Achilles nodded with a big grin. “Of course. Ask away. I don’t think she will have any issue, but I would understand if she did. She’s more than just a person. She’s a… an image. An ideal. A hope.”
I smiled gently, nodding. “Funny you say that. I used to call her Hope, before I realized what she was.”
Achilles smiled distantly, lost in his own thoughts.
“Mind throwing me any tidbits while we await her response?”
Achilles frowned. “Can’t. At least, nothing you couldn’t find out on your own with a bit of reading. Part of my agreement. I can’t get involved directly in any… important events going on between supernatural factions.” I watched him thoughtfully. Important to whom?
But I knew better than to ask the obvious. He was playing it close to the chest, whether out of choice or obligation, I knew not, but I understood the basic psychology of the human mind. Never ask directly if the patient has any kind of defense up. Circuitous always worked best.
Asterion was thumbing his nose ring thoughtfully, eyes glinting in the dim light. It was nice to see him out and about. The Grimms had burned down his field during their visit, and he had fled into hiding for a time. I had only just discovered he had returned to St. Louis after a casual breakfast stop at Midas Kingston’s farm.
Well, King Midas, if you want to get technical.
He was the Minotaur’s landlord.
I shook my head at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Anyone else have something for me? I had a run-in with Baba Yaga, notorious Russian witch. She also wanted this book. Now, Mr. Personality shows up demanding the same thing. To be honest, I don’t know anything other than that it’s a book a client wanted. Baba admitted it can grant a wish.” Incredulous stares met my words. Fat lot of help that was. “I think I have enough information on Grandma, but I have to admit I’m kind of in the dark on Van Helsing. Other than that movie that came out a few years ago. Picked fights with Dracula, werewolves, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Few other European tussles. What’s so special about him? He didn’t seem to have any magic or anything, so how did he become so widely feared?”
Asterion cleared his throat. “He’s warded. Heavily. Not sure with what, but he’s practically immune to magic. Not sure if it’s a gift he was born with or if he has an artifact of some kind, but he can only be harmed by bone, claw, or teeth. Metal and magic cannot harm him.”
“Dibs,” Gunnar growled as his fists suddenly shifted into white furred paws, thick shiny black claws poking out from the tufts. Alucard smiled agreement as he raised a fist to bump. Gunnar didn’t even look as he obliged with his werewolf paw.
Asterion continued. “Basically, he fancied himself a medieval Batman, saving Regulars from the claws and fangs in the dark. Of course, back then, Europe was a breeding ground for all sorts of creatures, and they pretty much had a stranglehold on the world, those with gifts taking open advantage of those without. It’s why many of you left for the Americas.” I blinked at that.
“But Europe had the Grimms… Surely, Van Helsing can’t compare to them. They could duplicate their opponents’ powers.”
Asterion looked at me. “And Van cannot be harmed by magic…” He tried a different route. “Are you more afraid of the attack you can’t see coming or an army of monsters facing you openly in battle?” I waved a hand, capitulating. “That’s Van. He’s an… entrepreneur,” he glanced around the room, judging to see if his word encompassed the totality of Van. He received a few nods, but just as many frowns. “He goes for the most efficient means of accomplishing his objective. Always. No matter the venue. If he needed to act the waiter for a year in order to get close enough to kill you, then he would be a waiter for a year. He’s the shadow. The Grimms were the police. Both deadly, but at least you knew the Grimms were coming. With Van, you never knew if you were walking around on borrowed time. The ultimate mercenary. In fact, he’s known for delaying his kills, and his contractors don’t mind at all. They just pay for a job well done. No one puts a time limit on him. Just that they die within a reasonable period of time.” He leaned back finally, stroking his goatee.
I grunted. “Immune to magic…” I muttered.
Death piped up. “Not necessarily immune to it, just well protected. I’ve heard of some close calls where a Maker or two injured him during an exchange. They thought they had bought their life back…” Death leaned forward, face flickering briefly into a skull. “They were wrong. They died later. Unexpectedly, and violently. And the shadow drifted off like smoke. No one said aloud that Van had done it, but everyone knew. He’s… thorough,” Death maintained his smile, leaning back. “Reliable to his contracts to the last.”
“Yeah, well. Not sure why I’m in his crosshairs, or what exactly this magical whatsit is or does. What would attract a famed witch like Baba Yaga, and a legendary assassin like Van Helsing?”
No one had an answer to that. I slapped my knees. It was getting late. “Well, I would say it’s been a pleasure, but Van kind of ruined that. Sorry about the damage.” Achilles waved a hand.
“Worth it. No obligation to rectify. You did what I wished I could have.”
“Want to tell me what he did to piss you off so badly?” I pressed.
Achilles turned raptor-like eyes on me, physically pinning me to my chair. “No.” He said it with the finality of a funeral speech. “I don’t.”
Death shook his head discreetly at me, urging me not to push. For some reason, I listened.
“Well, looks like I have some research to do.”
“Great. More book stuff,” Alucard muttered.
Asterion piped up. “You know, maybe hiring a vampire to run your bookstore wasn’t the brightest of moves. Nothing against you personally, Alucard.” He smiled at the vampire’s scowl. “You make it fairly obvious that you don’t enjoy your job, or like books, or any of the other things that come with running a bookstore.”
Alucard grew thoughtful, but didn’t say anything. “I’m just thirsty. Makes me hangry.”
Achilles stood and walked behind the bar. A moment later he tossed the vampire a blood bag. Alucard’s eyes twinkled as he caught it. “Last one, I’m afraid.” But Alucard was already guzzling the black-market blood donation bag. He finished it like a kid slurping a soda through a straw, crushed the bag in a fist, and let out a long, contented sigh. His skin visibly darkened from pale to… less pale, I guess, but he looked suddenly stronger. We all watched him for a minute before I shook my head and turned towards the door. “See you guys soon,” I called over a shoulder as Alucard and Gunnar said their goodbyes.
My mind wandered, casting a heavy silence over the car as I drove us back to the shop to drop off Alucard – who lived there and had a night of cleaning ahead of him – and Gunnar – who had parked just down the street. Gunnar had informed me that he was fine to drive, and I believed him. He may have changed a bit, but he would never openly break a law that could put others in danger.
The mood was somber as we said our goodbyes outside my shop. “See you tomorrow. Early,” Gunnar reminded me. I nodded distantly, mentally combing my Memory Palace of books, items, artifacts, and any other things I stored there from my past, questing out for whispers of stories I may have read about either of my two new enemies.
I had the unique ability to remember things. Everything, pretty much. When I chose to utilize it anyway. To better organize my thoughts, I typically stored important things in an imaginary house that resided in my mind. A mansion where practically everything inside was a stored memory of some kind. This chair represented Plato’s Allegory of The Cave. That lamp represented my father’s conversation about manhood. Each item in the home, every painting, book, piece of furniture, and article of clothing, was a memory.
But I had nothing on Van Helsing other than common knowledge of the name.
Which meant I would be spending a few hours in my library before getting some sleep so that I could meet Gunnar in the morning.
Chapter 17
&
nbsp; I sat in my study, fingers nervously tapping the satchel beside me.
To hell with it. Better now than later…
I leaned over the arm of the chair and finally plucked out the book I had stolen from the ogres. Even though we had pretty much been discovered, a small sense of satisfaction lingered in my heart. My success was the fact that I had gotten the book before my unknown competitor had gotten his or her grubby hands on it.
The embossed black leather cover shone dully in the light cast from the low-lit sconces on the wall, almost transforming the glow on the cover into flames of a sort.
I carefully cracked the spine. A chilled glass of Macallan sat beside me. The fifty-year-old one that Mallory seemed to find either at some kind of bulk sale, or from some secret stash that my father had stowed somewhere in the rambling family mansion. I let the book rest on my lap as I reached over to take a sip, careful not to spill any condensation on the pages. I had risked my life to get it.
Fortified, I finally glanced down at the book which had nearly gotten me killed.
An alleged first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
Or, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as it was more commonly known.
I would have to do some testing in order to verify the authenticity, but this was a personal acquisition. I could have bought it, but with that other player swiping up my purchases of late, I had wanted to verify that this one ended up in my hands. And it could still end up being a fat waste of time.
But this book had haunted me of late. Because I had seen it in one other place.
The White Room. Or White World, if I was being accurate. And with the strange bearded Ginger who resided there. The one Death had warned me to leave alone. My first visit to that place had been after I died…
Let me explain.
I had been framed by the ruling body of wizards – the Academy – as a sympathizer to demons. Really it had been one wizard trying to gain access to an Armory of supernatural weapons my father had hidden away, but I hadn’t known that until later. The Angels got wind of my alleged allegiance with Hell, and made it their mission to destroy me, along with their gang of Nephilim. That was when my shop got destroyed. During the final tussle, I had been killed. Death – one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – had taken mercy on me being framed, and had given me another shot at life, which I had used to immediately roast – figuratively and literally – the bad guy. Then I had passed out, and found myself in a… White Room.
And we’re not talking a simple interior decorating preference. You see, everything there, floor, carpets, decorations, walls, books, paintings even, had been white. When I had touched the railing on the window to look outside in sheer disbelief at a shining white forest and milky ocean, I had left a sooty stain. Then, when I had tried to wipe it off, my clothing only made the stain worse. But I had been perfectly clean. Giving up on the stain, I had found a bookshelf housing a collection of entirely white books – font, lettering, and covers, all white. Despite their lack of pigment, the embossed covers had allowed me to read their titles. Like Braille in a way. I had picked up a book at random, Through the Looking-Glass, and left a noticeable stain. Everything I touched had left a stain. As if my very existence had been a stain on the natural order of that world.
I had somehow managed to escape right before the owner entered the room to find me, the intruder, staining his perfectly organized and cleaned world. But then a few months ago, after my fight with the Grimms, I had found myself back in the room. And the same book – the one I had previously stained with my touch – had been resting on the coffee table. As if a message left just for me. I know you were here… and that you will be back… This time I had managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the resident – a giant flaming red-bearded Ginger – before I escaped.
But the question remained. What was that place? Who was the Ginger? And why had he left the book I had stained on the table? As if knowing I would someday return.
Neither time had I intended to visit the man’s home. I had just ended up there for some reason. Almost as if there was a purpose unbeknownst to me that kept forcing me to go there.
I carefully flipped the pages of the almost identical black book before me, checking the edition, print, and all the other nerdy facts, verifying that it did indeed seem to be one of the first copies printed.
Regardless, it was the only thing I could concretely say that now connected us.
Or I was bat-shit insane and would be urinating in milk bottles after locking myself up in my house.
I continued flipping pages, smiling absently as I noticed no resulting stain from doing so.
I still thought about that. I wondered if it was some kind of message, that my soul was stained. That everything I touched was stained. It implied that something about my very self was a stain in his world.
Whoever he was.
I tapped my lips thoughtfully, continuing past the well-known story. I smiled at a particular passage, reciting it from memory as I continued flipping pages.
In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die…
As I neared the end, I found notes scrawled on the side margins. I carefully turned the book sideways to read them. The comments were printed in a neat precise hand, and alluded to fairy tales from other books. Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s Fables, and a few others. Just mentions of characters with lines drawn to certain random words on the pages. But the words didn’t reference whatever character the comments implied. For example, Goldilocks was written on the margin, and the line pointed directly at the word Dreams. Shaking my head, I continued flipping pages, taking note of the characters mentioned in the margins and the words circled or underlined. The amount increased as I neared the end of the book with the last page having no white space in the margins at all, entirely crammed with manic notes.
Then I turned over the last page of the story. It was blank, but I found myself frowning.
A dozen pages or so remained, which made no sense at all.
I flipped the page over and found it completely covered, from top to bottom in a tight, harsh script. There was exactly zero white space left to cram in a single vowel. In fact, there were so many words packed so tightly together that it seemed to form one of those optical illusions that if you stared at long enough you would see a yacht or something. I knew that was just my imagination, because the level of skill needed to make the lines of words form a specific image would force the words to simply be gibberish. I scanned through them, just in case, and found that it was a collection of poems – some that I recognized, and others I didn’t – and that they were all complete, made perfect sense, and were absolutely not gibberish, which meant that the representation of an image concealed in the words was outlandish, and purely a figment of my imagination.
I flipped the page to find the same thing.
And the next.
And the next.
I quickly continued flipping, careful to scan the pages first in order to verify that they were identical to the first, being complete, accurate poems, and that they did indeed seem to draw my mind into forming images.
The penultimate page was half complete, and instead of a poem, it read more like…
Well, a text message or email conversation. Dialogue.
The hair on my neck threatened to mutiny and jump into the cold fireplace beside my chair as I read the words.
Are you there?
Hello?
I’ve been waiting for you…
Alice?
We’ve had a guest, but they didn’t stay for tea-time… quite rude.
Please come back… I’ll be good, I promise…
It was the diary of a madman. I continued reading.
I’ll filet your gizzard and floss my teeth with…
Pretty lights!
He returned! I hope he saw the book…
I jumped to my feet, slamming the book shut and to
ssing it onto the chair behind me as I took several quick steps away. I glanced at the harmless book with true fear.
“No,” I whispered, taking another step away. “That’s… that’s not possible…” It couldn’t be referring to me. It sat there, like books are wont to do, but I was breathing heavily. I took another step back, and I heard a sudden tinkling noise in the vacuum of silence. I jumped back a step, whips of fire on the tip of my tongue, ready to obliterate whatever Demon had dared disturb me.
Then I heard it again, my eyes tracking the sound, and I saw it had merely been a clump of ice cubes melting in my drink. I sighed, shaking my arms loose of the sudden adrenaline, glad no one had witnessed my fright.
“Ice cubes!” I chuckled nervously, turning back to the book as if ready to see it suddenly grow eyes and a tail.
Nothing happened.
I slowly approached the book, and flipped to the last page of dialogue.
I’m so lonely…
I shivered. Death had told me not to go back. To never, ever go back, in fact.
I considered my next action carefully, weighing options, potential consequences and ramifications. But I also considered potential gains.
Then I picked up a pen and scribbled a quick note. Then I closed the book quickly, tossed it onto the coffee table, and flicked the pen over my shoulder somewhere near my desk.
After a few too many glances at the book, I suddenly let out another burst of laughter. It suddenly occurred to me that I was acting like a love-sick teenager who had just professed his love to a classmate via text or email or voicemail, and was anxiously checking his phone every twenty seconds for a response, heart in hand the whole time. I shook my head with a chuckle and took a sip of my drink.
It was just a foolish fancy.
No one was going to respond to my comment in the book…
Silver Tongue: A Novel in The Nate Temple Supernatural Thriller Series (The Temple Chronicles Book 4) Page 8