Stunned silence.
“I’m a sprite,” Karl said. “S-P-R-I-T-E.”
Dawna made another hiccup-burp sound. “This is all too much,” she said hoarsely. “My boss thinks he’s a sprite.”
Karl made a HARUMPH sound and adjusted his tie. “I don’t think I’m a sprite, Ms. Jones. I am one.” His face reddened. “I know what I am.”
Dawna kept one hand over her mouth and used the other to point at Zinnia. “You’re a witch.” She pointed at Margaret. “You’re a witch.” She pointed at Karl. “And you’re a sprite?”
Karl pointed at Gavin. “Gnome,” he said. “Your boyfriend’s a gnome.”
Dawna turned to Gavin. “A gnome? Seriously? You told me you were a wizard!”
Gavin’s cheeks reddened to match Karl’s. “I didn’t tell you that,” Gavin said. “You made an assumption, and I didn’t correct you.”
None of them noticed the elevator had stopped moving until the doors opened.
All five occupants wheeled to face the opening. Would it be the sandworm again? Or more bone-crawlers?’ Zinnia cupped her hands and prepared to shoot what was left of her blue plasma.
A man in head-to-toe protective gear threw up both hands. “Hold your fire,” he said.
Zinnia recognized him through his protective goggles.
“Agent Rob,” she said.
“That’s me,” he said. “Agent Rob is here to save the day! And hopefully not become lunch for a nest of hungry bone-crawlers.”
Zinnia turned to see her coworkers in various states of alarm. Margaret had green plasma dripping from her fingers.
“At ease,” Zinnia said to the group. “This is Agent Rob. He’s with...” Her discretion stopped her from naming the DWM. “He’s with pest control,” she said.
“I’m with the good guys,” Rob said. “You can call us pest control.”
Karl pushed his way to the front of the group, taking charge as usual. “Good to see you here,” he said to the agent. “I’ve already taken care of three juveniles that got into the elevator.” He sniffed the air. “Did you find the queen? If you take out the queen, the rest will fall in line.” He licked his lips. “I’d be happy to help with that.”
Agent Rob held up one armored hand. “No need, Mr. Kormac. We’ve already taken care of the queen. We’re moving on to clean-up. Speaking of which, did any of you nice folks happen to see anything strange that you’d like to speak to one of our helpful members of staff about?”
“Don’t say anything,” Margaret whispered to Dawna. “If you say you saw something, they wipe your mind.”
Karl, who was still standing at the front of the group, leaned in toward the agent and said something. Zinnia couldn’t hear him over the echoing screams and thumps coming from further down the ground floor hallway. According to the ruckus, the DWM hadn’t quite taken care of the entire mess yet.
“You got it, man,” Rob said as he backed away from Karl, nodding. He gave the group two thumbs up, then turned and ran toward the noise.
Zinnia started to run after Rob, but Karl stopped her with a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I have to tell them about the third floor,” Zinnia explained. “They need to send in a team to get Liza and Xavier. Maybe they have a way of getting through.”
Karl seemed to consider this a moment.
“No,” said Dawna. Her face was sweaty. She didn’t look entirely well, but she’d calmed down her hiccup-burps. “They aren’t the ones who do it,” she said. “They’re not the Chosen.”
Gavin gave her a skeptical look. “Are you messing with us? Is this your way of getting back at me for not telling you everything sooner?”
The elevator doors tried to close on the group. Margaret stopped the doors with her foot and shooed everyone out. “Let’s talk about this somewhere else,” Margaret said. “Somewhere not inside this cramped elevator.”
The group stepped out. Zinnia ran back to get the remaining bits of crushed key off the floor of the elevator, then stepped out and let it go.
Dawna was saying, “I know I’m new to the whole supernatural thing, but I’ve been practicing with my tarot cards, and, you guys, I think I can tell the future.”
“Of course you can,” Margaret said. “You’re a cartomancer.”
“Exactly,” Dawna said. “I’m a fortune-teller. Same thing.”
“No, no, no,” Margaret said. “Not the same thing. You’re a card mage, Dawna.”
For once, Gavin agreed with Margaret. “It’s true,” he told Dawna. “If you call yourself a fortune-teller, none of the cool supernaturals will be friends with you.”
Dawna put one hand on her hip. “Maybe I don’t want to be friends with them.”
“You want to have powerful friends,” Gavin said. “Trust me.”
“Like you? What does a gnome do, anyway?”
Gavin looked around furtively and muttered, “Where’s a bone-crawler when you need one?”
Karl blustered, “That’s enough chatter! Back to the business at hand. Dawna, you were telling us you saw something in the cards?”
Dawna scratched her dark cheek with one long fingernail and glanced around. They were still in the hallway near the elevator, and nobody else was nearby. “Where are the new kids? Where are Liza and Xavier?”
Zinnia put her hand on Dawna’s shoulder and looked the woman straight in the eyes. “They need our help,” Zinnia said. “We’ll explain everything soon, but you were saying something about seeing the future? About people who are Chosen?”
Dawna stared back at Zinnia, her orange, cat-like eyes gradually relaxing. “The cards keep telling me that two people are in danger, and the only ones who can save them are a group of five wizards.”
“Well, we’re not wizards,” Gavin said, brushing his hands. “Guess that leaves us out. Maybe it’s five of the pest control guys.”
Zinnia ignored Gavin and asked Dawna, “What else did the cards tell you?” Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw the other three leaning in to listen.
“There’s a giant snake,” Dawna said. “Enormous.”
Margaret gasped. “She knows about the sandworm! Dawna, you really are a cartomancer!”
Zinnia prompted, “What else?”
Dawna’s voice was soft, unsteady. “The giant snake swallowed two people, but it’s a magic snake, so the people didn’t die.”
“That’s good news,” Margaret said. “They’re still alive.”
“But they’re in terrible danger,” Dawna said, her eyes glistening. “So the five wizards—or, I guess they’re actually five people with supernatural powers—have to find a magical key and rescue them.”
Gavin asked, “How?”
Karl cleared his throat. “What’s the plan, Dawna?”
Dawna took a step back from the group, shaking her black curls. “That’s all I know,” she said. “Five people use the key.” She put her hand on her hip again. “Please tell me one of you has this magic key.”
Zinnia lifted her hand to show everyone the broken key fragments in her palm.
“We need an alternate plan,” Zinnia said. “This is the only magic key we know of, and it’s broken.”
Karl said, “That can’t be the only key. There must be another one. Dawna, think! Where’s the other one?”
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice shaking. “I mean, I could try reading the cards again, but...” She held both hands to her mouth and hiccupped. “Oh, no. I’m going to be sick. I can still smell those creepy-crawly things.”
“Me, too,” Gavin said, wrinkling his nose. “What’s that pest control crew doing? Having a barbecue?”
Karl burped. “It might be my breath,” he said.
That set off a chain reaction that included more hiccupping from Dawna, and everyone talking about the smell of burnt bone-crawlers and each other’s powers.
Zinnia tuned out the conversation and stared at the crumbled bits of key in her hand.
She didn’t know Liza and Xavier very well. She wasn’t even particularly attached to them. But they were still people! They weren’t Red Shirts in a Star Trek episode. They had lives and futures that weren’t going to happen if they were stuck inside magical snakes on another plane of reality.
She had to think. How could the five of them mount a rescue without the key?
She started to get an idea, fuzzy around the edges.
Karl burped again, and the stench of bone-crawler meat set Zinnia’s thinking back by a minute.
Soon, she was back on track. They didn’t have the magical key, but they did have a physical duplicate of it.
She couldn’t shake the mental image of Karl’s long, chameleon-like tongue snaking out of his mouth. However, the visual wasn’t entirely bad, because it made her think of chameleons, and then she remembered a specific potion she’d read about in one of her books.
That was it! She had a plan, and it was thanks to Karl’s smelly burps and freaky tongue.
Zinnia interrupted the conversation and said, “I have an idea. We might not have the right key, but I believe we can make one.”
Everyone stared at her.
“We can make one,” she repeated. “Maybe. I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Zinnia, you can do it,” Margaret said, clapping her hands together. To the others, she said, “Zinnia can do it. She’s amazing with potions. We just need to get her home, where she keeps all her good ingredients.”
“Great,” Karl said. “It’s settled. We’ll all go to Zinnia’s house straight after work.”
“All of us?” Zinnia tried not to let the horror show on her face.
“You heard the card mage,” Karl said, gesturing at Dawna. “This is a five-wizard job.”
“A five-man job,” Gavin corrected.
“A five-person job,” Margaret then corrected.
Karl checked his watch. “We’ll head out to Zinnia’s residence in a couple of hours, as soon as the department is closed.” He shooed them down the hallway in the direction of their office. “Back to work with all of you. Chop chop. Don’t make me tongue-lash anyone.”
Dawna shrieked a little at the idea of Karl’s chameleon tongue making another appearance. She ran ahead of the group, leading the way.
Chapter 26
THREE HOURS LATER
Zinnia found herself alone in her kitchen with her least favorite coworker, Gavin Gorman. Previous to today, she would have said Karl was her least favorite coworker, but ever since the department boss had munched a trio of nasty monsters, Zinnia’s opinion of the older man had been upgraded. Gavin was in the kitchen because he had insisted on helping Zinnia brew up a pot of coffee. So far, he hadn’t been much help.
The others, Karl, Dawna, and Margaret, were stationed in Zinnia’s living room, debating pizza toppings for their dinner takeout order.
Zinnia handed Gavin some of the freshly ground coffee she kept on hand for guests.
Gavin was sneering at her coffee maker. “This old thing is practically an antique,” Gavin said. He wrinkled his nose and banged on the top of it. Zinnia wondered how he’d like it if someone banged on the top of Gavin. Zinnia was, to her surprise, kind of protective of her appliances.
“Does it even work?” Gavin asked.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Antique or not, it still heats water and dribbles it through the beans. You ought to be able to make do.”
“If you say so.” He added the coffee and water, then grabbed a chair and sat right in front of the coffee maker, watching the drips come down.
“It doesn’t need supervision,” she said.
He grunted.
“The whole point of appliances is they do the work for you.”
He didn’t budge.
Zinnia leaned back against the kitchen counter and watched her coworker watch the coffee.
Gavin Gorman was a gnome who looked nothing like the gnomes in fairy tales. For starters, he was over six foot two. He wore stylish clothes that were, in Zinnia’s opinion, always a size too small. Then again, Zinnia didn’t read magazines about men’s fashion, so what did she know? Wearing shoes without socks would drive her nuts, but Gavin did so regularly.
The forty-something man had a square face, a cleft chin, a short nose, and close-set, hazel eyes. His skin was bronze from frequent spray-tanning and his teeth were blue-white from frequent laser whitening. He wore his sandy brown hair in a conservative cut, and was always clean-shaven. The man couldn’t walk past a mirror without pausing to admire himself, nor could he let a coworker’s verbal mistake go uncorrected, but he wasn’t all bad. Sure, back in January he had ransacked his murdered coworker’s corpse looking for a pen, but he hadn’t killed the woman for it.
Being a gnome, Gavin was naturally attracted to items of value. The one “item of value” he couldn’t stay away from was Dawna Jones. The couple was always getting together and breaking up again. Nobody but the two of them cared, yet lately they had been making announcements about their current state of entanglement. They were under the impression their coworkers were interested. What Gavin and Dawna didn’t realize was that people only cared to gossip about office romances that were secret or, better yet, taboo.
The last time Zinnia had been alone with Gavin, they’d been at his apartment at the Candy Factory. He had ingested an herbal compound, and she’d tricked him into believing the combination was going to have disastrous consequences for his love life. He’d then given her the information she needed, but the biggest breakthrough had come courtesy of a painting he had hanging in his living room. It was a painting of a nude redhead who bore more than a passing resemblance to Zinnia herself.
As Zinnia watched Gavin watching the coffee drip, she thought about the painting in a whole new light.
“Gavin,” she said hesitantly. “That painting of the nude redhead you have in your apartment, where did you get it?”
He didn’t take his eyes off the dripping coffee. “The one that looks just like you? I got it at a yard sale a few years back. It’s really old. The frame is vintage. I mainly bought it for the frame, but then Raquel grew on me.”
“Raquel?”
“That’s the name I gave her, on account of how she reminded me of Raquel Welch.”
Zinnia felt her pulse race. Could it be? Last night when she’d been alone with Piero in 1955, he’d shown her his beautiful paintings and asked that she pose for him sometime. The wine had gone to her head, and Piero was so charming. She’d thrown caution to the wind and offered to pose for him right then and there.
Zinnia’s mouth was dry. When she spoke again, her speech wasn’t so crisp. “Was there anything written on the back of the painting?”
“Just the date and the artist’s name.”
The tremble in her voice betrayed her nerves. “And what was the date?”
Gavin turned and gave her a confused look. “Since when are you so interested in an old painting? I’ll sell it to you, if you want.”
“No need. I’m just curious about the artist.”
“I don’t remember. I haven’t looked at the back side of that painting since I hung it there.” Gavin leaned to the side in his chair, looked down at his feet, and tapped the floor with the toes of one foot. “If it’s really that important to you, I could teleport to my apartment right now and check.”
Zinnia clapped her hands. “Would you? That would be wonderful.”
He frowned. “I would... except teleportation is really exhausting. Plus, it only goes one direction, straight to the pre-defined safe spot. I’d have to call a taxi to get a ride back here to your house, assuming I had the strength to leave the apartment right away.”
Zinnia tilted her head to the side. “Gavin, the last time we talked about teleportation, you told me it was just a myth about gnomes. You denied it.”
Gavin shrugged and returned his gaze to the coffee maker. “Yeah, well, we weren’t exactly friends back then.”
“And we are now?”
>
He turned his head and gave her a hurt look. “Are you saying we aren’t?”
“Of course not,” she said quickly. “I suppose I haven’t given it much thought.”
“We go bowling together on Friday nights, even though Annette isn’t around anymore to guilt us into it. That makes us friends. All of us.”
Just then, a chorus of laughter filtered in from the living room. Zinnia realized that Gavin was right. They were more than coworkers. They were friends.
Even so, she wasn’t about to tell Gavin that the painting that graced his living room was, quite possibly, a nude Zinnia Riddle.
“Speaking of friends,” she said, “how do you feel about Dawna knowing you’re a gnome?”
Gavin scoffed. “It’s not ideal.”
“But it’s only fair that she knows the truth.”
He scoffed again. “Whatever respect she had for me went out the window. Nobody wants to date a gnome. Not even other gnomes. My kind doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation.”
“The only gnomes I know are you and your uncle, Griebel.”
Gavin gave Zinnia a raised eyebrow.
“Oh,” she said, recalling what she knew about Griebel and his scheming ways. “I see what you mean.”
“If only I’d been born into one of the sexy supernatural families,” he said. “Like shifters. Everyone thinks shifters are so dreamy.”
Now it was Zinnia’s turn to scoff. “Not all shifters are dreamy.”
“You’ve never dated a shifter? But witches and shifters are supposed to hate each other, which only makes it hotter for them to date. It’s sexy and scandalous, like star-crossed lovers.”
Zinnia took a breath to settle the feelings that had flooded up. Gavin didn’t know the truth about her time with a shifter, or how it had ended.
Or did he? Gavin was staring at her intently.
“Never mind about supernatural politics,” Zinnia said. “There will be plenty of time for you to speculate about my nonexistent love life after we get Liza and Xavier back. Those poor kids.” She grabbed mugs for everyone from her cupboard. “I just hope Dawna is right about her cards, and they’re still alive.”
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