Thorn Fall Read Online Free PDF

slept until ten after arriving so late the night before. Simon was in the van, setting up the satellite, wifi, and solar panels. I hadn’t seen Alek yet, but I hoped he was keeping a low profile, because we hadn’t had a chance to clothes shop for him yet. At least his sword and shield were in the men’s tent, as Simon now called it, so he wasn’t walking around in his full Spartan regalia.
    “It’s four dollars for a shower,” Temi announced, joining me at the picnic table. She sounded bemused.
    I hadn’t encountered many campgrounds with pay showers, but there had been a few. Not many in that price range though. I hoped four dollars included enough time to shampoo and condition your hair.
    “You’re paying for the view.” I extended a hand toward the famous red rocks of Sedona, visible beyond the oaks and junipers that shaded the campground from the equally famous Arizona sun.
    I had driven through Sedona a couple of times and done a hike on the north side of town once, but the prices and the number of tourists had always kept me from lingering. Still, the view was impressive, with towering rock formations rising in all directions, the striated cliffs a rich red from all the iron in them. Canyons and nooks hid all over the area, and I’d heard that amateur archaeologists were still finding undiscovered ruins left by the Sinagua, a people who had lived in the area for centuries before disappearing. A part of me hoped that the monsters forgot to show up, and we could simply explore. The Coconino National Forest was super strict about relic hunting, and even things left by settlers tended to be classified as off limits, but with Simon’s metal detector and explorers app, we might find some more recent stuff that was fair game. And I still longed for that awesome historical find that I could write up for one of the archaeology magazines.
    “The view from inside the shower cubicle wasn’t that notable,” Temi said. “For me, anyway. There was a lizard on the wall watching me.”
    “Don’t tell Simon. He won’t shower for a week. Either that or he’ll make you take out your sword and go in and deal with it.”
    My phone blasted the chorus from Metallica’s Enter Sandman , and I rolled my eyes—I needed to put a passcode on there so Simon would quit changing my ring tones. Of course, he would simply find a passcode an inviting challenge.
    The phone was sitting on the picnic table, plugged into my portable solar charger. The Phoenix number looked familiar, but I didn’t have it programmed into my contacts.
    “Hello?” I answered.
    “Delia? Professor Tillium.”
    “Oh. Hi.” I set down the cereal bowl and sat up straighter. “Did you find the cavates?” I asked, referring to the underground rooms we had discovered when following Jakatra and Eleriss to the spot where they had located Temi’s sword. Since there hadn’t been anything in them, they hadn’t been the significant find I had hoped to make, but I had emailed the GPS coordinates to one of the ASU professors who maintained a catalogue of Native American ruins across the state. After being waylaid by the last jibtab at the site, I hadn’t been that eager to go back—Zelda wasn’t the ideal vehicle for driving through old washes, either—but I had been wondering if a team might find something of interest in the hole the elves had burned to find the sword.
    “We found them,” Tillium said neutrally. He didn’t sound excited. Maybe he wasn’t thrilled that they had wasted a trip simply to look at cavates; their location, underground and beside a river that flooded regularly, was a curiosity I thought someone might have been interested in, but maybe I was wrong. “They were empty.”
    “Yes, I said that in my email. I’m guessing the river has flooded a number of times over the years and cleaned everything out. I thought it was strange that they’d been built there in the first place.”
    “I see.”
    I frowned down at the phone, as if