The elevator door opened on our floor and Rynn stepped out, setting a fast pace down the hall to our suite. “What agreement? What terms? For my cat? Rynn, I was perfectly capable of handling it.”
“Alix, can we please deal with your frustration with me later?” he snapped, then stopped and breathed. “I’m sorry, this has nothing to do with you. It’s hard to stomach being treated like the empathic grunt.” He hit the side of the wall. There was a dent, but since no one ever came up to this floor, I didn’t think he was particularly concerned.
I realized what the bargain was over. “Lady Siyu traded Captain to do things her way.”
“I said I would help you get him back.”
A pit formed in my stomach. I hadn’t wanted that, I hadn’t asked for it.
“You couldn’t have offered her anything she would have wanted,” he explained.“She made up her mind weeks ago when we hit a stalemate over the elves. This was her first opportunity to get her own way.” After a moment he added, “And, as much as I hate to admit it, Lady Siyu isn’t wrong about getting the elves on our side or covering up supernatural mishaps. So far it’s only trolls and goblins, but every time they misbehave . . .”
Eventually someone was going to get a video up on YouTube.
I pushed past Rynn and opened the door. The suite was exactly how I’d left it, clean and sterile, not really my home.
Captain, smelling his old territory, took that moment to let out a baleful howl from inside the red carrier. “Just wait,” I told him.
“That’s not all of it,” Rynn said. “The cat has a sense for supernatural things. Even a half-trained Mau is an invaluable tool.”
My pride at Captain’s progress reared its head. “He’s not half trained.”
Rynn nodded to the carrier, where Captain had gone quiet.
I looked down. Captain had decided it was time to eat his way out. This carrier was new and had stronger mesh; I was guessing Lady Siyu had had some incidents over the past month. But still, I gave him an A for effort . . . or would that be for eviscerating? Or ability to generate pet damage? How do you assign RPG stats to a cat?
I maneuvered inside our suite and closed the door before putting the carrier on the ground and opening it. “There you go, Captain.” He darted out and made a pass of the living room and kitchen, checking that everything was still marked by rubbing everything with his chin and the top of his head.
I glanced up at Rynn, who was watching me. I recognized the look as one he got when there was something important he wanted to talk about.
There was a conversation or two we needed to have about just how intertwined our personal and professional lives had gotten lately. I wasn’t sure where things ended and began anymore, and now with the mess that was this suit for the elves and the IAA’s bounty on World Quest . . .
I held up the folder. “Whatever it is, Rynn, it’ll have to wait. I need to start looking now, because between the IAA breathing down my neck and the elves, this suit is going to be a real bitch to find.”
5
THE ELECTRIC SAMURAI
7:00 p.m. The Japanese Circus Casino
It wasn’t the alarm I’d set on my phone that woke me, nor the chime on my computer, which I’d set to wake me up. It was the crash of shattering glass.
I swore as I sat up in my chair, almost knocking my half-finished Corona over. I readied a slipper to throw at Captain, but he was already out of sight.
The glass wasn’t though. The one Rynn had left on the coffee table for me was now on the floor in a million odd pieces where I couldn’t help but see it.
Whereas I’d spent the last two hours working, Captain had spent the time re-scenting everything in the apartment and making sure all the nooks and crannies were where he’d left them. Every now and again, when he remembered he was supposed to be punishing me, he found something to knock off a table.
I swore and checked the time on my computer screen before grabbing the dustpan and broom. It was the second glass since Captain had been reintroduced to his territory.
“Seriously, the first one was fine, the second one was overkill,” I called out. Captain let out a muffled baleful meow in response from whatever hidey-hole he’d crawled into.
I deposited the broken glass in the garbage with its predecessor. Well, at least Captain was destroying things in pairs.
Two hours I’d been poring over the file Lady Siyu had given me. No wonder my eyes were so damn tired. I closed them again. Rynn was checking security and updating himself on the situation in Tokyo, which worked well for me, since it gave me time to work without him hovering over my shoulder. Considering the mood he was in . . .
I’d memorized what the elves had given me to the point where the notes were burned into the back of my eyeballs. I couldn’t not see them, even with my eyes closed.
I took another pull of my now-warm beer and went over what I knew. Despite the incomplete notes, I now had a grasp of the time line and the armor’s path across the ancient world. And the picture it was painting was one of uncomfortable death and destruction.
Around 300–150 BC, the suit of armor made its first appearance in ancient Japan, well before the time of samurai, geishas, and emperors. I’d managed to find a few more versions of the legend online. They varied in details, characters, and periods of history, but they all had the same kernel: a beautiful water spirit, possibly a demon or elemental of some kind, felt sorry for a group of farmers who were at the mercy of a neighboring warlord. One brave soul, a man from the village, petitioned her for help. Depending on which story you read, her motivations change. This was not uncommon; legends and myths had a funny way of changing to suit the time they were being told in, to communicate some sort of culturally acceptable message. In this case, some of the stories said she felt sorry for the villagers, others said she was in love with the man, and yet others claimed she was in a vindictive mood that day for having been slighted.
Regardless of intentions, she offered to help. Some say it was a magic sword, others claim she cast a spell on the villagers, but the earliest refer to a suit of armor gifted with the power of the storms, that could down a field of enemies with a sheet of lightning.
Of course, any old fable with a grain of truth in it tends not to have a fairy-tale ending. This was no different. Powerful gifts from supernaturals always come at a high price. The stories all ended more or less the same. Sacrifice for the greater good, be careful what you wish for, everything has a price—take your pick of the lessons, but the result was the same: the man saved his village but at excruciating costs.
Whatever the true version, it had been lost to the ages. The armor itself though . . . Lining up the periods represented in the folder, the suit had somehow made its way to the mainland, appearing briefly in Korea, then India, then disappearing for a hundred odd years until it surfaced in Roman times, around the reign of Caligula. From there it vanished again until it reared its head in Genghis Khan’s army during the early Middle Ages.
And that was it. According to what the elves had given me, the suit hadn’t been seen since.
I polished off my warm beer and sat back to give my eyes another rest.
One thing was certain and corroborated by every sighting of the armor recorded in the elves’ notes: like the four horsemen, the armor brought death and destruction with it, though whether it was the cause or the catalyst remained to be seen.
I let out a deep breath. Maybe I was missing an angle. Maybe if I started looking at Genghis Khan’s rule . . . I could always probe the university archives a little deeper.
I was about to open a browser when I heard yet another crash, from the kitchen this time.
Son of a bitch, that was the third time. I turned to see what the hell Captain was up to now.
He was standing in the middle of the suite’s kitchenette. Waiting for me, braced to run. When I looked a
t him he meowed, a long, baleful, accusatory moan.
“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give you to that harpy, and certainly not for an entire month.”
He meowed again. I narrowed my eyes as I peered at him. It sounded muffled, as if he had something in his mouth.
Shit.
I bolted for Captain, and he leaped onto the kitchen table. “Get back here!” I yelled. I don’t know how, I wasn’t sure why, but Captain had my cell phone in his mouth.
I cornered him on the counter, blocking off the easy exits. “Drop it,” I said.
There was a crunch as Captain bit down into the glass. “Son of a—” I lunged, but he was faster and skidded around me.
“Don’t you dare chew! Stop it!” With my luck he’d manage to break the screen and swallow the glass before I got to him, then it’d be a trip to the vet and a whole new wheel of spawned vengeance over the indignity of a cone. . . .
“You no-good, rotten cat. Get back here!” Finally he dropped the phone in order to man an escape up the cupboards. Served him right for breaking his diet. He hunkered down above the kitchen cabinets, swishing his tail and glaring at me.
I checked my phone. Shit, he’d cracked the screen.
I held the phone up so Captain could see it. “A hundred fifty bucks down the drain. Are you happy?”
He meowed, and swished his tail again.
The front door clicked open and Rynn stepped in. He took in the scene.
“I’m fairly certain the cat has no idea what you said. Maus are smart, but not that smart,” Rynn said.
“No, but he can understand intonation. He lulled me into a false sense of security so he could go after my phone. It smells like me and he knows I need it.”
As if in answer, Captain settled in to clean himself, satisfied with whatever cat point he’d been trying to make.
At least he hadn’t peed on something. Yet. Served me right for thinking all I was going to get were a few indignant mews, a couple broken glasses, and demands for a filled food dish.
I turned my attention to Rynn, but before I could say anything he stopped me with a shake of his head. “Give me a minute, Alix.” And with that he headed into the bedroom. I heard the door close, and a moment later the shower turned on.
Something was definitely still bothering him, well beyond our meeting with Lady Siyu. Part of me wondered whether I should push, but I scrapped that idea. Part of a relationship—any kind of relationship—is trusting the other person to tell you something’s wrong when they’re ready, not when you’d like them to. Though I was tempted to join him in the shower . . .
I grabbed a fresh beer from the fridge and returned to my desk and laptop.
Cohabitation. Regardless of the whole supernatural angle, I was still getting used to it. Not that things weren’t going well, or that we didn’t have our disagreements.
I was used to freedom—sort of. Truth be told, I didn’t think there was any such thing, between university, being on the run from the IAA, and Alexander and his cronies chasing me . . . But this was a wholly new kind of containment. Before, it had just been me and Captain. Now I wasn’t the one in control anymore.
Or maybe it was just the illusion had been removed. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t have jumped on a plane for Nadya at the drop of a hat. And Rynn? I’d spent three months avoiding him specifically because I hadn’t wanted to care. Even Carpe had known who I was online; he’d only kept it secret so I wouldn’t delete my profile and run.
I’d been buying into my own fantasy of independence—not living free. There’s a difference, subtle, but it was there.
Captain let out a piercing howl as my browser window opened back up. I glanced over my shoulder to where he was sitting, shifting from paw to paw in front of his half-full food dish. “Goddamn it, I just filled your dish and you repaid me by eating my phone?”
He meowed back.
My view of independence had been not unlike my cat’s: I’d made a lot of noise about not needing anyone, but at the end of the day I’d still needed friends—or, in Captain’s case, someone to open the kibble bag.
I reached for the fresh Corona as I turned my attention back on the search engine. The one problem before me I did have control over.
Since Genghis was the most recent sighting of the armor according to the elves, I decided to start there. I headed for the IAA university archives and used an old set of passwords I kept handy, rotating them so one never set off alarm bells. I found the red folders, the ones containing supernatural references, and typed Genghis Khan into the search bar overhead. “Let’s see what kind of supernatural monsters hung around your court, shall we, Genghis?”
A couple vampires, at least one skin walker, succubi . . .
I looked for anything concrete; diaries, journals, inventories. But even the online stuff was sparse . . . now hold on, that was interesting. At the bottom of the search results page was a footnote reference to someone’s thesis. I clicked through to the summary.
It was a detailed analysis of the fall of the Khwarezmian Empire during the early middle ages, whose border had covered parts of modern Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, among others. The Mongol horde had ransacked the empire and burned most of it to the ground—to the point where there really wasn’t much left of an archaeological record. I suppose it made sense at the time. Genghis didn’t want to allow anyone who might hold a grudge to have a roof over their head. Grudges tend to fester the dryer and well fed they are.
The supernatural link had to do with one of the palace treasure rooms that had been ransacked. A large portion of the king’s treasure went to one of Genghis’s generals. Jebe. Including a suit supposed to have magical powers.
I frowned at the screen. Could that be it? Regardless, I now had a name.
I checked the source material and swore. It was on a secure server. The IAA had a bad habit of doing that lately in an attempt to keep the information they really didn’t want out of the wrong people’s hands. Like mine. They’d taken to using secure servers that traveled with the collections and never met a high-speed connection. They had the ports removed before anything was even installed. This was one such collection.
I opened the thesis, hoping the contents contained more about General Jebe and the fate of the armor, but when the thesis loaded all I saw were swaths of black mixed in with the print. It had been redacted like crazy.
I was starting to think a scrub job might not be so much paranoia. . . .
I heard the door to the bedroom click open as Rynn came out.
I did a double take—I couldn’t help it. He’d thrown on track pants but had otherwise forgone clothes. Though he pretended that there wasn’t anything unusual about that . . .
I watched him as he headed into the kitchen and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. Something was still bothering him. I was at a loss for what to do. I mean, my go-to was not exactly touchy-feely talks with people about their feelings. I’ve never been particularly in touch with my feminine side.
“How goes the research?” he asked, nodding at the dossier open on my desk as he took the seat beside me. I felt my own temperature and heart rate rise. Touchy-feely I was not, but I wasn’t immune to Rynn’s physical charms, not by a long shot.
I shoved down a couple ideas that popped into my mind and set my brain to answering him, not undressing him. “Besides a general time line? Not much. The records the elves gave us are next to useless. Though it looks like the last stop was in Genghis Khan’s horde.”
Rynn closed his eyes as he drank his beer. “Tell me about the Mongolian connection,” he said.
“It’s not concrete. Genghis Khan’s army stumbled across a suit that vaguely matches the description of the armor, buried in a Khwarezmian king’s treasure room. After that, the reference shifts to one of his generals, Jebe, who led part of the army north to invade what’s now Russia
and Poland. And that’s as far as I was able to read through the redacted thesis.” I shook my head. “It’s like someone’s actively trying to scrub it from history.” I hesitated, not entirely certain what kind of mood Rynn was in.
“Ask,” he said, not opening his eyes.
“When we were dealing with Lady Siyu, you mentioned you’d heard of the armor.”
My phone started to ring, and Nadya’s name and photograph flashed across the screen. It took me a second with the cracked screen to answer.
“Nadya?”
“Are you alone?”
Hi to you too. “No, Rynn is here.”
“Put me on speakerphone. Rynn should hear this too—it concerns him.”
I did as she asked. “You’re on, Nadya,” I said, and sat back.
“I just finished a meeting.” There was a brief pause while Nadya chose her words, something she always did carefully. “I don’t have time to be subtle about this. Rynn, has anyone contacted you about changing your fees at Gaijin Cloud?” Gaijin Cloud was the bar Rynn ran remotely.
Rynn frowned. “Yes. I’ve got someone looking into it. Why?”
“Because they’ve started asking for more.”
“More payments?”
“No. They’re demanding—or should I say suggesting strongly—that I change my financial manager.”
Rynn frowned. “You don’t have a financial manager. Neither does Gaijin Cloud.”
“My thoughts exactly. They want to put one of their people in the club to run my money.” She made a derisive noise. “I made a few calls, not everyone was forthcoming or even willing to answer, but I’m not the only one who is being squeezed.”
Rynn’s brow knit. “I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out from some of my more-connected contacts. Nadya, whatever you do, don’t let them anywhere near your books.”
Nadya snorted. “Like I’d leave the money somewhere it could be found.” Her voice took on a more serious tone. “Look, I don’t know if this is serious. It could just be a simple cash grab, some new lowlife in power who wants to see how far he can push the local clubs, but my nose tells me something else is going on. And Alix?”
Owl and the Electric Samurai Page 11