Chapter 15

"Do you think there's more you can do?" Lienna mused.

We were seated outside a cute coffee shop not far from a waterway with a Danish name so unpronounceable it might as well have been my neighbor's Wi-Fi password. The early birds of Copenhagen walked past, and I didn't see any obvious tourists aside from us. Seven a.m. was a tad early for sightseeing.

"Telepathy and telekinesis aren't enough for you?" I asked, then pitched my voice up into an admittedly flawed Lienna Shen impersonation. "My partner's okay, I guess. He's the only psycho warper I've ever heard of, he can read minds and move objects without touching them, but sometimes I wish he could do more."

She shot me a playful scowl. "I'm just saying, there are a lot of psychic powers. Have you tried anything else?"

I shrugged. "I don't even know what to attempt."

"What about clairsentience?"

Pondering that, I took a big gulp of my Danish coffee, which was a lot like Canadian coffee, just accompanied by a delicious flaky pastry. "It'd be handy to sense Kade coming so I don't jump out of my skin every time I spot a bald dude on the street. I can sort of feel minds—I think that's how I accidentally telepathed you—but it's all pretty fuzzy."

Lienna pursed her lips in thought. "Agent Tim said clairsentience overlaps with empath and telethesian abilities. What about those? Maybe they're easier."

I fidgeted with my mug, swirling the dregs of my coffee into an unpleasantly brown vortex. "Every magical stunt I've ever pulled has come from my imagination. If I can dream it up, I can make a hallucination out of it. Reality warping, telekinesis, telepathy—they're just extensions of that. I can imagine turning metal into plastic or moving a barbell with my mind or hearing your thoughts, but those other abilities… I can't begin to imagine what it'd be like to sense a person's psychic waves."

Lienna nodded, a slight frown knitting her brows together. "That rules out a lot of Psychica abilities."

"Yeah, I won't be taking over Cutter's job anytime soon."

"Mmm," she replied vaguely, her gaze traveling around. The architecture along the street featured flat-faced buildings painted in a pastel rainbow of blues, yellows, pinks, and greens, all with white-framed windows on every floor. With the clear sky broken only by the odd whisp of cloud, it was like we'd wandered onto the set of a cozy, coastal fairy tale.

I watched her, trying not to look too mesmerized by the early morning sun lighting her glossy black hair. She was wearing it down again, and it softened her face in a way that kept drawing my gaze. Or maybe I wasn't over the fact that we were together again after five months of separation.

She abruptly swiveled her head back to face me. "Kit, should we finish that talk we started the other night?"

I simultaneously tensed and tried not to look tense, which was a muscular paradox that reminded my shoulders of how sore they were from being tied to a pull-up bar. I'd been dying to finish that conversation. Lienna's statement that she wanted there to be an "us" had been playing on a permanent loop in the back of my head like a busted record player ever since the sentence had left her lips.

Between inadvertent mind reading, Kade kidnappings, secret meetings, and last-minute travel plans, that conversation hadn't had the chance to reach its conclusion. We'd had more than half a day on the cross-Atlantic plane ride to revive the subject, but as far as I was concerned, the only people who carried out heartfelt relationship talks over the never-ending drone of a jet engine were flight attendants and boomers who shouted their side of every phone conversation.

"Yes." I cleared my throat, trying not to sound too eager. "We definitely should."

She nodded again, looking both hopeful and unbearably nervous. Her teeth scraped over her lower lip.

Wait, why the hell was I trying to sound not eager? This was no time for "cool guy" tomfoolery. I was eager.

"Lienna." I leaned forward, holding her gaze. "I've been wildly attracted to you ever since you tackled me in LAX. I've wanted to date you since the days of you dragging my handcuffed ass around the city in our very first smart car. And for the past five months, I haven't stopped thinking about how much I've missed you."

Her face went beet red, but a small smile pulled at her lips. "Yeah?"

"Oh yeah." I sat back in my chair. "So, yes, I absolutely, inarguably, and unequivocally want there to be an ‘us.' I just need to know where to start."

"What do you mean?"

"Am I competing for your favor, Robin Hood and Maid Marian style? Do I need to prove my capabilities as a boyfriend first? Or can we skip straight to exclusive power couple?"

Her blush deepened. "I… I mean, exclusive would be good."

Grinning, I leaned back in my chair. "You know, that actually makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it."

"What does?" she asked with a frown.

"Your determination for me to add more powers to my arsenal," I said with a shrug. "You don't want a ‘rare psychic ability' partner. You want a hotshot trophy boyfriend."

She rolled her eyes but couldn't contain her smile. "Boyfriend?"

"I don't care what you call me. Your beau, your arm candy, your personal first aid Kit, whatever."

"My personal first aid Kit," she echoed lightly. "I like the sound of that."

"Does that mean I can ask you out? Officially?"

She bobbed her chin, hiding half of her expression behind her coffee mug.

I drew in a deep breath. Then with only partially exaggerated seriousness, I said, "Lienna, would you like to go tomb raiding with me today?"

She choked on a sip of coffee. "You're asking me on a tomb-raiding date? When we were already planning to go?"

"Any activity can be a date with the right mindset," I said brightly. "Also, can I take you to dinner afterward? Assuming we don't get eaten by a Danish grave-robbing demon or something."

She laughed. "All right. It's a date."

We quickly downed the last of our hot beverages, and twenty minutes later, we were cruising down the highway southwest of Copenhagen in our luxury rental sedan. We'd made sure to buy all the collision, demolition, and destruction insurance available—just in case.

The morning sun beamed through the back window, heating the car's interior and bamboozling my internal clock. Beyond the suburbs and industrial areas, we found ourselves in the Danish countryside, farmland stretching out as far as we could see.

Lienna pulled the car off the main thoroughfare and onto a small two-lane road, which we followed until she turned us onto a dirt track that ended at a dusty patch of earth overlooking a rather unremarkable field.

A sign beside the ad hoc parking lot informed us this was a closed site, and trespassers would be heavily fined. Or more accurately, my phone's translator app told us when I held the camera up to the sign.

A grassy ridge nearby featured a set of wooden stairs leading up and over it, but otherwise, the scene felt overwhelmingly plain.

"This is it?" I asked, standing beside Lienna in front of the crude stairs.

"I hope so."

Her investigative efforts hadn't turned up much information about the tomb beyond what she'd already told me: it had been discovered twenty years ago by humans, taken over by the MPD, and assigned to a local archeological guild.

"They're called ring fortresses," she informed me as we started up the wooden steps. "Or Trelleborg-type fortresses, named after the first one that was excavated by archeologists back in the nineteen thirties."

At the top of the stairs, we paused to take in the midmorning view. The grassy mound formed a perfect circle at least a hundred yards in diameter. Two paths intersected at the center of the ring, creating four identical quadrants, all of which were dotted with depressions and knolls that I presumed meant more to an archaeologist than they did to me.

It was bigger than I'd expected, but it also didn't seem like the kind of place that would hide the tomb of a magical Viking monarch.

"Not much of a fortress," I muttered. "Unless the enemy really hated charging uphill."

Lienna rolled her eyes. "There would've been ramparts made of wood and stone built on top, around five meters tall and more than ten meters wide."

"Oh." I imagined massive fortifications rising high above us. "Yeah, that'd do the trick."

Lienna pointed across the former fortress. In the empty field beside it, a plain trailer with a door and a single window had been set up. "That's probably where the archeological team works when they aren't in the tomb."

"Speaking of going in the tomb…" I looked all around. "Where's the entrance?"

"Near the trailer, most likely. Let's check it out."

The stairs continued down into the earthen ring, and Lienna began her descent. I took in our surroundings one more time before following her, but there wasn't another soul in sight. Too early for archeologists? I would've thought they were go-getter types. Maybe there wasn't much left to study after twenty years.

At the intersection of the two paths, a flat rock was embedded in the ground. There was a circle etched into it, as well as numerous symbols I recognized as Old Norse runes.

"Is this the entrance?" I asked. "How do you say ‘open sesame' in Old Norse?"

Crouching, Lienna pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of the engraved rock. "I recognize some Arcana elements here. This might be a seal."

"A seal against what?" I raised my eyebrows. "Did Vikings like to be buried with heaps of gold like Egyptian pharaohs?"

"Not necessarily. They were buried with whatever their loved ones thought they might need in the afterlife, like weapons or clothes." Lienna traced an array of circles, her fingertip hovering just above the rock. "I could be wrong, but this seems backward, like the seal acts as protection against something breaking out, not someone breaking in."

"Uh." I inched back. "You weren't planning to open that, were you? Because the last time you cracked open a seal, I was almost melted by fae acid."

"I don't think we need to break it," she said calmly, rising to her feet. "The archaeologists must have found a different way in. Come on."

She skirted around the stone tablet and headed toward the trailer. I hastened after her.

"Okay, but aren't you a little worried about the seal that keeps scary things locked inside the tomb? There are so many cinematic parallels that I don't even know where to start."

"This tomb was excavated twenty years ago, Kit. Besides that, superstitious beliefs about the dead were common in this time period. The seal is probably to keep the deceased monarch from rising."

"Oh, that's fine, then." I nodded. "Just a Viking zombie king, no biggie."

We used another crude set of wooden steps to climb back out of the ring. As we reached the top and the trailer came into view, I jerked to a halt and threw up an invisi-warp, excluding Lienna's mind so her body didn't suddenly vanish from her own senses.

Sitting on the steps of the trailer, with a cigarette hanging from his lips, was a man wearing dark jeans and a black t-shirt. He looked like he'd either popped a few sleeping pills or just endured an unabridged screening of Andy Warhol's Empire.

Lienna had frozen beside me. When the overwhelmingly bored man didn't react to us, she glanced at me questioningly.

"I'm invisi-warping us," I told her.

"But I haven't activated my cat's eye."

I shrugged. "You might as well save it for when I need to break out the big warp guns. As long as I have some spare concentration, I can exclude your mind so you don't see anything I'm warping."

She seemed impressed. "When did you learn to do that?"

"I was starting to get the hang of it before you left, but I perfected it while working with Darius. He does all right sans senses, but it was safer to learn to exclude him."

"It's definitely handy. Let me know if you want to switch to me using my spell."

"Got it."

We approached the trailer, getting a better look at the dude guarding the door. He didn't look like an archaeologist, and he was also in our way. Lienna and I were discussing what warp I should use to lure him off the trailer doorstep so we could sneak inside when I caught the sound of voices.

I expanded the range of my warp, and maybe because I was thinking about Lienna's questions about clairsentience, I got a clearer sense than usual of the minds I was warping—three of them.

Appearing from the west side of the ring, a middle-aged woman was accompanied by two younger assistants around my age. Chatting casually as they tromped toward the trailer, all three women were dressed in wide-brimmed hats and pants with so many pockets they'd make Vincent Park nostalgic for his khaki days.

Lienna and I retreated to a safe distance, watching the small team approach Mr. Sleepy. They greeted him, he replied and got out of their way, and they went inside. Then he plunked himself back down on the step, looking more bored than before.

"I think he might be a guard from the guild in charge of this site," Lienna whispered. "They wouldn't want to leave it unprotected."

"That makes sense." Plus, the Dissimulation Department would be very unhappy if scientific proof of actual Viking magic suddenly came to light. This was a strictly "no humans allowed" tomb.

I pointed westward. "Think the entrance is over there?"

We ventured twenty yards farther around the outside of the grassy ring, and there, carved into the earth, was a downward-sloping passageway reinforced with wooden supports. Extension cords ran out from it, snaking toward the trailer, and LED lights beckoned us inside.

"Our tomb raid begins," I declared dramatically. "Should we hold hands? This is our first date, after all."

Rolling her eyes, she marched into the tunnel, and I followed behind her with a grin.