Vendetta (Deadly Curiosities Book 2)

by Gail Z. Martin

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I said, nodding toward the artist’s version of the old live oak. Even though it was a fraction of the size of the actual tree, it was still huge. Although I hadn’t touched any of the artwork, the display filled the ballroom with a peaceful vibe, strong and confident. I felt myself relax for the first time in days, enjoying a sense of safety. There in the midst of the angel art, it really did feel like someone was watching over me.

  “Isn’t the model of the Angel Oak striking?” Mrs. Morrissey said. “The artist received permission from the tree’s caretakers to use some of the twigs and acorns from the real Angel Oak. He really captured the essence, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, looking all around at the artwork. “Whenever there’s been a difficult time, we’ve had a rise in art with angels,” Mrs. Morrissey said, leading me around the exhibition. “Yellow Fever, cholera, earthquakes, bombardments, hurricanes, and the like – people turn to making or painting angels. I guess it gives them a sense of comfort.”

  “So the display is part of the fundraiser?” I asked.

  Mrs. Morrissey nodded. “Yes, and I think it will be fabulous. Almost everything here is part of the silent auction to raise money to preserve the Angel Oak. The exhibition premier will be during the donor gala. It’s just a few days away – I have a million and one things to do to get ready!”

  A grouping of paintings in the far corner of the room caught my eye and I wandered over. I could feel the energy shift as I headed toward the edge of the room, and the feel-good vibe became edgy. The angels in the rest of the display ranged from cute to protective, chubby cherubs to hunky bare-chested guys in white robes with flaming swords. But the images in this painting were much darker and more sinister. The faces of these angels leered or threatened, and their eyes were cold. The artist had painted the background in the colors of storm clouds: black, gray, sickly green, and a shade of purple that was the color of a deep bruise or a wound gone bad. I found myself face-to-face with a painting of three Nephilim.

  “Why is this part of a display on angels?” I asked, taking a step back.

  Mrs. Morrissey chuckled. “Interesting, isn’t it? It’s one panel from a series of paintings called ‘Nephilim Rising’. I suspect they’ll raise a lot of eyebrows. I call them our ‘bad boys’. Haven’t you ever heard of fallen angels?”

  “Of course I have. Those just look like they fell hard.”

  One of the fallen angels was in its monster-form. A second was robed in black with a cowl that nearly covered his face. The third looked straight ahead with a frightening intensity, strikingly handsome, like a movie star hired to play a psychopath with the flat, dead eyes of a remorseless killer. I shivered, having seen that same look in Coffee Guy’s eyes. Whoever had painted these Nephilim had first-hand knowledge.

  “I can’t imagine anyone getting a sense of comfort from these angels,” I said. There was a horrible beauty to them that made it difficult to look away, and a disquieting sense that it might be best to keep an eye on them. Near the painting, the resonance was disquieting and dangerous, as if the room itself was screaming a warning to stay back.

  “Unfortunately, you’re right,” Mrs. Morrissey said. “They were painted by Gerard Astor, an artist from Charleston who gained national – and international – prominence. But Gerard battled some demons of his own, like depression and drugs. This was the last painting he finished before he vanished. Most art historians believe he committed suicide.”

  I remembered what Father Anne had said, “Poor, doomed Gerard Astor”… If he had enough contact with the Nephilim to paint their portraits, it didn’t surprise me he killed himself. Especially if the Nephilim came with the same dose of overwhelming guilt that I felt around Coffee Guy.

  I let Mrs. Morrissey lead me around the rest of the exhibition, although I did not turn my back on the fallen angel painting. The other pieces were light-hearted, inspirational, and gorgeous, and I tried to push the darker images from my mind.

  “I think your display is fabulous,” I said, surprised at how many different ways there were to fashion angels. I let my hand gently touch one of the carved and painted wooden angels, and felt a warm, protective power resonating from the sculpture. I was willing to bet the same would be true for most, if not all, of the figures. Whether the artists knew it or not, the angels they felt moved to carve carried their own flicker of magic, bound up in the emotional imprint of the artists that made the figures.

  Reluctantly, I left the ballroom and followed Mrs. Morrissey to the Archive’s library. “Here we go,” she said, bringing a large, canvas-bound book down to one of the reading tables. Not everything had been scanned into computers yet, and while doing so was an ongoing project, such things take time and money. Hence the ‘stacks’, dozens of shelves filled with old volumes organized by the Dewey Decimal System with Mrs. Morrissey’s brain as the search engine.

  “The Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1854,” I read, looking down at the embossed cover of the large book. Yellow Fever had scourged Charleston from its founding until the creation of modern medicine. A hot, wet climate, mosquitoes and the constant coming and going of strangers in a port city was a recipe for epidemics. But even by those standards, the outbreak in 1854 had been a doozie.

  Gingerly, I touched the cover of the book, but no vision appeared to me. Just a persistent sadness, perhaps from others who had looked for clues to the fate of ancestors in these pages.

  “I can’t imagine wandering around the city with a sketch book in the middle of an epidemic,” Mrs. Morrissey said as I flipped the pages in the oversized book. Black-and-white charcoal sketches caught images of funeral processions, corpses littering the streets, carts filled with dead bodies and mourners of every age and social class. A few old daguerreotype photographs were sprinkled among the sketches, faded with the years.

  “They must have realized that the epidemic would go down in history,” I mused. The sketches looked like they had been drawn quickly, but with an eye for detail. I turned one more page, and drew in a sharp breath.

  “Did you find what you needed?” Mrs. Morrissey asked as she busied herself with another book.

  Oh yeah. The next sketch looked like the cover for a fantasy novel. A man in a long duster coat was shooting at five dark, cloaked figures. Bodies lay heaped around the feet of the creatures, and one of the beings gnawed on a human leg bone. Streaks of lightning fell from the sky, and the gunslinger’s weapon shot fire.

  Most people would have taken the sketch for allegory, mankind versus the plague. I was certain the sketch’s artist had witnessed a battle between Winfield and the Nephilim. I took a picture of the page with my phone, and decided to ask Sorren for details later.

  “I found the man you asked about, here in the names of the dead,” Mrs. Morrissey said, calling me away from the sketchbook and over to where she pointed to a name in a big ledger of the plague dead. And right above Mrs. Morrissey’s sculpted fingernail, I saw the name ‘Winfield, Josiah. Death by unlawful duel’.

  “Looks like he didn’t die of the epidemic,” she said brightly. “I hope that helped.”

  “Oh, it did,” I replied, still thinking about the battle sketch. I wanted to ask if there had been missing people before the plague broke out, people who started down staircases and never made it to the bottom, but I didn’t. I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.

  We had to cross the ballroom again on our way out. I was pondering what we had seen in the sketch book. You’re no good at protecting people, I found myself thinking. What good were you to the people at Belle Terre? They’re dead because you didn’t warn them. If you were faster on the uptake, you’d have known they were going to be in danger…

  I caught myself, and shook my head to clear it. Alarm replaced the overwhelming, unnatural tide of guilt. Sorren said Watchers stood in judgment. That means either a Nephilim or a Watcher is nearby, and we’re in danger.

  The room’s energy shifted. The lights dimmed and the air was c
old. Mrs. Morrissey shivered. “Something’s wrong with the air conditioning!” she fussed. “I’ll have to have someone take a look at it.”

  I shook my left wrist, and the old dog collar fell out of my sleeve, but I didn’t put the power into it yet to call Bo’s ghost to my side. I let my athame slip into my right hand. I could use it in more places than the walking stick, since shooting blasts of flame in a museum is generally frowned upon, except as a last resort. I moved into the ballroom, wary and ready for an attack.

  Something moved over on one side of the exhibit, and my gaze traveled toward Gerard Astor’s dark, haunting ‘Nephilim Rising’. That’s when I blinked and caught my breath, because one of those darkly handsome fallen angels was peeling himself off the canvas.

  “Who are you?” Mrs. Morrissey spotted the Nephilim as he stepped away from the painting. She had drawn herself up to her full height, chin raised. “No one’s supposed to be in here until the event tomorrow night.”

  The Nephilim did not answer her. He only had eyes for me. I figured that he could sense my magic and wanted to take a bite. Painting Creep sauntered toward us, and there was a lethal, panther-like grace to his movements.

  Mrs. Morrissey moved toward the alarm by the door, but Painting Creep was faster, and before I could draw my athame on him, he got between her and the alarm panel. He gave her a shove that sent her off balance, and she fell against a large, solid display table, smacking her head on the way down. She moaned but did not try to get up, and a combination of fear and anger moved through my veins like rocket fuel.

  “Get away from her, you bastard.” I willed power to my bracelet and my athame at the same time. Bo’s ghost went to stand watch over Mrs. Morrissey’s fallen form, while the cold force of my magic caught Painting Creep square in the chest. The force sent him tumbling, barely missing some of the large granite angel statues, throwing Creep across the room. I kept myself between him and where Mrs. Morrissey lay, but remembering the fight with Coffee Guy by Magnolia Cemetery, I was afraid this wasn’t going to end well.

  Painting Creep rose to his feet, then he laughed as if it was all a game to him and headed for me again.

  I backed up one step and then another. Painting Creep moved like he had all the time in the world. Bo’s ghost lunged at the Nephilim, barking and snapping, and his ghostly teeth managed to rip open the fallen angel’s left arm from shoulder to wrist. Dead, undead or other, the bite must have hurt, because Painting Creep gave an angry cry and shook loose from Bo’s jaws.

  I blasted him with another shot of cold white energy and Painting Creep started to transform. His model-perfect good looks twisted and stretched, and I knew that if he completely transformed, I would never be able to beat him on my own.

  I took another step back, and found myself backed up against a marble statue of an angel. It stood two feet taller than I was, with wings partially unfurled. Now, with my back against the smooth, cold marble and my magic wide open, I could feel the vibe that I sensed when I first entered the room. All of these pieces except for ‘Nephilim Rising’ had a warm glow to them, carved or painted with good intentions, a sense of awe and consecration. The Angel Oak replica had the strongest essence.

  I grabbed on to the edge of the angel’s wings as I drew my will to me, focusing on that warm glow of power in the art and the tree sculpture, summoning it to envelop me, charging my magic until I could hear it buzz in my mind. I gathered all the power I could hold, and sent it streaming toward Painting Creep in one massive thrust.

  The paintings and statues took on an inner glow and beams of light appeared, linking the artwork together like a giant grid, with the Angel Oak at the center. All except for ‘Nephilim Rising’. I felt the magic growing stronger, amplified and reflected, taking on more power as it pulled from the strong emotions of the art’s creators and beholders.

  This time, the magic was a tide, not a single blast, and it rolled toward Painting Creep like an overwhelming, golden wave. It swept over everything in its path without damaging a thing, but when it struck the Nephilim, the surge of magic stopped him mid-transformation, and knocked him off his feet, hurling him back toward the huge, life-sized canvas of ‘Nephilim Rising’, into the blackness that yawned where his image had once stood.

  I expected a crash as his body connected with the large painting, to hear the tearing of canvas and the splintering of the frame, but there was no sound at all. One second, the Nephilim’s form was borne on the tide of magic, and the next, he was disappearing into the darkness of the painting. I blinked, and Gerard Astor’s masterpiece stood intact as it had been when I first entered the room, except for the fact that it was missing one Nephilim.

  Bo’s ghost barked, rousing me as I stood there trembling in shock. I turned, trying to pull myself together, and saw Mrs. Morrissey lying on the floor. Bo barked once more, then vanished as I knelt beside my friend.

  Mrs. Morrissey moaned and tried to turn over. I helped her onto her back, and her eyes fluttered open. “What happened?” she asked. I could see where she was going to have a goose egg on her head where she had hit the table, and blood matted her hair from a cut on her scalp.

  “We were coming back from the stacks and you must have tripped,” I replied. I felt awful about lying to her but the truth was much, much worse. “You fell, and I tried to find someone to help, but there’s no one else here.”

  “No, there wouldn’t be anyone else right now,” she said, her voice sounding thin and reedy. “Everyone else is at lunch.”

  “Let me call an ambulance,” I offered, worried.

  Mrs. Morrissey reached up and touched the side of her head, coming away with bloody fingers. “Maybe that would be a good idea. I don’t have time to be hurt,” she said with a sigh. “There’s so much to do for the gala.”

  I sat with her as I dialed for help on my cell phone. The downstairs door was unlocked, and the EMTs arrived sooner than I expected. Even though I knew it was standard procedure to put her on a backboard and brace her neck, I hated to see Mrs. Morrissey looking so frail. They carried her carefully down the steps, and for a moment I held my breath, terrified that a void might open up out of nowhere and swallow them whole the way it had taken the other missing people, but the stairs remained just steps. I hoped that Mrs. Morrissey would be fine, and out of the hospital soon. At the same time, I was worried about the Archive hosting a big public event with ‘Nephilim Rising’ on display. That could be a disaster. Maybe she’ll be okay, but they’ll postpone the event, I thought. At least until we can take care of Sariel and his fallen angels.

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that Detective Monroe arrived a few minutes after the ambulance crew. “Well, well. You again,” she said, eyeing me with a very cold gaze.

  “Hello, Detective,” I replied.

  She looked around the foyer of Drayton House. “Aren’t you supposed to be running your shop?”

  “Mrs. Morrissey is a friend of mine, and I often consult with her on the history of pieces that come into the store. I brought her a latte, and she wanted to show me the new Angel Oak exhibit. She tripped and hit her head. I called for help.”

  “You show up in strange places too often. It’s a bad habit.”

  “I didn’t think they sent detectives out to follow up on ambulance calls,” I replied, thankful that at least this time, my fight with the Nephilim had not left the exhibit hall in ruins. That would have been difficult to explain.

  “Normally, I don’t,” Monroe said. “I happened to hear the call on the scanner, caught your name attached to it, and thought it might be worth dropping by.”

  I tried to keep a handle on my annoyance, and hoped I didn’t look as pale and shaky as I felt. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing in a fight, but once the fighting is over I usually want to throw up. “You don’t look so good,” Monroe observed.

  “It was the blood,” I lied. “Blood makes me sick.” Actually, since I’d taken up with the Alliance, I’d seen my share of blood, ichor and lots of other really
nasty fluids that don’t have names and I’d been just fine. I figured it was an answer the detective would accept, and she rolled her eyes as if I had lived up to some unspoken stereotype.

  “Go back to your shop. Stay out of trouble. You might just be unlucky,” she said, giving me a skeptical glare. “But if you keep showing up in the wrong places, I will find out why.”

  I walked two blocks before I sank down on a park bench and let myself have a good round of the shakes. I wanted to call the hospital to find out how Mrs. Morrissey was, but I knew it would be a couple hours before she was through the emergency room, and no one would release information to me, anyhow.

  My head was full of what I had seen, trying to figure out where Josiah Winfield and his pistols fit into the picture. It seemed like too much of a coincidence for his prized guns to show up right when we had monsters and ghost-eating spirits loose in Charleston. I walked back to the store, but we were busy enough with customers that it was over an hour before I had the chance to catch Teag up on what I had seen.

  “I’ve got some news as well,” Teag replied when I finally filled him in. “In between customers, I did a little digging on the Darke Web. I looked up good old Josiah Winfield, and also tried to find out more about your mysterious Mr. Thompson.”

  “And?” I poured the last cup of coffee and rinsed out the pot and filter, then drew up a chair at the break room table.

  Teag brought in his half-finished cup of tea and joined me. “Let’s start with Josiah. Sorren described him right: Josiah was a combination private investigator/hit man/demon hunter.” He grimaced. “He was kind of a splashy guy.”

  “As in style or blood?”

  “Both. Josiah liked to make an impression. He rode a huge, black stallion, and wore all-black clothing and favored a long duster that resembled a priest’s cassock.”

  “That squares with what I saw in the vision, and the drawing Mrs. Morrissey showed me at the Archive.”

  “He had the pistols, but he also carried a crossbow and a nasty modified shotgun. Oh, and he had a penchant for making things freeze over with magic,” he replied, raising an eyebrow.