"All I'm saying is if we have to walk, we don't have any water."
Ivy glanced at him. "You're not walking anywhere. You're staying in the car."
From the lump of blanket came an irate, "I'm trying to sleep! Will you shut up!"
Ivy settled back, and I said nothing, dividing my attention between the unmoving dot of Jenks on the amulet, the winding road, and the shocking views of sharp-angled ravines and colors that were like nothing I'd ever seen before. We passed pull-off after pull-off, Trent rolling his window down, sucking the cooler air out of the car, the flat of his arms on the frame to get a look at the admittedly spectacular views. It wasn't until we found flat desert again that he sank back into his seat. As expected, we crossed under the overpass and headed south.
"Think we'll get to the place in time?" I asked, my mood vacillating wildly between relief and impatience as I hit the gas.
"Lots of time," Ivy said, fingering the amulet. "They aren't moving anymore."
"He can't fly. Not at this altitude." Damn it, I was babbling.
"He's wearing his red," Ivy said, pointing out the sign for the auto tour. It went into the desert, and Trent perked up, his gaze going up and down as he traced our path on his brochure. "They might have taken him because he collapsed. Maybe they were trying to help."
"Yeah, and that's why they were swearing at us when we caught up with them," I said. Double damn, what if I found him, only to find that the size difference prevented me from doing anything? The curse in my bag was for making little things big, not the other way around.
Driving with one hand, I looked at my bag, where my phone was. If worse came to worst, I could call Ceri for the curse to make myself smaller. I'd do it in front of Vivian if I needed to.
Again Trent put his window down, and the dry smell of the desert lifted through my hair as we drove a level course on the top of the world, the canyons dipping an impossible distance down, colored with purples, grays, and blues-like mountains in reverse. It was a weird way to see things. We'd met no one since entering the park, just seen a few ravens and buzzards. Silence, still and uncomfortable, and the sun hammering at everything without mercy.
"Slow it down," Ivy said, eying the amulet.
"Are we there yet?" Trent said sarcastically, and Vivian groaned, pulling the blanket over her head despite the heat.
I drove past a sign about an ancient ruin, and Ivy stiffened. "Back up. Rachel! We're close. I think they're at the ruins!"
My heart pounded as I jerked the car to a halt so fast that Vivian hit the back of my seat, and even Trent had to catch himself. Ignoring Vivian's snarl, I flung my arm over the back of the seat and put the car in reverse. Trent's eyes widened as I whipped the car around, landing it between two white lines and jamming it into park. Intent, I turned the engine off and bolted out of the car, my boots scraping on the pavement as it threw up a wave of heat.
The silence hit me, and I hesitated, shocked almost.
There was nothing out here, impinging upon me the impression of magnitude. The hot wind shifting my hair had been in motion for hundreds of miles without impediment, giving it a slippery feel as it molded around me and continued on, elastic and not even recognizing me. I couldn't see far enough, my eyes failing due to their own limitations for the first time in my existence. It was...immense. Jenks...
The sun beat down, making even the shadows hot. I sent my senses out as I stood on the road to the ruins, looking out over the purples and mauves, searching for anything, every part of me taking in the feel of the air, listening for the hum of a wing and hearing only an aching emptiness. I looked for a ley line, finding a crisscrossing of faded nothing, like hints of what had once been but was now gone. Empty. Everything was empty.
My head ached from the echo, and I took in every nuance as I looked for a sign, a breath, a wing chirp. Every chip of rock, every shadow stood out in sharp relief as I searched for him, the image of the desert almost scratched on the inside of my mind and built around the faded images of ley lines that no longer existed. They whispered, hinting at a time when there was grass and trees here, and huge animals roaming, living, dying...until they vanished along with the ley lines. I wondered which had disappeared first.
Al had once told me that demons made the ley lines in their efforts to escape the ever-after, but magic was older than that. Was what I was seeing now the faded remnants of lines gone dead? Had the demons destroyed the original source of magic in their attempt to banish the elves? I squinted, closing my eyes and reaching for a breath of understanding, wrapping my awareness around an empty shell of a scratch between the present and the past, finding no energy but only the lingering idea that power had once run here, now gone, leaving only the skeleton, dry and dusty, to hint at what had been. It made me feel so damned alone.
A door slammed shut, and I turned, my last thought heavy in my heart. "Get back in the car," I said to Trent, and Ivy slowly got out, her head bent over the amulet in her hand.
Trent looked me up and down, his expression closed. "It's an oven in there," he said, turning to the map on the brochure. "And besides, it's a bunch of pixies. How bad can it be? Just go and get him. You're a thousand times their size." Irate, he leaned against and squinted at me in the sun. The wind playing with his wispy hair, and the heat, made him look tired. "I'll stay here unless you scream for me. Promise," he said sourly.
Yeah, like that will happen. Jittery, I looked at the map sketched on the big brown sign beside a trail, seeing that there was a quarter-mile footpath that circled around a ruin. According to it, about four hundred people had once lived here, almost a thousand years ago.
Ivy shut her door with a backward kick, the thump not going on for long before the silence soaked it up. "You should listen to Quen more," she said, looking up from the amulet to frown at the slight rise of land before us. "Pixies are deadly."
Trent frowned at the sky, and I ran a finger between my ankle and the heel of my boot. "A clan of wild pixies kidnapped an experienced runner," I said. "They live in the desert. What does that tell you?"
"They aren't smart enough to move?" Trent said, and I made a noise of disgust. Ivy headed for the narrow footpath of paved asphalt, and I turned to follow. According to the plaque, archaeologists had begun to reconstruct the village site, but there were no walls higher than my knees.
Reaching my awareness out past the faint scratchings of what might once have been ley lines, I tapped the nearest real one. My eyes closed as I found hundreds of them, some as far away as the next state. The lack of water had extended my reach, much like the lack of trees expanded my sight. Having so much visual mindscape to play in was almost nauseating, and I quickly spindled a wad of ever-after energy in my head. I remained holding on to the line, knowing this was not going to be easy. I didn't want to resort to magic. If I couldn't convince them to let Jenks go, I wasn't sure if I could force them to without hurting them.
The click of Vivian's door opening was loud as I started out after Ivy, but she was only propping it open to get a cross breeze.
Yeah, there was the Vivian angle to consider, too. Anything I did was going to land in the coven's ears. Frowning, I picked up the pace until I caught up with Ivy, my heart pounding as we went up the slight rise. The altitude was getting to me. I tried to walk softly to listen for the clatter of pixy wings, but there was only the wind.
How anything could survive out here was beyond me, much less flower-loving pixies. The only plant life I'd seen was tough and herbaceous, something that I'd never give a second glance at if I was home, but here, the tiny flowers stood out. "Trent is dumb enough to make me want to cover him in honey and toss him into the middle of them," I said tightly as we passed down a narrow alley, slumps of rocks to either side.
Ivy didn't look up from the amulet, too worried to notice the stark beauty around her. It felt good to be moving, even though the idea that I was a ghost walking down an abandoned alley lost to history was creepy. I didn't like the fatigue creeping up my legs. We'd walked only twenty yards, but it felt like a mile in the heat and elevation. No wonder Jenks couldn't fly.
The path turned, and we halted at the end of the village, looking over what was once probably the refuse dump. Below us at the bottom of a steep drop-off were figures etched into the rock, the dark surface chipped off to show the white stone underneath. Most of the glyphs were indecipherable circles and spirals, but the one with the bird holding a man in his beak was clear enough. It looked kind of Egyptian, and I wondered if demons had been here.
"Look at those cave drawings," I said, pointing out the one with the storklike bird.
"They're called petroglyphs." Ivy didn't even look at them, focused on the amulet.
"Okay, but that huge bird is eating that man," I said, and she glanced up.
"I think it says 'stay close to the village, or the boogie man will get you.'"
I lifted my eyes to the open spaces over the glyph, feeling like we were being watched.
"Right," I said, not convinced. "And those little tally marks under it are what?"
She shrugged, and I hugged myself, wanting to scream for Jenks. "Where is he?" I said, stifling my urge to take the amulet from her, knowing better. Ivy felt helpless, too.
"I can't tell." Ivy turned in a slow circle, her expression one of the lost. "I know they're watching us." Pursing her lips, she whistled.
Below us in the parking lot, Trent pushed from the car. I waved him to stay, and he kicked a stone as he crossed the parking lot to crouch and feel the dirt between his fingers.
Ivy and I strained to hear something, but not even an insect broke the sound of wind on stone. I didn't like this. If they took Jenks to ground, we'd never find them. "Jenks!" I shouted, then spun at a tiny rock falling.
"Careful...," Ivy said, her hand on my arm, and we went forward together, following the path over a small ridge and out of sight of the parking lot.
I crept along, uncomfortable under the sun as the heat evaporated the sweat before it dampened my skin. Twenty feet ahead of us was another part of the village, the corner wall rebuilt almost to waist height. A small motion caught my attention, and I stumbled to a halt.
There atop the wall, hogtied and with his own bandanna shoved into his mouth, was Jenks. I couldn't see his face, but his quick motions told me he was ticked, squirming with his words muffled by distance and his bandanna. His wings weren't moving, either. A black dust sifted from him. He looked like a sacrifice, and Ivy's words about the local gods echoed in my thoughts along with the image of that bird with a man in his beak. Maybe it was a pixy.
"Son of a bitch!" Jenks shouted, finally getting the bandanna off his mouth. "You cowardly sons of bitches!" he said again, then accidentally rolled off the wall to vanish behind it with a yelp.
"Jenks!" Ivy shouted, lunging forward.
"No, wait!" I shouted, reaching after her and feeling like the earth was going to drop out from under us. A piercing whistle echoed. My adrenaline pulsed.
"Rhombus!" I shouted, cowering as my molecule-thin layer of ever-after rose up around us. The protection circle snapped into place with a mind-jolting echo, and I looked up as tiny arrows plunked into it. The sun seemed darker, scaring me. Have I put that much smut on myself already?
"Stop!" a shrill pixy voice cried out ahead of me. "Or we kill the black-haired woman!"
"Rachel, stop!" Jenks shouted, and I looked up. And blanched. Thirty. No, fifty, maybe more, pixies surrounded Ivy, all with a bow or a sword or both. She wasn't in my circle. Her vampiric speed had moved her too far.
"Ivy!" I called out, and she slowly licked her lips, fingers spread as she put her arms up in capitulation. Her face was deathly pale, and she barely breathed as the pixies, in shades of brown and violet, hovered over her, their dust coating her in a sheet of red, savage as they hooted and brandished their weapons. I had the ugly realization that this was how they survived out here-bringing down animals to supplement the traditional pixy diet of pollen and nectar. Shit, we were in trouble.
"Ah, sorry about this," Ivy said, freezing when the pixies above her told her to be still.
"If you hurt her," I threatened, and my gaze darted to the ridge. Trent was there, tense and looking like he was ready to do something. Damn it, I couldn't protect both of them. What was he doing? If they saw him, they'd attack, and I tried to tell him with my eyes to get the hell out of here.
The bright flash of yellow drew my attention back, and I frowned at the colorful pixy dressed in a flaming yellow, billowing outfit as he hovered before me. He looked like an ill eighteen-year-old who'd been into the Brimstone too much, his dark skin wrinkled by the sun and too little rest. His grip on his six-inch toad sticker of a spear was firm enough, though, and his green eyes were as sharp as any I'd ever seen.
"Why are you following us, witch?" he demanded, hovering inches from my barrier. His words were so fast, I almost couldn't understand him. My eyes flicked back to Trent, and I shifted my shoulders as I realized he was gone. Just start the car and wait, I thought, knowing that was too much to ask. He was going to do something, and it probably was going to make things worse. Stupid elf.
From behind the wall, I heard Jenks shout, "What the Turn is wrong with you? They're my friends!"
The pixy confronting me darted to the wall. "Liar!" he exclaimed, gesturing for two pixies to get him. "They're lunkers!"
"They're my friends." Two pixies dropped down, depositing Jenks back on the wall right where he'd started from. Looking pissed, Jenks stood, wobbling as he tried to find his balance. It looked like they'd weighted the tip of one wing to keep him from flying.
"I'm not making this up," Jenks said in disgust. "I'm Jenks! Of Cincinnati. I'm traveling to the West Coast on a job, and I can't stay here. And I'm not going to marry any of your women! I have a wife!"
I exchanged a shocked look with Ivy, and she rocked back, centering herself. They had kidnapped him as stud material?
"Liar!" the head pixy shouted, his wings moving fast in the heat. "You said she died!"