by Laura Bickle
A wisp of smoke exited from the bottle and slipped up through the ceiling to the floor above. Anya could hear Hope’s wail of anguish filtering down. She peered into the bottle, saw the telltale crystal lining.
She reached for one bottle after another. Her heart lifted as she saw wisps of spirits escaping, the sighs of air breathing out of jam jars and flasks. She smelled old musty air and fresh perfume, a whiff of vodka and the smell of sour pickles. She found and opened children’s bottles of bubble bath and pepper shakers. Sparky climbed the shelves and rooted among the vessels, batting at the shreds of spirits as they escaped. The ghosts were going home; she could feel it. The magick was draining out of this place, as if someone had pulled a stopper in a drain.
Tentative footsteps fell on the steps above. “Hey, did you find anything down there?”
Anya smiled in triumph. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. Do me a favor and cuff Ms. Solomon for me.”
“Charges?”
“Book her on receiving stolen property, for now.” Anya climbed the steps, leaned in the doorway as the uniforms cuffed her. Hope fixed her with a murderous gaze.
“You will regret this,” she snarled. Wrath contorted her motherly features.
“We’ll see,” Anya said mildly. She followed the uniforms taking Hope down to the street. She smiled when she saw the Channel 7 news van parked at the curb and Nick Sarvos speaking before the camera.
“What’s the press doing here?” Hope hissed.
“Someone must have tipped them off.” Anya shrugged. Inwardly, she beamed.
The uniforms marched Hope out to a waiting squad car. A cop opened the back door, put his hand on the top of Hope’s head to keep her from hitting her head on the door frame when she climbed in.
In that instant, Anya saw something spill from the collar of Hope’s shirt: the necklace she wore on television, the gold chain that held the tiny glass vial.
She remembered Charon’s words: You’d have to separate her from all her bottles, and she’ll fight that to the death.
Remembered them too late.
As soon as the door slammed shut, the squad car burst into a ball of flame.
ANYA SAT ON THE BACK of the paramedics’ truck, arms wrapped around the newt transporter. Sparky perched on her shoulder, licking a scrape on her temple where a piece of burning debris had struck her. Her clothes smelled like burned gasoline. Despite the ministrations of the paramedics and salamander, Anya was fucking pissed.
Marsh surveyed the scene: a cop car burned down to the ground, with the shell of a news van guttering out. The street was wet with chemical foam, and fire trucks flashed red lights against the sides of the buildings.
“One cop dead. One severely injured.” Marsh took her inventory. “One newscaster with burns.”
Anya pinched her eyes shut. “Look, it was not my fault that Sarvos was wearing that much hair product. Sparks and aerosol products do not mix.” But she still felt bad. If not for her, the reporter would not have been here.
“I suspect he’ll be fine, but will be a lifelong customer of Hair Club for Men,” Marsh growled. “And your suspect is missing.”
Anya groaned. “She was in the backseat when the car blew up.”
“She’s not anymore. No bones or traces that I can see. Go look for yourself.”
Anya slid down to the pavement and limped to the shell of the ruined patrol car. She’d been far enough away from the blast that she’d been thrown mostly clear, which was more than could be said for the DPD uniforms. When she peered into the backseat, all she saw was melted plastic, the bent grille separating the front seat from the back, and the gleam of a metal seat-belt buckle.
Impervious to fire, Sparky wormed his way into the wreckage. He sniffed around the driver’s side and pressed a paw on the horn. To his delight, and the consternation of the emergency personnel, the horn gave off a weak, warped trumpet like a goose caught in a lawn mower.
“Shit,” she mumbled.
“‘Shit’ is right. You let her get away.” Marsh shook his head.
Anya bit back her reply. She’d come to her senses minutes after the explosion, rolled against the side of the building, with a salamander licking her face and the car in flames. Someone had been shouting at her, and an ambulance had rolled up.
Somehow she’d hoped that the bitch had enough grace to kill herself in the blaze.
No such luck.
“I put out an APB on Hope Solomon,” Marsh snapped. “I want her found, before anything else burns up.”
Anya pressed her mouth into a grim slash. “It’s a promise, sir.”
A police scanner in the background crackled, and Anya’s ears perked up. “… ten-thirty-three at 5200 Woodward Avenue.”
That was the address for the Detroit Institute of Arts. And a 10-33 was an alarm sounding.
Anya ran for her car.
Hope was all out of reliquaries, and was hell bent on acquiring a new one.
Anya raced up the stairs to DIA, two steps at a time, Sparky scrambling at her heels. The scene was a confusion of strobing red and blue lights and scurrying personnel: ambulances, paramedics, firefighters, cops, and museum staff. Two people were being removed from the scene on stretchers. A crumpled car was sideways on Woodward Avenue, with gawkers cordoned off to the side.
Anya charged through the doors, raced through the Great Hall. She smelled something burning, prayed that the magick that Katie had worked on the floor of the exhibit room had been enough to keep Hope from being successful.
Anya skidded to a halt in the doorway of the Greco-Roman Exhibit Hall. The glass case that held Pandora’s Jar stood wide open, and there was an empty hole in the exhibit where the pithos had once been. Sparky wandered to the edge of the invisible circle but didn’t cross it. The circle still seemed to be intact. How the hell had Hope gotten in?
She grabbed the sleeve of a man wearing a museum guard uniform. “What happened to the pithos… to Pandora’s Jar?”
The guard’s eyes were wide in panic. “After what happened… the lending museum wanted it back. They sent some archivists to pack it and load it into a truck.”
“You guys opened the case and took it out of the room?” Anya closed her eyes. Pandora’s Jar had been safe from spiritual interference… but not the stupid actions of humans.
“Yeah. They loaded it up in a crate, put in on the dolly, and got it out to the truck.”
“Show me where.”
The guard led her back out of the museum to the curb, pointed to a scorched spot on the pavement. “Then… one of the archivists and the driver caught fire. It was horrible… they ran into the street. Somebody got a fire extinguisher, but…” The guard’s hands shook. “One of them got hit by a car. I don’t know which one.”
“Where’s the truck?”
The guard blinked.
“The truck holding Pandora’s Jar. Where is it?”
The guard looked around. “It was right here.…”
Anya clenched a fist. “Look. I need you to contact the lending institution. Now. Have them give you the license plate and the make and model of the truck, okay?”
The guard blinked, still in shock.
Anya shook his arm. “Okay?”
“License plate, make and model of the truck…” The guard repeated those instructions like a mantra, grabbed his radio. In a few moments, he was patched into the phone system, got the information from the lending institution.
“Why, what do you need it for?” the voice on the other end squawked. “Tell her that we’ll call her back.”
Anya wasn’t going to subject the poor man to being the bearer of more bad tidings than he already was. She scribbled down the information and ran to the nearest knot of cops. She elbowed her way through until she found someone with a badge number that began with an S. The sergeant in command of the scene was barking orders at the other uniforms to clear traffic. She was a good head shorter than the rest, and Anya located her primarily by the sound of her voice, pure and proj
ecting like a gospel singer.
“Lieutenant Kalincyzk, DFD. There’s been a theft at the museum,” Anya told her, breathless.
The sergeant turned the volume down on the squawking walkie clipped to her shoulder. “Are you kidding me? We’ve got an injury accident, two people on fire—”
“I think it was staged to cover the disappearance of an artifact. Pandora’s Jar.” Anya held her hands at this level. “Big stone jar, about waist high. Packed in a crate.”
The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. “It couldn’t have just grown legs and walked out.”
“It’s in the truck the archivists were loading.” Anya gave her the scrap of paper. “If you put out an APB on this truck, you might be able to catch it.”
“You got a description of the suspect?”
“Yeah. Five-foot-two, early fifties, blond, blue-eyed white woman wearing a light-blue pantsuit. Hope Solomon, aka Christina Modin. She escaped from DPD custody about an hour ago.”
The sergeant keyed her walkie and put out an APB for Hope and the van. The sergeant nodded at her. “I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the tip.”
“No problem.”
The sergeant sang out more orders to her troops, and Anya receded back into the crowd. She looked back at the museum, frowned.
Something wasn’t right. She’d smelled magick outside the building.
But not inside.
Anya climbed the steps again, wove past the chaos in the building. Men in suits had showed up, waving papers. Anya assumed that they were muckety-mucks at the museum, and avoided them. Instead, she let herself into the Special Exhibits Gallery, where the ghosts had gathered around the glassed-in guillotine for their party.
The lights had been lowered to conserve energy, and Anya closed the door behind her. Frantic footsteps pattered outside, but the door muffled most of it to the level of ambient noise.
“Gallus,” she called. “Are you here?”
She waited. But he didn’t answer her.
She stepped more deeply into the shadowed room. Light dripped off the guillotine in the center. “Pluto? Marie? Samurai guy?”
No answer.
“I realize that you’re frightened, but… I need to talk to you. Hope’s taken Pandora’s Jar. I need to know what you saw.”
Silence. She reached out with that black hole in her chest, to see if she could detect some bit of them with that hungry sense, but the walls and artifacts felt blank.
Anya looked down at Sparky. “Sparky, can you find where they’re hiding?”
Sparky lowered his spade-shaped head to the ground and sniffed. His tongue snaked out beyond his teeth, and he scuttled along the floor. Anya followed him as he snuffled around the guillotine, back down the hallway. He paused in the Greco-Roman exhibits before Pluto’s gear, turned around. He waddled through the Great Hall, sniffing at the glass cases full of medieval armor.
With growing dread, she watched as Sparky plodded out through the building. He flowed down the steps, through the throng of people. He stopped at the scorch mark at the curb, where the stolen van had been parked.
Fear flashed through her.
“Sparky,” she whispered, trying to confirm what her senses told her was true. “They’re gone, aren’t they?”
Sparky sniffed the air and looked up at her. He whined plaintively.
“Hope didn’t just take Pandora’s Jar. She took the museum ghosts. Gallus, Pluto, Marie… All of them.”
Sparky lay down on the sidewalk and put his head between his paws.
“I’ve got to get them back.”
Anya paced the floor of the Devil’s Bathtub, chewing her lip. She’d placed the newt transporter in the bathtub full of pennies, and Sparky had climbed up inside it to watch her stalk. The newt transporter was growing too hot to carry; Anya didn’t know if that was a good or bad sign. According to one of Katie’s pastry thermometers, they were cooking along at 103 degrees. Sparky leaned his head on the edge of the cool bathtub, watching Anya wear out the floors.
“I don’t know why you care so much,” Jules muttered from behind the bar. “They’re just ghosts. And old, dusty ones, at that.”
Anya spun on her heel. “They were people, Jules. People like you and me. And they don’t deserve to be treated that way.”
“If they were good people, they’d be in heaven.”
Renee cleared her throat. The ghost of the flapper was sitting on a bar stool, twirling her cigarette holder and fiddling with her strand of pearls. She cast her eyes down.
“Present company excluded. I mean generally,” Jules amended. “There’s an exception to every rule.”
“You can stuff your rules, Jules,” Anya retorted. “There isn’t anybody here who’s following them.”
“Enough, you two.” Ciro wheeled across the floor. Though his voice was tinny, he still commanded respect. The old man shoved the wheels of his chair with shaking hands until Max grasped the handles and pushed him across the floor to a table. “There’s no point in you two arguing over philosophy, with everything at stake.”
Jules threw a dish towel over his shoulder and reached for a glass. “What’s at stake here? A museum artifact got stolen. That’s regrettable, but—”
“People are dying, Jules,” Anya said tightly. “Hope’s responsible for as many as six deaths… that we know about. She’s not going to stop just because she got a shiny new toy for her collection.”
“It’s more than a shiny new toy.” Ciro laced his fingers together to keep them from shaking. “A reliquary the size of Pandora’s Jar can contain thousands of spirits. With that much power at her fingertips, burning a few people is child’s play.”
“The data storage of that thing has to be immense.” Brian banged through the bar door, a computer tower strapped to his back. “We’re probably underestimating the storage capacity—never mind how much battery power such crystals could store.”
He shrugged the equipment down to the floor and hugged Anya. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he whispered against her hair.
Anya returned the embrace, though stiffly. She craved the warm sensation of feeling Brian’s heart beating against her cheek, but she couldn’t unring the bell of her memory and forget what she’d learned about ALANN. Brian was a corpse thief. And God knew what else.
But this wasn’t the time. Anya pulled away from his embrace, faced the others. “I met a spirit at the morgue. He told me how to go to the astral—the Afterworld—to track down Hope. From where I stand, that’s our only choice.”
Brian narrowed his eyes. “Some spirit at the morgue? How sure are you that you can trust him?”
I’m a bit more certain of him than I am of you right now. Anya bit her tongue and said, “He calls himself Charon. Says it’s his job to ferry dead to the Afterworld.”
Ciro nodded. “You met a psychopomp.”
“A what?”
“A spirit who guides the newly deceased to the afterlife. If you were to speak to a Jungian psychologist, a psychopomp would be described as the mediator between the conscious and unconscious minds.” Ciro’s eyes gleamed. “In many traditions, they’re called ‘midwives to the dying.’”
“Can they be trusted?” Brian asked.
“They aren’t judges. Charon isn’t going to take Anya to heaven or to hell. Psychopomps are more like subway conductors. He will take you wherever your ticket says you’re supposed to go.”
“He said that I need to stop Hope.” Anya’s mouth thinned. “I believe that he will take me where he says he will.”
“And how will you get back?” Brian asked. His fingers were knit tightly in hers.
“When the living travel on the astral planes, they’re connected to the body by an etheric cord,” Ciro explained. “It extends from the naval of the astral double to the physical one. It isn’t limited by time and space, and will stretch to infinity.”
“Leslie had one,” Anya said. She didn’t mention that it worked as Ciro had described, until it had been severed b
y Hope’s vortex.
“If need be, we can reel you back in,” Ciro said. “Give you a good, hard pinch or shake you awake.”
“What about Sparky? And the eggs?” Anya’s brow creased as she looked at Sparky’s head peering out of the bathtub.
“I don’t know how it works for familiars,” Ciro admitted. “I do know that they wander the astral planes as they wish, so they are able to exercise some free will on those other planes.”
“Can I leave them here?” Anya wanted to leave them safe in the protection of a magick circle.
“Unlikely. You’re bonded to your familiar. Many people meet their familiars for the first time on the astral plane. Where you go, he will likely follow you.”
Anya unwound herself from Brian and went to sit on the edge of the claw-foot bathtub. She stroked Sparky from nose to tail, feeling the warmth of his skin. “I don’t want to drag you along into this, Sparky.”
The salamander stood up. He looked up at her with solemn marble eyes and licked the side of her face. Tears sprang unexpectedly to her eyes. No matter what other crazy shit was happening in this world or any others, she could always depend on Sparky.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Brian said. “There must be some other way.”
“If Hope has disappeared, there may not be another way to track her.” Katie shook her head. “Unless the police find her, Charon may be our only hope.”
“For once I agree with Brian,” Jules argued. “Wandering around in other worlds didn’t help Leslie. We should let the cops do their job.”
“And how many more of them could get hurt trying to catch her?”
The chatter of the debate washed over her. Anya slid into the bathtub, curling around the nest of eggs. The eggs had warmed the coins beneath them, heating them to the temperature of bathwater. Anya’s breath fogged the porcelain side of the tub. Sparky spooned around the other side of the nest, rested his head on her collarbone.
