A Little Rhine Must Fall (21 page)

I made the call. I held my tongue through the barely veiled insults and guilt trip. (I was looking fat. I enjoyed spending time with my sisters more than I liked spending time with her. Other grandmothers were allowed to see their granddaughters more often and buy them anything they wanted. And (my personal favorite) was I trying to strain Mark’s finances by overpopulating the Earth?)

She agreed reluctantly to do me a favor by coming to spend the time she wanted to spend with her grandkids. Why was is that if
I
needed her to watch the girls it was a big imposition, but if I didn’t need her then she was hurt and offended and wanted to just drop by? Go figure.

The things I was willing to do to save the world. Or, in this case, not
save
the world but help arrange its surrender. My hope now was the Synod had a plan. They were big, scary, powerful beings and they had to have some way of fighting off an alien race without involving the humans. Didn’t they? Cecily didn’t seem to think so, but she was just your average vampire who was a little too close to humans for other vampires’ liking.

They had a plan. They
had
to have a plan. The alternative was not pleasant.

Speaking of unpleasant alternatives, I was reminded that Matthew was still out to get me and had been in my house. I didn’t think taking the girls with me was a great idea, but leaving them unprotected was also not great. So, I came up with a plan that would kill two birds with one stone. I’d ask Bastet to stay and watch over them. That way my daughters would be safe, and the know-it-all Egyptian goddess wouldn’t be bothering me or talking in my head at inopportune times. If a goddess couldn’t keep my babies safe, than I don’t know what could.

Fortunately, Bastet agreed to the idea, something about spending more time with Otis. He had taken to following her around the house and purring. I wasn’t going to break it to him yet that she was
not
staying with us forever. Let him enjoy the time he had.

As I locked the front door behind me I was startled to turn and come face to face with a small man wearing a trench-coat, sunglasses, and a dollar-store fake mustache. He put his finger to his lips and said, “Shhh!”

“Hello, Floyd,” I said patiently.

He looked furtively from side to side and then dived into my front bushes, crushing an oyster plant on the way.

“What are you doing in my bushes, Floyd?” I asked calmly. Sad to say, I was getting used to this sort of behavior.

“Shhhh!” he hissed louder.

I glanced at my watch. “Look, Floyd, I’m on a tight schedule here. What do you want?”

He stuck his head out of bush and beckoned me closer. “Annabeth has to work this morning, but she told me what was going on.”

Thank you, Annabeth
, I thought sarcastically.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to keep an eye on your house. Guard the perimeter.” He opened up his trench-coat to show me a sharpened stake stuck through his belt buckle.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. If I truly thought that there was any possibility of Matthew attacking during the daytime, then I wouldn’t be leaving my children home alone. Floyd was no match for a vampire, but, since I was pretty sure that there would
be
no vampire, then there wasn’t much trouble he could get into patrolling my yard with stake in his belt.

I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and just said, “Thank you, Floyd.”

He tried to surreptitiously roll out of the bushes, landed with his spine on the brick border, yelped, and then limped off to hide around the side of the house.
Please, don’t let Carolyn see him
, I prayed.

The children taken care of and Floyd on guard, alien/Karen and I loaded up into Cecily’s little red car and we took off. Cecily was wearing her trademark high-heeled sandals with a twirly skirt. The alien was wearing one of my dresses since apparently she hadn’t arrived with a wardrobe. I had considered going dressy, but considering the fact that the last time I had met with the Synod in an official capacity I’d wound up with blood drenched clothes, I decided that jeans were a safer bet. No matter how practical, I couldn’t bring myself to put on heavy shoes in the Florida heat. My flip-flops were just going to have to do.

“Where are we going?” I finally got the chance to ask.

“Chiang Mai.”

“Chang my?” I repeated, having no idea where that was.

“Chiang Mai,” she said again, as if a simple pronunciation difficulty was stopping me from recognizing the location.

“Where’s that?”

“Thailand.”

I choked on the coffee I had brought along in a travel mug. “Thailand?”

Cecily gave me a look. “Yes. That’s what I said. Thailand.”

“Thailand?” my voice may have squeaked a bit at the end.

“You just got back from a trip to Egypt. Why is Thailand such a big deal?”

“Because it’s … Thailand!”

She kept her gaze on the road. “What can I say? It’s where the Synod is meeting.”

“Why Thailand?”

“Because Deerhurst is the chairman of the Synod and gets to pick the location for all official meetings.”

“But,
Thailand?
”

“Yes, he is particularly fond of a Buddhist temple there called
Wat Phrathat
. That’s where we will be meeting.”

“What is a what?” Alien/Karen asked.

“What?”

“A ‘what.’ You said ‘What Phrathat.’”

“No, a
Wat
. It’s the Thai word for temple. Most people just call this one
Doi Suthep
though, after the mountain it’s built on.”

“Why this one in particular?” I asked.

She grinned. “You’ll see when we get there.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. Something was up. “What?” I asked.

She tried to look innocent and failed. “Oh, nothing. I just have a feeling that you are going to be expressing yourself loudly about this trip.”

“What do you mean?”

She flashed me a wicked smile. “I mean grumbling.”

“I never!” I said shocked.

“Oh, we’ll see about that. Want to make a bet?”

I stuck out my tongue. “That’s not necessary. I never grumble. Or complain.”

“Uh-huh. We’ll see.”

I decided then and there that I was not going to complain about anything. Easy to say when you are riding in an air-conditioned car, driving down the streets of your hometown.

Even with the wonders of the Zipline, it was not a simple hop, skip, and a jump to Chiang Mai, Thailand. It
was
much faster than the fifteen plus hours it would take to
fly
there, but it was not instant by any stretch of the imagination.

First we had to use the abandoned garage Zipline in Melbourne to travel to Orlando. It was still creepy. ‘Nuff said. Fortunately, the Synod had arranged for the WAND to replenish (or whatever it was they did) the Zipline so that there was no danger of it failing when we used it. Then, in Orlando, we had to park the car and use the Zipline there to travel to Arizona. The sun was just rising as I stepped from Melbourne into another old garage in Phoenix. Weird.

“Why can’t we just materialize in Chiang Mai?” I asked. If I accepted that magic could take us straight to Orlando, why couldn’t it just take us straight to Thailand? We seemed to be heading in the wrong direction now.

Cecily got her teacher’s voice going. “Do you know how far it is to Thailand?”

I made a face when she wasn’t looking. “No.”

“From Florida to Thailand, it is over 9,000 miles.”

“So? We went directly to Egypt.”

“Yes, because from Florida to Egypt it is just over 6,000 miles.”

“The extra miles make a difference?”

“Yes. Plus, the location in Arizona is closer to a Ley Line nexus point, which makes it easier for the Zipline to operate.”

I gave her a look. “You have no idea how it works, do you?”

She acted offended. “You asked a question and I’m trying to explain it to you!”

“Yeah. But you really don’t know why we have to leave from one point to get to Egypt and another to get to Chiang Mai. Do you?”

She glared at me. “Are you ready? Or do you want to stand here arguing all day?”

I smiled snidely and stepped into the Zipline.

Once again, I should have been prepared for the time difference. There’s just something very disturbing about one instant being in early morning Phoenix, and the next, in a dark foreign country.

We had materialized in an old apartment building. Basically, it was a concrete box with flimsy wooden walls, or even, in some places, sheets hung up in place of walls. It was dark; it was dirty, and a quick look into the small bathroom closet convinced me that if I hadn’t “gone” before we left, I really would have to hold it.

Alien/Karen also stuck her head into the small room and studied the hole in the ground.

“There is no toilet,” she announced.

Cecily stuck her head around to see. “Oh. That’s a
squatty-potty
.”

“A what?”

“A squatty-potty. You squat down to—”

“Yeah, we get it,” I interrupted. Nope. There was no way I would be able to do that. I wasn’t limber enough to squat with my feet flat on the ground. I doubted I could squat, hold my pants out of the way, and still manage to pee without falling in. This was obviously a culture geared more towards men.

Alien/Karen was still studying the hole. “What if you need to have a bowel movement?”

I rolled my eyes. This was not the conversation I imagined adults having.
I
had these conversations every day. I had to talk about “dirty diapers,” and “poop,” and “tinkle,” and a host of other bodily functions that I had always imagined were politely
not
discussed in adult situations. Maybe I’d had false expectations.

Cecily had no such qualms. “You squat and hope your legs are in really good shape,” she said cheerfully. “It builds awesome quads.”

Yup. I was holding it.

“Can we go?” I asked. The sounds of the city were beginning to filter through. Mostly honking horns. From my two foreign country experiences, it seemed that drivers around the world enjoyed using their horns on an almost constant basis. Perhaps they had never seen the signs that Americans put up for “residential quiet” zones.

The smells were also different. As we exited the building I was hit with a potpourri of diesel fumes, cooking meat, and a strong smell of manure. I looked down. Oh. I was standing in a pile of poop, and it was still warm and steaming. A glance down the road showed a man with a long stick herding a group of goats. Goat poop. It’s not every day that you get to step in goat poop.

I carefully wiped my shoes (I was regretting the flip-flops) on the curb and hurried to catch up with Cecily and the alien. They were just stepping out into the main road. Trucks whizzed by, horns blaring, motorcycles cut through traffic with no thought to personal safety, bicycles were everywhere. Above the streets were lighted signs, most in an indecipherable (to me) language with curlicues and swoops, but some in English letters with odd phonetic spellings and grammar.

In front of the stores were carts of every shape and size, selling rice, seafood, meat-on-a-stick, DVDs, CDs, clothes, watches, jewelry, you name it. And people were everywhere. Not just Thai people, but travelers from around the world. I heard British accents, French, German, and quite a few that I couldn’t place.

Cecily grabbed my arm. While I was drinking in the sights, she and the alien had kept walking. “Come on, Piper,” she said.

“This is amazing!” I said. We were passing a cart where a woman was making some kind of dessert with bananas and pastry and sweetened condensed milk. It smelled heavenly.

“Can we?” I pointed.

Cecily smiled. “Trust you to find
banana roti
within five minutes of arriving in Thailand.” She pulled out some heavy gold-colored coins with a silver border and, through hand motions, ordered a cardboard tray filled with deliciousness. The woman gave us each a toothpick and we kept walking down the street, stabbing the pre-cut bites as we walked.

“Wow!” I said when the last piece was gone and I was contemplating grabbing the tray from Cecily’s hand and licking it clean. “That was great!” I was getting used to the noise and bustle and, away from the manure odor, the smells of all the different cooking foods was making my mouth water. “Can we try something else?”

Cecily glanced at her watch and frowned. “No. Perhaps on the way back. We need to grab a
songtheaw
and get to
Doi Suthep
.”

I pointed to something that looked like a rickshaw attached to a motorcycle. “Is that a ‘song tau’?”

Cecily shook her head. “No. That’s a
tuk-tuk
and I don’t think all three of us can ride in one.”

The driver saw us pointing at him and pulled up to a stop in front of us.

“You ride! You ride!” he called.

Cecily pointed at all of us. “There are three of us. Three!” She held up three fingers.

“No problem. You ride!” he insisted.

I grinned. This looked like fun. Before she could stop us, alien/Karen and I were both squeezing onto the seat. Like a rickshaw, it had a bench seat covered by a small roof with tassels. Cecily looked unhappy.

“What?” I asked.

“You are supposed to agree on the price
before
you get in,” she said.

“Oh, quit being such a party pooper,” I scolded. “How much can he possibly overcharge us?”

She pointed to a sign across the road that seemed to be attached to a medical facility. The sign read:
Foreigner will charged 50% more for hospital serve
. I had to laugh.

“It’s not funny,” Cecily rebuked me. “This is a haggling culture. They take it very seriously. We will already be paying more for being Americans, if we’re not careful he could charge us a hundred times the going rate!”

“Where go?” the driver asked, confident that we were hooked.

“Doi Suthep,” Cecily said.

“Doi Suthep?” he echoed. “Far. Ver far.” He shook his head as if amazed at the audacity of Americans in asking him to travel to another galaxy. Then, after sucking his teeth a bit, he announced the generous discount he would offer to take us there. “
Song pan baht
,” he said.