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“Oh, man. I never miss a Brad Pitt movie,” she assured with a grin.
Murtagh just rolled his eyes as I tried to keep down a laugh.
“Okay, so Troy was in Turkey, and this Bloodlight Diamond originates in Turkey,” Murtagh said.
“Do we have a picture?” she asked, blinking up at him.
He smirked and turned it around, showing a picture of an ancient carving with lots of footnotes scrawled in very small print just below it.
She smirked. “Oh, yes. That’s our baby. I can feel it.” She scrunched her nose.
“It can’t be that easy,” I doubted.
She shrugged. “I guess there’s only one way to find out,” she replied in almost a musical and overconfident sort of way.
I snorted but picked up the phone to call the pilot with a flight plan.
“You plan to take her—a small woman—” Miles continued, pointing at Zazie.
“I’m very average height. Five-six,” she immediately retorted without defensiveness, poking around the large stack of books that had been piled freshly in the middle of a table on my plane.
“A Gen-Z barfly,” he amended, adding, “No offense—” to her, but then looked at me, “to a dangerous city to look for long-lost artifacts while a daughter-eating monster and possibly hundreds of his minions are out there looking for us?”
“And hopefully we find the gems before he finds her, and thereby finds us. Dying would really put a pin in my plans,” I assured him. I didn’t like that he was trying to shame us about our decisions. We had no choice—we had to either breed with her, or escape with her, and no option was a safe option.
“She doesn’t speak the language,” he began, counting off all the reasons he thought this was a bad idea on his fingers, “she doesn’t know how to use a weapon, she?—”
“Miles,” I halted, putting up my hand to silence him. I didn’t like the plan either, but I found myself defending it anyway. Mostly because I needed peace between us and her, or else she’d never just behave herself. “We need to at least try. I can protect her against people. I won’t let this carry on for long,” I assured him.
“How long is this even going to take?” he demanded, falling down in a chair across from me.
“I’ve never hunted for anything longer than five days,” she assured him. She shrugged her shoulders and laid back and looked at Miles, who snapped himself into his seatbelt and was almost vibrating with stress. “Can you chill?”
“No, I can’t, because we’re being chased by crazy, insane people who came within five minutes of breaking into my house and killing us, and I have monsters helping us, then leaving bloodstains like I’m living in a horror movie,” Miles said succinctly. “Not to mention that my stomach is no good with middle eastern food,” he pouted, crossing his arms tightly across his chest.
“And you wonder why I didn’t travel much in the last century,” I sigh, looking at Murtagh, who had mentioned it more than once.
“Co-dependency does have its downsides,” Murtagh commiserated sardonically, handing over a book to Zazie.
Zazie looked down at the book—it was thick, it seemed like her hand had to stretch just to hold it at all. “What the balls is this?” she asked, looking at it with disappointment the same way a child might look at a homework assignment given to them for summer break.
“The new city is built, more or less, on the old city, and the old city was built on an older city, and all the way down.” He frowned and winced. “And I’m going to go ahead and imagine that this is locked away in a place that wasn’t even obvious or easy to find, even when the ancient city thought of itself as quite modern.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve found a lot of shit in my life, and I’ve never needed a tome.” She picked up the book and dropped it onto her lap just, apparently, to make the ‘thud’ that sounded as it dropped a few inches.
“You’ve never looked outside of your backyard,” he reminded her.
“Shows how much you know,” she snorted. “I have to go into Houston every now and then—wait,” she held up her hand, then thoughtfully nodded and paused. “No. I heard it. It sounded much lamer outside of my mouth.”
I smirked at her. She was quite delightful—it was this ability to find humor in dark times that made me take on Miles as a familiar during the middle of the first World War, which he had seen up-close, had lungs almost demolished by toxic gas, and was still missing two fingers from. Still, he was more than eager to let small things bother him and could always joke about big problems. I always found that comforting.
And here was my girl—she very recently found out she was a different species and that her parents were part of a cult, that she had been bred to be sacrificed to and was currently being chased by her father, who was an evil djinn king—something she hadn’t even known existed last month.
“I’m going to be honest, though—I’m hoping this has a lot of pictures,” she said, beginning to skim though the book lazily.
Murtagh rolled his eyes at this. “Maybe we can stop at an ancient map-shop or something, then,” he grumbled.
“That’s not going to help, but you can certainly get a souvenir there,” I scoffed at him. “Are you serious? This city predates Rome. It was ancient when ancient cities were brand-spankin’ new! They’re not going to know what’s under the city.”
