The Beginning Of The End

Chapter 25

I managed to find a parking a little up the street from Banana Pepper Cafe, and we stood outside, staring right at the spot where we had seen in the Bloedzoeker stone Lucas being magically knocked out or whatever had happened to him.

"What do we do from here?" I asked. I was trying to ignore the fact that this place, the Banana Pepper Cafe, had been where Adam and I always used to come. We had had so many dates and spent so much time there, at least in the first year or so, even though we were living together already.

"Maybe we can pick up some sort of magical trace," Jaylon said slowly. "I've never done anything like it, but I've read about it. Thalia, did Lucas teach you anything like this?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "Sorry."

"Well, I guess I should give it a shot and see if I can figure out how this works then," he said with a sigh. "I need something from the car, can have the keys, Louisa?"

I tossed them to him and he caught them deftly, turning and walking back up the street to where we'd parked.

"You okay?" Thalia asked softly. "You look like you've seen a ghost or something."

"Yeah, this place just brings back a lot of memories," I murmured.

"Did you live around here after you left home?" She asked, and I looked up at her sharply. She caught the question in my eyes and smiled. "Noah told me. About how you ran off with some city guy that came into town for a while."

"Oh. Well, yeah. We had this little apartment a few blocks from here," I explained, looking up in the direction I was talking about. "For the first year or so things were great, and this is one of the places we used to come to all the time." I indicated the cafe in front of us with a feeble hand gesture. "But then his inner douchebag just took over everything, really. Things sort of turned to crap after that."

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, looking at me apologetically.

"Serves me right for just leaving the way I did with someone I barely knew," I said with a shrug. "Anyway, you said Noah told you?"

"Yeah, he was pretty worked up about it at the time," Thalia said, a smile on her lips. "He wanted to go after you and demand you come back, but he was too chicken. You know he had like, a massive crush on you ever since you were kids up until, like, a while after you left."

"Wait, what?" I spun to face her, my eyes wide, mouth open in shock. "He what?"

"Oh, look, Jaylon's back!" She said, looking over my shoulder. I turned to see Jaylon returning with something I couldn't see clutched in his closed fist.

"You guys ready?" He asked. I nodded, but Thalia shook her head.

"Look at all these people, we should really wait till theirs not so many out on the street," she said logically.

"The rush dies down a little, but it's the city, there are always people around," I said, shaking my head. "We'll be less noticeable if we do it with all these people around to block us from sight, and they're almost all busy and going somewhere. Hardly any of them even look at you. Trust me, Adam's sister was visiting one time, and she stood out somewhere around here yodelling for a good five minutes and no one even bothered her. I mean, until some employees from a nearby shop came to complain but it-"

"We get what you're trying to say," Thalia interrupted, laughing a little.

"Okay, so now that we've established we're doing it now, are you guys ready?" Jaylon asked a little impatiently. "Can we get on with this?"

We headed to as close as we could get to the exact spot we had seen Lucas in the stone, or as close as we could remember it, and Jaylon opened his hand. Swinging on the end of a thin silver chain that now hung from his hand was a piece of quartz. As I watched, it stilled, hanging motionless from the end of the chain.

"Place a hand on me, both of you," Jaylon murmured. "It'll work better with more power." We did as he said and he started to move. "Focus your intentions," he said softly. "Focus on finding whatever magic trail Lucas and his captive may have left behind."

We did as he said, and I closed my eyes as I found it easier to focus that way. People bustled around us, but we didn't bother them and they didn't bother us. In fact, I forgot all about the city around me and the busy streets and focused entirely on what we were doing. I only opened my eyes when I heard Thalia's sharp intake of breath, and the first thing I saw when I did was the quartz. It was swinging purposefully back and forth on the end of the chain, seeming to point in a certain direction.

We followed the swinging stone which Jaylon held steady on the end of the chain for quite a while. Up the street away from the Banana Pepper Cafe, down this street and that, around corners and across roads, until at last we reached our destination and the quartz began swinging in a circle.

We stood there, staring. We weren't in a very busy part of the city anymore, and there weren't many people around. I had been here a couple of time before with Adam. It was where his grandmother was buried.