Owl and the Japanese Circus (47 page)

“I’ll make you a deal,” Rynn said. “I put down my bag and bail on my meeting with Oricho, and you close your laptop and forget we’re here for the rest of the evening.”

I nodded. I could deal with tonight. One small step at a time.

The corner of Rynn’s mouth turned up. “Train wreck,” he said.

“Whore.”

He picked me up off the desk and headed for my bedroom. I didn’t even bother putting up a fight. Sometimes there are things more important than finding scrolls and digging stuff up.

I woke up by myself, with a vague memory of Rynn getting up while I was too groggy to say or do anything except roll over and bury myself under the covers. As much fun as I’d had with him last night, I needed sleep. Badly. Four days running on empty had caught up, and I’d needed the rest, both physically and mentally. I was still adjusting to the idea of having Rynn around, let alone the incubus factor . . . I pulled the duvet over my head. Dear God, what the hell was I doing?

I reached over to the nightstand and checked my cell. No messages from Nadya, Rynn, or anyone else wanting to yell at me. I stretched out with every intention of sleeping for another hour or two when I heard the first scratch on the door—light . . . probing. I closed my eyes and buried my face in the pillow, but Captain’s scratching kept coming. Damn it, he’d heard me pick up my cell phone from the other room.

I pushed the covers off and swung out of bed. I had no intention of seeing what kind of damage bill Lady Siyu was gonna give me if Captain scratched the paint.

I opened the door just as he started a second run of scratching. “It’s amazing how much noise you make when you want something,” I said. He slid through to complain in person. Instead of mewing, he stood on his hind legs, begging for food.

I headed into the kitchen, Captain hard on my heels. Was I caving? Yeah, but trust me, it was better this way.

On the living room table, beside my laptop, stood a folded piece of white paper. It was from Rynn.

Meeting with Oricho. Text me if you do anything stupid.

Yeah, right. Like I’d have the chance to text him first.

As soon as I got close to the kitchenette, the aroma of warm coffee hit me. I made a beeline straight for the coffeepot, ignoring Captain’s protests as I breezed by his empty food bowl.

I poured a cup and had a sip—still warm, dark but not burned . . . OK, maybe I could get used to having Rynn around some mornings.

I deposited Captain’s wet food in his bowl—so that he’d shut up, not that he actually deserved it—and headed back into the living room. Coffee in hand, I slid into the desk chair, opening my laptop and a text window to Nadya.

Just got up. Taking another crack at the codex. Please say you’re doing better than I am.

A few seconds later Nadya rang me. I answered but didn’t even get the chance to say hello.

“I hope you have a backup plan. One that involves running.” You’d think if anyone would have a backup plan that hinged on running, it’d be me. “Uhh, yeah. Don’t count on it,” I said. Nadya swore. “Look, let’s meet here in five hours and compare notes again. These symbols are the codex—I’m sure of it. We just have to figure out how to read it.”

“Fantastic. The American woman tells me all we have to do is decode a three-thousand-year-old encryption, then translate it.”

I ignored her tone. “If anyone can translate it, it’s you. In the meantime, don’t open the door for anyone, and call if you get anywhere. And let me worry about cracking it.”

“Vice versa. See you in five hours. And Alix?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell Rynn to have his clothes on,” she said.

“Oh come on—” But she’d already hung up. I shook my head and hunched back over my laptop.

The one thing I was sure of was that the symbols, not the actual written words, were meant to be read off the scroll. The words themselves, illegible to both humans and supernaturals, were only there to hide the symbols like a very sophisticated mask. How did I know? I’d run into it before in ancient texts out of Russia, though they’d been much less sophisticated. No 3-D rotations, only pictures hidden in the paper. This was on another level entirely. The symbols could only be seen in a 3-D rendering of the text.

I just wish I had a hint as to what the symbols meant. I wasn’t delivering an incomplete spell scroll and entering into round two with the dragon.

I am capable of learning from some mistakes.

I ran a few translation programs from the International University archives on pairs and groups of symbols, and then again on each of the individual symbols against all the known supernatural languages on file. Zip, nada, all roads lead to a dead-end nothing.

“Maybe I should just package it up in a zip file, send it to Mr. Kurosawa, and run before he can open it,” I said to Captain after my translation program finished comparing images from a Peruvian university. It’d been a long shot, but you never know—in their heyday, those South American civilizations got around a lot more than you might have thought. Apparently it pays to worship a demigod.

About 12:00 p.m. the lock to my room jostled and the door caught on the chain. I’d set it and the dead bolt. I had a sneaking suspicion the next supernatural goon Marie sent wouldn’t bother trying to trick me into letting them in.

Rynn’s face scowled at me from the small crack. “Do you mind?” he said and pointed at the chain.

“You told me to be more careful,” I said as I unlocked the door.

“That isn’t safe, it’s annoying. Do you have any idea how easy it is to break one of those chains?” he said.

“Well, what would you suggest? Since you’re the professional on all things supernatural and mercenary,” I said.

Rynn removed two bottles of bleach and a water gun from a plastic bag. “These, for starters. Bleach burns skin walkers, accelerates their chemical preservatives to dangerous levels, and stops them in their tracks.”

The mention of skin walkers, I figure, drained the color right out of my face. “Please say there aren’t any more running around the casino.”

“We found two more in the casino kitchens. Came looking for the rest of their pack. I’m fairly certain it’s the last of them.”

“Then what’s the bleach for?” I said.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Precaution. Skin walkers are bottom feeders, but they get hired for this kind of work a lot.”

I took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to go and hide under my comforter. I pulled up the scroll again and tried rearranging the symbols for the fifth time that afternoon.

I felt Rynn come up behind me and lean on the back of my chair to look over my shoulder.

“Making any progress?” he said.

I shrugged and zoomed in on the symbols. Maybe Rynn would recognize them. “Yes and no. Nadya and I found these symbols hidden in the scroll and the inscriptions. It’s slick—three-dimensional encryption without a computer. Whatever supernatural wrote this knew what they were doing. Ever seen them before?”

He narrowed his eyes at the screen. “Seen what?” he said.

“These,” I said, and highlighted the sword symbol with my cursor, drawing a circle around it. “The one that jumps off the page like a picture. It was hidden underneath the writing. You just have to take the writing off and rotate it,” I said, and set my program running again. The writing lifted off the page and rotated at 180 degrees, uncovering the symbols.

“Alix, there’s nothing there except for the writing.”

There was no way. “Have you ever watched a 3-D movie?”

He shook his head. “Tried once. I didn’t like all the colors. I’m not entirely sure what the appeal is, no offense.”

“Holy shit,” I said, and reached for my phone. There was no way, it could not be this easy—how the hell had no one picked up on this before? I called Oricho.

“Hey,” I said as soon as he picked up. “You study humans—ever seen a 3-D movie?”

There was a pause before Oricho said, “I fail to see why you would call to ask my opinion on human entertain—”

“It’s important—just answer the stupid human’s question.”

Like always, Oricho paused, then said carefully, “I’ve seen one before but did not like the blurred motion and colors. I fail to see the appeal.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said, imagining what Oricho and Rynn must have seen. “Look, I need to run one more test. Don’t go too far from your phone. I might have just figured out how to read the scroll,” I said, and hung up.

Rynn was looking at me as if I’d gone nuts. I bit my lip and tried to figure out the best way to explain it. I pulled out a piece of paper and pencil and started to draw a cube. “What do you see on the paper?” I asked him.

He looked down at it, then back at me. “Poorly drawn squares and triangles,” he said.

I nodded. No wonder supernaturals thought we were so stupid. “OK, technically you’re right. On the piece of paper I’ve drawn a bunch of uneven lines. But to humans that looks like a cube. Our brains take in the angles and translate them into a familiar three-dimensional shape.” I wondered what film and pictures looked like to Rynn. I pointed to a painting across the room of a group of ballet dancers. A Degas reprint, or, knowing Mr. Kurosawa, an original. “What do you see in the painting?”

“A picture, colors, like a snapshot.” He shrugged. “Well done, but a flat representation of ballet dancers.”

“OK. So in order for you to recognize it, it has to be done well. For whatever reason, your brain is harder to trick than mine—or slower, depends how you want to think about it. Human eyes and brains work independently of our consciousness. Our eyes see the shape of a box and translate it into the three-dimensional cube, without me even noticing they’re doing it. If it’s convincing, like a film, a photograph, or even a painting, you and Oricho can tell what it’s supposed to be, even though you know it’s a two-dimensional representation. We just have a . . .” I reached for the right word. “. . . call it a lower threshold, an ability to recognize three-dimensional objects from something as simple as angles. When it comes to TV and 3-D, you guys are back to seeing the lines and blurred colors—it’s not convincing to your eyes, or brains, or whatever. To us though, it looks like we’re not just watching the film; we’re in it.”

Rynn stared at the cube I’d drawn and back at the scroll on my screen. He shook his head. “I still don’t see it, but I believe you.”

I nodded. “I don’t think a supernatural could have made this. I think a human did.” We exchanged a glance as both of us realized what this was. Shit, I was looking at human written magic. Something that hadn’t been around since . . . well, think the legends of King Arthur’s court and ancient Egypt and you get the picture. We sure as hell didn’t have any reliable written records of it.

Rynn pulled out his cell phone. “I’d better call Oricho back. This is not going to go over well with Mr. Kurosawa.”

I stopped him. “Let me run one more test.” I went into my essentials bag—ever since the skin walker, I didn’t like having it too far out of reach—and pulled out a scrambling device I’d picked up in Japan for my cell phone.

I headed back to my laptop, and Rynn frowned as I attached it to my cell. “Alix, what are you doing?”

“I want to see if I can get confirmation about the 2-D, better than you and Oricho just not being able to see it.”

“How do you plan on doing that?” he said, still frowning.

“There’s only one supernatural I know of that starts off human,” I said, and punched in Alexander’s number.

“H-hello?” a timid female voice said after the third ring.

I frowned. I’d never had someone else pick up Alexander’s phone. “Umm, yeah, is Alexander there?”

“Who should I say is calling?”

Wait a minute, I knew that voice. “Bindi?” I said, not quite believing.

“Y-yes—who is this?” she said, taking on that unmistakable, petulant tone.

Damn, I’d have figured Alexander would have just killed them. Oh well, vampires are a fickle lot. “Alexander has you answering his phone now? Jesus Christ. It’s Owl—put him on. Now.”

She placed her sleeve on the receiver, and I could hear her muffled voice say, “Alexander? Owl is requesting an audience—”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Bindi,” I said as loud as I could, hoping Alexander would hear. “Grow a backbone. Just tell him to fuck off and answer the goddamn phone before I ha—”

“Owl.” Alexander’s clear, smooth voice came across the line. “To what do I owe this distinct displeasure?”

“You’ve seriously got them answering phones for you? I thought you’d have turned them in or killed them or something.”

“Who says I won’t? I can still change my mind. And I only use the girl for answering the phone. I found other uses for the boy.”

I rolled my eyes. “Listen—I need to know something. You remember way back when you were a human? Three-dimensional boxes drawn on paper; can you still see them?” I asked.

He paused. “A very interesting academic question. One I believe should have a price.”

“Just answer the question, vampire boy—can you still see a 3-D object out of a 2-D rendition or not? Yes or no?”