“Wait, what?” I said. “How the hell did you know about that? Are you with Nicola right now?”
“She showed up at my place half an hour ago,” he said. I heard footsteps through the phone, and when Eric spoke again, his voice was much quieter. “She’s convinced you and her father are keeping things from her, and she came here to vent. Why weren’t you watching her this morning?”
“I went to talk to Nathan, and I didn’t think bringing her along was the best idea. Now, do you mind telling me how you knew about my locator spell? I thought you people couldn’t use magic.”
The line stayed silent a moment.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “Suffice it to say we can’t use magic, but we can detect when it’s being used around us. I’ve been keeping tabs on Nicola for weeks now.”
If Nicola was with Eric, she was likely as safe as she’d be with me. There were things I wanted to take care of that would be a lot easier to achieve if I had a trustworthy babysitter for Nicola. I couldn’t very well leave her alone with Ada again, but maybe Eric could keep her busy for a while.
“I need a favor,” I told him. “Can you watch her for a few hours? Make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid?”
“I can try,” he said. “No promises, though. You know how she is.”
“Do your best. And by that, I mean don’t let her out of your sight for even a second. This whole thing is looking a lot worse than I thought. I need to run down a source, and Nicola can’t come with me. Can I rely on you or not?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Let me know the second you’re back, though. If Nic figures out I’m helping you, she’s likely to have a fit and take off again. I’m on my own up here, Alex. It’s not like I can call on my network to track her down if she decides to run out on me when I eventually have to take a piss or something.”
I gave him a few vague reassurances that I wouldn’t take his head off if Nicola managed to give him the slip, then ended the call.
“Mind if I hold onto this?” I said to Ada, holding up the pentacle.
She nodded once, then followed me to the front door where I began searching the closet for the warmest clothing I could find.
“Are you going to get Nicola?” she asked.
“Not just yet,” I told her, slipping into the puffy jacket Nicola had been wearing the night before. “First, I’m going to have a conversation with a sasquatch.”
Ada looked at me like I’d just said… well, like I’d just said I was going to have a conversation with a sasquatch. It sounded as crazy to me as it probably did to her, but to her credit, she didn’t try to stop me. I suppose after everything she’d just experienced, accepting the notion that a supposedly mythical creature wasn’t so mythical after all wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination.
Now all I had to do was convince myself the same thing.
Chapter Thirteen
Having outfitted myself from the chalet’s gear room, I was dressed in a heavy winter parka, ski pants, and the bulky waterproof boots I was currently trying to attach snowshoes to. The straps were impossible to work with mitts on, so I froze my fingers to near total numbness in the struggle to thread six long rubber tails through their respective buckles. Once the blasted things were strapped to my feet, I stood up and blew on my hands to warm them before shoving them back into the mitts. The security guard observed me from the doorway of his little shack, no doubt laughing to himself at how stupid I looked when I attempted to figure out how to walk with two big chunks of plastic on my feet. The snowshoes forced me into a weird bowlegged stance that made it tricky to move without clacking them together.
“Snow’s not that deep,” the guard said. “If all you want to do is take a look at the site, you don’t need them snowshoes.”
I’d already taken a brief look at the Bloedermeyer development site before putting on the snowshoes, and all I’d learned was that I was going to have to explore the surrounding woods. I didn’t exactly feel like explaining myself to the guard, so I just smiled and nodded like the idiot he seemed to think I was. I then waddled over to the burnt-out shell of the sabotaged excavator. The machine was built about as tough as they came, but something had caused the gas tank to explode from within. The resulting blast had torn a hole in the side of the excavator’s body, knocking the beast over onto its side. One of the caterpillar treads had snapped in half and crumpled into a heap on the blackened snow. The cabin was nothing more than a scorched husk of twisted metal and a few splotches of burnt plastic. While the long arm attached to the shovel end of the excavator still retained its bright yellow paint job, the rest of the machine was coated with a thick layer of soot.
The security guard had followed me. He nodded towards the wreckage and said “Fire inspector thinks the only way it coulda blown up the way it did, was if someone had put explosives right on the gas tank. You ask me, though, that just ain’t possible.”
“Why not?” I asked. “There’s only one guard on duty at any given time, right? It would have been easy for someone to have snuck in to plant a nasty surprise. Anyone with half a brain can use the internet to look up instructions on how to build pipe bombs. It wouldn’t be the first time a radical environmentalist used explosives to sabotage a construction site.”
“That’s why it don’t sound right to me,” the guard said. “Sure, some hippy coulda made explosives outta bath salts and dreadlocks, and maybe they coulda snuck in here overnight, but the inspector said the bomb’d have to be inside the excavator’s body. You know how many people like to break into construction sites? These babies are built with locks on everything to keep drunk kids from screwing around with ‘em.”
I walked around to get a better angle on the back of the excavator. Jagged metal shards had been peeled out and away from the hole left by the explosion. If something had been attached to the outside of the excavator, the resulting blast would have pushed metal into the guts of the machine instead.
“Could someone who works here have been in on it?” I asked. “How many keys are there for this thing?”
“There’s a set locked in the on-site office, but they’ve been accounted for,” the guard said. “Only other guy that had a key was Frank, and I can guarantee you he wasn’t involved.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
The guard gestured towards the burnt out cabin. “Frank never struck me as the kind of guy who’d go and suicide bomb hisself. This wasn’t his first job for Bloedermeyer. Frank’d been working sites like this most of his life.”
We fell silent. I tried to picture the incident. The explosion would have been massive for it to tip the heavy excavator over. Poor Frank hadn’t stood a chance of surviving. As committed as most militant environmentalists were, there was virtually no chance anyone would have voluntarily climbed into the driver’s seat knowing there were explosives attached to the gas tank.
The guard wandered back to his post, leaving me to do my thing. I’d seen what there was to be seen with mundane vision, so I activated my mage sight and scanned the area again. The excavator gave up no additional secrets. Not a wisp of trace magic hung in the air. Short of climbing up there to peer down into the guts of the fallen beast, I did everything I could to check for signs of residual magic around the twisted metal remains. If magic had been used, either the blast or the elements had washed it clean away in the intervening hours.
All in all, it was about what I expected to learn from the construction site itself. The development in progress was a cleared patch of forest land the size of four or five football fields. Several concrete foundations and early skeletal support pillars had gone up here and there, but the entire project was obviously quite far behind schedule. Almost everything was covered in a layer of snow from the recent storm. The crews seemed to have gotten as far as clearing only one of the building sites before the accident had forced a halt to any further work. The hard-packed snow near the entrance to the development and around the building site was heavily marked with footprints and
tire tracks, but everything beyond that was completely untracked.
Glad of the snowshoes once I began trekking towards the tree line, I set off in a direction that would take me even farther away from the village. I’d scoured whatever satellite and topographical maps I could bring up on my phone before arriving on the site, focusing specifically on the large expanse of empty wilderness along the northeastern edge of town. Bordered by the resort, the highway, and the mountains themselves, this untouched pocket of wilderness was where I hoped I’d finally find some answers to the question of who was stirring up the local wildlife and spirits against the Bloedermeyer family.
The farther I pushed into the forest, the tougher the going became. Even with snowshoes, I sank to my thighs in places where the snow had piled up in drifts like sweeping white waves. Every tree looked the same, and other than the set of tracks marking the path behind me, I quickly lost all sense of direction. Down among the towering evergreen trees, it was impossible to use the nearby mountain peaks as landmarks. All I could do was keep hiking in the direction my gut instinct told me to go, hoping I’d stumble onto some kind of clue that would point me towards the sasquatch’s home.
Stupid? Maybe. But if someone with as much knowledge of local legends as Nathan didn’t know whether the sasquatch was even real or not, it wasn’t like anyone could give me GPS coordinates to the creature’s doorstep. If a big hairy beast was roaming these woods, it had to leave a trail of some kind. All I had to do was hike around until I found a sign indicating I was on the right track.
After an hour of slogging through increasingly deeper snow, I came across something unsettling. A familiar set of snowshoe tracks crossed the snow in front of me. I’d been intermittently checking my progress via a GPS-enabled app on my phone, and until this moment I didn’t think I’d been traveling in anything but a straight line. Close inspection of the snowshoe claw print left no doubt that I’d somehow doubled back on myself. In fact, looking at the app again, my position seemed to have jumped wildly over the last mile or so. Waypoints were scattered everywhere, only the last few markers sitting in a straight line that matched up with the path I’d just forged through the snow.
Frustrated, I unslung my backpack and plopped down into the snow. Ada had prepared three sandwiches and a thermos of coffee for me. I devoured two of the sandwiches, drank half the coffee, then took stock of my situation. It was mid-afternoon, and the hazy blotch of sun I could see through the clouds was already sinking towards the western horizon. I had two or three more hours of daylight at best, and I did not want to be caught out after dark. If this sasquatch was somehow corrupting the local wildlife, I’d be an easy target once the sun went down. Even now, I started at every sound, worried I was about to catch sight of another wolf leaping for my throat.
I stuffed the remains of my late lunch back into my bag and got back to my feet. I’d been periodically casting about with my mage sight hoping to catch a glimpse of something that might indicate concealment spells or wards had been put in place for protection, but nothing obvious had revealed itself. There had to be more to this picture than even my enhanced sight could pick up, though. It was nothing I could put my finger on, but the wackiness of my GPS app and the unshakeable disorientation suggested supernatural forces were at play.
On a hunch, I pulled out my phone and set the GPS to update more frequently. My battery was getting dangerously low, but if I was right, all I had to do was start walking directly into the zone where my GPS had lost accuracy on my first loop. Cutting a line directly through the circle I’d already traveled, I only had to walk for thirty minutes before new waypoints began dropping themselves everywhere but on my actual location. I checked behind me to ensure my trail was still as straight as possible between the trees. The GPS made it seem as though I’d been zigzagging wildly, setting waypoint pins as far as half a mile apart from each other.
So had I simply entered a zone of GPS interference, or was there some force trying to keep people out of the area? A light tingle in the sensitive skin behind my ears suggested magic in the air. It was so subtle I probably hadn’t noticed it while laboring to break trail through heavy snow the first time I’d passed through the area. Whatever it was, it was completely invisible to my mage sight.
I continued onwards. After crossing my initial trail through the zone of GPS confusion, I did my best to walk straight forward instead of letting myself veer off to either side. The straighter the path I walked, the stronger I experienced a powerful urge to turn away. After twenty more minutes of careful progression, I discovered that even twisting my torso to look behind me relieved some of the mental pressure to go any direction but forward. Every step increased the mental resistance, as though the snow and trees themselves were pushing me away.
So I put my head down and trudged into it. Every time I felt the resistance lessen a little, I stopped and turned slowly from left to right, trying to tune into the one direction that made me most anxious. By the time I’d traveled another half mile, I felt sick to my stomach with worry. Visions of lying half-frozen in the snow plagued me, filling me with a sickly dread that no one would even find my body if I so much as stumbled and twisted an ankle. Behind me were safety and security. Ahead of me lay only a foreboding sense of danger and death.
Meaning I was headed in exactly the right direction.
The terrain angled upward ever so slightly at first, then steeper and steeper until I was using my hands to paw at the slope in front of me. Each step forward caused me to slide back half a foot. These sliding steps packed loose snow into a firm platform I could eventually push down, lifting my other leg to repeat the process. My lungs burned from inhaling cold air in heavy gasps, and my thighs trembled like I was stuck on a StairMaster set to max difficulty. Working my way upwards was so exhausting, I eventually had to sit down for a break to catch my breath and eat the last of my lunch.
When I finally crested the edge of the slope, I looked back down and saw that I’d hardly climbed more than a few dozen yards. The angle didn’t even look that steep. It was something a child might eagerly toboggan down. Just standing on the little plateau was tiring, though. An oppressive weight pushed down on me. It affected my thoughts as well as my body. Where I’d once been able to think of little other than turning around and going home, I now wanted only to sit down and give up. My eyelids drooped. My legs and arms were dead weight too heavy to contemplate lifting. Every thought in my head revolved around my desperate desire to lie down for just a little while.
Almost every thought, that is. A dim part of my brain registered the opening in the rocky cliff band ahead of me. It drove me to put one foot in front of the other, numbly marching me forward against my body’s every wish.
The second I crossed the threshold of the cave, the compulsion fell away. I blinked and drew a deep breath. My mind was clear once again, no longer firing a barrage of warnings to flee for my life. Whatever doubts I’d had whether or not something was living in this patch of wilderness on the edge of town disappeared. With the veil lifted, the constant desire to be anywhere but at the opening to this cave was unmistakable. Someone or something was trying to prevent anyone from entering this particular cave.
After unstrapping my snowshoes from my feet and stashing them next to the cave entrance, I dug out my phone. I dismissed the low battery warning and turned on the LED flashlight. Pointing it down into the darkness of the cave, I strode forward, determined to learn what was working so hard to keep people away from its home.
Chapter Fourteen
Although the cave’s opening was little more than a narrow fissure in the cliff face, it quickly widened into a kind of natural pathway the deeper I progressed. The ceiling was only seven or eight feet high, and the walls were wide enough I could only just brush my fingers against them if I stretched my arms out as far as they’d go. The ground beneath my feet was level and smooth past the entryway snow drifts, looking almost like it had been hewn out with primitive tools before becoming polished b
y the passage of feet and time. Unlike the floors, the route the cave took was rough and jagged, zigzagging back and forth every few feet like the maw of some great stone beast waiting to crush anyone stupid enough to pass between its teeth. I paused at each new turn, blocking my phone’s light with my thumb and peering around the next corner to make sure I wasn’t about to stumble headlong into trouble.
Around one of these sharp curves, I saw the flickering orange glow lighting the way ahead of me. Warm air greeted me when I crept closer, the crackling hiss and pop of a fire serving as a clear sign I’d found what I’d been looking for.
When I finally poked my head around the last corner, I saw something out of a children’s storybook. The source of the warm and inviting light was a meticulously crafted stone fireplace built against the far wall. Tendrils of smoke rose up towards a crack in the ceiling serving as a natural chimney. A carpet made of tightly woven reeds covered most of the roughly circular stone floor. Here and there were scattered piles of things which appeared to have been scrounged from yard sales and antique fairs. A rusted old lantern sat on a steamer trunk next to a cigar box overflowing with tarnished silverware. Musty cloth-bound books were stacked in several piles around the room. An inviting array of mismatched blankets and cushions were heaped in a large nest-like sleeping area. Other than a couple of broken wooden stools lying on their sides next to a rough wooden bench, the only real piece of furniture was a cracked old leather reclining chair parked near the fire.
And sitting in that chair, puffing away on a long stem pipe, was a creature of legend.
“Come in if in is where you want to come,” the sasquatch said without turning its head towards me. His voice was deep and gruff. His words were measured and slow.
I straightened up from where I’d been spying, and I walked cautiously into the room. There was no place for me to sit, so I went to stand near the fire. It was more than a little unnerving to be in the presence of something that could most likely snap my spine with a flick of its hand, so I hovered just outside striking range of the sasquatch’s long and hairy arms.
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 12
