Banishing the Dark (Arcadia Bell #4)(56)

“Somewhere over there.” I gestured toward the downed fence. “Payne took my phone. Do you have yours?”

“I’ll tell you if you get off me.”

“Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed, as I rocked away from him and teetered on one knee.

“Don’t be. I like you on top. And for the record, it wasn’t an angry orgasm.” The corners of his mouth quirked up in a dirty little smile that made me fall backward onto my ass. Which hurt. In a weird way. It took me a second to realize I was sitting on my tail.

He lifted a brow.

“I . . . better shift back down,” I said.

His face sobered. “I think that’s a wise idea.”

My sight and hearing returned to normal when I concentrated and pushed away the Moonchild body. Meanwhile, Lon found that he did, indeed, have his phone. “A million and one texts from Jupe,” he murmured. “And it’s almost midnight? Jesus f*cking Christ. We lost hours.”

“Half a day,” I confirmed, looking around the pool. I searched the dark water for Payne’s body and couldn’t find it. That gave me the creeps. I didn’t want to dream about his bloated corpse popping out of the viper pit.

Lon grunted behind me. He was having trouble pushing himself up to stand. I helped him to his feet and encouraged him to lean on me.

“Maybe we should find a hospital,” I said.

“I’m fine,” he said in a weary voice. “Just a little woozy. Need to rest.”

Which probably meant he was about to die again but was too stubborn to admit it. While helping him keep his balance as we skirted the wretched pool, I spotted Payne’s abandoned coat and shirt on a nearby patio table. My phone was there, too. And Lon’s wallet. I grabbed both, then remembered something and peeked inside Payne’s jacket pocket. Jackpot. The gilded frame with the parchment fragment was still there. I snagged it.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said, eager to get to a safe place where Lon could rest and I could do a little old-fashioned magick. “I’ll drive.”

* * *

It only took a few minutes to get him into the SUV, and a couple more for me to change into an extra pair of not-ripped jeans. And while we argued the pros and cons of making an anonymous report to the police about Payne—from a pay phone, we decided—I drove us to the nearest decent-looking hotel in Twentynine Palms. It was somewhere between acceptable and shady, but on the plus side, it was clean and quiet, with an all-night diner across the parking lot.

“You need to sleep inside the ward,” Lon mumbled after I’d checked in.

“What?”

“The canvas tarp. You can’t fall asleep outside it. Not after what you did tonight. How long were you transmutated?”

“A while.”

“If your mother noticed, she’ll know you aren’t in a coma anymore and might try to tap into you when you’re asleep. It’s a wonder she didn’t while you were hypnotized.”

Yes, I supposed he had a point. And he sounded frustrated with me that I’d put myself in this situation, but I couldn’t fathom why. I wanted to say, “Hello, I saved your life, dumbass,” but I didn’t. We both knew it was the only choice. And the tarp might be an inconvenience, but if it kept my mom out of my head, I had nothing to complain about.

After helping Lon into the room and calling to check in with Jupe, I soon discovered that being passed out for several hours under Payne’s hypnotic knack didn’t count as actual rest. We both felt as if we’d been awake for two days straight. I grabbed a first-aid kit from the SUV and cleaned up Lon’s snakebite, which was definitely better, thank God. I also fetched us something to eat from the diner. When I got back to the room, Jupe called.

He reported that Priya had noticed my transmutation in the Æthyr. Big-time. The Hermeneus spirit had unfortunately lost track of my mother, so he didn’t know if she’d also noticed. But I guessed it had panicked him so much that he’d immediately appeared to Jupe and told him. Jupe had been freaking out that he couldn’t get in touch with us. Poor kid sounded frazzled, and this made me miss him. And made me wish something fierce that we were back home.

Back at Lon’s home, I mean. Not mine. I got that weird rush of déjà vu again and continued to feel unmoored, even while I gathered some random supplies from the motel room and began assembling a servitor.

Servitors are Heka boomerangs, roving balls of focused magical energy that I can shoot out into the world. They’re able to perform small, mindless tasks: remote viewing and spying, information gathering. And in this case, I hoped it could track down a single sheet of paper.

I needed a physical vessel to anchor the Heka. Back at home, I kept a supply of crudely sculpted clay dolls for this purpose. Since I had no clay dolls at my disposal, I used Lon’s pocketknife to carve a small bar of hotel soap.

“You sure that’s going to work?” he asked.

“We’ll find out.”

While he ate, I broke open Payne’s gilded frame and removed the parchment fragment.

If my mother had stolen the parchment this fragment belonged to, I was hoping a servitor could find it. No way in hell she would have gotten rid of something that valuable, especially if she used it to rework the Moonchild spell. I hoped that finding it would finally give me some solid insight into the Moonchild spell.