigating you back in September?”
Not long after I’d met Lon and before Dare had revealed that he knew my real name. “Guess so, but don’t get your hopes up too high. Only three things are listed. One is a street address with no city. The second thing is just a note that says ‘3AC 1988.’ ”
“Not the year you were born.”
“No. But it’s my fake identity’s birth year. And I have no idea what ‘3AC’ would have to do with that.”
He grunted. “What’s the third thing?”
“Variations on spelling for ‘Naos Ophis.’ ” I spelled it out for him.
“Naos means shrine, or an inner temple.”
“A cella.”
Lon nodded. “That’s Latin, but yes. Naos comes from a Greek word. I don’t know what Ophis is, though.”
I stared at the paper for a couple of moments, but my brain was in no mood for solving riddles. The clock on the dash said it was half past seven. And whether it was the power of suggestion or my adrenaline running out, exhaustion hit me like a brick.
“We’ll research all that later
,” Lon said as Golden Peak came into view in the distance. “Right now, we need to rest. If you don’t sleep, you’ll be nodding off when night falls. Or I will. And I need to watch out for you.”
My stomach tightened when I thought about being alone with him in a hotel room again. I hoped I’d manage to keep my clothes on this time. “I’m not sure if it’s the best idea to crash at the Redwood Motel. What if that waitress tells people she sent us up to Wildeye’s house?”
“They won’t be looking for two people who triggered a landslide,” he said. “But on the other hand, I don’t want nosy people knocking on the door or logging my tag number while we’re sleeping.”
I certainly didn’t disagree. So while he made a quick stop to pick up the things we’d left in the motel room, I futzed around with the search function on the GPS until it brought up the closest motel off the highway, about ten miles south of Golden Peak. It took us a half hour to get there.
Tucked into grass-covered cliffs facing the ocean, the Lucia Inn was all beachy clapboard and white picket fence, geared toward retirees taking leisurely excursions up the coast of California. We got the last room with double queen beds available and dumped our bags onto the creaking wood floor.
While Lon showered in the pale pink bathroom, I managed to get a broadband signal on his tablet and unfolded the scrap of paper from Wildeye’s notebook. I tried looking up “Naos Ophis” in quotes. Nothing. Not one single hit. How was that possible? Maybe Wildeye had the spelling wrong, after all. But searching for variations proved just as futile. Maybe Lon would have other ideas. He was the linguaphile.
Changing tactics, I typed Wildeye’s mystery address into a map search, which located it in fifteen cities. Better than hundreds of hits, I supposed, and most of them were in the West. But we couldn’t exactly traipse around the country searching for the right one. And what was I even looking for, exactly? Most of the locations looked to be houses in residential neighborhoods. One convenience store. And—
Rooke Gardens. Pasadena, California.
Long-forgotten memories bloomed inside my head.
I raced to the bathroom and knocked, shouting against the peeling pink paint. “Lon! I know the address in the notebook. It’s in Pasadena.”
