Owl and the Japanese Circus (22 page)

As soon as the first drop of chicken blood hit the tablet, it lit up like a short circuit. I shielded my eyes until I was relatively certain the flash was gone. Once I opened them, I saw that the tablet was intact but charred.

“What was that noise?” Rynn yelled from the main temple.

“Not an explosion,” I said. Well, it hadn’t been.

The arcane blood symbols were glowing, some of them fuzzy and offset by the charred bits, but there. I started taking pictures. Not my best work, but pretty damn good, considering what I’d been given to work with.

I got down on all fours to check underneath the tablet for any markings I might have missed. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have seen the black computer bag. I pulled it out and checked the name. Bingo. It was Bindi’s. I knew she’d been holding out. The laptop was small and light, so I slipped it into my backpack along with my camera.

Rynn was standing right outside the curtain, waiting for me. He blocked most of my view of the room, but I glimpsed Bindi and Red propped up against the wall, looking peaceful, serene . . . lifeless . . . Shit.

“What did you do to them?” I said and tried to push past.

He stopped me and steered me into the hall towards the temple kitchen, where we’d left Charles. “I only wiped their memories and planted some suggestions,” he said. “They’ll wake up tomorrow and confess to killing their roommates over drug money.”

“Really? You can do that?”

He shrugged. “Either they’ll turn themselves in or go on another killing spree.”

“Rynn!” I started back for the temple room.

He spun me back around. “I’m kidding. They’ll turn themselves in. I’ve never had it backfire before.”

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Positive.”

I glanced back anyways to make sure they were in fact breathing. They were. “Jeez—where do I get whatever you shot into them?”

“Trade secret, can’t share.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I pressed.

He shrugged.

Damn it. I slid my gas mask on before we entered and glanced over at Rynn; I hadn’t seen him put on a gas mask once. It unnerved me.

He caught me looking and said, “I don’t need the mask. I’ve got a chemical inhibitor I use instead.”

My jaw dropped. “Oh, come on, you have to share that one—”

“I told you, trade secrets.”

I snorted, though it sounded more like Darth Vader coughing than me being derisive. “I think I might join a mercenary band when this is over.”

Rynn smiled and shook his head. “You wouldn’t like it. The emphasis is on mercenary—not stealing.”

He had a point.

Charles was still tied and gagged where we’d left him, with Captain curled up, licking his paws.

“What do we do with him?” I said.

“Feed him to your cat?” Rynn replied.

Captain perked up and stopped grooming. Charles mumbled through the gag and started to struggle and wedge himself further into the fireplace.

“Tempting, but can we just knock him out for a few hours? Maybe you can use that chemical memory trick again?”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t work on vampires.” He removed another syringe and held it up for Charles’s benefit. “Horse tranquilizer mixed with a heavy dose of morphine should knock him out for half a day though.”

I nodded. “Good.”

Even though Charles was tied up and terrified of getting in
Captain’s striking range, Rynn still had to pin the vampire down in order to inject him. Charles’s eyes rolled up as he passed out.

“You surprise me. I thought you’d want to kill him,” Rynn said, putting his syringe away.

It caught me off guard. I shrugged. “Just because these idiots want to break a truce with a red dragon doesn’t mean I want to be stupid too and go right ahead and nullify it. Besides, Alexander doesn’t slaughter people. He just wants me dead. Killing one of his vampires just escalates things somewhere I don’t want to go.” I was going to add,
I’m not a cold-blooded killer,
but that was a little close to the whole mercenary thing. I’d pushed enough of Rynn’s buttons in the last twenty-four hours.

“Even when he wakes up, he’ll still need to get through the ties,” Rynn said. “You just don’t strike me as having a soft spot for the supernatural.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t about to give him all my deep, dark secrets. My actions had led to death twice in my career. The first was a vampire—by accident, I might add. The other—well, that had been a person, and it’d been less killing and more self-defense by inaction. At the end of the day it’d been an accident too, one I didn’t think about—or tried not to. I wasn’t OK with it then, and I’m still not OK with it. I get self-protection—Oricho knocking off Sebastian hadn’t caused me to loose a wink of sleep—but this was different. Charles wasn’t a threat right now; he was pathetic.

“I draw the line at executing living things. Besides,” I said, and nodded back down the hall where Bindi and Red were out cold, “those two are the only ones who actually killed anyone in the last forty-eight hours. If I were going to kill anyone, it’d be them. Come on,” I added, needing to change the topic. “I need to get out of here.”

Before I accidently blew up a second temple in as many days.

I grabbed Captain’s leash and bent down to scratch his ear. “I’m so way in over my head,” I said. He mrowled, and to my surprise he followed me instead of straining to reach the vampire. Maybe desensitizing him was working . . .

He feinted back and pulled on the leash in an attempt to break my hold and get back to Charles. Nope, not desensitized. Getting better at manipulation.

“Did you get what you needed?” Rynn asked as we exited the temple. Damn, but the sunlight felt good on my face.

“From the tablet?” he added.

“I don’t know. Hopefully I can find something useful. Without the placement though it’s going to be incomplete . . . maybe I can figure out a patch in the inscriptions from the other piece, pick up patterns . . .” If I could get a translation out of Nuroshi.

Rynn put a hand on my shoulder, and I brushed it off.

“It sounds like you’ve got enough to keep going,” he said.

“That’s not what’s bothering me.” I sighed. “Benji and Red are right. I’m bad news. Just by showing up in Bali I got four people killed. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I think I was better off running away from vampires.” I slid my gas mask off and started looking for the jeep. Goddamn it, Red had the keys. Shit.

“I should never have taken this job,” I said.

“Finish the job and you won’t be thinking that,” he said, his face softening.

“Yeah, well, explain to me why the more I tell myself that, the less I believe it?” I closed my eyes and took another deep breath. “Come on. Let’s get the hell back to Tokyo.” I caught sight of Red’s jeep by the side of the temple and made a beeline for it . . . and noticed the second bright orange jeep. Kato popped his head over the backseat and waved.

“Hey, lady!”

“Seriously? Again?” I asked Rynn.

“Well, we can’t take the jeep we came in,” he said.

I didn’t bother arguing. I was out of arguments today. I threw my bag into the backseat and hopped in with Captain.

“Where to, lady?”

“Kid, just get us to the airport,” I said.

Rynn hopped into the front seat. “Extra if you get us there fast.”

“You got it,” Kato said. He peeled out and down the mountain faster than a bat out of hell. I gripped the seat, though I doubted it’d do me any good. I kicked the back of Rynn’s chair. “I’m blaming you if he rolls the jeep.”

“He won’t roll the jeep.”

It wobbled as Kato took a turn without slowing down.

“I’m holding you to that,” I said, and rested my head against the seat.

Captain complained as I eased him into his carrier. “Yeah, you said it, this whole trip has been a complete disaster.”

What the hell had I gotten myself into?

We reached the airport in record time. I couldn’t get out of the jeep fast enough. I handed Kato fifty bucks. “Nice knowing you, kid. Do yourself a favor and stay the hell away from any archaeology students. Bad for business.”

Rynn handed him a hundred-dollar bill. “And if anyone ever asks, you’ve never seen us.”

Kato lifted his shades and eyed Rynn. There was something funny about his eyes . . . something off-color and old . . . but he pulled the shades back down before I could get a good look.

“It’s a deal, mister. Just keep your side of crazy the hell off my island.” He pointed at me. “And that goes double for her. She’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

“Hey!”

But Kato had already peeled out of the airport.

“What the hell was that about?” I said to Rynn.

Rynn couldn’t quite wipe the grin off his face. “You really do have a blind spot for supernatural things, don’t you?”

I spun on my heels and almost fell over. “Shit—him?”

Rynn laughed. “An Apsara-Balinese luck demon.”

I rolled my eyes and made for the line. “Get me the fuck out of Bali. And stop laughing.”

“You have to admit, it’s a little funny.”

I shot him a dirty look and pushed past him to the check-in counter. “The sooner we get back to Tokyo, the sooner I can have a shower and a beer. Make that four beers.”

I had been about to say,
So things could go back to normal,
but I’d have been lying through my teeth. Both of us knew damn well normal wasn’t ever going to happen.

Rynn dropped me off at Space Station Deluxe straight from the airport and made me promise to stop by at Gaijin Cloud that evening, after Nadya and I dealt with Nuroshi. I would rather have slept, but as he so helpfully pointed out, not with two concussions. Would suck to escape a naga, a pack of vampires, and psycho serial killer grad students only to die in my sleep.

I tied my hair back and breathed in the coffee fumes from the cup Nadya had brewed for me. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was feeling the bruises from my beating. I wanted to crawl into bed, concussion be damned. At least I’d had a shower. I’d leave the beer until after I finished with Nuroshi.

Nadya placed her hands on her hips. “She was with one of the Paris boys, no?”

I savored my first sip before answering. “Not that simple. Alexander was freelancing, and he was nervous this time. I don’t think this has anything to do with the Paris Contingency. It’s got something to
do with Mr. Kurosawa’s scroll. They’re not telling me something.” I opened my laptop with the pictures of both tablets and placed Bindi’s laptop on the bar. “I’m hoping these shed some light on what the hell all these supernatural assholes aren’t telling me.”

Nadya paused as she sipped her own coffee. “Alix, you’re avoiding an important detail. This woman has something personal against you. Who have you pissed off that much—besides the Contingency—that would want you dead?”

“Vampire, not woman,” I said. “And your guess is as good as mine.”

Nadya lowered her head and looked at me.

“Nadya, really. I have no idea who this vampire is or what the hell I did to piss her off.”

She shook her head. “All right, but none of this fits—or not completely. For example, how does she know Alexander if she has no ties to the Paris Contingency?”

“Easy. Don’t vampires have some kind of hotline or something . . . a dark bar where they all go and plot the enslavement of humans?”

“Come on, you know as well as I do it doesn’t work like that. They’ve got a very complicated social and political structure—”

“I know, I know, like a superhive of cockroaches.”

Nadya pursed her lips. “More like ants, but yes. The point is, their connections are complicated. He has to know who she is—probably how she knows you.”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly on speaking terms with them, so that’s out . . . wait a second.” I fished into my pocket for the cell phone I’d taken from Charles the vampire. I still had it. I scrolled through the contacts until I found Alexander. I dialed and put it on speakerphone. An angry male voice answered, and I let him go on for a few seconds before interjecting. “Slow down, Alexander, my French sucks.”

I heard a hissed, drawn-in breath on the other end. “
You
.”