“You see that, Brownstone?” Shay inquired.
“Yeah, I see it. Fucking magic.”
Shay slowly exhaled. “That must be the cloaking. From what I’ve read, you can’t actually see the caves unless you’re already looking for them and generally know where they are. Neat trick.”
Brownstone opened his door.
“Stop,” Shay called.
The bounty hunter turned to look at her.
“From what I’ve read, this place might have a lot of traps and shit,” Shay explained.
The field archaeologist slammed the driver door shut and took a deep breath, which she held until she passed through the magical field. There was no pain or discomfort, and she was still in her own shape.
She waved and hiked to the entry. Three different caves confronted her now. If she’d had any doubts about being in the right spot, the faded classical Chinese characters carved above the caves erased them. Despite the dry climate, the centuries of wind and dust had taken their toll.
“Seems like the right spot, at least,” Shay muttered. “Would be a good time to have Peyton in my ear or even Lily’s fifteen minute warning.”
The minutes passed as she painstakingly checked each hexagram with the help of an app on her phone. The hexagrams on the first two caves were normal, but over the right-hand cave, she found duplicates of the patterns for radiance and force.
Either the priests had gotten sloppy, or they had been trying to leave a clue that they thought only an educated Taoist priest could decipher.
Good enough for me, Shay thought, stepping toward the cave on the right. She pulled out a small flashlight and strapped it to her arm.
“Geez, guys, it’s like you moldy old assholes were trying to hide some powerful ancient magical weapon or something.”
Chapter Eight
The cave narrowed and split off in two directions. No skeletons or traps were obvious in either, so Shay held her breath and listened. A quiet hum and the faint sound of running water reached her ears from one of the paths and she stalked that way slowly, searching for any sign of traps or angry-Taoist-priest ghosts.
The real trouble was finding the place. I’m already ninety percent to my prize just by being in here and not getting killed by the first trap. I mean, how well could they have fortified this place so far from home?
Shay’s smug satisfaction vanished as her path opened into a large cavern with a huge drop into inky darkness. The sound of running water had increased, swallowing the earlier hum, so she suspected an underground river lay at the bottom of the cavern. She deployed one of the drones she’d brought to check out the terrain ahead.
“Didn’t plan on some bitch coming with her fancy flying metal demon, did you?”
A long, curved, bladed polearm lay on the ground. It was clearly a guandao. The weapon fit the description of the Green Dragon Crescent Blade.
Shay crept toward it. She wanted to take the whole damn thing. If Brownstone could get his arsenal through Customs, he should be able to get one stupid ancient magical weapon through too.
A distant crack echoed through the cave system. Shay sighed when she realized what she was hearing.
“Oh, Brownstone, who are you shooting at now?”
Shay shouldn’t have worried. Brownstone’s little altercation involved some confused militia members. He hadn’t even needed any help.
That didn’t stop her from being annoyed.
She had successfully collected the artifact and they should have been on their way out of Mexico, but instead he was obsessed with his detour to take down a necromancer. She hadn’t minded when he’d first mentioned the job, but when she looked into it she thought the whole thing was a bad idea—not that the bounty hunter listened.
She looked down the path Brownstone had taken. “Hurry up, Brownstone, before I die of boredom and the necromancer has to bring me back.”
He knew she wouldn’t leave him in the mountains without a way to get back, so now she had to risk her life and the artifact because Brownstone had a raging hard-on for catching the damn necromancer.
Shay sighed. She still had her downloaded messages and emails available, and it wasn’t like she’d been keeping up with them since arriving in Mexico. She picked up her phone and started reading.
There were a few emails and texts from her friends talking about the great time they all had dancing the other night. Janelle even commented that Darius hadn’t been willing to give up, but suddenly after that night, he stopped calling her. A blessing, she called it.
Shay snickered. “I’d call it more an ass-kicking.”
Later that evening Shay sat on the edge of her bed. She couldn’t help but chuckle at how the day had unfolded. She’d collected a Chinese artifact in Mexico. Brownstone had fought both humans and the undead, getting himself a nice little necromancer head to turn in for a bounty.
The man was something else. She’d never met someone that powerful who possessed such a strange combination of naivete and cockiness. The bounty hunter got the job done, but she couldn’t ignore the strange amulet she’d seen him wear or the odd changes to his eyes during the fight with the Harriken.
The man didn’t claim to be Oriceran, but she had a hard time believing that an amulet that made him bulletproof wasn’t a magical artifact. Shay’s curiosity kept poking at her. She’d need to investigate sooner rather than later.
Brownstone had decided to head back to LA, which made sense. He’d done what he needed, and she’d collected the artifact the Professor wanted in exchange for helping Brownstone.
When she’d called Smite-Williams, he’d mentioned he had some other work for her but there was no hurry.
Her phone rang. It was Peyton.
“Hey, Peyton.”
“No, it’s me, Lily. I borrowed Peyton’s phone.” The phone was muffled as Lily said, “Grab for the phone again and lose a finger.”
“Play nice, he’s necessary to the operation and all of his fingers would make things run more
