Halfblood's Hex (Urban Arcanology Book 1)

by S. C. Stokes

  According to Knight's information, the entire temple structure had been buried by the Spanish. Resting as it had between two hills, they had buried all traces of the witch cult and purged them from history.

  Now the Inquisition were investing considerable resources in digging it back up. Why? What was their interest in the ancient temple?

  Their intolerance of the supernatural was a fact of history, but burying the temple made no sense. If it was the location of known heretics, they ought to have destroyed it. That was their normal modus operandi. Instead, they had buried it, only to return four hundred years later.

  There was something else at play here. I knew why I wanted to enter the temple. It was the genesis of our curse. But that didn’t explain why the Inquisition and Americans were so interested in it.

  I was running toward the eye of the storm. I could feel it, and I needed to pack accordingly.

  Reaching the back wall of the shed, I ran my hands along the timber panels. I drew on my power and extended my senses deeper. My vault was heavily warded. Should anyone have found their way into my sanctum, the traps I had laid on it would leave them a smoking husk.

  My wards too seemed intact. No one had found their way into my stash. Making my way along the wall, I lifted a crowbar off the tool rack mounted there. Counting the timber panels, I reached number six and knelt down.

  Leaning against the panel, I whispered, “Disminuir.”

  There was a flicker of power, as the wards behind it deactivated. It wouldn’t do to have my own magic reduce me to cinders.

  I slipped the crowbar between the panel and the skirting-board and applied some pressure. There was a creak as the nails gave way and the skirting board came away from the wall. I slid the loose skirting board aside and slipped the bar against the seam of the timber panel. With a few firm taps on the crowbar’s bent claw, it sank into the seam. With a groan, I pried the board away. Dropping the crowbar, I slipped my hands into the gap and pulled the panel free before setting it aside.

  Removing the panel revealed a doorway a little wider than I was that led into a six-foot deep space behind the false wall that ran the length of the shed. I entered the hidden chamber; it was lined with lockers and storage trunks and contained equipment and artifacts I had acquired over the years.

  It had taken me months of work to make the space. Figuring no one used the shed enough to notice, I’d spent a summer shortening it by several feet. I’d built the fake wall and reinforced all the panels bar the door with a layer of steel.

  My vault was hidden in plain sight. Anyone breaking into the Manor would certainly go for the residence. The Caldwell wealth was no secret and certainly there were treasures aplenty there. What was hidden in my vault tended to be at the more arcane end of the spectrum. Mundane wealth had little value when you could transmute any substance into solid gold.

  The vault was where I kept all my equipment along with a small treasure trove of artifacts I'd acquired over the years. Not all of them had been willingly parted from their previous owners. Some of them were bartering chips I had hoped would aid me in gaining what I needed to unlock the secrets of my curse. Others were artifacts I had encountered that were simply too powerful to let remain in the wrong hands.

  Many of them could prove useful on my current venture, but I would be operating on a limited carrying capacity. Hiking through the jungles of Panama, I would die of heatstroke if I took too many with me.

  I bent down and opened a storage trunk that was set against the wall. Inside it was a lightweight tactical vest. Made of layers of Kevlar weave and enchanted for good measure, the charcoal fabric could stop a few rifle rounds. More than that and the enchantment would wane, and the vest itself could fail.

  I placed it on the wooden counter that ran along the wall and hoped it would be enough.

  As I reached into the locker, something vibrated in my pocket. I jumped my heart racing until I realized it was just my phone. My heart slowed to a dull thumping as I reached into my slacks. I drew out my phone and saw Dizzy's face. Tapping the screen, I set it on speaker and popped the phone on the counter.

  “Hey Dizzy, what's up?”

  Only silence greeted me.

  “Dizzy?” I called, trying to calm my racing heart. “You’re not gonna believe it. I found it. The temple!”

  “That's great, Seth,” Dizzy replied, her voiced devoid of her usual enthusiasm.

  I remembered my father's comments about her family and paused, leaning over my phone. “Dizzy, what's wrong?”

  I could hear Dizzy breathing heavily in the background, but she didn’t speak.

  “Dizzy? Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  “I just wanted to make sure you got home okay,” she replied.

  I could tell she was deflecting.

  Something was terribly wrong. I could feel it in shaky timbre of her voice.

  “What's wrong, Diz?” I asked. “Talk to me.”

  Dizzy let out a sob. “She's gone.”

  I gripped the counter. “Gone? Who’s gone?”

  “Mom. I got home and she was just gone. She didn’t even call me.”

  “What happened?”

  Dizzy began to cry, and my heart sank. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to say. In my single-minded focus on the mask, I had been a terrible friend. I knew almost nothing about what was going on at home for her.

  “What can I do, Diz? I’ll do anything.”

  “You can’t. I can’t. She’s just gone, Seth.”

  I began to pace in the narrow confines of my vault. “Where has she gone?”

  “She went home. To Nigeria. She just up and left my dad. I don't know what's happening, Seth. Everything is coming apart.”

  I could hear the despair and guilt in her voice. Dizzy had been in New York for years. Like any child, she was no doubt wondering if she had played a part in what had happened.

  “It's not your fault, Dizzy. People make their own choices.” I tried to reassure her, but the words felt clumsy. “What are you going to do?”

  “It's dangerous there,” Dizzy replied. “It’s why they left in the first place. I have to go after her. Before she gets herself killed.”

  I leaned heavily on the bench, eying the bulletproof vest. I wanted to go with her. She’d backed me up more than once. Leaving her to go after her mother alone made me feel terrible, but I was on the clock. Every day mattered.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked.

  “No,” Dizzy whispered. “If you’ve found the temple, you need to go. I know what this means to you. You have to go. Besides, it could take me weeks to find her. You don’t have that kind of time, do you?”

  I shook my head, a gesture she couldn’t see, but I was struggling to find the right words.

  “No,” I whispered. “The Inquisition is already there. They could destroy everything.”

  “Then go,” Dizzy replied, her voice soft. “Before it’s too late. I only wish I could be there to help.”

  “Family first, Dizzy. Find your mom. I’ll be fine. When are you leaving?”

  Dizzy stifled a sob. “I'm getting on a plane tonight. Going to see if I can find her trail.”

  “Same here,” I replied, picking up the phone. “Just gearing up now. The Inquisition has been there for a week with enough manpower to tear the whole temple apart. Sounds like I’m walking into a real party. I’m going to miss you on this one.”

  “I’d be there if I could, Seth.”

  “I know. Stay safe, Dizzy. I’ll come find you.”

  “Stay safe, Seth,” she replied, and cut the call.

  I hung up the phone and set it down on the counter with a groan.

  After everything Dizzy had done for me, I should have been following her to Africa, not jetting off to South America. She needed back up. I owed her that. Not coming through for her now was going to eat at me.

  The sound of a throat being cleared caused me to bolt upright and turn, reaching for a kn
ife resting on a weapon’s rack on the wall.

  “Easy,” a somber voice replied.

  My father filled the doorway, his big frame taking up most of the entrance. In one hand, he held the mask in its pouch, in the other one of my forebear’s leatherbound journals.

  “How did you find me?” I asked as he stepped into the vault and sat down on one of the storage lockers.

  He looked up at me. “Charles gave me his report and you were nowhere to be found. So, I came looking. I checked your room first. This was my second guess.”

  I opened a vertical locker and began to rummage through it. The locker contained a number of artifacts I had acquired, stored in silk pouches.

  “I didn't know you knew about the vault.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Frank laughed. “I know everything that happens in my home, Seth. I’ve known about your little retreat for years. I simply never wanted to intrude.”

  “So what's changed?” I replied as I lifted a small silk pouch out of the locker. I loosened the drawstring and counted out a series of small glass beads onto the counter.

  “We need to talk. I want to know how the meeting went. I also wanted to share a few interesting details I discovered on my own.”

  I counted a dozen of the glass beads onto the counter, and put the pouch back into the locker. The glass marbles were my own creation. They were far from the most potent artifacts in the vault but they had saved my life more times than I could count. Each of the glass beads had been enchanted to provide light when activated.

  Most wizards made the mistake of summoning their own light when confronted with darkness. The problem was that often made said wizard a perfectly illuminated target. Being the only such target in a dark room made for dead wizards. I preferred to use the beads as a kind of turbocharged glow stick. They served well for both illumination and distractions.

  “So what happened?” Frank asked, leaning back against the wall.

  He was going to find out soon enough. There was no point hiding it from him now. “He gave me the location in return of a favor.”

  Frank tipped his head to scrutinize me. “What kind of favor?”

  I shrugged one shoulder.

  “You gave the Red Knight an unnamed favor?” he asked, his hands gripping the journal so tight his knuckles turned white. “Are you mad?”

  “No, just desperate,” I replied, reaching into the locker.

  With Dizzy going after her mother, I was going to be entering the temple alone. Outnumbered and outgunned, I needed more firepower. A lot more.

  I moved several pouches aside, reached into the base of the locker, and drew out a black pouch. I didn’t check its contents; I could already feel its power through the silk. I knew what it contained. I had liberated it from the vaults deep beneath the Vatican.

  It was one reason I wasn’t welcome in Rome.

  Inside the pouch was a girdle length of gold chain. Its finely woven rings formed a chain that could be worn as a belt, though its purpose was far from decorative. I set the pouch by the bulletproof vest and looked at my father.

  “I got the location of the temple, didn’t I?”

  Frank crossed his arms. “Yes, but have you ever considered what will happen if you survive this journey? Have you even considered what he may ask for?”

  It was all I had been able to think about for the last hour. My mind had raced through a truly dizzying array of possibilities, all of them potentially deadly.

  “He will have me steal something. Probably something I don't want him to have. Something that may well get me killed. On the plus side, if I die at the temple, I'm not going to have to give him a favor, am I?”

  “The least of your problems if you are dead, Seth,” Frank said. “But the greatest of them if you survive. No man can serve this many masters. You still have the Brotherhood to think about.”

  “Lynch can get in line with the others,” I replied, sifting through the locker for other potentially useful artifacts. “First we cure the curse, then we can deal with the rest later.”

  Frank tapped the journal against his thigh. “They may not give you the luxury of time. Besides, have you considered that the Red Knight's favor might set you against the Brotherhood? It wouldn't be the first time we've traded shots with him. Pointing you against them would do more damage than anything he could hope to accomplish on his own. Have you thought about that?”

  I hadn’t, but I hardly had a choice in the matter, so I didn’t see how it mattered.

  “We’re dead men walking, Father,” I replied. “I don't have the luxury of worrying about his motives. I needed his information, and he wasn't going to give it to me. It was the only way. The Inquisition are already there. They have been for a week. If they are going to this much effort to unearth the temple, they likely intend to destroy it. We can’t wait.”

  My father raised his hands. “I get it. I just want to know that you understand what you've done.”

  “More or less,” I replied, thinking about the events of the past day. “It seems finding the mask and the temple is going to cost me everything I've been trying to save. My relationship, my principles, hell, probably even my life at this rate.”

  It was a depressing thought.

  “You said you found something while I was gone?”

  Frank held up the journal. “I've been scouring Ellawaya’s records. I translated the mask and found some other tidbits you might find useful on your journey.”

  That was something at least.

  “What did the mask say?”

  Frank set the journal on the locker beside him and raised the mask. Tracing one finger along the left-hand edge of the mask, he said, “The characters on the left read ‘Wealth begets misery’.”

  I chuckled. “Kind of ironic, given its origin.”

  Frank nodded. “I thought so too. Perhaps it says something of the role our bloodline was expected to play. I dare say it certainly seemed Ellawaya felt duty-bound to the temple. It was a fear of the life before her that caused her to flee during her ritual purification. They left her alone in the temple for three days. On the second night, she escaped through a subterranean passage, met up with Francis, and fled to the old world.”

  “What of the other glyphs?”

  Frank traced the right-hand side of the mask. “The symbols down this edge translate to ‘Tradition begins with blood’.”

  I leaned on the counter. “What does that mean?”

  Frank shook his head. “I'm not sure, but the Brujas de Sangre were practitioners of blood magic. It's possible that the rituals they enacted in their sanctum were fueled by sacrifice and blood. Its more than likely our own curse is the result of such magic.”

  There were so many possibilities. The inscription could be literal, or figurative. Our familial power had passed by blood for generations. It had passed to Ellawaya from her mother, and then from parent to child through the years until it had reached us. Perhaps that was also significant.

  Frank stood up. “It could mean a great many things, but if the mask belonged to the high priestess, I dare say all of the inscriptions are significant. Consider them as a guide as you make your way through the temple.”

  “You mentioned an underground passage,” I said. “Is it another way into the temple?”

  Frank eyed the growing pile of equipment. “It could be. At least it was back when she left. Her journal says it led from a well in a nearby village into the deadly way of the temple. Whatever that means.”

  “The deadly way?” I asked. “Sounds ominous.”

  Frank set the mask down by the pile. “Indeed, but she says little else about the temple’s interior. The path itself was only passable at low tide. Apparently underground streams and caverns dot the region. Ellawaya used the passage to escape undetected. But that was four hundred years ago. It could well have collapsed or be impassable.”

  “It's worth considering.” I lifted the lid on another trunk and pulled out a small scuba re-breather and a t
ank.

  It had a limited capacity, but it would give me an hour or two underwater if need be.

  “Just in case,” I said, setting the scuba gear on the counter and pulling out some tactical rigging to attach everything to.

  Frank tapped the black pouch. “What’s in here?”

  “My heavy artillery,” I replied. “I found it during the Rome incident.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I see. I hope it was worth it. You certainly aren't going to be welcome back there anytime soon.”

  I shrugged. “It's hardly on my list of tourist destinations these days.”

  I tucked the pouch into a pocket on the back of the tactical rigging and proceeded to load the beads and scuba equipment into different compartments attached to the rigging.

  “You’re going to need a parachute,” Frank said.

  I paused. “Why jump out of a perfectly good plane?”

  Frank lifted a parachute off the wall and set it down by the vest. “Because it's the only way you're going to get to that site undetected. I'll have you and Murdoch flown to South America so you can both get some rest. If the temple is near Portobello, you will be best off inserting from above. Otherwise, you’ll have miles of hiking through the jungle and they'll be looking for you. You are going to need to drop in outside of their line of sight and find the village well. Driving in will just draw attention and risk raising the alarm.”

  He was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like the plan. It was my best hope of getting in undetected and if that meant jumping out of a plane, that was just the price I would have to pay. Given everything else that was stacked against me, jumping out of the plane seemed positively tame by comparison.

  I sighed, grabbed a few other pieces of gear, and loaded it all into a black duffel bag.

  I looked to my father.

  He met my gaze. “What's up?”

  “I'm storming an ancient temple currently being breached by the Spanish Inquisition. According to the Red Knight, they have enough manpower and machinery to terraform Panama. Dizzy is gone, and I’m alone. I guess I'm just feeling a little out of my depth.”