Keller saw Winnie glance at him sharply when he said the bit about Iliana having a good mind. But she didn't say anything.
Iliana looked a little startled herself. But then she picked up the box of tissues and slowly came to the kitchen table.
"I don't think well when I'm sick," she said.
Keller sat down. She didn't want to undo what Galen had accomplished. "So where does that leave us?"
she asked, and then answered her own question. "Nowhere, really. It could be any of those scenarios or none of them. We may need to wait for whatever Circle Daybreak comes up with."
Keller looked around the table grimly. "And that's dangerous," she said. "Assuming it was the Night World that sent that car, they're up to something that we don't understand. They could attack us at any moment, from any direction, and we can't anticipate them. I need for all of you to be on your guard. If anything suspicious happens, even the fittest thing, I want you to tell me."
"It still bothers me that they haven't even tried to get in here," Galen said. "No matter how strong the wards are, they should at least be trying."
Keller nodded. She had an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach about that. "They may be laying some kind of a trap somewhere else, and they may be so confident that well fall into it that they can afford to wait."
"Or it could be that they know I'm not the one," Hiana chimed in sweetly. "And they're off kidnapping the real Wild Power while you guys are wasting your time here." She blew her nose.
Keller gritted her teeth and felt a pain in her jaw that was getting familiar. "Or it could be that we just don't understand dragons," she said, possibly with more force than was necessary. She and Diana locked stares. "You guys, you guys," Winnie said nervously. "Um, maybe it's time we opened this." She touched the box Circle Daybreak had sent.
Diana's eyes shifted to it with something like involuntary interest. Keller could see why. The box had the mysterious allure of a Christmas present. "Go ahead," she told Winnie. It took a while. Winnie did witchy things with a bag of herbs and some talismans, while everyone watched intently and Diana mopped her nose and sniffled.
At last, very carefully, Winnie lifted the top of the box off.
Everyone leaned forward. Piled inside were dozens and dozens of pieces of parchment. Not entire scrolls but scraps of them, each encased in its own plastic sleeve. Keller recognized the writing"-it was the old language of the shapeshifters. She'd learned it as a child, because Circle Daybreak wanted her to keep in touch with her heritage. But it had been a long time since she'd had to translate it.
Diana sneezed and said almost reluctantly, "Cool pictures."
There were cool pictures. Most of the scraps had three or four tiny illustrations, and some of them had only pictures and no writing. The inks were red and purple and deep royal blue, with details in gold leaf. Keller spread some of the plastic sleeves across the table.
"Okay, people. The idea is to find something that will show us how to fight the dragon, or at least something to tell us how he might attack. The truth is that we don't even know what he can do, except for the black energy he used on me."
"Um, I can't read this, you know," Diana pointed out with excessive politeness.
"So look at the pictures," Keller said sweetly. "Try to find something where a dragon is fighting a person-or, even better, getting killed by one."
"How do I know which one's the dragon?" It was an amazingly good question. Keller blinked and looked at Galen.
"Well, actually, I don't know. I don't know if anybody knows how to tell a dragon from another Night Person."
"The one in the mall-Azhdeha-had opaque black eyes," Keller said. "You could tell when you looked into them. But I don't suppose that's going to show up on a parchment like this. Why don't you just look for something with dark energy around it?"
Iliana made a tiny noise that in someone less delicate would have been called a snort. But she took a pile of the scraps and began poring over them.
"Okay," Keller said. "Now, the rest of us-"
But she never got to finish. The phone on the kitchen wall shrilled. Everyone glanced up toward it, and Iliana started to stand, but there was no second ring. After a long moment of silence, it rang again-once. "Circle Daybreak," Keller said. "Nissa, call them back."
Keller tried not to fidget as Nissa obeyed. It wasn't just that she was hoping against hope that there was useful information about the car. For some reason she couldn't define, that very first ring of the phone had made her feel unsettled.
The early warning system of the shapeshifters. It had saved her life before, by giving her a hint of danger. But for what was about to happen now, it was entirely useless.
"Nissa Johnson here. Code word: Angel Rescue," Nissa said, and Keller saw Diana's eyebrows go up.
"Yes, I'm listening. What?" Suddenly, her face changed. "What do you mean, am I sitting down?" Pause. "Look, Paulie, just tell me whatever-"
And then her face changed again, and she did something Keller had never seen Nissa do. She gasped and brought a quick hand up to her mouth.
"Oh, Goddess, no!"
Keller's heart was pounding, and there was a boulder of ice in her stomach. She found herself on her feet without any memory of standing.
Nissa's light brown eyes were distant, almost blank. Her other hand clutched the receiver. "How?" Then she shut her eyes. "Oh, no." And finally, very softly, "Goddess help us."
Chapter 12
They were all on their feet by now. Keller's early warning system was screaming hysterically.