Owl and the City of Angels

Chapter 1(Excerpt): Tomb Raiding Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

Noon, about two stories underneath Alexandria

I brushed another chunk of two-thousand-year-old dirt off the horse femur. It was lying in a shallow alcove in the Hall of Caracalla, part of the catacombs that ran underneath Alexandria. I readjusted my baseball cap and cleared the sweat off my forehead before glancing up at the man crouched on the other side of the mummified horse remains. Mike, the dig supervising postdoc I'd been saddled with, was a couple years older than me and suffered the poor posture and starters' beer gut rampant amongst grad students everywhere. Especially the ones who spend more time than wise hunched over a computer and/or things buried in the ground.

Annnddd Mike was still engrossed with the front end of the skeleton . . .

I swore silently. Great. Just fantastic. Out of all the dig sites on my list, leave it to me to pick the one in the middle of a heat wave with stifling stale air and the overattentive postdoc. I'd been stuck in Egypt for three days now on a job that should have taken hours. If Mike would just leave me alone for fifteen minutes even, I could find my way into the lower levels, grab my Medusa head, and get the hell out before anyone double-checked my paperwork.

"Shit." I dropped my brush and braced against the wall as the entire burial chamber shook; the catacombs ran under a main artery of the city, and every time a heavier-than-average truck passed overhead, the whole thing trembled. On the bright side, the truck meant it had to almost be lunchtime. Maybe I could convince Mike to take a long break . . .

Artifact or not, three days in this tomb with Mike—the one postdoc in the entire IAA who doesn't shunt his work on to grad students—and I was well past my breaking point . . .

Come on, Owl, keep in character: you're Serena, a young, impressionable grad student trying to wrangle a decent dig for her PhD, not an antiquities thief with personal space issues . . .

Mike shifted, leaning further over the horse's skeleton.

Curious, I glanced up and caught where he was looking—not at the horse skull.

Oh, screw staying in character. Captain would be getting restless, and this job was taking too long anyways.

"I swear to God, you stare down my shirt one more time, I'm going to break your nose with my pickax," I said.

Mike sat up and feigned shock—or maybe it was shock at getting caught. "What? I swear, I wasn't—"

I glared. "Mike, I'm tired. My sinuses are filled with enough dust to last a week, and the only thing I want right now is a cold beer, which is now impossible because the beer fridge broke yesterday—meaning I'm stuck with warm beer, only half an excavated horse, and you staring down my shirt." I derived some satisfaction as the shock on his face faded to a resigned white pallor when he realized I wasn't buying his protest.

"I refuse to take my frustration out on the skeleton," I continued. "The horse can't help that it's caked in two thousand years' worth of dirt—and the beer is technically still drinkable. Guess which of the three things pissing me off right now that leaves? I'll give you a hint, Mike. It's the one acting like a dick."

He shifted and wiped the fresh sweat off his face with a dirt-covered palm. He gulped, "I'll—ah—how about I go grab us water and lunch?"

I glanced back down at my horse femur. "You do that," I said, and went back to brushing sediment off the bone until Mike's last footstep was followed by the gate clanging shut behind him.

Finally. I pulled my cell out of my pocket and dialed Nadya. From now on no more sneaking in as a grad student . . . For whatever reason, these days the IAA was upping security just about everywhere. Where normally I'd only worry about the dose of sedative needed to knock out an overly attentive postdoc like Mike, now I had to contend with security checking up on us at random intervals. Understandable, considering the boom in demand for antiquities, but that didn't mean it didn't still piss me the hell off . . .