Golem in My Glovebox (25 page)

“So, you discredit what they see with their eyes, and the camera discredits the proof.”

“Yes. Also, a gnome team sometimes goes out to divert attention elsewhere. For example, gnomes will sometimes take plaster casts from a real Bigfoot and leave prints in the mud in areas where there are no such creatures. That way, humans go looking in the wrong place.”

“That’s actually genius.”

She smiled. “It happens that way a lot. The diversion gnomes leave weird combinations of animal scat and hair samples so the DNA-testing folks get crazy readings. From what I understand, the gnomes love their job.”

“So, even with this large a group, nobody’s really getting decent footage.” I did a mental count of all the people holding up camera phones and news equipment.

“Probably not, though it’ll be good enough for some people. Especially since the lake monster keeps splashing around in the water.”

“But it could be something else. A dolphin or something.”

“Bigger than a single dolphin, I’d say, but yes.”

We stood watching for a while, each of us deep in thought. Or maybe she was making a grocery list. Who knows? Riley rejoined us the same time the car door opened and the region’s new/old O.G.R.E. overseer stepped out.

“I think I can get out there,” Riley said. “If I slip into the water about half a mile south of here, no one will see me. I should be able to swim under and cut a hole in the net.”

“That won’t be necessary, my friend.” James reached out and shook his hand. “James Wilde, O.G.R.E. overseer. I’ve already got a man at the ready. Back in a minute.”

James took two steps toward the trees, then disappeared.

“Where’d he come from?” Riley asked.

“He came from the shadows.” Having lived with a closet monster, I was only mildly impressed with the shadow traveling.

Riley frowned. “I don’t trust him.”

True to his word, James returned about a minute later. “Rescue is set in motion. We just need to hang back and wait for a few minutes.”

A few minutes actually took about fifteen before everything changed. If I hadn’t been there to see it, I wouldn’t have believed the plan would work.

From where we—and all the other humans—stood, it looked as if we’d all imagined the lake monster. Something had cried out and slapped at the water, but did we really see a long, snakelike arc rise above the water? Did we really see a monstrous snout surface? Was there really such a huge splash?

Or maybe we’d seen what we wanted to see, our brains translating the length of a marine mammal into a coil, a bottlenose into a gaping maw, and the venting of a blowhole into a massive splash.

Because all we were looking at was a group of three bottlenose dolphins. One leaped high in the air, making it clear to everyone watching that it was nothing like a lake monster. If I hadn’t been on the inside of the conspiracy, I’d have believed my eyesight had been faulty.

“Okay,” I said. “That worked, though I have no idea how you pulled that off.”

James grinned. “I have a merman on my team. He went in and made the switch underwater.”

Riley’s expression was pinched and a tad hostile. “But where the hell did you get dolphins in a landlocked lake, and how will you explain their existence to the media? They’re not stupid.”

“They aren’t real dolphins. Teddy talked some catfish into letting him put a temporary glamor on them.”

“Teddy?” Riley scratched his chin.

“The merman.” James patted Riley on the shoulder. “Keep up. Anyway, I’ve already got my tree sprite, Aspen, dealing with the media. She’s feeding them some nonsense about a traveling marine exhibit being set up over by the campgrounds. Since the dolphins escaped, the backers are canceling the entire project and the dolphins will be sent back to Florida.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t even make any damn sense.”

He shrugged. “It makes enough sense to divert the media from lake monsters to a marine exhibit fiasco. The whole incident gets moved from the front page to the fifth, figuratively speaking, and everybody eventually forgets about it.”

Considering I went nearly my whole life oblivious to the Hidden around me, this seemed plausible. Crazy. Ridiculous. A bit embarrassing. But plausible.

“So,” Riley said, annoyance leaking from his pores. “You’re saying we drove all the way up here for nothing.”

“Of course not.” Mina scowled at Riley. “You came all the way up here to help me save Rob. And I brought you to the lake so the little guy would pay James and get him to sign the contract.”

Riley turned on James. “And you were just going to stand there and watch while the entire Hidden world was exposed until somebody renegotiated your contract? Nice.”

He stomped off, furious. James didn’t seem at all concerned, and returned his attention to the lake, where fishing boats had drawn closer to the nets. What had earlier been a triumphant capture of a monster was now a heroic rescue mission of a dolphin family.

Mina and I exchanged a look, and she held out her hands, as if to say “Men. What can you do?”

I trotted after Riley and caught him by the arm before he could melt into the crowd. “Hey. What was that all about?”

Riley’s arm was rigid under my hand. “I don’t like that guy. I don’t like how he was looking at you. Hell, I don’t like how you were looking at him.”

“Seriously? Riley, we’ve been here less than a half hour. There’s nothing to be jealous of.”

“I’m not jealous.” His words didn’t carry a lot of conviction. “Okay, maybe a little jealous.”

I tugged on his bicep until he turned to face me. “After everything we’ve been through together? We practically live together. And we’ve been with each other nearly every second since this trip started. Why would you be jealous of anybody? I wasn’t jealous of that waitress in Idaho. This is no different.”

Riley took a deep breath, then let it out. “I guess you’re right. It’s just that...” He looked away, his eyes following a camera crew setting up for a live broadcast. “It’s just that we went from flirting and disastrous first dates to this comfortable, practically married stage. I’m not saying I’m bored, don’t get me wrong. But...”

Pinpricks of ice stabbed at my heart. I couldn’t imagine not being with Riley. But he was right. “It’s like we jumped over the newlywed phase straight into married for fifty years.”

He nodded. “And then that asshole comes along, and reminds me what it was like to flirt with you and feel like everything was new. Too much has happened outside our relationship to have time for butterflies in my stomach. Except the kind of butterflies I get when your life is in danger—which is far too often.”

I sighed. “I don’t disagree. I don’t know what to do about it, either. Seems like something will always be in the way.”

We stood together in silence. I was terrified of saying anything else. He was right. We’d slipped into this comfortable relationship that wasn’t exactly boring but definitely not interesting. What did people do when their relationship was getting stale?

A bitter chuckle erupted from my chest.

“What,” he asked.

“I was just thinking, when this sort of thing happens to other people, they get away. Go on vacation.”

He cringed. “Ironic.”

“Yeah.” I folded my arms, tucking my chilly hands against my body, my stomach full of lead and bile. “Riley, are you breaking up with me?”

“What?” His eyes grew wide. “Why would you think that? Oh, my God, Zoey.” He put his arms around me, pinning me against his chest. He buried his face in my hair. “Of course not. I want to be with you forever, don’t you know that?”

I tugged my arms loose and wrapped them around him. My throat constricted and my eyes burned. “I don’t know what to do, though. I can’t stop being an Aegis. We’ll always have problems to solve.”

Riley placed his fingers under my chin and tilted my head to look at him. “Zoey, part of why I love you is that you care so much about everyone around you. I don’t want to change you. But when this latest problem is solved, do you think maybe we could make
us
more of a priority?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice, and he kissed me. Really kissed me, like he used to in the beginning. My barriers crashed around us, and his emotions and mine slammed into each other and joined, the lines between our own psyches blurring until we were a single entity fueled by love and lust and want and need.

When he broke the kiss, I looked into his beautiful gray eyes and knew I belonged there. I swore never to take it for granted again.

“Are you done?” Mina stood a few paces from us, one hand on her hips. “Or should I give you a minute?”

I smiled and tucked my hand into Riley’s. “No, I think we’re good.”

“Glad to hear it. I know where Rob is. If we hurry, I think we can save him.”

Chapter Eighteen

The drive should have taken over an hour, but we made it in less than forty-five minutes. The distress call Mina had received on the wind carried urgency, and I was sure the entire episode with the lake monster had been carefully engineered by Katy in order to delay us until she was ready.

In fact, everything to date had been one manipulation after another. We were always in the right area at the right time. I no longer thought that might be because Katy was following us. She’d already written out her creepy poem of half-assed clues. She knew where she would stage each brutal murder, long before she let us in on the game.

Getting us to each location had been simple, with help from the unwitting Bernice and the greedy Leprechaun Mafia.

And this time, she had the connection between Rob and Mina. She knew Mina would get us out here. Apparently, we were faster than Katy wanted, so she dropped a huge media event in our direct path to buy herself more time.

We’d been on Katy’s schedule all along. Our only hope of saving Rob now was to drive faster than she’d calculated.

As advantages go, it was pretty weak. Fifteen minutes wasn’t much.

We absolutely had to catch her this time. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing one more Aegis. And after that, my mother was the only one left. Riley drove, but by the end of the drive, my calf quivered from keeping my foot pressed so hard to the floor in an effort to make the car go faster.

James really did have connections. He couldn’t send us with any of his O.G.R.E. squad. They had to finish cleaning up the lake monster situation. But he did arrange a police escort for us so we wouldn’t get pulled over for speeding. We followed Mina in her Jeep, and James said he’d join us as soon as he finished at the lake. Gris stayed in his glove compartment to keep from seeing or hearing anything Katy might find useful, just in case she’d been using him to keep track of us.

When we pulled off the road across the street from our destination, the cop car flashed its headlights, turned around and drove back in the direction we’d come. We were on our own.

Katy’s sense of humor was grim. She’d staged her big finale before the main event at an abandoned dinosaur park. Seriously. And it was between three and four in the morning.

“So help me,” I said, stepping out of the car, “when we get this little bitch she is getting so grounded.”

The front gate was chained and padlocked. No trespassing signs threatened all sorts of unpleasant legal ramifications. Tiny red lights blinked from above, cluing us in to the presence of surveillance cameras. Mina pointed up at them and waved us around to a hole in the fence that seemed to be free of visual capture on film.

We wiggled through, one at a time, and Mina clicked the flashlight app on her phone. Riley and I followed her example, and I wondered why the hell we hadn’t done that before.

The place was probably creepy during the day. It terrified me at night.

Dilapidated buildings that once housed a gift shop and a snack bar judged us for trespassing. Small scurrying things rustled inside them. Paint peeled in strips before my eyes—probably an optical illusion from the shadows.

We stepped carefully down an overgrown path that led deeper into the park. Mina waved at us to follow her. She stopped every few steps, head tilted, listening to the wind.

Every step we took announced our presence. Leaves crunched. Twigs snapped. Boards groaned. We crossed a bridge over a dry, weed-choked riverbed. Something small and twitchy moved down there when I shined my light on it. I looked away, not wanting to know what it was.

We rounded a corner, and I stifled a scream. A
Velociraptor
, all teeth and claws and beady eyes stared at us through a broad-leafed bush. I took a step back and bumped into Riley. He grabbed my elbow to keep me steady.

I took a moment to catch my breath. Upon closer inspection, we could see the
Velociraptor’s
paint had worn, and plaster flaked from the corners of its hungry mouth. Two fingers had broken off its left hand.

“You okay?” Riley whispered.

I nodded. “Startled me.”

He smiled and pointed up. I bent my head back to follow his gaze. A
T.
rex
towered over us, its monstrous maw filled with dead vegetation, his puny hands showing bare fiberglass beneath the crumbling cement.

Mina turned and gave us an annoyed look, then waved us on. We crossed another bridge, passing a sad
Triceratops
and what was once a cave man, but now was reduced to a pinkish blob with one leg broken off.

When we reached a stubby, manmade mountain with a cave in it, Mina stopped.

“Rob?” Her voice quivered, and she took a step sideways to get a better view of the top of the two-story mountain. “Rob, come down from there.”

He was hard to spot in the dark, at first, but the three of us aimed our lights to illuminate him. Rob Cavendish stood at the highest point of the building, his eyes wild with fear.

“Mina, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have called to you. Get out of here. She’ll kill you, too.” He grabbed his chest and yelled, and his feet, which I’d thought were planted on the roof of the cave, kicked beneath him in the air.

“It’s the wind,” Mina said. “Rob, you control the wind. Tell it to stop!”

“I can’t, Mina. I’m just so sad. Everything is so sad. This makes the sadness go away. The wind is my only real friend. The wind loves me and holds me tight.” He screamed, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.