Owl and the Electric Samurai

by Kristi Charish

  He swore. “Bad news,” he said, then took a generous drink of his beer.

  A man after my own heart. “Don’t look now, but see the table with the six varsity wannabes at my seven o’clock?”

  Dev swore, sat up, and started searching the crowd.

  I leaned across the table and grabbed the front of his jacket, pulling him back down. “What about the statement ‘Don’t look now’ did you not understand?” I whispered, although it came out sounding more like a hiss.

  “I thought you said the mercenaries weren’t following you,” he whispered back.

  “They aren’t—and that’s the good news. They have no idea I’m here or that I’m talking to you. As far as I can tell, they ended up here by complete chance.” Or looking for Rynn, but I figured that was speculation Dev didn’t need to hear right now.

  He shook his head before laying it on the picnic table. “I should have listened to Benji. Vampires, mercenaries, the IAA, World Quest—Is there no one on the face of the planet you will not tell to fuck off?”

  “Okay, I admit I did not act completely honorably with Benji. Wait a minute, how do you know about the vampires?” A little over a year ago I’d been retrieving an artifact from Ephesus, in Turkey, for a client. A sarcophagus, an old one, which my client, Alexander, unbeknownst to me at the time a vampire, had instructed me not to open.

  Yeah, that hadn’t gone well.

  Dev lifted his head to glare at me. “I’m off the grid, not oblivious. Frying an ancient vampire in sunlight is the kind of story that gets around. And what did we say about bringing your personal brand of shit into my hometown?”

  “Not intentional—”

  “Like seriously, you’re a walking disaster of bad luck.” He frowned as he appraised me. “Are you sure you’re not some supernatural bad luck demon?”

  “No!” I cringed as I said it a little louder than I would have liked. “Of course not,” I added in a quieter voice, checking to see that Dev’s use of the word supernatural didn’t catch undue attention.

  I drew in a breath, held it, then started counting to five. Had I been screwed by my own cohort? Hell yes, and not just by Benji. But I didn’t want to live my life with that as my excuse to act just as badly as everyone else.

  Damn Rynn’s pop psychology. I think I preferred it when I got to be the bad guy.

  Okay, Owl, new leaf. A responsible leaf. Don’t reduce yourself to insults. Keep the conversation factual, on topic, and, most importantly, civil.

  “Dev, I have a plan for the mercenaries,” I started, warning in my voice.

  Dev snorted. “What? Leave bread crumbs to a goblin den and hope they don’t come back?”

  I clenched my teeth. “Will you knock it off for two seconds so I can explain? Jesus Christ, do you actually think before you speak, or do you just like to hear yourself? Or do you want them to start paying attention to us?”

  It was all fine and well to follow Rynn’s advice to keep things civil, but what the hell was I supposed to do when the other person didn’t stop their own shit talking? It takes two, doesn’t it?

  Dev sat back and crossed his arms.

  “This isn’t some run-of-the-mill treasure quest, this is serious shit list IAA bounty money.”

  Dev still looked skeptical, so I added, “Put it this way. They offered me a get-out-of-jail pass and practically offered to give me my degree plus a clean slate. Me, their perennial scapegoat.”

  “Fuck,” Dev said, his face turning ashen as the ramifications sunk in.

  “They mean business. Even if you didn’t have anything on the World Quest duo, you need to get out of town. Which I would have told you a minute ago if you had listened.”

  It wasn’t a closely guarded secret that Frank Caselback and Neil Chansky, the World Quest duos’ real names, had been working on ­Shangri-­La myths before they’d disappeared. Take that logic a step further: their disappearance had something to do with their research. Then take that a step further: there was only a handful of locations on the planet where Shangri-La was fabled to be. . . . “Eventually they were going to put two and two together, and start looking for the guides.” And for the specialized sites in the Himalayas, the kind that attracted IAA attention, Dev was one of the best. He knew it and I knew it. “They’re going to chase down everyone. And it’s not just one group either, Dev—the bounty is big. At some point these guys are going to fire a brain cell or two and decide to start pooling resources.” Or shoot at each other. I had no illusions about that being good for anyone. “For all I know they already have.”

  Dev finished off his second beer, taking a much more careful and measured look around. “What are they offering?” he asked.

  Knowing the IAA, it depended on what they had on you. I shook my head. “Enough that, as soon as we are done here, you should run, preferably somewhere very warm without a 3G cellular network. I recommend the Cook Islands. They don’t actually have street addresses, so it’s next to impossible for anyone to find you—”

  Dev grabbed my arm. “And if they do catch me?”

  “Make something up—sell them what they want, take them where they want, do whatever they ask, just don’t piss them off.”

  Dev let out a breath. “Jesus. All right, I’ll tell you what I know, but I’m warning you, you might decide you were better off not knowing. Those guys disappeared . . . what? Three, four years ago? They were here in the off-season, I remember them because they needed a guide who wasn’t afraid to go into yeti territory to look at a set of hillside ruins.”

  “Looking for Shangri-La,” I said. That matched up with what traces I’d been able to find on their research.

  But Dev shook his head. “That’s where it gets weird. They weren’t looking for Shangri-La. I mean, they knew about it, we talked about it on the trek into the hillsides, they knew as much about the local legends as I did, but that’s not what they were here for. They were looking for something else. An old monastery,” he said as he pulled his backpack—­a dark red nylon number that made me wonder if he wasn’t nervous about wearing it in front of a yak—onto the table.

  Another sect of violent Buddhists? “They must have had a reason. Maybe they thought it was related to Shangri-La.”

  Dev shook his head and pulled out a package from inside his backpack, wrapped in brown and roughly the size of a book. “I thought so too,” he said, and unwrapped a book, opening it carefully to where a cloth bookmark had been left before sliding it across the table. “That is what they were looking for.”

  It was a research journal, the kind I used to use—bound with leather, the pages grid lined. The page Dev had opened to was a collection of handwritten notes. They weren’t on Shangri-La; I had no doubt the rest of the book was full of that, but Dev hadn’t been right either.

  I tapped the page. “This isn’t a monastery, Dev. It’s a temple, they were looking for a specific site of worship for the Dzo-nga, the Kanchenjunga Demon.” A local deity of legend worshiped throughout the Kanchenjunga mountain region.

  When multiple religions and ethnic tribes managed to agree on a single deity, it usually meant one thing. That it was real . . . and probably ate people.

  Seriously, if you want to get humans to worship, you threaten to eat them. Has a much better track record than being nice.

  It also wasn’t completely off line with their research on Shangri-La either. The Dzo-nga was tasked in a number of legends with guarding the way to the valley of immortality. They were not to be mistaken with yeti; oh, they were real too . . . just way less exotic than the stories made them out to be . . . or maybe more. I guess it really depended on what you thought of goblin culture and politics expressed in the form of entrail finger painting with yak horns thrown in for good measure.

  I scanned through the pages. Whatever the reason they’d been looking for the Dzo-nga temple, it hadn’t been a wild-goose c
hase. They’d gone through a number of locations—ten in all, with Dev I assumed, between May 3 and May 15, 2011. After the fifteenth, though, they returned to site three, which they’d written off earlier. “What changed after the fifteenth of May?” I asked Dev.

  “Avalanche—a small one, but it uncovered a section of caves that we gathered hadn’t been opened for more than a century.” He tapped the diagram, a series of pictures of caves from the outside and another series of diagrams of the inside, carefully grafted on the journal grids. I frowned at the series of pictographs—animals, a few characters, various symbols. Nothing I recognized, but they were carefully categorized along the side and then diagrammed to various locations in the cave.

  I frowned at the research notes on the pictographs. The rest of their notes on the caves had been carefully laid out, but these . . . I squinted at the shorthand in the columns but couldn’t make it out. Shit, it was in code.

  I glanced back up at Dev. “Any idea what these are?” I asked him.

  He spread his hands. “The diagrams? Most likely the Lepcha or early Buddhists left them. What they mean? Frank and Neil never told me what they suspected, though they spent days in those caves taking notes and pictures.”

  “What happened?” And how did Dev end up with the journal?

  “That is where things get strange. We hiked into the mountains less than a week after the avalanche exposed the caves. We were three days in when I got a call. Another avalanche had occurred not too far from us, caught a dozen mountaineers and hikers. They needed help searching for survivors. I tried to get the two of them to return to a lower camp—the mountain was still dangerous, and you know how finicky goblin-yeti get when there’s that kind of upheaval.”

  Goblins in general tended to blame humans for mishaps, but that was more their looking for an excuse to eat any stragglers they came across.

  “After two days of helping survivors, I got a call from Neil in the early evening, badly garbled by bad reception, but I picked up the word help. I reached the caves by morning.” He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “There was nothing left.”

  “Are you telling me the yeti got them?” I struck that off as a possibility. First, there’d be no World Quest. Second, there’d have been remains. Very disturbing finger-paint-style remains . . .

  “No, I’m saying there was nothing there. No equipment, no remains, no trace,” he said as he leaned forward. “No tracks,” he said, and let it sink in before continuing. “The only thing left was that book. Left by one of the altars to Dzo-nga. I never heard from them again.”

  So they had disappeared. “Do you think they found Shangri-La?”

  Dev tsked. “What I’m saying is that they found something in those caves. As to what happened?” He shook his head. “I think some things in this world are worth not knowing.” He flipped the pages back to a map, where the caves were marked, including latitude and longitude. They’d even printed out a picture and taped it to the page. “Regardless, I have no intention of returning. You want to trace their steps? Be my guest, but mark my words when I say it’s a bad idea.” Dev finished off my beer, having already finished his own.

  I took my phone out and started to photograph the journal, but Dev stopped me before I could take any pictures. “Keep it.”

  “You’re giving it to me?” What was the catch?

  Dev stood. “You’re damn straight I’m giving it to you. Like you said, someone is eventually going to tell the mercenaries I was the guide who last saw Frank and Neil.” He nodded at the journal. “Better that’s in your hands than mine.”

  I tucked the journal into my parka and stood as well. “Remember what I said about those off-the-grid islands.”

  He shouldered his backpack and nodded. “I’ll take the advice under serious consideration, but only if you take this piece of advice to heart: my family has lived in these mountains for generations, as far back as we can trace our family tree. We have a different interpretation of the legends that account for the mystical valley than you Westerners do, and it is this: when people start disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again, only fools and small children are so quick to think they ended up in a magical paradise.”

  Coming from Dev, it wasn’t advice I was going to take lightly. “Regardless of what they’d found, they have to still be alive.”

  Dev nodded, a sobering expression on his face. “Which raises the question, why has no one heard from them outside of that video game in four years? Like I said, there are some questions I am happy not knowing the answers to.”

  I took another look around the bar. The mercenaries were still ignoring us, but there was one man, a local guide, who was paying attention. I wondered how long it would be before the locals got paid enough to turn Dev over as the guy who handled the weird shit. Solidarity of a community is one thing, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that everyone has their price. “Dev, three o’clock. Yellow canvas parka, local-looking.”

  He shot a glance in that direction and swore.

  “Let me guess, voted most likely in high school to sell his mother?” Or in this case sell Dev out to the mercenaries. He looked the type too . . . especially the way he was giving us the evil eye.

  Dev swore. “No, aahhh, I might have hooked up with his girlfriend last night.”

  I did a double take. “Seriously? That does not look like the guy whose girlfriend you want to mess with.”

  Dev offered a sheepish shrug. “You won’t mention that to Nadya, will you?”

  I didn’t think it was worth mentioning, seeing as Nadya wouldn’t care. My paranoia made me check the room one last time before glancing down at my phone. Fifteen minutes had passed. I needed to be upstairs now. Dev offered me his hand. I took it. “Just be careful, all right?”

  “I always am,” Dev said, winking at me. I stood there and watched until he was out the door. No one seemed to notice him leave. Not even the mercenaries.

  My turn to disappear. I headed up the stairs to the lodge rooms that ran the length of the second floor. God I hoped Dev kept his head down. I liked Dev—he might not have been a friend exactly, but he was something close. And how the hell did the IAA always manage to pit the entire archaeology community against each other? At some point, shouldn’t we all figure out they were the bad guys and band together?

  Only in fairy tales and comic books. In real life, you might actually get hurt. That scares people. It scares me.

  On the way down the hall I passed two men who looked like they could be part of one of the mercenary outfits on their way down. They gave me a brief once-over, and I ignored them. It wasn’t unusual for a petite woman to avoid the big, burly, dangerous-looking guys in a backpacker lodge.

  When I reached my room at the end of the hall, I checked that the small piece of tape was untouched before checking the handle. Still locked. I fitted the heavy metal key in and carefully opened the door.

  The glow the neon streetlights cast through the thin drapes was only enough to show the outlines of the small double bed tucked in the corner and the open closet. No movement, no strange scents.

  I reached around the corner and flicked the light switch, watching from the doorway as the ceiling lamp sputtered before finally flickering on, bathing the already yellow-painted room in a buttery glow. Still nothing out of place. I stepped inside and locked the door behind me before checking the window, pushing aside the thin fuchsia and yellow patterned curtains.

  Nothing. And no tampering on the windowsill.

  I let out my breath. Half the time I didn’t know if my paranoia was getting the better of me or if it was forcing me into a reasonable state of caution.

  Not wanting to waste any more time, I fetched our backpacks from the closet and shoveled what extra clothing we’d unpacked inside. Now where the hell was Rynn?

  A hand clamped around my waist, anoth
er over my mouth, smothering my yelp.

  I was spun around, and it felt like for a moment my heart stopped as I looked up into the face of one of the most attractive men I had ever seen. A little taller than me, with close-cropped blond hair and a slim build, he was dressed in a dark fitted jacket that hugged all the right parts of his athletic frame and rivaled anything the mercenaries downstairs were wearing.

  Rynn. Son of a bitch. He smiled wide, pleased with his own fucking joke. My surprise and relief at seeing him safe morphed to anger.

  I opened my mouth to express how pissed I was, but before I could say anything his lips were on mine, fast and insistent. Rynn was a good kisser, and it took me a second to remember I was pissed off at him. I pushed him away. He was still grinning at me.

  “Rynn!” I loud-whispered and smacked him on the shoulder for good measure. That only served to make him laugh. “For Christ’s sake, there are mercenaries outside and you’re sneaking up on me? You said we needed to leave fast!”

  He let me go and lifted his hands in surrender, even trying to wipe the amusement off his face. It didn’t do much, which as far as I was concerned meant he wasn’t actually trying.

  I’d known Rynn for a year and a half. He’d been my bartender in Tokyo before we’d ever hooked up, and he was one of the few people outside my circle of ex-archaeology grads and antiquities smugglers who’d known about the supernatural and my run-ins with them. More importantly, he’d believed me, which was likely on account of the fact that he himself was an incubus.

  Don’t get the wrong idea—the whole feeding-off-sex thing is seriously overplayed. They feed off attraction, but it’s more passive than you’d expect.

  He was attractive, but more importantly, there were some other useful powers incubi had beyond sex appeal. If you asked me, that was the lesser of the bunch, and only served to make feeding off the energy of people’s attraction that much easier. Their real talents lay in the usual supernatural cadre—strength, longevity, quick reflexes—along with a couple of extra skills, namely the ability to heal damage and to sense what people were feeling. I figured that had evolved to help them get a leg up for feeding more than anything else, but it had other uses as well, namely persuasion—using emotions to manipulate people’s thoughts. That was where their real power was. I’d seen Rynn do it a few times—had it done on me—and witnessing it happen always left me with chills.