“Where’s Jakatra?” I whispered. It came out in an unintelligible jumble.
“Yes, your blood will be purified, as well,” Eleriss said.
So not what I had been asking, but I was glad to know. And I hoped he was telling the truth.
I wasn’t sure if I could tell anything was happening. I was too tired and wanted nothing more than sleep. Before I had regained the ability to speak, Eleriss removed his device, put a hand on my shoulder briefly, then slipped over me and out the door, scarcely stirring my clothes. It looked like I wasn’t going to get an answer to my question, not now. I didn’t know when.
Alek didn’t climb back in right away. He exchanged a few words with Eleriss in the Dhekarzhan language. They walked away together, out of my view.
“Uh,” Simon said. “Are they coming back?”
“You tell me,” I mumbled, too low in the seat to see much of anything.
“Oh, I think maybe he’s healing Alek too. Either that or Eleriss couldn’t resist the appeal of Mr. Sexypants and wanted to haul him off into the bushes to ravish him.”
I closed my eyes, too tired for Simon’s wit, such as it was. A few minutes might have passed. The world had grown fuzzy to me, and I had a hard time maintaining a grip on reality. Eventually, Alek climbed back into the car.
“All right,” Marcus said. “Where to, Simon?”
Simon looked back at me. “The hospital? Or a hotel? Campground?”
My head lolled to the side, and I found Temi’s eyes open slightly. She gave me the faintest nod. A nod that meant she would be okay? I hoped so.
“Hotel,” I rasped, deciding I trusted Eleriss. Jakatra… was a question for later.
“Hotel?” Marcus asked. “Which one?”
“Are you paying?” Simon asked.
“If I don’t, will we end up in a campground?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m paying.”
“I hear L’Auberge de Sedona is nice,” Simon said. “Five stars.”
Marcus squinted at him. “How about the Best Western?”
“Fine. Cheapskate.”
I caught the faintest smile on Temi’s face before slumping down further in the seat and passing out.
Epilogue
Uncommonly warm sun beat down on the pool deck, and I stretched out my feet on the lounge chair and wriggled my toes while admiring the rock formations in the distance. We were on the other side of town, so Bell Rock, with its brand new gaping hole in the top, wasn’t part of the view. A margarita sat on the table beside my chair, and I smiled as I leaned over to take a sip. Simon’s brother was heading back to Washington in the morning, and our stay at the Best Western would soon be over, but I was determined to enjoy this moment of luxury.
Whatever potion Eleriss had pumped into my veins had worked. Even if I still had bruises enough to make a piñata jealous, lying here in the sun was doing wonders to heal them.
“The life of a monster hunter should be like this more often,” I observed.
“I won’t disagree with that.” Temi was also recuperating—also with a margarita—on an adjacent lounge chair. Thanks to the late season and the recent chaos, the hotel was sparsely occupied, and we had the pool area to ourselves. That was a good thing, because I didn’t think either one of us wanted to try to explain our bruises. Some Good Samaritan would probably be worried that we were in relationships with abusive men. No, just abusive monsters and elves…
Temi kept glancing toward the gate leading to the pool area. We were expecting Simon to return from his photography trip to Bell Rock—apparently he hadn’t gotten enough pictures the night of the event and needed some aftermath footage for the blog—but I doubted he was the one she was wishing would come for a visit. She had mentioned Jakatra a couple of times, not so much in a sense of romantic pining, but she probably wanted to see him walk in with his leather jacket in one piece, thus to prove he hadn’t had anything to do with Alek’s wrestling match.
The gate clanged, and Simon strolled in, his laptop bag slung over his shoulder. “Hello, ladies. Do you want to hear my excellent news?”
“It depends,” I said. “Does it have to do with your crowd-funding campaign, the amount of traffic your blog has gotten in the last two days, or the Battlestar Galactica re-runs you insisted on watching until one a.m. last night?” Simon’s brother might have sprung for the hotel, but he had a blue-collar job and a wife and new baby back home, so he had drawn the line at the idea of multiple rooms. The five of us had been sharing the two queen beds. Well, the four of us, since Alek preferred to sleep outside under a tree—I had yet to actually catch him snoozing.
“Two of those things, maybe.” Simon smiled. “We’re getting more traffic to the blog than ever, and the crowd-funding campaign was a success. Zelda’s repairs are going to be covered. I’ll be sending out autographed pictures of myself, and in a few more months, we might be making enough that we won’t have to scrounge the hillsides for hundred-year-old coffee tins.”
“Notice he didn’t catch that I was implying that we didn’t particularly want to hear news about those things,” I told Temi.
She merely took a sip of her margarita. She had more bruises than I did and had spent most of the previous day sleeping.
“I like scrounging,” I told Simon. “Now, about the news you promised to get while you were out, the news we’re actually interested in. Naomi’s grandmother?” I had picked up the morning’s newspaper in the hotel lobby, and it had promised that many of the people who had been attacked were recovering and had good prognoses, but I hadn’t missed the fact that the entire article had possessed a pro-tourism bent—why, yes, of course it’s safe to come back to Sedona and would you like to book a Jeep tour right now? It also hadn’t said that all of the people had recovered.
“Grammy’s alive. Naomi emailed me through the site this morning. She wanted to know when she would get her cut for those old coins, and she sent some pictures to add to the blog.”
“Good.” We might not have been able to help everyone—the death count from the suicides and fights that had broken out around Bell Rock had been high—but at least we had stopped the monster and talked Eleriss into coming up with a serum. “You should keep in touch with her.”
“Why?”
“How often do you meet girls that like your Dirt Viper?”
“You think we should make her a junior monster hunter?”
I snorted. What an honor. “I think you should keep her number and give her a call in about five years.”
Simon’s brow furrowed. “For what?”
“Never mind.” I glanced at Temi and found her smirking this time. “Look, guys, I think we should head back to Phoenix tomorrow. Focus on selling some of our inventory for the business and also focus on doing some major research. We need to figure out who’s behind these monsters. Stopping that person should be our priority, rather than simply reacting to his or her latest experiment. Sooner or later, our mad eco engineer might decide to unleash more than one monster on the world, and where will that leave us then? We have exactly one sword, and we’re out of luck if someone ever takes it away from us permanently.”
“Oh!” Simon shoved my feet over and sat on the end of the lounge chair. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“About how to find the culprit?”
“No, I’ve been thinking about how to get some more weapons.”
“You think you could make something now that you know about this… dimensional angle?”
“Me? Uh, I could send out some emails to engineering friends who are geekier than I am, see what they think.”
Temi’s eyebrows twitched. Yeah, it was hard to imagine people geekier than Simon.
“But what I was thinking about for now,” he went on, “is going to visit Elf Land.”
“Elf… Land?” Temi asked.
“You said it yourself, Del.” Simon pointed at me. “If people like Jakatra keep swords capable of hurting monsters hanging on their
walls, then how much could it hurt them if we borrowed a few? Maybe they even have more powerful weapons over there. Guns or lasers or something that could shoot these jibtab. And then we could recruit a few more people capable of wielding them.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “Or maybe we can even figure out a hack that would let us wield them.”
“I did notice the other night that Jakatra was strangely precise about telling us the location of his home,” Temi said.
I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but she was right. He had given us the name of a town, anyway. That couldn’t truly have been a secret invitation for us to come rob him, though. If anything, it was more likely a trap. “I… think my back-to-Phoenix-for-research suggestion sounds less dangerous. How would we even get to their world? I was too busy almost dying the other night to think to pick-pocket Eleriss for his portal opener.”
“As long as I’m contacting geeky friends who have engineering degrees, I could probably have them take a look at this.” Simon opened a flap on his bag and pulled out the dusty artifact he had found in the box with the coin jar, the elven artifact. “Not that much of it is missing. Who knows? Maybe it can be made to work somehow.”
It was crazy. Nobody here would know how to fix some alien technology, and even if someone figured it out… we couldn’t possibly stroll uninvited onto another planet, one Temi had already promised was extremely unwelcoming toward humans. And yet… the explorer in me itched at the idea of examining a culture and a people nobody on Earth had ever witnessed, not in recent generations anyway. Maybe I could finally learn their language, figure out how their people had affected our history. I still wasn’t sure what had happened all those centuries ago. I believed someone with a sword, maybe the very sword that Temi now had, had caused one of those portals to open and harm the Sinagua in a way that had convinced them to leave this area forever, but I still didn’t know who had brought the sword, who had opened the portal with it, and who had ultimately decided to bury it more than fifty miles to the southwest. And who had imprisoned Alek and the others in nearly the same location, and why? The answers were probably in an elven encyclopedia somewhere, along with a thousand other answers that would blow my mind.
Simon grinned and pointed to me. “You want to go there. I can totally tell.”
“I… was just thinking about… things.”
“Uh huh.”
“Is your brother going to report back to your mom that you’re doing important things down here and shouldn’t be dragged home by the scruff of your neck?” I asked to deflect his all-too-accurate reading of me.
His amusement faded. “Marcus was disinclined to believe that we were fighting monsters. It didn’t help that the jibtab body seemed to have disintegrated by the time I got back up there today. Too much napalm maybe. Anyway, Marcus thought the portal was some light show and that everyone up there was doing drugs and a part of some cult.”
“Seriously?”
“To give him credit, he didn’t think I was a part of the cult. He thought I was there to get pictures to update my sensationalist blog.”
“Huh. Did he think we were part of the cult?” I pointed at Temi and myself.
“He thought you started it.”
“What? Really?”
“No, I don’t know. I tuned him out when I realized he was tuning me out. As for being dragged home…” He shot me a dirty look, but then his shoulders slumped. “It would be Redmond. Apparently, Marcus talked to a friend of a friend and got me a sure-thing job interview at Microsoft.”
“I… assume you’re not going?”
He wouldn’t, not when he was plotting an invasion of Eleriss’s home world, but for a moment, there was a shadow of a doubt in my mind.
“Of course not. It’s just depressing to realize my family doesn’t think I’m doing anything with my life and that I need help getting a job.”
“At least they’re trying to help you get a good job. Not the night shift mopping middle school bathrooms or something.”
“Please, you know how many hours a week those Microsoft people work? When would I have time to play RealmSaga?”
I decided not to point out that we had been so busy this last week that neither of us had logged in. I thumped him on the shoulder instead. “Once we’re done with the monsters, we’ll get our careers back on track.”
“Speak for yourself. I intend to make a few million off these monsters. I won’t need a career after that.”
“You will if all of those millions go into repairing your van.”
“Ha ha.”
The gate clanged again at the same time as someone in the distance yelled, “Sir? Sir?” in an alarmed tone.
When I looked over, I got an eye full of naked man. Alek strolled in with a towel slung over his shoulder and nothing else. The new scar on his side and the cuts on his face didn’t detract from… anything. He laid the towel on the foot of a lounge chair, walked to the water’s edge, and looked over at us.
“For bathing, yes?” he asked in Greek, pointing at the water.
I closed my dangling jaw and made sure I was looking at his eyes. “Yes, but—”
The man who had been doing the shouting raced through the gate, stopping himself with flailing arms a few feet behind Alek. “Sir,” he panted, straightening his uniform and tossing alarmed glances our direction, “this is a co-ed pool. You can’t be here without a swimming suit.”
Alek looked at him, then at me. “What?”
“Simon,” I murmured, “I see you still haven’t had the underwear conversation with him.”
“Please.” Simon was studying the sky and very pointedly not looking in Alek’s direction. “This is a whole different conversation. And it’s all yours.”
Temi was smirking around her margarita straw, clearly enjoying the situation. Or perhaps the view. Maybe I needed to stop trying to convince her that Jakatra was a bad guy, thus to ensure her interests stayed focused in that direction.
The employee stepped toward Alek, reaching out a hand, though he didn’t look any more enthused than Simon at the idea of dealing with a naked man. Alek’s eyes narrowed, watching that hand.
“It’s all right,” I called. “He’s European.” Oh, sure, that explained everything. “Very European,” I added at the clerk’s skeptical look.
“Well, this isn’t Europe,” the man finally managed. “He needs to…” He waved at Alek’s bare butt and the towel.
“I know. I’ll explain it. Thank you.” I repeated myself in Greek, so the guy would know I actually could explain it and wasn’t simply trying to shoo him away so Temi and I could admire some beefcake.
Grumbling under his breath, the employee left.
I padded across the pool deck, picked up Alek’s towel, and gestured for him to wrap it around his waist. “The world has grown more prudish in recent millennia.”
His brow wrinkled, but he covered himself up. I was going to have to check my history texts. I’d been under the impression that nudity and bathing, while common among one’s own gender, hadn’t been a co-ed activity in Ancient Greece. Maybe the Spartans had been freer spirits than the scholars had let on.
“Let’s go find that package Simon gave you. The one with the cloths you’ve been using for polishing your weapons.” I headed toward the gate, not certain the hotel would be that much more thrilled with Alek swimming in his underwear, but we hadn’t thought to shop for a swimming suit at Goodwill. “I wanted to talk to you anyway,” I said as we walked back to the room. “We haven’t had much time for research these last few days, but I did get in touch with a cousin who lives in Athens. She’s a history enthusiast. I gave her your name and the year and events you won in the Olympics. She promised to drive to Sparta over the holidays and see if there are any physical records, more detailed than what’s on the Internet.” The Internet genealogy sites, alas, had not been particularly helpful for tracing ancestry back more than a couple hundred years, not to mention the fact that we were trying to do the opposite of
what the sites were designed for. We knew the antecedent rather than the descendant.
“I appreciate this effort you are making,” Alek said as we stopped at the room door.
I blushed. I had done so little, especially given how much he had risked to help us over the last few days. “It’s nothing. I hope… no, listen, I promise you this: one way or another, once this monster stuff is resolved, I’ll find a way to take you home. I mean, it’ll be totally foreign and changed since your day, but you’ll at least recognize the hills and the sea.”
He closed his eyes. I watched with concern, afraid I had said the wrong thing. Would it be too painful for him to go back? But he took a deep breath, and I realized he was just struggling to control his feelings. When his eyes opened again, they were brimming with moisture, and he gave me a solemn nod.
I nodded back. I wasn’t sure how the hell I was going to get him citizenship and a passport from somewhere, but I would make it happen. Or I would arm-wrestle Simon into making it happen, since that seemed like something his repertoire of skills could handle.
Since I was contemplating arm-wrestling, I wasn’t quite prepared when Alek bent and kissed me on the cheek. I was too busy gaping at him—for the second time in ten minutes—to think about hugging him or maybe giving him a kiss until he drew back.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” I managed, though I wanted to kick myself for missing out on… something. Yes, he had lost his wife, and yes he had been forced to do who-knew-what for some elven master, and I probably shouldn’t even contemplate kissing him, but damn it, how often did a hot, naked guy give me a kiss?
A kiss on the cheek. A kiss of gratitude. That was it. Cool the hormones, Delia.
I swiped the key and pushed open the door. “Your stuff is in here, isn’t it?” I knew the shield and spear were still in the van but hadn’t kept track of his other personal items—it wasn’t as if he had many.