Owl and the City of Angels (16 page)

Did I mention Carpe is also a world-famous hacker called Sojourn? And an elf? Though what the hell
elf
meant was up to interpretation. There was next to nothing on them in the IAA literature, and Carpe wasn’t any goddamn help either.

Yeah, it hadn’t escaped my notice that out of my three friends, two were supernatural. Again, the theme of the universe throwing what I won’t do at me doesn’t escape my notice.

“Come on, you were right there!” Carpe said.

I sighed. Oh yeah. Then there was that damn book. I was officially adding stubborn to the whole elf thing. The spell book he wanted was still in use by a mummy, and somehow I didn’t think the mummy would part with it willingly. “No, Carpe. What I said was that I might be able to swing by Cairo if I had time. See what I did there? It’s called a qualifier. In this case I added two of them. In human terms I was actually telling you hell would freeze over first—
which
you would have picked up on if you’d damn well bothered to listen.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say no?”

“I did. You wouldn’t stop pestering me about it. Just like now.”

“It’s a matter of life and death—”

“So is me working for a dragon, and you don’t see me whining about it.”

“Who’s to blame for that? If you’d have let them eat the onryo—”

“OK, that’s wrong on so many levels—hey, chest!” I noticed the small chest tucked into a tunnel alcove. I equipped the dragon eye goggles in Byzantine’s inventory, lending my avatar a steampunk vibe and the ability to see in-game magic. Crucial for not ending up dead. As soon as they were on, I looked at the chest. There was a symbol of glowing red flames. Fire trap. Definitely didn’t want that sprung.

“Hey Carpe, you’re wearing a fire cloak, right? How bout you come stand here between me and the booby-trapped box?” Whereas I played a human thief in World Quest, Carpe Diem played an elven sorcerer. I wasn’t sure if he was just meta or unimaginative. Hadn’t wanted to broach that one.

“Piece of cake,” he said, and his avatar started casting. “So tell me, was it you who decided not to get my book, or the incubus? And how’s that going, by the way? Got to admit he’s lasted longer than I thought. I figured he’d have bailed out of the shit storm known as Owl by now—”

And of course elves liked incubi about as much as incubi liked them . . . “Never made it to Rynn, that one was all me. But hey, thanks for the vote of confidence in my ability to navigate adult relationships. Appreciate it, really.”

“I mean, you can tell me, Byzantine, we’re all friends here.”

“Can we please just finish robbing the goblins blind and get to the temple?”

“Fine—sheesh, try to help a friend out . . . That’s the one thing I will never understand about humans. You guys would rather lie to yourselves than take a few moments of uncomfortable self-reflection. I mean, if that’s not the pinnacle of procrastination—”

“The game, Carpe?”

From what I’d managed to get out of Rynn, elves weren’t evil—or not on purpose—and trust me, there was a pretty severe bias I had to weigh in there.

Rynn said elves tried to make everything fair for everyone—humans, supernaturals, you name it, like Zen Buddhism of the supernatural world. And therein lay the problem. Details were sparse, but what I’d gleaned from Rynn had been peppered with: “get everyone killed,” “idiots couldn’t design a battle plan if they tried,” and “how would they like to be cannon fodder.”

“In my opinion, Byzantine, you’re totally letting the incubus dictate the relationship.”

“Wow—wait, no—that’s not what’s happening here. And what the hell did I say about staying out of my love life?”

“Whatever. Makes no nevermind to me what you let the incubus tell you to do. Ahhh . . . you might want to step back. I’ll be OK if this trap goes, but you?”

I moved Byzantine back out of range, but the thought worm Carpe had thrown at me wheeled its way around my brain. Was I letting Rynn dictate the relationship? Maybe I was—not like I’d had a lot of experience in relationships, unless you counted pissing off vampires . . .

I forced the mind worm out. I played World Quest to get away from real life, not discuss it with Carpe, whose motives were suspect at best. Speaking of motives, Carpe was disarming a treasure chest. Normally I’d be concerned about Carpe pocketing items, but for the most part we were relatively honest with our hauls; besides, I knew his pack was full from the goblins and I was the one with the bag of holding—a pocket dimension in a bag. Every good thief’s best friend to haul every bit of loot.

“Like a real friend, Byzantine, I don’t mind taking the odd spell in the face, kind of like a real friend wouldn’t mind getting me
my goddamn spell book
!”

The coffee was done brewing, so I grabbed a cup before starting in again. “Is it you who wants the damn spell book, or your Grand Poobah?” The biggest bitch about being in the dark about most supernatural goings-on was having to invent my own phrases.

“Oh for—we don’t have a ‘Grand Poobah.’ ”

“Same difference. Some elf has to be in charge of the rest of you elves—hence, Grand Poobah elf—unless you’d like to fill me in with the proper name.”

I smiled, took another sip of coffee as Carpe made a derisive noise, and continued, “You know, Alexander got pissed I called the head vampire a Grand Poobah too. Is Grand Poobah hate a supernatural thing?”

“Vampires? OK, you can’t compare me to Alexander, he was trying to kill you.”

“Yet you want me to go kick a mummy in the balls and, what? Take the book while he’s clutching his knees? You do realize that strategy barely works in World Quest?”

“I never said kick the mummy in the balls—”

“Let me guess. Kick, then run really fast? Or maybe open a discussion on why he should give me the book?” I snorted.

“You deal with monsters all the time, just look at your boyfriend—”

“For the last time, no! No goblins, no Egyptian mummy sorcerers, no helping the elves in their reign of chaos.”

“Now you’re just name calling.”

“Whatever floats your boat. Now open the damn treasure chest!”

Carpe didn’t offer a comeback—or move his avatar to open the chest.

Oh for the love of— “Come on. You deserved that for the last dig about Rynn.”

Nothing. Wait a minute, why was my screen flickering? I zoomed in on my game window. Sure enough, Carpe’s character was giving me the finger.

“You goddamn son of a bitch—” And where the hell had he learned that? Damn it, I needed that hack. World Quest profanity filters were notorious. I got blacklisted at least once a month—mostly auditory, but every now and then written. Obscene gestures, on the other hand . . .

The World Quest censorship light flared orange on the right-hand corner of my screen. I sat straight up.

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me! How the hell is he supposed to be able to give me the goddamn finger and I’m the one getting the fucking sensor light? You’re really raising the bastard standard, World Quest, you know that—
Shit
.” The server flashed two more warning lights and logged me out of the game.

I sat back in my chair. “You asshole, that got me kicked off.”

“Alix, this is our private chat line—I loop it out of the server. They can’t hear you swearing like a sailor, promise.”

“No, they kicked me off for your avatar giving me the finger.”

“No way, they haven’t got the build for the gesture filter patched in yet—”

The fact that that was even an emerging problem on their radar . . . “So what the hell gives?”

A series of pink and orange vertical lines flickered into existence across my black screen. “Carpe? You seeing this?”

“Already on it. It’s not a hacker, it’s the game.”

An unsettling feeling formed in my stomach as I remembered something Nadya had said about not using World Quest to plan heists . . . But there was no way the game could know about my recent string of jobs.

Even so, the unsettling feeling remained.

The lines solidified into a solid orange screen with a black dialogue window in the center. Across the dialogue box in retro DOS green letters scrolled one word.

Probation.

I swore.
Probation? What the hell for?
I typed.

The green words flickered out, and new text scrolled across.
We designed World Quest for entertainment. Not so you could loot the ancient world.

Oh come on! Like you can prove anything.

“Owl,” Carpe said. “You should maybe leave this one alone. Seriously, I’ve never heard of the creators actually banning someone before.”

Against Carpe’s judgment, I kept typing.

“Owl, will you shut up and just apologize!” Carpe said.

I ignored him. Ban me from World Quest?
Look, if you don’t want me using your maps to steal artifacts, maybe you should have put a disclaimer on the damn terms of use page. I pay my monthly membership, and I haven’t broken any rules. You want to change them? Be my fucking guest, but you bastards don’t get to ban my ass for breaking a rule that didn’t exist!

Hence, probation. No more thefts based on our blueprints. We mean it. And have a nice day.

And with that the screen returned to my game home screen.

I couldn’t believe it. “What the fuck just happened?”

There was a pause on Carpe’s end as I fumed.

“Please tell me you haven’t been using World Quest to plan your heists,” Carpe said.

“Uh, OK, but I’d be lying. What is it with everyone thinking that’s a bad idea? It’s an awesome idea. Bonus, they’re accurate.”

“Uhhhh . . . OK, resourceful? Yes. Ethical? No. Do you have any idea how much scrutiny World Quest would fall under if anyone else links your thefts to the game? Not just the IAA, I mean the supernatural community too.”

I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective . . . at all. I felt the beginnings of a pang of guilt. It’s not a feeling I’m comfortable with—I try to avoid doing things that might make me feel guilty.

“Look, Carpe, I’m out for . . .” I checked the bottom of my login screen where a twelve-hour countdown clock blinked orange. “The next twelve.”

He sighed. “You sure know how to ruin a game. See you online in twelve.”

I shut down my login window and stared at the screen. Numb, that was the only way to describe it. Not being able to do anything about the game in the interim, I refilled my coffee cup and pulled up the theft files.

I closed out the last black market page on my list. Those had been a bust. The only Neolithic artifact for sale had been a piece of flint arrow three months back, originating from France—not even in the same geographic ballpark.

I next searched the entertainment magazine articles and video coverage, and stopped at the description in one of the captions.

“This isn’t right,” I said to Captain, who was perched behind my computer. The legend for the piece had to be wrong. The flint piece had been called early to proto-Neolithic, and the stone bowl had been labeled as late—about a five-thousand-year separation. The sword? The sword was labeled as Bronze Age. None of the three pieces were identified correctly.

I pulled up the video on the tablet and cranked the volume, to see how the entertainment personality explained the pieces.

“All three pieces were found in northern Israel at the Eynan dig site, a Neolithic city settled by the Natufians, a culture famous for the burial of their family members underneath their homes,” the host said. She went on to ooh and aah over the idea of burying family members in one’s house, and that fast devolved into cracking jokes about in-laws and exes. Funny how humor is how we cope with things that make us uncomfortable.

I stopped the video after it moved on to a collection of Greek and Roman statues. The mistakes were understandable, just not the kind Nadya or I would ever make—not to mention any other archaeology grad worth their salt. The sword could never have come from Eynan; there was no overlaying Bronze Age. The city was decimated by droughts, as well as excessive farming and hunting, well before the Bronze Age reached the Levant. And they were wrong about the culture—the flint size was too large, for starters; they were Qaraoun, not Natufian.

Either the thief who’d sold the items or Daphne’s collection curator hadn’t known what they were doing. These just weren’t the kind of mistakes I expected from the thief who’d pulled off this job. Unless I was dealing with another archaeology dropout—one who’d missed the “by the way, there be monsters” speech.

Not enough information to know what they were doing, just enough to be dangerous. Especially if they didn’t know about the curse.

Before I could email my new theory to Nadya, my laptop pinged. A message from Hermes.

Dear Owl. We need to talk—Cheers, Hermes

That was . . . unexpected. One of the things I liked about Hermes was his ability to conduct business online without all the bells and whistles associated with meeting in person. I know it’s counterintuitive, but there’s a level of trust that comes with knowing you couldn’t pick someone’s voice or face out of a lineup and vice versa.