I glowered at him. And weaken my gift of Inscription? Hah. “Over my dead body,” I growled.
“Of course,” he said, harrumphing.
We trudged back to my pile of suitcases, where Mr. Wrinkles was rubbing himself against the closest trunk.
“Wait,” I said. “If these are my things – Pierce, where’s all your stuff?”
He shrugged. “Don’t really own much. And don’t really wear much, either. Makes it easier in the long run, you know? Especially if I ever needed to, aha, go on the run.” He unsheathed both of his daggers, twirling them between his fingers like a pair of six-shooters. “My babies are all I need.”
“So no savings, either,” I grumbled.
He blinked at me. “Why would I need savings? We had all our needs met at home. Duh.”
“But you just said that you wanted to be ready to go on the run.” I could have pulled all my hair out. “What kind of idiot watches as many heist and action movies as you do and – ”
“Children,” Dantaleon bellowed. “Enough. We won’t get anywhere with all this arguing. The priority is to find shelter.” He shuddered about as well as a book could shudder. “Preferably not in that abandoned property right over there.”
I glanced over at the decrepit building I’d noticed earlier, grimacing. For once, Dantaleon and I agreed on something. But speaking of savings and property, that reminded me. I pushed a damp handful of hair out of my face, beads of river water dripping down my forehead as a forgotten corner of my mind pulsed with remembrance.
“Wait,” I said, smiling for the first time in what had felt like hours. “We can go somewhere. I know a place.”
14
By some unholy miracle, I managed to get Dantaleon to stop wailing long enough to squeeze a teleportation spell out of him. Instinct – and fine, a map application on my phone – told me that we were somewhere in California, fortunately not too far from the outskirts of a city named Valero, a place that was familiar to me. I pointed in that direction, then told Dantaleon to send us there.
“Where, precisely?” he rasped.
“Just – there,” I said, waving my hand vaguely towards the horizon. “Somewhere in the city.”
Pierce nudged me in the ribs and whispered. “You know him, dude. He’s going to teleport us right into traffic.”
“Unlikely,” I muttered back. “He’s alone and defenseless out here, just like us. He needs us.”
Whether or not Dantaleon heard us didn’t matter. We all knew I was right. A faint light emanated from his pages, bathing Pierce and me in an aura of magic, disassembling us piece by piece as it sent us to our destination. As our bodies faded, I told Dantaleon one last thing.
“Take care of Mr. Wrinkles for us, won’t you?”
Pale fire burst from his pages, accompanied by angered tendrils of smoke. “Well, how in blazes am I supposed to take care of that hairless, verminous – ”
And just like that, Dantaleon’s voice was gone, replaced by the honk-honk of urban traffic and the low, nonspecific murmur of city life. I groped at myself, checking that I still had all of my parts and pieces. Pierce was doing the same, tugging on his waistband and peering into his pants. I glowered and yanked him by the wrist.
“Come on,” I growled, leading him out of the garbage-filled alley that Dantaleon had designated as our endpoint. Hey, it was better than appearing in the middle of rush hour traffic.
Far more relaxed, too. Conventional teleportation, that is, if cast by a sorcerer as competent as Dantaleon, meant that you could blink and instantly find yourself transported from a strip mall in Vegas to the sunny shores of Mykonos. Proper teleportation didn’t involve all the muss and fuss of helleportation, which always involved the screaming, swirling vortex of the chaotic Hexus. Much worse than Tom Bradley International, take my word for it.
As for why we’d teleported all the way? This was my plan. You’ll realize that I take great pride in my intellect, and part of that is knowing that I couldn’t depend on Mother and her riches forever. I also knew that I couldn’t simply maintain the apartments in her dimension as my only stronghold. In case of emergency, I’d decided long ago, I would also need a base of operations on earth. A proper villain, as I was raised to become, needed multiple hideouts, after all. Or maybe that was just something I picked up from spy movies.
Without telling a single soul – not even Pierce, and not even Mr. Wrinkles, for that matter – I’d invested in a simple house of my own, somewhere within a quaint, if expensive residential district in Valero. Five bedrooms, a four-car garage, self-heating swimming pool – you know, simple. It made for a cozy nook, too, far enough away from city traffic to be restful and peaceful, but close enough to all of its conveniences and amenities that I wouldn’t have to drive too far with one of the several luxury cars I kept in my collection.
So that’s where I was taking Pierce. I’d stopped pulling him by the wrist a few blocks back, because he could very well walk on his own and was very much capable of snapping my arm if he got too sick of being tugged along like a dog on a leash.
“That’s honestly super smart,” he said, beaming at me with excitement. “I can’t believe you kept it a secret from me for so long.”
“You’ll be thrilled,” I said. “You’ve got your own room and everything. But mine’s bigger, of course.”
He shoved me in the shoulder, laughing. “Doesn’t matter, we all know that I’m biggest where it counts.” Idiot. But I laughed back, the fear and anxiety of being turned out onto the street finally exiting my body through the soles of my feet.
I wasn’t sure why I’d panicked so much when I first arrived in that blasted field by
