Owl and the Japanese Circus

by Kristi Charish

  “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.

  10

  NUROSHI, THE AMAZING TURNIP

  10:00 a.m., Space Station Deluxe, Tokyo

  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.”

  “Hey, how’s it going? You guys out of the catacombs yet?”

  He paused. “No, your trap was well set. We are still, how do you say it, killing time.” Hmm . . . even better. He didn’t realize there’d been two of us. Only Charles knew that, and he was upstairs.

  “Hunh. You guys are slow.”

  “Much as I am enjoying this impromptu chat, I hope you didn’t call simply to mock me.”

  “As much fun as that would be, no. I want to cut a deal.”

  “Interesting. I would need to speak with Charles first.”

  “No can do. I don’t make a habit of kidnapping vampires. He’s upstairs in the temple, tied up. He let me borrow his phone though.”

  “How do I know you are not lying? That you didn’t just execute him.”

  “You don’t until you go upstairs and find him and the murdering Bobbsey Twins tied up in a room. You know, Alexander, you guys are really slipping with your flunkies. That girl is a real piece of work. I expect more from you.”

  “Don’t insult me, she isn’t one of mine.” Hmmm, that had pissed Alexander off—yet another useful tidbit. The vampire was losing his edge; he was letting all sorts of stuff slip. “What is it you wish to barter?”

  Alexander was trying to sound aloof and bored. It was an act.

  “I’m not going to waste time playing games, so here it is. You tell me everything you know about Sabine and why the hell she has it in for me. In return, I’ll leave you out of my report to my boss, the dragon who threatened to eat all of you if you touched a hair on my head. I’ll even leave out this lovely little cell phone, with all the names, numbers, and addresses of all your associates. No one will ever know you betrayed the Contingency.”

  “A generous . . . offer . . . but what you ask for is impossible—”

  “Did you know that I can triangulate the location of all these numbers? I mean, a friend was just telling me yesterday. Who knew?”

  “Owl, you are not being fai
r, what you ask is impossible because—”

  “Or I could just start dialing random numbers. I think this one means ‘boss’ in French; shall I try that one?”

  “Merde, will you listen to me, you reckless sewer rat? What you ask is impossible because I do not know.”

  “How the hell can you be working for a woman—vampire—you don’t even know? You’re not that stupid . . .” I started to laugh. “Holy shit, first you let me get away, then you let some vampire chick blackmail you? You’re losing it. Damn, maybe I should just screw all this and head back to my apartment in Seattle if this is what your standards have dropped to . . .”

  “Listen, you worthless piece of peasant trash, I don’t know who she is, but I am willing to tell you what I do know. Will that satisfy you?”

  “Tell me what you know and I’ll tell you if we have a deal.”

  There was a tirade of French expletives—or I think that’s what it was—on the other end. I hung up the phone.

  Nadya stared at me with her mouth agape.

  “He needs a minute to think about it,” I said.

  “You enjoyed that.”

  I took another sip of my coffee. “Damn straight.” The phone started to ring with Alexander’s number.

  “Aren’t you going to pick that up?” Nadya asked me.

  I shook my head and let it go to voice mail. “He’ll just yell some more.” The phone rang three more times. After it fell silent, I picked up and dialed.

  “Owl.” Alexander’s voice strained with forced control.

  “Hey asshole, you ready to deal yet?”

  There was a sharp intake of air on his end. “What I should do is wring your neck and hand you over to a meaner vampire—”

  “Wrong answer.” I went to hang up the phone, but Alexander stopped me.

  “Since you leave me with no other choice, I will tell you what I know. She goes by the name Sabine, and she appeared on the vampire club scene roughly three months ago. She is old, older than I. She has a need for other vampires to help with daylight tasks. She also has a perverse pleasure in making the kind of human companions you saw.” He sniffed. “She uses them up quite quickly. Very distasteful.”

  I rolled my eyes. Leave it to an aristocratic vampire to try and justify making thralls. “Right. Controlling the doses you give your thralls somehow makes it all OK.”

  Alexander ignored my snide comment. “Sabine approached me about an archaeological site in Romania. I connected her with an archaeologist I know, and we did some mutual business. She had a connection in Florida, and I had a buyer for Caribbean artifacts.”

  Sebastian, Sabine’s old flunky. I’d jumped to the conclusion that he’d been selling forgeries, like the news articles had reported, but if he’d been selling pieces to Alexander, what were the chances he’d been running supernatural pieces? If the IAA had gotten wind, they would have made it look like forgeries. Same downward end to Sebastian, different and more complicated cause.

  “So how did she become interested in Mr. Kurosawa’s egg?” I asked.

  “I do not know. Initially her interest was mostly with you. She has a personal grudge. She approached me about it, since I have some knowledge of how you . . . work.”

  “You mean you’ve been hunting me like a dog for the past year.”

  “You always have to be so crass.”

  “Get to the point. How’d she rope you into this mess after the truce? You’re slimy, but you aren’t stupid.”

  “None of your business—”

  “Ah, ah, ah—I’m going to start calling through the contacts, one by one, alphabetically. Tell me, who is Anajoulie? Is she important? ‘Cause I can give her a call—”

  Alexander swore. “Through our dealings, Sabine uncovered how one of my elders met with the true death. The one from Ephesus I paid you to bring to Paris.” There was a hell of a lot of venom in his voice.

  Shit. I’d have felt bad for Alexander—if he wasn’t evil. He’d hired me a year back, and at the time I’d had no idea he was a vampire—I’d just thought he was some hot, rich French kid obsessed with the occult and in possession of more money than sense. I really do suck at spotting the supernatural. Maybe that’s why I keep bloody well tripping into it . . .

  I’d had a sinking suspicion Alexander had lied to his bosses about what happened to the vampire I was supposed to deliver to Paris from Ephesus, the one I’d sent up in flames—accidently, I might add. I had no doubt the ancient vampire would remain “missing” until Alexander could drag me in, the proverbial lamb to slaughter. It’s a shame our working relationship had gone south after that, because his checks always cleared.

  “Alexander, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. That was an accident. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to kill your Grand Poobah vampire. If I had known there was an actual real vampire in that case, I never would have opened it.”

  “I told you explicitly it was a vampire—”

  “And I thought you were nuts!” Actually, I’d thought there’d been treasure he’d been trying to hide from me. When someone tells a budding antiquities thief, “Don’t open a box, there’s a monster inside,” surprise, surprise, the first instinct is to open the box. “All right. So Sabine has you by the short and curlies. If she tells them you were responsible for the fuckup, they punish you.”

  “It’s a far cry worse than punishment—”

  I rolled my eyes again. There was that indignant tone I’d grown to hate. “And if they find out you’re working for a rogue vampire, you’re just as screwed.”

  “Correct.”

  I let out a breath. “All right, out of the goodness of my heart—and the fact that I feel really sorry just how pathetic you sound right now—I’m going to give you advice.”

  He snorted. I continued anyways. “Either way, you guys are fucked. If you get out and Sabine keeps you going after me, my boss will find out, and either he’ll eat you or you’ll be on your boss’s hit list. If you get out and don’t work for Sabine, she’ll tell them exactly what happened to your Grand Poobah vampire.”

  “He was not a Grand Poobah—”

  “Then, the Contingency will call you in for a ‘fate worse than death.’ ” I didn’t add that under those circumstances I’d still get off scot-free because the Contingency wouldn’t want to piss off Mr. Kurosawa. I have a remedial understanding of when to pull my punches. “Am I right?”

  “Correct.”

  “All right, so here’s my advice. Stay buried a few days. Say there was a cave-in and it’ll take some time to dig yourself out. I’d head upstairs though and grab Charles. A bit of good faith advice here, Sabine is making some twitchy thralls. I wouldn’t want to leave him with that girl too long.”

  The other end was silent for a moment, then I heard, “An interesting assessment of my predicament.”

  “You’re welcome.” I went to hang up the phone, but Alexander chimed in.

  “A good faith piece of advice, Owl. Sabine has a rat in Tokyo. And, if you go back on your end of the deal, even one breath—”

  He hung up.

  “Son of a bitch.” I hate vampires; they always have to get the last word in.

  Nadya caught my expression. She’d been listening the whole time over speakerphone. “You know who she is?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’ve got no clue, but I do know what she is. She’s an old vampire, older than Alexander. That puts her over three hundred, and she’s interested in antiquities, with at least a partial archaeology background.”

  “You stepped on her toes,” Nadya said.

  I nodded and pulled out my laptop. “All we have to do is go through my jobs list and figure out where we missed the supernatural clue. Once we find out what I took from her, maybe we can arrange some kind of barter—”

  Nadya nodded. “At the very least we’ll be able to open a dialogue. It’s worth a shot.”

  “Any dialogue is going through the dragon. You heard Alexander. Sabine is some kind of pheromon
e sadist, and coming from Alexander, that’s a new crazy kind of scary.” I turned my attention back on Bindi’s computer. “I’m hoping we can get something off this. I haven’t been able to crack into it yet. It’s got some pretty hefty encryption.”

  Nadya opened the laptop and frowned at the start-up screen. “Let me take a look at it.”

  “Be my guest. If you can’t get anywhere, I’ve got someone online who can do it, but they might be busy.” Or in jail.

  She took the laptop into the club office and shut the door.

  My phone rang. DRAGON LADY flashed across the screen. I swore and answered. “Lady Siyu? Good news. I’ve got copies of both the tablets. As soon as I get a translation up and running, I’ll be able to figure out more about this language and where to look next—”

  “Stop. Babbling.”

  I shut up and listened as she drew in a deep breath. “You are to be on a plane tomorrow afternoon back to Las Vegas. Oricho will meet you at the airport. You will not miss that plane. You will not make any changes to the reservation. If anything arises, you are to call myself or, preferably, Oricho immediately. If you do not follow these directions to the letter, you will have me to face, and you do not want to see me angry. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal.”

  “Your travel arrangements are in your inbox,” she said, and hung up.

  I finished my coffee and checked my email.

  I opened the one from Oricho first. It was a warning that Lady Siyu wasn’t used to dealing with individuals who deviated from her plans, and also asked what my progress was. I drafted a quick letter and gave him a heads-up about Sabine and the translation. A minute later he replied, telling me that he would contact Rynn concerning my safety.

  I’d have to have a talk with Oricho as soon as I touched down about keeping me in the loop on things like Rynn from now on.

  I checked the clock. 11:00 a.m. Still plenty of time. I opened up my emails from Carpe next. There were four.

  You’re late.

  This isn’t funny.

  OK, now I’m worried. There is some strange stuff going on with your account—get in touch.