Reload Faster_An Urban Fantasy Action Adventure

by Martha Carr

  Shay took a few deep breaths and headed toward the door. The torc hadn’t been left behind. It’d been sold twice and mysteriously ended up back in the house twice, even if that wasn’t a matter of public record.

  After a few encounters with the spirits of the home, people—including a few wizards and witches—had decided to leave well enough alone. From what Shay had read, the confluence of magical energy in the area was unstable.

  Previously, the haunting had involved only sounds or moving objects, but the flood of magic into Earth turned the haunted house into a genuine physical danger. If it hadn’t been in the middle of nowhere, someone would probably have handled it already.

  No one could agree if actual ghosts inhabited the house, or if they were the product of some artifact and the confluence of magical energies. Shay didn’t really see that the details made much of a difference. She was going in, one way or another.

  She kicked open the door. No ghost confronted her, just rotted wood and scurrying rats.

  “The ghosts don’t scare off the animals? Lazy assholes.” She took a few careful steps inside. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. Just need the torc, and I’ll be out of your ghostly hair. Hell, if you want to steal it back from Smite-Williams, be my guest.”

  She assumed the Professor had some master plan to stop whatever curse or magic kept reclaiming the object. If not, maybe retrieving it would be a steady source of income.

  The wind whispered in her ear, “Get…out.”

  Shay sucked in a breath and shook her head. “I can’t do that. Maybe some other day I might consider it, but I’m coming off a recent loss, so it’s kind of important that I complete this job.” She walked toward the stairs. The last two reports had indicated that the torc always returned to the master bedroom.

  A spectral form of a glaring man winked into existence at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Come on, pal, you’re already dead. Why the fuck do you even ca—”

  A force smashed into Shay, knocking her clean across the room. She slammed into a wall with a grunt and fell to her knees.

  “That fucking hurt, you dead asshole.”

  The ghost floated toward her. “Get…out.”

  Shay reached into her pocket. “Guess the recipe calls for a pinch of salt.” She flung the enchanted salt at the ghost.

  The form writhed and contorted its face, a howl of unearthly pain echoing throughout the house. It blinked out of existence.

  The tomb raider let out a sigh of relief. “Okay, so that shit works. Good to know. Too bad I have to give it back to the Professor.”

  Shay stood and dusted her hands on her pants.

  “You…will…die…Shay…Carson.”

  “Oh, you know my name? Nice trick, assholes, but not worried about loser ghosts who can’t even leave their house spreading the word.”

  She bounded up the steps, not wanting the ghosts to have any chance to throw her down the stairs. Two spectral forms, a man and a woman, guarded the hallway. She flung the salt at them and they vanished.

  Dead or sent to the World in Between—who knew? Didn’t matter. She was killing some ghosts. Maybe that was redundant.

  The hallway contained six closed doors. Shay kicked in the first couple and found empty rooms. The third contained a scowling ghost of a woman in a dress that looked more Little House on the Prairie than 1960s. The tomb raider managed to toss some of her salt right before an invisible force smacked her into the hallway wall.

  Shay took a deep breath and rubbed the back of her head. This was getting annoying.

  The third room was also empty, and so were the next two.

  Fortune mocked Shay, forcing her into the sixth room. At least she didn’t have to look far. The torc sat in the middle of the room and shone brightly, as if it’d just been polished.

  “There we go.”

  She snatched it up and spun on her heel. Three ghosts confronted her this time, frowning. Her free hand dropped to her pocket to grab some salt.

  The tomb raider stopped just before throwing it. The ghosts should have thrown her around by now, but they were only glaring at her.

  Shay lifted the torc and grinned. “Something about this is stopping you, huh?” She laughed and sauntered toward the spirits. They disappeared. “Yeah, thought so. Not so tough now, are you, you dead assholes?”

  The tomb raider continued toward the stairs. A half-dozen spectral forms floated in the air, all wearing masks of hatred.

  “Hey, don’t hate me. I’m just doing a job.” She gave a little wave. “Keep it fun. Keep it dead.” She winked.

  Shay snickered as she made her way to the car. A dozen translucent spirits now floated in front of the house, but that wasn’t so bad. If she was going to piss somebody off, it might as well be somebody who was already dead.

  Yeah, fuck you, Yulia. You were just a blip in my badass career. Let’s see you try your ice magic shit on them.

  Ghosts and Ice Witches made for annoying and exciting jobs, but Shay looked forward to visiting Alison at the new school and seeing how well she was adapting. She’d decided against telling Brownstone about any of her recent adventures or even her new tomb raider in training, just yet.

  He didn’t need to know about her failure, and the Catholic bounty hunter might take issue with her fucking with ghosts rather than bringing in a bunch of priests to do Last Rites.

  She didn’t feel any guilt. She was just doing a job. If the Church wanted to handle the house, that was on them.

  It was Parents’ Weekend at Alison’s school, and she was going to enjoy it.

  The girl waved happily from a table in the lunchroom as Shay and Brownstone maneuvered through the thick crowd of kids and parents.

  “Look at this place,” Brownstone exclaimed, gazing at all the elegant wooden tables and booths. “This looks more like a fancy restaurant than a school cafeteria.”

  When the pair got to the table, Alison got up and hugged them.

  After they sat down Shay glanced around, taking in everything. The contrast between a magic school centered around teens and her experiences with deadly magic on her job stuck out in her mind. The implications of the place weren’t lost on her either.

  Just because a kid studied magic at the School of Necessary Magic didn’t mean they’d grow up to be a good person, any more than all the asshole politicians who went to college at some fancy private school grew up to be good people. A future Snegurka might be already there.

  The tomb raider shook her head, not wanting Alison to look into her soul and see any of her dark thoughts. As if raising a teenager with hormones wasn’t tricky enough. Now they could see your soul or predict your future.

  After they’d talked about Alison’s classes and her friends, Shay poked Brownstone with her elbow. “Don’t put your baggage on her. And give Alison her present already.”

  After all, they’d both worked hard for it, including the recovery of the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. Once Brownstone explained what the Professor was offering him, Shay’s respect for the man grew even more. He’d found a way to be overprotective and stylish at the same time.

  Brownstone pulled out the jewelry box and opened it, revealing a jeweled pendant on a silver chain.

  “The magic coming off of it! It’s beautiful,” Alison exclaimed.

  “And functional.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s called an ‘Aegis Pendant.’ It’s a kind of shield. You activate it by wanting to be protected and saying ‘Aegis aeon.’ Once you do that, it’ll form a magic shell right around your body.”

  “I love it,” Alison replied. She hopped up and rushed over to pull him into a hug as tears ran down her cheeks.

  Brownstone blinked. “Why are you crying if you like it?” Alison just looked at him and Shay rolled her eyes.

  After a few moments, the girl hurried off to show her friends.

  Shay shook her head. “You’re a damn enigma, Brownstone.”

  “Huh?”

&nbs
p; “Clueless one second, wise the next.”

  12

  As her own boss, Shay could take a vacation whenever she wanted. A week after visiting Alison at the school, she’d still avoided taking on any new jobs. It was even nice to take Lily out shopping for some new clothes and some decent pizza, leaving Peyton behind to play with the new oven.

  Pounding out so many in a row might have done wonders for her reputation, even with the loss of the magic beans, but the tomb raiding world wouldn’t fall under the control of Snegurka just because Shay didn’t take on a job every other day.

  Running herself ragged also increased the chance she’d make a mistake. She was still wondering if taking Lily with her was an asset or a mistake.

  As annoying as the Antarctica situation had been, she hadn’t screwed anything up. She’d just not gotten there in time. It didn’t make the burn go away completely, but it dulled it.

  The tomb raider sighed as she sat down at a table in Warehouse Four with several piles of books in front of her. She wasn’t sure about what irritated her more—that Yulia had snagged the beans before she had, or that the woman held her in such contempt that she hadn’t finished her off.

  You’re gonna regret letting me go, bitch.

  Shay shook her head. She wasn’t going to worry about that for now. Today’s little background research session was a follow-up to an already successful—if not particularly profitable—raid. She’d been practically living in Warehouse Four for the last few days, occasionally checking on Lily.

  The stone she’d recovered from Mexico sat on the table next to her. Now that she’d had time to catch her breath, she had thrown herself into good old-fashioned research to figure out what the hell the thing was.

  Something caused it to be worth the life of a tomb raider and special enough that some weird possessed elf didn’t want to give it up.

  Peyton was still looking into the stone, but she’d told him not to prioritize the work. He was more useful to her keeping an eye on the net and Lily was more than eager to help him. If Yulia surfaced Shay wanted to know right away, so she could roast the ice bitch.

  Her internet searches into the stone and its symbols had proven useless so far, so she decided to just hit book after book in hopes that she might find something. A lot of accumulated knowledge still hadn’t made it online, so she hadn’t been worried that she’d not found anything in her initial checks.

  What did trouble her was the lack of information now that she’d dived into her rare book collection. She’d hoped for at least a hint of progress.

  Ancient Mesoamerican Language and Writing Systems: A New Unified Approach and translated journals from missionaries all the way back to the Conquistadores hadn’t turned up anything during the previous day’s research session. She couldn’t find anything that looked remotely like the symbols, not even if she squinted and tried to find vague similarities.

  The day before that she’d hit some of her South Asia sources heavily, working on the theory that the stone might be related to a vimana. Hours and hours of skimming hadn’t located anything familiar.

  A Modern Field Guide to Ancient Scripts didn’t help.

  Her trip through Oriceran Writing: An Academic Survey proved no more useful than any of her other books.

  Shay held up the stone and stared at the glyphs. The more she looked at the symbols, the stranger they seemed. Something about them was different from anything she’d ever encountered.

  She thought back to what the elf had said about it.

  “It gives me hints. Places to visit. For the future.”

  The words were English, but she no idea what they meant.

  His explanation could mean everything from the stone being a map to it being some sort of time-travel artifact, if such a thing even existed. She hadn’t heard about time-travel magic, but it was hard to dismiss anything out of hand, no matter how outlandish.

  How would I know? Maybe some asshole keeps fucking with time, and we all don’t notice because events reset?

  Shay chuckled. The thought didn’t disturb her for some reason. No point in worrying about something she couldn’t even begin to control.

  She set down the stone and rubbed her chin.

  One possibility was taking the stone to Tubal-Cain. She could ask him if he knew anything about it, but she was leery of presenting an unknown artifact to a gnome she had no reason to trust and who didn’t seem to care whether she lived or died. Just because he’d made knives for her didn’t mean he wouldn’t seize a powerful artifact if given the chance.

  No, she needed to keep the mystery in-house. Even the Professor didn’t need to know. For all his smiles and friendship with Brownstone the man was still cryptic, and sometimes the only way to maintain control was to keep certain information private.

  Secrets made the world go around, and everyone had more than a few.

  Even though Peyton and Shay were tied together in a mutually beneficial relationship, he still didn’t know she’d defused his dead man’s switch, which meant she had the upper hand. He could keep his mouth shut, even if he was being a dumbass and using shadowy underworld companies to deliver pizza ovens.

  That all meant, however, that he could be used as a resource once she had a better idea of where to direct the investigation. She also didn’t want him to know just how desperate she was. Showing weakness or ignorance was never an advantage.

  I’ll figure this shit out. This library isn’t just for show.

  A few days later, Shay stifled a yawn as she opened another book and started flipping through the yellowed pages. True desperation had long since set in, and she’d stopped even trying to narrow her search by picking useful sources.

  Instead, she’d settled on grabbing books and skimming through them until she found any diagrams or pictures she could compare to the symbols on the stone.

  Small piles had grown into larger piles until she’d been forced to stop and re-shelve them all. If the situation continued, she’d have to look into if there was such a thing as an underworld library assistant.

  Damn, I have a lot of books. Maybe I should digitize all this shit someday. Then again, who would do the work? Purity?

  She snickered at the thought of creating a whole new underworld service industry.

  Shay returned her attention to her current book. She hadn’t even bothered to check the cover. At least it wasn’t all that long. At this point, reading any of the text instead of focusing on the images was a waste of time.

  She paged through a quarter, then half, then three-quarters of the book.

  “Another whole lot of nothing. Yay.”

  She turned a page and froze, staring at the picture in the center of the new page. Her hands trembled in excitement.

  The image depicted an iron obelisk unearthed on a Greek island. The writing didn’t resemble anything from that area and most of it was unreadable, worn down by the elements, but she did recognize one of the symbols. She slid the stone next to the picture. Despite some minor stylistic differences, the similarity to one of the glyphs was unmistakable. She read the caption underneath the picture.

  This iron obelisk might be considered an out-of-place (OOP) artifact. The pillar was uncovered in a clearly bronze-age cultural stratum but is the product of advanced iron working. The unusual writing hasn’t been linked to any extant or non-extant writing system, leading certain fringe theorists to suggest it might ultimately be of extraterrestrial origin, even though it’s far more likely to be sourced from a lost regional language.

  “Aliens, huh?”

  Shay flipped to the front of the book to check the copyright date, which was 1982. That was decades before the truth about Oriceran had come out.

  She rubbed her chin. Everyone now assumed that all ancient alien reports involved Oricerans, but it was hard to be sure. So many things had changed. The writing didn’t resemble anything from Oriceran that she’d been able to find, and the book’s blithe assertion that it must be linked to another lost langua
ge didn’t sit well. Very few non-Oriceran languages and writing systems couldn’t be traced to something else in Earth’s history.

  Places to visit. Had he been talking about other planets?

  Shay laughed, not sure if some ancient lost Oriceran language was a more outrageous theory than the idea that the writing had come from another planet harboring intelligent life.

  It wouldn’t hurt to follow up that angle.

  This shit is crazy. If aliens were real, people would have proof, just like we do with Oriceran, right?

  A few days later, Shay found herself sitting across from the Professor in the Leanan Sídhe. Even if she’d taken a little vacation, she wasn’t going to say no when the man called her and offered her a job.

  “It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, Miz Carson?” The Professor was even rosier cheeked than usual. Father O’Banion might already be in control, which would be rare for a briefing.

  “It’s okay.” Shay shrugged. “No one tried to kill me today. That’s always a plus.”

  The older man shook his head. “What a sad, low bar both you and James set for your lives. I pity you at times.”

  “And what about you? What’s a good day to Doctor F.J. Smite-Williams?”

  “Any day I’m still breathing.” He sipped some beer. “I should have been dead years ago. I’ve lived ten men’s lives, and the fact that I continue to exist is a miracle in of itself.” He held up the glass. “It’s the alcohol. It’s like ambrosia to the ancient Olympian gods.”

  “Maybe, but you’re a careful guy.”

  He winked. “Well, it doesn’t hurt to create your own miracles.”

  Shay chuckled. “Your text said you had a job for me. I liked the amount of money you mentioned, so I’m here.”

  He took a gulp of his drink and set it down. “Aye, Miz Carson. Are you familiar with the Ainu?”

  “They were the native inhabitants of northern Japan. Same story as elsewhere—the new guys showed up, took control, and tried to erase the culture. Same song, different verse, et cetera. Not many of them left.”