“Ready?” Marcus asked. He wasn’t sure he was comfortable yet with all this magical stuff, but if it led them to Kesh, he might just become a fan. The upcoming violence, on the other hand, he was completely on board with—especially if it ended up with Kesh lying on the ground bleeding profusely and begging for mercy.
Beka walked to the door, putting the pendant over her head so it nestled between her breasts. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
They got into Marcus’s Jeep. He’d already argued, successfully for a change, that she needed to keep her attention on the necklace instead of the road. And if they managed to capture Kesh, he’d never fit in the back of the Karmann Ghia. Even Beka couldn’t dispute that one.
“Which way?” he asked as they pulled out onto the highway.
Beka, her expression intent, as though listening to a melody only she could hear, pointed to the right. “That way. He’s at least a few miles away, I think.”
Huh. “How does that thing work, anyway?” Marcus still couldn’t quite decide whether to be freaked-out or fascinated by the discovery that magic was real, but he was definitely starting to lean in the direction of “Shit, that’s cool.”
“It’s a little bit like that game kids play,” Beka said. “You know, the one where when you get close, someone says you’re getting hotter, and when you move in the wrong direction, they say you’re getting colder.” She sounded a little wistful, as if she’d only ever seen the game played by others but had never taken part herself. He supposed that little Babas-in-training didn’t get to hang out with other kids much. Or ever.
“So the spell makes the pendant hot or cold?”
She shook her head, flipping her braid over her shoulder so that the knife hidden inside clunked on the headrest behind her. “Not exactly. The spell just strengthens the connection between the object, in this case the necklace, and the person it used to belong to. If I’d done the spell slightly differently, I could have tracked every owner it ever had, but for our needs, I just have it homing in on Kesh. When we head in the right direction, I can feel a kind of tug in my belly. When we go farther away, the tug lessens, so I can tell if we’re off target.”
Marcus whistled. “Wow—magical GPS. That’s pretty snazzy.”
“Mmm,” Beka agreed, sounding distracted. “We need to go north from here, I think.”
He found a side road that meandered more or less in a northerly direction.
“Ah, better,” Beka said. “I think we’re getting close.” Her fingers tightened around the pendant, her knuckles turning white.
“Are you worried about facing Kesh?” Marcus asked. “Afraid you won’t be able to hurt him if you need to? I know it can be tough when you’re facing someone who used to be a friend.” Thankfully, he wasn’t going to have that problem. At all.
Beka pointed toward a sandy path, barely a road at all. “Hell no. More afraid that I won’t be strong enough to beat the crap out of him. I can’t believe he actually poisoned his own people and drove them from their homes. What a shit.” Suddenly she stuck out a hand. “Stop here. Stop!”
Marcus eased the Jeep to a halt, pulling it over to the verge where scrubby grasses struggled to take over what little path there was. “Are we close?” he asked, wishing again for a gun. Any gun, although an assault rifle would have been preferable.
“I think so,” Beka said. She indicated the road ahead of them, which looked like it led straight into the ocean. “I’m pretty sure he’s right over that rise,” she said. “I hope he didn’t hear the car.”
But when they crawled on knees and elbows to peer over the sandy hill, it was clear that Kesh was too preoccupied to have noticed the small sounds of the Jeep engine. Beyond them lay a small cove, too shabby and off the beaten path to get much use, from the look of it. At the moment, however, it seemed full to overflowing with a milling crowd that gathered in front of Kesh as he spoke to them from atop a rock outcropping.
Marcus was too busy assessing the enemy force to listen very closely to Kesh’s speechifying, but he caught something about “strike a blow for water people and paranormals everywhere” and “are you with me?” There was a muted roar of cheering.
Great. Nothing like attacking an already revved-up adversary. He did a quick head count and decided that there weren’t quite as many as he’d initially thought, although there were still a lot more than he was comfortable taking on with just him and Beka; maybe a dozen in all. They mostly looked Human to him, although he suspected that none of them were—some had the sleek black hair and round, dark eyes that Kesh had, as well as a few with the red or auburn tresses that Beka said often indicated a Mer.
“There are more of them than I expected,” Beka said quietly. “If you want to back out, I wouldn’t blame you.” She pulled out one of her larger knives and grasped it tightly.