Salt and Iron

by Tam MacNeil

  Salt and Iron

  By Tam MacNeil

  James van Helsing is the youngest son of the famous monster-hunting family—and the family’s big disappointment. He’s falling in love with Gabe Marquez, his oldest friend and son of the family the van Helsings have worked alongside for years. Things get even harder for James when he becomes what he and everyone else despises most—a magic user.

  He didn’t mean to evolve into such a despicable person, and he knows using magic is illegal, but there’s nothing James can do about it, no more than he can stop himself from loving Gabe. Just when things can’t seem to get worse, he and Gabe are called to help nab a network of magicians who are changing destiny. Not just any destiny, but the destinies of the van Helsing and Marquez families. James foresees a terrible fate, one in which monsters emerge from the cracks, along with his dark secret. And that’s when people start to die.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Casey Blair, Ian Llywelyn Brown, Sarah Olsen, Sandy Skalski, Beth Wodzinski, and to the whole crew at VPXVI, who were and continue to be relentlessly wonderful.

  One

  REPORTER: HOW does it feel to be a member of such a famous family?

  James van Helsing: Well, it’s a privilege that I’ve thought a lot about. I mean, growing up with a name like this is like living in a history lesson. You sort of discover that everybody knows about Grandpa van Helsing, because of the stuff that happened with Dracula, and that’s always the first question people ask. [Laughs] But the fact is, we’ve been monster hunters as long as there’ve been records. Any time I look at a text on magic or on monsters, there’s a… a, you know, a grandma or a great uncle or somebody saving the world.

  Reporter: That sounds like a lot to live up to.

  JvH: Yeah, it is. But… I’m up for it.

  Reporter: Are you?

  Abe van Helsing: Of course he is. He’s a van Helsing. It’s in his blood.

  [Laughter]

  JAMES TURNS off the TV. He’s never liked watching himself but does it anyway, whenever there’s a thing about the family on, and always when it’s him. Sort of like penance. He usually has a drink when he’s watching. It makes it easier to bear the stupid, stumbling comments, the ramblings and lost threads, the jokes that aren’t funny.

  He upends the last dribble of whiskey into his glass, wondering as he does if it’s going to make any difference now, considering the little bit left and the state of him. He drains it anyway. Another drop in the ocean.

  Then he heaves himself to his feet, head somehow both heavy and light, hands as unwieldy as balloons, and gets himself over to the bathroom to relieve himself and have a squint in the mirror.

  “Let me tell you about James van Helsing,” he tells the reflection, working the slack tie around his neck into an untidy knot. “First thing you need to know is don’t trust that guy. He talks big and he’s got a big name, but he’ll always let you down. Not like the big brother, Abe. Abe’s a solid guy. You need something done, you should probably go to Abe.”

  The knot is wrong. He has to undo it and retie it. Should be able to do this blind. Knows he’d maybe overdone it with the whiskey but hadn’t thought he’d had quite that much to drink. He laughs a little at his fumbling hands.

  “Second thing is, look at that kid. I mean, look him in the eyes. Even he doesn’t believe it. If he wasn’t sitting there with Abe he’d’a run away like a… like a….” He’s got the knot sorted out but forgets what he was lecturing his reflection on.

  Someone knocks on the door to the bathroom. This is his place, and nobody’s supposed to come in here. This is where he lives. It rankles, but the knock is quiet and respectful. So it’s probably not family. If it was family, the door would have just banged open against the tile, even with the risk of a mutually embarrassing pants-down interruption. The only people who’re polite enough to knock are the staff.

  “Don’t be shy,” James calls, “there’s a party going on in here.”

  The soft snk of the door handle turning. Rob stands just outside. He’s in his suit and tie too, so the reporters are probably starting to trickle in for the announcement. “You got a sec?” he asks, leaning on the doorframe. “Your mom’s asking for you.”

  “Yem,” James says. It was supposed to be Yeah, no problem, but it didn’t work out like that.

  Rob squints at James. Rob’s been with the family a long time. He’s probably about five years older than James is, which makes him Abe’s age, or near enough as makes no difference. But he looks older. Lines make furrows at his mouth and crease his forehead like a newspaper. His nose is pretty much flattened, as if somebody once used it to polish a floor. Maybe that’s what happened. Sometimes the sidhe have a hell of a sense of humor.

  “James,” Rob says quietly, “are you shittered?”

  “Yeah.” No point in lying. “Too drunk to see Mom, that’s for sure.”

  Rob sighs and pretends to pick something out of his eye. “Okay.”

  Nonplussed. Takes a fair bit to faze Rob. He’s not in charge of a team of sidhe hunters for nothing. Not like James, who trades on name. Rob’s actually got the chops to do the job. Any job, it seems.

  “Okay. Well. When did you have your last drink?”

  James smiles.

  Rob frowns.

  “Oh, c’mon. Makes me charming.”

  “Makes you front page news,” Rob says, shaking his head.

  If James wasn’t so drunk, he’d probably be ashamed. But he is, so he’s not.

  “I’ll go get some coffee. And I’ll tell your mom you’re in the shower. The press are here, James,” he adds in an undertone.

  “Why’d’ya think I had a couple drinks?”

  Rob sighs. “You stay put. I’ll deal with your mother. Make sure you can stay on your feet for the announcement.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I got it under control.”

  Rob glowers and slips out of the room again.

  James takes another look at himself in the mirror. If Rob can tell from a distance, he is definitely too drunk for this.

  He splashes a little cold water from the tap onto his face and drinks a cup of it out of the glass he keeps by the sink. Then he takes a big breath and uses the exhalation to settle his shoulders, and he calculates.

  A shower means a thirty-minute reprieve, plus another fifteen where he could conceivably be getting dressed. Between the time and the coffee he’ll be settled. Press conference in an hour. He’ll be on the mellow straights, not the alcohol high by then. He’ll be calm and relaxed and charming. He won’t be such a goddamned embarrassment. Probably.

  “WELCOME BACK, darling,” the madam says when she sees him. Bonnie, James reminds himself, brain struggling a little to crank up to speed. Her name’s Bonnie. She puts a glass in his hand. He’s a regular and he’s got an account he always pays, and she knows how to treat the good customers. And damn is he glad to see her. Glad the press conference is over. Glad he’s here and not there.

  He salutes her with the glass and drains it and smiles. That’s easy. The booze makes it easy to smile and to joke and to look all at ease. Which is what he was supposed to be doing, since his mom and dad were announcing Great Uncle Abraham was stepping down from the day-to-day running of the Firm. Big shoes to fill. Will maintain the family mandate and keep the city of New Glamis safe. No large-scale changes likely to be made in the near future. Excellent working relationship with the justice system. Welcome meetings with interested parties. Blah, blah, blah.

  Fifteen minutes of talking, half an hour of mingling, standing in dress shoes, sweating under the wool suit jacket, feeling thirsty and bored, a faint smile fixed on his face, fresh talking points rattling around in his head. Not that anybody asked him any questions.

&n
bsp; And thank God for that. He’d escaped out a side door as the press conference was wrapping up. He even got Yuko to drive him down here. (He’s drunk, maybe more drunk than he meant to be, but he’s not stupid. Knows better than to take one of the cars in this state. God, it’d be all over the news. And then, phew, fire and brimstone from Dad.) And he’s feeling better than he has all night, actually, so the smile he gives to Bonnie is genuine. Mostly.

  Okay, maybe not mostly. Say, 30 percent genuine. With 20 percent habit and 50 percent booze and, well, various other recreational psychological enhancers. He’s not really sure what he took, but one of the guys on staff gave it to him. If anyone asked him what it was, he’d have to think about it pretty hard. But nobody’s going to ask, because he’s here. Ah, here.

  Bonnie Nettle, a pretty woman with a notorious sting. Bonnie Nettle knows his type, and she knows a good account when she sees one. She smiles right back at him and says, “I think I have just the thing for you.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asks, turning on the smile he uses for judges and senators and big-money donors. “Am I starting to get boring, Bonnie?”

  She twists her mouth and raises one eyebrow at him. “I’m just getting zeroed in on what you like,” she says. “It’s how we serve you better.”

  He snorts and covers his mouth and nose automatically, as if he’s still at the press conference, but he’s not, and Bonnie grins her pretty, gap-toothed grin and leans back a little in her brown leather boots.

  “Cutie,” she calls through the parlor, as if that could possibly be somebody’s real name. But someone does turn. A young woman, lean and willowy, short, black hair combed in a sort of marcel wave, brown eyes lined with kohl, the dark blue swirls of some big tattoo showing on pale brown skin. Most of the tattoo is hidden by an ironed white dress shirt and sharply creased black dress pants. Wonderfully androgynous. Bonnie’s pegged him perfectly.

  “Cutie, come here and meet Mister—” Bonnie meets James’s eyes. “—let’s call him Mister Bourbon.”

  “Mister Bourbon?” James asks.

  “You are drunk as a skunk, sweetie pie,” Bonnie answers. “I’m calling you Mister Bourbon tonight.”

  He shrugs. “Your house, your rules,” he says, and she laughs like it delights her.

  Then she holds out one big arm, catches the young woman around the shoulders, and pulls her closer. She glances at James, a silent question. He nods back, feels his face already hot, already blushing as all the blood in him starts rearranging where it wants to go.

  “Cutie, this is Mister Bourbon. He’s a nice man, pretty regular, has a type.”

  Cutie smiles at him. “Do you? Am I it?” She’s definitely a pro.

  “Maybe,” he answers. “I want your mouth and then your puss, if that’s what you’ve got, in that order,” he says. “Pretty vanilla. You okay with that?”

  Cutie looks at Bonnie. “Looks like he might be my type too,” she says.

  “Why don’t you two get to know each other a little,” Bonnie says, disentangling herself from Cutie. “You let me know if I’m getting close to what you like, Mister Bourbon.”

  “I think you’ve got me figured out, Bonnie.”

  She smiles. She didn’t need him to tell her that.

  Cutie nods at him and slides her arm through his. “You don’t want to stay down here, do you?” she asks.

  “Not even a little.”

  “Well come on upstairs, then, Mister Bourbon, and let’s get to work, you and me.”

  He goes up the stairs with her. It’s a grand old house that used to be a sugar magnate’s mansion, and now it’s a brothel. Some of the rooms are still huge and open. The ballroom’s still there, but it’s full of green baize-covered tables and there’s a heavy redwood bar at one end. Some of the other rooms, the library for one, have been changed over to purposes that he figures the original architect could never have imagined.

  Cutie takes him to one of the small rooms, furnished pretty simply. There’s a bed, a TV, a big mirror that’s probably a two-way, with a heavy red curtain draped over most of it. It’s a service room. Nobody lives here and there’s no personal stuff.

  “You want to tell me what you like, or do you want me to see what makes you moan?” Cutie asks.

  “I like option B,” he says, hands already at his belt. “Hey,” he adds as if it’s an afterthought, “is it okay if I call you something? A name?”

  “Call me what?”

  “Gabe,” he says.

  “Gabe?” Cutie echoes. “Like the angel Gabriel?” She laughs. “I’ve been called worse than that, Mister Bourbon. You can go right ahead and call me that if you like.” She pauses then and smiles faintly, crooked. “You look like that guy who’s always on TV, you know? What’s his name. Van Helsing, the younger one, though, not the older one.”

  It steals away the numb pleasure of the booze and the pills and the this, whatever it is. So he does what he does when things cut close. He laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “I get that a lot. He oughtta pay me to use my face or something.”

  She laughs. “And what do you want me to call you?”

  He shakes his head. Her voice will ruin it. “Don’t call me anything.”

  “Well,” she says, shrugging, sliding her hands down James’s hips, “I was raised to believe it’s rude to talk with your mouth full. So I guess I better fill up my mouth, then.”

  James lets Cutie undo his belt and fly, coax him out of his clothes, kneel, lay her cheek against his thigh. And James swore he wouldn’t do this, but he does it because he’s in love. He wishes he wasn’t in love, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Because it’s Gabe who makes his heart scrape the back of his breastbone raw with longing, and they’ve been friends their whole lives, and James fucks everything up, damned if he’s going to fuck that up too.

  So this. So he slides his fingers into Cutie’s hair and whispers, “Gabe,” and when they’re on the bed together, he whispers, “Gabe,” like it means anything but a name, until he goes over the edge and Cutie squirms out from under him and twists around and smiles and says, “Mister Bourbon, you shouldn’t wait so long between meals. I’ve never seen anybody as hungry as you seem to be.”

  He’d like to laugh, but he’s a tangled mix of sated thrumming and drunken dullness, and the pain that abated for just a minute there, it’s come back because the face that’s smiling at him now isn’t the face he wants to see.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t,” he says, because Cutie’s good at what she does and she’s kind and she’s a professional, and there’s no need to be rude to the help. “You on contract here for a bit?” he asks, propping himself up on an elbow.

  “Maybe,” she says. “If I get regular customers like you.”

  “Yeah? Well maybe you’ll see me again.”

  HE’S COMING down the stairs when he hears raised voices. People are making a scene in the foyer, so of course they’re people James knows. He smiles down at the crowd by the door, at Bonnie’s scowling face, at the two guys who’ve made it through the vestibule to actually stand inside the brothel. He knows them both.

  “Sorry, Bonnie,” James says, and he means it. She doesn’t need the shit he brings in with him. She’s good to him, and he’d like to be good to her. “Didn’t think work was going to follow me out the door. I’ll sort this out.”

  “Be quick about it,” she says. “The law makes people nervous, even in a nice clean establishment like mine.”

  “Understood, ma’am.”

  She frowns at him and drifts away. James nods at the guys clustered in the doorway.

  “What’s up, Rob?” he asks. “Mama missing me? This a search party? Did she tell you to check all the whorehouses from Cawdor to New Glamis?”

  A couple of the guys behind Rob laugh. Everybody knows James is a joker. Rob glares at him, not impressed. So everything is as it ought to be.

  “We got a call,” Rob says.

  “Urgent?”

  “Abraham says he wants you there. W
itches,” he adds. “Out in the old Sweno place.”

  “You coming or what?” the guy beside Rob asks.

  James shrugs. “You know me. I’m in.”

  Gabe grins.

  Two

  BY THE time they get there, they’re already late.

  They pass a couple of people standing guard, Sam and Therese. They usually work with Gabe’s dad, which means this is serious business. He’s not here to help bust up some little ring of bathtub-potion-makers. With them are a couple of blues, actual cops in uniform, hanging out by the van. The old Sweno place hasn’t been occupied in years, maybe decades. The cracked pavement and the packed earth, scorched where teenagers build campfires and tell stories and try to scare the shit out of one another, are littered with garbage and still sending out daytime heat in waves. All that’s left in what was once probably a beautiful garden is the scraggly mint that’s trampled and wilting and perfuming the air as it dies.

  One of the guys standing guard nods at James and grins, and James has a hunch he might be the guy who gave him the pills earlier in the evening, but he was pretty screwed up and he can’t remember. He pauses, lets the others go ahead of him.

  “Hey, man, what was that?” he asks, vague enough that if he’s wrong he won’t embarrass himself.

  The guy’s grin gets bigger. “I make it. Let me know if you want more.”

  James nods, frowning. It took everything away, from the constant twist of anxiety in his belly to the weird shit his eyes sometimes do. He can’t really remember getting from the Firm to Bonnie’s either, excepting that Yuko drove him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I probably will.”

  He trails in after the others. Inside, the foyer is huge and made bigger because the upper stories have collapsed and stand open to the sky. One room is still enclosed; it’s the old parlor on the river side of the house.

  It’s cool in there, what with the proximity to moving water. All the windows have been blocked up with plywood sheeting, and the place would be dark, except somebody’s set up those lights mechanics use, the ones in little cages. They’re linked up with yellow and orange extension cords and strung like a garland along the wall. The place smells like mushrooms and dirt and fresh paint.