Immortal at the Edge of the World (16 page)

“I realize that. But hang on a minute. He didn’t sign this.”

“Perhaps he was in as great a hurry as we are.”

“No, he signed the other ones. So did everyone else. Oh. I understand.”

Carefully, I lifted the plexiglass cover that was protecting the letters from the harmful effects of fresh air and oily skin.

“What are you doing?” Mirella asked, aghast.

“The letter is two-sided.”

I picked out his letter and flipped it over.

Abraham, Yahweh bless him, had drawn a diagram of the toy he sent back for Isaac so his son could use it properly. I knew what I was looking for now, and I knew what the face of it looked like. I also knew I was going to have to keep the letter.

“If this helps add some urgency to your process, your pixie is on the other side of this window and she is extremely agitated,” Mirella said. She actually sounded happy about this, as if she now had someone else there insisting I was in grave danger and that made it okay to rush me.

“I’m nearly ready,” I said.

I had in my jacket pocket an empty envelope for this exact occasion. I carefully folded Abraham’s letter and put it in the envelope, then arranged the remaining letters under the glass until it looked like there was no space where the letter had been. It was very likely someone was going to eventually notice it missing, but hopefully not for a while.

“Put the case back,” Mirella said. “I’m going to open the door before she tries to break the window.”

A second later Iza was flying around my head while I was still trying to load the letters back into the cabinet.

“Iza, calm down,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Someone’s following us, yes?”

“Yes, follow,” she said. “Someone.”

“All right, well they’ve been following us for a while. We knew about this. We’ll be okay, just tell us where—”

“No. Not okay.”

“Not okay? Why? Who’s following us? Are there a lot of them?” I know it’s better to ask a pixie only one question at a time, but now that I had what I wanted I was ready to sign up for all of Mirella’s nervous energy and add some of my own.

“Man,” Iza said. “Big man.”

“A big man.”

“Big man. Big D man.”

Mirella’s head snapped around. “What did she say?”

“Demon,” I translated. “She said demon.”

Chapter Ten

“Anyone can be seduced,” Indira was fond of saying. I spent only a few years with her, but in that time she more or less proved that point, almost as a dare. Human, non-human, male or female, it didn’t much matter to her.

When it came time for us to part she asked if I now believed her. “Nearly,” I said. “I never saw you try to seduce a demon.”

She grimaced and spat into the dirt. “Don’t be disgusting,” she said.

*
 
*
 
*

Mirella reached over her head and pulled a sword out from a sheath on her back. It was lined up with her spine, as far as I could tell, and it was a remarkable thing to watch because I could swear the blade was longer than her back. She swung the sword around a little bit either to loosen up or to keep Iza’s attention.

“Well go on, put your papers away. I’d like to get as close to the exit as possible before engaging anybody, and we are a long way from an exit.”

“Demons are things you run away from, not fight,” I said. “That sword won’t even go through their skin.”

“I told you I was the best and I wasn’t exaggerating. I know demons, Mr. Justinian. The surprise is that
you
do, although perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by anything from you going forward. Can we dispense with your obviously fake name as well?”

“You can call me Adam if you want.”

“Mr. Adam?”

“Just Adam. We can be on a first name basis.”

She pointed the tip of her sword at me. “Maybe you’re older than the thousand years you claim to be and never had a last name. Is that what I should think?”

“That’s actually true, but Adam is just what I’ve been calling myself recently. So no last name, no first name really either. Or lots of them, depending.”

“Demons, pixies, and the oldest man in the world. If I survive remind me to ask for more than three million.”

I slid the last drawer back into place and pulled off the gloves. “There’s supposed to be an associate curator out in the hall. That sword might alarm him a tiny bit.”

“He’s probably dead.”

“Cheery.”

“She said demon. She knows what they look like, I take it?”

“She does.”

“Then if he came across one, he’s either dead or working for the same person who sent the demon. Either way, demons don’t much care who they’re killing on the way to who they are there to kill. And killing is almost the only reason to send one.”

I knew all of that already, but it was kind of fantastic hearing it from someone else for a change. I joined her at the door. “Maybe you’ll tell me how you know so much about demons after this is over.”

“It’s my job to know,” she said. “Now, we’re going to open this door and go straight. At the end of the hall is a door leading to a stairwell that should get us back to the ground floor. We’ll be three rooms away from an exit to the compound. That’s provided all of the maps I examined on our tour are accurate. If the car is no longer there we’ll have to take to the streets. Are you a good runner?”

This was becoming insulting. “I can keep up.”

“I know you can,” she said with a brilliant smile. “Old man.”

She pulled open the door and out we ran.

Iza buzzed ahead of us and up the stairwell. If she came to a closed door at the top she’d probably take to the vents and meet us on the other side. This was how she navigated buildings. She would hopefully double back and warn us before we walked into a trap, provided she recognized a trap when she saw one. That was always iffy when it came to pixies. Sometimes I wished she had some of the intelligence I’d come to expect from other small creatures, like iffrits. Of course, they’re obnoxious little assholes, mostly, but that also sometimes comes with intelligence.

The floor plan for the Archeology Museum was simple enough that it was pretty impossible to get lost in, but also so simple that it was difficult to avoid running into someone who might be looking for you inside. It was basically one long chain of rooms with two right angles in it, so that it looked—based on the bird’s-eye view maps at every junction—like a bisected square. There were two main entrances that could be reached from two of the middle rooms, which is an annoying design decision if you want to see the place without ever doubling back on yourself, because that’s impossible to do. I imagine it made a lot more sense as a palace than as a museum.

The stairwell we ran to led to the back of a corner room, which put us five very large rooms away from the nearest main exit. There was a lot to be said for finding a side door somewhere and sneaking out, except the fire doors I’d seen were all alarmed, and since we weren’t sure yet whether our car was even outside anymore—I had hired a car to take us from the airport and back again—it didn’t seem like a super idea to call law enforcement to the scene on top of whoever else was already with us in the building. Add to that the fact that we didn’t know for sure whether Mr. Acar was still in one location or scattered across several, and we didn’t want to be around to explain anything to anybody.

I’m being glib, but only kind of. Demons are nasty creatures. They’re large and violent and indiscriminate when it comes to who they kill and why, as Mirella had already noted. Thus if the associate curator encountered one he was probably no longer alive, and he was also probably no longer recognizable as Mr. Acar or possibly as something that was once a human being. Demons are also nearly indestructible, all except for truly awful immune systems. This makes them germophobes, which is great for everyone that isn’t me. I can’t get sick, and if they know me well they know this, too, and know I’m not going to be infecting them with anything.

The only time I ever successfully dispatched a demon it was because I had a concentrated bacterium on hand. If I were smart, I’d carry a vial of it with me everywhere.

There was no sign of Mr. Acar or any of his body parts in the stairwell or in the main exhibit area. There was also no sign of anyone else.

Mirella, ahead of me, came to a stop when we reached the first room off the stairs and signaled that I do the same. We stood still and listened. I couldn’t hear anything, but her hearing was better than mine so I wasn’t expecting to pick up much other than Iza’s buzzing.

“We are alone here,” she whispered after about five seconds.

“They could be downstairs.” I remembered how we’d been taken to the basement, from a stairwell on the other side of the building and down the corridor. If they had been following our scent that would have been the path they’d taken, which could mean we had a clear path to the front if we moved fast enough.

She was thinking the same thing. “Quickly,” she said. And then we were running again.

The exhibit design of the museum was cleverly varied so that no one room looked even remotely like another. This was incredibly annoying when attempting to exit the building quickly, as there were no straight lines from door to door. And the floor was slick stone and I hadn’t brought running shoes, so there were a few tragicomic moments when I or Mirella—in heeled boots also not meant for running—nearly skittered into a display holding something ancient and delicate. We probably made a lot of noise too, but speed was what we were aiming for and not stealth. And it worked. We reached the exit without incident, and a second later we were outside and in the courtyard.

The Istanbul Archeology Museum was technically three museums in a single compound. We were in the main building. Across the yard was the Tiled Kiosk, where the sultan had kept his girls and was now an art gallery. I didn’t know much about the third building other than that Mr. Acar called it the Museum of the Orient. The three buildings surrounded a grassy garden area, which was encircled by a cobblestone road.

Our car was supposed to be waiting on this road, in front of the Kiosk where we had left it.

It wasn’t there.

Mirella stopped us again, at the top of the stairs. “This seems emptier than it should be, doesn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded. Museum grounds or no, we were in the middle of a city. It was close to three in the morning locally, but when we entered a few hours earlier there had been plenty of people about, and now there wasn’t a soul.

“Iza, tell me about the demon,” I said.

“Deeman big.”

“Yes I know. Where did you see him?”

“Over there,” she said.

“
Outside?
” Mirella asked.

“Maybe we should have asked that earlier.”

Mirella quite suddenly whipped her sword through the air in front of her face. The sword slapped aside something metal, and then there was a dagger skittering along the steps a few feet away.

“That wasn’t from a demon,” she said. “And it wasn’t aimed at you.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me behind her in a sprint for the grassy area between the buildings. It was just the shortest way out of the courtyard, and with the most cover, even if that was only from a few trees. Anything was better than standing at the top of the steps in front of a lit entrance.

If we were going to make it any farther it would have to be by running into the middle of the city to the nearest cabstand or whatever the Turkish equivalent of that was. We were too far from Ataturk airport to make it back to the plane without a vehicle, and I hadn’t bothered with a hotel because I didn’t expect to stay any longer than necessary.

Tactically, then, the grass was a smart move. The only other real option was to try and reenter the museum, but the door had locked behind us; even if it hadn’t, it would have just meant allowing ourselves to remain cornered.

Of course, the best strategy when planning an ambush is to expect the ambushed to act rationally, and so the grassy space was exactly where they were waiting for us. If we had been given a little bit more time to think about it, we probably would have worked out another solution, but there were knives being thrown and that kind of impacted our decision-making skills. And perhaps that was the point of the knife, no pun intended.

Thankfully—and oddly, really—there were only two of them: one demon and one goblin. A human would have been nice because, frankly, I can take a human no problem. But goblins are tough, and demons are entirely out of my weight class.

Mirella stepped in front of me protectively. “Can you fight?”

“You mean do I know how?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“I can, but I need a weapon.”

She grimaced and handed over her sword. Almost immediately, two shorter blades were in her hands. “When we get back to the plane we’re going to talk about arming you properly,” she said. “I’ll take the demon. Try to keep alive until I’m finished with it.”

This was undoubtedly bravado. If she knew anything about them at all she knew she stood little chance with the sword and almost none with those little knives of hers. But I didn’t get a chance to suggest another option, both because she had already launched herself at the demon and because there weren’t any other options. I had tried everything on demons from swords and pikes to firearms, and the only things that work are the flu or enough water to drown them.