Shay stared down at the cat. “Seriously?”
The cat paused, one front paw in the air for a moment as he watched Shay as if waiting for her to make a move. After a few seconds, he darted through her legs and ran out of the office.
“Aww, he was just getting comfortable.” Peyton sighed.
“Spoil your cat too much, and you’ll regret it.” Shay pointed at the computer. She cleared her throat and asked the question she really wanted to know. “Still no sign?”
Peyton looked up and shook his head. “Nope, no sign of Lily, no sign of trouble. She may just be gone. Gray ghost is in the wind.”
“Maybe it’s for the best.” Shay did her best to shake off the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Did Lily see something in the near future that spooked her? “Got a little side job for you. Something perfect for your skills.”
“Liking the sound of this. Or maybe I should be afraid of the sound of this? Give me the details, and I’ll figure it out.”
Shay shrugged. “It’s not a big deal. Tubal-Cain wants me to find some cousin of his, a gnome named Bosvid. He was last seen on Earth in Europe about three hundred years ago.”
Peyton scoffed. “Oh, only three hundred years ago? Is that all?”
Shay shrugged. “I didn’t say it’d be easy, just that you’d be perfect for it.”
“Okay. And what am I getting paid for this little side job?”
Shay laughed, then blinked. “Wait, you’re serious? You’re not getting paid anything. With the percentage slice I’ve started giving you on jobs you’re making more than enough to keep you in silly clothes and costumes for years, and that’s before I consider how you’ve been fleecing James.”
“It’s just a modest cover charge for services rendered.”
“Did you charge him when you helped him out with the AET?”
“Well, no. That was for you, though, not him.”
Shay patted Peyton on the shoulder. “This is just some research for me. Not asking you to break into any government computers or try and translate weird alien writing. I remember how shortly after I first fake-killed you, you were bragging about your magical research skills. Now you’re whining?”
“I do know a lot of people,” Peyton grumbled, “but I’m not a miracle worker.”
“Never too late in life to pick up new titles.”
“Okay.” Peyton sighed. “And that’s all you have to work from, the name of a gnome who might have been in Europe three hundred years ago?”
“Sure.” Shay walked toward the office door. “I’m gonna be out of town with James visiting Alison this weekend. If you turn up anything important, just text me. I don’t need a play by play. I want to know about it once you’ve located him or his grave, but until then I don’t give a shit.”
Peyton saluted her. “Yes, ma’am.”
Chapter Seven
Peyton’s computer beeped with an alert—another hit for one of his bots. He smiled at the window that popped up on his second monitor.
He wasn’t sure why he’d waited so long to set up another monitor. On some level he’d been convinced Shay would get rid of him, fatally or otherwise. With his apartment and cat, and even Shay’s relationship, everything now felt more stable—or at least as stable as a life could be when a man was hiding in LA after faking his death in New York and working for a tomb raider who had faked her own death.
“That’s what I like to see.” Ten seconds passed as he scrolled through results. “Actually, I’d like to see half of that. Maybe a third. Need to refine these algos more.”
His bots had returned a tsunami of search results to provide the raw material for further processing by various algorithms. Drowning in hits was still a problem, even with the programs and machine-learning tools he had at his disposal.
Finding a gnome in hiding who had been living on Earth for centuries was an interesting challenge that was leaning heavily on his non-technical skills. His searches, automated or otherwise, were focused far more on folklore and legends than simple record searches.
One problem was that human societies had defined magical beings a myriad of ways prior to the full return of magic. An elf from Oriceran might look very different than a gnome, but a small village in eighteenth-century Germany might have run into a gnome and called it an elf. It wasn’t like he could just pop onto Google and type “Bosvid the gnome.”
The rest of his plan was brilliant in its simplicity of idea, if not its execution. Step one: gather raw data with bots using customized algorithms. Step two: cross-reference the gathered data and filter using algorithms and manual inspection. Step three: verify Bosvid’s location. Step four: bask in Shay’s praise of his awesome research skills.
The raw data so far was promising, but a gnome who had hidden for centuries wasn’t going to be listed in some cutesy newspaper article about local characters. Therefore, Peyton had unleashed an army of bots to hit all corners of the web, hidden or otherwise.
He’s a gnome, not some DOD White Hat. It’s not like he’d even think to take measures to hide his presence from computer searches until recently.
Peyton grinned, the thought buoying his confidence. His fingers ran across the keyboard as he passed a batch of search results through his first set of filtering algorithms.
Shay’d been wrong when she’d described the job. When someone searched for a person on the internet who didn’t want to be found, it often led to hacking into servers. Passive data collection wouldn’t cut it.
People in the government had known about Oriceran before the general public had, which meant at least some of them might have access to hidden information concerning the wayward gnome.
Project Houdini had been mentioned in some of the Project Nephilim files. Peyton couldn’t be sure, but the name made him think it had something to do with magic. He doubted the government was spending a lot
