Solomon's Jar Read Online Free

rush her: a nice middle-class twentysomething white girl with more education than sense.
    I’ve got victim written all over me, she realized.
    She had already stopped talking. Instead she turned and lowered her head to bear squarely on his face and hardened her eyes. She would not summon the sword unless he displayed a weapon. And maybe not then; even before her transformation she had known how to take care of herself and been surprisingly good at it.
    But if he actually tried to coerce her she would react with force as ungentle as it was unarmed. She had always hated victimizers. Now as her life’s destiny had begun to unfold she found herself growing almost pathological in her hatred for them.
    Something in her manner melted his resolve, which had never so much as gelled. The readying tension flowed out of him. His head dropped and he muttered into a filthy scrap of muffler wrapped around his neck.
    Annja realized he wasn’t a victimizer, not really. Just another opportunist who had realized on the teeteringbrink of too late that the opportunity he thought he saw was the eager smile of the abyss. He was weak rather than committed to anything. Even evil.
    In a way she found that sadder.
    She struggled with her groceries, her hand fumbling in her pocket, then handed him the first bill she found. “In the end, I find myself fresh out of answers,” she said. “So I guess I’ll take the easiest course.” And wonder who’s really the weak opportunist, she thought.
    He snatched it away with crack-nailed fingers swathed in what might have been the shredded gray remnants of woolen gloves, or bandages. The movement sent a wave of his smell rushing over her like a blast of tear gas. Eyes watering, trying not to choke audibly, she turned and walked away.
    â€œHey, what’s this?” he screamed after her. “A lousy buck? Tight-ass bitch! Don’t care about anybody except yourself.”
    Â 
    H ER LOFT HAD a window seat. She liked to half recline on it as she studied or read her e-mails. It gave her a cozy feeling, surrounded by her shelves of books and the artifacts, the potsherds, bone fragments and chipped flint blades, that seemed to accrue on every horizontal surface. Today the clouds masked the time of day and veils of rain periodically hid and revealed the distant harbor. Rain ran long quavering fingers down the sooted, fly-spotted glass.
    She sipped coffee well dosed with cream and sugar. The way she’d loved it as a child at the Café du Monde. Which, of course, wasn’t there anymore.
    As active as she had always been, she had never had much need to watch her diet. And now that her activity levels had increased, her main problem was keeping up weight.
    She frowned slightly as she finished downloading headers from her favorite newsgroups, alt. archaeology and its companion, alt.archaeology.esoterica. There enthusiasts, nuts, grad students and professional archaeologists, mostly anonymous, would splash happily together in the marshy outskirts of her chosen discipline.
    She quickly surveyed the headers in alt.archaeology. To her annoyance a number were obvious spam. While she was in South America she hadn’t been able to keep the filters up to date. She resented having to spend the time and effort to do so, but it was like weeding a garden: either you did it regularly or gave in altogether to the forces of entropy.
    Part of living in the modern world, she told herself, as she added a few new exclusions. It helps to keep me appreciative of the Middle Ages. Not that she was naive or romantic enough to wish away little things such as air-conditioning and antibiotics, she thought with a laugh.
    The spam du jour was real estate. Before that it had been small-cap stocks, and before that, the heyday of male enhancements. She had filtered all of them out. She manually deleted all the new spam she could identify as such, and also the vast majority of legitimate headers that