Timeless Moon (14 page)

"Yeah, we went. I didn't stay."

"Why not?" The question seemed to harbor some unspoken suspicion
—
like he wasn't supposed to do nothing except what he said he would. That always pissed him off about Harold.

"I think I saw somebody."

Harold snorted like he was stupid or something.

"You probably saw a lot of somebodies, Raymond. That drive-in's right popular on a Friday night."

Ray fought down his annoyance. He wanted out of the truck, but Harold was still in the way and the damned dogs were prowling around loose. Fucking idiot was playing games with him. He was half-tempted. He reached for the door handle, but then looked into the other man's eyes and stopped mid-motion.

There was death in those eyes. Harold was just looking for an excuse and he wasn't about to give it to him. "I just want to look at the cards. See if I'm right."

"Where are yours? You'd best not say you lost them, either, mate. You know what Damon said would happen if you did."

"He couldn't find the cards. It's why he's out here,"
Josette
breathed the words in a low tone and heard Rick swear.
“T
here's an Australian man who controls the dogs. He seems to be Ray's boss, or at least a supervisor of sorts, but not one Ray likes."

"Can you see anything about how the yard is laid out? Any way to get in there other than the gate?" Rick moved his mouth very close to her face, easing the words into her ear lightly enough to tickle the sensitive hairs inside. Another shiver overcame her, and he noticed and smelled pleased.

The question itself would have made
Josette
laugh
if it hadn't been such a serious one. How could she forget something so obvious after poking and prodding Ellen to do the same thing just yesterday! "I can't tell the size of the compound. The lights are only around part of it. But from the size of the gate we entered, I'd say it's about fifteen feet wide. There's a building, more of a shack, to the left and what looks like a cabin from a kit to the right." She allowed herself to pull input from Ray's other senses. The effort would probably give him a little headache, but he'd probably assume it was the confrontation with Harold that had done it. "There's a strong chemical smell that I can't place. I've smelled it before, too. When I was at the drive-in. It floated on the breeze, but I couldn't pin it to a source." She stopped speaking as Ray answered the earlier question.

"Hell, no. I just didn't feel like opening up the safe and looking through them with my wife there. She doesn't know about this yet. I want her to see it firsthand before I bring her in."

Apparently that satisfied the other man. Harold gave him a disgusted look but didn't press the point. "Fine, whatever." He stepped away from the door and nodded his bald head toward the trailer. He shook his head in disbelief. "You really think you saw some big muckety-muck Sazi out here in the middle of fuckin' nowhere?"

Ray nodded grimly. His expression soured even

further when Harold guffawed. God how he hated that man. He hated most of the people he was forced to work with. Fucking criminals all of them. But the movement needed money. And there was plenty of money in drugs.

Drugs! That was the smell. Some kind of drugs that she'd heard of in the news, but never encountered. "They're making drugs out there. They're raising money for some sort of project that Ray calls 'the movement'."

He opened the door and climbed down from the cab of the truck. He forced himself to move casually. The damned dogs made him even more nervous than Harold. But showing it would be a sign of weakness the other man would lord over him. So he pretended not to notice the burly furred forms with their wicked teeth; pretended not to see how they moved as a unit, as if they were hunting prey.

Without warning the vision shifted. She barely had time to hiss a warning to Rick before she was sucked inside. "I'm being pulled out to
…
somewhere else. Keep watch on the truck for me."

If he responded, she didn't hear.

She was in a cave, watching as a dark-haired woman stood reading harsh-sounding syllables

from an ancient book she held in her hands. The cover was whitish green, the color of mold
—
or of the lighter scales that sometimes appeared on the underbelly of a snake. The naked woman bound to the stone with silver chains was her new sister-in-law, Tahira. And Giselle
—
Grandmere, her voice clear and cold—was taunting her captor.

Josette
felt a pang of regret. Grandmere was dead. This was the past then. The scene was one that had been described in
Antoine
and Ahmad's reports. Amber had sent them as a way to notify her of Grandmere's death. But why was she seeing it
now?
What did it have to do with the current problem?

Again and again her eyes were drawn to the book. Was this the same one she'd seen in the previous vision
—
the one the caster was using? She needed to see more, but the information eluded her. It was incredibly frustrating. There was no pushing into this vision. It had already happened. With a thought, she stopped it as though it were a movie on a screen, and then backed it up several times, searching the narrow view for anything that might give her a clue as to why she was seeing it. But the focus was narrow
—
on Tahira and the book. The cave looked like any other.

Her muscles tensed, causing a cramp that made the posture she'd taken too painful to hold. Her body
rebelled, dragging her mind forcibly back to the present. Rick was there, patiently watching the distant compound, but close by, guarding.

She was lying on her side, panting heavily and while she shouldn't be able to sweat while in cat form, her fur was nonetheless soaked and rank with fear and anger.

"Did anything happen while I
…
well,
while?"
While she was unconscious; comatose; out of her mind in a strange part of the desert with no way to protect herself? To Rick's credit, he didn't comment for the second time. He just shook his head and kept watching the compound.

His voice was barely loud enough to be called a whisper. "They've gone inside briefly, but then they're leaving. I got a little closer before the dogs quieted down completely from Ray arriving and overheard that the cards are at the other man's house. They're both going to go there in a minute. Oh, and the dogs are only
Dobermans
—so no big deal. But it would be better overall if we didn't raise an alarm by killing them."

She agreed. No sense in harming the creatures, even if they were
dogs.
"If one of us can hold them with magic, we should be able to climb the tree by the shack and drop onto the roof."

He smirked as well as a bobcat was able. "Seems of the two of us you're the expert on
holding.
I saw a picture of your handiwork in Chicago while I was in Denver."

Oh God! There were
pictures?
She let out a small frustrated snarl. "There was a good reason for
—"

A quick bump of his head against her shoulder stopped her explanation. "There's no need to justify yourself, Josie. I know how Ahmad provokes you. He intentionally pushes your buttons. I'm surprised you left him alive."

Her chuckle was tired. It was so hard having to plan her every movement by possible futures. At least this time, she'd chosen correctly. "I had no choice. If I'd killed him, Sargon would have lived. He had to be in Germany to bring down
h
is father."

Rick's jaw dropped and his eyes went wide.
"Sargon?
That insane son of a snake was still alive?! I thought Ahmad had put him down centuries ago."

A truck started up in the distance and
Josette
twisted her ears. They were leaving. It was time to make their move. "No time. More later. If we're going in it has to be now."

There wasn't much to see, and getting inside was ridiculously simple
—almost as though nobody cared if they wandered around. They'd left the gate wide open and the dogs penned. It felt for all the world like a trap, but nothing happened. The shed looked like a chemistry classroom. Beakers of noxious smelling fluid bubbled over low flames, while white smoke swirled through coiled glass tubes. Small packets of nearly clear crystals were stacked on a table, and
there was a cash counting machine against the opposite wall.

As
they ran
back toward the hotel, Rick mulled out loud. "I need to get someone from Wolven out here. I'm way out of practice for this sort of thing."

She shook her head as she dug her claws into the pea gravel of a dried creek bed halfway back. "Why involve them? It's a human matter. Just make an anonymous call to the police."

"Not so human, Bun. What about Ellen?"

The cool breeze was turning into a wind as the storm approached. It was hard to talk without coughing. "What about her?"

"She's underage," he said, as they slowed down near the edge of the drive-in lot. "What happens if both her folks go to jail on drug charges? I don't know about New Mexico, but up in South Dakota, Social Services would be all over this case. I could smell her feathers, but she still smells mostly human. We can't afford for that to happen. We have no idea when she'll turn the first time."

That had never occurred to her! Her mind just didn't think in that mode. "Oh. Yes, I suppose that's an issue. But what will happen to her folks if Wolven comes in?" Wolven didn't deal well with felonies committed by Sazis. Usually, the involved parties were simply put down and the bodies removed.
Josette
remembered well what it felt like to have a parent put down by Wolven. Even though
Maman
had been insane, and
Josette
already an adult, it had been
…
difficult.

From the sounds they heard as they passed behind the massive screen, she could tell they were well into the second movie of the double feature. While the trip to the shack and the visions had felt like they took only a few minutes, it had obviously been otherwise. It was often like that. Time just seemed to warp, running too fast, or too slow to mesh properly with reality. It was one of the many things that made the gift so disconcerting. Another was the fact that the visions were often so very vivid, so
real
that actual reality seemed to pale in comparison. She suspected that only someone who'd actually experienced it could understand just how confusing it could be.

"How about we concentrate on getting back to our rooms and getting cleaned up. Then we can talk about where to go from here." It seemed like Rick had already made his decision and had raised valid points, but maybe he'd listen to reason. Ellen was distraught enough without losing her parents to the very thing they hated and warned her about.

It was only a few minutes before she leaped back inside her room and changed back to a human. She carefully sniffed around, but didn't notice anything out of place that would say anyone searched her room or had even been inside. She decided to take
the few minutes for a shower. Heaven only knew when the next time she'd get the chance would be. Although it probably wasn't necessary, she even put on some makeup, choosing the shade of blue eye shadow that matched the flowers that used to grow at their Illinois cabin. Even her teeth felt filthy, although she'd cleaned them just before she decided to go out for popcorn.

After getting dressed and gathering up her key to go to Rick's room, she paused to lift the glass of soda she'd poured for herself earlier. It was probably flat, but better than the water from the tap. One glass of that stuff had been plenty. She'd stick with bottled from here out.

The glass was halfway to her lips when she heard the slamming of a truck door and the angry stomping of a man's heavy boots as he passed the door to her room. Through the wall she heard soft swearing, and the sound of a window being opened frantically as the man in front pounded on the hotel room door.

She set the glass silently onto the back of the toilet tank and moved to the bathroom window. She pulled aside the blinds to get a better look. There, in the tall weeds, stood a handsome man of about thirty. He was buck naked, and smelled of equal parts anger, embarrassment, and fear. Still, he held himself with confidence, and while his dark blond hair needed a trim, the rings on his hands spoke of money.

"Ma'am." He stepped toward the window, speaking
to her through the screen. He was using one hand to cover his crotch, the other brushed his hair out of eyes the color of new grass. A small tattoo adorned his neck, barely visible at the hairline.

His voice was an urgent whisper. "I know you don't know me, and y'all have no reason to trust me, but I swear to God, if Greg actually finds me back here like this he'll kill Dawn and I both. I need help real bad. Even if you just let me use your cell phone."

A man's voice began shouting obscenities, and there was the sound of something being thrown into a wall.