Page 13

13

They’d just emerged from the shower in the Airbnb’s main suite — all that activity in the bedroom had made them sweaty despite the air conditioning — when Bellamy’s cell phone rang from inside her purse.

“I’d better get that,” she said, pulling her towel more tightly around her as she hurried over to grab the phone.

Marc watched as she picked it up and said, “Hello?” A pause, and then she replied, “Oh, hi, Levi. What’ve you got for us?” Another pause, longer this time. “Let me get a pen,” she said, and then gestured frantically at Marc.

Was there even a pen in the bedroom? He didn’t know for sure, but a moment’s rummaging in the nightstands didn’t turn up anything. A shake of his head to let her know that a pen didn’t seem to be handy, and she spoke again.

“Let me go into the kitchen to find something to write with. The hazards of being in a house that isn’t yours.”

She chuckled slightly, and Marc had to admit she was playing it pretty cool. Based on what she’d just said, it would be impossible to know for sure whether she was at the ranch…or over at his vacation rental.

Then she headed into the kitchen, where he knew for a fact there were a couple of pens in the “everything” drawer near the fridge. He followed a pace or two behind, then hurried over to the drawer so he could extract one of the pens in question, along with a small notepad.

Bellamy shot him a grateful smile as he set them down on the countertop for her, then picked up the pen.

“Okay, I’m ready.” Another of those pauses while Levi spoke, and she responded, “Clint Greaves. Got it.”

Mr. Greaves, Marc assumed, was the vortex specialist. What else could he be with a name like that?

“And he’s expecting my call?” Bellamy asked next. A few seconds of silence as she listened to Levi’s answer, and then she said, “Okay, we’ll call him right away. Thanks.” She touched her finger to the screen to end the call and looked over at Marc. “Well, he found our guy. Or at least, he found someone he thinks can help us.”

“Then I guess we should get in contact,” he replied, even though he figured that was what she already planned to do next.

“On it,” she said, then opened the keypad on her phone so she could type in the number she’d written down a moment earlier. “Mr. Greaves? Hi, I’m Bellamy McAllister and — ”

She stopped there as though she’d been cut off. Her mouth pursed, but it seemed she was making herself listen to the person on the other end even though she didn’t appear to be too happy about being interrupted.

“Okay,” she said at length. “We’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes.”

And she ended the call and looked over at Marc.

“He wants to meet us at Crescent Moon Ranch,” she told him, and he found himself frowning.

“Where’s that?”

“Down by Red Rock Crossing,” she replied. “It’s a park owned by the Forest Service. Kind of popular, so I’m surprised Mr. Greaves wants to meet there. I would have assumed he’d have something more private in mind.”

“And there’s a vortex at this Crescent Moon Ranch?”

She shrugged. “I think I might have seen one on the map your grandmother showed us at her house, but I can’t remember for sure — I was looking more in the Secret Mountain wilderness area. Anyway, we need to get going, because it’s going to take us at least ten minutes to drive over there.”

That seemed to decide things. Bellamy hurried into the bedroom and grabbed her purse so she could stow her phone inside, and then they both went into the garage and climbed into his truck before heading over to their meeting place. Since Marc didn’t know exactly where he was going, he just told the nav, “Crescent Moon Ranch, Sedona,” and the vehicle headed out of the neighborhood where his Airbnb was located and down to the main drag without any hesitation.

As Bellamy had warned him, their drive took most of the fifteen minutes she’d promised on the phone, mainly because the second half of the trip wound through an area with houses on large parcels of land where the speed limit dropped to only twenty miles an hour. Eventually, though, he saw the signs directing them to Crescent Moon Ranch and Red Rock Crossing, so he took control of the truck and guided it the rest of the way.

Or rather, most of the way, since they had to stop at a ranger shack on the way in and pay fifteen bucks for the privilege of going into the park.

“Did Mr. Greaves warn you about the fee?” Marc asked with a grin as they pulled away from the shack and into the parking lot proper.

“No,” Bellamy replied, looking somewhat annoyed. “He sort of left out that part. But I’ll pay you back.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

She lifted an eyebrow, and he chuckled.

“Okay, you can buy me a drink after we’re done messing around with the vortexes.”

Now she cracked a little bit of a smile, telling him she probably wasn’t quite as irritated as she was pretending to be.

Or maybe she was just really looking forward to that drink.

“It’s a deal.”

A few cars were parked here and there, not too many, which wasn’t that much of a surprise, considering it was a Tuesday afternoon and late enough in the day that it was too hot to go hiking unless you planned to walk in the creek for a good part of your journey and stay cool that way. At the far end of the lot was a Jeep Wrangler probably older than Marc, with a tall, thin man standing near the driver-side door.

“You think that’s him?” Bellamy murmured.

“Probably,” Marc replied. “At least, he looks like he’s waiting for someone, so it makes sense.”

He pulled into the space next to the Wrangler and then turned off the engine. The two of them unfastened their seatbelts and got out, even as the man standing by the Jeep sent them an expectant look.

“Bellamy McAllister?” he asked her, and she nodded.

“Yes, I’m Bellamy, and this is Marc Trujillo.”

Clint Greaves extended a hand. His skin was tanned and lined, his nose beaky, and he looked like someone who’d spent most of his life outside.

“I’m Clint. I hear you want to know more about vortexes.”

For some reason, Marc hadn’t expected the older man to put it that baldly. Then again, there wasn’t anyone around to overhear what they were saying, and it was probably better to get right down to business.

He shook the man’s hand, and Bellamy did the same.

“Yes,” she said in reply to Clint’s comment. “We were wondering if there are more vortexes here in Sedona than the ones you see on the maps online.”

The other man’s eyes glinted. They were bright blue, startling against his deeply tanned skin.

“Oh, there are plenty,” he replied. “The stuff you find online — that’s for the tourists. But those who really know Sedona, know her well, understand that’s only scratching the surface.”

“And there’s a vortex here?” Marc asked.

Clint nodded and swept an arm toward the creek, barely visible from the parking lot. “Pretty much all of Oak Creek is a vortex, but it’s stronger in some places than others. I’ve got something to show you.”

After delivering that remark, he opened the door of his Wrangler and pulled out what looked like one of those old-fashioned little folders schoolkids might use to hand in a report. He pulled back the cover to reveal a detailed map of Sedona with a clear plastic overlay.

That overlay was covered with bright blue starbursts, some larger, some smaller.

“Are those all vortexes?” Bellamy asked as she peered over the man’s shoulder.

“Yes,” Clint said. “We’ve been mapping them for a long time. This is the latest version — it was just updated last month.” He handed the folder to her and she took it from him, eyes scanning the map and all those blue starbursts. “You can study it later, though. For now, I want to take you to the beach.”

“‘The beach’?” Marc echoed, a little startled. Weren’t they at least three hundred miles from the nearest ocean?

Bellamy smiled. “It’s a place along the Red Rock Crossing trail called Buddha Beach.” She paused and looked over at Clint. “The vortex is stronger there?”

“A lot of people think so. Come on.”

And he began walking toward the edge of the parking lot, where a trail wandered away into some cottonwood trees. He didn’t look over his shoulder, indicating that he was going to go where he wanted and it was up to them whether they wanted to follow along.

Marc shrugged, and the two of them hurried to catch up to their guide. It was a good thing they’d dressed casually and put their hiking boots back on before they left the house, because even though the trail was relatively flat and easy enough to traverse, it was just rocky and uneven enough that it wasn’t the sort of place you’d want to be wandering around in while wearing flip-flops or something similarly flimsy.

The landscape was beautiful, though, and even if it turned out that this little hike was a wild goose chase and nothing more, he wasn’t sorry they’d come. In fact, he thought he’d like to return with Bellamy at some point so they could explore it on their own.

Funny how his mind was already imagining a future with her here, as if his stay at the Airbnb didn’t have a fixed endpoint…and even though they hadn’t made any concrete promises to one another beyond that single exchange of “I love you.”

Maybe that was all they needed.

Clint didn’t seem too disposed toward conversation, and definitely wasn’t playing tour guide, possibly because he was waiting until they reached their destination to prove more explanations about the vortexes. Bellamy also remained silent, as if she’d decided it would be better to get to their destination and see what happened next. As beautiful as their surroundings were, they’d come here for one reason and shouldn’t allow themselves to get distracted.

The trail eventually emerged into an open area where they had to traverse a span of smooth red rock, pocked here and there with little hollows that still held some rainwater from the storm two nights earlier. And beyond the red rock was the quiet murmur of the creek as they came down onto a rocky beach dotted with little cairns made of river stone.

Now Clint looked almost disapproving as he paused on the beach. “The tourists like to make those,” he said as he nodded toward the stone constructions, some of them only a few inches high, some of them almost as tall as his knees. “We try to discourage it, since the whole point is not to disturb the landscape, but they keep building the damn things anyway.” He paused there, his back toward a large red rock formation in the distance that Marc recognized as Cathedral Rock, even though he’d only seen it in pictures before now. “But the vortex energy is strong here, so I wanted to see how you reacted to it. No right or wrong, of course — different people experience different things.”

Which was also what Bellamy had told him, that one person might feel a tingling along their skin, while someone else might experience a surge of energy and yet another would have nothing more than a deep feeling of calm, of belonging.

Marc looked around at the creek and the brilliantly green cottonwood trees and the red outlines of Cathedral Rock off in the distance, but he had to admit he didn’t feel any different. Then again, this was more about Bellamy than it was about him. As far as he could tell, the vortexes hadn’t affected him at all. Was that because the magic he carried inside was very different from hers, or simply because she’d spent more time in Sedona than he had?

“What is it, exactly?” Bellamy asked, gray eyes also scanning the landscape from behind her sunglasses. “The vortex energy, I mean.”

“Magic,” Clint said simply, and then cracked a smile that deepened the laugh lines around his eyes. “Although maybe you don’t believe in magic.”

Marc looked over at Bellamy, and her lips twitched in amusement.

Boy, was their vortex guide off base about that.

But since they certainly weren’t free to tell him that they were both from witch families and knew all about magic, Marc stayed silent.

“I believe in a lot of things,” she said, which he supposed was a good enough answer. “I guess I was just wondering if there was any kind of scientific basis for the energies people believe exist here.”

Clint nodded. “That’s one of the theories. Something about the composition of the red rocks and all the iron they contain creating energy fields that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. I suppose that’s as good an explanation as any.”

Right — the distinctive reddish hues of the rock formations in Sedona came from an abundance of iron oxide, and even though other places in the world also had reddish rocks, none of them were the exact shade you found here. Marc could see why people might think the concentration of those minerals could create vortexes of unusual energy.

“Got it,” Bellamy replied. She looked up at Cathedral Rock, probably still a good half mile away, and then down at the creek. “I think I should walk in the water.”

“Go ahead,” Clint told her. “A lot of people think that’s where the energy is the strongest.”

Was that such a great idea? What if she got caught up in the vortex energy like she had on the Devil’s Bridge and started speaking in tongues or something?

Marc tried to tell himself it would still be fine. After all, it sure looked as if Clint had plenty of experience shepherding people through vortex areas, so it probably wouldn’t be the first time he saw someone act a little crazy while caught up in the moment, thinking the vortex energy was acting on them.

And even though he knew Bellamy wasn’t psychic — at least, not in the way people generally thought of such things — she seemed to guess what was passing through his mind, because she flashed him a peace sign and said, “It’s cool, Marc. I’ll be fine.”

Smiling, she wandered down to the water’s edge, then paused to pull off her hiking boots and socks. Because it was another hot day, she’d put on a pair of cargo shorts, so she didn’t have to worry about rolling up her pants and getting them out of harm’s way.

She walked a few feet out into the water, then stood there with her eyes closed, hands loose at her sides, as if she was doing her best to relax and let the vortex speak to her.

“Is that water very cold?” he said to Clint in an undertone.

“Oh, yeah,” Clint replied. “Even at the peak of summer like we are now, it never gets much warmer than fifty-five, maybe sixty degrees. Oak Creek is fed by snow melt from up in Flagstaff.”

Marc supposed he should have already known that. To be fair, he hadn’t done a huge amount of research on Sedona since it was just enough of a drive from Tucson that he couldn’t really count it as a day trip.

If the water really was that cold, Bellamy didn’t seem to be too worried about it. She stood there silently, eyes still shut, and didn’t appear to have moved at all in the last minute or so.

He wondered what she was thinking.

Damn, the water was freezing. Sure, she’d known it would be — her dads had brought her here on outings plenty of times when she was a kid, and she’d splashed and played in the creek as if it wasn’t any big deal. After all, if you came here in the summer, you’d dry off plenty fast once you stood in the sun for a couple of minutes.

But she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about how chilly the water was.

No, she was supposed to be trying to see if the vortex energy here was even stronger than it had been out on Devil’s Bridge.

She thought she could sense it pulsing under the thin layer of reality that most people saw, almost like a slow, strong heartbeat, or maybe the rhythm of the world’s biggest bass drum. It felt calm, unhurried, and in that moment, Bellamy let herself be buoyed up by its strength, by its utter belief that all was as it should be, and no one here should have any reason to give in to worry or fear.

Yes, this felt very different from the energy at the Devil’s Bridge, which had been wild, almost jangly, like the winds that sometimes came from the east and brought with them warm, dry air that put everyone on edge. Even as that thought passed through her mind, though, she heard them again.

Out there….

Watching….

Waiting….

The Collector? she thought, feeling a little foolish. After all, she had no way of knowing if those voices belonged to anything that could be considered an intelligence, or whether the vortex energies were dredging them up from some hidden place in her brain.

The Collector…and others, the voices whispered, and at once, Bellamy frowned.

You mean there’s more than one of them?

One Collector, the voice said, many servants.

Well, that didn’t sound good at all.

So was it the Collector who’d tried to steal the amulet and break into the magical library at Zoe de la Paz’s house, or one of his minions?

How can we know who they are? Bellamy asked.

You will know, the voices said. You will know.

And then they faded away. She stood there for a moment longer, but somehow she could tell that they wouldn’t come back even if she called out to them.

As far as they were concerned, they’d delivered the message they needed to.

Annoyed, she opened her eyes. Marc and Clint Greaves were still standing on the bank of the creek, having some sort of low-voiced conversation, although she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She could tell they’d been trying to stay quiet so they wouldn’t disturb her while she was communing with the vortex energies.

Well, the voices had been clearer here, that was for sure. It seemed Clint had been right when he’d said some vortexes were stronger than others.

But even though the voices had provided some useful information, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do about it. So the Collector had an army of minions he summoned to do his bidding? How in the world were they supposed to fight something like that? It felt as if the people in charge in the Arizona clans were hanging on by a thread as it was.

She supposed that was something they’d need to figure out. Right now, she was a conduit for this information, nothing more. It wasn’t as if she had much to offer when it came to finding the Collector’s servants.

You will know, the voices had said.

Right now, she felt as if she didn’t know much of anything.

But she made her way to the bank where her boots and socks waited, and picked them up so she could go over to the spot where Marc and Clint were standing. No point in putting her footwear back on until she’d given the sun a chance to dry her feet and legs.

“What did you think?” Clint asked as she approached.

“Yes, it’s very strong,” she said, then gave Marc a sideways glance, just enough to let him know she’d experienced something important but couldn’t discuss it in front of a civilian. “I’m not sure why I haven’t noticed before — I’ve been to this spot plenty of times.”

“It could be you weren’t ready until now,” Clint replied calmly. “I’ve seen that happen before. People spend years in Sedona, and then out of nowhere, they have an awakening, a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them. This was probably the right time.”

Bellamy supposed that was one way of looking at the situation. Right now, though, she needed to think of a good excuse to get back to the truck so she could talk to Marc in private.

“Thanks for guiding us here,” she said. “But we’re meeting a friend in a half hour, so we should probably head back to town.”

Maybe Marc’s eyebrow lifted ever so slightly. However, Clint only said, “Fair enough. It’s usually a good idea to step back a little after you’ve had your first real vortex experience. Wouldn’t want you to overdose.”

His tone was dry enough that Bellamy couldn’t be sure whether he was joking or not. However, he hadn’t tried to tell her she needed to stay out here a while longer, and that was the important thing.

“Right,” she said with a smile. “But this has been…enlightening.”

He tilted his head at her, a knowing glint in his clear blue eyes, as if he’d somehow guessed she’d experienced a lot more than she wanted to let on. After that, though, he led them back to the parking lot, and then paused next to his Jeep.

“That map I gave you,” he said, and Bellamy nodded.

“We appreciate having it.”

He made a sound that was almost but not quite a chuckle. “Sure. We always want to make them available to the true seekers.” A pause, and then he added, “But if I find it online, we’ll need to have a few words.”

Again, she wasn’t sure whether he was joking. However, since it seemed as if she needed to reassure him, just to be safe, so she quickly said, “Oh, no worries about that. We’ll keep it hidden.”

“See that you do.”

Then he hoisted himself into his Wrangler, which seemed to be the signal that it was time for them to get in Marc’s truck. Once again, Marc gave her one of those expectant glances, but he waited until they were away from the parking lot and driving on Lower Red Rock Loop as they headed back to town.

“You heard something,” he said at length, and Bellamy nodded.

“I did. The voices were pretty clear this time, but I also felt clearer, too. On Devil’s Bridge, it felt almost as if I went into a trance or something. Today, though, I remember every bit of what happened.”

“Which was?”

Briefly, she explained how the voices had told her about the Collector’s servants, how there seemed to be a whole lot of them.

“So I’m pretty sure the person who broke into Connor and Angela’s house isn’t the same one who tried to get into your prima’s library,” she concluded. “Which means those bastards could be all over the place.”

Marc frowned, and she could tell he was less than thrilled by that piece of information. “But the voices said we should be able to tell who these servants are?”

“Well, that’s what they told me,” Bellamy replied. “But they didn’t give me any hints as to exactly how we’re supposed to manage that.”

“Especially when it seems as if they’re pretty damn good at evading security cameras,” Marc said, brows still pulled together. He was letting the truck drive itself, which she thought was probably a good idea. Right then, he looked way too distracted to be piloting the thing on unfamiliar and curvy roads.

“Yes,” she said, and didn’t quite sigh. While they had a bit more information than they’d had before, the voices’ message had still been pretty cryptic. “But I suppose all we can do is pass along what the voices told me and see if the elders and Connor and Angela can figure it out.”

Even as she spoke, she wished she could do more. Sure, it was the responsibility of the prima and primus — and the elders — to really delve into problems like this, but at the same time, the voices had reached out to her, not them.

Which meant she should probably be doing more than just sitting back and twiddling her thumbs.

Marc reached over and took her hand, fingers warm and reassuring as they wrapped around hers. He still had his left hand ready to reach out and touch the steering wheel in case something happened with the self-driving system — even though incidents like that were few and far between these days — but it still felt good to have him make that contact, to let her know she didn’t have to go through this alone.

“We’ll go back to the Airbnb and look at that map Clint gave us,” he said, and his voice was also comforting, calm and sounding as if not much was going to ruffle him.

And boy, did Bellamy need that, considering how rattled she felt at the moment.

Looking at the map would be a good place to start. If nothing else, they’d be able to tell if the ranch had its own vortex energy, something that had awakened a part of her powers she hadn’t even known existed.

Leaning over, she pressed a kiss against Marc’s cheek.

“Sounds good. And after that” — she paused and finally allowed herself the sigh she’d held back a few moments earlier — “after that, maybe we’ll have a better idea of what we should do next.”