Blood Heir (Aurelia Ryder, #1)(82)

He didn’t offer me any. Aww, where was that famed Southern hospitality?

“Eighteen years ago, an asshole by the name of Waylon Billiot invited me to do a job with him. Normally I don’t work with those Creole motherfuckers out of Louisiana, but he’d been in Atlanta for years and the prospect was good, a buried temple on Mykonos. That’s a Greek island.”

I nodded. So considerate of him to educate me.

“He’d done his research; he had a guy who actually had seen the landmarks with his own eyes, so all he needed was extra money and muscle. We got ourselves a ship and crossed the Atlantic. It’s a pretty trip, the Mediterranean. With all the weird shit that’s breeding under the waves, you never know if you’ll make it. Was part of the appeal.”

He refilled his glass and took another swallow. Looked like that ruddy color wasn’t all sun.

He was talking and taking his time. Stalling. That was fine. I wasn’t in a rush.

“We got to the island. Took us a month to find the right cave and another two weeks for the divers to empty it. They pulled a lot of weird shit out of that cave. We had boxes of crap. But, the most valuable find, the real good stuff, was this chest, about this big, with a cross on the lid. We found it on the last day.”

He held his hands eighteen inches apart. “Solid white. Not plastic, not ceramic, not metal. Looked like wood but didn’t feel like it. They found it underwater, and as soon as they set it on the deck, the damn thing was dry. We poured some water on it, and it just rolled off. We tried to scrape it for sampling, couldn’t scratch it with a drill. Wanna guess what it was?”

“No.” Just because he was buying time didn’t mean I had to sell it cheap.

“We never figured it out. But during magic, the damn thing radiated power. Nicolson, he was our mage, tried to touch it and it knocked him the hell out. Haven’t seen anything like that since.”

He waited. I didn’t say anything.

“The market for Christian relics was hot. People realized faith had real power and they were buying artifacts left and right. You had your collectors, your investors planning to sit on it and resell it later, and your denominations, trying to purchase proof of their god.”

“Not a believer, yourself?”

“Can’t go to hell if you don’t believe in it. Besides, I like things I can touch, things I can own.” He raised his glass, letting the sun play on the cut crystal. “This glass is real, the bourbon in it is real. Faith didn’t buy this glass, or the bourbon, or this house.”

“Spoken like a true hedonist. That’s a Greek word.”

Anger flashed in his heavy-lidded eyes. Rudolph didn’t like to be mocked. No surprise there.

“We both knew that white chest was retirement money. We sailed home. Stopped in the Azores. Stopped again in Bermuda, spent a few days celebrating. Left port. And a mile from the fucking Port of Savannah the ship sank. No storm. No critters. Something blew a hole in the hull. I went to get the box. It wasn’t there.”

A shadow crossed his face. His eyebrows came together, his upper lip rose in a grimace, his hands curled into fists, and an instant later it was all gone, and he was back to drinking bourbon.

It still ate at him all these years later.

“The cargo went down with the boat. We spent a month combing the seabed. Pulled out everything else except for that box.”

“So you got conned by the Cajun. Did you still make a profit?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Sure. And Billiot gave me two-thirds of his earnings to compensate me for my boat. But it wasn’t about money. It was about respect. Nobody fucks with me like that. Nobody.”

“Nobody except Waylon Billiot.”

His eyes narrowed. “You got a mouth on you.”

You have no idea. “He never did admit to stealing the artifact, did he?”

“No. He was real smart about it. Never heard a peep about the box or him trying to sell it. He died about four years back. I opened a good bottle when I heard. For six years his snot-nosed kid kept his head down. See, the son is like his father. Billiot had a nose for magic, and so does Junior. He’s been digging in South America. But something happened on the last trip. Word on the street is, he’s damn near wiped out. He’s looking for a buyer for the box. He had the pastor to authenticate it, and he had a historian to establish where and when it popped up through history.”

“How do you know?”

“Billiot’s sources said there was a curse attached to the temple. If you messed with it, a monster would come and eat your heart. Now you’ve got a dead pastor and…” he tapped the newspaper on his desk. “… a dead professor who’s known to trace Christian artifacts for the right price. And you in my office.”

Rudolph smiled, showing yellowed teeth. Like looking into the mouth of a shark. He was telling me all this because he thought I wouldn’t be leaving. At least not while still breathing.

The doors behind us swung open. Two men walked in, the hungover guy who came down to bring me up to the house and a tall black man in his twenties with the misshapen nose and mangled ears of a street fighter. Between them they dragged a limp body. Behind them a third man came in, pale, red-haired, carrying a machete. The Viking-wannabe moved to my right and parked himself there.

Showtime.

They dumped the body on the floor. A girl, fifteen, maybe sixteen, tan skin, dark hair, jean shorts and a tank top. Her breath came in hoarse gasps, as if she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.