“But she’ll get away.”
“She’s not in the van. I think she went that way.” He pointed toward the trees and the river.
Yes, keep thinking that…
I ran as soundlessly as I could, not stepping onto the gravel until the last minute. As the agents darted off into the trees to look for me, I opened the passenger-side door and pulled myself in.
“Go,” I whispered, closing it as quietly as I could.
“That’s creepy.”
“What?”
“The door opening and closing by itself. I can’t see you. It’s straight out of Ghostbusters.”
Dimitri peeled out. It was not quiet.
“You’re too young to know that movie.”
“They rebooted it.”
“Without any guys in it. I didn’t think anybody male watched the reboot.”
“I’m not your typical male.”
“Because of your dwarf blood?”
“Not exactly.” Dimitri glanced in the side mirror as we rounded a bend and almost knocked over a garbage can.
“Well, you’re helping me, so you can be as typical or atypical as you want. I don’t care.”
“Glad you’re open-minded.”
“That’s me. Embracing diversity in all its shapes and forms.” I grabbed the oh-shit handle as he roared around another curve fast enough to make the mailboxes cower. “Slow down, eh, Mario? You flattened all of their tires. They won’t be after us. But the police might if we shoot through town doing eighty.”
“Right.” He slowed down as he drove toward the highway. “Where are we going now?”
“How far are you willing to go?”
“Depends on your destination. I’d have a hard time getting excited over Burns or Hood River. Also, I have to get gas if we’re going more than fifty miles.”
“I need to get to Seattle.” I didn’t expect him to drive me six hours to get there and was about to say so, but he smiled over at me—at my collarbone actually, reminding me that he couldn’t see me.
“I love Seattle. Good club scene.”
“I didn’t know yard-art creators were big into clubbing.”
“I’m only twenty-five. If you pay for gas, I’ll drive.”
I glanced at my side mirror, half expecting to find police barreling after us. Nothing but the city’s ubiquitous SUVs were on the road behind us. Dare I hope we could make it all the way to Seattle without being pulled over?
“I suppose they saw your license plate,” I murmured.
“Nah. The plumber statue by the mailbox squirted black oil all over it. It’ll bleed off soon enough, but it should have kept them from getting the plate number if they didn’t think to record it earlier.” He grinned at me. “What do you think of my yard art? I admit when I was making it, I wasn’t imagining a scenario quite so interesting. I just thought your mom might appreciate help defending against hoodlums.”
“The hoodlums of Bend?”
“Yeah, they live in the seedy part of downtown.”
“Where is that exactly? Between the yoga studio and the furniture store that sells ten-thousand-dollar couches?”
“No, two blocks south of that. And I think the couches there are twenty thousand dollars. The owner of that store turned her nose up at me when I tried to get them to carry my art.”
“I’ll bet.”
I checked the mirror again, hoping my mom and Rocket would be all right. And hoping I could get to Seattle and find a cure for Willard before the government caught up to me.
13
Twilight was falling by the time we neared Puget Sound, the city lights of Olympia off to the side. It was late enough that the traffic wasn’t too bad. Soon, assuming the police didn’t catch up to us in this last stretch, we would reach Seattle. I wished I had a better idea of where to go. I hoped Nin had more local magical contacts than I did and that she could point me to an alchemist—or someone who knew all the alchemists in the city.
Since Dimitri was still driving—I’d offered to take over, but he said he didn’t let strange women hold his steering wheel—I pulled out my phone. I’d tried calling Willard earlier but had been shunted off to voice mail. This time, I texted her, asking if she’d heard anything about dark elves in Seattle.
After that, I called Mom’s house again. Even though I doubted the government would harass her because of my actions, I couldn’t help but worry. She was the kind of person who could wander off into the woods in one state and reappear three months later in another state, without having suffered any adversity along the way, but she was also law-abiding enough to hang out and wait to be questioned. And she would have felt obligated to watch Maggie. A burden I had imposed upon her. I grimaced.
All I got was the answering machine.
Shortly after I left another message, the phone rang. It was Willard’s office number, not Mom’s.
I made the mistake of answering before I realized it was unlikely Willard was in the office. “Hello?”
“Thorvald, where are you?” That sounded like Lieutenant Snotty. “Did you resist arrest? Your ass is dead meat. If you don’t get back here and turn yourself in by dawn, I’ll have—”
I made a hissing sputtering sound, my best imitation of static. “Hello? Sorry, I’m—hiss—having trouble hearing you. Driving through—hiss—tunnel. Is this—hiss—pizza guy? Just leave it at the door. Long tunnel, about to lose you.” I hung up.
Dimitri glanced over at me.
“Wrong number,” I told him.
“Darn, I was hoping for pizza.”
“They don’t chase you down to deliver it.”
“No? I hear delivery drones are coming. They ought to be able to find you on the freeway.” He braked in response to three lanes of brake lights ahead of us. We’d hit Tacoma. So much for the light traffic. “Especially when traffic is slow.”
I glanced at the phone. No response to my text yet.
“Where in Seattle am I going?” Dimitri asked.
“Occidental Square.”
“Oh, Trinity is near there. They have a dress code though. And might sneer at Bessy.”
“Bessy?”
“Bessy.” He waved a hand toward the interior of the yellow-carpeted van, the back seats replaced with a bed and boxes of clothing and personal items. The galaxy-colored curtains on the side windows were pulled, and an alien-head bobble doll on a crate wobbled as we started and stopped in the traffic. “Bessy would fit in more on Capitol Hill.”
I doubted Bessy fit in anywhere. “I just need a few minutes to talk to a friend. She’s got a food truck she usually parks there.”
“She? That’s a sketchy neighborhood at night, isn’t it?”
“She sells a lot of her merchandise to the sketchy clientele.”
“And they refrain from mugging her afterward?”
“She can take care of herself. Trust me.”
Dimitri shrugged.
“Thanks for driving me up here, by the way.” I should have said that five hours ago. “And helping me with the agents. I hope you won’t get in trouble for that. I was a little surprised that you helped, given that you barely let me on the premises yesterday.”
“They shoved their way in and were asking me questions before you got there. I asked them if they had a warrant to come into the house, and they got real pissy. Turned it into an interrogation. Like they already had me pegged as a criminal who’d broken probation.”
I eyed his scarred, buzzcut head, pockmarked face, and black metalhead T-shirt. Even in a tutu, he would have looked like some mafia dude’s bodyguard. All I said was, “Rude.”
“That’s what I told them. They found out I live in the van, not the house, and told me to go wait there and stay out of the way. I was tempted to knife their tires even before you and Sigrid showed up.”
“So you helped me to spite them, not because you warmed to me as a person and a human being?”
“I’m mostly hoping to see your dank tiger again.”
&nbs
p; I assumed dank had evolved—or devolved—into slang, since Sindari was far from damp and musty. “Gotcha.”
He looked hopefully over at me.
“I don’t usually bring him out to sit in traffic. His time here is limited, so I save him for battles and when I need someone to vent to. He charges less than a therapist.”
“Huh.”
My phone buzzed as we rolled into Seattle proper, city lights glittering next to the dark waters of the Sound.
Get out of town if you aren’t already, came in from Willard’s number. There’s an investigation going on at the office, Sudo has brought in MPs and some brass, and I’ve got a guard outside of my hospital door. I don’t know where they think I’m going while I’ve got all these monitors cabled to me, but there’s someone there day and night. And I know Sudo is looking for you. And his car. What trouble are you getting yourself into, Thorvald?
I stared at the screen, worried by the mention of monitors and cables. Had she gotten worse? How much time did I have to figure this out? Or was it already too late? Whatever she’d been given, it couldn’t be some simple poison, not if it caused cancer.
I’m trying to figure out who dosed you and with what, I texted back, deciding there had to be a reason she hadn’t accepted the call. Either she was too sick to speak, or the walls were thin, and she worried about that guard overhearing her. You ever come across anything about dark elves? It looks like someone was in your apartment and spiked your coffee or something you drink regularly with a potion. There was a sigil on the bottom of the vial from the dark-elf alchemical language. It took me three tries to get alchemical out without AutoCorrect inserting something stupid, and I growled at the phone. Maybe my mom wasn’t missing anything by forgoing modern technology.
As I told you before, someone may have been in my apartment recently. By the way, is it true that the building burned?
Yes, sorry. I got your cat out. She’s staying with my mom in Bend.
North Bend?
No. Bend, Oregon. It was a long drive.
I’ll bet. Maggie can be vocal in the car.
You’re a master of understatement, Colonel. FYI, she detests Sindari.
I’m sure. As far as dark elves… they’re around. We’ve never sent you after them because they’re too discreet to get caught kidnapping anyone, but the city morgue always has a few bodies in it that have been mutilated in ritualistic fashion. It’s believed that a lot of the people who disappear in Seattle end up in their lair, but nobody’s ever lived to talk about it. They hide the entrances very well. The police have looked and never found them.
Where’s their lair? Do we know?
The Seattle Underground.
Uh, I went there on a field trip when I was a kid. It’s a bunch of basements and a couple of spots where you can walk under the street downtown. I was underwhelmed.
That’s only a tiny portion of what’s down there. The whole city burned in the late 1800s. Today’s Seattle is built on top of that. All of downtown, and some say there are tunnels that were added later and go under Lake Union and Portage Bay, all the way up into Fremont and the U-District. Every time someone’s started exploring them, city workers die, and access points get cemented in real quick.
I rubbed my face. Why did this sound like a place I was going to end up having to visit?
But, Willard continued, the dark elves have never given me trouble personally, and if you didn’t know they existed, it seems unlikely that they would be behind this. Even if they had a reason to hate me, why would they come after me and risk bringing the light down into their tunnels?
To get to me?
Willard was getting the brunt of all this, but I couldn’t help but think someone might want to take both of us out of the picture. If she was gone and Sudo was in charge, I wouldn’t have a job, and I wouldn’t be going after the magical—or so someone might think. I would still kill murdering wyverns even if I wasn’t on anyone’s payroll.
They’ve spent over a hundred years convincing the city that they don’t exist, Willard added. They clearly like it that way. I think it’s more likely that someone found one of their recipe books and made a potion.
That’s what I was thinking. I’ll hope for that. A human dabbler should be easier to find and deal with. I didn’t point out that creating the vial would have required more than a recipe book—that hadn’t been some bauble picked up at Walmart. It had been handblown by an artist. And the glow-in-the-heat sigil was definitely magical.
Yes. I don’t know where you would go to find an entrance into their portion of the Underground.
“We’re here.” Dimitri found street parking he could wedge his van into.
A homeless guy wearing five coats and pushing a shopping cart eyed Bessy, admiring the galaxy curtains, perhaps.
“Good. Thanks.” I finished my conversation with Willard. I’m going to talk to Nin, see if she has any suggestions on alchemists. I’m confident I’ll be able to get to the bottom of this, so hang in there, all right? If there’s an alchemical potion that did this, whoever concocted it can damn well come up with an antidote, and I’ll bring it in personally. Along with your cat.
I didn’t share my concern that the cancer wouldn’t be something that could be treated with a potion. I had to hope—had to believe—that if there had been a magical cause, there would be a magical solution.
I do miss my cat. Thank you for working on this for me, Thor— Val. But be careful. Our people were originally trying to find you and deal with you in-house, but Sudo got the police involved and said there’s going to be a warrant for your arrest soon. If there isn’t already. You better get a hood for that duster of yours if you’re going to roam around downtown.
I’ll look into it.
I grabbed the door handle. “You coming with me or hitting that nightclub?”
“What are the odds that you’ll take your tiger out tonight?”
“His name is Sindari, and given my last two phone conversations, the odds are excellent.”
“I’m going with you. Can I pet him?”
“If he lets you, sure.”
“Will he let me?”
“Call him regal and noble, not a pet or a service animal, and he’ll let you rub his ears.”
We met on the sidewalk, and the homeless guy scooted away when he saw Dimitri’s imposing height and brawn.
I lifted a hand to stop him. “How much for one of your jackets? That one with the hood.”
He scratched a gray beard with gum stuck in it and eyed me up and down. “I’ll give it to you for a kiss.”
“I deal in cash only, friend.” I pulled out a couple of twenties and rubbed them together.
“I’ll trade it for your coat.” He pointed at my duster.
“Another nope. This is part of my look. Werewolves would be distressed if I showed up to kill them without it.”
“Shit, I hate werewolves.” He spat on the street.
“Don’t we all. Forty bucks. Deal?”
“Deal.” As he pulled off the jacket, the streetlight caught a few dubious stains, making me regret my decision already.
We traded and I headed off down the street, putting on the jacket over my duster and pulling up the hood. The scent of pot and body odor almost made me gag.
“It’d be better to be arrested,” I grumbled.
“What?” Dimitri was walking several steps to my side.
I had a feeling I wasn’t the only one who could smell the jacket. “Nothing.”
Nin’s truck was still there when we walked into Occidental Square, but I doubted the three big men lined up by the side door were there for beef and rice. Two had some magical blood, my senses told me, and the third had a stronger aura, a purebred something. Not a mongrel, as Zav would have called the others—and me. Probably a shifter of some kind.
The men turned toward us, stepping apart from each other to give themselves elbow room in case of a fight. That wasn’t the usual reaction I got from guys. Maybe Dimitri
and his bruiser dwarf blood had them wary.
“Hey, girlie,” one said, ogling my chest, though it couldn’t have been that impressive under two coats. I had to be downwind from him, or he would have been gagging instead of leering. “Why don’t you lose the arm tough and come over here and enjoy our company?”
“You sure you’d enjoy her company?” one of his buddies asked, pointing over my shoulder. “Her sword’s bigger than yours.”
My weapons’ camouflage didn’t work nearly as well on the magical.
The first speaker smirked. “I don’t mind a challenge. And you might be surprised about what I keep in my pants.”
“A sock ball, your mom says.”
“You’re supposed to be my wingman, not my buzzkill.”
I hoped Nin was in the truck and would come out soon. If I had to make conversation with these Einsteins, I’d grind my teeth out of their sockets.
The third man, the shifter, eyed my sword with more than passing interest. “You get that from Nin? In the magical spectrum, it’s lit up like the Space Needle.”
“No.” I stopped a few paces from them, so I would have time to react if needed. “I had to travel to Mordor, past the Dark Tower, up to Mount Doom, and do battle with the Lord of Barad-dûr for it.”
“Sounds epic.”
“I think they’ll make a movie of it.” Keeping my eyes on them, I pulled out Fezzik. “This I got from Nin.”
This elicited a few oohs and ahhs. The gun looked pretty, but for those who could sense magic, its intricate web of integrated auras would be even surer to impress.
I let them step forward to admire it, though I watched them carefully in case anyone tried anything. Dimitri lurked nearby, not looking like he knew if he should threaten them on my behalf or stay out of the way. Fortunately, he opted for the latter.
It was possible the men would give me trouble, especially if I’d killed a friend, distant relative, or childhood schoolmate of theirs, but Nin’s was considered neutral territory by most in the community. I hadn’t seen many fights break out here. Muggings by mundanes, sure, but not battles among the magical. Nin sold guns to normal people who were afraid of the magical, but she also sold weapons to the magical, so they could settle their grudges with each other.
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