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.”

I groaned. Damn it, the last thing I wanted was for him to wear himself out again. “You’re majorly stubborn, you know that, right?”

“Zharkat, it is much less confining this way,” he reassured me. “I am well.”

I peered at him and had to admit he did look much less stressed than on the trip to Austin.

“All right.” I ran fingers through my hair and tried unsuccessfully to bite back a yawn. “You want me to drive for a bit now, or are you good?”

“I will continue,” he said. “Have you need to stop elsewhere before journey’s end?”

I shook my head. “I just want to get home.”

“Not long now,” he said. “Sleep more.”

And I did.

The abrupt silence of the engine woke me the second time, and I opened my eyes to see trees bordering a parking lot. “Are we home?” I asked.

“We have but the short walk through the woods,” Mzatal replied. “And you are more rested.”

Bryce roused and prodded Paul awake and out of the SUV. We made quick work of unloading our stuff, then tromped through the woods, over the fence, and back to the house, where a bouncing and burbling Jekki greeted us with delight. After reassuring the faas he was indeed well, Mzatal went straight to the mini-nexus. Bryce bundled the still sleepy Paul off to bed, then headed to the kitchen to scrounge breakfast while I went to join Mzatal.

We sat quietly for a while, facing each other in the center of the mini-nexus, the potency tickling like the nibble of minnows as we listened to the chirp of sparrows and drone of insects.

“Boss,” I said after some time, “we need to do something about your aura. If you’re going to function here on Earth without causing chaos, we need to figure out how to tone it down. A lot.”

He grew contemplative, reading the implications behind the words. “It is a marked problem while among humans,” he admitted.

“Perhaps Szerain could help,” I ventured. “No one feels his aura.”

Mzatal’s frown deepened. “He is submerged. I cannot mimic that.”

“Yes, I know. But I’ve been around him unsubmerged, as well as when he’s expressing way more through Ryan. It’s as if he’s able to keep a lid on his aura projection. Maybe you could talk to him about it and see how he does it?”

I felt the resistance in him. He frowned, as if looking for any other alternative, and it was a long moment before he spoke. “It is the best and most expedient solution,” he said, though his tone was certainly grudging. “I will speak to him.”

There was something going on between those two, but I didn’t have time to deal with it now. At least he’d agreed to talk to Szerain.

I yawned, still tired. Even though I’d slept quite a while in the car it wasn’t the same as sleeping in a proper bed. I frowned. Why had I been in the car for so long?

“Kara!” Mzatal said sharply.

I jerked and blinked at him. “Shit.” My pulse lurched. “The implant containment.”

He laid one hand on my shoulder and the other against my cheek. “We are joined at the hip, beloved, as you have noted,” he said, calm and placid. “I will reinforce it again.”

He went still and quiet for only a few minutes, but it was enough time for me to go through plenty of worry. “I need to get some real sleep for a couple of hours,” I told him. “Could you give me a little of your magic sleeping mojo?”

He smiled and kissed me. “It is done. Be in your bed in five minutes or you will find yourself napping on the floor.”

I laughed, kissed him back, and headed inside. Yet as I passed the dining room I had to stop and do a double take. The elves had been at work expanding Kara’s Kafé while we were in Austin.

The dining room hadn’t been an actual room for dining in the entire time I’d lived in the house as an adult. But now, storage boxes, miscellaneous items, and cobwebs had been cleared away, and a simple but lovely eight chair dining table occupied the middle of the hardwood floor. Nostalgia tugged hard as memory filled my senses of the last Thanksgiving before my dad died: family and friends and food.