Smirking briefly, he started making calls, finding a place for them to stay and getting special access to the museum.
While he was busy, Diana pored over the old ley line map she’d tucked into her bag at the safe house. She cross-referenced it with what she knew about the shifts of magnetic fields in the area, marking likely search areas.
Hopefully they would find something at the museum or through one of their sources that might narrow down the possibilities. After a while, she put away the maps and settled down to sleep. It was a good idea to conserve energy for what was coming.
She slept the rest of the way to France, aware on some level of Alec’s watchful gaze on her for the duration of the flight.
28
Toulouse was known as the pink city because of the brickwork on the old buildings in town and along the river that flowed through it, the Garonne. Diana had zipped through it on her way to the nearby cities of Barcelona and Bordeaux. They had a safe house in Provence that Logan especially liked, but Diana hadn’t spent any real time in Toulouse before.
She had a basic idea about the layout of the center of town. The natural history museum was attached to a complex of public gardens near the Palais de Justice, the city’s courthouse. Alec had rented a recently renovated eighteenth-century house near the gardens to use as their base of operations. The three-story building was meant for multiple families, but Alec had rented the entire thing to make sure they had complete privacy.
Diana put her pack in the bedroom. From the window, she could see part of the public gardens. It was not quite dark yet, and there were still people milling about, enjoying the late light despite the humidity in the air. After fishing her super phone from her pack, she made a call to arrange for one of her bikes to be delivered before dark fell.
She and her sisters had resources in every country in the world, and it was a good idea to avoid being restricted by a car in this town. Europe’s small and narrow streets were difficult to navigate, and she didn’t know where this search was going to take her.
Us.
Having second thoughts, she called back her service and had one of her spare bikes delivered as well. One for her and one for Alec. She couldn’t leave him behind at this point.
Besides, he had a definite knack for tracking her down. Which was weird. Elementals had evolved to be difficult—nearly impossible—to trace. Except by their own kind. . .and their mates.
* * *
Summer heat generally meant shorter hours at the municipal buildings of the city, but it also meant longer days with people lingering in the park as it cooled off. It was late evening before it was empty enough to enter the area surrounding the museum and its small botanical garden. Diana led Alec around to one side near the greenhouses where she jumped the fence in one smooth motion.
“You know, we could have had the museum’s curator lead us around,” Alec said, looking askance at the fence and then down at his designer suit. “It wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“And we tell him what? That we’re looking for signs you’ve been robbed by a bunch of witches?” Diana said from the other side of the fence, hands on her hips.
“Fine,” he muttered, jumping over the railing at human speed.
Using his vampire grace, he avoided snagging his suit, but he landed in a particularly muddy spot. He shot her a look, shaking the mud off his shoes.
“Seriously? Why did you wear those anyway?” she asked, gesturing to his feet. “They must cost like thousands of dollars. Those are not caper shoes.”
He grinned at her. “This is a caper?”
“Close enough. Come on. Let’s take a look and see if any plants have been lifted from the garden,” she replied, rounding the greenhouse.
“Okay, I’m going to ask. How can you tell normal gardening activity from outright theft?” he asked and then stopped short, looking at a small hole in the dirt where a plant had been clearly ripped out by the roots.
“Yeah. Not exactly subtle. They’ll want to keep the plants as fresh as possible for as long as possible so they take the whole thing, roots and all. I think this one was betel nut,” she said, bending to examine the labels fixed to little sticks in the grounds. “Look for more.”
They split up and found an additional four more stolen plants.
“Three of the usual suspects: henbane, belladonna, and anise seed. And that last one, alihotsy, is pretty rare. It had been used in some dark spells in the past,” Diana said as he knelt in front of a particularly large hole in the ground. “The circle has definitely been here.”
Alec straightened up. “I thought alihotsy was fictional.”
“Most people do. You know it as asafoetida but it’s a specific subspecies that only grows in a specific corner of Eastern Europe. . .and museum collections.”
“Interesting. Do you think we need to look inside?”
“Definitely. We need to pay special attention to their gem and fossil collections,” Diana said, leading him toward the back doors.
No cameras were apparent on the exterior of the building. The doors, however, were sure to be wired. She had bent over the back door and was starting to tap into the electrical system when Alec tugged on her shirt. He whipped out a key from his suit pocket and nudged her toward another door.
“How much did you pay for that?” she asked with a knowing smile.
“Actually, I called in a favor. No silver crossed any palms. Honest,” he said, taking the lead as they moved into the darkened interior of the museum.
Left of the door, there were a number of skeletons set into the wall of windows between two panes of glass. It was a striking effect, but most of the skeletal remains were plastic reconstructions, so they moved on. They quickly glanced over the rest of the fossil collection and concluded that none of the genuine ones were missing. The ground up powder of human and animal bones was a common base in dark spells.
Unfortunately, their luck didn’t hold. Diana knew there was trouble when they stepped into the gemstone and mineral exhibits.
“It’s the fucking meteorites.”
Alec frowned. “They’re still here,” he said, pointing at the stones in their display case.
“No, they’re not,” she replied, rubbing her forehead at the hairline. “These are definitely common earth rocks, not meteorites.”
“How can you tell without looking at them microscopically? Do you have a geology degree that I don’t know about?”
“I can tell when something is not from here. Something not of the Mother. And these are just rocks,” Diana said, turning to meet his eyes. “This is not good. If I’d known they had meteorites here, I wouldn’t have waited till night to take a look around.”
“What can they do with them? I know they are prized as materials for weapons, but what can they do in spells? Magic is centered around the natural world, isn’t it?” he asked, frowning at the display.
“That’s exactly why they’re so useful in weapons. If the forger knows what he’s doing, they can break through any sort of protection spell. Fortunately most don’t. The circle shouldn’t be able to use them in spells properly, but they’ve been able to innovate in unexpected ways. Maybe they think they’ve found a way to use them in their magic,” Diana mused, biting her lip.
“Or they’re going to try and use them to forge weapons to use against you,” he added in a worried tone.
“I doubt they know what I am. Besides, we wield weapons like that sometimes and spar against each other. We’re not immune to the effects, but they can’t undo our magic. Our abilities are a facet of the Mother and don’t require spells to use. Not something undone so easily. These stones haven’t been missing for long. Judging from the state of the garden, the theft happened within the last few days. It would take a master much longer to forge a weapon.”
“And if they can find a way to work them into their spell-craft instead of using them to forge weapons?”
“Ve vill burn that bridge vhen ve come to it,” she said i
n a terrible Transylvanian accent, and he broke into a grin.
“Don’t make me smile. This is serious,” he said, forcing a scowl over his handsome features.
“I can’t help being hilarious,” she said with a perfectly straight face, making him laugh outright before leading the way deeper into the museum.
They checked the other gem and mineral cases, but nothing else was missing despite the presence of several minerals useful in spell craft.
“They left some valuable things behind,” Alec said. “Maybe they didn’t want to get greedy and alert the museum’s security to the thefts. It looks like they took only what they really needed.”
“Or they didn’t know the value of the other things in here. My gut still says untrained in traditional spellcraft. Do the most common spell books, the kind outsiders can get their hands on, mention the healing properties of jade? Or the energizing boosts from amethysts? Only trained witches learn how to use them in their spells. These guys might have had no idea,” she said, heading toward the exit.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But too many things missing would alert the authorities. And they might want to blend right now and not call attention to the theft,” Alec pointed out as they went out the door and back into the garden.
“Doesn’t matter. We need to start looking for that farmhouse. They might not be there anymore, but it’s got to be a better lead than this. Meteorites can’t be traced—at least not from a distance. They are not of the Mother and so are outside of our ability to track. But they sometimes buzz like hell when we are close.”
Alec harrumphed. After waiting for some late-night passersby to leave the park entrance clear, they jumped the fence. They slipped across the street unnoticed by others still walking about.
“But if you were near a meteorite-based weapon, you could sense them right? I thought you could tell what wasn’t of the Mother as readily as what was?”
“When it has a heartbeat and is making trouble yes, but when it’s inanimate, what doesn’t belong isn’t easy to find from a distance. It doesn’t vibrate on the same frequency that earthly things do—and it’s not apparent till you’re close to it. If it’s terrestrial and significant, the Earth Elemental could connect to it to track it down, provided we could narrow the search enough to differentiate it from others of its kind. But not something extraterrestrial in origin,” she said. “It’s not a viable lead. What have your men done to find the farmhouse?”
“They are out looking at likely properties based on matching descriptions from tax records and the like. They eliminated a few possibilities, but they aren’t capable of detecting ley lines, and I haven’t found a ley line witch nearby yet. We should get out there ourselves,” he said.
“My thoughts exactly,” Diana murmured, heading to the garage.
She was pleased to see that their MTT turbine bikes had been delivered, along with a matching set of leathers for Alec.
“Why are there two? I ordered a car to take us to start searching in the areas you pointed out. It’s a long ride to get out there on a bike.”
Diana beamed. “Not at the speeds these two are capable of. The black Turbine is mine and the blue is yours. These two bikes are literally the fastest and second-fastest in the world,” she said, gesturing to each bike in turn. “They’ve been specially modded by specialists I found in Tokyo. . .and a little juice courtesy of Gia. With the mods, they leave the Dodge Tomahawk in the dust,” she said, stroking the black bike lovingly. “Technically, these two clock out at the same speed but the black one is faster on the curves.”
“Err, I haven’t ridden one of these in a while,” he said, looking down at the leathers and helmet with less than his usual confidence.
Diana waved off his concern. “With your supernatural reflexes, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said before heading for the staircase to get her pack from her room,
She waited till he was out of sight to grin. The vampire had actually gone pale. That had to be a real achievement. When she returned with her pack, Alec tried to convince her to take the car again, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“These bikes are more flexible on all terrain than your stretched out sedans or SUVs. Come on, it’ll be fine. Plus this way, we can split up to cover more territory in the hot spots,” she said as she climbed onto her bike. “Oh, and Alec?”
“Yeah?”
“If you scratch my baby, I’ll kick your ass into next week,” she said with a sweet smile as she started the bike.
“Right,” Alec said, looking down at the bike in a sour look of dismay as he pulled on his helmet.
She pulled out of the garage and waited on the drive until he reluctantly mounted his. Minutes later, he was following her out of town on the world’s second-fastest bike.
29
They were running out of paved roads in the rural countryside surrounding Toulouse. Their bikes were pretty quiet on the road, quieter than occasional cars that passed.
They’d hit the largest hotspots near town already, and Alec’s men had been making a sweep at the far end of the range they’d defined. They were looking to match the rough farmhouse drawing Alec had made. At the rate they were going, the two groups would meet in the middle by dawn.
Diana stopped her bike under a tree and waited for Alec to pull up alongside her.
“Did we miss a ley line?” he asked.
“I think so. There used to be a major point of convergence near here at the base of these hills. It shifted away from the stream in this area,” she said, scanning the darkness, her night vision giving her a clearer view than his.
“Wouldn’t it shift closer to the water?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. Too many people have moved close to the stream. They build their houses near them as long as the law allows. The manipulation of energy and water to converge in one place, namely a house’s electricity and plumbing, forces ley lines farther away. The point of convergence was strong but unstable. I think we should head into the hills in the east, away from the water and the houses in this area. If there are any old homesteads in your records that wouldn’t have electricity or running water, we should start there.”
He nodded and made the call to his staff, trying to find farmhouses in the area they were headed to.
According to their research, there were two possibilities. He relayed GPS coordinates to Diana, and they were on their way.
* * *
The speed at which they drove in the darkness made Alec distinctly nervous for Diana. He knew she would be all right if they crashed, but her delicate build and fragile features put his protective instincts into overdrive.
To make things worse, she had opted to leave the lights turned off on their bikes, another detail that made him extremely anxious.
He followed the other bike as closely as he could. His senses were also in overdrive from all of the adrenaline. He was able to smell the night air, the greenery and warmth radiating off the soil despite the speed at which they were traveling.
Ahead of him, Diana crested a hill in the dark and paused. She waited for him to catch up and then lifted her visor. “This is the wrong way. I don’t feel any ley lines this way. Let’s turn around and head down west,” she said, gesturing to another road in the distance.
“There won’t be any houses down that way at all according to the records,” he added.
“They’re just spread farther apart, which is what we’re looking for. And there is a greater likelihood of finding their hiding place near a convergence point,” she said, dropping her visor and heading off to find the start of the road in the distance.
It took another half hour before they found the leyline and the abandoned farmhouse Diana had seen in the Mother’s memory. Wordlessly, they stopped some distance away, parking the bikes behind a stand of trees. They were too far away to see if the house was occupied or not.
Diana took off her helmet and paused in a break in the trees. Taking his own helmet off, he moved to stand next to her. Unsure wha
t to do, he studied her taught profile. Tension was coming off her in waves.
“Whatever we find, we are here to make this right,” he said firmly.
“Yeah,” Diana said, sucking in a deep breath before starting toward the house.
* * *
As they crept closer to the structure, they could see the old place looked better from a distance. Up close, the house was a ramshackle. The left side of the roof was missing, as well as part of the wall closest to them. A crumbling barn was moldering on their right.
Diana paused catty-corner from the house, looking for signs of other people in the vicinity. “No heat signatures that aren’t animal-sized. No child-sized ones either,” she finally said, her voice heavy.
“Let’s take a closer look. They might have left something behind.”
“Like a body under a concealment spell,” she muttered, running over the elephant in the room with a truck.
“Yeah, something like that,” he said softly before subsiding as they approached the house.
Diana didn’t bother with the door; using instead a gap in the wall into what ended up being a ruined kitchen. Moonlight filtered through the holes in the ceiling, revealing a wooden table on its side. All the chairs were gone, but in the corner, a broken down china cabinet with no glass still stood. A lone stirring spoon was its only occupant.
Turning in a slow circle, she examined the residual heat signatures in the room. People had passed through it in the last week, but the forms were too degraded to see clearly. The ambient heat in the room contributed to the weakness of the signal.
She motioned to Alec who was waiting outside the hole in the wall.
“There are no clear signatures. Only adult-sized people were in this room. No one appears to have been here recently,” she said.
As Diana made her way through the empty front rooms, Alec ducked inside through the gap, letting her look for signs of the children without adding his own slight heat to the mix.
Fire: The Elementals Book One Page 22
