*
As soon as I got back in the car—without having to stop and puke, thankfully—I called Jill and put her on speakerphone to give her the rundown. “My next job is to figure out if there’s some way to block the portals so he can’t pull power from them,” I said after I caught her up. “Problem now is that I don’t know if that’s possible. Plus there are probably some other portals in play that he knew about before he started using enemies of mine to find these latest three portals.”
“I was thinking there might be other portals too,” Jill said. “I put this focus you just found on the map to see if we could maybe figure out where other portals might be, but it still isn’t all that clear. I mean, it’s not forming some recognizable pattern.”
I considered that for a moment while I absently toyed with the cuff. My eyes dropped to the mark on the inside of my left forearm. Without othersight it was practically invisible, like a faint and faded henna tattoo. “Well, unfortunately it might be part of a pattern that we don’t recognize. A sigil or a mark.”
“Sort of like constellations, right?” she replied. “If you only have half the stars of the big dipper, you’d never realize that’s what it is.”
“Exactly.”
Ryan rubbed his chin. “But do we need to know what the whole constellation is?”
I exhaled. “Well, without knowing the whole pattern we don’t stand much chance of figuring out how to disable it—which would be a whole lot nicer and neater to do instead of having some big fucking showdown or confrontation. He can’t start this shit without me, and as long as I’m wearing the cuff, I’m not going to be feeling compelled to head there.”
Zack grinned. “No confrontation? Is that even allowed?”
“Well, if not,” I said, “I plan on being a bad girl.”
Jill gave a snort. “So what else is new?”
I ran a thumb over the mark on my forearm. “Jill, if I give you some general locations, can you look in your database and see if there’ve been any deaths there in the last, say, forty years or so?”
“I think so,” she said. “The records department supposedly just finished putting the last fifty years of reords online.”
I gave her the locations that Rhyzkahl had looked up on my computer. “Look for deaths that would have occurred right before the summoning of Szerain, or within a year or so.”
Ryan narrowed his eyes. “You think that they might have tried to open this gate-thing once before?”
“Right,” I said. I didn’t look up at him, since I wasn’t sure I could keep my face totally neutral. “Szerain was up to something, and I think that he needed an easier way to be summoned.” But would that have been enough to get him punished? There had to be more to his crime than that.
Out of nowhere the memory of my dream swam up. For an instant I could smell the dust of the place on my tongue, feel the stone against my feet.
.…smooth marble cool against my cheek as I struggled for breath, the taste of blood thick in my mouth…
“Kara. Kara?”
I blinked and jerked my gaze up to Ryan. What the hell just happened? That wasn’t part of the dream.
“You okay?” he asked. “You just went pale.”
I forced a smile. “I’m fine. Just hungry, most likely. We should go grab a bite to eat soon.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” he said.
Jill cleared her throat on the phone. “You were right, Kara. Three deaths. All looked to be natural.”
“And I’ll bet anything that all three were linked somehow to one of the summoners,” I said. “Then that summoner was killed by Rhyzkahl in the summoning-of-Szerain that went wrong, and so now Tracy’s picking up where he or she left off.” I fought the urge to slide a look toward Ryan. I wonder how Tracy would react if he knew that Ryan was Szerain. I bit back an inappropriate giggle. With as many oaths and secrets and whatnot going on around Ryan, I had no doubt that Tracy was completely clueless as to that little detail.
My phone beeped to indicate another call was coming in—one with an out-of-state area code. Something about the number tickled at my memory, but I couldn’t immediately pin it down. “Lemme get this call, Jill. If it’s a telemarketer I’ll just hang up on them.”
I took it off speakerphone and clicked on the new call. “Detective Gillian,” I answered.
“Kara? It’s Roman.”
Something about the tone of his voice sent a warning zing through my body. “Hiya, Roman. What’s up?” I replied, keeping my own tone light.
“There’s a man here with a gun pointed at my head,” he said, and now I could hear the slight shake in his voice. “He says if you don’t come to the…the gate he’s going to shoot me.”
I couldn’t breathe for several seconds. When I finally could I said, “It’s going to be all right, Roman. Let me talk to him, please.”