“Maybe.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.Could we trust that their magic would hold strong against everyone and everything tracking us?I doubted it.But if it could buy us enough time to find a weapon that would kill Headwaters, it was worth the risk.
“Hey,” Josie waved us into a side alcove just off the control room.“Pamela’s checking on our visitor.We can watch from here.”
This room had screens—some of them computer, some of them older gear that looked like radar, and other technology I wasn’t familiar with.
An array of crystals sat in a circle on a small lit table in the center of the room, crystals that looked like the one Pamela had used earlier.
Josie did the sand trick over the table of crystals and they responded, showing a sky view that lowered to eye level.
Cardamom stood in the same place as before, sweating in the heat, but otherwise he looked calm.
The perspective shifted, and we got a view of the side of him, the back of him, the side, and front again.
I didn’t see Pamela in any of those angles, but I had a feeling she was the one controlling the view.
“We have tests that will tell us if he’s who he says he is,” Josie said.“Make sure he’s not under any contracts, trapped by ageas, or working for someone who wants to harm you or us.”
“What kind of tests?”Lula asked.
“Pam’s doing them now.It’s a mix of things.Magic, of course.Some physical test equipment that can give bio readings from a distance.And our secret weapon, the sniffer.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said.“What’s a sniffer?”
“That.”Josie pointed at the image.
A very small lizard, about the length of my thumb skittered out from under a rock.It was no different than every other lizard out there that bobbed up to the warm tops of rocks or dipped back down in the shadows.
It didn’t approach Cardamom or do anything strange.
It was (to be generous) the plainest looking dirt-brown lizard I’d ever seen.
Cardamon didn’t appear to notice it either.
“Is it magic?”
“Not really, but yes, a little.We found it, oh, I don’t know, twenty years ago?It’d been living in the archives, hibernating.It just popped up and wanted the banana Elmer was eating.You should have seen that fight.Hilarious.We didn’t understand its ability until we ran into some ghouls.The little guy really came in handy.”
“A lizard,” Lula said.“It can smell magic?”
“Yes, but more importantly it can sense the intent and threat of a person or thing.”
“We’re trusting a lizard?”I crossed my arms.“That’s not weird at all.”
“Is that any weirder than being an earthbound spirit, who may or may not be able to wield the spell book of the gods, and who is traveling with the actual rabbit from the actual moon?”
Lu covered her mouth and snorted.
“But a lizard,” I said.
“Oh, it’s not just a lizard,” Elmer said coming into the space with glasses of water for us all.“It’s dragon kind.”
“Dragon?”Abbi pushed forward to better see what was, admittedly, a pretty boring scene of a man standing in the desert.
“Dragonkind.Not a full dragon, but…dragon adjacent,” Elmer said.
“Like a dragon pet?A dog or cat, but dragon?”Abbi asked.
