Thorn Fall (11 page)

The first smacks of flesh came from outside. Instead of jumping into the fray, which was already a confusing commingling of bodies, I stepped toward the front of the van, hoping to use it for cover as I attacked. From there, I had a better look at the layout and could pick my targets. Temi and Alek were standing back to back, defending but also trying to protect Autumn, who had her back to a streetlight post. Weird, it seemed like the thugs were trying to get to her.

Nobody was paying attention to me. Good. I shook out my arm, trying to loosen tense muscles, and chose a target, a man in the back who had his hand in his jacket. He pulled out a knife.

I thought about targeting his wrist, but went for a bigger target. With a sidearm flick, I wrapped the whip around his ankles and yanked back with both hands. If the brute had set his substantial weight, I might have done nothing more than throw my back out, but he was surprised and caught off balance. He tumbled down, landing hard on the pavement, and he cried out. I hoped he had cut himself with the knife.

I’d wrapped the whip well, unfortunately, and had to dart close to loosen it. The knife was on the ground next to the guy, and I kicked it away. He snarled and lunged for me. My next kick took him in the face. We were too outnumbered to worry about fair play.

Someone noticed me and lunged in my direction. His fallen buddy was in the way, and he almost tripped, giving me time to leap back and put some distance between us. I ran through a combination of underarm and sidearm flicks to keep him back, smacking his cheeks and knocking a bandana off his head. He roared with pain or anger; I couldn’t tell which, but he looked like he wanted to kill me. My heart was in my throat. Even though I had taught myself fighting combinations on purpose, I had never attacked a person with the whip before. I came close to hitting myself in the head more than once, because my hands were shaking.

But after a few more cuts, the man didn’t want anything more to do with me. He backed up, nearly bumping into Alek, who slammed a palm into the side of his head. Not exactly a typical wrestling move, but he was dealing with two other people, so all he wanted was to get the man out of the way.

Even though it wasn’t as if I was going to seriously harm someone with a whip, the cracks were making the bikers nervous; they kept glancing over their shoulders at me. I wrapped the whip around the calf of a man trying to get past Temi to grab Autumn. When he went down, I realized someone had already gotten to Autumn. Two somebodies. Where had they come from? They weren’t part of the original eight.

Cursing, I freed my whip and ran around the others, trying to help her. One man had her arm, and her microscope case crashed to the ground. The second man grabbed her around the waist, trying to throw her over his shoulder to run away. I couldn’t imagine why they were targeting her, but I snapped my whip again. I couldn’t aim for the one who was hoisting Autumn, not without risking hitting Temi, but the supple leather curled around the other man’s neck. Normally, I would have used a light touch for targeting exposed flesh, but my nerves were jangling, and the wrap must have dug in harder than I intended, because he released Autumn’s arm instantly, screaming and grabbing at the thong.

I shook my wrist, trying to disengage the weapon. Still scrabbling at it, the man stumbled and fell onto his back. The guy kidnapping Autumn only ran three steps before crying out, his scream so loud that everyone in Sedona must have heard it. He hurled her to the ground and sprinted for his bike. Two others were running in that direction as well. I snapped the whip at anyone who dawdled, finding the cattleman crack appropriate, though I was still scared someone was going to pull out a gun and turn this into something fists and whips couldn’t handle.

But the biker thugs were done. They staggered or ran away, and the motorcycles roared to life.

“Get in the van,” I ordered, thinking they might try to knock us over, but they drove straight for the exit. “Autumn, are you all right?” I called, running to her side. She had been hurled to the ground hard.

Autumn groaned, sat up, and spat something out of her mouth. A tooth? Damn, I hoped not. Some reward that would be for coming out to help us.

“Gross,” she said. “I have blood in my mouth.”

“Did you lose a tooth?”

“No, I bit that idiot.”

I stared at the thing she had spit out under the parking lot light. It wasn’t a tooth, but a piece of flesh. My lips curled back in repulsion. “Is that a piece of his ear?”

“It was all I could latch onto. Where did that dumbass think he was taking me?”

“You bit his ear off?” Simon asked from the door of the van. He was standing there, holding something that looked vaguely like one of those garden torches used for burning weeds. I didn’t think he’d had a chance to fire it up. Which was probably good, because the sandwich clerk was standing on the stoop outside of the shop and staring at us. Several shoppers with grocery carts had paused on the other side of the parking lot too.

“Not…
all
of it.” Autumn looked as disgusted as I, her face pale, her hands shaking.

Alek came over, taking her arm and helping her to her feet. Temi picked up the dented microscope case. I hoped the drop hadn’t broken anything inside.

Alek watched me roll up the whip, pointed, and said, “Good.”

“Thanks,” I said, though it was a silly tool for a fight. I had done little more than harry distracted men. “I usually don’t target anything more dangerous than plastic bottles.”

“Why were they picking on you?” Temi asked Autumn.

“Hell if I know. Maybe they thought my suitcase has a million dollars in unmarked bills in it.”

Good, she had recovered her humor. She would be all right. Knowing her, she was probably more disturbed at the idea that someone’s ear had been in her mouth rather than that someone had attacked her.

“Could they know about the samples?” Simon glanced around; a couple of people were walking in our direction. “And should we take this opportunity to exit stage left?”

“The samples.” Autumn patted her jacket pockets, then stuck her hand into them.

My stomach sank as the expression on her face darkened.

“The bag is gone,” she said.

“Maybe it fell out in the fight.” I eyed the parking lot around us, not seeing anything except broken glass and a couple of discarded food wrappers.

“Or maybe that’s what they wanted all along,” Simon said. “And once they got it…” He waved to the parking lot exit.

“Well, we needed a fresh sample, anyway, right?” I asked, trying not to feel bleak, trying not to feel like the whole world was against us. It was hard.

“Turn off the headlights,” I whispered from the passenger seat as we left the highway and drove into the campground. Temi and Alek sat at the table behind us, the darkness shadowing their features. I had offered Autumn my bed, not wanting to send her off alone after the attack, but she had sneered at the idea of slumming in Zelda and had headed home. Flagstaff was less than an hour away, but I was still worried. With random attacks coming out of nowhere, I was reluctant to split up our group, even if Autumn wasn’t technically a member and had reasons to avoid us.

“You want me to blow
another
tire?” Simon asked.

“I want to see if anyone’s lurking at our campsite before we commit ourselves to rolling in. Given the day we’ve had, I don’t think I’m being paranoid.”

“Just tire-unfriendly?”

“The speed limit is five miles an hour. If you can blow a tire at that speed, you shouldn’t be driving.”

“Zelda was going
zero
miles an hour when she lost her last tire.” Simon didn’t take slights to the van kindly.

He continued to grumble under his breath, but he flicked off the lights as he rolled along the curving roads of the campground. Even with the autumn chill in the air, half of the spots were occupied for the weekend, and the lights from RVs and campfires guided us toward the rear of the facility without mishaps. A few people glanced in our direction as we drove by, but it was only 6:30 and dusk lingered in the air, so they should assume we had forgotten to turn on our lights. It was dark enough to camouflage us, I hoped, so it should be hard for observers to tell if we were in a little motorhome or a 1980s Volkswagon van that might have been painstakingly described to the police…

All right, maybe I
was
being paranoid.

We rounded the last bend, and Temi’s Jag came into view, highlighted by a powerful lamp on the picnic table in our neighbor’s site. And by the headlights of a police car. I groaned.

Simon turned off the main strip early, veering through an empty drive-through site.

I sank low in the seat, but not so low that I couldn’t see through the window. The officer was standing next to the grandmother, taking a few notes as she pointed toward the brush, the brush Alek had walked out of with his rabbits. The woman pointed at the Jag too. She couldn’t know about the chemicals in the trunk, could she? We had locked it, so even if she was a snoop, she couldn’t have poked her nose inside. Of course, she might have wondered if the car was stolen, since none of us appeared all that affluent at the moment.

The police officer looked in our direction. Simon turned back onto the main strip and headed toward the exit.

“They’re going to know it was us.” I peeked in the side mirror. The officer and the grandmother were watching us go. I thought I glimpsed the pigtailed teen peer out from the window of her van too. “That was suspicious.”

“It was
your
idea.”

“It was a suspicious idea.”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t speak to them?” Temi asked. “We haven’t committed any crimes. In fact, we’ve been the victims of several crimes today.”

“Rabbit,” Alek said out of nowhere. Apparently he had mastered the barnyard animal section of the language program.

“I don’t think that’s a crime. I’m more worried about explaining all of the weapons and potential weapons we’re carrying around.”

“Monster hunting, of course,” Simon said. “I’ll point them to my website. I uploaded some pictures of the thorns today with links to the new stories of the dead tourists.”

“Of course you did.” I couldn’t imagine Simon’s blog endearing the authorities to us. The Prescott Police Department hadn’t been impressed.

Alek grunted. Belatedly, it occurred to me that his rabbit comment wasn’t “out of nowhere,” after all. He must be following the gist of the conversation. I would praise his progress later, but we had bigger issues demanding my attention. Like the fact that the officer was walking to his car. He leaned in to grab his radio handset.

I groaned again. “Is your license plate lamp on when the headlights are off?”

“I doubt it’s lit up when the lights are
on
,” Simon said. “Zelda’s safety requirements aren’t all up to date. You’re lucky the seatbelts work.”

It probably didn’t matter. It was a distinctive van, and Sedona was a small town with exactly two main roads that actually went somewhere. If a message went out to the police to watch for Zelda, it wouldn’t be long before someone spotted her.

“Where to?” Simon asked when we reached the highway.

Another campground? No, the police would probably think to check them. And we had to come back for the Jag sooner or later anyway.

“Munds Wagon Trail?” Temi asked.

I glanced back at her. “At night? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Actually, all of the unconscious punctured people have been found during the day.” Simon looked in the rearview mirror and turned onto the highway.

I didn’t stop him; if the officer decided to hop in his car, it wouldn’t take long for him to catch us. We had to get closer to town where there were at least some side streets we could turn down.

“Just because they were
found
during the day doesn’t mean they weren’t attacked much earlier,” I said.

“Oh sure. Those people were out there hiking at night. Besides, it attacked
you
during the day. This
jibtab
isn’t like the first one that preferred caves and night.”

All right, maybe he had a good point about the unlikelihood that those hikers and ATV-renters had taken to the trail in the dark, but… “Just because the creature has attacked everyone during the day so far doesn’t mean it won’t come out at night. It’s
magical
. I doubt it needs sleep.”

“Are we going with magical?” Simon asked. “I thought you were arguing for technologically advanced.”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t care, either. I was too busy staring in the side mirror, watching for lights on the highway behind us. Avoiding walking into a cop’s path was one thing, but I wasn’t going to advocate leading a high-speed chase through Sedona. Not that Zelda could outdrive a patrol car, anyway. Our road trips usually involved getting passed a lot by semi trucks going up hills. “You were the one who pointed out that Temi is carrying around a magical sword.”

“True, but we haven’t really examined the sword all that closely yet. That’d be another thing we could do if Autumn let us—me—into her lab. Slip it under the microscope.”

“You’re not cutting a cross-section out of my sword,” Temi said dryly. Interesting that she considered it hers now. She must have bonded with it during her training week.

“No, I’m sure we could find a way to examine it without slicing off a piece for a slide.” Simon turned off the highway into a residential neighborhood. “At the least, we could tell if it had some special coating that accounts for the glow.”

“Is this the way to the trail?” I asked.

Simon winked at me. “I may have looked it up earlier. It’s off Schnebly Road.”

“How far is it to the Cow Pies?”

“About three and a half miles.”

I slumped down in my seat. “You want to take a midnight, seven-mile hike through monster-infested hills?”

“Nah, there’s a dirt road that goes alongside the trail. It looks like we can drive most of the way to the rocks.”

“Even so, we’re going to have a heck of a time finding those thorns in the dark. We barely saw them when they were on the cave floor under our noses.”