The Curse Merchant (The Dark Choir Book 1)

by J. P. Sloan

  I debated surrendering this information. As Bollstadt put it, secret knowledge was our only real value. However, I was the one in the dark here, and as Bollstadt swayed on his feet I recognized that he was far too lubricated to really present any threat to me.

  “Neil Osterhaus. Heard of him?”

  Bollstadt shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

  “Not surprised. As recently as two years ago, he was nothing. A joke.”

  “And then a sudden reversal of fortune, I suppose?”

  “Yeah. You could say that.”

  “Sounds like he doesn’t even know what he’s got. You might be lucky.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He refused to cancel the contract. Said he wouldn’t release her contract prior to the maturing period without a replacement. I think he knows she’s worth more than just an average contract.”

  Bollstadt was frowning at me.” Maybe not. You sure on the timing? Sure he still has it?”

  “He showed me the contract.”

  “You certain it wasn’t a forgery?”

  “Pretty sure. The thing was almost magnetic.”

  “Fair enough.” Bollstadt dumped the glass shards into the trash can. What a waste of a perfectly good reagent. “Okay, there are possibilities here. You want to free your friend from this contract. She’s not a practitioner, is she?”

  “No.”

  “Damn. If she was, there would be options.” He rubbed his chin. “And he already said he won’t sell it back to her.”

  “No. But I think he’s got it in for me.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  “Actually, it is. He’s so eager to rub my face in his superiority, he’s insisting I be the one to find his replacement.”

  Bollstadt shook his head. “Sounds like a real piece of work.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Did you even try?”

  “Yes. Three times. Nothing panned out. Now I’ve got two days to figure this out, or her soul hits this open market, and her unborn child will become one of these… agents.”

  Bollstadt crossed his arms and pondered for a while. “Okay. She’s basically screwed, then.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Not much you can do. He gave you an in, and you couldn’t follow through.”

  “I’m not saying I didn’t try.”

  “I believe that. At least, I believe that you believe it, anyway. Look, that’s okay. That’s where you are. I’m not here to judge. If Emil’s student wants to stay clean, I’m not going to say that’s wrong.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that your friend is damned. What happens to her depends on who buys her soul. But that’s out of your hands and hers. I think you need to start thinking about how you’re going to deal with this soul monger after this affair has concluded.”

  “I hadn’t really thought about that.”

  “Well, start. Sounds like he’s gunning for you. He’s showing classic narcissism, and the two of you are operating so close to the Presidium’s home turf that no serious practitioner is going to come and challenge you. Hell, I’m kind of jealous. If only I had that kind of balls. But, I’ve got my own problems.”

  He waved back at the corner of his ceiling.

  I still couldn’t see what he was seeing, and took a moment to be grateful for that.

  “So you’re telling me to give up, is what you’re doing?”

  He shrugged, then nodded.

  “What about the infant?”

  Again, he shrugged.

  I stared down at his polyester countertop, tapping my fingers against the cold surface.

  “Consider this,” he said. “Maybe you’re done with Baltimore?”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Come to New York.”

  “Why?”

  “Sounds like you’re getting ground down under the weight of all of the rules and bullshit the Presidium is lording over you. Come back home, Dorian. There’s a thing or two I can teach you. I’d find it a pleasant diversion.”

  I coughed out a laugh of disbelief. “You’re joking, right?”

  “What’s so funny about that? Emil left you high and dry. You’re languishing, Dorian. Languishing. You already have the cold dead aura of a Netherworker. You’re living with the doom already. I can’t believe Emil left you without any benefit of his Netherworking tutelage, but he seems to have done just that. This is just your first real encounter with the hard balls decisions you’re going to have to make if you stay in the Practice. More will come. If not this Osterhaus idiot, then more. Those with real talent. And real education. You’re not going to stand a chance against them. And if you get to the point where you can, the Presidium will probably blackbag you one night, and that’ll be the end of Dorian Lake. I can’t see an upside, here.”

  I moved away from the kitchen shaking my head. “Look, Gene. I appreciate your concern, but I’m doing okay.”

  “You’re doing okay? Kid, I don’t think you realize how not okay you really are. You fell right into one hell of a mess, and you’re still trying to find a way to fix it. Aren’t you? You still think you can win this one, right? You want to show this Osterhaus that you won. See, you just don’t realize it. There’s no winner and no loser. There’s just one ill-trained, but stubborn-as-hell charm peddler, and one soul monger with his head shoved so far up his ass he can see the backs of his teeth.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s another option, Dorian. Just wash your hands of it. Come back to New York. I won’t lie, my time is running short. I can feel it. The shadows. They’re moving.”

  A chill ran down my spine as he said it, and I thought of Brandt. “You’re scared?”

  “You’re God damned right, I’m scared. But there isn’t a thing I can do about it. Maybe Emil never spelled this out for you, but there is a price to Netherwork.”

  “Damnation.”

  “Or maybe he did. Maybe that’s why you’re dabbling in the shallow end of the pool.”

  “You think that’s a bad thing? Me not wanting to condemn my soul?”

  “It’s not a matter of condemning yourself. Looks like you’ve done a fine job of that on your own.”

  “I had help, if that means anything.”

  “I’m just offering another option for you. Pick sides. You’re riding the fence here, Dorian. You won’t throw in with the real power in this short life. But you won’t give up what little power you’ve acquired. You’re something more than the average mundane piece of shit that blunders through life trying to find some kind of meaning in it all. But you’re still afraid of what’s to come. I’m just saying,” he said with a dismissive wave, “you don’t have to win.”

  I continued stepping away from Bollstadt, looking for something to fix my attention on. I found it in the form of a framed picture of Bollstadt sitting on his mantel. He was dressed in what a non-practitioner could have confused for a graduation smock. I recognized it as the ceremonial garb of the Donati Cabal.

  Emil stood at the far end of the line of men. He was the only one who wasn’t smiling.

  “What do you say?” he prodded.

  “I say,” I replied as I turned to face him, “that Emil didn’t leave me unprepared.”

  He squinted in confusion. “Oh yeah?”

  “You said that if my friend was a practitioner, there would be options. What options?”

  “Blood magic is a sordid, intricate discipline. Its only tangible quality is the connection to the one who has bled. But you have to know what you’re doing. You have to have to be sensitive enough to energy to manipulate it from the vein. It’s like a harpoon. You can spear something big, but if you want to control it, you have to hold on tight. Spear something too big, and it’s the one controlling you.”

  “Harpoon the whale.” I stepped close to Bollstadt and reached out my hand. “Gene, thank you.”

  He looked down at my hand and tilted his head. “For what, exactly?”

 
I gripped his hand firmly and gave him as genuine a smile as I could muster. “A moment of clarity.” I withdrew and moved for the door, pausing to add, “I’ll give you a call next week, about the other thing.”

  “Which other thing?”

  The poor bastard was totally lost.

  “I think there is a thing or two you could teach me. And after this weekend, I feel like I could do with some education.”

  I nodded to him and pushed my way through his door and into his hallway.

  It wasn’t too late in the day. I had time to get back to Baltimore before the sunset, or at least before everything closed.

  There was still time.

  I ran down the hallway and fidgeted as the elevator made its way to the ninth floor. By the time I reached the lobby, I was sprinting out to the street. A cab spotted me almost immediately, and within only a couple minutes of leaving the Curse Merchant, I was on my way back to Penn Station. The Cosmos was making a path for me.

  Of course it was. I was finally figuring it out. And after everything it had put me through, it God damned owed me.

  t was dark by the time I reached Baltimore, but the night was young. I had voicemails from Edgar, Carmen, and Bright sitting in my phone, but I resolved to leave them in the ether. I was moving forward for the first time in a couple years, and it felt fantastic.

  I stopped by the house briefly, parking on the street and sweeping through the door after fumbling with the lock for a full minute. The writing desk beneath the street window was organized once again. Notes and receipts were arranged in columns, organized by priority, and in some cases alphabetized.

  I jerked open the left hand pencil drawer and emptied the entire contents right on top of the neatly organized paperwork, spilling pens, matchbooks, nail clippers, hardware leftover from piecing together shit Scandinavian furniture, phone chargers, spare change, and keys.

  Keys.

  I fingered through the detritus on the desk, separating keys from the rest of the junk. I missed the key I was looking for after the first few passes, but finally spotted it when I recognized its odd shape. A black oval lay beneath a matchbook from the Raylene Lounge. I snatched it between two fingers and held it up to the light. The bulbous, black mass glistened in the low light of my front room, a ball of dark embroidery thread wound tightly around a brass key.

  With a deep breath, I picked at the thread until I could grip a loose end, and unraveled it. Energy spilled out as I released my binding charm, winding it around my index finger. After three minutes or so, the last length of thread fell loose, dangling from a tight knot at the key’s eye. I bit it off with my teeth and slipped the brass key into my shirt pocket.

  And I drove straight for Catonsville.

  The long lanes of garage doors at the mini storage were bathed in the orange glow of sodium vapor lamps mounted above the long, black chain link fence surrounding the property. I keyed in my code and drove slowly along the rows until I reached my storage unit.

  My workspace.

  There was no activity anywhere in the mini storage. I was completely alone.

  I unlocked the padlock on the overhead door and pulled it open with a loud rattle. Stepping inside and closing the door behind me, I fished for the light switch. The single bulb shed light over most of the unit. The cardboard boxes, the work table, my chest of reagents.

  But not the back wall.

  I walked up to the work table, leaning against it on my knuckles, staring at the cage.

  The Library sat behind the metal fencing, dark, squat, cloaked in its own shadow. I felt it staring back at me, opening an eye like a predator roused from its sleep.

  Bollstadt was wrong. Emil didn’t leave me unprepared. The Library was all he had left me in his will. Most of his other hermetic materials had been liquidated or had otherwise disappeared shortly after his death. But the Library remained. Crated. My name stenciled on the crate. It was delivered to me by ship. I had to pick it up in a rented truck, and actually brought it to my home before I realized what it was.

  Emil’s complete collection of ancient tomes and personal notes had loomed in the loft of his London flat for the entire time I spent training with him. The loft was off-limits. That much I had understood. My aversion to Netherworking wasn’t necessarily a function of my own personal ethics, or cowardice. Emil worked hard to keep my training grounded in karmic principle. This, he claimed, was the result of his personal research and world travels.

  He hadn’t told me that it was far too late for him until just before the end. As he put it, the shadows were moving, and there was very little time.

  Ten years later, I stood facing those taboo volumes, a palpable sense of dread spilling from the dark wood cabinet in waves. The answers I needed may have been inside that box. For so long I had assumed the damned thing would drive me mad if I had ever opened it.

  At that moment, I wondered if I would have gone mad if I didn’t open it.

  I searched my key ring for the key to the cage, and inched forward. With a final cleansing breath, I unlocked it and stepped into the shadows.

  The brass key slipped from my fingers as I tried to fish it out of my shirt pocket, giving me one last moment of pause. I managed to catch it, and crouched down in front of the cabinet. The wood was dark-stained, a red tint flowing over the rifts of the grain. I placed a hand on the curved door, which was remarkably cold. It was just a cabinet, I reminded myself. Just a box. And inside, there were only books.

  Words.

  But any practitioner worth his salt knows how powerful, how utterly deadly words can be.

  I slipped the key into the lock and turned it. The tiny tumbler clicked softly. I slipped the double curved doors open, leaning back on my heels as my eyes searched for enough light to view the interior.

  A sweet smell of cedar and sage rolled out of the cabinet, filling my nostrils with undulations of nostalgia. It was the same scent as Emil’s London flat as if this cabinet had bottled the atmosphere, preserving it for a decade for me to feel at ease when I would inevitably open its doors. Or was it lulling me into a false sense of security?

  I reached into the cabinet. My fingertips touched irregular spines of leather, twine, wood, and parchment. These were original texts, not clean factory reprints. Each one had a pulse of energy, an aura with its own peculiar tactile signature. These books were charged, filled with the residual charge of several thousand man hours of attention.

  They were alive.

  I pulled the cabinet across the smooth concrete slab floor, its thin wooden legs scraping softly as I pulled it into the light. Something flapped against the inside of the left hand door, and I swung it open wide enough to find a small spiral notebook hanging from a tiny finishing nail driven into the wooden door. Opening the notebook against the thin light from the single incandescent bulb behind me, I found several lines of Emil’s longhand. Book names. Indices. Notes on the authors, or presumed authors. A vague, organic attempt to categorize the texts within the cabinet.

  And on the last page, a note.

  To me.

  DORIAN, OWN YOUR FATE. EMIL.

  Own my fate? The bastard was obtuse, even from beyond the grave.

  I brought the notebook to the work table to read it directly beneath the lightbulb. He had broad categories for arenas of hermetic practice, all of which were Netherwork. Goetia, cursing, necromancy, subordination, soul binding.

  Bingo.

  Emil made the notation, “Darquelle, Servitor, Soul Trap, Contracts. Black leather, Simonus.”

  I rushed back to the cabinet, crouching down again to get my eyes as close to the books as possible. There were ten leather-bound books in the cabinet, and all of them looked black in the dim light. As I tilted them out of the shelf to catch the finely engraved gold leaf lettering on the spines, the smell of the cedar filled my nose, honing my thoughts into a razor focus.

  A slamming noise from the overhead door jarred me out of my focus. I jerked my head quickly, grazing my forehead on
the top of the cabinet. What was it, a knock? It sounded insistent, but it’s difficult to sound delicate when knocking on a garage door. I hung the notebook on the nail and locked the cabinet. Another pounding on the door. I locked the cage and gathered myself before lifting the overhead door.

  A bright light shone instantly in my face, and I lifted my hand in defense.

  “You mind?” I barked, peering past my hand.

  The light dropped to my shoulder, and I saw a man in a bland uniform gawking beyond me into my unit. “This your unit, sir?”

  I turned slowly to face the interior of my storage unit, then peered back at him with a lifted brow. “Uh, yeah?”

  “This your car?” he added.

  I reached into my pocket and hit the lock button, chirping the alarm once. “You’re two for two, Sparky.”

  He scowled at me, then stepped to the side to look into my unit.

  “What’s your business here?”

  I stepped back in front of him, getting into his face. “I thought we covered that. This is my storage unit, and I’m organizing.”

  “A little late for organizing, don’t you think?”

  The man had a cocky air to him that was starting to boil my blood.

  “I was told this was a twenty-four hour storage.”

  I pulled down the overhead door to waist level, just low enough to force him to crouch down like a complete jackass in order to invade my privacy.

  He crouched down, but straightened up, presumably when his fleeting common sense kicked in.

  “Okay, then.”

  “What. Done harassing me?”

  His eyes took a sharp edge, then softened. “Sometimes the owners have problems with people squatting in the units, sir. I have to check out anyone here after sundown. Nothing personal.”

  “I get that, but if I drove here in an Audi, what are the odds I’d be squatting in a mini storage?”

  He swished his lips around, then replied, “Guess you’re right. Have a good evening.”

  I resisted the urge to release a parting barb, electing to let the man work. I did watch him, however, as he tucked his flashlight into his belt and stepped along the rows of storage units, disappearing around the corner. He didn’t seem terribly interested in anything else but me.