The Curse Servant (The Dark Choir Book 2)

by Sloan, J. P.

I retired to the room for a bit of brain-numbing conversation with the others. I stumbled into a deep, emotional argument over the proposed gas tax, and managed to stay far from mayoral topics. Though I could tell from keeping my ear pressed to the ground why Julian had been avoiding the Club. This had become Sooner’s audience in a big way. Happily I wasn’t publically linked to Sullivan. Hopefully it would remain that way.

  After draining my wine glass, I wandered back to the bar to get my own refill. The girls were giving me a wide berth, and for good reason. Their new house mother had warned them about what had happened between Carmen and me. It seemed I was on a blacklist among the working girls in the Club, and it suited me fine. That particular service of the club hadn’t been sitting well with me for a while now.

  I stepped past the dark side of the room before the single lamp lit inside registered in my brain. A chill trickled down my neck as I stopped mid-stride. Backing up a couple steps, I spotted a familiar figure seated in one of the wingbacks, smoke from his cigar wreathing his head.

  It was the man I called Mr. Brown. I’d had run-ins with agents of the Presidium in the past, but Mr. Brown was the only bona fide Presidium member to date who had spoken with me in person.

  If he was here to see me, I couldn’t ignore him. I set the wine glass down on a planter and ventured inside the dim room.

  “Have a seat, Mister Lake.”

  I complied, trying not to give Brown any reason to take offense.

  “How have you been?” I asked, dutifully weeding out any trace of sarcasm as I took a seat across him.

  “You’ve kept us busy as of late, Mister Lake.”

  “Have I?” A little sarcasm may have crept into that one.

  He stared at me from beneath those snow white eyebrows, a sneer creeping onto the mouth buried inside his ivory beard.

  “The Baltimore mayoral campaigns don’t garner much attention inside the Capitol Beltway, which is good news for you.”

  “Then this is a social visit?”

  “As I’ve said before, there are associates within our organization which feel you represent a real opportunity to forward our mission. There are others, however, who consider you to be reckless in the extreme. Stubborn. Arrogant. And dangerously uninformed.”

  “I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek.” Okay, I couldn’t fight the sarcasm anymore. He was starting to piss me off.

  Mr. Brown’s eyes bored holes through my head, and I shifted in my seat.

  “Also, callously flippant.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Until recently your affairs haven’t compelled us to take action. Hence our relatively benign conversation. The regrettable fact is this all could have been avoided.”

  “What could have been avoided?”

  “Oh, where to begin? You’ve insinuated yourself into the election of a major public figure. You’ve met in broad daylight with the Deputy Mayor on more than one occasion to discuss sensitive esoteric matters. Trading with inconsequential corporate accountants is one thing, but a man who is viewed as holding the political marionette strings for a major U.S. city is quite another. And when faced with a genuine metaphysical crisis, rather than coming to us, you’ve resorted to your own paltry miseducation and fly-by-wire hermetic gimmickry. On what level did you feel we were ever going to ignore this?”

  My blood pressure raquetballed from vessel-bursting anger to piss-my-pants fainting levels.

  “The Presidium is getting involved?”

  “More accurately, we’ve already involved ourselves and the matter is dealt with. The Sun and The Charm City Spectator threatened to expose hermetic activity close to a seat of political power. We simply can’t let that happen.” Brown cocked his head. “This can’t be news to you.”

  My stomach dropped to my knees.

  He took a long puff on his cigar. “Dangerously uninformed seems a bit on-the-nose.”

  My brain rewound the conversation a few seconds as I rose to my feet. I inched back into the main room as Brown looked on.

  “Mister Lake? This could have gone differently. Please try to remember that in the coming weeks.”

  I withdrew into the room and hustled over to the bar. I gripped the bar rail as I scanned the television hanging in the corner. All I could see were cars festooned in corporate logos taking several hundred left turns. Ben wandered over to me and coughed discretely into his sleeve.

  “Another?”

  “Can I get the news?”

  “It won’t be on for another hour-some. What’s up?”

  “Don’t know. Just expecting bad news, I suppose.”

  I waited at the bar for that hour-some, not speaking a word to anyone. By the time I realized what Brown was going on about, the room was largely empty.

  There was a massive pileup on the Jones Falls Expressway. It was a tragedy. An entire family had been killed when their car spun out from road debris. They speculated it was gravel from a poorly secured dump truck. A man, his wife, and two young daughters were killed upon impacting an overpass support column.

  Cecil Rawls deserved better than that. His children sure as shit deserved better. Whatever poor bastard at The Charm City Spectator that probably met with a sudden, tragic demise did, too.

  In one of those moments I generally regret later, I marched back to the side room. Brown was gone.

  I stared into the shadows, and spotted something flickering just beneath the wingbacks. Something small, withdrawing its impish legs before I could quite see it directly. The entire room seemed to crawl with malevolence. The shadows twitched like a fly-covered horse. They were getting restless.

  Things could have gone differently, Brown had said. It could have been an Audi wrapped around that support column.

  But still… two little girls.

  As I drove home with remarkable vigilance, I put a great deal of thought into my current vocational situation. Politics simply wasn’t agreeing with me. It certainly didn’t agree with Cecil. I couldn’t withdraw myself from Julian’s employ without a great deal of crow-eating and self-debasement. But wouldn’t that have been preferable to seeing more innocent people eliminated for the sake of hermetic expediency?

  As I turned off the freeway into downtown, I spotted the tops of Harborside Towers and remembered what Cecil had told me. This wasn’t simple politics. This was a quiet takeover of a city. I was certain Cecil would have done everything he could to protect his family from the inherent dangers he must have sensed lay in his line of work. And yet he persisted. Now that he was gone, I had a choice to make. I could let Brown muscle me out of the campaign, or I could try to honor Cecil’s memory by continuing his work.

  Perhaps I was simply being too sloppy? I had been too distracted with finding my soul. I let myself get photographed. I wandered up to the front of City Hall with damning photographs in a conspicuous envelope. This was as much my fault as anyone’s.

  I had to focus.

  I had to get my soul back.

  Happily, I was hours away from catching a flight to Oregon, and with any luck at all, I’d finally have a means to find it.

  was musing on what reason the city of Portland, Oregon, decided to put a mountain at the end of their airport runway as our plane touched down. I had visited the Pacific Northwest only one time before, some six years ago when I helped Edgar negotiate a purchase of a Han Dynasty altarpiece. I remembered it had never stopped raining the entire time I was there. It was that constant, drizzly misting rain that drove me to the end of my ragged nerves. As we sidled up to the concourse, I was relieved to find endless sunlight bathing the city of Portland.

  I secured a cab ride across the Willamette and into the downtown Westside. As the cab crossed one of the dozen-odd bridges spanning the river, my phone rang.

  It was Julian.

  “Hey, Julian.”

  “Dorian.”

  “This whole thing with the photos has been taken care of.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Trust me, and I m
ean you really have to accept this when I say it… you don’t want to know.”

  “Granted.” After a long pause, he continued, “So, I’m here at Gordon’s.”

  “Having a late lunch?”

  “Where are you?”

  I blinked away the question. “Oregon.”

  “The state?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “That’s funny because it’s kind of hard to make a meeting here at Gordon’s when you’re in the state of Oregon.”

  Shit.

  “Right. That… that was today.”

  “I know we had a lot of back-and-forth in the last couple days, Dorian, but I had some people I wanted you to meet.”

  “Sorry, Julian. I… shit. Yeah, that’s on me.”

  “This would almost be funny if this wasn’t basically our standard operating procedure at this point.”

  I rammed my head into the cab’s upholstery a couple times. “I didn’t―I just forgot. I’m not blowing you off.”

  “And I had people here for an hour and a half.”

  “How many ways can I apologize here?”

  He went silent for a while.

  “Julian?”

  “I’m not saying this whole arrangement was a mistake, yet.”

  “Okay?”

  “But you’re not giving me a lot of reasons to think otherwise.”

  I balled a fist trying to figure out how to save face without losing patience here. “I know it.”

  “Is this about finding your soul, or whatever you’re doing?”

  I didn’t want to confirm nor deny. So I just shut my mouth.

  “Dorian, I need you with me, or I need to get you out of my peripheral vision. You’re distracting me more than you’re helping me.”

  “Someone died yesterday, Julian.”

  “What?”

  “A whole family. A couple and their two kids. It looked like an accident, but I know it wasn’t. It was damage control. Our damage. You and me.”

  “The photos?”

  “That’s just part of it. I want to help you, but you need to take a moment and get some perspective. You’re focused on the mayor race. That’s great. I’m on board. There’s some specific bastardy McHenry is whipping out of his pants right now that I wouldn’t mind shoving back up his ass. But there are people in higher places than City Hall who have me under a really big microscope. Now, I’m going to say ‘I’m sorry’ exactly one more time for missing this meeting. And then, you know what? I’m going to see you again this week. Hell, I’ll pound some yard signs into the ground if you want. And if you feel like we can’t continue this arrangement, no hard feelings. But right now, right this very minute, I just have bigger problems.”

  Julian simmered on that for a good while, but I didn’t give him anything else.

  “How does your Thursday look?”

  “I have a meeting with Julian Bright, but after that…”

  “Alright, smartass. Gordon’s. Nine a.m.?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You promise this time?”

  “Barring an act of God or people in scary high places, yes.”

  I hung up in time for the cab to roll onto Columbia Street. A row of trees lined the one-way two-lane cutting through the middle of Westside Portland. I oriented myself as I stepped out onto the brisk bustle of morning pedestrians. I spotted a canvas awning sporting the words, Green Tree, in what could be generously described as twig-letters. My watch read eleven-fifty. I was early, but only just.

  A young man skateboarded directly in front of me as I tried to cross with the light, and nearly knocked me over. No one seemed to notice or care. In Baltimore, that kid probably wouldn’t have made it a half-block without something unnatural in his thorax. Taking a moment, I continued across the street and on to the Green Tree.

  The old birch door creaked as I opened it, and one pathetic brass bell jingled as I stepped inside. Warped hardwood slats groaned as I took the first few steps, their surfaces worn from years of snow-tread and street salt. The room swam with the scents of cedar and old books. The walls of the narrow retail slot were lined with bookcases. Near the front all I could find were dog-eared paperbacks, mostly recent. But as I ventured deeper toward a clutch of wrought-iron tables and a coffee bar, I spotted more and more leather bound spines peeking at me through the dim halogen lights.

  I ordered an Americano and took a seat at the rear-most table, watching the front of the room. There was only the one goateed barista working, and an elderly man near the front windows, his face buried in a faded paperback. I sipped the coffee as quickly as the heat would allow. Something about the claustrophobia of this joint made me edgy. The cedar was fairly strong, perhaps more than the bookcases merited, even if they were hewn from solid cedar planks. No, this was an essential oil, probably burning in a censer somewhere behind the coffee bar.

  And as cedar was a powerful warding reagent, I made sure to keep my energy wound tight around my mainline.

  At ten after noon, the door opened with its creek and jingle, and a woman stepped inside. She was tall, remarkably so. Her broad shoulders were draped with a dark trench coat. The coat was clearly more of a fashion statement in the middle of summer, but somehow it seemed to work for her. The rest of her clothes were tidy, but bland. The sides of her head were shaved bald, with the middle swath of close-clipped copper-red hair settling into a rat tail. Her nose and eyebrow were pierced, and her ears sported a half-dozen shiny dark stones. Probably hematite.

  But it was her eyes that put the hook in me. They were clear blue, and burned with a kind of nameless anger that I had come to recognize in the few people Emil called “friend.” Despite her youth, this woman was clearly Old School, and I wished I was more prepared for her.

  She stopped directly in front of my table. I stood out of a sense of respect and etiquette, but couldn’t find anything intelligent to say.

  She reached into her coat and pulled out an e-reader, setting it onto my table without ceremony. The barista steamed some milk without order.

  Finally, as she pulled a chair to take a seat, and I found myself following suit, she spoke.

  “So, you’re Lake?”

  “Quinn Gillette?”

  She cocked her head in a half-shrug and reached for her reader. She clicked it blandly, eyes moving in sharp jerks. The barista brought her coffee and withdrew without a word. I sat in silence, watching her sip and read, never once looking up at me or further acknowledging my presence.

  It was horribly awkward.

  “Ms. Gillette, I wanted to speak to you about, well, sensitive matters. Matters relating to our chosen Craft.”

  She cleared her throat and clicked her reader.

  “Soul magic, to be specific.”

  “So you said.”

  “I’m lead to believe you’re practiced in creating servitors.”

  Her eyes finally lifted to meet mine. “That a fact?”

  “And that you powered these servitors with shards of your own soul.”

  She returned her attention to her reader. “Not an unusual practice.”

  “Unusual in my particular corner of the nation.”

  “Where did you say you were from?”

  “Baltimore.”

  Her eyes lifted again, this time in genuine surprise. My phone call had made precisely zero impact on her.

  “You live in the lap of the Presidium, you dolt. Of course you’re not going to practice soul magic.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Then what are you talking to me for?”

  “I have a problem.”

  The door creaked open, and Gillette jerked around in her seat. A trio of college age women whispered with each other and started scanning the book racks. Gillette exhaled and turned back to me.

  “I don’t want to know about your problems, Mister Lake.”

  This conversation was getting tiresome. “Well, you know what? You gave me little option but to fly out here on a short notice, so
maybe you could spare me fifteen God damn minutes of your attention?”

  She glared at me for a long moment before laying her reader down gently on the table. She cradled her mug and repositioned herself to face me full-on.

  “Didn’t mean to get your tampon in a twist,” she grunted before taking a long sip of coffee. “Go ahead. Bore me.”

  “As I said, I have a particular problem. I signed my soul into a contract with a soul monger.”

  “Stupid.”

  “I had reasons.”

  “Your reasons were stupid.”

  “Anyway, before I could buy it back, he destroyed the contract.”

  “How do you know he destroyed it?”

  “He burned it in front of me. Out of spite.”

  Gillette smirked. “Sounds like a real son of a bitch.”

  “I’ve known more than a few. So, here I am. My soul’s been released into the ether, and I’m starting to see things. Moving shadows. Things haunting me in the corner of my vision. Same thing happened to my mentor, just before the shadows tore him limb from literal limb.”

  “Was that recent? I hadn’t heard about that.”

  “No. It was more than a decade ago.” I didn’t want to drop Emil’s name in front of this woman. There was a better than average chance she had heard about Emil at some point. “But the point is you lost a part of your soul once. And you found it again. At least that’s what I hear.”

  The door creek-jingled again. Gillette turned to watch as the college girls exited in a fit of conversation.

  “So you think you can apply my method to finding your soul? That’s what this is about?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you would be correct.”

  I sat stunned for a moment. The confirmation came so quickly and matter-of-factly that I almost missed it.

  “I would?”

  “The laws of conservation are still in play at the interstitial plane.”

  “Interstitial?”

  “The void where ancient malevolence, daydreams and nightmares, and yes even misplaced souls abide. Your soul should be intact as long as it hasn’t been re-captured or consumed by something on the other side.”

  “Funny you should mention that.”

  “I figured as much.” She set down her now empty coffee cup and leaned back in her chair. “So what are you proposing?”