Owl and the Japanese Circus (42 page)

“Probably wants to talk strategy. Sabine knows by now we have the scroll. She’ll be desperate to get it.”

“Fine, then Oricho has lousy timing,” I said.

That got me a laugh. Rynn kissed me, bringing my sex drive right back to the forefront of my brain.

“That’s not helping,” I said.

He slid his jacket on and winked. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t go anywhere. And we still need to talk.”

“Yeah right. Talk. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Train wreck,” he said.

“Whore.”

I heard the door click shut behind him. I got up and slid the dead
bolt in. I’d blown it off, but Rynn was right. Marie was going to want the scroll back, and she was crazy enough to try to grab it. I needed a cold shower. Very, very cold.

My stomach growled, and I realized I’d only had coffee since before Nadya and I had touched down in San Francisco. I called room service and ordered a bottle of red, more Corona, and one of those fancy hamburgers hotels love. As long as it came with fries, I could care less what they called it. Then I stepped into the washroom and took that cold shower I needed.

Still drying off my hair, I grabbed my last Corona and opened my laptop to see what Carpe wanted.

Where have you been?
popped up in our chat box.

I snorted and wrote back,
Busy not being eaten by a dragon. Now go away.
But I slid into the chair and put my headset on. It had been almost twenty-four hours since my Byzantine Thief had fallen down the temple trap and blacked out. It was time to see how bad the damage was. I’d had a resurrection charm on me, so regardless, it wasn’t game over. Yet. Still, dying by trap chute was humiliating . . . and a waste of a resurrection charm. Think of it this way: imagine you were a highly trained assassin who had to use a rare antidote because you accidently poisoned yourself with your own tools. That’s how this felt.

I took a deep breath and a big sip of beer as the screen loaded. I couldn’t take it. I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

My play screen came alive with the familiar blue I preferred, my stats displayed along the bottom. My life bar was down to half, but it was there.

“Holy shit, I’m not dead,” I said into my headset. My elation disappeared a moment later when I didn’t teleport out. “Oh no.”

“What’s wrong now?” Carpe said.

I hit the button again that should have activated the teleport spell
Carpe had sold me. Nothing. “Hey, did you sell me a faulty teleport scroll?”

“Umm, no—that’s below my standards threshold.”

“Then why the hell isn’t it working?”

“Give me three,” Carpe said.

While I waited, I flipped open my inventory and equipped myself with my prized possession: a pair of dragon goggles, two steampunk-ish green orbs that sat on Thief’s face like a pair of fly eyes. Dragon goggles are few and far between in World Quest. Not only do they let you see in the dark but they also let you see magic, infrared, heat—basically anything a dragon can see. I won’t go dungeon crawling without them. Why waste a torch when you can slide on these babies? Come to think of recent events, I wonder how accurate these are . . .

The room was small and circular, providing just enough space to stand. I made my avatar walk the entire way around. No doors, no cracks. I started tapping sections of the wall, looking for weak spots. All I heard was solid brick.

“A perfect replica of the Ah Puch Mayan temple, fourth set of catacombs down,” I said.

“Hey Byz, that room you’re in is magic blocked. Any spell Level fifteen or lower won’t work. Is there a door?”

“No, nothing—no writing, no doors, no seams, no cracks.” I looked up. There was only the thin chute I’d fallen down. “Oh for the love of God, I’m in an Oubliette.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s French for a deep, dark, doorless pit.”

“OK. How do you get out?”

“You don’t. That’s the point. No doors or windows means they can forget about you,” I said.

“I’m up top, can I pry the trapdoor open—”

“No! Not that I don’t appreciate it, it’s just a really bad idea. Liable to set off another trap.” I tried shooting at the trapdoor with my crossbow. Not even a dent.

“Owl, try Reveal Magic. It’s a Level nineteen spell. It should work in there,” Carpe said.

“That’s a brilliant idea. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?” I said, and set the Byzantine Thief casting.

“By the way, I have some bad news about Paul.”

I snorted. “Can’t possibly be bad enough.”

A message appeared in my inbox. I opened it, and a Wanted poster unfolded on my screen. It was for Paul and promised a reward of a rare spell book, one out of Carpe’s stash, and better than gold. I checked the view rate. One hundred thousand and counting. It put a smile on my face. Paul wouldn’t last the week. “Carpe, you never cease to impress. Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

I watched the Reveal Magic spell set as gold-orange writing covering the walls started to solidify. I zoomed the screen camera in to get a better look at the ones on the ceiling.

“It’s going to take me a while to puzzle through this—Oh, you got to be fucking kidding me,” I said as the symbols came into focus. They were the same kind of symbols and ring series as the Balinese inscriptions.

“What?”

I folded my head against my keyboard. “Nothing. Just the universe screwing me over. Again. Look, there’s no sense in you sticking around. I’ve got an alarm set if anyone attacks, but honestly, I don’t even think a rat could find me here.”

“All right. Shout if you need help. I’m playing for the next few hours.”

“Roger Wilco,” I said.

I was still working through the puzzle when I heard the knock at the door.

“Room service,” I said to Carpe and took my headset off.

I checked the door peephole. It was the same scared girl I’d seen
before. “Just a minute,” I yelled as pleasantly as I could and threw on a T-shirt and sweats. I checked my reflection and pulled my wet hair into a respectable ponytail. I was dead set not to scare the crap out of her for the second time in a row. I looked very all-American this time, not one bruise, not even a little black eye. I practiced a quick smile and answered my door.

“Hi there,” I said.

Instead of looking scared out of her wits, the girl gave me a shy smile. “Can I bring this in?” she said.

It worked! Point and match for a friendlier, more personable Owl. I nodded and held the door open as she pushed the tray in.

My laptop chimed, twice. Carpe.

“You can put it over there,” I told the girl, pointing to the dining room as I went to check what he’d said. I smelled urea and wondered if Captain had peed somewhere, although he was with Nadya.
Owl, whatever you do, do not open the door. It’s not safe, there’s someone trying to kill you, right now. Run. Get out of there, and call me, I can help—

I turned around. Too late.

The girl was right behind me, leaning against the wall. “You know this one is terrified of you. She’s convinced you’re some kind of hit woman, or spy. Her essence is shaking, even now as I stand here,” she said with a strong Russian accent, just like Nadya when she was angry or smashed.

I wrapped my hand around the empty Corona bottle and swung at her head. I was too slow. She leapt at me and in a moment had me pinned to the plush carpet. “It” grinned, and I saw the serrated yellowed teeth.

Skin walker.

Skin walkers are the kind of monster nightmares are made of. They don’t possess you like a genie or demon, they rip your skin off and wear it. It gets worse; before you die, they steal your essence so they can do a passable job pretending to be you.

“I’ll have fun wearing you around I think,” the girl-wearing
skin walker said. It had lost the Russian accent in favor of the girl’s mid-American. That made things worse.

“Really doubt that,” I said and bridged up, arching my back and throwing all my weight into it. This close I could really smell the urea seeping out from under its skin, a natural disinfectant that keeps the stolen hides preserved a few days longer.

The skin walker was lighter than me and growled as I tossed it off. I reached for the beer bottle, broke it against the table leg, and rammed it into its face as hard as I could.

It screeched and covered its face, giving me some space to back up. I ran for the door, but not fast enough.

My hand was on the handle when it snarled. I glanced back as it readied to pounce, moving the girl’s legs like a cat’s hindquarters. “You’ll regret that,” it said and leapt for me.

I grabbed its wrist as it slammed me into the floor for a second time. I cringed; its skin looked normal from the outside but was clammy to the touch, and I could feel its spindly bones underneath. I struggled even more to get it off me. I started to scream, but it clamped its hand down over my mouth and breathed yellow gas in my face before I could make a sound.

The wooziness hit me. Damn it, how come there was no mention about yellow gas in the textbooks?

As the skin walker leered over me, it dawned on me that the reason there was nothing written about the yellow gas in textbooks was that no one had ever lived to tell the tale.

My head hurt. And I was cold.

And the bathtub was running.

I opened my eyes, or at least the one I could. The one that wasn’t swollen. I was handcuffed to the corner of the antique wrought-iron bathtub I’d been enjoying . . . whenever that was.

The girl’s skin was discarded over the back of the chair. Yet another person who’d ended up dead because of a passing association with me. Who needs an end of the world when all I have to do is look at you? I was turning into the angel of death.

The skin walker was kneeling over the running water, humming a pop song I’d heard on the radio. Probably stolen it from the girl’s head before it killed her. I’d read something about skin walkers needing water to get in and out of the skins, one of the reasons they’d never spread outside Russia until after the Industrial Revolution, when trains had been invented. It was also something I’d never hoped to see in practice.

“I know you’re awake,” the skin walker said, its voice no longer high and feminine but low and raspy, like a car running over loose gravel.

“I suggest you listen,” it continued. It moved around the tub and sat on its haunches in front of me. Its thin yellow hide covered its bones like plastic wrap, probably evolved to better slip into other creatures’ skins. And its face, well, it was like a skull wrapped under cured leather. And the
smell
. I coughed as I choked on the ammonia.

“If you tell me where the translation is, I will kill you quickly. I won’t even wear your skin like I did this girl’s. However, the clock is ticking.”

It picked up the girl’s skin and held it over the bathtub. I realized the ammonia wasn’t just the urea from the bare skin walker. It had filled the tub with lye, something that could dissolve a body.

“I need to walk out of here in something. It can be this skin or yours. It makes no matter to me which it is.”

I coughed. “What? No ‘I’ll let you live’? Just die bad or die worse? What kind of choice is that?”

Its smile widened. “An honest one. Consider it respect paid a worthy adversary. Or more worthy than this girl at any rate. I do hate it when humans freeze up, so much better when they struggle.”