Owl and the Tiger Thieves

by Kristi Charish

  “Says the last family to stay here was the Smiths, a family of four from Massachusetts,” Artemis said from the chesterfield, where he’d sat down to read the guest book, his bejeweled boots resting on the coffee table.

  Considering that there were children’s activities circled on the map and two of the sun hats were child-sized, that made sense.

  Next I checked the bookshelf. More pamphlets: tours of the glass factories, city canals, kids’ books.

  “I don’t think this place has been cleaned since the Smiths were here,” I said.

  Artemis shrugged. “Maybe they couldn’t be bothered. Or maybe they got tired of catering to tourists.”

  “In Venice?” That was how most people paid the rent.

  Artemis shrugged, running a finger over the coffee table, pulling it back covered in dust. “I’ve given up trying to figure out what you humans do and why. Maybe someone died? Like the person running this place.”

  “Or the guests,” I said. I headed into the bedroom and opened the dresser, where I found four passports along with a purse. I flipped through the first one, skipping the photos—I didn’t want their owners to be personalized. They were the passports of the Smiths, a nuclear family of four. June 10 of this year was the customs stamp. June—and this was November. I held them up. “These have been here for five months.”

  “Explains the sunscreen and hats, then, doesn’t it?”

  I made a face at Artemis’s cheerful tone. “Get off the couch and look for something useful, will you?”

  I picked a couple of books off the shelf and checked the covers. English—mysteries, a couple of adventure thrillers, and the odd romance novel mixed in with self-discovery new-age stuff. The kinds of books you pick up at the airport to read on vacation. Though from the spines most of them looked as though they’d been only half read, then discarded. Odd—usually a vacation rental library got more use. I know I’d gone through many a hostel bookshelf on short trips. It seemed odd that these would all be left half read, with dust catching on their spines and pages. Though maybe the kind of people who would rent an apartment in Venice had better things to do than read.

  “Look at this,” Artemis called from across the apartment. He’d found a piece of baroque wallpaper that had been pulled free and then taped back into place. Carefully he pulled at it, revealing a bronze-colored handle behind.

  He took hold of it and, with obvious effort and a generous dusting of plaster, managed to turn it. The wall creaked and split down its seam, exposing a door that opened. I did my best to clear out the cloud of dust that emerged, waving my arm. When that failed, I used my sleeve to cover my nose and mouth.

  When the dust settled, it revealed an unlit wooden alcove, large enough to house a gas lamp casing and a stairwell leading down. A hidden staircase in a hidden apartment.

  “Looks like our host has a voyeuristic predisposition,” Artemis said, peering over my shoulder. Somehow I didn’t think the voyeurism was just for looking.

  Artemis’s nostrils flared. “And a vampiric one.”

  As the dust settled, I picked up the scent. It was reminiscent of lily of the valley, which I’d started to suspect I’d find, but it was wrong—rotten wrong, as in more than usual. And it was faint. Not enough to warrant my gas mask but enough to make me wary.

  I frowned as I shone my flashlight around the alcove. With the missing vacationers, I’d been expecting as much, but the scent was throwing me off.

  Captain seemed attracted by the strange scent as well, sniffing the stairs and walls, then snorting, as if not sure what he’d found. With the exception of the lamp fixture it was bare; a ragged hole cut out of the wall revealing a century or so of dusty timber and bricks, the parts that needed the most structural attention hastily patched up with mismatched building supplies.

  Still, it was large and wide enough for a short adult to comfortably fit inside.

  “Well?” Artemis asked me.

  It took me a second to realize he was asking for my opinion. “Sometimes the best hiding spots are the obvious ones no one suspects,” I said, and ducked through.

  Artemis followed, swearing at the plaster that rained down on us, which was more than happy to settle on his jacket and the highlights of his hair. Mine too, for that matter; the difference was I didn’t care.

  As soon as Artemis was through, the hidden door slid back into place behind us.

  “Oh, shit!” I pushed Artemis aside as I scrambled to block the door with my foot, but it was no use. I ran my hands over the back of the door but couldn’t find a release.

  I aimed the flashlight down the stairs. Well, there were no screams of terror or cackling laughter—yet.

  I tested the first step, easing my weight to make certain it would hold. I made it four steps before I realized that Artemis and Captain weren’t behind me.

  I aimed the flashlight at the two of them, still hugging the top of the stairs. “Well? Are you coming or not?”

  Captain didn’t need a second prodding. He darted ahead of me, sniffing nose in the air.

  “Have I mentioned that I hate fucking vampires?” Artemis said, as I felt his weight settle onto the steps.

  My God. We had something in common.

  The stairwell was short—only a flight of steps that wound its way down. At the bottom, I narrowly missed hitting my head against a wooden ceiling beam—would have if I hadn’t checked. It’s amazing how something as simple as good nutrition has altered our architecture over the course of a few centuries.

  “You have a bad habit of finding staircases that lead nowhere good,” Artemis said. “What’s under here?”

  “Hard to say. Before we hit the flooded parts? Maybe another floor—two, tops—but below that? There could easily be another flooded three stories built on Roman-era dwellings. And then there’s disease. A bad case of the plague or cholera and the remains of an entire family, wiped out and forgotten.” I shrugged and avoided another beam; it was easier now that I had my eye out for them.

  “Buried through the ages.”

  The scent of still water got stronger, and I could hear the canal licking against the foundations. “Or in this case drowned. Unfortunately, salty swamp water isn’t great for the preservation of books and parchment.” Which was what I was hoping the Illuminati and Leonardo had left behind. I stopped my descent as my flashlight reflected off shallow water a few feet below. “Careful,” I said as I eased my foot under and tested the first submerged step. “You never know what’s rotted until you fall through.” Despite my trepidation, the first step held, as did the second. A few steps later I felt a sturdier platform under my foot.

  “Let me phrase that another way. What are we looking for?”

  “Besides whoever has it in for tourists?” I asked, shining the flashlight around me. There were more stairs under the water, but that wasn’t what I was interested in. I aimed my flashlight beam at the image carved into the door: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man. “In a word? Da Vinci’s workshop.”

  Artemis let out a low whistle. “So, this is where Leonardo built his weapons against the supernatural?”

  “Amongst other things,” I said as I checked the door for traps and whether it could be opened without collapsing. “According to the IAA records and the Vatican investigators, this was a suspected hideout of his. Off the books, of course.”

  “Would have thought the Vatican was all for wiping out supernaturals,” Artemis said.

  “Often they were, but even they balked at using the occult.”

  “Weren’t willing to burn their own immortal souls to save everyone else’s?”

  “Something like that.” The door seemed stable enough and, more important, wasn’t locked. I pushed it open and shone my flashlight around.

  It was a small, damp workshop. The workroom had a low ceiling, held up with wood beams that had accumulated an impressive amount of rot over the decades. There was an old glass oil lamp sitting on a wooden desk—also waterlogged—and an accumu
lation of loose-leaf papers, well, everywhere: on the desk, pinned to the wall above the desk, shoved into the numerous bookshelves that cluttered the wall space. They all had the yellow tinge and curled edges that denoted neglect. And there were candles, a lot of candles, used and mismatched, the wax dripping off the holders and cooled into puddles on the floor and furniture. As I swept the low ceiling with my flashlight beam, I spotted incandescent bulbs suspended overhead.

  Somehow the idea that someone had decided to run electricity through here didn’t make me feel any more comfortable.

  Captain let out a growl as he crept into the room, huffing near the table’s seat, trying to parse the scents, his hackles raised.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone has been here in a while,” Artemis said, too close to my ear for comfort.

  “No shit!” I jumped back into Artemis as something mechanical rumbled and sputtered to life in the workshop. Captain bleated and abandoned the puddle he’d been sniffing at warily, fleeing for the safety of my feet.

  It took me a second to identify the rumbling; a water pump had turned on in the room, a jerry-rigged electric number that quickly began to drain the puddles, depositing the water somewhere behind the walls.

  Well, at least whoever was down here made a passing effort to keep the water at bay—not that it made me feel any better about the electricity.

  “Hello? Anyone in there?” I said, running the flashlight beam around the workshop once again.

  When there was no reply, I stepped inside. No electricity coursed through me. I spotted Captain creeping up to one of the many offending puddles the pump couldn’t reach. I pulled him back. “I don’t need a fried cat,” I told him. With no idea where the electricity had been wired, I couldn’t guarantee any of the floor was safe. Any and every puddle could be lethal. Captain bleated but otherwise avoided the puddles.

  As the air circulated, I picked up the same lilylike scent I’d noted on the way down, stronger this time. Though I still had no idea what the other mingling scents were, I realized what was missing: it didn’t have the narcotic-like effect. There was nothing, not even a buzz to rival a bottle of glue.

  “Artemis, are you certain these are vampires?” I headed to the desk and carefully began to rifle through the discarded papers, lifting their edges with the sleeve of my shirt so as not to damage them any more than the water already had.

  There were scrolls and more scrolls tucked into cubbies, lying on the desk, and pinned up onto the damp plaster, as if the person behind them gave little care to their state, despite the intricate work.

  “Vampire—singular,” Artemis said, a frown touching his face. “I only scented one—though you’re right, there is something . . . off. ‘Diseased’ might be the closest thing.”

  “I didn’t think supernaturals could get sick.”

  “It’s rare, even for vampires, and usually traces back to a wasting curse of some sort—which I definitely don’t pick up a trace of—magic, that is.”

  I wasn’t sure what was worse: a supernatural who got his kicks fulfilling a deep-seated Venetian fantasy of knocking off tourists or one who was sloppy about . . . well . . . everything.

  Regardless of the absence of a narcotic-like effect, I decided it was high time to put my gas mask on. There were things besides vampire pheromones lurking in waterlogged buildings that could do damage to your lungs.

  “Vampires usually seek out drier places,” I said.

  Instead of replying to that, Artemis asked, “What the hell is wrong with your cat?”

  It took me a second to locate Captain. He’d managed to wedge half his body into a pigeonhole cabinet that had been packed with scrolls. His hind legs kicked out as he tried to wedge himself farther in.

  It wasn’t unusual for him to chase his nose . . .

  He gave a triumphant chirp and shimmied his way out. In his mouth was a scroll, which he deposited by my feet before sitting back on his haunches and wrapping his tail around them.

  I picked it up. There were traces of green algae growing on the edges, and the corners were curled with humidity.

  “Blueprints—for a pump of some sort.” I frowned at the signature in the corner. No, that couldn’t be right. I mean, these couldn’t be more than a few decades old . . .

  “What?”

  I checked the paper. It was a reproduction of the kind of blueprint used back in the sixteenth century, but it was definitely recent. I didn’t think any paper of any kind could last down here for ten years, let alone more than five hundred. “It’s signed Leonardo da Vinci—but that can’t be right. The paper on its own is only a decade old at most.” Meaning we had one hell of an amateur forging operation going on—I mean, screwing up the paper . . .

  Unless—but there was no way. I mean, something that juicy in the supernatural community would have to have gotten out by now, wouldn’t it?

  Artemis began rummaging through a number of boxes filled with more papers and scrolls left haphazardly in piles, some with more blueprints, and some sprouting drawings—completed or not.

  “I wondered what that smell was,” he said. “It’s been a long while. Chemicals for pressing paper—ah, here we go.”

  Lo and behold, underneath the last box, hidden under the pack rat–like collection, was an old paper press. “I remember these coming into fashion—expensive as hell to make paper this way.” He glanced at me. “Strange, why not just buy paper?”

  I frowned. Parts of it had been modernized—in patches, the modern metals and plastics gleaming under my flashlight—which made no sense. As Artemis had said, why not just buy paper? Even if our vampire was a recluse, it wasn’t as though there weren’t options. If he could organize an online B&B listing, he could use an online retailer . . .

  “Fake or not, do you have any idea what these could be worth?” Artemis said, holding up one of the sketches.

  I picked up a box full of discarded pump parts—salvageable, if not for the fact that they had been left to soak in a corner. Most of the metal was irrevocably rusted and warped out of shape, not worth selling even for the scrap. “I don’t think our vampire is running with a full set of screws and gears,” I replied.

  I was briefly tempted to lift a few but I’ve never been one to peddle fakes. Even thieves have their low bars. “If I could spot it as a fake, so will an art expert.” And I wasn’t here for paintings or blueprints; I was looking for a link to the Tiger Thieves. I kept sorting through the items on the desk, wondering what the hell it was I was looking for exactly.

  I noticed that Artemis had stopped searching through the boxes and shelves and had tilted his head to the side, his nostrils flared, as if he was appraising something. Even Captain stopped his rummaging to watch.

  He didn’t stand there for long. He went over to a pile of boxes on one of the shelves that neither of us had yet reached and began to pull them down. He narrowed in on a single box and brought it out after giving it a shake that sent the contents rattling against the wood. Then he opened it and held it out to me. “I think this may be what you’re looking for,” he said. “It smells like your amulet—faint but there.”

  Inside was a small wooden box that, unlike everything else in the room, hadn’t rotted or warped away. It still retained its polished veneer and sported painted decorations. The hinges on the lid still worked.

  I peered inside and found a collection of wooden and metal tubes, each lined with a series of numbers and letters on the outside—hieroglyphs, Latin, even some more ancient texts . . .

  Hello, what did we have here?

  I removed one of the wooden cylinders from the box, one whose letters had been covered with gold lines not unlike the ones on my Tiger Thief medallion: four heavy streaks of gold with smaller lines crisscrossing in an undetermined pattern and no alphabet I recognized.

  “They reek of magic—supernatural,” Artemis clarified, seeing my expression. I’d had enough run-ins with human-made magic that any mention of it usually sent my blood pressure soaring.


  Not that supernatural magic was any better . . .

  The problems with supernatural magic came when people tried to use it. Supernatural magic was never meant to be used by humans, only supernaturals. Think explosions, natural disasters, uncontrolled curses—and that was the bright side. Humans weren’t meant to read or enact supernatural magic, yet that didn’t seem to stop anyone from trying.

  “God knows Leonardo da Vinci had a reputation for working with magic things he shouldn’t have,” Artemis said.

  “You said he was a hunter? Of the supernatural?”

  Artemis tsked. “Well, the Illuminati certainly were, but him? Who knows if he got his hands dirty? He was a genius, and his inventions were certainly used for those purposes—weapons, traps, devices of generic torture—though whether that was his original intent is debated.”

  “What else could his intent have been?” I asked as I rummaged through another box, this one filled with parts of half-built contraptions.

  “Be careful with those, they reek of magic. And to answer your question, many things get repurposed from their original intentions. The weapons may have been designed to save people from the more nefarious of our kind—vampires, goblins, skin walkers, even the odd ghoul that decided it couldn’t wait for the morgue to fill and decided to hasten things along.” He nodded towards the desk, which still sported a pile of blueprints, one for a particularly nasty-looking pike sitting on top. “Take that, for example. For keeping goblins out of the canals, if I read the pictures right.” He shrugged again. “Or perhaps he simply liked torturing supernaturals. I doubt it. The truly creatively gifted rarely go that route.”

  Another thought occurred to me. “How many of these do you think he actually made?”

  “Hard to tell,” Artemis said from the workbench he was investigating on the other side of the room. “I imagine he tried most of them. He went so far as to draw up the blueprints, seems like a lot of trouble to go to and not try them out.” He glanced at the box I was holding. “See that club?”