“I don’t know,” I said. “He may not even be alive anymore. It’s just a rumor.”
Bergeron stood up, gripping his cane tightly. “Are you implying my gauntlet was stolen by a dead man?”
“I’ve seen dead men do stranger things,” I said.
I took one last glance around the gallery. No windows. No skylights. No other doors besides the one we’d come through. Bergeron said there hadn’t been any break-ins. So how had our mystery man gotten inside to steal the Thracian Gauntlet? I thought back to our encounter in Chinatown, the killer vanishing after jumping off the roof. Of course. It was so simple I could have kicked myself for not thinking of it immediately.
“He didn’t need a key to get in here,” I said. “He used a portal to get in and out.”
Bethany nodded. “Teleportation. That makes sense. We know he has a portal charm.”
“Who has a portal charm?” Bergeron demanded. “Who in blazes are you talking about?”
“That’s what we’re trying to determine.” I pointed up at the tiny black objects that dotted the corners of the ceiling. There were more of them by the door and the far end of the room. I’d spotted them the moment we came in. Old habit. Always look for the security cameras. “Do you still have the footage?”
“I do, but I found it most unhelpful,” Bergeron replied. “There’s nothing on it.”
“Can we see it anyway?” I asked.
He sighed. “Fine. Suit yourself. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t.”
We left the gallery, went back through the immense library, and eventually found ourselves in a small, dark room filled with electronic equipment and video monitors. Francisco the baby-faced guard was sitting at the desk in front of the monitors. He stood up and glared at Philip, but he left without an argument when Bergeron asked him to. On the wall, the monitors showed scenes from all over the house and grounds, including the hill where I’d been watching the house. No wonder they’d found me so easily.
Bergeron sat down behind the desk. He hit a few buttons on the control panel in front of him to call up the footage we wanted. On the monitors, the images of the gallery froze, then whizzed backward until we saw ourselves entering the gallery a few minutes earlier. Most of us, anyway. Philip, it turned out, didn’t show up on video.
The vampire shrugged it off. “No reflections, no recorded images, and yet somehow I still manage to look damn good.”
“Were there any protection spells the thief would have had to get through to reach the gauntlet?” Bethany asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Bergeron said as he typed on the keyboard. “As I mentioned, I’m a collector of artifacts, but I’m no magician. I leave the handling of magic to the professionals. No, I’m afraid my security system is comprised of locks, alarms, and cameras, just like everyone else’s. But believe me, I am now questioning the wisdom of that. Ah, here we go. This is it.”
The monitors showed the gallery again, only this time the Thracian Gauntlet was there, inside its unbroken glass case. Bergeron let the feed play. About thirty seconds later, the screens went snowy with static. Ten seconds after that, the picture returned. The glass case was broken and the gauntlet was gone.
“The moment of the theft, completely obfuscated,” Bergeron said, frustrated. “If whoever did this has a portal spell, then he’s got other spells, too, including one that interfered with my security cameras.”
“I take it you never called the police?” Bethany asked. Bergeron didn’t answer. “No, of course you didn’t. Reporting the crime would mean admitting you’d committed one yourself when you bought it on the black market. So there was no one here dusting for fingerprints or collecting fibers. In fact, I’m guessing no clues were collected at all before you cleaned up the mess.”
Bergeron turned in his chair to face her. “You think you know all about me, don’t you? You think you know everything. Well, you’re right, I didn’t call the police, but not for the reason you think. It’s because the police wouldn’t understand. They’re not like us. They don’t know the things we know. To them, this would merely be a stolen objet d’art, but you and I know differently. We understand the implications of its existence. We understand what it is, and what it can do.”
“So does the man who took it,” Bethany said. “There were seventy other artifacts in that room just as deadly, but he didn’t take any of them. Only the Thracian Gauntlet. Why?”
“I don’t care why, I just want it back.” Bergeron stood up out of the chair. “Obviously, I want to help however I can. I know how dangerous the gauntlet is. I hate to think of it in the wrong hands.”
“If you want to help, there are two things you can do for us,” Bethany said. She took a pen and paper off the desk, wrote something down, and passed it to him. “The first is, you can e-mail the names and addresses of everyone who works in this house to this address. Everyone, no matter how part-time.”
Bergeron looked at the piece of paper with mild annoyance. “You do understand that I employ several different service companies? This is a large estate, and it’s quite a long list. It will take time to compile. That’s if their company lawyers allow it, of course. Or mine. Quite frankly, they’re going to hate the idea. They’ll demand a warrant of some kind, but I’ll see what I can do to convince them. Now, what’s the second thing I can do for you?”
“You can stop,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t understand.”
“No more Ghost Market,” she said. “No more artifacts. Take every last one you have in that room and put it in a safe, or a vault, or better yet hand them over to someone who knows how to keep them safe. They’re not toys. They’re not art. They’re dangerous. If you can’t keep them safe, you shouldn’t keep them at all.”
“After what happened, you can be certain I won’t be buying anything from those crooks and cheats again,” he said, scowling.
“The gauntlet was used in a murder,” she reminded him. “A man is dead.”
Bergeron nodded gravely. “Of course, of course. You’re right. Consider my lesson learned.”
As soon as he said it, I went cold. Consider my lesson learned. It was possibly the most disingenuous thing I’d ever heard someone say. In that moment I understood exactly what kind of man Clarence Bergeron was. He wasn’t going to stop. Not ever. Collecting and hoarding artifacts wasn’t just a hobby for him. No one devoted an entire wing of their home to a hobby. No, this was his kink, just like keeping all those thousands of books his family had accrued over the generations. He couldn’t care less that someone had been killed, only that someone had the audacity to steal from him. If helping us catch the killer meant giving up his kink, he wasn’t going to lift a finger. We would be lucky if we ever saw that list of names from him.
The rich weren’t just different from everyone else. They were untouchable, and they knew it.
“What happens when you recover the gauntlet?” Bergeron asked.
“We’ll destroy it, if we can,” she said. “Barring that, we’ll send it back to the Avalonian Collection.”
Bergeron’s face clouded. “We seem to have a miscommunication, young woman. The only reason I let you in here and answered your questions is because I was under the impression you would help find what was stolen from me. That you would bring it back to me. I spent a small fortune on that gauntlet. If you destroy it or send it back to England, will the money I spent on it be returned to me? Where is my restitution, I ask you? I’m the victim here, too.”
Bethany glared at him.
“Fine, I’ll pay you,” he continued. “If you find the gauntlet, I’ll pay you to bring it back here instead. I assure you, money is no object. Just name your price.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Bergeron,” Bethany said. She walked out of the room. Philip and I followed her.
Bergeron hurried after us as we made our way to the front door. “I’ll increase the security, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said. “No one will ever steal it or any of my
other artifacts again. I’ll make sure of that myself. You needn’t worry.”
At the door, Bethany turned to face him. “Thank you for your time. We’ll be in touch.”
Bergeron bid us goodbye, struggling to remain chipper in the face of his disappointment that we couldn’t be bribed. He shook our hands as we left. I found myself reluctant to shake his, as if everything I despised about him—his arrogance, his callousness, his sense of entitlement—would stain me. But he grabbed my hand, shook it vigorously, and didn’t let go.
“Tell me your name again, young man,” he said.
“Trent.”
He nodded. “Huh. Funny.”
“What is?”
“Nothing. It’s just … that name doesn’t suit you at all.” He let go of my hand. “Until we meet again.”
Then he closed the door between us, leaving me to puzzle over what he meant by that.
I didn’t have much time to dwell on it before my cell phone buzzed in my trench coat pocket. I took it out and saw Isaac’s name on the screen. I answered the call.
“You’d better come to the warehouse right away,” Isaac said. “I’m texting you the address. I found something. Or rather, someone.”
Fourteen
If there was one part of Brooklyn I still loved, one part I could still stand after the whole borough had taken on Underwood’s stink, it was the Promenade. I’d only been there once, ages ago, in the timeless dark between midnight and dawn when no one else was around. I’d just finished a messy collection job for Underwood. Confused, delirious, covered in my own blood, half a dozen bullet holes perforating my shirt, I had stumbled through the dark cobblestone streets of Brooklyn Heights, past the quiet town house mansions of the rich. Eventually, I found myself on a half-mile-long flagstone terrace that wound along the edge of the East River. Across the water, the lights of the Manhattan skyline twinkled with signs of life. I was the man who never slept looking upon the city that never sleeps. I thought that somewhere in all that city, somewhere in all that light, someone was still awake. Someone confused and alone, just like me. Somehow, it was a balm for my wounds. I stood on the Promenade for what felt like hours as the sun rose over the river, slowly pulling back the curtain of night to reveal the Statue of Liberty, the South Street Seaport, the Brooklyn Bridge. I didn’t want to leave. Looking at Manhattan sprawled out before me, I felt connected to something. I felt small, the way you feel small when you look up at the stars at night. The way you feel small when you’re not alone.
But so much of New York City was an illusion, and the Promenade was no exception. Just below it, the exhaust-choked Brooklyn-Queens Expressway wound conveniently out of view, willfully ignored in favor of the Promenade’s carefully cultivated metropolitan fantasy. And below the BQE was Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront. For decades it had sat as empty and decrepit as a ghost town, until they started bulldozing the area flat to make room for an expansion of Brooklyn Bridge Park. It was the inevitable next step of Brooklyn’s gentrification—remove all signs of industry from the wealthiest neighborhoods so the rich never again had to be reminded of the working-class people they’d displaced when property values shot through the roof. But the entire waterfront hadn’t been razed yet. One warehouse was left untouched by the bulldozers, as if it were protected by a ward. That wouldn’t have surprised me, considering it was the warehouse where the Ghost Market held its auctions.
Crossing the machine-flattened dirt of the waterfront, I felt the Promenade at my back. I glanced over my shoulder at it, the memory of that night coming back to me. I had promised myself I would return to the Promenade one day. That I would stand on its flagstones and look out upon the city once again, only this time I would do it without fear, without blood, without bullet holes. And I would know who I was. When I went back, it would be with my real name and my memories intact. That was a promise I intended to keep. But I wasn’t there yet.
The warehouse was a four-story, brick structure roughly the size of a city block. From the outside, it looked desolate, its arched windows and doorways shuttered with rusting metal slabs. Graffiti and gang tags had been painted all over the façade. A single shuttered doorway on the ground floor stood slightly open. Philip motioned for us to get behind him, then carefully pulled it open the rest of the way. The door’s hinges didn’t make a sound. They were the color and texture of rusted metal, but they were as quiet as any well-oiled hinge.
Walking inside, we found a short hallway cluttered with garbage—old coffee cups and beer cans, empty potato chip bags and cigarette butts, a moldy mattress up against the wall. It looked like the spot where the local high school kids held their parties. If Isaac hadn’t already told me it was all a carefully crafted deception, and if the silent hinges hadn’t tipped me off, I would have bought the lie without hesitation. Clarence Bergeron was right. The Ghost Market did a hell of a job covering its tracks.
At the end of the hallway, we passed through an open doorway into a ten-thousand-square-foot space. More piles of carefully arranged garbage stood stacked in the corners and along the walls. Dust coated everything. The windows on the far wall were unshuttered, allowing a wan, yellow light to stream into the warehouse through the dust. It reminded me of the abandoned warehouse on the West Side Highway where I’d first met Bethany and Thornton, just before everything took a sharp turn into Crazytown. A sharp turn for me, anyway. The others, of course, were no strangers to it. They’d been at this a lot longer.
Though, for all I knew, I could have been at it a lot longer, too. As Lucas West. It would make sense. Something had happened to me, and magic was the likeliest answer.
I filed the thought away for later. Now wasn’t the time to let myself get distracted again. On the other hand, it was getting harder and harder to keep Jordana Pike out of my head, and not just because she’d put a name to my face. That kiss …
Damn. So much for not letting myself get distracted. I shook my head and told myself to focus.
Isaac was standing in the middle of the warehouse, his hunter green duster billowing around him. His arms were raised as if he were holding something over his head, which in a way he was. A good five feet above him was another man, trapped inside a floating, translucent, reddish bubble. To my surprise, the man was laughing. He wore a yellow rain slicker, despite the clear weather outside. The slicker’s hood was up over his head, but as I drew closer, I saw his face. His skin was deathly pale. He opened his mouth wide, laughing like a maniac, and revealed sharp fangs.
Shit. Another vampire. As far as I was concerned, one was more than enough. I turned to Philip to see what he thought. His expression was as stony and unreadable as ever, his eyes hidden behind his ever-present mirrored shades.
“I found him skulking about in the shadows,” Isaac explained. “He’s with the Ghost Market.”
“Yes, but as I said, I’m just a lowly bookkeeper,” the floating vampire said, breathless from laughter. “Now let me down, mage. Let me down so I can tear you open and bathe in your blood.”
He threw his head back and resumed his crazy laughter. A string of glistening drool lengthened from his chin down to his chest. He didn’t care. He just laughed and twitched and repeated the words bathe in your blood like it was the punch line to his favorite joke.
“He’s insane,” I said.
“He’s infected,” Isaac clarified. “Magic has twisted his mind.”
The vampire looked down at Isaac. “Go away, mage! This place is mine! This is where I feed—go find someplace else!”
“What does he mean?” Bethany asked. “He feeds on the people who come to the Ghost Market?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Even thieves need people to buy their stolen goods. No crime syndicate in the world would let someone pick off their customer base like that. They’d kill him in a heartbeat. I don’t think that’s what he meant by feeding.”
Philip crossed his arms and said, “It’s not.”
The floating vampire’s gaze swept over us, finally
registering our presence. His pale blue eyes were like a cold draft blowing through us. He stopped when he saw Philip. Recognition flickered in his eyes.
“Well, well, well. Renshu Chen,” he said.
“Hello, Crixton,” Philip said. “I go by Philip now.”
Crixton grinned. “And here I was thinking I would never see you again.”
“Thinking? Or hoping?” Philip’s tone was as cold as a February blizzard.
“You know this guy?” I asked him.
“Unfortunately,” Philip said. The two vampires kept their gazes locked onto each other like high-intensity laser sights. “Our families are bound by clan. I’ve known Crixton a long time. Too long. He was always a junkie. Though the last I saw him he was addicted to more … mundane substances.”
“Junkie?” Crixton shook his head. “That’s such a mean word. I prefer to think of myself as a connoisseur of heightened experiences, that’s all.”
Philip grunted in disgust. “How much magic have you taken into yourself, Crixton?”
“So much, Renshu. So much,” Crixton said. “Why should I let it go to waste?”
“What do you mean waste?” Philip asked.
Crixton rolled his eyes as though the answer should be obvious. “Not every artifact sells at auction. Some are useless. Some are ugly. The curators give me all the unwanted artifacts to dispose of. But I don’t dispose of them, not the way they think.” He giggled and wiped the string of drool off his chin. “I break them open and drink their magic. I feed on them. Have you ever seen magic in its rawest form, Renshu? It sparks like a bonfire. Dazzles like fireworks. And it sings, Renshu. It sings in so many voices.” Crixton drew his hands down his face, letting them linger by his mouth. “It tastes like smoke and shadows and earth; it tastes like everything, because it is everything. And when you let it inside you, it’s glorious. Like no other drug in the world. It’s a night-blooming flower that opens in your belly, only it’s so much more than that. It gives you so much more. You can’t imagine what it feels like. Don’t even try. You have to experience it for yourself. You have to feel it.” Crixton’s icy gaze shifted to Isaac. “The mage knows. He carries magic inside him, just like I do. He can feel it flowering inside him. Can’t you, mage? You know the more magic you carry, the more you want. The more you have to have.”
Die and Stay Dead Page 15
