Thorn Fall (5 page)

Simon clutched his baby to his chest, an uncertain look on his face. He usually got the same expression when I asked to use it.

Naomi gazed at him with big hopeful eyes, and he relented. “All right, but we’re leaving soon, and I’ll need it back.”

“Sure thing.” Naomi took a few steps toward the woods with her prize, then shrieked.

I grabbed my chest, expecting a monster to leap out of the trees at her. But it was Alek, strolling out of the brush by the stream, wearing his crimson tunic and cloak and carrying his spear, along with two dead rabbits. He paused, giving the girl—and the metal detector she had lifted as if it were a weapon—a curious look.

“It’s all right.” I jogged up and stood between them. “This is our friend. His clothes were stolen on Halloween, and he hasn’t had a chance to get new ones yet.” That sounded… pathetic. I should have kept my mouth shut about the clothes.

The look of disbelief Naomi gave me agreed. Oh, sure, she could believe in vortexes and spaceships, but not a guy in a cape.

“Naomi?” came a call from the next campsite over.

The gray-haired grandmother appeared, her eyes icy as she regarded our group and her granddaughter, the Dirt Viper still lifted in a pose of self-defense. “Come over here,” she said. “Now.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Naomi’s shoulders drooped, and she clasped a hand over her mouth, doubtlessly realizing her scream had ruined her chance to go scavenging for lost coins. She returned the metal detector to Simon and slinked around the bushes to join her grandmother. The older woman skewered Simon with her eyes and glowered at me, as well—as if
I
had done something. The look she gave Alek was harder to read as she glanced from his face to the rabbits and back again. She gripped Naomi’s shoulder, pulling her toward their van without turning her back on us. As she rounded the corner, she slipped a cellphone out of her pocket.

“Is hunting illegal in Sedona?” Simon whispered. He had seen her pulling out the phone too.

I doubted snaring rabbits was illegal; I was less certain about stalking around a campground with a spear. “It might be a good idea for all of us to go relic hunting. Just in case the police stop by later.” I hoped the grandmother was calling her psychic to get a read on the day’s vortex activity, rather than someone who might give us trouble, but I didn’t want to bet on it. “Especially given all of the dubious chemicals you’ve got in Temi’s trunk,” I added in a mutter. If I had put two and two together and come up with napalm, someone else might too.

Alek held up the rabbits and said something that sounded like, “I must prepare breakfast.”

“Put them in the fridge.” I pointed through the open van door to the brown appliance. “We have a portable propane grill we can fire up for lunch.”

Simon curled his lip. “Dead rabbits in the fridge? Touching my Mountain Dew? Gross.”

I slapped his chest. “How could you grow up on a reservation and not eat anything that didn’t come out of a box or a can?”

He sniffed. “I’ve had rabbit before. But Grandpa put them in the smokehouse, not in the fridge.”

“Well, the VW people forgot to include a smokehouse in the base model camper. You’ll have to take that up with them.” I raised my voice. “Temi, Alek, let’s go for a ride, eh? We’ll take the van, so you better lock everything up in the Jag.” Especially the trunk.

“If we all go scrounging in the wilds today, who’s going to work on assembling those chemicals into a monster-slaying state?” Simon asked.

“You can work on them tonight instead of playing
RealmSaga
until three in the morning.” I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of him mixing toxic chemicals at any hour of the day, especially in the van where I slept, but maybe I could talk him into going up and visiting Autumn’s lab tonight. It was Friday, so her colleagues should be off for the weekend.

“Fine,” Simon said, “but don’t look at me if we get attacked by a monster today. While it’s clawing out your innards, you’ll be thinking, gosh, if only we’d had a flamethrower.”

“Somehow I doubt that’ll be my first thought if my innards are in danger.” I looked at the brown van next door and spotted the grandmother peering out the window at us while she spoke on the phone. Alas, I had a feeling she wasn’t chatting with her psychic.

I slid down the rope, holding it with my left and braking with my right as my body dangled thirty feet from the top of the cliff. The rock face had sloped inward ten feet ago, so there was nothing to grab onto
except
the rope. Below me, clumps of prickly pear cactus, catclaw acacia, and crucifixion thorn spread across a ledge. Whatever I landed in was going to poke the hell out of me, so I was glad for jeans and hiking boots.

Temi, who was sliding down a rope next to mine, wearing clothes more suited for the gym, might wish she had participated in Alek’s Goodwill shopping trip. Then again, finding sizes suitable for her six-foot-tall frame must be difficult. If nothing else, she could clear the way with her sword; it hung across her back in its scabbard as she descended. When it had first been foisted on her, she hadn’t been that interested in it, but something had changed during her week away. She rarely let it out of her sight now, and she had made me promise to keep an eye on the bag holding it while she had taken her shower that morning.

I swung as the ground drew closer and managed to land between two of the thorny shrubs. Mostly. I had brought my bullwhip, wearing it in a loop on my belt, and it snagged a couple of times. I disentangled it and walked toward the wall of the cliff to get out of the way for Temi.

Thanks to the ledge overhead, perennial shadow covered the dusty red stone in the concave opening in the side of the cliff. We had spotted the hollow—and something that looked like an old campsite—from atop the opposite side of the narrow canyon, then made our way over to a spot where we could descend.

I made myself wait for Temi before running over to what looked like a pot and a collapsed cooking tripod, though the rust on the iron already had me excited. It took a long time for things to rust in the desert.

Temi paused about ten feet from the top of a thorn bush, eyed the ground, then rocked back and forth. She found some momentum, then leaped, landing in a crouch next to me. A wide grin split her face as she stood straight.

I hadn’t seen a grin like that from her since we had been kids. “Knee feeling good?”

“Like new.”

“That’s amazing.” I pointed to the old campsite and headed in that direction as I talked. “How did they fix it?”

“A guy who didn’t speak English stuck some little patches on either side of my knee. While I was sitting on a blanket in the middle of the forest. It was… weird.”

“I’ll bet.” I bit my lip to keep from lamenting once again how disappointed I had been—still was—not to have been allowed to go along. I focused on the pot instead, wondering if it was a legitimate relic from the late 1800s or some prop from a cowboy movie; they had shot a lot of those out here back in the day. But no, this would be a dangerous location to film anything. From our ledge, it was another thirty-foot drop to the bottom of the canyon. Usually one only found Native American relics in spots like this, since they had stuck around long enough to build ladders and had preferred the high ground for protection from unfriendly visitors.

The old fire pit had scarcely been disturbed, and my belly filled with jitters as I crouched beside the rock. Finding undisturbed sites always made me tingly with excitement and anticipation. This was what I had wanted to do with my degree, not sit in a laboratory, cataloguing rocks and potsherds.

I turned over the old cast iron skillet, checking for a maker’s mark. ERIE 9.

“Ah, nice,” I said. “It’s a Griswold, late 1800s. This is a hundred-dollar skillet. It wasn’t cheap back in the day, either. I wonder if we could find out whose fire pit this was and why they abandoned their kitchen.”

I was talking to myself more than Temi, which was good, because she was over in the shrubs, looking toward the canyon floor instead of listening. Oh well. I backed up and snapped a couple of pictures—I should have done that before disturbing anything. After that, I went back to poking around. There was a coffee pot too. I imagined some old homesteaders on a hunting trip, stopping to spend the night and cooking up some beans and bacon and coffee for breakfast. I’d have to scrounge in the bushes to see if they had left a midden. Yesterday’s garbage was today’s treasure. I’d found one of the original cans of Heinz baked beans in a collapsed root cellar once and sold it for hundreds.

I admitted a self-conscious twinge at these thoughts of monetizing history, especially after Professor Tillium’s condescending call, but damn it, nobody was going to pay me to find things and leave them there. This was the only way I knew to make a living. But was the skillet fair game? Hadn’t I just been thinking about how strict the relic-hunting rules were on this land for anything more than a few decades old? A Griswold purchased for a quarter in an estate sale would be perfectly legal, but one plucked from an old campsite on the side of the cliff might qualify as being historically significant.
If
I admitted that we had dragged it out of here.

I sighed and walked over to poke in the bushes.

Temi frowned at me. “I thought I saw something moving in the brush down there.” She pointed to the canyon floor. “I know Simon was staying back at the van, but what about Alektryon? Was he heading this way?”

The flutters returned to my belly, this time having nothing to do with discovering pots. “He’s searching the area around the trail mentioned in the police report.” I pointed to the other side of the canyon. We had walked a good mile from the path and even farther from the dusty dirt road where Simon had parked the van.

“So he shouldn’t be down there.” Still frowning, Temi crept closer to the edge.

“It could be an animal.”

“Maybe.”

I thought of the green eyes I had seen the night before, the
glowing
green eyes. But we had left that person—elf, whatever—in Prescott. Unless he had followed Jakatra and Eleriss’s example and stolen a motorcycle, he would have had a long walk to Sedona. And how would he have tracked us, anyway?

My gaze drifted to Temi’s sword scabbard. Maybe monsters weren’t the only beings who could sense the weapon from a distance.

“It could be a hiker,” I added hopefully. “Or even another relic hunter. It’s not as if millions of people don’t come here each year for various reasons.”

Temi arched her brows. “Are we close to a vortex?”

“No, I don’t think so. Look, you can stand guard there if you want. I’ll look around a little more, and we’ll go back and see if the boys have discovered anything.”

“All right.”

I had felt guilty about sending Alek off to do the tracking work, but he had volunteered when I had explained what we were doing—the tablet-assisted conversation had taken the entire ride out here, and I still wasn’t sure if his offer to help was some extension of his bodyguard proposition or if he understood the threat and simply wanted to assist humanity in general. If I were in his shoes—sandals—mourning the loss of a wife and a child I had never known, I couldn’t imagine caring about the rest of the world, especially a world that wasn’t mine and hadn’t been for a long time. Maybe he was a better person than I was. I eyed the campsite I was scavenging. Yeah, that wouldn’t take much.

I grumbled as I returned to checking the bushes, telling myself I would have been perfectly content with my “scavenging” if I hadn’t answered my phone that morning. It was fun, damn it, and if not me, someone else would find the relics sooner or later and remove them to sell or add to their personal collection.

My boot crunched on fine rock, then slipped. I flailed, visions of skidding down the slight slope and going over the edge flashing into my mind. I caught myself on a bush, the pokey leaves digging into my palm, but kicked something free at the same time. The item clattered into the open, then rolled under a big shrub.

“You okay?” Temi asked quietly.

“Yeah.” I righted myself and dropped to my knees in search of whatever that had been. Some canister?

“Well, quit making so much noise then.”

“What are you? Uber scout, now?” I resisted the urge to pat randomly under the bush; it wasn’t the season for rattlesnakes, but you never knew. Instead, I squinted into the gloom. Ah, there was my prize.

“No, but I thought I heard something.”

“Down in the canyon?”

“No.”

I pulled out the big canister and popped up, looking at Temi before examining my find. “On the ledge with us?” My voice had grown quiet now too.

“Up above.”

“Well, we know it’s not an elf then. They’re quieter than foxes when they’re skulking around.”

Temi gazed toward the ceiling of the ledge. “That
is
true.”

“Hah.” I held up the century-old trash. “An Uncle Sam’s Coffee tin. That’s a rare one. Nice.”

Temi smiled, though her heart didn’t seem to be in it. She was taking her lookout job seriously. Again, I wondered what she had experienced over the last week.

“Whoever was up here was well provisioned,” I said. “Maybe one of the homesteaders from Oak Creek out hunting for a day or two. Maybe even looking for ruins. It’s funny to think about, but there were archaeologists, professional and amateur, back then too. Fewer rules about looting.” My mouth twisted. More than once, I had wondered what it would have been like to live in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Aside from the threat of dysentery and cholera, it had been a golden age for exploration. So many things that had yet to be discovered.

“Are those things going to end up on eBay?” Temi asked.

“Maybe. Under a new account.” I grimaced, knowing my online actions were being watched now. I finished searching the area, tucked our finds into my pack, and walked farther along the ledge. There was a bend I wanted to take a look behind. The ledge grew narrower over there, so there probably wasn’t anything else to see—except a drop-off—but I hated to leave a crack or crevice unexplored.