24. Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Four

S ?ren didn’t talk to me at all after that, even though I kept asking if he was all right. It had to have been a terrifying thing for him, to be swallowed up by a force so much greater than he himself was. Like Jonah and the whale, only if the whale was just as smart as Jonah and they both knew it. Hell, I’d have been scared under the circumstances. I’d been scared just watching it.

Bobby was kind of a bastard, but I took his meaning. S?ren wasn’t a big fish in America. I needed to find him somewhere to put down roots—literally and figuratively—that wouldn’t chew him up and spit him out. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t blame S?ren for not wanting to stick with me, because everyone needed a home. Just because I didn’t know exactly where mine was didn’t mean S?ren had to suffer along with me. Fortunately, I knew someone in the oil business who I could talk to about that.

But first I had to take care of S?ren, who was curled up in the passenger seat, still clutching a fistful of Slim Jims but not eating them. He was filthy, but he hadn’t been amenable to me touching him after the initial brush down. Which, yeah, I could understand him wanting some serious autonomy right now.

I pulled up outside of a La Quinta hotel and said, “We’ll get a room, and you can get cleaned up.”

“No.”

Well, fuck. Of course his first word in an hour would be No. “Why not?”

“I’m not getting out of the car.”

“You can’t just stay in the car like this, S?ren.”

Purple eyes glared at me. “And you can’t tell me what to do.”

It was like having a toddler as my copilot. “Explain this to me, okay? Why don’t you want to get out of the car? I’m not trying to make this hard for you. I genuinely want to know.”

“Because I don’t want to step on the ground.”

So this was sort of like the camping issue. “Why not?”

“Because this ground is aggressive now. It’s reaching for me, disrupting my energy. I hate this place.”

“What do you mean, reaching for you?”

“I mean that it’s reaching for me!” he hissed. “How can you not feel it?” Suddenly he reached over to me and grasped my face in his hands. “I will show you.”

“Wait—” Reading S?ren when he was like this didn’t work the same way. I didn’t see the future in his eyes, but apparently if he wanted me to, I could get a really good grasp on the present. The sensation started as an itch at the base of my spine and then began a slow crawl up and down my body, like a wave of pinpricks stabbing my flesh. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it was definitely uncomfortable. “What the hell is that?”

“Magnetism.”

“Magne—how?”

“This land is rich in lodestone. It can move and direct it, and it is following us with it and disrupting this body’s equilibrium. The lodestone pulls on the very particles in this blood. It’s trying to tug me back to it, and I hate it. I want us to leave.”

And now I could see why, but I was starving, he was filthy, and we were running low on gas. “We need a room, S?ren. We don’t have to stay the night” —although I was going to push for that if at all possible— “but we need to regroup. Look, the floor in there will be concrete and tile, and that will help to muffle things, right?”

“Barely,” he said, letting go of my face and crossing his arms. “But yes.”

“Then we’ll get cleaned up, I’ll get something to eat, we’ll figure out our next move, and things will be good. Okay?”

“Things haven’t been very good so far.” He eyed me dubiously. “What makes you think they’re about to change?”

“I’m going to talk to a guy who owes me a favor. I think he can find you the land you need.”

That perked S?ren up immediately. “Empty land?”

“Probably.”

“Will it have an aquifer?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“I will need one, in order to replenish my lake.”

I didn’t even want to consider the logistical difficulties of shipping a goddamn lake across country, but hey, if Egilsson could do it… “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“And some granite outcroppings would be nice.”

“Okay.”

“And a small volcano, if possible.”

“Look, this isn’t Hawaii,” I said, because there was a limit to the things I was willing to let S?ren have access to, and a freaking volcano was at the top of that list. Right above fault lines. “The continental United States doesn’t have very many active volcanoes, and wouldn’t those have their own elementals guarding them?”

“Possibly,” S?ren allowed.

“There you go. I’ll see what I can do, okay? Let’s go get a room first.”

Getting a room involved me practically carrying S?ren into the hotel, because he was adamant about not stepping foot on the ground. The sidewalk was a compromise, but he basically ran inside once he was out of the car. I followed with my bag, got us a room on the second floor—the more distance the better—and got S?ren situated before taking my phone back downstairs and outside. I didn’t want him to listen in while I was talking to Roger, in case things ended up being a lot more hopeless than I was holding out for. Thank god for permanent ink and lazy bathing habits.

The sun was sinking toward the horizon now, and the sky looked almost like a parody of a sunset, so orange and pink and violet and gold it could hardly be real. It was gorgeous, the sort of thing that could steal a person’s heart. I could see why someone would choose to live out here, in this town of less than three thousand people, if they had that kind of view every evening. Didn’t mean I’d ever want to do that, but I could understand it.

I dialed Roger’s number, feeling a little nervous. It was one thing to tell a guy that you owed them right after they’d saved your life—it was quite another for them to call in the favor. And I was asking for a big fucking favor.

He answered on the third ring. “This Cillian?” His Texas twang was oddly relaxing.

“Yeah, Roger, it’s me.”

“Goddamn, son, finally! I’d about thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth!”

No, that would be S?ren . “It’s been a busy time. How are you?”

“Not as good as I’d be with you here. The cards just ain’t fallin’ my way tonight.”

“You’re in Vegas?” That was good and bad news. Good because that meant he was relatively close, all things considered; bad because there was no way in hell I was going to Las Vegas.

“Yep. I reckon you’d clean up in a town like this.”

“That’s the whole reason I can’t go there.”

Roger Vandermoor wasn’t a multimillionaire businessman for nothing. He was quiet for a moment before saying, “Got yourself blacklisted, huh?”

“Among other things.” Apart from not being welcome in any casino on the Strip, I was also wanted by the overtly criminal side of Vegas as well. And the magical community. All of Nevada was basically a no-go zone for me if I wanted to be safe.

“And they’ll break your kneecaps if they catch you in their town again. I understand. Well, what can I do for ya, Cillian?”

“Okay.” I took a deep breath, trying to marshal my thoughts. “I need a piece of land.”

“The wife and I own over a million acres, so I reckon there’s plenty of pieces in that. What kind of land specifically?”

A million acres? I had underestimated Roger’s net worth. “Something that was used for oil or gas development and then tapped out, fairly recently. Something that’s not too remote—it has to have road access, but not be close to many people either. Something with access to water, if you could manage it. The plot doesn’t have to be big” —after all, S?ren’s land fit within that warehouse, and while it was big, it wasn’t football field sized— “but it does have to have been used up, so to speak.”

“Huh.” I could hear him tapping his phone, looking something up. “I’m sure I could wrangle something like that. You need a place to build a house or something?”

“More like I need a place to transplant some property. It’s complicated.”

“I figure everything with you gets pretty complicated. Hmm.” He tapped some more. “Let me see what I’ve got and get back to you on it. This time sensitive?”

“Pretty time sensitive, yeah.”

“Any places you’re not willing to consider?” I heard ice clink in a glass as he took a sip of his drink.

“Nothing in Illinois.” Because even if, by some miracle, we came out ahead at the end of this, I didn’t want to tempt Fate by settling S?ren in Illinois.

“Not to worry. Not much oil development in Illinois…” I let Roger mutter some more, pinching the spot right between my eyes where a headache was rapidly developing. It was probably dehydration; I hadn’t had much to drink today along with my unintentional fasting, but the pain was building so rapidly that it was more like…more like…

Oh, fuck.

Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—I got premonitions. It was different from seeing someone’s fate, or playing out what was going to happen in the future through someone else’s eyes. A premonition was the sudden, intense knowledge that I needed to be looking at someone; Fate’s way of throwing me a bone, so to speak. And the only person around right now was Roger. Which meant—

“Can you do me another favor?”

“What d’you need, son?”

“I need to see your eyes. Can we go live?”

Roger chuckled. “You gonna change my luck, Cillian?”

“I think you might be the one to change mine,” I said. “Please.” I wasn’t actually sure if this would work over a phone, but I had to try.

There was some shuffling, and then Roger’s face came up on my screen. He was wearing the same white hat as before and had a glass of what was probably whiskey in one hand. He didn’t look drunk, though, mostly amused.

“Here I am,” he said expansively. “You need me to do anything else?”

“Just hold the phone a little closer to your eyes, and be still for a bit.” He obliged, and I relaxed my mind as best I could, stared into his eyes, and let myself dig down, a little deeper, a little harder. It wasn’t easy—the pixilation blurred some things—but after a few seconds, I found what I was fearing.

“Oh, shit .”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I…” How had they found us again? How had I given us away? Santa Rosa was a fucking hole in the road, there was nothing here to distinguish it—how had they found us? And we weren’t going anywhere, obviously. We could run into the desert, but the land was angry at us, and the farther we got from civilization, the more of a problem S?ren might have. Besides, that wasn’t what the future showed anyway. It was blurry, but it was all I had to go on.

“Roger, I need to ask you another favor. A big one, right now. And I need you to just go with it, okay? Because it’s gonna happen, but the sooner you get started on it, the better the odds are. And I swear to god if I survive what’s coming, I will pick the winning horse at the next Kentucky Derby for you.”

Roger blinked once and then shrugged and threw back the rest of his drink. “Eh, Vegas was getting boring anyway. What can I do for you, Cillian?”

I told him. He laughed and laughed.

It was nice that one of us was confident.