The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(60)

“You never told me who you are,” I said. “Who are you?”

“You know, Alfred. You have always known.”

A radiant light shone around her face.

“Who am I, Alfred son of Lancelot?”

She smiled and the light around her face began to sear her flesh, burning it away until her skull gleamed white in front of me, wearing the leering, knowing smile of all skulls. Her voice thundered inside my head.

“I AM THE DRAGON AND MY NAME IS SOFIA!”

I woke up. The room was silent except for the humming of the air unit beneath the window. I looked toward the door. Ashley was still sitting there. In the bluish half-light eking through the window, she looked as if she too was part of a dream. I watched her for a couple of minutes, glad and not glad at the same time that she had found me.

If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.

I slipped out of bed and padded to the table in my sock feet. Mom always said you should never go barefoot in a hotel room because carpet was a breeding ground for all kinds of nasty germs and contagious diseases. Mom had a thing about stuff like that. Every week she went through about twelve cans of Lysol.

Ashley watched me slide into the empty chair across from her. I thought she looked tired, especially around the eyes.

“Let me take the watch,” I said. “I can’t sleep.”

“Why can’t you sleep?”

“Bad dreams.”

The black box sat on the table between us. I touched it. She watched me touch it. Her eyes flicked from my hand on the box to my face then back to the box again. She didn’t say anything. Box. My face. Box.

“This huge flat-faced dude tried very hard to kill me today,” I told her. “Big. Six five, six six maybe, at least three hundred pounds, with a dagger about the size of my forearm. Came right at me.”

“What happened?” she whispered.

“I took him out.” I drew in a deep breath. “I killed him.”

She ran her hand through her golden hair.

“I’d rather have a hundred Flat-Faces coming at me than this,” I said, stroking the edge of the box. “Nueve said it was no bigger than a pencil lead. It’s the little things that kill us faster—sometimes better. Like germs. Or cancer cells. The spot on my mom’s temple was the size of a pea when she found it, and six months later she was dead. It’s those things you can’t see. Like that old story of the blind men and the elephant.”

“I don’t know that story,” she said. Her eyes shone in the ambient light coming from the parking lot.

“These guys blind from birth are taken to this elephant and each one touches a different part. One guy feels the trunk, another the tail, another a leg and so on, and someone asks them, ‘What is an elephant?’ The one who felt the trunk says an elephant is like a plow; the one who felt the tusk said it was like a tree; the one who felt the leg said it was like column to a temple. All of them got it wrong because they couldn’t see it whole, but that didn’t change what it was. It was still an elephant.”

“Okay . . .” she said. She was waiting for the punch line.

“See, sometimes it’s right there in front of you, only you’re too close to see it.”

I pressed the blue button. The red light came on. She jerked forward, her free hand instinctively going for the box. I pulled it away and cradled it in my lap.

“Alfred, what are you doing?”

“Seeing if what I felt was a tree or an elephant.”

If you’re going to give someone the slip, Alfred, you should take the tracking device with you.

“At Camp Echo I asked you about the range of the tracking device,” I said. “You said maybe a mile or two.”

“It’s a GPS, Alfred,” she said slowly, carefully. “I didn’t know that until I tested it in Knoxville. I really didn’t know the range when you asked me.”

“GPS, gotcha.” I ran my fingertip over the glowing red button. “So it doesn’t matter how far I run, Nueve and company will always know where to find me.”

She swallowed. “I guess so.”

“You guess so? Don’t you know so?”

“Alfred, you’re making me very nervous. Why don’t you put that down before you do something you shouldn’t.”

“I probably should,” I agreed. “I’m not sure what happened next, whether the blind men were told what they really felt and if they got mad because they had it all wrong. Maybe it’s better for everybody involved to call an elephant a tree and leave it at that.”

“Give me the box, Alfred.” She was leaning over the table, her left hand extended toward me, her right gripping the butt of the semiautomatic.

I’m in love with someone I shouldn’t be in love with. It’s wrong and I know it’s wrong and still I can’t help myself.

“Nueve let me run off into the woods even though he had no way to find me. I had the only box on the mountain. Then he let me fly off the mountain with both boxes, free to go wherever I wanted and he’d have no way to track me, at least until he could get another box and that would take time, time he really couldn’t afford because anything could happen, right? There’d be a huge gap where he wouldn’t know where I was and he’d have no way of protecting the Company’s investment. That’s what I am—the investment—and that’s his job: protecting it. So why did he let me go?”