by MJ Kraus
I followed Sully into the back of the pawn shop, feeling a ripple through my flesh as we passed through the heavy set of wards that were installed just behind the counter. Normals wouldn’t be able to detect them, but they were powerful enough to keep an army at bay. Why Sully felt the need to have such heavy protection on his shop wasn’t any of my business and I fully intended on keeping it that way.
“So then.” Sully sat down in a large rocking chair and I sat across from him. “What is it?”
I pulled out the towel-wrapped book from my pack, and Sully’s eyebrows shot up in surprise as he recognized the sigils I had inscribed on the towel. “Those’re Daelic sigils. What th’ devil’ve you got in there, Will?”
I cast a worried glance out into the hall beyond the room we were seated in. “Last night I heard a couple of imps chattering on about a bleed farm that some vamps set up.”
Sully’s whole body sagged and he shook his head. “Christ, William. You di’n’t go after a bleed farm, did you?”
“Relax, Sully. It was empty by the time I got there.” I paused for a second. “Okay, well…mostly empty.” Sully muttered something unintelligible as he reached underneath a table next to his chair and pulled out a bottle. He gave a glance out the door before taking a drink from the bottle and then stuffing it back into its hiding place. “You okay, Sully?”
“Just finish up th’ story, Will.”
“Right. So. Anyway. It was mostly empty. A couple of cops from my department showed up because they were checking the place out for a noise complaint. Next thing I know a freaking vamp flies through the window and goes up the fire escape. I give chase, catch him, he pops a pill and turns to ash before I can persuade him to answer any questions.”
Sully raised his head and frowned. “A vamp ashed himself? Why th’ hell would he do that?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. He was trying to protect something, it sounded like. I guess he forgot that he was carrying this, though, or maybe he knew he couldn’t get away and would rather die than have his boss find out he lost it?”
I pulled back the towel and felt the sigils weaken and break as the book was revealed. The power contained within the book burst forth into the room and the shop, straining against the wards that both protected the shop from anything getting in as well as keeping anything from getting out. I had kept the book wrapped in the sigils for long enough that I forgot the potency of its magic.
I had expected Sully to have a reaction upon seeing the book, but I didn’t expect it to be as strong as it was. Sully leapt up from his chair and manipulated his hands as he spoke in a furious combination of old English and Russian. The book jumped out of my hands and onto the floor, where Sully circled it, his fingers and hands alight with magical fires. A translucent sphere of energy surrounded the book after a few more seconds and I felt the magic from within the book dissipate as it was contained once again.
“What in th’ depths of hell and fire did you bring into m’home, William Silver?!” Sully turned on me the instant he had contained the book. His eyes flashed with fire and I could see electricity arcing up his arms and down the hairs of his beard.
“Take it easy, Sully!” I held my hands up. “I have no idea what it is! That’s why I’m here; the vamp had it and I took it off of him!”
Sully seemed to have grown a full two feet, and I could swear that he was standing over me with his fists balled in a fury I couldn’t understand. His jaw quivered as he clenched his teeth together until he finally began to calm down. He went to the door and closed it, then turned back to me.
“William.” Sully’s voice was calm, but the joviality had completely drained away. “The power that thing is giving’ off… do y’want a pack of elder vampires to swarm your apartment and tear y’apart?”
I walked around the book slowly, glancing between it and Sully. “Not particularly, no. Look, I don’t know what this thing is, but I secured it with wards so none of the aura would be detectable.”
Sully kicked at the towel that I had wrapped the book in and shook his head. “You inscribed wards onto a bath towel, William.” Sully rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair as he squatted down in front of the book. “I can scarcely believe that worked. This thing… well. I don’t know what it is either. But it’s got power. Gobs of it.”
I sat down on the floor opposite from Sully and watched him as he gazed at the book. “That’s why I came to you, Sully. I’m not a complete idiot. This thing has a hell of a lot of power, and it’s not something that a bottom-feeding vamp should be carrying around. Especially not in an abandoned illegal bleed farm.”
“Well then.” Sully finally sat down on the ground, then cracked his knuckles as he scooted up to the magical sphere that surrounded the book. His initial shock and anger over my bringing the book into his shop had evaporated, and I could see the curiosity and wonder in his eyes. He was just as eager to discover what the book was all about as I was.
Unfortunately, the answers we were setting out to find were far more dangerous than we realized at the time.
Chapter 4
When I arrived at Sully’s shop it was around two in the morning. By the time dawn cracked, we were finally starting to get somewhere in determining just what the hell the book was about. Through some cautious manipulation of the pages (through the use of decidedly non-magical chopsticks to keep away from the dangerous-looking sigils inscribed on the front and many of the pages) we had gotten the cover open and flipped through nearly the whole book. Unfortunately, though, the higher vampire language used inside made it nigh on impossible for most people to determine what the book was about.
Sully used to be fluent in higher vampire tongue, but it had been a long time since he had a need to speak or read the language, and like any other unused skill, it had grown rusty over the years. The more he read, though, the more started to make sense and he was soon muttering to himself as he scribbled down notes on pieces of paper that he then passed over to me.
By the time we got to the middle of the book where the text stopped and the blank pages began, there was a stack of notes two inches thick spread out on the floor. Sully closed the book gingerly with the chopsticks and stood up, cracking the tendons in his broad back as he groaned. “Hells bells, Will. If I’da known ye’d be brinin’ me somethin’ like this I would’ve locked th’ front door.”
I forced a smile and shrugged apologetically. “Sorry.”
Sully pursed his lips and shook his head. “No need for apologies, m’lad. What y’ve got here is… well. It’s somethin’ else.”
I looked down at the notes I had scattered around on the floor and gestured at them. “So what’s all this mean? I see references to rituals, records of individuals that they bled at different farms, names of vamps and elder vampires. It’s like some kind of mishmash of information that’s been collected, but most of it’s fairly mundane.”
Sully snorted. “Information is power, Will. You of all people should know that.”
“Yeah, but come on.” I flipped through the notes as I gathered them up into a stack. “What possible power could there be in having a list of names of bleed farm victims?”
Sully leaned back down towards the book and opened up the pages with one of the chopsticks. “Did y’even bother t’look at the pages themselves?”
I leaned in close, being careful to keep my nose from slipping through the containment ward. The pages of the book were high quality and looked new, though the leather they were bound in appeared far older. The pages were off-white, containing no blemishes of their own except that which had been placed there while the author was writing.
The lettering was crude and scratchy, like a cross between a child’s handwriting and someone with a degenerative muscle disease. Blotches of ink stained the page from top to bottom, and the color was nearly black, with the faintest hint of the deepest crimson. I squinted at the page, trying to understand what Sully was talking about when I realized what he meant. I quick sat back
and glanced at him, seeing the confirmation written on his face.
“That’s elder vampire blood. Isn’t it?”
Sully nodded. “Mixed with the blood taken from their bleed farm victims.”
I stood up and ran a hand through my hair, trying to take in the new information. Vampire blood—at least the blood from higher or elder vampires—is incredibly potent. Much like their speech, vampire blood has a great deal of magic bound up inside of it. For the most part, though, vampires don’t exploit the power in their blood like they do the magic in their speech. It still imbues them with strength, speed and an ability to heal incredibly quickly from nearly any non-fatal injury, but they don’t tend to extract it and use it as part of rituals or spells.
While holding no magic at all, the blood of a normal everyday human, you might be surprised to hear, is actually quite potent as well, though for a different reason. The blood of a Normal—and most animals, too—holds the essence of that person inside of it. There’s enough potential power that you can concoct incredibly powerful spells with just a few drops of Normal blood as the base. The Council keeps most of the blatant abuses of that in check, but there are plenty of fringe Touched that use Normal blood for unsavory operations. Not many, but a few. And now, it seemed, there was one more.
“So wait, if that’s a vampire’s blood mixed with a victim… does that mean there was an elder there in the bleed farm?”
“Not necessarily. They could’ve used a wee bit’o his blood in a vial. It’d have t’be fresh, though. He might’ve visited every couple of days or stayed close by.”
“But that handwriting. That’s not the handwriting of a higher or elder. That’s chicken scratch.”
“Aye.” Sully stroked his long beard thoughtfully. “Tis a mystery, Will. But the power in the book, that’s no longer a mystery at all.”
“No kidding.” I shook my head. “Extracting elder or higher vampire blood and using it in a ritual is like trying to play with dynamite. Completely untested dynamite.”
“Combine it with a Normal’s blood in th’ right ritual…” Sully trailed off.
“And you’ve just locked the potential, the power and the very life force of that person inside this book. Doubly so now that most of them are likely dead after being bled dry.” I blanched. “Sweet mother of mercy, Sully. No wonder this thing’s overflowing with power.”
“Aye.” Sully sat back down in his chair and continued stroking his beard as he stared at the book in contemplation. I sat back down as well, though I wasn’t nearly as calm as Sully appeared to be, and we sat in silence for several minutes until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What do we do here, Sully? Destroy it? I’m sure as hell not taking it to the Council. I doubt you want to do that either, given the questions they’ll start asking you.”
“Th’ Council really needs an anonymous tip line, eh?” Sully cracked a grin and I couldn’t help but chuckle before forcing a serious expression.
“Come on, man, this is serious.”
Sully pulled back his sleeve and examined his wristwatch. “No sense in figurin’ it out now. Samantha’ll be up making breakfast by now. She restrained from coming in last night and disturbin’ us, but she won’t have that restraint for much longer.”
He stood up and opened the door, then looked back at me. “Y’coming, lad?”
I shook my head and stood up, giving the book a wide berth as I crossed the room. “Breakfast. After all that?”
“Never hurts t’think on a full stomach, Will.”
I followed Sully with no small amount of amusement through the back of his shop. As we drew closer to the small kitchen and dining room on the next floor up, the smell of bacon, sausage, eggs, biscuits, gravy and hash browns hit me like a freight train. If you’ve ever seen those old cartoons where a character has the smell lines from a baking pie pass under his nose and he levitates and starts floating toward the pie, that’s what it felt like.
In the kitchen, standing over the stove was a tall, broad-shouldered woman wearing a lightly patterned dress, a frilly white apron and her hair up in a bun. A good foot and a half taller than Sully, Samantha O’Dalley was built as solid as Sully was and had a hair trigger temper, though she lacked his thick Irish accent. She and Sully had met years prior and married almost immediately after being introduced. While she mostly occupied her time with cooking and tidying around the shop, she was no less of a wizard than Sully was, though she rarely showed it.
From the little bit I had been able to glean from Sully, Samantha had shown a remarkable gift of the Touch from a very young age, but being an orphan she had no sponsor to the College and thus was left unable to develop her magical talents until she met and married Sully. He took it upon himself to help teach her and develop her talents, but—and again, I’m not certain on this—she quickly overtook him. If I ever had to choose between fighting Sully and Samantha, I’d choose Sully any day of the week.
“Sam!” Sully thundered as we walked into the kitchen. “That smells divine!”
“Sullivan O’Dalley.” Samantha kept her back to us as she continued cooking, and I cracked a grin as I heard the frustration rising in her voice. “You stay locked up with wards all night long in the study with no warning to me and then come in when you smell food and expect to—” Samantha turned, brandishing a wooden spatula in her hand, preparing to lay into Sully when she spotted me. Instantly her expression changed and she smiled broadly and ran over to smother me with a flour-coated embrace.
“William Silver! What’s this devil of a husband been doing to you?”
I extracted myself from Samantha’s hug and patted Sully on the back. “Just helping me figure some stuff out. I ran into a few issues on the job last night.”
“Vampire issues.” Sully helpfully interjected.
Samantha’s expression darkened and her eyes narrowed. “You two’d better not be bringing any sort of neck-suckers into my shop. Understand me?”
We both bobbed our heads up and down rapidly and she smiled again. “Anyway, you can tell me about it over breakfast. I hope you’re hungry.”
Samantha turned back to her cooking and I grinned and leaned down to whisper in Sully’s ear. “How is it you’ve survived for this long?”
Sully elbowed me in the side in response and we both took our seats at the table just as Samantha began lining it with dishes filled with food. The way she cooked, you’d think it was for a gathering of a dozen or more. Sully had inherited the Dwarvish love of food, though, and he could tuck away enough for several people in one sitting.
Between bites, Sully and I relayed my story of the previous night, the discovery of the book and what we had learned after a night’s worth of work. Samantha mostly kept quiet as we talked, only asking questions when she wanted to clarify a point. When Sully told her about the amount of magic that was bound up in the book, I expected Samantha to blow up at him, but she and Sully had slipped into their problem-solving modes, where everything was a challenge that they could overcome together.
As Samantha started talking more, my portion of the conversation pretty much ended and I busied myself with refilling my plate while they discussed the intricacies of ancient magic, vampire lore and other such mysteries. I followed along with it half-heartedly, but since I hadn’t ever gone to the College or been educated for years by a tutor like Sully, I didn’t have the background required to participate.
“Will.” It was about half an hour later, as I was absent-mindedly chewing on a piece of bacon and staring off into space when Sully nudged me in the shoulder. I sat up in my seat and blinked a few times to clear my head.
“Yeah, sorry about that, Sully. Think I drifted off a bit there.”
“Are you getting enough sleep, William?” Samantha frowned at me in concern. “I told Sullivan you shouldn’t be working a job like that.”
“Hush about that, Sam. Just tell him what we figured out.” Samantha gave Sully a dirty look when he spoke, but obliged him anyway.
>
“What my husband means, William, is what I figured out. He couldn’t find his way out of a wet paper sack without my help.”
“So you figured something out about the book?” I pushed ahead, hoping to cut off any chance of an argument between the two.
“In a manner of speaking.” Samantha pushed back her chair and looked up at the ceiling as she thought. “The College keeps a tight grip on historical records of the wizarding world and the Touched, but Sullivan was able to keep me in a steady supply of books for the years I spent studying after we got married.”
Samantha pushed aside a few of the books that she and Sully had stacked on the table and opened a tome that looked like it was older than time itself. The pages had clearly been preserved with something, though it was most likely chemical in nature given that I couldn’t detect any magic layered into the fibers.
“I spent a few months fascinated by vampire practices and rituals dating back to the 800’s. When we got to talking about the book, I remembered reading about this one in particular.” Samantha spun the book around and pointed to a passage.
The book was written in Latin, and while I knew enough to sling a few key spells, I wasn’t fluent enough to read it. “Mind translating that for me, Sam?”
“There was a practice called, in modern tongue, ‘The Bonding.’” For some reason, when Samantha said the name of the ritual, I felt a shiver go down my spine.
“Sounds delightful.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.
“Not really. It was a ritual where the potential in a Normal’s blood was locked to a storage device and then used at a later date in time when it would be needed.”
“For what?” I sensed the answer to the question as I asked it, but I had to be sure.
“Summoning ceremonies, for the most part. Daemonic summonings, raising of the dead; those sort of things.”
“So, basically nothing good and everything evil?”
Samantha nodded sagely. “Exactly. Not just that, though. The Bonding is incredibly volatile.” She glanced at the book and shook her head. “If any of the names are written down improperly as the victims are killed or if the names are read out incorrectly in any way during the release ritual, the results are catastrophic.”