by Angie Fox
Trying to look inconspicuous in my soaked dress and switch stars, I ducked into an empty elevator as a half dozen bellhops unloaded a massive iron urn from the elevator next to me. I jabbed the lobby button until the heavy doors thunked closed.
Patrons crowded the casino downstairs, gambling and drinking as more hotel staff rushed for the magical thirteenth floor.
I spotted Pirate next to the Keno parlor eating peanuts from an abandoned buffet plate. "Lizzie!" Pirate forgot his meal and dashed across the pink- and green-swirled carpet.
"What are you doing?" I scanned the casino lobby. "Are the witches here?"
"Nope," he said, snuggling into my arms. "I escaped."
I sank into a pink casino chair with him.
"So," Pirate said, "tell me about the fight. You kick some butt?" He closed his eyes as I rubbed his head. "I tried to get up there, but they don't make elevators with dogs in mind."
"I don't want to talk about it."
I was relieved, grateful that we'd prevented a tragedy. Yet I'd never felt so alone. There'd be no help from the Red Skulls or Dimitri. I knew I had to let them go, but at the same time, I didn't know what to do next. The demons were still coming. They'd slowed, but they certainly hadn't stopped.
The dark mark burned against my palm. It had given me the power to survive—so far—but now what? Was I here, alive, only to watch the demons take Las Vegas?
"Aw, well that's nice," Pirate said, roaring out a wide doggie yawn as he settled in next to me. "Let's go upstairs and get a nap."
Bless Pirate. "The thing is," I began, trying to figure out how to explain the last twenty-four hours. I was starting to feel like Jack Bauer. The thirteenth floor was destroyed, the demons wanted the Red Skulls and we had to get out of here ourselves. I needed to figure out my next step, yet one thought tugged at me.
Dimitri loved me.
On some level, I think I knew. I'd certainly craved it. But it was an entirely different thing to have him say it. I loved him too. And it wasn't because he was strong, loyal and all together devastating in the sack. He was the first man who made me feel like I wanted to be more than Lizzie the superorganized, Lizzie the good girl. True, he hadn't been himself lately. But I had to think there might be some hope for us yet.
My gut twisted with how I'd let him down. He'd blown into Vegas, thinking he had the power to fight off the succubi. I'd taken that away from him. I'd saved him, but I'd also lied about it. In my defense, we'd just gotten back from the second layer of hell, so I hadn't exactly been thinking straight. Besides, we'd known each other for less than two weeks. I've never been the type to jump into things. It had been too early. I wasn't sure. I didn't know how he'd feel about' me—or the fact that he could no longer claim his pure griffin heritage—once he'd had a chance to think.
Fear skittered through me. If we didn't play this thing right, I might never see him again.
"No," I said. "It ends here." I launched myself off the chair.
"Hey, now," Pirate said, slipping sideways into the spot I'd vacated.
If it was up to me, then fine. I'd figure out how this whole thing started, exactly why—out of all the half fairies—Serena chose Phil. I had to think it was something more sinister than mere chance. Whatever it was, I'd use it to fry the demons.
"We have to think," I told Pirate. "What does Phil have that could possibly give him any power? We hadn't seen anything in his house to indicate he was particularly magical. I tried to recall anything out of the ordinary among the wedding brochures, shrine to my retainer and lunch receipts. He didn't have a strong fairy heritage. What then?"
"Oh, gee, Lizzie. I don't—"
Blood rushed to my head as it hit me. It was about power, and then some.
I rushed to the concierge desk. "Skeep! I need a Skeep!"
Chapter Nineteen
Eight Skeeps rushed straight for me. "Meko!" I called out to the orange ball of fire. "I have an important mission for you, okay? I need you to find someone who knows the Hoover Dam. Fast."
Meko zipped away.
Shoot. I hadn't mentioned I needed someone close by. I wasn't too eager to stick around with everyone rushing to the emergency on thirteen. Eventually, they were going to start looking around for survivors… or someone to blame.
According to Grandma, Skeeps tended to be literal. I sure hoped fast meant close, and while we were getting specific—connected. I needed to see some things for myself and I doubted Hoover Dam officials were going to let just anybody in. Uncle Phil worked at one of the biggest power-generating plants in the nation.
I tossed my keys to a second Skeep. "Listen, can you send someone to retrieve two Harleys parked at the airport, section L-8?"
"Immediately!" He and my keys disappeared with a large pop.
Twenty seconds later, Meko reappeared.
"My apologies!" he gushed. "I would have been back sooner, but my aura tends to stick." He shook himself like a wet dog. "I have your expert."
Son of a gun. It had taken me longer to brush the peanut crumbs off Pirate's back. How they got there was still a mystery.
"Ezra," Meko dipped into a row of slot machines against the wall. "We have a guest who needs you."
A ghostly head emerged from the Lucky 7-7-7 machine. He had sandy red hair and a dusting of freckles along his nose and cheeks. "If I can have a minute to compose myself," he said, cringing.
"Hey," I said, trying to imagine his head without the polished slot handle sticking out of it, "you're one of the doormen, aren't you?"
"I'm a bellhop," he corrected.
"Sure," I said, nodding. I recognized him from when Max had taken me to see the demon prison. It had been a tough night and I'd been impressed with how sweet the bellhop had been. He'd looked real enough to me, well, before he'd poked his head through the slot machine.
The phantom bellhop glided out of the Lucky 7 and hovered a few inches off the floor.
"Hiya, Ezra!" Pirate rushed in, paws out, mouth open, wet doggie nose and tongue at the ready and ended up leaping straight through the ghost.
"You two know each other?" Impossible. I'd only met Ezra once.
The ghost's shoulders slumped.
"Oh yeah," Pirate said, winding in, around and through Ezra's ankles. "He's been teaching me how to play Scrabble!"
I stared at my dog. "You can't spell."
"Not with that attitude." Pirate plopped his rear onto the carpet.
Fantastic. Pirate had been having people over. "Is this true?" I asked the ghost, already knowing the answer. Pirate could make friends with a garden gnome.
"Aw, Lizzie. Don't get him in trouble. I asked," Pirate said. "Just like when Meko took me to Jodi Maroni's Sausage Kingdom."
"How?" What had Pirate been doing while I was away? Couldn't he stay put like a regular dog?
"Easy," Pirate said, his tail thumping against the floor. "He's a Skeep and I called him and he said, 'How can I serve you?' and I said I'd give anything for a bratwurst."
Meko glowed with pride.
At least Ezra knew he'd overstepped his bounds. "I'm very sorry," the ghost said. "I don't normally visit guests in their rooms. I know it's a breach of protocol. But his essence called out to me."
"Um, hum," Pirate said. "I've got one of them special essences."
He had an essence all right. Wet dog. "We're going to discuss this later," I said, more than a little annoyed.
The ghost glanced at my hand and visibly paled. His eyes rested on my devil's mark.
Was he afraid of me? Okay, yeah, I'd been feeling edgy since I sent Dimitri and the witches away, and the ghost knew he'd been out of line sneaking into my room.
Pirate nudged a cold nose under my hand. "Dang, Lizzie."
The 6-6-6 glowed with an eerie red light. I clamped it against my thigh, ignoring the sizzle that shot down my leg.
Ezra opened his mouth and then closed it, his body flickering.
"Don't you dare fade on me." If I had to be the problem solver for
every witch, fairy and leprechaun within a fifty-mile radius, he could at least give me the facts. "I'm looking for an expert on Hoover Dam. Is that you?"
Ezra ducked his head and smiled. "Yes, ma'am. I worked as an engineer on Boulder Dam."
"Sure. Why not?" I said, trying to wrap my mind around the ghost currently scratching the spot on Pirate's neck that made him thump his back leg. I thought I was the only one who knew about that.
"You can call it Hoover if you like, but it'll always be Boulder Dam to me," the ghost said.
Frankly, I didn't care what they called it. "We'll need your brains and also somebody who knows what's going on at the dam right now."
"I'll take you to see Joe Lipswitch."
That surprised me. "You know someone who works there?"
Ezra scoffed. "Joe lives and breathes that place. Spends most of his time in one of the old inspection tunnels off the Nevada spillway. I keep telling him he needs to get out more, but he's a stubborn one." Ezra shook his head sadly. "We'll have to go to him."
The realization crept over me. "Joe's dead, isn't he?"
"High scaling was dangerous work. Lots of guys got hit by falling rocks or those forty-pound jack-hammers they had to have lowered down to them. Joe says it happened so quick, he didn't feel a thing."
"And Joe's the best we have?" I glanced at Meko.
The orb dipped. "Ma'am, it is my job to bring you the best sources, information, snack foods, panty hose or anything else you require. I can assist you with restaurant reservations, tickets to the hottest shows on The Strip and plenty of—"
"Of course, Meko." I hated to cut the poor thing off, but we were in the middle of a crisis here. "I should have known you'd have it covered."
Meko glowed.
Why couldn't I meet a normal person with good information? Someone who wasn't a biker witch, eighty years dead or a half demon? Someone who hadn't been wandering the bowels of Hoover Dam since its construction. A real source like any other normal frickin' woman-on-a-mission would have?
"Field trip!" Pirate declared, launching himself off the chair and rushing for the door. He turned in a circle and sat. "You know you're going to need a ghost sniffer along. We canines have a sixth sense about us."
I hated to admit it, but… "You're right. We could use you." I certainly wasn't going to leave him alone.
It would be nice to have someone along who wasn't creeped out by the devil's mark on my hand. I adjusted my switch stars and slid my new hotel key card into an empty slot on my utility belt.
"Lighten up, Lizzie," Pirate said, practically dancing in place. "It's not like Joe's gonna marry a demon or start a big succubi invasion or give you a devil's mark or—"
"No, of course not," I said, before Pirate could cheer me up any more. For all I knew, Joe could be far worse.
Joe Lipswich lived in one of the tunnels used to inspect the dam during the half a century it took for the concrete to cure. Naturally, Joe's residence had to be sixty feet below the towering edge of Hoover Dam. Since he wouldn't come to us, we went to him, via the two o'clock Deluxe Hoover Dam Tour.
"Did it start yet?" Pirate's nose tickled me from where I'd hidden him in an oversized purse. I'd bought the thing at the Paradise Hotel gift shop. Made of woven straw, it made everywhere it touched itchy.
"Hush," I said, arranging the purse flap over Pirate's prying nostrils. There were no dogs allowed on the tour—or anywhere on the dam for that matter. Pirate shifted inside my purse.
Voices tended to carry in the sparse lobby below the observation deck. Our tour group was small, less than twenty of us in all. I tried not to fidget as the tourists checked their cameras and flipped through their guide books. I wished we'd had more of a crowd. It would make it easier for me to disappear into one of the inspection tunnels. I flipped through the guide book, one eye on Ezra. Luckily, no one seemed to be looking for a ghost squeezed behind the bronze statue dedicated to the men who built Hoover Dam.
People liked to see what they wanted to see.
Still, I motioned for Ezra to tuck in his elbows.
At last our guide introduced himself and led us into an immense elevator.
"Hoover Dam was begun in 1931 and dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935," the guide said as the elevator dropped seventy feet into the concrete bowls of the dam. It made my stomach dip to think of being surrounded by six million tons of concrete, steel and darkness.
We exited into a tunnel that grew narrower as we went. And where was Ezra? I craned my neck to see behind doors and into dark corners. I looked behind fellow tourists and even past a "restricted" door. Maybe I did like it better when he had his elbows sticking out.
We saw intake valves and turbines before our deluxe guide led us through round tunnels smelling of concrete and old steel. The passageways were barely taller than I was, their light bulbs dangling above us, casting shadows and daring me to depart down a lonely dark tunnel.
A soft voice touched behind my ear, nearly scaring me out of my gourd. "It's time," he whispered.
I whipped around to find Ezra poking his head out of the top of the tunnel. "Where have you been?" I hissed.
He nudged his head back to a particularly dark artery we'd passed. "Follow me."
I glanced at our guide up front, showing my fellow tourists the chalk inspection marks left behind in the 1930s and '40s. When he turned his back to us, I slipped into the side tunnel.
My heart echoed in my chest. I couldn't believe I was doing this. The light quickly vanished, and I had to reach out to the cold walls of the tunnel to guide myself. Ezra glowed faintly ahead. It was a strange feeling, this deliberate breaking of the rules. I didn't even like to walk on other people's lawns, much less cut out on a tour group at a major national landmark. A lot of the things I'd had to do in the last few weeks, I'd done because they were forced upon me. I'd had no choice, or at least that's what I'd told myself. But now I had a choice. And I was still doing it. I think sometimes when you change, the last person who knows about it is you.
Ezra halted and I had to make a quick stop myself to keep from barreling straight through him. "Joe does like to wander," he said with an apologetic glance over his shoulder. "Fortunately, he's not going too far."
Yeah, well those two might have all the time in the world, but I didn't.
"You ready, babe?" I dug Pirate, warm and snuggly, out of the bag.
"Hee-yah. I was born ready!" Pirate's nails scratched at the concrete as I eased him down next to me. He took the curve of the tunnel NASCAR-style.
Pirate took a quick left, with Ezra and I right behind. I cringed as the soles of my sandals hit a hollow metal grate. "Hold up, everybody." My voice echoed down the round passageways. "How sturdy is this?"
"It's hard to say," Ezra said. "But I've seen inspectors in here."
"What? In 1952?" I said, fighting a twinge of panic. I could see it now. Lizzie Brown, survivor of multiple demon attacks, taken out by a tunnel. This Joe person had better be worth it.
"Come on, Lizzie." Pirate took off, his tags jingling. "Follow me. I can take the pressure. I was bred to take the heat."
I pried my hand off the wall. The eerie red light revealed a metal grate with nothing underneath. The emptiness under my feet seemed to stretch into oblivion.
We took a series of twists and turns, more than I wanted to think about. Still, I tracked them like my life depended on it—which it would if Pirate lost his way.
Near the end of a shaft that I swear curved unnaturally to the left, Pirate hitched up on his back legs. "Hey! Nice hat."
Ezra let out a whoop. "Joe, you clown!" He clapped at a glowing, yellow orb. "I've got visitors for you."
The orb lengthened and grew into a lanky construction worker in dusty 1930s-style overalls. His white shirt stretched around muscular arms streaked with dust and sweat. He wore a crude-looking hat covered in what looked to be black goo.
He lifted his head and grinned as if he hadn't seen a woman in years. Joe h
ad a rawboned, friendly face, with a hooked, Roman nose and a dimple at the chin. "Well, dang, aren't you a sight?" he said, eyeing me a bit too appreciatively.
"Joe," Ezra said, embarrassed. "She's about seventy years too late."
Joe shook his head, as if to clear it. "My apologies, ma'am. It gets lonely down here. Add that to the fact that nobody can see me, hear me, talk to me. 'Cept Ezra here. And Mad Mertle, who jumped in '62."
"And Farsworth," Ezra added.
Joe rubbed his hand against his chin. "Nah. He gave up. Went to the light." His eyes searched as if we were outside instead of in a narrow tunnel deep in the dam.
"Aw, now that's too bad," Ezra murmured.
"I was hoping you could answer a few questions for me," I said to Joe. "I have an uncle who works here. Phil Whirley. I'm not sure what he does, but whatever it is, he's got demons after him."
Joe winced at the mention of demons. "Used to be I could go years without even smelling one. Now I have to work to avoid them."
"At the dam?" Now we were getting somewhere.
"How much do you like your uncle?" Joe asked.
"What do you mean?" I asked slowly.
Pirate wound his stubby little body around my legs. "Enough that she got the devil's mark," he said.
Joe's gaze swept over my body and rested on my glowing palm. "So I see." The muscles in his jaw worked. "In that case, you'd better act fast. Your man is sabotaging the dam's turbine timing system."
A shiver ran through me. "Not Phil." He wouldn't.
Ezra shot me an apologetic glance. "You said he married a she-demon."
"I said?" I hadn't told Ezra anything. "You've been telling him our business?" I asked Pirate.
He shot me an innocent doggie look. "Oh, this and that. In between high-stakes, winner-take-all Scrabble trash talk."
Ezra cleared his throat. "It's unnatural, a succubus marrying a half fairy. She probably hooked the human side of him, but with her ability to enhance people's powers, I'm willing to bet your uncle could do some serious damage."
Oh frig. I hadn't thought about the succubus giving Phil power.
Joe nodded. "He's got something going on. I've seen it myself. Now I'm no engineer, but I've been around long enough to know Phil Whirley's working on a massive power outage. This place lights up a good chunk of the West Coast."
