after us. Nothing but the city’s ubiquitous SUVs were on the road behind us. Dare I hope we could make it all the way to Seattle without being pulled over?
“I suppose they saw your license plate,” I murmured.
“Nah. The plumber statue by the mailbox squirted black oil all over it. It’ll bleed off soon enough, but it should have kept them from getting the plate number if they didn’t think to record it earlier.” He grinned at me. “What do you think of my yard art? I admit when I was making it, I wasn’t imagining a scenario quite so interesting. I just thought your mom might appreciate help defending against hoodlums.”
“The hoodlums of Bend?”
“Yeah, they live in the seedy part of downtown.”
“Where is that exactly? Between the yoga studio and the furniture store that sells ten-thousand-dollar couches?”
“No, two blocks south of that. And I think the couches there are twenty thousand dollars. The owner of that store turned her nose up at me when I tried to get them to carry my art.”
“I’ll bet.”
I checked the mirror again, hoping my mom and Rocket would be all right. And hoping I could get to Seattle and find a cure for Willard before the government caught up to me.
13
Twilight was falling by the time we neared Puget Sound, the city lights of Olympia off to the side. It was late enough that the traffic wasn’t too bad. Soon, assuming the police didn’t catch up to us in this last stretch, we would reach Seattle. I wished I had a better idea of where to go. I hoped Nin had more local magical contacts than I did and that she could point me to an alchemist—or someone who knew all the alchemists in the city.
Since Dimitri was still driving—I’d offered to take over, but he said he didn’t let strange women hold his steering wheel—I pulled out my phone. I’d tried calling Willard earlier but had been shunted off to voice mail. This time, I texted her, asking if she’d heard anything about dark elves in Seattle.
After that, I called Mom’s house again. Even though I doubted the government would harass her because of my actions, I couldn’t help but worry. She was the kind of person who could wander off into the woods in one state and reappear three months later in another state, without having suffered any adversity along the way, but she was also law-abiding enough to hang out and wait to be questioned. And she would have felt obligated to watch Maggie. A burden I had imposed upon her. I grimaced.
All I got was the answering machine.
Shortly after I left another message, the phone rang. It was Willard’s office number, not Mom’s.
I made the mistake of answering before I realized it was unlikely Willard was in the office. “Hello?”
“Thorvald, where are you?” That sounded like Lieutenant Snotty. “Did you resist arrest? Your ass is dead meat. If you don’t get back here and turn yourself in by dawn, I’ll have—”
I made a hissing sputtering sound, my best imitation of static. “Hello? Sorry, I’m—hiss—having trouble hearing you. Driving through—hiss—tunnel. Is this—hiss—pizza guy? Just leave it at the door. Long tunnel, about to lose you.” I hung up.
Dimitri glanced over at me.
“Wrong number,” I told him.
“Darn, I was hoping for pizza.”
“They don’t chase you down to deliver it.”
“No? I hear delivery drones are coming. They ought to be able to find you on the freeway.” He braked in response to three lanes of brake lights ahead of us. We’d hit Tacoma. So much for the light traffic. “Especially when traffic is slow.”
I glanced at the phone. No response to my text yet.
“Where in Seattle am I going?” Dimitri asked.
“Occidental Square.”
“Oh, Trinity is near there. They have a dress code though. And might sneer at Bessy.”
“Bessy?”
“Bessy.” He waved a hand toward the interior of the yellow-carpeted van, the back seats replaced with a bed and boxes of clothing and personal items. The galaxy-colored curtains on the side windows were pulled, and an alien-head bobble doll on a crate wobbled as we started and stopped in the traffic. “Bessy would fit in more on Capitol Hill.”
I doubted Bessy fit in anywhere. “I just need a few minutes to talk to a friend. She’s got a food truck she usually parks there.”
“She? That’s a sketchy neighborhood at night, isn’t it?”
“She sells a lot of her merchandise to the sketchy clientele.”
“And they refrain from mugging her afterward?”
“She can take care of herself. Trust me.”
Dimitri