Golem in My Glovebox (14 page)

Riley smirked, then slipped the paper into my bag. I caught the total on its way past and grimaced. It wasn’t that we were cheap. But Riley wasn’t kidding. Who goes to a skanky bar and spends well into three figures? I was surprised there was any beer left in the place, and the cook had probably gone home for the night since he had to be out of ingredients by now.

After a minute or two, my purse moved again and the check appeared out the top, along with enough cash to cover it.

“Be sure to give our server a healthy tip,” Gris said. “I couldn’t see her, but she sounded quite charming and efficient.”

I took the items sticking out of my purse and placed them on the table. “Thanks.”

“It’s the Board’s pleasure. Oh, and I’ll need a receipt, if you don’t mind.”

I made sure Janis got the healthy tip Gris requested. After all, she didn’t get to go to a hotel with Riley when her shift was over.

That pleasure was all mine.

When my phone rang at five the next morning, I almost didn’t answer. Groaning, I rolled over and glanced at the display.

“It’s Bernice.” I tapped the screen to answer, then lay back with my eyes closed. “Bernice, you know we’re an hour behind you and it’s not light here yet, right?”

“After we catch this psycho, you two can discuss business hours.” Her voice shook, and sadness pattered through the phone line in big fat drops. I sat up, fully awake. “Zoey, they found CeeCee. Her body is less than an hour from where you are now.”

Chapter Nine

I doubted it was a coincidence that the murderer had chosen a place called Massacre State Park. It seemed to fit her warped sense of humor.

What bothered me the most about all this, aside from someone dying, of course, was that it happened near where we were.

“Do you think she knew we were going to Pocatello? Or did she follow us?”

Riley glanced in his rear view mirror, as if checking for someone tailing us. “Who? Kathleen Valentine?”

I nodded. “It can’t be a coincidence. We drove all the way from Texas to talk to Frankie, and here the next murder is practically next door. Doesn’t that weird you out?”

He took a slow, deep breath. “It’s been weirding me out since we got the call from Bernice. I’m also not thrilled that Kam and Darius got sent in the other direction and can’t get back here in time.”

I understood the whole Covenant-breaking, imminent-doom thing Bernice was trying to avoid by getting the O.G.R.E.s up and running, but I wasn’t happy with how she’d handled it. Separating the group investigating the murders and trying to save remaining kidnapped Aegises seemed counterproductive. Most of Bernice’s way of running things didn’t sit well with me. She had a tendency to pull rank and dole out information only when it suited her. I had to wonder how much of the crap we’d all been through would have happened if she’d been a little more forthcoming from the start.

I sat forward in the moving car and rapped my knuckles against the closed glove compartment. After a moment, the door clicked open and Gris blinked at me through a tiny pair of glasses perched on his nose. I tried not to laugh. He was a wooden construct. I was pretty sure the glasses were an affectation. Again, something an unfeeling, soulless creature wouldn’t be likely to adopt.

I wasn’t totally comfortable with him yet, but he was growing on me.

“Yes?” he asked, peering over his horned rims. “What can I do for you, Aegis?”

He was so damn formal with me. “Do you have time to talk?”

He made a show of taking off his glasses and placing them in the compartment in his chest. “For you, I always have time. What would you care to discuss?”

I sat back and readjusted my seatbelt. Whoever invented the damn things sure as hell hadn’t had boobs to deal with. Otherwise he’d have come up with a solution that actually settled between them rather than slide up and choke the wearer.

“How long have you been...self aware?” It seemed like a delicate question. I didn’t want to offend him, but I needed more background. On him as well as Bernice. I reached toward him through my mental filters and probed for any emotions, no matter how small. He didn’t feel offended to me. But then, the tiny emotional light inside him was dim and hard to decipher.

He settled himself on the edge of the open door to the glove compartment, swinging his legs. “Let me see...” He tapped his chin while he thought about it. “It was a gradual thing, you understand. I think it was about ten years ago that I first realized the sounds I sometimes heard around me were voices, and several more months before I understood those sounds were language. About seven years ago, I experienced my first movements. Oddly, it was a twitch in my elbow that started the ball rolling.” He grinned, caught in the memory.

I couldn’t imagine being stuck on a shelf, unable to move or comprehend the people and objects around me. Worse, understanding came to Gris long before the ability to interact with anything. “How awful,” I said. “When did you begin moving around? When did you know you were
you
?”

“When Alphonso Fester stepped down from heading the Board six years ago, Mother was promoted. She’d always lent her golems to do grunt work at the compound, but once she was in charge, she stepped up production. She wanted more help, you see. And more servants to wait on her so she’d look the part.”

That didn’t surprise me. For a place running on two board members when there should have been thirteen, they seemed to have a ridiculous amount of constructs running around waiting on people.

“So, she was in her workshop more often.” I saw where he was going with the story.

“Yes. The more golems she animated, the more residual magic came my way. So, less than a year after she took office, I was fully mobile, thinking for myself and wanting to learn everything I could.”

The dull glow of emotion inside Gris sparked brighter at the memory, then nearly went out with my next question.

“What did Bernice think when she found you?”

“I thought Mother would be happy.” His smile faded and his legs stilled. “I was wrong. At first, she seemed afraid of me. Once she got used to me, she was tolerant at best.” He shook his head, as if to rid himself of unhappy thoughts, then returned to smiling and swinging his feet, though he didn’t show as much enthusiasm at it now. “Anyway. Does that answer your question, Aegis?”

The small light of emotion inside him faded further, retreating. I squelched my anger at Bernice and gathered love and acceptance around me like a cloak. Those were emotions I always found easy to pull together. It was constantly around me these days.

Molding the positive feelings into a tight ball in my head, I pushed them past my filters and toward the little wooden man. I’d held back from accepting him because of my own prejudice against Bernice’s creepy golems. No more. No one should feel so utterly lost and alone, even if he didn’t have a lot of feels of his own in the first place. I imagined the ball of love and acceptance pressing against Gris’s chest and melting through to the storage area inside him. To his heart, if he’d had one.

His dull light flared like a blowtorch, igniting a fuse between the two of us and knocking me against my seat.

“Great balls of fire!” he said, eyes wide. “What was that?”

My hand flew to my mouth. “Oh, my God, Gris. I’m so sorry.” I sent out a tentative tendril to check his emotional health.

What if I broke him?
What if I burned out the flicker of emotion he’d grown on his own?
Worst.
Empath.
Ever.

The dull bulb inside Gris was now a small, cozy campfire. Not the full-blown emotional level of regular folks, but more than it had been before. And it seemed to be steadier, too.

“I feel a bit warm,” Gris said in a dreamy voice. “If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to take a nap.”

“Are you all right?” I’d meant to ask him more questions about Bernice and what she’d been doing over the past few years. That’s where I’d been going with my questions, anyway until I screwed everything up.

“On the contrary. I feel especially good,” he said, rising from his spot then grabbing the edge of the door. “I think I need some time to readjust and rest. Please let me know when we arrive.”

The door shut, and Riley and I were alone in the car.

We were both quiet for a minute. Riley finally broke the silence. “What did you do?”

“I think I broke our golem.”

* * *

We parked where the signs directed us, and hiked the half mile or so to the lake. We passed a middle-aged man with an enormous backpack. Four kids with smaller versions of the adult pack skipped behind him. He nodded at us and kept going.

I frowned. They could have easily been the ones to come across the body if our guys hadn’t found it first.

A set of stairs led down the side of the cliff to the fishing dock. By the time we got to the bottom, my legs wobbled, and I was grateful for the handrail. I mentally shook my fist at Sara for not dragging me to the gym more often.

At the bottom, I heard voices on the other side of a pile of rocks, so we headed in that direction. We found Frankie the Imp and his merry band of imp-ettes waiting.

Well, maybe not merry. And not the whole team, either.

Shelby sat on a rock, watching for movement in the surrounding area. When I spotted her, she already had her eye on us, and gave me a small, awkward smile and wave. Hector and Felicia, the brainy trolls, wandered the area, carefully inspecting crevasses with flashlights, putting small items in plastic bags, and tapping on rocks and trees with sticks.

Frankie stood watching with a dour expression. When he saw us, he strode over, his face screwed up in a scowl. “Ugly business,” he said. “Not our usual fare.”

“Mine either,” I said, frowning. “Where did you find her?”

He pointed toward the water. “Face down in the drink. Craziest thing ever.”

“She drowned?”

“No.” He wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead. “She died of smoke inhalation.”

Riley frowned. “CeeCee was a heatsync. That shouldn’t be possible. Besides, she was in water, not fire.”

I rubbed my arms, as if I had a chill. “Dennis shouldn’t have been able to drown, either. Especially on dry land. Where’s the body now, Frankie?”

“I had Meg and Gar take her back to the office. Once Hector and Felicia are done scouring the area, they’ll do an autopsy. I don’t expect them to find anything, though.”

“Was she...” I stopped and swallowed. I didn’t want to know the answer to my next question. Hell, I didn’t want to be doing this at all. I wanted to go home and plan a lesbian elf/attic monster wedding in my back yard. I wanted to get up in the morning and eat Maurice’s freshly baked muffins, hang out in Andrew’s herb shop with his fennec fox, Milo, and forget this whole disturbing nightmare. Of course, if I did that, more people would die. Including my mother. “Was she posed in an odd manner? Was she wearing anything strange?”

Frankie let out a slow breath. “As a matter of fact, she was dressed in a fancy party dress.”

Riley glanced up at the cliff we’d come down. “A party dress?”

“Yes. Her hair was done up in pigtails and ribbons, and—well, here. I’ll show you.” He pulled up a picture on his phone and passed it over to us.

I shuddered. As he’d told us, she was face down in the water, so that made it a little easier to look at, but not much. Her wet dress spread around her in a mass of pink and white crinoline. The pink ribbon on one pigtail had come undone, and the two strands trailed in a V-shape away from her. A water-bloated paper cone engulfed the top of her head, the words
Happy Birthday
in bright, puffy colors.

Her right hand was adorned in colored plastic jewelry, and it gripped a small blue bottle.

“What’s in the bottle?” Riley asked.

“Bubbles.” Frankie led us to a small rock a few feet away and indicated the bottle of bubbles and a small giftwrapped box sitting next to it. “I kept it here for you to look at. The present was sitting on the shore. Shelby sang at it to check for poison and bombs, but your name is on it, so we didn’t open it.”

Sure enough. A small tag stuck to the package had my name printed in neat writing. I reached for the bubbles first. “Did you check these?”

Frankie nodded. “They just seem to be bubbles.”

I unscrewed the lid and dug around for the wand, soaking my finger in soap. I blew through the hole in the wand, and a regular bubble formed, floated a short distance, then popped. Nothing remarkable happened. I poured the bubble mixture on the ground. It didn’t turn itself into a soap monster and speak to me. It didn’t form words or a map. I emptied the bottle and peered inside.

“Anything?” Riley leaned toward me to see.

“Nothing.” I dropped the wand inside and handed him the bottle and lid. The package sat on its rock, waiting.

I squatted in the dirt, my hands dangling between my legs while I regarded the box. I probably should have been more eager to tear it open. After all, it might hold the answer to the most important question on my mind—where the hell was my mother? Sirens had all sort of cool powers I didn’t know about, apparently, and ours had already cleared the box for giant cartoon bombs or poisonous Joker gas.

But what about my heart? Would the contents inside the gift shatter me into a million pieces? Would this be the movie scene where I took off the lid and found a dead, maggoty raccoon? A photo of myself sleeping last night? My mother’s hand?

I braced myself and reached for the end of the ribbon tied around the box. After a sharp tug, the bow came loose and the ribbon fell away. I took my time with the silver birthday paper, in case the message turned out to be on the wrapping itself, but there didn’t seem to be any writing on the undecorated side.

The plain white box sat in my hands, bare and non-threatening. I shook it, and the contents shifted in the empty spaces.

“Go ahead,” Riley said. He put his hand on my shoulder to lend me strength. “I’m right here with you.”

I nodded and lifted the lid.

Inside, red and silver tissue paper lined the box. I lifted one sheet aside. A white face grinned up at me. “Sonofabitch,” I said, exhaling the breath I’d been holding in case something jumped out. “How’d she know I hate clowns?”