“…the matter of your sister-wives. I will question each one separately.”
She could feel him shaking her by the shoulders. “Annabeth! Pay attention.”
“Y… yes, Father.”
“You will not speak to anyone about this matter ever again. Do you understand me?”
She nodded mutely as the door slammed in her face. She felt sick with dread. A demon had taken possession of her body. Someone else was peering out from behind her eyes. Hell wasn’t simply some faraway place where the Fallen would go on the Day of Judgment. Hell was as close as the beating of her own heart.
Chapter 13 – Catal Huyuk
Catal Huyuk. Cassie thought the very name sounded mysterious and exotic. They were on their way to an honest-to-goddess archaeological dig site, but she couldn’t help feeling slightly disgruntled. Nothing was turning out the way she’d expected. It had all started going sideways that morning. She imagined they would make the cross-country journey from Istanbul by train in something that looked like the Orient Express. Instead, they took a commercial flight to Konya—a large town in central Turkey that had traffic signals and chain hotels. When their plane landed, she imagined they would be met by a vaguely sinister contact wearing a fez with a tassel. His name would be Ali Ben something. Instead, they got a balding American guy named Fred who picked them up at the airport in a minivan. Fred’s only distinguishing characteristic was that he was so utterly ordinary that he had no distinguishing characteristics. Just about as colorful as an ice cube on a snow bank in Antarctica.
Not remotely what she expected, Cassie thought dismally, as she sat in the back seat of the van gliding smoothly along well-paved highways. They ought to be bouncing along in an open truck with bad shocks across back country dirt roads. They should all be wearing khaki and safari helmets instead of jeans and T-shirts.
Erik sat up front with Fred and Griffin was in the back with her. She confided her disillusionment in a whisper to the scrivener, not wanting Erik to hear.
He smiled sympathetically. “I think you’ve seen one too many films about mummies.”
She turned away to look out the window. They had to drive forty miles to Catal Huyuk which Fred explained meant “fork mound” in Turkish. Hmmm. Not such an exotic name after all. It was located on the central Anatolian plateau where the terrain was flat, and most of it was planted in wheat fields. It was all so utterly ordinary.
The minivan slowed to pass through a gate with a barbed wire fence which protected several acres of hillside in the middle of nowhere. There were some guards in uniform, but nobody stopped them or asked them for papers or tried to pass them any suspicious relics wrapped in brown paper like the Maltese Falcon.
Cassie gave one last hopeful look out the window to see if there were any upper-class Brits in camp chairs writing field notes under canvas canopies while inscrutable houseboys served them tea. Nope. All she could see were a bunch of tourists in cross-trainers standing in a semi-circle around a tour guide.
“Romance is dead.” She sighed.
“I beg your pardon?” Griffin gave her a startled look.
“I mean, where’s the glamor in it?”
“Archaeology is far from a glamorous profession. A good deal of it consists of scraping dirt off the odd bit of crockery.”
“Can I touch some of the objects they’re digging up?” Cassie asked eagerly.
“No!” both Erik and Griffin shouted in unison.
“Do you have bat ears?” she asked Erik. “How can you hear all the way back here?”
“I hear the important stuff, and no you can’t touch anything!”
“Why not,” she challenged.
“Cassie, this dig site isn’t controlled by the Arkana,” Griffin cautioned.
“It isn’t?”
“Nope,” said Erik. “The Arkana has its own section of the dig separate from what’s going on here, but the last thing we need is to call attention to…” he paused.
“Your special gift,” Griffin finished tactfully. “We’re only here to collect information from the trove keeper.”
“I don’t know why you guys are so twitchy about it,” she grumbled. “I mean the people in charge have to know about the Arkana, don’t they?”
“They actually don’t,” Fred called over his shoulder. “When we have to share a project with outsiders, we operate using front organizations that have respectable academic credentials. Staying off the radar is especially important when we’re working on a government-controlled site like this one.”
“But then you don’t get to keep any of the artifacts you find,” Cassie objected.
“Neither does anybody else,” Erik countered. “It all gets turned over to national museums.”
“But we do get a chance to see what’s here in its original state,” Fred explained.
“Why is that important?”
“Ah, there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” Griffin remarked sententiously.
Cassie sighed. “Do I even need to tell you to unpack that?”
Erik laughed. “What Sir Quipsalot is trying to say is that a dig site can get messed up by the people who are doing the digging.”
“Quite so,” Griffin agreed. “It’s very common for objects at a site to be taken to museums before they’ve been identified in their original context. Not to mention some of the official interpretation given to the objects found.”
“He’s right,” Fred concurred. “It’s always better if we’re around to see for ourselves without being treated to an overlord explanation of what it all means.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Cassie relented slightly. “So, no touchie?”
“Absolutely no touchie.” Erik’s voice was stern. “Just stick your hands in your pockets while we’re here, OK?”
“And whatever you do, don’t tread on any of the structures that have been unearthed at the dig site,” Griffin advised.
“Is it OK if I breathe?”
“Only if it’s through your nose.” At least Erik sounded as if he were joking.
The minivan idled its way through the main parking lot past something called the Dig House. Again, Cassie’s expectations were deflated.
