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“No, they won’t. Remember, you’re their queen. You have power over them.”
“Okay, then. Your homage is noted,” I said as pompously as I could while keeping a straight face. “Now, be gone! Leave me!” That wasn’t any more effective. I turned to Owen. “Maybe I should give you the brooch and let you try.”
He flinched. “I don’t want to touch that thing.”
“It can’t be any more dangerous for you than it is for me.” I studied him for a moment, trying to read what I could see of his face in the eerie glow of all the little magical creatures on the ground. “Or are you feeling something from it? I know you want your powers back, but this would be really bad timing.”
“No, but if I ever even act like I want the Eye, with or without powers, there will be plenty of people who think I’m trying to take over the world.”
I gestured around us. “There’s nobody here but us!”
“That we know of. I’m pretty sure I’m being watched, all the time, by officials and by other people, and the moment I show any sign of doing anything even remotely suspicious, they’ll probably just shoot me without asking questions.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“Not really,” Rod said. “He is being watched.”
“Then if they won’t listen to me, what do we do? If anyone’s searching for us by air, they’ll have found us by now.”
Granny banged her cane on the ground and shouted, “Oh, get out of here! Shoo!” The glow receded rapidly, flowing away from us until there was no sign it had ever been there. When the rest of us turned to look at Granny, she shrugged and said, “It’s all in the tone of voice. I deal with these folk all the time, though yours aren’t as sophisticated as the ones we’ve got back home. Ours would have argued with me for a while or demanded a gift instead of just leaving.”
I laughed. “You know, that may be the first time someone called something from a small Texas town more sophisticated—” I broke off as something came at me out of the sky, knocking me off the rock. I hit the ground hard, landing on the brooch, and that caused such a sharp pain that I cried out. The fall had knocked the wind out of me, though, so my cry came out as a mere gasp.
I was so dazed that I only got a vague sense of the others running around and shouting. I felt the ground shake slightly and heard a loud thud as something hit the ground hard, as though from a great height, nearby.
Then someone took me by the shoulders and shouted my name. I started to fight off my assailant, then realized it was Owen. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I landed on the brooch,” I said, wincing and shifting my weight so the brooch wasn’t pressed against my hip. “I have a feeling I’ll have a very interesting bruise in the morning.”
He chuckled and started to help me to my feet, but then Rod shouted, “Incoming! They didn’t just send the one.”
“I hate these things,” I muttered into Owen’s shoulder as he pressed me back into the ground, sheltering me from the attacking zombie gargoyles.
“You two find cover,” Rod ordered. “We’ll deal with them.”
We moved in a crouch toward a cluster of trees, weaving our way across the clearing like we were crossing a battlefield. I had the strangest feeling that we were being followed. When I turned to look, I saw that Rod was right behind us.
“Rod!” I shouted. “You’re supposed to be fighting them, not following us!”
He froze, then shook his head. “Sorry! Fighting, yeah, that’s it.” Without another word, he turned and ran back to where Granny and Earl were fending off the attacking gargoyles.
“That’s not a good sign,” Owen said softly before leading me to an entirely different group of trees.
“Maybe we should take this chance to go off on our own again,” I suggested.
It was a while before he answered, so I knew he was thinking about it. “No,” he said eventually. “We’d be sitting ducks without their help. We shouldn’t get rid of them until we know they’re a danger.”
“Rod was just breathing down our necks and reaching for the brooch,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but he snapped out of it as soon as you said something. It’s when he doesn’t snap out of it that I’ll be worried. Do you still have the dart?”
I reached for my purse and then had a moment of panic when I didn’t find it. “I think my purse is back at the rocks.”
“Then that settles it, we can’t just sneak away. We’ll have to trust Rod. I don’t think your grandmother will let him harm you.”
The others were winning the battle against the zombie gargoyles, turning them back into stone—again. Soon, several more “boulders” decorated the landscape. When nothing else came out of the sky, Owen and I rejoined the others.
I kicked one of the de-animated gargoyles and said, “I wonder if smashing them thoroughly would keep them from being brought back to life yet again.”
