The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(78)

I landed on my bare feet—boots were great for fighting demons but not for robbing a museum—and caught my balance. Gym and yoga classes were paying off in some ways even if they were at the mercy of the diner’s biscuits and gravy. Leo had looked up the contents of the museum via their Web site on Thor’s computer, after fighting off all the porn-bots, and said there didn’t appear to be anything valuable enough to elicit the need of motion detectors throughout the building or around any specific exhibits. Most of what was here wasn’t half as valuable as what your average collector bought off eBay. This wasn’t the British Museum, full of gold and irreplaceable pieces of history. This was a nice, educational museum with the funding that went with that. That meant all the doors and windows had alarms. There would also be an alarm if you shattered a display case and there would be at least one security guard.

Easy damn peasy for any thief, including a nontechnologically gifted one such as I.

I’d appeared in a room full of dead, stuffed birds. While it was a teaching tool and the birds had died of natural causes, I didn’t like it. It was the pa?en in me. We were of nature. We were nature in a very real sense and everything born of nature should return to it, birds included—they shouldn’t be frozen behind glass. But humans were human and had long lost the connection to what raised them up and took them down.

The Latin American exhibit was to the left of the bird mortuary, both on the second floor, which was where Thor had put me, miracle of miracles. I kept close to the walls and in the shadows. The lights were turned low but not completely off. If anyone was watching a bank of video screens in the security office, I wasn’t going to make it that simple for them.

Many of the ancient discoveries were, like the birds, set in a recess in the wall and behind glass. The weapon mold wasn’t. It was halfway through the exhibit in a display case in the middle of the floor. It was set atop a square black marble pillar. The mold itself was colored black as well, inaccurately described as Mayan, age indeterminate. It wasn’t their fault. Even if carbon dating could be used for dating an obsidian artifact, instead of relying on the layers of earth it was found within, it would be worthless against a Namaru one. Their devices were immeasurable and inviolable. They would fool any modern technology into thinking they were brand-new, older than wrinkly-assed Methuselah, or didn’t exist at all except for the fact you could see it with your own eyes. As I was seeing this one. I could see why it stood separate. The museum might not think it was worth any more than the other Mayan artifacts, but it drew the eye as nothing else around it did. It would catch a visitor’s attention immediately and draw them into the room. It was a showstopper, a shout formed of stone. They might not know why or how, but people on a subconscious level would know it didn’t belong. It hadn’t come from a human hand and it wasn’t meant for humans. People being people, of course they’d immediately want a look at that. The old saying was wrong. It wasn’t a cat that curiosity killed.

I moved closer. It was almost as black as the pillar beneath it except for a shimmer of silver gray that floated just under the surface. It looked like a block of volcanic glass twelve inches by twelve inches. There was carving along all the edges, looping and swirling. It was intricately deceptive, that design. If you thought it was Mayan, then the design would appear Mayan. If you thought Egyptian, then you would get Egyptian. If you thought Namaru, it would squirm like a living thing until it gave you a headache. Thor’s archeologist must have been an expert in all things Mayan, because that’s what she’d seen, that’s what it had been labeled, and to most of the world, that’s what it would be.

To me it looked like a nuclear bomb, and if the Namaru were alive today, you’d be able to make one with one of their new weapon molds. Fortunately, they’d lived in a time when weapons didn’t have moving parts and there were no new molds, but that didn’t lessen what that block could do. A nuclear bomb wouldn’t work on Cronus anyway—what I could hopefully pull out of this chunk of dark rock just might.

My cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket. Knowing that couldn’t be good, I slipped it out, opened it, and held it to my ear. I couldn’t answer, not with my knowledge of the security system being based on guesses. I could only listen and hope it was the diner wondering where I was as I rarely missed turkey meat loaf night. It wasn’t. It was Leo’s voice, quiet and brusque. As fond as I was of Leo, I would much rather it had been that fetal-aged nineteen-year-old cook from the diner, worried I’d fallen and broken my hip.

“Thor’s out cold again,” Leo said. “Useless steroid-popping frat boy. There’s no waking him up and Zeke ever so generously emptied a clip into him, ruining his silencer in the attempt. We can’t get you out of there. We’re going to cause a distraction, and you’ll have to run for it.”

Run for it. I was going to have to run for it carrying a piece of Namaru tech that not only was close to the size of a concrete block, but would weigh as much if not more. The Namaru had been able to create seemingly miraculous things, but those miraculous things invariably weighed a ton. If you wanted miraculous, there was always a price to be paid. Sometimes that price was blood and sometimes it was a herniated disc. Considering how long this run was going to be, I would rather have forked over a pint.

I disconnected the call on Leo’s further happy news of, “We’ll give you two minutes.” I was glad he had faith I was already in position, but when you can’t bitch back about the sudden change of plans and vagaries of fate, nearly everything annoys you . . . faith included. Scanning the area quickly, I found what I needed and in precisely two minutes, I smashed the fire extinguisher into the display case. However loud it might have been, it was completely overshadowed by the explosions I heard outside. They sounded like entertaining distractions. I wished I were the one making them and not the one carrying an artifact that had surprised me by not weighing as much as a concrete block, but weighing as much as two or three concrete blocks.