Page 40 of Ulune's Daughter

“Not so far. Nor wail at the passing of a noble family. Thank the Mother. How dull would that be?”

I chuckle. “What do you do for fun instead?”

“Other than drive to Albany to listen to cover bands? Artifact recovery.”

“Hope this doesn’t make me sound like an idiot,” I say. “But I’m not even sure what that means.”

Her grin flashes again. It’s hard to tear my eyes away from her pretty mouth. Puffy lips, very kissable.

“Treasure hunting,” she admits.

“Treasure hunting? You’re a treasure hunter?”

She nods.

“Like Aztec gold?”

“I haven’t found any Aztec gold, but I did recover a gold statue of a Polynesian shark god.”

“Wow,” I say, genuinely impressed. “So, like Indiana Jones.”

She nods. “Thank you for saying Indiana Jones instead of Lara Croft.”

I chuckle. “Is this where I should say something complimentary about your physical attributes in comparison to hers or is that creepy?”

I don’t want to be creepy. Or compare her breasts to Lara Croft’s anywhere but in my head. Kellan’s are better.

“Depends on which physical attributes.” She winks at me in the rear-view mirror.

“In comparison to Lara Croft, your magnificent ... brain ... just blows me away.”

She laughs. “Nice save.”

“Thanks. How’d you get into treasure hunting?”

She tells me about the first artifact she recovered, on a Bevington field trip when she was a freshman. What really engaged her wasn’t what she found—a shaman’s scrying bowl from the Nipmuck people—but that it turned out to be afake, manufactured in the early 1900s. She was so angry about the forgery that she spent half of her sophomore year independently researching who might have made it and discovered a previously unknown forgery mill operating out of Amherst. The articles she wrote about the group that she named the “ShamAm 19” were published in scholarly journals throughout the magickal world.

“My first team leader read the articles and contacted me,” she tells me. “I spent the summer between sophomore and junior year working with him and his team in New York. It was grunt work; a lot of research. But the bug bit me hard. I did a junior independent study on historical forgeries. That’s when I found the first artifacts from the Magi of the Mist. They weren’t forgeries. Magickal historians thought they were because they couldn’t identify the culture they came from.”

“And you continued treasure hunting after you finished at Bevvy?”

She nods. “The thing they don’t tell you about magickal archeology? It doesn’t pay very well. I tried to get grants from everywhere to fund my dig on Isla Cedros. No one would give me a penny. Fortunately, my share of the finder’s fee for recovery of Sagoru’s idol funded the dig and then some.”

“I bet they’re sorry now,” I offer, knowing from listening to Luca rant for weeks that her discovery of the lost mage colony on Isla Cedros is the find of the decade, if not the century.

Kellan’s grin sharpens. I can definitely see the fae heritage in that expression. “Yeah,” she says. “The guy who nuked my grant proposal at Madavar was pretty hot to weasel his way in when I began turning up artifacts he couldn’t explain away as Olmec or Mayan.”

Something in her expression, the edge in her tone, tells me “the guy” was more to her than a disapproving academic. “Ex-boyfriend?” I ask.

“Ugh. Am I that transparent?”

“Only to a prospective boyfriend.”

She lifts her eyebrows. “Is that what you are?”

“Aren’t I? This is our second date. Do you go on second dates with guys who aren’t prospective boyfriends?”

“Hmm. I can’t say that I do,” she admits. Then she raises her index finger, leaving the rest of her fingers wrapped around the wheel. “But, I haven’t had a second date in four years. So, my sample size could just be insufficient.”

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