Thorn Fall (3 page)

“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 find 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?

“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.