Her face grew hard and more than a little scary. “Tracy Gordon baztakh unk kirlesk.” She spat into the gravel.
I didn’t know what that all meant, but it was simple enough to guess the sentiment, and I certainly couldn’t blame her for it. He’d shot her twice, point blank, and killed her. Fortunately, because it happened on Earth, she made it through to the demon realm and recovered. Once through the void was usually successful. Twice, not so much.
I nodded toward the Camry. “Whose car is that?”
She followed my gaze, then looked back to me and beamed. “Yours!”
I gave her a blank look. “How can it be mine?”
Eilahn ducked through the front door and returned before I had time to process she’d gone. She dangled a set of keys in front of me, displayed the brass fob with Kara’s Kar neatly engraved in script on it. “Because this proclaims that these keys match your vehicle, I have tested them in the ignition, and they fit. Therefore, that,” she said with a nod toward the car, “is your vehicle by the process of a successful trial.”
Kara’s Kar? I rolled my eyes. My house elves were out of control, but right now I wasn’t about to complain. I took the keys from her and smiled. “Well, let’s try it out!”
A note on the dash in Zack’s neat handwriting held clear, concise instructions for operating the automatic gate. Yet another point for the elves.
The house Tracy Gordon had used for summonings and other arcane practices was on the far side of Beaulac, but since it was so early in the morning, and there was little traffic, I went ahead and cut straight through town.
A garbage truck made noisy work of dumpster-emptying behind Beaulac Junior High, while across the street a man in nothing but shorts and sleep-tousled hair ignored his dog’s yappy barking at the din. A few determined souls headed into Magnolia Fitness Center, clutching towels and water bottles. I was probably still a member there, I realized, since my dues were on auto-payment.
“Back when I was a street cop, this was right about the time I’d be heading to the station for shift change,” I told Eilahn. “Whether I was coming on or going off duty, I always liked seeing the world wake up.”
She slanted a disbelieving glance my way. “Liked? You who pulls your pillow over your head if any dares disturb you before mid-morning?” She let out a low snort. “I doubt you woke to your alarm and thought, ‘Oh, what a pleasure it will be to see the world wake up!’ You would have liked to have been in your bed.”
“Okay, so maybe ‘liked’ is a relative term,” I said with a laugh. “But since I had to be up anyway to keep my job, I figured I might as well dig for a silver lining.”
“Ah, yes,” she replied, “because you are always a model of good cheer before you have had your coffee.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked with mock horror. “Who the hell said anything about going to work without coffee? Do you know how many people I’d have shot even before roll call?”
Eilahn gave a musical laugh, then nodded toward Grounds For Arrest, the coffee shop across the street from the PD. “I wonder how he has remained in business with you gone.”
“Now that’s a mystery.”
My mood remained light as we continued on through town. We passed by the Garden Street Industrial Park, and I stuck my tongue out at it since it was from there that I’d finally been summoned to the demon realm. The industrial park had been developed a couple of decades ago with grandiose plans of bringing in high-tech industry. Too grandiose for Beaulac, it turned out. A gate in the chain link fence was closed and locked, and a large sign proclaimed it to be the future home of an “exciting new development in health care” by RiseHigh LLC.
I doubted the new development would be as exciting as promised, but at least something worthwhile would come of the place.
We made it to the house without any issues and, thanks to the early hour, we managed to avoid problems with nosy neighbors. To my relief and dismay, the wards on Tracy’s house remained intact. Good because it meant the contents probably hadn’t been vandalized, and bad because we’d have to get through some serious protections.
It took close to half an hour of us working together to unwind and temporarily neutralize protections, but finally Eilahn and I squeezed through and into the back of the house without causing an explosion or major blood spillage.
“You will acquire his library?” she asked as we gazed at the books and scrolls and papers.
“Yes. I’m claiming it under Article Five, subsection three, paragraph A of the Multidimensional and Interplanar My Goddamn Property Now statute, namely the section titled Right to Have All The Shit of The Guy Who Shot You and Tried to Fuck Me Up.” I nodded firmly. “This is all mine now.”
Her mouth twitched. “I do not argue your right to ownership,” she said. “But I wonder how you will acquire it.” She arched an eyebrow at me. “You recall our difficulty entering this dwelling? It will be similar on the egress.”
My mood took a nose dive. “Well, shit.” Double shit. Because of the complexity of the protections, we hadn’t dismantled most of them, simply eased by. “Mzatal would be able to rip through them like a wet dog through tissue paper, right?”
“The analogy, while odd, seems apt.”
“Fine,” I said, scowling at being thwarted, even if only temporarily. “Then for now, we’ll gather up as much as we can carry of stuff that looks personal to Tracy. Journals, notes, letters, whatever. That man was up to some weird-ass shit, and I don’t think he came up with it on his own.”
“Nor do I,” she replied, expression grave. “Then let us begin.”
Together, we moved toward the bookcases.
Chapter 6