18

Dead Gods

9:00 p.m. Where the hell was Carpe?

I swore as I stumbled over another uneven section of floor. The one bitch about old ruins is they never planned or accommodated for ground settling. My head was killing me, and on top of that my vision was now coming in and out of focus—hence the more frequent tripping.

Lucky for me Benji hadn’t caught on just how bad off I was. No need to give him anything to tip his flight-or-fight response. As it was, he was jumpy under the best of circumstances.

A wave of light-headedness hit me, and I steadied myself against the wall—yet another part of the curse I was becoming more familiar with. I felt Captain wind around my feet.

“You really need to revisit your priorities.”

I frowned. The voice wasn’t Benji’s—not whiny enough; it reminded me of an old Egyptologist professor back in my undergrad years.

“Seriously, you need a life overhaul.”

There it was again. I looked to find Benji—he was farther along, examining a section of floor.

Captain was sitting behind me—watching me, patiently. I frowned. My cat didn’t do patient. There was no way, but still . . . “Did you . . . say something?”

Captain shook his ruff out and looked straight back at me. “Slow on the uptake, aren’t you?” he said, his lips molding around his teeth to form the words. “But seriously, you should really revisit your life goals. I think at some point you really derailed things.”

I closed my eyes. Great, now my cat was giving me life advice . . .

“And maybe spend some time reflecting. I try to be positive, but I think we both know the chances of survival are not in your favor right now. I mean, my kind are the guardians of the underworld; I think I know a couple things about death.”

I frowned. “OK, you’re a cat. You chase vampires and apparently the odd mummy—not exactly a tactical genius that should be doling out life advice.”

“Hey, you said it; I have a brain the size of a walnut. All things considering, I’m doing fucking spectacularly.”

I don’t know what was worse: Captain giving me relatively coherent life advice, or me arguing with him.

This wasn’t happening, just another hallucination. Wait it out, Alix, it’ll go away . . .

“Oh and you should give me more treats. Like now. On account of you dying.”

“You’re a figment of my imagination.” I said it more for myself than my cat.

“And tell Nadya to take me off the diet. It’s cruel and unusual punishment, and completely unnecessary.”

Captain blurred out of focus. Either that meant the hallucination was almost over, or I was about to start bleeding out of my ears . . . I squeezed my eyes shut and hoped for the former.

“Alix? Hey, Alix?”

Someone was shaking my shoulders. Hard.

I opened my eyes. Benji stood in front of me, searching my face, and not with concern. “You were just standing there mumbling to yourself,” he said. It was phrased as a statement, but I didn’t miss the open-ended question.

Note to self, when hallucinating don’t talk to the imaginary people. Or cats.

Captain, still sitting behind me, let out a baleful meow. “Just light-headed with the air down here—needed a breather is all.”

Benji let me go, but I don’t know how convinced he was on the fine part . . . then again, maybe he was just worried a monster was about to jump out at us. Considering the location and company, I could forgive him on that one.

And that was another hallucination down. I was starting to see a pattern; the people I cared about pointing out the things I was most afraid they thought about me. Well, that and the idea of my cat speaking in general scared the shit out of me.

Manifestations of my own paranoia. Fantastic.

“Let’s keep going,” I said, nodding at the three-way junction up ahead. “You said there was a hall coming up?”

Benji took the left fork. “It’s a cistern with some inscriptions left on the pillars and walls, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. Past that?” He shrugged.

I checked my phone clock. Two minutes to go until my meeting. The cistern would do. I followed Benji, placing my feet where he did. After finding a spot to sit, I pulled my laptop out. Time to see if our signal hop worked . . .

“Carpe, I hope to hell you can still hear me,” I said.

“Loud and clear. Log in and head to the Dead Orc. I need to teleport our characters to the meeting location.”

“Provided the game designers don’t delete them as soon as we log in. You think a phone call or email would have been a hell of a lot easier,” I mumbled, but I did as Carpe asked.

“You think I didn’t try that already? They said in game was the only way.”

In World Quest there are only a handful of places you can re-spawn; bars are the place of choice. I watched as the Byzantine Thief fazed into existence amongst the other players on-screen. So far so good. Thank God bars weren’t PVP zones anymore.

“I’m not dead yet,” I said.

“Hold on, teleporting. Special destination spell, so don’t mess with your screen.”

My screen shifted as the Byzantine Thief materialized alongside Carpe on a small mountain path leading up to what looked like a ski lodge, with a distinct Himalayan feel. The mountain path was narrow enough that I had to roll to save my character from sliding down the steep mountain cliff.

“Damn. I’ve heard of this place,” Carpe said. “Just, I’d never thought to actually end up here in game.”

“Where are we? It’s not showing up on my world map—at all.” My headache flared again, and I winced as I tried to focus on my screen.

Carpe turned his character around, taking in the scenery—and probably a lot of screen shots. Below us was a valley spotted with a lake and other dwellings.

“Owl, you don’t understand, we’re not only off-map, we’re, like, in the mythical realm of off-map. This is the game makers’ house.”

Wait a minute—that rang a bell. Something I’d heard at an archaeology conference a few years back after a lot of beer. I winced again as the headache struck a second time and my vision blurred.

“Byzantine, welcome to the Himalayas and the gates of Shangri-la.”

Now, I might have been having a hell of a time focusing, but that detail blazed a trail through my brain. Shangri-la was a mythical location. Like Valhalla, it wasn’t supposed to actually exist.

Except here it was. In World Quest.

If there was one thing I’d learned over my years playing, everything in the game had a basis in reality. Shangri-la was real, and Carpe and Byzantine were standing on the edge of it. All I needed to do was get a dot on my map . . .

“Ow—son of a bitch!” I grasped both ears as the headache reared, ugly. “Owl?” I heard Carpe say, though his voice sounded muffled.

“Yeah, fine—” Just your run-of-the-mill curse . . . The pain abated, and I opened my eyes.

You know, on the one hand I knew perfectly well I was sitting in an ancient cistern built underneath a cursed monastery in Syria . . . but my eyes, nose, and brain were convinced I was standing on a Himalayan mountaintop. I looked down. Instead of a laptop, I was looking at Byzantine’s climbing gear. Carpe’s elf—an uncanny rendition of the real one—stood beside me.

Of all the times for me to hallucinate . . .

Well, no choice but to roll with it. “Let’s just get this over with before I freeze.” The Byzantine Thief wasn’t exactly dressed for snow-filled mountains. Damn it, I couldn’t even screen-shot to try and analyze the topography later on. Shangri-la, right there in front of me . . .

The chalet door opened, and a man wearing Buddhist robes paired with a cowboy hat stuck his head outside. “You’re late,” the one I’d dubbed Texas said.

I was late? . . . Asshole. “Yeah, just be happy I’m not raiding Shangri-­­la down there.” I started walking for the chalet. Damn, these halluci­nations were getting awful real. Couldn’t be a good sign . . .

Texas spit on the ground as someone I assumed had to be Michigan stuck his head out. No cowboy hat, but the yellow Buddhist robes were there as well.

“I told you it was a mistake meeting them here,” Texas said . . . well, growled might be more accurate.

“We’re here for negotiations, and the elf is trustwort-oomph!” Michigan was cut short by Texas’s elbow to the ribs.

They stood aside, and I entered the chalet in a hallucinated daze. For the next few moments we all stood there, awkwardly looking at each other, Carpe fidgeting his thumbs. “This is the Byzantine Thief, and I’m Carpe Diem. We appreciate you meeting us to negotiate,” he said.

Yeah, no time for this right now . . . “Look, let’s save the uncomfortable pleasantries. Give me the map to the Syrian City of the Dead, and I’ll leave. I won’t even raid Shangri-la down there on my way out.” Not that I would raid Shangri-la on my way out. That was a few too many steps over the ethical gray zone line, even for me.

Not that I wouldn’t consider coming back.

Carpe winced. So did Michigan, I noted. “Byzantine—” Carpe started.

“Can you not take no for an answer?” Texas said. “Is that what’s going on here?”

I needed to have a long chat with Carpe later about what constituted negotiations and what was a fucking waste of time. “How about you stop trying to fuck me over and give me the goddamn map? That we agreed upon.”

“Jesus, no wonder we keep getting censorship notes on you,” Michigan said.

“Give me my fucking map.”

“You’re here to negotiate, not hold us at gunpoint,” Texas said.

You know, I wasn’t going to say it, but if the shoe fits . . .

I grabbed Carpe—or the Byzantine Thief grabbed Carpe; my brain was having trouble keeping track of what was real and not real right now. “Give me the map or World Quest gets it—”

“Hey—” Carpe started to argue.

“Do you want your spell book or not?”

Carpe gave a disgruntled sigh but settled out of his argument.

Texas looked like he might punch me, and I readied my poisoned daggers. I’d get a good hit on him if he swung first.

Michigan took the opportunity to step between me and Texas. “Enough, both of you—”

“But she—” Texas started.

“She’s got a mouth worse than a sailor, and you’re offering up a bar fight. What did you expect was going to happen?”

Michigan turned his attention on me next. “All right, Carpe took the liberty of explaining your predicament. We get why you attacked World Quest, and I even get the whole give-the-IAA-the-finger thing you’ve been doing. We both do, but we also don’t want any more attention than we already get. You raiding every site we’ve mapped out in game is causing us some pretty fucking huge problems.”

“To put it in terms and words you might be able to understand, we’re real inclusive that way,” Texas added.

Michigan glared at Texas before continuing. “Because of the extenuating circumstances—namely, someone letting loose cursed artifacts into the public and you dying—we’ve agreed to help and not ban your asses. Got it?”

“I’m waiting for the but.”

I must have picked up some kind of cue from the audio, because Michigan’s avatar looked as if he’d aged a few years where he stood. “All right, here’s the problem; we don’t have the entire map to give you because we never finished the level. We’ve never been inside.”

“On account of us being sane and the whole city being cursed,” Texas added.

“Let me get this straight—you two knew you didn’t have the map and brought me here anyways? Why didn’t you just say that in the first place and save us all the time?”

“Alix—” Carpe started.

I turned on him. “If I’d have known there was no complete map, I’d have never wasted time with your damn book.”

Carpe winced.

“Jesus—is she always like this?” Texas asked.

He fidgeted. “Well . . . sort of, but right now we’re kind of under extenuating circumstances—”

“Enough, Carpe.” Oh why, universe, do you derive so much pleasure setting me up for disaster? “All right, what can you give us?”

“The only one we figure has been inside the city is whoever is ­removing the items,” Michigan said.

“If they aren’t dead yet,” Texas said.

“We’ve got a decent layout of the tunnels and rooms, including the cistern you’re in right now and most of the big outer traps. Basically anything the IAA had in their archives and a few they didn’t.”

“Wait a minute—how do you know I’m in a cistern?”

Michigan smiled and pointed at Carpe. “Because he’s not the only person here who can hack. Now, I’ll send you the file, but we want your word no more breaking World Quest.”

“Deal,” Carpe said, a little too fast for my liking.

“And no more using our game to steal stuff,” Texas added.

“Yeah, I heard you the first twenty times. For the record, I wasn’t even trying to steal anything this time—”

He snorted. “Yeah, and the guy in the Mexican whorehouse is just visiting his sister.”

Goddamn it . . .

“We’re in agreement, then?” Michigan asked.

Carpe and I both nodded, and Michigan extended his hand.

I knew it wasn’t really there, but what the hell. It felt so real . . .

And then the Buddhist ski chalet was gone, as was Shangri-la. My character, the Byzantine Thief—or me, if you want to get into validating my hallucinogenic delusions of grandeur—was left standing in the Himalayas.

“Carpe?” But Carpe was nowhere to be seen or heard. Son of a bitch had already left. The temperature dropped, and snow that hadn’t been there before started lashing at my face . . .

“Hey, assholes, how do I get out of here?” I yelled.

“Walk down the mountain like everyone else,” I heard Texas say.

Walk down the mountain. Damn it, I was not leaving Byzantine here . . .

I turned around to see if there was a portal or launch pad to get the hell out.

I heard a cross between a roar and a growl behind me.

“And watch out for the abominable snowmen,” came Texas’s voice.

Damn it. I started to run down the mountain path and heard something crash after me.

Come on, brain, positive thoughts, we are not running away from abominable snowmen in the Himalayas . . . I closed my eyes and willed the hallucination to disappear. The cold faded, as did the growling, and my screen came back into focus.

I was back in the catacombs—but the growling had been replaced by yelling . . . Benji’s.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said, his forehead scrunched.

“What’s wrong with me?” What wasn’t wrong with me was more like it . . . “I’m fine. Just tired. The last few days of no sleep catching up with me.”

Benji stood up and took a step back. He wasn’t buying it this time. “Yeah, unh-hunh, and that’s why your nose is bleeding.”

I held my hand to my face and pulled it back. Sure enough, there was blood. Damn it. I glanced back up at Benji. Oh what the hell . . . “All right. In amongst chasing down cursed artifacts, I may have cursed myself—accidently.”

The color drained from his face.

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not contagious—”

His pallor wasn’t from fear though, as I soon discovered. It was rage. He threw down his flashlight, cracking the plastic on the stone floor. “I don’t—You’re not here to save everyone from the artifacts, you’re here to save your own neck!”

OK, it was my turn to get angry. “I’m here to do both. Hell, I don’t want to see anyone else die—”

“Oh and you’d have come here anyways, I suppose? If you weren’t trying to cure yourself?” Benji ran his hands through his hair. “Un-­fucking believable.”

“I got cursed retrieving the artifacts to get them out of circulation—and you should talk. You’re helping them excavate, for Christ’s sake!”

He made an exasperated sound. “I don’t have a choice.”

Funny how five small words I’ve said myself carried that much weight.

It’s when I think I’m at my worst that things click—what Rynn, Nadya . . . hell, even Oricho . . . had said.

“Yeah, you do. You can’t stomach the consequences, so you pretend you don’t have a choice. It’s not the same thing.”

The look on his face was still furious, but it wasn’t aimed at me anymore—or not entirely.

I took a gamble. “Look, you’re more than welcome to try and find your own way out. I won’t stop you, but I won’t stand half as much of a chance if you don’t help me—and I’d really like to make sure nothing else leaves this place.”

He swore but grabbed his flashlight and continued back towards the cistern. I checked my phone. The map from the World Quest developers still hadn’t downloaded. “Owl?” came Carpe’s voice.

“Carpe, Nadya—the World Quest map isn’t showing up on my screen.”

I heard Carpe typing on the other end. “Sorry, I’m having trouble pushing the file through.”

Shit. “All right, I’ll need you two to walk me through—meaning traps—sooner rather than later.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Carpe said.

“With descriptions.”

I hoped Carpe got the message, then I set off after Benji. Let’s see if we could find out where the hell these artifacts were coming from.

We stepped out of a small rectangular room into another forked section. We’d found inscriptions in the previous rooms, but nothing referring to the sword or the other cursed artifacts.

Looking at the wall, I could have sworn I needed to go left, not right, like Carpe said. “Carpe, are you sure it’s a right turn here? It’s a dead end—it’s the left tunnel that keeps going.”

“That’s what the map says,” he said.

“Hey, Benji. See anything on this right wall, like a lever that might open a door?”

He gave a cursory examination to the wall, cracked floor tiles—even the ceiling. After he checked the seams between the wall and floor, he stood back up, shaking his head. “It’s just a wall.”

Damn elf . . . “Carpe, it’s a dead end—the only way out is to the right.”

“Alix, Carpe’s right, I can see it on the map—left tunnel,” Nadya added.

I sighed. And while I was telling them that wasn’t possible, there was a rock wall . . . We’d have to find another way around to the Neolithic chamber.

“Where did you say you found those items again? The ones that went missing from the inventory?” Benji asked.

“Daphne Sylph’s private collection in L.A.—two of the pieces, at least. The third one—the bronze sword—reappeared in an L.A. vampire den.”

Benji shook his head at the mention of vampires, and I felt no need to elaborate. “Give me Cooper’s phone,” he said.

“There’s no point; I can’t download anything.”

“No, but you know how he is. He takes more pictures on that thing than is healthy.”

“So?”

“So, maybe he took a picture of the place where he took them from? I mean, why not? If he was going to go to all the trouble of having the artifacts stolen—which he must have, because he went to the trouble of filing the reports in the first place. There’s no advantage to not keeping a record. Besides, I’m pretty sure he didn’t expect you to show up and lift his phone. And besides, the photos would be on his phone’s memory—here, give it to me.”

I passed Benji Cooper’s phone, and he scrolled through the pictures. “Bronze sword—that’s the one, isn’t it?” he said, holding the phone back out.

I took the phone back and focused in on the image. “That’s it exactly.” There were five or six more pictures showing the flint and stone bowl, along with some long shots of the room the three had been found in.

“Wait a minute,” Benji said, grabbing the phone back and zooming in on the room. “Shit, son of a bitch . . . that’s what Cooper wanted with those translations.”

I froze. “What translations?”

Benji shook his head and showed me a picture of an old room.

“Cooper asked me to do some translations on some old Aramaic inscriptions he pulled off one of the burial mounds. I didn’t think of it at the time because it was way past the Neolithic time point. Figured they were added by the next batch of people who moved in and started building the monastery foundation. There was a lot of term discontinuity though, and parts had been added a hundred years apart—as if someone was making notes.”

“And you’re just telling me this now?”

“I figured it was a translation mix-up, all right? I didn’t think it was related to the cursed items. The items were long gone by the time I got there—and you said yourself they were from the Neolithic sites.” He pointed to the image. “That room’s not Neolithic; it’s ancient, but built during Aramaic times.”

“All right, what was in them—disjointed shorthand?”

“They were run-of-the-mill burial spells—similar in nature to the Egyptians’, but much less refined; not as much detail, and a lot more room for ad-lib.”

That made sense—the Egyptians had picked their mummification spells off the supernaturals. From there they’d spread out to other regions, but a lot was lost in ancient games of telephone.

“It was talking about the dead,” Benji continued, “but there was some funny stuff that kept slipping in—modifiers and descriptors. It was weird.”

Supernatural spells in general were a bad idea. When humans started ad-libbing them, things went worse fast. “What kind of funny stuff?” I asked.

“Ah, images and words I’d associate with recruiting an army. I fig­ured it was just a strange way of referring to a burial site for soldiers—­­and some stuff on the afterlife I thought might have traveled over from Egypt.”

I thought back to what Mr. Kurosawa had said about armies of the dead marching across the plains. There was only one reason ancient humans obsessed about burial rites. The Egyptians, the Norse, Nubians—you name it, all ancients had the same agenda. “Resurrection,” I said.

Benji frowned. “Well, yeah, that goes without saying—”

“No, that’s the thing I was missing. I figured this place was lived in by some ancient supernatural who used to control humans and terrorize the neighbors. Cooper’s forte was never Neolithic cultures in this region. He was always way more interested in the cultures who came after: the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Aramaics. All the cultures who’d obsessed with the afterlife and obtaining immortality through death.”

Oh man, my head hurt considering the implications: it wasn’t the supernaturals we needed to worry about, it was what the humans had done with all the cursed and magic garbage the supernaturals had left behind when they’d gotten bored and moved on or died.

I’ve always said supernatural spells are way more dangerous in the hands of humans, and Cooper had stumbled onto the ancients figuring out a way to get them to work. . . .

Jumping onto that logic, what better way for the supernaturals to get a free pass to come out in the open? If someone like Cooper and who knows who else was running around raising an army of dead, the supernaturals and IAA could kiss the anonymous supernatural underworld good-bye. It’d be well and out in the open.

But how did the three artifacts fit into it?

“Benji, I need to see that room now,” I said.

He nodded. “Down the right hall. I think it loops up with one of the other rooms Cooper had me translating—or should.”

“Carpe, did you hear that? Change of plans—I need you and Nadya to look for traps on the fly.”

“I thought we decided you were going to the Neolithic chamber one level down?” he said.

“Trust me, this is a better idea.” That chamber, the original resting place of the knife, would give me a better chance of finding the original curse instructions, but Benji’s chamber would tell me what the hell the ancient Aramaeans had been doing and what the hell Cooper was trying to replicate . . .

“Alix?” Benji said.

I ignored him for the moment. “Just make sure we don’t stumble into a trap,” I said to Carpe.

“Seriously—Alix,” Benji said, this time with more trepidation.

I muted my earpiece. “What?”

“What the hell is your cat doing?”

I glanced to where Benji was pointing. Captain was hunched in front of the right-facing tunnel, growling at something past the shadows.

Something growled back and reached out with a corpse’s rotting hand.

Dr. Sanders—or what I figured was left of my old supervisor—stepped into the light cast by our flashlights and reached for Captain. He was still wearing the tweed suit and tie I remembered from lectures and team meetings.

He growled and shambled towards us. I scrambled back out of sheer instinct.

Well, now I knew what had happened to him and why he hadn’t been more concerned about an ancient cursed dig site being opened up under his name. I doubted he cared much at all what Cooper was doing with this place anymore.

“Is that a-a-” Benji stuttered, stepping back.

“Zombie? Yeah, I was hoping that was obvious.” Unfortunately, what I know about the undead can be summed up in World Quest experience.

“What’s happening down there?” Nadya said.

“Found Dr. Sanders. He’s a zombie.” Well, he wasn’t rushing us yet. Maybe real zombies didn’t rush people like they did in World Quest.

He growled and bared his teeth.

No such luck.

“Do you know anything about them?” I asked Benji, forcing optimism I didn’t feel.

He shook his head and opened his mouth, but no words came out. At least he wasn’t trying to wedge himself between me and the zombie, like some other archaeology postdoc I know. “Do you think he’s contagious, like in the movies?” he asked.

“Those are movies, not real life.”

“Then why are you backing up?”

“Because now is not the time to find out.”

Captain was still sniffing at Dr. Sanders, curious more than anything why something that was dead was still moving.

The zombie moved faster than should have been possible for something in the throes of rigor mortis and lunged for my cat.

Captain took one look at the zombie’s outstretched arms and turned tail. His legs just about skidded out from under him as he propelled himself down the right tunnel.

For once I agreed with my psychotic cat. I grabbed Benji and bolted after Captain. I think the one bonus about fever is you stop noticing mild disturbances, like pain in the legs or shortness of breath. We kept running, Dr. Sanders growling in pursuit.

There was another fork up ahead—this time with three options. “Hey, Nadya, Carpe! Three-way split up ahead—straight, right, and left. Which has a really heavy door? Preferably one that won’t kill us.” That last bit wasn’t so much for Nadya’s benefit as Carpe’s.

“Ahhh . . . right tunnel, definitely right,” Carpe said.

Right it was. Captain had enough sense to wait for us at the intersection.

Up ahead I could see what looked like the entrance to a chamber.

“Is the genie still there, Carpe?” I said as I slid to a stop across the stone tile floor. Benji careened into me. The chamber held no obvious exit. I hoped that was temporary.

“Yeah, still here,” Carpe said.

Nomun and the genies were from this region of the world. “Ask him whether he knows any stories or legends about zombies from the city,” I said. Every good archaeologist knows most legends and tales have some basis in reality. Just in this case the dead leaving the city hadn’t been the nice, happy version of resurrection people always envision. Still, any stories Nomun had might hold a clue that would tell me how Cooper had raised Dr. Sanders and, more immediately, how to stop him.

“Little thief,” came Nomun’s voice.

“Stories about dead walking out of the city—any useful details?” I said.

An angled slab of stone sat above the entrance we’d just crossed through. Looked like a door to me. I crouched down and searched the edges for a trigger. Benji caught on and started searching the other side. Dr. Sanders was out of our flashlight range, but we heard him growl.

Eaten by supervisor—not exactly how I wanted to go . . .

“Thief, all I know are old legends. None of the living Jinn have any recollection of those events.”

“Legends are all I’ve got to go on right now anyways. Spit it out.” Where the hell was the release for that door? Come on, it had to be in here somewhere . . .

“In the story of the city we tell, the Jinn defeated the king, who held the army of the City of the Dead under his thrall by stealing a magic lamp that allowed him to drive the risen army across the lands. In our stories, the price our betters made us pay for interfering with the humans was banishment to live in the lamp until humans called us. But that does not mean there is a lamp or that it controls the dead. It is a legend to explain away a distasteful aspect of our history.”

“Wait a minute,” Benji piped up. “There was a lamp in the logs—taken out of this place when it first opened up a couple weeks ago. I should know, I had to handle part of the inscription earlier this week.”

A magic lamp. I was starting to think this was less some Neolithic gods’ resting place and more a dumping ground for supernaturals to dispose of dangerous magic shit.

“One last word of caution,” Nomun added. “In the stories, the risen turned those they touched against their rightful rulers.”

Great, these were the biting kind . . .

“What the hell did the inscriptions say?” I asked Benji.

“Partial translation—totally out of context. You think Cooper is a big enough idiot to give a single grad student enough to figure out he was raising an army of the dead? I would have gone to the IAA.”

No, of course not. Cooper would have used the army of grad students at his disposal to carry out his plan. Damn it . . . “Carpe, hypothetically, if I had another phone down here, could you get info off it?”

“Whose phone?”

“One I stole. What difference does it make?”

“I might be able to get into the files, but it’ll take me awhile. What’s the number?”

I read it off as Sanders rounded the bend. The zombie wasn’t running, but we were trapped in a dead end.

“Benji, did you find a lever on your side?”

“There isn’t any!”

“No one builds a ceiling slab like that unless they intend to drop it.” It just meant it was probably on the outside, to lock people in . . .

I grabbed Benji and dragged him back into the hall with me.

“What is wrong with you?” he yelled.

“Lever’s outside. You search left, I’ll search right—other left!” I said, giving Benji a shove as we collided.

OK, lever, lever . . . I checked every stone slab on my side. Not one gave.

“Nothing here,” Benji said.

Maybe it wasn’t a lever. “Carpe, any pressure plates down this way?”

Nadya spoke up first. “It looks like there is one back in the tunnel a few feet.”

Farther back, in the direction of the zombie . . . I started to crawl out, feeling each stone as I went, to see if it might give. Benji swore but followed suit, covering the ones on the other side.

One of the stones shifted ever so slightly under my hand. That had to be the pressure plate. I pushed with all my weight.

It sunk—slowly at first, and then faster until it sunk a good foot. The ceiling above shook as the wedged, pillarlike slab started to slide down.

I called out to Benji and dove for the entrance, sliding under the lowering slab.

“Shit,” Benji yelled. I glanced back. He’d tripped, landing short of the entrance by a foot as Dr. Sanders closed in. If the zombie didn’t get him, the pillar would.

I grabbed Benji’s hands and hauled him towards me as Dr. Sanders dove on all fours with a burst of speed and wrapped his bony fingers around Benji’s sneaker, the joints cracking as they went.

I swore and pulled again. Benji moved but not enough, and Dr. Sanders wasn’t letting go.

“Benji, stop screaming and kick him!” I said, and put everything I had left into dragging him under the slab. I got further this time, dragging Dr. Sanders along with him.

I reached under, but Benji wouldn’t stop kicking long enough for me to get a hold of Dr. Sanders’s hand.

Bone cracked as the slab crushed Dr. Sanders’s first vertebra.

I slapped Benji hard in the face. “Sneaker—off!”

That did it. Still yelling at the top of his lungs, he kicked at his sneaker instead of Dr. Sanders’s head. His foot slipped free as I pulled, and the two of us fell back.

The rest of the stone slab slid into the groove, squishing what was left of my old supervisor.

We collapsed against the wall—me catching my breath, and Benji reorganizing his sanity.

“The inscriptions,” I said after a moment. “You said the room Cooper found that sword in had modifications—what kind?”

“Changing the order of the rituals mostly—adding something in here, taking something away there.” He shivered. “I can’t believe Cooper turned Dr. Sanders into a zombie.”

“What if Cooper isn’t looking for one item?” I said. “What if he’s trying to re-create whatever this ancient king did with the lamp?” I had Cooper’s phone with the images. “The lamp . . . do you know where it is?”

Benji shook his head. “Cooper’s been keeping it with him for study.”

“The lamp might be enough to make a zombie, but it’s not enough for whatever the hell it is Cooper’s trying to pull off,” I said.

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“Because the dig is still open. Dr. Sanders was left down here, and the rest of you are excavating like mad for one reason and one reason only—he either hasn’t figured out how it works, or he’s still looking for something.”

I grabbed the phone, but there was no picture of the lamp or mention of it in the pictographs that illustrated a ritual for the three items to raise a dead army . . .

Then again, if I were a king who’d figured out how to control an undead army, I probably wouldn’t leave all the clues in one place either. As Nomun so well illustrated, the problem with an undead army is its binary loyalty—in this legend’s case, whoever had the lamp. Cooper was always a little too fast in his dismissal of data he deemed irrelevant . . .

“I think I know what went wrong and what he’s missing,” I said.

“You know, I kind of figured that might happen if you made it down here.”

A voice I knew—that I’d know anywhere—echoed around the chamber.

Benji and I aimed our flashlights at the ceiling. Above us was a small opening, no more than a vent, carved out of the rock—Cooper’s face framed perfectly in it.

“Fuck.”

Cooper smiled. “I’ve been going in circles for a month now on how to get this army of dead to work. I only recently found the lamp. Then I remembered how you figured out where Cleopatra’s cuffs were, after everyone else gave up. Those made an awesome paper, by the way—for me, anyways, after your spectacular bail from the academic community. You know, if you had taken the gig in Siberia, I might have even given you second author.”

“You son of a bitch, you set me up in Algeria.”

“Didn’t let me down either, Alix—knew you wouldn’t. Though I would have preferred it if you’d just run straight here after I stuck the IAA on your trail. Two years ago you would have. Didn’t think you’d have the wherewithal to go for the artifacts first. Had to do some improvising there with the vampire. He was trying to get the bronze sword anyways, so I told him I’d throw something extra in if he gave you incentive to head this way.”

“You got Alexander to curse me?”

His smile widened. “Was surprised how fast he agreed to that one. Barely had to sell him on it.”

I know at one point I’d thought Cooper had a really cute all-­American surfer sort of look going. Can’t imagine why . . .

I shook my head. It hadn’t been some nebulous branch of the IAA analyzing my behavior; it had been this backstabber, trying to herd me so I could solve his zombie problem—or lack thereof.

“Here’s what I think,” Cooper continued. “I think just like finding those cuffs, you’ve got a damn good idea what I need to get a zombie army up and running.”

“Wow, and I’m the one hallucinating . . .” I had to cover my eyes as he shone his flashlight around the room, lingering where Dr. Sanders’s hand protruded, still clutching Benji’s sneaker.

“I see you found Dr. Sanders. Yeah, he was pretty pissed when he found out I’d opened this place up under his name. Not a risk taker—not like you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Figured you might say that.” He pointed a gun through the vent. “Here’s my bet, Hiboux. I think you either know what I’m doing wrong, or you’re real close to figuring it out. You tell me—”

I snorted. “And what? You won’t shoot me? I’m already dead, moron—or I will be real soon.”

“No, I’ll shoot Benji. Right now Benji hasn’t done anything wrong, and we both know he’ll toe whatever line I give him—won’t you, Benji?”

Benji swore, but he didn’t argue. The problem was, Benji might keep up his end of the bargain, but I knew damn well Cooper would shoot him—or, better yet, get the pirates to make it look like an accident.

Benji glanced at me and gave me a slight shake of his head. He knew. He wasn’t nearly as stupid or obedient as Cooper gave him credit for.

Still, maybe I could get Benji a couple minutes of running room. Apparently I sucked at saving people, but I could buy them a head start—how’s that for an ego builder?

I feigned scratching my ear so I could tap my earpiece—I couldn’t talk to Nadya and Carpe, not directly, but I could maybe route them in to listen . . . all I got though was static. Hopefully that meant Nadya had picked up on Cooper and already bugged out.

Least I could do was stall for time—for Benji and Nadya. “So you think the IAA is going to let you have a zombie army for kicks? As a reward for publishing the most papers last year?”

Cooper’s smile didn’t drop. “Actually, they’ll be enraged after I tell them how the great failure Alix Hiboux snuck in, stole the artifacts, and killed her old supervisor so she could raise her own army.”

“Got news for you, I’ll be long dead by then—curse, remember?”

“Yeah. That’d be a problem—except I’ve got an entire team of Owls running around the Mediterranean.”

Good luck pulling that one over Lady Siyu and Mr. Kurosawa for any length of time. Army of dead or not, if I was Cooper, I would not want to get in Mr. Kurosawa’s bad books . . .

Unless Cooper had no idea who I worked for. That was almost as good as Odawaa throwing Rynn the incubus into a regular run-of-the-mill cell. It’d be funny to imagine what Lady Siyu might do to Cooper if not for the fact that his plans were based on me ending up dead . . .

He also couldn’t know I had his phone—and that Carpe was well on his way to hacking it.

Cooper might know the old me real well, but the old me always worked alone. As much as I bitch about Nadya, Rynn, and Carpe—especially Carpe, after that idiotic stunt with the plane—I sure as hell wouldn’t want to find myself on the wrong side of any of them.

“Quit stalling,” Cooper said.

You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that Benji, Captain, and I might get shot, I’d feel sorry for Cooper. He had no idea what he was in for . . .

Cooper shot the ground a few inches from Benji’s feet. “I don’t know what kind of a distraction you orchestrated out there, but my new, improved pirate Owls are on a schedule. Any more stalling and you’ll be dealing with them, not me.”

“And they’re real safe to have around your students? Hey, how’s Odawaa handling his dead pirates?”

Cooper shrugged. “They’re pirates; they can be bought. As far as student casualties, I’ll just blame everything on you anyways. Tell me what I want to know and I’ll even let Benji go. After I make him put you out of your misery.”

I licked my lips. There had to be some way to screw Cooper over. “You’ll just shoot him after anyways. Let’s at least try some honesty here. All I’m doing is buying him running time.”

“Now. Or I shoot your cat too,” he said, and fired near Captain’s feet, forcing him to yelp and dance back.

“Stop with the gun already,” I said. When no more loosely aimed bullets fired at Benji or Captain, I took a deep breath and started. “Here’s the thing. None of these artifacts were ever meant to raise an army of the dead. It’s the result of a couple hundred years’ worth of trial and error, courtesy of a brutal kingdom with more ambition than sense.”

Cooper frowned, probably trying to figure out whether I was lying or not. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

I was telling the truth—too risky not to when he had the gun. Besides, if I told the truth and he shot Benji and Captain, there wasn’t much incentive left to keep telling the truth.

I shrugged. “Trial and error, a few thousand disposable bodies, you’d be amazed what civilizations come up with. Look at the pyramids. My guess is you got hold of some of the old Jinn tales or found them in the archives—makes no never mind. You figured out there actually was a king who built a zombie army. Courtesy of Dr. Sanders, you now know the lamp will raise dead, but my guess is you had no control over him, am I right?” Now I was speculating—for all I knew, Cooper had let his zombie loose in the tunnels and told it to guard against stray archaeologists.

Cooper waved the gun. “Keep going.”

One down, one more hypothesis to clear up. “I only have one question for you. Did you plan to get rid of the knife, bowl, and flint from the beginning, or was that a stroke of creativity to help get me involved?”

Cooper tsked. “You’re stalling again,” he said, and shot the ground near Captain’s tail. Captain jumped and growled at the spot in the sand, not sure where the threat was coming from. I flinched; I have a real problem with anyone threatening my cat . . .

“You need me to string all the pieces together for you, Cooper? The instructions are already in your goddamn notes, which you’d have known already if you’d done a better job going over all the pictograms instead of tossing them off on the grad students in pieces. Do you think the sword, bowl, and flint piece kept appearing in all the references for the dead as suggested party favors?”

“Shit, I need all of them, don’t I? Damn it, I wondered if selling them to the vampire and siren was preemptive. Oh well, can’t predict everything. Don’t suppose you’d like to tell me which order they go in?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Don’t worry about it, Alix. I can take it from here—just like the rest of your projects. It’s like you’re the golden goose.” He aimed the gun at me. “Real sorry about this. You’re a hard girl to forget.”

“Not you, Cooper. You’re easy.”

“Like I told Odawaa and the pirates, you’ve got a hell of a habit of crawling out of tight situations. Not if you’re dead though.” He paused. “Speaking of hard to forget, Nadya still looks great. Odawaa sent a photo of her too—looked for her but I’m guessing she was smart enough to stay out of your particular brand of shit storm. What’s she up to these days?”

“Why not ask me yourself, asshole?”

I saw the shock register on Cooper’s face as something heavy connected with his head. Cooper slumped, and then was dragged away. Nadya’s head popped through the window in his place.

“You were supposed to run,” I said.

“You are not the only one who has difficulty following instructions.” She dropped a rope down. “Come on, I’ve got a way out, but we need to be fast.”

I made Benji go first, then tied the end of the rope around my midsection and had them pull me up. I couldn’t have made the climb if I’d tried, and as it was, I needed both Nadya and Benji’s help crawling out the vent into a more recent wing of the monastery, a cellar of some sort.

“What about Cooper?” Benji asked, nodding at the asshole’s prone body.

Nadya shook her head. “No time. Cooper is not stupid. I overheard him tell the pirates to only wait fifteen minutes, and it’s been ten already.”

I bet the only reason he hadn’t brought them along was that he hadn’t been sure I’d taken care of Dr. Sanders. After the golem, I didn’t think Odawaa would react well to a zombie in a tweed suit.

I started rifling through Cooper’s army-issue cargo jacket pockets as voices echoed nearby.

“Alix, we don’t have time,” Nadya started.

I kept going. Wallet, pocketknife, sunglasses . . . where the hell did Cooper keep it?

Bingo. I found his white plastic access card in his inside pocket. “The gold standard of IAA security clearance everywhere,” I said, holding it up. Not useful now, but definitely once we got out of here.

Nadya shook her head and pointed down the monastery hall. “Down this way there are tunnels that should lead into the caves in the cliffs. Rynn and the elf will meet us there.”

No sooner had she said it than we heard yelling in Somali and a door banging nearby. Nadya leading the way, we bolted in the opposite direction, Captain close on my heels.

“Did you find the Neolithic inscriptions—the ones mentioning the curse?”

I shook my head. While we now knew who was behind the thefts, as far as saving my own neck, the Syrian City of the Dead had turned out to be nothing more than an epic wild-goose chase. I hadn’t even gotten to setting off traps . . . “Someone moved the knife a few thousand years ago. It’d take me months to find it, if it’s even here.”

Nadya didn’t say anything more, but there was a hard set to her mouth as we ran for the exit. We had a short, uneventful run through the basement—the monks who built this place didn’t have a need for extensive traps. Go figure. We came out at the caves just outside the camp perimeter, though with the way the IAA was mobilizing, it wouldn’t be outside their perimeter for long. . . .

I saw a jeep careen around the side of the mountain towards us, Rynn in the front seat and Carpe hanging on for dear life behind him.

Nadya and I broke into a run as Rynn pulled the jeep up. “You know, for someone who doesn’t steal, this is the second time you’ve hot-wired an IAA jeep,” I said.

“Not stealing when they give you the keys.”

Damned incubus . . . “What happened to your pirate fan club?”

“Sent them back to Odawaa. Caused quite the internal commotion. They weren’t sure who to shoot at for a while there.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the mobilizing groups. “However, I think they’ve figured it out—get in.”

“I’m coming with you,” Benji said, running up behind us as I tossed Captain in the jeep.

Nadya and I exchanged a glance. The IAA was regrouping around the city. It was not going to take much time at all for them to figure I was involved, and I knew Cooper would be blaming me. There might be a way for Benji to still get out of this with his career intact. Antiquities thief in training Benji was not—lightly corruptible professor with a soft spot for thieves? OK, that I could see. A hell of a lot more useful in the long run.

I gave Nadya the nod, and she retrieved a glass bottle from her coat pocket as I grabbed Benji from behind. He began to struggle, and I cut off his protests with an elbow in the ribs.

Note to self: no grabbing people while cursed . . . “Relax, Benji, we’re doing you a favor,” I said. “The IAA won’t find you until after Cooper and his pirates are long gone.”

Benji could tell his bosses I’d forced him to help me. If I had my way, by the time I was done with Cooper, anything he said would be worthless.

Or he’d have an army of the dead. Either way, Benji’s role would be inconsequential.

“Deniable plausibility,” Nadya said.

“That’s plausible deniability,” he said.

Nadya pressed the now damp cloth over his mouth. I shrugged. “Same difference.”

Benji passed out and Nadya dropped him to the ground—gently. Though to be honest, roughing him up a little might have helped his case.

Rynn hopped out of the jeep and picked up the bottle Nadya had used. “Where the hell did you two get chloroform?”

“Emergency bottle. I always keep one on me,” Nadya said.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I use alcohol with just enough GHB to put them to sleep” . . . and only when I had absolutely no other choice.

Rynn’s frown deepened. “I have an entire arsenal of weaponized pharmaceuticals designed to knock out everything from a human to a vampire, and you two use chloroform and GHB?”

“Move faster next time.” I tossed my bag in the jeep and hopped in the backseat alongside Captain. “I know where Cooper’s going.”

That was one silver lining to this—Cooper needed the rest of the artifacts to get his army to work, but he didn’t know we had them in Las Vegas. He’d head to Los Angeles first, where we could cut him off.

Rynn stepped on the gas, and I felt something warm in my front pocket: Hermes’s card, which I’d forgotten was still there. I flipped it over.

Doing better, kid, but the odds still aren’t great.