Owl and the City of Angels Read Online Free

before, whatever it was clung to the shadowed recesses my flashlight couldn’t penetrate.
    The sooner I got out of here the better. I crawled back up on top of the cracked sarcophagus. The hole was only nine feet away, but high enough that I couldn’t reach the edge. I angled my flashlight along the wall, searching for foot- and handholds, but I only found a carved depiction of Anubis, which wasn’t recessed enough for me to get my toes in, or pronounced enough to hold my weight. I turned the flashlight as I heard the scraping noise for a third time, swearing I caught movement just outside my light stick’s range . . .
    I heard a door slam shut a few floors above me, followed by hurried footsteps. “Hey, Serena?” Mike called.
    Five minutes early, but under the circumstances . . .
    I shone the light back through the hole and waved the beam around for good measure. “Down here, Mike.”
    His face appeared over the hole.
    “The floor gave way when the building shook,” I yelled up. More or less the truth. “I need you to throw a rope or something down,” I added, keeping the far side of the room in the corner of my eye.
    “Just wait there, I’ll go get help,” Mike said, and disappeared from view.
    The thing in the corner moved again, and this time I caught a glimpse of what looked like an arm. Yeah, not a chance in hell—
    “No!” I yelled, maybe a little too desperately. When Mike’s perplexed face returned, I added, “I don’t think the room is stable—do you have your rope up there?”
    “Found it,” he said.
    I hoped that either Mike didn’t notice the climbing hook, or, if he did, I could talk myself out of it. “Tie it to something sturdy and lower it down.”
    I heard Mike moving in the cramped space above me.
    The “thing” hiding in the corner grunted, and this time I was ready—I managed to hit it in the face with my flashlight beam.
    An embalmed head, showing too much decay to be recognizable, looked up at me with empty eye sockets. What had to be the mummified remains of Caracalla snarled at me, displaying a rotting mess of sharpened black teeth.
    “Make it faster, Mike,” I yelled. Leave it to me to find the one IAA dig site with a mummy still in it . . . What the hell was the IAA doing nowadays? They were supposed to clear supernaturals out before hapless researchers like Serena and Mike showed up.
    Caracalla said something . . . or I think it tried to say something; its vocal cords weren’t exactly in the best shape. I mean it when I say the Romans messed up the Egyptian incantations. On top of that, I might be a genius at translating written languages—I can read and write ten, three of them dead—but I can’t speak one of them to save my life.
    Caracalla’s mouth twisted up into something reminiscent of a smile, and he began to wade through the water towards me.
    I scrambled as far back as I could until the carved Anubis idol dug into my back.
    “Mike, I mean it, get me the hell out of here —now, ” I screamed. There had to be something around here to throw . . .
    Caracalla reached the end of the shallows and stretched one of his black arms towards me before submerging under the water.
    Son of a bitch, they could swim? Mummies weren’t supposed to swim . . .
    “Almost there,” Mike said as the end of my rope slipped over the edge.
    I searched the water for Caracalla as I waited for the rope . . .
    Crack .
    Above me, a fracture line appeared in the floor near the hole. Mike swore.
    “Mike, out of the way—” Son of a bitch—I jumped back into the knee-deep water as a slab of stone, followed by a screaming Mike, crashed into the sarcophagus. The rope followed him down last, sliding off the slippery stone surface and disappearing underneath the water.
    Damn it. I headed over to where Mike sat in the water. “Mike, are you OK?” I said, shaking his arm, hoping nothing had broken.
    He shook his head. “Fine—yeah . . .” His voice trailed