Page 66 of Cheater Slicks

“That doesn’t sound good, Francita.” Pascal rubbed his jaw. “Kierce could be sitting on something big.”

“Dis Pater shakes his brain like an Etch A Sketch.” I defended him, knowing how much he hated the gaps in his long, long life. “He isn’t concealing what he knows on purpose.”

“I’m not blaming him.” Josie held up her hands in a peacekeeping gesture. “I get it. Really. I do.” She took one step closer to me. “But you’re my sister, and it’s my job to protect you. Even from him.”

As much as I wanted to argue the point, I would have done the same thing for her.

“How can we help?” Pascal gentled his tone. “What do you have in mind?”

“I saw a tall ship in the water outside Dis Pater’s window. I was hoping you guys could help me check out the companies running cruises on them out of Massachusetts. There’s nothing but open water from that angle, so maybe we could track the routes? Narrow down the possible areas?”

This task was finding a needle in a haystack, and we all knew it, but I had to try something.

As the scope of the task sank in, Pascal winced at the work ahead of them. “Can’t you ask Kierce?”

“I’m not sure he could tell me,” I admitted. “I’m more worried if he can, if he does, that Dis Pater has already given him instructions to report it back to him. Since I can slip past his wards, he could ditch that location and go somewhere else. Then I would never figure out where he’s keeping the bone. And if that happens, I can’t destroy the relic.”

“Wait.” Josie snapped her fingers. “You said he’s got a cat?”

“Yes.”

“Did it have a collar?”

“Yes?”

“With an ID tag?”

“Maybe?”

“Could it have had, say, its home address etched on its ID tag?”

“Crap.” The urge to smack my forehead itched in my palm. “I didn’t think about that. I’ll check.”

The vet angle had crossed my mind, but we hadn’t had pets growing up, so that was as far as I got.

“Can you go back so soon?” Pascal shared a concerned glance with Josie. “It’s not dangerous?”

Danger was a matter of perspective these days.

“You’re not taking grave-dirt uppers to get over the hump,” Josie warned me. “If that’s what you’re thinking, you can forget about it.”

Good grief. She made it sound like I walked around with pockets full of dirt to snort when her back was turned.

“I’ve seen Kierce do the popping thing,” Pascal said, sitting next to me, “but he can’t take anything with him or bring anything back, right?”

“Nothing else alive.” I thought about Badb visiting Abaddon with him, but she was no ordinary crow. “I think that’s how it works.”

The only thing I knew for certain was teleportation was possible for me. I didn’t know how I had done it, or if I could do it again, but I had transported myself from the Alcheyvaha burial ground to the commune in the blink of an eye. No time like the present to discover if it was a fluke or a new skill I had unlocked.

Speaking of flukes, I didn’t want to vanish myself into the belly of a whale if I got it wrong on my first try, but I vaguely recalled the sisters at St. Mary’s telling us a bedtime story about a guy named Jonah who…

No.

Wait.

He was in there in the first place for disobeying his elders, and now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure the sisters also mentioned the whale swallowing a shark to eat him for his sins, which the whale then spat out.

Maybe?

---