Owl and the City of Angels

by Kristi Charish

  There was another fork up ahead—this time with three options. “Hey, Nadya, Carpe! Three-way split up ahead—straight, right, and left. Which has a really heavy door? Preferably one that won’t kill us.” That last bit wasn’t so much for Nadya’s benefit as Carpe’s.

  “Ahhh . . . right tunnel, definitely right,” Carpe said.

  Right it was. Captain had enough sense to wait for us at the intersection.

  Up ahead I could see what looked like the entrance to a chamber.

  “Is the genie still there, Carpe?” I said as I slid to a stop across the stone tile floor. Benji careened into me. The chamber held no obvious exit. I hoped that was temporary.

  “Yeah, still here,” Carpe said.

  Nomun and the genies were from this region of the world. “Ask him whether he knows any stories or legends about zombies from the city,” I said. Every good archaeologist knows most legends and tales have some basis in reality. Just in this case the dead leaving the city hadn’t been the nice, happy version of resurrection people always envision. Still, any stories Nomun had might hold a clue that would tell me how Cooper had raised Dr. Sanders and, more immediately, how to stop him.

  “Little thief,” came Nomun’s voice.

  “Stories about dead walking out of the city—any useful details?” I said.

  An angled slab of stone sat above the entrance we’d just crossed through. Looked like a door to me. I crouched down and searched the edges for a trigger. Benji caught on and started searching the other side. Dr. Sanders was out of our flashlight range, but we heard him growl.

  Eaten by supervisor—not exactly how I wanted to go . . .

  “Thief, all I know are old legends. None of the living Jinn have any recollection of those events.”

  “Legends are all I’ve got to go on right now anyways. Spit it out.” Where the hell was the release for that door? Come on, it had to be in here somewhere . . .

  “In the story of the city we tell, the Jinn defeated the king, who held the army of the City of the Dead under his thrall by stealing a magic lamp that allowed him to drive the risen army across the lands. In our stories, the price our betters made us pay for interfering with the humans was banishment to live in the lamp until humans called us. But that does not mean there is a lamp or that it controls the dead. It is a legend to explain away a distasteful aspect of our history.”

  “Wait a minute,” Benji piped up. “There was a lamp in the logs—taken out of this place when it first opened up a couple weeks ago. I should know, I had to handle part of the inscription earlier this week.”

  A magic lamp. I was starting to think this was less some Neolithic gods’ resting place and more a dumping ground for supernaturals to dispose of dangerous magic shit.

  “One last word of caution,” Nomun added. “In the stories, the risen turned those they touched against their rightful rulers.”

  Great, these were the biting kind . . .

  “What the hell did the inscriptions say?” I asked Benji.

  “Partial translation—totally out of context. You think Cooper is a big enough idiot to give a single grad student enough to figure out he was raising an army of the dead? I would have gone to the IAA.”

  No, of course not. Cooper would have used the army of grad students at his disposal to carry out his plan. Damn it . . . “Carpe, hypothetically, if I had another phone down here, could you get info off it?”

  “Whose phone?”

  “One I stole. What difference does it make?”

  “I might be able to get into the files, but it’ll take me awhile. What’s the number?”

  I read it off as Sanders rounded the bend. The zombie wasn’t running, but we were trapped in a dead end.

  “Benji, did you find a lever on your side?”

  “There isn’t any!”

  “No one builds a ceiling slab like that unless they intend to drop it.” It just meant it was probably on the outside, to lock people in . . .

  I grabbed Benji and dragged him back into the hall with me.

  “What is wrong with you?” he yelled.

  “Lever’s outside. You search left, I’ll search right—other left!” I said, giving Benji a shove as we collided.

  OK, lever, lever . . . I checked every stone slab on my side. Not one gave.

  “Nothing here,” Benji said.

  Maybe it wasn’t a lever. “Carpe, any pressure plates down this way?”

  Nadya spoke up first. “It looks like there is one back in the tunnel a few feet.”

  Farther back, in the direction of the zombie . . . I started to crawl out, feeling each stone as I went, to see if it might give. Benji swore but followed suit, covering the ones on the other side.

  One of the stones shifted ever so slightly under my hand. That had to be the pressure plate. I pushed with all my weight.

  It sunk—slowly at first, and then faster until it sunk a good foot. The ceiling above shook as the wedged, pillarlike slab started to slide down.

  I called out to Benji and dove for the entrance, sliding under the lowering slab.

  “Shit,” Benji yelled. I glanced back. He’d tripped, landing short of the entrance by a foot as Dr. Sanders closed in. If the zombie didn’t get him, the pillar would.

  I grabbed Benji’s hands and hauled him towards me as Dr. Sanders dove on all fours with a burst of speed and wrapped his bony fingers around Benji’s sneaker, the joints cracking as they went.

  I swore and pulled again. Benji moved but not enough, and Dr. Sanders wasn’t letting go.

  “Benji, stop screaming and kick him!” I said, and put everything I had left into dragging him under the slab. I got further this time, dragging Dr. Sanders along with him.

  I reached under, but Benji wouldn’t stop kicking long enough for me to get a hold of Dr. Sanders’s hand.

  Bone cracked as the slab crushed Dr. Sanders’s first vertebra.

  I slapped Benji hard in the face. “Sneaker—off!”

  That did it. Still yelling at the top of his lungs, he kicked at his sneaker instead of Dr. Sanders’s head. His foot slipped free as I pulled, and the two of us fell back.

  The rest of the stone slab slid into the groove, squishing what was left of my old supervisor.

  We collapsed against the wall—me catching my breath, and Benji reorganizing his sanity.

  “The inscriptions,” I said after a moment. “You said the room Cooper found that sword in had modifications—what kind?”

  “Changing the order of the rituals mostly—adding something in here, taking something away there.” He shivered. “I can’t believe Cooper turned Dr. Sanders into a zombie.”

  “What if Cooper isn’t looking for one item?” I said. “What if he’s trying to re-create whatever this ancient king did with the lamp?” I had Cooper’s phone with the images. “The lamp . . . do you know where it is?”

  Benji shook his head. “Cooper’s been keeping it with him for study.”

  “The lamp might be enough to make a zombie, but it’s not enough for whatever the hell it is Cooper’s trying to pull off,” I said.

  “How the hell do you figure that?”

  “Because the dig is still open. Dr. Sanders was left down here, and the rest of you are excavating like mad for one reason and one reason only—he either hasn’t figured out how it works, or he’s still looking for something.”

  I grabbed the phone, but there was no picture of the lamp or mention of it in the pictographs that illustrated a ritual for the three items to raise a dead army . . .

  Then again, if I were a king who’d figured out how to control an undead army, I probably wouldn’t leave all the clues in one place either. As Nomun so well illustrated, the problem with an undead army is its binary loyalty—in this legend’s case, whoever had the lamp. Cooper was always a little too fast in his dismissal
of data he deemed irrelevant . . .

  “I think I know what went wrong and what he’s missing,” I said.

  “You know, I kind of figured that might happen if you made it down here.”

  A voice I knew—that I’d know anywhere—echoed around the chamber.

  Benji and I aimed our flashlights at the ceiling. Above us was a small opening, no more than a vent, carved out of the rock—Cooper’s face framed perfectly in it.

  “Fuck.”

  Cooper smiled. “I’ve been going in circles for a month now on how to get this army of dead to work. I only recently found the lamp. Then I remembered how you figured out where Cleopatra’s cuffs were, after everyone else gave up. Those made an awesome paper, by the way—for me, anyways, after your spectacular bail from the academic community. You know, if you had taken the gig in Siberia, I might have even given you second author.”

  “You son of a bitch, you set me up in Algeria.”

  “Didn’t let me down either, Alix—knew you wouldn’t. Though I would have preferred it if you’d just run straight here after I stuck the IAA on your trail. Two years ago you would have. Didn’t think you’d have the wherewithal to go for the artifacts first. Had to do some improvising there with the vampire. He was trying to get the bronze sword anyways, so I told him I’d throw something extra in if he gave you incentive to head this way.”

  “You got Alexander to curse me?”

  His smile widened. “Was surprised how fast he agreed to that one. Barely had to sell him on it.”

  I know at one point I’d thought Cooper had a really cute all-­American surfer sort of look going. Can’t imagine why . . .

  I shook my head. It hadn’t been some nebulous branch of the IAA analyzing my behavior; it had been this backstabber, trying to herd me so I could solve his zombie problem—or lack thereof.

  “Here’s what I think,” Cooper continued. “I think just like finding those cuffs, you’ve got a damn good idea what I need to get a zombie army up and running.”

  “Wow, and I’m the one hallucinating . . .” I had to cover my eyes as he shone his flashlight around the room, lingering where Dr. Sanders’s hand protruded, still clutching Benji’s sneaker.

  “I see you found Dr. Sanders. Yeah, he was pretty pissed when he found out I’d opened this place up under his name. Not a risk taker—not like you.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Figured you might say that.” He pointed a gun through the vent. “Here’s my bet, Hiboux. I think you either know what I’m doing wrong, or you’re real close to figuring it out. You tell me—”

  I snorted. “And what? You won’t shoot me? I’m already dead, moron—or I will be real soon.”

  “No, I’ll shoot Benji. Right now Benji hasn’t done anything wrong, and we both know he’ll toe whatever line I give him—won’t you, Benji?”

  Benji swore, but he didn’t argue. The problem was, Benji might keep up his end of the bargain, but I knew damn well Cooper would shoot him—or, better yet, get the pirates to make it look like an accident.

  Benji glanced at me and gave me a slight shake of his head. He knew. He wasn’t nearly as stupid or obedient as Cooper gave him credit for.

  Still, maybe I could get Benji a couple minutes of running room. Apparently I sucked at saving people, but I could buy them a head start—how’s that for an ego builder?

  I feigned scratching my ear so I could tap my earpiece—I couldn’t talk to Nadya and Carpe, not directly, but I could maybe route them in to listen . . . all I got though was static. Hopefully that meant Nadya had picked up on Cooper and already bugged out.

  Least I could do was stall for time—for Benji and Nadya. “So you think the IAA is going to let you have a zombie army for kicks? As a reward for publishing the most papers last year?”

  Cooper’s smile didn’t drop. “Actually, they’ll be enraged after I tell them how the great failure Alix Hiboux snuck in, stole the artifacts, and killed her old supervisor so she could raise her own army.”

  “Got news for you, I’ll be long dead by then—curse, remember?”

  “Yeah. That’d be a problem—except I’ve got an entire team of Owls running around the Mediterranean.”

  Good luck pulling that one over Lady Siyu and Mr. Kurosawa for any length of time. Army of dead or not, if I was Cooper, I would not want to get in Mr. Kurosawa’s bad books . . .

  Unless Cooper had no idea who I worked for. That was almost as good as Odawaa throwing Rynn the incubus into a regular run-of-the-mill cell. It’d be funny to imagine what Lady Siyu might do to Cooper if not for the fact that his plans were based on me ending up dead . . .

  He also couldn’t know I had his phone—and that Carpe was well on his way to hacking it.

  Cooper might know the old me real well, but the old me always worked alone. As much as I bitch about Nadya, Rynn, and Carpe—especially Carpe, after that idiotic stunt with the plane—I sure as hell wouldn’t want to find myself on the wrong side of any of them.

  “Quit stalling,” Cooper said.

  You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that Benji, Captain, and I might get shot, I’d feel sorry for Cooper. He had no idea what he was in for . . .

  Cooper shot the ground a few inches from Benji’s feet. “I don’t know what kind of a distraction you orchestrated out there, but my new, improved pirate Owls are on a schedule. Any more stalling and you’ll be dealing with them, not me.”

  “And they’re real safe to have around your students? Hey, how’s Odawaa handling his dead pirates?”

  Cooper shrugged. “They’re pirates; they can be bought. As far as student casualties, I’ll just blame everything on you anyways. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll even let Benji go. After I make him put you out of your misery.”

  I licked my lips. There had to be some way to screw Cooper over. “You’ll just shoot him after anyways. Let’s at least try some honesty here. All I’m doing is buying him running time.”

  “Now. Or I shoot your cat too,” he said, and fired near Captain’s feet, forcing him to yelp and dance back.

  “Stop with the gun already,” I said. When no more loosely aimed bullets fired at Benji or Captain, I took a deep breath and started. “Here’s the thing. None of these artifacts were ever meant to raise an army of the dead. It’s the result of a couple hundred years’ worth of trial and error, courtesy of a brutal kingdom with more ambition than sense.”

  Cooper frowned, probably trying to figure out whether I was lying or not. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  I was telling the truth—too risky not to when he had the gun. Besides, if I told the truth and he shot Benji and Captain, there wasn’t much incentive left to keep telling the truth.

  I shrugged. “Trial and error, a few thousand disposable bodies, you’d be amazed what civilizations come up with. Look at the pyramids. My guess is you got hold of some of the old Jinn tales or found them in the archives—makes no never mind. You figured out there actually was a king who built a zombie army. Courtesy of Dr. Sanders, you now know the lamp will raise dead, but my guess is you had no control over him, am I right?” Now I was speculating—for all I knew, Cooper had let his zombie loose in the tunnels and told it to guard against stray archaeologists.

  Cooper waved the gun. “Keep going.”

  One down, one more hypothesis to clear up. “I only have one question for you. Did you plan to get rid of the knife, bowl, and flint from the beginning, or was that a stroke of creativity to help get me involved?”

  Cooper tsked. “You’re stalling again,” he said, and shot the ground near Captain’s tail. Captain jumped and growled at the spot in the sand, not sure where the threat was coming from. I flinched; I have a real problem with anyone threatening my cat . . .

  “You need me to string all the pieces together for you, Cooper? The instructions are already in your goddamn not
es, which you’d have known already if you’d done a better job going over all the pictograms instead of tossing them off on the grad students in pieces. Do you think the sword, bowl, and flint piece kept appearing in all the references for the dead as suggested party favors?”

  “Shit, I need all of them, don’t I? Damn it, I wondered if selling them to the vampire and siren was preemptive. Oh well, can’t predict everything. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me which order they go in?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Alix. I can take it from here—just like the rest of your projects. It’s like you’re the golden goose.” He aimed the gun at me. “Real sorry about this. You’re a hard girl to forget.”

  “Not you, Cooper. You’re easy.”

  “Like I told Odawaa and the pirates, you’ve got a hell of a habit of crawling out of tight situations. Not if you’re dead though.” He paused. “Speaking of hard to forget, Nadya still looks great. Odawaa sent a photo of her too—looked for her but I’m guessing she was smart enough to stay out of your particular brand of shit storm. What’s she up to these days?”

  “Why not ask me yourself, asshole?”

  I saw the shock register on Cooper’s face as something heavy connected with his head. Cooper slumped, and then was dragged away. Nadya’s head popped through the window in his place.

  “You were supposed to run,” I said.

  “You are not the only one who has difficulty following instructions.” She dropped a rope down. “Come on, I’ve got a way out, but we need to be fast.”

  I made Benji go first, then tied the end of the rope around my midsection and had them pull me up. I couldn’t have made the climb if I’d tried, and as it was, I needed both Nadya and Benji’s help crawling out the vent into a more recent wing of the monastery, a cellar of some sort.

  “What about Cooper?” Benji asked, nodding at the asshole’s prone body.

  Nadya shook her head. “No time. Cooper is not stupid. I overheard him tell the pirates to only wait fifteen minutes, and it’s been ten already.”