“Think not that you have escaped us.” This time, Baelor’s jarring voice issued from the shapechanger’s mouth. “If you keep the staves, you are thieves. If you return them, you aid the cause of Hell. Either way, your place among the damned is assured. By Twelfth Night, it shall be sealed!”
Darkness welled up from Gregor’s staff, and the three demons vanished like a shadow before the sun. The chimera reached the place where they had stood and pawed the ground, sniffing.
“Stupid dopes,” snorted Mephisto. “They could have just used the staff again to send Chimie away.” Turning to us with a hand on his hip, he announced, “Always pays to know your tools!”
WE could not take the chimera on the Lear, so we opted to have lunch while we discussed our options. We found an empty café overlooking the beach. Mab and I sat on the rounded white plastic chairs beneath a blue awning that kept some of the day’s heat off our faces. Mephisto rested on top of the chimera, his hands knotted about the mane. The waiter who approached us gazed at the chimera with an expression of puzzlement and growing terror.
“Stage prop,” Mab said tiredly, waving a hand at the monster. “We’re from Hollywood.”
The terror died from the young man’s eyes. He stared, intrigued.
“Is there a role for me in your movie?” he asked, in his lyrical island accent.
“No,” Mab replied flatly.
Cowed, the waiter took our orders and retreated.
“Are we really doomed and damned?” Mephisto asked from the back of the chimera. “These pesky spirits have been flinging about an awful lot of prophecies of gloom lately.”
“Most likely,” Mab replied tiredly. “You play with fire, you get burned. You play with the Powers of Hell, you get damned.”
“We are not damned yet!” I declared. “Nor shall we be, if I can do anything about it!”
“That’s the spirit, Miranda,” my brother cheered. “Knock ’em dead! Or alive. Or something.”
As we waited for our food, I noted that Mephisto was playing with a black dirk with a ruby set in the pommel. I asked to see it.
“I found it at Logistilla’s.” Mephisto handed me the knife.
“It looks familiar,” I said.
“Titus and I made it,” Mephisto explained, “for one of Gregor’s Centennial Masquerade costumes.”
“Centennial Masquerade?” asked Mab. “That’s when all the world’s immortals gather once a century to chat, right? In costume, as if that’s going to help hide their identities. Let me see if I remember . . . on the night of the first full moon after midsummer on the last year before the new century.” Mephisto and I nodded. Mab continued, “I attended once. I was part of a costume with a few other guys. I got to control the left knee. Had a grand time blowing humans’ tunics around and carrying off their hats.” Seeing our frowns, Mab added quickly, “This was a while ago, of course, before we worked for Prospero.”
“You went!” I said, amazed. “I’ve heard gods and spirits come among us sometimes. I never believed it though.”
“Elves come, too,” said Mephisto.
“Yeah, King Alastor usually goes,” said Mab.
“Really?” I asked. “How does he dress?”
“Like himself,” said Mab. “Huge antlers, mirrored purple cloak.”
“Oh, him! I thought he was a Fomori. No wonder he didn’t have an Irish accent.” I had danced with the King of the Elves in a London ballroom and had not known it!
“Miranda’s elf went once, but she didn’t recognize him,” said Mephisto.
“I don’t own my own elf, Mephisto,” I said wearily, though Mephisto’s words prompted me to wonder. Had the elf lord come after all? I remembered the wry humor in his stormy eyes and felt mildly sad that he had not chosen to reveal himself. Of course, I reminded myself, Mephisto might be inventing the whole thing.
Mephisto was speaking happily into the chimera’s lion ear. “Chimie, you and me! We’re going to show this old world. We’ll get my staff back, won’t we! They’ll see!”
“What in creation are we going to do with this thing, Ma’am?” Mab gestured toward the chimera.
“Easy,” Mephisto replied. “I just hold on to Chimie until they tap the staff to call him back. They will. They’re demons of Hell, after all. They’re not allowed to leave magical beasts hanging around on the sunlit plane. Then, when Chimie goes back, I go too and grab my staff. Easy as pie!”
“Begging your pardon for asking, but how do you get away after that?” Mab asked.
“Hmm,” said Mephisto. “I know!” He halted and looked at me hesitantly, a speculative gleam in his eye. “What happened to that cloak, the one Mab found at the thrift shop?”
“It’s gone,” I said.
“Gone! Gone how?” Mephisto sat straight up.
“We destroyed it,” said Mab. “It’s gone, finished, kaput.”
“When? I don’t remember!” Mephisto cried plaintively.
“At Theo’s, while you were asleep,” I said.
“You let Theo see it? Oh, you dopey-heads! Now, how am I going to be able to sneak around? I only left it at the thrift shop because I needed money. You had no right to destroy it!”
The hair at the nape of my neck stood on end. I asked softly, “Only left what, Mephisto?”
Mephisto’s face went suddenly pale, as if he only just realized to whom he was speaking. He smiled a nervous smile and babbled, “Anyway, I’ll find a way to escape without it. You see, they won’t be expecting me. And once I can grab my staff, I’ll have all my friends. They can’t make my friends their friends just by tapping the staff, can they, Chimie? I’ll call Behemoth and Leviathan and Nessie. Or maybe the monstrosity from the Black Abyss. See how well the Three Shadowed Ones deal with him, eh?” Mephisto continued rapidly. He swung his legs out so that he was stretched across the chimera as if it were a Roman couch, one hand entangled in its mane, the other outstretched. “Teach them to trifle with Mephistopheles, Prince of H . . .”
Before he could finish, he and the chimera vanished; fading away as if their presence at the table had been nothing but a trick of the light.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Prospero, Inc.
“Tell me he was not about to say Hell,” begged Mab. He leapt to his feet, darted around the slate patio of the café, and peered down the hill toward Charlotte Amalie port, as if to make absolutely certain Mephisto and the chimera had not departed in that direction.
Despite its being December, the weather on St. Thomas was sunny and beautiful, with a salty breeze blowing off the sea. As our waiter approached, the aroma of fried fish, garlic sauce, and coconut supplanted the other scents, even as the clink of dishes drowned out the distant ships’ horns and cries of seagulls from the harbor.
I started to rise, to tell the waiter that there was a change of plans and we had to go, but the food smelled so good. I sat down again. I had eaten nothing since last night at Logistilla’s, and there would be no opportunity to eat on our plane. Whatever was wrong at Prospero, Inc. could hold another fifteen minutes, while I had my lunch.
“Wish I could,” I said to Mab as soon as the waiter had departed. I took a bite of my conch in garlic. It was delicious. “What could he have been thinking? He hasn’t seemed all that crazy, except for the thing with the lute. How could he suddenly have forgotten he was not Mephistopheles the demon?”
“Maybe he wasn’t going to say Hell,” Mab drawled. “Maybe he planned to say ‘Harlem’ or ‘Hollywood,’ but I kinda doubt it. None of those places have princes nowadays. Prince Mephistopheles sounds suspiciously like Hell to me. . . . Maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he is the demon Mephistopheles.”
“What?” I spit conch across the table.
“It’s just I don’t remember a demon named Mephistopheles back when I was wreaking havoc as the Northeast Wind. When was that Faust play written, anyway?”
As he spoke, Mab approached the place where Mephisto and the chimera had stood. Slowly,
he inched his way around the chimera’s tracks, leaning over and sniffing the air. When he had circled the place, he scowled. “No otherworldly scent. That’s good for him—means he’s still on Earth—but, it makes things harder for me. Earthly scents are harder to pin down.”
Mab pulled a sextant, a slide rule, and a handful of brown rice from his pocket. Kneeling, he took a reading off the sun with the sextant, tossed a handful of rice in the air, and took a reading again as the grains pattered to the dusty earth. He stood silently for a time, calculating his results with the slide rule. Then, scratching his stubble, he repeated the whole process again.
I watched him work and sipped my tannia soup, savoring the creamy texture and mild, nutty, potato-like flavor. After five hundred years, it often amazed me there were still foods I had never tasted.
“It’s no good,” Mab growled finally. “The doorway dissolved too quickly. There’s no spatial drift.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he hasn’t been taken from this world. Even a short dimensional hop would have allowed some unearthly air to escape through the cracks between worlds. And if there’s one thing I can detect, it’s unearthly air. The brief whiff I got smells more like Rome or Chicago.”
“That’s good enough, I guess. I’d ask you to do more, but by the time we found him, either it would be too late, or he’d have his staff again—in which case, he’ll be fine. Since I agreed to send him off on his own anyway, I’ll leave it like this.”
“Ma’am . . . what did he mean about the chameleon cloak? Was it his? How could it have been?”
I recalled our visit to The Elephant’s Trunk thrift shop. The clerk had smiled and headed for Mephisto immediately. I had dismissed her interest as romantic. Could she have been smiling because she was already acquainted with Mephisto?
A cold chill ran down the back of my spine. As soon as Mephisto departed, she brought his companion, me, to the chameleon cloak!
“Do you remember how he thought that gas station and The Elephant’s Trunk looked familiar?” I asked Mab. “They were familiar! He’d been there before!”
“Your brother was acting weird at the thrift shop. The only excuse I can offer for not having noticed is that he always acts weird.”
“But why?” My voice rose. “How could Mephisto own a chameleon cloak? He knows their vicious nature! He helped destroy the originals.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Mab offered. “Maybe he squirreled one away and had it all this time.”
I shook my head. “No, I was there when Mephisto, Theo, and Erasmus destroyed the originals. I watched as each one was unmade. Mephisto must have gotten this one more recently. But where? And why?”
And how long ago? All this time, I had been assuming Mephisto’s interest in ponchos over the last century or so was based on nostalgia for his old royal tabards, but might it not have the sinister purpose of hiding his chameleon cloak? I tried to remember when Mephisto first started wearing a poncho. It had been many, many decades, at the very least.
Mab shrugged. “Who knows why Harebrain does anything? Maybe he’s actually a demon-haunted horror, or perhaps he wanted it for the reason he gave us, camouflage. Where’d he get that big demon body, anyway? That’s what I’d like to know!”
“Me too, Mab. There are a lot of things I’d like to know including . . .” I ticked my questions off on my fingers, starting back at my thumb again when I reached my pinky. “What is up with Mephisto? What’s up with Logistilla and her cavern of naked Italians? Is my sister trafficking with the Devil? Is my brother? Is my father? Why did Cornelius use his staff on a brother, and what can be done to disenchant Theo? What was my father doing when he released the Three Shadowed Ones? How do we rescue Father from Hell? What is going to happen on Twelfth Night?”
I took a breath and continued, “Where did Father get his books? Could the virtue of his tomes—their magic—have been in the paper, rather than in the words written upon the pages? Is that why Father could not cast the spells again, once he made our staffs? What really happened to Ferdinand? Where’s Gregor’s body?” And silently, I added: what is this secret Baelor spoke of that is destroying my family?
Mab flipped through his notebook, looking for additional loose ends. “Dang lucky Mr. Theo showed up when he did at the gas station. I wonder what Harebrain meant about him being prompted by an angel. And . . . Oh!” He tapped his finger on the page before him. “You left out whether Prospero has you under a spell, Ma’am.”
“I’m not concerned about that. But, I’ll tell you another thing I’d like to know! How did that knife end up at Logistilla’s?”
“Knife? What knife? The one Harebrain was playing with?”
“I just remembered why that knife was important. It was on Gregor’s body when he died!”
“So, maybe his sister kept it as a keepsake . . . to remember her brother by. Weren’t they twins?”
I rubbed my temples, which were beginning to ache. “You don’t understand, Mab. It was on his body when he was shot. By the time my family got there, the knife was gone. According to the police report, the killer took it. Now, if the last known person to own this knife was the man who killed Gregor . . . how did Logistilla get it?”
“Maybe she hunted down his murderer and turned him into a newt?” suggested Mab. “Dang! I had meant to ask your sister if we could interrogate the men she mentioned recently adding to her retinue. What an idiot I am! Guess I was distracted by the scent of devils and empty Italians.”
Pulling out his notebook, he added our questions to the list he was keeping.
AT the airport, I phoned headquarters and learned that the shipment of phoenix ash promised to the salamanders of Mount St. Helens had never reached its destination. Our truck had crashed somewhere in Arizona, spilling barrels of the precious deadly substance across the road.
Returning to the Lear, we flew directly to Prospero, Inc.’s corporate headquarters in Seattle. I immediately dispatched Mab with a team of experts to clean up the crash. Afterwards, he was to continue on to Elgin, Illinois, to see if Gregor’s grave held any clues. Meanwhile, I dealt with the problem of locating another six drums of phoenix ash before the Mount St. Helens salamanders blew their top, literally.
According to modern lingo, Prospero, Inc. was a multinational corporation; however, as it was originally founded in the same era as the East India Company—with a similar royal charter—I still referred to it by the older nomenclature of “company.” Early in the twentieth century, we incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware, leading to our current appellation of Prospero, Incorporated—or as most of us called it, Prospero, Inc. As our supernatural clientele have become familiar with this name, I have kept it, even though the folks at marketing press me, from time to time, to modernize. Mr. Charles Chapman, the vice president of marketing, jokes that our name is so out-of-date, some of the younger employees believe they are working for a printing firm known as Prospero Ink.
Upon arriving, I passed Charles Chapman in the bustling hallway. Father had hired him when he was just out of college, and he had now been with the company thirty-five years. He believed me to be Father’s granddaughter, the daughter of the Miranda he had known in his youth. He often paused to tell me how I was the spitting image of my mother, which was more pleasant than Philip Burke, the oldest of our salesmen, who liked to tell risqué stories of his exploits with “my mother” back in the fifties and sixties, none of which even remotely reflected the truth.
After commenting that he remembered my mother wearing that very green dress, Mr. Chapman asked after my father. I smiled and nodded and murmured something unintelligible. As I walked on, I wondered how he would have responded if I had told him Father was in Hell. “Befuddle the mortals” was not a game I cared to play, but it had once been a favorite pastime of Mephisto’s and Erasmus’s. They had taught it to Ulysses, who took to it like a seal to the sea. For a time, he got a kick out of blurting irrelevant bits of supernatural lore t
o unsuspecting mortals and then tapping on his staff and disappearing in a burst of light. My father eventually made him stop, ordering him not to make things difficult for the Orbis Suleimani after pictures of him using his staff appeared in a British tabloid.
I took an elevator to the tenth floor, nodded kindly to the ladies manning the phones in the upstairs foyer, and pressed my hand against the white rectangle to the left of the locked doors marked “Priority Wing.” What looked like a security device was actually a magical talisman that did exactly what a security device would have done—but we had been using ours for nearly four hundred years. The doors swung open and then, with an audible click, locked again behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief.
The company was divided into two major divisions: the Mundane Branch, run by normal humans, and the Priority Branch, staffed by incarnated Aerie Ones. The first handled mundane business concerns: factories, chains of retail stores, and other business ventures of the ordinary sort. The second supported our supernatural customers.
Long ago, King Solomon charged the Orbis Suleimani with the task of conquering the supernatural entities whose struggles and strife caused what humans called natural disasters. The great innovation of our company, which was fundamentally a branch, or perhaps an offshoot, of the Circle of Solomon, was the discovery that if we provided wares that spirit creatures wanted—usually some commodity owned or produced by a different kind of supernatural being—they would cooperate willingly, with a minimum of oathbinding and fuss, saving both tremendous effort and countless lives.
Prospero Incorporated carries out this charge by facilitating the exchanges between these entities. We provide phoenix dust to salamanders who otherwise caused volcanoes; cinnamon sticks from the nests of Cinnamologus to the phoenixes; pearls from the nereids to the oreads of the earth, who could make every gem but these; and the black blood of the oreads to hungry djinn. It had taken years, centuries, to negotiate the agreements we currently maintained, and their success was based on a delicate balance between our various clienteles. This balance helps to stabilize the supernatural community. Were even a single link in the chain lost, it would herald untold disaster!
Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I Page 29