by J. P. Sloan
I pulled the brass key from my pocket and unlocked the cabinet. I examined the spines and irregular shapes of the texts. They were beautiful, really. Authentic. The knowledge they contained was hard-earned and painstakingly scribed, though their exteriors were unremarkable.
A lot like Emil, actually.
And someone had tried to steal them. I was filled with anger. Indignation. A righteous fury that I didn’t know was possible for a jaded middle-class suburbanite like myself.
It was that point that I realized I had hit my limit for bullshit.
I was done.
After a short perusal of Emil’s spiral bound notebook, I ran a finger along the line of spines until I reached a pale leather bound book. I pulled out the book, its leather cover oddly pale and smooth. For a moment, I realized what manner of leather with which it was bound, and quickly put it out of mind.
I set the book onto my writing desk and sat down with a heavy breath. Large letters of brown ink on its cover spelled in ornate cursive NETHER CURSES.
That son of a bitch wanted to play?
I was ready to play.
My phone rang at eleven o’clock that night. I almost didn’t hear it ringing. My mind was entirely immersed in the book of Nether Curses. I pushed away from the writing desk and snatched my phone from my coat.
“Hello?”
“You still in town?”
I struggled for a moment, but finally pegged the voice as Malosi’s.
“I am.”
“Penn Station, eleven o’clock.”
“What now?”
“Osterhaus. That’s when it’s going down.”
I stood up. “Penn Station?”
“Right. At eleven. He mentioned someone called Levantine.”
That arrogant bastard. “He’s selling the souls to a Levantine Cabal.”
“It’s a shot. Just thought you should know. I have to go.”
I hung up my phone and rubbed my neck. Osterhaus was selling to the Levantines, which meant he was probably meeting one of their agents at the train station. It made sense.
Penn Station. A foreign agent.
There was a chance. A very small, razor thin chance.
I had a little less than half the day to pull it off. I didn’t have much to work with. Just a book of curses.
And nothing to lose.
pulled up the circular drive of the Druid Hill Club with a freshly sealed envelope in my jacket pocket. The valet at the front of the mansion reached out and opened my door.
“I won’t be long,” I said, moving swiftly for the front doors.
Kim the Coatroom Queen greeted me with a measure of cheer for a change. If I was in a better mood, I might have stopped and capitalized on it, but I was on a mission. It was Saturday night, the club was in full swing, and I had a little less than twelve hours before my soul would become the property of beings older than Humanity itself.
Big Ben was entertaining a trio of young businessmen at the bar when I caught his attention. I took a seat and waited for him to find his way to me.
“Dorian, how’s tricks?”
I gave him what had to be an utterly unconvincing smile, and said, “I need my Glenny.”
“How much?”
“All of it.”
He paused as he turned toward the back bar and frowned at me with a hurt expression. “What’s up?”
“I’m moving.”
“The hell you say.”
“It’s true. Heading back to New York.”
He moved in close to whisper in my ear. “You in some kind of trouble?”
“I’d rather lie to you and say ‘No, Ben. Everything’s peachy.’“
“What’s the matter? Maybe there’s something I can do for you?”
I sighed and responded, “No, Ben. Everything’s peachy.”
More sweat than usual welled up in the creases of his forehead, and his eyes filled with misery. “Oh. This place won’t be the same without you. You know that?”
“It’s done okay without me, Ben. You, I’m not so sure.”
He smiled and turned to climb his ladder.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and swiveled on my stool to find Julian Bright looming behind me with a martini glass.
“I’ve been trying to call you,” he said with a warm grin. “There’s a matter or two we need to discuss.”
I stared at Bright. His energy, his vitality, his certainty. All of it was so foreign to me now.
He squinted and held up his free hand. “And this is a bad time, isn’t it?”
“Sorry. Just got a lot going on this weekend.”
He gave me a lavish nod. “Understood, say no more. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He turned to retreat into the crowd in the room.
I shouted, “Call me Monday.”
He looked over his shoulder and gave me a wink.
Ben returned with my Glenrothes Vintage Seventy-Eight and set it down gently on the bar.
“I’m going to miss this old bottle.”
“I’d rather you missed that scotch than me, Ben. You haven’t seen Carmen lately, have you?”
“Guess you haven’t heard. She quit this morning.”
“Not surprised.”
“You hear about Mama Clo?”
“Yes. I heard.” I pulled the envelope from my jacket and set it on the bar, gesturing for Ben to lean in. “Listen, I know you have a policy about not discussing the club owners.”
Ben bristled and straightened his spine. “Then you know I’m not going to continue this conversation.”
“I’m not going to talk about the owners. I have no idea who they are, and I know you won’t tell anyone. So there’s no point at all. I realize that.” I slid the envelope forward. “I realize that if Joey McHenry Sr. was one of the owners, there would be no point at all in my leaving a message for him with you. So I won’t even try.”
I gathered my whiskey and reached out and slapped Ben on the shoulder.
“Take care of this old club for me, Ben. When I’m old and gray, I gotta know this place is still standing.”
“I’ll keep an eye on her for you, Dorian.”
I turned and took my exit, cradling the bottle in my arm. As I approached the front door, Kim waved me down.
“Mister Lake? Excuse me.” She sidestepped the swing gate and looked down the hallway before closing in with me. “Carmen wanted me to give you a message.”
“When did you see her?”
“This morning. After she turned in her letter.”
“What’s the message?”
She reached up and pulled my head down to hers, planting a full, wet kiss onto my lips. I froze for a few seconds before she let me go.
“Just that.”
Kim darted back to the coatroom as I straightened up. She busied herself with some kind of work behind the gate as I looked on.
“All right then, thanks.”
She gave me a curt nod and turned her face away.
I stood in front of the white mansion as the valet retrieved my car, and took in the sight of that white-bricked beauty. Another home I was leaving behind.
My phone rang as my car pulled around the side of the building. It was Edgar.
I answered his call, immediately asking, “Can you get it?”
His voice was low and gravely.
“Dorian, you know I don’t deal in these kinds of materials.”
“I know, but can you get it?”
“Not tonight. But I know a guy.”
“I don’t trust ‘a guy.’ I trust you.”
“Yeah, that’s cool and everything, but this is human skin we’re talking about. I mean, what the hell do you need it for? That’s dark stuff, man.”
“I know.” I tipped the valet and took the wheel. “I just need to know if you can get it.”
Edgar paused, and continued in a whisper, “If I had time.”
“That’s exactly what I don’t have.”
“Look, if Wren knew I was even t
alking about this, she’d have my balls.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“It’s Saturday night, man―”
“Then that’s a no?”
He sighed heavily, then answered, “I gotta wait until she’s in bed. Then, I don’t know. I’ll try.”
“No good, Edgar. I need a yes or a no. Can’t do this on a maybe.”
“Dorian, you’re my friend. But if you’re getting into Netherwork, then I have to say, I don’t know if we can do this anymore.”
“I respect that.”
“Well, thanks.”
“So that’s a no?”
“It’s a no.”
“All right. Sorry I kept you up. Give Wren a hug for me.”
“Dorian, man, you doing okay?”
I hung up on him. I hated doing it, but I couldn’t let any more emotion seep into my brain that night. I had to find perhaps the darkest material I had ever worked with, which if I lived in the Old World wouldn’t have presented such a problem. But this close to the Presidium’s turf made it almost impossible.
I pulled out onto Cockeysville Road and cycled through my address book until I found Bollstadt’s number. He was a curse merchant. He had to have sources for curse materials. The curse I found in the book was very specific. It was neat, clean, targeted, and I had everything I would need to execute it.
Except for human skin.
Even if Bollstadt had a seller somewhere in Pennsylvania or upstate New York, I could make the drive before sunrise. However, as I juggled my phone and the steering wheel, his phone simply rang without answer or voice mail. Bollstadt wasn’t going to be any help.
I had to think. Morgues, cemeteries, how was I going to find skin? A shiver flickered across my lower back as I voiced my thoughts out loud, startling myself with the darkness of my own words.
Then it dawned on me.
The book.
It would be a tremendous waste, but the content of the book would be preserved. The only use for the exotic binding leather was perpetuating the charge of energy held within its pages. Why Emil felt the book needed a charged binding to begin with was beyond me, but there probably was a good reason. At the moment, I was willing to risk it. I didn’t need much. The back cover would be all I needed.
I took the long route home, driving past Osterhaus’ office on Light Street. Something tugged at my core as I drove by as if a thread of floss were tied around my organs and gently pulled them toward his building.
It had to be the blood, my consideration for my contract. I was bound to my own blood, and I could feel it lurking somewhere in the basement of that brownstone, hiding in a drawer, waiting for its fate.
As I drove through downtown, something occurred to me. I was given my consideration. Something out there had answered the contract. And now I owed it. Even if I managed to secure my soul contract and nullified it, the being that gave me the very thing I asked for would take it back, and it was going to expect interest.
Carmen was in that position that night. I mused as I returned home, exhausted, but unable to stop moving, what her penalty would be? She was given success in her job, a secure relationship, and the respect of her peers. I assumed it would all come crashing around her ankles. Her relationship was already ruined. But she didn’t need the Dark Choir to accomplish that.
The Dark Choir. The beings older than God. Emil always spoke of them in hushed tones as if they were always listening. I found that thought presently horrifying.
I only had one more call to make, but decided to save it for the morning. I really didn’t want to antagonize the Syrian if at all possible, but he was my nuclear option. Figuring it was best to let sleeping nukes lie, I decided to rehearse the Nether Curse.
I found the mechanics of Netherwork to be entirely alien. All of my astral anchor points were useless in this practice. The source of power was rooted in something brutal, visceral, infernal. The sense of trust in the Cosmos which I had cultivated over the years had become instantly irrelevant. There was no trust in this rite. Only anger, fear, and pain.
There was no way around it. This spell was going to hurt. Bad. It was meant to deal real damage. Permanent damage. It was ancient, pulled from the mind of early civilizations that treated human life as cheap and transient. It was born from a time when the Dark Choir treated more closely with our world, before the human mind had begun to build up its collective bulwarks of logic, science, and reason. A time when the woods were home to monsters, natural disaster was the vengeance of the gods, and the winter was the Earth turning its back on humanity.
All of this I was prepared to unleash on Osterhaus. Never before had I used magic to harm. But I needed to do more than try to reason with Osterhaus. I needed to terrorize him. From what I had learned of the man in the last week, I was confident he would respond. With any luck at all, I wouldn’t even need the curse.
But as with any deadly weapon, I wouldn’t wield it without being willing to use it. Osterhaus had shown he was willing to lie and cheat. Malosi’s fear of the man showed me that even though he practiced his arts with a mercenary’s hand, he wasn’t the rank amateur I had hoped he would be.
Besides, he was pissing me off.
And the tricky thing about screwing with pissed off practitioners is, invariably, they screw you back.
he sun rose over Baltimore that chilly Sunday morning with only a pale tease of warmth spilling from red clouds to the east. The pink-orange light flooded into my bedroom between the blinds, casting savage shadows across my mirror as I inspected the fresh bandages on my arms. The wounds from the ritual finally stopped bleeding sometime around four a.m., and I was still feeling light-headed as I buttoned up a black dress shirt. I reached for the purple silk vest I had pulled from my closet earlier. It was a vivid color. Hard to miss. Which was precisely the point.
I made myself an egg and ham breakfast and powered down two glasses of orange juice. I wasn’t sure if it was good for blood loss, but they always seem eager to pour orange juice down your throat when you donate blood, so I went with it. After breakfast, I took a look at the workspace I had created in the front room the previous night. Most of the mess was cleaned up already. The book of Nether Curses lay on the center of my coffee table, closed.
It was waiting for my final act.
The pale brown, impossibly smooth leather glistened in the morning light. It seemed eager, almost willing to surrender part of its gruesome binding. Something inside wanted to get free. I could sense that. Every hermetic ethic was screaming in my brain to think twice about dismantling Emil’s binding, but I was out of options. I had five hours before Osterhaus resold my soul. I couldn’t wait.
I cracked my knuckles and crouched down in front of the book. My athame, an unremarkable steel pocketknife, was still lying next to the tome. I reached for the blade and slid its tip beneath the twine along the bottom of the spine.
A knock on my front door made me jump, tugging the twine without cutting it. I pulled the blade away from the book and set it gently on the coffee table before answering the door.
I opened my front door to a blast of chilly October air and Edgar Swain.
“Hey,” he said, huddling his shoulders up to his ears.
“Morning.”
He was wearing nothing warmer than his usual Hawaiian print shirt and a pair of jeans.
“So, I’m freezing to death.”
I opened the door and ushered him into the foyer. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that Edgar had ever set foot inside my house.
He coughed and cleared his throat as he set down a small cooler.
“Need some coffee?” I asked.
“No, man. I’m kind of cranked on a few dozen cups of coffee already.” He looked at me for a moment, his drooping eyes filling with anxiety. “Wren woke up.”
“Hmm?”
“Last night. She woke up. I, uh, I told her what you were looking for.”
“Did she completely lose her shit?”
He smi
led and shrugged. “Not really. Actually, yeah. She did. But not on you.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She was pissed at me, man. She said, ‘Edgar, you need to quit being such a prick, pull your head out of your ass, and go help your friend.’ So, here I am.”
I looked down at the cooler with a giddy feeling in my chest. “That’s―”
“Yeah. Don’t ask me how I got it, and do not ask if I can get it ever again because I can’t.”
I crouched down and put a hand on the cooler. “Edgar. God. I don’t know what to say.”
“‘Thank you’ usually works pretty good in times like this.”
I stood up and gave Edgar a hug. “Thank you.”
He squirmed out of my arms and chuckled. “Yeah, okay.” He turned and looked around my living room. “Wow. These are your digs, huh?”
“This is it.”
“I was expecting something, I don’t know, less Old Lady-ish.”
“Thanks for that.”
His eyes centered on the Nether Curse tome on my table, and the cabinet of dark wood standing in front of my fireplace. He took two slow steps into the front room and turned back to me.
“Is that―?”
“Yeah.”
“Holy shit. I thought you were keeping these things caged up? What’s going on with you?”
“A lot’s happened.”
“Feel like sharing?”
I shook my head. “Soon. I’ll tell you and Wren what’s going on. But not right now.”
“Why not? Maybe I can help.”
“You have. You always have. Hell, I feel like I’m never the one who helps you.”
His mouth curled into a frown and he put his hands on his hips. “Don’t get weird on me, man.”
“Sorry.”
He lingered for a moment, then slapped his thighs. “Well, okay. You do your thing, then. And when it’s done, let’s get some pizza.”
“That sounds pretty good to me.”
He nodded, lingered, then nodded again before stepping out of my front door, leaving me with a cooler of human skin.
A wave of revulsion washed through my stomach as I stared at the cooler. Decades old human skin, tanned and worn from use was one thing. I honestly didn’t want to know how Edgar acquired it, but the fact that it required a cooler hinted that it was perhaps fresher than I was planning on. I retrieved a pair of rubber gloves from under the kitchen sink and delicately opened the cooler.
