The Curse Merchant (The Dark Choir Book 1)

by J. P. Sloan

  With as condescending a snicker as I could muster, I said, “The Greek word is haimatos.”

  “Haimatos?”

  “No offense, but your Greek is shit. I’d trust me on this one.”

  He set down his quill and scratched out the word haimatos before completing the remainder of the draft.

  “I’ll assume therefore you understand the terms and conditions?”

  “Let’s just skip to the blood work.”

  Osterhaus slid a tiny brass bowl across the desktop. I unbuttoned my sleeve and rolled it up to my elbow, exposing several parallel scars from my years of charm working. I reached out for the darquelle, gripping it by its double rope hilt.

  One slow, shallow cut along one of my scars, and I released enough blood to drip into the bowl. It took several minutes to gather enough to write with.

  Osterhaus produced a cotton ball from his drawer, and I pressed it against the wound, watching as he reached for another implement. He gripped a short cylindrical piece of carved wood, dipping it into my blood, and then rolling its design against the parchment. The design traced a small spiral inscribed in runes near the bottom of the contract.

  He then pulled a short, shiny pen from his shirt pocket and clicked it. Instead of a ball point, a tiny blade emerged from the writing end. He jabbed himself in the thumb with the point and held it against the rising drop of blood. He lanced the drop of his blood onto the quill and positioned it over my stamp, pausing with one more look into my eyes.

  “You leave Baltimore. By Monday.”

  “By next Monday.”

  “Agreed.”

  He signed his name over the stamp, activating the soul trap.

  I held my breath, and gripped my hands into fists. I expected something to shift. To click. Something at all to indicate that my soul had left my body and was drawn into the wide sheet of parchment on the desk in front of me.

  But I felt fine. I looked down at my arms and body. Everything seemed the same.

  Osterhaus clicked his pen and slipped it back into his pocket. “What were you expecting? Mephistopheles?”

  So this was what my clients felt like when they received my charms. Who would have guessed I’d be the disappointed type?

  Osterhaus leaned over and blew against the blood sigils, inspecting his work.

  “Are we done here?” he asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Carmen?”

  He nodded, and pushed away from his desk. “I’m a man of my word.”

  “Right.”

  He frowned, then disappeared into the back room.

  I turned to Malosi, whose face was long.

  “You okay over there?” I asked.

  “You’re insane,” he whispered. “You know that right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not so insane.”

  “I thought you were smarter than this.”

  I turned in my chair and lifted my brow at Malosi. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Penn State, but I actually know what I’m doing.”

  He straightened up and shook his head. “All this for an ex-girlfriend? Hate to see what you do for someone who actually likes you.”

  Malosi stepped back to the door as Osterhaus returned with Carmen’s contract in his hand. He spread the parchment out on his desk and inspected it thoroughly.

  “Such a waste,” he muttered as he reached into his pocket once more for his stylus. He freshened up the drop of blood on his thumb and drew more into his quill. With slow, tiny, maddeningly intricate strokes he circumscribed her stamp with sigils.

  Malosi took a step forward, putting a hand on the back of my seat.

  Osterhaus reached into his desk and produced one more item. A small black lacquer box. He opened its lid, revealing a tiny cache of coarse salt. He dropped several pinches onto the stamp, then leaned forward and released a tiny stream of spittle onto the salt. He rubbed the spit and salt together onto the stamp with his wounded thumb, sucking in a breath as he scrubbed the blood stamp into an illegible smear.

  He wiped his thumb with a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, then folded the contract and handed it across the desk to me.

  “Your friend’s soul has been returned.”

  I nodded and took the contract from Osterhaus.

  “Thank you.”

  “I doubt she will thank you, frankly. Bear in mind that all of her consideration will be returned with penalties.”

  “I get that.”

  “Now,” he said with a long exhale, “we are done here.”

  I stood up and turned my back to Osterhaus, slipping Carmen’s defunct contract into my coat pocket.

  “See him out, will you Reed?” he said as I reached the door.

  Malosi followed me up the stairs. At some point, it had started to rain outside. The air was heavy with ozone and cold as hell.

  “Where are you going?” he asked as I reached my car.

  “Home. What used to be home, anyway.”

  Malosi was positively crawling out of his skin as I fumbled with my keys.

  “Look, for what it’s worth,” I said, “I appreciate your concern.” I turned toward him and tried to smile. “I’ve been watching you this past week. I’m convinced that Osterhaus is a waste of human space, but you’re all right. Tell me the truth. You hate him as much as I do, don’t you?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “What’s he got on you that’s keeping you at his mercy?”

  He stared at me through his sunglasses without comment.

  “Well, you’re going to wake up one of these days, God willing. And if you do, and you find yourself up in the New York City area, look me up.”

  He reached out and offered his hand.

  I shook it, and stepped into the car.

  And I drove home.

  stood in the front room, surveying my personal space. My old roll-top writing desk. My coat rack. Carmen’s sofa. Two short bookcases with pulpy fiction. The old piano I’ve never played. The framed pictures I bought at a flea market.

  This had been home for several years. It had been my only real home since my parents died. I had moved in with Aunt Viv after Mom’s accident, trying to figure out how to live with everything, what to do before I went to college. We were both devastated by Mom’s passing, but we both had our peculiar ways of dealing. I found myself stampeding through as many steps of the grief scale as cliché would allow. Aunt Viv, on the other hand, hit the sauce. She was a kick in the ass after a few glasses wine. She actually made me laugh, which was something because at that point I seriously didn’t think I would ever laugh about anything again. So she would get hammered, pass out, wake up the next morning and figure out how to keep the catering business running in her absence. Things could have gotten better for both of us until the night she guzzled a liter of Seyval. She disappeared for an hour, then showed up in the living room in a negligee. I’m not sure what her wine-soaked eyes were seeing, but she called me “John.”

  My father’s name.

  I packed up the next morning. We’ve never discussed it since. I never wanted to know what she was remembering, but it was enough to make me realize my life wasn’t what I thought it was. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t true. I couldn’t accept it.

  Nor did I accept the circumstances of my father’s suicide. My need became vengeance. I had to make sense of what happened to Dad. And my seventeen-year-old brain had decided his death was something that had happened to him. It wasn’t something he did to himself. I believed someone else was responsible for his death. I needed to believe that. It became my religion. I didn’t understand the business of investment banking. I didn’t understand how quickly a short sale could go wrong, and how quickly a man who was otherwise in control of his career could lose everything. To me, he was part of a powerful world, one that was filled with money and mystery, and it had taken my father’s life.

  Then Mom was killed in the Bowery. One moment. One cab. One red light. The violence of the moment pre
vented me from dealing with it. Her death had to have been part of a greater scheme. Two deaths in one week? No natural order could have allowed something so arbitrarily cruel to occur.

  My life became a quest to uncover the truth. I sank deeply into darker fantasies and paranoid delusions than an otherwise healthy mind could conjure. Which led me ultimately to the world of the Craft. It was another world, also filled with mystery and death. A world that could explain how something so unfathomable could happen to someone like me. I had embarked on a year-long search for someone to find the answers, find the culprit, right the wrong.

  Then Emil came and pulled me out of the cycle of hate and regret and grief. I became his project. His redemption. He took me to London for ten years’ training. And though we lived together for a decade, mostly indoors doing little more than reading and reciting, his flat never felt like home to me. It was part of that dark, mysterious world, always separate, always alien. I had no space that was my own. It was this sense of detachment that led me to start breaking away at night and frequenting the pubs. Which is where I met Genie, a leggy blonde Briton with a permanently cocked eyebrow and a great pair of lips. She proved to be more beguiling than dead languages, and it wasn’t long before Emil called me out for abandoning my studies to meet her and her friends.

  I was twenty-five, and had never had a social life. Since high school I had been an orphan suffering from acute paranoia, managing to gate myself into a particularly strange lifestyle with a man who was for all intents a purposes a shut-in.

  The girl won.

  Unlike my relationship with my own father, which ended abruptly, my relationship with Emil withered on the vine. I stayed out more nights, crashing with Elise or one of her friends. I would return for a tongue lashing from Emil, though his diatribes became weaker and lazier as the months progressed. Soon we had very little to say to one another.

  Then I took a two week trip to Europe with Elise and four others. When I returned, I found Emil in a pool of his own blood, his limbs severed and laid in a spread eagle on his bed. The police conducted a cursory investigation and ruled it a break-in gone wrong. But there was no forced entry. No fingerprints. I was the only suspect of interest, and my alibi was rock solid.

  But when I had stared at his dissected body, all of his late night rantings and ravings about moving shadows spilled into my frontal lobe from that little corner of the brain where we like to hide ugly truths. I hadn’t listened to him, and he had told me that his soul was due for repossession.

  I couldn’t stay in England, and I wouldn’t move back to New York. I’m not entirely sure why I moved to Baltimore. It had an old world quality that I couldn’t match in another major city on the Eastern Seaboard. A buyer’s agent found this house for me. It had some historical value to it, which I found appealing. It was within shouting distance of both stadiums, which at the time was a selling point. Mostly, however, it was wholly unlike any place I had ever lived before in my life. Not a single nook or corner of the Amity house reminded me of my parent’s house in Nassau, Aunt Viv’s house down the island, or Emil’s flat in London. It was mine.

  It was home.

  And now I was about to leave it behind.

  Osterhaus had given me hope. Throughout my pressing him, he continually referred to Carmen’s contract as One Soul. That was all he was accounting for. He hadn’t given me the impression that he knew Carmen was pregnant. Bollstadt may have been right; Osterhaus didn’t have a full appreciation for what he had in his own hands. I had banked on that, and it seemed to work.

  For Carmen, anyway.

  I was still screwed.

  I had taken another gamble on the consideration. I counted on the Donati Cabal’s historic failings in fostering a sense of language studies among their members. Mercenaries to the end, they simply never bothered. Which explained Osterhaus’ poor grasp of Koine Greek.

  I had spotted his weak grasp of the language when he showed me Carmen’s contract. I counted on being able to strong-arm the man into putting haimatos on my contract, without knowing what it really meant.

  Blood.

  My blood was on the contract, as was his. We were blood bonded, now. If the forces that powered the contract gave me any cooperation at all, I’d have control of my own blood.

  And his.

  I let Osterhaus sink a harpoon into me. Now, I was about to drag him down. I just had to figure out how I was going to do it. I had two years to figure it out. Two years for Bollstadt to offload his knowledge of Netherworking onto me. He was the one who said that a practitioner had options. With any luck at all, I had stacked the deck in my favor.

  The hardest part would be breaking the news to Edgar. I had just made progress with him, repairing some of the damage that had been done. I hadn’t spoken to him since disappearing from his shop two nights ago. A lot had happened since then.

  The house, on the other hand, would be easy. I would keep the house, renting it to someone who could manage the other properties for me. One property manager renting the Amity house would be all I needed to keep myself from having to bother with selling, and the rental income from all five properties could keep me in a comfortable budget, even by New York City standards.

  And then there was Bright. He liked me. I could tell by the way he refused to let me irritate him. He was a crusader with true faith in his mayor. Despite my success in gaining his trust, I would have to sell him directly back to Osterhaus. He wasn’t going to be happy with that. His life was about to get far more complicated, and far more expensive.

  His scheme for occult intervention was a crutch, at best. If Sullivan was half the man Julian thought he was, he didn’t need magic. Unless I was reading the two of them completely wrong, which considering how close I had come to grappling with Joey McHenry, made me glad I was moving to New York.

  Baltimore was getting too complicated, anyway.

  I felt the need to start boxing up my possessions, but the enormity of the task pressed into me. I elected instead to grab my coat and walk down to the café. The rain had stopped long enough for me to find an outside chair. It was damp, but I didn’t really care. I needed to be out in the open, on the street, perhaps for the last weekend. I sipped a cappuccino as I watched a homeless man panhandle his way down Fayette. He locked eyes with me and kept moving on. I must have been giving off the “not worth the hassle” vibe.

  Just another man lost in his own life. I could relate.

  “Whatever trouble burdens you, I hope to relieve,” said a velvety, deep voice from behind my table.

  I turned to find the Syrian approaching, a newspaper tucked under one arm and a clear mug of tea in the opposite hand.

  I didn’t know what to say to him, so I just stared as he pulled out a chair and took a seat at the table beside me.

  He tugged at his teabag and crossed his legs.

  “Did I disturb you?”

  “If you only knew.”

  “My apologies. I was on my way to the Lexington Market, and decided I needed a moment of peace.”

  “That’s great and all, but we’re two blocks from the MLK. So let’s just stop pretending this is a coincidence. I’m too tired.”

  He looked down at his tea and nodded.

  “Very well. I’ve never been overly fond of pretense, to be quite honest.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “A moment of your time.”

  “You’ve taken a few already.”

  “What is your interest with Neil Osterhaus?”

  There it was. Finally, we were getting somewhere.

  “My friend sold her soul to the man. I was negotiating its release.”

  “Which requires four visits in a single week?”

  “You’ve been watching me.”

  “I have my means.”

  “Listen, if the Presidium has such a burr under its saddle over Osterhaus, why aren’t you going straight to him?”

  He milked his teabag with a spoon and set it gingerly on the sau
cer. “Who said the Presidium has the first issue with Osterhaus?”

  “Me, then? What have I done? I’ve been the cleanest practitioner on the Eastern Seaboard for the last ten years. I’ve never had any problems with you people before.”

  He took a long sip of tea and set it down without even a clink. “You’re very defensive, Mister Lake. Is that normal for you?”

  “Considering the circumstances, yeah. I’d call it normal.”

  “Then allow me to arrest your fears. I have no interest in complicating your life. Quite the contrary.”

  I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “Can we please get to the point, then?”

  “Brevity. Alas, it is a lost art.” He turned to face me and cleared his throat into a business voice. “Mister Swain tells me you are in the possession of Emil Desiderio’s personal library of hermetic tomes.”

  I blinked.

  Edgar had some explaining to do.

  “True enough.”

  “He also tells me you find the possession of this library to be particularly onerous. As Mister Swain may have told you, I am in the process of gathering dangerous and otherwise mystically compromising items from free agents and radical elements. I would very much like to make you an offer for this library.”

  I closed my eyes as my shoulders wilted. At long last, someone was shooting straight with me. It was almost therapeutic. “You really could have saved a lot of time and just asked me directly, you know.”

  “Imagine for a moment, if you will, that you were in my position. A hermetic practitioner who is not a regular member of any known cabal, nor is under active participation with the Presidium, is harboring a relatively infamous collection of Netherwork tomes. His closest confidant tells me that he has been acting erratic and unstable for a period of time, and that he is prone to antagonistic behavior. And then imagine my reaction when I discover that he is in regular contact with a known soul monger with a nearly worthless pedigree.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Thank you for that. At any rate, I have gained nothing in my career for acting in haste. How much better might I be received if I took the time to understand the man, rather than to take a prejudiced stance?”