by Lysa Daley
Something was bothering me. “I found the tooth with a troll who lived in a garbage heap in a drainage tunnel in a remote industrial part of the valley? Not exactly a secure location. Also, trolls aren’t known for being geniuses. It wasn’t exactly difficult.”
“Dr. Song controls a group of… agents, shall we say, who work for her all over the world. She has been ruthlessly searching the globe for the other half. When one of her spies located the tooth here, they staged an elaborate break-in and stole it. To keep it safe until she could retrieve it, they placed it with the troll.”
“So it was just temporary.”
“Let me ask you: how did you manage to track down the troll?”
I explained that I had only been told I was searching for a troll with a necklace. “Everyone knows that trolls love tunnels and caves. The other agents had been searching outside of the city, up in the mountains for troll caves. But it occurred to me that it might be in the city. I looked into large drainage tunnels not far from here. Once I narrowed down the area, I just got lucky and stumbled on the troll.”
From a safe hidden in the wall, Dr. Chen pulled out a small metal box that looked like it was made from iron, a metal that many supernaturals avoided. He opened it to reveal a smaller glassy, green box carved from jade.
Dr. Chen finished securing the necklace in jade then in the iron box. “I don’t think it’s luck, Ms. McCray. Stroud is right. You have a great deal of natural talent.”
I watched as he silently invoked a protective spell in Chinese then slipped the box back in the safe.
Even if it had been in English, I might not have understood the structure of the spell. The practice of witchcraft had taken different forms all over the world. It was true that all magic had been based on one original form that grew out of Africa centuries ago. As humans spread across the planet, witchcraft eventually spread throughout the world too, changing its structure to suit the culture where it was practiced. Western magic and Asian magic developed in entirely different ways. Only a student of Chinese magic would understand or recognize any of the spells that Dr. Chen was putting on the box.
Now that the delivery was complete, I felt a desire to get away from here and this tooth. But I couldn’t go unless I got what I came for. “Um… Mr. Stroud said that I'm taking back a shaker of salt or something?”
He chuckled. We both knew it wasn't a shaker of salt. “Yes, let me just secure this, and then I shall retrieve the payment for you to take back.”
I could feel a little tingle of anxiety. Salt and animagus witches didn’t go well together. But as long as the salt stayed in a container, I would be fine.
“What are you going to do with the pendant?” I asked. “Now that you have both halves?”
“Tonight, I will board a private jet and take it to a new location on the other side of the world.”
Suddenly, the lights went out.
Chapter Four
The two young art restorers gasped, eyes wide with fear. Dr. Chen immediately scrambled to open the safe that he had just closed and locked.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“She’s here.” He quickly removed the small jade box with the pendant inside and grabbed me. “We must protect the tooth at all costs. Follow me. I know a fast way out.”
I needed to get the salt back to Mr. Stroud at headquarters. He’d been very clear about me delivering the pendant and then coming straight back to his office. Also, this felt a little like an internal squabble: two Chinese wizards fighting over an enchanted object of dubious ownership.
I raised the subject by asking, “Maybe you could just point me in the direction of the front entrance so I can get—?”
“You must come with me.” Dr. Chen looked me square in the face, his eyes blazing. “She will not hesitate to kill you if you cross her path. Dr. Song has become ruthless and cruel in her desperate quest for the dragon’s tooth.”
Before I knew what was happening, I was trailing behind him. He rushed past the door we’d initially come through over to a second door that had previously remained unseen. Moving through it, we entered a different gallery that was much longer and flanked with ancient Asian pottery.
“We’ll use the side exit,” he said as we sprinted through the gallery. “It’s just across—” He jerked to a stop.
Something not visible to me had halted our flight. I stepped slightly to the right to see a six-foot-tall figure blocking the side exit. It moaned and moved with unnatural stiffness. Staggering into the light, the mummy had somehow come to life.
The hard, brittle exterior of the mummy cracked and fell away as it approached. Pieces of the hard shell of skin rained down on the floor, allowing the mummy to move with more ease and fluidity. Shedding its hard shell exposed a skeleton of rotting flesh and bone underneath.
“We need to hurry.” Dr. Chen changed directions, racing into the next gallery and slamming a pair of heavy fire doors—the only way in or out of this gallery. “She’ll have them all after us soon.”
“There’s more?” I swallowed.
“Nearly two dozen mummies are housed in this museum. They have the largest collection in the Western world.” Dr. Chen bolted the heavy doors. “And she can raise them all if she wants.”
“That’s not good.” I looked around, realizing that while we had escaped the mummy, we had just locked ourselves in the gallery that exhibited a few statues, along with two more mummies inside glass cases.
Dr. Chen saw me staring at the mummies. “Don’t worry. Most are locked in the basement. And she’s not in here with us.”
An instant later, the mummy pounded on the locked door from the other side.
“So she’s a necromancer?”
“Technically, yes.” Dr. Chen conceded. “Among her quite considerable powers, Dr. Song can reanimate. This is not illegal in Eastern magic like it is in the West.”
Raising the dead, or necromancy, was definitely highly illegal, dark magic here in the West. It drained the wizard of their humanity, literally leeching the body and soul.
The mummy’s pounding on the doors got louder and louder. With each blow, it began to bow inward.
“This door won’t hold much longer,” I said.
“All hope is not lost yet, Lacey.” Seemingly out of thin air, Dr. Chen produced a wand carved like an elegant crane. I had never seen a wand so intricately carved. “Because I have something better than the power to reanimate. I have the power of animation.”
Reanimators brought the dead back to life. Animators brought inanimate objects to life.
Where had he been keeping the wand? It was far too long and bulky to have been stored in a shirt or pants pocket. He aimed it at a pair of fierce, life-size Japanese shogun warrior statues, crafted four hundred years ago out of metal. Light shot from the wand’s tip, hitting the statues that flanked either side of the door, slowly bringing them to life.
“Dr. Chen, hurry!” I pointed. “The door is giving way.”
The shogun statues had begun to creak forward, roughly jerking to life. But the mummy, endowed with the unnatural strength of dark magic, had just burst through the door.
He and I backed up as the ten-foot-tall statues moved more and more quickly while expertly spinning fearsome-looking swords. Thundering around, they took up a strategic position in front of us, blocking the mummy’s path like a pair of secret service agents.
I breathed a sigh of relief now that we had a pair of such formidable bodyguards.
Undeterred, the lone mummy mindlessly surged onward. The warriors raised their heavy swords, ready to cut down the thousand-year-old mummy. The first warrior swung the sword toward the mummy’s midsection.
But the mummy flung an arm upward, easily deflecting the weapon’s blow as if it were a paper sword.
Dr. Chen and I exchanged perplexed looks.
“That’s not possible,” he murmured, grabbing my arm and pulling me backward.
The second warrior swung his sword, and the mumm
y again deflected it. Then he balled his rotted fist and punched one of the metal warriors square in the chest, causing the towering shogun statue to explode into a thousand pieces.
“That mummy’s been enchanted with dark magic,” I said.
“I told you Dr. Song is a terrible foe to battle,” Dr. Chen muttered.
As the mummy moved toward us, glass shattered behind us. I turned to see a second mummy’s head appear from inside a display case, then a third. Dried out, gaping-mouthed undead sprouted like daisies all around us. Moaning, they crawled out of their glass sarcophaguses to the ground.
The trio of wretched living dead moved in our direction, their eyes glowed with the sickly evil light of dark magic, their bony jaws snapping as they stumbled toward us. And the bitter, musty smell. Horrible. It was like nothing I had ever experienced. Death smelled really bad.
We were trapped as three mummies closed in on us.
“What do we do?” I asked.
Dr. Chen pointed his wand at the first mummy and managed to at least injure him as a blast of energy blew off a chunk of his arm. “Help me! Use your wand.”
I bit my lip. “Oh, uh…I don’t have my wand with me.”
“What?” He sounded shocked.
It was true that as an agent I was supposed to have my witch’s wand with me at all times. But I’d misplaced my personal wand and returned the loaner that Mr. Stroud had given me. At this moment, I really, really wished I’d kept it.
“I’m so sorry.” I shrugged pathetically.
“Well, the good news is we found a weak spot on them.” He blasted the mummy again as we were forced farther and farther into the gallery until our backs were against the wall. “The bad news is we’re outnumbered, and this may take a while.”
He was right. We were doomed. Why had I taken this stupid job? I’d already promised myself I wouldn’t work for the Society again. And now, here I was, about to be killed by a pack of ravenous mummies. I instinctively had the urge to shift into a bird and fly away to safety. But I couldn’t abandon Dr. Chen.
Then, Dr. Chen bravely stepped in front of me, pointing his wand. If we were going down, then he planned to go down swinging. He kept zapping the mummies, blasting a hole in a leg here, taking off an ear there.
“The dark magic surrounding them is powerful,” he said sounding frustrated.
Suddenly, a figure in black whizzed over the top of the mummies, landing between them and us. Whoever it was wore a black mask, revealing only their eyes.
“Is that…” I began, “a ninja!?”
This whole evening was getting crazier and crazier. I should have just agreed to have a drink with Stryker instead of taking this job.
“Yes!” Dr. Chen beamed. “They are sworn to protect the pendant.”
“They?”
A second figure in black followed the first. If the towering, enchanted shogun warriors couldn’t stop the onslaught of mummies, I wasn’t sure how two ninjas could stop them. But then, the first ninja pulled out what looked like a large six-pointed snowflake and threw it at the closest mummy. When it stuck in the torso of the mummy, I realized it was a metal ninja throwing star. The mummy instantly evaporated into a cloud of dust.
“Whoa!” I said in awe.
The sharp metal ninja stars had to be enchanted with some sort of super-charged spell to completely destroy a mummy. A second star was thrown, evaporating the next mummy.
We took advantage of the situation. As soon as the pathway was safely open, Dr. Chen and I sprinted past the remaining mummy out into the next gallery while the ninjas stayed to deal with the last one.
“They were useful,” I said, glancing back at the mysterious ninjas.
“I find they come in handy so I bring them with me where I go,” Dr. Chen admitted.
“Wait…” I said, the pieces falling into place. “Were they the one who were following me?”
He just shrugged but a grin creased his lips.
The museum’s maze-like galleries spidered from gallery to gallery. We rushed through square room after square room, each doorway leading to another gallery, leading to another. I was now hopelessly lost. If something happened to Dr. Chen, it would take me forever to find my way back to the front of the museum.
Finally, I spotted an unmarked door. “Where does that door lead?”
“To a stairwell down to the service area and loading dock. Excellent, Lacey!” Dr. Chen changed direction heading for the exit.
But then, a woman cut us off, blocking our path. She carried a long, carved wizard’s staff and wore an ornate flowing red dress with a full hood reminiscent of a Chinese empress. In her traditional gown, she fit right in among the museum’s ancient artifacts.
“Thank you, Elias, for reuniting me with my treasure.” The woman laughed cruelly. She removed the hood, revealing the face of an older Asian woman, still beautiful with lovely features but fierce, determined eyes.
“It’s not yours. This dragon’s tooth belongs to no one, except perhaps all the people of China.” Dr. Chen argued. “It belongs to all the people of the world. And yet it is no one's possession.”
“Husband, you know very well that the one who finds that tooth is the one who controls its power,” she countered.
Husband? Dr. Snow, the woman trying to kill us and steal the tooth, was Dr. Chen’s wife?
“This tooth is too powerful for you or any one person to possess.” He held up the jade box. “That is why it was broken in two.”
“You broke it because you were jealous. It hurts to be betrayed by one’s own husband.”
Yikes. Not only had I gotten myself in between two powerful Asian wizards, both experts in a form of magic that I knew nothing about, but I had also gotten myself stuck between an angry husband and wife.
“Was it not I who found the tooth and pulled it from its earthly tomb?” She focused her eyes, now glowing faintly red like a blazing fire, on the jade box in his hands.
An instant later, the box burst into flames. Startled, Dr. Chen dropped it, shaking his burned fingertips. “Grab it, Lacey. She can’t get that box.”
With flames rising up, I yanked a thick scarf from my messenger bag and quickly tried to smother the hot fire.
“As long as I live and breathe, you shall not possess this tooth,” Dr. Chen defiantly spit out.
A dark grin appeared on her face. “We shall see about that.”
Retreating, we stepped into another dead-ended gallery. Dr. Chen spun around, confused. “I think we made a wrong turn.”
We were trapped. Cornered like rats. Dr. Chen looked desperate.
“Get back,” he ordered me. “I can’t let her get both halves of the tooth. No matter what.”
“Wait!” Fearing that he was about to harm himself in order to destroy the tooth, I intervened. “I can get it out of here.”
“How?” He squinted, discouraged by our seemingly hopeless situation.
My mind raced as I searched the area. There was one possibility. I spotted a very small vent, the size of a brick, along a floorboard in the wall.
“I’m an animagus,” I answered, hoping an Eastern Wizard would know what that was. There weren’t many animagus witches left in the world. As far as I knew, those of us who remained lived in the West.
“Why didn’t you say that before?” He held the box out to me. “Transform into a powerful beast. Perhaps a deadly tiger or a massive rhinoceros.”
“I can’t do that. I’m only a class two,” I explained as disappointment filled his eyes. I pointed to the small vent. “But I can still get the pendant out of here. And no one can follow.”
He hesitated, unsure if he should give me the jade box and its precious contents.
“Trust me, Dr. Chen.”
“Take it.” He thrust the whole box toward me.
“I can’t take the box with me. Just the pendant.”
“But it protects the tooth?” He sounded alarmed.
“I understand but look how small that vent is.
I can only carry the pendant through that opening.”
“Of course.” As he fumbled to get the dragon’s tooth out of the protective box, Dr. Chen handed me the pendant with the dangling tooth. “No matter what, Lacey, you must keep the tooth out of her hands.”
“I promise to protect it.” I ripped off the faceplate to see that the narrow vent curved.
There’s only one animal I could think of that would be both small and nimble enough to work. And it wasn’t very appealing.
Dr. Song slowly moved closer, chanting, preparing a spell of some sort of destruction.
“Come on, Lacey,” Dr. Chen urged me on as the moaning mummies surged closer.
Time was up. I closed my eyes and concentrated. Despite a shiver of revulsion, I felt the transformation begin as I shrunk down to the cold museum floor.
Towering above me, Dr. Chen jumped back, startled by my new appearance.
Holding my head up, I undulated forward. I’d become a Western Green Mamba, one of the most poisonous snakes in the world.
Chapter Five
Ihissed as my retracted snake fangs pulsed and shot forward. I felt the instinctive desire to strike.
Dr. Chen took another step back, and my defensive reptilian urge faded.
Instead, I slithered across the floor toward the small opening in the wall. My venom wouldn't affect any already dead mummies, but it most certainly would kill Dr. Song, or any other human wizards who might get too close to me.
Of course any halfway decent wizard would be able to keep their distance from me while still using their magic. I had to move fast while I still had the advantage of surprise.
“Damn you, Marius.” Dr. Song’s eyes blazed with fury, the kind of anger only a wife could feel toward her former husband. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”
But Dr. Chen's voice was soft and calm. “I love you still, Camille. Give up this foolish quest and come home to see your children. They miss you so.”