Owl and the Tiger Thieves

by Kristi Charish

  “Keep your seat, Hiboux. I didn’t come here to talk you out of or into anything.” He made a face. “Well, maybe a little, but just hear me out.”

  I sat back down, suspicious of his intentions. “What if saving your boyfriend means that every monster that’s itching for its big moment on prime time gets its wish? You really expect me to believe that you’re fine with the monsters coming out of the closet?”

  I wasn’t in a patient mood to begin with, and Hermes had run it thin. “Can you honestly tell me that anything will really change? Seriously,” I added as his eyes widened. “I mean, isn’t it a bit like voting? Doesn’t matter which party is in place, the policies don’t really change. Monsters will still kill people. They do now anyway,” I said, thinking back to the skin walkers shopping for new passports.

  Hermes rolled his eyes. “Okay, you are not that jaded.”

  I shrugged. Mr. Kurosawa’s little war had honestly been the furthest thing from my mind the last twenty-four hours, but if I were being completely honest . . . “Oh, a few things will change. Vampire dating shows, a new CNN segment with experts from the IAA who couldn’t tell a supernatural anomaly from a bagel, Artemis hosting a talk show, probably on the trials and tribulations of being one of them in a human world—but besides a few surreal novelties, can you honestly sit there and tell me anything will really change? Monsters will still eat humans, and we won’t be able to do anything about it. That fact will probably still get shoved under the carpet, and no one will be the wiser.”

  Hermes polished off his coffee. “Okay—first, that is a defeatist attitude and I’ve never known you to be a defeatist, and second, I’d so pay to watch Artemis host a talk show. All joking and your bad attitude aside, Rynn knows exactly what that little silver device of yours can do, even if you don’t, and he’s already coming after you. If you plan on going the nuclear route, you gotta move fast.”

  “Why do you keep calling it the nuclear route?”

  “Because it is. Trust me, as soon as that cat is out of the bag, they’ll all forget their war and set their sights on you. Unless, that is, you don’t have it. If you missed it, that was a hint.”

  “You think I should give you the device?” I snorted. “Why should I trust you?”

  “Think about it, Hiboux. You won’t want to have that device anywhere near you when you’re done with it, and you can quote me on that.”

  He passed me a white card. Tentatively I turned it over. On the back was a seven-digit number prefaced with a US area code in gold embossed ink.

  “It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but when you decide to take me up on the offer, use it. Keep it up, Hiboux, I love me some chaos.” Hermes stood, ate his last cookie, and headed for the door.

  “Any other pieces of unsolicited advice?”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Yeah. I thought I told you not to ditch the guy.”

  It was all I could do not to throw my empty coffee mug at him as he headed for the lobby.

  Fantastic. More supernaturals in the mix to worry about . . . just what I needed.

  I began packing up my computer—the lobby had lost its charm, and besides, if what Hermes said about Rynn going to the ends of the earth to hunt me down was true, I needed to find Artemis and get to the cistern.

  A woman cleared her throat. I looked up to find the server. “Ah, excuse me, miss, but your friend, he said you would pay. For his?”

  Of course he had stuck me with the bill—the self-professed king of thieves . . . asshole was more like it.

  I added more liras to the pile and went to find Artemis at the cistern.

  I leaned against a wall across from the cistern, drinking a soda and eating a sandwich. I’d donned a brown baseball cap—Rynn knew my red one too well. I watched the entrance to the cistern in between checking my phone. Just another tourist enjoying Istanbul—nothing to see here. I’d been watching the court by the cistern on and off for an hour now, from various positions so as not to arouse any suspicion. The Turkish government took security around its monuments seriously and was touchy on the subject of surveillance. I hadn’t had much choice; Artemis was late.

  I gritted my teeth. Just when I’d begun to expect more from him . . .

  Captain stirred in my backpack. An hour and I hadn’t seen anything suspicious—or anyone who betrayed mercenary training.

  Captain mewed. “Well, let’s see how Nadya is doing,” I told him. I’d hesitated to call her since leaving Venice, but I’d expected an update by now. It was hard not to be worried.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  “Alix, it’s getting worse—much worse,” she said, after we exchanged pleasantries.

  “Shit.” Not that there was anything I could do about it, even if I were there—not when the problem was supernaturals running amok. “What’s happening?”

  “People are dying. Not in droves, but some of the Tokyo monsters and demons are getting bold. Oricho can do only so much—though, thankfully, they’re so set in their ways that they aren’t doing anything outright blatant.”

  “How so?”

  “You know the salaryman deaths?”

  Salarymen were businessmen who worked themselves to death; it was something that happened in Japan due to cultural traditions around work. It was sad in a tragic sort of way, but also wasn’t exactly out of the normal.

  “Let’s just say, Alix, that the rate has gone up—significantly, the news reporters are calling it an epidemic. According to Oricho, a handful of demons are behind it.”

  They weren’t actually demons, but that was the designation that the Japanese had given to the various species of supernaturals that called the Japanese islands and Korean peninsula home—ones that had an affinity for thematic nature shows and a lot of magic. None of them had ever disputed the demon moniker, and so it had stuck.

  “No one has connected the dots yet,” Nadya continued. “But it’s only a matter of time before something can’t be explained away easily with Photoshop—and then?”

  “And then people will do what they always do, Nadya: they’ll take whatever excuse you give them, however improbable, as long as it doesn’t involve monsters.”

  “I hope you’re right, but I’m not so sure. The major websites and news organizations are being scrubbed clean, but everywhere else on the Internet is full of monster sightings.”

  The Internet drew dirty laundry to its ugly, awful, fluorescent haze like a strobe light did moths on acid. There was no reason the supernaturals’ bullshit would be any different. “I’ll try to get there soon,” I told her.

  “One more thing, Alix, I found something about the da Vinci device.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said. I didn’t hide my surprise.

  “Don’t thank me just yet. It was a footnote in a Russian thesis on da Vinci’s devices in general. There’s an entire chapter on his supernatural and magic endeavors. It might not be anything.” I heard the click of computer keys. “All right, this is the passage:

  For all da Vinci’s ingenuity, his supernatural artifacts employed esoteric activation methods. Rather than using traditional methods, they employed numerical and pictographic codes and riddles. Users were more likely to cause the devices to backfire without the precise instructions. Whether that was purposeful to prevent misuse or sheer accident is unknown, though either is possible.”

  Nadya was right—it was generic. And I hadn’t seen a code attached to the devices. In fact, I hadn’t seen codes attached to any of the discarded devices. There had certainly been pictures over the device . . . wait a minute.

  I pulled the notebook out of my jacket and began flipping through the pages until I found the ones full of symbols—what I’d originally thought amounted to the designs of a madman, but they should have predated da Vinci’s descent into elixir-filled madness.

  I scanned the pages. Some of them matched the ones that decorated the orb. From the looks of the labels, different configurations of hand-drawn symbols were
clustered under names for various monsters: Nosferatu, Romanian for vampire; lycanthrope; espiritos; even incubus was listed, with another series of the diagrams underneath. Just like codes.

  I looked around the park before pulling the sphere out of my pocket. I wasn’t stupid enough to try fitting the configurations in now; who knew what might happen, but it couldn’t hurt to see what configurations the orb had been fit into. Half of the mobile images looked jammed, but they’d been jammed in the order for vampires.

  Well, it fit with what he’d said in his notebooks about dissolving vampires . . .

  I noticed two men on the other side of the road. There was nothing obvious about the way they were dressed—jackets, caps, like a lot of other tourists in Istanbul—it was the way they held themselves and walked: alert, straight, as if they were ready for a fight. “Nadya, I’m going to have to call you back later.” I slipped the orb back into my pocket and angled my head down so underneath the cap it looked as if I was staring at my phone.

  If I hadn’t been certain they were Rynn’s mercenaries, the way they glanced around, their stares vacant as they scanned the crowd—

  “Fancy seeing you here.”

  I just about jumped. Artemis was leaning against the wall beside me. “Don’t worry, they can’t see us.”

  Sure enough, the mercenaries’ eyes passed right over us. They didn’t interact, speak to each other, look at each other.

  “Definitely Rynn’s mercenaries,” Artemis said, confirming my suspicions.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  Artemis stared at them with concentration, for once looking perturbed. “Can’t say,” he said after a moment. “I can’t even get a reading off them. I slid right off their minds—it’s as if they aren’t feeling anything.”

  “How is that possible?”

  He shook his head. “It isn’t.”

  That wasn’t necessarily ominous . . . I realized that Artemis could hide himself from me as well as from anyone else. For all I knew, he’d been listening in on my conversation with Nadya . . . “How long have you been hanging out here?”

  “Long enough” was all he said. “She’ll meet us now—and she’s open to a trade. I figure she hasn’t gotten wind of any of your recent shenanigans—which is all the more reason for us to go now. Your call, O fearless leader.”

  I supposed it was my call. I let out a breath as I watched the two mercenaries round the corner and disappear out of sight. What I would have liked was a week to suss out the entire cistern and find a couple of exits. But, I wasn’t going to get what I wanted, and if I waited any longer I might piss off the Medusa.

  “It’s now or never.”

  We crossed the street and entered at the front of the line. No one noticed us, not even as Artemis pushed aside a guard so we could pass the other tourists heading down. I caught my own reflection in a mirror above the stairs that led into the stone cavern, the one that allowed the ticket sales personnel and guards to see who was in the crowd. I saw my blond braid sticking out the back of my cap and my cargo jacket. I still looked the worse for wear, but that wasn’t what got me. It was the blond head right behind me, his blue eyes staring into the mirror, looking right at me. I gasped and turned, my heart racing despite my best efforts. There was no one there except a couple from a Chinese tour group. I searched the crowd, but none of them looked remotely like Rynn.

  I stole another quick glance back up at the mirror. Rynn was gone. Either I was completely losing it, or Rynn was busy learning new tricks . . .

  Artemis was staring at me.

  “Got the sun in my eye,” I lied. “Let’s just get the necklace.” I picked up my pace as we descended the steps, weaving around the other people as if we really weren’t there.

  I shouldered Captain and took one last long look at the crowd above us. “Let’s hope a Medusa is all that’s waiting for us down here, eh, Captain?”

  The light dimmed as we entered the cistern. Despite the fact that we were in an underground cavern, the smell was of fresh, not stagnant, water. The sound of water dripping from the cavern ceiling punctuated the din of voices as we descended. Lights placed under the water projected ripples onto the ceiling, giving the entire cavern an appearance of being underwater. Wooden walkways wound through the massive natural aquifer, filled with people snapping pictures of the ancient civil engineering and architectural handiwork of the Romans.

  And then there were the carved pillars, the warning of the Medusa heads, and the column carved to look like a tree—whether the practice work of an apprentice or a full-scale artistic plan cut short because the artist died, who knew?

  We maneuvered around the coffee shop line and the metal wire tables and chairs set around the beginning and end. One thing was certain: with all the people down here, I had a hard time believing a Medusa could blend in, let alone hide.

  “Medusa was the name of one Gorgon,” Artemis told me as he led the way through the people gathered along the boardwalk looking for fish in the water. “It’s not a species name. You’d be smart to remember that.”

  “How exactly do we meet her?”

  “Oh—that.” He looked around at the packed cistern and curled his upper lip, making a face. “Yes, they are a bit of a problem. The Gorgon won’t like trespassers; she has enough fountain statues as it is. I suppose we’ll need a distraction.”

  Before I could stop him, Artemis took his silver lighter from his pocket and lit a cigarette, which earned more than a few disgusted looks from people who couldn’t see us but could smell the smoke. He took two drags off the cigarette and then held the lighter’s flame underneath a smoke detector directly over us.

  I swore and pressed myself against the wall as the fire alarm sounded, echoing off both the water and walls, the distortion making it sound all that more ominous.

  The effect was immediate. People began to flood out, none of them seeing us even as they stumbled and pushed past us. Captain let out a warning mew, but none of them noticed. Soon the place was empty except for a skeleton staff who spread out to track down what had set off the system.

  “See? Not a problem.” Whistling, he ran his hand against the wall until he found what he was looking for. Stone ground against stone as a section of the wall slid open, exposing another walkway—this one lit with lanterns.

  Artemis leapt onto the new boardwalk and held his hand out for me. I ignored it and hopped over all on my own, thanks very much. Artemis shrugged and led the way. The stone door slid shut behind us.

  The walkway and new cavern were similar to the other, but as opposed to a sterile tourist attraction, it was clear that this was someone’s home. There were vine and lantern decorations that showed someone’s personal touch; even the boardwalk was detailed. The wood was more expensive than what had been used in the tourist section and was stained a slick, shiny dark grain, gleaming more like prized teak furniture than something you would tread on. Even the tread pads were more expensive looking and obviously much less used. I was thinking that the place looked more like a fairy-tale home—like something a fairy up on modern style magazines might live in; there was an enviable Zen-like quality to everything.

  At least until I almost stumbled into the first statue . . .

  It was floodlit with a submersible LED that bled blue into the water, reaching out as if it were ready to pull you in. The statue wasn’t the shiny gray of polished granite but the dark matte black color of cooled lava. He—I assumed it was a he because of the clothes, despite the fact that the details of his face had been mostly smoothed away by the cistern’s water over the centuries—had what was left of his features twisted into a permanent grimace. His hands were clasping a spear that had been rammed through the Roman armor. I shivered. It didn’t look as though it had been a nice way to die. I realized that it was only the first of a forest of statues; throughout the Zen-worthy hidden cistern there were hundreds of them. Some, like the Roman, were highlighted on their own like cherished pieces of art, while others were clu
stered—cowering, readying for battle—collections of vignettes capturing the moments before they had died. Most had seen better days, the water having worn away their features, while others had stumbled in during the last hundred years, their features still crisp and clear. All shared one characteristic: their faces were terrified.

  They were displayed like art, but that’s not what they were, not entirely.

  “Territorial markers,” Artemis offered. “To warn off any other Gorgons or other supernaturals who might think of taking up shop here.”

  “You’d be amazed how well it works.” The voice wasn’t Artemis’s nor that of any other male. It was decidedly female.

  I swore and spun around. Behind me was a woman—and not a human one, not by any stretch.

  Unlike the depictions of Gorgons around the cistern, all of which sported thick snake tendrils in lieu of hair, this one’s hair was not quite that. It was hair, a mix of dreadlocked and braided strands that were an inky, shiny black. Instead of lying flat, though, they’d been given a life of their own, the ends twisted, knotted, and sculpted into snake heads—and they snapped. Magic, most likely.

  There were no snakelike qualities to her body beyond the shape of her hair. Her legs, neck, and what I could see of her chest were covered in iridescent scales that highlighted her olive skin under the soft lights. She was more fish than reptile.

  Older legends claim that Medusa was one of three Gorgon sisters born to the marine deities Phorcys and Ceto. In those stories, the Gorgons are monsters through and through, with wings, snake hair, and horrid faces—so horrid looking are they, in fact, that they turn mortals into stone. More modern interpretations paint Medusa as a beautiful Greek woman who flees from Poseidon to Athena’s temple, beseeching her for protection. She’s raped, and Athena, disgusted by her weakness, curses her so no man will ever touch her again. Apparently Athena was not the goddess you asked for favors before she had her morning cup of coffee . . .