Minutes ticked past on my phone’s clock, and Amber didn’t call back. Rivulets of rain ran down the windshield, and the sky was so dark and gray, it barely seemed like morning. Reluctantly, I jogged inside.
It was too soon for Willard to have gotten the data from the volcano-monitoring stations, but I hadn’t wanted to stay home. Alone. Angry. Frustrated. I needed a lead to follow, some bad guys to hunt down. I didn’t even care that going into a dark-elf lair without Zav would be suicidal. I’d told him I’d handle it, and I would find a way. As soon as we located them.
Rain sloughed off my duster as I crossed the hard tile floors inside. I kept glancing at my phone, hoping to see Amber’s name pop up.
Willard was waiting for me outside her outer office with a giant cup of coffee from the drive-through stand on the corner. I hated the stuff, but this morning, I would be tempted to try it if she offered me some. I hadn’t slept well. As usual.
She looked me up and down, taking in my wet braid and dripping clothing. “You look like you’ve been through three wars and a goat-roping.”
“More like a dragon-roping.”
“You and Zav have a tiff?”
“No.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “Any new data from the seismic network yet?”
“Not yet. They’re grabbing it for me. I had to guess at the date range.”
A cackle came from the outer office. Willard sighed and lifted her eyes toward the ceiling.
“Is that your goblin helper?”
“Yes. He comes in early and stays late. Except for yesterday. He and my new elf intern went to the Pacific Science Center.”
“They let goblins in?”
“He wore a hood, goggles, and black leather gloves. Because he was short, he got the children’s rate.” Willard sipped her coffee. “I understand they went to the railroad exhibit and got to design and test bridges. Competitively.”
“Who won?”
I wouldn’t have cared, but I was mildly curious if Freysha was the tinkerer she appeared to be. If she showed up today, maybe I would ask her if she knew Lirena. This might be an opportunity. I could question them about each other and see if any discrepancies came up in their stories. Though I supposed they might be from different worlds and have never met. Also, if Lirena had truly been sent by my father, she wasn’t here as a refugee, like most of the magical beings who came to Earth. Freysha might be in hiding from the elven court because of some crime she’d committed.
“Gondo told me he built the superior bridge,” Willard said. “Later, Freysha told me she won the competition and also got the phone number of the college kid volunteering there.”
“Did she want that?”
“I don’t think so. She asked me what she was supposed to do with it. Most magical beings don’t have phones unless they’re pre-paid flip phones.” Willard’s own phone rang, and she pulled it out. “This looks like our data.”
“Good.” I followed her through the outer office, pausing to gape at a mountain range of shredded paper along the wall. Gondo sat on the floor with the shredding machine, gleefully inserting documents. Strips of paper dangled from his pointed ears and scattered the tiles around him. He seemed to be munching on a small pile of blue shreds next to his thigh. Did blue paper taste better than white? “He’s supposed to be doing that, right?”
“Yes.” Judging by the baleful look Willard cast at Gondo before turning into her office, he was taking liberties with the assignment.
“Is he actually useful to you?” I asked once we were inside with the door shut.
“Amazingly, yes. He’s an incredible gossip. He’s lived in our world for a year, and he knows everything about every goblin in the Pacific Northwest, and even into California and Canada. He knows more than you would expect about the species that goblins trade with too. That includes trolls, ogres, gnolls, kobolds, canine but not feline shifters, and a clan of dwarves we didn’t know had returned to Earth.”
“Are wolf shifters more accommodating to goblins than lions and tigers?”
“They don’t try to eat them.”
“I guess that’s one way to accommodate.”
Willard stepped behind her desk, leaning her weight on her hands and eyeing the big screen of her Mac. “We’ve got a match.”
A lead? Finally? Hope filled my chest for the first time in days.
“One of the volcanos?”
“One of the monitoring stations at Mount Rainier. Located at Observation Rock,” Willard read from a report that had come in along with the numbers, “it’s approximately eight kilometers northwest of Mount Rainier’s summit. The numbers we sent over match activity recorded from June of last year to June of this year.”
“June is when I took their notebook.”
Willard nodded. “In an average month, the station detects three to four earthquakes of up to 3.9 in magnitude, but there was a period of four days in May when a swarm of over a thousand earthquakes was detected.”
“Swarm sounds ominous.”
The numbers recorded indicated earthquakes small enough that hikers probably hadn’t noticed them, but it still struck me as ominous.
“Swarms are rare,” Willard read—maybe whoever had put together the report had anticipated our concern, “—but they do occur on occasion and do not necessarily precipitate an eruption. However, another swarm occurred in July. Scientists from the USGS have deployed additional instruments on and around Mount Rainier to monitor the situation. Thus far, it’s believed that these are not tectonic in nature, that the quakes are a result of hydrothermal fluids lubricating existing faults inside the basement rock underlying the Rainier edifice.”
“Is lubricating a code word for dark elves experimenting on them with magic?”
Willard leaned back, her face grim. “It could all be natural, but the fact that the dark elves were recording the data from the station… They must have had at least one person going up there during this time period, intercepting the readings on their way from the monitoring equipment to the base computers.”
“Ominous was the right word, I think.”
“I’m inclined to agree. Were you alive when Mt. St. Helens erupted?” Willard squinted at me. “I keep forgetting how old you are.”
“We’re almost the same age, remember? My ancientness just isn’t that apparent.”
“Not like mine.”
“You don’t look a day over fifty.”
“I’m forty-four.”
“I know.” I flashed a grin, though I was joking more to break the tension than because I was in a good mood. The more I thought about this, the more scared I was getting.
Willard didn’t rise to my bait. She had to be concerned too. “I lived on the other side of the country when Mt. St. Helens erupted. I remember it being in the news but not much else.” She smiled fleetingly. “I think the news interrupted Sesame Street.”
“We lived in Snohomish County then, Mom and me.” I waved to the north. “I was a toddler. I remember some ash fall in Seattle, but I think it was a lot worse to the east. The wind blew it out over Yakima. Still, we wore dust masks for days.” I grimaced, imagining how my lungs of today would handle ash-choked air. I tapped my pocket, making sure I had my inhaler with me. “Portland wasn’t in the line of fire, or whatever you would call it, and relatively few people died overall, but some logging crews and campers didn’t make it. I’ve seen articles that say Mount Rainier erupting could be a lot more devastating.”
“I know. I’ve seen projections for lava flows and lahars.”
“Remind me what lahars are?”
Willard tapped it into the computer for a precise definition. “Lahars are destructive mudflows from the slopes of volcanos that can be as much as a hundred feet thick and travel forty-five to fifty miles per hour.”
“Shit.” I imagined an entire population center trying to evacuate and outrun such things.
“On Mount Rainier, the risk from lahars is more than from lava flows and volcanic ash fall,” she read on. “Their projected pathways go through densely populated areas and important infrastructure such as highways, pipelines, bridges, and ports. Approximately eighty thousand people and their homes are in lahar-hazard zones.”
Eighty thousand? My gut tightened.
“Was this the dark elves’ plan all along? Decimate Puget Sound so… What do they want? To take it for themselves?” I thought of the goblins in Harrison, Idaho, that had hoped to scare away the population of two hundred people so they could claim the town for themselves. That plot was almost innocent compared to this, but maybe it demonstrated how many of the refugees who had come to Earth thought. Our people hadn’t made a place for them. Maybe the dark elves intended to take a place. “And if that is their plan, how do the pleasure orbs tie in?”
“I suppose it depends on where they’ve been placed and how many there are. The ones in Seattle are gone. Maybe they were just here for testing, and now they’ve been moved down south.” Willard waved toward a map showing the lahar zones. “All of this is speculation at this point, but wouldn’t you agree that if people were attached to one of those things, they wouldn’t pay attention to an eruption? They wouldn’t evacuate.”
“Oh, I agree. Humans and shifters can’t keep their paws off them. I barely could.”
Willard pulled out her phone. “I’ll make some calls. Like the report said, the government will have more people monitoring the volcano with the increase in activity, but I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that, for the first time in human history, magic could play a role in the eruption of a volcano.”
“How many people will listen?”
“My superiors know that magic is real and refugees from other planets are on Earth. World leaders know too. The problem is that few of them have practical experience. People like you and me are the ones who’ve battled these magical beings and dealt with their otherworldly powers. You especially. Out of ignorance, those in charge may make idiotic choices.”