by Tricia Owens
I blinked as something she'd said flashed like a neon sign in my head.
I checked that the gun's safety was on (action movies were good for something), before shoving the weapon at her.
"I'm not buying your gun. I need you to please take it out of here."
My tone scared her. It was I'll-call-the-cops-on-you-if-you-don't. With a pouty, outraged glare, she snatched the gun and shoved it into her hobo bag.
"You know what?" she said. "This place stinks, too. I'm thinking all of Vegas stinks. So overrated."
With a flounce, which I had to admire since she was in shorts and not a skirt with petticoats, she spun and stormed out. She left the smell of coconut body butter behind, but not until first pausing in the doorway to pull her bubble gum out of her mouth and slap it against the frame in defiance.
"Some people," I muttered, shaking my head. Vegas really brought out the kooks. I hoped she got picked up by the cops for carrying that gun in her purse without a concealed carry permit. With another shake of the head, I put her out of my mind. I had bigger fish to fry.
"Underpass," I said to Vale's statue with satisfaction. "Under the dark city. It's perfect."
I was pretty sure the gargoyle's topaz eyes flashed with agreement. But if they flashed with warning, well, there was just no way I could tell.
Chapter 7
As soon as the sun dipped behind the Spring Mountains in the West, I turned off the Open sign. Ten minutes later, as I was counting out the till, I heard the rustle of cloth.
"You're finally awake?" I murmured without turning my head.
"I am. Are you not looking at me while I'm dressing out of respect, or because you're not interested?"
I hid my smile. "I plead the fifth."
"I'll just assume, then, that you're a very respectful woman."
Vale eventually stood before me on the other side of the counter, fully dressed in the clothes that had been packed in the box with him. His dark hair was casually mussed the way guys' hair can be when they drag on a T-shirt without bothering to check in a mirror afterward. Looking at him, it was easy to recall the taste of his skin as he'd lain in my bed. I wanted to taste it again.
I liked seeing him in my shop. He fit the place, like he spent all his time working here alongside me. As old as he was, he might even recognize some of the objects that other magickal beings had sold to me. He would be the muscle that I'd told myself I didn't need, a watch dog who understood magickal dangers the way a rent-a-cop never would.
It was a dangerous fantasy, perhaps, to imagine him permanently imbedded in my life. He was apparently gargoyle royalty. That had to come with baggage and secrets no matter how lightly he'd tried to play off his heritage. A gargoyle prince and a dragon sorceress shacking up together would draw all sorts of the wrong attention. Still, what was the point of having fantasies that were safe?
Safe was boring.
"Who left you on my doorstep?" I asked him after locking away the few bucks I'd made today.
"A friend."
"Oh, yeah?"
He smirked at my glower. "He's a three hundred year-old sorcerer, bald, and with hair on his back."
"I think I've dated him."
His eyes gleamed with amusement. "I asked him for a favor. He came through."
"Kind of dangerous leaving you on the sidewalk for any kid to come along and steal, don't you think? What if it had been garbage day?"
"I told him to try to breach your wards. I figured it'd wake you up and you'd come investigate." He shrugged. "Calculated risk, Moody. I thought it was worth it to make sure you didn't go off on your own." He leaned his forearms on the counter. Lean muscles flexed in his forearms. I tried not to stare. "I have some information about our golem-maker. I think we should check it out."
"I have information, too." I told him about the séance and what my mom's spirit had told us. "I think the dark city reference is about the homeless people living beneath the underpasses."
Vale looked impressed, but he did me one better: "There's a golem living in the storm drainage tunnels beneath the freeway."
I sucked in my breath. "Is it the gargoyle?"
"It's a troll."
"Wow." I grinned in wonder. "That makes perfect sense since trolls live under bridges." Did that mean a dragon lived beneath the Federal Reserve Bank, guarding the country's gold bullion? "How did you learn this?"
"I spent all of last night after I left you visiting various contacts throughout the city. They're ones I'd hit before, twenty years ago, when I was first tracking the gargoyle golem. But this time I had some leverage." Vale's grin was wolfish enough to make Lev proud. "I told them I was on a mission for the Oddsmakers. It lit a fire under a few of them."
I regarded him dubiously. "You think that's wise? What if it gets back to the Oddsmakers that you're slinging their name around to open doors? You said yourself this necromancy artifact may not be the mission that they're trying to talk me into."
"You gotta shake some trees to make the fruit drop, Moody. I'm willing to risk disturbing a wasp nest to get that fruit." His gaze intensified. "And this way the blame is on me. As far as the street knows, I'm the one looking for this golem-maker, not you."
"I don't need you to protect me that way." Chivalry was cool and all, but not if it was going to leave me behind while Vale did the heavy lifting.
"I'm not trying to protect you so much as I'm making sure I play a part in this." Vale leaned closer. His eyes held striations of gold. "I've been after this golem-maker since you were a toddler, Moody. He's mine."
His alpha posturing was impressive and all but it had no effect on me. I chose not to argue with him but if he thought he was elbowing me out of the way at some point, he had another thing coming.
"So we'll help each other," I said with an edged smile.
I saw the light of competition flare in his eyes and that was fine. Competition would make us each faster and sharper.
I pulled out my phone and called Melanie since neither Vale nor I had a car. I never went anywhere and I lived within walking distance of everything. I don't know what his excuse was. He didn't strike me as the chatty type who took the bus just to meet new people.
"Monkey," I said when my friend answered, "we need you. Are you busy right now? Can you swing by Moonlight and give us a ride?"
She chattered happily before hanging up.
"She'll be here in fifteen," I told Vale. I saw him looking around the shop. "Do you think we need weapons?" I grabbed my personal flashlight and one from off the shelf. I had spare batteries behind the counter. I inserted two into the shop's flashlight.
"I'm not sure how effective weapons would be against a golem," Vale said. "Hopefully we'll be lucky and they won't be necessary." He shot me a quick smile. "We'll just use our charm."
"Has it bugged you all this time not knowing what happened to that gargoyle?" It seemed strange to me that he'd let the trail go cold after my parents were killed. If anything, he should have had even more motivation to find it.
"Who said I don't know what happened to it?" Vale picked up what looked like a twisted old stick. It was worn as smooth as bone and the tapered end was burned black. He tapped the wand in my direction. "I tracked it down in Vegas. It was living on the UNLV campus, hiding on the rooftops."
"Not a single student saw it?"
"It didn't come down until after midnight. It could have lived there like that for decades."
"But it didn't," I guessed.
He replaced the wand on the shelf, his fingers giving it a final stroke. "I came for it one night, to question it." A mirthless smile crossed his face. "It melted into mud before I could get a word out of it. It dripped through the cracks and over the side of the building. I couldn't scrape enough of it together to make a mud pie."
I imagined his frustration at that moment. I wish I'd been there. I could have baked all the mud to keep it together. "Did that mean it was dead?"
"It meant that whoever had made it had take
n its life away. Golem-makers are mini-gods. They can make their own children."
"What's to stop him from doing the same with this troll? Should we bring a shovel and pail?"
"We can't prevent it if it happens again, but we can hope that we're moving so quickly that the golem-maker has no idea we've found his troll."
"Ugh, I hate racing against the clock," I complained, but I should have expected this. The golem-maker didn't want to be found. It underscored the need for us to keep this quiet and for me to keep a tight leash on Lucky. Softly, softly was the name of the game here. We needed to be ninjas.
"I promise you, Moody, another twenty years aren't going to pass before we get our answers. This will pan out."
Vale sounded so determined, almost angrily so, that I couldn't help asking, "Do you feel responsible in some way for what happened to my parents?"
I wasn't accusing him of anything, and I was glad I could tell that he understood that. He stared sightlessly into the shadows for a moment.
"I could have done more," he admitted. "I didn't know that at the time, but I know it now and that's enough motivation for me. I want to bring their killer to justice but I also want you to find some peace, Moody."
"I'm not haunted by their deaths or anything," I said dismissively.
His dark eyes found me. "Their loss shaped you. Don't downplay that. I'm not saying it's made you better or worse. You are who you are, and I like who you are. But I know that you still miss them."
"I guess I want closure," I said slowly. "I want to know that the bad guy didn't get away this time."
"He won't."
When you had someone like Vale, standing in the shadows, speaking those two words like they were the most important words he had ever uttered, you couldn't help but shiver with a thrill. I wanted to be badass with him. I wanted to right every injustice in the world with him by my side.
A minute later, a bright blue Prius pulled up in front of the shop. Not quite the Batmobile, but it would do.
"Hey, guys!" Melanie waved from the driver's window as we left the shop. Her car's paint was only a few shades darker than the color of her hair. "I brought some goodies in case we get hungry!"
"We're not going on a field trip to California," I grumbled. "Vale, you take shotgun since you know where we're going."
Vale eyed the car. "I'd forgotten you drive a Prius."
"Hey, Mayans care about the Earth, you know," Melanie told him sternly. "You should care, too! You're a gargoyle. You're going to be here for a long time!"
"I recycle when I can," he said somberly as he opened the passenger door.
I hid my snicker and slid into the back seat.
"Look in the pink box," my best friend told me as she drove us down Charleston Boulevard. "My family runs a food truck, Vale. We make all kinds of super delicious Mexican tortas. Anne loves them! She's always yelling at me not to bring my truck around because then she'll order everything. She can be a real pig, ha ha!"
"Yeah, ha ha," I muttered as I eyed the contents of the bakery box and made my selection. I bit into a round, pink Mexican pan bread that was flavored with guava frosting. "You're trying to sabotage me with all these, Melly. My dragon's gonna get fat."
"Most guys don't like sweets, huh?" Melanie asked Vale, sounding disappointed that he hadn't asked what was in the box she'd brought.
He turned, looked back at the box of sweets in my lap, and reached in and selected a donut covered with bright yellow glaze.
"I'm not like most guys," he told Melanie and shoved half the doughnut in his mouth.
"Oh, my god, Anne!" Melanie squealed with delight. "You have to keep this one!"
I was glad to be sitting in the backseat so no one could see my blush.
"So why are we going to see a troll, huh? Aren't they like, big and mean and stuff?"
"Probably," I said, finishing up my bread and putting the box on the floor so it would be less of a temptation. "But it doesn't matter if this troll is infected with Ebola. We have to grill it and see what it knows about the golem-maker."
"'It' is a 'he'," Vale said. "Melanie, my source told me this troll may himself be a golem, made by the person we seek."
"Why would anyone make a troll?"
I tried to come up with any reason and failed. Trolls were like dumb beasts, with IQs of two-year-olds. All they did, as far as I knew, was eat and sleep. They weren't good for heavy labor because they suffered from agoraphobia: a fear of open spaces.
"This troll supposedly was made a long time ago," Vale answered for me, "so there's a good chance it was one of the maker's earliest constructions. It may have been an experiment that he had no active use for so he dumped it in the tunnels. The good news is that if it's truly been down there that long then people have probably seen it and can point it out to us."
Vale sounded confident, but I questioned whether we'd be able to find this troll even with GPS. They weren't exactly the most social of creatures. A long time ago real trolls used to eat people, but the growth of civilization had forced them to change their diets to things like cows and goats to avoid being hunted by armies of angry villagers.
What would a Las Vegas troll eat? The only animals in the city, barring a stray coyote or wild rabbits, were kept in zoos or in casinos.
By the time Melanie parked at the entrance to the tunnels, I was brimming with curiosity and yeah, excitement. Another step closer to finding the necromancy artifact meant another step closer to finding justice for my parents.
But Vale caught my arm as soon as we climbed out of the car.
"Let me speak to him." He raised a finger to cut me off when I opened my mouth to argue. "Trolls aren't used to dealing with women. You'll scare him and he won't be any good to us."
"I'm still going in," I said firmly.
"Of course you are. I wouldn't dare deny you. But you'll let me ask the questions. Otherwise this troll will clam up and we'll end up with nothing."
I didn't like it, but I recognized that my pride was trying to get involved and that had no place here. This was about obtaining information, not about proving who cared more about finding the golem-maker.
"We're not leaving until we get the information we need. Promise me that, Vale."
"If this troll knows anything, we won't leave until we know it, too."
Melanie looked to me to see if I believed him and in truth, I did. At any rate, what choice did I have? This was Vale's lead, not mine.
The drainage tunnels were locked behind a chain link fence but it was no problem scaling it. Melanie needed a little help just because she was shorter than Vale and I, but soon the three of us were cautiously approaching the bunker-like concrete structure with its three broad openings. We could hear the buzz of traffic along the freeway.
We chose the center opening, though all were equally dark. Leaves and trash cushioned our feet as we walked, but soon we found ourselves on hard concrete again as we moved beyond the wind's reach. Immediately the smell of urine besieged us as we crept along the wide tunnel. While flash flooding was extremely dangerous in the desert and occasionally stalled cars and drowned some people, this wasn't the season for it. The only moisture present was found in the manmade puddles lying at the base of the graffiti-covered walls.
I swept my flashlight over a couple of scorpions on a wall but the place was relatively clean of vermin and insects. The smell of human habitation grew stronger as we walked deeper in.
"These tunnels go for about 200 feet," Vale told us in a low murmur. "Allegedly a thousand people live in here at any one time."
"And at least one troll," I added. "I don't see how. Why wouldn't anyone freak out over a giant monster living here?"
"Unless it doesn't," Melanie suggested almost apologetically.
"It's here," Vale insisted.
We encountered the first "home" about fifty yards in. A man and woman were waiting for us, apprehensively shining their own flashlight in our eyes as we approached. They looked like typical homeless t
o me, wearing secondhand, mismatched clothes, but I was shocked at their living conditions. It wasn't half-bad.
The square of carpet on the floor I recognized from the Rio. These people must have salvaged it during a carpet repair or replacement. Sitting atop the carpet was a double bed complete with a box spring, a rolling rack for clothes, several milk crates stacked in various configurations to provide storage and an eating surface, and a couple of castoff cafeteria chairs. Everything except the carpet square was balanced on either wooden pallets or bricks, I assumed in case of flooding.
"We're looking for someone," Vale said as we slowed our approach. "Named Stevie. Know of him?"
"Sure, man, we know the dude." The man who'd spoken was unexpectedly friendly and forthcoming, as if now that he knew we weren't cops come to kick them out we were all buddies. He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and placed it between his lips though he didn't light it. "He's four camps down. Cool dude, though a little, you know." He gave a hoarse smoker's laugh and rolled his finger against his temple to indicate that Stevie might be crazy.
"Stevie lives alone?" I asked.
The woman hacked and spat on the floor. "No one'd want to live with him, lady. He's Looney Tunes."
Melanie, who was huddled by my side as if afraid of infection, whispered, "He sounds scary."
The man wheezed out another laugh. "Nah, he's just loco. Hope he's not your friend, 'cuz he ain't good for conversation."
"We're friends of friends," Vale told them. "Thanks for your help."
"No problem, man. We're cool down here."
We continued on, leaving that sphere of body odor to enter another bubble that reeked of alcohol. Farther on we hit another home or camp, as the man had called it. This one was less fitted out. A dirty red sleeping bag leaking its stuffing was spread across the floor beside an Albertson's shopping cart brimming with plastic bags and, for some reason, four toilet plungers. A plastic bucket holding wadded up newspapers, generic brand window cleaner and a squeegee rested beside the sleeping bag. Cans of Bud Ice lay alongside the walls.