by Martha Carr
Peyton crossed his arms. “From tombs?”
Shay flexed her hands, fighting the urge to punch him in the neck. “From wherever. Sure, some of it is your stereotypical ancient tomb in the jungle or whatever, but a lot of it isn’t like that. A lot of times it can be things like some old artifact buried under a Walmart parking lot or in a cave under a split-level three-bedroom.”
“You hit up a lot Walmarts, lately?” Peyton grinned.
“Don’t make me bitch slap you. I’m still getting my business established, and the whole being dead thing hasn’t helped.”
“When you say you’re getting your business established, that means you’ve done what, collected like five artifacts, ten artifacts?”
Shay looked him dead in the eye, even while dodging the question. “The key has been teaching myself to be an expert on history, the fake and the real. History gets rewritten by the winners, and now we know that a lot of history was crap to hide Oriceran and magic.” She pointed at Peyton. “You’re good at sorting crap from the truth.”
Peyton eyed her for a moment, suspicion coloring his face. “I’m good at researching information, not translating ancient scrolls or whatever.”
“I don’t need you to understand it, just find it. Information is information, and the more important the information is, the better hidden it’ll be. We’re a few decades into the twenty-first century, Peyton. Even if the revelation about Oriceran and all this magical energy flowing to Earth has messed a lot of shit up, we’re still a world that depends on information and computers. You can help me find the info that will lead me to an artifact. Once I find it, I sell it. Easy as that.”
“You didn’t answer my question before about how many artifacts you’ve recovered.” Peyton ran a hand through his hair. “Look, I’m grateful that you saved my life, but if we’re going to be working together, I can’t have you hold back on me too much. It’ll make my job harder.”
Shay’s jaw tightened, and she nodded. She wanted to glide right past her actual level of experience in her new job.
“Okay, so I’ve done a tomb raid. That first raid, I think I did okay.”
“One?”
“Yep. One. We all have to start somewhere. It’s not like I killed twenty people the first time I took a contract.”
Peyton winced and nodded. "No casualties during your tomb raid? I mean, you said you’re not a killer anymore.”
Shay shook her head. “There were a few. It went okay, because the return on my investment was okay. I don’t consider zero causalities necessarily part of the scoring for tomb raids.”
“You’ll still just kill anyone who gets in your way?”
She snorted. “Don’t feed me that sanctimonious bullshit, Peyton. If you weren’t swimming around with scumbags, you would have never ended up in the situation you were in.” She waved a hand. “I changed jobs, I didn’t change skins. I’m not going out of my way to kill people, but I’m not suddenly a pacifist, either. You understand who I am, right? You knew me from my past.”
Peyton locked gazes with her. “Yeah, I get that. I also can help you with your business model. Refining it so that it’s beyond what you described.”
Shay shook her head. “You stick with figuring out where things are hidden and help with the necessary background information. Start with getting things set up here, and we’ll see about everything else.”
“Look, Shay, I really can help with this, I—”
Shay cut him with a harsh look. “I don’t have time for this shit right now. I have some people I need to meet.”
Peyton frowned but didn’t say anything.
Shay turned to leave, before stopping to look over her shoulder. “Look, don’t get me wrong about any of this. I didn’t save you because I’m a good person. I saved you because you have skills I need. That doesn’t mean we’re best friends all of sudden. I’m trying to make a new life for myself, and I figured you helping me out would be a nice trade in exchange for saving your life.”
“Understood.”
“There’s food in a fridge in the office. Get me a list of groceries you need, and I can supply that, too, maybe even a bigger fridge.”
Peyton gave her a shallow nod, and Shay continued walking to her car. She didn’t have time for a bruised male ego.
3
Faking a man’s death the day before and then having a casual brunch with two women the next day. Shay doubted anyone else lived their life that way.
Her stomach knotted as she pushed into the small café. Two women waved at her from a booth in the back, and she made her way toward them. They represented her latest determined attempt at normalcy.
Her idea of it anyway.
When she faked her death, she got a glimpse of the path of violence she started walking in her teen years. It led her to being more than a little warped, and that was being charitable to herself. The obvious solution was to try and find some normal people to befriend. Place to start, even if she had to mislead them a little, it might help her recover some of the emotional balance she’d been missing.
It might have been the obvious solution, but it was far from the easiest.
Sure, I can fake a man’s death and rescue him from imminent doom, but I can’t find a few people to hang out with who I don’t want to strangle. Why the hell did I think meeting random people in a meetup group would be a good idea?
Shay slipped into a seat opposite the two women, Terry and Lisa, both bubbly bottle blondes.
“We’re so sorry you had to cut out early from bowling last time,” Lisa said with a smile. “You missed out on a very, very tense game. I almost got a strike.”
“Sorry to hear that.” Shay mirrored their smiles back at them. “I’m sure it was as nerve-wracking as being in a gunfight with a bunch of mercenaries.”
Lisa and Terry laughed.
“Oh, you’re so funny, Shay,” Lisa said. “You have such a wacky sense of humor.”
“Thanks.” Yeah, nothing but a joke. Keeping believing that.
“But we get it. It’s got to be hard running around all these foreign countries doing archaeology digs. If you ever want to show us your office at UCLA, we’d love to see it. I’m sure it’s so exciting and filled with ancient artifacts. Or even Oriceran ones.”
Shay shrugged, the lies flowing easily now. “It’s just an office. The magical stuff tends to be in the Extra-Dimensional Archaeology or Engineering departments, and not exactly in a normal newly hired archaeology professor’s office. I don’t even have tenure.”
Disappointment passed over Lisa’s face. “Oh, I was expecting it to be all, you know, like Indiana Jones or Caleb Rodriguez.”
“Just a computer and desk. Really not that exciting. Real life isn’t like the movies.”
All strong friendships are built on foundations of mutual understanding and trust. This one is like quicksand.
Shay was lying through her teeth to her new acquaintances about who she was and what she did for a living. As far as they were concerned, she was a newly hired assistant archaeology professor at UCLA. She figured it was close enough to the truth that if they asked her a few questions, she’d be able to answer them. Still didn’t help with her immediate problem of carrying her side of the conversation. It would feel so good just to shoot someone right now. Bad Shay.
“Find anything interesting in your last dig?” Terry asked. “Like hidden treasure?”
It really wasn’t that hidden. And maybe those mercenaries I had to kill counted as interesting.
Shay forced a smile. “Some evidence that may indicate a tribe was in northern Mexico earlier than we thought.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. How do you tell any of that anyway?”
“In this case by examining pottery and arrowheads found at the site,” Shay explained. “That sort of thing.”
Why am I trying so hard to lie to impress these two? How do people do this shit?
Terry and Lisa exchanged looks. “That’s neat, I guess.”
The waitre
ss came to take their orders, offering Shay a brief respite. The awkward pain returned once the waitress left.
Terry’s eyes widened, and she clapped her hands together. “So, I heard that Drake is doing a comeback tour.”
Lisa gasped. “Really? I loved him when I was a kid.”
“I think he’s even hotter now than when he was younger. You should see the photos from the promotional tour. Seriously scrumptious abs for a man in his fifties. They say he’s using some sort of special Oriceran diet.”
Shay let the women’s discussion of Drake recede into the background until it was more buzzing than actual speech to her.
Kill me now. Small talk is torture.
Maybe Terry and Lisa would love to know the best type of gun to use depending on range, best knife for close quarters, and how to improvise a weapon when you absolutely need to kill an asshole quickly. At least I know about that.
No, instead, we’re talking about Drake. Whoever that hell that is. And not only are we talking about him, but his fucking abs.
In retrospect, Shay’s decision to lie about being an academic archaeologist struck her as a big damned mistake, even if it gave her an excuse for being gone for long periods. She couldn’t talk about her actual tomb raider jobs without risking the truth coming out, and everyone she’d run into so far didn’t seem all that interested in archaeology. Talking to an actual archaeologist would quickly expose her as a fraud.
Maybe I should start just claiming to work for the IRS or something.
Shay sighed, desperate to find something, anything, to talk about that didn’t involve Drake’s abs. “You know the problem these days with archaeology is that we can’t trust a lot of the dating techniques.”
“Huh?” Lisa said. “You mean like Tinder?”
Shay clenched her fist under the table and kept going. “More like the carbon kind. Finding out Oriceran existed changed everything. I mean, it moved magic from a stage act to something legit and altered the history of our world.”
A pained look came across Terry’s face as the conversation sputtered. Not enough Drake?
“Archaeological sites are more difficult to pinpoint a date now. Magic can throw off carbon dating, along with various other techniques. A lot of modern archaeology has to rely on more old-fashioned methods such as trying to compare layers and figure things out more indirectly.”
“Really?” Lisa said. “It’s weird, you know. It’s like everything we know might be wrong. I don’t really think about it a lot, I guess, even though they talked a bit about it in my history classes in high school and college.”
Shay slapped her hand on the table, some excitement flowing through her at last. “Exactly. We thought we knew history, but what do we know? So much could be off, even more than we think, and that means our understanding of the modern world is off.”
Even if she did her new job for the money, that didn’t mean she didn’t still love her job.
Magic was real. History was a lie. Even a woman as jaded as Shay couldn’t help but get a little pumped at the idea of exploring some of that. Truth was a weapon in of itself, and the more she learned, the stronger she became.
“That’s so true,” Lisa said, bobbing her head with earnest excitement in her eyes.
Some relief flowed into Shay. The women could be led to an interesting topic other than delicious celebrity abs.
Terry nodded. “My cousin said he got kidnapped by an alien when he was younger and probed. I bet it was just a horny Elf.”
“Umm-hmm. I want to date an Elf with scrumptious abs,” Lisa said. “I mean they have to know some great sex magic.”
Shay resisted a groan. The last thing she wanted to talk about was men, human or Oriceran.
It wasn’t that she had trouble with them, not attracting them anyway. She’d always been beautiful and didn’t see the point of pretending otherwise, but at the same time, that was a two-edged sword.
Men didn’t want to know her. They only saw high cheekbones and curves, and that was it. A lot of them thought they could do something with her just because they were attracted.
Maybe if her early life had been different, she wouldn’t get so prickly about it, but it was a decade too late for that now.
Shay gritted her teeth. Yeah, my life was pretty fucked-up, and maybe I shouldn’t even bother trying to be friends with normal people, but that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to talk about men.
“What about you, Shay?” Lisa asked, pulling the woman out of her thoughts.
“What about me?”
“You dating anyone? You never talk about any men. Or, are you into women?” Lisa shrugged. “You don’t seem the type, I think.”
Shay rolled her eyes. “No, I’m into men.”
“Oh, great. I totally have someone to hook you up with.”
“So do I,” Terry said. “Try before you buy!”
Terry and Lisa both leaned forward, hunger in their eyes.
Shay rubbed the back of her neck. The last thing she needed was the women throwing their loser cousins and friends at her. This part of the conversation wouldn’t be an issue. The only thing she was better at than killing was lying.
I’ll just give them my made-up ideal guy.
“I’m seeing a guy,” Shay said. “I, uh, we stumbled on to each at… work, you know, um, at the college, you know?”
“Does he have scrumptious abs?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, totally. This guy, he’s the Emperor of Rock Solid Bodies, pretty much. Works out tons. His face is okay, nothing to write home about it. Lots of character. Quiet guy though. I mean he can be witty, but he’s usually more a man of action.”
Yeah, like I’ll ever meet a guy like that.
“I could use a little action with a rock-solid body,” Lisa said, and chuckled.
“This guy, you know, he sees me for me, right? Not just my body and all that.”
The other two women nodded.
“Oh, yeah, you definitely need a man who respects you as a person,” Terry said. “And respects your intelligence.”
“I guess,” Shay said, “he’s a little closed off, but I kind of like the challenge of opening him up.”
Lisa and Terry exchanged another glance.
“When do we get to meet your man?” Lisa said. “I want to see the kind of guy who can get you to describe him that way.”
“Oh, he’s busy. Has a job that takes him all over.” Shay shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll be able to meet him soon.”
Disappointment fell over the other two women’s face.
Huh. Probably can’t hang out with these two much longer, or they’ll ask questions I don’t want to answer. To hell with it. It’s not even like they’re all that interesting. For now, though. Ugh. Drank too much water.
“I need to get hit the ladies’ room,” Shay said, rising. “I’ll be right back.”
The vapidity of her friends, if she could even call them that, struck her as she headed to the restroom. She didn’t know why she couldn’t find someone who didn’t want to make her throat punch them.
Shay couldn’t be normal friends with a man, not really, not with her issues. Men were either enemies or work contacts, even Peyton.
She understood that all too well, but at the same time, it’d been excruciating to try and find some girlfriends. Lisa and Terry represented her sixth attempt since coming to Los Angeles.
“How do normal people make friends?” Shay muttered.
The thought still haunted her when she stepped out of the restroom a few minutes later. Some business jerk in a blue suit emerged from the men’s room at almost the same time.
His gaze traveled up and down her body, and he broke into a grin.
“Do I need to call heaven?” the business jerk asked.
Shay stared at him. She sniffed the air for alcohol but didn’t smell anyway.
“What are you talking about?”
The man took a step forward and placed an arm beside her head on the wal
l, pinning her in.
Her heart rate kicked up, and she sucked in a breath.
“I was wondering if I needed to call heaven and report that one of their angels has fallen to Earth,” the man said.
Shay groaned. “You should be locked up in an ultramax for that weapon of mass disappointment.”
“Come on, babe,” the man said, licking his lips. “I haven’t seen a woman as hot as you in a long time. We could have a good time together.”
“Move… your… arm,” Shay said, her eyes narrowing. “Or you’ll regret it, asshole.”
The business jerk rolled his eyes and dropped his arm. “Suit yourself, you frigid bitch.”
Shay spun on her heel and took a single step. That’s when the business jerk reached over to squeeze her butt. She spun back to face him, her gaze filled with murderous intent.
The man stood there, smirking, his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket. “A body like that is wasted on a woman like you. Hey, if you’re going to be frigid, can’t blame me for—”
She seized his hand and grabbed two fingers. A quick bend and snap ended with the man falling to his knees. His eyes teared up, and his mouth formed an O, but only a squeak escaped.
“You… bitch,” the man moaned. “You broke my fingers.” Tears streamed down his face.
Shay leaned over. The corner of her mouth lifted in a sneer. “Go ahead. Get up and tell everyone that some sexy woman broke your fingers. Either people will call you a pussy, or they’ll ask why it happened. Either way, you come out looking poorly, asshole.”
She waved and stepped away, making her way back to her table. The man’s sobs grew in volume. She sat back at her table, Terry and Lisa looking in the directions of the restrooms.
“Why is there a guy crying over there?” Lisa asked.
Shay shrugged. “Who knows? Men.”
4
The morning sunlight came through the narrow windows along the top of the warehouse. Shay was deep into her morning ritual, unleashing a series of vicious jabs into a black Everlast punching bag that hung from a heavy chain near the roll top door. She finished with a roundhouse kick, sending the bag sailing back.
