Taylor Davis and the Flame of Findul (Taylor Davis, 1) Read online

  “Perfect. Where’s the nearest coffee shop?”

  We all looked out the window and suddenly realized someone should have been keeping tabs on our surroundings. While we’d been discussing our options, Chico had taken us into a seamy part of town. We were at the docks. Dank, fishy-smelling air wafted in the open windows. Huge, rundown warehouses blocked the sun.

  “This is just a hunch,” I guessed, “but I don’t think this is the way to the airport.”

  “It’s not,” Elena whispered.

  Then something happened that I didn’t believe even as I watched it take place. Chico’s dreadlocks began to writhe. They solidified into tentacles of leathery skin that crawled up the back of the driver’s seat and groped for our faces. The cabbie’s beautiful chocolate coloring faded into the disgusting bluish green of a nasty bruise. Milky yellow eyes glared maliciously at us in the rearview mirror. With a screech of brakes and a hideous roar, the monster lunged into the backseat.

  “A Swaug!” Mike screamed. He and Ranofur baled out the doors with Elena and I right behind them.

  The monster made slurping, hissing noises as it slithered out of the car. Its face had elongated, its human features swelling into a rubbery snout with an impossibly bulbous nose. Arms and legs had morphed into long, snaky appendages, each topped with two feathery, ropelike fingers that were delicately ripping the rear passenger-side door off its hinges.

  “The sword! The sword!” Mike was shouting at me. “Where is it?”

  The Swaug lunged at me, fangs snapping shut only inches from my face.

  I leaped backwards. My hands patted my pockets instinctively. The sword wasn’t there, of course. “In the makeup bag!” I shouted.

  “And where is that?”

  “In the backseat of the cab!”

  Mike clutched his head in his hands. “You put it down?”

  I remembered Davy’s warning then and shrugged helplessly. “So what do we do now?”

  Ranofur had been following this exchange closely. Now he took charge. “I’ll distract it. You get the sword.”

  The security guard threw himself at the Swaug, a silver mace appearing in his fist with a magician’s sleight of hand. The Swaug roared and deftly dodged the glittering spikes. Ranofur swung again. The monster ducked and counterattacked, slicing the air with a whiplike motion of its arm. I watched, entranced. Theirs was a vicious dance, performed at lightning speed.

  “Get the sword!” Ranofur reminded me.

  I jerked into motion, but the Swaug anticipated every move. Just as I reached the still-intact driver’s side, I felt a burning pain grip my ankle. The feathery fingers had entwined my left foot and jerked me into the air. “Ranofur, help!”

  Dangling seven feet above the pavement, I watched—upside-down—as Ranofur moved in to attack the arm holding me captive. A powerful swipe of the mace took the appendage clean off. I was flung onto the roof of the car and quickly scrambled inside.

  There was the pink case! It sat in the seat on the far side of the vehicle. I lunged, but just as my fingers closed around it, the car jerked beneath me. I was pitched onto the floor. With a groan of twisting metal, the car began to crumple around me.

  “Ranofur!”

  “Get out of there, kid!” the guard screamed.

  A glance out the gaping hole where the door had been showed Ranofur struggling to free himself from a tentacle arm that wrapped around him tighter than a boa constrictor. His arms were pinned to his sides; the mace hung limply from one hand.

  “Mike!” I screamed. “Elena! We could use some backup!”

  The car shuddered again, shrieking like a thousand unoiled hinges. My foot was crushed under the front passenger seat as it merged with the floor. I was trapped!

  “Taylor, throw me the sword!”

  It was Elena.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Never mind. Just throw me the case.”

  I reached for it, stretching as far as I could, but the twisting of the car had torn the back seat away from the trunk. The case had fallen among Elena’s luggage.

  “I—can’t—reach—it!”

  Elena dove for the open car door, but the creature swatted her away as if she was no more troublesome than a mosquito. She sailed into a nearby wall and lay still.

  Then the car began sliding toward the waterfront. The tires squealed in protest. The frame shuddered and crumpled around me more tightly.

  “Taylor, get out of there!” Ranofur screamed again. “The Swaug is trying to drown you!”

  Only I would trap myself in a doomed automobile. With my free foot, I began pounding away at the seat binding my ankle. It wouldn’t budge. “Mike!” I screamed again.

  The car slid onward. I could see the water now. The road ended at a massive steel dock. The channel beside it probably accommodated ships with a twenty-foot draft—far too deep for me to keep my nose above water. The creature’s ropy arms groped forward, twisting around trees, drains, pipes, whatever it could use to drag itself and the cab relentlessly toward the depths.

  I left off kicking and twisted my body so my back was braced against the crumpled rear seat. With all my might, I strained against the metal holding my foot.

  The car was on the dock now. The water was turquoise and so clear that I could see a school of fish swimming near the bottom.

  “Taylor, throw me the sword!”

  Elena was back with a bump on her head the size of a Mississippi bullfrog. With one last supreme effort, I wrenched the seat off my ankle and fished for the makeup case in the trunk. The front tires were over the water. The car’s underbelly shrieked as it grated against the steel of the dock.

  “I got it!” I screamed.

  Just as the car plunged into the ocean, I flicked the case out the door to Elena. The next moment, green seawater closed over my head.

  Episode Two

  Lesson #6

  Guardian Angels Don’t Always Excel at Physical Combat

  I gave a mighty kick and launched myself out the car door. When I broke the surface, the air had fallen deadly silent. Where was the monster? Where were the others?

  I heard a grunt and a shout. The voice sounded like Elena’s.

  “Aim for its head!” Ranofur bawled.

  There was a roar. And scuffling. Bumping. A scream.

  And then nothing.

  Something oozed over the edge of the dock and dripped in the water. Something green and slimy.

  “Hey guys?” I called.

  Elena’s head popped into view above me. “Can you swim?” she asked.

  “Of course I can swim. Where’s the monster?”

  She pointed to the nasty green stuff that was spreading around me like an oil slick.

  “Gross!” I struck out for a nearby ladder as quickly as I could and dragged myself, dripping, onto the dock. I stood with my hands resting on my knees. “What happened?” I gasped.

  “Elena dispensed with the Swaug,” Ranofur replied casually, tucking his Polo shirt neatly into his Dockers. The mace was nowhere to be seen. “Well done,” he told her.

  Elena looked the worse for wear. Blood oozed down her elbow from a nasty looking raspberry, presumably where she kissed the wall, and her left eye was already turning purple. She still held the sword in both hands, the point dragging on the ground. Even in her bedraggled state, she managed to toss her head and add, “While you were swimming.”

  I bristled, more than a little annoyed that she got to wield the sword before me and that she did it so successfully. “If I hadn’t been pinned in the car I could have saved you the trouble.”

  “If you hadn’t left the sword on the seat,” she countered, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “If you had joined the fight a little sooner maybe we could have—”

  “That’s enough, both of you,” Ranofur commanded. “We all made mistakes. Even I am out of practice. But what’s done is done. We have to get out of here now, before another Swaug shows up.” He moved us off the
dock.

  “What was that thing?” I asked.

  “A tracker. A bloodhound. Did you see the nose on it? They can smell whenever humans move supernaturally. It leaves the faint odor of pastrami.”

  “We weren’t traveling supernaturally,” I protested. “We were in a cab.”

  “A cab that showed up almost immediately after we rippled out of Davy’s sinkhole,” Elena emphasized.

  “Whatever it was, it fought like mad.”

  “That wasn’t a fighter,” Ranofur told us.

  Elena and I glanced at each other. “What do you call it, then?”

  “A scout. The fighters show up after the Swaugs locate an enemy.”

  He wiped the sword clean on a patch of weeds, then slid it back into the case and handed it to me. “Put this in your backpack.”

  I was surprised to find it still on my back.

  “I’m afraid we have to leave your luggage,” he told Elena.

  “That’s okay. I’ve got plastic.” She pulled a coin purse out of her jeans pocket and waved her credit cards at us triumphantly.

  “Say, where’s Mike?” I asked.

  With a grimace of disgust, Elena jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Last time I saw him, he was hiding in the doorway of that building.”

  Ranofur marched over, plucked the angel out by the neck, and hauled him—backward—up the street. “Article 21-15 of the Code of Conduct,” he snapped. “‘A licensed agent shall accompany his charge at all times. He shall remain in attendance and offer assistance as needed.’”

  Elena and I jogged to keep up. “I take it you two know each other?” she asked, her eyes flicking from one to the other.

  I jammed on the brakes. “No way! Ranofur, you’re an angel, too?” After what just happened, how had that one sneaked by me?

  “You’ve failed in your duties, agent.”

  Mike stuttered, his face turning three shades of purple, but that may have been because Ranofur still held his neck in a death grip.

  “You’re choking him,” Elena protested.

  Ranofur set Mike aside none too gently. Mike gasped and clutched his neck. His glove wasn’t even soiled. “Okay, I admit, I barely squeaked by in my physical combat courses. My strengths lie more in systems management, computer networking, data processing.”

  He failed to elicit any sympathy from Ranofur, so he turned to Elena and me. “Not everyone can configure a databank to house all the records of Heaven, you know. I transferred and updated the entire record of men’s deeds. I made digital backups of the Book of Life. I set up Heaven-to-Earth surveillance technology and applied basic language interface to—”

  Ranofur began jogging. “There’s an abandoned laundromat up the road apace. We’ll regroup there. Try to keep up.”

  Half a mile later, we stopped in front of a boarded up building with graffiti scribbled on the plywood. Ranofur took a pick out of his pocket and jimmied the lock. Elena glanced over her shoulder, shifting from foot to foot, and if my own anxiety was any indication, it wasn’t because she needed to use the facilities. I pressed closer to Ranofur.

  Amazingly, we’d only passed three people on our walk from the docks: two little kids and an old man. None of them looked threatening, but that didn’t mean much. The cabbie had seemed pretty normal, too.

  “Can you two walk through the wall if you need to?” I asked.

  Ranofur grunted. In the affirmative, I assumed.

  “And could you get me and Elena through the wall?”

  “Sure, kid,” he said, popping the door open with a soft click. “But if you went through the wall, we’d have every Swaug in a fifty mile radius on us in ten minutes. Get inside.”

  We didn’t hesitate.

  Apparently recovered from his embarrassment, Mike pulled a rickety table into the center of the room and set up his laptop while Ranofur ran a perimeter check. All the windows were boarded up tight except one, and that was so high up the wall any peeping toms would need to top seven feet.

  “I don’t think you’re going to get much of a Wi-Fi signal in here,” Elena said.

  “Wi-Fi is for the technologically inferior,” Mike answered. He plugged his laptop into his cell phone. “We have satellite capabilities.”

  He took charge. “We need information. We need to find out who your adversary is, where he was born, where he went to school, where he’s sailed, his favorite color, his brand of underwear. Everything.”

  “I still have the DVD Davy gave me,” I suggested, pulling it out of my backpack.

  Mike swiped it out of my hand and had it playing in seconds.

  “That’s Nigel, head of my order,” he mentioned.

  “He’s the one who assigned you to us?”

  “Quiet,” Mike snapped, concentrating on the video. When it concluded he made a distracted clicking sound with his tongue. “That told us nothing. I’ll get Mr. Jones on the screen.”

  He began typing furiously. Even Ranofur ceased his patrol to watch over Mike’s shoulder. And it was Ranofur’s face that was caught by the digital camera and projected on the screen.

  “Who the devil are you?” were the first words we heard. I grinned. It was Davy, all right.

  Ranofur replied very politely, “Mr. Jones, I assure you I’m on your side, not the Devil’s. I have two children here who would like to ask you some questions before we continue with our mission.”

  “Are you their new agent?” Davy shouted, suddenly exultant. “Did they reassign the scallywag?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  I pushed in front of Ranofur. “No, Mike’s still here,” I told Davy.

  Mike popped his head up in the range of the camera and gave Davy a cheery wave. “Hello, old pal.”

  Davy’s face darkened on the screen. “Good-for-nothing knave. Blackjack. Rogue.”

  Though I tended to agree with Davy’s assessment, I broke in. “We have a second angel, so we’re covered. Right now we need to ask you some questions. Like, where was Bartholomew Swain born?”

  Davy knew right offhand. “A little town in the south of England called Luxet. It’s in Dorset County, not far from the English Channel. The year must have been—” he paused to think “—perhaps 1652 or 1654.”

  “Do you know his father’s name?” Mike barged in.

  Davy scowled at him. “What do I look like, his blessed aunt? No, I don’t know his father’s name, nor his mother’s. He was such a wretched scoundrel, I doubt he even had a mother.”

  “What year did you land on the island?”

  “July 28, 1684.”

  “What happened to Mr. Swain after that?”

  “Blamed if I know.”

  “Do you know what year he dropped out of knowledge?”

  “Sometime after 1684.”

  “Can you tell us—” Mike continued, but Davy exploded. “Do you think I’m a blasted encyclopedia?”

  I tactfully took over the questioning. “Davy, you said Swain has been to Hades.”

  “Aye. He found his way there, all right. Don’t rightly know how he got there.”

  “But he can’t die.”

  “Not proper like.”

  “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No idea, but I do know I had a gang of Wasitters pass by my beachfront after you all left.”

  I glanced at Ranofur. “A what?”

  “Demon water spy.”

  “Oh, is that all?” I blew out my breath and turned to Mike. “Anything else we need to know?”

  “I think we’re good,” he answered. “Thank you, Davy. You’ve been most helpful.” Davy was still ranting when our connection broke off.

  “That went well,” Elena gibed.

  “Say,” I said thoughtfully, “if we have the sword here, what protection does Davy have at the tree?”

  Mike waved off my question. “Oh, don’t worry about Davy. He’s an old pro with weapons, and the brass keeps an eye on him. We’ll have the sword back to him soon enough.”

  Almost insta
ntly, Davy’s face was replaced by a map of England. Mike shifted subjects. “Luxet isn’t far from Southampton. I suggest we fly into the city and take a day trip to the Channel.”

  “I second that suggestion,” Elena said.

  Ranofur stood across the table from us, arms crossed, face stern. “Before we leave this room, we have a few orders of business to discuss.”

  “And the first one,” Elena broke in, putting her hands on her hips with a stern look of her own, “is how you knew about this trip to begin with. You weren’t at Davy’s.”

  The angel hunched his huge shoulders. It was pretty comical to see him cowed by a skinny girl. He tried to wiggle off the hook. “I’m trained to observe such things.”

  She wasn’t buying it.

  He sighed in resignation. “I was assigned to guard you at birth. Since it’s unusual for someone of my rank to be given such a low-level job, I guessed you were designated for something important. I tried to sneak a peak at your files, but they’re so heavily encrypted I couldn’t access them, which only confirmed my suspicions. So I’ve kept my eyes open. About the time you turned thirteen, the buzz around you picked up. That’s when I took the security job. I’ve been expecting something like this for a long time. When it happened, it was nothing to arrange for your father to leave on business so we could slip away.”

  He gazed at her with something like fatherly affection, and I could see that after all those years of protecting her, his bond with her was strong. She was smiling at him now, too.

  “Wait a second,” I blurted, barging in on their tender moment. “Elena was assigned a guardian angel? I’m the One of Two Names. Why wasn’t I assigned an angel?”

  “You were,” Ranofur answered.

  “Who?”

  An embarrassed cough sounded behind me. I turned to find Mike tracing a crack in the floor with the toe of his patent leather penny loafer.

  “You?” I gawped.

  He twitched his shoulders nervously and pulled at the neck of his sequined jacket. “I think they line these collars with emery boards. Can you read this? What does the tag say?”