Owl and the Japanese Circus (48 page)

“You have still not addressed what’s in it for
me,
” he said.

I sighed. “Next time you try to kill me, I’ll count to five before sicing my cat on you. Hey!” I said as Rynn snatched my phone away.

He glared at me before holding it up to his ear and speaking French to Alexander. Damn it, times like this I wish I had an ear for languages.

“Here,” Rynn said, giving the phone back. “He’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“How did you do that?”

“Easy. I told him I’d do worse than light a grenade if he didn’t stop flirting with you.”

I cringed and covered the mic. “Please don’t tell me that was vampire flirting.”

Rynn shrugged and smiled. “Fine. I won’t,” he said and headed into the kitchen. I cringed again.

“All right, Alexander. Can you see 3-D or not?”

His voice came on like a purr. “Why, Owl, you surprise me. I wonder if you know half the things I do about your new companion. Shall we see? A game of twenty questions, perhaps?”

I closed my eyes and just about hung up. “Just answer the goddamn question—”

“Yes. Though it is much more difficult than when I was alive. My mind remembers, but my eyes do not want to see.”

“Finally. We’re getting somewhere. Could you still draw or write a 3-D object?”

I thought I heard paper crinkling and pencil scratches on the other side.

“I regret to inform you that it gives me a headache, much like watching a 3-D movie, even in short increments,” he said. I even thought I caught a slight sigh in his voice.

I snorted. Alexander could reminisce about being alive on his own time. He was drawing this out, and my call scrambler wasn’t foolproof. Given enough time, someone could track it.

“So is that a ‘no, you couldn’t draw it’ or ‘you could, but you’d get a bad headache and take it out on some poor human’?” I said.

“Much as it pains me to say so, I would not be able to draw such a thing anymore.”

“Finally.
Thank you,
” I said and hung up the phone. “Goddamn it, I hate vampires.”

I heard Rynn laugh from the kitchen. “Maybe you should stop calling them then?” he said.

“If I had a non-vampire vampire expert, I would.”

He came back into the living room with one of my Coronas and leaned against the doorway. “Sounded like you got what you needed.”

I nodded. “Yeah. A vampire maybe could have written it, but doubtfully. Alexander couldn’t even draw a box, let alone something this detailed, and he’s a couple hundred years old. It’s gotta be human made.” Damn, if it was human made, that meant we could translate it—really translate it. “Do you know what this means?”

Rynn gave me a half smile and took a pull off his beer. “Yeah. My evening plans are shot,” he said and pulled a chair up beside me.

I called Nadya and gave her a rundown on what I’d discovered.

“I know just what archive to run it through,” Nadya said. “It’ll take an hour or two, at most.”

Next I called Oricho. “You are not going to believe this, but the scroll isn’t supernatural. It’s human. Nadya is running the symbols through her databases.”

“You will be able to read it?” he asked.

“Let’s hope so.” A thought occurred to me, and I needed to test it immediately. “We should have more for you in another hour. I’ll give you a shout then,” I said and hung up.

“Anything I can do?” Rynn asked, leaning further over my shoulder. I got the distinct impression he was squinting at the computer screen, still trying to see the symbols.

I shook my head. “No offense, but human eyes only.”

“None taken.” He headed into the kitchen and returned with his jacket in one hand and the bleach-filled water gun in the other. “I’m heading to the bar—the skin walkers took a hit out of me and, let’s face it, I’m the last thing on your mind right now.”

I looked over my shoulder at him. He did look tired. Damn, I
hadn’t even thought to ask him how he was; I’d gone straight into my problems. “Sorry. I’ve just finally gotten somewhere with this mess—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Keep the bleach gun close,” he added.

I logged into World Quest. There was one more thing I had to do before working on the scroll; get rid of my Achilles’ heel. I made the Byzantine Thief get up, light a torch, and place it in a holder. Then I made her take off her dragon eye goggles.

Son of a bitch.

The same inscription rings that had been there all along flared with the three-dimensional symbols, just like they appeared on the scroll. The far wall was what really got me though.

Rows of symbols, maybe thirty or so, lined the walls in a grid pattern, four across the top, six down the side. I’d noticed etchings before but had brushed them off as graffiti, since I hadn’t been able to see the full three-dimensional shapes with my dragon eye goggles on. A trap for supernaturals. Guess Ah Puch didn’t play nice with his brethren.

Damn, the guys who designed this game were good.

All I had to do was hit the right symbols in the grid, laid out in the inscription rings overhead. In no time I had a series of symbols from the inscription rings dashed in the dirt. I started with the first in the sequence, guessing it had to be the symbol that followed a small gap in the outer inscription ring. I tried not to think of what would happen if I got the order wrong.

After I pressed the last symbol the room shook slightly, and there was a flash that knocked me onto my backside and made everything go dark. For a second I thought I’d entered them wrong and killed myself.

Then the Byzantine Thief came to with a tunnel stretched out in front of her.

Jackpot.

I gave Carpe a call. “The Byzantine Thief is back in play,” I said. And to be honest, I wasn’t feeling too shabby about me, Owl, either.

By five o’clock Nadya and I both had cabin fever, so we headed downstairs to the bar. I wasted no time ordering a Corona from the rotund, red-faced bartender with a nametag that read,
HI, MY NAME IS SYOKO
. He stopped midpour and narrowed his eyes at me as I slid onto the barstool. He’d been on staff when I’d thrown the beer bottle. I shrugged; if I spent time dwelling on all my mistakes . . .

Nadya ordered a fancy drink that included champagne as one of many ingredients. Tomorrow was the start of a long weekend, and the bar was packed. I couldn’t take my eyes off Syoko. His eyes were big—too big—and seemed to sit on his face like strange gold orbs. “Frog demon?” I asked Nadya.

She shook her head and took a sip of her champagne cocktail. “No, he’d have a more yellow or green undercast,” she said, and squinted. “Japanese radish demon. I’d put money on it.”

I nodded. Yup, radish demon fit—and yes, there are plantlike supernaturals out there. I think even with the noise he overheard us.
He shot me a glare, and when I passed him bills for our drinks, he stared at them as if I’d been offering him kryptonite.

“Do you think any humans work here?” I asked Nadya after the radish demon snatched my money away with a grunt and didn’t bother bringing back change.

“Please focus for a minute. I finished the translation.
Wait
—” she added as I opened my mouth. “The symbols refer back to a Cyrillic precursor, a very old dialect. And it’s a curse, a bad one.”

“We already knew that from the genie text, didn’t we? The priest Cervac? The great equalizer?”

Nadya started to answer but was interrupted by her phone chiming with a new message. She glanced down, and I noticed a ghost of a frown cross her face as she read. She put the phone away and returned her attention back to me, but now her words spilled out fast, as if she was worried about running out of time.

“Yes, but I think Cervac was wrong. I don’t think he had a very good translation. By the time he wrote this book, the dialect had been out of use for three centuries. We know now that Cervac couldn’t have read it himself, even with a human body. He’d have needed a human translator, and they would only have had a remedial understanding of the language.”

“So what does it really say?”

She shook her head. “I can’t be sure, but I think it’s a wasting disease. Remember the old children’s rhyme ‘Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posies’?”

“ ‘Hush a hush a, we all fall down’?” I finished. “Of course I do. It signaled the black plague. The original one, not the bacterial bubonic. People thought singing kept it at bay.”

“Yes, well, not quite. When the goblin clans found themselves in the middle of land disputes in old Europe, instead of going to war they’d solve them by sending their young into human villages, masquerading as small children. They’d sing the song and start the curse. The village would die out, and they’d come in to split up the land and fill their salt pantries.”

I hadn’t heard that one before, but I wasn’t surprised. Goblin clans weren’t known for scruples. I cringed at the thought of what they’d filled their salt pantries with.

“So if this thing gets read, it won’t blow up a block, it’ll release the next black plague?” Nowadays with international travel it wouldn’t just wipe out a town; it’d cause a global pandemic.

“Not the black plague exactly, but I think something similar.”

“OK, but it can’t be a goblin curse. For one, they can’t write.” Goblins came from the same school of thought as skin walkers when it came to written records. If it didn’t include fingerpainting with entrails, what was the point?

“Now that we have the order of symbols, that’s what it reads like,” Nadya said.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Vampires, dragons, and now deadly magic plagues—goddamn it, why had I taken that egg job? I knew I’d had a bad feeling about it, I just knew it . . .

Nadya continued, “My translation’s not exact. Some words got lost over the centuries. It can’t be helped, but the emphasis in the scroll is placed on the tree of life and the doubloon—”

“Skull,” I corrected her. I couldn’t help myself. It was a damn skull, not pirate treasure.

She tsked. “I could care less what you think it is. Let me finish. The two together with the sword and heart mean that the strong will fall, and the great and powerful will crumble. Worse though, there is one more way to interpret the scroll. I think Mr. Kurosawa plans to use it as a weapon—Oh for the love of God, what now?” Nadya said as her phone buzzed again. This time she didn’t bother to hide the frown as she read. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

She shook her head, still distracted. “Nothing. Just wait here, will you? There’s something I need to deal with.”

From the way her brow furrowed, I wasn’t buying it. “Nadya?” I started, but she silenced me with a shake of her head.

“I just need to check on a detail—it pertains to the scroll, and I can’t do it from here.”

“What detail?”

“It’s not important,” she said. Whatever had been on the phone, though, had her distracted. I tried to get a glimpse, but she hid the screen by slipping it back in her pocket.

“Yeah, forgive me if that doesn’t instill confidence. Spill.
Now
.”

She glanced up and shook her head. “I do not wish to say until I am certain. It will only prove a distraction—”

“Nadya—”

“Alix, trust me on this one. Don’t worry, it is probably nothing, but I have a very short server window. I won’t be more than ten minutes. It’s important,” she added.

I capitulated and watched Nadya head into the lobby, then disappear into the elevator. If it was nothing, why did I have such an awful feeling about it?

I turned my attention to the people crowding the casino floor and shook my head. If they knew a quarter of the things going on in this place . . . a murderous naga, ghoulish nymphs, a couple of hired skin walkers, the odd vampire looking for a weekend lunch mixed in there . . . let alone the fact that a dragon owned this casino, one who had a penchant for collecting ghosts in his private slot machines.

I shook my head and went back to my drink. Who was I kidding? Most of the time I wasn’t any better off with the supernatural than they were. I just knew they existed.

Fifteen minutes slipped by while I people-watched and worked on my Corona. I began to tap my foot against the bar. Nadya should have been back by now. It never fails that this close to the end of a job I get antsy, like if something is going to go wrong, it’ll be now . . .

My phone rang and Nadya’s number flashed across the screen. “What happened to ten minutes tops?”

“Listen to me carefully,” she whispered. “Get the scroll. I don’t care how, just get it and don’t let anyone read it.”

I heard banging in the background.

“What the hell is going on?” I said. “Where are you?”

She swore. “Locked in my bathroom. I ducked in right before the room door gave out.”

I grabbed my jacket. “Get on the toilet and cram yourself into the vent. You just need to hide until I get there with Rynn—”

“I’m out of time. Check your left pocket,” she said, and I heard the door crash.

“Nadya?!” I yelled. “Nadya?!” But there was no answer.

Shit.