Dopey began dancing around on my outstretched legs, disrupting Raja, who was asleep on the other side of me. From the other room I heard Cody and Chip crashing around, and the puppy begin to whine. If I was awake, they assumed it was playtime. Still hanging on to the phone, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and went to let everybody outside, wearing panties and an oversized army T-shirt. There are benefits to living out in the middle of nowhere.
“There’s something else you need to know,” I told Simon. “There was an incident last night with the vampires. It could be related to your sandworm.” I briefly sketched out the events from the night before. It was a risk, since Maven hadn’t given me explicit permission to involve Simon, but fuck it. People were being eaten, and I figured Simon was the best daytime resource we had. As long as I kept quiet about the werewolf case, surely Maven couldn’t get too upset. “So anyway, the guys seemed unnecessarily stirred up,” I concluded. “It could definitely be related to the sandworm’s sudden appearance.”
“That’s what happened to the Walrus?” Simon said disbelievingly. “Damn. I saw the thing on the news about the fire, but I thought it was just, you know, a fire.”
“Did the whole place burn down?” I asked. I had no love for the Walrus, but it was kind of weird to imagine it being gone.
“No, just the room with the dance floor. They found five dead, and a broken back window. The current theory is that the victims broke in to steal booze and passed out with cigarettes burning.”
Probably not the most airtight story, but I supposed it would work. Meanwhile, there wasn’t much I could do for Maven or the vampires until nightfall, and the werewolf situation was at a dead end: If we were right, and the attacks were more of a symptom than a calculated attack, the best way to restore Maven’s authority was to figure out what was stirring up magic. It’s just that I had no idea how to do that.
This investigation was getting complicated, and I was starting to feel flat-out useless. Simon was a biologist, and Quinn a trained investigator—he’d been a cop before he was turned. Aside from pressing one vampire for basically no information, I wasn’t helping much. “What can I do?” I asked Simon.
“Not sure yet,” he admitted. “I’m not entirely sure what I can do, at this point, other than more research. What does your day look like?”
I wandered over to the fridge to check my calendar. “I’m supposed to work a midday shift at the Depot, magical crises permitting. And I need to call Magic Beans this morning to pull the trigger on getting that Las Vegas witch up here.”
“The only other thing I can think of doing is going to Chautauqua to look around for evidence,” Simon offered, not sounding very convinced, “but the cops will be crawling all over the park until nightfall.”
“We could go back tonight, and stake the fucker out,” I said, mostly just thinking out loud. I probably had a little bit of time to kill before the thaumaturge would arrive; it’d be nice to do something useful. “Except that Chautauqua has like fifty miles of trails, and we don’t know where it will go, let alone how to stop it.”
“No, that’s a great idea!” Simon said enthusiastically. “I know where the first pellet was found; we could wait there and see if it reappears.”
“Simon, this thing is hostile,” I objected. “And we don’t know how to kill it.”
“Maybe not, but at least we can learn more about it,” he argued. “And technically, we don’t know that it’s hostile. It could just be unaware of humans as a sentient species.”
That wasn’t possible . . . right? Killing and eating a human being didn’t seem like the kind of thing you could do by mistake, but then again, Simon was the biologist, not me. “I don’t know,” I said dubiously. “No offense, Simon, but you can’t even run yet.”
There was a long pause before Simon spat, “I’m still a goddamned witch, Lex. I’ve got a few other tricks up my sleeve before I’d resort to running away.”
Whoops. I’d hit a soft spot. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Look, you can call Quinn, get him to come, too. Best-case scenario, you guys get a shot at the thing. Worst-case scenario, I get some more information we can use to track it.”
I thought it over. I was getting really sick of playing defense on this case. I was more than ready for some action. “Okay, I’m in. You bring the coffee, I’ll bring the weapons.”
“Why do I feel like you’ve said that before?” he teased.
We arranged to meet half an hour after sunset, to give Quinn enough time to arrive. Then I hung up with Simon and called Ryan, Maven’s human errand boy, at Magic Beans. He promised to start working on the Las Vegas witch’s travel plans, and swore up and down that he would have Maven and/or Quinn call me the second they “arrived” at the coffee shop that night.
It was an unseasonably warm day for early November, so when I was done on the phone I took Chip and Lady for a run outside, enjoying the sunshine. I had learned (the hard way) that it was difficult to run with more than two dogs at once, so poor Cody was stuck at home this time. As usual, we took the path that veered the hell away from the small fishing pond where I’d accidentally sucked the life out of all the fish the month before. When we got home, I waded through the jealous animals weaving around my ankles and headed for the shower.