Thorn Fall (4 page)

When I looked back over my shoulder, nothing was there.

Temi walked out of the nearby bathhouse in flip-flops and a robe with a towel wrapped around her head. A couple of years ago, that might have been a winning picture for some Paparazzi. Apparently, there weren’t any tennis fans in the Manzanita Campground, because nobody gave her a second glance.

I was dining on a late breakfast of Fruity-Os, having slept until ten after arriving so late the night before. Simon was in the van, setting up the satellite, wifi, and solar panels. I hadn’t seen Alek yet, but I hoped he was keeping a low profile, because we hadn’t had a chance to clothes shop for him yet. At least his sword and shield were in the men’s tent, as Simon now called it, so he wasn’t walking around in his full Spartan regalia.

“It’s four dollars for a shower,” Temi announced, joining me at the picnic table. She sounded bemused.

I hadn’t encountered many campgrounds with pay showers, but there had been a few. Not many in that price range though. I hoped four dollars included enough time to shampoo
and
condition your hair.

“You’re paying for the view.” I extended a hand toward the famous red rocks of Sedona, visible beyond the oaks and junipers that shaded the campground from the equally famous Arizona sun.

I had driven through Sedona a couple of times and done a hike on the north side of town once, but the prices and the number of tourists had always kept me from lingering. Still, the view
was
impressive, with towering rock formations rising in all directions, the striated cliffs a rich red from all the iron in them. Canyons and nooks hid all over the area, and I’d heard that amateur archaeologists were still finding undiscovered ruins left by the Sinagua, a people who had lived in the area for centuries before disappearing. A part of me hoped that the monsters forgot to show up, and we could simply explore. The Coconino National Forest was super strict about relic hunting, and even things left by settlers tended to be classified as off limits, but with Simon’s metal detector and explorers app, we might find some more recent stuff that was fair game. And I still longed for that awesome historical find that I could write up for one of the archaeology magazines.

“The view from inside the shower cubicle wasn’t that notable,” Temi said. “For me, anyway. There was a lizard on the wall watching me.”

“Don’t tell Simon. He won’t shower for a week. Either that or he’ll make you take out your sword and go in and deal with it.”

My phone blasted the chorus from Metallica’s
Enter Sandman
, and I rolled my eyes—I needed to put a passcode on there so Simon would quit changing my ring tones. Of course, he would simply find a passcode an inviting challenge.

The phone was sitting on the picnic table, plugged into my portable solar charger. The Phoenix number looked familiar, but I didn’t have it programmed into my contacts.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Delia? Professor Tillium.”

“Oh. Hi.” I set down the cereal bowl and sat up straighter. “Did you find the cavates?” I asked, referring to the underground rooms we had discovered when following Jakatra and Eleriss to the spot where they had located Temi’s sword. Since there hadn’t been anything in them, they hadn’t been the significant find I had hoped to make, but I had emailed the GPS coordinates to one of the ASU professors who maintained a catalogue of Native American ruins across the state. After being waylaid by the last
jibtab
at the site, I hadn’t been that eager to go back—Zelda wasn’t the ideal vehicle for driving through old washes, either—but I had been wondering if a team might find something of interest in the hole the elves had burned to find the sword.

“We found them,” Tillium said neutrally. He didn’t sound excited. Maybe he wasn’t thrilled that they had wasted a trip simply to look at cavates; their location, underground and beside a river that flooded regularly, was a curiosity I thought someone might have been interested in, but maybe I was wrong. “They were empty.”

“Yes, I said that in my email. I’m guessing the river has flooded a number of times over the years and cleaned everything out. I thought it was strange that they’d been built there in the first place.”

“I see.”

I frowned down at the phone, as if we were having a video chat and I could frown right at him. Was he… implying something? “Professor?”

“Since you graduated from the university’s archaeology program, you are doubtlessly aware of the numerous laws related to the buying and selling of Native American artifacts taken from federal land and national forests. And you must know also that I feel particularly strongly about the looting of the world’s archaeological heritage.”

“Of course I’m aware, sir. We didn’t take anything.” God, he couldn’t know about the sword, could he? Whoever had left that sword down there, it hadn’t been some Yavapai tribesman.

“I have a T.A. keeping an eye on your company—” he said company as if it were the filthiest word in the English language, “—eBay page. If illicit artifacts appear there, you can expect someone to take action.”

I stared at the phone again, heat flushing my cheeks. “Sir, we’re not selling anything illicit. And we didn’t take anything from those caves. Why would I have told you about them in the first place if we had been looting them?”

“There’s little reason to hide their existence when they’re empty.”

“They were always empty!” I gulped air, trying to take a deep breath, trying to calm down. Shouting at a professor wouldn’t get me anywhere. “We’re not selling anything illicit,” I repeated.

“Good. See that you don’t.” The phone beeped as the connection was cut.

My cheeks were hotter than suns now. I felt like hitting someone.

Temi, standing a few feet away with her towel still wrapped around her head, was the only one around. Picking a fight with someone fresh off a week of special combat training with elves wouldn’t be a good idea.

“Problem?” she asked, her dark eyes wary. She probably didn’t know if she should leave me alone or pretend she hadn’t overheard everything.

I jammed the phone back onto the charger. “Just be glad you got to
have
a career before you screwed up your life.”

Pain flashed through her eyes. She gave me a curt nod and strode to the van with her shower kit. I dropped my face into my hands. That had been as tactful as an avalanche. It wasn’t her fault that she had overheard the call, but I couldn’t go after her; I was too embarrassed. Did Tillium really have some nineteen-year-old teacher’s assistant keeping tabs on me? As if I was some criminal? “Like I’d sell artifacts on eBay. I’m not an idiot.”

“That’s right,” Simon’s voice came from behind me. “Everyone knows black market artifacts go on Craigslist, not eBay.”

He had hopped out of the van, his Dirt Viper metal detector in hand, and he winked at me.

I glowered at him. He had business and computer science degrees from the same university. I wasn’t sure how I had grown so notorious, but I doubted anyone back at school cared what he was up to. Or if they were checking up, they probably approved, since he was off being entrepreneurial. Although maybe there was a T.A. following his monster-hunting blog and laughing himself to bed every night.

Simon’s grin said he wasn’t daunted by my glower. Nothing new there. He patted the Dirt Viper. “She’s all charged up and ready for action. Want to put her to use today?”

“Depends. Do you want to go hunting for abandoned goodies or signs of monsters?”

“Absolutely.” He grinned wider.

I grunted. Yes, why not multitask?

“Actually, I thought I’d send the Dirt Viper with you so I could stay here and work on…” Simon paused to eye the campsites on either side of us. The one to the right was empty, but an old brown camper van similar to Zelda occupied the one to the left. I had seen a teenage girl and a stringy woman with long gray hair there earlier. Simon lowered his voice to finish with, “Certain defensive and offensive items.”

“You’re going to do that here? In the van? Shouldn’t you have a lab?”

“I should, but nobody’s offered me one.”

“Maybe you could go up and visit Autumn in Flagstaff.”

Simon propped a foot on the picnic table bench. “Do you think she’d let me use her lab?”

Hm, she had never been impressed by Simon’s wit.

“Maybe if
I
asked…” Or bribed, more likely. Autumn could be bought for burgers and sweet potato fries.

“A lab would be nice,” Simon said, “but I’d hate to leave a hotbed of monster activity prematurely.”

“A kid got pronged in the neck two days ago. I’m not sure that qualifies Sedona as a hotbed of monster activity.”

“Not yet. But now that a certain sword is in the area…”

I grimaced, still hoping that we would have a while before another monster showed up and that we could make some money first. “Did you find out where that kid was found? We should go check out the area for signs the police might have missed, but we need something more specific than Oak Creek Canyon. That covers a lot of miles.”

“Yup, it was west of Slide Rock State Park on one of the trails in the Secret Mountain Wilderness.” Simon wriggled his eyebrows, as if the name was perfect for monster craziness. Maybe it was. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I have the name of the trail and everything that was on the police report. And I just happen to have identified some possible treasure troves in the area as well. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, right?”

“Was that police report made publicly available?”

“Of course not.”

“I can’t believe
I’m
the one that the professors are keeping tabs on.”

“What do you mean?”

I sighed. “Nothing.”

A twig snapped on the other side of the picnic table. Expecting Alek’s return, I didn’t do more than glance in that direction at first. But when I spotted a pale face peering out at us from behind the leaves of a bush, my stomach sank. Those twin braids of red hair and hazel eyes definitely did not belong to Alek. Damn, how long had the girl been there? We’d been talking about… far too much and far too openly.

“Uhm, hi.” The girl stood up, giving us a sheepish grin. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

“She didn’t mean to be
caught
eavesdropping,” Simon murmured, and I wondered if his inability to talk to cute girls would extend to this one. Maybe not. She looked to be about sixteen, wore glasses, and was on the chubby side. I wasn’t sure she would fall into his cute-girl category, not when he was busy pining over Temi.

“I saw your metal detector, and I was curious,” the girl said. “Is that a Dirt Viper 3000?”

Simon blinked. “Actually it’s the 2700, but it’s just as powerful as the 3000. The upgrades in the more expensive model are mostly aesthetic.”

Nope, he not only wasn’t going to have trouble talking to her, but he was going to talk geeky to her.

“Really?” she asked. “Can I take a look?”

I tapped my wrist, not that I was wearing a watch, and gave Simon a significant look. We weren’t exactly on a schedule, but we should make the most of our time here, since this campground cost almost as much as a hotel back in Prescott. No need to stay extra days. Besides, we didn’t need to encourage a snoop.

But Simon was strolling over, his baby cradled in his arms, and he didn’t notice my gesture.

“I’m Naomi,” the girl said. “Are you looking for gold?”

“Nah, this isn’t a big gold area,” Simon said. “We’re hunting for relics from the past.”

“Oh, are there any left? I’m here with my grandma, and we’re checking out the vortexes.”

“Vortexes?” came a murmur from behind me. Temi had traded her towel and flip-flops for track pants and running shoes. She didn’t seem to have hiking boots or clothes more appropriate for scampering over boulders and up mountainsides. I wondered what she would say when she saw us dig out the climbing gear later. In such a popular tourist area, anything left that was worth finding wouldn’t be in an easily accessible spot.

“You grew up in the adjoining state, and you haven’t heard of Sedona’s famous vortexes?” I asked.

“It didn’t come up in Greek school.”

We shared edged smiles at the memories of learning to conjugate Greek verbs and how to be good Orthodox Christians.

“There are supposed to be at least five vortexes,” our new neighbor announced. “Maybe more. They’re special places on Earth where the life force of the planet is really strong. They say you can see evidence of funnels of energy coming up out of the ground. The vortexes can cause vibrations in the body if you’re aligned the right way, and some people have seen strange lights and heard weird sounds while they’re standing in a power spot.” Naomi shrugged, giving that sheepish smile again. “That’s what my grandma’s book says anyway. I
did
think the junipers growing at one of the spots seemed kind of swirly and twisted.”

I expected a dismissive snort from Temi, or something that would otherwise signal that she found these notions silly, but her face was merely… thoughtful.

“Bell Rock supposedly has a crystal in it that will eventually reveal a spaceship,” I added, trying to get more of a reaction from her.

Simon was the one to smirk. “Did you take a class on this stuff in school, Del?” he asked, his eyes crinkled.

“No, I read a book. Quit smirking at me. It’s not just the new age—” I glanced at Naomi and stopped myself from saying
nuts
, not sure how much she believed and how much was Grammy’s influence. “It’s not a new thing. The Sinagua considered this area a place of power and spiritual importance. Come to think of it, if you stand in one of the vortex areas, you’re supposed to be able to access interdimensional portals.” I cocked an eyebrow at Simon, daring him to mock that, given Temi’s recent experience.

He snorted, but softly.

“Yes, if your body vibrates correctly,” Naomi said. “Grandma’s just hoping to access the healing power of the vortexes. Can I try your Dirt Viper?” She pointed to it, apparently more interested in metal detecting than in healing vortexes.