Peyton shrugged. “It looks like it’s some sort of power play, and we’re helping him out.”
“Well, it’s not gonna hurt the world to remove a little dark magic.” Shay grinned. “I’m thinking that I can make a million dollars blowing up some demon-summoning bullshit.”
See, Brownstone. I can make money and be a good girl, too.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Shay guided the drone with the virtual thumb stick on her phone as she looked through a night-vision display being fed into her AR goggles.
“This is almost too easy,” Shay muttered to herself.
No one was even guarding the cave entrance. They had a few cameras set up, but they wouldn’t last a minute against her once she closed on them. The lame gates they’d set up along the approaching roads were easy enough to drive around, and she’d not spotted any cops.
It was like they were depending on their pathetic closure announcement to keep people away. Security by obscurity meant no security at all.
Her feed died.
LOST CONNECTION TO DRONE ALPHA FOUR.
Shay narrowed her eyes. She flipped up her goggles and tapped away at the control app. She couldn’t ping the drone at all, but her phone signal was still as strong, which meant no jamming. Someone had taken her drone out.
She sighed. “Okay, so it won’t be too easy.”
Shay flipped her AR goggles back down and activated the night-vision mode as she stepped out of the rental Chevy truck. She’d flown the drone all the way around and then approached the cave from the opposite side to not draw attention to her vehicle’s location.
Shay checked her knives and gun then stepped out of the truck. She didn’t have to win some epic fight. She didn’t even need to recover the artifact. All she needed to do was smash the thing.
Better not tell Brownstone I’m in a Chevy instead of a Ford.
Shay made her way through a dense patch of trees on one side of the mound. She picked up the occasional owl or fox through her goggles, but nothing remotely human. It was only a small comfort.
They were out there and watching. They had no reason to destroy her drone otherwise.
Shay stayed in the forest rather than hitting the small path running along the mound. At night, it wasn’t much of a sight, though she could make out the outline of the raised ground. The recently uncovered cave was about another 200 yards away, near the center of the mound where it twisted up in a near-U pattern
She continued to sweep for any sign of other people but saw nothing. A cracking branch sounded behind her, only a few yards away.
Shay spun her gun at the ready but saw no one. She stared into the night, the eerie green glow of the night vision coloring even the most banal of objects and making them seem otherworldly.
There were no more noises. Shay turned around slowly. Her free hand moved to her goggles and she tapped a button to switch to infrared mode. She spun back around.
Gotcha, assholes.
Four human IR signatures lit up her display like Christmas lights. They had masculine outlines, she thought.
Shay smirked. “If you don’t want to end up dead, put your hands up and shut off whatever bullshit you’re using to hide yourself.”
The four invisible men walked toward her. Four shots rang out from Shay’s gun. The men jerked and fell to the ground. She followed up with four more shots into the downed men. The men didn’t move.
Shay switched back to night-vision mode, but the men remained invisible. A quick check back in IR revealed their heat signatures were still there. She didn’t know how long it took a dead body to cool down.
The minutes stretched on as she moved forward a few yards at a time, sweeping the area in both night-vision and IR mode. She spotted no other invisible men, but her neck remained stiff.
Fucking assholes have to hide like that.
Her checks on the bodies also confirmed they hadn’t gotten back up. Shay’s recent experiences had taught her that just because something went down didn’t mean it’d stay down.
She approached the cave entrance. She pulled back her sleeve to tap on her wide-frequency jammer. She then put bullets into the cameras set up around the entrance. After a reload, she hurried toward the cave.
Shay switched to normal vision mode and switched on a headlamp as she stepped into the narrow tunnel.
The tunnel widened into a long but short cave containing several small flags marking the corners of string squares. There were no signs the archaeologists had excavated any of the marked areas yet.
The skeleton from the picture, in all its double-jawed, long-taloned glory, lay in the corner, in the center of one of the string squares. A smooth-topped earthen mound held the bowl.
Shay let out a long sigh. Even if the bowl was some sort of evil chaos-demon summoning artifact, the idea of destroying history made her stomach churn.
Curiosity shouldn’t put the world at risk.
She lifted her hand to switch back to IR mode and gasped.
In IR, the skeleton glowed as brightly as any of the men she’d killed outside. A half-dozen other large humanoid forms rested against the back of the cave, packed together and leaning against the wall.
Shay frowned, wondering why the archaeologists didn’t feel anything even if they hadn’t run an IR sweep through the cave. She switched back to normal visual mode and made her way toward where she’d spotted the heat signatures. She holstered her gun and pulled out a knife to tap at the air.
Her knife met something hard. Bone. She was sure of it, even if it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
She looked over her shoulder toward the cave entrance. Even if IR mode wouldn’t help her make out many details, the men she’d shot outside looked about normal height. She didn’t understand the link between the invisible giants and the normal-sized men.
Shay returned to normal visual mode and made her way back over to the bowl.
