The Curse Servant (The Dark Choir Book 2)

by Sloan, J. P.

  Still, McHenry hired this hitman. I had to secure proof it was Carmody, but ultimately the chain of responsibility stopped with McHenry. I mused at my meeting with Carmody in which he “let slip” the existence of a practitioner working Sooner’s camp. That was precisely the kind of half-intelligent play I expected from the man. Still, Carmody had made a lot of headway with only a minimum of effort. He wasn’t particularly good at lying, but he had a knack for making friends. Chums, he might have said. One might even say he was charmed. A man like Carmody survived by slipping between the railroad tracks, not by standing in front of the train. He had to have some angle. I just couldn’t figure it out.

  With those thoughts rattling through my brain, I called Frater Zeno.

  The phone rang its requisite rings, and rolled to voice mail. I was running short of patience with Zeno, so I left a curt message.

  “It’s Dorian Lake. Call me now.”

  He was good for it.

  My phone rang in a minute, and I answered, “Zeno?”

  “Your phone etiquette leaves something to be desired.”

  “I need information.”

  “Don’t we all?” he grumbled.

  “What can you tell me about Del Carmody and Quinn Gillette?”

  After a pause, Zeno replied, “More than we have time for.”

  “Can you make some time, then?”

  “I seem to recall not wanting to ever speak to you again after our last meeting. Why am I even talking to you?”

  “I can pay you.”

  “Again, not really an enticement.”

  “I know why you failed, Zeno. That alone must be worth at least ten minutes.”

  Another pause. “If I failed, it was because I wasn’t given full possession of the facts.”

  “No shit. Look, there’s still an entity to bottle up, if you can use it. And I still want it out of that girl.”

  “Fine, Lake. Carmody is a charm broker from Leicester, relocated to the states in the mid-eighties.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “What about soul magic?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Is he a known practitioner of soul magic?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Gillette, on the other hand, is what I would call an authority of soul magic. And I don’t use the word ‘authority’ with any kind of informality.”

  “I knew that much. But do you know why Gillette is hell-bent on mounting Carmody’s head over her fireplace?”

  Zeno chuckled. “It would be easier to find a reason for Gillette not to be.”

  “How’d it start?”

  “I’m not informed on the particulars. West Coast magic tends to bore me with its needlessly human drama. Carmody had some kind of close call with a poorly anchored hex and decided to move away from active practice. So, he cultivated his puerile interest in gossip into a career in information brokerage. He and Gillette played in the same sandbox for several years before Carmody managed to stumble into a turf war between Gillette and the Seattle people. Carmody got paid, lives were lost, and Gillette knew whom to blame.”

  “His information got people killed?”

  “When I said turf war, I meant it.”

  “So Carmody hauls ass to the East Coast figuring Gillette won’t chase him so close to the Presidium?”

  “That follows.”

  “And now it looks like Carmody’s trying to get back into the Practice, trades me Gillette for a book of curses, and here we are. Only he’s grossly misjudging the Presidium’s patience for penny-ante Netherwork. Jesus, at least Osterhaus was discreet.”

  “Does that satisfy your need for information?”

  “Almost. In your opinion, would Carmody have the means or the skill to create a servitor?”

  Zeno responded with a very long pause.

  “Zeno?”

  “Of course. Human powered thoughtform. My traps weren’t crafted to attract or retain a human soul, regardless of how small.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Lake, if someone sent a servitor into that girl’s body, that girl is probably doomed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Servitors are short-lived creatures by nature. Even a soul shard loses its potency as a source of power over time. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of a servitor possessing a human. That would be bold as a servitor would likely consume most of its original soul shard attempting the crossover.”

  “So it would have to feed on the new host’s energy?”

  “And so on and so forth. This creature may not have been warned about the quagmire of a child’s psyche. If it’s trapped, it will starve unless it finds a new energy source. Which means it’ll start eating her soul to survive. This isn’t just a physical condition, Lake. If that girl dies at the hand of this construct, any hope she has for a meaningful afterlife will die with her.”

  I rubbed my eyes.

  “Any idea how I’d yank it out before it comes to that?”

  “Sorry. I work in demons, not humans. I couldn’t use the thing, regardless. It’s a tangled mélange of hostile energies at this point, probably unaware of its own nature. That kind of chaos is more than even I’m willing to work with.”

  “Understood. Thank you, Frater.”

  “Lake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t call me again.”

  He hung up.

  Carmody probably wasn’t my man. Oh, he was definitely playing me against Gillette, that much was clear. But I wasn’t convinced Carmody had the ability to create a servitor. Which left me with a very real and pressing conundrum. I had an unidentified practitioner out there responsible for the imminent demise of Elle Swain’s soul.

  And I had no clue how I was going to find him.

  spent two hours in my working space downstairs boning up on thoughtforms, courtesy of Asok the Sharqui. The information was patchy. I was basically aware of thoughtform theory. That much wasn’t Netherwork. One generally worked with thoughtforms for Ego Magics, attempts to re-write one’s personal psychological makeup. This was particularly useful in treating personal psychological issues like eating disorders, addictions, and social anxiety disorders. I mused on whether Ches would be interested in any of this information.

  When it came to powering a thoughtform with a soul shard, that dropped the entire practice squarely into the sphere of Netherwork. It was a forbidden act of creation, playing God with a thought. Servitors were unpredictable, chaotic, and often destructive. The only saving grace was that they were most often very short-lived. Zeno was right on that account.

  But I found nothing about a servitor possessing a human body. What I did find, however, was that a servitor presented itself as a version of the one who crafted it. That meant it possessed a portion of its creator’s knowledge, personality, and even its gender. My thoughts strayed back to one nagging question.

  Why was this thing only possessing women? Perhaps it could only possess women?

  That would make its creator a woman. Which made Gillette a suspect. She was the only person I knew who was familiar with how servitors were made, how they break, and how to dispatch them when they wander off reservation. Could Gillette have been the one to create the servitor?

  No, that wouldn’t make sense. She was too far removed from the East Coast and its peculiar esoteric dramas to want to be involved. More pertinently, she was a master of soul magics, and had already proven she knew how to locate and liberate a servitor when it strayed. She wouldn’t have gotten a thoughtform stuck inside a child. Not unless she wanted the child to die, in which case I was convinced she knew several cleaner methods toward that end. No, she wasn’t McHenry’s hitman, but she could end up being Elle’s savior, if not mine.

  I dialed Gillette’s number and remained standing, pacing into and out of my kitchen.

  “Yes?” she answered with that familiar gruff tone.

  “Gillette? It’s Dorian Lake.”

  “Who?”
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br />   “Dorian Lake? Of Baltimore? The one you want to curse Del Carmody?”

  “Oh right,” she grumbled. “You. What do you want? Is it done?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then you can call me when it is.”

  “Wait,” I grunted before she could hang up. “I’ve decided to do it.”

  “You want me to throw you a parade, or something?”

  “I want to negotiate a change in your service. In exchange for cursing Carmody.”

  “I thought this was all ironed out, Lake.”

  I had to be careful. Old school Netherworkers weren’t fond of contract negotiation. “It was. But I want something else, now.”

  “No additions. The deal is struck.”

  “Not an addition, Gillette. A substitution.”

  After a pause, she responded, “Go on.”

  “There’s a friend of mine out here in Baltimore. Someone crafted a servitor and sent it to possess a human body. The thing’s been hopscotching through bodies, and now it’s trapped inside a thirteen-year-old.”

  Gillette made a noise that could have either been disgust or amusement. Probably both at the same time.

  “Is this what you people do for fun on the East Coast?”

  “You see the problem, then?”

  “I see several. None of which are mine.”

  “Here’s my substitution. If I curse Carmody, instead of finding and securing my soul, I want you to remove this servitor from this girl.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Yes. If she were here, that is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you really think I’m going to fly out there and do this little task for you? There’s no way the Presidium would even let me leave the airport before they bagged me and tossed me into the Potomac with a few dozen pounds of lead tied around my throat.”

  “I don’t think I can move her. She’s in bad shape.”

  “Sucks to be her, then.”

  “Gillette! This is my friend. Actually, she’s more like family. You understand that? I know you’ve lost people who were close to you. I know that’s pushed you to hunt down Carmody like this. Do you even get why I’m asking you to do this for me?”

  “I understand, Lake. I just don’t care.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to get my blood pressure to drop. “Look. This is a simple exchange. Instead of my soul, which is out there somewhere, this is a Frankenstein thoughtform bottled up exactly where you’ll know where it is. If the Presidium wasn’t an issue here, would you agree to the change?”

  “If you can manage a way to get her out here to Portland, then yes. I’ll agree to that.”

  “What if I can guarantee your safety here?”

  “Against the Presidium? There’s no such thing.”

  “You seem to do okay.”

  “No deal.”

  I took a split second to reevaluate my options. “I have connections. People I can call.”

  “I’ve never known the Presidium to keep their word.”

  “Then I’ll push harder. I’ll make them agree.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Leverage. It all comes down to leverage.”

  Gillette mulled it over for a while, then answered, “I have an associate in Gresham. Her name is Judith Wilcom. If the Presidium delivers a sealed letter of guarantee to her, I’ll book my flight.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “But that had better not happen before Carmody is cursed.”

  “Out of curiosity, how will a letter of guarantee change your mind if the Presidium always lies?”

  “Judith is an expert sigilist. When someone gives her a written word, she can sanctify it as a verum inviolata.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She will turn that into the spoken Word of God. The Presidium will understand what I’m asking, and I guarantee they won’t agree to this.”

  “Let me worry about that. I’ll be in touch.”

  I hung up and laid my phone down on the desk next to McHenry’s envelope. I had Gillette on board to extract the servitor from Elle’s body before it consumed her soul. All I had to do now was find a way to get some of Carmody’s real blood, and find a way to convince myself to curse a man who was probably innocent. How could I do that? Osterhaus was one thing. He was utterly despicable. Carmody might not have been McHenry’s hitman. He was slippery, sure, but I didn’t suspect that he was clever enough to pull my strings to this degree. Anything was possible; I had certainly misjudged people before.

  What it really came down to was family. Carmody was the one who had pulled me into this entanglement in the first place. Perhaps he had karma due in arrears. But Elle? She was family, and that was enough.

  I reached for my phone and made a few calls.

  The first was to Carmody. I fished out his business card and dialed his number.

  “Who’s this then?” he asked directly.

  “It’s Dorian Lake.”

  “Twice in one day? I feel like a celebrity.”

  “Good for you.”

  “How can I be of service?”

  Here came the bluff. “Actually, I need your knowledge. You know the Library of mine you’re hell-bent on plundering?”

  “That I do.”

  “Emil left me a kind of index. All handwritten. A kind of list of the texts he’s collected and from whom.”

  “I’ll wager that’s a hell of a list.”

  “I have a few holes here and there. Missing texts from his index. I suspect they were loaned out or otherwise pilfered. You can imagine how important it would be to me to find those texts.”

  “And you figure I know how to sniff out the odd truffle, so to speak?”

  “Something like that.” He was silent for a moment, to which I added, “I figured it’d be worth it to you just to lay eyes on this list of names.”

  “It is something of a tease.”

  “Look, if you’re not interested, no harm no foul. Just thought since we’d be working together, this might, I don’t know… be a team building exercise or something.”

  He hummed to himself, then responded, “I read you, Lake. I’m a bit occupied at the moment, however.”

  “How’s tomorrow look?”

  “I can make time. What say Silver Lane Diner in Catonsville? Around and about noontime?”

  “I’m writing it down now. Thanks, Del.”

  He hung up without response. It was done.

  I moved on to my next priority… Ches.

  “Hey there,” she answered.

  “Hope you’re having a better day than I am.”

  “I’ve had worse. How’s Elle?”

  “Tired. Possessed. Probably scared.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I wasn’t aware of anything when it had taken me over.”

  It did make me feel better, to a point. “Yeah, but it didn’t pitch a tent inside your skull for days.”

  “She seemed to come through today. I took that as a good sign.”

  “I don’t know. I kind of wish she hadn’t. I wanted her just to wake up from all this.”

  Ches lingered on that for a moment. “Are you okay?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You sound a little lost.”

  “Maybe a little, but I might have a plan.”

  “Do tell.”

  An intense longing to see Ches at that moment burned in my chest. “Look, I know I already saw you once today, but are you busy tonight? I could tell you all about my clever plan over dinner or something.”

  After a second’s pause too long, she replied, “Actually, I kind of have plans.”

  My stomach dropped. “Oh.”

  “It’s not a big deal. You shouldn’t be worried or anything.”

  “Why would I be worried?”

  “Nothing. Forget I said that.”

  “You have a date?”

  Another second’s pause. “A guy from my class asked me out yesterday.”r />
  I swallowed the lead weight in my throat that was threatening to jump out of my mouth and bludgeon me to death. “Hey, no problem. I should probably get ready for a ritual tonight, anyway. Besides, we’re not actually… I meant, we’re not exclusive. We’re not even dating. Or, what?” I broke down into a nervous laugh. “What are we, exactly?”

  “Let’s start again tomorrow. Reboot the whole thing. What do you say?”

  I nodded, then rubbed the bridge of my nose when I realized she couldn’t see me. “Morning coffee sound good?”

  “I don’t think you’re allowed back at the café, to be honest.”

  “Then swing by on your way in.”

  “It’ll be early.”

  “That’s okay,” I blurted. “I’m probably not going to sleep tonight.”

  “Alright. Cool. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

  Piece by piece, my life was stitching back together.

  And I had a plan for Carmody. All I had to do was make one more phone call, and spend the rest of the night rifling through Emil’s Library for an appropriate curse, preferably one that didn’t require cadaverous reagents. It would be cold, draining work. Just touching those books made my skin crawl.

  But as I dug through my research, a stray idea flew into my head. I made one more phone call, then fished Amy’s hair from my pocket. I spent the night on a very specific working. Very soon, and it would all be over.

  he front door called with three quick knocks. I emerged from the basement with gauze on my forearm and a vicious case of the blinks. When I opened the door, I found Ches smiling back at me in her café apron. She dangled an expensive-looking bag of coffee in front of me.

  “Hope you didn’t get the coffee going already,” she chimed. “Got this at the organic market.”

  “Looks incredible.”

  She nodded over her shoulder. “Oh, mind if I park my car in your drive? Won’t get towed or anything?”

  I eyed her old blue Chrysler parked behind my Audi. She was far enough away from the street. “What, no bus?”

  “I wanted to stop by the market for the coffee.”

  I nodded her inside and shook my head. “You have a car and you take MTA every day?”

  “Screw you, gas is expensive.”

  “Especially in that thing.”