Thorn Fall Page 3

  “I think it’s time to wake Sleeping Beauty.” I nodded to the car.

  Temi hadn’t moved from the back seat; she had simply crumpled over to take the spot Simon had vacated. Her clothes were caked in dirt and—damn, was that blood? She hadn’t appeared injured when we picked her up, though I hadn’t been able to tell from the way she slouched wearily to the car whether her knee had been fixed up. She had tossed her tennis bag in the trunk, the glowing sword presumably still inside, without commenting on Simon’s paraphernalia. Or maybe she hadn’t noticed it.

  I shook her shoulder, wondering if I should be checking for a pulse. “Temi? You can sleep more later, but I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  I thought I would have to shake her a few times, but she jerked awake, sitting bolt upright and gripping the back of the seat, her eyes bulging. “Are there more? Are they attacking again?”

  “Uh. Not yet.”

  Alektryon had followed me to the car, and he didn’t seem surprised by her reaction.

  Temi blinked a few times, looking around the camp, and finally focusing on me. Her eyes were bloodshot, and I felt bad about waking her up. “Do you have any water?” she rasped. For the first time, I saw how chapped and dry her lips were. What exactly had Jakatra’s “training” involved?

  “I’ll get some,” Simon blurted before I could answer.

  “Temi, we apparently have an elven visitor,” I said. “We need to know if it might be Jakatra or Eleriss. Would they have followed you back? To make sure you arrived home?” I made a face and waved dismissively at the campground, since it wasn’t exactly home.

  “They didn’t follow me,” Temi said.

  The cooler door slammed inside the van, and Simon appeared an instant later. He had never brought me a soda that quickly. He lifted a chilled water bottle in one hand and a can of his treasured Mountain Dew in the other. Temi took the water; she must have recovered from her earlier lapse of judgment.

  “We don’t have any Gatorades, do we?” I asked. “Something with electrolytes?”

  “I get my electrolytes straight from the can.” He popped open the Mountain Dew and took a swig.

  “Healthy.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Temi said after downing half the bottle in thirty seconds. “I still have a couple of the green wafers they gave me. They seem to contain everything you need.”

  “Did you go to their world?” Simon asked.

  Temi nodded. “Yes, but they kept me in a little house in the woods, and I never saw anything except predators that make wolves and tigers look like kittens. I guess I saw another elf too. The one that kept trying to kill us.”

  “Uh?” I prompted.

  “It’s a long story,” she said, her tone suggesting she wasn’t interested in telling it now.

  “How did you get there?” Simon asked, visions of spaceships dancing in his eyes.

  “They made a glowing… doorway thing. A portal, I guess.”

  “A portal? Was it like… a wormhole to another location in the galaxy? Or was it more like an interdimensional entrance to another space and time here on Earth?”

  “It was a blue rectangle,” Temi said.

  I snorted. “I don’t think she’s ready to discuss Alcubierre drives and quantum mechanics with you.”

  Temi’s lips flattened as she frowned at me.

  “Sorry.” I hadn’t meant to imply she wasn’t bright enough to discuss such things, just not geeky enough to care about them.

  “Amazing,” Simon whispered. “I wish…”

  “Me too.” I wasn’t all that into the idea of exploring the paranormal, but the idea of learning how the elves’ history intersected with ours? I would have given a lot to go along, even if it was just to live in the woods and eat green wafers. “You’re sure they wouldn’t have followed? Because Alektryon says there was an elf spying on us.”

  Even now, he was walking around the perimeter of the campsite, his alert gaze toward the forest.

  Temi nodded grimly. “There could be others watching us. Watching me. The sword. Jakatra said you guys should research it, see if there’s a reason it might be valuable. Besides for killing things.”

  “We can do research.” Simon smiled. “In Sedona.”

  My earlier objection didn’t make it to my lips. With this new information that someone was spying on us, I didn’t mind the idea of leaving town. “All right. Let’s get on the road. Temi, do you want me to drive while you sleep?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation.

  “We’ll follow you, Simon. Find us an inexpensive campground.”

  “Will do.”

  “Alektryon?” I asked.

  “Alek,” he said.

  “Alek, will you ride with us?” I asked the question in Greek, but pointed at the vehicles so he would understand. The van would certainly be more spacious for him, but I wanted him to come along so I could get him to talk to me while I drove. If I could hear him speaking for a while, I was certain I would catch on.

  He pointed at me and said a few words while gesturing to the woods. I was still guessing more than understanding. “You need to stop along the way? To check on our spy? Or, oh, you probably stashed your spear and shield somewhere.”

  I wasn’t sure he understood all that, but he nodded.

  We piled into the respective vehicles, and I followed the van out of the campground. The back of my neck itched as we drove past the spot where Alek had gone into the woods, and I admitted I was glad to have him in the car for more than language reasons.

  Darkness rode with us as we drove up the road through the trees, only the headlight beams parting the night. There weren’t any streetlights out here, and the other campers must have gone to bed, because there weren’t any lights back there, either. Nonetheless, something caught my eye in the rearview mirror. A tiny pair of glowing green specks. I swallowed. I had seen Jakatra’s and Eleriss’s eyes in the dark and knew they glowed. I also knew neither of them had green eyes.

  When I looked back over my shoulder, nothing was there.

  Chapter 3

  Temi walked out of the nearby bathhouse in flip-flops and a robe with a towel wrapped around her head. A couple of years ago, that might have been a winning picture for some Paparazzi. Apparently, there weren’t any tennis fans in the Manzanita Campground, because nobody gave her a second glance.

  I was dining on a late breakfast of Fruity-Os, having slept until ten after arriving so late the night before. Simon was in the van, setting up the satellite, wifi, and solar panels. I hadn’t seen Alek yet, but I hoped he was keeping a low profile, because we hadn’t had a chance to clothes shop for him yet. At least his sword and shield were in the men’s tent, as Simon now called it, so he wasn’t walking around in his full Spartan regalia.

  “It’s four dollars for a shower,” Temi announced, joining me at the picnic table. She sounded bemused.

  I hadn’t encountered many campgrounds with pay showers, but there had been a few. Not many in that price range though. I hoped four dollars included enough time to shampoo and condition your hair.

  “You’re paying for the view.” I extended a hand toward the famous red rocks of Sedona, visible beyond the oaks and junipers that shaded the campground from the equally famous Arizona sun.

  I had driven through Sedona a couple of times and done a hike on the north side of town once, but the prices and the number of tourists had always kept me from lingering. Still, the view was impressive, with towering rock formations rising in all directions, the striated cliffs a rich red from all the iron in them. Canyons and nooks hid all over the area, and I’d heard that amateur archaeologists were still finding undiscovered ruins left by the Sinagua, a people who had lived in the area for centuries before disappearing. A part of me hoped that the monsters forgot to show up, and we could simply explore. The Coconino National Forest was super strict about relic hunting, and even things left by settlers tended to be classified as off limits, but with Simon’s metal detector
and explorers app, we might find some more recent stuff that was fair game. And I still longed for that awesome historical find that I could write up for one of the archaeology magazines.

  “The view from inside the shower cubicle wasn’t that notable,” Temi said. “For me, anyway. There was a lizard on the wall watching me.”

  “Don’t tell Simon. He won’t shower for a week. Either that or he’ll make you take out your sword and go in and deal with it.”

  My phone blasted the chorus from Metallica’s Enter Sandman, and I rolled my eyes—I needed to put a passcode on there so Simon would quit changing my ring tones. Of course, he would simply find a passcode an inviting challenge.

  The phone was sitting on the picnic table, plugged into my portable solar charger. The Phoenix number looked familiar, but I didn’t have it programmed into my contacts.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “Delia? Professor Tillium.”

  “Oh. Hi.” I set down the cereal bowl and sat up straighter. “Did you find the cavates?” I asked, referring to the underground rooms we had discovered when following Jakatra and Eleriss to the spot where they had located Temi’s sword. Since there hadn’t been anything in them, they hadn’t been the significant find I had hoped to make, but I had emailed the GPS coordinates to one of the ASU professors who maintained a catalogue of Native American ruins across the state. After being waylaid by the last jibtab at the site, I hadn’t been that eager to go back—Zelda wasn’t the ideal vehicle for driving through old washes, either—but I had been wondering if a team might find something of interest in the hole the elves had burned to find the sword.

  “We found them,” Tillium said neutrally. He didn’t sound excited. Maybe he wasn’t thrilled that they had wasted a trip simply to look at cavates; their location, underground and beside a river that flooded regularly, was a curiosity I thought someone might have been interested in, but maybe I was wrong. “They were empty.”

  “Yes, I said that in my email. I’m guessing the river has flooded a number of times over the years and cleaned everything out. I thought it was strange that they’d been built there in the first place.”

  “I see.”

  I frowned down at the phone, as if we were having a video chat and I could frown right at him. Was he… implying something? “Professor?”

  “Since you graduated from the university’s archaeology program, you are doubtlessly aware of the numerous laws related to the buying and selling of Native American artifacts taken from federal land and national forests. And you must know also that I feel particularly strongly about the looting of the world’s archaeological heritage.”

  “Of course I’m aware, sir. We didn’t take anything.” God, he couldn’t know about the sword, could he? Whoever had left that sword down there, it hadn’t been some Yavapai tribesman.

  “I have a T.A. keeping an eye on your company—” he said company as if it were the filthiest word in the English language, “—eBay page. If illicit artifacts appear there, you can expect someone to take action.”

  I stared at the phone again, heat flushing my cheeks. “Sir, we’re not selling anything illicit. And we didn’t take anything from those caves. Why would I have told you about them in the first place if we had been looting them?”

  “There’s little reason to hide their existence when they’re empty.”

  “They were always empty!” I gulped air, trying to take a deep breath, trying to calm down. Shouting at a professor wouldn’t get me anywhere. “We’re not selling anything illicit,” I repeated.

  “Good. See that you don’t.” The phone beeped as the connection was cut.

  My cheeks were hotter than suns now. I felt like hitting someone.

  Temi, standing a few feet away with her towel still wrapped around her head, was the only one around. Picking a fight with someone fresh off a week of special combat training with elves wouldn’t be a good idea.

  “Problem?” she asked, her dark eyes wary. She probably didn’t know if she should leave me alone or pretend she hadn’t overheard everything.

  I jammed the phone back onto the charger. “Just be glad you got to have a career before you screwed up your life.”

  Pain flashed through her eyes. She gave me a curt nod and strode to the van with her shower kit. I dropped my face into my hands. That had been as tactful as an avalanche. It wasn’t her fault that she had overheard the call, but I couldn’t go after her; I was too embarrassed. Did Tillium really have some nineteen-year-old teacher’s assistant keeping tabs on me? As if I was some criminal? “Like I’d sell artifacts on eBay. I’m not an idiot.”

  “That’s right,” Simon’s voice came from behind me. “Everyone knows black market artifacts go on Craigslist, not eBay.”

  He had hopped out of the van, his Dirt Viper metal detector in hand, and he winked at me.

  I glowered at him. He had business and computer science degrees from the same university. I wasn’t sure how I had grown so notorious, but I doubted anyone back at school cared what he was up to. Or if they were checking up, they probably approved, since he was off being entrepreneurial. Although maybe there was a T.A. following his monster-hunting blog and laughing himself to bed every night.

  Simon’s grin said he wasn’t daunted by my glower. Nothing new there. He patted the Dirt Viper. “She’s all charged up and ready for action. Want to put her to use today?”

  “Depends. Do you want to go hunting for abandoned goodies or signs of monsters?”

  “Absolutely.” He grinned wider.

  I grunted. Yes, why not multitask?

  “Actually, I thought I’d send the Dirt Viper with you so I could stay here and work on…” Simon paused to eye the campsites on either side of us. The one to the right was empty, but an old brown camper van similar to Zelda occupied the one to the left. I had seen a teenage girl and a stringy woman with long gray hair there earlier. Simon lowered his voice to finish with, “Certain defensive and offensive items.”

  “You’re going to do that here? In the van? Shouldn’t you have a lab?”

  “I should, but nobody’s offered me one.”

  “Maybe you could go up and visit Autumn in Flagstaff.”

  Simon propped a foot on the picnic table bench. “Do you think she’d let me use her lab?”

  Hm, she had never been impressed by Simon’s wit.

  “Maybe if I asked…” Or bribed, more likely. Autumn could be bought for burgers and sweet potato fries.

  “A lab would be nice,” Simon said, “but I’d hate to leave a hotbed of monster activity prematurely.”

  “A kid got pronged in the neck two days ago. I’m not sure that qualifies Sedona as a hotbed of monster activity.”

  “Not yet. But now that a certain sword is in the area…”

  I grimaced, still hoping that we would have a while before another monster showed up and that we could make some money first. “Did you find out where that kid was found? We should go check out the area for signs the police might have missed, but we need something more specific than Oak Creek Canyon. That covers a lot of miles.”

  “Yup, it was west of Slide Rock State Park on one of the trails in the Secret Mountain Wilderness.” Simon wriggled his eyebrows, as if the name was perfect for monster craziness. Maybe it was. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have the name of the trail and everything that was on the police report. And I just happen to have identified some possible treasure troves in the area as well. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, right?”

  “Was that police report made publicly available?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one that the professors are keeping tabs on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I sighed. “Nothing.”

  A twig snapped on the other side of the picnic table. Expecting Alek’s return, I didn’t do more than glance in that direction at first. But when I spotted a pale face peering out at us from behind the leaves of a bush,
my stomach sank. Those twin braids of red hair and hazel eyes definitely did not belong to Alek. Damn, how long had the girl been there? We’d been talking about… far too much and far too openly.

  “Uhm, hi.” The girl stood up, giving us a sheepish grin. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  “She didn’t mean to be caught eavesdropping,” Simon murmured, and I wondered if his inability to talk to cute girls would extend to this one. Maybe not. She looked to be about sixteen, wore glasses, and was on the chubby side. I wasn’t sure she would fall into his cute-girl category, not when he was busy pining over Temi.

  “I saw your metal detector, and I was curious,” the girl said. “Is that a Dirt Viper 3000?”

  Simon blinked. “Actually it’s the 2700, but it’s just as powerful as the 3000. The upgrades in the more expensive model are mostly aesthetic.”

  Nope, he not only wasn’t going to have trouble talking to her, but he was going to talk geeky to her.

  “Really?” she asked. “Can I take a look?”

  I tapped my wrist, not that I was wearing a watch, and gave Simon a significant look. We weren’t exactly on a schedule, but we should make the most of our time here, since this campground cost almost as much as a hotel back in Prescott. No need to stay extra days. Besides, we didn’t need to encourage a snoop.

  But Simon was strolling over, his baby cradled in his arms, and he didn’t notice my gesture.

  “I’m Naomi,” the girl said. “Are you looking for gold?”

  “Nah, this isn’t a big gold area,” Simon said. “We’re hunting for relics from the past.”

  “Oh, are there any left? I’m here with my grandma, and we’re checking out the vortexes.”

  “Vortexes?” came a murmur from behind me. Temi had traded her towel and flip-flops for track pants and running shoes. She didn’t seem to have hiking boots or clothes more appropriate for scampering over boulders and up mountainsides. I wondered what she would say when she saw us dig out the climbing gear later. In such a popular tourist area, anything left that was worth finding wouldn’t be in an easily accessible spot.