Vanished g-4

by Kat Richardson

  “Me?”

  Mrs. Jabril nodded. “For whoever might come to open the vault after him, that is. He said that he might not return to open it again. And he forbade me to open it to Jakob without his presence.”

  Purcell had been twisted to Alice’s purposes, but he hadn’t been entirely in the dark about the dangers. He had anticipated trouble and done what he could. I hoped the letter would give some indication of why he hadn’t spoken directly to Edward about it, though with the asetem in the picture, that may have been enough.

  Mrs. Jabril cut short my mental wandering by opening the iron grille in front of the vault door. It looked too heavy for such a tiny woman to move, but I was becoming quite sure she wasn’t at all a normal person. She pointed to one of two keyholes—there was one on the top and one on the bottom of the door, an uncomfortable span for anyone other than an ape—and told me to put my key into the one on top. She slid hers into the keyhole on the bottom and we turned them together. The door loosened in its frame and sighed a little as a gust of air cooler than the air in the cellar leaked out. Mrs. Jabril took hold of the door’s handle and turned it with the sound of metal rolling on metal. The hinges made a whisper of protest as she opened the door.

  Given the production of opening it, I expected the treasure of King Solomon’s mines, but the interior of the small vault was packed with various crates and wooden cases with a pile of plastic file boxes near the front. A large envelope had been taped to the top of the nearest file box and an open carton sat beside it.

  “I shall return to the office above, if you like,” Mrs. Jabril offered. “There is a bell near the lift which you can ring for me.”

  There was no way I had the time or temptation to go through the whole vault. I suspected that Purcell had left everything I needed in the box on top, and I was certain I could trust Mrs. Jabril. “I don’t think that’s necessary. If you don’t mind waiting while I read the letter, I’m sure I won’t be much longer than that,” I said, looking into the vault.

  Mrs. Jabril said nothing and stood silently by as I reached for the envelope, which was addressed, “Edward, or his Agent.” A curious little symbol near the bottom of the address glowed red and then blue as I picked up the letter, and I thought it was probably some kind of ward. I wondered what would have happened to the letter if I wasn’t in possession of Edward’s power of attorney. Bursting into flames seemed likely. A gold wafer and two small blobs of blue wax held the flap closed. A little nervous, I broke them and opened the letter.

  Dear Ned,

  I have fallen to the twin follies of complacency and arrogance which led me to betray your trust and lose our security to your enemies. I can only say I did not realize what I had done until it was too late, did not know there was a cuckoo in our nest. I cannot say who works for them—I don’t know which of our friends and servants have taken their coin—but the asetem-ankh-astet are among us, and destruction already rules the day. I hope you will forgive me.

  I have done what I can to mitigate your losses, converted as much as possible to negotiable forms, made transfers of deed and title, and moved assets as swiftly as possible to those safe places of which we spoke long ago. I have collected copies of those papers into the boxes attached to this letter as well as certain articles which I know to be of great importance to you. I have left them to the care of the clockwork, she, of all things, being unassailable. Once the proper forms are filed, your property will be restored, as much as it can be, but the power that held St. James’s is gone, taken by that abomination that called herself Alice and that black monster, Simeon.

  Beware of them and even of your own shadow. There is a traitor among your close circle who comes from the Pharaohn himself and will be dangerous beyond description and subtle as a serpent. You must be most careful if you are to escape the Pharaohn’s machinations. More so than I have been.

  I regret that my foolishness has cost you so much and that I shall not see you again to say that I am sorry.

  Your friend, as ever,

  John Purcell

  I refolded the letter, feeling a little sad once again for Purcell even if he was a vampire, and returned it to its envelope. Then I peeked into the box next to the file case. A clutter of objects had been thrown into it, including a handful of animal teeth, an oddly shaped knife with a missing point, a single ornate garnet earring, and a black silk scarf, lumpy with the masked shapes of other things below it. Something about the contents made me shiver and I set that aside to open the plastic file box.

  The sheer volume of paper was staggering for such a small container. Packed into the box were records of stock transactions, transfers of title to dozens of properties, records of deed and incorporations, bank account records, recordings of probate, and dozens of other legal documents. From the dates, it appeared Purcell had done it all himself in a whirlwind of activity during the shortening spring twilight of the two weeks before he was taken by Alice’s minions. No wonder he hadn’t replied to Edward’s messages; he’d spent all the available time trying to fix what had gone wrong and he didn’t trust anyone to make replies for him—not once he’d realized that Jakob was tainted by the asetem, as he must have been. I put the letter into the front of the file case and picked up both that and the small carton of odds and ends. Then I carried them out of the vault and shut the door.

  “I’m ready to go,” I said to the patient Mrs. Jabril.

  She hadn’t moved or complained while I looked through the boxes. Now she stepped forward and helped me relock the door before closing the grille back over it.

  I watched her through the deepest layer of the Grey as she finished her job. Her eyes really were emeralds and her teeth truly were pearls: she was “the clockwork” that Purcell had mentioned, a thing of metal and machinery beneath her sagging skin, animated by that pure golden magic I had observed in her corona and by a spark of something human tangled at the heart of her gears and pinions. But beyond that, the only sign of humanity was the lingering trace of the man who’d built her, though she faked it well.

  I surmised it was her job to care for the vault—maybe it always had been—and her charge to answer if asked the right questions. Jabril, the silversmith who’d wanted to be a clockmaker, must have built her. I’d never seen anything like her before, but she was a thing of laws and mechanisms, and one thing I knew was that creatures like her did not lie or deviate from their programming. She must have been nearly two hundred years old, but she would mind the shop and the vault and carry out her maker’s intentions until she fell to bits, however long she lasted.

  She turned and looked at me as she finished. “Is there anything else?”

  “Only that you shouldn’t allow anyone access to that vault except Edward Kammerling or his agent.”

  “You?”

  “Gods, I hope not,” I replied, shuddering at the thought.

  “Shall I see Mr. Purcell again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She nodded and started back to the lift. I caught up to her in a few strides.

  “Mrs. Jabril,” I started, a little reluctant to ask but compelled to the question and knowing she would be equally compelled to answer, “have you ever met a man called Simeon? A. wizard?”

  “A sorcerer,” she corrected. “I met him once, when Mr. Jabril was still alive. An evil man. He had raised up an apprentice of great talent—a distant cousin of Mr. Jabril’s named Ezra—nurtured his power, and used him to learn great things. Then he slew him and drank Ezra’s soul. Only I knew, and I could say nothing against him. I do not care to see Simeon bin Salah again. Has he something to do with Mr. Purcell’s going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” She said not another word until I was leaving the shop, and then she shook my hand with her cold, hard one in which I felt the cables and cogs moving under the skin. She said, “I shall look after the vault. As we always have.” She had a significant gleam in her emerald eyes as she nodded to me. I pitied anyone or anything fool e
nough to try to get past Mrs. Jabril and her mechanical cousin below.

  On my way back down the arcade, Percy tried to trip me, giggling in a chorus of ghostly voices. I stumbled and caught myself, muttering, “Damn you. Don’t make me come after you, you pain in the butt.”

  The collective mean spirit of Percy whispered in my ear, “It wasn’t at all what you thought, was it, little girl?”

  “What?” I barked, turning in a circle to catch a glimpse of the poltergeist.

  “It’s not over,” the chorus whispered.

  One of the beadles strolled over and steadied me by the elbow. “Are you all right, madam?”

  “I’m fine. I slipped but I’m OK.” It wasn’t just what the poltergeist had said but how that flipped me out. “Little girl,” it had called me—my father’s pet term, again. I’d always supposed that he’d have continued to call me that, had he lived to see me at my current five foot ten, and I was shaken by the poltergeist’s use of it. Had all these communications really been from my father? Was Dad somehow reaching through the wards around him? Why—or how—after so much time. unless he was making a desperate effort to help me before it was too late. The thought added urgency to my plans and a terrible weight to the future.

  “Do you require assistance?” the beadle asked.

  I started to refuse but thought I’d be better off without another visit from Percy. “Yes, please. I seem to be managing poorly with these boxes.” With a very good grace, he took the biggest box from me and escorted me to the nearest street door to hail a cab and wave me on my way. There were no other little tricks from the resident poltergeist.

  I asked for the nearest place I could pack and ship the boxes, and the cabby obliged with alacrity while I worried at the question of what the poltergeist meant. It was obvious this was a continuation of the messages I’d been getting since this whole kerfuffle started, but they’d dropped off once I’d left the States and I’d been happy to be shut of them for a while. Now here was another message and much clearer than before. The question I’d started out with had been answered to a degree: I was a Greywalker because my father had dumped the job and Wygan, the Pharaohn of the asetem-ankh-astet, had a purpose for one, a special one, so he’d pushed us to be that tool. But, as the ghosts had warned, that answer wasn’t the answer at all. The real question wasn’t so much “why” as “what next?” and the answers seemed to be coming, in a way, from my dad, if the telltale endearment meant anything. Obviously, I had a lot of unfinished business back in Seattle, which included finding out what had become of my killer and what Wygan was doing with the ghost of my father. Yet another reason to get home as soon as possible. The job I’d come for was almost done and the one remaining loomed like a tidal wave.

  CHAPTER 45

  Once the packages were on their way to my place in Seattle—I figured that even the collective powers of the Red Brotherhoods of St. James and St. John couldn’t subvert FedEx—I called Quinton. It was about eight in the evening there, so it only took a few minutes for him to call me back as I was walking toward the nearest Underground station.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself. You still at my place?”

  “Yeah. It’s still crazy under the streets. Crazier, even. And Edward is still missing or incognito.”

  I made a face. “I hate to say that’s what I was expecting.”

  “So, you’re not coming back?”

  “No, I am coming back. Tomorrow in fact. So long as things go as planned. If not, well. send flowers.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “It is all of that bad. Do you remember Alice, the vampire who crashed our party at the museum two years ago?”

  “I thought she was dead,” Quinton answered slowly.

  “Join the club. She fooled us all. She was hooked up with Wygan and he somehow kept her going long enough to ship her here and start pulling the rug out from under Edward. Once she was in control, she lured me here under his orders and tried to make me a little more dead so I’d be a better fit for whatever Wygan has in mind. That’s what this has been about since I was a little kid, even before I was born. My dad was supposed to be the Greywalker, but he quit with a.38-caliber resignation.” I was amazed how angry I felt as I recited it. I was furious at how I’d been used, how my father had been pushed until he broke, how our friends and family had been hurt and killed and used as levers against us.

  I continued, “Alice was Wygan’s cat’s-paw from the start. She got me killed the first time, too—or the second, I guess, but who’s counting—so I could be the right kind of Greywalker for Wygan’s purpose. Once I have Will back, I’m done here, because what’s going on at home is apparently just the start of Wygan’s endgame, and I’m going to stop him. At least now I know. I know what I am: I’m a tool to build some kind of gateway—but I’m not going to do it.”

  “You don’t have to. Sweetheart, we could run—”

  “No. You can run. Wygan will just keep coming after me until he gets what he wants or he gets stopped.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you, unless I’m running toward you.”

  I smiled and felt warm for the first time all day. “I’ll be the one running toward you. Will you come get me from the airport?”

  “Sure.”

  “I may have the Novaks with me, but I’m hoping they can travel alone and attract less attention. I’ll page you with more info. Then I’ll call the condo when the plane touches down. You should be able to get to the airport by the time I’m through customs. The car keys are on the—”

  “Floor. Chaos has them.”

  I laughed. “She’s such a little thief.”

  “She’s not a very good thief. She never tries to fence anything that’s worth a damn. Just old squeaky toys and buttons—which were mostly mine to begin with.”

  We both laughed a little more, but the next breath brought back our worries and Quinton said, “You are coming back. Right?”

  “I am coming back. Yes. Because the alternative is not an option. And I love you.” It was the hardest thing I’d ever said, especially after the casual blow Cary’s ghost had delivered about those words, and I waited in torment during the silence that followed.

  Very quietly, Quinton responded, “I love you, too. And I will see you soon. Once I get the keys back from the ferret.”

  I hung up, smiling, even though the prospect ahead was grim, and headed for my meeting with Marsden at Angel Station.

  The platform was busy, and I looked through the Grey for Marsden’s slippery aura of colorless shapes rather than try to sort the crowd by eye for him. It took a bit of walking and a ride up the nearly endless escalator to find him on a bench in the intermittent sunshine that was breaking through the clouds.

  A girl and her mother were sharing the bench with the blind man, who was keeping his head down, his long hair masking the disfigurement of his face, as he talked to them. The woman looked a bit wary, but the girl was smiling and holding something out to him. He took it and stroked the thing with remarkable gentleness. I got a little closer but stopped to watch, rather than interrupt the scene.

  Marsden must have sensed my proximity; I saw him stiffen a bit and turn his head a little in my direction. He passed his gnarled hands over the furry little thing. “Magic, he is,” he murmured. “Just magic. I had a hob just like him once—noble fella and a fine mole catcher, too. Quick as thought, he was, and clever with it. He’ll do well with you, I think.”

  Then he held the fluff ball out for the girl: It was a young sable ferret with a little bandit mask and bright eyes. The sight of it made tears sting in my eyes as I thought of Chaos living in Quinton’s pockets, and I hoped she would stay safe. “I’ve got to move along now,” Marsden continued. “Thank you, my dear, for introducing me to your Dexter. You’ll take good care of him, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl replied, cuddling the little animal to her chest.

  He nodded at her mother before tapping
his way across the busy cement apron around the station’s mouth to where I stood.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “And you are a big fake, you grumpy old man. I didn’t have you pegged for a ferret fancier.”

  He snorted and began walking on, expecting me to follow. “Clever little beggars. Excellent at flushin’ moles from holes. And ghosts from buildings—they can’t resist chasing ’em. Not trying to kill ’em, mind you; they just like to rout ’em out. They’ll dance and chatter like a mad thing and drive the haunts bloody bonkers. They’ll zoom along a ley line and pounce on anything Grey as gets in their way. Fearless, they are. Charm the socks right off ya, too.”

  “Yes, they do,” I replied, thinking of Chaos’s wild behavior around anything ghostly, like the first time she’d dived headfirst into the Grey to take on the guardian beast on her own. She hadn’t won that fight, but she hadn’t lost it, either. “I have a ferret at home.”

  “Do you, now? P’raps your dad didn’t father as big a fool as I thought.”

  I rolled my eyes. Back to the same old Marsden.

  “So what are we looking for?” I asked.

  “The right sort of sewer opening. Did you have any luck with the silversmith?”

  “Did you know she’s some kind of machine?”

  “Is she indeed? I take it she was the one.”

  “She was. I found a lot of papers that should repair most of the financial damage. They might not give Edward any leverage back into St. James’s, but they should give him some options. I shipped the important ones home.”

  “And what will happen to them if you do not return?”

  “I have a friend who’ll deal with it.”

  He nodded. “You’ve surprised me.”

  “Really? How?”

  “You carried through. Y’didn’t have to, y’know. Good chance this will go pear-shaped, and then what’s in it for you, eh?”