I took my seat at the table and set my bag on the floor. I’d joined the conversation late, so I tried to figure out the gist of what was going on before I said anything.
Better to stay silent and be thought the fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
“Where are we with the Old Tampa Hotel?” John asked, not to anyone in particular, but Reggie responded immediately.
“That’s what I was saying earlier: we’ve got a problem.”
Omar’s eyebrows enacted the best yoga-pose I’d ever seen on inanimate forehead-hair. “What sort of problem?”
John tilted his head. “Everything looks clean on the contract, zoning is fine. We’ve got all the permits lined up.”
“It’s bad…”
When Reggie said something was bad everyone knew to lean in—the stone-biter almost never classified something as bad—when he’d broken his foot a few years ago he said it was ‘a minor setback.’
Only broken in five places—minor setback, no biggie.
“The guys found bones.”
If Reggie had chosen that moment to change into a man-eating ogre and start tearing Omar’s arms off, I’m not sure it would have broken the stunned silence in the room.
I’d been worried about the Old Tampa Hotel remodel ever since I’d heard we won it from Jeff Masterson—that was the same night both he and his wife had narrowly escaped being murdered by what I believed to be a vengeful spirit. The Old Tampa Hotel had secrets, and they were secrets I didn’t want anything do with.
“Excuse me—bones?” Sharon asked, her pen dancing across the legal pad in her lap.
Reggie nodded.
We’d dealt with gopher tortoises and scrub jays before, but never human remains. The former were pretty standard fare in Florida. We’d call in the right environment crew and they’d haul them away with expert precision—provided John wrote a large-enough check—but human remains were a whole different animal.
“Are they old?” Omar asked, his brows bunching up in frustration.
“Huh? I don’t know. Do I look like a bone expert?”
Omar pursed his lips. “The estate never gave me any reason to suspect there might be a burial ground there…”
“That’s not the worst of it. Ever since they discovered them I’ve got half the crew out—”
“What do you mean out?” John asked, leaning forward in his chair.
“They say the place is haunted.”
My chest tightened and I tried to hide the concern on my face. There’d been problems at the Old Tampa Hotel in the past, and it now seemed they hadn’t gone away after all.
Mr. Kinder shook his head, then turned to me. “Right. Listen, Gene, you’re the fixer here. Can you fix this?”
“I—”
Sharon jumped in before I got another word out. “We need to call the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. This could be a crime scene.”
John sighed and got up from his seat—the man’s brain was directly wired to his feet, and he did his best thinking while pacing. “Okay, call in FDLE, but I want you working with Gene on this. Reggie, tell the guys there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I tried, but—”
“Gene. Fix it.”
I nodded with no idea what fixing it meant.
“Good. Reggie, tell them Gene’ll get it fixed.”
“Okay…” Reggie gave me a skeptical look.
John pushed his chair in. “We’ve got to get this project started—the delays are killing us.”
“Third loan payment is due Monday,” Charlie said, his voice a near perfect monotone.
In the next moment the conference room was filled with the chirps, dings, and beeps of phone alerts. I retrieved my own phone from my pocket just as the ‘Black Magic Woman’ guitar riff was heating up.
YOU HAVE 6,667 NEW MESSAGES.
What the hell?
Judging by the rest of the faces in the room it appeared everyone else was having a similar experience. I opened the email and found hundreds of pictures of gyrating couples in various and unseemly poses.
“What the—Gene, you manage Adam. Go find out what the hell is going on. So help me God if we get a harassment claim out of this he’s gone,” John Kinder said, slamming his phone against the conference table.
“On it.”
I pushed my way out of the conference room door and into the main hallway just in time for the fire alarm to go off.
14
Bat outta Hell
Adam pounded away on the keyboards in front of him, switching from screen to screen like he was neck deep in a game of whack-a-mole. Tiny beads of sweat appeared along his brow—my apprentice was nervous.
“What’s going on?” I shouted, slamming the fishbowl door behind me.
“I don’t know!”
If Adam didn’t know that meant one thing—we were deep in it.
“Can you turn off the fire alarm?”
Adam clicked a few buttons and the wailing fire alarm stopped.
“Oh thank God—did we get hacked?”
Adam wiped the sweat from his face and sucked down as much soda as he could in a single gulp. “It’s… No… Well, maybe. It’s like all the systems are going haywire. Thousands of lines of code have been changed.”
“Changed? Like scrambled?”
“No,” Adam said, pointing to the screen. “It’s like someone came in and patched things to have the worst possible affect.”
“How—”
“Look—right here.” Adam highlighted a few lines of undecipherable text on the screen. “There’s the fire alarm. It’s now been set to go off anytime someone is looking at porn.”
“Are you looking at porn?”
“Well, not right this second!”
“So it could be a hacker?”
Adam pointed to the bright red network cable now hanging like a limp noodle on the far wall. “Not unless they found a way to break the WiFi encryption, we are disconnected from the internet.”
The Hellgate.
The Dad Wagon.
Adam’s Servers.
“I think we have a stowaway.”
My apprentice stopped his frantic typing. “What do you mean?”
I held a finger to my lips, then leaned in to whisper in his ear, careful to not touch the edges of his oiled beard. “We need a box, I’m guessing something roughly squirrel-sized. What do you have?”
Adam jumped out of his seat and dug through the cornucopia of junk that lined the wall behind him.
While he hunted for a suitable container, I took a moment to gather my strength. I’d left my bag in the conference room, which meant most of my go-to Magickal items were somewhere entirely unhelpful, but it didn’t matter. I had a really good idea of what we were dealing with.
Much of my early Magickal experience had come during my college days, thanks to and at the hands of, one very challenging young woman.
Morgan Crowley.
It had started out simply enough, like most of those things do. She was one of the goth coeds with the black eyeliner and leather corsets who got a huge kick out of some very dark Magick. She’d gone all in on some dangerous conjuring, and since I’d been pretty keen to conjure those corsets off her nubile frame, I’d made a few less-than-stellar life decisions in the process of helping her.
When you spend your first semester skipping prerequisites for a business management degree to learn the complex sigils of dangerous Magick just to see some boobs, you come to realize your decision-making has been delegated to the wrong organ.
That semester had been a blur—the corsets came off as much as they went back on—and I ended up spending far too much time with a very tricky and unpleasant Imp.
And then I go and open a Hellgate and bring one right back, and there wasn’t even a corset in play—nice work, Master Magician.
Adam returned with a plexiglass and metal box that had three large spools of plastic filament hanging off one side. He held the box out like an old-
fashioned lantern and dangled it in front of me. “This work?”
“What is that?”
He looked at me like a visitor from the distant past. “It’s a 3D printer.”
“What the hell do we need a 3D printer for?”
Adam shrugged. “If I don’t spend all my budget it gets cut.”
“Gah! What else have you bought?”
Adam’s face fell, and he slipped one of his hands behind his back. “I needed the watch for… monitoring… um… the stuff.”
I took the 3D printer from him and navigated my way through the refuse to the server rack. Dozens of dark metal cases, stacked like evil pizza boxes, blinked in seemingly random patterns along the far wall. It was like a terribly tight and compact harvest festival of lights—just the place for an Imp to hide.
Imps live for tight spaces—which is rather fortuitous for them, because as nefarious Hellspawn go they really do dwell solidly at the bottom of the food chain. They cram their rubbery little bodies into all manner of impossibly small spaces to keep from becoming hors d’oeuvres for the bigger, badder, and more ravenous citizens of the unspeakable depths.
Yeah, small places, like the middle of my back.
“Here, hold this open,” I said, handing the 3D printer back to Adam. “Be ready to close the box the moment I say to.”
My apprentice nodded his man-bun in assent.
“What do you think it is?”
“An Imp…”
Adam’s fingers quivered against the box’s edge. “Are they… evil?”
“Yes.”
“Like scary evil?” he asked, his tone indicating he was rather inclined to believe me.
“Nah, more like obnoxious evil.”
“So… like…”
“Like that annoying apprentice who asks a ton of questions while you’re trying to focus on a very particular Magick—that kind of obnoxious evil.”
Adam clamped his mouth shut.
What was it again… All I can picture are corsets… Oh, right!
“Nullus latebras!“
The Magick surged through me like a lasso, and the server rack rattled, sending tiny screws falling to the ground only to be lost in the great junk wasteland of the fishbowl.
“What’s happening?” Adam said, backing away from the gesticulating mass of computers.
“Nullus latebras!” I shouted again, inwardly proud of myself at the undergarment reference that just happened to find its way into my Latin.
A bright pink ball of rubbery flesh shot out of the server rack as if it had been fired from a cannon.
“Catch it!” I cried.
Adam tried to line up the case, but he moved like that lethargic kid at tee-ball only there to scope out the snacks. “I got it!”
He didn’t.
The Imp slammed into the man-boy’s chest, missing the printer box entirely and knocking Adam’s prosperous butt to the ground.
I peeled the tiny Demon off my apprentice’s hoody and dropped it in the printer case. The Imp was a little dazed from his high-velocity expulsion but still more than capable of spewing a decent amount of salty curses in demonic low-speech.
“Yeah, I feel the same way about your mother too,” I said, closing the door on the tiny Demon.
He wasn’t much larger than a yard squirrel, with bright pink flesh and a long, crooked nose. His black eyes were set deep in an over-sized skull that perched precariously on a neck far too thin to hold it properly. The Imp’s tail whipped back and forth in time with his tiny wings. He banged on the tiny glass and let me have an earful.
“Yeah, yeah. If I had a nickel for every time some Demon cursed my man bits to shrivel and die I’d have a big stack of nickels and two fewer kids—I don’t care that you know Asaroth the Defiler on a first-name basis, you aren’t getting out of that box.”
My phone chirped, and I handed the Imp-box to Adam.
FDLE wants to meet us at the site now. I’ll drive. - Sharon
“I’ve got to run off-site with Sharon.”
Adam blanched at the mention of the lawyer’s name.
“I need you to keep an eye on this until I get back,” I said, tapping the box with my knuckle, further enraging the diminutive beast.
“What?! I don’t know… What do I do with it?”
The Imp continued its stream of various curses and unbridled opinions about my genetic lineage.
“You’re a Magician’s apprentice, right?”
Adam hesitated. “Yeah…”
“You’ll think of something.”
“But…”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Just ignore his curses and, whatever you do, don’t name it.”
“Why?” Adam asked, holding the box at arm’s length.
“Because if you do, he’ll be bound to you for all eternity.”
“Oh, right. That.”
“It’s all covered in the book I got you—you did read at least some of it, right?”
“Totally…” Adam stared at the diminutive monster now tearing apart the insides of his 3D printer.
I dismissed Sharon’s message and found the link he’d promised me below it. John Henry’s spike would have to wait—I had a job to do.
15
Job Site Sigils
Sharon drove a nice Lincoln town car, the kind with thick leather bench seating and strong air conditioning. She had NPR going and was tuned in to a segment on our American heritage. The reporter was interviewing an elderly woman on her family’s rather tawdry history on the wrong side of the Civil War.
The sins of the father…
Aside from the radio we rode in relative silence. Sharon knew nothing of my Magick, and I wasn’t much for the law beyond the few simple rules I’d picked up in college. I highly doubted she’d want to discuss the finer precepts of Business Law 101.
The Old Tampa Hotel was a decent drive from the office, so the NPR correspondent had just wrapped up her interview with a surprisingly forgiving elderly woman by the time we pulled off and found a spot behind a forensics van and a couple police cars.
“Let me do the talking,” Sharon said, taking her phone and leaving her purse in the car.
“You got it.”
I wasn’t going to be interacting with the officers any more than I had to—I’d had a few law enforcement entanglements over the years and was more than happy to keep a low profile. When your off-hours profession involves all manner of strange and arcane practices, you tend to end up on the wrong side of the law fairly often. The real trick was getting over to the right side and making sure no one remembered it.
My goal today was simple: figure out what the hell was going on at the Old Tampa Hotel and try not to get killed in the process.
That’s a tall order for you nowadays.
Sharon introduced herself to the detectives—two average-height gentlemen with thinning hair and exceptional tans. This wasn’t South Beach, but short of some rolled-up sportcoat sleeves we had old men Miami Vice working the scene.
The Old Tampa Hotel was a city landmark, with its Moorish minarets and soaring brick facade. Henry Plant had built it back in the late 1800s, all part of his plan to get more rich people taking his trains down to Tampa. It had worked for a time—at least until the city grew up around it. Now most of it was used by the University of Tampa; however, part of Plant’s deal with the university included keeping the southeast wing set aside as future museum.
John Kinder had scored a plum contract to do some remodeling on that museum, one I hadn’t been overly keen on winning. I’d spent a decent bit of time dealing with a malevolent spirit in that converted hotel and still had the healthy fear of flying cutlery to prove it.
“Glad you called,” the slightly more prosperous of the two gentlemen said, pointing to a taped-off area at the top of the stairs. “I don’t think it’s a crime scene—looks like your guys stumbled on some sort of walled-up grave. So far they’re telling me it’s a single body, but they’re still trying to put together all the p
ieces.”
I didn’t need the officers to fill in the details; I could feel the evil like a normal person picks up the pressure drop before a storm—something bad was buried here and was not keen to see us. At one point as a kid, I’d knocked a massive hornet nest off a tree in the backyard. I must have received a dozen stings as a reminder of that lapse in judgement. Right now, standing at the bottom of these stairs felt for all the world like that day—we’d just poked something very terrible with a wicked sharp stick.
“Wait, pieces? Are you saying it’s incomplete?” I asked while trying to avoid Sharon’s withering gaze.
“Yeah, it’s pretty typical. We’ll piece it together, but so far we know we’re missing the head.”
That’s a relief.
In the olden days people understood the significance of dismemberment.
Oh, how far we’ve fallen.
Someone back when Mr. Evil had been killed had the foresight to separate the head from the body. Was this the assassin sent by Flagler all those years ago? Even I didn’t know how much of that old Magician’s yarn was true.
What are you hiding?
I slipped past Sharon and the rest of poor-man’s Miami Vice, then up the stairs and into the lobby. The Old Tampa Hotel had a large and ornate foyer, with a round bench presided over by a large statue of Henry Plant himself. The bronze giant eyes stared down at me over a wooly mustache.
So was it true? Did Flagler send something terrible after you?
I gave the old Magician’s statue a nod before turning down the hall and heading toward the pops and static of police radios.
I considered using Magick, but it had to be small and simple. The air here was thick—not just with humidity, but with a malevolent frustration that I had no interest in drawing the attention of. If Porter was right, and the dead really did hate me, then the last thing I should be doing was shining a flashlight in their empty eye-sockets.
Dead Set Page 7
