Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(26)

The driver’s door swung open, and a hard hand shoved me into the SUV. I half sailed, half scrambled over the center armrest, banging my head in the process. I’d never seen anyone start an engine so fast. Dirt flew from the wheels as Lon threw it into reverse and swung the car around. Metal crunched. I yelped as my head bounced against the headrest.

“Shit!”

He’d hit a boulder. Or a boulder had hit the SUV. Either way, it was in back of us—not in front—and the back window was still intact. Teeth rattling, I twisted in my seat in time to see a giant oak crack and sway toward the back of the house. It crashed into the roof with a massive boom!

“Go, go, go!” I shouted.

Lon slammed the SUV into gear and tore down the driveway like a bat out of hell. In seconds, we were speeding onto Diamond Trail, away from Armageddon.

“Jesus f*cking Christ,” Lon repeated several times, staring wide-eyed at the road ahead. After sobering up a little, he asked, “Are you okay?”

“Considering? Yes, I think so. What just happened?”

“Hell if I know. Did we set off a ward?”

I knew what he was thinking: the putt-putt golf course last fall. But that was strange Æthyric magick etched in pink light, not earthly white Heka. I would have definitely noticed something like that in Wildeye’s house. The warding magic he’d used in the closet was an oldie-but-goodie spell, nothing all that special. A kindergartner could cast it—at least, I could when I was that age.

“I didn’t see anything. And no warning whatsoever,” I said. “Are there a lot of landslides out here? Could it have been a coincidence?”

“You don’t believe in coincidences.”

“I’m willing to start now. Slow down. I see a car over that next hill. I don’t want it to look like we’re fleeing a crime scene.”

“We are.”

“But we didn’t do that!”

He grumbled and slowed to a speed barely under a reckless-driving violation. The car I’d spotted was now cresting the hill and turned out to be a truck. The truck belonged to a park ranger. Orange warning lights flashed as it sped toward us, sending a fresh flood of panic into my brain. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the ranger had zero interest in us. He passed us and continued on his way. Headed to the landslide, I supposed.

Lon banged the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “All of that for nothing.”

“You didn’t see anything in the files?”

“They were all several years old.” He flashed me a glance. “How did you knock down that door?”

“Adrenaline?”

“You snapped a fork in two, and you ripped the lock off the patio door.”

And nearly knocked the leg off the table in the diner, but I didn’t say this. “You think it might be part of the moon magick, some kind of Superman strength?”

“You aren’t experiencing other demonic abilities, are you?”

“Not that I know of.” Just to ease my mind, I tried to manage the most common of knacks—telekinesis—by willing something to rise into the air, a pen rolling around an open compartment in the console. Nope. Nothing.

“Are my eyes . . . ?” I pulled down the visor mirror. Still had the elliptical pupils. Great.

Lon gestured at me. “What’s that you’re holding?”

I glanced down and was surprised to see my hand balled into a fist. My fingers were stiff, locked around a couple of scraps of paper. I loosened my grip and flattened out the wrinkles against my knee. “It’s from Wildeye’s notebook.” I must have lost the notebook itself in the landslide, but by some miracle, I’d managed to hang on to three pages. The tops were torn off, and the bottom two pages were empty. But I’d snagged the one I’d been looking at when the mountain smote us.

“Looks like coded notes from September,” I explained to Lon. “But I think these could be my initials.”

“He was investigating you back in September?”

Not long after I’d met Lon and before Dare had revealed that he knew my real name. “Guess so, but don’t get your hopes up too high. Only three things are listed. One is a street address with no city. The second thing is just a note that says ‘3AC 1988.’ ”

“Not the year you were born.”

“No. But it’s my fake identity’s birth year. And I have no idea what ‘3AC’ would have to do with that.”

He grunted. “What’s the third thing?”

“Variations on spelling for ‘Naos Ophis.’ ” I spelled it out for him.

“Naos means shrine, or an inner temple.”

“A cella.”

Lon nodded. “That’s Latin, but yes. Naos comes from a Greek word. I don’t know what Ophis is, though.”

I stared at the paper for a couple of moments, but my brain was in no mood for solving riddles. The clock on the dash said it was half past seven. And whether it was the power of suggestion or my adrenaline running out, exhaustion hit me like a brick.

“We’ll research all that later,” Lon said as Golden Peak came into view in the distance. “Right now, we need to rest. If you don’t sleep, you’ll be nodding off when night falls. Or I will. And I need to watch out for you.”