Lone Werewolf Duology (bxb)

19. Scholastic Integrity

Volya gawked at Damir. "What... what's going on?"

Surely, he misunderstood. His hearing was superb, but with the rushing water and thin mountain air, who knows.

"Let's find a quieter place to talk it over." Whatever that it was.

"No, Volya, we won't." Damir's cigarette made another loop in and out of his mouth. At the end of the move, it practically stopped trembling and sprinkling the pristine wilderness with burned tobacco. Damir rolled his head back, closing his eyes. A white plume of smoke aimed upward, but jerked in three different directions by the crazy wind. "I let curiosity overpower my judgment as is. I shouldn't even come this far."

Volya glanced over his shoulder at the hidden cave. "You came here with us. Dumping us at the doorstep sucks."

"Agreed. I should have dropped you off in Baksan and returned to Moscow."

This was getting better and better. "That's not what I meant!"

"I know that." Damir let the cigarette linger between his fingers, forgotten, threatening to burn his knuckles. "You, Nadezhda, Kramola and the rest have a compelling moral reason to be here. It's your heritage. You're living it. Me? Quite the opposite."

Volya suppressed a scream. "You're our expert. We invited you in." Technically, he bullied the Crones into inviting Damir, but close enough.

"It's an illegal dig. Even knowing that you're about to hack through that passage hoping to discover an undisturbed Bronze Age burial and..." Damir gave Kramola a careful look and settled for waving his hand.

"Don't be shy now. What were you going to say? Vandalize it? Rob it?"

A line of ash falling off the cigarette was turning from gray to white in the mud. "It compromises my integrity."

Volya licked his lips.

"It doesn't have to be an illegal dig," he said. "At least not completely."

Instead of panic he felt, confidence suffused his voice. "In fact, you're here to ensure that we do it by the book."

Damir scoffed.

"Do you really think that an excavation can only be done correctly if a proper authority conducted it? This is Russia." Volya wanted to add how Damir's own faculty ignored all the meticulous research he had done, because Nesterov carried influence. How everything in human chains of command was rotten. How corruption permeated everything here, including archaeology.

His impassioned tirade remained in his head, however. Damir's face was transparent for once—he had been making those same arguments on their way here. It was better to let him mull it over, not beat him over the head with what he already knew.

Volya took a deep breath in, curbing his anger. He wished he could imitate the siren's voice that had propelled Liam to fame. "After we're done, we'll seal the cave properly, and you can report the find. Locals tipped you off or something. Your supervisors know you travel a lot, so they would buy it."

Damir's features sharpened into an expression that Volya could only describe as hunger. He could smell the man's sweat. So, he followed up with an ace up his sleeve. "You'd said composite skeletons were rare, right?"

"Very." Even this short word didn't come out of Damir's mouth easily. Perspiration dotted his temples. His eyes burrowed into Volya's, like, I know what you're doing.

Volya rolled his shoulders, skirting a dangerous boundary. Where did trying to convince ended and subduing another's will began? He thought he could sense it. "Then you can excavate next summer with all the officialdom's paperwork in hand. With all the bells and whistles. You will be the first to find the Bronze Age composite skeletons in Russia."