Adam looked from Zee to me. “What aren’t you saying?”
“I am pretty sure,” I said apologetically, “that the Soul Taker is preparing a sacrifice.”
“I have come to believe that the Soul Taker was forged as an instrument to bring death to honor a god,” Zee said. “In the old religions, sacrifice was more usual than not. The sickle, a symbol of harvest, was a common instrument to use.”
“You were supposed to disagree with me,” I told Zee.
“What god?” Adam asked. He’d moved to stand behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.
Zee shrugged. “Keine Ahnung. Perhaps, given that the sickle is a tool of the harvest and the harvest gods were commonly blood-soaked, it was one of those—though I still think there was a connection to spiders.” He frowned but shook his head. Evidently the memory was still not coming. “I can say that its magic does not have the feel of any god I have encountered—though I could tell you more if I held it in my hands. When I say that the sickle is very old, I mean just that. It was old on the day I first heard of it. The name of its god is long lost.”
“But not the god itself,” said Adam.
“Sadly, gods seldom die unless someone kills them,” said Zee, who had done so at least once that I knew of.
* * *
—
My phone rang on the way home.
“Are you going to answer that?” Adam asked.
I looked at the caller ID.
“Unavailable,” I told him. “I don’t need a warranty to take care of repairs on the van. And no warranty is going to help your SUVs.”
He grinned appreciatively. “True. But you might have a twenty-year-old tax bill that you can take care of now—or else the feds will come calling.”
“You get more interesting spam calls than I do,” I told him.
More seriously he said, “My people couldn’t trace the last crank call you got. If it’s the same people calling now, I’d like to give them another shot. Why don’t you pick it up and see how long you can keep them on the line? If you make it three minutes—”
While he considered rewards, I said, “I get to pick the color of your next SUV.”
He snorted. “Do I look stupid? Pick up the call, please.”
“Fine,” I said and accepted the call.
“Mercy?”
Samuel’s voice took me by surprise. I’d almost forgotten I’d asked him to call. Sherwood wasn’t precisely the least of our problems, but he was no longer the most immediate one. The SUV slowed momentarily and then resumed its former speed. It was getting dark out, so Adam turned on the lights.
“Hey,” I said. “How’s Africa?”
“Still a continent,” Samuel answered, but his voice was wrong.
I stiffened, moving to the edge of the seat as if I could leap up and help him from half a world away. “Is there something wrong?”
There was a pause.
“Samuel,” I said insistently.
“Can’t fool you,” he said, sounding almost relieved.
“Ariana?”
“She’s fine. I’m fine.” Those words hung in the air for a moment.
“Liar.” I called him out on it. “Do you need something? Is there anything I can do?”
“Or I?” Adam asked. My phone wasn’t hooked up through the SUV’s sound system, but that didn’t matter. “Or the pack? Whatever you need, you know that.”
“Thank you, my friends,” Samuel said, sounding weary, but also better somehow. “I think we have it covered for now. You were my second-string but my first-string has the ball.”
“Football metaphors aren’t like you,” I tried.
“You would not believe how competitive a bunch of doctors can get,” Samuel said, sounding more like himself. “I’ve played a lot of football—proper football and not American—this past year.”
“Where are you now?” Adam asked.
Africa was a whole giant continent. I never had been able to pin down exactly where Samuel and Ariana were on it. Sometimes he talked about where they’d been last week or last month, but not where they were.
“Middle of a snowstorm,” Samuel said. “In more ways than one. I have about three minutes of battery left on my phone, Mercy. What did you need?”
“Snowstorm in Africa?” I asked. Granted it was a whole continent, but when I thought of Africa, I thought of jungles and deserts.
“What did you call me for?” Samuel said.