“He wants to talk.”
I waited. She didn’t say anything more, so I fished through the other cartons on the side table, looking for something with vegetables. Found chow mein. Good enough. I scooped, chewed, swallowed.
“When was the last time you sent him a find?” I asked.
“Find” was a polite term for what most people would assume was a rusty piece of junk.
But that rust hid magical items that the reclusive collector had bought without fail for over forty years now.
We’d never met Headwaters. The few times Lu had been instructed to speak with the collector, a representative handled the call.
“Six months ago,” she finally said. “That porcelain doll hand.”
“Creepy doll hand that summons demons?”
“We don’t know that’s what it does.”
“It’s a disembodied doll hand. What else would it do?”
“I think it blesses water.”
“Definitely summons demons.”
“Just because it’s magical doesn’t mean it’s evil.”
“So it summons nice demons?”
She squinted at me and stole a piece of broccoli out of my container. I left it tipped her way, hoping she would eat more. She had always been slender, but since the attack that had left her half-vampire, she was downright lean.
“I don’t have a find on me,” she said. She picked a carrot from the box, glared at it, then dropped it in her mouth. “The closest storage unit is Tulsa. We could stop there before going to Arcadia to call Headwaters.”
I paused with a clump of bean sprouts halfway to my mouth. “Pops is there.”
“Who?”
“Where. The store and gas station. Pops.”
“You want a Moxie Cola?”
“No. Well, yes, now that you bring it up, but that’s where the seer—the owl woman—wanted me to meet her.”
“You didn’t tell me that. You just said in Arcadia. She was specific about that place?”
“In both visions.”
“Maybe she’s Headwaters,” Abbi said.
“Why would you think that?” Lu asked.
“Brogan said some people aren’t what they look like. Maybe she’s not a seer. Maybe she’s a trickster. Maybe she’s whatever a Headwaters is.”
I chewed and thought that over. It made some sense. Headwaters had been gathering magical items for almost half a century. He or she might be able to create visions with some of those items. But why contact me via a vision when calling Lu was easier and more straightforward?
“Brogan?” Lula asked.
I hummed. “I don’t think so. Visions take a lot of energy, a lot of work. Headwaters texts and uses representatives to remain anonymous. But two people pushing us toward the same place is suspicious.”
“We could refuse,” Lu said. “We don’t need the money and we don’t owe Headwaters anything.”
