Owl and the City of Angels (46 page)

“You got Alexander to curse me?”

His smile widened. “Was surprised how fast he agreed to that one. Barely had to sell him on it.”

I know at one point I’d thought Cooper had a really cute all-American surfer sort of look going. Can’t imagine why . . .

I shook my head. It hadn’t been some nebulous branch of the IAA analyzing my behavior; it had been this backstabber, trying to herd me so I could solve his zombie problem—or lack thereof.

“Here’s what I think,” Cooper continued. “I think just like finding those cuffs, you’ve got a damn good idea what I need to get a zombie army up and running.”

“Wow, and I’m the one hallucinating . . .” I had to cover my eyes as he shone his flashlight around the room, lingering where Dr. Sanders’s hand protruded, still clutching Benji’s sneaker.

“I see you found Dr. Sanders. Yeah, he was pretty pissed when he found out I’d opened this place up under his name. Not a risk taker—not like you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Figured you might say that.” He pointed a gun through the vent. “Here’s my bet, Hiboux. I think you either know what I’m doing wrong, or you’re real close to figuring it out. You tell me—”

I snorted. “And what? You won’t shoot me? I’m already dead, moron—or I will be real soon.”

“No, I’ll shoot Benji. Right now Benji hasn’t done anything wrong, and we both know he’ll toe whatever line I give him—won’t you, Benji?”

Benji swore, but he didn’t argue. The problem was, Benji might keep up his end of the bargain, but I knew damn well Cooper would shoot him—or, better yet, get the pirates to make it look like an accident.

Benji glanced at me and gave me a slight shake of his head. He knew. He wasn’t nearly as stupid or obedient as Cooper gave him credit for.

Still, maybe I could get Benji a couple minutes of running room. Apparently I sucked at saving people, but I could buy them a head start—how’s that for an ego builder?

I feigned scratching my ear so I could tap my earpiece—I couldn’t talk to Nadya and Carpe, not directly, but I could maybe route them in to listen . . . all I got though was static. Hopefully that meant Nadya had picked up on Cooper and already bugged out.

Least I could do was stall for time—for Benji and Nadya. “So you think the IAA is going to let you have a zombie army for kicks? As a reward for publishing the most papers last year?”

Cooper’s smile didn’t drop. “Actually, they’ll be enraged after I tell them how the great failure Alix Hiboux snuck in, stole the artifacts, and killed her old supervisor so she could raise her own army.”

“Got news for you, I’ll be long dead by then—curse, remember?”

“Yeah. That’d be a problem—except I’ve got an entire team of Owls running around the Mediterranean.”

Good luck pulling that one over Lady Siyu and Mr. Kurosawa for any length of time. Army of dead or not, if I was Cooper, I would not want to get in Mr. Kurosawa’s bad books . . .

Unless Cooper had no idea who I worked for. That was almost as good as Odawaa throwing Rynn the incubus into a regular run-of-the-mill cell. It’d be funny to imagine what Lady Siyu might do to Cooper if not for the fact that his plans were based on me ending up dead . . .

He also couldn’t know I had his phone—and that Carpe was well on his way to hacking it.

Cooper might know the old me real well, but the old me always worked alone. As much as I bitch about Nadya, Rynn, and Carpe—especially Carpe, after that idiotic stunt with the plane—I sure as hell wouldn’t want to find myself on the wrong side of any of them.

“Quit stalling,” Cooper said.

You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that Benji, Captain, and I might get shot, I’d feel sorry for Cooper. He had no idea what he was in for . . .

Cooper shot the ground a few inches from Benji’s feet. “I don’t know what kind of a distraction you orchestrated out there, but my new, improved pirate Owls are on a schedule. Any more stalling and you’ll be dealing with them, not me.”

“And they’re real safe to have around your students? Hey, how’s Odawaa handling his dead pirates?”

Cooper shrugged. “They’re pirates; they can be bought. As far as student casualties, I’ll just blame everything on you anyways. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll even let Benji go. After I make him put you out of your misery.”

I licked my lips. There had to be some way to screw Cooper over. “You’ll just shoot him after anyways. Let’s at least try some honesty here. All I’m doing is buying him running time.”

“Now. Or I shoot your cat too,” he said, and fired near Captain’s feet, forcing him to yelp and dance back.

“Stop with the gun already,” I said. When no more loosely aimed bullets fired at Benji or Captain, I took a deep breath and started. “Here’s the thing. None of these artifacts were ever meant to raise an army of the dead. It’s the result of a couple hundred years’ worth of trial and error, courtesy of a brutal kingdom with more ambition than sense.”

Cooper frowned, probably trying to figure out whether I was lying or not. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

I was telling the truth—too risky not to when he had the gun. Besides, if I told the truth and he shot Benji and Captain, there wasn’t much incentive left to keep telling the truth.

I shrugged. “Trial and error, a few thousand disposable bodies, you’d be amazed what civilizations come up with. Look at the pyramids. My guess is you got hold of some of the old Jinn tales or found them in the archives—makes no never mind. You figured out there actually was a king who built a zombie army. Courtesy of Dr. Sanders, you now know the lamp will raise dead, but my guess is you had no control over him, am I right?” Now I was speculating—for all I knew, Cooper had let his zombie loose in the tunnels and told it to guard against stray archaeologists.

Cooper waved the gun. “Keep going.”

One down, one more hypothesis to clear up. “I only have one question for you. Did you plan to get rid of the knife, bowl, and flint from the beginning, or was that a stroke of creativity to help get me involved?”

Cooper tsked. “You’re stalling again,” he said, and shot the ground near Captain’s tail. Captain jumped and growled at the spot in the sand, not sure where the threat was coming from. I flinched; I have a real problem with anyone threatening my cat . . .

“You need me to string all the pieces together for you, Cooper? The instructions are already in your goddamn notes, which you’d have known already if you’d done a better job going over all the pictograms instead of tossing them off on the grad students in pieces. Do you think the sword, bowl, and flint piece kept appearing in all the references for the dead as suggested party favors?”

“Shit, I need all of them, don’t I? Damn it, I wondered if selling them to the vampire and siren was preemptive. Oh well, can’t predict everything. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me which order they go in?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Don’t worry about it, Alix. I can take it from here—just like the rest of your projects. It’s like you’re the golden goose.” He aimed the gun at me. “Real sorry about this. You’re a hard girl to forget.”

“Not you, Cooper. You’re easy.”

“Like I told Odawaa and the pirates, you’ve got a hell of a habit of crawling out of tight situations. Not if you’re dead though.” He paused. “Speaking of hard to forget, Nadya still looks great. Odawaa sent a photo of her too—looked for her but I’m guessing she was smart enough to stay out of your particular brand of shit storm. What’s she up to these days?”

“Why not ask me yourself, asshole?”

I saw the shock register on Cooper’s face as something heavy connected with his head. Cooper slumped, and then was dragged away. Nadya’s head popped through the window in his place.

“You were supposed to run,” I said.

“You are not the only one who has difficulty following instructions.” She dropped a rope down. “Come on, I’ve got a way out, but we need to be fast.”

I made Benji go first, then tied the end of the rope around my midsection and had them pull me up. I couldn’t have made the climb if I’d tried, and as it was, I needed both Nadya and Benji’s help crawling out the vent into a more recent wing of the monastery, a cellar of some sort.

“What about Cooper?” Benji asked, nodding at the asshole’s prone body.

Nadya shook her head. “No time. Cooper is not stupid. I overheard him tell the pirates to only wait fifteen minutes, and it’s been ten already.”

I bet the only reason he hadn’t brought them along was that he hadn’t been sure I’d taken care of Dr. Sanders. After the golem, I didn’t think Odawaa would react well to a zombie in a tweed suit.

I started rifling through Cooper’s army-issue cargo jacket pockets as voices echoed nearby.

“Alix, we don’t have time,” Nadya started.

I kept going. Wallet, pocketknife, sunglasses . . . where the hell did Cooper keep it?

Bingo. I found his white plastic access card in his inside pocket. “The gold standard of IAA security clearance everywhere,” I said, holding it up. Not useful now, but definitely once we got out of here.

Nadya shook her head and pointed down the monastery hall. “Down this way there are tunnels that should lead into the caves in the cliffs. Rynn and the elf will meet us there.”

No sooner had she said it than we heard yelling in Somali and a door banging nearby. Nadya leading the way, we bolted in the opposite direction, Captain close on my heels.

“Did you find the Neolithic inscriptions—the ones mentioning the curse?”

I shook my head. While we now knew who was behind the thefts, as far as saving my own neck, the Syrian City of the Dead had turned out to be nothing more than an epic wild-goose chase. I hadn’t even gotten to setting off traps . . . “Someone moved the knife a few thousand years ago. It’d take me months to find it, if it’s even here.”

Nadya didn’t say anything more, but there was a hard set to her mouth as we ran for the exit. We had a short, uneventful run through the basement—the monks who built this place didn’t have a need for extensive traps. Go figure. We came out at the caves just outside the camp perimeter, though with the way the IAA was mobilizing, it wouldn’t be outside their perimeter for long. . . .

I saw a jeep careen around the side of the mountain towards us, Rynn in the front seat and Carpe hanging on for dear life behind him.

Nadya and I broke into a run as Rynn pulled the jeep up. “You know, for someone who doesn’t steal, this is the second time you’ve hot-wired an IAA jeep,” I said.

“Not stealing when they give you the keys.”

Damned incubus . . . “What happened to your pirate fan club?”

“Sent them back to Odawaa. Caused quite the internal commotion. They weren’t sure who to shoot at for a while there.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the mobilizing groups. “However, I think they’ve figured it out—get in.”

“I’m coming with you,” Benji said, running up behind us as I tossed Captain in the jeep.

Nadya and I exchanged a glance. The IAA was regrouping around the city. It was not going to take much time at all for them to figure I was involved, and I knew Cooper would be blaming me. There might be a way for Benji to still get out of this with his career intact. Antiquities thief in training Benji was not—lightly corruptible professor with a soft spot for thieves? OK, that I could see. A hell of a lot more useful in the long run.

I gave Nadya the nod, and she retrieved a glass bottle from her coat pocket as I grabbed Benji from behind. He began to struggle, and I cut off his protests with an elbow in the ribs.

Note to self: no grabbing people while cursed . . . “Relax, Benji, we’re doing you a favor,” I said. “The IAA won’t find you until after Cooper and his pirates are long gone.”

Benji could tell his bosses I’d forced him to help me. If I had my way, by the time I was done with Cooper, anything he said would be worthless.

Or he’d have an army of the dead. Either way, Benji’s role would be inconsequential.

“Deniable plausibility,” Nadya said.

“That’s plausible deniability,” he said.

Nadya pressed the now damp cloth over his mouth. I shrugged. “Same difference.”

Benji passed out and Nadya dropped him to the ground—gently. Though to be honest, roughing him up a little might have helped his case.

Rynn hopped out of the jeep and picked up the bottle Nadya had used. “Where the hell did you two get chloroform?”

“Emergency bottle. I always keep one on me,” Nadya said.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I use alcohol with just enough GHB to put them to sleep” . . . and only when I had absolutely no other choice.

Rynn’s frown deepened. “I have an entire arsenal of weaponized pharmaceuticals designed to knock out everything from a human to a vampire, and you two use chloroform and GHB?”

“Move faster next time.” I tossed my bag in the jeep and hopped in the backseat alongside Captain. “I know where Cooper’s going.”

That was one silver lining to this—Cooper needed the rest of the artifacts to get his army to work, but he didn’t know we had them in Las Vegas. He’d head to Los Angeles first, where we could cut him off.

Rynn stepped on the gas, and I felt something warm in my front pocket: Hermes’s card, which I’d forgotten was still there. I flipped it over.

Doing better, kid, but the odds still aren’t great.

19

Best-Laid Plans

Don’t ask me the time, I can barely see, let alone think straight . . .

You know, funny difference between humans and supernaturals.

When supernaturals find something magic, they try to take over the world, subjugate humans and/or other supernaturals . . . that sort of thing.

Humans get a hold of magic, and what do they do?

Raise dead things.

Maybe try for world peace? Save the environment? Build an exclusive paradise for you and five friends?

Nope. Dead things.

I mean,
come on
. As a collective species, isn’t there something better we could come up with? Nope. Over five thousand years, and all we’ve managed are mummies, zombies, and a handful of walking skeletons.

I’m starting to understand why some supernaturals can’t stand us.