Owl and the Electric Samurai

by Kristi Charish

I tried to go back to the painting, but Rynn grabbed me by the arm and spun me around until I was facing him. He waited until I met his eyes. I didn’t need to be empathic like him to know he was barely covering his own anger. “I agree with you trying to help them.”

  “Then why do you keep arguing with me about treasure hunting!” There was more venom in my voice than there should have been.

  “Because you and I both know that city is a golden treasure beacon, and treasure hunting is one of your faults, Alix. I care too much not to point it out.”

  I clenched my fists. This was verging on the first real fight we’d had in a long time. “I am not on a treasure hunt,” I said, straining to keep my voice even.

  “Who are you trying to convince? A lost mythical city that hasn’t been seen for centuries?” Rynn shook his head. “There are other kinds of treasure, Alix, than the ones you can haul away taped to your chest or in your bag. And the fact that you seem to have an intentional blind spot for that right now should be a huge warning.”

  Rynn knew when I was lying—or strongly suspected was maybe more accurate. Incubus perk—or handicap, depending on the situation.

  “I’m well aware that the part about Shangri-La being filled with treasure is a myth,” I tried.

  Rynn brought his face close to mine, until I could see just how much anger was hidden behind those eyes. “You don’t believe that for one second. You think you were there, Alix.”

  I froze. I’d seen Shangri-La, or something very close to it, in World Quest while under the influence of an ancient curse. Granted, I’d been delusional at the time—and there with a talking Captain—but I hadn’t told Rynn that, not in so many words.

  He could have kept pushing, yelling at me. I could see it in his face. But he didn’t. Instead, his features softened, and he let me go. “I don’t want to see you get hurt, Alix. And I’m worried. Over the past month you’ve become . . .” He paused, searching for a word. “. . . obsessed with finding them. At first I thought it was having the IAA threatening you again, but now? I wonder if it’s the shadow of that city, and I think those,” he said, nodding at the murals, “just made things worse.”

  A snarky retort was on the tip of my tongue, but looking at Rynn, the worry written on his face, I wrangled hold of my temper and forced it back down.

  Rynn’s concern wasn’t lost on me—not completely. “Look, if they’re living in there and running World Quest, it stands to reason it’s not cursed.”

  Rynn shook his head and gave me a sad look. “Not the same thing as safe.”

  No, it wasn’t. I drew in a breath. “I’m not trying to find the city for a thieving free-for-all. For once I’m not on a treasure hunt,” I said, though I wondered who I was trying to convince: Rynn or me?

  “Then what are you trying to do?” he said, crossing his arms. “Because right now, standing here . . .”

  I met Rynn’s stare and said something that might not be the entire truth but was part of it. “Saving those idiots from their self-righteous, egotistical selves.”

  Rynn watched me with those gray eyes, but instead of nodding, he turned his head to the side in confusion, as if he’d seen something in my face that shouldn’t be there. “There’s something else,” he said, his brow knitting as his eyes flickered blue. “I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something not right.”

  He looked like he wanted to say something else, but we both heard the crash of a tree outside. In the silent forest, that couldn’t be good.

  Rynn swore and turned back to the entrance. “Stay here—and whatever you do, don’t touch the doorway.”

  I watched him disappear into the cave’s shadows. I tried to focus on sounds outside—anything that might tell me what was happening—but I found myself staring back at the images. A moment later my fingers were tracing what had to be the arches of the portal. . . .

  I frowned. Hadn’t I been on the other side of the cavern? There was something worrying about that, but the worry vanished, drifting away on a warm breeze.

  I was standing in front of the doorway to Shangri-La.

  And it wasn’t like touching it would open the gate. Blood, maybe UV light, but not my bare fingers.

  No, I’d only touch.

  But what if Neil and Frank were waiting for me? What if they were trapped? In need of my help . . .

  “Alix!”

  I stepped back from the portal and shook my head as Rynn’s voice broke through whatever fog I’d fallen into. I turned in time to see him slide through the alcove. “Mercenaries, the South Africans, to be precise.”

  Goddamn it. Any thoughts of the doorway vanished as I followed Rynn back into the main chamber. Sure enough, we could see the trees and brush moving, giving the mercenaries’ movements away. “Have they seen us yet?” I said.

  “No, but they will. I don’t think they’ve seen the goblins either, but with this many humans in their valley . . .”

  It wouldn’t be long before the bloodlust at so much food kicked their caution to the wind. “What about Talie?”

  Rynn shook his head. “Gone. She would have seen them coming.”

  “Great, couldn’t she have warned us?”

  “She’s a luck demon, not a soothsayer.”

  Regardless of the why, the result was the same—we were on our own.

  “We need to leave now if we want to have any chance of slipping by them undetected,” he said, and began collecting the glow sticks. “If we hug the far side of the valley, they may not see us.”

  “Rynn! We can’t leave them the portal,” I said, surprised at the panic in my own voice.

  Rynn frowned at me but shook his head. “We don’t have a choice. I’m sorry, Alix. If we’re lucky and they don’t find the cave . . .”

  We could always come back.

  I nodded and headed back into the alcove to grab my things. I shoved the lab book into my backpack, than collected the glow sticks, careful not to look at the mural—no point in tempting myself.

  Flashlight, floodlight. I frowned as I came across a squirt bottle—my squirt bottle, the one filled with chicken blood that I carried with me.

  When the hell had I brought that out? I hadn’t planned on activating the gate. Rynn was right about that one. I started to put it back in my bag . . . and stopped.

  What if there was another way? Maybe we didn’t need to sneak out the cave entrance and play peekaboo with mercenaries.

  “Come on, Alix. Hurry it up!” I heard Rynn call, but it sounded more distant this time. I turned to face the mural, bottle of blood in hand.

  I was the expert on this stuff, I reasoned. And it was my gut telling me not to leave the gate here, untouched, unopened.

  I was Owl, infamous antiquities thief. Since when did I take the wise or easy way out of anything? And since when couldn’t I handle a few activated inscriptions on a rock wall?

  I had to know.

  “There’s another way out.” It took me a moment to realize it had been my voice; there was something that should bother me about that. I frowned, trying to chase the thought down, but I already had the bottle of water and blood ready.

  I started to spray the mural.

  “Alix!” Rynn said, but it was too late.

  There were still two UV flashlights on the floor. Under the light I could see the magic contained in the images begin to activate, glittering and flickering as they brightened, the swirled designs churning in on themselves, the animals taking on a life of their own as they danced toward the gate.

  Someone gripped my shoulders and turned me around. Rynn, an incredulous look on his face as his attention went from the portal to me. “I cannot believe you just opened the portal, Alix, what the hell . . .” He trailed off as he stared at my face, his anger disappearing, replaced with worry. He swore under his breath and started to pull me toward the cave entrance. />
  I shook him off. “Which one of us is the expert on antiquities here? I made the call to open it, all right?” It still didn’t sound quite like my own voice—and my thoughts were foggy, churning, slipping past me.

  Rynn’s mouth set in a hard line. “Something isn’t right. There’s magic at work in here, one I’m not familiar with.”

  I shook my head, trying to shake the fog clouding my thoughts, weighing them down.

  There was a furious shock of anger that coursed through me—then, slowly, as if a wind had picked up, the clouds lifted off my thoughts.

  The cave rumbled behind me.

  Shit. I ran my hand through my hair. What the hell had I been thinking?

  The cave rumbled again as the portal continued to turn in on itself.

  Whatever had happened, I didn’t have the luxury of kicking myself now. The two of us backed away slowly. “Let’s just wait and see what it does before we panic,” I said. “If it malfunctions, we run.” And if it didn’t? What then?

  Rynn swore in supernatural—the few words of supernatural I ­understood—as we watched the magic unfurl. The air filled with the tangy scent of citrus and warm, heavy spices. The wall began to waver under the UV, showing glimpses of somewhere else, a place with green grass and snow-covered peaks.

  “It’s working,” I said. I didn’t know whether it was the gate itself or the air coming through, but my breath fogged the air in front of me.

  Then it changed. The lights fumbled and the scent of orange and spice was replaced with something metallic and sharp. The image began to flicker with dark shadows. Letters started to scrawl along the gate, but quickly faltered and fell apart.

  The cave groaned this time. We both jumped back as the far walls crumbled, spilling onto the floor.

  “Please say you know how to turn it off,” Rynn said, his voice quiet, as if it might upset the portal.

  I shook my head, backing up toward the larger cavern a little faster.

  More words attempted to scrawl out over the top of the mural, instead twisting violently into tangled and fragmented strings. “The mercenaries will have heard that for sure,” he said.

  “Is this the part where you try and tell me I told you so?”

  “I don’t do that until after we avert the disaster.”

  There was a respite in the shaking cave as a last series of iridescent words made their way across the portal itself. These were in English—and legible.

  We tried to warn you. I’d run. Now.

  Shit. “You were right, back up faster,” I said. I turned and bolted through the narrow passage and out into the main chamber. Rocks had started to fall in here too as the caves had begun to collapse.

  “Alix!” Rynn said, and knocked me out of the way as rocks from the ceiling crashed to the floor.

  We grabbed what we could and made for the entrance, skidding to a halt just outside the cave entrance as the main chamber collapsed behind us.

  When the adrenaline subsided I looked up at Rynn, who was watching me, his jawline still clenched.

  “Do you think they heard us?” I said hopefully.

  Rynn started to say something.

  Instead, his attention was drawn to the ping of metal striking the cliff face above, followed by two more. Darts. Metallic and modern, the contents from the broken glass vials dripping onto me, smelling acrid and chemical.

  “I’d say yes,” Rynn said and knocked me downward, into the cover of brush.

  I landed on my back, the air knocked out of me—which is why I saw the ripples of white tattered rags in the trees above us.

  “Oh no.”

  “That mercenaries have seen us? Yes, I’d say that’s an issue,” Rynn said, still holding me to the ground.

  I shook my head. “No, we have another problem.” I pointed as best I could at the yeti balancing in the tree above us. This yeti was about seven feet tall, give or take, the combination of two goblins, one standing on the other’s shoulders and draped with a ratty yak hide, which I smelled as the wind shifted.

  At the top and the middle of the hide, holes had been randomly cut—what I imagined were eye and mouth holes. There were also holes in the sides for all four of its spindly brown arms, and though I couldn’t see their feet I imagined they’d have the same dried-twig-like texture. The only thing out of place was the yak horn; instead of being held up top like a horn on an animal, the lower half was holding the horn out, curved end up, looking like an extremely disproportionately large phallus.

  It made a low chirping noise, not unlike Captain when agitated.

  Rynn said something in supernatural that I most definitely did not recognize, and yanked me under a bush as a spear hit the loose dirt where we’d been a moment before.

  One of the goblins shouted down at us, a screeching, garbled sound this time.

  Rynn said something back at it, his voice low and rough but nowhere close to matching the yeti-goblin.

  “They speak supernatural?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “A few words here and there. Badly translated. They called you ‘meat,’ then said something about a yak horn. I think it was offering it in trade, but considering where it’s got the horn placed . . .”

  Not something I cared to be left open to interpretation . . .

  More voices drifted toward us, shouting various orders and directions over each other. Mixed in were the screeches of the yeti.

  “Run,” Rynn said, and with a hard shove sent me down ahead of him toward the trail. When we hit the bottom, Rynn steered me to the left, into the brush and away from the river.

  “This way. They’ll expect us to head toward the river. Yeti-goblins don’t like to get wet.”

  “So why the hell are we going into the forest?”

  “Because we’re desperate.”

  Damn it. “I thought your plans weren’t supposed to involve running?” My cardio had gotten better over the past few months, but I was already feeling the run in my legs and lungs.

  “My plans most definitely didn’t involve you deciding to fuck with magic and setting off a cave-in!” Rynn said, and pushed ahead of me. “Keep up.”

  Keep up. I could hear men and women yelling out in the valley. It might have been my imagination, but I could have sworn they were closer this time.

  “How many of these supernatural jobs have you followed me on now?” I said, my voice coming in short bursts. “How many of them end in some kind of supernatural cave-in or explosion?”

  Rynn shot me a dirty look over his shoulder. He’d pulled ahead a few paces, partly because of the dense brush and miniature trees, but also because of my quads protesting loudly.

  “Run faster” was all Rynn said as he somehow navigated the nonexistent path.

  I swore as Rynn skidded to a sudden stop in front of me, his shoes sliding in the damp forest floor. I slammed into his back, but oddly enough he seemed to be ready for that.

  “Booby trap,” he said. I followed his line of sight to a series of wooden spikes hanging precariously from a tree. The scent of rotting hides and days-old cat urine hit me. Yeti-goblins, cackling and screeching like cats in the trees all around us, as if they were arguing. There was a scuffle in the nearest tree before one of the yeti fell, crashing to the ground.

  That was the only warning we had before they let the trap loose.

  Rynn pushed me out of the way as the spikes crashed to the ground.

  “Since when do goblins have booby traps?” I hissed.

  “Since they’ve been breeding like rabbits and ate all the food. They’ve been selecting for the smart ones who figured out there was one food supply left.”

  The ramifications of that hit me. I guess it was already cold enough up here that they’d had to figure out furs. Put the right selective pressure on them—namely, make it warm enough for a couple breeding sea
sons and then have them eat all the food—and it was only a matter of time before a few of them figured out they could eat each other. The blueprint was set. “Cannibalistic phallus toting yeti-goblins?”

  Rynn inclined his chin. “I was going to say hyper-aggressive, but your description is apt enough. It’ll be the smart ones that survived and bred.”

  We both turned as more shouts came from our right this time—probably picking up on the screeching yeti. “They’re herding us all. We need to go another direction.”

  As if his words were premonition, something slammed into the tree trunk behind us, narrowly missing my head. Darts. And not primitive ones made out of bone and feathers, but plastic-and-glass encased. For the second time I smelled the sweet metallic contents as they trickled to the ground. I had a feeling whatever was in those darts would put down a supernatural as easily as a human—and I doubted the mercenaries cared what it did to my liver and kidneys . . .

  Rynn sprinted to the left as something else whizzed by our heads—whether from the yeti or the mercenaries, I couldn’t be sure and wasn’t about to look.

  I pushed my legs to keep up—or not collapse underneath me. I figured they were about the same thing.

  “The jeep should be up ahead.”

  “I thought she took off?”

  Rynn gave a shake of his head. Even he was starting to look and sound winded. “She wouldn’t leave us here. We’ll have a window if we keep running while the yeti try to pick off the Zebras.”

  I caught sight of it up in the tree. I mean, it was a glimpse of white, and for a second I thought it was moss or pieces of some animal’s nest that had been shredded and left hanging from the limbs.

  “Ow!” I came to a halt as something sharp, like a bee or a fire poker, bit into my cheek before slamming into the tree behind us. I touched my face, my fingers coming back covered in blood. I looked at the tree behind me. A nasty jagged arrow, with a smaller, feather-decorated shaft, was lodged into the tree trunk. And my cheek was numb. Shit. They’d figured out poison.

  I heard the gleeful cackle before the yeti began to step out of their hiding spots. The one nearest us had a pair of yak horns protruding from its middle. It was the kind of disturbing visual that you wanted to look away from but couldn’t.