Wade and the Scorpion's Claw (6 page)

“You know it,” said Becca.

I slipped my hand into the right pocket of my jacket to check on Vela's baggage-claim ticket. I felt a moment of panic when my finger poked into a little hole in the lining.

“Oh, no—”

“What?” said Lily.

A moment later, I felt the ticket . . . and something else.

I slid off the jacket. “There's something in here. . . .”

“He bugged you!” said Darrell. “I knew it. Leathercoat put something in your pocket when you were in the go room, and now he knows where we are!”

I spread the jacket on the bed. “He never got near me. Not that you or your Snickers would know.” The object, whatever it was, was caught in the folds of the lining, and I worked it up through the hole and out into my fingers. “Whoa, what's this . . . ?”

It was a flat, round piece of something hard and shiny like ceramic, and it had a vein of pale green stone coiling through the design.

“Omigod, that's white jade,” said Lily, snatching it from me. “I have earrings made from jade like that. This is beautiful. Where did you . . . Wade, are you a secret shoplifter?”

“What? No!”

“Then where did you—” She gasped. “Is this a gift for Becca?”

“What?”

“Lily!” Becca screamed.

“Give it to me!” said Darrell. He swiped it from Lily's palm and held it out for all of us to study. The piece was highly polished and perfectly circular, about two inches across. The jade design on the top appeared to be the body of an animal, but it wasn't all there. The flip side was crisscrossed with metallic fibers, and the edge of the bottom side was ridged with tiny teeth, like the edge of a quarter, only much deeper.

All this time, Lily was tapping on her phone. “Hang on, I'm looking it up . . . looking . . . and . . . here. It's Chinese, and it's called a tile.” She turned the screen around so we could look at some photos. “These are a bunch of others.”

“Those are not new,” said Becca. “They're works of art, from museums. Is yours valuable, Wade?”

“I don't know,” I said. “And it's not
mine
. I don't know how it got in my jacket.”

“So then where did it . . .” Darrell stopped and stared at us. “Whoa!” he said. “Whoa! Mr. Chen! He slipped it into your pocket before he died, then he died, and now you have it. That's it. I solved it!”

“Darrell, wait.” I thought back to the shuttle ride, the airports, the flights, the crowds. No one had touched me, brushed up against me, done anything near me, except my family. The only time I was even close enough for a stranger to get into my jacket pocket was on the flight from Honolulu.

“Actually, you're right,” I said. “Mr. Chen must have slipped this tile to me when I was sleeping.”

D
ominic Chen.

Now his death was frightening in a whole other way. As nice as he had seemed, as friendly as his smile had been, I felt so creeped out imagining his fingers in my jacket pocket while I slept. The fingers that would soon be dead.

“Wade, are you all right?” Lily was searching my face.

“He's fine,” said Darrell. “He always looks a little sick.”

“If he did slip this to me, how did he know for sure I was, you know, one of them?” I said. “We're not wearing signs, are we? It doesn't say ‘Guardian' on my forehead, does it?”

Darrell leaned close to examine my head. “I make out
G-E-E-K
—”

“Ha. Ha,” I said.

“Maybe Guardians know about us through their network, or from Carlo in Bologna,” Becca said. “Or maybe Mr. Chen didn't know for sure about us, but he was in danger, so he hid the tile on you.”

“Right,” said Lily. “If he hadn't been . . . if he hadn't died, maybe he would've found us and told us all about it once we landed.”

I turned the piece over in my fingers. It was cool to the touch, and it certainly felt old, like Lily's web search suggested. But it gave off none of the same feeling that Vela did.

Touching a true relic of Copernicus's astrolabe was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. When I'd held Vela in the cave, the tingle across the surface of my skin and into my chest was like I'd been plugged into an outlet. I could barely take in air. Vela in my palm had felt heavier than heavy, and it made perfect sense—I was holding part of an ancient time machine! Here, no. It was a tile, maybe old, almost definitely a clue, but not one of the relics.

But there was a chance it was also a key that would lead us to one. Like the Copernicus dagger had led us to Vela.

As I studied the tile by the window, I saw that our bus driver had been right. The rain had stopped, and the mist was beginning to burn off, now that it was getting close to noon. I turned to the others.

“Here's what I think,” I said. “I think Leathercoat is after this tile, whatever it means, and if he wasn't on our flight, then another agent of the Order killed Mr. Chen for it. We have to think that
both
that killer and Leathercoat are after us for
both
Vela and this tile.”

“Which kind of explains why Leathercoat just warned you in Honolulu,” Becca added. “And didn't try anything worse—”

The room phone buzzed loudly on the desk by the window.

We stared at it like it was a tarantula.

“Who's calling the room?” Darrell whispered as if the person on the other end could hear. “Dad would call our phones.”

There was a long silence as we waited for a second ring. It didn't come. Becca let out a long breath. “Maybe it just was a wrong—”

Zzzt! Zzzt!
The phone somehow sounded more urgent than before.

“It could be the front desk, asking if we have enough shampoo,” Lily said. “If we don't answer, they'll send someone up. . . .”

It buzzed again. No one went for it.

“Really?” Lily rolled her eyes and picked it up. “Hello?”

You could hear someone's voice on the other end. It was soft, low. Lily's eyes widened. She pulled the phone away from her face, searched the keypad, and pressed a button. “He wants it on speaker.”

“Who does?” asked Darrell.

“Can the four of you hear me?” asked a deep voice.

“It's him!” I said, putting my palm over the microphone. “The German! Leathercoat!” I removed my hand. “What do you want?”

“You will please go to the window.”

“Omigod, now what?” Lily whispered.

We lifted the narrow blinds. On the opposite sidewalk, in front of a doorway with an awning over it, stood the tall man with white hair. He was gazing up at our window as he spoke into his cell phone.

“First, I must compliment you on your ability to appear at the right place and at the right time. Copernicus himself would have approved. Now look down the street to my left.”

We did. The sidewalks were crowded, though the cars were few. Darrell pointed. “Dad's down there. I see him coming.”

Two blocks away, my father was carrying two paper shopping bags—the food he had promised to bring back to the room.

“You see now what easy prey you and your family are.”

My dad was ambling up the street toward a killer he didn't know was there. It was sickening. I wanted to pound on the window to warn him. “Someone call him—”

“Call him if you like, but I will be gone.”

“So you're just going to keep haunting us? Like some creepy ghost?” said Lily as she tapped on her phone. “It's ringing.”

We saw Dad pause, shift his food bags, and fumble for his phone.

“Soon I will ask you for Vela,” Leathercoat said casually, “as well as the item you received from Mr. Chen. I will pursue you without end to obtain what I want. Cooperate, or your father will be connected to Mr. Chen's demise. Vela will be seized from you. You will have nothing. Darrell will tell you that one person dear to you has already been taken. You do not wish to make it a pair.”

“Why you—” Darrell screamed.

“Uncle Roald!” Lily yelled into the phone. “Leathercoat is outside the hotel!”

Dad started running up the street.

Click.

The call ended.

Leathercoat stepped back under the awning, and I swear the shadows enveloped him. I wasn't sure whether he actually slipped through the building's open door or just dematerialized. I'd have believed either. Dad ran past the spot and charged over to the hotel. Seconds later, he rushed into the room, and we leaped on him.

“Leathercoat was right down there!” I cried. “He saw you and threatened to do something to you if we didn't hand over Vela and the jade tile. He said he would find us.”

Dad double-locked the door. “But are you all right?”

“We're fine,” Lily said. “Just . . . scared.”

“I think we should call the police,” Becca said. “He said we shouldn't, but he's threatening you, and all of us. We have to.”

Dad shook his head sharply. “Hold on. Back up. You said something about a jade tile? What tile?”

I handed it to him. “Mr. Chen passed it to me before he died. Leathercoat said so.”

Dad studied the tile in silence, and then went to the window. “This Leathercoat man is using us—using
you
. Twice now he's talked to you kids instead of me. I'm sorry he's doing this to you, but he's relying on our fear about Sara to keep his actions secret.” He looked in our eyes one after the other. “It's smart of him. He's right that broadcasting what he's doing would hinder us, too. So, fine. We'll be quiet. For now.

“But we won't play into his hands, either.”

Dad's words made me remember a theme we had studied in Language Arts, the struggle between good and evil. Leathercoat was like an evil demon, a devil, luring us into doing his work for him. It made me feel guilty and a little sick to my stomach.

“Can we at least change hotels?” Lily asked. “Leathercoat is a ghoul. He scares me way more than Darrell when he talks about the go room. Plus, who knows if he has reinforcements coming? Leathercoat, I mean. He'll attack us in our sleep.”

“No, he won't,” said Darrell. “I'll kill him first!”

“Darrell, never say that,” Dad said. “That's what the Order wants.”

“Well, we're
doing
what they want,” Darrell said, a bit more calmly. “We should just go back to the airport and wait. Not play his stupid game. We have to find Mom—”

“Except, wait . . . ,” I started. Darrell shot me a glare, but I went on. “Look, we can't get to New York until tomorrow at the earliest. If there's a relic here, yeah, we could let the Order just find it. Leathercoat would bring it to Galina. Or we could try for it ourselves.”

Dad rubbed his forehead, then turned to me. “But, Wade . . .”

“No, Dad, listen. If Leathercoat wants this tile, then it's a clue to a new relic. Mr. Chen thought we could find the relic, or he wouldn't have given this to me. I think he knew we were Guardians. And anyway, wouldn't
two
relics be better than one to help us get Sara back?”

Darrell held his breath during my rant. He breathed it out slowly, then looked up at Dad. “I think Wade's right. And you know how hard that is for me to say.”

Dad stood there, staring out the window, then at each of our faces. I was actually surprised, but Lily and Becca were both nodding, as if agreeing with what Darrell and I had said.

“All right,” said Dad. “We
are
stuck here until morning. So, yes. We can follow this clue—if it
is
a clue—except that we stop at the slightest hint of more danger. Either way, relic or no relic, we are on our flight at ten tomorrow morning. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Lily.

“Besides, we already have Vela and Copernicus's magical diary and two priceless daggers,” said Becca. “After everything that's happened, we
must
be doing something right. And no matter how scary it gets, we sort of have to keep on doing it. For Sara. And for Copernicus.”

Which was not something Becca would have said before last week. She was becoming a little tougher, different. I noticed it in myself, too. The old Wade would never have had the nerve to pull a dagger on a man. The truth was that the search for the relics was changing us. Who we'd end up being, I couldn't tell yet. But one thing was certain.

We had just agreed to work outside the law.

Dad scanned the street one last time and then lowered the blinds. “The first thing we do is to leave the hotel. The second thing is to get this tile examined by an expert—”

“The Asian Art Museum,” said Lily, waving her cell phone at us. “They're open till seven tonight. We can walk there in half an hour.”

We wolfed down the food Dad had brought. The few minutes of eating helped to make us feel a little more normal, even if we weren't.

I stood up. “Let's go. The more we know, the more we know.”

“That's deep, bro,” Darrell said. “Can I quote you?”

“I'd let you, but I own all the rights to what I say.”

We grabbed our gear and vacated the hotel, leaving our keys but nothing else in the rooms. We didn't inform the ponytailed clerk that we were checking out. I guess you could say that this was our new way, being sneaky about what we did.

We were playing the Order's game now.

Using a map Becca snatched from the front desk as we left, we headed down the next two blocks then turned onto Larkin Street. It was dry for the moment and warmer. I kept swiveling around, but naturally didn't spot Leathercoat.

“He doesn't need to follow us,” Darrell said, guessing what I was thinking as only a stepbrother can. “He'll wait for us to come to him.”

“He knew right where we were,” said Becca. “Can you really trace a phone right to a single room in a city?”

“It's possible,” said my dad, “but not with another cell phone. He must be getting computing help somewhere.”