Thorn Fall Read online

  My phone blasted Pour Some Sugar on Me, and I jumped. Temi’s name flashed on the screen.

  “Temi,” I blurted into the phone. “You’re alive!” Either that, or someone had found her phone lying in the forest and was randomly calling her contacts. My gut clenched at the thought, especially when nobody answered right away.

  “Yeah,” her voice finally came over the phone. “My battery’s almost dead, and I’m up on Senator Highway past Goldwater Lake. Can you pick me up?” She sounded wearier than an ER doctor after a twenty-four-hour shift.

  “Yes, of course.” I eyed the small car, again wishing we had opted for the van. “I hope you have lots of stories to share.”

  “Some, yeah. But all I want now is something to drink and a bed.”

  The line died before I could answer. I didn’t know if it was a reflection of how she felt about the conversation or if her battery had died.

  “Is she all right?” Simon asked, genuine concern in his eyes. I wondered if he would be that concerned if I had been missing for a week. I kept telling him Temi was out of his league, but he refused to believe it.

  “I think so. But she wants a ride. And a bed. Maybe we should upgrade to a hotel for the night.” I grimaced at the expense—November’s student loan payment had been sucked out of my account at the beginning of the month, leaving me barely treading water, as usual.

  “A hotel?” Simon whipped out his own phone. “If my lady wants a hotel, I shall arrange fine accommodations for her.”

  I watched in some bemusement as he arranged “fine accommodations” at the Motel 6. Thanks to his frugal streak, he didn’t have my pile of debt, but getting him to spring for something extravagant was next to impossible. “You don’t think your lady—” I made air quotes around the words, “—would like something classier than the Motel 6?”

  He frowned at me. “Like what? The Econo Lodge?”

  “Never mind. I—”

  My phone bleeped, and a text message from Temi popped up. The reception is too spotty for calls. But needed to let you know. They said there’s another jibtab here.

  “What is it?” Simon asked.

  “You better start on your napalm right away.”

  Chapter 2

  As I folded tent poles by the headlights of the Jag, I eyed the nearby campsites, hoping nobody was paying attention to us. A few ponderosa pines and alligator junipers added some cover, but I had no trouble seeing the RVs in the other lots, some still with lamps on inside. People might think it was strange that we were disassembling our camp in the middle of the night, even if the luxury of the Motel 6 awaited. During the last week, there had already been eyebrow-raising at the sight of Simon’s 1980s, dusty blue van sitting alongside Temi’s sleek car. And now our group had grown decidedly odder. Only a few other campsites were occupied this late in the year, but I didn’t want to have to explain Alektryon to anyone, not until I had an opportunity to whisk him into Goodwill for a change of clothing.

  Having a former pro tennis player passed out in the back of a Jag with out-of-state plates wasn’t something I wanted to chat about, either, not with neighbors anyway. There were about a bazillion things I wanted to chat about with Temi, but as soon as we had picked her up at way-the-hell-out-there-after-Senator-Highway-turns-to-dirt, she had swilled a warm half-drunk can of Mountain Dew and crumpled in the tiny back seat, practically lying on Simon who had been wedged into the narrow seat with her. He couldn’t have been comfortable, and Temi had smelled of dried sweat and caked dirt, but he had worn a big grin all the way back to Granite Basin Lake.

  The other person I needed to chat with was standing beside our picnic table, watching the tent disassembly. He looked lost. Bleak.

  When he caught me watching him, he pointed at the flattened tent and asked something that was probably, “Do you want help?”

  I shook my head and held up a finger toward him. “Simon? I want to find out what our friend wants. Can you get your tablet for me when you have a moment?”

  Simon was stuffing his sleeping bag into its casing, a task that he would find easier if he ever actually bothered to roll up the bag properly. “Oh, yes, it’s under the front seat in the van.”

  He must have been in a hurry when we left. That was his second-choice storage place for valuables. There was a fake floor in one of the cupboards that he usually used.

  “With the booby trap in place?” I asked.

  “Of course. Have you seen the unwashed delinquents that lurk around these campgrounds?”

  “Besides us?”

  “In addition to us.”

  I stuck the last folded pole into the bag and headed for the driver’s seat of the van. I patted around under it, careful not to catch any of the corners of the duct tape holding the rips together on the faded, striped upholstery. Something brushed the backs of my fingers. I grimaced but didn’t withdraw my hand until I had the tablet. A fake tarantula perched on my wrist when I pulled it out, but I returned it to its hiding spot and reset the trip wire.

  I sat cross-legged on top of the picnic table, waved for Alektryon to come closer, and pulled up the drawing program. His message about not trusting the elves was still there. I nodded at him when he pointed at it. He looked over at Temi and frowned. He couldn’t know she had been off with Jakatra and Eleriss, could he?

  “Go ahead and write first.” I held out the tablet toward him. I had questions for him, but he had specifically come looking for us, so he must have something pressing on his mind. Like what he was supposed to do with his life now that he was stuck here.

  Alektryon sat on the table beside me, his shoulder not quite touching mine. I wouldn’t have minded. He was a lot better looking than any of my other boyfriends had been, and more than once when I’d been driving us back to the campground, I’d caught myself glancing at the muscular thighs on display, thanks to his short tunic. I wasn’t sure who had made the rule that women were supposed to wear skimpy skirts so men could more easily ogle them, but there was nothing wrong with things going the other way.

  He dragged his finger across the screen, forming Ancient Greek letters. A cool breeze whispered through, smelling of dust and pine needles, and he paused to squint into the dark woods across the road. After Temi’s warning about another monster coming, that made me nervous. I had no idea if it would show up here, where we had slain the other one, or on the California coast where the first had originated. Or maybe it would be in Beijing. Who knew? It was hard to establish a pattern and make predictions based on one data point.

  Alektryon held out the tablet for me to read, though he glanced into the pines a few more times.

  “You want to be my… warrior? No, bodyguard.” I stared at him. The offer would have surprised me coming from anyone, but it wasn’t as if women had been all that highly regarded in Ancient Greece. True, Sparta had given women more rights than a lot of the city-states, but this seemed an unlikely train of thought for someone from that time period.

  “What?” Simon paused in the middle of stuffing the tent bag into the back of the van. “What do you need a bodyguard for when you’ve got Temi? And you’ll soon have my napalm.”

  I read the next screen of his request. “He wants to protect me—us, maybe—in exchange for language lessons.”

  Alektryon pointed at one of the words. “Bo-dee-gart?” he asked.

  “No, the one you’re pointing at means language. Language,” I repeated slowly, wishing I had some experience tutoring English. I had worked in the computer lab at school instead. Maybe he would like to learn how to do mail merges in MS Word? “This one is bodyguard.”

  I wrote yes on the tablet, that I accepted his offer. It seemed too complicated to explain that I would have taught him anyway. I felt somewhat responsible for his appearance in our world, even if I had only been a witness when the elves had taken him out of… whatever it had been. Not a cryonics chamber, Eleriss had said. But something that could suspend a body for centuries and revive it later. I still struggled to
believe it and dearly wanted to ask Temi if she had seen any other indications of advanced technology. Or magic. Whatever.

  Alektryon held up a finger, then wrote a few more sentences.

  “Can you speak as you write?” I asked, touching my lips and pointing to his, then to the words. “I think I can understand your language more quickly than you’ll be able to get mine.” Especially if we were going to teach him English rather than modern Greek.

  “Such arrogance,” Simon said from the door of the van. “Do you think he likes arrogant women?”

  I shooed him away. “Don’t you have something you should be doing?”

  “I’ve finished packing. I could start working on… my projects, but I’m not sure how smart it is to mix chemicals in the dark and without access to running water.”

  Or at all… I couldn’t imagine the staff at the Motel 6 would be happy about him doing it in one of their rooms, either.

  “I could also stand over there and watch Temi sleep,” Simon said, “but I’ve heard that girls find that creepy.”

  “You think?”

  “I bet Spartan boy has been watching you sleep.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “He knew how to find you, didn’t he? He’s been keeping tabs.”

  Hm, that might be true, though I doubted it had anything to do with a romantic fascination such as Simon had for Temi. It was more likely that Alektryon knew I was the only one around here who could understand him, however awkwardly. Now that I thought about it, it was surprising he had waited this long to approach me. Maybe he had been waiting for an opportunity for me to need a bodyguard. I snorted. If we ever made a love connection, I would have to thank the punks at the Safeway parking lot.

  “Why don’t you see if anyone has spotted monsters lately,” I said. “Temi said another one is supposed to be around.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Simon snapped his fingers and dug out his phone.

  Alektryon returned the tablet, several screens’ worth of writing waiting for me. He navigated the computer interface remarkably well, assuming he had never used anything like it before meeting us. Of course, I wasn’t sure I should assume that. He had known the elves and been a part of their world somehow, at least for a time, long enough for them to believe he understood their language. And long enough for them to label him a criminal and lock him away.

  “All that is to ask for language lessons?” Simon asked, walking over.

  “No.” I read the words slowly and twice through, making sure I understood everything before turning a sympathetic grimace toward Alektryon. “You were married?” So much for my love connection.

  He was looking toward the woods again, that same spot as before. It wasn’t one of those unfocused gazes of thoughtfulness but rather a sharp, watchful one. I couldn’t imagine what might be out there. There weren’t any more campsites in that direction. Some animal? I hadn’t heard anything, but there were javelinas and coyotes in the national forest.

  “You sound surprised,” Simon said, scrolling through some news feed on his phone. “If he was wandering around the Peloponnese in that get-up, he probably had Greek girls jumping him at every intersection.”

  “Really, Simon, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d noticed.”

  “It’s hard not to notice when his twig and berries are on display every time he lifts his leg. You’re going to get him some underwear, aren’t you?”

  His tunic wasn’t quite that short.

  “I’m sure we can hit up Goodwill tomorrow. Though the subligaculum didn’t come along until the Romans. You may have to take him aside and show him what to do with briefs.”

  “Ugh.”

  I chewed my lip and stared at the tablet, not wanting to share more with Simon. Even if Alektryon hadn’t mentioned it, he probably preferred his personal details not be shared with the world. The reason I had been surprised he’d had a wife was because history said Spartan men lived in the barracks until they were thirty, and I didn’t think Alektryon was that old yet. But there were stories of younger men getting married and then slipping away in the night to visit their wives. And his words said he had been expecting a child when he had been kidnapped. His first.

  I rubbed my face, upset on his behalf, even if I barely knew him. How long had it been since he had seen his wife? In his years, not the rest of the world’s. I couldn’t imagine waking up and realizing the love of my life had been dead for more than two millennia. Maybe he was finding something to stare at in the woods, because it made him uncomfortable talking about this with a stranger. He probably would have kept it to himself, but the last thing his message asked was if I could find out what had happened to them. He seemed to grasp that they were long gone, but he wanted to know if they had lived well. Maybe he wanted me to trace the genealogy through the centuries. He hadn’t written as much, and I wasn’t going to recommend it, because I couldn’t promise to deliver. If memory served, the Spartans hadn’t been as obsessed about keeping estate records the way the Athenians had, and nobody had had a surname back then. Even if Alektryon’s family had been particularly prominent and some record had survived, Sparta had been reformed, invaded, and sacked throughout the ages, so it wasn’t as if we could simply wander into a public archives building and look him up.

  Alektryon jumped to his feet, his hand touching the hilt of his sword. He said two quick words, then jogged across the street, and into the trees.

  “Where’s he going?” Simon asked.

  “I think he said, ‘Wait here.’” I scrolled through the pages of writing again. Nothing about stalkers in the woods.

  “Because he has to take a leak or because something creepy is watching us from the woods?”

  “He didn’t say, but he’s been eyeing those trees for a while.” I eyed them too. Alektryon had already disappeared, his crimson cloak like black in the dark, letting him blend in.

  “Maybe we should head to our hotel room. The reception is pathetic out here. It would be easier to search for monster news from town.” Simon waved toward the back of the van where we mounted the portable satellite dish when we were staying for a while; he’d already stowed it, though, so all we had was the cell network. “Oh, wait. The page loaded.” He climbed up on the picnic table, pointing his phone toward the stars, as if this would significantly improve the reception.

  “Murder in Tucson… just guns. A woman was strangled in Buckeye. Some drug thing. Shooting in Flagstaff. These are lame deaths.” He lowered the phone to punch in a different search.

  “Yes… so irritating when people are murdered by mundane methods. I’m surprised you aren’t hooked into some police scanner somewhere.”

  “I’ve got Yavapai County coming in on my Mac.” He winked, then frowned down at the much smaller screen. “Oh, here’s something from my mysterious death search. This just happened today. Teenage boy from Sedona found unconscious in Oak Creek Canyon with small puncture wound in his neck. Died early this morning in a Phoenix hospital. Cause unknown.”

  “Puncture wound? Unless that was done by the fangs of something big and ugly, I’m not sure it sounds like our jibtab,” I said, using the name Eleriss had given the monster.

  “Are we sure they’ll all going to be the same? Our pointy-eared guardian angels were awfully vague about… everything.”

  No kidding. And if Alektryon was to be believed, angels didn’t describe them properly. I needed to get the rest of his story from him.

  Simon held up a finger. “It was the second person to have been found with a puncture wound in Sedona this week. The first was found near Cathedral Rock, already dead when hikers encountered the body, which belonged to a seventy-three-year-old grandfather from Tucson. His puncture wound was also in the throat.”

  “That does sound suspicious.”

  “Other than those cases, there hasn’t been anything in the news specifically about monsters for over a week,” Simon said, “not since we took care of the last one. Too bad there’s no way the National Guard could fi
nd the body and give us credit for vanquishing it. Most of the comments on the blog post I wrote up expressed a certain disbelief.”

  “Imagine that.” I’d forced him to take his monster blogging to a new site and to keep it off our business page, so I couldn’t care less about what he wrote there now. He would probably be offended to learn I hadn’t read most of the posts.

  “Sedona’s not much more than an hour away,” Simon said. “We could head over tonight. We’ve never searched for rusty gold there, either. Bet we could find some stuff in between investigating punctured people.” He wriggled his eyebrows at me.

  “It’s less the distance and the rust, and more the cost of lodgings there. It’s a tourist trap. I’m sure the Motel 6 is three times as expensive.”

  “Actually there’s not a Motel 6. Or an Econo Lodge.”

  “That should tell you something. Why don’t we stay here and drive over in the morning?”

  Alektryon jogged back into the influence of the headlights. His sword was no longer in his scabbard but in his hand. I eyed the edge but didn’t see any blood dripping from it.

  “What is it?” I picked up the tablet.

  “Dhekarzha,” he said.

  “Gesundheit?” Simon asked.

  “No,” I said, “that was the word our elves had for themselves. Alektryon, was it Jakatra? Eleriss?” Maybe they had come to watch us to make sure Temi returned safely.

  Alektryon gave me a blank look. Right, they had probably never given him their names. I grabbed the tablet and asked, “The two from the cave?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re sure they’re elves? Dhekarzha?”

  He took the tablet and wrote, “I would have caught a human. The Dhekarzha move with speed and agility that cannot be matched.” He must have remembered my request, because he spoke the words as he wrote them. His gaze drifted toward the treetops for a moment, then he finished with, “One of them was spying upon us.”

  For our own good? Or for… other reasons? Nothing had bothered us during the last week, but Temi and her glowing sword hadn’t been here, either. The last jibtab had been drawn to it. As had the elves. With it back among us, would we be magnets for trouble again?