Owl and the Tiger Thieves Page 12

  The supernaturals haunting the submerged levels of Venice added a layer of difficulty to retrieving and removing any artifacts. I’d avoided jobs in Venice for that very reason—unless the pay was substantial—and I’d been certain I could avoid the supernaturals.

  I glanced over at Artemis, who was shadowing me down the narrow street. Oh, how times had changed. Hopefully he could smell any vampires or other supernaturals before we stumbled into them.

  I’d held out hope at the Las Vegas airport that Artemis had decided to hell with torturing Owl under the pretense of help and decided to blow off the flight with a bachelorette party from Tallahassee—or wherever else bachelorette parties originated.

  That hope was trounced when I stepped out of Italian customs and found Artemis lounging by a pillar. Shit. He had made the flight. And now we were here. Artemis my unwelcome shade . . .

  “You could at least pretend not to hate being here,” he whispered after a couple passed us by. Captain, for his part, shuffled around in my backpack to get a good look at the incubus before letting out a bleat. Captain couldn’t figure out what to make of Artemis either.

  “It’s either pretend I don’t hate you or keep my eyes out for vampires.”

  “You have me for the vampires.”

  Captain let out an excited bleat at the word vampire. “No offense, but I’ll take his warnings over yours any day.” Now . . . I thought this was the right street up ahead . . . had the right shape, though it was difficult to determine without any posted street signs. It was a Venetian thing; I suppose if you lived here you knew what all the streets were, so why use signs?

  “So where to now, oh great explorer?” Artemis asked.

  I turned down another street, at the end of which was a taxi stop.

  I spotted a water taxi turning the corner. “First things first—blend in with the rest of the tourists, and get on a boat.” I frowned as I gave Artemis’s clothes a once-over. Whereas I’d donned my usual backpacking student gear, Artemis was wearing torn black jeans with gold paint with a leather jacket that stood out as expensive and opulent rather than subdued. It screamed “Look at me!” not “Just here for the sightseeing.” He didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, he was the sore thumb.

  My expression must have been obvious because he said, “Don’t worry, no one will even notice I’m here.”

  I made a face. “It’s hard to see how not.”

  “I have my ways,” he replied with a wink. We were out of time so I didn’t push the point. The taxi pulled up to the stop, and we joined the line to get on.

  Sure enough, as we made our way down the aisle to find seats, I noted that though I garnered the odd glance, no one paid attention to Artemis, who was unabashedly dressed like a movie-extra rock star.

  I eyed him warily as we took two seats near the back. His sunglasses were firmly set over his eyes. “You’re using your powers,” I accused him.

  He scoffed as he leaned back, resting his head against his hands. “Of course I’m using my powers. Otherwise I’d have to dress like you and slink around in the shadows, and it’ll be a cold day in Hell before that happens.”

  “I thought incubi read and manipulated emotions.”

  It was Artemis’s turn to make a face. “That’s a baseline. It’s not unusual for things to . . . branch off. Suffice it to say that I can make certain no one bothers to pay attention to us.”

  “Since when the hell can incubi make themselves invisible?”

  Another face. “We can’t—and I can’t. I’m just making them not pay attention. I’m very good at it. It’s not something that ever came easily to Rynn. He’s too honest.”

  Sure enough, no one was looking at us, but neither did anyone try to sit down in our seats. We weren’t invisible but about as close a facsimile as you could get . . .

  “I will admit that this place wasn’t the first one to come to mind for one of your infamous heists.”

  I bristled as I kept my eye on the canal stops. Should be coming up in two . . . “Venice is an ancient trade city that was part of the Byzantine Empire. The question isn’t whether there is stuff worth taking lying around, it’s what, where, how dangerous, and who originally stole it.” It was astounding the number of things that got lost in some old merchant’s warehouse, then were passed on for generations, until an army came in and sacked the place or a plague killed off everyone who knew the location of the vault . . . repeat that over a thousand and a bit years, and Venice has a number of interesting artifacts stowed away in its depths—dry and otherwise.

  “Mmmm,” he mused. “So tell me, what is it we’re after? Don’t worry, none of them can hear us.” He glanced at the passengers sitting on either side of us. “Or more accurately won’t bother remembering.” At my expression, Artemis made a clucking sound. “That’s right, you’re a little shy around supernatural magic.”

  “I have good reason to be.”

  “I suppose. But you take it a little too personally, if you ask me.”

  Yeah, I had taken being attacked and almost included in an incubus’s harem pretty fucking personally . . .

  Artemis must have felt the round of emotions rolling off me—none of them complimentary—so we pulled into the next taxi stop. It took me a second to realize that he was staring at me, eyes narrowed in concentration. “Things aren’t always what they seem, Owl. You of all people should know that” was all he said.

  Yeah, and the world was full of misunderstandings . . . And this was definitely it. I jostled Artemis to get up as soon as the taxi came to a halt. I was worried that we might have to push our way off, but once again people didn’t quite ignore us; they just didn’t bother showing an ounce of interest. Like being invisible without the toe squishing. We alighted on the canal sidewalk and headed for the narrow streets. This section of Venice, for whatever reason, hadn’t attracted the number of tourists that others had. It wasn’t run down, more forgotten. Kind of like we were . . .

  I got my bearings and headed towards the street where the church should be.

  “It was either Venice or head to Norway and try to outwit a bunch of ice trolls,” I told him. And both Oricho and Lady Siyu were keen on it, though for different reasons. Not that I was sharing with Artemis. I might have to take him with me, but Oricho hadn’t said a damn thing about letting him know the details.

  “So our current location is entirely due to being the less cold and lethal choice? I’m disappointed. I thought there would be more of a plan.”

  I kept my annoyance in check. “I have a hunch, Artemis. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “How does the saying go? ‘If you believe that, I have a magic bird to sell you’?”

  I checked the front of the building. It was the right one, an almost exact match for the one in the drawing minus a few sunken feet. This was definitely one of Leonardo da Vinci’s old secret storehouses—not that it was in any of the history books. The city had even been nice enough to include a street sign here. Wonder of wonders, would have been real useful earlier . . .

  “The saying is ‘Magic beans’—hello?” I called out, knocking loudly on the door and listening to the echo inside. There was no answer. “The birds are two in the bush versus one in your hand. Apparently, according to Lady Siyu, you guys have a bush that includes two dead birds.”

  The old building had been converted into a church, of all things. I tried the wooden double doors.

  Odd . . .

  The doors swung wide open, but not a soul was inside.

  “A bit odd for a church to be this empty—during visiting hours, no less,” Artemis said.

  And it was low lit, even for a church. I pulled out my flashlight and aimed the beam inside, where I was greeted with an abundance of dust—on the wood floors, along the ledges, even on the dust sheets that had been used to cover a portion of the furniture before someone had given up. I even picked up dust suspended in the air, reflected in the thin beams of light that had managed to escape through the cracks of the b
oarded-up stained-glass windows.

  Artemis examined the sign by the door. “It says it’s open and these are the visiting hours,” he said.

  Somehow I didn’t think it was due to the laissez-faire nature of Italians—that they’d simply forgotten to put up the “Closed for renovations” sign.

  It could be a sign of something else . . .

  “Well, Captain?” I said, and eased my backpack off my shoulder before opening his compartment. He crept out, carefully examining the area around him before creeping along the floor to survey the rest of the church.

  “Looks like something has your cat being cautious.”

  Or he smelled mice and didn’t want to scare off a potential snack . . .

  I aimed my flashlight at a corner in the rafters, peering into the dusty darkness. I could have sworn I’d seen something—a flicker of movement.

  I was about to chalk it up to pigeons and my brand of paranoia when Captain chirped. He was straining to sniff one of the covered pews. I stopped moving and held up a hand for Artemis to do the same. My paranoia might know no bounds, but Captain was immune to the machinations of my imagination.

  I glanced back over my shoulder through the open door. It was early afternoon, but that didn’t mean much when there were this many shadows. I did think it odd that on a midafternoon of a sunny day in Venice, no one was in the vicinity.

  “You picking up anything, Artemis?” I asked as I continued to where Captain was nosing his way under a sheet.

  “Nothing distinct,” he said. He’d opened the visitors’ book and was perusing the contents—signatures of people who had visited the church.

  I waited for Captain to do something—growl, hiss, let out a battle cry. But all he did was sit back on his haunches and start cleaning himself. Apparently even the church mice weren’t coming out to play.

  “Find anything?” I called out to Artemis, my nerves relaxing a fraction.

  “Signatures from all over, people stopping in to visit the church. A lot of comments about the dust and no one here to meet them, but other than that, nothing. I thought Leonardo spent most of his time in Florence?”

  “Leonardo moved around—Florence, Milan, and Rome mostly—but he spent a stint here during the Italian war with the French when he worked as a military architect and engineer.” It was also where he had built most of his supernatural devices, the vast majority of which had been lost to the ages—or the Illuminati—or the supernaturals themselves . . . it really depended on which conspiracy theory you subscribed to. “It wouldn’t be much of a secret workshop if it was in schoolbooks.” This one had been buried under centuries’ worth of IAA archives. Might even have been courtesy of the Illuminati themselves.

  “Tell me, Artemis, you were around during the fifteen hundreds, yes? What do you know of the Illuminati?”

  He snorted. “Next you’ll be telling me that the Masons were friends of the Tiger Thieves too.”

  “No, the Masons stayed the hell away from supernaturals. They were smart.”

  Captain, having given up on seeking mice, accompanied me while I began examining the church walls.

  “Well,” Artemis said, “the Illuminati were real enough, if that’s what you mean. Less educated and more dangerous than the stories would have you believe. And they weren’t chasing after the way to turn lead into gold, not the serious ones at any rate.”

  I tapped the wall at various intervals, searching for a hollow sound that would denote a passage of some sort.

  Artemis continued, “Now, immortality through alchemy, that’s a different story entirely. There are enough incubi and vampires who survived the Illuminati inquisitions and experiments to attest to that.”

  I nodded to myself as I examined a seam in the wall that struck me as out of place. It matched with what I’d learned about them at university: the Illuminati were one historic group the IAA didn’t gloss over. It used them as a cautionary tale of why not to meddle with supernaturals. Scattered throughout the Middle Ages, their activities had consisted of bumbling over artifacts they had no right testing—dangerous, magic ones. They had been a nuisance to the supernaturals but manageable.

  Then, around 1500, they got organized, some say because of Leonardo da Vinci’s involvement. And his search for immortality.

  “You ever run into any of them?” I asked.

  Artemis gave me a serious look, one of the few he’d bothered with. “Today you might call them supernatural hunters, though exterminators is more accurate. Especially the more extreme factions that popped up over the centuries. They were particularly fond of capturing supernaturals without any proverbial teeth, and even the ones with teeth weren’t immune to their attentions.”

  I followed the seam to a spot where, due to a difference in the wood stain, it looked to me as though an altar had been removed. I tapped it, and it echoed back hollow. Bingo.

  “As I recall, the Illuminati and Leonardo took quite an interest in my vampire brethren.”

  That was not surprising, considering vampires were one of the only breed of supernaturals that started off human. If I were after the secrets of immortality, that’s where I’d be inclined to begin.

  Though the idea of humans being any real threat to supernaturals was dubious. It wasn’t that Artemis was a liar—there were too many grains of truth in what he’d said—but humans hunting supernaturals? I held my hand up to one of the cracks. There was air coming from the other side—faint but definitely there.

  “Don’t believe me?” Artemis asked, from where he was still perusing the guest book.

  Now, where the hell would I hide a release for a panel door in here? “I just don’t see the supernatural community ever considering humans a real threat.”

  “The vampires would know more than I about the Illuminati’s interest in supernaturals. I would have asked them.”

  I snorted. “Unfortunately, Alexander and the Paris boys aren’t exactly returning my phone calls.” I had tried to contact Alexander despite the fact that as a rule I avoided any dealings with vampires, particularly Alexander, since we’d had a substantial falling-out a few years ago, one that had involved me exposing one of the elders to sunlight—by accident, I might add, though that detail had been lost on him.

  We’d briefly shelved our differences on account of the turmoil in the supernatural community. Vampires ate people, but the smart ones had no interest in coming out of the closet. They were too easy a target and had very well publicized weaknesses. They also weren’t the hard hitters of the supernatural world that romance novelists make them out to be. Annoying and dangerous, certainly, but cockroaches compared to a dragon or a skin walker. Alexander had no interest in humans’ knowing vampires were real.

  Regardless of our truce, though, Alexander hadn’t deigned to answer my queries on Venice or Leonardo da Vinci. He probably had enough to do keeping vampires in line and out of everyone’s sights.

  Now, door release. Come on, wouldn’t it have to be here, somewhere . . . With my luck a tall person designed it and it’d be just out of my reach.

  “Hey, I found something,” Artemis called. When I looked his way, he nodded at the church guest book. “Did you know this place was being run as a vacation rental?” he asked.

  I frowned. “A vacation rental?”

  “Starting a few years back, through one of those online sites—there are even instructions here, see?” He picked up the book and brought it over. It occurred to me that out of all the items in the room, the book was the only thing that wasn’t covered in dust. Sure enough, there were pages of check-ins, along with a pamphlet instructing people how to access the apartment, which was billed as a historic restoration.

  “Surprises you?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing really surprises me anymore.” I supposed that if everything dated back a thousand years, the idea of an old building as a historic site wore off. Might as well make a few bucks off it—even a church.

  “It says, ‘To access the apartment, pull the l
amp handle.’ ” That was a little clichéd—and nonspecific, considering that the church was filled with wall lamps of varying appearances and sizes. It took us a few minutes, but eventually, through trial and error, I found the right one. I pulled it, and sure enough, a set of pulleys churned behind the wall and the door opened, revealing a small, comfortable-looking apartment done in a mid-century modern style. There was a small desk to the side, a kitchenette done in a muted orange, an old chesterfield with a small coffee table, a sparsely occupied bookshelf, and two small bedrooms, the doors ajar enough for us to see the two single beds in each. The rooms were dark; they would have been pitch-black if not for three small windows, their glass dusty and purpled with lead.

  “Hello?” I called out again. No response, only the musty air of a room that hadn’t been aired in a while.

  Odd for a vacation rental in Venice.

  I glanced to see if Artemis had anything useful to offer. “After you” was all he said, nodding at the inner rooms.

  I could have sworn I saw something looking through one of the dusty windows—like a face. But the translucent lead glass made it impossible to tell one way or the other.

  I waited to see if it would reappear at one of the other two windows, but nothing happened. I stepped inside, Artemis and Captain following me.

  “A hideout from World War II, I imagine,” I said to Artemis. The decor certainly suggested that: faded baroque-style wallpaper mixed in with mid-century pieces. It would certainly appeal to a certain kind of tourist looking for an authentic experience.

  “Or they tried downsizing the place to evade taxes.”

  I didn’t think churches needed to evade taxes, but I supposed anything was possible in Italy.

  I went to the desk first and found a backpack covered in dust like everything else in the room. I opened it and found a bottle of sunscreen, cotton summer hats crumpled into balls, water bottles, and a cartoon map of Venice, the tourist stops highlighted in bright colors. I frowned at them. The kinds of items tourists would use but not the kind that got left behind.