At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(101)

“This place is nicer than my school,” he said in his flat voice. “Do you think we’re safe?”

Startled, Evan nodded. “I think we’re very safe here. Why?”

Tommy offered a shrug, the universal teenage gesture that could mean anything from I don’t know to I don’t want to talk about it.

Evan sipped his tea, telling himself to take it slow. Talking to someone like Tommy was a little like training a hawk—patience was its own reward.

But Tommy, it turned out, was ready to get to the matter at hand. “Is Mr. X a bad guy?”

“What do you think?”

“I think he’s a really bad guy.” Tommy looked over his shoulder again at the nearly empty room, then swung back to Evan. “Because of why he wanted the bones with runes on them.”

“He bought the bones you found by the pond?”

“All but the ones you and Detective Bisset took. I hid those from him. He gave me two hundred and fifty dollars for five bones. I bought a new reptile cage and a heat lamp for my emerald basilisk.”

Questions sparked in Evan’s brain faster than his tongue could move. But he knew he needed to proceed slowly. “I hope your new basilisk isn’t like the basilisks of myth.”

Tommy’s eyes lit up. “That’d be cool. The king of serpents who could kill you just by looking at you. I’d like to have one of those in my pocket. For mean people.”

“I imagine there would be laws against that.”

“There should be laws against mean people.”

No argument there. “And Mr. X, he’s one of these mean people?”

Tommy took a moment of reflection. “Mr. X could be a basilisk. He told me he was a sorcerer.”

“Mr. X sounds mysterious. Does he have another name?”

Surprisingly, the kid offered a slow, sleepy grin. “Yeah. He wouldn’t tell me, but I heard him talking with his friends. They call him Dave.” The grin turned wide. “That’s not a scary name.”

“No. It isn’t.” This matched with what Addie had told him—that Mr. X, aka Raven, was actually David Hayne.

“He has one more name. Raven.” Tommy hunched his shoulders. “He hurts people.”

“Have you seen him hurt people?”

An emphatic headshake no. “But he said he wanted the bones for his next sacrifice. I didn’t want to sell them, but I was scared not to. And I needed the reptile cage.”

“But now you’re worried that Mr. X—Dave—might hurt you?”

“Yes. Because I quit selling bones to him, and he got mad. He might have followed me here.”

The memory of Addie’s desperate warning sent up a small flare. Evan looked around the room. If a killer sat among them, he was doing a damn good job blending in. As serial killers were wont to do.

“Did you see Dave follow you?” Evan asked.

“No.”

“Did you notice anyone following you?”

“No.”

“Tommy, no one is going to hurt you. When we’re ready to leave, the campus police will walk us out to my car. Or, if you’d rather, we can have an officer from Chicago PD come and get you and take you home. Or we can wait for your mom, and you guys can—”

“My mom doesn’t drive at night.”

“Okay, that’s fine. We’ll figure it out.” He slipped his hand into his pocket and touched his fingers to the warm metal of the gun. “Right now, you’re completely safe.”

“Okay.” Tommy’s eyes met his for the first time. “I trust a smart person with dwarfism.”

Evan fervently hoped Tommy’s trust wasn’t misplaced. But he’d worry in a few minutes how to get Tommy someplace safe, whether or not the danger was real. He leaned forward. “Right now, what would be helpful is if you could tell me what was on the bones that Mr. X bought from you. Did you take pictures?”

“No.”

Evan felt a french kiss of disappointment followed by a small lick of panic. “Do you remember what the runes looked like?”

Tommy tapped his forehead. “You aren’t the only smart person.”

The kid took a piece of paper from an inside coat pocket, unfolded it, and set it on the table. There were nine lines of runes printed on it in pencil; presumably this included the runes from the four bones Evan and Addie had taken.

“I wrote this down on the bus,” Tommy said.

“From memory?”

“My biology teacher, Dr. Almadi, says I have the mind of a steel-jaw trap.”

Evan pulled the paper close and began mentally transliterating the runes into modern English.

Tommy must have read Evan’s silence for confusion. “Do you want to know what they say?”

Evan looked up, surprised. “Do you know? In English, I mean?”

Another grin, this one sly. “It’s not hard, Dr. Wilding. I can show you. Some of the lines were backward. But I turned everything around so that the runes that were off by themselves lined up. Then I saw that they must be numbers, and even though five of the lines were upside down when I did that, I put everything back together.”

“Amazing!” Evan doffed an imaginary hat, humbled by the straightforward brilliance of this kid. “What do the runes say?”