by R. L. Naquin
He was, however, at the door when Riley opened it. And he wasn’t alone.
A thin, middle-aged blonde woman, taller than a leprechaun, but a few inches short of average, stood waiting in the hallway with Gris perched on her shoulder.
“I found her!” he said, punching his fist in the air.
“Found who?” I moved toward the door, frowning. “Come inside before someone sees you.”
The woman held out her hand, and lace dripped from her wrist. “I’m Mina,” she said, shaking Riley’s hand and stepping inside.
It was a good thing we’d splurged on the suite. I hadn’t planned on receiving guests, but having a living room to do it in was better than offering her a bed to sit on.
“Mina’s the head of the O.G.R.E.s in this area,” Gris said. He hopped off her shoulder and took a seat on the chunky wooden coffee table.
“Was,” she said, giving him a raised eyebrow. “Gris, however charming, has not convinced me to go back to work.”
“Didn’t Gris show you the contracts and give you your back pay?” Riley sat opposite from her on the couch, his hands dangling between his knees. “I believe there’s a rehire bonus, too.”
She nodded. “He explained these things. I’m not convinced, however, that the same lack of management won’t occur again, leaving me high and dry. I’d love nothing more than to get back to work as the regional O.G.R.E. overseer and stop having to hock my wares at swap meets and Renaissance festivals. But the Board’s chain of command broke down somewhere. I don’t know how and, frankly, I don’t want to know. But I don’t think I can trust its stability right now, at least not as far as my own security goes.”
Riley started to speak, and I interrupted him. I could feel her hesitation mixing with regret in a wind tunnel of emotion. This was a conflicted woman. I’d have to be the one to ease her through it, because I was the only one who could feel it with her.
“What is it you do, Mina? You certainly look human, but it’s been my experience that looks don’t tell the whole story.”
She blinked in surprise, though I wasn’t sure if it was my question or my ignorance that surprised her. “I’m an elemental hag.”
I’d left my Cycle Pedia of the Hidden at home. Janey and Toby, the goblin kids I’d taken care of, made it for me to help keep me from looking stupid in situations like this. I was pretty sure there was no entry in it for an elemental hag, so it wouldn’t have helped anyway.
“Forgive me,” I said, “but I’m not familiar with that term.”
Again with the surprised look. “How do you not know who and what I am? Clearly, the Board still doesn’t have its act together if their own employees are so ignorant.” She rose from the couch. “I think I’ll be going, now.”
Excellent work, Zoey. Chased her right out. Good thing you’re in charge.
“Mina, please. I think we have a misunderstanding here. While these two gentlemen work for the Board in different capacities, I do not. I’m helping. And doing a poor job of it. If you’ll sit down, I’ll explain.”
Reluctance and distrust drifted off of her like dandelion fluff, but underneath it, a tiny spark of eagerness flickered. I could get through to her if I tried. She wanted to believe. I had to earn her trust, first.
She perched on the couch cushion, stiff and wary. “All right. I’ll give you five minutes.”
I took a deep breath, held it, and let it out while I gathered my thoughts and sized her up. There was only one way to approach this woman. I’d have to tell her the truth. “Mina, you’re absolutely right. I’m going to trust you with information I’m not supposed to give to anybody. I need your promise that, no matter what, even if you decide to walk away, what I’m going to tell you is between us. You won’t tell anyone else.”
She narrowed her eyes while she considered my words, then nodded. “If you’re straight with me, I’ll be straight with you and keep the information to myself.”
“Good.” I glanced over at Riley, and his posture was tense. I don’t think he approved of my plan. Too bad. The Board—Bernice—had screwed up in keeping everything quiet. I wouldn’t broadcast it all to the world, but some people needed to know or the whole system would break down. Exactly as it had.
I told Mina about the Board murders. I told her my story, about how I knew nothing of the Hidden a year ago, but after a series of experiences, had found out I was an Aegis. Mina asked few questions, but nodded a lot, as if she knew some of the stories, but not all of them or how they fit together.
When I described the auction and how all the Aegises had been captured as slave labor by the Collector, then kidnapped by someone else while we battled the Collector, her face paled.
She stopped me when I got to the two grisly murders of the Aegises in Texas and Iowa. “What about the others? What about Rob Cavendish?”
I looked at Riley, and he pulled out his notepad. “Rob’s an aviacom,” he said. “He can direct wind, so he’s air. Earth is next.”
Mina frowned. “What do you mean by that? Do you know where he is?”
I shook my head. “We don’t know where he is. But the clues left for us indicate the order they intend to kill the Aegises. I wish more than anything that there was a clue to the location, but there isn’t. Not much of one, anyway. All we have to go on right now is what was written near the first body.”
Riley checked his notes again. “The only clues for the next two are ‘Caught between stalagmite teeth’ and ‘Used as dino bait.’ That’s not much when the entire United States is possible.”
Mina chewed her bottom lip, her eyes focused on the wall behind me. After a long moment, she fixed her eyes on me. “I’ve been friends with Rob for a very long time. We have similar skills. Since we can both communicate with the wind, we could communicate with each other over long distances. He stopped talking to me a few years ago. I didn’t think about it much. Friends lose touch sometimes.” She wiped her palms on her jeans. “As long as you keep me in the loop and let me help with the hunt for this murderer, I’ll go back to work for the Board and deal with the petty crimes going on around here.”
I crossed my heart with my index finger. “I promise. In fact, I’ll give you my cell number. Any problems you have with the Board, call me, and I’ll get it sorted out for you.”
Riley nodded. “It would be nice to have somebody on speed dial who can talk to the wind.”
She shrugged. “It’ll be nice to have a steady paycheck again. I’ve been selling handmade soaps imbedded with small spells and charms. It’s a nice hobby, but it’s not paying the bills.”
Gris stretched from his spot on the coffee table. “Are we ready, then?” He reached into a compartment in his chest and removed some paper folded into a tiny square.
I’d missed this part of the process last time, since he and Frankie the Imp had conducted their business in the men’s room at the bar. Gris wiped his hand along the condensation on my glass of water, then flicked it at the tiny square of paper. The paper swelled when the moisture hit it, much like those dinosaur sponges that come in a capsule and blow up to their full size when immersed in water.
After a careful smoothing, the contract was perfectly dry and the expected size. Gris pointed at several spots. “Sign here and here, initial there, and we’re all set.”
Mina signed the contract, and Gris folded it, blew on it until it shrank, and returned it to the secret compartment hidden in his chest cavity.
“How long before you can get your team back together?” I asked.
Mina smiled. “My team is always available. I use dust devils, water spouts, and wind tunnels to assist me. It’s just me and all the elementals I can convince to help me. It’s a matter of tact as much as magic.”
This woman may very well have been the coolest person I’d ever met. I had to wonder whether my friend Aggie could do all the same things, o
r if she had a totally different skill set.
Note to self: Ask Aggie if she controls the weather, and if so, can she make sure it’s sunny when we hold the elf/attic monster wedding in the back yard.
We followed Mina out into the hallway, then walked out to her car. When she stepped outside, she stopped, one foot poised half in the air. Her head tilted to the side, and her hair fluttered in a slight breeze.
“Shit,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Someone is forcibly disrupting the elements. The wind is distressed.” She paused to continue listening. “You said ‘caught between stalagmite teeth’ was one of the clues?”
Riley nodded. “Yes.”
“I know where the next Aegis is.”
Chapter Fourteen
Felding Caverns was a tourist attraction twenty minutes outside of Branson. The gift shop and check-in hadn’t closed, so if Mina was right about Amanda Fairweather, nobody had discovered the body yet. In fact, if we hurried, maybe we could keep her alive.
As we pulled into the parking lot, an SUV similar to Mabel passed us going the other way. The girl in the backseat looked familiar. Her blonde pigtails swung with her head, her gaze trained on mine. My head swam with pictures of small blonde girls. At the Cadillac and Bug ranches with a small, happy family. Hiking on the trail in Massacre Rock with a middle-aged backpacker and several other kids.
I gasped. “The little girl. A year ago,” I said, voice shaking. “I saw her a year ago.”
Riley frowned. “Who?”
“I saw Katy last year in a park in Bolinas. She was on a swing, looking so sad. I’d just learned I was an empath, and I was practicing with people in the park. I tried to send her emotional comfort from a distance. She looked so, so sad.” I ran my hand through my hair and scrunched it in my hand at the scalp. “She’s been watching us since the first murder. And she’s been watching me all along.”
Riley put his arms around me and smoothed his hand over my back for comfort. “What makes you think that was her? We don’t even know what she looks like yet.”
I pulled away and took a step back. “I just saw her. We’ve seen her at every location so far. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize her before. None of us did.”
Mina frowned. “What is she talking about?”
Riley brushed a strand of hair from my face. “Honey, there’s nobody around. We’re alone here.”
I pointed at the road. “She was in the car. Just now. Looking right at me.”
Riley and Mina exchanged wary looks. “The SUV?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“There was nobody in there but the driver.”
“She had her face pressed against the glass. How could you not see her? Mina, help me out. You saw her, right?” I looked at both their faces, desperate to have confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things.
Mina bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Zoey. There was nobody else in there.”
My purse lurched from my shoulder. I caught it by the strap before it hit the ground, and Gris popped his head out.
“I didn’t see anything, obviously, but it’s quite possible she fogged the minds of everyone but you.” He craned his neck to look for the car. “That’s well within her abilities, from what I understand.”
I shifted the purse in a more comfortable position. “Thanks, Gris. That makes me feel a little less like I’m losing my mind.”
I glanced down the road, then at the cave’s welcome center. We couldn’t take off to chase a car that held a driver and a girl only I could see. We’d already stood there long enough for the car to hit the highway and be long gone. I’d screwed up and lost my chance at catching her. The best I could do now was try to get to Amanda in time to save her.
Unlike some of the bigger, more popular cave attractions, the tour was self-guided and on foot. No tour guide, and certainly no fancy jeep to drive us through. We paid the entry fee for the three of us, and the long-haired college kid gave us helmets with headlamps, maps and a prerecorded tour. We thanked him, and he went back to his anthropology textbook.
Riley and I walked behind Mina into the damp darkness. Water dripped somewhere ahead, and our steps echoed. Mina didn’t bother with the map. None of us bothered to turn on the tour recording. From time to time, Mina skimmed her fingers over the calcium deposits and murmured.
She led us deeper into the narrowing caves. At times, we stooped to keep from scraping our heads on the ceiling, and twice Riley had to turn sideways to keep his shoulders from getting wedged.
Gris supplemented the light from our headlamps by holding up my cellphone. It didn’t give much light, but it helped.
After what seemed like an endless descent into darkness that probably only took about ten minutes, the walls and ceiling widened and dumped into an enormous room lit with torches.
Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, and stalagmites grew from the floor. On the opposite side of the room, water trickled down the wall into a small lake, the source of the sound we’d been hearing on our way in.
Not far from the lake, the stalagmites stood in shadows, their forms less uniform, more lumpy than the rest. Mina rubbed her arms, and I pulled my sweater tighter around myself. Our chills had little to do with the twenty-degree drop in temperature from being underground.
We exchanged a look and made our way over.
Mina made a small sound in the back of her throat and covered her mouth.
“Holy hell,” I whispered.
We’d found Amanda Fairweather. Her body was somehow threaded through a stalagmite, as if it had grown around her body. She lay face up, arms spread wide and feet dangling off the ground. Her face was blue, and a tiny dribble of blood spilled from her lips.
The stalagmite originally might have had a hole in it, but I didn’t believe so. Amanda had the power to shape earth. Someone had forced her to make the rock malleable enough to push her body through it, then let the rock reform and harden again, crushing her internal organs.
Her death would have been slow and excruciating.
We scoured the cave for clues and found nothing. Nothing glowed. The body held no props in its widespread hands.
It seemed Kathleen had grown tired of taunting me. And if she was tired of the game, she’d probably speed up her activity in order to get finished with what she intended to do.
We left Mina to deal with the body the same way the O.G.R.E. squad in Iowa had taken care of CeeCee. Riley and I were only in the way, and Mina had the resources to clean up the scene and keep the general public from knowing about it.
A body morphed through a stalagmite was something no one wanted to explain to the police or the media.
Back at the room, all I could think about was how little we knew. “Used as dino bait” wasn’t enough to narrow down the next location, even to a general region. Dinosaurs had once been everywhere. Museums housed their bones all across the country. The clue was almost worse than no clue at all.
“What do we do next?” Riley asked. He leaned against the counter in the small kitchen, his face wrinkled in worry.
I shrugged. “I’d like to take a hot bath and try to forget what I saw today. I need a few minutes to process all this. I’ve been seeing this bitch without realizing it, and apparently she can project her mojo so that nobody else notices her.”
We’d failed to save anybody, and now there was only one Aegis left before it would be my mother on the line. And who knew what her captor had been doing to her all that time while we rushed around putting out fires to hold back some vague world-ending threat I’d only just found out about.
I sighed, exhausted both physically and emotionally. “Just give me some time to pull myself together. I’ll spend tonight going through those files I stole from the prison, then tomorrow we’ll go back to headquar
ters and, I don’t know, give Bernice a thorough pat down and search in case she’s hiding anything else.”
I set my purse on the counter, and Gris climbed out. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We should talk to that gremlin in the jail cell.”
“Agreed. I’ve been thinking about that, myself, though he didn’t seem very interested in talking when I saw him. There was only one way out of that prison, and it was down the hall past the gremlin’s cell.”
Gris nodded. “Exactly.”
I reached into my magic purse and brought out the gremlin’s file, flipping it open. “His name is Crink. A name is a good start.”
“What’s it say?” Riley craned his neck over my shoulder.
“Three. He’s been in there for three years.”
“What the hell did he do?”
I skimmed the file with my finger. “He stole a bracelet from one of the Board members.”
“He got three years for that?” Riley moved behind me to read over my shoulder. “That’s ridiculous. Six months, tops.”
I scowled. “Even that’s harsh. Gremlins steal shiny stuff. That’s what they do. They’ll put it back if you ask.”
Riley read the file. “He stole it from Amelia Gantry, head of the Hidden Social Services department. She’s really strict.” He swallowed. “I mean she was strict. But the sentence was only for three months. I don’t see why he’s still there.”
I handed him the file and pulled my hair into a bun on top of my head. “I guess that’s what we need to find out. I’m taking that bath before anything else, though. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
I went into the bathroom and ran hot water into the tub while I got undressed. Kathleen may have grown tired of giving us clues, but her clues sucked ass, anyway. They weren’t real clues. Nothing we could follow to get us to the next point. More like teasers than solid leads, and Kathleen probably did it more to make herself feel clever than to aid us in any way.
But something stank at headquarters where the problem originated, and I intended to find out what. We’d overlooked something there, and I was certain it was what we needed to finally give us a solid lead. We had to get ahead. I couldn’t get so close to finding my mother and be too late to save her. I wouldn’t even entertain the possibility.