Thorn Fall (18 page)

“No, it’s sixteen hundred dollars.”

I swore and rocked back in my chair. “Simon, I don’t think we
afford
to be monster hunters.”

“It is proving to be expensive. And it’s decimating poor Zelda.”

“Why don’t you look as daunted as I feel?”

“Because I have a plan.” Simon winked.

“Which is…?”

“Crowd funding.”

“Uhm, what?”

Simon tugged his laptop out of his satchel. “I’ve started a crowd-funding campaign to finance our repair needs.”

“Aren’t those sites for getting people to pitch in to help indie artists to make a record or produce a film?”

“Some of them. This one is going to help us pay for our monster-hunting expenses.” He lifted the lid to the laptop, the browser already up and open to a webpage with one sorry-looking blue VW Vanagon front and center on it, cracked windshield and all.

“And… why would people who don’t know us pay for this?” I asked.

“Because they
do
know us.” Simon winked again. “Me, anyway. Through my blog.”

“The monster-hunting blog?”

“Naturally.”

“It’s only three weeks old. How many people can possibly be reading it?”

“We have nine hundred followers.”

“And how many of those followers actually believe we’re hunting monsters?”

“Judging by the comments? At least seven.”

“Impressive,” I said.

“They don’t have to believe to want to chip in. They’ll be excited to do it even if they think it’s all an elaborate farce. But seriously, who would do such a thing to such a magnificent van as part of a joke?”

“People will do a lot of things for money…” I gave him a pointed look, one that slid past him unnoticed. “Don’t these sites require that you give your backers something in exchange for their… donation?” I kept myself from saying the word pity, but barely. The idea of paying that repair bill daunted me, but this sounded like a sketchy way to get the money. I wished Simon would put more of his web expertise into getting more people to our
business
site. We had more than ten thousand dollars in inventory sitting in our storage unit in Phoenix; we just had to sell it.

“They
do
get something. If the campaign is successfully funded, everyone who donates will get a signed print of me, holding the sword.”

“Wow, that
is
a treat.”

“I’d offer a signed picture of Temi holding the sword, but she seems to have an aversion to press coverage.”

“Oh, I see. When you didn’t mention her role in slaying the last monster, it was because you were respecting her privacy. Not because you were trying to make yourself look like a hero.”

Simon nodded. “
Exactly
. Do you think Temi will help out with my picture? It would be even better for my followers if the sword was glowing. Maybe she could hide out of the frame, behind a bush or tree, and have her finger on the hilt.”

“I’ll let you run that by her. By the way, I noticed you also respected
my
privacy by not mentioning my role.”

“I knew you weren’t a fan of my blog. I didn’t think you’d want to be identified. After all, you’re trying to redeem yourself to the archaeology world. You wouldn’t want to be seen on some silly monster-hunting site.”

“Yes… you’re all kinds of thoughtful, Simon.”

“I did mention that my colleagues were instrumental in slaying the monster.”

“Uh huh. I read the post. You called us your sidekicks.”

He brightened and pressed a hand to his chest. “You’re following my posts? I’m touched.”

“I bet.”

“Can I count on you as a donor to my campaign?”

“Please, do you honestly think people are going to give you money to fix your van?”

“To aid in the quest for monster footage and subsequent monster slayage,” Simon corrected. “It’s right there in the first paragraph. And in the video I recorded.”

“Slayage? I can’t believe someone actually awarded you those degrees.”

“It’s possible my professors were passing me to ensure they didn’t see me again.”

I gave him a wave of dismissal and went back to perusing the old newspapers on the screen. Simon seemed content to open his laptop and start working on something. I hoped it was something more pertinent to our research than updating that stupid webpage.

For my part, I was reading articles the author of the vortex book had cited. There were a few archaeology magazines, but most came from early editions of the Sedona newspaper, interviews with old-timers, people who had come here to settle long before the tourists had arrived in droves. Most of those interviewees had since passed on, so there was no chance of talking to any of them.

“What is this?” I murmured, opening a newspaper article from the ’30s, one of the few I had come across with photographs. Between the black-and-white nature of the photograph and the degradation that had occurred when the paper had been transferred to microfiche, it was hard to see much of it, but it was clear I was looking at pictographs.

“I don’t know,” Simon said. “You’re not sharing.”

“I’ve seen that circle before,” I whispered as he came around the table to look. “It’s not the same painting though. That’s a different rock formation, and there isn’t a village nearby. But once again, the circle—the portal, maybe—is on top of the formation. And look, there’s that same guy standing in the shadow. Kind of a Kokopelli style, almost like he’s in a position to play music, but doesn’t that look like a sword?”

Simon’s upper lip curled as he squinted at the screen. “I can’t believe you’re getting all of that out of that faded photo. I see the circle, but enh.”

“Maybe it says where it is.” I skimmed the tiny text of the accompanying article. “Yes, here. Some homesteader named John Haines stumbled across the painting in a cave on his own property. Northeast of town, in the Oak Creek Canyon on the way to Flagstaff.

“Back up in the Secret Wilderness?” Simon asked.

“Sounds like it was closer to the main highway. Well, main road. It was probably made of dirt back then.” I grabbed a notepad and scribbled down the farmer’s name. “I’ll see if I can find an address. There couldn’t have been that many people living here back then, and that’s rugged terrain. I don’t think many people were settling this area.”

“You think the address will be the same eighty years later?”

“I think the road name will be the same—or there’ll be a record of it changing. There was a big wildfire up there recently. It could be a lot easier than usual to find a cave right now. I wonder if it’s still on private property or if that’s in the national forest now. Heck, let me…” I pulled up the county GIS site and typed in the guy’s last name. It was always possible a descendant with the same surname still owned the land.

Simon returned to his laptop as the search plodded along.

“Doing anything helpful?” I asked him.

“Am I correct in surmising that you wouldn’t consider the crowd funding helpful, even though it could greatly assist with near-term financial concerns?”

“Correct.”

“Then the answer is no.” He smirked at me. “Although I do plan to do some research on Jacques Vallée’s interdimensional hypothesis. Something Eleriss said last night has me thinking.”

“One of the vague things?”

“Indeed so.”

My search popped up a match, and my breath caught. I told myself not to get excited, that it wasn’t that uncommon of a surname, but my eyes were riveted to the screen, anyway. “Alicia Haines, home address in Florida, is it possible that your Sedona vacation property came from a grandfather?” I was clicking as I spoke, getting the parcel number and looking it up on a map.

“Is it legal for you to stalk people like that?” Simon asked.

“You’re asking
me
about the legality of something?”

“Yes,” he said, his dark eyes twinkling.

Though I was fairly certain he was messing with me, I waved at the screen and said, “This is all in the public record.” By then, the results had come back. I zoomed out a couple of times, then grinned. “Oak Creek Canyon, hello.”

“How much land is there?”

“Less than a half an acre now, with a cabin just on the other side of the stream from the highway. It backs up to the national forest, and it’s close to the canyon wall. The rest of the land must have been purchased or donated at one time or another. Well, good. Then we don’t have to call Miss Haines to ask for permission to wander around on her property.”

“Would you actually have done that?” Simon asked.

“In the name of amateur archaeology, absolutely.”

“And then gone anyway when she said no?”

“Maybe.” I pulled up the topographical view. “The lots are rugged. It looks like you could slip between people’s properties without anyone noticing.”

“Especially if the owners are in Florida?”

“It could be rented to someone. Maybe we can find a trail that goes behind the properties, though…” I looked at the photograph on the library computer again. “We better take our climbing gear. If that cave were easy to access, I’m sure it would have been photographed often. It definitely would have been listed in the archeological database I checked. There’s nothing about portals for any of the catalogued paintings in the area, unless people have been making some incorrect assumptions about clan shields for a long time.” I plugged the address into my phone. “Think Zelda is up for another expedition?”

“Are
we
up for another one?”

“Maybe we can get some nice Kevlar vests and helmets from an army surplus store.”

“Vests? Helmets? I want Darth Vader full-body armor, complete with a self-contained breathing apparatus before I go back out there.”

I couldn’t blame him for the sentiment. Today, with daylight streaming in the window and cars and trucks rumbling past on the nearby road, the world seemed normal. But last night… that had been a nightmare. “We’ll talk to Temi and see what she thinks, all right? Maybe Jakatra gave her some tips. And we wanted to fight in a cave, right?” I waved to the article. “This painting is in a cave.”

“Can we roll up to it in a tank?” Simon muttered.

“We can—” My phone bleeped, a text message from Autumn coming through.

I’ve got some results for you. Can you talk?

Strange question, unless she expected me to be in the middle of a police interrogation somewhere. I looked around the library for one of those ubiquitous signs that said to take phone conversations outside, but it wasn’t crowded, and we were surrounded by enough shelves that I didn’t think a conversation would bother anyone. Hadn’t Simon and I already been blathering?

Yes
, I texted back, and silenced the ringer. Autumn’s named popped up on the display a moment later.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m hoping you have some great information for me, especially about antivenoms.”

Simon nodded firmly.

“Not exactly,” Autumn said, and my shoulders slumped.

“It’s something weird, isn’t it?” Simon asked.

I waved him to silence so I could listen. “So it mystified us some,” Autumn said. “The blood sample was helpful in figuring things out. We ran it for a number of things including traces of chemicals.”

“Chemicals?” I couldn’t imagine a vaccine for some kind of chemical poisoning.

“The blood sample read off the charts for something that is, or is very similar to, Imidacloprid.”

“Which is?”

“In short, a pesticide. It’s not usually all that toxic to humans—it was specifically developed in the ’90s as a less dangerous alternative to the organophosphorus compounds being used then.”

“It’s not that toxic to humans?” I asked, laying the phone on the table for a moment so I could attempt to type the word she had given into the computer. “So it couldn’t kill somebody?” Maybe this was a coincidence and had nothing to do with the real poison.

“I didn’t say that. In this case, what less toxic means is that it’s probably not a huge deal if you’re eating corn that came from a crop field sprayed with the stuff. Handling it can cause some mild symptoms, such as respiratory distress and a reduced level of consciousness. Having a bunch of it pumped into your veins… If there are any animal studies where that was done, I couldn’t find them. It’s a newer pesticide, so there are fewer reports of clinical consequences overall. But like I said, the blood sample was saturated. You could go out in a freshly sprayed field, lick the corn stalks all day, and not get this much in your blood.”

“And is it what’s coming out of the thorns?”

“You got it, Sherlock. I’m guessing that when they detach—”

“Shoot out,” I interrupted.

“Whatever. I’m guessing that when they stick in a person, the stingers deliver their entire canal full of the pesticide.”

I had the encyclopedia entry on the pesticide up now. “It doesn’t sound like something that occurs in nature.”

“It’s not. There are some plants out there that make natural pesticides to keep things from noshing on them, but this is a man-made chemical through and through.”

“And there’s no possibility of making a vaccine or an antidote?”

“I think the antidote is not to get hit.”

My lips curled. That wasn’t the answer I wanted. “And what if you
do
get hit? There are people in the hospital here that are going to die if the doctors don’t figure something out.” Not to mention the odds weren’t good of us avoiding being hit if we went out and tried to kill the
jibtab
.

“Atropine followed by pralidoxime chloride would be the typical treatment for acute poisoning by an organophosphate insecticide. I’m not sure for a neonicotinoid, which is what imidacloprid is. Neonicotinoids work by interfering with the transmission of nerve impulses in insects—and I suppose humans, too—by binding irreversibly to specific nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. That induces neuromuscular paralysis and eventually death.”

I swallowed. “Irreversibly?”

“That’s what the research states. Like I said, there’s not a lot of it out there yet, in regard to cases of humans being poisoned. And Del?”

“Yeah?”

“The hospital lab should have figured out what they’re dealing with by now too. It’s not like I’m some brilliant analyst. If they haven’t found an effective treatment yet, there probably isn’t one.”