“Like, the geysers would all go off at once or something like that?”
“Or they’d all stop. My geologist friends say that’s when we really need to worry, is if they ever all go quiet.”
“And there’s been nothing like that?”
“Let me make a call to a buddy over at Old Faithful.”
We waited. I chewed a fingernail. Glanced out the window just in case Lightman came striding up the road. He didn’t, not yet.
“Hey, Roy,” Lopez said. “When’s the last time Old Faithful blew? Half an hour ago? So it should go off again around”—she glanced at the clock—“four fifteen, yeah? Great, thanks.” She smiled at me. “Geysers are normal. Feel better?”
Oddly, I did. Whatever was going to happen, it hadn’t started—or it wasn’t about to finish. We had time. While it was still daylight, Roman couldn’t be out causing trouble. And Lightman couldn’t, not by himself, or he’d have done it already. He needed pawns, Ashtoreth and an army of vampires and werewolves.
In the meantime, I was still snuggled in the office chair, wrapped in a blanket.
“Thank you for not calling the cops on me,” I said to the ranger.
“No worries. You just seem lost, not crazy.”
Small comfort, there.
Sun asked, “Is there a restaurant or diner around here where we can get something to eat? And maybe a place to pick up some clothes?”
“Yeah, down the road in West Yellowstone. Wait just a sec.” She went into a back office.
She came back with spare set of clothes, sweatpants and a hoodie. “This should be more comfortable than that blanket.”
I sighed a very heartfelt thanks. “I promise to wash them and get them back to you—”
“Don’t worry about,” she said. “Just take care of yourself.”
Yeah, that was me, crazy enough to elicit worry from strangers, but not enough to actually commit. Yet.
Chapter 17
WEST YELLOWSTONE, a few miles outside the park’s west gate, was a lot like other wildnerness tourist towns I’d been to, except maybe a little more hopped up on hype and enthusiasm. A lot of one-story motor lodges done up to look like log cabins, a lot of billboards advertising snowmobile tours. They probably offered ATV tours in the summer.
We pulled up to a rustic diner—fake log cabin siding, murals of moose and bison hung up between picture windows—to wait for the others and come up with the next plan. Maybe Ben and Cormac and the rest had thought of the ultimate Stop Roman Plan, at long last. How hard could this be? Two thousand years, and no one had stopped him yet. That was how hard.
We’d just closed the truck doors and were standing in the parking lot when the asphalt under our feet shook, just for a couple of seconds. Having felt this a few times now, I knew exactly what it was. I put both hands on the truck’s hood for balance and waited. A car alarm somewhere started wailing, glass in the diner’s windows rattled, then everything fell still. A few people ran out of the diner and surrounding shops and buildings. There was talk and confusion.
“That’s the kind of thing you’re worried about, isn’t it?” Sun, also leaning on the truck’s hood, asked.
“If things get really bad, I don’t suppose you can use your divine power to zap us out of here like Ashtoreth does?” I asked.
His brow wrinkled. “Ashtoreth. That one is bad news. Really annoying. But no, I can’t. Sorry.”
As other diners wandered back into the building, a pair of calm men in smart business suits came out, apparently unaffected by the tremor. They went to a nondescript white sedan a few parking spots down, and one of them glanced up at me.
They were my two Men in Black.
I took a few steps toward them and called, “You!”
The one at the driver’s side looked up and smiled widely. “Oh! Hello, there.”
“What are you doing here?”
They glanced at each other, then back at me. “We thought we’d try a little early season fly-fishing.”