by J. P. Sloan
The second box, however, was what I was looking for. There it lay in a wad of black tissue paper. Finely rendered gold chain culminating in a single-helix that caged an unpolished hunk of smoky quartz. The materials themselves weren’t so noteworthy. The method of craftsmanship was.
I reached into the tissue and gripped the onyx knob at the palm-end of the pendulum, carefully lifting it from the box. It hung motionless from my hand. Not even a slight sway from my own pulse. It was an arrow pointing obstinately and unwaveringly toward Hell.
Malosi muttered, “What’s so special about this particular pendulum?”
“You heard of Maximilian Gregori?”
He eased away from the pendulum.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
“This was his.”
“You sure?”
The energy from the gold crawled up the chain and around my hand like a swarm of fire ants.
“Pretty sure.”
“He, uh… didn’t he successfully curse a Pope to death?”
“That’s the story. Benedict XI. Contributed to the schism in the Papacy.” I eased the pendulum into the box and replaced the lid. “I didn’t say I was a fan. Just that he made some impressive working tools.”
I returned the other boxes, closed the closet, and set the yarn as well as I could on the doorknob. A part of my subconscious prodded that Edgar would spot that it had been disturbed the second he’d lay eyes on it. And that would be a real test of our friendship.
Reaching into my pocket, I laid the envelope with my check onto the glass case, then thought twice about it. Instead, I tucked it onto the frame of the locked sliding glass doors behind the case, out of sight.
“We’re good?” Malosi nudged.
“No, we’re horrible. But we’re done here.”
he front door to Zeno’s lodge mansion was crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape. As I drove past the lodge, I wondered where Zeno had disappeared to.
Malosi pointed out a free street spot around a corner, and I parked us out of sight of the building.
“Sure you want to stick your nose up in the Presidium’s business like this?” he asked.
“Nope. But it seems wrong just sitting on my ass, you know?”
“Not really.”
I killed the engine and turned to Malosi. “Okay, I have an uneasy feeling about this. Instincts are popping off that this wasn’t the Presidium.”
He lifted a brow.
I continued, “Too violent. Too histrionic. The Presidium isn’t into making grand, bloody gestures like this.” I nodded to the corner. “They’re more into black-bagging the problems and making them disappear quietly into the night.”
“That was before they got outed on network television.”
“Still, though. I don’t see them making examples of people. This whole purge doesn’t sit right.”
Malosi nodded. “If not the Presidium, then who’s mowing down these Netherworkers?”
I leaned back and thought of Lillian. That was a Presidium hit. It fit the profile, and she was pushing the Presidium’s very specific buttons by importing hermetic contraband. But Zeno? This was more elaborate. Almost a punishment.
“That’s what we’re here to find out.”
As we rounded the corner on foot, I reached into my pocket to feel the fire ant energy buzzing off the Gregori pendulum. It was a finely tuned piece of divination gear, and I was about to field-deploy it for the second time. We stopped across the street from the lodge, and I pulled out the pendulum.
“Okay, so let’s see what―”
The pendulum levitated directly up and back toward the top of my thigh.
I sucked in a breath.
“You see that?” I whispered.
Malosi squinted, then shrugged. “See what, exactly?”
I took another look, only to find the pendulum hanging straight to the ground.
“You didn’t see it rise on its own, just now?”
He shook his head with a dubious wrinkle between his brows.
Hell. This thing was tugging at my brain more than my hand. All that energy I was allowing to seep through my skin had already built resonance. This was the cost of dealing with cursed items. That, and damnation. But damnation was something of a fluid thing for me at that moment, so I just rolled with it.
I released my thoughts for a brief moment, and just felt the pendulum. It tugged upward, pointing again to my leg. I turned a slow circle, and images from the Gregori pendulum led my third eye to a green space just behind a row of upscale houses.
“There,” I whispered.
I jogged up the sidewalk and found a wide patch of grass between two driveways. We slipped between two very expensive homes and climbed across a length of brush separating their garden-lawns from a careworn public park. Most of the grass surrounding the park had been walked over to the point of dusty topsoil. A couple benches sat opposite a towering piece of particularly ugly public art. It was a chimera of welded steel, glass, and what appeared to be sails of canvas. A line of orange netting remained strung between landscaping stakes surrounding the sculpture, and the smell of freshly-turned clay soil hung in the air.
Malosi rubbed his chin. “I like it.”
“De gustibus non est disputandum.”
“Hmm?”
“Taste can’t be disputed.”
“You don’t like it?”
I held up the pendulum. It swung in a savage line back and forth between Zeno’s lodge and the sculpture.
“You’re seeing this, right?”
“Yeah,” Malosi grumbled. “That, I’m seeing.”
I walked a circle around the sculpture. It was newly erected, that much was obvious. But nothing about it seemed expressly esoteric. Just a series of geometric shapes and animal heads welded into a mass beneath what seemed to be some cubist realization of a schooner. I inspected the geometric shapes for convergences, sacred geometries, or any kind of glyphs I could recognize… and came up empty.
I gave Gregori another shot. Once again, it felt stiff and intense. Angry, even. Something about this damned piece of public art was pissing it off. So, in keeping with the new relationship I was forging with this tiny spiral of gold, I centered myself and did something I hadn’t done since my training days with Emil.
I returned my focus to my third eye chakra, and released the guarded filter I had maintained to this point.
The pendulum poured images and insinuations, if not outright hallucinations, into my consciousness. If the faucet was at a drip, I wondered what would happen at a full flow.
Turned out, a full flow was fucking terrifying.
The third eye being the center of magical conceptualization, the input was largely visual. Individual images of places, people, and situations I didn’t want dredged up out of the sewer of my subconscious. Moments of danger. Attacks, both physical and magical.
I saw my parents, both before and after their deaths. I saw Emil, vivisected and lying in his own bloodied bed in our London flat. I saw that dickhead from tenth grade who loved to sucker punch me in the stairwells when we were alone.
I saw Carmen.
Every pore of my being oozed alarm. This pendulum had tapped into my instincts for fear.
Danger.
And it pointed me directly to this structure of welded steel, glass and fabric.
I opened my eyes.
Malosi stared at me from several yards away, his eyes wide.
“Oh, you did not just do what I think you―”
“It’s this statue, Reed. I know it.”
“Looks clean to me.”
“It’s not. It very much is not.” I paced around the front of the statue, then pulled the orange netting aside before pocketing the pendulum. “It’s hot, Reed. Something inside this chunk of fugly art is cursed.”
He shrugged and pushed the netting further apart.
I climbed up the six-inch concrete platform and gripped the top of what I assumed was a raven’s head.
“Give me a boost, will you?” I called.
“Huh?”
“I need to look inside.”
He stood behind me, then shoved his hands onto his hips. “I am not grabbing you around the waist, brother. Let’s just get that sorted out right now.”
“Oh, grow up.”
He crouched down and made a cradle with his hands.
“Okay, good enough,” I muttered as I stepped onto his enormous hands, guiding myself along the ridge of the steel animal shapes as Malosi hoisted me higher.
Over the top ridge of the raven’s head I spotted a series of glass shapes completely occluded by the exterior of the statue. There was no point in having those blown-glass ornaments tucked so deep. No one would ever see it. Fishy as hell.
They encircled the central support pole which held the keel of the sort-of-schooner up at the top of the statue.
My forehead burned, and for a brief moment, the pole flickered.
It flickered.
Energy ants crawled up and down my side. The pendulum was itching to get back out of my pocket.
“Anything?” Malosi huffed.
“Hang on.”
“Please hurry. Your bitch ass ain’t as light as it looks.”
“I’m wiry.”
“The hell you say.”
I centered myself again, and with a little effort focused those energy ants back up my back and over the top of my head… into my third eye. It felt like a very, very poor decision. I was opening myself up to random energy without proper precautions. This was precisely the kind of thing I’d have busted Ches on.
But it worked.
My eyes focused on the pole itself, which glowed with some kind of hateful light. It positively vibrated. And there, etched into the surface of the cold-rolled steel ran a line of runes.
“Fuck. There it is.”
I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone as Malosi complained below. Testing the limits of his steadying power, I snapped several photos before dropping to the concrete as he let me go.
I grabbed his shoulder and gave him a pat on the arm.
“Thanks, Reed.”
“What did you find?”
I pulled the photos up on my phone, zooming in on the images. Runes. Definitely magical. This wasn’t some random arthouse Viking homage. These runes ran in an intentional spiral up the pole.
“How’s your Nordic?” I asked as I handed over my phone.
“Fair.”
“Anything you recognize?”
He studied the photos, sliding them back and forth, continually adjusting the zoom. Finally, with a rub of his eyes, he handed the phone back to me.
“It’s a niding pole. Looks like you were right.”
I swore under my breath and pocketed my phone, turning back toward the statue that had taken a decidedly sinister caste.
Niding pole. That was serious next-level Netherwork. It was a stationary curse pole used by the Old World Asatruar. When a Viking took a wicked hair against his neighbor, he would scribe a niding pole with some notably hateful runes and pound it into the ground facing his neighbor’s property. Then all he had to do was to sit back and wait for his neighbor’s life to fall directly to shit. It was powerful, but unfocused, magic.
“This was planned,” I whispered. “Well in advance.”
“Hate to break it to you, Dorian, but niding poles aren’t easy to break. I mean, we could take a bazooka to this statue, the curse will still be on the land.”
I paced a circle, staring at the base of the statue. My brain sent alarm signals to my logic center, which unfortunately was still swimming with fight-or-flight hormones courtesy of the Gregori.
“Geomancy,” I muttered.
It was starting to make sense. I lifted my phone and dialed Ches.
“You okay?” she asked immediately.
“Peaches and cream. How are you coming with the Enoch Pratt glyphs?”
“Um, okay I guess. I’ve been with Ricky since you left.”
“Okay. Stay there with him, inside Reed’s wards. We’re going to check something out.”
Ches seemed to move to another room, and whispered a response.
“Are you starting something I should know about?”
“No. Not really. I’m just seeing the bigger picture. If you identify the glyphs, call me immediately. It could be helpful.”
I hung up and turned to an increasingly annoyed Malosi.
“Where are we going now?” he asked with a snarl.
“Harrisburg.”
knew Deirdre’s address from our first communication, should I have found occasion to invoice her. She lived in a tidy condo near the center of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Just an hour and a half drive north. I was willing to take the trip easy enough. Malosi, on the other hand, seemed about ready to drop me off on the side of I-83 and keep driving back to New York.
He gave me sidelong glances as we proceeded.
“This woman’s a what, now?”
“Geomancer.”
“Which matters why?”
“The niding pole is a geomantic apparatus in nature. Right? It requires a specific placement, a duration, a direction. I’m no Asatruar, but the fundamentals have to apply to all magical schools.”
Malosi shook his head. “Still not shedding any light, brother.”
“She’s the only geomancer I know on the East Coast. Which basically means she’s the only geomancer I know anywhere. And what little I know about geomancy tells me that these things are stupid easy to retro-engineer. If she can deconstruct the niding pole, we’ll know a little more about the magical school that created it. Which helps us identify the people who rogered Zeno right and proper.”
“You’ve committed to the fact that this isn’t the Presidium, then?”
“Trust me, I’d rather it not be a giant question mark.”
We pulled up behind Deirdre’s condo. Malosi wouldn’t let me go up the stairwell to her third-floor condo without checking the lay of the land first. He was a consummate professional, that much was certain. I hoped Clement was paying him adequately.
If I was right, and Deirdre could help identify the runes and by extension the craftsman of the niding pole, then maybe there was hope that I could deconstruct Ricky’s curse. If I watched her do it, I might catch a clue as to how I’d approach the Dead Dragons’ curse. Granted, the Dead Dragons probably didn’t use geomancy on Ricky, but any insight was helpful.
Malosi nodded me up the stairs, and after six flights, I found myself in a blustery breezeway knocking on Deirdre’s door.
No answer.
I checked my phone and dialed her number again. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t anything new.
“Sure she’s home?” Malosi asked with an air of impatience.
“No.”
His air ratcheted up a couple notches.
I gave the door another shot before pressing my ear against it, listening for a TV or anything.
And I heard something.
Mumbling. Distant, pained mumbling.
I gave Malosi a look, and he reached into his jacket.
“You best be right about this,” he grumbled as he pulled a lock pick from his jacket. He had the lock open in less than a minute, after which I moved to open. I met with a meaty palm in the center of my chest, and to my admitted astonishment, Malosi pulled a handgun from a holster I never knew was tucked inside his jacket.
I swore softly, but his hand shoved me clear of the door without further protest.
Malosi disappeared inside the apartment for several seconds longer than I found comfortable. Finally, he reemerged, weapon stowed, ushering me inside.
The condo was extremely dark. My eyes took a moment to adjust before they caught up with the utter havoc spread out in front of us. Papers everywhere. Dishes. Clothes. It was complete chaos.
“Someone toss the joint?” I asked, before Malosi pointed to the back room.
I stepped carefully up the short corridor leading to the rea
r sleeping area. One door stood ajar, and I nudged it open with my foot. I found a bed inside. Small. Probably a twin. It was largely swallowed by the enormous en suite that contained it. And yet more improbably, the twin bed swallowed the tiny figured huddled in its center, holding her knees tight to her chest.
With a thin clearing of my throat, I called out, “Deirdre?”
She didn’t look up at me. Her hair fell in ratty tangles over crossed arms, but I knew she heard me. Her rocking intensified.
“Deirdre,” I repeated. “It’s Dorian Lake. Are you hurt?”
She thrust a hand out, a trembling finger pointing at the wall opposite her face.
I reached into my pocket to grab my sachet of salt, but Malosi held out his hand before I could advance. With an upturned palm, he revealed a large oval of hematite.
“Good thinking,” I whispered.
“Half of defensive magic is planning ahead,” he replied.
I took the hematite, and trusting in its energy-absorbing capacity, stepped inside the room. My head spun instantly. The energy was swirling, flowing around me, cascading against the Gregori’s particularly cranky bristle from my pocket. Nothing inside that room seemed correct, orthographically speaking. Up was down, left was right, and inside was outside. It was like a tiny vortex swam with every kind of reversal imaginable. How Deirdre was still alive inside this room frankly astonished me.
She waggled her finger again, squealing. I turned to follow her finger. The entire south-facing wall was covered in what appeared to be black marker ink. Seemingly random letters filling the entire wall in a kind of scribbled grid. Some letters backward, some upside down.
I shot Malosi a questioning glance, but he simply shook his head.
I crouched beside Deirdre on her bed.
“Hey, can you look at me?”
She clamped her arms tight around her face.
“Deirdre, it’s Dorian. You can trust me. Listen, you’re inside an energy vortex. A nasty one. It’s cooking your noodle, so I’m not sure if you’re even hearing the words I’m saying. But you have to try and trust me.” I reached out for one of her hands, trying to pry her fingers away from her arms. “Come on. Let’s get clear of this.”
She squealed again, shaking her head. Deirdre could hear me. What’s more, she could understand me. But she was sealed tight inside a cage of terror. Whatever was reverse-spinning the energy in her condo was turning her world into a living nightmare.
