“They’re just examples. The point is, they’ve always been here, so they’ve always been able to send people here—like probably Brownstone.”
Peyton shook his head. “He might just be a guy whose parents were on a local wizard’s good side.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I’m going to research his amulet and see what it turns up. At this point, verifying he’s from Oriceran would be less weird than finding out that I grabbed a weird alien stone from some possessed elf.”
“You want me to look into Brownstone?”
Shay shook her head. “You stick to the alien shit, I’ll handle the Oriceran stuff. There’s too much weirdness on either side for one person. And Peyton…”
“Don’t tell Lily. Not hard to figure out. You normally keep a pretty good eye on that teenager and you left her alone in a warehouse. By now, if you had any secrets in that one, she’s found them.”
“This whistling while you work isn’t so bad,” Peyton mumbled to himself after finishing a whistled ditty.
Working for Shay had started out as indentured servitude even if she did give him a very slim cut of the profits. Shay was good about rewarding effort.
But directing his talent toward helping the tomb raider had pushed him into areas he’d never imagined.
Areas such as Project Nephilim, whose files proved that not only did the government know about non-Oriceran extra-terrestrials, they’d recovered their artifacts.
“If you’ve got a little stone with an alien language, you’ve probably got an alien ship stowed somewhere. I just know it.”
Peyton’s fingers flew across the keyboard. He’d been stopped early when he’d hacked the Department of Defense systems and recovered the initial records on the alien research project, but that didn’t mean the government was guarding everything as competently. Now that he knew what he was looking for, it was far easier to snoop around the net.
A window popped up on his screen.
“Now Homeland Security, huh? Let’s see what you’ve got for me.” A document popped up. “What the hell?” He rushed out of the office.
The door to the Fiat was open, and Shay was halfway in.
“Wait,” Peyton shouted.
Shay stood and eyed him. “I don’t really have time to wait around for pizza experiments if that’s what this is about. I’ve got to pick up Lily and get her back here and then go talk to someone at the university about the symbols on Brownstone’s necklace.”
Peyton chuckled. “Although my pizza experiments redefine the glory of what could be called pizza, this isn’t about that.”
“What then?”
“I was poking around, and I just found out we have some competition.”
Shay shrugged. “We’ve got a lot of competition. Tomb raiding’s not exactly a forgiving business.”
Peyton shook his head. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about on the alien stuff.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. If you found something, I’m sure it’s just that Correk guy looking into it on the other end for his Elf Mafia buddies or whoever.” She frowned. “That reminds me, I need to check into that guy more.”
“I don’t think Correk would go to the Professor to hire you, then go to the government to hire an outside contractor.”
Shay frowned. “Outside contractor?”
“Yeah. I haven’t found a lot of details, just that the Department of Homeland Security is paying a ‘retrieval specialist’ a shit-ton of money to look into any artifacts related to Project Nephilim. Departments of Energy and Defense are kicking in, too.”
“An outside contractor versus creepy government guys?” She frowned. “It smells like they hired a tomb raider.”
Peyton sighed. “That’s what I was thinking. Maybe all this stuff isn’t worth looking into. There might be too much heat.”
“Bullshit. First, I want to know the truth about all this crap. We’re on the edge of verifying historical information that is considered fringe if not laughable in the academic community. Second, there’s money to be made, just like with the Lake Michigan stone.”
“You plan to sell the stuff if you find it?”
“Maybe. Got to find it first. With this Brownstone assassin-and-Harriken shit I don’t want to take off too soon, but at least we can do background checks. What about the retrieval specialist? Any info? Name?”
Peyton shook his head. “Not yet. The only thing I’ve found is the payment information.”
Shay slipped into her car. “Keep at it then. And, just to be clear, I also still want you to find me a good job. The way Brownstone rolls, this latest Harriken shit won’t last longer than a week or two.”
Shay pulled out of the parking lot and onto the street. Her meeting with Professor Armstrong at the university only reinforced a startling truth that was threading her Brownstone and alien research together.
The symbols on Brownstone’s amulet didn’t match the symbols on the alien stones, but she could no longer ignore the obvious. Brownstone’s amulet was of non-Oriceran extraterrestrial origin.
She took a deep breath as she turned onto the highway. Several puzzle pieces were falling into place. Brownstone had gated from another world, except it wasn’t Oriceran. Some aspects of his background now made more sense. He’d told her that he’d been tested, including magically, and it had been confirmed that he wasn’t from Oriceran.
But you can only find what you’re testing for, and no one would even think to test if he’s alien. And if his amulet changes his DNA somehow, they might not have been able to figure it out that way.
Shay frowned. The only thing she couldn’t determine was if that meant Brownstone’s amulet had any relationship to the alien stones. She found it hard to believe there were two lost alien worlds that most people didn’t know about.
The tomb raider laughed. Twenty years ago most people hadn’t known about Oriceran, and until recently she hadn’t even known about any other planets with intelligent life. On second thought, it wasn’t so strange that there might be more than one alien world out there.
“I’ve got to get to the bottom of this shit, but what the hell am I supposed to tell Brownstone?”
She could put it
