Croakies Monster, page 2
“Like a silver bigfoot?”
“Yeah. That was the impression I got.” He frowned. “Except for the melting part. I’ve never heard of a melting sasquatch.”
My eyes went wide. “You’ve heard of a sasquatch?”
“Of course. Haven’t you?”
I was saved from having to answer when his phone rang.
He answered on the second ring. “Grym.” He listened for a beat, his handsome face darkening in a frown. “Where?” Grym started moving toward the woods. “I’m close. I’ll take the call.”
I fell in behind him, glad I’d finally started being serious about getting into shape. My job had become a lot more strenuous than I’d expected, and I was tired of dragging around after artifacts with my tongue flapping in the wind, wheezing like an asthmatic gorilla.
Grym disconnected. “Another sighting. It’s through the woods. Faster just to go on foot. You up to running?” He didn’t wait for me to respond. He took off like a shot, leaving me to follow as best I could.
The woods was deeper than I’d thought. Darker. The trees grew increasingly closer together until we had to slow down or risk breaking an ankle on the bulging roots and tangled vines that dipped from tree to tree.
The overarching canopy of branches grew thicker too, strangling out what little sunlight managed to make it through the vegetation. Grym and I slowed to a fast walk, picking our way through the tangle of growth impeding our progress.
I was panting, itchy, and imagining all sorts of things crawling on me by the time Grym stopped abruptly ahead of me. I was scratching a big red bump, thinking about how sweaty I was, and ran into him so hard I fell backward, landing in a prickly green plant with a grunt of pain.
“Sorry about that,” I told the cop.
He didn’t say anything.
I shoved ungracefully to my feet. “I really hope there’s no poison ivy or anything in that bush.”
Grym didn’t speak. He didn’t move.
That was when I noticed the tension in his broad shoulders. I moved up beside him and stopped, my pulse spiking to my ears. “Um…”
Beside me, Grym swallowed hard. One of his big hands was hovering above the gun holstered on his hip like an old Western gunslinger. His gaze was locked on the creature standing a dozen yards away from us, the sun a semi-circle, like a halo, behind its head.
I was pretty sure eight feet tall was an understatement. The monster had to be thirteen feet at least, give or take a foot. The thing was covered in long, silvery-white hair. Not fur. The silky hair covered its entire form, from its elongated head, over its extended torso, and down arms and legs that were as long as I was tall, to cover its hands and pool around its feet.
The face was covered in shorter hair, dark in the low light. But there were long, feathery brows drooping along the back corner of its small eyes, making the monster look sad. The eyes that peered at us from beneath the brows were black, but they sparked silver in the thin ribbons of sun shining down on its silky head.
The ground was glossy with ice beneath its feet, as if the monster created frost wherever it walked.
We stared at it for several moments.
It stared back at us.
I started to wonder who was going to break the stand-off first. My phone rang, the ring tone from Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which told me it was my assistant, Sebille.
And when I blinked, the tall, willowy form ahead of us seemed to melt sideways and disappear.
I looked at Grym. He looked at me.
“It melted away,” I said, amusement coloring my voice.
He shook himself out of the stupor first, striding quickly toward the spot where the monster had been. And I answered my phone. “You aren’t going to believe what Grym and I just saw,” I said by way of greeting.
“You wanna bet?” The bushes behind where the monster had been standing rustled. Grym’s hand shot toward his holster and drew the big gun, pointing it at the rustling branches.
The sprite stepped out of the trees, hands in the air. “Don’t shoot, Tex.”
Grym expelled air. “You should have announced yourself, Sebille. I could have shot you.”
“Sorry,” said the sprite in a tone that told everyone there she wasn’t really. “I was a little discombobulated from discovering that the artifact I’ve been hunting was actually a giant Winter Monster.”
I scrunched up my face. “Winter Monster? What’s that?”
Beside me, Grym sighed. “Someone’s imagination gone wild.”
Sebille nodded. “It’s tied to an artifact and can take whatever form the person who owns the artifact thinks up. Usually, it’s a mix of several monsters.”
“What does the artifact look like?” I asked my assistant.
She shrugged. “The order we got on the thing says it’s a book. Probably a novel. Sometimes they come as videos. I remember hearing about one that was a song.” She grimaced. “That was a bad one. It was a cross between a dragon and a saber tooth tiger.”
Grym winced. “I remember that too. As I recall, that thing killed a couple of cops and several civilians before it was stopped.”
“So, they’re dangerous?” I asked, feeling fear grow.
“Think about what you read in those paranormal romance books you like so much,” Sebille said. “People’s imagination is only limited by what they see in the world around them. And between books, movies, and television, that’s not very limited.”
I flushed, carefully avoiding Grym’s gaze. I really hadn’t wanted anyone, especially him, to know that I liked romance books. “I just buy them for the words,” I muttered sheepishly.
Grym barked out a laugh. “Not for the man boobs on the covers?”
“Moobs,” Sebille said, waggling her fire-red brows.
Glaring at the sprite, I shrugged, not wanting to lie right to Grym’s face. I settled, instead, for changing the subject. “Okay. In this case, I guess we’re looking for a Yeti type critter. “I frowned. “Why are these called Winter Monsters? What if it was a giant scorpion from the desert?”
“It’s not a seasonal thing,” Grym explained. “Jedediah Winter was the man who discovered their existence, so he gets credit for them.”
“Ah,” I said.
“And it’s a Yeti right now, but it could be that giant scorpion you mentioned tomorrow. Like I said, it changes according to its owner’s inclinations. We have two choices for fixing this. We either need to find the person behind the Monster, or we need to find the artifact itself.”
“Either way, we should end up at the same place, right?” I said.
“Yeah. But we can divvy up the search that way. I can take the artifact, and you can take the person.”
I thought that sounded like a good plan. With all three of us working on it, we should be able to find it more quickly. “Deal.” I pulled out my phone and dialed a number.
“Who are you calling,” Grym asked.
“Lea,” I said as my friend came on the phone. I swung my gaze to Grym and he pursed his lips before nodding his understanding. “Grym and I need your help with something. Can you come to Enchanted Park?”
Lea shivered violently, her teeth clacking together as she pulled her coat close. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” she groused as she relit the thick, white pillar candle she’d brought for the fifth time.
“Sorry,” I said, my own teeth clacking together. “It wasn’t this cold when I called you.”
The winter storm had blossomed out of nowhere. The sun that had threaded its way through the thick tree cover just an hour earlier was hidden behind a heavy bank of charcoal-gray clouds. The temps had dropped a good twenty degrees at its loss.
Wind scoured over us, singing a sad melody of cold and desolation as it flowed through the trees. I could smell snow on the air and the tiny flurries that were sifting down on us were coming faster and growing larger by the minute. “Maybe we should come back tomorrow.”
Lea sniffed, shaking her head. “As much as I’d love to do that, the trail will be cold by then.” She laughed. “Icy, in fact.”
I huddled deeper into my coat and looked up as Grym returned. His face, which looked like it was carved from granite and sometimes was, had been chapped red from the cold, and his hands were purple. “No sign of the monster or an artifact.” He glanced at me. “Any chance you could be wrong?”
I shook my head. Since gaining my full Keeper powers, I’d been hitting the books, learning as much as I could about artifact wrangling so that I’d be better at my job. It didn’t hurt that I had the Société of Dire Magic keeping a close eye on me, watching for me to make another mistake.
I tried not to let that sobering thought show on my face as I looked at Grym. Since I still mostly blamed him for siccing them on me in the first place.
It helped a little that Grym had been responsible for getting Agent Rogers of the Société to back off a bit. However, I was under no illusions that Rogers would continue to give me space if I messed up again.
“Any products of an artifact can only be released within a two-mile radius of the artifact’s location. So, unless the person who owns the book is driving around town with it, we should be able to isolate a subsection of Enchanted where the person lives.”
“Then we just need to narrow it down,” Grym said, nodding. “I’m not sure how we’re going to do that. I guess we can go door-to-door and have you use your power to call the artifact to you.”
I saw two problems with that scenario. First, if a non-magic human owned an artifact but didn’t know it was magical, we’d be introducing magical knowledge where it hadn’t been before. That, I knew, was against the Société of Dire Magic’s laws for magic use. I smiled at the thought of turning Grym in for that. But I quickly muted the smile when he narrowed his gaze at me.
And the second problem was that I might call a lot of artifacts that rightfully belonged to people. Then we’d have to sort through all of them to figure out which one was our Winter Monster artifact.
Given the fact that I was already ear-deep in rogue artifacts I needed to find, the idea of adding twenty-fold to my backlog was not appealing.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Lea said. She looked up at Grym and pointed to a spot near the circle she’d made with salt. “Can you stand there to block the wind? It keeps blowing my candles out and breaking my circle.”
Grym obliged her, his bulk doing a pretty good job of protecting the circle. Lea looked at me and pointed to a spot on her other side. “Naida, you stand there.”
She stepped into the sphere and picked up the container of salt, finishing off her circle. Sprawled in the center of the circle, her belly exposed and her paws batting at a small stick on the ground beside her, Lea’s cat Hex seemed happy to be in the park, her thick, soft gray coat apparently doing a better job of keeping her warm than mine was doing for me.
“Let’s get to work, Hex,” Lea said. She kneeled next to the unlit white candle at the center of the circle and struck a match, protecting it with her hand as she held it down to the wick. The candle took a moment to light, but as soon as it did, there was a sound like air being pulled from an enclosed space, and visible lines of energy shot up from the circle and into the trees high above.
The wind inside the circle dropped away, apparently blocked by Lea’s magic. She began to chant and Hex stood beside her, tail whipping the air and narrow chest glowing under the power of her particular sigil, which was the symbol to focus energy. Hex was from the same litter as Mr. Wicked. His sigil was a soul star and the other cats carried sigils representing an athame, a pentacle, and one for chaos magic.
As Lea chanted, pale green energy rose from the ground inside the circle and lifted into the air, filling the magic cylinder she’d created into the trees and beyond. I knew when the power had reached the top of her circle because it exploded outward with a muffled boom and formed a visible ring of pale green energy in the sky.
Then Lea threw her hands into the air, and the ring broke apart, shooting across the sky with a hissing sound.
We waited for the magic to locate the monster’s path, hoping it would lead us to the artifact that had spawned it.
We heard the hiss of magic searing a path through the woods a moment later. The soft, green glow danced through the trees as we watched, waiting expectantly.
With a final violent sizzle, the energy left the trees and slammed into Lea’s circle. The energy surrounding her and Hex trembled, rolling over itself as it adjusted to the concussive force of her returning probe, and then settled into the circle with a sigh.
Lea lowered her hands and the cylinder above our heads dropped into a simple, glowing ring on the ground. She stretched her leg and broke the circle with a scuff of her toe.
The energy went dark, leaving only the faint scent of ozone behind.
The three of us stared at the meandering green glow snaking through the woods.
“Is that the path?” Grym finally asked. He frowned. “That’s where Sebille came out of the woods.”
He was right. It could very well be the sprite’s path.
Lea turned to look at him, her pretty face a study in worry. “I don’t know. Without a targeting object, the energy doesn’t recognize the difference between one magic-user or another.” She pointed to a glossy puddle of energy a few feet away from us. “And I have no idea what that is.”
My gaze caught on the puddle and I sighed. “I think I do.”
It was the exact spot the monster had “melted” away. And I was very afraid it was the only path that meant anything in our search.
Unfortunately, it didn’t lead anywhere we could follow.
3
Wilfreda the Witch goes Walkies
“Maybe it’s a giant worm monster,” Sebille offered unhelpfully around a bite of taco.
I shook my head, observing a record-player that drew the listener back to the date of the music’s creation and stranded them there until a more recent record was played. Setting it aside to catalog later, I turned to Sebille. “No, this monster looked like a Yeti, only it was white.” I frowned. “Like the abominable snowman.”
“Isn’t that just a children’s story?”
I shrugged. “Most of those stories are based on real things.” But I’d researched as many Winter Monsters as I could find records for, and nothing of the kind Grym and I saw was described. “It’s possible this is a completely new one. Never before seen or documented.”
“That seems unlikely,” Sebille said, crumpling her taco wrapper and shoving it into the bag in front of her. She sighed wearily. “I retrieved the pen that writes in musical notes and the toothbrush that cleans up potty mouth.” She pointed to the end of the long table. “They’re down there somewhere.”
I nodded, glancing toward the spot she indicated. The pile of artifacts was daunting and it made me depressed. “We’re going to need a bigger table.” At my words, the thirty-foot-long artifact table grew another five feet. Pretty soon, we were going to need an annex at Croakies to accommodate it.
When the walls started to groan and shift at my thought, I blinked, panicking. “Belay that order!” The groaning stopped as the magic that controlled the size of the library backed down again. Phew! That had been a close one.
A soft dinging sound brought my head around. Sebille went over to the communicating mirror and tugged off the black shroud we’d been keeping on it since a doppelganger spirit tried to get a little too close to me.
Light played across Sebille’s face as she waited for the caller to appear. I joined her, curious.
A few moments later, Madeline Quilleran’s scary countenance appeared in the center of the glass, her living room recognizable behind her.
I caught movement in the background and snapped my gaze up to the stag on the wall above the fireplace. Felonius was its name, and I could feel it watching me whenever I came near, but I hadn’t been able to catch it in the act.
“Keeper,” Madeline said in her usual brisk, no-nonsense way. “Princess Sebille.”
Sebille’s usual resistance to being called by her magical title showed in a slight tightening of her lips, but she simply inclined her head. I was pretty sure she’d decided that, when dealing with a witch as scary as Madeline Quilleran, it was best to use every weapon you had in your arsenal.
Being the daughter of the Queen of the Fae in Enchanted was a definite plus when dealing with powerful magical creatures like the Quillerans.
The room behind Madeline erupted with the sound of fluttering wings and a large raven with small silver eyes settled to her shoulder. Madeline’s familiar’s name was Rasputin. The raven had a slight Russian accent and I was pretty sure he’d once been someone of great importance in what had once been the Soviet Union. Currently, he was a bird. I had no idea how that had happened but I selfishly hoped he’d been cursed for being a jerk to someone. Also, the raven didn’t much like me. I didn’t take it personally because I was pretty sure Rasputin hated everybody except Madeline, and maybe her young niece Maude.
The scary witch reached up and ran a fingertip over the bird’s glossy black breast.
“What can we do for you, Madeline?” I asked, arching my brows at the bird as he lifted his wings and snapped his beak at me.
“I just came back from a meeting of the PTB. It’s come to our awareness that there’s been an explosion of artifact orders across the dimensions.”
My gaze slid unhappily toward the mass of artifacts waiting to be cataloged. “Unfortunately, that’s true. Sebille and I have been running ourselves ragged trying to collect them all.”
Madeline looked thoughtful. “Yes. It’s the same in the other dimensions. We’re speculating that you opened up some kind of blockage when you interfered in that business of the gate in Plex.”
I clenched my jaw at her wording. “You mean when Sebille, I, Hobs, Slimy, and Wicked saved the Universe from another Dark Rages at great risk to ourselves?”
Madeline shrugged and Ras made a chuffing sound that sounded like laughter. I glared at the stupid bird and he lifted his wings in threat, dancing across Madeline’s shoulder.
