Curse of the Druids by Aiden James Read Free Book Online Page B

darlin’.”
    “It’s not intended to be funny. This shit’s very serious, Nick. The same goes for you, too, Ishi.”
    I swear, Marie has eyes in the back of her head. Ishi dropped what looked like a gold brooch encrusted with emeralds and rubies onto the shelf he presently stood next to. The item came from somewhere hidden, below the shelf, likely from the putrefied contents of the very bottom, based on the nasty gunk still clinging to it.
    “That royally sucks!” he lamented. “Do you know how hard this is for a pair of looters to not loot?”
    “Apparently harder than I previously thought,” she replied. “If you two can behave while we’re down here, in the coming weeks I’ll take you to a place that will put the riches stored here to shame. But only if you don’t piss away the opportunity we have here. Comprende?”
    I especially hated her using one of my pet words. Even so, my gut told me Marie was right. We were indeed wasting time picking through this shit.
    “Well, I hope you’re right about it being here,” I said. “If it isn’t, please spare us the mumbo-jumbo bullshit about it magically hiding someplace, or that the damned thing is presently in use somewhere else. Otherwise, you’ll have two very unhappy ‘compadres’ on your hands. Comprende?”
    I couldn’t resist the return barb, and there wasn’t any sugar to sweeten that sucker. It was increasingly feeling like a very bad idea, and I had become too pissed off to care. Focused only on finding anything resembling the amulet Marie had described, Ishi matched my fervent efforts to get through this exercise as quickly as possible. Regrettably, priceless relics can be destroyed by such recklessness. However, since we weren’t taking them with us anyway, the rarities that could’ve gone for untold thousands were simply in the way of what we sought.
    I expected Marie to squawk about our careless bulldozing, but like us, she hurriedly sifted through corpses and filth as if looking for the iPhone she frequently misplaces. Within two hours, we had finished our initial investigation.
    No sign of the Ambrosius Amulet.
    “Maybe it’s hidden in the walls, between the bricks, no?” said Ishi, wiping the sweat from his brow with his cleanest forearm.
    The tomb was nowhere near as cold as the outside temperature had been upon our arrival. All of us were sweating from the exertion and high humidity inside. Exerting and breathing the air’s foulness, too. We were idiots for leaving our better surgical masks in the Viano, and being too damned lazy to go get them once we picked up the pace of our sifting work.
    ““We just haven’t looked hard enough in this place… or the amulet’s not here,” I said, snickering. “Maybe the map is a fraud.”
    “It’s not a fraud, you dumbass!” Marie reached in her coat and yanked the map out. “How can you not believe in alternative explanations that deal with the supernatural, Nick? Especially after everything we’ve dealt with? Did you not watch a pyramid lift off from an Egyptian desert and soar into the sky? And did you not see a living deity that was half human and half lioness? Or, do you suppose this is one long opiate-fed dream state you’ve been stuck in for the past six months? Hell, maybe I’m not real either!”
    Yeah, you’re real all right—a real peach when you don’t get your way, which makes you a royal b—
    “Don’t say it, Nick! Don’t say it, or I swear to Christ I’ll….”
    “Maybe it’s just a treasure map, Boss—”
    “Shhhh!”
    “What in the hell was that?” whispered Marie, after I motioned for her and Ishi to remain quiet.
    She pointed nervously to the hole leading out of the mound. The sunlight from earlier barely reached inside the opening, as the winter sun continued it’s westward journey across the sky. But I seriously doubted it would aid us in any way from the men owning the voices we heard. Voices speaking in the Masri dialect of