21

HARD HAT AREA

Opal considered herself to be an extremely persuasive person even under the worst possible circumstances. After all, not just anyone could boss around unruly sorcerers, cajole favors out of ancient animal spirits, or make a believer out of even the most hardened skeptic. When she told people what they needed to think and believe, generally they listened to her, with Dru being a notable exception.

But no matter what approach she tried with the tall and lean-bodied police officers who were cordoning off the sidewalk, she was denied entry to the Crystal Connection. They just folded their arms and shook their heads. Straight-up honesty didn’t work with them. Neither did sweet talking, flirting, demanding, or even crying. Nothing she said moved them in the least. She was told, in no uncertain terms, that she had to stay on the outside of the strip of yellow plastic tape that repeated CAUTION - CAUTION -CAUTION all the way across the demolished front of the building.

She crossed the street in a huff and climbed back into Ruiz’s van, slamming the door. “Well, that’s it. I don’t know how Dru is going to save Rane and Salem now. We can’t get in there.”

Ruiz frowned. “That’s terrible. Rane is like the life of the party. And Salem is a good guy, too.”

“Nuh uh, he is not. But we have to save him anyway. Somehow.” Opal idly watched through the windshield as Mr. Chen from the liquor store next door gave a statement to the police. He pointed up at the Crystal Connection sign, hanging sideways. The cop glanced up and nodded, taking notes.

Behind the seats, Feral shifted in the gloom. He was a little too comfortable being naked back there. “We need to get out of here.”

“Not yet. First, we need to get those crystals.” Opal resisted the urge to turn around and get a good look at him.

Ruiz brightened up. “You know what we need? A distraction. Yeah.”

“Yes.” Opal snapped her fingers. This time, she did turn around, but only so she could look Feral in the eye. “You need to go out there, get their attention, and draw them off so we can get inside.”

Feral frowned and shook his head in a sharp no. “I don’t turn into a wolf when I’m downtown. Last thing I need is Animal Control on my ass. Again.”

“No, I mean by being naked. You should run around like a crazy person, draw them off. They would chase you.”

He gave her the same look the cops outside did, and just folded his arms across his broad, bare chest.

Opal flung up her hands in frustration. “What else are we going to do?”

Ruiz took a deep breath and blew it out, then gave his head a little shake. “Okay,” he said, with a surprising amount of finality. “Okay.” He nodded to himself and started the van.

Opal gave him a suspicious look. “Okay, what? I don’t like the sound of that ‘okay.’”

A bright smile split his face, lighting up the interior of the worn-out van. “You know I got mad skills, right? Don’t worry, baby, I got a plan to get us in there. This is gonna work, I promise.”

Before Opal could tell him exactly how much the sound of that worried her, he hopped out of the van and shut the door behind him, leaving her speechless. A moment later, he opened up one of the van’s side doors from the outside, coming face to face with Feral, who was still totally naked.

“Whoa.” Ruiz put up a meaty hand to ward off what he was seeing, and then turned to dig through the thick pile of jackets and coveralls hanging from a hook behind the door. He held out a pair of khaki pants with big square pockets. “Here. Try these on.”

Feral’s muscles flexed as he worked his way into the pants. A little voice inside Opal told her that she shouldn’t watch. She ignored that voice.

Feral zipped up. His feet and calves stuck out the bottom of the legs, and the fabric was stretched tight. “Little short in the inseam.”

“Uh huh.” Ruiz gave him a sour look, then pulled on a reflective yellow vest and a well-used hard hat. He shut the door with unnecessary force and climbed back into the driver’s seat again.

“Ruiz, what on earth are you doing?” Opal asked.

“Going to work, baby.” He flipped a pair of toggle switches. Yellow flashing lights sprang to life on the corners of the van’s roof, adding just a little bit more chaos to the red and blue lights already bouncing off the street around them.

Spinning the wheel, he executed a perfect three-point turn and drove the long van around the corner and down the alley behind the shop. Long before they got there, though, a police officer appeared out of the flashing lights and waved them back urgently.

Opal hunched down a little lower in the seat. “Turn around! Last thing I want to do is spend the night in jail. Unless you’re planning on bailing us out, we need to go back.”

“Oh, you think I’m going to miss out on all the action? No way, babe. Watch this.” He parked the van with the engine running and hopped out, returning the cop’s wave as if it were a professional greeting.

Plainly annoyed at being misunderstood, the cop strode toward them, talking into the radio on his shoulder.

Quickly, Ruiz opened another door and heaved out a heavy stack of tall orange construction cones, dirty from years of use. One by one, he dropped them off across the width of the alley, blocking it off. Then he busied himself with unhooking a giant orange fiberglass ladder from the van’s roof rack.

The cop, still talking into his shoulder radio, paused and glanced toward the other end of the alley, as a fire truck backed up on the street outside. He gave Ruiz another suspicious glare.

In the side-view mirror, Opal watched Ruiz climb halfway up the back of the van, giving the cop a wave that clearly said, “Thanks, I got this.”

Apparently, it was enough for the cop, who obviously had other things to attend to. He turned and headed back into the flashing lights surrounding the front of the shop.

Ruiz leaned out from the side of the van, craning his head around to make sure the coast was clear. Then he climbed down, hopped in, and drove the rest of the way to the shop’s tiny back parking lot. It really wasn’t much more than three parking spaces right off the alley, but the van with all its flashing lights managed to block off the area while at the same time looking completely official about it.

Seeing Ruiz in action like that made Opal’s heart melt, just a little bit. She leaned across the tool-filled space between the seats and kissed him, good and proper.

When she pulled back, he looked so amazed that he had to hold onto his hard hat. “What was that for?”

“Honey, you know I love a strong man in uniform.” With a wink, she climbed out of the van and sneaked into the shop through the alley door.

The back room of the shop looked completely normal. As normal as things ever got around there, at any rate. The lights were on. The circle painted around Dru’s workbench was smudged and broken. The paint had shriveled and browned, as if it had been exposed to extreme heat, or some kind of magical spell. No monsters anywhere.

The shelves were crammed with musty stacks of ancient books of all sizes, along with a few rolled-up maps and even some clay tablets. In the corner hung bundles of rare and bizarre-looking herbs. A just-opened cardboard box of creepy porcelain doll heads filled up one of the ugly plaid armchairs. Business as usual.

The firefighters had already tromped through here, leaving dirty boot-shaped footprints everywhere, and the door that led upstairs to Dru’s apartment was ajar. Opal leaned her ear close to the gap and listened to make sure no one was up there.

“We’re all alone back here.” Feral’s deep voice boomed behind her, making her jump.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” she hissed.

He jerked his chin toward the front of the shop, where all the squawking radios and flashing lights were focused. “Party’s all up front. We’re gonna be fine. What are we looking for again?”

“Keep your voice down. And where’s Ruiz?”

“Out back on his ladder, keeping a lookout. Still making like he’s one of the Village People.” He sounded unimpressed.

“I’ll have you know I happen to like the Village People. You just keep an eye out for trouble. Not just cops. Anything. Specially if it looks like a ghost that wants to suck out your soul.” She was satisfied by the worried look that crossed his features. He looked back over both shoulders, but they really were alone. At least for the moment.

She made Feral put those big tattooed muscles of his to work, moving cardboard trays full of rocks so she could get to what Dru needed. It didn’t take Opal long to find everything, considering that she had just finished taking an exhaustive inventory that week, something she hated almost as much as soul-sucking undead creatures. Maybe even more.

She was hoping, by some miracle, to find more lunar meteorites, so she could grind up some more moon dust. But they were among the rarest rocks on Earth. The chances of another one miraculously turning up, even in a collection as large as this, were effectively zero.

She stepped up on a chair and scanned the shelves full of books to see if any curious-looking rocks had been tucked away as paperweights, which occasionally happened. No rocks turned up, but she did find a tiny leather-bound book tied shut with coarse twine. It must have fallen behind the other books and lain there for years, impossible to find without standing on a chair and reaching way back. She would have ignored it, except that there was a yellowed slip of paper tucked into the twine that said “Tristram” in her own handwriting.

The name caught her attention immediately. Tristram was the mad sorcerer who had written about trapping dispossessed souls.

Curious, Opal brushed the dust off the book and took it over to Dru’s workbench to clip off the twine. As she leafed through its crackling brown pages, she found a chapter about confronting “outsider” spirits. After the usual admissions not to approach spirits or speak to them directly, there was one line in particular that caught her eye:

They come from beyond our world, and lo, their weakness is likewise that which comes from beyond our world.

“Such as moon dust, for example,” she said out loud, thinking hard. That line hinted at a much bigger idea, she was sure of it.

Feral just looked confused. He hefted the cardboard box full of rocks. “Where you want this?”

“Just hold on.” She waved her fingers at him, still distracted by the book. No wonder Dru always had that preoccupied look on her face. She was busy thinking in six different directions at once.

Opal kept turning the dry brown pages and scanning through the text. Several pages on, she found a drawing of eerie, mist-like forms, presumably some sort of outsiders or dispossessed spirits, being struck down by meteors plummeting from the sky. Again, it said, Their weakness is that which comes from beyond our world.

Still hefting the box, Feral came around to stand behind her, reading over her shoulder. He smelled like pine needles and sweat, but not necessarily in a bad way. Still, she stepped away from him.

“You have to call down meteors on these things, or what?” Feral said.

No sorcerer she knew had that kind of power. Then it occurred to her that Feral probably didn’t understand the magnitude of anyone else’s powers. By his own account, he had only recently become a sorcerer. He was still figuring out what was possible and what wasn’t.

Well, for one thing, him getting any closer to her was impossible, but he hadn’t caught on to that fact yet. Opal was about to say as much when she finally figured out a solution. It hit her like disco lights spinning to life in a dark nightclub. She was so excited, she almost broke out dancing.

Feral mirrored her bright smile, apparently thinking it had something to do with him. Fine, she could let him think that, as long as he kept carrying that heavy box of rocks for her.

She dug through a nearby shelf and handed him a heavy chunk of gray metallic stone riddled with scintillating amber-yellow crystals. “Pallasite,” she sang out.

“Palace what?”

“It’s a meteorite, honey. An extraterrestrial rock with some olivine crystals stuck in a whole bunch of nickel and iron. Tristram says we need something that comes from beyond our world. He didn’t say it had to be from the moon.”

Feral gave her a vague smile. “Whatever you say.”

“Just follow along and bring that box. I’ve got to find us some coesite. And stishovite. Those are from meteors, too.” She was about to say more when she remembered her paycheck was still sitting on Dru’s desk. She darted back, found the little envelope with her name on it, and folded it up with a little sigh of satisfaction. “Next chance we get, I am definitely going to have a good long talk with that girl about the size of this paycheck. Because as you can see, I make this job look good.”