Page 46 of As Darkness Fall
“Please don’t tell me you melted it down into bars to pay your team,” I moaned.
“He didn’t,” Vir said, speaking up.
I turned to look at him. “How do you know that?”
“The magic would prevent that from happening.”
“What magic?” I asked. “There was no magic about it. Nothing that I could sense. It was just a lumpy little statuette.”
Vir stared at me. I ignored him. Nobody in their right mind would think to call the Idol of Amunlea a crafted masterpiece. That would be impossible because itwasn’t. It was a lump with some slightly carved features. Nothing more.
“Trust me,” Vir said quietly. “There is magic. If you held it again, you’d believe me.”
“Why? Why now?”
“Because,” Vir said quietly, “a lot has changed in the past few days. The Idol will be awake now.”
I fell silent. As much as Vir was on my nerves right now, I wasn’t inclined to call him a liar. After all, he’d lived with the thing a thousand years ago. He knew what it was capable of.
“Okay, fine,” I said after a moment more of thought. “We go get the magic thing from whoever you gave it to, Aaron. Then, we take it back to Lars, give it to him, and get my parents back. No big deal, right?”
“No, we can’t do that.”
“You can’t give it to Lars!”
I stared at Vir and Aaron, both of them protesting over top of one another. Holding up a hand, I waited until they subsided into silence.
“One at a time,” I said, then pointed at Aaron. “You first because I’m tired of hearing him preach about the horror I’ve inflicted on his little action figure.”
Vir sputtered and protested wordlessly, but both Aaron and I ignored him.
Aaron shifted uncomfortably in his seat under the double scrutiny. I was amazed. I’dneverseen anything ruffle his feathers this way. Just how bad was this going to be?
“Talk. Explain why you don’t have it,” I said, growing tired with both of them. For people who were supposed to be old, like Vir, or whatever Aaron was, they sure were running scared from one tiny, ordinary shifter like me.
“I sort of had to use it,” Aaron said. “To pay off a debt of my own. So, I don’t have it.”
Vir groaned audibly from the backseat, leaning forward to rest his head against the back of Aaron’s seat, his long black hair falling forward, hiding his face but not his reaction.
“Sacrilege,” he moaned. “I can’t believe you just used the Idol like a lump of gold.”
“Itisa lump of gold,” Aaron and I said at the same time, glancing at one another in surprise.
“Okay,” I said, trying to calm the butterflies in my stomach that Aaron’s gaze had produced. “That’s fine. Vir will just get some of his treasure, and we’ll pay this person off. Give them a premium to make it worth their while. Who has it? We’ll go get it.”
“It’s not that easy,” Aaron said, yanking his eyes off me and staring at the road again.
I noticed his knuckles getting white on the steering wheel. Was he scared?
“Whynot?” I asked, exasperated. “Where is it?”
“You’re not going to like the answer,” Aaron said, hedging.
“I already don’t like anything coming out of either of your mouths,” I said dryly. “I’m not sure how this is going to change a thing. How much worse could it get?”
“A lot,” Aaron said quietly.
There was silence in the cab of the truck. Then, from the back seat, I saw Vir stiffen and stare in horror at the back of Aaron’s seat.
