by Martha Carr
The tomb raider laughed. Twenty years ago most people hadn’t known about Oriceran, and until recently she hadn’t even known about any other planets with intelligent life. On second thought, it wasn’t so strange that there might be more than one alien world out there.
“I’ve got to get to the bottom of this shit, but what the hell am I supposed to tell Brownstone?”
She could put it off for a while. Add it to the list of things she was keeping to herself… like Lily.
Brownstone had more immediate concerns. One way or another they’d need to handle the assassins soon, and she suspected his troubles would only end if they snuffed it out at the source in Japan.
Time to take a trip. Peyton would have to babysit Lily. Maybe that was the other way around.
It was a rare clear sky over Los Angeles as Shay drove into Warehouse Two, exhausted after the world’s bloodiest and most thrilling vacation.
It wasn’t a huge surprise, but worrying about killing high-end assassins and helping Brownstone murder hundreds of Harriken had cut into her research time. The days had blurred together, starting with an ambush at LAX where they’d killed the first assassin, and then the trip to Japan where they’d finished the rest of the assassins and the Harriken.
All the bloodletting and massacres had given her some important tips. First, Shay was still good at her old job, and second, the shadow of her past lurked closer than she realized, courtesy of her encounter with one of the assassins, a Japanese woman, Hisa. The memory lingered in her thoughts.
Shay whipped out a knife and stabbed Hisa in the back. “He’s not disrespecting you, bitch. He’s respecting me.”
The assassin collapsed to the ground, coughing blood. She turned her head, her eyes wide, to stare up at Shay. “No, it can’t be! You’re dead!”
“Yeah, I’m dead,” Shay murmured to herself as she stepped out of her car.
She’d changed her hair color when she’d left her old life behind, but she hadn’t gone through the trouble of plastic surgery or magic to alter her appearance. Stubbornness, some might say. Or stupidity.
Lily stepped around the corner. She was holding a cheese sandwich. “Oh, didn’t know you were coming in today.”
Shay shrugged, taking a long look at the girl, wondering what she wasn’t saying. “What am I gonna do, sit at home?”
Peyton came around the corner with his own sandwich, dressed in breeches and laughed. “It wouldn’t hurt to take a little while off after helping end an entire international criminal gang.”
“Screw that. I’m ready to stop with the whole helping-Brownstone-for-free thing and go back to making money.”
“Well, I’ve got a line on something in Australia. Just checking the background still.”
“I helped him ferret out the background.” Lily flounced down on the couch.
“Shouldn’t you be hanging out with friends or something?”
“Friends around here are overrated. What would I do with them? Talk about buying shoes and boys and summer plans? Or how about the best gun to take as a backup and how to defeat an Ice bitch.” Lily’s lip curled as she mentioned the witch.
“We have to find you another girlfriend besides Peyton.”
“Hardy har.” Peyton took a large bite of his sandwich. “Someone had to add some feminine energy in here, besides Lily.”
Shay arched an eyebrow at him and waved a hand. “Will it be ready by tomorrow?”
“Probably.” Peyton took another bite of his sandwich and stared at her.
“What? Something on my face?”
“This is what I mean. You’re not an easy sharer. How it’d go?”
Shay shrugged. “You know how it went. We came, we saw, we massacred.”
He walked into the office to place what was left of his sandwich on a plate on the desk. “Not talking about that. I’m talking, you know, personal stuff. I meant what I said about having your back in that sort of thing.”
The tomb raider grimaced. She’d almost put the conversation out of her mind, which had been easy enough with the busy days in Japan.
“Look, um… He understands now that I’m interested in more than just a partnership on jobs.” She shrugged, glancing over at Lily, wondering if she was venturing into TMI.
“You don’t have to edit yourself around me. There wasn’t a lot of privacy in that nuclear escape tunnel. Not a lot I haven’t already seen.”
Shay cringed, wondering yet again if she was doing right by the teenager.
“I already know that look and for the hundredth time, no to the school of hormonal magic. I’m not going,” said Lily, her leg draped over the arm of the couch. “Back to you. Peyton already told me everything anyway.”
Shay scowled at Peyton. “I thought you were better than that at keeping secrets.”
“I’m selectively brilliant at it.”
“Not much to say. Neither one of us is running around sleeping with other people, but we’re together.”
Peyton shook his head. “Yet you still call the man ‘Brownstone.’”
“It’s his fucking name isn’t it?”
The man offered a placating gesture. “Okay, okay, but did you tell him about the alien stuff?”
“Yeah. Don’t think he buys it entirely, but I told him about his amulet.”
“What about the other stuff? The government stuff?”
“Nope. Not gonna.”
“Really?
Shay nodded. “Look, the guy likes everything simple as possible, and is already OCD because of how he was raised, or maybe that’s just how they are on his home planet of Interior Decoratis IV or whatever. I don’t know. One interesting clue. He’s not Oriceran.”
“Then what is he?” asked Lily.
“To be determined, I think. The last thing he needs is to obsess over is the other alien shit if we’re not even sure it’s connected.”
“You don’t think it’ll be dangerous? That someone might come after him?” asked Peyton, sitting down at his computer.
She burst out laughing. “Who? The government? Given what Brownstone has done to the Harriken, even if the government figured out he was an alien, there’s no fucking way they’d risk coming after him. You’re the one who said he’d win against a country.”
“Good point.”
“Wow, not Oriceran, not from Earth… maybe.” Lily let out a low whistle.
Shay let out another chuckle. “Nah. We’ll keep looking into the other angle. If something comes up that he needs to know about, I’ll tell him.” The mirth vanished from her face, and she glared at Peyton. “And that means you don’t tell him, either. Understand?”
“Sure, sure. And same goes for our junior tomb raider.”
“Shay’s not worried about me.” Lily sat up on the edge of the couch, restless and stood up, jumping neatly backward till she was standing on the couch. She leapt to a nearby chair and out the door, onto the top of the closet cubicle square. She kept going, moving further away from them, traveling the warehouse without hitting the floor.
“She does that a lot these days,” said Peyton, shrugging his shoulders. “You get used to it after a while. I think she’s bored. Teenagers. Set her lose in a mall already.”
“I picture her perched on a railing somewhere stalking something. This will have to be a problem for another day. In the meantime, you don’t tell Brownstone about what we find or about Lily. Capiche?”
“Don’t worry about it. Got to finish checking into the Australia job anyway.”
Shay gave him a curt nod and sighed. Brownstone liked his life simple, but hers was getting more complicated by the second.
Australia would help. All her running around investigating aliens and killing gangsters had messed with her head, not to mention opening her up to Brownstone. She was drifting from her original plan, and it was time to return to the path with a tomb raid where she could deal with normal threats—just mundane everyday annoyances like Ice Witches and ghosts.
3
> Shay stared down at the piles of weapons, knives, and other supplies on the tables in Warehouse Three. Peyton had called and told her to meet him at that location. He apparently believed she’d be ready to head out the minute he explained the job.
“Missing a little something?” Shay inquired.
Peyton looked offended. “Like what?”
“Lily for one.” She pointed at him. “Fashion sense, a close second.” His current combination of madras shorts and a Wham T-shirt was killing her. Apparently, it was Casual Day at the office.
“Girls dig this look.”
“That look gets you girls?” Shay shook her head. “Blind girls, maybe.”
Peyton averted his eyes. “Well, a certain kind of girls. You know, confused ones with daddy issues.”
“Oh, strippers.”
The man groaned and shrugged. “Lily is probably hanging from the rafters. Give her a second, she’ll make a grand entrance. I’m surprised she hasn’t begged you to go on the mission.”
“I noticed that too. I’m not going to beg for trouble, just this once.”
“And instead leave trouble here with the Chameleon.”
“Don’t do that.” Shay grinned. “But I was really talking about the lack of serious electronics in the equipment loadout.”
“Ah, that.” Peyton shook his head. “The Chameleon doesn’t forget.”
Shay rolled her eyes. “I swear I’ll pull my gun on you if you talk like that again.”
“You’re no fun, you know that? Anyway, the lack of electronics is a feature, not a bug. That’s why I wanted you to come here instead of wasting time doing the briefing at Warehouse Two.”
Shay crossed her arms. “Okay, get down to it.”
“I’ve cross-checked the client, and he’s offering a million per artifact for the recovery of three different artifacts.”
“That sounds like a lot of work.”
Peyton shook his head. “The good news is all those artifacts should be at the same site in Australia.”
“Australia isn’t exactly small.” Shay gestured for him to continue.
“You ever hear of the Mahogany Ship?”
“Yep. They say that before Captain Cook or even the Dutch sightings, an earlier ship made landfall in Australia.”
Peyton nodded eagerly. “That’s the executive summary. From what I’ve been able to find, it was Portuguese. Our client has provided a map and some information to get you to the ship.”
“If it’s so easy, why does he need a tomb raider?”
“Because it’s in a weird part of the Outback. Even the aborigines have avoided it for centuries. They claimed the area was cursed, but mostly it seems to have some sort of weird energy field that disrupts electronics and even messes with non-electronic compasses. Also, there are more than a few legends about nasty monsters, and…a few sightings that are a lot more recent. I’m not talking poisonous snakes, but things like drop bears.”
Shay searched her memory, but the name didn’t ring a bell. “’Drop bears?’”
“Basically, think giant carnivorous koala bears that jump down from trees to maul you.”
“Great, and the Aussies aren’t cleaning this shit up?”
Peyton shrugged. “The monsters stay in the cursed area, and it’s in the middle of a desert in the center of the country, and small, relatively speaking. With all the trouble with electronics, I guess they figure it’s just not worth the trouble.”
Shay rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Wait, so I’m not going to be able to drive around? This will take fucking forever.”
“Can you ride a horse?”
“I’m not an equestrienne, but I can manage.”
Lily sprinted up to the doorway of the office. “You can handle it.”
Peyton eyed her, looking her up and down. “Look who’s being super supportive. Where have you been hiding?”
Shay watched Lily keep a faint smile on her face. That girl is hiding something. No time to dig it out of her. That would take days, if then.
“Lily’s right. I can handle it.”
Peyton gave a shrug and clapped his hands together. “Then it’ll work out perfectly. They might have trouble flying or driving in the area, but it shows up on satellite well enough. At least the terrain. Not so much the ship.
“Maybe the ship isn’t there?”
“Nope. It’s just, there’s weird distortion in the images. The client insists it’s there.”
“How am I supposed to navigate in the middle of the desert without any of my electronics?”
Peyton smiled. “I’ve got a course plotted for you from oasis to oasis.” He rubbed his hands, an eager gleam in his eye. “I’ve got it all printed up. Old-school maps, none of this fancy tech stuff.”
“Says the man who pretty much lives behind a computer,” said Shay.
He put a hand up to the side of his mouth and whispered to Lily. “This is how the grownups got around back when CDs were all the rage. Had to look down while driving.”
“What’s a CD?”
“Exactly.”
He shrugged. “I’m the research assistant and handsome, stylish hacker. Not the tomb raider.
Shay scoffed. “Explain one thing to me.”
“What?”
“How does a Portuguese ship end up in the middle of the desert?”
Peyton grinned. “Because the crew were rude.”
“I’m rude all the time, and I… Well, LA is pretty arid.” She shrugged.
“Not arguing, but you weren’t some new asshole showing up and screwing with a local and powerful… Well, I guess we’d call him a wizard or something like that, but the aboriginal dude they pissed off had serious magic.”
“Strong enough artifact would do it. Those things are like magical storage facilities. What? I grew up around magic. Trifling magic, but still.” Lily played with a long lock of grey hair. Somehow, on her it only made her look younger.
“Look who’s making a contribution. Now I know something’s up.”
Shay glared at Peyton to get him back on track and off Lily. She had only known the teenager a short time but the girl clammed up even tighter when cornered.
“Fine,” said Peyton. “Where there’s a will there’s a way. He teleported the entire damned ship into the center of the country to punish the Portuguese for killing some of the locals, and they died. A lot of that stuff was covered up until the truth of Oriceran came out.”
Shay shook her head. “If they all died in the middle of the desert, how does anyone even know about them?”
“The captain was a wizard. He wasn’t as strong as the guy he screwed with, but he had a few toys at his disposal.” Peyton held up a finger. “Artifact number one, a magic quill made from a raven’s feather. You dip it in magic ink and write on a special piece of paper, and the message appears in another place, far away.
“Our client recovered a copy of some of the communications between that wizard and his boss in Lisbon, and that’s how we know the details.” He held up a second finger. “There’s a magic compass that you can adjust to track different things. Like instead of pointing north, it can point toward the nearest land.”
“I have that. It’s called GPS.”
“Sure, but it was cool back in the day.” Peyton shrugged. “And he’s still willing to pay a million for it.”
“A million dollars,” whispered Lily, her eyes widening.
“Junior Tomb Raider, that’s a small job.”
“What else?” Shay was tempted to reach out and thump Peyton to keep him on track.
He held up a third finger. “A lantern that uses oil, but somehow doesn’t use it up.”
“It’s an eternal lantern?”
“Yeah, basically.”
Shay furrowed her brow. “Pretty low-key when you think about it. I’m used to these guys wanting some ridiculous zombie rod or shit like that.”
Lily took a step back and bent backward into a handstand, balancing easily on her fingertips, stil
l talking. “That’s something I’ve never seen before. Zombies were supposed to be a myth.”
Peyton leaned down to talk to her. “Not a myth.”
Shay watched how easily Lily was moving. It was as if she had to keep moving to work off some of the energy. All the training was making her even more graceful and athletic. Look out Ice Witch. Shay felt a shudder pass down her spine and made herself snap back to the present.
She was glad she was hitting the road on another mission. Stop thinking about Brownstone, a hormonal moody magical teenager and a partner who was brilliant and a loose cannon all at once.
“I looked into the client,” Peyton said. “The guy’s been trying to get people to do the job for cheaper, but no one would go into the cursed lands for what he was offering. Also, several previous expeditions have ended up…not coming back.”
“And you don’t have the location from the satellite images? No patterns in the distortion?”
Peyton shook his head. “We have the terrain, but not the ship. I’ve combed through the research, and I’ve located some likely spots from surviving eyewitness accounts. The place has always been dangerous, but it wasn’t quite as dangerous before.”
Shay groaned. “It might not even be there. Are you fucking kidding me?”
“He’s willing to pay ten percent down just for you to try.”
“Really? Guess it’s time for a little walkabout then.”
Shay took note. Not once did Lily ask to go. Yeah, something was definitely up. She reminded herself that the teenager had survived just fine on her own till recently. She would let Shay in when she was ready, and Shay would hope that was soon enough.
Shay’s horse clopped along, and she smiled at the pleasant breeze. Back in the States spring was close to giving way to summer, but the magic of hemispheres provided a more tolerable autumn vibe and even a few clouds as she rode through the sparsely vegetated red sand and dirt of the Outback. Red-orange sandstone outcroppings rose from the land to break up the monotony. She wouldn’t want to live there, but the sweeping vistas provided a nice bonus.