“If you insist,” Eliza muttered. The light was irritating her eyes, so she closed them and was at least able to enjoy the warmth on her face. When the sun was all the way down, she threw the blanket off them and stood up. She noticed Veronica taking her time getting up. “Are you okay?”
The human blushed. “Yeah. I just had problems standing when I woke up yesterday. Apparently, getting fisted by a naughty vampire goddess in my dreams had certain repercussions.”
Eliza wrapped her arms around her lover and grabbed a double handful of ass. “Next time, in won’t just be in your dreams.”
“Promises, promises,” Veronica replied and kissed her girlfriend. The two of them wandered inside. Dennis was the only person awake by that point, and he gave the lovers a friendly smile.
“We were tempted to bring you inside,” he said, “but it seemed warm enough and you two looked so downright peaceful.”
“We appreciate letting us be,” Eliza said. “That was the best I’ve slept in while.”
“Me too,” Veronica said. Then she sniffed the air. “Do I smell eggs?” Sure enough, Dennis was actually cooking omelets. As they sat down to eat, Wyrm came in with a dour expression on his face.
“What’s up?” he boss asked.
“Bad news ladies. Looks like another jewel got found last night, but the Purity jumped on in during transport.”
“Shit!” Veronica said.
“Those fanatical bastards have already been advertising their ‘victory’ all over the web,” the hacker told them as Dennis started up another omelet.
Veronica kissed Eliza on the cheek. “If it’s already out there, then I’m going to call my bosses and see what they want me to do. I hope this doesn’t mean I have to cut my visit short.”
“Do what you have to do,” Eliza said, gripping her lover’s hand before she vanished into the next room. “Where did they find it? What do we know?”
Wyrm punched up to the world map on the holo-projector. “This one was found in East Africa. A big purple gem they think was tanzanite. A couple safari guides apparently reported finding it in a tiny village shrine. Somehow, the Purity got wind of it and managed to get a strike team there before the local governments could. A small group of guards and both guides were killed. I looked through that list of spells again. There’s one which Valar labeled ‘The Alchemist’s Dream’ that seems to meet the description. Apparently it has something to do with . . . let’s see here . . . ‘unity and metamorphosis.’ Something about combining two imperfect things into something else.”
Eliza thought it over. “I’ll be the Purity think that the ‘unity’ line means recombining the dimensions. Otherwise, why risk the attack? Wyrm, put the location of the Dream up on the world map.” Something was bothering her. With electronic communications so closely controlled, how did these guys get there so quick?
“Got an idea?”
“I think the Purity may have some sort of presence in Africa. There’s no way they could have flown in from Europe without being detected. Same goes for the Middle East. These guys found out about the new discovery and jumped on it way to quickly. So they had to have come from nearby. Radar and tracking capabilities of most African nations are almost carbon dated. There are still large pockets run by local warlords. That means a lot of places to hide a fighting force.”
Veronica had wandered back in by that point. “Mind if I pass that guess onto the World Council on my next trip? It could narrow the search area.”
Eliza was still stung by her sudden termination, but she accepted that the time for petty complaints was over. “Might be a good idea.” She was slightly nervous. “So this means you’ll be leaving again?”
“Actually, no. I convinced them that my mental and physical health was in jeopardy, and they decided it would be better to just give me a couple of days off now than to try and replace me after having a total breakdown.” She was looking up at the map. “I keep thinking that there should be some sort of pattern there. It seems like things are moving forward towards . . . something. And that probably won’t happen until all these things are found. Like they said in ‘Lord of the Rings’ centuries ago, these gems ‘want to be found.’ So how can we find the rest?”
Eliza couldn’t disagree with her girlfriend’s logic. They sat down and started going over their information as a group. Eventually, Thug and Allyson showed up, followed shortly by Kelik. The elder vampire was pleased to see his young friend and her companion in much better physical condition than the prior evening.
“Maybe something about the order,” Eliza said. “Are the gems being found in the order the spells were written?”
“No,” Veronica said. “We checked that. The Heaven’s Eye spell was written after the Dead Man’s World spell and before the Ocean’s Heart spell. Nothing there.”
The lot of them spent hours turning every piece of data on its ear. All of them had come to believe that there was a secret hiding just beneath the surface of the evidence, and it was driving them nuts that they couldn’t find it.
Then, an hour before dawn, something happened. A breakthrough. And it came from the most unlikely source. They were staring at the map of Earth again, trying vainly to create some sort of pattern or geometric formation that incorporated the four locations where the gems had been found.
“I just wish we could go back in time,” Kelik muttered, “and talk to those sorcerers. Get them to tell us what they were thinking.”
“Or what they saw,” Eliza said. “They had to have seen images of the jewels in their minds’ eye. Some of the physical descriptions were astounding.
|| MAYBE THEY DID SEE THEM, || Thug mumbled. || WYRM, PUT UP A MAP . . . SAME ORIENTATION AS THE EARTH MAP . . . OF THE LOCATIONS ON TERRA WHERE THE SORCERERS THAT WENT MAD WERE KEPT. ||
“What are you thinking big guy?” asked Dennis. Everyone was wondering where the troll was going with this.
|| WE KNOW THE JEWELS HAVE SOME ‘LINE OF SIGHT’ RULES. THE DEAD MAN’S WORLD AND THE OCEAN’S HEART ONLY REACTED WITH ONE ANOTHER WHEN THEY COULD SEE EACH OTHER. WYRM, DRAW A LINE FROM THE LOCATION OF THE SORCERER WHO WROTE THE HEAVEN’S EYE SPELL STRAIGHT THROUGH THE POINT WHERE THE DIMENSIONAL BREACH WAS LOCATED. || Wyrm did as Thug asked. A line slowly emanated from a point on the Terra map and extended onto the Earth map. After a few moments, it came into contact with a glowing point in South America. || THE RIFT IS LIKE THE LENSE OF A TELESCOPE. THE PATTERN IS SMALLER LOOKING FROM ONE SIDE AND LARGER FROM THE OTHER BUT . . . ||
Eliza gasped. “That’s where the Heaven’s Eye was found!” she interrupted. Suddenly, everyone was very excited. “Wyrm . . .”
“Way ahead of you boss,” the hacker said, frantically typing at his keyboard while simultaneously shouting into his voice-activated headset. A series of lines began to appear from the Terra map, all from sorcerers who had written spells involving gems that had already been found. Each line connected up with the appropriate jewel.
“Good God!” Veronica uttered. “Is there a relationship between the distance from the whole to both the gems and the locations of the sorcerers . . .”
“Computer isn’t coming up with anything, but it isn’t great at problem solving.”
“Maybe we are thinking a little TOO linearly,” Eliza muttered. “Wyrm, calculate a ratio based on the distance of each gem from the rift over how long ago each spell was written.”
Wyrm made some calculations. “Nope. Sorry boss.”
“Nice idea though,” Kelik said. “But you need to remember that sorcerers live a long time. The power of the gems and the dimensional rift could have been affecting them years or even centuries before they wrote the spells.”
“Maybe,” said an almost giddy Veronica. “But we just limited the search area by an ungodly amount! We’ll be way ahead of the Purity!”
The group began shaking hands and congratulating each other. Veronica gave Thug a great big hug, almost disappearing in his massive arms.
“Wyrm, save all this data to CD, make a couple copies, then delete everything from the hard drives. I don’t want the enemy hacking the system somehow and figuring this out.”
“Done and done,” Wyrm said, handing her a CD. Eliza took one copy to hide in a floor panel. ‘Never put your valuables in a vault,’ she thought smugly. Veronica was offered one, but declined. She said she knew enough to be able to tell her superiors how to look for the gems, and didn’t want to carry around something she might lose or let fall into the wrong hands. Eliza decided to deliver a copy of the CD to Valar. She hated the idea of dealing with him again, but he might have some insight that they could use. As she was finishing secreting away her prize, she heard her door close and footsteps coming up behind her. Then she felt something bump against her ass.
“I could get used to this view,” Veronica said smoothly, gripping Eliza’s hips and making a fucking motion, smacking her crotch against those tight buns. As Eliza stood up, the human woman reached around and snaked a hand down the front of the vampire’s pants while encircling her waist with the other arm. “I’m in a VERY good mood right now,” the blonde woman said huskily. “Wanna celebrate? A quickie before we get back to work?”