by Stark, Jenn
A splash?
I rolled over on my back, gasping. What was this place? From Alonso’s stories, there was supposed to be a ledge broad enough for three or four people to stand on, the treasure dumped into a third hole beside it. But this ledge was barely wider than I was, and the hole on at least one side dropped way the hell too far to be useful. I sat up as I heard Alonso’s terrified bleats above me and called out, but he didn’t respond. The odds of him waiting around for me had just dropped to a cool fifteen percent.
That wasn’t my only problem either. I unhooked my penlight and flashed its beam up to the ceiling where I’d crashed through, and realized the cave fall-in had not only sent rocks crashing down on my head, but several dead bats as well. Worse, the hole was now almost completely blocked by rocks, dirt, and a few stray, still-wriggling bat bodies. I made a face. That exit strategy had become seriously nasty. Not going to happen.
Yanking a couple more cards from my jacket pocket, I raked the penlight over them. Six of Swords, Five of Wands. A water journey ending in a fight? A fight with what, the bats?
The faintest sharp, quick exhale was my only warning.
A second later, a long, slender projectile pinged onto the ledge beside me, and I stared at it. The dart was exactly the last thing I expected to see on the rocky outcropping, second only to the next dart that landed right beside it. In the narrow beam of my penlight, I could see goo glistening on the tip of the wicked-looking projectile. Not just any old dart, then, but a poisoned one. Neat.
More to the point, hello, Five of Wands. Apparently, the fight portion of my day would be hitting sooner rather than later.
Another volley of blow darts soared toward me and I scrambled back from the edge of the shelf, into the more or less sheltered lee of the cliff. When the next barrage of darts clattered against the rock face, I managed a credible yelp as if one of the darts had struck home. Immediately, I heard the chatter of excited voices below me, the language still indistinct to me, but its murmurs echoing against the rocks. Then came the sound of a paddle being dipped in water. Okay, then. The water in the pool below was definitely deep and wide enough to allow for boats, but who were these people? And how did they know I was here? I mean, yes, there was the little detail of the noisy cave-in, but that’d happened mere minutes ago. The blow-dart brigade couldn’t have assembled that quickly.
Unless Alonso had tipped them off that I was coming.
I grimaced, suddenly understanding why my guide might have been in such a hurry to get me into the cave and barricaded. Had he also set the rockfall into play somehow? I couldn’t see how, but there was a lot about this situation I didn’t understand. More to the point, a new sound insinuated itself into the relative quiet of the cave, above my half-assed whimpering: the sound of human exertion. Not the scrape of hands and feet, but the grunts of breath that would be required by someone silently climbing, say, a cliff wall. Which meant some of the intrepid boaters from below had taken to the rocks. This kept getting better and better.
I exhaled slowly, weighing my options. I understood my client’s need for me to keep a low profile here and, if I was honest, there was a stubborn part of me that wanted to succeed without any skills but my own natural-born human abilities—and my ability to read the cards, of course. That skill had been a part of me so long, it was as natural to me as breathing.
Speaking of, it was time for another hit of oxygen. The cards had certainly set up the problem, but I hadn’t gotten much in the way of a solution yet.
I fished out another card and stared at it for a long second, before stuffing it back in my pocket. It was the Star. Normally a card of hope and good fortune, except for when I was reading cards literally, the way I did when I was trying to get out of, say, death by blow darts. For that kind of reading, what was most important was the fact that the card depicted a woman leaning over a pool with one foot in the water. In other words, I needed to get into the water. I had to do that anyway if I wanted to get my hands on the goddess totem, so it seemed like there was no time like the present to get that started.
Moving as quietly as possible, I gathered my feet beneath me until I was on the balls of my toes in a crouch. I waited another second more until I fancied I could hear the breathing of my assailants enough to know that the climbers were only a few feet below the edge of the ledge. Then I lunged forward and jumped high, sailing into the open space. I didn’t know how far the water stretched, but it had to be at least thirty or so feet to accommodate multiple canoes. I also didn’t know how deep it was. To avoid breaking anything that mattered, I tucked my knees to my chest and flailed my arms, trying to make my mass as broad as possible and praying that the water was deeper than a few inches.
For once, my prayers were answered in the affirmative. Accompanied by a chorus of startled cries, I crashed into the water and sank a fair distance before my fingers grazed an uneven surface. Unwilling to open my eyes despite the fact that I’d glimpsed a flash of gold in the water, I had far less compunction about opening my third eye, an act that surely wouldn’t be noticed this far underwater, given all the flailing going on above me.
The force of psychic energy that blasted back at me from the bottom of the cave pool nearly shot me out of the water and up against the cliff wall. I gasped, arguably not my best move underwater, but managed to remember where I was in time to avoid sucking in a lungful of ocean as I broke the water’s surface. And it was definitely ocean I’d landed in, or at least partly ocean, which meant—once again—there should be a way out.
My brief foray above the water’s surface was not entirely to my advantage, as another blast of blow darts assaulted me from all corners of the cavern. In addition, the cave divers above me peeled themselves off the wall and dropped into the water one by one, making five distinct plops. Five of Wands, five guys in the water.
I appreciated the symmetry of the cards, but I had a goddess to catch.
Diving down below the water again, I opened my regular eyes and kept my third eye to a mere slit. Much easier to manage the blast of energy that way. There was a pile of gold as I suspected, but a few pieces lit up as bright as the sun. A cup, a squat and angry-looking bull, several iterations of what looked like a fertility goddess—not the goddess I was looking for—and a handful of discs with spiraling circles etched into their surface. All of them pretty common, none of them what I needed, so I dug deeper, my lungs burning with the effort of holding my breath underwater. I hadn’t even been down here all that long, but there was definitely something about being forced to hold your breath that made everything so much more difficult.
Then I found it. The tips of a flailing hand, unquestionably a part of the symbol I’d been primed for. I eagerly reached for it—
And was blasted to the side by a small, heavy human body, a virtual cannonball in the water. The force of the blow took me by surprise, and I went spinning through the water, my fingers wrenched free from the icon even as I barely grazed it. A slash of pain in my left arm galvanized my senses. Crap—one of the bastards in the water had a knife. If one of them had a blade, chances were all of them had one, which just made my evening that much more complicated.
Scrambling away from my attacker, I exploded upward, clearing the surface and sucking in precious air. I whirled around as another slash of pain seared across my shoulder, and I realized I had a knife sticking out of me. It was a nice knife, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I’d been skewered, but the sudden pain nearly took my breath away. I felt my hands crackle to life, the supernatural ability for self-combustion I’d recently acquired struggling to be put to use, low profile or no.
I quelled the fire quickly. These men were only trying to protect what they believed was theirs, which probably was theirs by rights, and I was there to steal it. I certainly wasn’t going to give up my bounty now that I was so close, but I didn’t need to take them out at the same time. I also could only imagine the tales that would result about a goddess come down to Earth to steal t
heir sacred relics. I needed that like a hole in the head.
I dodged to the side, barely missing another blow dart. If I didn’t act fast, I was going to get that hole in the head whether I wanted it or not.
I treaded water for a precious few seconds, trying to get my bearings…and, sure enough, more darts whistled through the darkness, one of them planting in my other shoulder. “Hey!” I gritted out, yanking the projectile free before—hopefully—any of the poison on its tip could seep into me. Regardless, I needed to move.
Diving back down into the water, I kept my eyes open while I angled for the biggest mound of gold. That was what the escapees from Devil’s Island had seen from the ledge, after all. Those were the tales that had survived through the decades until my client had finally heard them. The prison runners had shared the story of the goddess totem, so it had to be the same one I’d seen sticking out near the top. I’d disrupted it when I’d crash-landed into the pile, but it had to be close.
I slit open my third eye again as I kicked toward Mount Goldenstuff, and once more had to brace myself for the beam of energy. Yup, that was it. There was something else too. Spectral light, pouring in from beyond the pile, as if a train was racing toward the pool of water from the cavern wall. I shook my head as a wave of dizziness overtook me—was I really seeing that, or had some of the blow dart’s poison started to affect me?
I had neither the time nor the oxygen stores to contemplate that possibility. I reached out and grabbed all the treasure I could in one swipe, including the flat, pounded-gold icon of the thrashing storm goddess, and kept moving. I broke the surface only long enough to draw in a lungful of air, then dropped again, kicking as hard as I could. I didn’t have to look back to know I was being followed. I thrust on and on, but the truth remained that as strong as I was, I was not a good swimmer, and I was not making up the ground I normally would running. I believed I could run fast. I didn’t believe I could swim well, and the old saw of “fake it till you make it” wasn’t helping me out so much. As my lungs began to burn and my sight began to fade, the dark, cold stain of poison seeping through me from my left shoulder, I realized that all the supernatural powers in the world weren’t going to help me if I died at the bottom of a cave.
Angling myself upward, I broke the water’s surface for only a second before I cracked my head on the low ceiling of the cave. Delirious with pain, I reached out mentally for the only person I knew could help, remembering a fraction of a second later that I was wrong on that count too.
Armaeus Bertrand couldn’t connect with me. He couldn’t even remember me. Everything he’d pushed me to learn, everything we’d shared, every hope, every fight—every glance and touch and sigh—might as well have never happened. He was gone from me. Vanished in plain sight.
I sank down in the water again, my heart thudding with panic. The whole reason I was even here in this fucking hellhole was to fix that problem. I couldn’t fix it if I drowned.
Impotent fury scorched through me, and in a flash, my debate was over. I was out of here. But while I wanted nothing more than to get as far away as I could as fast as possible, I couldn’t leave Alonso behind if he hadn’t actually betrayed me.
Hell, even if he had. Times were hard in French Guiana these days.
I crackled out of existence in that underground waterway and flashed back to the vine-strung cave opening…
No Alonso.
“Dammit!” Spinning around unsteadily, I unstuck the various blades the locals had sunk into my skin as a parting gift, then stashed those, the golden relic, and random bits of treasure into the steaming pockets of my jacket. Then I turned to run, panicked and confused.
I’d taken only three steps away from the opening when I saw Alonso. What was left of him, anyway. Pinned to a tree with half a dozen narrow handmade arrows sticking from his body, and a blue dart buried in his neck. Just like Indiana Jones said would happen.
I hated being right sometimes.
I tried to focus enough to whisk myself out of this death trap once and for all and back to the client who’d give me the precious information he’d promised, but with the cold drip of poison fouling my bloodstream, I couldn’t…quite—
Just then, a hail of blow darts came soaring out of the trees. I yanked Alonso’s machete free from his clenched fingers and ran forward, cursing as I raced blindly through the brush. Flicking my third eye open, I could once again see a bright light leading me on. I hoped it was taking me in the right direction, but honestly, I didn’t have much choice. I didn’t know these trees, I didn’t know these paths, and everyone around me did.
Wielding Alonso’s machete, I slashed my way through the underbrush, picking up speed. My brain might be jacked up, but my feet still worked. I no longer cared about maintaining natural speed as much as getting the hell out. Then the trees broke in front of me, and the bright light of my third eye was replaced by the bright light of moonlight and open space.
I went hurtling out over the cliff to the ocean far below. I didn’t know if there would be sharks there, but sharks weren’t a problem for me. They couldn’t tell my tale.
With a last surge of energy seconds before I hit the water, I burst into flame and crackled out of sight.
Chapter Three
“You look like complete merde, eh? Worse than usual.”
There was something ineffably elegant about getting insulted by a Frenchman that always managed to soften the blow of their disgust, but I still skewered Jean-Claude Mercault with a squint-eyed glare. “You never cared what I looked like when I worked for you before.”
“Before? Before, bah!” he said, doing a flicky thing with his fingers as if he could shoo the words away. It was a gesture that worked for him, right along with his expensive deep-navy-blue suit and crisp white shirt, open at the neck. Mercault was a small, fastidiously put together man with slicked-back hair and a ruddy complexion, an eternally genteel expression on his face. You would never know that he had killed a significant portion of his family after they’d betrayed him, or that he’d suffered the loss of still other members of his family far dearer to him in an attack on his sprawling fortress of a home. He was no saint himself, of course. He’d double-crossed me more than a few times, when the price was right. For his sake, I hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those times.
“Before, you were a tool. An excellent tool, well forged, whom I trusted to do her job and nothing more than her job,” Mercault continued. “Now I am the tool, and you are the master.”
“I’m not at all comfortable with this analogy,” I muttered.
It also wasn’t exactly true. A few days earlier, Mercault had reached out to me at an exceedingly opportune time, as I’d been reeling around in a state of both confusion and depression in the aftermath of my most recent assignment in my role as Justice of the Arcana Council. The assignment had ended pretty well—bad guys defeated, peace on Earth—but everything else had gone to complete hell. The Magician now no longer recognized me and was, by all accounts, not operating with a full deck. He was weak, and as the strongest sorcerer on the planet, weak was not his jam. The Arcana Council was being run by stand-ins, none of whom were me, and there were rumors of factions of opposition around the world thinking that now might be a good time to take the Council out entirely, or at least deal it a leveling blow.
I was in no mood to get leveled.
Then there was the personal fallout I was experiencing in the wake of Armaeus’s memory lapse, a thousand variations of the same tune all played in the key of Why. Why had he forgotten me—and why only me, and not anyone else on the Council? Why, as arguably the most powerful sorcerer on the planet, couldn’t he snap his fingers and regain his memories? And why did I feel so personally bereft at being forgotten? It wasn’t like he thought I was expendable, or, well, easily forgettable…right?
In the midst of all this dithering, getting an urgent artifact-hunting request from Jean-Claude Mercault had been a blessing. Nevertheless, I wasn’t foolish e
nough not to suspect the man of having ulterior motives. Mercault could barely tie his shoes without considering all the angles to get it done better, faster, or cheaper.
Now the Frenchman grinned, but the expression of concern didn’t leave his eyes as he tilted his glass of gin toward me, ice clinking. “Tools aside, you are many things now, eh, Sara Wilde? You come to me as a bounty hunter, responding to my plea as you did in the days of old, offering to find that which cannot be found. You say it was for money—but you do not need money, I think.”
I shrugged. “I always need money.”
“Ah, no. With your position now as Justice of the Arcana Council, you have access to the Council’s great troves of treasure. You also have the ability to blast me into the next lifetime with a wave of your fiery hands. I know this to be true. And so I ask myself, why? Why does she agree to do this task for me?”
“I could ask you the same question. Why ask me to hunt down some trinket in the South American wilderness? Surely you have other people you can tap to find you gold.”
At the mention of gold, Mercault’s gaze shifted slightly, avarice making his pupils dilate. It was almost comforting, seeing his reaction. Like old times.
Still, he didn’t allow himself to get fully distracted. “Perhaps I know you better than you know yourself, Madame Wilde. Money tempts you, but it is information you need. And it is information I have. Only the warnings, the rumors, the tales I have heard, I cannot tell you those in any ordinary way, lest I myself pay the price, eh? And so, instead of me sharing information that can get me killed, I am merely meeting with you to use your well-known services for my own gain.”
My brows lifted as he spoke, his caginess pricking my current relentless, low-grade anxiety. “You afraid of someone, Mercault?”
“Afraid? Bah,” he said, flicking his fingers again. “I merely know more than I should comfortably know about those who would seek to harm your precious Council.”
