Darius Carson watched the couple walk by his job site. They looked happy. Hands in each other’s back jean pockets. Shoulder to shoulder. Big cheesy grins on their faces as they gazed into each other’s eyes. It looked like a Hallmark commercial. Darius half expected one of them to trip, or accidentally walk out into traffic, or something like that. But it didn’t happen.

If he was going to be honest, he envied them. He’d struck out, dating-wise. It seemed like most of the women he met in Vegas were only looking for flings or boy toys. They wanted nightlife and glitz, while he was holding out for the kind of woman who’d be happy watching reality TV and ordering pizza while they vegged out in sweats. He didn’t mind a nice night out every once in a while, but constant clubbing made it impossible to get to know the other person. You couldn’t have a decent conversation shouting over the music, and trying to do so always gave him a headache. So while he would have liked to walk down the street with his hand in his woman’s back pocket, it looked like that wasn’t going to happen.

Besides, at six-seven, perhaps his height was prohibitive to the whole pocket-sharing endeavor. The dude he was watching was maybe an inch taller than his woman. He was lucky to find a woman who reached his shoulder. Most of his past girlfriends had been more along the lines of nipple height. Which was an odd way to measure prospective mates, now that he thought about it.

“Darius…? Earth to Darius!”

He blinked, brought back to the present by the insistent voice of his best friend and site manager Rebecca Augustin. She had a whiskey-deep voice and copper curls, and like most of his exes, she was also nipple height on him. Now that he’d come up with that unit of measurement, it was going to be difficult to shake. But unlike his ex-girlfriends, there had never been that kind of tension between him and Rebecca. Their mothers had been best friends, way back in the day. She felt like a sister more than anything, and putting a move on her would have been more awkward than telling her that he was now mentally measuring everyone based on the height of his nipples.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I was daydreaming. What did you say?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I’m used to you not listening to me after all this time,” she teased.

He punched her lightly on the shoulder. As a big man, he always tried to stay conscious of how much he outweighed most people. He moved with the kind of extreme caution that one develops when they shoot up a foot in the summer before seventh grade. It had been an awkward year, always running into things and accidentally hurting people when he’d only been trying to play around. His boosted shifter strength only made things worse. He’d worked very hard back then to develop control over his muscles and over his shifts. Darius Carson might have a lot of faults, but he would not hurt anyone by accident.

Of course, one of the things he liked most about Rebecca was that he didn’t have to hold back quite so much. She’d always been tough. Although she wasn’t particularly tall, years of working on construction sites had built up her musculature, already developed from years of roughhousing around with her best friend Darius. And although she wasn’t a full blown shifter, she was shifterkin. That meant she was stronger than the average woman by far, and healthier too. So Darius didn’t have to hold back as much as he did, but it was better to maintain a level of restraint at all times. When he didn’t, people tended to get hurt.

So when she made a show of rubbing her shoulder and pantomiming pain, he knew it was all just an act. “Wimp,” he rumbled.

“Bully,” she shot back.

“What are you interrupting my deep thoughts for anyway?” he asked. “I am the brains behind this operation, you know, and brains need their thinking time.”

“And here I thought you were just staring at that blonde who walked past.”

“Was not.” He shrugged. “I mean, not her in particular. I was just looking at the sidewalk. It seems wider than it looked on paper, and I’m wondering if it’s going to cause problems.”

“I’ll have someone measure it out,” she said promptly. “But in the meantime, I’ve got something you should look at.”

He went instantly on alert. This project had been plagued by issues from the start. The multi-millionaire who bought the property had bought in early, and his plans for the home had required the development of infrastructure that simply hadn’t existed in what passed for the neighborhood so far. It had all been handled, but there had been problems with laying the water lines, and then issues with zoning, and then one of the cranes they’d rented had broken down and needed replacing, and then the ground where the resort-style pool would end up going had turned out to contain a large and unexpected layer of rock-hard clay. He’d never seen anything like it in the middle of the desert before, but it persisted in existing anyway.

“What’s wrong now?” he asked.

“Maybe nothing,” she said mysteriously. “Come see.”

He followed her as she walked across the freshly laid tile, out the retractable doors and onto the patio. Spring had sprung in Las Vegas, greeting him with a bright and sunny day, not too hot, with just the right amount of breeze. He was looking forward to taking a dip in his pool when he got home. Maybe ordering a pizza and watching some reality TV. He had a not-so-secret thing for cooking shows, even though he wasn’t much of a chef himself. There was something about watching expert cooks at work that he found soothing, and based on Rebecca’s carefully cultivated air of mystery, he was beginning to think that he might need a little relaxation after today.

A handful of guys in hard hats stood around the hole in the ground where the pool would eventually go, once they got through all of the clay. But that wasn’t going to happen with all of this standing around, and he made his dissatisfaction clear with a glowering look. That was all it took. Darius Carson didn’t yell at crews. He didn’t waste his breath. Subcontractors who didn’t pull their weight were terminated, and that was that. But the ones who put the work in were more than fairly compensated. The policy gave him the pick of the proverbial litter when it came to work crews, and it was just one of the many reasons that Carson Contracting got first pick when it came to jobs.

As the men scurried off, Rebecca watched them with a stern expression on her face, but she didn’t say anything either. Still, Darius would have taken a bet that she’d make note of the guys who were slacking on the job, and any repeat offenders would be reported to him by day’s end. She took her task as the enforcer of company policy very seriously. He hadn’t just hired her because of their friendship; she was damned good at her job.

He walked up to the edge of the pit and looked down into it. His guess had been that they’d discovered a broken water main where none should be, but the guess turned out to be dead wrong. At the bottom of the pit, he saw a stone square about 2’ x 2’. It was perfectly shaped, glossy marble. It did not belong at the bottom of Mr. M’bala’s resort style swimming pool.

Darius frowned thoughtfully. He could see where someone had dug down alongside the marble slab, trying to determine how far down it went. It descended about a foot and then was swallowed by that strange clay that belonged nowhere near the desert.

“That’s…odd,” he said.

“Yep.” Rebecca nodded.

“Man made, though.”

“Yep. Can’t see any tool marks on it, but it’s perfectly square. I measured it. No way had that shape occurred naturally.”

“Artifact, maybe?” he asked.

“Could be. You should smell it.”

She kept her voice pitched low. A few of their employees were shifterkin like herself. Darius had hired his cousin Hex to work in the office just a few weeks ago, and she seemed to be working out okay. Hex could be flighty, but she was kin, and she wasn’t going to let Darius down. It would be a matter of pride with her. But many of the employees had no idea about Darius’s double nature, and he intended to keep it that way. Although he had the utmost faith in their loyalty to Carson Contracting, the fact that he sometimes turned into a giant scorpion could be a deal breaker for a vanilla human. Heck, sometimes he freaked other supernaturals out. He didn’t understand the big deal. It wasn’t like he turned into a giant spider like Rebecca’s mom had. Now that had been scary.

As a werescorpion, he had a surprisingly good sense of smell. He tracked his prey by smell and sound, mostly. So while his eyesight couldn’t compete with the werewolves, he could follow a scent trail that would stymie most shifters. If there was something odd about this stone construction, he would certainly be able to pick up on it.

“Did you scent anything?” he said to Rebecca, sotto voce.

“I’m…not sure yet. Maybe?”

Of course, as a shifterkin, her senses wouldn’t be as keen as his. But often, when Rebecca alerted him to something on one of their job sites, she’d been right. They’d found a few Native artifacts when they were digging out a new foundation. He usually alerted his contact at the Paiute reservation when he came across a new one, and they’d come out and identify it. Make sure it got to its rightful home. But sometimes, the things they dug up had power to them. Magical power. Those artifacts needed to be safely stored away lest they hurt someone on accident. He was beginning to suspect this would be one of those times.

“I’m going to climb down there and see if I can’t find the bottom edge,” he said aloud. “Get me a shovel?”

“Sure thing, boss,” replied Rebecca.

By the time she returned to the hole, Darius had already made quick work of scaling down into it. His crew had done a good job despite the strange soil. The excavation had nice firm walls that didn’t crumble out from under his feet. He managed to get to the bottom of the hole without incident.

A quick look up to the top reassured him that no one would see the odd things he was about to do. No one but Rebecca, that was, and she didn’t count. He dropped to a crouch, took a handful of soil, and brought it up to his nose. It smelled strangely acrid, like something had burnt it. But burnt sand didn’t turn into clay; it fused into glass. Nothing about this pit made sense. It hadn’t come about naturally. Something had created it. Someone had dumped a big slab of marble in the desert and sealed it away in a crapton of clay. It had the makings of some kind of magical storage, but he’d never heard of anything quite like it. Then again, magic wasn’t exactly his forte.

When he put his nose up right next to the marble—being extra careful not to touch it just yet—the electric smell of magic was so strong that it felt like it seared his nose hairs clean off. He recoiled from it, rubbing at his face. Like all shifters, most magic didn’t touch him. Of course, if a mage summoned real fire, he’d burn. But mental magics danced off him like water off a hot pan. He’d gotten that phrase off his werewolf friend Derek, and he liked it enough to steal it.

“I think we’re going to want Carl Hammond,” he called up to Rebecca. “And probably an appointment with Desert Oasis.”

She nodded, pulling the phone out of her pocket and already beginning to dial before he’d finished the sentence.

“Oh, toss that shovel down here first,” he called.

After a moment, the shovel came sliding down toward him.

“Thanks!” he called, but she didn’t answer.

He took a few moments to consider the marble. From the looks of it, it was a cube shape. A box, then. A sealed box of marble, encased in clay in the middle of the desert. The magic artifact inside was powerful enough to leak out, which meant that he didn’t want anything to do with it.

He pulled the work gloves out of his belt and put them on. He wasn’t about to touch this box with his bare hands, not without knowing what it did. He’d heard all kinds of stories about shifters who got burned by unknown magical artifacts. Some of them had been literally burned, and he’d had a pretty serious fear of fire when he was a kid after hearing some of those stories. From Rebecca, come to think of it.

The box would be heavy, but he wasn’t going to let anyone else touch it. He’d remove it himself. It would be a nice workout, the likes of which he didn’t usually get to enjoy. And once it was out, he’d let Carl take a look at it. The medicine man would know if it was a Native artifact, and he’d take charge of it if that was the case. But Darius didn’t think it smelled like that. He hadn’t smelled anything like this before.

In that case, he’d have to take it to Desert Oasis. Most people thought it was just another pawn shop, but the supernatural community of Las Vegas knew differently. Really, the pawn shop was a front for the real business. The important business. Desert Oasis was a storage service for dangerous magical artifacts. He’d done business with Grey James before, although he’d heard that Grey’s niece had taken over after the old man died a few months ago. Heart attack or something. Darius wasn’t worried, though. If Grey had chosen this woman as his successor, she’d be more than capable. They all knew what was at stake when it came to the Desert Oasis. Some of the artifacts stored there could kill. Darius knew that for a fact, because he’d put some of them there himself and slept better at night once he’d known they were stowed safely.

Just like he’d feel better once this mystery marble box and its even more mysterious contents were safely in behind the wards at the Oasis. The pizza and swimming and cooking shows would have to wait, but at least he would know he’d earned them.

He squared his shoulders and plunged the shovel into the clay, putting all his considerable muscle to work.