Cauldron

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Go home. And…put some clothes on.”

  He loped toward the darker shadows at the edge of the lot and shifted back to his wolf form before vanishing into the night. I didn’t have all the answers, but I’d accomplished something.

  Miro wasn’t imagining the disappearances, and whatever was snatching people wasn’t just a sick human being. It stank of foul magic, and it wasn’t human or a shifter. That narrowed down the possibilities, at least a little. I smiled. I had a job to do.

  By the time I got back to the rooming house where I lived, dinner was over. Mrs. Branson, the landlady, included a hot supper in the cost of the room, which I appreciated and rarely missed. She had put a plate in the icebox for me, and the meatloaf wasn’t completely cold yet.

  I sat down at the table and tucked a napkin under my chin. Just as I started to eat, Officer Colin Kennedy, a beat cop with the Cleveland police, trudged in and grabbed the remaining plate from the icebox.

  “Long day?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

  “My feet are killing me.” Colin ate like the food might disappear. So did I. I’d gone hungry too many times growing up to ever waste a good meal, and Mrs. Branson’s cooking was surprisingly good.

  “There you are.” Aislin, Colin’s wife, swept into the kitchen with a big smile for both of us. “You’re both late tonight.”

  “Can’t be helped.” Colin sighed.

  “Goes with the job,” I said with a shrug.

  Our rooming house wasn’t near the theater, but Mrs. Branson was also one of Ben Lavecchia’s people. She took in odd ducks, like me, and didn’t ask nosy questions. I suspected that Oscar, the other tenant, was a shifter of some sort. So long as no one got eaten when the moon was full, it really wasn’t any of my business.

  “You know anything about people going missing over in the Russian neighborhoods?” I asked through a mouth full of meatloaf.

  Colin frowned. “Heard something like that. Not much. Those folks stick pretty much to themselves. Why? You got a lead?”

  “Maybe.” I told him about my stroll. “I don’t think whatever’s taking people is human.” Colin and Aislin were among the few who knew my secret. Colin and I had helped each other out a time or two, hunting down the bad guys.

  “Interesting,” Colin said, wiping his mouth. “We’ve been on alert for anarchists. Some dotty Brit is spouting off about the end of the world, and that’s got dodgers here thinking that if the world’s going to end, there’s no need for government.”

  I was just about to respond when an insistent knock sounded at the door. Colin drew his service weapon, and Aislin, never one to be left out of the action, grabbed an iron frying pan from the stove. I went to the door and found a flunky from the speakeasy nervously twisting his cap.

  “You Mr. Mack?” he asked, avoiding eye contact. The skinny kid barely came up to the middle of my chest and looked like a stiff wind would blow him over. “Mr. Lavecchia sent me to fetch you. Says it’s important.”

  My eyes narrowed. “Which Mr. Lavecchia?” Ben was a friend but damned if I’d dance to his father’s tune.

  “Mr. Ben. Please, he said to bring you right back.”

  “Is everything okay?” Colin called from behind me.

  I didn’t know what business Ben needed help with, but I didn’t want to drag Colin into it. “Yeah, I’m good. I need to go deal with some trouble over at the theater.” With that, I grabbed my coat and followed the messenger outside.

  I wondered what had gone wrong enough for Ben to send for me. He couldn’t exactly call for the cops if he had a problem at the speakeasy—another reason I didn’t want to involve Colin—but the Lavecchias had their own muscle to deal with troublemakers.

  The messenger brought me in one of the back entrances to the club, and my intuition told me something was very wrong. For a few seconds, I wondered if it was a set-up, but Ben had no reason to be angry with me, and since he knew what I was, I didn’t figure him for stupid. That meant that whatever had gone wrong had spooked Ben, and a guy who was that mobbed-up didn’t scare easily.

  Ben was waiting in the back hall, near the secret tunnel they used to bring in shipments of illegal liquor. He stopped pacing and waved me over. I looked down and found a dead man on the floor.

  “We’ve got trouble,” Ben said, gently turning the man’s head with the toe of his wingtip. “See those marks? This isn’t a Mob hit, or a stick-up. We’ve got a vamp on the loose.”

  3

  “Mack. Why am I not surprised to see you here?” Special Agent Jack West, Supernatural Secret Service, took one look at me and pinched the bridge of his nose as if to hold off a migraine. I had that effect on some people.

  “Probably because you’re reasonably smart, and you know I belong here, same as you.”

  West and I had history. He knew about me, and we’d tangled several times over the years. Sometimes we were on the same side, other times, not so much. With his slicked back hair, sharp suit, and fedora, West looked more like a hotshot gambler or Chicago hitman than a Fed. The SSS dealt with supernatural problems—something I had no issue with—and kept an eye on people with special abilities—something I most definitely had a beef about. On the other hand, West had pull, so he could be handy to have on my side—when he wasn’t being an asshole.

  “You seen any vamps around?” West asked me, raising an eyebrow.

  “Not as such, no. But people have been going missing over in Moscow Heights. I went to take a look—favor to a friend. Something with dark magic has been there. I didn’t see who or what it was, but there was no mistaking the traces they left behind.”

  I was doubly bound to get to the bottom of the problem, first because of my vow to Krukis, and second, because I’d been invited—more like conscripted—into the Shadow Council, a loose alliance of people with extraordinary abilities who tried to keep the world safe from supernatural threats. West knew about Krukis, but not about the Council.

  “You get anything from the stiff?” West asked, jerking his head toward the dead guy.

  Ben cleared the room, leaving just him, West, me, and the corpse. I closed my eyes and called my magic. When I opened my eyes, I saw what usually stayed hidden. Ben’s aura glowed a deep blue—not surprising for a witch of his power. West had a slightly silver glow, something I’d confronted him on in the past. He always blew me off or made a joke of it. I suspected his “intuition” might be a bit more psychic than he wanted to admit.

  When I peered at the dead man, I saw faint traces of the blood-red wisps I’d seen in Moscow Heights. Could there be two creatures snatching people? Sure. Was it likely? No.

  I looked back at Ben. “Can you see it?”

  Ben nodded. “You?”

  “Yeah. Same red glow I saw in Miro’s neighborhood. Which means we don’t just have a vamp gone feral, but a witch-vamp.” It wasn’t illegal to be a vampire in Cleveland, so long as you didn’t snack on unwilling people or kill anyone. Like the shifters, vamps tended to do their best to avoid coming to the notice of guys like West—or me. We got called when one went rogue.

  “Where’d you find him?” West asked. He knelt beside the body, tipping up his hat to let him see better, but he didn’t touch anything, just gave the dead guy a very intense once-over.

  “Out back, with the garbage,” Ben said. “One of the kitchen boys found him when they took out the trash.”

  “You turn any of their kind away from the club lately?” West always cut right to the chase.

  “No. They’re welcome like anyone else, long as they pay their tab and don’t make trouble.”

  The dead man was poorly dressed, probably a vagrant, and smelled like he hadn’t bathed in a long time. Most vamps who weren’t absolutely desperate for blood were more discriminating, and not just because of an excellent sense of smell. They usually had no difficulty finding willing donors who enjoyed the danger. The only vamps I’d ever known to start chomping on hobos were outcasts. But that didn’t square with th
e traces of power I’d seen.

  “Any reason for someone from the family business to decide to leave you a warning?” I asked.

  “None that I’ve heard about,” Ben replied. “I do my best to stay out of what they do. But fucking around with the vamps isn’t like them.”

  “You brought us down here,” I said.

  “I brought you here. He showed up on his own,” Ben said with a pointed glare at West. “What was I gonna do? Call the cops?”

  Figured. “Fair enough. But you didn’t have your boys take care of it. Why?”

  Ben looked like he was deciding how much to say. “I’ve been hearing things, about the vamps. Not the ones who’ve lived here for a while—they know their place and how to get along. But there’ve been whispers about some new vamps who don’t play by the rules. Russian vamps.”

  West and I exchanged glances. I’d been in Cleveland for more than a decade without any trouble from the Russians. Now I had Ruskies coming out my ears—Miro’s missing neighbors, Ben’s dead vamp, Grace’s Countess-in-exile, and Colin’s anarchists.

  “Is there a turf war no one’s told us about?” West asked, standing and brushing non-existent lint from his suit. “Maybe the Russian Mob making a move on your old man’s territory?”

  Ben snorted. “Seriously? No. First—if I thought it was related to business, you two would be the last people I’d call. And second?” He shook his head. “No. The Russians are thugs. Muscle. Not businessmen.”

  Once upon a time, back when I was mortal, I might have had objections to being allied with someone like Ben Lavecchia, a man with criminal ties and unholy powers. Then I saw the pain and death that “legitimate” businessmen like Carnegie and Frick caused, and my moral compass tilted a little. Ben—and West, in his own way—had honor. I could work with honorable men.

  “I have some contacts among the vamps,” I said. “I’ll see if anyone is willing to talk.”

  “We have people in Moscow Heights,” West said.

  Of course he did. I reined in my anger, reminding myself that the SSS wasn’t the Pinkertons. West wasn’t above throwing his weight—and his badge—around, but he’d told me flat out when we first met that, in his unofficial opinion, the Pinkertons had fucked up big-time in Homestead. “I’ll ask around.”

  Ben nodded. “Yeah, I already put out the word. But I don’t expect to hear anything from the Family. This wasn’t a hit, and it wasn’t a shake-down gone wrong. This guy was dinner, and whoever drank him tossed out the leftovers with the trash.”

  West and I left the speakeasy together. “Where’s your shiny Buick?” I asked. As usual, I’d walked, but then again, I didn’t have West’s stylish reputation to uphold.

  “I parked it a couple of blocks away. Didn’t want to make Lavecchia’s pop nervous.”

  “And you just happened to be in town when a vamp goes feral?” I didn’t try to hide my skepticism.

  “How about we go get a cup of coffee and talk?” West lifted his collar against the cold wind.

  If I were going to trust a Fed—which I wouldn’t, at least not completely—I’d probably trust West. And maybe I should get over the fact that a goddamn Pinkerton beat me to death, but I’m pissy like that and hold grudges. Still, what happened before wasn’t West’s fault, and he’d been decent to me while still being a pain in the ass. So I figured that I might as well go along with it, because my gut told me that whatever was actually going on was big.

  The all-night diner smelled like bacon grease and burnt coffee. West hailed a waitress to bring us two cups of java and slices of their best pie. Betty, the waitress, gave him a bright smile, and when she brought our food, she slipped him a note that I figured said when she got off work. West had that effect on people. A real charmer—when he wasn’t being a son of a bitch. Guess which side of him I got to see?

  “So, talk.” I stirred more sugar than usual into my black coffee and drank it fast, letting the heat and sweetness cover up the bottom-of-the-pot taste.

  “I think the dead guy was a warning.” West got us a table in the corner so we could both sit with our backs to the wall and have a view of the door while being far away from the big glass windows. The diner’s neon sign cast the sidewalk in a crimson glow.

  “I’ll buy that he was a message. But who was supposed to get the hint? Ben? His pops?” I’d ended up with a piece of the banana cream pie and intended to enjoy it.

  West shrugged. “Dunno. But I think we’re being played for chumps here, and I don’t like it.”

  “Well, at least we agree on something.” I finished my coffee and hoped that when the waitress refilled it, she’d have a fresh pot. “What do you know about anarchists?”

  West’s eyebrows rose. “They’re bad news. Why?”

  “C’mon. You want info from me, you’re gonna have to share, too.”

  West’s expression soured, but it could have been the coffee. “We’ve had reports that there are troublemakers in town. Eastern European—maybe Russian.”

  “Bolsheviks?” We’d all heard about the bloody revolution and the deaths of the Tsar and his family. I didn’t figure the guy had been a saint, but at least his kids and his dog deserved better.

  “White Russians,” West replied. “Anti-Bolsheviks. I appreciate that they’re against the Reds, but most of them are nutty as a fruitcake. There’s always a lost prince or princess showing up to lay a ‘true claim’ to the throne. They don’t just want to toss out the Leninists—they want a new monarchy.”

  “Do you think that any real heir survived?” From what I’d seen in the paper, the wily monk Rasputin, the Tsar, and the entire royal family—along with their loyal servants—got massacred in cold blood.

  “Doubtful,” West said through a mouthful of pie. “I mean, if you go out far enough, there’s probably a second cousin who might technically be next in line since everyone else is dead, but that’s not the kind of claim that’s going to hold water.”

  I was thinking about the fancy luncheon Grace had asked me to attend. That crowd was the upper crust end of the same sad pipe dream. “I know what it’s like to have to leave my homeland,” I said quietly. “Many people dream of things getting better so they can go back again.”

  West stared at me like he was seeing me for the first time. Maybe he was just remembering that I’m a lot older than I look. “I can buy that,” he said finally and finished the rest of his coffee without wincing. Betty swooped in to refill both our cups. This batch didn’t smell any better. Maybe the regulars liked it burned.

  “The thing about anarchists is, they just like to burn things down and have riots,” West continued. “And if they organize—”

  “Organized anarchists?” I mocked. “Isn’t that—”

  “An oxymoron?” West replied with a twitch of a smile. “Maybe. But stay with me. If they loosely organize, they might decide to pick another target. An American target. And once the rioting starts, the Pinkertons get called in, and no one is too precise about who’s who when the brass knuckles come out.”

  He had me, and he knew it. Hell, I’d kinda figured that much out on my own. “I hear there’s a Countess in town who’s got the caviar crowd all a-twitter,” I replied, figuring I owed him something.

  West’s smile broadened. “Ah, Grace Harringworth’s at it again, isn’t she? Cleveland’s debutante spy. Whatever she drags you into, be sure to take notes, and try not to get anyone killed.”

  I gave him a look that was as bitter as my coffee. “Do you think the Countess has any connection to the anarchists?”

  West took his time to answer, like he was thinking it over. “Maybe indirectly. If so, the money is calling all the shots, and the anarchists are the muscle. There’s probably someone in the middle, playing both ends. Whoever that is could be the connection to the rogue vamps. But we’re missing pieces. I can’t figure out the big picture.”

  “I speak a little Russian,” I said before I could stop myself. “Understand it better than I can talk it, but
I can follow a conversation. Lots of guys in the mills spoke it.”

  I could see West sizing me up, figuring out what I was offering without me even having to put it into words. “You think you could infiltrate a meeting?”

  “Maybe. I can certainly look the part.”

  He nodded. “It could work. If you went to one of their rallies, you might be able to tell whether they’re just blowing smoke, or if there’s actually a plan.”

  “Or I could be the unlucky SOB who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time when a riot breaks out.”

  “Maybe,” West agreed. “I can get you sprung if you get arrested. Not much even Ben can do if you get dead. Again.”

  “Funny. So if I’m carrying tales from what Grace hears and being your shill in the anarchist meeting, what are you doing besides sitting on your thumbs?”

  West smirked. “Doing what I do best. Intimidating the cops and charming the ladies.”

  “Better than the other way around, I guess.”

  West muttered a phrase not usually said in polite company, but then again, the crowd in the diner didn’t look like they’d care. “I’ll work my channels, you work yours. I’ve got the feeling that there’s mutual benefit here, much as it pains me to say it.”

  I grinned. “Admit it, Jackie. You missed working with me.”

  “Like a bad case of the clap,” he replied. “I’m just pragmatic.”

  “I always said you were a prick.”

  He glowered. “That’s not the same.”

  For as much fun as it was to rile West up, I didn’t need him as an enemy. All things considered, he wasn’t a bad guy—as Feds went. “Geez-Louise, West. Can’t you take a joke? Somebody put too much starch in your shorts?”

  West rolled his eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”

  “Maybe. Takes one to know one.”

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again, and I took that as a victory.