up. I hoped my mom would let her out in the house.
A furry dog head thrust out of the car window and barked. Sindari sat up.
You may want to head back to your realm for a while, I told him, hoping he was listening. I had no power to project my thoughts, so he had to be monitoring me through our link for him to hear me.
It is getting tediously crowded here.
I think the geese and the squirrels feel that way, yes. I touched the charm and whispered the word to dismiss him.
Mom parked, got out of the car, and let the dog out while giving me a peculiar look. Probably a what-are-you-doing-here look. If she’d been off on her volunteer mission for more than a day, she wouldn’t have heard my phone message.
Rocket, a handsome golden retriever of four or five, shot into the trees to investigate the place Sindari had been lounging. I had no idea if Sindari smelled like a real tiger or not. He was warm when I petted him, and he felt real, but maybe to a creature with a better-than-human nose, he smelled like fire and brimstone. But not, thanks to his bath, like cat pee.
“Hey, Mom.” I lifted a hand as she approached, a backpack slung over one shoulder.
She wore faded blue hiking pants, a camp shirt, and nothing but dirt on her feet. Tall and rangy with blonde hair gone to gray and bound back in a braid, she was how I imagined I would look in thirty years—though I had a fondness for shoes. I’d been told my eyes were a more emerald green than was typical and that my facial features were finer, but it was hard for me to see my father’s influence. As I now knew, human genes were dominant, at least to mixed-species children born on Earth, and usually won out. That was good, I supposed. I’d seen the time-travel-to-historical-Earth Star Trek episodes where Kirk had to explain Spock’s ears.
“Val.” She stopped in front of me, and we stared at each other. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
This was the part when normal mothers and daughters hugged, but as Mom had told me long ago, there was no need to hug when a handshake would do. She always said Norwegians weren’t touchy-feely. I’d stopped pointing out that her mother had been the real Norwegian and that we had both grown up in the States.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard my message—” I pointed a thumb toward her open door, “—but I have a problem and was hoping you could help.”
“You don’t need money, do you?”
“No.” Not unless Colonel Willard didn’t make it and the snotty lieutenant talked the army into cancelling my contract… No, even if that happened, I could get work as an independent. I was sure of it. But I liked my gig with the army, and I liked working for Willard. I had to figure out how to heal her. “Just your elven expertise.”
Her eyebrows arched.
Instead of saying more, I tilted my head toward Dimitri, hoping Mom would take a hint and send him off to his van or her shop. He was watching our exchange with a curious expression—or maybe a puzzled one. Maybe his mother hugged him when they saw each other, though he looked like someone who would be easy not to hug.
“Dimitri is a quarter dwarf,” Mom said. “He knows about things.” She waved a hand.
“Dwarf?” I looked him up and down. “Are you sure?”
“Grandpa was a big dwarf, I hear,” Dimitri said.
“Either that or the rest of your family were giants.” That put a strange image in my head, as far as how copulation would go. I pushed it aside and dug out the vial, painstakingly wrapped in papers so it wouldn’t break.
“What happened to your Jeep?” Mom asked.
“A dragon.”
This time, her eyebrows flew upward instead of merely arching.
I took out my phone, flipped to the pictures of the wreck, and handed it to her while I unwrapped the vial.
“A dragon did this? Is this what you’re here about?”
“No. As crazy as it seems, the dragon is the least of my problems this week.” I glanced upward, half-expecting to see him flying over the trees. “This vial may have held a potion that was dumped into my boss’s coffee or juice or something in her house. There’s a sigil on the bottom that appears when it’s heated up. I think it’s elven, and I’m hoping you can identify it.”
She