Owl and the Japanese Circus (4 page)

Captain picked the middle of the bed to take a nap. I was going to have a bitch of a time getting him off, so I opened up my laptop and logged into World Quest. Time to face the music.

There was a flurry of messages from my team telling me to eff off. Touching, close-knit group that we were. There was a series of messages from Carpe Diem asking if I was OK. I opened up a private chat window before entering the game.

Hey, Carpe—I’m fine,
I wrote.

A moment later his reply scrolled across the screen.
What happened? You disappeared.

Emergency business, couldn’t be helped. I’m back for the weekend—beer in hand, room service on the way.

There was a delay in Carpe’s response
. Out of your realm of behavior. Had me worried.

I’m touched.

Wouldn’t be hard to find a decent thief. Next time get a message off.

Had to admit, it got to me that my World Quest friend even cared—or maybe it was beer number three talking.
Roger Wilco. What’s the schedule?

Five more hours, then a seven-hour break. Halfway through a dungeon. Get your ass online and I’ll port you in.

Room service knocked. I opened the door and could smell the steak instantly. They’d even included a bottle of red wine. I started salivating. I hadn’t had a steak in months, let alone a decent bottle of red wine.

I slid back into the hotel chair, and Captain, smelling the steak, hopped up onto my lap. There was one more message from Carpe Diem on the screen.

By the way, sorry about all your stuff.

Fuck.

I pulled up my inventory screen. It, and my bag of holding, was empty. To top it off, my character, the Byzantine Thief, was standing in all her skivvy computer-generated glory. “Motherfu-ow!” I said as Captain chirped at my sudden movement and dug his claws into my leg.

Well, this would be interesting. I’d never entered a match with my birthday suit on before. Son of a bitch.

Carpe Diem, resident team sorcerer that he was, ported me. A flurry of in-game comments on my character’s relative nakedness greeted me. For the next few hours the only dragons and monsters I had to worry about were the ones the rest of the world worried about—the ones in a game.

Something rough scraped against my face, interrupting my sleep. It smelled like fish.

I groaned and rolled over in the incredibly comfortable hotel bed, pulling the thick duvet over my head. Captain fell off the bed with an indignant chirp, and I sealed myself under the covers while I still had the chance.

That bought me all of five seconds before he started to dig.

“I’m so brushing your teeth,” I said.

I swung the covers off and checked my watch. Noon. I rubbed my eyes and got up. Not fast enough for Captain, who had bypassed meowing and gone straight to death howls. Well, five hours was better than nothing.

“Screw off,” I said, hopping to avoid tripping over him. Damn it, why do cats always wind around your legs in the morning before you’ve had any coffee?

He followed me over to the stack of cans and didn’t let up until I
dumped the contents into his plastic bowl. He dug in, and I shook my head.

“I need to put you on a diet.”

He meowed indignantly before digging right back in. I headed into the kitchenette and gave a little victory yelp as soon as I discovered the stocked espresso machine. I don’t like to do anything—bathe, get dressed, find breakfast, speak—before I’ve had a good jolt of caffeine. I loaded a capsule into the holder. While it spit out my coffee, I got a second capsule ready. I like my caffeine.

By the time I was downing my second, I started putting together my strategy for the day. First, find out from Lady Siyu whether I was going to be dodging vampire lackeys; second, find breakfast. The second condition prevailed regardless of the outcome of the first, but if I was still being hunted, my options were going to be limited. That and I could get a few more hours’ sleep.

I picked up the room’s phone, an off-white enamel number as ornate and expensive-looking as the other antiques in the room, and dialed the number Lady Siyu had left me.

After two rings her crisp British accent answered, “Yes?”

I rolled my eyes. In one word Lady Siyu managed to convey both irritation and a perceived superiority.

“Hi, ah, just checking in to see where things were at—”

“Mr. Kurosawa has completed the negotiation of terms,” she said, cutting me off. “You may leave the casino and make travel arrangements accordingly.”

And with that, the line clicked dead.

Well, that settled that.

I showered, dressed, and went online to start getting my life back in order and test my new immunity. Digitally transferred funds and a few phone calls to the bank later, I was good to go. It felt weird, seeing my bank account balance for the first time in months, and the idea of actually spending my money—like a normal person. It had been a while since I’d felt anything close to normal. Ever since I’d become an
antiquities thief. Well, if I was honest with myself, not since I’d started grad school, but it wasn’t until after I’d left grad school that things had gone to hell in a handbasket.

The main draw to my line of work isn’t getting dirty on archaeology digs or breathing in corrosive acid fumes while restoring thousand-year-old artifacts. It also isn’t the hours of eyestrain on the computer stalking museum and university archives. If that had been it, I’d have tried a hell of a lot harder to stay in archaeology—not by much, but I’d at least have put in a token effort.

It’s the money. A
lot
of money. And lower risk than being a real thief. Truth be told, most governments don’t really care what happens to their artifacts—not enough to arrest anyone . . . or shoot. Except for Egypt, that is, but with the right palms greased, it’s a moot point. After three revolutions, the tourism industry is shot and they’re hurting for cash.

Another perk is I actually get credit for the work I do—not screwed over by some talentless dick of a postdoc who spends more time trying to stare down my shirt than dig . . . OK, off that train of thought—I try
not
to have anger management issues nowadays.

My very first paycheck I spent on a condo in Seattle, which I haven’t stepped foot in for months now due to the vampires camping outside. I had sources tell me they hadn’t torched it, just rifled through everything and broken a few Roman vases. The vases had really pissed me off; I’d had buyers lined up.

The only money I’d been able to spend since the Paris boys started trailing me was on computer and gaming equipment online, and even then I had to use every dirty trick in the book to stay stealth.

Speaking of online shopping . . . I picked my cargo pants and oversized surplus military jacket off the arm of the chair by the kitchen table. Both were caked in dust and had old coffee stains on them. On a hunch I held them under my nose. Funny how three weeks living in a Winnebago with a cat numbs your sense of smell. My clothes didn’t need a wash; they needed to be thrown in a landfill.

There was no shortage of shops on the Vegas strip, but a scene from
Pretty Woman
came to mind—the one where they refuse to serve the hooker in a designer store. Switch out hooker for homeless woman and that would be me. Nuts to that.

I ordered breakfast from room service and pulled up the online stores for Chanel, Versace, and Ralph Lauren, which all had locations in Vegas. My best friend, Nadya, who could pass for a fashion model on a bad day, gave me a piece of advice after I showed up at her club in Tokyo wearing a number I’d picked out myself: next time, shop out of a catalogue. Apparently fashion sense isn’t one of my talents.

I checked out Versace first. Time to get my Visa out and test this truce.

I dialed the Vegas number.

“Hi there,” I said, “do you guys by any chance have the snakeskin leather jacket and matching leather boots in a small and a size seven and a half? You do? Great, I’m going to need that and a few other things brought over to the concierge at the Japanese Circus—” I flipped to the next page on the screen and checked my watch. 12:30. Six and a half hours until I was scheduled to meet Carpe back online. Plenty of time to get dressed, get food, and do some research on Mr. Kurosawa’s egg.

I ordered a bagel and my third coffee of the day at the hotel casino’s garden cafe before grabbing a seat poolside. I’d spent an hour and a half researching leads for Mr. Kurosawa’s egg and missing scroll while I’d waited for my new clothes to arrive. I wasn’t any further ahead than if I’d spent the time playing World Quest. Every mention I’d found of puzzle boxes and scrolls found in the emperor’s tomb, or from the same period, had been dead ends; not one shared characteristics with the puzzle egg or the strange inscriptions.

Sitting by the pool and fresh out of any leads, I decided to hack
into the University of Tokyo’s archaeology server. I remembered a talk a few years back by a Japanese postdoc—Yoshi? He’d spent a few years in the Bali catacombs, and I vaguely recalled him mentioning foreign tablet inscriptions, found in two of the antechambers, that had been untranslatable. On the off chance there were similarities with the inscriptions on Mr. Kurosawa’s egg, I dug up the Bali thesis. There’s a lot of porn on the university server to sift through, in case you were wondering what Japanese profs and students store in their personal accounts.

The only mention of the tablets and inscriptions was a small footnote, with no picture. I sat back and weighed the possibilities. I knew the postdoc had shown photographs of the tablet in his talk, so the only reason they’d have been omitted from the thesis proper was if there’d been a supernatural link discovered after the fact. The International Archaeology Association would have insisted the Japanese bury it; first and foremost, they had to keep those pesky bits of supernatural proof out of the public’s delicate hands. Heaven forbid anyone actually knew there were vampires, dragons, and other assorted monsters out there, just waiting to eat them. . . .

Without an actual image of the tablet in front of me though, I couldn’t be sure . . . And there’d been no mention of scrolls anywhere in the thesis . . . but then again, it was supernatural, so maybe the university had buried that too.

I rubbed my eyes. Between the vampires and Mr. Kurosawa . . . How did I get myself into these messes . . .

However long a shot, the tablet and inscriptions from Bali were the only leads I had.

I had to go to Japan and talk to Nadya’s contact in the university. If my hunch was right, the egg and missing scroll weren’t Chinese artifacts at all but much older pieces.

I pulled up flights to Japan. There was one that left at 11:00 p.m. I checked the time. 2:15 p.m. I’d still make World Quest and be able to sleep on the plane. I emailed Nadya and let her know I was coming
for a visit and needed to crash at her place. Code that I needed her to get her contact ready for me . . . and that I’d be crashing at her place.

With five hours to spare, I pulled my new Versace sunglasses down and leaned back to enjoy the poolside sun and people-watching.

Not ten minutes passed before I realized I was being cased. If I hadn’t been watching the boys from down under hanging out across the pool, I’d never have caught the greasy rock star wannabe lurking a few tables away.

Stringy dark hair, black eyeliner, leather pants, open white shirt—without the build to pull it off, I might add—and a pair of dark boho sunglasses. How the hell did heroin ever become chic?

I usually suck spotting supernaturals in a crowd, but even I know a vampire’s lackey when I see one, and this one was low end. Think slumming it, for vampires.

As soon as he realized I’d spotted him—my look of pure contempt and disgust probably gave it away—he stopped the pretense and creeped around the other tables and suntanners towards me.

I took another sip of my coffee and waited. If I was going to run into one of Alexander’s thralls sooner or later, I might as well deal with him now. In the back of my mind I couldn’t help worrying Mr. Kurosawa had double-crossed me. But that would be a lot of trouble to go to when he could have just eaten me last night. Out of reflex I cased the rest of the pool for more vampire lackeys. Apparently this guy was solo, though I did catch Oricho and two tattooed guards standing off to the side.