Thorn Fall (2 page)

“Exactly what kind of teacher is this who’s supplying you with…” I waved at his booty. It looked more like junk than anything that could be turned into monster-fighting gear.

Someone inside coughed, then came to the door, carrying a gallon jug drowning in Mr. Yuk stickers. “You forgot your benzene, bro,” the guy said, elongating the last word to epic proportions.

Benzene? I hadn’t looked at the college catalogue, but they had to be offering more than gun-smithing in there.

“Thanks, Simon,” Simon said.

I squinted suspiciously—maybe he
was
stoned—until Simon caught my look and said, “We have the same name. He’s a T.A. Can you get that jug? Oh, and the iron bar leaning against the wall there. I’ll put all this stuff in the front and sit in the back.”

“You can put it in the
trunk
.” If I had known our grocery-shopping trip would include picking up poisonous and possibly caustic liquids, I would have made him bring the van. I gingerly grasped the jug from the T.A., a twenty-year-old kid with dreads Bob Marley would have approved of, gave him a nod, and wondered when I had started thinking of college-age people as kids. It had been less than a year since I graduated. “The front seat is taken.”

Simon stopped and stared at Alektryon, who was gazing at the scene blandly. He couldn’t possibly know what was going on, but I felt sheepish, and a little guilty, anyway. I didn’t know why; it wasn’t as if
I
had done something wrong. Maybe it was just that he was a few years older than I was, and he had an authoritative military aura about him, like he might have been someone used to giving orders once. And enforcing the rules. Not that marijuana had been illegal in Ancient Greece—I was pretty sure it had been used to dress wounds or something like that.

“I thought you were just picking up burgers and hot dogs,” Simon said.

“Burgers, hot dogs, ancient Spartan warriors, you know how hard it is to stick to the list.” I glanced at the T.A., realizing Alektryon would be hard to explain in that outfit, but the door was already thudding shut. Doubtlessly, the kid had papers, or maybe metal-smithing projects, to get back to grading.

Simon headed for the trunk while keeping a wary eye on Alektryon. “Is he coming back with us?”

“I think so. He wants to talk. I thought you’d have your tablet handy.”

“It’s back at camp. You can talk while I start working on my projects.” Simon rubbed his hands together like an evil overlord contemplating world domination.

“Am I going to approve of any of these projects?” I wedged the jug between the crate and a bag of tire chains, hoping there was no way it could slip free and roll around in the trunk.

“You might like the upgraded version of a Maglite laser I’m going to make. And the thermic lance is going to rock. Oh, did you get the polystyrene cups I asked for?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure they’re polystyrene?”

“Yes, and you can thank the dollar store for that. It’s hard to find that stuff anymore.” I eyed the benzene, and a few memories from chemistry class came together in my mind. “Simon… you’re not planning to make napalm, are you?”

He grinned at me, his shaggy black hair flopping into his eyes.

“Are you serious? Arizona is in the middle of a twenty-year drought, you know. The rangers don’t even like people building fires at the campsites.”

“I’m not going to burn the trees, just any monsters that show up.”

“When you fling fire around, other things tend to burn. How do you know fire will even work? Bullets and arrows didn’t, and our buddies said human weapons wouldn’t hurt the monsters.” The
jibtab
, that was what the elves had called the creature, and they had promised more were on the way. “Hence the whole adventure to find the glowing sword.” I glanced at the door again, making sure nobody had opened it again. Even a stoned guy might remember this kind of craziness.

“Yeah, but you can’t trust them. We don’t know anything about them or what their agenda is. I refuse to believe that Temi’s the only one who will be able to fight them until I personally see one walk away after a nuke lands on its head.”

I stared at the trunk, his words birthing a new horror within me. “You’re not making plans to build nuclear weapons are you?”

“Don’t be silly; you can’t get uranium from the community college. Or the dollar store. I’m just planning to try some non-projectile methods of fighting.”

I glanced at Alektryon. He was gazing toward the woods behind the metal sculptures this time. That made me twitchier than if he had been frowning at us. There hadn’t been anything in the news about monster-related deaths in the last two weeks—we were actually following the Internet feeds this time around—but that didn’t mean a new creature couldn’t have appeared.

My phone blasted
Pour Some Sugar on Me
, and I jumped. Temi’s name flashed on the screen.

“Temi,” I blurted into the phone. “You’re alive!” Either that, or someone had found her phone lying in the forest and was randomly calling her contacts. My gut clenched at the thought, especially when nobody answered right away.

“Yeah,” her voice finally came over the phone. “My battery’s almost dead, and I’m up on Senator Highway past Goldwater Lake. Can you pick me up?” She sounded wearier than an ER doctor after a twenty-four-hour shift.

“Yes, of course.” I eyed the small car, again wishing we had opted for the van. “I hope you have lots of stories to share.”

“Some, yeah. But all I want now is something to drink and a bed.”

The line died before I could answer. I didn’t know if it was a reflection of how she felt about the conversation or if her battery had died.

“Is she all right?” Simon asked, genuine concern in his eyes. I wondered if he would be that concerned if I had been missing for a week. I kept telling him Temi was out of his league, but he refused to believe it.

“I think so. But she wants a ride. And a bed. Maybe we should upgrade to a hotel for the night.” I grimaced at the expense—November’s student loan payment had been sucked out of my account at the beginning of the month, leaving me barely treading water, as usual.

“A hotel?” Simon whipped out his own phone. “If my lady wants a hotel, I shall arrange fine accommodations for her.”

I watched in some bemusement as he arranged “fine accommodations” at the Motel 6. Thanks to his frugal streak, he didn’t have my pile of debt, but getting him to spring for something extravagant was next to impossible. “You don’t think your lady—” I made air quotes around the words, “—would like something classier than the Motel 6?”

He frowned at me. “Like what? The Econo Lodge?”

“Never mind. I—”

My phone bleeped, and a text message from Temi popped up.
The reception is too spotty for calls. But needed to let you know. They said there’s another jibtab here.

“What is it?” Simon asked.

“You better start on your napalm right away.”

As I folded tent poles by the headlights of the Jag, I eyed the nearby campsites, hoping nobody was paying attention to us. A few ponderosa pines and alligator junipers added some cover, but I had no trouble seeing the RVs in the other lots, some still with lamps on inside. People might think it was strange that we were disassembling our camp in the middle of the night, even if the luxury of the Motel 6 awaited. During the last week, there had already been eyebrow-raising at the sight of Simon’s 1980s, dusty blue van sitting alongside Temi’s sleek car. And now our group had grown decidedly odder. Only a few other campsites were occupied this late in the year, but I didn’t want to have to explain Alektryon to anyone, not until I had an opportunity to whisk him into Goodwill for a change of clothing.

Having a former pro tennis player passed out in the back of a Jag with out-of-state plates wasn’t something I wanted to chat about, either, not with neighbors anyway. There were about a bazillion things I wanted to chat about with Temi, but as soon as we had picked her up at way-the-hell-out-there-after-Senator-Highway-turns-to-dirt, she had swilled a warm half-drunk can of Mountain Dew and crumpled in the tiny back seat, practically lying on Simon who had been wedged into the narrow seat with her. He couldn’t have been comfortable, and Temi had smelled of dried sweat and caked dirt, but he had worn a big grin all the way back to Granite Basin Lake.

The other person I needed to chat with was standing beside our picnic table, watching the tent disassembly. He looked lost. Bleak.

When he caught me watching him, he pointed at the flattened tent and asked something that was probably, “Do you want help?”

I shook my head and held up a finger toward him. “Simon? I want to find out what our friend wants. Can you get your tablet for me when you have a moment?”

Simon was stuffing his sleeping bag into its casing, a task that he would find easier if he ever actually bothered to roll up the bag properly. “Oh, yes, it’s under the front seat in the van.”

He must have been in a hurry when we left. That was his second-choice storage place for valuables. There was a fake floor in one of the cupboards that he usually used.

“With the booby trap in place?” I asked.

“Of course. Have you seen the unwashed delinquents that lurk around these campgrounds?”

“Besides us?”

“In addition to us.”

I stuck the last folded pole into the bag and headed for the driver’s seat of the van. I patted around under it, careful not to catch any of the corners of the duct tape holding the rips together on the faded, striped upholstery. Something brushed the backs of my fingers. I grimaced but didn’t withdraw my hand until I had the tablet. A fake tarantula perched on my wrist when I pulled it out, but I returned it to its hiding spot and reset the trip wire.

I sat cross-legged on top of the picnic table, waved for Alektryon to come closer, and pulled up the drawing program. His message about not trusting the elves was still there. I nodded at him when he pointed at it. He looked over at Temi and frowned. He couldn’t know she had been off with Jakatra and Eleriss, could he?

“Go ahead and write first.” I held out the tablet toward him. I had questions for him, but he had specifically come looking for us, so he must have something pressing on his mind. Like what he was supposed to do with his life now that he was stuck here.

Alektryon sat on the table beside me, his shoulder not quite touching mine. I wouldn’t have minded. He was a lot better looking than any of my other boyfriends had been, and more than once when I’d been driving us back to the campground, I’d caught myself glancing at the muscular thighs on display, thanks to his short tunic. I wasn’t sure who had made the rule that women were supposed to wear skimpy skirts so men could more easily ogle them, but there was nothing wrong with things going the other way.

He dragged his finger across the screen, forming Ancient Greek letters. A cool breeze whispered through, smelling of dust and pine needles, and he paused to squint into the dark woods across the road. After Temi’s warning about another monster coming, that made me nervous. I had no idea if it would show up here, where we had slain the other one, or on the California coast where the first had originated. Or maybe it would be in Beijing. Who knew? It was hard to establish a pattern and make predictions based on one data point.

Alektryon held out the tablet for me to read, though he glanced into the pines a few more times.

“You want to be my… warrior? No, bodyguard.” I stared at him. The offer would have surprised me coming from anyone, but it wasn’t as if women had been all that highly regarded in Ancient Greece. True, Sparta had given women more rights than a lot of the city-states, but this seemed an unlikely train of thought for someone from that time period.

“What?” Simon paused in the middle of stuffing the tent bag into the back of the van. “What do you need a bodyguard for when you’ve got Temi? And you’ll soon have my napalm.”

I read the next screen of his request. “He wants to protect me—us, maybe—in exchange for language lessons.”

Alektryon pointed at one of the words. “Bo-dee-gart?” he asked.

“No, the one you’re pointing at means language. Language,” I repeated slowly, wishing I had some experience tutoring English. I had worked in the computer lab at school instead. Maybe he would like to learn how to do mail merges in MS Word? “This one is bodyguard.”

I wrote yes on the tablet, that I accepted his offer. It seemed too complicated to explain that I would have taught him anyway. I felt somewhat responsible for his appearance in our world, even if I had only been a witness when the elves had taken him out of… whatever it had been. Not a cryonics chamber, Eleriss had said. But something that could suspend a body for centuries and revive it later. I still struggled to believe it and dearly wanted to ask Temi if she had seen any other indications of advanced technology. Or magic. Whatever.

Alektryon held up a finger, then wrote a few more sentences.

“Can you speak as you write?” I asked, touching my lips and pointing to his, then to the words. “I think I can understand your language more quickly than you’ll be able to get mine.” Especially if we were going to teach him English rather than modern Greek.

“Such arrogance,” Simon said from the door of the van. “Do you think he likes arrogant women?”

I shooed him away. “Don’t you have something you should be doing?”

“I’ve finished packing. I could start working on… my projects, but I’m not sure how smart it is to mix chemicals in the dark and without access to running water.”

Or at all… I couldn’t imagine the staff at the Motel 6 would be happy about him doing it in one of their rooms, either.

“I could also stand over there and watch Temi sleep,” Simon said, “but I’ve heard that girls find that creepy.”

“You think?”

“I bet Spartan boy has been watching
you
sleep.”

“Doubtful.”

“He knew how to find you, didn’t he? He’s been keeping tabs.”

Hm, that might be true, though I doubted it had anything to do with a romantic fascination such as Simon had for Temi. It was more likely that Alektryon knew I was the only one around here who could understand him, however awkwardly. Now that I thought about it, it was surprising he had waited this long to approach me. Maybe he had been waiting for an opportunity for me to need a bodyguard. I snorted. If we ever made a love connection, I would have to thank the punks at the Safeway parking lot.