Sworn to the Night (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  “I wish I could. I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t be here with you. You know, because of the…the shooting.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “Little bit,” Marie said. “I can take it.”

  Nessa’s hand closed over hers. Her slender fingers curled.

  “Not alone. You belong to me now.”

  Nessa closed her eyes. A moment later, she began to snore. Marie gently slipped her hand away, pulled up the stiff, scratchy hospital sheet, and tucked her in.

  Forty-Nine

  Richard Roth was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery on a bright spring morning.

  A crowd of mourners gathered at the gate of the Roth family mausoleum, standing in respectful silence while a priest spoke words of comfort and surrender. Nessa wore a veil. She didn’t know most of the attendees, and she doubted Richard knew half of them. In his world, a funeral was just another place to see and be seen. She played the grieving widow and dabbed at her bone-dry eyes with a silk handkerchief.

  Alton Roth wasn’t playing. The senator’s usually stoic lips quivered as he stared at his son’s tomb, his eyes bloodshot. A tiny bubble of snot flared at the tip of his hawkish nose until an aide whispered in his ear and passed him a tissue. He hadn’t said a word to Nessa since his arrival. Not until now, when she found him sidling up alongside her while the priest droned on.

  “You did this,” he whispered. “I don’t know how you did it, but you’re responsible.”

  She arched an eyebrow, glancing sidelong at him.

  “Be grateful,” she murmured. “I didn’t go to the press and tell them how your son threw me through a glass table. For the moment, your golden boy’s legacy is intact.”

  “He loved you,” Alton hissed. His hands shook. “He called you his angel. I told him when you started dating that you were nothing but trailer-park trash, but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “I have fifty-six stitches’ worth of your son’s love. Would you like to see the scars? Back off, Alton. It’s a simple deal: you don’t challenge his will, I don’t show up on television talking about how soon-to-be President Roth’s son was a monster. Besides, you should be thanking me.”

  He turned his head, his face twisted in disgust. “Thanking you?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Nessa folded her arms and smiled beneath her veil. “Now you get to go to the polls as a grieving father. Should be good for a few sympathy votes.”

  Alton’s right hand curled into a fist. His aide tugged at his sleeve, fast, pulling him away.

  Nessa returned home after the funeral. It was strange to be alone and know Richard was never coming back. The halls of the brownstone felt wider, draftier. Her footsteps sounded louder when she was the only one there to hear them. She put her music on to keep her company. More than anything, she wanted Marie.

  Not until the investigation was over, though. Not with plainclothes officers sitting in an unmarked car across the street, keeping a ham-fisted watch over her. For the moment, for her and Marie’s sake, they had to keep their distance.

  For the moment.

  The doorbell chimed. Special delivery: a cardboard box, about three feet long and six inches thick, from an auction house in Los Angeles. She furrowed her brow as she hauled it into the kitchen, then set it up on a counter and sliced it open.

  Inside, nestled in layers of bubble wrap and fistfuls of foam peanuts, an antique mirror awaited her. Nessa purred as she ran her hand over the mahogany frame. The woodwork was exquisite, carved with loops and twists and geometric designs. The oval glass at the frame’s heart, speckled with dust, crackled with static electricity under her fingertips. The mirror had been painted over with black pigment and it reflected a world cast in onyx.

  It wasn’t just static she felt. She peered closer. Subtle symbols hid in the woodwork, seals of the planets and the spirit world. And in the glass, when she let her vision slip out of focus, shadows moved. Shadows that belonged to no living thing.

  “Now where,” she murmured to the mirror, “did you come from? And who sent you?”

  * * *

  The ivory plastic skyscraper, Richard’s dream of his masterpiece in Tribeca, blasted to shards under Scottie Pierce’s fist. Fragments went flying and the broken model skittered across the polished office floor in pieces.

  “There is catharsis in destruction,” Savannah said, sitting behind Richard’s desk with her VR headset on, “but you could take a few lessons from your friend’s demeanor. Richard was far less emotional.”

  He stormed over to the desk, his eyes wet, face mottled and red.

  “She killed him. She killed my best friend. That bitch Reinhart fucking shot him.”

  “You’re being extremely unproductive right now. Out of curiosity, were you and Richard having sexual relations?”

  Scottie walked away, walked back, and jabbed a shaking finger at her.

  “I am not a faggot!” he shouted.

  Savannah sighed. Her gloved hands snatched at the air, shuffling invisible data while she studied the world from inside her headset.

  “So emotional. I’m only saying that you’re exhibiting grief associated with heightened levels of oxytocin. You know, I have a procedure to fix that.”

  “Why are we waiting?” he demanded. “We tracked Reinhart down, just like you told us to. We know where she works, where she lives. I’ve got guys watching her apartment right this fucking minute. We can take her right now. One phone call and it’s a done deal.”

  “I’m not finished gathering field data. She hasn’t been in close proximity to Vanessa Roth for days, thanks to this unfortunate confluence of circumstances. I need to see them up close together. I want energy readings.”

  “And then?”

  Savannah pulled her headset off and looked Scottie in the eye.

  “And then, after the next time they meet in person, and after I give my approval, you may do as you please with Detective Reinhart. Just so long as I get whatever is left of the body afterward, for study.”

  He put his hands on the desk, palms flat.

  “There won’t be much left of her,” he said.

  * * *

  Alton Roth sat slumped in the back of his limousine. The world drifted by beyond the tinted glass. Springtime. Birds were chirping, people were smiling. It felt like a personal insult. Didn’t they know they should be grieving? The universe should be grieving.

  “Vanessa did this.” He hooked a finger in his tie, loosening it. “That whore killed my boy.”

  The man who some called Calypso, some called Webster Scratch, sat across from him. Dark fingers smoothed the lines of his caramel-tan suit.

  “Your boy had issues,” he said.

  Alton narrowed his bloodshot eyes. “Watch it.”

  “Your boy,” Calypso said, “was consorting with the Network. Now, I know you’re only invested in human politics, but my people and their people? We don’t get along.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Noodle it out, baby. Richard was a stone killer, recreational-style. That was a problem. We’re aiming to sell you as the second coming of JFK; people won’t buy into the dream of Camelot if they find out your kid got his kicks on the edge of a knife. Richard was sloppy. And, real talk? You didn’t even like him that much.”

  Alton sank lower in his seat.

  “That was before he was…” He shook his head. “I should have spent more time with him.”

  “I’ve been around for many, many years, my friend. If it’s any consolation, the one real commonality in the human experience isn’t love or even hate. It’s regret. Right now, in this moment, you’re connected to every human who ever lived. Philosophers and kings, baby. Rollin’ right alongside ’em.”

  The limousine rumbled across a pothole. Alton stared at Calypso.

  “I want justice.”

  “Everybody wants something.”

  “Vanessa and that cop,” Alton said, “they killed my son. My son. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Prob
ably send them a fruit basket with a thank-you note, seeing as they took care of Richard before I had to do it myself. You’re forgetting something, Senator Roth.”

  Calypso smiled. He flashed two rows of curved, jagged teeth. The teeth of a great white shark.

  “You already sold me your soul,” he said. “You’ve got nothing left to pay me with.”

  Alton glowered at him. “You’re forgetting something. Vanessa hired that cop to murder my boy, so she could get her claws on his money. She set him up.”

  “That’s one theory of the crime. Not the only possibility, though, no matter how badly you want it to be true. What’s your point?”

  “If we know that, so does that ‘lodge’ he ran with. You know, those sloppy people you were complaining about? And they’re not going to let this go any more than I will. So it seems to me, you’ve got a choice to make: help me take care of this situation in the most controllable, media-friendly way possible, or sit on your thumb until they do something loud and stupid and stick you with damage control. Your job is to get me into the Oval Office. We’re one wrong move—somebody else’s wrong move—from a scandal that could tank the whole deal.”

  Calypso’s fingers played over the razor-sharp fold of a patterned handkerchief poking from his breast pocket. He glanced out the window, lost in thought for a moment.

  “I’ll concede a point in your favor. How do you see this playing out?”

  “Get me some evidence I can use,” Alton said. “I’m having lunch with the district attorney. I’m thinking we get Vanessa and the cop indicted. Conspiracy to commit murder. Throw them both behind bars where they belong, and let them rot.”

  “Turn your life into a true-crime special? That’s the opposite of inconspicuous, baby.”

  “We’re already halfway there,” Alton told him. “Right now, the official story is that Richard was shot by a cop after he attacked his wife, and I’ve got two goddamn PR firms working overtime to keep it out of the papers. All Vanessa has to do is go on camera and shed some crocodile tears, and we’re screwed.”

  Calypso nodded, slow. “You want to flip the script. Go all-in on making her the villain of the story, and Richard can play the martyr in memoriam.”

  “We’re going to draw media heat no matter what,” Alton said. “I’d rather be the father of an innocent man, murdered by his greedy wife so she could steal his family fortune, than the father of a man who threw his innocent wife through a table and died with a gun in his hand. One of those stories is an albatross. The other makes me a noble, silently suffering victim.”

  He sat back, grimacing as Nessa’s words at the funeral came back to him.

  “Should be good for a few sympathy votes,” he muttered.

  “Talk to your DA friend,” Calypso said. “I’ll get a few eyes on Vanessa.”

  * * *

  The Chrysler Building loomed over Manhattan, an art-deco monolith seventy-seven stories high. The tower wore a crown, a base and a narrow ledge with radiator caps at each corner, before cascading up in scalloped peaks to a shining, solitary spike. The stainless-steel cladding, ridged with triangles, captured the light of the setting sun.

  Calypso sat on the lip of the crown. A cold wind rippled his suit as he dangled one lazy leg over the ledge, glancing to the street nearly a thousand feet below. He could see it all from here, Manhattan and beyond, the crossroads of the world sprawling out to the ocean’s edge. Eight million people. Eight million stories. Stories were Calypso’s stock in trade.

  He unslung his guitar. It was a 1958 Fender Telecaster, cherry and vanilla, just like Muddy Waters used to play. He strummed a single note, rich and deep, letting it ring out across the rooftops. He ran his tongue over his teeth, tasting the sound, like the first sip from a good bottle of cheap wine.

  One note became two, then a bar, chords rolling slow and lonely under his guitar pick. In the distance, lightning flashed beyond an ink-black cloud. A storm was moving fast, coming in over the water.

  Roth was nothing but a client to him. A vanity project, really. Taking a no-account grifter all the way to the White House was far more trouble than any one man’s soul was worth, but it would win him the ultimate in bragging rights. Beyond that, Calypso couldn’t care less. Alton Roth was a petty, venal man with petty, venal sins.

  Vanessa, though. She was something different. He hadn’t told Alton what he’d seen through his own, eternal eyes.

  A shadow fell across his guitar. A woman stood on the lip of the roof. Her Louboutin heels balanced on the edge like the claws of a hawk, and she wore her hair in a braided scarlet twist. The wind took hold of her cashmere scarf tail and ruffled it behind her.

  “You called,” Caitlin said, her voice touched with a Scottish burr.

  “You came,” he replied. “The delightful Miss Brody.”

  “I shouldn’t be in New York. The locals are territorial and they get nervous when I leave the West Coast. But I don’t turn down an invitation from my favorite musician.”

  He patted the ledge at his side.

  She sat down, curling her legs beneath her and smoothing the pleats of her skirt with one crimson-nailed hand. “There’s a storm coming.”

  “That there is.” He pointed to the west. “See that?”

  Caitlin’s eyes flooded with flecks of copper. They swirled and blossomed, as if her irises were filled with molten metal. She leaned forward and squinted.

  “Something wicked on the wind,” she murmured. “I can taste it. Festering and growing.”

  “And it isn’t us. This isn’t hell’s handiwork.”

  She frowned. “The Network, then?”

  “Those boys are about as subtle as a boot to the head. No, not them either. Something else. Something I’ve never seen before. And I’ve been rambling these roads for a long, long time. It’s got the faintest tang of the familiar, though. By any chance, were you around back when Franz Ferdinand ate a bullet?”

  Her molten-copper eyes twinkled. “Never ask a lady her age.”

  “There are moments in history,” Calypso said, “when a single event changes the world. Times when one profound act sets a string of dominoes in motion. Once the dominoes start to fall, all you can do is roll along, swept up in the tide. Now, at the time, you might not realize what you’re looking at. Might not see the trigger event when it happens.”

  “But in the aftermath,” she mused, “gazing upon a transformed world while you’re standing in its wreckage…”

  “Hindsight is twenty-twenty.”

  “And you think that’s what we’re seeing now?”

  Thunder rumbled and Calypso strummed a low note on his guitar, meeting sound with sound. He looked out over the darkening skyline.

  “The assassination of Franz Ferdinand led to the first world war. One man, gunned down in Sarajevo. That was all it took—the right death at the right moment—to set the entire world on fire.”

  “But every action rises from another action,” Caitlin said. “History is a chain.”

  “History is a wheel. And I think this time around, the trigger event has already happened. The right death at the right moment. Too late to stop it now.”

  He gazed into the distance. Off to the west, in his second sight, a shifting, inky blot hung over the city. Dark tendrils of smoke drooled down from the cloud like the arms of a jellyfish, brushing their tips against rooftops and skylights. Searching. Hunting.

  “Tonight,” he said, “we watch the first dominoes fall. Nothing we can do now but hold on tight.”

  He strummed his guitar again, picking out the first chords of a blues song. Caitlin leaned close, resting her head on his shoulder, and listened to him play.

  Fifty

  “It’s gonna be nasty out tonight,” Janine said, craning her neck at the apartment window. She looked over her shoulder, back at Marie. “Did you see these clouds?”

  Marie sat on the futon, staring at the paperback in her hands. She’d spent the last two hours trying to read the same page. She�
��d get to the end of a paragraph, her thoughts would drift, and she’d find herself starting over again.

  The woman in green-steel armor, the story read, sank to one knee on the black basalt floor. Around her, she heard the rattling of dead, dry bones as she put one hand to the key at her throat.

  “The elders of the city have forsaken me,” she said, fighting through her tears, “and my order has cast me out. They deny the coming darkness. They refuse to see. But I am still a knight in my heart. And a knight is nothing without a liege.”

  The witch-queen sat upon her bloody throne, a hungry smile rising to her lips.

  “You seek to wage war upon darkness,” she said. “To triumph, would you embrace mine?”

  Janine craned her neck to read the cover. “Carolyn Saunders? Again? You know, we got her new book in at the library.”

  Marie blinked, her listless, looping train of thought broken.

  “Oh, The Killing Floor?” She shook her head. “I couldn’t get into that one. She brought in some new characters and it was kinda weird. Anyway, this is…you know. Comfort food.”

  “Yeah.” Janine nodded at Marie’s phone, resting silent on the futon’s armrest. “You hear from ‘George’?”

  Marie had to smile, just a little bit. “No. I told Nessa we need to be careful while Internal Affairs is investigating me.”

  She sat back and closed her book.

  “But I don’t want to be careful.”

  “So…I hate to ask, but how much trouble are you in?”

  Marie looked to the window, and to the gathering storm on the borough’s edge.

  “Well, my police union rep told me the odds of keeping my job when all is said and done, and he wasn’t smiling when he said it.”

  Janine held up a finger. “Hold on.”

  She scurried into her bedroom and came out with a long, slim box wrapped in garish birthday-cake paper. She thrust it at Marie.

  “It’s not my birthday,” she said, taking it from Janine’s outstretched hands.

  “It was the only wrapping paper I had. This is an award for being my best roommate.”