“Don’t you need a posthole digger?” I asked.
“No, I think I can manage without one,” Rafe responded.
We returned to the cash register by the door and checked out. Rafe paid with a credit card and then we returned to the pickup.
On the way back to the cabin, Joe pulled into a liquor store parking lot. Rafe ran in and came out a few minutes later with a case of beer and a bottle of bourbon. He set his purchases with the other material in the pickup bed.
When he slid in next to me, I caught his eye, and he said, “We can’t drink up all of Joe’s beer without replacing it.”
I grinned and placed a hand on Rafe’s knee as Joe started the pickup moving again.
We were back at the cabin before noon.
“Beast,” Rafe called. “You and Maia morph. We have some flying to do.”
I heard bells chiming from somewhere nearby. I listened, enjoying the fine tune and was surprised when I counted more than thirty notes. Looking at Joe, I found him smiling.
“Thirty-two, if you were wondering. It’s on the hour. That’s the Shrine of the Sun.”
“He means the Will Rogers Shrine,” Rafe corrected.
“Same thing,” Joe said. “Shame about ol’ Will. He was a good man.”
“You knew him too?” I asked.
The bells echo had barely died away when music began playing.
“Now what? That sounds like Anchor’s Away,” I said.
“It’s Veterans Day today,” Joe said. “They play seasonal music three times a day.”
“Don’t they have The Caisson Song? Not that there’s anything wrong with Anchors Aweigh, but…”
Joe laughed. “I think that one played yesterday or maybe the day before. They only play three times a day and they don’t repeat.”
Both familiars were resting in the shade of a tall pine, but at Rafe’s words, they shifted forms and walked over. We mounted up, and Rafe told Joe we’d be back in a few hours. I carried the three brass rods, while Rafe carried the three 4x4s and the roll of copper.
Maia and Beast each activated their glamours to appear as nothing more than hawks and then leapt into the air. I thought I was going to lose one of the rods, but then I triggered my shield tat and focused it tightly around the rods. That made them much easier to control.
We soared upwards, passing the concrete structure of the Shrine. It had to be at least one hundred feet tall and looked like a medieval castle. We rose steadily along the heavily treed mountainside, climbing higher and higher until we reached the top of the massive granite mountain.
Television and radio towers sprouted from between the trees, rising high above the city. I noticed that the air was thinner and wondered what the altitude was. The city was above six thousand feet, and Joe’s cabin had to be nearly eight thousand. I guessed that put us somewhere between nine and ten thousand feet at the top.
Rafe directed Beast toward a clear rock west of the towers and had him land. Maia set us down beside Beast a second later. She knelt to make it easier for me to dismount.
The top of the mountain was cooler, and a strong breeze tried to blow my hair, but the little dab of product I’d applied held it still. Rafe’s hair, while shorter than mine, still showed the effects of the wind. He turned toward me, and his hair flew forward into his face, momentarily hiding his expression.
I took one of the rods, leaving the other two on the ground, and followed Rafe to the massive granite boulder that stuck up above the trees.
“Where are you going to put it?” I asked.
Rafe pointed toward the top of the boulder. He looped one arm around my waist and pulled me tight against him. I wrapped an arm around his waist and resisted smiling. A moment later, we floated upwards the forty feet or so to the top. He set us down gently on the top and slowly released his hold on me. I could no longer resist smiling, and I made sure he caught it. He hadn’t needed to hold onto me to levitate us both. He had wanted to hold me. I found that…interesting.
Rafe cleared his throat noisily and set down the sheet of copper and the single 4x4 that had floated up with us. While he took out his pocket grimoire, I marveled at the view from the rock. Pikes Peak rose considerably higher than we were and was just a dozen or so miles to the northwest. Snow covered a good share of its barren area above the tree line. To the south, I could see the snowcapped peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that we’d flown near on the way from Raton, New Mexico. More mountains I didn't know the names to pointed toward the sky everywhere I looked to the west and north. Only eastward did the land appear flat and nearly featureless. I wondered if I was looking at Kansas or if it was too far to see. I decided I needed to Google the local geography during our future travels.
Rafe took my hand and snapped me out of my thoughts. He was kneeling, and his grimoire was open in front of him. “Mesh with me.”
I knelt beside him, and in a few seconds, we meshed auras, heartbeats, emotions, and thoughts.
“Follow me on these spells,” he said aloud.
Rafe triggered a tattoo. I could feel it heat up on his left bicep as the spell released energy from Rafe’s stores. Rafe’s right hand began to glow with power. He lowered his hand toward the boulder and extended his index finger. A soft glow emanated from his fingertip and where the glow touched, the rock vaporized. Moving slowly, Rafe traced a square in the surface of the boulder. The cloud of vaporizing rock was swept away on the wind.
A minute after he’d started Rafe canceled the spell. There was now a square hole in
