by Sara Hanover
My mother took a deep breath. “What about the Butchery, again?”
“It’s a bar. A popular night spot at the edge of Old Town, but I saw things there that nobody should ever see. People on hooks hanging from the ceiling, like meat carcasses, but they were . . . alive. Mostly. Ordinary people. I couldn’t help them. I had to run or be caught up myself.”
“Actual bodies?”
“More like souls, I think now.” A shudder ran through me.
“Should you call the police?”
“I don’t think so. It’s more like it resides in two worlds at once. Ours and its. I doubt if anyone would find anything.” I looked at my mother. “You already know magic has a dark side.”
“Yes, but I didn’t think I’d find you wandering about in it!”
“I’m not. But . . .” I flipped my left hand over, palm up. “This is power. People will cheat and kill for power. That’s nothing new.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to study this book and then, when we go out to dinner Saturday night, I’m going to make sure the Iron Dwarves promise to help.”
Steptoe thought on that a bit. He nodded to my mother. “Might be a bright idea, that. They’re judges but also a bit on the marshaling side of things.”
“More than the Society?”
“Heaps more.”
She rubbed the bridge of her nose as if a headache might be settling there. “All right then.” She stood, pointing at me. “No more midnight rambles without telling me where and why you’re going.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I mean it.”
“And so do I.” I nodded sharply. I noticed then she’d dressed for the office. “Where are you off to?”
“Campus. The university is starting a roster of on-line courses, and I’ve been asked to train for it.”
“Wow. They’re really moving into the twenty-first century.”
She gave a half-laugh. “I’m not sure it’s an honor. I think most of the teachers are too unfamiliar with the Internet to be useful.”
“Well, that’s not you.”
“Not at the moment. We’ll see how well I cope once the instruction gets going. We only have a few weeks before the spring semester starts. Today we show up, and tomorrow morning the IT team goes to work showing us what to do and how to work with their programs.”
“You’ll be great,” I told her.
“Remote learning. It could just be a phase.”
“At least, you’re still teaching.”
“For the moment.” She waved and went out the kitchen door to the driveway, and we could hear her car leave. And I realized I’d missed yet another chance to ask her if she’d had company the other night. I huffed at myself for being careless.
Steptoe swung around in his chair. “You do know how much trouble you’ve been in?”
“Trust me, I know.”
“We can’t help if you don’t spill the goods.”
I moved around the kitchen, restoring lids to jam jars and putting them away, sweeping crumbs off the table, and generally just not looking him in the eyes.
“Tell Carter any of this?”
“I did, yes. Finally.”
“Good. ’Cause I’d hate for him to blame me if something happened to you.”
“He won’t.”
Steptoe’s face sagged into unhappy lines. “Sooner or later, everyone always blames the demon.” His tail wilted.
I took the dirty dishes from him, loaded the washer, and decided we had enough to run a cycle. “Where did you run off to?”
“When?”
“Earlier.”
“You might say I had a bit of demon business to attend to.” He rocked back in his chair.
“And did you?”
“Not exactly.”
I saw a gleam in his eyes. “What, then?”
“You know that black sooty stuff that leaks from one of the professor’s boxes?”
I nodded.
“I got a bit on my handkerchief, right, and took it to a friend to be analyzed,” he said proudly.
“You did? And what did they say?”
Steptoe cleared his throat. “Vampiric dust.”
“Vam what?”
“Vampiric dust.”
I sat down quickly, asking, “What on earth is that?”
“In great quantities, it can be a shroud, like the one wot covered Malender.” A bit of his cockney accent sneaked into his words.
“Imprisoned him,” I corrected. “Well, he’s shed of it now, one way or the other.”
“True right. You have anything to do with that?”
“Salt.”
His eyebrow waggled in surprise. “Salt? Must have been a ton of it, then.”
“Close.” I flexed my left hand about the maelstrom stone. “Why would the professor have anything like that in his goods?”
“Ever see Peter Pan?”
“A few times. Why . . . oh . . . the missing shadow.”
“Something like that, I think.” Steptoe’s tail came up and wrapped partway about his waist.
“The professor had part of a . . . a shroud from somebody?”
“’e had my tail, didn’t he?”
“He definitely did. Vampires are real?” Not that I hadn’t believed Morty, but the fact was a difficult one to accept.
“We told you they were. Real, rare, and nasty. Not that I think the professor would be intemperate enough to try to bind a vampire to him, like he did me, but he had something to do with one, some time or other.”
“But we boxed all that stuff up. I never saw anything like that.”
“Nor I, ducks, but it was in there somewhere. Maybe in a hollowed-out book or some such. He was a good and devious wizard in his day.” Steptoe stood up. “Cost me a pretty penny to get that analysis. I have to go pay up now.”
“Doing what?”
He laid his index finger alongside his nose. “That’s for me to know, and you to wonder. But it won’t bring any harm home, I promise that.”
“Better not,” I said to his back as he left. I waited a few moments, listening to the house settle in the winter air, getting used to just me and the dog. When I was certain I was well and truly alone, I went to the pantry and got the journal out of the cereal box.
Scout and I took up a warm corner in the living room, me on the couch, and he stretched across my feet while I went in search of answers to questions that seemed ever more complicated.
The journal fell open in my lap, Mortimer’s exquisite cursive easy to read, and yet difficult because it was so different looking from my friend, although I could hear his bass voice booming through the sentences themselves.
Then his words reached out and gripped me.
It is well known the power that resides in a name. But there are names which dare not be uttered even once, let alone thrice, for that being will hear and know and appear. The calling of a true name will breach even the long-standing protection of a threshold, and the intent of the visitor called in is never anything less than evil. Yet mortals seem slow to learn this truism and John Graham Andrews slower than most.
Finally, my dad, fully mentioned. My jaw dropped. Holy shit. Had my father summoned something?
CHAPTER TWENTY
WHO GOES THERE?
WHAT HAD HE done? What had I done? Had I put all this into motion?
I forgot to breathe for a long moment and then made a greedy gulp for air. This couldn’t be. Not right under our noses, more or less. Steptoe would surely have noticed the remnants of such an action, and the professor, too, and I couldn’t count Carter out. It might not have been recent, but it surely would have left a sign if a traumatic summoning had happened in this old house. Surely.
Wouldn’t it have
?
Would the summoned one have stayed here before making a break for the outside world? And if it had happened, they would have acted upon it. Perhaps even ending it, and I would never have spent those hellish last months in high school, and Mom . . .
No. I couldn’t think that we would have been saved, because the past was past. No changing it. And we’d made it through, hadn’t we? More or less intact? In some ways, better than we’d been before. My mother and I trusted each other truly and deeply, bonded by adversity and blood, and we were all right.
Only my father suffered unspeakably. I couldn’t believe that he deserved it.
I bent over the journal again, reading as swiftly as I could, taking care not to skim if I could help it. I ran across Devian’s name and stopped, reading the sentence several times to see if the silver-eyed, deadly elf was the name I sought.
No. Mortimer’s entry dismissed him as little more than a devious, back-dealing personage to be watched carefully for the future. That future, I thought, had bothered me quite a bit, but it had taken Devian a few decades to get there.
And then, thirty pages and nearly two decades beyond the torn page, I came across a new personage.
Nicolo.
I leaned close to the pages.
Vampire. A master of centuries, hidden under our noses, and yet as woven into the fabric of Richmond and its Virginian environs as any being can be. We will have to root him out very cautiously. Nicolo is magic incarnate, wrapped in spells and wards that defy decryption. His instinct for survival and cruelty is vast. He protects and stokes the prejudices of old, to his advantage. There are few vampires and fewer alive who have studied them successfully and can be consulted. All I can do is watch, wait, and learn . . . and pray no one breathes his name. Devian is said to be one of his puppets. And then along came John Graham Andrews, up to his neck in debt and desperation.
Cold fingers trailed down my back, leaving a chill dancing in their wake, despite the warm dog across my feet and ankles, and the furnace vent blowing softly from above in this corner of the room.
Nicolo would certainly match the scrap of a page which had defiantly remained in the journal. The notion of such a being would also certainly explain why no one spoke openly of him. Did Carter know of him? He had to, through the Society if nowhere else, but perhaps even through his position with the police. Vampires had to feed, didn’t they?
I stood up, dumping Scout off my feet. He shook himself awake and trotted after me as I made my way to the cellar stairs and down to the limbo which imprisoned my father.
I centered myself in the middle of the room, where I could feel the chill despite the optimistically redecorated tile and walls and recessed lighting. Hiram and his crew had modernized the place far beyond its dirt floor, and plank shelves on stacked cement bricks, and rickety forgotten furniture. There hung little in the way of shadows, but an atmospheric depression filled the room. I’d gotten as used to that as my father’s presence, never bothering to wonder if it could mean anything more. Now I did.
I held my hand up and the beady Eye of Nimora opened without reservation. My father’s ghostly appearance looked like little more than a mirage, wavering transparent before me, but I could see an expression on his face, alert and listening.
“I came across a name in Morty’s diary. Does Nicolo mean anything to you?” Scout leaned against my leg heavily with a little dog moan. The moment the words left my mouth, it felt as if something massive pressed on me, waiting, pushing, preparing to spring open. My throat closed a little bit in a spasm, and I coughed to clear it, not helping much. Upstairs, in the kitchen, keys and pots and pans clanged back and forth in a loud cacophony of sound and alarm.
“No,” I told him. “I won’t be saying it again. But is he the one?”
More rattles and clashes and then the sound of one of the pots falling off its hook, crashing onto a counter and then bouncing on the floor above.
“I’ll take that as a yes, and a warning.”
The noise ceased abruptly. Definitely a warning. “Is it about the stone?”
A single clang came from the upstairs kitchen. My hand shook slightly. “What does the stone have to do with it?”
My father’s lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him speak. Only a breathy sigh reached my ears.
“Had you found it? Were you negotiating with him over it? Gambling debts and everything? Or was this elf Devian the middle man?” Why I questioned him when he could not give an answer I could hear or know, I didn’t understand, but I felt I had to. I had to know what had happened so I could unwind it.
The chill around me intensified as my father drew close. His mouth still moved, yet I could not gather his words.
Then his fingers brushed against my left hand, and in a movement too quick to deny him, he took the stone out of my palm.
I stared at it in astonishment as it floated in the air before my eyes. My hand felt empty. Abandoned. Icy cold. The stone rarely left me except when I willed it free, to save lives, and then it returned to me as quickly as it could. It chose its holder. It moved on when it was ready, unless the possessor had died and it had no choice. Yet he’d taken it without resistance.
“Wh-why did you do that?”
I caught the breathy whisper then. “It’s what he desires and what will defeat him.”
At least, that’s what I thought my father said. Before I could blink, the stone pressed back into my palm again, warming, eyes still open. The cursed gold ring that had been the professor’s and which the stone had eaten, fell chiming to the floor. Two things now it had given up: the null stone and then the ring.
“Okay. Was that supposed to happen, too?” I bent over and picked up the thick, 24 karat gold ring that would only have fit my thumb without falling off. “This belonged to Brandard. It was cursed.”
“Not anymore . . .” and then my father retreated to the far side of the room. A cloud of cold went with him, all misty like, a fog moving across the tiled floor and gathering at his feet.
I looked at him. Possibilities swarmed through my mind. “If N—if the vampire is ended—are you freed?”
The apparition shrugged. My father did not know either.
I threw him a kiss and a promise. “I’ll be careful.” Scout and I clattered back upstairs where the dog threw himself against my ankles again and skimmed his lips back to show his teeth in a rumbling growl.
I unwrapped myself and tried to step around him, but Scout matched my every move, determined to stay between me and whatever it was he sensed. I had the journal tucked in my waistband and pulled it loose. Back into its bag and cereal box it went, although Scout’s positioning impeded me, causing a handful of cereal to dance across the kitchen floor. He inhaled the bits and gave a choking growl as he retreated back into guard mode.
“Don’t eat while you’re snarling.” I put my hand on his broad head. “What’s going on?”
I’d only said the name aloud once. Just once. Like not thinking about the word hippopotamus, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, but I wouldn’t speak it. Broad daylight outside or not, I didn’t dare. I had no ideas whether anything ever said about vampires in the movies or in books or folk tales were real. Was sunlight their bane? Garlic? Holy water? If I invited one in, was I as good as dead . . . or worse?
Correction. I did know something. Thresholds held a not understood but powerful gate against the uninvited, supernaturally speaking. Morty had spelled that out. I’d ferreted out a likely book from the professor’s stash that might help as well. I’d have to prepare myself, without his phoenix wizardly help, and likely without the Society as well. If Carter found out I was up to anything, he’d probably put a very quick stop to it. The trick with him would be for me to get involved and then ask for help when I’d gone beyond the stopping point. I have friends I can call on, but first I need to find out what needs to be done, and how much help
I’m going to need finishing it. I made this mess. I have to dig my way out of it.
I went upstairs toward the bedrooms, the path of least resistance to Scout’s obstinate guard. From there, I stood in the hallway before looking to the tell-tales to see if they had reacted to whatever bothered my pup.
There are reactions and there are reactions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the tell-tales with their petals reaching to the sky, their tiny leafy arms standing up straight as well, their faces stark with floral alarm. I think each and every one of them had a panic attack.
Which meant I should, too.
Whatever signals they might be sending to Steptoe, he was undoubtedly too far away to intercept. He’d only know what had happened after the fact.
I spread my hands and concentrated on displaying my shields. Then, having to nearly vault over Scout, I went into the professor’s old room where the curtains still hung with just a slit open between them, to look out upon the front street. I wanted to brush the old lacy fabric aside to see better, but I didn’t dare. Not with the hair rising on the back of my neck, my dog growling beside me, and the tell-tales frozen in silent screams in their hallway vase.
Peering out the window, I scanned the street. Broad daylight, more or less, with shadows lengthening for the shortness of the day. I stood back so that my breathing wouldn’t condense on the window panes, giving me away. I needn’t have—I couldn’t breathe anyway. Something lurked on the sidewalk below.
It wasn’t nighttime, so the eyes did not gleam as ferociously red-coal brilliant as they had during the dark. But they still glowered, amidst a shadow so black and shifting and sharp angled that it could not possibly be natural. As before, its form mutated as I watched, growing and shrinking, edges jabbing and then receding. It looked as if it wanted to devour whatever it could: sidewalk, lawn, house, and inhabitants. Then it would withdraw and curl up, before surging forth again. Their attention stayed rabidly on the front of the house, lower level, and I had no desire to direct the stare toward me. I felt melted and unnerved enough. To add to my fear was the realization that this was the third time I’d seen it, and in the magical world, three times is a summon.
