Cauldron

by Gail Z. Martin

  Miro was Russian, one of the many who’d found their way to the factories and steel mills of the Northeast after the War and the Revolution. I’d picked up some Russian over the years in the mill, but I wasn’t fluent. Unfortunately, Miro’s English was still dodgy, though he and Georgina seemed to communicate just fine. He worked at the greengrocer and always reeked of onion and garlic.

  “Mr. Ben told me I should speak to you,” Miro said in a hushed voice. I drew him away from the crowd.

  “What’s going on?”

  “People in my neighborhood, they’ve been…going gone.”

  I frowned. “Leaving?”

  He shook his head. “They just suddenly go.”

  “Disappearing?”

  “Yes. That. Going gone, suddenly. No reason. I think something bad is happening.”

  Ben’s Aunt Frederica ran a rooming house near the theater that mostly catered to the performers, like Millie, Sampson, and Georgina, who would have had difficulty finding safe lodging elsewhere, but she didn’t have room for everyone on Ben’s payroll. That meant Miro probably lived in one of the neighborhoods filled with other new arrivals from Eastern Europe.

  I had an idea of what Miro’s neighborhood was like, having lived in Homestead’s crowded tenements. Each group—Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and more—had their own few blocks, complete with bars, churches, and stores that catered to them. God help the poor bastard who wandered into the wrong territory.

  “Did they owe money? You think the cops took them?”

  “No. Not these. Good people. I think, maybe something in the dark.”

  “They’re being kidnapped?”

  “No, Mack. I think they’re being eaten.” He looked around, worried someone might have overheard.

  Oh. That kind of “something” in the dark. “You got any proof?”

  “Nyet. But coming home late at night, I see things,” Miro confided. “Red eyes in the shadows. Shapes that move too fast to be a person. I think something is hunting.”

  “How have you stayed safe?” I asked.

  Miro dug beneath his shirt and pulled out a silver medallion. “Saint Boris protects me.” He kissed the medallion and slipped it back next to his skin. “But maybe I am lucky too. I do not wish to find out, how you say, the hard way.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll check into it.” Miro gave me directions to his rooming house, and I resolved to have a look later that night. He thanked me with embarrassing gratitude and drifted off to join Georgina. I headed back to the bar, in search of another island tiger.

  Heavy footsteps sounded overhead, in the now-closed theater. The room quieted. New patrons paled, expecting a raid.

  “That’s just Gertrude,” Ben announced, naming the theater’s resident ghost-diva. “She wants her song. Play it, Hank.”

  Hank swung seamlessly into “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and the ghostly tantrum immediately stopped. Satisfied, Gertrude apparently went off to wherever ghosts go when they’re not making things go bump in the night.

  Grace sidled up beside me. “Hello, Joe. Fancy meeting you here.” Her cultured voice held a promise of classy naughtiness.

  “Hello, Grace. How come your swell date is making you get your own drinks?”

  Grace chuckled. “Frank? He’s busy telling stories. Hasn’t even noticed I’ve moved,” she replied. A glance told me she was correct. “And he’s just a friend. Arm candy. His heart belongs to Freddy.”

  “That photographer who’s always hanging around?” I hadn’t seen that coming.

  “Can you think of a better cover?” Grace was right. I’d been fooled, because what I saw fit what I expected. It reminded me that the Hathaway’s speakeasy provided a sanctuary, but the word outside wasn’t nearly so welcoming. So far, immortality hadn’t redeemed my faith in human nature.

  “What can I do you for?” I asked, resisting the urge to knock back my drink.

  “I need a date.”

  I nearly snorted rum through my nose. “Excuse me?”

  “Not a real date, silly,” Grace replied in fond frustration, batting at my arm. “More like a hunky ‘Hunky’ bodyguard for an event I need to attend.”

  “I’m Hungarian,” I said with an exaggerated sigh. “And ‘Hunky’ isn’t any more polite than ‘Polack.’” I knew Grace didn’t mean anything by it, but my time in the mills had exposed me to plenty of people who did.

  “Then I need a handsome Hungarian with muscles,” she said imperiously.

  “And Flying Frankie can’t escort you?”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “It could get dangerous. He can go zoom-zoom when bullets fly. I need a man who can go pow-pow.”

  Several ungentlemanly comments occurred to me, and I resisted them all. I saw the sparkle in Grace’s eyes that said she knew exactly what she’d said. “That aside,” I replied, clearing my throat, “why me?”

  Grace slipped an arm through mine and led me away from the bar, closer to where Hank’s piano music would make eavesdropping difficult. “I’ve been asked to go to a luncheon by Countess Antonina Demidov. Sounds very impressive,” she said with a dismissive hand wave, “but I’m certain she means to ask for money for a pet cause.”

  Grace leaned closer. “The Countess is an Imperialist,” she confided.

  “Not going to do much good, after the Bolsheviks shot the royal family.”

  “Some live forever in hope. Oh, it’s likely a con of some kind. They’ve found a missing princess. Or the tsarevich was secretly spirited away. But I promised my dear friend, Jack West, I’d keep an eye on her.”

  This time, I did snort a bit of rum. “You’re asking me to do Jack West an indirect favor?” West was an arrogant prick, and a Supernatural Secret Service agent as well. Too close to a Pinkerton in my book.

  “It’s really doing me a favor,” Grace replied, turning the wide, pleading eyes on me that we both knew had absolutely no effect. Almost.

  “Why can’t Jackie-boy escort you?”

  “He might be recognized.”

  “More like he wants us to pull his chestnuts out of the fire,” I grumbled. West and I had crossed paths a few times. I’d grudgingly admit that he was probably one of the good guys, but doing so left a bad taste in my mouth.

  “I can count on you, right, Joe?” Grace pressed.

  I sighed like a martyr, but she knew she had me from the time she walked up to the bar. “Sure. Where and when?”

  “You’re the bee’s knees, Joe,” Grace said with a saucy wink.

  “Pretty sure I’d be an awfully big bee.”

  “I had your monkey suit pressed,” Grace told me. I escorted her to enough fancy-pants parties that she’d had a tuxedo custom-made for me. I felt like an organ grinder’s pet in it, but Grace assured me I looked swell.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll do it.”

  Grace stood on tiptoe to give me a peck on the cheek. The feather in her headband tickled my nose, and the beaded fringe on her flapper dress tinkled like a glass chandelier to my enhanced hearing.

  “Better get back to Frankie before he gets jealous,” I said, with an affectionate shooing motion. “Then Freddie will have to bash me with his camera.”

  “See you around,” Grace said with a look over her shoulder. “Don’t be late.”

  For some reason, watching Grace walk away made me suddenly melancholy. The crowd’s gaiety struck me as a bit desperate. Then again, the horrors of the influenza and the Great War weren’t far behind us, reminding mortals that their time was brief. Mine, on the other hand, was long. On nights like this, I felt the weight of the bargain I’d made. I didn’t exactly regret it, but it weighed on me, nonetheless.

  I took my empty glass back to the bar. Ben gave me a look. “You get roped into another job, Joe?”

  “Just doing a favor for a friend.”

  Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Sure you are. Just don’t let that metal head get you into trouble.” Ben was one of the very few who knew my secret. His witchcraft saw right throug
h me.

  I rapped my knuckles lightly against my forehead. “No different than any other day,” I said with a grin and walked out into the night.

  Miro’s neighborhood lived down to expectations. Locals referred to it as “Moscow Heights.” It reminded me of the squalid tenements back in Homestead, though the air here smelled more of borscht, less of cabbage. Clotheslines crisscrossed over my head, though the washing would be gray from coal smoke minutes after hanging it on the line.

  Teenage boys and older men sat out on the stoops, smoking cheap cigarettes. Even with the windows closed, voices carried. I spoke enough Russian to get by, but I didn’t need to speak the language to understand the gist of most of the conversations. Mothers screamed at children. Husbands growled at wives. Dogs barked, and babies screeched. I remembered the whole glorious mess from my mortal days.

  I had changed clothes after the speakeasy. What I wore now didn’t look much different from how the men on the stoops were dressed, but they knew I didn’t belong here. I considered stopping to ask about the missing people but suspected everyone would suddenly “forget” how to speak English. I’d played that game a time or two myself, before.

  But as I walked, I picked up an uneasiness that didn’t come from being poor. I knew that discomfort well enough. Taking a second glance, I saw that the men didn’t sprawl on the steps, they huddled, as if no one wanted to be at the edges in the dark. First-floor windows were shuttered, odd on a night without a storm. Few other walkers passed me, and as I walked farther, toward the mills on the other side, I saw no one at all. The street lamps were few and dim, making the shadows long.

  The steel mill hulked like a behemoth along the river, huge and dark. In silhouette, the many pipes and conduits looked like the ribs of a great beast, and the burn-off chimney cast hellish shadows. A shiver went down my spine.

  I’d never been a very imaginative man before my almost-death, so I wasn’t given to flights of fancy. My sudden jitters told me something was truly wrong.

  “Open,” I murmured, igniting Krukis’s borrowed magic. I blinked, and the world changed around me. Colors, sights, and sounds grew sharper, but what mattered most were the faint, blood-red wisps I could see in the air, the tell-tale sign of dark magic, like the lingering scent of a cigar.

  Something unnatural and magical had come this way and gone toward the steel mill. Even with all my advantages, there was no way in hell I wanted to chase a monster into the chaos of rail yards and storage buildings. Not when I had no idea what I might be facing, or how many there were.

  But I went, anyhow.

  I followed the red traces only I could see. They wafted like smoke, and I needed to hurry before the wind took them away. It took strong magic to leave a resonance like that, which worried me. A neighborhood witch shouldn’t have that kind of power. Usually, someone like that used their abilities to protect the group. If not, everyone knew who was behind the hexes and curses and drove the witch out.

  Milo hadn’t said anything about a local magic user, which made me think the traces of power came from an outsider. I strained to suss out more from what had been left behind. The magic was definitely tainted. I could feel the malice, as well as an overwhelming hunger. Not the normal need to eat; no, whatever left behind the echo of its essence needed to destroy and consume, to rip its prey out of existence.

  I followed the trail of a monster, not a predator.

  Closer to the steel mill, hundreds of workers came and went, working round-the-clock shifts. Out here, in the rail yard, I saw no one. Empty train cars awaited bars or rolls of new steel to carry across the country. Heaps of coal and stacks of raw materials littered the gravel lot, each of them a potential hiding place. Sheds that housed equipment hulked in the darkness, too many to search, and all of them perfect places for a killer to go to ground. I knew from my own time in the mills that no one went into every storage building every day. Some weren’t visited for weeks or months, depending on what was needed.

  They would be ideal for lying in wait—close to vulnerable prey and yet difficult for someone to notice. The cops wouldn’t listen to a guy like Milo. Even if they did, they’d be sitting ducks against dark magic. I edged closer, still trying to figure out what would have left a trail like the blood red traces of power that grew fainter with every breeze.

  Sorcerer. That alone made my blood freeze. I’d never really tested my borrowed magic. Maybe Krukis would give me what I needed, when I needed it. That made me understandably nervous. I didn’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight hoping it would become a rifle, only to be left with a pig sticker. I didn’t even know if Ben Lavecchia could hold his own against a true sorcerer. I hoped we didn’t have to find out.

  But my gut said more than blood magic left the traces. Whatever had been here wasn’t human.

  The traces led me to one of the sheds. A lock on the door didn’t keep me out; I snapped it with a jerk of my wrist. As soon as I opened the door, the smell of rot and old blood assaulted my nose. The nearly empty shed clearly hadn’t been used for anything except a monster’s lair in quite a while. My vision, enhanced in the dark thanks to Krukis, could make out lumps that I felt certain were the remains of the missing people from Milo’s neighborhood, and probably from elsewhere as well.

  The red wisps and the stink of their dark magic lingered stronger here, but I could tell that the source of the power was gone. I moved slowly, expecting an ambush, staying close to the wall. In the far corner, I found a pile of filthy blankets and bloodstained, ragged clothing. Something had made its nest here, feeding to gain strength. When it was ready, it moved on, leaving behind what it no longer needed.

  Shit. The creature had been dangerous enough in its weakened state. Now, I wasn’t sure what it would take to stop it. I had gained my abilities from Krukis, but he wasn’t the only god who might want a champion, and some of the other options were the stuff of nightmares.

  Nothing I found gave me a clue about the nature of the monster, and I didn’t want to be found with a bunch of corpses. I slipped out of the door, leaving it ajar behind me so that someone might find the missing people and give their worried relatives the news. As I headed back across the no man’s land toward Milo’s neighborhood, I heard the attacker closing on me right before he struck.

  The werewolf lunged, hitting me in the chest with its full weight. A normal-sized wolf with a man’s bulk would have been bad enough, but the huge creature looked more like a direwolf, bigger in every way. If he’d hit me before I’d powered up with magic, he’d have taken us both to the ground, and I’d be hurting. As it was, he chomped on metal skin, clanging as his teeth hit unyielding steel.

  I seized that moment of surprise to flip us, pinning him with my weight. Thanks to the steel bones, I’m always heavier than I look, and when the skin turns to metal, that adds to the heft. The huge wolf let out an oof as I knocked him breathless. He clawed and snapped, but I had him, and finally, he bared his neck in surrender, waiting to die.

  “I don’t want to kill you. I just want answers. Now shift. And if you try to get away, I might change my mind on the whole killing you piece.”

  The bones beneath me began to shudder and realign, and the body expanded and contracted. Fur sloughed off, changing to skin, and in minutes, I found myself pinning a very large, very naked man to the ground.

  Not the most awkward moment of my life.

  “Why are you here?” I growled.

  “Why are you? What are you? Did you kill them?”

  “Kill who?”

  “Don’t bullshit me! I can smell them. Your clothing stinks of death.”

  A wolf’s sensitive nose would be able to find the rotting corpses in the shed despite the heavy coal smoke of the mill.

  “Did you?”

  My prisoner had a raw-boned, Eastern European look, not unlike Milo or the men I’d known from Romania, Bulgaria, or the Ukraine. I wondered if he was from the neighborhood, or had come as a favor to someone who lived there. He looked a
t me in shock.

  “Me? I’m here to find them. My cousin Mikhail disappeared.” He regained some of his bluster. “You’re not from the neighborhood, and you’re sure as hell not human.”

  “I came because a friend asked me to see if I could find them. Maybe we’re on the same side.”

  I could tell from the look in his eyes that he didn’t trust me, but he was freaked out by not being the biggest dog in the fight. “Do you know what killed them?”

  “Not one of us.” By that, I took him to mean a shifter. “I would have smelled it.”

  Probably true. “What then?” I had my suspicions, but I needed to know what he considered likely.

  “One of the fey? A hound of the gods? Perchta, come to winnow the herd?” He shook his head and gave up any pretense of a fight. “All I know is that it killed my cousin and many others. It must be stopped.”

  “I came here to hunt it. Do you have any idea where it might have gone?”

  He shook his head. I believed what he said, given the grief I saw in his eyes. Deciding to take a chance, I eased up, moving off him. The man drew his legs up in a belated attempt at modesty, or maybe he was just cold. “No. Perhaps it got what it wanted and left.”

  Or maybe it just changed forms, like a butterfly leaving a cocoon. That thought did nothing to lift my mood. Neither did the suspicion burning in my gut. If the monster wasn’t a shifter gone wrong, the most likely culprit was a vampire—who also practiced the dark arts.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, more because I needed to wrap up this little heart-to-heart before the mill security goons caught us. “Get out of here. Whatever hunted the neighborhood isn’t likely to come back. You found your cousin. Now, leave the revenge to the professionals.”

  He gave me a disdainful look. “I am Romanian. We do not walk away from vengeance.”

  “I’m Hungarian. And we know better than to take on a fight we can’t win.” Not true in my case, but he didn’t need to know that. “I promise you, in the name of Svarog and Krukis, your cousin will be avenged.”

  His eyes widened. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who still remembered the Old Gods. The shifter scrambled to his feet, not bothering to cover his bits. “Thank you.” He made a shallow bow. “Mulțumesc.”