Demeter's Tablet: a Nia Rivers Adventure (Nia Rivers Adventures Book 2) Read online

  Demeter's Tablet

  a Nia Rivers Adventure

  Jasmine Walt

  Ines Johnson

  Dynamo Press

  Copyright © 2017, Jasmine Walt & Ines Johnson. All rights reserved. Published by Dynamo Press.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and incidents described in this publication are used fictitiously, or are entirely fictional. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except by an authorized retailer, or with written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be addressed via email to [email protected]

  Cover art by Rebecca Frank

  Edited by Mary Novak

  Electronic edition, 2017. If you want to be notified when Jasmine’s next novel is released and get access to exclusive contests, giveaways, and freebies, sign up for her mailing list here. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Authors

  Also by Jasmine Walt

  Also by Ines Johnson

  1

  There was a difference between growing up and growing old. Growing old was the process of aging. It was the accumulation of changes in body and mind over time. The body wrinkled and turned gray. The mind expanded with knowledge, only to learn years later that its sage collection was now obsolete in the new day.

  I understood why humans didn’t want to succumb to Father Time and instead changed their bodies with cosmetic and medical procedures. Why people resisted the drag of years by surrounding themselves with items and ideologies of their youth, holding on to a past that no longer had a place in the present.

  Growing old was a cruel fact of life. But growing up—the taking of responsibility for one’s actions; the standing at attention to face an uncertain future; the acceptance that, in the grand scheme of things, one person was insignificant and would be forgotten in a matter of time? Yeah, that was a buzzkill that deserved to be ignored for as long as humanly possible.

  Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t human.

  I tried to sink my ancient bones down into the depths of the waters, but my youthful flesh was too buoyant, too resilient, and I floated back to the top. As an Immortal, my body didn’t age. I would never grow old. It was my mind that creaked and ached under the weight of time. I shoved the nagging pressure of my responsibilities for the past, present, and future aside and came to the surface.

  I floated in the baths of Budapest, my body weightless in the mineral waters. The Budapest thermal baths were said to rejuvenate the body and help preserve age, not that I needed it.

  On the deck, a few women lay out in the moonlight. Their stomachs were flat and their asses were high. When they smiled, their faces barely moved. Their breasts defied gravity. It was their wrinkled hands that gave them away, telling the true tale of their age. My eyes were sharp enough to see the gray roots peeking from their expensive dye jobs.

  In the waters, an old man in a Speedo delivered his best lines to a svelte coed, who was a quarter of his age by the looks of her. She turned to her friends, and they pointed and giggled at his outdated attempts. Undaunted, the man floated to another side, bypassing all the age-appropriate women basking in the moonlight, to find the next sorority girl.

  I swam into the middle of the coeds. Even though I was older than their minds could comprehend, they took one look at my physical body and accepted me into their group. I waved my toned arms in the air and gyrated my trim body alongside the crush of sweaty, young bodies singing about never getting older and being a rebel youth. As if any of them knew anything about age and rebellion.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my friend, Loren, motioning to me. She mouthed the words, “Come here,” urging me to get out and join her. I turned my back on her, not ready to return to work, to the reason we were here in Budapest, to my responsibilities. I wanted a night of being stupid and immature. So I rebelled and pretended I was young.

  I shoveled tumblers of alcohol down my throat and brushed against mostly naked bodies in the waters. I was surprised when Loren didn’t pull me bodily from the waters. Normally, she had the attention span of a gnat, but she could be single-minded when she was on a mission. Instead of tugging me out, she only shrugged and gave me a look that told me I’d regret it. I didn’t doubt it. The cheap alcohol burned a hole in my throat even as my immortal cells worked double time to repair the damage.

  “Excuse me? Are you German?”

  I turned to a lanky young man dressed in board shorts. His chin had yet to grow into his facial hair. I shook my head in response to his query.

  “Oh, that’s too bad, because I want to be Ger-Man. Get it? Your man.”

  “Really? Is that the best you got?” I stared at the guy, waiting to see if he could produce some other come-on. When I didn’t tug on his line, he retracted his rod from my little area in the waters and cast his net wider.

  I floated away, scoping out the masculine bodies as I glided through. My body caught many gazes, but none that I cared to hold. I hadn’t dated in over five hundred years. Over the last dozen decades, I’d gone to balls, fairs, and clubs that were filled with eager men, ripe for the picking for any woman who could bat an eyelash and crook a finger. I didn’t understand why modern women had trouble getting dates. There were dozens of unattached males at every turn. Many were in these waters.

  I immediately caught the eye of another young man. This time, our gazes held as he made his way over to me. His eyes were a light brown hooded with dark, lush lashes. I couldn’t immediately pinpoint his heritage from his facial features. He could have been Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. He had a defined chest with a smattering of hair that happily trailed down. The rest of him was tall with sun-kissed skin.

  “Can I get you another drink?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  When he returned, he said, “I’m Aydin.”

  “I’m Nia. Aydin is a Turkish name. Is that where you’re from?”

  “My father is from Turkey; my mother is from Hungary.”

  I let out a chuckle. It came out a little forcefully since it had been several weeks since I’d laughed. “I’m sure dinners at your house must be interesting with that kind of heritage.”

  Aydin cocked his head, his thick eyebrows squished with incomprehension.

  “You know,” I prompted, “because the Ottomans conquered Hungary five hundred years ago.”

  His face remained an array of puzzled pieces.

  “Based on that, I assumed there might be fighting at the dinner table between your parents?”

  He cocked his head to the side, but the movement did not bring the pieces of the historical picture together. “They did?”

  I wasn’t sure if his words were a question or
a statement. Had I just opened an old wound about his dysfunctional family? Or did he truly not know his own history? He had to know the Ottoman Empire had invaded this land. Their influence was everywhere—from the smell of paprika that spiced the evening air to the very baths we were pruning in.

  “Wait . . .” Aydin gave a shake of his head. “Who were the Ottomans again?”

  I opened my mouth but then closed it. A full moment passed as I stared at the kid. But in the end, I decided to swallow my judgment. In older times, people didn’t get much of an education outside their trade. Perhaps the school systems in Budapest weren’t that good? There were plenty of other things to talk about besides history.

  “So, are you on holiday, Nia?”

  “Business trip,” I said. “I’m taking the night off. Enjoying the baths.” But I couldn’t help myself. Another history lesson burst forth. “Did you know it was the Ottomans who introduced the practice of bathing to the Magyars?”

  “The who?”

  The Magyars were the people who lived on these lands before the Germans. What were they teaching the youth in these schools? I threw up my hands, both literally and figuratively.

  “You know, Aydin, I think I’d better check on my friend.”

  “Wait, Nia. Do you mind if we go Dutch on this drink?”

  I blinked, almost launching into a lecture about how ‘going Dutch’ was actually a derogatory phrase. It hailed from the seventeenth century, when England and the Netherlands fought over political boundaries and trade routes. But instead, I decided to go find the Dutch woman I had come with.

  “You know what, Aydin? It’s fine. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Sweet.” He grinned. “Are you on the ’gram?”

  “The what?”

  “Instagram. So we can talk.”

  “You want to talk with me on a computer app used for pictures?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded and bent over his phone in its waterproof casing.

  “You wouldn’t want my phone number?”

  “What for?” he asked, cradling his phone in his palm, caressing it with his thumb. He no longer made eye contact with me.

  “Right,” I said. “Look me up under CroftyGirl.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “Ask Siri?”

  I headed for the steps that would take me out of these troubled waters. But I didn’t make it home free.

  “Excuse me,” said a dimple-cheeked frat boy with an American accent. “But your breasts are like Mount Rushmore. My face should be in the middle of them.”

  “OMG, I am too old for this shit.”

  Another moment in these waters surrounded by juveniles of any age would drive me into early retirement. I turned and climbed out in search of Loren. Once out of the healing waters, the weight of the unwanted memories left me feeling old and weary. I wanted to sit down next to the cougars lined up in lounge chairs and shrivel up.

  “Had enough?” Loren asked when I joined her.

  “How the hell can you stand dating in the twenty-first century?”

  “I don’t date,” she said. “Like a modern woman, I use men only for what they’re good for. Then I do everything else myself.”

  “And where has that gotten you?”

  She turned her blonde head and glared at me with those baby blues. “Oh yeah, and dating the same guy for five hundred years got you what?”

  I jerked at the low blow.

  Loren grimaced, her hand coming to rest on my shoulder. “Too soon?”

  I had broken up with my lover, Zane, over a month ago. Supposedly, time healed all wounds. In fact, there was some non-scientific study done in a women’s magazine that said it should take half the time people were together in a relationship to get over their ex. In that case, I’d be mourning my relationship for the next 250 years.

  Time didn’t heal anything. As someone who’d been around for a very long time, I knew that all more time did was allow people to make new wounds. If this was all the dating world had to offer me, I might join a convent.

  “I have good news,” Loren said. “I think I found our man.”

  My eyes lit up. But then I realized she didn’t mean Zane. We were after her ex-lover, a guy who had an in with a cult that promised everlasting life. I’d remembered hearing about a tablet depicting the sacred rites of such a group—the Ninnion Tablet. But it had gone missing a while back.

  We’d been chasing after Loren’s ex since we’d left France a few weeks ago. Normally, I worked for the IAC, the International Antiquities Coalition. But I didn’t feel like going on a dig in a remote part of the world. I didn’t feel like being surrounded by a group of crusty old men who would second-guess things I knew to be true because I’d lived them.

  None of my old colleagues would listen to me bitch about their gender. None of them would understand the need to redo my pedicure two days after I’d gotten it done. Not even one would comprehend the validity of retail therapy. No, what I needed was some good old-fashioned girl time, sprinkled with a little adventure, with a healthy side dish of male bashing on the side.

  “I just got a tip that Leonidas Baros is out on the town tonight,” Loren said. A wide grin spread over her face, and her blue eyes twinkled at the mention of her ex’s name.

  My gaze narrowed. “You seem awfully eager to see him.”

  Perhaps she heard the irritation in my voice, because she quickly rearranged her features into nonchalance. “Well, yeah. So we can solve this case. We’re gonna uncover history, shine the light on marginalized cultures, ’cause that’s what we do. And if we happen to get lucky along the way, well, then everybody wins.”

  “I thought we were taking a break from exes. What did you say?” I asked. “‘Hoes before bros.’”

  “I’m not trying to get back with Lenny. I don’t do repeats. Well, except that one time I saw him in Prague. And then we did bump into each other in Rome a couple of years ago. But other than that, no repeats.”

  I arched an eyebrow at her.

  “But,” she continued, “I do think you need to get a little something-something while we’re on this trip, just to take the edge off your breakup. Maybe a lot of the edge off. You can toy with these little boys if you want.” She waved her fingers at the boys playing at men in the water. “But I think you might need a man. Lenny always has a nice group of men around him. You can take a bite out of one of them while I . . .”

  I cocked my head and pursed my lips at her.

  “While I get the information we need, of course.”

  “Whatever, let’s go check this lead out.”

  “Not so fast.” Loren blocked me with her arm. “We may be a little overdressed.”

  I looked down at our bikinis. Then I crossed my arms over my chest. “Loren, what have you gotten us into now?”

  2

  We left the hedonism of the baths and headed for holy ground. Mátyás-templom, or Matthias Church, sat atop a hill aptly named Buda Castle Hill. Its turrets stretched up into the darkened night. On the roof, colorful tiles gleamed in the moonlight. The architecture was a marriage between Ottoman mosque, Jesuit temple, and Roman Catholic church.

  “Here, put this on.” Loren handed me a lace mask.

  I was still in a bikini and heeled sandals from the baths. We’d slipped on shear cover-ups before we’d hopped in the car. The mask would cover more of my face than the swimsuit covered my body.

  “Why do I need a mask?” I eyed it suspiciously. It reminded me of a party I’d gone to in Paris thrown by the Marquis de Sade.

  “It’s kind of a costume party.”

  Loren and I had only known each other for two months. But a lot had gone down in that time—life and death situations, breakups, makeups, a little mass genocide. We’d seen each other at our best and our worst. We’d had a chance to learn each other’s habits and quirks well. So when she didn’t meet my eye, I knew something was up.

  “Loren?” I elongated the two syllables of her name.

 
She turned around, exasperated. “All right, it’s a sex party.”

  “Loren!” I stomped my foot against the car’s floorboard, eyeing the door handle.

  “We’re just going to go in, find Baros, question him, and get out.”

  “Loren . . .” I sighed, turning away to look out the window at the cityscape passing us by.

  “It’s either this or we go to a museum and try to decipher the writings of the Eleusinian Mysteries on pottery.”

  I grimaced. I loved museums, but she knew I hated riddles. Even more, I didn’t want to sit in my room moping, or worse, go back to the baths and be hit on by Millennials. I needed something to do. If this guy, Baros, was a quick route to finding out more about the mysterious cult, I supposed I could risk my virtue for one night.

  “Are you sure you’re not trying to get back with this guy?” I asked.

  “No.” She didn’t meet my eye. “Baros and I are over. I’m here for work, not play. Besides, you’re still in that mourning period where all guys are jerks. Since I’m your best friend, I won’t break the girl code.”

  Loren had taken the title of my best friend shortly after we’d met. I hadn’t bestowed it upon her—she’d just claimed it. Like I was a newfound land and she’d staked her flagpole in my chest. I didn’t mind. It was nice having someone watch my back.

  “But a sex party,” I whined. I wasn’t a prude. I’d been to orgies before. I was alive during the heyday of Rome. Had been present and accounted for during the writing of the Kama Sutra. And for those romance readers who got a kick out of the new wave of BDSM books? Yeah, they should have lived through the Victorian age.