“You have to be fucking kidding! It was right over here, and I took the wrong way? Why weren’t there some damned clues about that? Assholes.”
A high stone column decorated with a cross sat in the center of a chamber. A stone bowl sat atop the flat-topped column at about chest level. Thick lamp oil filled the bowl.
Shay recalled the final few clues.
Burn the holy lamp and prove your faith with the holy fire. Only then will the prize be revealed.
“I get the feeling I’m not going to like this.”
Shay reached into her pocket and pulled out a lighter. She lowered the lighter to the oil and flicked it on. Blue-orange flame spread over the entire surface.
A huge curtain of flame burst into existence a few feet from the back wall and drifted toward the center of the room.
Shay leapt back, rolling to the ground, assuming she’d set off a trap, but the wall of flame didn’t move past the center of the room.
She glanced to either side. The wall didn’t extend out the doorways, and she couldn’t see any obvious source. She assumed it was magical, but to her greater irritation, she also still didn’t see a golden owl.
The intense heat from the flames radiated from the wall, making the room stuffy. Sweat beaded Shay’s brow.
“Prove your faith with the holy fire? What’s that even mean?”
Inspection with her AR goggles confirmed a very hot wall of fire now separated the room into two halves.
Shay flipped up her goggles and winced. “No.” She turned to go out the way she entered. “I can come back with protective fire gear.”
The wall suddenly thickened and extended. Flaming death now blocked both exits.
“Shit. That’s inconvenient.”
It was time to gear up for an escape. She was already wearing leather gloves that could protect her hands. She pulled off her coat to drape over her head and prepared to rush through one of the exits. The fire didn’t seem to extend past the room she was in.
Shay took several deep breaths. She took one step, stopped and spun toward the back wall, aborting her run.
“No, no, no. That can’t be it, can it?” Shay nodded. “Okay, okay, okay. I can do this. I can leap through a magical wall of flame to prove some damned point because some magical thief really liked his magical riddles. I wonder if the guy who froze to death tried to escape through a wall of snow.” She paced back and forth, keeping up the argument. “Okay, it could be that I run through this wall and find a treasure, or it could be that I run through and end up horribly burned and behind even more fire than before. Yeah, fucking great.” She shook her head, considering her options and odds of survival.
“Shit. Whatever. Still better than dying in my kitchen.”
Shay charged through the wall of flame, her eyes closed. Something was off. She kept running, hesitating only a moment before she opened her eyes and looked around.
The flame hadn’t burned her. Not only that, she couldn’t even feel the heat from the flames behind her. She slowly turned around and looked. The fire had vanished, and a golden owl sat in the now empty stone bowl in the center of the room.
Prove your faith. The old mark’s words echoed in her head. There has to be a gap of information and you go anyway, despite the consequences.
Shay slapped her cheeks a few times to make sure she was awake. She stepped toward the owl, reaching out her hands. Her still-pounding heart managed to beat even faster as she prepared to lift the owl from the bowl.
“Okay. One… two… three.”
Shay snatched up the heavy artifact. The room didn’t bathe her in flames or even frost. She filled her lungs just in case and turned to head toward the exit.
Why was the owl behind magical flames? Mystery for another day. The fact that different treasure seekers had ended up dead in different ways made her wonder if the coded clues had changed. Maybe even the location. That might explain why the owl wasn’t found till now, and not just the convenient cipher decoding.
Shay pushed the thought out of her head. She had a client willing to drop a lot of euros for it. It wasn’t her responsibility to solve the mystery of who stole it, only get the artifact back to the client.
Her heart beat returned to normal as Shay whistled, heading toward the stone stairs.
No logs, no water, no mercs. Just a magical wall of flame.
Shay snorted. It wasn’t that long ago when killing mercs seemed like a much more normal day for her than running through magical walls.
Shay drove through the streets of Paris, the top down in her rented convertible. She was rocking sun glasses and a red maxi dress that clung to her toned body. Satisfaction emanated out of every pore in her body.
She grinned down at her passenger secured with a lap belt, swaddled in a cloth. A solid gold owl.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Shay stifled a yawn as she watched Peyton put one of her wrist frequency jammers on the wrong shelf. She was standing behind him, deciding if she should go work out for a while and reset her system.
“Hey, not there. I like to keep the wearables separate from the deployables. I already told you that.” Shay shook her head, trying to force out some of the cobwebs that came from her jetlag. “Just putting everything together by general type makes it hard to find later.”
Another yawn bubbled up. She left Paris on the next flight out even though she considered adding an extra day or making arrangements for the delivery in the city. Better to do a valuable handoff on her own playing field with her own resources and safety precautions in place.
Peyton glanced down at the silver bracelet he was holding, and back at the shelf. “I don’t understand your organization system at all. If I
