Captors. I wondered if he had meant to say owner or master or something more unpleasant.
“They are the enemy, the other,” Alek went on. “Much could be learned by interrogating one of them.”
“That could come with repercussions that we can’t foresee.”
“Oh, I foresee them well.” Alek clenched his jaw, and a muscle in his cheek ticked. “But some risks are worth taking if it protects your own people.”
“True, but Alek… do you really consider us—” I touched my chest, then waved toward the mostly empty campground, “—your people? I appreciate that you’re helping us—I appreciate it a great deal—but I keep wondering why we matter to you.”
He gazed back at me, holding my eyes. Such a direct stare might have made me uncomfortable, coming from another man, but there wasn’t a challenge in his eyes. Just… a sadness.
“Isn’t it possible that some of these people are my descendants?” he asked. “If not mine, then those of my friends, my colleagues? I understand this is not my continent, but you are here. Others from Greece must be too. And it is all… the same world, the same people. To be a warrior, a protector… that is all I’ve known.”
“That’s true. It is possible that you have descendants here.” I wondered exactly how possible it was. “You go back far enough, and we’re all related. There was this conqueror about a thousand years ago, so still fifteen hundred years after your time, Genghis Khan, and he, ah, got around. They say that one in two hundred men alive today are his direct descendants. I’m not sure how scientifically accurate that study was, but you’re from much farther back. If you got around a lot in your youth, who knows? One in three people walking around might be your descendant.”
That made him blink a few times. I’d meant it as a joke, but maybe he thought I was serious.
“I… got around only moderately and only amongst my own people,” Alek said. “Young Spartan men were supposed to be too busy training to engage in affairs with women.”
I noted that supposed and smiled. “All right, so only one in five people are your descendants.”
Zelda’s door opened, and a rectangle of light slanted across the dirt. Eleriss stepped out of the van. I leaned back, trying to get a glimpse of Temi, to see if she was awake.
“…and if you need to recuperate, you could play some RealmSaga,” came Simon’s voice from within. He was studying the ceiling of the van but clearly talking to Temi. “Want me to set up my laptop? You could even play my character, since yours is only Level Two. Just don’t go out of town or the training area. Or talk to anyone. Or agree to run any dungeons. Maybe you should play your character. I can wander around and help you level.”
“Temi’s awake,” I decided. “And probably reminiscing over the days when Simon was too nervous to talk to her.”
“Artemis is healed?” came a voice from the trees.
I flinched. Jakatra. How long had he been there? Long enough to hear about notions of theft and interrogation? No, Alek and I had been speaking in Greek. We should be safe. I hoped. Though Simon had inflicted enough episodes of Star Trek on me that I knew aliens in those stories always had universal translators.
Alek didn’t look the faintest bit guilty. Maybe he had even known Jakatra was there. He gave the elf his usual frosty glare. Jakatra frosted right back at him, though not for long before focusing on Eleriss again.
“Yes.” Eleriss rubbed the back of his shoulder and shifted his head back and forth. It was the first time I had seen either of them appear physically tired. How long had he been up, looking for us and hunting for the portal monitor? “You did not reacquire the sword.”
“No. Yesathra and her unidentified ally must have known there would be pursuit. They left quickly. It has likely already been returned to our world.”
“Returned?” Temi sat on the edge of the van’s doorway. She appeared even more worn down than Eleriss, but it was good to see her awake. “But it came from here to start with, didn’t it? I thought that’s why you thought we could use it.”
“It has been here for centuries, but it didn’t originate on this world.”
“No,” I said, “some exploring elf came to check out the portals here in Sedona, let something out he shouldn’t have, and then decided to bury the sword to make sure nobody else opened those portals.” Everyone turned curious eyes toward me. “Or he came to check out the vortexes, got jumped by some natives, and they opened the portals. Then they realized bad things were coming out of them, figured out how to close them, and buried the sword themselves. The, ah, pictographs weren’t that clear.”
“It was buried by someone with more power than humans possessed at the time,” Eleriss said, “so likely the wielder was responsible. One of our people, yes. But the six portals located in this area, they have been known by the Dhekarzha for millennia. An explorer shouldn’t have opened them unless he or she meant to deliberately do damage to the local populace.” He looked at Jakatra. He wasn’t implying that Jakatra was someone like that, was he? No, he probably wanted verification. But Jakatra merely gave his usual glare in response. “It is possible there is a record. I will look for it when we return home. If it is true that the sword also has portal manipulation capabilities, it is a rarer tool than I realized, and there may, indeed, be a recorded lineage of it.”
“It can open portals,” Simon said. “We were this close to doing exactly that.”
And who knew what might have come out if we had done it? I shuddered.
Eleriss looked toward Temi. Not trusting Simon? It was true we were only speculating at this point. We had yet to prove that the sword could open a portal.
“As we drew close to one of the supposed vortex areas, there were flashes of light,” Temi said.
“Too bad the sword was stolen before we had a chance to see.” Simon plopped down on the picnic table beside me. “It’s gone for good, right?”
“It is gone,” Jakatra agreed.
“Would your people, your portal authorities, be having as much of a hissy fit if we just had a sword that could hurt monsters?” Simon asked. “Not one that opens portals? It sounds like that’s a more common weapon from your world.”
Eleriss looked at the three of us on the picnic table. “Hissy… fit?”
“Would they chase a regular magical sword to Earth and back?” Simon asked.
“There would still be repercussions for taking one through a portal to Earth.”
“Especially to Earth,” Jakatra added.
Temi frowned at him, as if this was a callback to another conversation they’d had.
“I just want to know if there’s any way we could get another sword,” Simon said. “Or two. One for Temi and one for Alek. Because we still have a monster that’s going to be harassing Sedona again, if it isn’t already.” He looked up through the tree branches, most bare thanks to the late autumn date. The stars were starting to come out.
“Not from our world,” Eleriss said. “It’s possible others may have been lost on your world over the millennia, but I do not know where. It took much effort for us to find this one.”
“And time,” Jakatra said.
“You people can’t bring a sword through the portal, or you’ll get fined,” Simon said. “I get it. But what if we happened to follow you home, bought a sword from the magical sword shop, and then went back through the portal? Didn’t Jakatra say he had one on the wall in his house? Maybe he could just look the other way as some pesky humans slipped in and borrowed it.”
I elbowed Simon, then wished I had thought to do it earlier. If we were going to try to sneak onto their world and acquire a jibtab-slaying tool through dubious means, telling them about it beforehand probably wasn’t wise.
“Humans are not welcome on our world,” Jakatra said.
“I’m not welcome a lot of places.” Simon smiled, undaunted. “The Denny’s in Prescott, the Pita Pit and the P.F. Chang’s in Tempe, any restaurant whatsoever in Scottsdale… That doesn’t keep me fro
m showing up there.”
“What could you have possibly stolen from the Pita Pit?” I whispered, more because I wanted to distract him from his current line of questioning than because I cared.
“I may have liberated a jug of their secret sauce when nobody was looking. At least I thought nobody was looking. Did you know the guys behind the counter there are allowed to leave their post to chase a mostly-paying customer three blocks before giving up? I wouldn’t have guessed that was permissible.”
“You do not have access to a portal, nor would we let you follow us through one,” Jakatra said.
“Knowingly.” Simon winked. He was irascible, but I had to admit that his unwillingness to give up, however incorrigibly, bolstered my spirit. And then there was Alek, who also seemed to believe we would continue on with the battle.
It might have been my imagination, but Eleriss appeared more thoughtful than obstinate at Simon’s line of reasoning. He hadn’t openly objected to anything yet anyway.
“Jakatra,” Temi said softly, “you’ve invested so much time into finding the sword and into my training… Wouldn’t that all have been for nothing if we have no way to continue the fight against the jibtab? If you have such a weapon, and it’s simply hanging in your home…”
“I cannot take it through the portal,” Jakatra said sturdily.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I would be banished. That is not something I would suffer for a human.”
Temi accepted the response with her usual quiet stoicism, but I wondered if his words—or the harshness of his tone—stung at all. Earlier, it had seemed like they might have some kind of connection. A mentor-student relationship, if nothing else. More than I had with either of the elves anyway.
“You didn’t really answer Simon’s questions,” I said, giving up on the idea of not alerting them to our potential plans. “What if a human snuck into your world and stole your sword?”
“Wow,” Simon murmured, “that’s usually my kind of moral flexibility, not yours.”
“Maybe I should have said borrowed.” We would happily return the sword once we figured out how to stop these monsters from appearing in our world.
“Next, we’ll find salt and pepper shakers in your purse,” Simon said.
“I’m just thinking of the greater good. The sword could be used to help people here, maybe even save lives. It’s a wall decoration there.”
Jakatra turned his icy stare on me. So far, there hadn’t been much bite behind his glares, but having seen him fight, I did wonder what it would be like to have him as a true enemy. Not healthy, that was for sure.
“Even if some humans could cross into our world without being noticed and navigate their way to my home in Fellward on the Mishnarahsu River, they would have to find a portal in the first place. And we will not be letting you through.”
“No,” Eleriss agreed. “That we cannot do. Jakatra, we must go and dispose of the bait box.”
I had forgotten about that. “Wait, you still have it? If you left it here, we could place it somewhere so the jibtab could be lured into a trap.” I looked at my friends. “We had talked about getting it into a cave with low ceilings, so we could…” I stopped, feeling dumb. So we could what? Absolutely nothing without that sword.
“Is there no way you could help fight it?” Temi asked, looking at Jakatra more than Eleriss. “There are clearly some tools you’re allowed to bring to our world.” She touched her temple—I hadn’t seen what Eleriss had used on her, but it had been more than antibiotic ointment and bandages from the drug store.
“We have already risked enough,” Jakatra said. “There will be repercussions for our actions.” He gave Eleriss a significant look, then stalked into the woods where the darkness soon swallowed him.
“He is right.” Eleriss sighed softly. “We have been strongly advised to leave this place. But I will contemplate other possible solutions and contact you when I’m able.”
“Wait,” Temi said. “You healed me—before you go, can you do the same for the people who were taken to the hospital? Everyone who has been struck by the jibtab’s stingers has ended up dying.”
“Yes,” I added, wishing I had thought to ask that as well. “Naomi’s grandmother and the others. There must be dozens after today’s attack.”
Eleriss tilted his head. “You examined the blood. Have your people not discovered an antidote?”
I decided not to find it creepy that he knew we had been stealing blood samples and studying those stingers under microscopes. “Autumn said there’s not a known antidote for… that type of poison.” I found myself embarrassed to admit that the ‘poison’ was a man-made insecticide, our own weapon, in a manner of speaking, being used against us. “You’re just… not supposed to expose yourself to it to start with.”
“I will see if I may be of some use before I leave,” Eleriss said, then jogged into the trees after Jakatra.
A moment later, the sound of motorcycles roaring to life drifted down to us.
“Well,” Simon said, “we either find a way to open a portal to their world and borrow some swords, or we figure out something else. Like how to build weapons of our own that can attack things in multiple dimensions.” He scratched his jaw thoughtfully.
“I’m guessing you’d need more than benzene and polystyrene cups for that,” I said.
“Yeah. I wouldn’t know where to start. We’d need to find an expert.”
“Like the guy who’s making the monsters to start with?”
“He would probably be a good resource.”
I was about to suggest that we turn our geeky research brains toward exactly that activity—though I didn’t know how far we could get if the person engineering all of this wasn’t from Earth—but Temi stood up abruptly, her eyes widening. She turned in a full circle at the same time as she scraped at her arms, as if bugs were crawling over them.
Alek shifted. “I feel it too.”
“Feel what?” I asked.
“Nothing good, I’m betting,” Simon murmured, watching Temi’s alarmed reaction.
“I think…” Temi licked her lips. “I think someone’s opened a portal.”
Chapter 16
“Someone opened a portal?” My first thought was that Jakatra and Eleriss had decided to leave our world without helping at the hospital after all, but the wide-eyed concern in Temi’s eyes said this was something different. Something bigger. “One of the portals here? At the vortexes?” One of the ones we had realized we didn’t want opened?
“I think so.”
Simon jumped off the picnic table. “Then they have our sword!”
“Are we sure?” A tingle of excitement thrummed through me—maybe it wasn’t too late to reclaim the weapon—but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. “It sounded like it had already left this world… Temi, can you tell that the sword was used to open a portal?”
“I can just tell… something’s different. It’s the feeling I had when we were at the Cow Pies, but a thousand times stronger.”
“Any chance you can lead us to the spot? Eleriss said there were six portal places here, right?”
Temi turned another half circle and pointed toward the canyon wall on the other side of the creek. “That way, I think.”
Alek nodded. “Yes, I agree.” He spoke in Greek, but he was obviously getting the gist of the conversation.
I looked at him. “If it turns out Green Eyes has that sword and is doing dastardly things with it, are you… willing to fight her to get it back? We’ll help, of course, but…” I shrugged. “You’re the warrior.” I was fairly certain Temi wouldn’t attack a person with the intent of doing more than defending herself. She had said as much on the night the elves picked her up for her training, that she didn’t have the mentality needed to stick swords in people. I wasn’t sure whether or not that would extend to attacking an elf who was causing harm to the Sedona residents.
“Gladly,” Alek said, his eyes glinting in a way that c
hilled me. I reminded myself that some elves, at some point in time, had done unpleasant things to him, and the desire for revenge was… human. “But you have the heart of a warrior, as well.” He waved at my whip. “Do not underestimate your abilities. They may be needed to best a Dhekarzha.”
The compliment made me blush. I didn’t think cracking a whip at thugs in a parking lot qualified me as a warrior, but I said, “I’ll do my best to help.”
“We may want to hurry.” Temi nodded toward the van.
I waved Simon toward the driver’s seat. “Is something coming out of the portal?”
“I can’t tell yet. I just know it’s open.”
“All right. You’re the navigator then.” I pointed Temi to the front passenger seat, while Alek and I climbed into the back.
Simon didn’t hesitate; he threw the van into gear right away, and we zipped around the curvy campground driveway, heading through the trees and up to the main highway. I eyed the darkness of the forest and the darkness of the sky above, trying to tell if I sensed any of what Alek and Temi felt. The road was empty in the aftermath of the afternoon’s chaos, and the world was quiet. Unnaturally so? I couldn’t tell. It was strange realizing there was more to the world—to the universe—than I could touch, see, or feel. I’ll admit, it made me feel a little less… less.
Simon’s phone rang before we hit Uptown, a head-banging song that I couldn’t name this time. He dug his phone out and cursed.
“Your brother?” I guessed. Few other people called him, and even fewer elicited curses.
“My brother.” He stuck his arm behind his seat, holding the phone out to me. “Can you text him for me? Tell him… I don’t know. Last I heard he was flying to Phoenix. Tell him to stay there, that I’ll try to come down tomorrow. If we don’t get swallowed by monsters from the fiery pits of the ninth circle of hell tonight.”
“You want me to text all that?” I noted with relief that the police barricade was gone, as were the cars that had been parked alongside the highway. We headed into town, unopposed.
“No. Tell him I’m with a girl or something.”