by Laura Bickle
Marsh grabbed her arm as she ripped the respirator off her face, sucked in deep breaths of fresh air. She coughed the sweetness of the halon and the bitterness of the magick out of her lungs. A respirator was of little use in an area with no oxygen. She felt light-headed and clammy with that limited exposure—and what of the guards, who’d been breathing it in for who knew how long?
“What the hell happened in there?” Marsh demanded.
Anya shook her head, croaked, “It was a fucking disaster. They had halon in that room. How long has it been since the alarm went off?” She watched the knot of people on the steps. The paramedics weren’t working with a sense of furious urgency, and her heart sank.
“More than an hour,” Marsh said. “We’ve been trying to get into that damn room for more than an hour.” He passed his hand over his eyes. “We’d been expecting to find two wet guards in a locked room soaked by sprinklers. Not bodies.”
When he spoke again, it was with restrained fury. “Nobody’s supposed to use that in occupied buildings. There’s supposed to be an alarm to warn people to leave the area before the room is sealed off.”
Anya frowned, thinking of the broken artifacts and the steel curtains. She jogged back to the Dart for more equipment, and Marsh followed. She pulled a single-cylinder air tank and mask out of the trunk, slung the harness over her shoulders. The respirator was less than ideal for suffocating gases, and she wanted to take no chances. This tank would give her about forty-five minutes of fresh air, give or take.
“Where are you going?”
“Back in to look around while the scene’s still fresh,” she said over her shoulder. She doubted that there’d be much evidence. Between the damage SWAT had done with the explosives and her own tromping around to drag the bodies out, it was likely that any evidence she came upon would be compromised. But perhaps there was something she could still use.
A haze of white gas still hung in the air, less dense than before, illuminated by the glare of the overhead emergency lights. Anya hauled her camera out and began taking pictures with the flash on. The insurance company would ultimately tell DFD that they were morons and take over the case, but Anya wanted to cover her ass. And even if there wasn’t evidence to prove it conclusively, she wanted to figure out what the hell had happened here.
She snapped a picture of the bench tossed up against the wall. The V-shaped scorch mark had reached up high enough to trip a sensor in DIA’s alarm system. It suggested to her that the fire had begun there. She poked around the perimeter with her flashlight, searching for cigarette butts or lighters. Nothing.
Her gaze slid past the artifacts. These things were much, much more valuable than anything in Bernie’s collection: marble heads of noblewomen and goddesses, sparkling bits of warbled Roman glass, bronze coins, and fragmented bits of frescoes. It was impossible to tell which of these things were damaged and what, if anything, was missing. She guessed that something had tripped the theft systems, and that the room had shut down around the same time as the fire-suppression system did, trapping the men. A dumb computer glitch born of bad timing? But that was only a guess—she’d need to go through the alarm company logs to know for certain.
She paused before a massive glass cabinet in the center of the room. Arranged on steps were a collection of double-handled amphorae, jars, and pottery decorated with the still-vibrant images of men, women, and beasts. Her breath snagged in her throat as she stood before the centerpiece of the exhibit: a double-handled clay jar called a pithos, almost four feet in height. The rim was adorned with a stylized pattern of Greek keys and the faded image of a woman. Anya walked around the cabinet, trying to get a better view of the pithos. She could make out a woman standing beside a jar, standing tall and proud and beautiful in a white dalmatic. In the next scene, her hands were on the top of the pithos. In the third, the pithos lay on its side, the jar leaking fearsome black shapes into the sky. The woman seemed to cower beside it, hiding her face in her hands.
“That’s Pandora’s Jar.”
Anya spun on her heel to find a ghost peering at her. And not just any ghost. This ghost was decked out in full Roman warrior regalia: short toga, sandals laced to the knee, red pallium, segmented armor, and helmet with a crest. His right hand rested on his sword belt. He was a fine specimen of manhood: well-muscled and broad-shouldered… the kind of man who could have starred in a gladiator movie.
Anya’s hand flew to her bare throat, automatically expecting Sparky to intervene. “Who are you?”
“Gallus, legionnaire of Rome in the Republican cavalry.” He puffed up like a rooster and gave her a sly smile. He looked her up and down. “You’re a woman. I couldn’t tell under that suit of plastic armor.”
“I’m Anya.” Her brow knitted. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for ghosts to haunt museums. There were many things for them to attach to—artists to their sculptures, decedents to reliquaries. Even a coin could house a restless spirit after death. But Anya had never met an ancient Roman. “I fight fires.”
“Ah. You are a bit too late for that, I’m afraid.”
Anya held up her hand. “Wait a minute. How do you know English?”
The Roman shrugged. “Stick around for a couple thousand years, with the last few hundred spent listening to tourists in museums. You’ll pick up a lot of things out of sheer boredom.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Her eyes roved around the hazy room. “Do you mind me asking what keeps you here?”
“My fucking horse.” Gallus turned and pointed to a glass display case on the west wall. Anya peered at a collection of bronze horse tack adorned with intaglio leaves. Unstrung fragments of horse armor, bits of harness, saddle horns, and a bit were arranged over the outline of a horse drawn on the back of the case. “His name was, appropriately enough, Pluto.”
“I don’t understand. You’re anchored to your horse?”
Gallus removed his helmet, and Anya could see where his skull was caved in on the left side. “Pluto and I had an acrimonious relationship.”
Anya nodded. “Oh.”
From the case, a horse head poked through. Anya took an involuntary step back. The horse glanced right and left, ears flattened. It looked every inch what a mount from hell might: black as pitch, teeth bared. It pulled itself from the case and clomped off through the room, its dressage jingling in its wake and inky tail kinked in fury.
“Good morning to you, too, Pluto,” Gallus called after it. The horse snorted and flipped its tail before disappearing through a wall.
Gallus shrugged. “He thunders through the halls all night just to piss the others off. He likes to be invisible when he does it, just to freak ’em out.”
Anya felt a stab of pain, missing Sparky. And she wondered if this was what she had to look forward to, centuries from now: haunting a museum with Sparky running loose. “Um… Dare I ask… How many others are there?”
“Dozens. The Bohemians are the most fun. The ones who kept their heads, anyway. Gets a little kinky with the ones who didn’t…”
Kinky? Did ghosts have sex? Anya rubbed her forehead. This was not the time to ponder spectral coitus. Her breath seemed very loud in her mask, and she was conscious of her dwindling air supply. She didn’t want to waste her precious air on the Roman’s frat-boy conquests. “I’m trying to figure out what happened last night. Can you tell me about the fire here? And about Pandora’s Jar?”
Gallus nodded. “The night watch was Gary and Paul. Gary always sleeps on the job.” He pointed to the overturned couch. “Paul’s new. He’s taking everything very seriously, patrolling all the alarm points, turning on lights, the whole thing. As a result, Pluto has been screwing with him. When Pluto wants to make noise, even regular humans can hear him. Paul was chasing Pluto downstairs in the cafeteria when the fire broke out.”
“Where were you?”
“Chatting up this hot chick from the new Asia exhibit. Thank Jupiter for rotating collections.” Gallus’s mouth curved upward in sublime joy. �
��I can’t speak a lick of Korean, but I’m willing to spend a few decades on it. Everything was going well until those Korean guys showed up with the hwa’cha. ” Gallus rolled his eyes. “They’re even more possessive than the Mongols are about their women.”
“What about the fire, Gallus?”
“Anyway, I hear an alarm going off. The first thing I think is that something bad’s happening to Pluto’s peytral and gear.” Gallus stared up at the artifacts. “I don’t know what would happen to me if something were to happen to those. I mean, they’ve survived fire and floods and storms, but…” He shook his head. “I get back to the exhibit to find Gary is on fire. But not normal fire. I’ve seen all kinds of fires, and I’ve burned more than my share of villages. Gary’s lying on the couch, and blue flame is just flaring out of his gut. Bodies just don’t burn that way.”
Anya’s mouth thinned. She didn’t want to know the gory details of how Gallus knew that. “Are you sure it was blue?” Blue flames only occurred under certain temperatures and conditions… and Gallus was right, they weren’t normal conditions associated with the human body.
“The only flame I’ve ever seen like that is a blowtorch, when they were repairing the promenade, outside.”
“Then what?”
“This is when things get really weird.” The ghost crossed his arms, and Anya was momentarily distracted by the scuffs and bits of dried blood on his armbands. “Ghosts show up.”
“The Bohemian ghosts or the Korean chick you were hitting on?”
“No. These weren’t museum ghosts. These were free spirits, ghosts without anchors. I hadn’t seen them before. This hole opened up in the ceiling, like a cyclone, and spat out a dozen ghosts.”
Anya’s heart thudded. She forced her breath to slow so she wouldn’t waste her air. “Can you describe them?”
“Young ghosts, much younger than me. Most of them were dressed like the people you see at the museum. They were trying to get at that.” He pointed to the case containing the pithos.
“Pandora’s Jar?”
“I tried to talk to them, but they were entirely mute—it was as if they couldn’t hear me. I mean, I’m always checking out the new ladies. It was a bit of a disappointment.” He winked at Anya, and she rolled her eyes.
“They tried to get to the jar, over there. But I think they screwed something up. An alarm went off, and all the steel curtains started to come down. By that time, Paul had showed up and was hosing Gary down with a fire extinguisher.” Gallus shook his head and cast his eyes down. “They weren’t able to get out.”
Anya frowned. “What about the ghosts?”
“They seemed to fade a bit, like they were low on energy. A hole in the ceiling opened again and they were sucked up, like the vacuum the cleaning staff uses. They were just… gone.”
Anya walked back to the glass case containing the amphorae. “The sign here says that the big one was rumored to be Pandora’s Jar, but archaeologists dispute the idea. Do you believe it?”
Gallus huffed. “Well, I was looking forward to meeting Pandora, but she didn’t come with the pithos. I don’t know if it’s real or not, but it’s plenty old enough to be.”
Anya squinted at the container. It was certainly big enough to hold an adult-sized woman. “What’s a pithos? Is that a type of wine cask?”
“It can be. Could store anything in a pithos—grain, oil, wine—even a body. You stuff your beloved grandmother in one, seal it up, and stick it in the ground. This one’s a funerary jar.”
Anya stepped up on the lip of the case to get a better view. “And there’s nothing still in it?”
“Nothing that’s showed itself to me. I was hoping Pandora was just shy, but…”
Craning her neck, Anya could barely see into the lip of the jar. It was lidless, and the fluorescent light gleamed within.
And it sparkled. Sparkled like the bits of the bottle she’d found in Bernie’s fire grate and the ginger jar on Hope’s desk. And the inside of her bathtub.
“This pithos is still special, though,” Gallus continued. “It’s a reliquary.”
“It has the bones of saints in it?”
“No. It’s a vessel that holds spirits. Most reliquaries contain maybe one or two, and those spirits are usually so boring they may as well be considered dead. A vessel this size can hold hundreds, if not thousands, of ghosts. If it’s not the real Pandora’s Jar, it’s something just as dangerous.”
The words of Bernie’s ghost came back to her: Don’t let her find the vessel.
“Shit,” Anya muttered, just before her air ran out.
ANYA WENT THROUGH FOUR MORE oxygen tanks, filched from the nearest firehouse, before the room had aired out enough to allow her to walk around without a breathing apparatus. DIA’s insurance agents and investigators arrived on the scene and closed the museum down until further notice. Anya expressed her concerns to them that the theft system had been tripped, and that Pandora’s Jar might be a target. The insurance investigators dismissed that theory out of hand, more concerned with the liability for the deaths of the two guards and the destruction of the Greco-Roman sculpture, which, it turned out, was on loan from Boston. The case was bad PR, all around, but PR was the least of Anya’s worries.
She knew Hope was after Pandora’s Jar, but didn’t know how to protect it. She knew that Hope was responsible for Bernie’s death, but she couldn’t prove it. She wanted nothing more than enough evidence to get a search warrant, to get into Hope’s house and offices and find Bernie’s missing artifacts… and who knew how many reliquaries containing ghosts she’d find?
But she had no hard evidence. Only the word of ghosts, and the fingerprints of dead people. Somehow she needed to get something to pin on Hope, something that would stick. Maybe she’d be able to find something in her financial records the IRS would be interested in…
… or the press. Hope might be untouchable by legal means, but that didn’t mean that Anya couldn’t distract her, give her something else to worry about while Anya figured out how to protect Pandora’s Jar.
And it didn’t surprise Anya to see the press milling about on the street as she dumped her gear in the trunk of the Dart. The same reporter she’d seen at Bernie’s house was there, clutching a microphone, and he jogged toward Anya’s car with camera crew in tow.
“Nick Sarvos from Channel 7 News. Lieutenant Kalincyzk, can you tell us what happened here?”
Anya winced. “A fire was reported at DIA, and the cause is under investigation.”
“Unofficial sources say that this is another case of spontaneous human combustion. Can you comment?”
Anya took a breath, then remembered the first rule of PR: Answer the question you want to answer, not the question that was asked. “DFD has not proved any cases in our jurisdiction are the result of spontaneous human combustion, nor have we any evidence to suggest that the phenomenon even exists.” She crossed over to the driver’s side, popped open the door, and slipped inside before Sarvos could jam the microphone back in her face. She backed out slowly, resisting the urge to gun the engine and back over Sarvos’s cameraman.
Inspiration struck her in a flash, and she rolled down the window, motioning at Sarvos to come closer. “You want to talk, off the record?”
The reporter’s eyes lit up like a crow’s spying something shiny. He shooed the cameraman away and shut off the microphone. “Yeah, sure.” He bent over the car, resting his arm on the roof. He was trying to be cool, like Woodward or Bernstein, but Anya could see that his hands were clammy. He smelled like sweat and too much aftershave.
“I’ve got a nice tidbit for you that you could run with… probably get a week’s worth of stories from it. But I don’t want it to ever come back to me.”
“You’re an anonymous source. I got it.”
Anya shook her head. “I don’t even want to be anonymous. You can take credit for this.”
“Okay.”
Anya took a deep breath. Leaking to the press violated her
sense of ethics, but there was little else she could do now to stop Hope. “Christina Modin.”
“Who’s Christina Modin?”
“You’re an investigative reporter. Find out.”
“Thanks.”
Anya rolled up her window and pulled away. The bird dog of a reporter now had the scent of something new. If he spent half as much time tracking down Hope Solomon’s former life as he did poking around in spontaneous human combustion, he might win himself a Pulitzer.
Once out of range of the television crew, Anya popped the iPhone out of her pocket.
“Call Sparky,” she ordered.
An image of black-and-red magma appeared on the screen: Sparky on the nest. Through the audio, she could hear him snoring. She’d been checking in on him compulsively, and it would be good to get home and see him in person.
She dropped the iPhone on the seat and turned onto Woodward Avenue, chewing her lip.
The iPhone rang shrilly, causing Anya to slam on the brakes. She pulled over, snatched the phone up.
“Hello?”
“Hey.” It was Brian. “How’s the new toy working out?”
“NewtCam is perfect. Everyone seems to be sleeping.”
“Good. Hey, are you available tonight?”
Anya lifted an eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”
Brian chuckled. “Well… what I have in mind and what Jules has in mind are two different things. Jules wants to go over to the house with the astrally-projecting neighbor and run an experiment. I told him I was all over it.”
“What kind of experiment?”
“He wants to tell Leslie what he thinks is happening, that she’s projecting over at the neighbors’. And he wants to set up surveillance to catch it on tape.” He paused. “Are you in? I mean, I know that you don’t go on runs without Sparky, but…”
Anya paused. She didn’t want to leave Sparky alone more than necessary, but perhaps she could work another angle with Leslie that would allow her to get some warrant-worthy dirt on Hope. “Let me stop by the house to tuck Sparky into bed, and I’ll meet you there.”