The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) (28 page)

“No. And yes.” He looked around and grabbed a bag from my most recent trip to the market. Carefully he scraped off a small portion. “This isn’t what I made, but it’s the same recipe.”

“Someone else took your recipe for stinky goo? How awful for you.” I couldn’t figure out why he was looking so upset. It was
my
door after all.

He finally turned back to me. “No, that’s not it. I took the recipe from an old find, a very, very old elven find a few hundred miles from here. This is original. This isn’t a recipe copy.”

I went back and sat in my chair. “So possessed squirrels flung rocks and thousand-year-old elf stink at my door?” I leaned my head down on my knees. My life was far less complicated before I took that job to find Alric. Maybe if I could just get him to leave things would settle down again.

“I’m not sure about possessed,” he said while ignoring the cries of outrage from the faeries. “But yes, they somehow found a thousand-year-old compound. In useable condition. And threw it at your door.” He fingered a small portion of the sample, then started swearing.

“You need to get this off now.” Ignoring me, he barged into my kitchen and began rummaging around. He came out with two of my largest, and mostly unused, pots filled with hot water. “Come on, if they figure it out, your door will be gone.”

“Figure out what?” I refused to get out of my chair. This had been by far the longest, weirdest, and most disturbing evening in my life. Not to mention it was clearly well past midnight and I needed to be up and at the dig bright and early.

“The squirrels, or rather whoever or whatever is working through the squirrels. The compound they put on the door can be modified to have explosive properties.” He nodded when my eyes grew huge. “Exactly. The version I used couldn’t have done any harm. However, this could. We need to get if off now.”

He rolled up his sleeves and furiously began scrubbing my front door. While part of me just wanted to sit there and enjoy the show, the other part really didn’t want to try and deal with an exploded door.

Dragging myself out of my chair, I applied my remaining energy to removing the gunk. Of course the faeries had vanished by this time, so were of no help.

The door clean, I started to shut it. But Alric stayed outside.

“Hey, wait a minute, you can’t leave.” I still had too many questions. At this point I might as well stay up until I had to go into work anyway. A huge yawn betrayed me.

“We do need to talk.” He had the gargoyle back in his pocket, but he also kept his hand on it. “You’re safe for now, and you need sleep. We’ll talk at Covey’s place. Tomorrow night.”

I tried to argue, but it was as if all the events of the day just slammed into me at once.

“Fine,” I yawned the word more than spoke it. It was damn hard to argue with someone when one’s own body was selling them out. I could barely keep my eyes open. But before I could rally enough for another comment, Alric had vanished from the hall.

I was too tired to even swear at him properly as I shut and locked the door and stumbled toward bed.

Chapter 32

The next day started wonderfully in spite of all of the trauma of the day before. The faeries were already gone for the day and I woke up early enough to have a nice breakfast at one of the local street vendors. While I did normally eat my meals at the Shimmering Dewdrop, breakfast wasn’t Foxy’s strong point. Besides, I’d gotten up early enough to grab a sack of tiny spiced donuts. Made by a sweet little grandmother, they were usually gone before I even thought of getting out of bed. With them, I could ignore the relic of mass destruction drifting around town in Alric’s pocket. At least for a little while.

You would think with the way my life had been going as of late, I would have been suspicious of too many good things coming my way.

I didn’t pick up on that thought until I was almost at the dig site.

And had to fight my way through a crowd of pushing diggers to get to the front.

A medic was checking on Thaddeus, and while extremely dusty, he seemed to have all of his limbs intact. The same couldn’t be said for our dig.

The tunnel had completely collapsed. All that was left was a small dent in the ground and a lot of churned up earth.

“What happened?” I fought the urge to run to the dig itself and instead forced myself to check on Thaddeus.

“Oh, child, thank goodness you weren’t here. It was awful. I barely got out with my life.”

Thaddeus hadn’t gotten out completely unscathed, a long trail of blood indicated where he’d been struck by something heavy near his temple. Luckily, dwarven heads were harder than diamonds. A blow like that could have killed me.

“The dig collapsed? I thought we’d reinforced everything…” I couldn’t help it—I started to drift toward the former tunnel.

Thaddeus pushed aside the medic mage and grabbed my hand before I could go far. “I wouldn’t go near there. We had the stoutest timber, yet whoever caused this brought it down like matchsticks. No one can go near there until an inquiry and investigation has been done.”

All I could think of was all the potentially amazing finds that had been in that room we’d almost gotten into. Wait, what did he say?

“This was deliberate? Someone pulled down the tunnel? Why? We weren’t even sure if we found anything.”

Thaddeus patted me on the shoulder and skillfully turned me away from the ruins. “I know, dear. It’s hard to take. But someone with evil intent struck me down and used foul magic to destroy the dig site. I barely escaped with my life.”

A number of culprits came to mind. But the biggest one, or ones, was Marcos, aka the jinn brothers. Marcos knew about the room, which meant the jinn did. The fact that this happened immediately after their Marcos spell broke couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Now I think its best you just take a few days off. Relax, take it easy. Everything will be all worked out soon enough.” He patted my shoulder, but there was a brief flash of something dark in his eyes. Must have been the sun because it was gone an instant later.

“But I really—“

“No, no. Just go home. See to your faery friends.” With a pat that turned into a light shove, he pushed me back toward the trail.

What had just happened? This was the first time a job left me without someone dying or going missing.

I was just out of the jungle when a buzz flew past my ear.

It was the little purple faery and she was carrying a pouch not unlike the one the girls used to store things too big to carry. She dropped it into my hand.

“I get given.You take. Him bad.” She pointed back toward the dig, but when I turned around she vanished.

There was no way I could open the bag, it was faery sized and had faery magic. The girls were gone but I had a sinking suspicion I knew where they were.

The park wasn’t my favorite place and not just because I often felt like I was being stalked by squirrels. It had been allowed to go wild years back, and the trees had taken their task to heart. Many of the trees had old magic, it was weak but still there. Going inside the park made me feel a bit like whisky did. Wild and out of control.

But I needed to know what was in the bag, and so I needed the girls.

The pressure in my head started building as soon as I stepped inside. In some ways it felt amazing. I felt like I could do anything. However, it also gave me the feeling that ripping off all of my clothes and climbing up in a tree to spend the rest of my days might be a good idea. Luckily the girls found me before anything happened.

“You no come here. Bad. Boom not now. No come here.” Garbage had taken her role as leader seriously and had added a small ring as a crown to her flower petal cap. The other two flew in formation behind her.

“I don’t have time for your stories, Garbage. I need you to get something out of this.” All three pairs of faery eyes grew huge when I waggled the black fabric in front of them.

All three flew forward at once, but Garbage held up her war blade, and the others stopped.

“This important. I take.” She shifted her blade to her other hand and reached out for the bag.

“No.” I jerked it just out of her reach. “The purple faery gave it to me. I need you to promise you’ll give me whatever is in there.” I didn’t like the looks on those tiny stubborn faces so I added a threat. “Or I’ll report it to Queen Mungoosey. She told me you would help me.” So that was stretching things, but it was close enough to the truth.

Garbage’s lower lip stuck out so far it looked like she was sucking half an orange. “Fine. Promise.” Once the other two nodded their agreement, I held the bag up again.

Even though I knew those bags could hold just about anything, I was really not expecting what came out.

The missing scroll. The one the torn pieces had come from. And another page that wasn’t in some undecipherable language. Well, I couldn’t read it, but I knew someone who could. The scratching was clearly chataling.

It was the last item that got me swearing however.

It was a clipping from a newspaper from three years ago. The Mount Traffia
Tattler
, a town fifty miles due south of Beccia, was saddened to announce the death of a beloved archeologist. One Dr. Even Thaddeus. Just in case the name wasn’t enough, the photo was an exact duplicate of the man I’d left not an hour ago.

Garbage looked forlornly into the bag, then shook it upside down. The look on her face indicated sorrow that there had been nothing of worth inside. Her sadness lasted an entire three minutes, just long enough for me to re-read the newspaper article.

“Here. You keep. We need to see about things.” In an odd fit of compassion, she patted me on the head, then all three flew deeper into the forest-like park.

I waved them on then carefully folded the papers and scroll into an inner pocket of my jacket. I needed to see Thaddeus. Or rather the thing acting his part.

The smart voice in my head said getting reinforcements would be the best approach. Whoever the dwarf was that I had been working for the last couple of days wasn’t Thaddeus, and it was most likely someone extremely dangerous.

The pissed-off side of my mind was sick of being the Universe’s whipping girl and wanted answers.

That side won and I was jogging through the outskirts of Beccia before the rational side could come up with a rebuttal.

I’d been gone from the ruins just under two hours, but it might have been days. All of the nosy diggers had been chased off, and a fence not unlike the one blocking the entire ruins a few days ago was around our former dig site.

Thaddeus, or whoever he was, was nowhere to be found.

I slowed down and approached the area with caution, but no guards came to greet me.

The fence looked like the previous one, but there was no spell casting on it. The filaments in the middle of the metal wire of the fence were dull and bland, not brightly waving like they would be if a spell was active.

Throwing more caution into the vortex, I jumped up and scrambled over the fence. I had been attacked, accused of murder, accosted repeatedly, and now I was getting some answers.

After fifteen minutes of some serious stomping around the dig area I was still looking for those answers.

There were no clues of any sort left. The destruction of the dig site had been thorough. And obviously deliberate. Although I now suspected my former patron had been the one who brought it down. What could he have been covering up?

I kicked a rock lying where the entrance had been. But the rock didn’t move.

I bent lower and realized it wasn’t a rock but a battered and cold brown foot.

I wasn’t certain, but I had a bad feeling that there was at least one jinn in that pile of rocks.

The thought of what I had previously been doing with said jinns, granted in an altered form, made me almost throw up.

I managed not to, but I moved away from the ruins. I’d have to tell someone, but I’d have to do it anonymously. Even though I knew that Zirtha had been the one who murdered Nirtha, I didn’t think the guards would believe me. Having one, possibly three more bodies show up suspiciously dead around me might not be looked at favorably.

I quickly climbed the fence, then took a less traveled route out of the ruins. I’m not sure who saw me coming in, I was too mad to notice at the time. But I was careful that no one saw me going out.

Once I had gotten clear of the dig, I made my way to the Shimmering Dewdrop as quickly as possible. I needed to talk to Harlan, and my only hope was that he’d broken off for lunch early and had gone into the pub.

Unfortunately there was no one but Foxy, the tiny gnome brigade of daytime bar sitters, and the large daytime barmaid, Piltian, awaiting me. I toyed about trying to sneak back into the dig and looking for Harlan myself, but I had no idea where Thaddeus was. I did know that my irrational search for him aside, I really didn’t want him to find me.

With a nod at Foxy, I ducked back out of the pub and went looking for some help.

It took me almost a half hour to find an urchin willing to run my note into the dig for Harlan. And the greedy monster took most all of my coin to do it to.

The note was simple. Danger. And I needed him at my house. Hopefully he’d take it seriously.