Which I took to mean yes.
“I need it.”
“There are copies all over the place.”
“The original.”
“That, there’s only one of.”
“And the Book of Samyaza.”
Now his brows tilted downward as he frowned. “It’s real?”
“Wanna find out?”
Slowly, a half smile appeared. “Actually, yeah.” He nodded thoughtfully and repeated, “Yeah. I still have connections.”
“One more thing.”
I reached for his arm, but he pulled back. Instead of being hurt, I was glad. The less he trusted, the better. I didn’t want to walk into a room someday and find pieces of him all over the place.
“If the Nephilim know you’re searching for it—”
“They’ll kill me. They try that all the time.”
“I was going to say ‘they’ll follow you.’ If you find it, they’ll kill you.”
“Then they’ll take it and march all over the earth in glory,” he finished.
“I’d hate to see either of those things happen.”
“You and me both.”
I gave him my cell phone number and e-mail address. He did the same.
“Where you headed?” I asked.
“Where are you?” he countered.
I decided not to share. Bram might try to burn me for a witch if he heard I was raising ghosts.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Me either.”
We were both lying, and we both knew it. Welcome to my world—trust no one who hasn’t proved trustworthy, and sometimes not even them. It was a sad, bad, lonely way to live.
I glanced at the sky. The sun was falling rapidly. There was no way I’d be able to find the Old One today. “You know of any motels nearby?”
“I don’t stay in motels.”
I lowered my gaze. “Ever?”
“Sometimes I wake myself screaming. Had the cops called a few times. Better to sleep in the van.”
Talk about sad, bad, and lonely. Poor guy. His life had not been easy. A weaker man would have gone stark, raving loony. But Bram had the confidence to believe in his dreams and the strength to do something about them. We needed more like him. The problem was finding them.
I might now possess Sawyer’s talent for detecting candidates. What I didn’t have was the time to troll the population waiting for a ripple.
Ruthie had used the social services system to discover kids turned out of foster homes again and again, often for very strange reasons. Weird stuff happened around breeds all the time—usually deadly, bloody, scary stuff.
But Ruthie was gone and the federation didn’t have the manpower to spare a member to run the group home that had been the salvation of so many. At Ruthie’s everyone was loved no matter what. Hers was the first place I’d ever felt like a girl and not a freak.
I stood, running my fingers over the dent in the hood. I wished I knew more about magic. I could probably fix that with a twitch of my nose. Turning, I stared at the empty road.
“You are definitely something more than human,” I said.
CHAPTER 17
Before getting into the Impala, I used one of the gallon jugs of water in the trunk to sponge off the draugar blood. I couldn’t drive around like this; I especially couldn’t drive into a small western town and check in for the night looking as if I’d spent the day as an extra in the latest Quentin Tarantino movie.
After removing my ruined lime-green tank top and bra, I changed into fresh ones—this time in power red. Maybe the shade would wake me up.
I bought shirts, bras, and underwear by the bagful at Wal-Mart. They rarely lasted long enough to wear out. I’d learned quickly to purchase dark-colored jeans that could disguise myriad questionable body fluids. I’d also bought black sneakers after my white pair had first become pink when I washed them, and then fallen apart when I bleached them.
I’d had high hopes for finding a motel in Osage, the next town up the road, but it turned out to have a population between two and three hundred and little use for a motel. Luckily I saw the sign for a family-owned establishment near Upton that promised an Internet connection and a free breakfast.
I paid cash. Too many Nephilim knew me by name. The federation did have a wide network in place—members in every walk of life and level of business and government—that could erase all trace of my transaction with a single phone call on my part. But they had better things to do with their time and talents. Besides, the Nephilim had a similar network. One never knew who might see the info first, or even intercept a phone call.
Though I was the leader of the light, I wasn’t exactly sure how many members the federation had, who they were, or even what all they did. Ruthie had died too suddenly to tell me much of anything, and I’d been a little busy sticking my finger in the dike of the Apocalypse to take an administrative crash course.