Chapter 1

The Minotaur

July 2018

From my place near the door, the bookstore was an oasis of light and humanity amid the booming snarl of a thunderstorm.

An oasis, at least, for most attendees, present company excepted. I stood at the back, gazing over the heads of forty-six people in folding chairs, their attention riveted to the woman playing a mythical Greek princess on the makeshift stage.

“Take this,” Princess Ariadne said to an imaginary Theseus, holding out her hand. Balanced on her palm was a ball of red yarn.

I sneered. Ariadne of Crete: lover of Theseus and traitor to her own brother. She might as well have killed Asterion with her own hands.

“Treacherous witch,” I muttered.

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A woman in the last row glanced at me and frowned.

I considered smiling to put her at ease. But a smile is submissive, and men like me do not submit. And while my disguise was good, I knew that after the events of tonight, the police would ask questions. I could not afford for this woman to remember me.

So instead, I tipped my head. A reassuring—even gracious—gesture. She took in my neatly creased jeans and the expensive raincoat and—certain now that she had misheard me—smiled before returning her gaze to the stage.

She was here, they were all here, as part of Chicago’s citywide reading of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and the arrival of the traveling play The King and the Minotaur. This woman, like the rest of them, preferred her mythology packaged neatly in the pages of a book or confined, like now, to a stage.

People don’t much care to have the myths run free, keeping score and taking retribution.

With effort, I turned my attention away from the stage. I’d come for Ursula and her father. They stood near the front, the father with one elbow propped on a bookshelf filled with history tomes. They’d arrived after all the chairs were taken, and the father looked tired.

They paid no attention to me. They didn’t know me in my current guise.

“Play of Shadows”

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But they would know me soon enough.

They appeared happy. Fat and happy, in the case of the father. Athletic and happy, in the case of Ursula. She had grown up to be quite lovely, which was helpful to the story I was building.

The story of me. The monster.

Asterion.

The Minotaur.

The events of tonight would be a continuation of my katabasis—my journey into the underworld. A journey I wouldn’t take alone.

Tonight would be first blood.

Half an hour later, the performance ended. Ursula and her father stood in line to shake Ariadne’s hand and then again to purchase Edith Hamilton’s book along with a trashy horror novel and a copy of The Economist. Throughout, Ursula smiled, laughing up at her father, who laughed along with her. They pulled on their raincoats, and she tucked her arm through his as they headed toward the door. He patted her hand with visible affection.

Yes, definitely happy.

When they left the store, I followed them. I removed my jacket, pulled up my hood, and loped past. I knew where they’d parked. I knew the path they’d take between the garage and the bookstore.

I’d stashed my labrys there, its double blades honed to a glittering edge as sharp and unforgiving as revenge.

revenge.

Chapter 2

Evan

Not far from the bookstore, as the crow flies, Professor Evan Wilding sat in his office at the Institute of Middle Eastern Antiquities and stared at the computer on his desk while wind howled around the repurposed brick house on Woodlawn Avenue.

He scratched his Vandyke beard and sighed, the sound an echo of the wind through the eaves.

Numbers. Rows and columns of numbers. Terrifyingly large ones, which were the institute’s bills. And very small ones, which represented their nearly nonexistent income.

Evan blinked and rubbed his eyes, hoping for a miracle. But the numbers stood their ground.

Outside the single window, lightning bolted across the evening sky. From his second-floor office, Evan could see only the tops of the wind-lashed tupelo trees that grew in a row against the back fence. Beyond the trees, invisible from where he sat, the city’s skyline glittered against the stormy heavens, a bastion of civilization etched across nature’s fury. Chicago was in the midst of a midwestern monsoon. Overloaded sewers. Flooded basements and roadways. Water poured off overpasses, and there were stories of rats climbing out of manholes and dogs being swept away. Blame El Niño, the meteorologists said. This summer was seeing cooler temperatures and more wind and rain. Almost daily rain.

As if reading Evan’s thoughts, the skies opened. Drops like silver coins battered the rooftop, drowning out the Beethoven symphonies—currently the Eroica—Evan had chosen for the evening’s work. Near the door to the hallway, Perro rose and stretched. The Welsh corgi watched Evan for a moment, decided the professor wasn’t doing anything of interest, and resettled on his bed. Unlike every other dog Evan had known, Perro was utterly unperturbed by thunder.

In that moment, Evan wanted nothing more than to be Perro. Adored and cared for. Taken for twice-daily walks. Provided with a diet of top-grade food and a steady supply of suitably challenging puzzle toys. Perro had even managed to avoid having his bushy tail docked, thanks to the tender heart of his first human, Evan’s research assistant, Diana. It was the perfect life, if you liked dog food. Which, judging by Perro’s generous girth, the corgi certainly did.

Evan wondered how his hawk, Ginny, was faring in her mews. No doubt fast asleep, as undisturbed as Perro by the storm.

He sighed again and returned his attention to the spreadsheet.

As an Oxford-educated Englishman, a professor of semiotics, linguistics, and paleography at the University of Chicago, not to mention an interpreter for government agencies on the writings and symbols left by killers and terrorists, Evan loved codes made up of letters and crime scenes strewn with bizarre symbols. Those, he could read. Maybe not easily or all at once. But, sooner or later, he would decipher their secrets.

He wasn’t much fond of numbers, however. Debits, credits, accounts receivable, asset classes, and other accounting terms—those rattled around in his brain without gaining purchase. Except insolvency. That was a word he understood.

And the Institute of Middle Eastern Antiquities was hovering at the brink.

He let his gaze linger on one of the books on the desk. The Phaistos Disk: An Account of Its Unresolved Mystery. The undeciphered Phaistos Disc (he preferred to spell disc with a c instead of a k) was where his heart really lay. Almost six thousand miles east on the Greek island of Crete. He’d been beating his head against the brick wall of deciphering the Phaistos since he was in his early twenties. And he had almost nothing to show for it.

Much like the numbers he was moving about on the spreadsheet. He seemed to have a fondness for lost causes.

Speaking of which . . . his eyes caught on another book on his desk: The Lost Manuscripts of Timbuktu.

Just outside the window, lightning flared. Brilliant light irradiated the room, and almost immediately, a fury of thunder shook the glass.

The lights flickered out. The computer screen went dark.

Perro barked.

“Looks like that’s it for wrestling with the books tonight,” Evan said aloud. He tried to suppress his glee. This was serious work requiring serious attention. Could he help it if the phrase In a thousand years, none of this will matter kept winding through his brain?

He picked up his cell phone and tapped the flashlight app. The chamber filled with a blue-white glow.

“Let’s get candles,” he said to Perro.

The dog followed him into the hallway and down the grand central staircase, each of them moving slowly in recognition of the gloom and the fact of their respective short statures. The stairs had not been built with either corgis or dwarfs in mind. As they walked, additional flashes of lightning and the glow from Evan’s phone illuminated the painting of a dying Cleopatra and caused the shadows from the institute’s urns and the carvings in their niches to leap as he walked by.

At the bottom of the stairs, he made his way through the front room to the windows and peered out to see if the rest of Woodlawn Avenue was dark. All around, the gloom lay deep. Nary a streetlight nor lamp glowed anywhere up or down along the road.

Perro barked a single sharp warning.

A figure moved in front of the glass, its shape caught in the glow from Evan’s phone.

Startled, Evan took a step back. “The hell?”

The figure—a man, judging by his height and girth—bent down. When he straightened, he glanced through the window at Evan. Their eyes met.

The man’s face shone pale blue in the light from Evan’s phone.

His eyes were wide, his mouth agape, his lips peeled back from his teeth in an expression of alarm.

On his forehead were strange marks: odd signs that appeared to have been scrawled across his forehead in black ink. Rain had caused the marks to blur and run until it was hard to guess what they might have been. A tumble of intersecting lines. Or a child’s doodle.

Another blaze of lightning. The man turned and limped hurriedly down the walkway, vanishing into the darkness.

Evan double-checked that the door was locked and that the alarm, which ran on a backup power supply, was still armed. Then he leaned against the door, his heart pounding. He’d had too many run-ins with too many killers to be comfortable with strangers dropping by in the dark.

In the near distance, an engine roared to life. Evan drew a deep breath.

“That was rather odd, wasn’t it?” he said to Perro. “A man skulking around near our front door. And those marks on his forehead. What do you suppose he was about?”

In answer, Perro set to barking again. Someone pounded on the front door.

Evan didn’t move. Didn’t so much as breathe.

The banging stopped. Perro’s bark lowered to a rumbling growl.

Then the pounding started up again. Perro howled. Evan closed his eyes.

A voice shouted, “Evan, it’s me!”

Evan’s eyes popped open. He punched in the code for the alarm and unlocked the door.

A tall man carrying a duffel stood in the doorway.

The man grinned. “Is this how you welcome me to Chicago, brother?”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Evan said, his heart pausing its leap toward his throat. “River.”

Barbara Nickless is a Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon Charts bestselling author of eight novels, a three-time recipient of the Colorado Book Award and five-time recipient of Colorado Authors League awards. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, the FBI Citizens Academy Alumni Association, the World Affairs Council, and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Her most recent travels—while conducting research for a novel—involved taking cover from rocket fire and being grilled at military checkpoints.