‘Then you better keep me alive.’
The sudden fury in La Madrina’s expression was terrifying. Callum took a step back.
‘You have no idea of the depth into which you’ve fallen,’ she said. ‘No idea of the world of hurt you have unleashed on yourself.
‘Look around.’ She waved her hands at the paintings lining the walls. ‘These men and women were once the rock stars and celebrities of the world. They captured the things that mattered, and they helped us understand the world. But we’ve pushed them to the margins and we are paying the price. Our imaginations have shrivelled and made the world ready for the rise of the Second Kingdom.’
Zach bent his head to his tablet. Before Callum’s disbelieving eyes, the naked Minerva in the Fontana painting started to breathe. A shimmering bubble of mist ballooned out from the centre of the canvas, wrapping around Zach and the screen of his tablet.
The goddess stepped out of the painting, dragging her rich brocade robes over her shoulder, a trail of light anchoring her to the canvas. When her feet touched the ground, the light behind her surged back inside the painting. Minerva’s flesh filled out and her skin gradually lost its translucence until she was solid and stunning and standing before a gobsmacked Callum, her auburn hair piled in waves on top of her head and held in place with combs of pearls.
Signora Orsini shook her head. ‘Really, Zach? It had to be the naked one?’
Zach grinned, set his tablet down, and helped Minerva on with her robes.
Questions were piling up in Callum’s mind. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, rubbing his eyes.
Andrea came into the gallery wheeling a drinks tray, apparently unaffected by Minerva’s presence. He offered a glass to Callum, who drank it down in one draft. He was sweating, a combination of shock and fear and whisky burning under his skin, his shirt sticking to his back. A sudden breeze from the open windows made him shiver, and he wiped his forehead with the bottom of his shirt.
Suddenly he hiccupped, finding it difficult to focus. Behind him the gallery door slammed. The shot glass clattered to the floor, and Callum toppled unconscious next to it.
35.
Bad Moon Rising
Luca waited until the moon was low in the night sky before stepping out on to the roof. He raised his hands to the heavens and drank the darkness. Then he soared out over the city and flew west until he spotted the distinctive skyline of Madrid, the four glass and steel towers like standing stones reaching to the heavens.
In darkness, he darted and dipped over the rooftops of the city, only folding his wings as his feet touched down on the roof of the southern entrance of the Museo Nacional del Prado. The statue of Diego Velasquez rocked gently on its foundations. A few couples spread on the grass enjoying the romance of a Spanish night looked up, but they saw only the creep of a shadow before a bank of clouds settled across the moon.
The day long ago when the Inquisitor had lost the lyre, Luca had arrived too late to stop the carnage. He remembered swooping across the Inquisitor’s garden, the air ripe with the stench of decay, thousands of beetle shells and carcasses twitching on the black earth. His father’s palazzo looked as if a hammer of the gods had flattened the balcony and demolished the entire rear wall. He had come in low and landed on top of the rubble.
‘The Moor has the Conjuror,’ his father had rasped, shaking with fury. ‘And the artist has the lyre. How has this happened? We were so close…’ It was only the Inquisitor’s malevolence that had kept him alive. ‘Get us away from here, Luca. We need to – regroup. I need to heal. How has this happened?’
Now the Inquisitor was free again. The scent of oranges and wickedness woven in the warm air inside the Museum of Antiquities still lingered in Luca’s senses.
The clouds swirled around Luca as he crouched on the Prado roof. Given what happened to Sebina one hundred years later, he should have left his father to rot with the beetles in that bedroom all those centuries ago.
He placed his palms flat on the roof vents. As soon as he felt a rush of air from below, he tore the heavy steel covers from their hinges.
He pursed his lips and sighed. He hated transforming immediately after flight. Flight was an aphrodisiac firing through ever muscle and organ, quickening his breath. Staring into the darkness below the vent, he wrapped himself in his wings. For a moment too short for the human eye to notice, he was only light. Then, like ice, his wings melted away, leaving Luca naked in his human form.
He dropped feet first into the gallery, landing with a force that sent shock waves throughout the building, knocking plaster gods from their pedestals, iron gates from their stanchions and paintings from the walls. The tremors set the alarms off in the building.
The security lights strobed overhead. The clang of the alarm was deafening. Unconcerned, Luca walked purposefully down the main exhibition hall to the centre of the museum. Night guards began flowing in from the galleries on all sides, but he wordlessly raised his hand, knocking them all out. He removed jackets from two prostrate guards before bending the steel bars that had slammed down in front of the gallery. There wasn’t much time. The authorities would be here soon.
Hieronymus Bosch had called it The Garden of Earthly Delights. The central panel of the triptych depicted a great phallic fountain rising from an earth-like globe, exotic creatures coupling with faceless humans of all races, lush fruits weighing down the branches of every tree, birds everywhere. It was not symbolism. It was reality. The Eden of the Second Kingdom.
Luca assessed the triptych with a cool eye. He had known about it for centuries, but had never needed to retrieve it until now. Critics had always struggled to make sense of what it meant, but it was simple enough to Luca. On a mission in the south of Spain spying for the Order of Era Mina, Bosch had seen the Inquisitor’s garden for himself and painted it from memory: as a warning to the world, and a hiding place for the sacred instrument that the Camarilla needed to open Chaos and raise the other Watchers. The trail for a Conjuror to play the instrument had gone cold for several hundred years, but at last there was another in the world.
Luca would do as he was asked. For now. He was playing a dangerous game with his recent deals and promises. He’d play both sides until the portal was opened, and then he’d strike.
Luca stepped closer to the panel known as ‘Musicians’ Hell’. He nodded, satisfied by what he saw.
He felt the rush of outside air and heard the wail of sirens as a hundred first responders burst into the building. Luca waved an absent hand at the unconscious guards on the ground. One by one, their heads lolling on their chests, they rose into the air and piled on top of each other, blocking the entrance to the Bosch gallery.
Luca folded the three panels of the altarpiece and wrapped them in the guards’ jackets. The nub of his wings stabbed through the flesh beneath his shoulder blades. With his arms around the triptych, he shot through the open vent in the roof overhead with two silent beats of his great silver-black wings.
London
Saturday
36.
Flower of Scotland
In her pink coat, matching pillbox hat with a spray of heather on its brim, a boxy handbag hooked over her forearm, and her gloved hands crossed in front of her, an elderly woman headed down a set of private stairs at the Royal Academy of Arts in London to interrupt a meeting.
Minutes earlier, she had faded from a Degas painting hung in a private gallery on the top floor of the RA building, a room few knew existed and even fewer knew held an enchanted work of art through which an old woman could travel. She brushed paint flakes from her coat, repositioned her hat, and walked smartly towards the guards flanking the doors of the Council Chamber. Her determination trailed behind her in ribbons of blue light. Even in her seventies, Jeannie Butler remained one of the most powerful women in the world, her supernatural abilities unprecedented but rarely seen.
The guards stepped in front of the doors, blocking her passage.
‘I’m sorry, Ma’am,’
said the younger guard stolidly. ‘But we have orders that under no circumstances are the Assembly proceedings to be interrupted, especially at this critical stage.’
‘Critical indeed,’ Jeannie Butler snorted. ‘The fate of the Calder siblings, maybe even of our kind is on the table here. Move aside now.’
She took a stride closer.
The older of the two guards stuttered, ‘But Ma’am, the Council has already begun its deliberations. Sir Giles has made it quite clear we mustn’t allow anyone to enter. Not even you.’
‘Ach, fer goodness sake,’ said Jeannie, her Scottish accent ramping up her already intimidating presence. ‘Yer really going tae do this, Bill? It is Bill, am I right?’
She was at least half the older guard’s size and weight, but she appeared to tower over him. He nodded, nervously.
‘Well, Bill,’ Jeannie went on. ‘Ye ken I must get inside that room.’ She slipped off one of her gloves, resting her bare hand on his forearm. ‘I can insist ye open this door, but if I do you’ll feel disoriented, sick, and awfie dizzy for a good couple of hours. Maybe you’ll even black out for a wee while. I’d rather not inspirit ye in that way.’
Bill pursed his lips and sighed audibly. ‘You’ll need to surrender your phone and any drawing materials.’
‘My purse has only a wee bit money and a lipstick in it.’
Jeannie unclicked her bag and held it open. Bill nodded to the other guard. Together, they pulled open the double doors.
Inside the room, seven members of the European Council of Guardians sat on high-backed chairs around a carved medieval table set for twelve. All heads turned. Sir Giles Grafton the Council director, jumped to his feet. But before he could get any words out, the two guards slammed the doors closed and relocked them.
‘This is an outrageous violation of protocol, Jeannie,’ Sir Giles said, his neck mottling red. ‘We are still hearing Vaughn’s testimony.’
Jeannie noted the Guardians at the table were dressed in their ceremonial velvet robes, each one with an ancient silver and a gold coin placed in front of them. She nodded at the handsome forty-year-old man at the far end of the table, shaggy dark hair combed off his face. Vaughn Grant, director of Orion, had a style that usually leaned towards biker-chic. Today, he looked uptight in a black bespoke suit and blue shirt open at the neck, his hands flat on the table. His adrenaline hummed in her head like a small generator.
‘Besides, you’re too late,’ Sir Giles added. A pewter vessel the size of a tea caddy etched with the symbol of a flying stag on its lid was gripped in his hands. ‘We were about to dismiss Mr Grant from the table.’
‘But ye haven’t voted yet.’ Jeannie indicated the gold and silver coins on the table. When an Animare broke Council rules, the coins were placed inside the pewter vessel: gold for guilty, silver for not. ‘So my timing is impeccable.’
She removed her other glove, making deliberate eye contact with each of the men and women seated at the table. Apart from the Italian representative, Luigi Silvestri, a distinguished art historian and the Council’s second-in-command, they all looked to their laps instead of meeting her penetrating stare.
The walls of the Council Chamber were draped in richly embroidered tapestries, each telling the history of the Order of Era Mina. Jeannie walked the length of the room, stretching out her hand as she moved. When her fingers touched the tapestries, threads began to twinkle and robed figures shimmied until one by one, kings, queens, warriors, and knights danced to life. Mythical beasts, big and small, with horns and without, breathing fire inside mountains or swimming deep under oceans whose names had long been forgotten, twitched and tugged against the dark embroidered cloth like constellations against the night sky.
Jeannie abhorred the Council’s binding ritual. Trapping an Animare inside a painting forever for breaking Council rules was medieval and monstrous, benefitting no one except those in power. She surmised that she wasn’t alone in thinking this, to judge from the half-empty room. The Council’s power was slipping.
‘Jeannie,’ said Sir Giles, moderating his tone a little. ‘You can’t stop this vote.’
Jeannie caught a subtle nod from Vaughn as he looked up from his smart watch.
‘Ah’m no here to instigate a coup,’ she said. ‘Ah’m hear to save our lives.’
Sir Giles snorted. ‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic.’
At the final tapestry Jeannie paused, letting her fingers linger on the stitching of a female warrior perched on the highest rampart of a castle keep. She deliberately traced the warrior’s bow and arrow as it lifted to shoot a demonic rider on a flying black stag with eyes like hot coals and orange flames streaming from its hooves. The girl’s head turned and an embroidered eye winked.
Sir Giles slammed his hands on the table. ‘Enough! This display in front of the men and women about to pass judgement on the future of Orion and its agents is diabolical. Those two delinquents left an unforgivable mess at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. They cannot be allowed to run wild any longer.’
His rage hit Jeannie in a current of charged air, knocking her hat from her head.
‘Diabolical?’ she echoed. ‘It seems tae me, given the threat we’re facing, that you should not be using that word so lightly.
‘You know that in recent months, musical instruments have been disappearing from paintings all over the world? The Camarilla is searching for the lyre. These thefts, together with the failed attempt in Italy to bind the Conjuror, should be more than enough evidence for you to act with Orion, not against us.’ Jeannie lowered her voice to a furious whisper. ‘With us, Giles. Do you understand?’
Ripples of static crackled over the tapestries. The frisson of electricity stretched over the centre of the table between Sir Giles and Jeannie.
‘There have always been rogue Animare loose and working for their own gain,’ blustered Sir Giles. ‘You know that as well as I do. That they are part of a secret army called the Camarilla. Ridiculous.’
Jeannie picked up her hat, sprucing the heather on its band with her fingers, her anger rising. Vaughn shifted forward in his seat, his hands in his lap.
‘Sit down, Giles,’ she said with an irritated sigh.
She took the empty chair next to Silvestri. Sir Giles remained standing. Jeannie unbuttoned her coat and set her hat and gloves on her lap. All around the room, the figures on the tapestries turned to watch.
‘Yer missing a few Council members, I see,’ Jeannie remarked. ‘Have they seen this assembly for what it is? A cover-up?’
Sir Giles breathed heavily. ‘The rest of the Council is otherwise occupied.’
‘Don’t lie tae me. You’ve lost their support for this reckless retribution. Or worse, you’ve lost their allegiance altogether and they’re siding with our enemies.’
‘This Council has the right to protect our kind from those who would do us harm!’ Sir Giles spluttered. ‘As far as I’m concerned, Orion has become a cabal of unregulated power, not the Camarilla.’
Jeannie gave a humourless laugh. ‘That’s as absurd a statement as it is a dangerous one! The Camarilla are gathering their forces on our horizon, Giles. There will be chaos if we don’t work together.’
Sir Giles banged the pewter container on the table, its vibrations scattering nearby coins. ‘We’ve already heard Vaughn’s testimony in defence of Orion,’ he said, his lip curling. ‘These stories of a Second Kingdom on earth, the enslavement of humanity – it’s preposterous! The Camarilla was neutralized during the Inquisition and, Vaughn assures me, crushed again more recently in Spain. A crushing, let me remind you, for which Orion agents were the only witnesses!’
‘What of events at the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome last month?’ inquired a soft German voice.
Jeannie noticed Vaughn flinch as Sir Giles turned to Kristopher Gilligan.
‘A proven radical terror attack,’ Gilligan said firmly. ‘Nothing to do with the Camarilla.’
‘Orion is attempting to distract us from the seriou
sness of the twins’ continued irresponsibility,’ added Silvestri, fussing with his bow tie. ‘And as for that poor young man from America, are we really to believe that he is a… a Conjuror?’
Jeannie felt Vaughn’s rage slam into her Spanish neighbour, who rocked back a little in his chair.
The Council’s newest member, Professor Ernestina Vershelden from Amsterdam, clasped her hands together on the table. The gold bracelets adorning her wrists chimed against each other like bells. ‘With all due respect, Mrs Butler,’ she said in her lightly accented English, ‘Mr Grant’s testimony about fallen angels manipulating Animare and Guardians to resurrect a second paradise on earth are myths for our art and stories. Nothing more. We should vote on the matter at hand.’
Jeannie picked up Professor Vershelden’s gold coin and rolled it over her fingers, like a street magician. The image of the peryton etched on one side alternated with a spiral on the other. Then she set the coin down.
‘You’ll listen to me willingly,’ she said. ‘Besides it’ll take me too long to inspirit all of ye, and time is’nae on our side.’ She snapped open her handbag and withdrew a series of photographs from beneath the lining which she slid down the table to Sir Giles.
The Council Director grabbed them and looked. His face contorted. The mist hovering above the table crackled with bolts of angry light but began to fizzle the longer Sir Giles stared at the photos. Professor Vershelden extracted the first photograph from Sir Giles’ hand, holding it as if it was contagious.
‘That is a Nephilim,’ Jeannie said. ‘Half-angel, half-human. He took human form in order to steal Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights from the Prado last night.’
Sir Giles’ face was white. ‘Nephilim?’ he repeated.
‘Look it up, you daft bugger,’ snapped Jeannie. ‘I take it Mr Grant here included the pertinent fact that Orpheus’s lyre – the lyre required by the Camarilla to open Chaos and bring about the Second Kingdom – was hidden inside the third panel of this painting?’
Inquisitor (Orion Chronicles Book 3) Page 8