“No idea. I’ll have to ask around. Somebody somewhere must have dealt with a baby firestarter before.” We couldn’t be the first, could we? There had to be some kind of precedent somewhere. Please let there be a precedent somewhere.
“Of course they have.” Ted nodded. “I’m sure we’ll find several chapters in a Dr. Spock book on firestarter training. Maybe there’s a What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Fiery Conflagration?”
“You’re not helping.” My phone buzzed in my pocket as my mother sang out that dinner was ready. Finally. “You take her in. I’ll be in in a second. Try not to let her set anything on fire.”
The text was from Dawn Bianchi. Dawn was a forensic veterinarian at the University who’d gotten caught up in a situation with a werewolf-hater when a dead werewolf ended up on her autopsy table. Diego, another werewolf, and I had tried to get the body before she got too curious, but the whole thing kind of backfired. Instead of making sure she didn’t get involved we wound up with her dating Diego and spending her free time stitching up werewolves and a few other creatures.
Her text read: Something weird at my lab. Can you come see?
I answered: Are you in danger?
Her response was: Srsly? That’s how you think I tell you I’m in danger?
There were reasons I liked Dawn. Sarcasm was definitely one of them. I answered: Tomorrow okay? Around 10?
In response, I got a thumbs up and a smiley face. I went to have Hanukkah dinner with my family.
Clara was eight months old. She had two teeth. My mother’s brisket was so tender that she was able to eat it. Just saying.
Hanukkah overlapped Christmas this year, as it does on occasion. We’d spent the morning before with Ted’s mother. Clara had been delighted with ripping wrapping paper off packages, playing in boxes, and eating cookies. Ted still wasn’t totally okay with his mom suddenly being back in his life. She’d abandoned him and his father when he was a kid, leaving him alone with a mentally ill parent. Or possibly not mentally ill. I thought it was possible that Ted’s father might have been at least part Arcane and that it had been his own powers that had driven him mad. It explained a lot of things, things about Ted. Like why he always smelled like cookies to me and how he always found fantastic parking spaces. Norah claimed there was nothing in her grimoire about cookie-scented parking place-finders, but I was convinced there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of in the grimoire Mae had given me for my twelfth birthday.
The next morning, Clara ate her breakfast and played without setting anything on fire. She didn’t even torch anything when I was buckling her into her car seat, something she often protests by arching her back, twisting, and pulling her legs up so I can’t fasten the straps. Maybe we’d be okay. Maybe she wouldn’t set things on fire when they irritated her. That could happen. I could get lucky for once.
We drove over to the vet school to see Dawn. This visit was a far cry from the first time I’d been in Dawn’s lab. That time, Diego and I had shimmied up the side of the building and in through a balcony door on the third floor that had been left unlocked and had kicked the door to the lab in. It was way easier to come in through the front door, give my name at reception, and walk down the hallway, especially with a baby on my hip.
Well, I had a baby on my hip for about ten seconds. Dawn practically snatched her from me. “Hello, Princess. How are you today?”
I stretched as we walked. I was developing a permanent crick in my neck. “Well, she hasn’t started any fires today so I’d say it’s a good day so far.”
Dawn cocked an eyebrow at me. “Is that new?”
I nodded. “And not entirely welcome. I’d rather she started swearing.”
We got into the lab and Dawn handed Clara back to me. “So what do you have?” I asked.
“I’ll show you.” Dawn gestured to a sheet-covered mound on her autopsy table. “Is she going to be okay seeing this?”
“I guess we’ll find out.” I shifted Clara so she was looking back over my shoulder just in case.
Dawn pulled back the sheet to expose a charred blackened vaguely human-shaped lump. A small human-shaped lump. Without thinking about it, I clutched Clara closer to me. “Is it a child?”
Dawn shook her head. “I don’t think so. Based on the teeth and the skull and the long bones, it was full grown, whatever it was. It also had a tail and horns. That’s how it ended up here. The medical examiner was pretty sure it wasn’t human. I’m pretty sure it’s not an animal. Or at least not a mundane one.”
I was starting to understand why she’d called me. “Where was it found?” Clara wiggled against the tightness of my arms. I sat down on Dawn’s desk chair and let Clara slip into my lap.
“Site of a house fire over in Boulevard Park. Looked like their Christmas tree went up like a Roman candle while they were up in Tahoe skiing.” Dawn drew the sheet back over the creature.
“A Christmas tree fire? I thought those were an urban legend.” Or at least historical legend since pretty much no one put real candles on Christmas trees anymore.
Dawn sat down on the rolling stool by the table. “Maybe it’s the drought. It’s possible the tree was dry to start with. Or there was an electrical short. However it happened, this thing was underneath it when it did.”
“Bad timing.” I certainly understood all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had been the story of a good deal of my life.
“Bad lots of things. Like taste. Based on its stomach contents, it was gorging on fruitcake.” Dawn wrinkled her nose.
Definitely weird. I didn’t know anyone who actually likes fruitcake. Well, anyone American. I have some wacky Scottish friends who think that stuff is the bomb. “How quiet can you keep this?” The last thing any of us Arcane beings needed was a bunch of Mundanes getting their holiday undies in a bunch over whatever this was before we determined if it was even bunch-worthy.
Dawn said, “Half the University is closed. I think I can keep it pretty quiet.”
That was good news. “What about the medical examiner?”
Dawn thought for a second. “He’s a busy dude. I’ll try to come up with a cover story before he checks in. Meanwhile I’ll write this guy up as too damaged to classify.”
“Good.” I gathered up Clara, fist-bumped Dawn, and headed to the car. On the way there, I called my former roommate and still best friend Norah. “You feel like coming over for dinner?”
“I don’t want pizza.”
I knew she wouldn’t. I also knew I had exactly what she wanted. “I have leftover brisket from my mother’s.”
“You’re on. What should I bring?”
See? I knew my bestie. “Your grimoire.”
Next stop for Clara and me was the River City Martial Arts Studio. I inherited the dojo from my sensei and Messenger mentor, Mae, when she died fighting off the kiang shi, a type of Chinese vampire. I run it now with the help of my Messenger protégé, Sophie. I didn’t know what I’d do without her. She was smart, independent, responsible. If I’d had half as much on the ball at eighteen as she did, I don’t know where I’d be now. Possibly right where I was, but who knows?
We generally shut the studio down between Christmas and New Year’s. Too many people were out of town or wanting to spend time with their families. Rather than teach half-full classes, we used it as a chance to do a big clean. When I got there, Sophie had all the doors propped open and was already pulling up mats.
I set Clara in the corner in a horseshoe-shaped cushion I kept there, surrounded her with toys, kicked off my boots, and pitched in.
“You know, you’re not going to be able to do that forever.” Sophie gestured at Clara with her chin. “She’s going to start to crawl soon and then what will we do?”
I glanced over at Clara. She was rocking from her butt up almost onto her knees, plopping back, and then clapping for herself. “We’re going to enjoy this phase while we’re in it and pray she doesn’t set the place on fire.”
Sophie folded over a heavy section of mat and started to roll it. She was only about five foot five and thin. She had that extra little burst of Messenger strength, though. Between her slight frame and the waves of blonde hair, the super strength surprised a lot of people even though she was fairly adept at keeping it from showing too much. Besides, a lot of people were too busy looking at the burn scars on the side of her face to take proper notice of her.
Sophie had been in a terrible car accident when she had been thirteen. She’d almost died. Kind of like how I’d almost died when I was three. Then somehow – poof – we were both Messengers. I’d never been given definitive proof that the whole near death thing was how we ended up with our powers, but it seemed like an awful big coincidence.
I didn’t believe in coincidences.
While we rolled up mats and surveyed the state of the floor beneath them, I filled Sophie in on what Dawn had shown me.
“What is it?” she asked.
I kicked at some dirt that seemed stuck to the floor. “I really don’t know. Norah’s bringing her grimoire over tonight. I’ll see what she can find in it.”
“But it’s already dead, right?” Sophie used the momentary break to stretch, pulling her arm across her chest.
I nodded.
“And nobody seems suspicious, right?”
I nodded some more.
“But you’re worried anyways?” She folded over into a toe touch.
I kept nodding. It wasn’t that I liked to borrow trouble, I had plenty of my own without taking in loaners. It just seemed little problems like these ones often became big ones that were a lot harder to take care of. “I want to make sure I have a handle on whatever it is that’s going on. Just in case, you know?”
“Got it, boss.” Sophie wiped the dust off her hands. “This enough for today? I thought we could start the serious scrubbing tomorrow.”
“Sounds perfect.” Anytime anyone suggests I stop cleaning, I make sure to agree.
“Okay if I stop by tonight, too? Just to make sure I have a handle on what’s going on, too?” She smiled. “I could bring soda.”
I smiled back. She was going to be such a better Messenger than I was. “Of course.”
I reached for the grimoire, but Norah pulled it out of my reach. “Hand over the brisket first.”
I pushed the platter toward her. It’s not like I couldn’t get more. I could actually make my own. I mean, my mother had given me the recipe. Unfortunately, it required two things I was generally short on: time and patience. The not-so-secret to my mother’s recipe was cooking it low and slow. That and onion soup mix.
Norah took a helping that was probably twice as much meat as she’d eaten in the past two weeks and shoved the grimoire to me. “Look at the page I marked.”
I shoved it back at her. “How about you give me the low down? What do you think this thing Dawn has is?”
She put down her fork and dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “A Kallikantzeroi.”
“Gesundheit.”
Norah rolled her eyes. “Very funny.”
She opened the book to the page she had bookmarked and took another bite of brisket. I’d given Norah the grimoire back when she’d first figured out that the beings I regularly carried messages for weren’t all blue fairies and benevolent brownies and proceeded to fully freak out on us. To avoid having a constant sprinkling of salt on all the windowsills while she cowered in a corner of her bedroom, I gave her the grimoire. I’d never been much to study it and she found a little knowledge about what was around her all the time to be more calming than terrifying. “Seriously, a Kalli what?” I could barely read the spidery writing on the page.
“A Kallikantzeroi. They’re Greek. They spend all year sawing at the roots of the World Tree, but get a vacation between Christmas and Epiphany. They come to the surface and by the time they go back down, the World Tree has healed itself and they have to start all over again.” Norah started eying the container of leftover latkes.
“They do this every year?” I opened the lid and let the steamy potato-y goodness scent the air.
“Every year.” She put two latkes on her plate and layered on the applesauce and sour cream. Hanukkah might be the only time Norah ate dairy. She made more dietary exceptions for the Jewish holidays than she did for anything else. Sometimes I worried that she was more Jewish than me. Not that that would be all that difficult. “They haven’t figured out that they need to skip the annual vacation to achieve their goal of … what? What is their goal? What happens if they actually saw through the roots of the World Tree?”
“Destruction of the world as we know it, I believe, and no, they haven’t figured it out. They’re not the brightest bulbs in the supernatural chandelier.” I read a little bit in the grimoire. “According to this, you can completely stop them by putting a colander on your doorstep. For some reason, they’re compelled to count the holes, but can’t count higher than two.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” She pushed her plate back. She might love Hanukkah food, but she was only as big around as a toddler’s pinky finger and it wasn’t hard to fill her up.
I picked Clara up and set her in her high chair. “Nothing.”
“Nothing as in no action at all?” She got up and kissed Clara on the top of her head.
“Yup. You got it. Nothing gets by you, does it?” I put some shreds of brisket on the high chair tray, then a few bits of latke. Clara picked up the baby spoon I had set on the tray and banged it.
“Then why the research?” Norah asked.
“Because it’s not a good idea to decide to do nothing until you know that nothing is the right course of non-action.” I tried to spoon some applesauce into Clara’s mouth with a second spoon. She grabbed that spoon from my hand and banged it on the high chair tray.
“Kallikantzeroi are a nuisance. Nothing more. The one that Dawn has was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
My cell phone buzzed before I finished my last sentence. I picked it up from the counter.
It was another text from Dawn: I’ve got another one.
Crap. Ignoring the dead Kallikantzeroi was starting to seem like less of a good option.
I left Clara with Norah and went back to the vet school. No receptionist this time, but I still didn’t have to climb the wall to the balcony. I texted Dawn and she came right down.
“So what exactly are these things?” Dawn asked as she led the way back to her lab.
I explained the basics of the Kallikantzeroi to her. “Is this one burned?”
Dawn shook her head. “Decapitated.”
“Eww.”
She shrugged and unlocked the door. “I’ll take that over road kill any day. Much less messy.”
“Anyway it could be accidental?” I knew that sounded desperate, but a girl could hope, couldn’t she? If it wasn’t accidental, then the crispy critter version most likely wasn’t accidental either. If neither of them was accidental, something or someone was running around killing stupid Canes and I was not sure I could ignore that. I have this idiotic weakness for standing up for the downtrodden even if the downtrodden deserved to be trod.
Dawn shook her head. “I don’t see how. Whatever did this was sharp. Whoever did this had quite an arm. You don’t sever someone’s spinal cord with a tap from a butter knife.”
“Did this one come through the medical examiner’s office, too?” It would be better if the world of Mundanes did not know too much about our dead friends, regardless of whether or not the deaths were deliberate or accidental.
“Nope. A grounds crew found it. They thought it was weird, but were too grossed out to look too closely. They saw the tail and the horns and called Animal Control. Animal Control brought it to me.” She pulled a metal gurney into the center of the room.
“Lucky for us.” I would take whatever breaks I could get.
“Totally. Because otherwise I’m not sure how I would explain this one away.” She pulled off the sheet to show
me the two pieces of Kallikantzeroi that lay there. I would not have looked too closely if I could have avoided it either. If this guy was representative of his species, the Kallikantzeroi were not pretty beings. He – and it was definitely a he – was a weirdly crabbed little thing with a long tail extending behind him and horns jutting out of his forehead. Not only was he ugly, he also stank.
I held a hand over my face to block the smell. Dawn seemed totally unaware of it. “Where was this one?”
“Under a Nativity scene on the St. Ignatius campus.” She recovered it with the sheet. It blocked the sight, but not the smell.
I could not quite picture where that was. “Where is that in relation to the Christmas tree fire?”
Dawn pulled a map out of one of her desk drawers. “Let’s see.” She grabbed a pen and circled an intersection and then another spot about an inch away. “There and there. About a mile from each other. Is that significant?”
“Maybe. What else is near there?” I wanted to pinpoint where they were coming up. It might help me figure out who was slaughtering them.
Dawn let her fingers linger on the map. “Kind of everything. It’s all near downtown. Why?”
“They have to be coming up somewhere. They don’t burrow through the earth. They use established pathways. I hope it’s not the tunnels under Old Sac again. I have some seriously bad memories about those.” I shivered remembering the way the Kiang Shi had risen from beneath the Buddhist temple. They’d been dug up accidentally during a renovation project that had accidentally broken through into the tunnels. “Are there any big construction projects near there?”
Dawn turned and stared at me. “Have you been living under a rock? Have you heard of a little thing called the Golden 1 Center?”
The Golden 1 Center was huge. It was the site of the new Sacramento Kings arena plus venues for concerts and shops and restaurants. That extensive of a construction project could create any number of pathways, tapping into existing routes and creating new ones. I sat down. “That would do the trick. Anything else I should know?”
Tinsel and Temptation Page 5