Because libraries were considered sacred ground by pretty much everybody, most of them had some level of quiet enchantments added surreptitiously by the locals. Nothing powerful, but enough to remind everyone to behave when they walked in.
Dan had ended up at the Cap Hill Library, off Harvard at Republican. He needed some time to decompress from Mrs. Li and that stranger.
Khulan Zima.
Dan pulled out his phone and started typing as he sat. He possibly could have pinged Stewey but wasn’t sure what the redneck could do at this point. She hadn’t threatened him in any way, other than being powerful and female. He supposed a competent female was enough threat to most of the men he’d known, but they were fools.
This woman was just flat dangerous.
Khulan. Two obvious options, neither of which thrilled him.
A Mongolian word for an Onager, also called the Mongolian Wild Horse. Probably not.
The second wife of Temüjin, the man known to Westerners as Genghis Khan, Mongolian Warlord and founder of one of the greatest empires in history.
Mongolia wasn’t that far from Siberia, culturally or physically.
That stepping disk had gone somewhere. Had he managed to piss off the folks at the other end by destroying it? Some might equate his actions with crude vandalism, but what moron left a disk that powerful just lying around?
The man who lived there should have either made arrangements for an heir to take possession of everything or dismantled it properly. Unless he’d died more suddenly than he had expected, but anyone powerful enough to have killed someone like that would have wanted to take possession of that power.
Unless it went someplace that person didn’t want to go.
Dan was going to have to go deeper into the corporate shells that Kate had been dealing with. Maybe ask Gavin to see if he could find anything.
Dan didn’t know anybody better at meandering down into the bowels of the internet and coming up with pearls than Gavin. Probably should have stopped into the man’s bookstore yesterday, but you couldn’t just pop in for five minutes. Not Soviet Books in Moscow, Idaho.
Gavin himself had exactly enough talent to be able to look at an old book and know if had any esoteric value or was just another wet dream about pyramid power written by some snake oil salesman. Or whatever the hipsters were deluding themselves with these days.
Dan added a note to another file to send Gavin an email later with some details and a request.
Last name Zima?
A Slavic name meaning cold or winter. Czech or possibly Russian. Either a nickname accorded someone with a gloomy or unapproachable personality, or who was from a particularly cold place.
Marvelous.
Dan opened his phone’s map and backed it all the way out, then dove in on Irkutsk, near the southern end of…Lake Baikal? Lots of nothingness there as he trailed north. Very few roads. Endless space not particularly filled with people.
Shit.
Siberian runes. Angry Mongols. Powerful strangers about.
Just exactly what his Wednesday needed, right?
Dan took a deep breath and looked around. He knew what her aura tasted like but couldn’t detect any scent of her in the building when he pushed outward. Not even old ones. Hopefully, she’d never been to Seattle before, so anyplace she went, she might leave a trace.
Still, this was a library. They ought to have something he could use.
Dan got up from the chair and headed to the computer to start looking for whatever they might have on Siberian culture. Iliana had promised him a quick cut on translation by Friday, rough but enough to get the gist while she started working her poetry on it.
Dan didn’t want to wait that long.
He didn’t think this Khulan babe would.