“We will wait,” Zav said without the impatient vibe he’d had for me earlier. Maybe golems were up there with elves as lesser beings that dragons considered more pleasing to spend time with than others.
Greemaw shifted off her bench and leaned against the stone wall of her alcove, closing her eyes. How long would we wait, I wondered. Could I wander off and call Nin to check on her? For that matter, I should call Dimitri and make sure he hadn’t had his blood sucked by Zoltan the night before.
As minutes passed, neither Greemaw nor Zav stirring, I stepped away. There wasn’t enough reception for phone calls, so I texted them both.
Dimitri replied right away, saying he was still at Zoltan’s place, eating pizza and finishing up the giant robot sentry tarantula. Imagining a delivery driver tramping into the back yard and leaving a pizza on the stoop of the haunted carriage house amused me. Dimitri also said Zoltan was working on translating the notebook. That was promising. I wondered how much he would charge me.
“Val,” Zav said, calling me back. By my name. Huh.
Greemaw stepped away from the rock wall and faced me. “There are not as many caves in that area as there are higher in the mountains, but there are a couple dozen. Many will not be easily accessible by a human vehicle, but a dragon could reach them.”
“The advantage of flight—and of not needing a runway.” I looked at Zav, wondering if he planned to tote me all over the foothills on his back.
But he’d stepped away and wore an abstracted expression, like someone listening to a podcast and not paying any attention to his surroundings.
“I will show you the locations.” Greemaw gestured for me to approach her.
She radiated magic similarly to, if to a lesser degree than, Zav, but I didn’t feel wary around her. Something about her ancient eyes made me trust her, so I didn’t flinch away when she lifted a massive hand and rested it on top of my head. When Zav had intruded on my thoughts, he’d left desires to do his bidding. Greemaw gently placed locations in my mind. Her point of view was strange, often looking up from the earth instead of down from above, and I knew I would struggle to translate the locations to spots on my map, but I did my best to remember each of the areas.
While Zav stood, his gaze toward the canopy of branches hiding the valley from the outside world, I put dots on the dirt map. After each one, I looked up for confirmation. Greemaw hesitated a few times, but I got a lot of nods. Once we’d marked all of the spots, I took a picture of the dirt map with my phone.
“I must go for a time,” Zav said.
“Go?” I asked.
“Back to my home.” He looked at Greemaw. “Family matters.”
I thought of Moonleaf’s words of how Zav’s family was struggling to maintain control.
“Does Dob’s presence here have something to do with it?” I asked, even though he was looking at Greemaw, not me, and probably didn’t want me to butt in.
Zav looked sharply at me. “It is possible he was sent to distract me. Or to vanquish me here where there would be no witnesses.”
Ugh, I thought to Sindari. I knew I wasn’t crazy to worry about what would happen if I was riding on his back when that other dragon showed up.
I am surprised that you did not insist on coming here in your automobile.
It was faster this way.
Zav looked at the map, then faced me. “I will take you back to your city. When I return, we will find Dobsaurin with this information Greemaw has provided us.”
Even though he was far more polite with Greemaw than with me, he didn’t thank her. Maybe please and thank you weren’t in the dragon vocabulary. You’d think a race with a language that favored words twenty characters long would have room to squeeze in pleasantries.
“How long will you be gone?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
If he was gone as long as he’d disappeared last time—weeks—I doubted I would have the patience to wait for his help with the panther brothers. And if I had to deal with them by myself, this detour and research for him would have been a waste of time.
No, I corrected. That wasn’t true. If the silver dragon was kidnapping people, I needed to know everything about him, because as Willard had pointed out, it would fall to me to deal with him. Which I might also have to do on my own if Zav didn’t return in time. A bleak thought.
15
Someone had broken into my apartment again.
I stood in the hallway, staring at the door slightly ajar, all four of the deadbolts I’d coerced the landlord into letting me install unlocked. A three-year-old with a couple of hairpins could have thwarted the cheap doorknob lock but not the deadbolts. They weren’t even visible from the outside.
Sighing, I summoned Sindari. Whoever had done this had probably long since gone, but there was a chance he or she was still inside. Or they.
I didn’t sense anyone magical, but mundane humans could ransack my apartment as effectively as an irritated panther shifter.
There is nobody inside, Sindari informed me after he materialized. Do you wish me to go in first in case the thief left booby traps?
I don’t know. Are you more in the mood to be dangled upside down from the ceiling than I am?
With my speed and agility, I am unlikely to be dangled at all.
In that case, you should definitely go in first. I pulled out Chopper.
Sindari pushed the door open further and padded inside.
A click sounded from across the living room. Still in the hallway, I dodged to the left, whipping my sword across defensively. Something tinked off the edge of the blade and clattered against the floorboard before hitting the thin gray carpet. A tiny silver dart.
Warily, I picked it up. A gunky blue residue smeared the tip. Poison?
“Clearly, I need a taller tiger,” I said.
My height is perfect for seeing over the tall grass on the Tangled Tundra on Del’noth.
“Helpful.”
Very much so in hunting there, yes. Sindari padded farther into the room, avoiding the lamps, books, and clothes strewn across the floor. I’d just gotten everything cleaned up from the last break-in.
“It may be time to move again.”
Perhaps you should not use your real name when you lease an apartment.
“You have to. They do credit checks before renting you a place. Gone are the good old days when you could lie about everything and pay in cash.”
Living in the human world requires an unsettling lack of privacy.
“Tell me about it.” I itched to go inside and try to figure out if the intruders had only come to ransack the place or if they’d taken anything. My giant wine jug of change was still sitting on the bookcase beside the door. Nobody ever stole that. Either it was too heavy for the average intruder to lift, or nobody wanted to deal with rolling coins to get the bank to take them.
I see the slender tripwire leading from the door across the ceiling and to this shelving unit. Sindari looked up at the ceiling, then put his paw next to my signed hardback of Elric of Melniboné. By some miracle, the Moorcock books were still on the shelf. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings hadn’t fared as well. A heavy vase I’d picked up at a thrift store was the bookend on that shelf and the object of Sindari’s attention.
Something akin to a miniature crossbow has been affixed in here. It looks like that was the only dart.
I held it up and sniffed the tip, but my olfactory senses weren’t good enough to identify poisonous substances more exotic than arsenic and cyanide. “I may need to visit Zoltan again.”
Sindari checked the kitchen, small dining area, and bedroom and bathroom. I eyed the deadbolts. They hadn’t been forced open, at least not with a clumsy tool that would have damaged them. When I squinted across the apartment, I saw that the sliding glass door to the balcony was still closed and the recently added wood board that kept it from being forced open was in place.
When Sindari’s perusal resulted in no other ominous clicks, I walked inside and picked up a box of sandwich baggies on the floor. Almost everything from the kitchen drawers was on the floor. All of the cabinets had been rummaged through and most of the plates and cups knocked off the shelves. Because this had happened before, I kept plasticware instead of glassware now. Nothing classy and breakable for assassins with enemies.
Whoever did this appears to have been looking for something specific, Sindari said. Everything was searched, but little seems to be missing.
“You’ve inventoried my whole apartment already? You are impressive.” Despite the joke, I was inclined to agree with him. The television I never used was on the stand, and my laptop was still plugged in and sitting on the little desk in the living room.
I have been here numerous times, and I have the keenly observant eye of an apex predator.
After slipping the dart into a plastic baggie, wrapping it up, and using masking tape to bundle it so the needle wouldn’t poke out, I walked toward the shelf with the crossbow. As I passed my laptop, I noticed the poster Zav had given me was rolled in a different way than I’d left it when I tossed it on the desk. Before, it had been rolled in a tight tube. Now, both ends furled toward each other, with a small bone dagger thrust through the paper and into the wood.
I gripped my chin and stared at the dagger for a moment, then nudged the furls open enough to see where the blade had gone into the poster. Zav’s stern, haughty face.
“Even though that’s roughly what I had planned for this poster, I feel affronted that someone sneaked in here and defiled it.”
I tugged out the dagger. Whoever had thrust it in there hadn’t been weak. The design was smooth and simple, and there weren’t any markings. For some reason, I thought of the dark elves and the big statue on the pedestal that had been made of bones and fossils.
Val? Your bathroom door has a dagger in it.
“Another one? Was there a two-for-one sale at the local hunting-supply store?”
Sindari, whom I’d never taken shopping, did not respond to that.
“Is it made from bone?” I headed to the compact bathroom, where he stood halfway inside, his neck craned to peer around the back of the door.