Rafe came out of our room, still zipping up his jacket. He had our saddlebags over his shoulders.
“We let Beast and Maia go for the night. What are we going to do for transportation?” I slung the crossbow over my shoulder in time to catch my saddlebags when he tossed them to me.
“I’ll try my whistle. Beast has good hearing and should be close enough to hear it.”
“And if he isn’t?” Joe asked. “You can borrow my truck.”
“Not necessary, old friend. I have a backup way of communicating an urgent need,” Rafe said.
“You’ve got some kind of psychic link?” I wondered.
Rafe shook his head. “I wish. No, this is more like sending up a flare.”
“Oh, okay.”
Rafe walked to Joe and put his hands on the older man’s shoulders. “Joe, we’ll try to come back before things get ugly. If we don’t, well it was good to see you again old friend.”
“Likewise, you are always welcome, especially when you have a beautiful young lady with you.” Joe glanced my way and winked.
I would have smiled, but my thoughts were on my Aunts.
“Don’t wait up, Joe,” Rafe said. He crossed to the front door and opened it.
Joe and I followed closely. Rafe hesitated on the porch, looked around in the sky, probably for our familiars. He must have had his senses tat active and could have spotted them if they were in line of sight.
After a moment of looking, he pulled the lanyard from beneath his shirt, put the whistle in his mouth, and blew hard. I didn’t hear a thing, but Joe winced.
“Never did like that dog whistle of yours, Wanderer. Maybe you should get Beast a cellphone.”
“Yeah, because that would be more dependable,” Rafe responded sarcastically.
We waited a full minute while Rafe continued to scan the heavens for our mounts. Finally, he must have decided they were out of range.
“Oh, well, plan B it is,” Rafe said.
He started unraveling the hemp cord from around his left wrist as he walked down the steps. In the center of the short driveway, behind Joe’s old pickup, Rafe loaded the sling with a metal ball and set the sling to spinning vertically at his right side. It began to whistle, as he held onto it longer than usual. He released it, and it soared straight up into the night sky.
Rafe raised his left hand and formed a Cub Scout salute. Even without having my senses augmented by his enhancement spell, I could feel the energy flowing toward the ball from all around us. Rafe raised his right hand, and I felt the breeze, which had been slightly from the east, begin to pick up speed.
I watched his metal ball as it soared higher and higher. It had already begun to glow from the energies he was directing toward it. It appeared to be a small meteor that flew upwards in reverse of logic. Then even its glow was lost against the background of stars.
The tattoo on Rafe’s upraised left hand went dark. He made a fist, and another tattoo began to glow on his left hand. I recognized this one, too, and cast my gaze upwards again in time to see an enormous bolt of lightning flashing across the sky toward where he had flung his little metal ball.
Suddenly, the sky lit up with an incredible blast of light. My unaugmented eyes were blind for several seconds, and when I could see again, I turned to Rafe.
“Wow! I haven’t seen you do that before,” I said.
“It’s not much use except for attracting attention. There is an explosion, but it's mostly a shockwave, full of light and sound and not much else.”
“Sound?” I asked.
The night was sundered by a thunderclap of biblical proportions, and I involuntarily flinched at the deafening boom. When I looked back up at Rafe, he was grinning that stupid grin he always got when he was showing off.
“Yeah, the impact was a couple of miles up so…”
“Yeah, I know about five seconds per mile,” I finished for him.
He chuckled. “If that doesn’t get Beast’s attention then we’re going to have to borrow Joe’s truck.”
“Unless you let him go through a portal, then he was bound to hear and see that. I think everyone between Pueblo and Castle Rock heard that blast and saw your firework,” Joe said as he walked down the steps from the porch to stand beside us.
“That’s the idea. Beast doesn’t normally go farther than he needs to in order to get a meal. With all the game around Cheyenne Canyon I would have thought he’d have heard the whistle,” Rafe said as he wound the hemp sling back around his left wrist.
“You never can tell about sounds up here. Some days I can hear trucks on the Interstate, and it’s more than five miles away. Other times I can’t hear anything but the wind in the trees. These mountains are old, and nature follows its own rules in their shadows,” Joe said.
Rafe turned and looked west toward Pikes Peak.
“There are our rides. I guess we won’t be needing your pickup, after all, Joe.”
I looked toward where Rafe had been looking and in a few seconds, I could see the shape of two hawks rising from farther down the mountains to our west. In a minute, the two hawks landed in front of us and dropped their glamours. Beast and Maia were here.
“What’s with the fireworks, Raphael? Is it time?” Beast growled.
“No, not our mission. A distraction. Someone has kidnapped Emily and Ashley. We’re going to get them back,” Rafe said.
I turned to Joe and stepped close enough to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Just in case we don’t get back anytime soon. It’s been great meeting
