Thorn Fall Read Online Free Page A

Maybe he wanted me to trace the genealogy through the centuries. He hadn’t written as much, and I wasn’t going to recommend it, because I couldn’t promise to deliver. If memory served, the Spartans hadn’t been as obsessed about keeping estate records the way the Athenians had, and nobody had had a surname back then. Even if Alektryon’s family had been particularly prominent and some record had survived, Sparta had been reformed, invaded, and sacked throughout the ages, so it wasn’t as if we could simply wander into a public archives building and look him up.
    Alektryon jumped to his feet, his hand touching the hilt of his sword. He said two quick words, then jogged across the street, and into the trees.
    “Where’s he going?” Simon asked.
    “I think he said, ‘Wait here.’” I scrolled through the pages of writing again. Nothing about stalkers in the woods.
    “Because he has to take a leak or because something creepy is watching us from the woods?”
    “He didn’t say, but he’s been eyeing those trees for a while.” I eyed them too. Alektryon had already disappeared, his crimson cloak like black in the dark, letting him blend in.
    “Maybe we should head to our hotel room. The reception is pathetic out here. It would be easier to search for monster news from town.” Simon waved toward the back of the van where we mounted the portable satellite dish when we were staying for a while; he’d already stowed it, though, so all we had was the cell network. “Oh, wait. The page loaded.” He climbed up on the picnic table, pointing his phone toward the stars, as if this would significantly improve the reception.
    “Murder in Tucson… just guns. A woman was strangled in Buckeye. Some drug thing. Shooting in Flagstaff. These are lame deaths.” He lowered the phone to punch in a different search.
    “Yes… so irritating when people are murdered by mundane methods. I’m surprised you aren’t hooked into some police scanner somewhere.”
    “I’ve got Yavapai County coming in on my Mac.” He winked, then frowned down at the much smaller screen. “Oh, here’s something from my mysterious death search. This just happened today. Teenage boy from Sedona found unconscious in Oak Creek Canyon with small puncture wound in his neck. Died early this morning in a Phoenix hospital. Cause unknown.”
    “Puncture wound? Unless that was done by the fangs of something big and ugly, I’m not sure it sounds like our jibtab ,” I said, using the name Eleriss had given the monster.
    “Are we sure they’ll all going to be the same? Our pointy-eared guardian angels were awfully vague about… everything.”
    No kidding. And if Alektryon was to be believed, angels didn’t describe them properly. I needed to get the rest of his story from him.
    Simon held up a finger. “It was the second person to have been found with a puncture wound in Sedona this week. The first was found near Cathedral Rock, already dead when hikers encountered the body, which belonged to a seventy-three-year-old grandfather from Tucson. His puncture wound was also in the throat.”
    “That does sound suspicious.”
    “Other than those cases, there hasn’t been anything in the news specifically about monsters for over a week,” Simon said, “not since we took care of the last one. Too bad there’s no way the National Guard could find the body and give us credit for vanquishing it. Most of the comments on the blog post I wrote up expressed a certain disbelief.”
    “Imagine that.” I’d forced him to take his monster blogging to a new site and to keep it off our business page, so I couldn’t care less about what he wrote there now. He would probably be offended to learn I hadn’t read most of the posts.
    “Sedona’s not much more than an hour away,” Simon said. “We could head over tonight. We’ve never searched for rusty gold there, either. Bet we could find some stuff in between investigating punctured people.” He wriggled his