“You’re sure you know how to drive, know the rules of the road, and what route to follow?”

“I have observed carefully.” Calm confidence radiated from him.

Rolling my eyes, I shrugged. “Eh, what’s the worst that can happen. I mean, other than death in a fiery crash.”

His mouth twitched into a smile. “Trust me.”

Apparently I didn’t have much choice. I tried to put out of my head the scene from the movie Starman, where the alien is driving and thinks that a yellow light means Go Very Fast, since he’d seen the human woman speed through a yellow.

“You do know that a yellow light means it’s about to turn red, and you have to stop, right?” I asked, just to be sure.

His only response was a low chuckle.

I allowed myself to relax as we made it to the interstate without any sign of police vehicles following us, and without any crashes, fiery or not. After about ten miles I had to admit that Mzatal knew as much about the operation of a motor vehicle and the rules of the road as the average human, and he certainly had better instincts and reflexes.

Since I still had too much adrenaline pumping through me to sleep, I snagged up one of Tracy’s spiral notebooks from the stack on the back seat and pulled a flashlight out of my bag, propped my feet on the dashboard and began to flip through. It was the notebook with no cover that had all the date and time info for the warehouse node. I’d never actually finished going through this one, since Eilahn and I had raced to the warehouse the instant we realized the “event” was that same day.

Then again, it didn’t look as if I’d missed much. More ritual configurations, some of which looked completely wrong to me. A doodle of an elephant beside another one of the weird tree sketches. A convoluted twisting sigil that didn’t seem to have any logical structure.

I began to toss it back to the stack, then stopped, flipped it open to the page that had all the dates and times for the warehouse node. My pulse did a stutter-step.

“Fucking shit!” I dropped my feet and wheeled back toward the stack. “I need the leather journal with the blue cover.”

Bryce quickly fished the correct one out of the pile and handed it to me. “What’s going on?”

“Node emissions.” I flipped through the fragile pages of the old journal as quickly as I dared. “Idris told Rasha he was following node emissions,” I said. “Tracy tracked the one at the warehouse, which is why we were there when you got shot.”

After a few seconds I found the pages I needed. “Here.” I held the journal and flashlight so they could see. “Six more lists in a really similar format to the warehouse one, so I think those might be for tracking node emissions too. Tracy’s grandparents started these lists, and then Tracy continued and added to them.”

Bryce and Paul leaned forward to peer at the odd lists. Paul frowned and opened his mouth to speak, and I jerked up a hand to stop him.

“Yes, I know there are no fucking locations for any of these,” I said. “All we have are the number series from grandma with dates from her time period, and then Tracy’s cryptic Peter-Piper-picked-a-peck-of-pickled-peppers shit along with the dates he filled in.”

Bryce’s eyes skimmed over the numbers and odd phrases and dates. “If he was tracking so meticulously, then it stands to reason the location is encoded in all of this somehow. He wouldn’t want to get mixed up and put a date and time on the wrong list.”

“Right, and he kept it coded because he didn’t want to risk anyone else finding the nodes and blocking his use.” I tapped the page. “We figure it out, and we might know where they’re going next with Idris.” Might being the operative word, I thought with a grimace. We had no way of knowing if Idris was tracking any of the same locations. Still, we had to try.

I looked back at Paul and put on an encouraging and confident smile to hide my fear that we were chasing shadows. “Okay, Wonder Boy, you up for the challenge?”

“You got numbers, I got answers,” he replied with a bright smile. “Well, y’know, probably,” he added. “I’ll do my best.”

“Your best is pretty damn awesome,” I reassured him as I handed over the journal.

Paul took it and settled in to work. I reached over and stroked Mzatal’s hair. He hadn’t said a word during all of this, but I’d felt his tension and hope for the possibilities rise right along with mine. We’re getting closer, Boss. Yes, we were chasing shadows, but they were beginning to take on more substance.

Mzatal slid a brief look to me, gave me a soft smile along with a mental caress that seemed to lift the anxiety from both of us. I closed my eyes, willed myself to relax.

Sleep slowly slides, I thought with a silent snort. Tracy didn’t have that one in any of his weird lists. Hell, I could play that silly game too. Maybe gas guzzles green for how much it cost to fill the damn tank of the SUV, and deputy debates demon for the mega-tense encounter at the gas station.

My eyes popped open. Tracy didn’t have G or D or SL alliterative sounds in any of his three-word phrases. I swung around in my seat. “Paul! The three word phrases—what letters do they start with?”

He jerked his head up. “Uh . . .” He blinked, frowned, and dropped his eyes to the journal. “Sick sirens sink, thick thread thrives, old over out, every eaglet ejects—”

Excited, I waved at him to stop. “The lists have one long phrase at the top—five or six words or so—but then how many three-word phrases are there in each one?”

Brow creased in bafflement, he quickly tallied. “Three of them have fourteen and three have fifteen.”

A giggle bubbled out of me. “And let me guess, there’s a phrase in the middle and at the end that start with N, S, E, or W, right?”

The bafflement on his face deepened to comical proportions. “Only N’s and W’s. One of each in each list. Naughty Nantucket nuns, Nancy needs nookie, woman weeds wagon—”

“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!”