Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The alarm silenced, but everything was still bathed in red light.
“Who?” Lula mouthed.
Abbi tipped her head to the side, a motion so like a rabbit it would have been cute if the secret bolt hole—that no monster, god, or man could find—hadn’t just been found.
“Ricky?” Abbi asked.
I shook my head. Ricky was Lula’s, well, now also my, good friend. She was a Crossroads, a person who guarded a magical house near Route 66 where all manners of supernaturals could claim sanctuary.
But that was a male voice, not Ricky’s.
“I know you’re not alone,” the voice said. “I promise you, I am here to help you.”
I rolled my eyes. We’d heard that so many times, it was ridiculous.
“Wizard.” Pamela strode into the garage, a scrying crystal glowing in her hand. “Here, I’ll show you.”
She sprinkled what looked like sand over the crystal.
The glow caught the sand, growing flat and bright over the bowl until it was the size of a small movie screen.
A bird’s eye view appeared in the glow, angled from above looking down. It swooped then hovered in front of a man.
He was built strong, like a rugby player, his bare arms tattooed with overlapping designs which flowed and shifted across his skin. He wore a brown shirt, tan pants, and had a twig of a pecan tree tucked behind his ear.
His intensely green eyes were narrowed and every inch of him signaled high alert.
“Cardamom,” Lu said.
Even though the crystal’s view was a little foggy, she was right. It was Ricky’s half-dryad wizard boyfriend.
At least it appeared to be him. There was no reason for him to be in New Mexico, much less in the middle of nowhere.
“You know him?” Pamela asked.
“Ricky’s boyfriend,” Lu said.
“Ricky Vargas?”
“Yes.”
“Haven’t met him.”
“He recently came back into her life,” Lu said.
“But he’s a wizard, right?”
“Half-dryad wizard.”
“Huh. Well, I’m not inclined to believe he showed up here minutes after we did by accident,” Pamela said.
“Don’t let him in,” I said. “It might be an illusion.”
“Not even my tenth rodeo, Brogan. We have ways to see what he really is. Hold tight.”
She jogged back into the building, taking the crystal with her.
I wanted to follow her but didn’t want to leave Abbi and the book alone.
“You folks worried about leaving the book out here?” Elmer asked as he came down the stairs like he was a man in his fifties, not his eighties.
“Yes,” Lu said.
“I’m not thrilled about it either. How about we use this to take it to the safe room?” He pulled a black cloth out of his pocket and flapped it in the air. “This whole place is a vault, but that safe room doesn’t even register as a blip on this Earth.”
“Shadow cloth!” Abbi said. “I like those. Here, let me.”
Elmer gave her the cloth. She opened the tool box and retrieved the witch’s box with the book hidden inside.
She wrapped the cloth around the box, and the hissing I’d been hearing for days stopped.
I stuck a finger in my ear and jiggled it. “You hear that?” I asked Lu.
“No?”
“Neither do I.” I hadn’t realized the book had been making noise—the slightest whispering, like water over stones, or the shift of sand under foot. It had been so subtle, I hadn’t realized how constant it was.
“It makes a sound,” I said. “It’s quiet now.”
“That cloth smothers any magic it touches,” Elmer said. “Got it off an old witch who’d once hunted the Strange.”
Abbi clambered out of the truck, the box in her arms. “Maybe we should do it fast.”
“Let’s go then.” Elmer jogged up the stairs, Abbi on his heels.
Lorde jumped out of the truck and came over to Lula and me, asking for head scratches. She wasn’t frightened or on guard anymore, which was a good sign for a dog who had been around a lot of magic and knew what danger looked like.
She bounded after Abbi.
“Thoughts on the place? On Cardamom?” I asked Lu, as we climbed the stairs again.
“They haven’t let him in yet,” she said. “They’re cautious, which is good. You can really hear it? The book?”
“I could. It’s a hiss, or a whisper. Like static. But it’s silent under the shadow cloth.”
“So, they have strong magical items and the knowledge of how to use them. I like that, too.”
“Are we staying?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. Could we trust that their magic would hold strong against everyone and everything tracking us? I doubted it. But if it could buy us enough time to find a weapon that would kill Headwaters, it was worth the risk.
“Hey,” Josie waved us into a side alcove just off the control room. “Pamela’s checking on our visitor. We can watch from here.”
This room had screens—some of them computer, some of them older gear that looked like radar, and other technology I wasn’t familiar with.
An array of crystals sat in a circle on a small lit table in the center of the room, crystals that looked like the one Pamela had used earlier.
Josie did the sand trick over the table of crystals and they responded, showing a sky view that lowered to eye level.
Cardamom stood in the same place as before, sweating in the heat, but otherwise he looked calm.
The perspective shifted, and we got a view of the side of him, the back of him, the side, and front again.
I didn’t see Pamela in any of those angles, but I had a feeling she was the one controlling the view.
“We have tests that will tell us if he’s who he says he is,” Josie said. “Make sure he’s not under any contracts, trapped by a geas, or working for someone who wants to harm you or us.”
“What kind of tests?” Lula asked.
“Pam’s doing them now. It’s a mix of things. Magic, of course. Some physical test equipment that can give bio readings from a distance. And our secret weapon, the sniffer.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “What’s a sniffer?”
“That.” Josie pointed at the image.
A very small lizard, about the length of my thumb skittered out from under a rock. It was no different than every other lizard out there that bobbed up to the warm tops of rocks or dipped back down in the shadows.
It didn’t approach Cardamom or do anything strange.
It was (to be generous) the plainest looking dirt-brown lizard I’d ever seen.
Cardamon didn’t appear to notice it either.
“Is it magic?”
“Not really, but yes, a little. We found it, oh, I don’t know, twenty years ago?
It’d been living in the archives, hibernating.
It just popped up and wanted the banana Elmer was eating.
You should have seen that fight. Hilarious.
We didn’t understand its ability until we ran into some ghouls. The little guy really came in handy.”
“A lizard,” Lula said. “It can smell magic?”
“Yes, but more importantly it can sense the intent and threat of a person or thing.”
“We’re trusting a lizard?” I crossed my arms. “That’s not weird at all.”
“Is that any weirder than being an earthbound spirit, who may or may not be able to wield the spell book of the gods, and who is traveling with the actual rabbit from the actual moon?”
Lu covered her mouth and snorted.
“But a lizard,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not just a lizard,” Elmer said coming into the space with glasses of water for us all. “It’s dragon kind.”
“Dragon?” Abbi pushed forward to better see what was, admittedly, a pretty boring scene of a man standing in the desert.
“Dragon kind. Not a full dragon, but…dragon adjacent,” Elmer said.
“Like a dragon pet? A dog or cat, but dragon?” Abbi asked.
Elmer held his finger and thumb slightly apart. “More like a tiny little dragon wizard.”
“Oh,” Abbi breathed. “Why does it look like a lizard?”
“Because that’s what it wants to look like,” Josie said.
Abbi nodded. “It’s okay to look like what you want to look like.”
She should know, since I was pretty sure her true form was actually a rabbit.
The lizard ducked down into the shadow and for the barest second, even though I had eyes on it, it disappeared. Then it reappeared and darted out from under the rock.
“Clear,” Josie said.
“How do you know?” Lu asked.
She tapped her forehead. “It said so.”
I just blinked, letting that sink in.
Elmer handed Lu a glass of water. “I know we’re asking you to put your trust in us, but Eunice agreed this was the place where you’d be safe. So did Bo and Raven. If you trust them, you can trust us. And we trust the lizard.”
“I super trust the lizard,” Abbi said.
“I have a better idea,” I said. “How about we call Ricky? See if she knows if Cardamom was headed this way.”
Lu huffed, annoyed she hadn’t thought about that. “Do you have cell service?”
“Clear as a bell,” Elmer said.
I took a glass of water and downed half in one go. It was sweet and refreshingly cold.
Lu took her phone out of her pocket and called.
“Ricky, hi,” she said. “Do you know where Cardamom is right now?”
I could hear Ricky’s voice even though Lula held the phone to her ear.
“Hello to you too. Are you okay? The house was really worried about all of you.”
“Thank the house. We’re fine at the moment. Is Cardamom with you?”
“No. He left to find you. Did he?”
“Someone’s here who looks like him,” Lu said.
“Oh, we’re being that level of suspicious. Okay. Can you see his left hand?”
We all looked back at the display.
“Yes.”
“There’s a tattoo he only ever shows when he’s proving who he is. In other words, nothing which can duplicate, clone, mask, or appear as someone else can ever get that tattoo right.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“What is it?” Lula repeated.
“It’s a circle at the base of his thumb. In the center is a star. A silver star. As you look at it, it will rotate counter-clockwise between silver, gold, and green.”
His hands were clasped in front of him, left over right so we could see the circle and the star.
“Do you see it?” Ricky asked.
“Yes,” Lula said.
“Then that’s Cardamom. We know what you’re trying to do,” she said, wisely not announcing the book or us wanting to kill Headwaters. “He thinks he can help.”
“Why aren’t you here?” I asked a little louder.