by Martha Carr
Guess we’ll see how much of a bitch it’ll be to get into this place.
The last two decoded clues injected more tension into her body.
Burn the holy lamp and prove your faith with the holy fire. Only then will the prize be revealed.
Yeah, that could mean a lot of shit. Fires of hell, anyone?
Shay easily hopped a fence, approaching the target building from behind. The two-story building was once a nobleman’s mansion centuries ago, and now served as a living museum during the day.
The drone survey didn’t show any security guards and the cameras would be easy enough to loop and the alarms to disable once she was ready to enter. The only thing Shay still couldn’t figure out was why the client had gone to the trouble of hiring a tomb raider at all. The job seemed like more of a simple snatch and grab, which meant there was information held back. Peyton searched for gossip on the dark web but there was nothing. Shay was going to have to learn on the fly.
The obvious explanation was the owl was a magic artifact, possibly dangerous. The background check confirmed the client was a legitimate businesswoman with a claim to a solid-gold owl. Shay was not turning over a weapon to a sociopath. More protocol.
The multiple dead bodies associated with the hunt for the owl might have been enough to spook the woman. The idea of a legitimate curse wriggled in the back of her thoughts.
Maybe she’s throwing enough bodies at it until the curse is resolved. Fun, fun. I don’t know if dying while looking for a golden owl is badass or lame.
Shay closed in on the rear of the building. She pulled out a small black rod and pulled it apart, extending three metal legs and a small antenna. She pressed a few buttons on the side and set it down, whistling to herself.
The simple device was insufficient to take down a serious security system, but Peyton reassured her that the mansion museum wasn’t exactly an IT marvel in the heart of Paris.
The next job I’ll probably end up in an ancient Atlantean city with some sort of magical super-computer making me answer riddles about Oriceran shit, and I’ll miss being in Paris.
Shay waited for her phone to buzz. Peyton had consolidated most of her various alerts to the device. I put a key detail for the mission in the hands of someone who went behind my back and created mutual destruction. Kind of clever.
The alerts indicated the successful suppression of the security system. She approached a door and looked it up and down. All electronic locks.
Shay gave a satisfied smile. So many people thought complicated locks were more secure, but in most cases, they were easier for a person like her to defeat than something older with tumblers.
Shay pulled a small black disc from her pocket and placed it above the handle. She pressed a button on the side and counted. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. A faint buzz filled the air, and the door opened.
She resisted the urge to clap. She half-wondered about recording the whole raid on a body cam to share with Peyton later. Not an entirely bad idea. Another time.
Okay, need to focus. Snegurka could be waiting for me in there.
No Russian Ice Witch ambushed her inside the building. The only enemy was the dust. She barely resisted a sneeze.
Shay sighed and pulled a small flashlight from her pocket. She’d brought her AR goggles in her backpack, but the job didn’t require that level of hardware, yet.
She swept the room, looking for anything out of place. Nothing but a storage room filled with boxes and shelves. A quick inspection didn’t net her a golden owl. The question remained if the owl was in the building, or if there was simply some other clue she needed to recover.
Deciding a systematic top-to-bottom search would be her best bet, Shay headed upstairs. Various bedrooms and closets contained interesting nineteenth century bric-a-brac, but nothing looking remotely like a golden owl. Her gloves kept her DNA and fingerprints off all the cabinets, boxes, chests, and drawers she opened.
Shay knew she could take her time.
She contacted Peyton after her café epiphany and he hacked into the place’s systems and reviewed the security tapes. He verified no guards patrolled the building at night. Shay had hours to play around inside.
The lack of time pressure didn’t ease any of her frustration at not finding any evidence pointing her toward the owl.
Is this one of those things where it’s hidden in plain sight in something else?
Shay shook her head, trying to think of anything she’d seen that might hold the owl.
Maybe I’m in the wrong place.
Not likely. Peyton’s additional background research discovered that the place had changed hands a few weeks prior to the theft of the golden owl. Coincidence wasn’t something Shay believed existed. Magic yes, coincidence, not so much. If the damned artifact wasn’t there, let there be some small scrap of evidence.
If necessary, she would track down the owner with Peyton’s help, but roughing up people for information wasn’t smart. The more you threatened violence, the more she risked forcing the hand of the authorities.
Okay, nothing on the second floor. But still the rest of the place to check.
Room after room, hour after hour of careful searching, Shay summed up her situation standing in a baroque bedroom. “I’m fucked.”
Her inspection of the first floor resulted in no more success than the second floor, other than the greater diversity of room types. The building didn’t appear to be anything other than what they advertised, a living museum dedicated to old lame aristocratic living.
Inspections with her goggles didn’t pick up anything more important than the fact the place was surprisingly well insulated.
Shay moved between the expansive dining room and the commercial kitchen a few times, looking for more clues, before heading down to her final hope, the large underground wine cellar that stretched under half the building.
What the hell am I missing?
Stacked barrels dominated one side of the room, and she didn’t see any other exits. Shay sucked in a breath and lowered her AR goggles.
Come on. It’s been a nice little trip to Paris, but I need that damned owl.
The tomb raider activated the goggles and shifted to thermal mode, looking around the darkened room. The back wall displayed large temperature differences from the rest of the room. It was several degrees colder than the rest of the room.
Huh. That’s the only weird thing I’ve seen since getting here.
Shay made her way over and felt carefully along the wall. Her patience was rewarded, as her hand brushed over a small hidden button.
Shay let a stupid grin dominate her face as a secret passage slid open in the back of the wine cellar, the loud scrape of the shifting wall against the floor echoing against the concrete walls. A cold breeze passed over her, making goosebumps appear on her arms.
“Guess this really is gonna be the easiest money I’ve made in a while.” Still, the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, anticipating trouble. Shay didn’t do well with easy.
Shay moved through the passage and down rough spiraling stone stairs that were connected to the hidden opening. She arrived in a narrow hallway with oddly textured walls. She lifted her flashlight to get a better look. Skulls stared back.
“What… the… fuck?”
Shay stumbled backward, going for her gun, her heart kicking into a measured gallop. Several seconds passed as she realized she wasn’t being attacked by a horde of undead. Instead, skulls and femurs formed the walls.
“Ugh. The Catacombs? Of course. Fucking Paris. I think I prefer the stupid desert now.”
Shay holstered her gun and looked back and forth. There were two paths, both curving away in opposite directions.
“Yeah, this isn’t annoying or anything.”
Thirty minutes into her exploration of the right tunnels, Shay decided she’d gone the wrong way, but that meant she’d lost a good hour by the time she’d returned and took the left tunnels instead.
F
ive minutes later, Shay threw her hands in the air and let out a loud groan.
“You have to be fucking kidding! It was right over here, and I took the wrong way? Why weren’t there some damned clues about that? Assholes.”
A high stone column decorated with a cross sat in the center of a chamber. A stone bowl sat atop the flat-topped column at about chest level. Thick lamp oil filled the bowl.
Shay recalled the final few clues.
Burn the holy lamp and prove your faith with the holy fire. Only then will the prize be revealed.
“I get the feeling I’m not going to like this.”
Shay reached into her pocket and pulled out a lighter. She lowered the lighter to the oil and flicked it on. Blue-orange flame spread over the entire surface.
A huge curtain of flame burst into existence a few feet from the back wall and drifted toward the center of the room.
Shay leapt back, rolling to the ground, assuming she’d set off a trap, but the wall of flame didn’t move past the center of the room.
She glanced to either side. The wall didn’t extend out the doorways, and she couldn’t see any obvious source. She assumed it was magical, but to her greater irritation, she also still didn’t see a golden owl.
The intense heat from the flames radiated from the wall, making the room stuffy. Sweat beaded Shay’s brow.
“Prove your faith with the holy fire? What’s that even mean?”
Inspection with her AR goggles confirmed a very hot wall of fire now separated the room into two halves.
Shay flipped up her goggles and winced. “No.” She turned to go out the way she entered. “I can come back with protective fire gear.”
The wall suddenly thickened and extended. Flaming death now blocked both exits.
“Shit. That’s inconvenient.”
It was time to gear up for an escape. She was already wearing leather gloves that could protect her hands. She pulled off her coat to drape over her head and prepared to rush through one of the exits. The fire didn’t seem to extend past the room she was in.
Shay took several deep breaths. She took one step, stopped and spun toward the back wall, aborting her run.
“No, no, no. That can’t be it, can it?” Shay nodded. “Okay, okay, okay. I can do this. I can leap through a magical wall of flame to prove some damned point because some magical thief really liked his magical riddles. I wonder if the guy who froze to death tried to escape through a wall of snow.” She paced back and forth, keeping up the argument. “Okay, it could be that I run through this wall and find a treasure, or it could be that I run through and end up horribly burned and behind even more fire than before. Yeah, fucking great.” She shook her head, considering her options and odds of survival.
“Shit. Whatever. Still better than dying in my kitchen.”
Shay charged through the wall of flame, her eyes closed. Something was off. She kept running, hesitating only a moment before she opened her eyes and looked around.
The flame hadn’t burned her. Not only that, she couldn’t even feel the heat from the flames behind her. She slowly turned around and looked. The fire had vanished, and a golden owl sat in the now empty stone bowl in the center of the room.
Prove your faith. The old mark’s words echoed in her head. There has to be a gap of information and you go anyway, despite the consequences.
Shay slapped her cheeks a few times to make sure she was awake. She stepped toward the owl, reaching out her hands. Her still-pounding heart managed to beat even faster as she prepared to lift the owl from the bowl.
“Okay. One… two… three.”
Shay snatched up the heavy artifact. The room didn’t bathe her in flames or even frost. She filled her lungs just in case and turned to head toward the exit.
Why was the owl behind magical flames? Mystery for another day. The fact that different treasure seekers had ended up dead in different ways made her wonder if the coded clues had changed. Maybe even the location. That might explain why the owl wasn’t found till now, and not just the convenient cipher decoding.
Shay pushed the thought out of her head. She had a client willing to drop a lot of euros for it. It wasn’t her responsibility to solve the mystery of who stole it, only get the artifact back to the client.
Her heart beat returned to normal as Shay whistled, heading toward the stone stairs.
No logs, no water, no mercs. Just a magical wall of flame.
Shay snorted. It wasn’t that long ago when killing mercs seemed like a much more normal day for her than running through magical walls.
Shay drove through the streets of Paris, the top down in her rented convertible. She was rocking sun glasses and a red maxi dress that clung to her toned body. Satisfaction emanated out of every pore in her body.
She grinned down at her passenger secured with a lap belt, swaddled in a cloth. A solid gold owl.
24
Shay stifled a yawn as she watched Peyton put one of her wrist frequency jammers on the wrong shelf. She was standing behind him, deciding if she should go work out for a while and reset her system.
“Hey, not there. I like to keep the wearables separate from the deployables. I already told you that.” Shay shook her head, trying to force out some of the cobwebs that came from her jetlag. “Just putting everything together by general type makes it hard to find later.”
Another yawn bubbled up. She left Paris on the next flight out even though she considered adding an extra day or making arrangements for the delivery in the city. Better to do a valuable handoff on her own playing field with her own resources and safety precautions in place.
Peyton glanced down at the silver bracelet he was holding, and back at the shelf. “I don’t understand your organization system at all. If I could set this up, it’d be totally different. I bet you’re losing all sorts of time to inefficiency. Seconds add up…”
“When you get your own ultra-secret warehouse full of cool gear, you can organize it however you want, but as long as you’re gonna party with me in my warehouses, we use my filing system.” She wagged her finger. “And no weird cubicle apartments here. This place is just for business, not for you to… Peytonize.”
He laughed and moved down the shelves, setting the equipment down. “I’m glad you’re letting me in more and trusting me.”
“We have an awkward understanding. Besides, my only real choices are to trust you or blow your brains out and moving a headless body by yourself sucks.” Shay glanced up at him with a sly smile. “These are the jokes.”
Peyton blinked and nodded slowly. “I recognize your flirting is kind of edgy… Takes dark humor to a different level. Good news… you’ll get both your warehouses back soon and we can turn Warehouse Two back into a place decorating dreams go to die.”
“Funny. Where are you going?” Shay sat up, her full attention suddenly drawn into the conversation.
“Stand down. I’m moving to an actual apartment soon instead of the warehouse. If we work together to pick a place and we both set it up, we can make sure it’s secure. Then I won’t feel so much like some twisted hermit.”
“Hermits lived in the woods. Not in air-conditioned warehouses abusing Amazon Prime.”
“Might as well be the woods far, far away from any fun.”
“I can see that this is going to be a give and take relationship until death do us part.”
“Look at you with the humor again.”
Shay let out a laugh, even as she grew serious. “I know you’re going to do it whether I help you or not.”
Peyton slapped his hand over his heart. “You get me.”
Shay did a slow roundhouse and kicked him hard enough with the top of her foot to jolt him forward. Peyton stumbled, catching himself. Shay lunged, bending one of his arms behind his back and squeezing him against the shelves.
“If this is foreplay, I’m not into MILFs.” He squeezed out the words, his face pressed so tight, one eye was shut.
“I’m not a mother.”
<
br /> “You’re a motherfucker…Argghh…you’re squeezing my face!”
Shay let out a whoop of laughter and let him go, her blood finally flowing faster. Almost as good as a workout.
Peyton stepped back from the shelves, rubbing his face. “You’re not getting a key to my place. Yes, I know you can break in faster than most people can turn a key. It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Just for fun, leave a few traps for me.”
“I thought that was a given. Early warning, one of them will involve flames and not the magical kind. Ouch! Too soon? Go play with your buddies who like to get punched by you. Leave me to reorganizing this place.” He looked at the smile on Shay’s face. “If I didn’t know better I’d say that the thought of mutual destruction was actually helping your mood. Little death on the table is your happy place.”
“Doesn’t hurt that we scored our little feathered friend.”
Shay looked at the round metal side table sitting near the shelves. Normally, she used the table to fieldstrip weapons, but the golden owl sat on it now, gleaming under the harsh fluorescent lights of the warehouse. Even though the job went smoother than any other raid, the experience left her unsettled. Open questions always bothered her.
“You honestly have no idea what the owl might do?” Shay asked. “I thought I wouldn’t care, but the more I think about some of the other guys who died… Did any of them die after they had the owl?”
Peyton looked over his shoulder. “All the more reason to deliver it sooner rather than later and collect our payday. You’ve already proven it’s magical, but there has to be more to it than weird curses on people going after it.” He rubbed his neck. “But that might not even be from the owl.”
“Tell me your theory.”
“It was stolen, right? It’s possible someone enchanted it later. Stored magic in it, turning it into an artifact.”
“Anything interesting you can find? Any links to Oriceran?”
Peyton shook his head. “Not yet, but I’ll keep digging.”
“I have a feeling I’m gonna be kicking myself when I find out I can make an immortality potion out of it, but a deal’s a deal. The last thing the great Goddess of Truth needs to be known for is stealing artifacts she was hired to collect.”
