Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser Series Book 5) (26 page)

The vampire looked freaking terrible. I hunched over him to touch his shoulder and he flinched away from me with a hiss. He wasn’t in full bestial form, but he hadn’t retracted his fangs and his eyes were a dull red I’d never seen before. He looked withered. Even worse, I swore I could see the dragon magic he’d consumed writhing in his veins.

I sat back on my haunches and reached out with my dowser senses, but I still couldn’t pick up any hint of Warner nearby.

Kett dragged himself into a half-propped position. “The sentinel?” His cool tone was marred by speaking through his fangs.

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” he said, starting to shiver. “I thought to distract her, not him.” He clasped his hands together as the shivering turned into violent shaking.

“You’re going to need blood,” I said, as pragmatically as I could suggest such a thing.

“Not yours.”

“I get it. You should already be dead.”

“Yes. I should.”

Ballsy as ever — even though I was fairly certain he was dying — Kett grinned at me. Then he threw up a gusher of dragon blood. All over himself and me. “Damn,” he choked. “Such a waste.”

“Yeah, yummy.” I wiped the vomit off my face, then dried my hands on my jeans. “Deadly and sweet.”

“Just like you.”

“Don’t sweet-talk me, vampire. I already know I’m going to have to carry you.”

Resigned, he nodded. “One of two things is going to happen next.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll lapse into a fugue state.”

“Been there, done that.”

Kett shook his head. “I will, for all appearances, be dead. I’ll need you to take me to my maker.”

Delightful. I really, really wanted to reenact the scene in London with Kett’s maker. What had she said to me? If Kett died, she would suck the marrow from Kandy’s bones and make me watch? Then if I set even one foot in London, she would take everything from me?

“Getting you through customs will be fun.”

“You’ll take the jet. There’s a coffin among the cargo.”

Wow, doubly delightful.

“No,” Kett amended himself. “Take me to Vancouver. You’re stronger there. Then you call her.”

“You have her on automatic dial? Under what, Audrey Hepburn?”

Kett squeezed his eyes closed. “Under ‘Master.’ ”

This was just getting better and better. “What’s the second thing that might happen?”

“I’ll try to rip your throat out.”

“Well, that’s always a possibility, isn’t it?”

Kett huffed out a pained laugh. Except I hadn’t really been joking.

“I’m not sure you would survive the assault, alchemist … Jade. I reiterate my plea for you to leave me.”

“Yep, I hear you. But we both know that’s not going to happen.”

Kett sighed. “Quickly, then.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The bridge was gone.

The silver lava river stood exposed between us and the entrance to the mountain cavern. The gap was far too wide for me to jump, even if I hadn’t had Kett hanging off my shoulder.

“So …” I mused. “That worm thing that lives in the lava knocked out the bridge, eh?”

Kett’s head was hanging to the side like a rag doll’s. I could barely see him in my peripheral vision. This made me exceedingly aware that he might be in worse shape than he was letting on. Not that I needed to be even more anxious than I was already.

“Centipede,” he corrected. “An impressive piece of metallurgy.”

Right. I’d been joking with the worm comment, but trust Kett to correct me. You’d think he’d give up on the whole mentorship thing in the face of dying. Or maybe that was a good sign —

“Jump.” The vampire dissolved the rising tide of my thinking positively about his potential survival with a single whispered command. Then he added, “You can make it.”

“There is no way I can. Could you?” I laid on the snark to cover my mounting concern that he was going to try to force me across.

“Yes.”

“We’ll die in that molten silver …” I faltered as an idea I’d been steadfastly ignoring rose unbidden in my mind. Namely, that I might have just watched Warner do that exact thing. This idea even came with interactive video — a completely imagined yet painfully vivid reenactment helpfully supplied by my jerk of a mind’s eye.

I shoved the thought fiercely out of the way, tamping it deep down and pinning it there with the sharp need to get Kett out of the damn mountain alive. Well, as alive as he already was. ‘Animated’ might be a better word.

“At least it will be painless.”

“Leave the comedy to the funny people, vampire.”

“Dowser, I scouted. There are no other egresses. If you do not jump, you will die here. By my fangs or through starvation.”

“I have chocolate.” I jutted my chin out stubbornly.

“Jump, Jade,” Kett whispered. “Or don’t.” His voice was so quiet on the ‘or don’t’ that a tiny corner of my heart cracked.

So I jumped.

I dragged Kett up the stairs to the top of the platform and backed up to take a running start first, of course. I wasn’t great at physics, but knew I wanted some lift. I figured it was better to jump from a higher point to a lower point, rather than across equal heights. But really, I had no idea. I was just doing my best.

Kett tried to help, pushing through his lethargy to run alongside me and jumping when I did, but I knew — microseconds after my back foot left the safety of the platform — that we weren’t going to make it.

I flung my left hand forward, reaching toward the far side of the cavern in an attempt to add momentum, but to no avail.

We dropped short.

Then my right foot landed on something solid.

I didn’t think. I sprung off this support to lunge the final six feet.

I hit the cliff edge on the other side of the river at chest height. Kett clawed his right hand into the stone, gouging troughs into it as we slid backward.

Then he hung there off one hand as I found footholds and hauled us up and over the edge.

I scrambled to my feet to peer over into the river. Two large antennae sank down into the liquid silver as I watched the centipede-creature swim away. Its segmented body looked even larger this close. Maybe it was just an optical illusion … things appearing larger in liquid. Yeah, I’d hold onto that thought, even though I was fairly certain I had it the wrong way around.

“Jesus,” I muttered. “Was it trying to eat us or save us?”

“Or save the instrument of assassination.” Kett was lying on his side by my feet, curled protectively around the hand he’d just clawed into the granite.

It pained me to see him so diminished. Then I chastised myself for that silly, little-girl reaction. “That’s not a scary thought at all,” I said.

“You think too much, dowser.”

I barked out a harsh laugh. “That’s rich coming from you, Mr. Fugue.”

“That’s meditation.”

“You are so lying, old man.”

Kett laughed, a quiet but warm sound. He turned his face to look up at me as I crouched down to pick him up. His eyes were still that dull, lifeless red.

“We get to save each other this time.” He reached up to brush his withered fingers through my tangled, blood-and-vomit-speckled curls.

I didn’t answer. I just got his arm over my shoulder and hauled him back to his feet.

But it occurred to me — just in the breath I took to lift him, which I quickly exhaled along with the thought — that Kettil, the executioner and elder of the Conclave, might be in love with me.

∞

The asshole firefly dive-bombed us at least twenty times during the arduous climb up the stairs. Yes, desperate to focus on something other than my screaming shoulder and burning hamstrings, I counted. On the twentieth time, Kett snatched it out of the air and crushed it in his hand.

This display of ire was so out of the ordinary for Kett — who cherished all things magical — that it made me forget that my quads were ready to refuse to lift my legs up another stair. I dragged us, half-jogging, up the last dozen steps and got us out into the fresh air.

The day was bright and clear. Thankfully, my eyes had adjusted to the light as we’d approached the entrance. The sun was slightly higher in the sky, which was confusing. It had felt like days had passed, not just hours.

Kett pulled away from me, walking a few unsteady steps to rest a hand against the rocky outcrop that had transformed into the boulder creature.

I snapped my mouth closed on a warning. The vampire wasn’t foolhardy … if I ignored the fact that he’d just tried to drain a dragon, whose blood was purportedly poison to vampires. Either that was a myth debunked, or Kett was more powerful than any vampire who’d tried to feed from a dragon before … or he was still dying.

I crossed to the runes I’d carved into the granite to open the entrance to the centipede’s cavern. Then I slashed my knife across them so many times that they became nothing more than oddly crosshatched stone.

I glanced back to see that the door had sealed behind me, with no further evidence of the runes that had formed to create it. I tried not to think about Warner, maybe trapped inside. The door had to open from the inside, right?

“I had to close it.” I spoke out loud to justify the action to myself. “The centipede thing …”

“I understand,” Kett whispered. His back was to me, his shoulders hunched. “I must leave you.”

“What? Here?”

He straightened with effort. “Find the SUV. Go to the airport. Hangar 57. Take the plane. They’re expecting you.”

“No way! You’re hurt, and Warner —”

Kett turned on me, his eyes blazing red and his fangs long and sharp. “You will go, Jade Godfrey. Vancouver is where you should be. I, and the sentinel if he survives, will find you there. There, I know you are safe.”

I could still see the dragon magic he’d consumed writhing underneath his skin. He hadn’t purged enough of it. I opened my mouth to protest further, but he was gone.

I stared through the barren landscape after him, tasting his tainted peppermint magic until it faded away.

Then I turned and tried to remember the way back to the SUV.

∞

I stopped after what felt like an hour of slogging over rock and moss, around craggy outcrops, and over shallow fissures in which I could easily break a leg if I wasn’t careful where I wandered. I tried to ignore that my mind was seriously attempting to convince me it wasn’t getting enough oxygen, and that I was going to come out of this both mentally and emotionally devastated.

I drank the last of my water.

I checked my cellphone. As had been the case the last fifteen times, I had no signal.

I wasn’t looking at the bottom of my hiking boot, though I knew I had to. For a while now, I’d been fighting the urge. My right boot had felt a bit off — the sole slightly thicker, slightly heavier somehow — the entire time I’d dragged Kett up the stairs. I’d assumed at the time it was because of his weight pressing on my shoulder. But I kept on feeling it — and ignoring it — for the trek through the Andes back to the SUV, because … Well, because because.

Yeah, I was all about logical thinking these days. If by logic, it was understood that I meant complete and utter denial of reality.

The bottom of my boot was covered in silver. I actually rapped my knuckles against it like a moron who doesn’t believe her own eyes. Solid silver, at least a quarter-inch thick.

From when I’d jumped off the gigantic molten-silver-river-dwelling centipede’s head.

Solid silver.

No one could survive being coated in solid silver …

I abruptly stood up, reached out with my dowser senses, and caught a hint of Kett’s peppermint magic — hopefully from the blood he’d left on the SUV. Then, my limbs responding jerkily as I fell into survival mode, I forced myself to continue walking.

No more thinking.

Kett was right. Thinking wasn’t going to help me … or Warner … or the vampire. Thinking was the enemy.

I was going to count squares of chocolate instead.

I thrust my hand into my satchel and pulled out my emergency rations — a 100 gram bar of Lindt’s 70 percent Madagascar. I had seven squares left.

If the chocolate was going to take me all the way back to the vehicle, I was going to have to run — even with one silver-heavy boot.

I weighed the benefits of just throwing the boots away. Then — realizing I was starting to think about reality again — I shoved two squares of chocolate in my mouth, seeking oblivion in trademark Lindt creaminess and heavy-handed vanilla.

Then I ran, following the trail of Kett’s magic as fast as I could.

∞

I made it back to the airport without completely melting down. Thank God for GPS, and being able to plug my iPhone into the stereo and crank the music so loud I couldn’t think.

I wasn’t sure any of the clocks were correct. The one in the SUV read 2:23 p.m., but guardians generally had no sense of time. My phone said it was 4:37 p.m., but I wondered if all the time spent surrounded by silver and metallurgy in the mountain could have messed up the phone’s ability to automatically adjust, despite the fact I’d kept it in its lead-lined case.

That seemed like something I should know.

There were a lot of somethings I should know.

I parked the SUV in the airport long-term lot, noting that the crushed Mini had been towed away. I paid for a week of parking, having no idea who would retrieve the vehicle, or when. I left the key in the visor and locked the door manually.

Then, staring like a moron at the now-locked vehicle, I realized I probably could have found my way back to Qiuniu’s garage and the portal using the GPS. But Kett had told me to go to the airport, so I went to the airport.

Admittedly, I really, really didn’t feel like being anywhere near the nexus right now. A deep, blistering anger was boiling in my belly, and I was only remaining functional by denying it over and over and over again.

Rather than going through the hassle of checking in and passing through security in the main terminal, I scaled the chain-link fence and wandered out into the area where I thought the private hangars would be. I doubted Kett did any differently either.

The low buildings I’d seen the night before from the parking lot did, in fact, contain planes. Numbers hung directly under their gray metal eaves.