Once again, I wondered where Taske had received his information. He must have had a mole in the bank. Whoever it was, I had a feeling their bank balance now sported a few more zeroes on the end.
Vittoria took a step back from the safety deposit boxes, her eyes shiny with excitement. “That's the one,” she declared. Max approached the safety deposit box she was pointing at and began to jimmy it open. After conquering the vault, the safety deposit box’s flimsy lock was a piece of cake. Less than a minute later, the box snapped open.
Max was about to reach for the box's contents when Vittoria stopped him cold.
“I’ll take over from here. No one touches the item but me.”
Before Max could protest, Vittoria's hand disappeared inside the box, only to reemerge with a rolled-up document—apparently, the sole contents of the box.
I watched her intently, my curiosity growing. I don’t know what I had expected, but after all that build-up, I was disappointed. It was like opening the Ark of the Covenant to find a couple of old magazines inside.
“That’s it??” I asked.
Vittoria put the scroll in a tube-shaped case and tucked it inside a small, black duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She clearly had no intention of sharing her knowledge with me. Was it some powerful spell? That didn’t quite add up to my mind. A spell would be useless to Taske; only a trained mage could decipher and unlock magic powerful enough to cheat death. A person with that much magical mojo would be even more difficult to find than a demon hunter like me. Magic was appealing in theory but it tended to rot the human brain. There was a good reason why the cliché of the mad wizard or the evil witch had stuck around for so long.
“Let's move.” Vittoria had infused her voice with a level of authority, but it failed to mask her growing fear.
“Why the rush?” Dimitri demanded to know. “There’s plenty more boxes here. Taske doesn’t need to know if we get ourselves a little bonus.”
“We got what we came for,” Vittoria replied. I sensed there was more to her skittish behavior. She was hiding something from us.
“What you came for,” Dimitri pointed out. “But what about what I came for?”
Vittoria’s gaze narrowed. She was clearly not on board for Dimitri’s freelancing. I didn’t blame her.
“Luck's been on our side so far”, I said, surprised to find myself standing up for Vittoria and getting involved in the argument.
What are you doing, I asked myself. Vittoria isn’t some damsel in distress who needs a knight in shining armor to come to her rescue. This isn’t Isabel. She’s the enemy.
Still, I couldn’t help it. When I see a woman in trouble, I have to step in and help.
“We shouldn’t take any chances,” I said, getting myself in deeper. “Let’s just leave, okay? The job is done.”
Vittoria studied me, clearly surprised by my attempt to back her up. That made two of us. Beautiful women have gotten me in trouble more times than I could count on over the years, but I’d thought I had finally kicked the habit after one of my clients double-crossed me, nearly killed Skulick while breaking into our loft, and stole an artifact of ancient evil in order to harvest souls for her demon-worshipping father.
What can I say? I lead a complicated life.
“What are you afraid of?” Dimitri said, unimpressed. “We own this place.”
“There could be security measures that we missed,” Vittoria replied in a measured voice. I could tell she was struggling not to explode at Dimitri. Archer often sounded like that right before she read some mouthy perp the riot act.
Dimitri leveled his gun at Vittoria and me. The other thieves in the vault froze as Sanchez raised his pistol, just in case anyone else should get any funny ideas.
“Be cool, man,” I said, holding up my hands.
“You be cool, asshole. In case you forgot, we're inside the vault now. Your talents aren't needed any longer, and I don't like you very much.”
“You sure could have fooled me,” I muttered, backing down. My eyes met Vittoria’s. If she’d been worried before, she was petrified now. Her gaze flitted from the guns to the door as if gauging her chances to cover the distance without getting shot.
Dimitri turned to Max. “Open a box.”
Max shrugged his shoulders and flashed Vittoria a sheepish grin. “Hey, taking a peek won’t hurt, right?”
The safecracker seemed like a decent fellow, but he must’ve learned early on in life to go with the flow. I couldn’t blame him. He was a small fish trying to stay alive while the barracudas were circling.
Sanchez stepped up to one of the deposit boxes. Shoji tried to block his way, clearly siding with Vittoria. Sanchez roughly shoved Shoji aside.
Lightning fast, his twin sister stepped into the fight. Her hand snapped out, grabbing Sanchez' wrist and twisting it behind his back in a fluid Akido move. Sanchez let out a stunned, painful gasp.
Dimitri pointed his pistol at Haru's head. The sound of the hammer cocking back was like an explosion in the nearly silent vault.
“Let go of him. Now!” Dimitri barked.
A beat. Haru's eyes shone with a deadly intensity. I sensed an imminent blood bath and stepped in, my gaze fixed on the big Russian.
“Just put the gun down, Dimitri, and we'll help you get all the loot you want. Alright?”
My gaze locked on Haru and Shoji, urging them to back off before things went any farther south.
The hacker slowly nodded at his sister. She finally let go of Sanchez's arm. The mercenary looked like he might press the issue, but seemed to think better of it.
Dimitri eyed Shoji. “Control your bitch sister, or I'll do it for you.”
“Listen to me, Dimitri,” Vittoria implored. “This is no game. We have to get out of here before it's too late.”
The urgency in Vittoria’s voice was genuine. She was scared. And running out of patience.
“Don’t bother,” I said quietly. “He’s not going to give up until he gets what he wants.”
“You don't understand! If we don't leave now, it won't make a damn bit of difference.”
Dimitri jerked his chin at Max and Sanchez. The two goons went to work on the safety deposit boxes.
My gaze remained riveted on Vittoria. Her nails were digging into the palms of her hands, drawing blood.
Something was putting the fear of God into her.
Or was it the fear of the devil?
12
Dimitri looked up from a row of open safety deposit boxes, his face a mixture of growing confusion and frustration. About thirty of the boxes had been pried open so far, but each one had contained scrolls like the one from the first box.
“What the fuck is going on? What are these documents?” Dimitri asked.
“It sure doesn’t look like no treasury bond I’ve ever seen,” Max said.
“Mind if I take a closer look?” I asked.
A strange suspicion had taken root inside of me. I had caught few disturbing glimpses of the scrolls, and I feared what I might learn upon closer inspection. But I couldn’t push it off any longer. I needed certainty.
Dimitri nodded at me, and I carefully examined a few of the scrolls. Each of them was about a page long and was signed in red ink. The signatures appeared to be from every culture and nationality. Arabic. Japanese. European. And then there was one more peculiar detail.
“These are written in Latin,” I declared.
“So Magic Man reads dead languages too?” Sanchez said sarcastically.
“All part of the job.”
“Cut the bullshit!” Dimitri barked. “What does it say?”
I took a deep breath and laid it all out. “These are contracts. Signed by people from across the globe. Every nationality, every culture.”
“What kind of contracts?”
Before I could respond, Dimitri’s pistol fixed on Vittoria. “Hand me the scroll.”
Vittoria hesitated.
“Do it,” I said. “Let him see it with his o
wn eyes.”
If my suspicions proved to be correct, we were all in for the fight of our lives.
Vittoria reluctantly offered up Dimitri the document. The Russian studied it for a beat before he tossed the parchment aside, unable to make any sense of the Latin.
I, on the other hand, knew exactly what the contract stated. Benefits of a classic monster hunting education. I scooped up the paper and scanned it. It was the same as all the others, but this document was signed by Vincent Taske. As I touched the signature, the contact with the parchment triggered another flare-up of my scar.
“These contracts are signed in blood,” I said. “They’re more than just legally binding. These are—”
“Do I look like I give a shit?” Dimitri said.
I sighed. Trying to explain the gravity of our situation to Dimitri was like explaining quantum physics to a four-year old. He simply didn’t care.
“I didn’t sign on for this job to get a fucking piece of paper!” Dimitri exclaimed. “There has to be cash here. Gold. Jewels. Valuables. And I won't leave until I get my hands on it.”
Suddenly, Max's voice interrupted him. “Oh my God!”
We all turned toward the safecracker. He looked up from an adjoining wall of slightly larger safety deposit boxes he’d pried open while we were arguing. He was eying the larger box’s contents, his face pale. “What sick twisted shit is this?
Max held up a stack of Polaroids. He was visibly trembling.
Dimitri scooped them up. The pictures showed murdered men and women. Each picture more shocking than the next, a collection of the grotesque.
Dimitri tossed the horrific images at Vittoria's feet. “Do you have a fucking explanation?”
Her voice was a dry whisper as she answered, “The clients of this bank are people who don't want any questions asked. People with things to hide.”
I took a closer look at some other objects that Max had removed from the larger safety boxes. He regarded me with big eyes. “What is all this stuff? Who keeps a knife in a safety deposit box?”
He held up a long blade which reflected the vault’s fluorescent light. Metal gleamed, catching my reflection. I look tired and scared. I reached out and touched the blade with a fingertip. Reality around me warped and -
I found myself in a parked car, a struggling woman beneath me, her red nails clawing at my face. I could feel my excitement building, the need to take a life…
There was a flash of silver. The knife came down. Again and again. The world drowned in a river of crimson…
Reality snapped back to normal and I recoiled, gasping. Everyone was staring at me as If I had lost my mind. Everyone except for Vittoria. She wasn’t at all surprised by the cursed objects we’d found here. She’d known all along that there weren’t any treasures to be found at Hagen Bank. Just horror.
I glanced in a couple of the other open boxes. One held a rolled-up piano wire. The other a vintage military handgun.
“I know this is going to sound nuts,” I said, working it out in my head, “but I think those objects belonged to people with secrets. Evil people.”
I leaned forward and reached out for the piano wire and old-fashioned pistol. Reality shattered around me again and I was assaulted by two very different memories.
A man strangled another man who was wearing a tuxedo with the piano wire. The victim exhaled his final dying breath.
At the same time, I found myself in what appeared to be a Vietnamese village, moving down innocent civilians. Bodies kept dropping around me, a scream building in my lungs.
A scream of mad joy…
Once again, I dropped the two objects and found myself back in the vault, desperately clinging to my sanity. Mild psychic abilities were a side effect of Morgal’s mark. As Taske had so nicely put it, I was touched by darkness. I wasn’t merely experiencing the crimes but feeling the emotions of the lost souls who had used these objects in the past. It happened like that sometimes. The worst part was that these impressions stayed with me forever. I still vividly remembered getting sucked into the nightmare world of a dead model’s overdose while I battled her malevolent ghost.
A loud creaking sound echoed through the vault. We all turned toward the giant vault door, which had started closing by itself.
Not good!
Sanchez, who stood closest to the door, reacted on blind instinct and leapt at the quickly shrinking opening.
He somehow managed to slip through the gap, clearing it by a few inches. There was a resounding clang as the door slammed shut behind him with a sound of finality, trapping the rest of us inside the vault.
Max let out a terrified gasp. Sanchez had escaped the vault but the rest of us hadn't been so lucky.
We were trapped.
Max and Dimitri reached the closed vault door at the same time. They tried to open the massive door, but the steel monster wouldn’t budge no matter how hard they tried.
Dimitri spoke into his headset. “Sanchez, can you hear me? Are you okay out there? Can you open the door?” Dimitri’s attempts at reaching his comrade in crime were met by popping bursts of static.
Dimitri whirled toward Vittoria, eyes ablaze. “What the hell is going on here?”
The Russian was closer to the truth than he realized. My gaze found Vittoria. The moment to come clean had arrived.
“Why don’t you tell them, Vittoria? Tell them what Taske was really after. It wasn’t some magical cure for cancer. Tell them what we’re up against here.
Vittoria remained silent, but her hands were shaking.
Fine. If she wouldn’t tell them, I would.
“Taske's enormous success in life wasn't merely the result of hard work or luck or his ruthless character,” I explained. “He made a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” Norton asked as he nervously cracked his knuckles.
“The kind of deal where the bargaining chip is your soul,” I said.
This latest revelation was met by a long, incredulous silence, finally broken by Dimitri.
“I’ve had it with this cryptic bullshit. Spell it out.”
“Taske made a pact with the devil.” Vittoria finally verbalized what I had come to realize the moment I laid my eyes on the strange document she’d retrieved from the safety deposit box.
“The Devil? As in the actual fucking Devil?”
“Devil, demon, whatever. It amounts to the same thing in terms of what it means for your eternal soul,” I said.
Dimitri shook his head. He was having a real problem wrapping his nugget-sized noodle around this concept.
“I think she's telling the truth,” Haru said. “This place feels wrong.”
Vittoria pressed on. I sensed she was relieved to finally come clean and get this off her chest. “This bank is no ordinary bank. It protects the assets and secrets of the most evil and corrupt people on the planet, furthering Hell’s influence and power here on Earth.”
Haru pointed at the parchment in Vittoria’s hand. “You’re saying that’s the contract…”
“Taske made with the lords of darkness,” I finished. “My guess is all the safety deposit boxes in the vault hold agreements drawn up between mortals and the Prince of Lies. Faustian pacts. This is the devil’s bank.”
My words hung in the air. I’d encountered similar bargains before, but never on this scale. What names would we find if we cracked open every safety deposit box? Celebrities, politicians, athletes. A who’s who of the elite in every field. People willing to take the ultimate short-cut to reach their goals and make their dreams become a reality here on Earth.
“You guys are all crazy,” Dimitri said, shaking his head. But below his denial, I thought I recognized mounting terror.
I took a step closer to Vittoria. Perspiration beaded her face, her eyes wide. She had been living with this secret all throughout the heist, living with the terror that we were double-crossing the devil himself on this job. Talk about the ultimate heist.
“Do you understand now why we nee
ded to get out of here as quickly as possible?” Vittoria eyes flashed with both rage and fear as she addressed Dimitri. He seemed to be the only one still unwilling to accept what both Vittoria and I were telling him. Stubborn bastard. Or maybe he’d been on an express ride to Hell for so long, he couldn’t recognize the destination.
“Hold on a sec. Time out,” Shoji said. “The guards, they were human. And the computers were running Linux, for fuck’s sake. If this place is really what you say it is, wouldn’t they have demons guarding this place?”
“There's a great darkness here, but the bank is still a manmade structure located in the physical world,” I said before turning to Vittoria. “That’s why you tore off McManus's crucifix earlier.”
Vittoria nodded slowly. “I feared the bank might detect a sacred symbol.”
Dimitri shook his head. He clearly wasn’t buying any of it. “You're all out of your fucking minds! Now somebody blow that goddamn door open and get us out of here!”
A sudden metallic snap interrupted his rant. I turned slowly to see all the safety deposit boxes popping open like hungry little steel jaws waiting to be fed.
Terrified, Max backed away from the wall of open safety deposit boxes. I was still clutching one of the strange Faustian contracts when I felt a warm liquid running down my fingers. A quick glance revealed that my hands were slick with blood. The signature at the bottom of document had liquefied.
It was now dripping down my fingers, pooling around my feet. I dropped the scroll and backed away.
And the same thing was happening in all the open safety boxes. Blood was pouring from the documents, the signatures bleeding out into the vault.
At first it was a thin stream, but the crimson liquid soon began gushing out, drenching the floor, closing in on us.
The blood lapped over my shoes and kept on rising. I felt the horrible wet warmth seeping into my socks, soaking the cuffs of my pants. In less than a minute, gallons had geysered from the boxes, the liquid already reaching my knees. At this rate, it would close over our heads in no time.
Shawdow Detective Box Set, Vol. 2 [Books 4-6] Page 7