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“It’s coordinates!” I crowed. “Latitude and longitude! The first letters of the words correspond to the first letters in the word for a number. Like ‘sick sirens sink’ is six. The exceptions are the phrases for North and West!” For longitude and latitude, the letters for direction always followed the numbers. I did a giddy little dance in my seat. “Oh, yeah, I’m awesome. Uh huh, I’m awesome. Go, Kara! Go, Kara!”
Paul’s eyes widened. “Degrees, minutes, seconds.” His face split into a grin, and then his fingers flew over his keyboard. “The first list, the one with ‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ at the top . . .” His eyes flicked between the journal and the laptop. “Thirsty thieves thrive, forlorn foxes fold, finicky fire fizzles, sick sirens sink, zygote zucchini zings, eat ears early, night noise nears. So that would be thirty-four degrees, fifty-six minutes, zero-eight seconds, North.”
“Well?” I demanded. “Where is it?”
He shot me a withering look. “Hang on, lemme get the longitude.” He mumbled to himself while I jiggled impatiently, and Bryce looked on in bemusement.
“Got it,” Paul finally announced. “‘Cowboy creek crevice creates confusion’ is a location near the town of Rock Creek in the Texas panhandle.”
A smug smile spread across my face. “The titles are clues and hints for Tracy so he knew which list was for which node without having to look up the coordinates each time he tracked an emission, but the cryptic phrases kept it from being obvious to anyone who didn’t know the code.” A thought abruptly speared its way to the surface, and I sucked in a sharp breath. “What about the dates? Was there something at that Cowboy Creek node in the last few days?”
Paul nodded. “A couple of days ago.”
I bit down on a shriek of delight. “That’s when we had video of him getting off a plane not far from Amarillo in the goddamn Texas panhandle!”
Bryce straightened. “Hot fucking damn,” he murmured. “We might be able to anticipate where they’re going next.”
“Right, though now we have to hope to hell that Tracy knew about the same nodes that Katashi and his crew are checking.”
I wagged my hands at Paul and the journal. “Work, Wonder Boy. Work!”
Paul grinned and quickly sank into processing the data. I faced forward again and tried to chill while he worked, but could only fidget.
“Whoa,” he said a few minutes later.
I twisted around in the seat. “What is it?”
“Here’s what we have.” He tapped a few more times. “The ‘Mountains mean multiple mergers’ one works out to near Basalt, Colorado. ‘Ashes are always around’ is about seventy-five miles outside of Austin. And ‘Wet wilderness wonder waxes’ is in Oregon. ‘Weird wondrous wares waver wildly’ is the warehouse. But the last one . . .” He blew out a breath. “‘Boss-boy breaks boss’s balls,’ is smack dab in the middle of the Farouche Plantation.”
Adrenaline surged through me even as Mzatal’s aura flared. “Let me see the journal,” I said and practically snatched it as Paul held it out. I quickly skimmed the dates. There were only three—one from over a year ago and one more than a year away. But the third set my heart pounding. “There’s one in three days.” I heard the tremble in my voice and didn’t care. “Idris will be there. I know he’ll be there.”
“And we will retrieve him.” Mzatal stated with dark determination. He’d made the same claim about me once and followed through against impossible odds.
“Damn straight,” I said. We had yet to come up with even the slightest inkling of a plan, but I had the ultimate faith that we would.
With the rush of excitement over, we fell into a comfortable silence. I mentally brainstormed various plans with myself, each more outlandish than the last, and finally decided to stop before I thought too seriously about the one where we all swooped in on hang-gliders.
I glanced toward a low snore to see Bryce with his head tipped back and his mouth open. Paul remained head down, his entire focus on his laptop, face weirdly lit by the screen. I relaxed in my seat and finally let myself think about the encounter with Rasha. The visit had unsettled me on numerous levels, and not all related to Idris and Amber. Rasha had been summoning for almost fifty years, living a life of careful isolation to keep it secret. Paul’s information showed that she’d married at eighteen and had a set of twins a few years later. Her husband had been killed in the Suez crisis, and at some point in all of that she’d become a summoner. And for what? To end up old and alone, used by others who sought power? She barely even saw her family. The most she could do was surround herself with pictures of them.
Propping my feet on the dashboard again, I watched the moon flicker through the trees that lined the interstate. I understood being so lonely that summoning a demon for a game of chess was a reasonable choice. I’d been there before. I wasn’t there anymore, but what about in thirty years? Fifty?
Mzatal reached over and took my hand. “I will not abandon you, beloved,” he said softly.
Tears pricked my eyes. I gave his hand a light squeeze. “Thanks, Boss.”
I drifted off to sleep with my hand in his.
Chapter 35
When I woke the sky ahead of us glowed with the pinks and blues of sunrise. I sat up, rolled my head on my shoulders to get the crick out of my neck. Mzatal looked over from where he still sat in the driver’s seat and gave me a fond smile.
“Hey, Boss,” I said as I rubbed the gunk out of my eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Six hours and twenty-two minutes,” he replied.
A glance at the backseat showed the other two men still sleeping. “Have you been driving this whole time?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
