Artifact

by Gigi Pandian

  I nodded.

  “Lug’s Spear is buried ‘round these parts.”

  “Lug’s Spear?”

  “He who held it could not be defeated in battle.”

  “Ye left out the bits about the battle,” Fergus said, his eyes widening wildly under his bushy eyebrows as if he was about to go into battle himself.

  “Doesnae matter, Fergus.”

  “Ach.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Ye cannae see it!” Fergus cried out in exasperation. “Only a fayrie—”

  “If I could.”

  “If ye could,” Fergus said, “ye wouldnae need to ask. But I’ll tell ye, because ye cannae.”

  The ragged skin on his nose gave a twitch. His wild eyes darted around the room. Satisfied that we were alone, he spoke three words: “In the sea.”

  Out of nowhere, a burst of cold sea air whipped around us. Safely tucked inside the cozy pub, it was as if the phantom wind had appeared in response to the revelation. The fire flared up and crackled violently.

  Angus was the only one who kept his head. Fergus’ large white brows raised higher on his forehead in horror than when he first saw me. His wrinkled hands gripped the arms of his chair. I jumped in my seat, wondering if I might see anything appear out of the angrily hissing fire. Angus turned his head calmly toward the door.

  “Ach,” he said, shaking his head. “They dunnae ken to wait until the wind has passed before openin’ the door.”

  “Sorry about that,” Malcolm called out from the doorway. “I didn’t expect such a big gust to follow me in.”

  Chapter 33

  The crew had packed up early because of the fierce winds, leaving the stone in the ground with a tarp they hoped would hold. In spite of the interruption, I now knew enough to realize why Mrs. Black heard late-night creaking. I knew why someone would be carrying out digging in the cave at the edge of the sea.

  None of us were in a good mood that night. I doubted it was because of the overly salted bangers and mash. Fiona flirted with Lane, upsetting Knox, who in turn reacted by ordering pint after pint of beer, ignoring Malcolm’s disapproving eye. Derwin ate even less than the night before, watching Malcolm pay more attention to Knox than to him.

  As soon as plates were cleared, the crew went their separate ways. Malcolm and Derwin set out a series of notebooks to write up the day’s work. Lane stood up to go outside for a smoke. Fiona followed. Knox headed for the bar and asked for a pint.

  “You doing okay, Knox?” I asked, seizing my chance to talk with him alone.

  “His dad didn’t even tell me about the funeral, you know,” he said. “Heard afterwards that it was a small private ceremony for the family. Since they didn’t have his...you know, since they didn’t find him.” He wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” he whispered.

  “I can help.”

  “I’m not sure,” Knox began softly, “about his accident.”

  I sat up straight and looked around. Nobody was paying attention to us. People never seemed to pay attention to Knox.

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “It’s just....” He took a seemingly endless drink from his glass. When he set it down, the glass was empty.

  He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You were good for him,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You were. If you’d stuck around, I don’t know if he’d have—”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “It does.”

  “Well....”

  The door of the pub creaked open and Fiona stepped inside.

  “Knox,” she said. “Fancy a pint?”

  She shot me a glare of supernatural strength from her translucent eyes. If I’d been a more self-conscious woman I would have fled the room. Or at the very least, blushed. I did neither.

  “Never mind,” Knox said. “It was nothing.”

  Fiona linked her arm around Knox’s. The two of them left the inn, the sound of a car engine following their departure. Apparently partaking in another pint would happen elsewhere. Damn.

  Back in my room, I threw myself down on the bed. The clothes Lane had muddied were now clean and hanging to dry on the bureau. I stared up at the slanted ceiling, listening to gusts of wind and wondering when I’d have another chance to talk to Knox alone.

  I rolled onto my stomach and sorted through my bag, looking for my cell phone. There were no messages on it. I threw it back in the bag. The door opened as the phone was in midair.

  “Your ex still hasn’t called?” Lane asked.

  “My ex has a name. And no, Rupert hasn’t called.”

  As curious as I was about what Rupert was doing, at this point I was more worried about his health. It had been too long since I’d heard from him. Had he made it to wherever he was heading? I pushed the thought out of my mind.

  “We need to stake out the dig tonight,” I said, sitting up and resting on my elbows. “I know there’s a storm coming. I’m prepared.”

  “What did Angus and Fergus tell you?”

  “Enough to suspect something,” I said, “but not enough to know. They believe in these gods who supposedly came out of the clouds.”

  “The Tuatha de Danann?” Lane asked. He sat down on the opposite end of the bed, nearly brushing his head against the sloped ceiling.

  “Do you really have to know absolutely everything?”

  “I overheard part of your conversation,” he said. “That first night in the pub.”

  “You have a remarkable talent for eavesdropping.”

  “I’m not sure if you mean that as a compliment. I didn’t hear you tonight. What did they tell you?”

  I told Lane about Lug’s Spear, of the legend where the holder of the spear was guaranteed victory, and how Fergus and Angus thought it was in the sea around here.

  Lane nodded. “You think it could be by the sea or at the sea, like the cave in the alcove.”

  “At least some spear that a real group of invaders did use, that would be attributed to this legend and thus considered a treasure. Hey, do you think this guy Lug is where the expression ‘big lug’ came from? If the real Lug was a really big guy, that would explain why he could never be defeated in battle.”

  “I like it,” said Lane.

  “You agree it sounds like we’re finally onto something?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “You think your ex and Knox managed to find a specific enough reference without Angus and Fergus, leading them to the cave. But not specific enough to find it easily, so they’re digging by the sea.”

  “What’s the matter with that theory?”

  “Nothing,” Lane said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Then what—?”

  “It doesn’t fit.”

  “You’re stuck on your precious Rajasthan Rubies,” I said. “I’m sorry you had to follow me all the way here on a wild goose chase from your point of view, but there’s no sense in being stubborn when the evidence takes us elsewhere.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course it does. Haven’t you been paying attention? Wait, why are you looking at me like that? You know something else!”

  “Sort of.”

  I stared at him in disbelief.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m trying to.”

  Lane crouched down. I initially thought he was trying to avoid bumping his head on the slanted ceiling, but he remained kneeling on the floor.

  “Hold on,” he said. I felt the bed yank under me. “Look.”

  I looked over the side of the bed and saw what he was talking about.

  The floorboards were
as solid as they were everywhere else in the building, but directly behind one of the bedposts, where the floor and the wall joined, a crack was visible. I got up and looked more closely. It wasn’t only a crack, but a crevice with room to put something inside of it.

  “You realize,” Lane said, “that this must have been your ex’s room.”

  “I already thought of that, since it’s the only one that was left. But since he’s not really dead, he would have come back to get anything important he left behind. I know him. He would have risked it.”

  “He wasn’t very thorough,” Lane said. “While you were downstairs talking with Fergus and Angus, I searched the room. I found his hiding place.”

  “He left something inside?”

  “Not on purpose. But look.” He pointed to a small chunk of gold covered in dirt. “It would have been a tight fit to hide a thick bracelet. A piece broke off.”

  “He felt the need to hide it,” I said.

  “Meaning this treasure is the one that had to do with someone trying to kill him.”

  “What about the digging at the cave?” I asked.

  Lane rummaged through his bag. He pulled out something that looked like a tiny tube of hair gel from a small bag of toiletries. I was about to roll my eyes in exasperation—although he did have very nice hair—when he moved not to the mirror but to the door frame. Taking off the cap, he stood, held it up to the top hinge of the door, and squeezed out a few drops.

  “You’ve heard the doors creaking,” he said. “We don’t want to alert anyone when we go find out.”

  Chapter 34

  I wasn’t cut out for Scottish weather. Bundled in three layers of clothing, I shivered as we stood inside the cave. The storm hadn’t yet materialized, but strong winds toyed with the clouds. A large moon hovered above us, lighting up the coast. At first this seemed fortunate, because it meant we could see better. Then we realized it also meant someone approaching wouldn’t need a flashlight. They would be more difficult to spot. The crashing waves would also drown out the sound of approaching footsteps. Lane and I had to pay close attention.

  Earlier that night I’d asked Douglas Black for a flask of whisky. I helped myself to it in an attempt to take the edge off.

  “You do realize that doesn’t actually make your body any warmer,” Lane whispered.

  “I thought summer in San Francisco was cold,” I whispered back through chattering teeth, slipping the flask back into my bag. “I don’t think my body temperature ever adjusted to leaving Goa.”

  Lane’s face was partially hidden in shadow from our concealed position, but my eyes had adjusted and I could see him clearly. Our eyes met.

  “This will work better,” he said, unbuttoning his coat.

  He pulled me toward him, but in a way that was completely different than I imagined—rather, completely differently than I would have imagined if I had imagined any such thing. Which I certainly hadn’t.

  He spun me around and pulled me backwards against the open coat so that my back rested against the sweater on his chest. He wrapped the coat around me, and his arms curled around my midsection. His chin rested on top of my head.

  “You should feel warmer in a minute,” he said quietly.

  His breath was warm against my hair. We stood in silence, looking out at the sand and the sea. I never saw a thing before I heard the noise.

  I had been paying attention. I truly had been. I didn’t see anyone approaching from the stretch of shore in front of us. The noise came from behind.

  Lane heard it, too. He let go of me instantly. The motion was so quick that I nearly lost my balance. He hurried around the corner and vanished into the back of the cave. I rushed after him. When I got there, Lane was already on his way through the back opening of the cavern.

  I heard him swear above the sound of the crashing waves. His voice was faint in the midst of the other sounds at the water’s edge. I didn’t think he would rush headlong into darkness without knowing what was beyond. But if he’d acted without thinking....

  I climbed through the hole. I expected to find Lane at the same lookout point. But he was nowhere to be seen.

  I scrambled to the edge, fearing he had been swept out to sea. There was no sign of him. The sea was pitch black under the night sky, and the waves pounded fiercely. He could have been right below me but I wouldn’t be able to see or hear him.

  I was about to call out when he appeared.

  “There’s a hidden path,” he said, stepping onto the rock from what I had thought was a sheer drop below it.

  “But—”

  “It blends into the rock face,” he said, “before it hits the coast on the other side. There’s no way you could have seen it when you were exploring before.”

  “How did you find it then?”

  Lane didn’t answer. Instead, he took my hand and pulled me sharply away from the edge, into the small opening and back into the cave.

  “I thought I saw—” he began, but then stopped. He stood looking out through the jagged rock opening.

  “You thought you saw who?”

  “Not who,” Lane said. “What.”

  I could barely make out his face in the shadow of the cave, but his voice was slightly unsteady. He shook it off with a forced laugh.

  “The stories of the locals must be getting to me,” he said, shaking his head. “And this Gothic setting. At the base of a cliff in the moonlight with the crashing waves…it’s ridiculous, really. I saw a person running away. That’s all. Whoever our mysterious cave digger is.”

  “But what did you think you saw?”

  “The figure. It was small and pale. Almost familiar.” He shook his head. “For a second, I thought it was the bean nighe.”

  I almost laughed. One look at Lane’s face and I thought better of it. Instead I did what I should have done in the first place. I broke into a run. Lane followed.

  In the darkness, the seaside path was too dark to follow. We hurried along the main path, hoping we might reach the top of the cliff with him—or her? or it?—in sight.

  We scrambled up the steep path. Once we reached high ground, we kept up our pace for a few minutes. But the landscape was empty. Whoever had been there was gone.

  We let ourselves into the inn. I insisted on waiting downstairs with the weak hope that the person had taken a roundabout way back to their lodgings—if these were indeed their lodgings. We decided the best place to wait would be the middle of the stairs, where we would be hidden from both the upstairs rooms and the main door, but could see and hear both.

  “Why didn’t we think of doing this in the first place?” Lane whispered after several minutes of silent waiting.

  “People could be doing all sorts of things in the night.”

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We didn’t beat him back here.”

  “Whoever it was didn’t necessarily beat us back here,” I said once we were safely inside the room. “We were assuming it was someone on the dig. But Rupert said he was going to go after the treasure, too.”

  Lane swore under his breath.

  “This whole thing is a complete farce,” he said.

  “I thought he was too injured to do much of anything,” I said, “but if he was doing better, he could be here.”

  “And not contacting you?” Lane tore off his jacket angrily, and instinctively reached for his pack of cigarettes. “I don’t know how you could have ever been involved with such a—”

  “What?”

  “No one should be able to do that to you.”

  “No one has done anything to me,” I said crossly. “I can handle myself.”

  Lane threw down his cigarettes and scooped me up in his arms. “Jones,” he said, “I know you can. What I wonder is if you can handle me, too.” He lifted me onto my tiptoes before tilting my head back and enveloping me in a kiss.
<
br />   I wasn’t sure if my feet left the ground or if it only felt as if they did. He lowered me onto the small, lumpy bed. At that moment, nothing had ever felt so soft.

  My head hit my bag, so I pushed it over—right as my phone buzzed in my ear. I’d turned the ringer to vibrate while we were on our stakeout, but next to my ear the noise was jarring. Lane swore under his breath and let go of me.

  “You better get it,” he said. “It might finally be your ex.”

  “Sanjay,” I said into the receiver, out of breath from Lane’s kiss. “Now isn’t really a good time.” A light on my phone was blinking, indicating other messages. “Sorry I didn’t call you back earlier.”

  “I never should have let you go on your own,” Sanjay said.

  Lane frowned as he watched me. From the volume of Sanjay’s voice, Lane could hear him.

  “He’s not—” I began to whisper to Lane with my hand over the receiver.

  “Are you talking to someone else?” Sanjay asked. “Isn’t it almost midnight there?”

  “Television.”

  Lane gave me a sharp look before slipping out of the room. Great. Lane was jealous of Sanjay, the person who was more like a brother than my own brother.

  “Was that a door slamming?” Sanjay asked. “What’s going on over there?”

  I was alone and wide awake in the closet-size room, so I took the time to fill in Sanjay about what was going on with Rupert not being killed after all, and everything going on at the dig and the inn. Well, not quite everything. But I hoped Sanjay might catch something I was missing. He was good at that sort of thing.

  “It sounds like you need to force Knox to tell you what he knows,” Sanjay said.

  “That’s what I was thinking, but it’s not easy to get him alone.”

  Sanjay grumbled something under his breath. “You don’t want him alone. He might have tried to kill his friend, remember? You need him to give you information in a way that isn’t dangerous. Is he in his own room, or with his girlfriend?”

  “His own room.”

  “That’s easy, then. Leave him a note under his door. Tell him you know what’s going on and he better stay late after breakfast to talk to you if he knows what’s good for him. The innkeepers will be there. You’ll be safe.”