Owl and the Japanese Circus

by Kristi Charish

  “Noooww we’re getting somewhere,” I said, and placed the sealed bag on her lap. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m not going to threaten you, like Rynn, and I’m not going to barter with you. Because we both know you need what’s in that bag.” I tapped it for effect. “Now, if you tell me where the tablet is, I might be persuaded to open it back up and leave it here.”

  And just like that, the screaming indoctrinate was gone. I don’t know if she looked more crazy, angry, or scared. Maybe some middle ground she’d found in a burst of lucidity. Her eyes didn’t leave the bag though, and she kept licking her lips.

  What can I say? I’m good with crazy.

  “She’ll kill me if I say anything,” Bindi finally whispered.

  I nodded. “You’re right, she’ll probably kill you. What I do know is I won’t open that bag unless you tell me what I want to know, so it’s up to you.” I crossed my arms and leaned back against the wall.

  A minute dragged into two with only the sound of my gas mask grinding in the background.

  “Time’s almost up. What’s it going to be?” I said.

  “All right,” she said, and licked her lips.

  Red, who’d been silent up till this point, pulled against his restraints. “Bindi, you can’t tell her,” he said. Rynn silenced him with a blow to the head. But it was pointless. Bindi couldn’t see or hear anything except the bag.

  “It’s at the back of the room,” she whispered. “Behind the curtain there’s an alcove. We hid the tablet under a canvas sheet before you arrived.”

  They’d moved it.

  “What about the bag?” Bindi screamed as I ran to the alcove and pulled the canvas off. Sure enough, there was the matching tablet I needed.

  “Shit.”

  Rynn came up behind me. “What’s wrong? That’s the tablet, isn’t it?”

  “What’s wrong is I’m fucked.” I ran my hand through my hair, and I swore again as it caught on a bad knot. I so needed a shower. “They pulled it out of its setting.”

  “So?”

  “I expected the room the tablet was housed in to have inscriptions on the wall like the one in Sanur.”

  “Then get the images you need off this and we’ll find the cavern.”

  I shook my head. “Once you take the focus object like this,” I said, kicking the stone tablet, “all the arcane symbols fall away fast. I might still get the inscriptions off the tablet, but I doubt I could get an imprint off the room anymore. And everyone says I’m the one who ruins archaeological finds.” I threw the canvas sheet across the room. I wanted to scream, but that wouldn’t help me and would probably just get Bindi riled up.

  I strode back to her, the adrenaline making up for any of the haze still left over from my giant dose of vampire pheromones. “When did you remove that tablet?”

  She looked up at me with desperate eyes. “You said you’d open—”

  “The deal’s changed.”

  Her bottom lip quivered. “But—”

  I picked up the bag and started to walk out of the room.

  “Three days ago!” she screamed.

  I stopped.

  “Sabine called us and said to copy the inscriptions and take it out.”

  Three days ago . . . Sabine hadn’t followed me to Bali; she’d laid a trap. She’d known exactly what I was looking for before I’d even taken the job. I glanced over at Rynn. He hadn’t missed that either.

  So what the hell did Sabine need me for if she’d already known about the Bali link?

  “What did she want with me? Come on, it’s important.”

  Bindi shook her head. She was losing it fast. I wouldn’t get much more out of her. “She called us when you left Tokyo and told us to give Alexander whatever help he needed to capture you. She never told us why she wanted you, only that you had to be alive.” She nodded at Rynn. “They didn’t say anything about him though. It was only supposed to be you.”

  “Why the hell did you try to chloroform me, then?” Rynn asked.

  “She figured you’d make a good vampire flunkie,” I said. I turned back to Bindi. “Am I right? Let me guess, a few days ago Sabine said keep a lookout for good-looking men?”

  Bindi’s eyes widened, but she nodded.

  I glanced back to Rynn. “That’s when Sabine’s old flunkie jumped me at the Circus. She’ll be looking for a replacement,” I told him. Rynn just shook his head.

  Bindi whimpered. “I’ve told you everything I know, please.”

  I doubted it. Still though, I had just about everything I needed, so I opened the Ziploc and watched her bury her face in it. I had a much bigger issue to worry about. Two, in fact.

  “She’s a step ahead of me,” I said.

  “Superficially,” Rynn said. “If she knew where to go next, she would have already. She thinks you know something she doesn’t—or can figure it out, I’ll wager.”

  It was the same conclusion I’d come to. If Sabine could find the scroll on her own, she would have by now.

  “There’s something else bothering you about this, isn’t there?” he asked.

  I nodded. “How did they get my flight and travel plans? I only told three people: Nadya, Oricho, and Lady Siyu. I didn’t tell you or Benji until I was already on the plane.”

  “It wasn’t Nadya or Oricho,” Rynn said, seeing where I was headed.

  “Why so certain about Oricho?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not his style. Besides that, he’s meticulous. He would have known I’d be tailing you, and this,” he said, looking around the room, “is sloppy.”

  I nodded. Funny that Oricho isn’t the kind of person who’d kill his employees wasn’t one of Rynn’s reasons. I’d shelve that tidbit for later. “That leaves Lady Siyu,” I said. I had no problem believing she would hang me out to dry.

  Rynn wasn’t convinced. “Oricho is very careful who he works with—it could be that a message was intercepted or she had a spy tailing you.”

  “Maybe.” But I wasn’t convinced. I used some pretty high-tech encryption. I’d paid enough for it.

  I ran my fingers through my hair again, gave up on the tangles, and pulled it back into a ponytail. “This whole trip is turning into a disaster.”

  Bindi, high again on pheromones, laughed. “You have no idea.”

  I rolled my eyes. Great, another junkie who got brave and delusional. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  She laid her head against the wall and looked up at the partly restored ceiling. “Sabine made a plan in case Alexander failed. All you’re going to see is the inside of a jail cell. They’ll have found the bodies by now.”

  I snorted. “The vampires are still in the catacombs, probably for another day. At least. And you two won’t even be missed until your buddies at the hostel figure out you haven’t come home. They don’t seem the brightest bunch, so I wouldn’t count on that happening until tomorrow—”

  Her maniacal laughter just got louder and grated on my nerves. I didn’t like that smile on her face. “What the hell is so funny?”

  “Who do you think Sabine had us kill?”

  I froze. “You wouldn’t. It’s stupid and pointless—”

  Bindi just laughed. “Who do you think they’re going to pin all the dead bodies on? Little old me, or the renowned international antiquities thief? Sabine thought of everything.”

  I lost it. I grabbed her by the neck and slammed her head against the wall. “What dead bodies?” I yelled. Even as I said it though, I knew. It made me sick to my stomach, but I knew.

  She spat at me, and even though I had her by the neck, she was grinning madly. “It’s too late,” she said. “We poisoned them. They were dead before we left this morning.” She leaned forward. “Go ahead, strangle me, you know you want to.”

  They’d killed the only other people I’d had contact with in Bali. The four other archaeology students staying at the hostel.

  I let her go and stepped back, shaking. I’m used to crazy, a safe level of crazy . . .
but everything had just left my comfort zone at warp speed. Thefts, a few maimed supernatural creatures . . . that I could marginally deal with, but a trail of dead bodies and a crazy, hopped-up serial killer were totally different.

  I took another step back. “Rynn, I’m out, I’m so out—hell, we need to get out of Bali, now.” I pulled out my cell phone and started to dial. “Maybe Nadya can pull a few strings—I’ve got an extra passport on me, I can head back to Tokyo under that . . .”

  “That’s not going to help,” Rynn said.

  “Fine, I’ll head to Australia this time . . . I don’t think dragons like Australia, and there are more than enough places to get lost in the outback—”

  Rynn grabbed my hand before the phone connected. “Owl—”

  I spun on him. “Don’t ‘Owl’ me, Rynn. This stopped being a job thirty seconds ago. We’re questioning a goddamn serial killer. Two serial killers,” I said as I realized both of them had been in on it.

  Rynn shook my shoulder, snapping me back to the present. “This isn’t your fault.”

  I stopped fighting him. He was right. I hated it, but he was right. I took a deep breath. I hadn’t actually pulled the trigger. If I’d never accepted the job or come to Bali, the four students at the hostel would still be alive, but these two had carried out the murders, not me.

  “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better about this—”

  “Please. Deal with the tablet. That’s your specialty. This is mine.”

  I didn’t want to. I wanted to run, to get the hell out while I still had a very small and disappearing window to escape. And tell Oricho and Mr. Kurosawa where to shove their lousy job.

  “Please,” Rynn said. I looked up at his face and into those incredibly blue eyes.

  I hate it when people look at me with that much sincerity . . . I pinched the bridge of my nose and nodded.

  I don’t know why I agreed; it went against every single instinct in my body, every single one of them screaming at me to run for it . . . hell, that was what I was good at.

  But Rynn was asking me to trust him. Some small voice in the back of my head told me I owed him that much. A very small voice, mind you—never underestimate my instinct to run and hide, it’s big and loud—but a needling one nonetheless.

  I gave Bindi one last glance. She was smiling. She’d killed four people for no reason except to try and frame me, and she was pleased about it. I shook my head and forced my thoughts to the tablet.

  “I need five minutes, Rynn,” I said, and headed to the antechamber to work.

  The tablet was lying exposed on the alcove. I assembled the filters I needed and started shooting pictures.

  The first thing I noticed was the sloppy job they’d done removing the slab. It looked like they’d taken their pickaxes to it instead of taking their time to pry it out of the floor relief. That worried me. Arcane inscriptions are more fragile than real ones. Cracks and faults made in the stonework can cause inscriptions to unravel, depending on how intricate and delicate they are. From what I’d seen in the Sanur tablet, these were very delicate.

  When I slid in the first filter and saw the fuzzy results, I knew they’d damaged the sets. Whether I’d be able to read or translate was another thing entirely. I kept taking pictures and switched the filters. Each arcane set had been disrupted by different micro fractures in the stone edges when they’d removed it. Shit.

  I pulled out my last tool—the diluted chicken blood, which I’d left for last on purpose. I figured that with the symbols already this fragile, the blood would probably unravel all the others.

  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.