Torrent(97)

I shifted again as we drove out of the parking lot, trying to find a comfortable spot for my leg. It must have swollen quite a bit, because my sock felt too tight. My foot bumped something again. Figuring it was Temi’s purse, I reached down to move it—and halted as soon as my fingers brushed the leather cover.
“Simon? I think I found your tablet.”
“What?” Simon leaned forward. “How?”
“I don’t know,” I said, though my heart beat faster. Was it possible Alektryon had escaped with it, chanced across the Jag, and returned the tablet when he saw the opportunity? But how would he have known the car belonged to us? Or what a car was for that matter?
Simon reached for the tablet, but I batted his hand away, and flipped the cover open. The drawing app was still up. My breath caught. His words from before were still there, the ones claiming he wouldn’t be anyone’s slave again, but there were a couple of new words in careful script.
“Is it still working?” Simon asked. “Did it get wet? Or, oh, what’s that?” He’d seen the drawing app.#p#分页标题#e#
“A new message,” I said.
We were speeding along the highway back into town, but the roads were empty, and Temi took a long look over.
“In Greek?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it say?” Simon asked.
“Roughly... Be wary. They are the enemies of humanity.”
“Similar to what the Roman said, right?” Temi asked.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” Simon said. “I don’t think we’re going to see those guys again.”
“Probably not.” I’d barely made it out of that chamber alive; it was hard to imagine someone else going in deeper and surviving.
I couldn’t say that I’d miss Jakatra and Eleriss exactly, but I missed not solving any of the mysteries surrounding them. Would we ever learn who they were and where they’d come from? Not to mention who had created that monster, why it’d crawled out of the ocean in L.A., and why it’d killed all those people... Eleriss’s warning that there would be more monsters made me uneasy, and I wondered if we should have tossed the sword in the lake when we’d had a chance. Only time would tell.






 
    Nine by Night: A Multi-Author Urban Fantasy Bundle of Kickass Heroines, Adventure,   Magic
    
 


 

EPILOGUE

Thanks to the curfew, the town was quiet, and we didn’t see another soul on the way back to the Motel 6. Temi had brought the sword inside, and it lay next to her on one of the beds. It didn’t glow when she wasn’t holding it, but it started up like a touch lamp whenever she brushed the hilt.
“Not too bad,” Simon said from the desk. He had the calculator up on his MacBook and had dug a scale out of the van. Our flakes of gold rested on its surface. “Given the spot price of gold, an estimate of the amount of pure stuff in our ore sample, and a subtraction of our expenses, including new headlights, a new windshield, food and motel bills, medical services—” he nodded toward Temi’s bandaged hand and my bandaged leg, “—and also minus the coin you won’t let me sell until you’ve researched it further, we’ve made over three thousand dollars for our work this last week.”
“Technically we didn’t get paid for the week’s work,” I said. “We got paid for scraping gold out of a crack before a tunnel filled up with water.”
Simon waved my objection away. “One must find a way to fund one’s philanthropy efforts. This was no different. Oh!” He leaned back toward the screen. “I forgot about the money we made from our web traffic. I wish we could have taken a few pictures of the dead monster to throw up there.”
“Three thousand dollars,” Temi said as Simon crunched more numbers.
I could tell from the wry twist of her lips that she found the amount more amusing than inspiring. Simon and I hadn’t made much more than that in the entire previous month, so I could hardly complain. But then I hadn’t won prize money at Wimbledon in a previous life either.
A sickly bleep came from the heater. My phone had been as unresponsive as Simon’s after the flood. I’d taken it out of its supposedly waterproof and drop-proof case to let it dry in hopes that it would come to life again. The bleep, however anemic, was promising.
“Text message from Autumn,” I announced with a sense of guilt. I’d forgotten that Eleriss and Jakatra had been after her before our diversion.
Three messages sent an hour or two apart offered variations of, Are you all right??
Yes, I tapped in, the cursor responding with irritating sluggishness. I’d have to find someone who could do more for the phone than setting it to dry by a heat vent. Are you? Has anyone bugged you?