Order of the Air Omnibus: Books 1-3

by Melissa Scott

  It was with that in mind that she got out of the car in Henry’s drive, the houseboy coming down to hold the door for her and then for Jerry in turn. Miss Patterson was nowhere in evidence, and Henry came to meet them just inside the door himself.

  “About last night,” Jerry began.

  Henry cut him off, leading them at a quick pace toward his office. “It’s all settled. I’ve sent a man to Union Station to check on outbound trains, but of course it’s too much to expect that Davenport would still be hanging around the station. He’s had hours, and it’s a busy terminal. Hell, he may have even left yesterday.”

  Jerry’s jaw clenched, and not entirely from stumping down the hall at Henry’s pace, so Alma forestalled him. “Yes, we’d thought of that. We’ve sent Mitch and Lewis to Grand Central.”

  “Oh, good.” Henry looked pleasantly surprised as he rounded his desk, and Alma shut the office door behind them as Jerry sank into the chair. “They’ll be able to get more out of aviators than my man will.”

  “Yes, that was what I thought,” Alma said patiently. Henry never would have doubted that Gil had two brain cells to rub together, but she was, after all, only a girl. Even if that was calling mutton lamb, as she was thirty-eight.

  “The real question isn’t where Davenport is,” Jerry said. “But what he plans to do.”

  “What it plans to do,” Alma said.

  Henry sat down on the other side of his desk, running one hand through his hair distractedly, and Alma thought that Henry really did look distressed. He might prefer the glamour to the actual work, but he did have a sense of responsibility. “And how are we supposed to guess what an infernal entity thousands of years old wants?”

  “Not simply blood,” Alma said logically. “If it just wanted to kill, the thing to do would be to lie low in Davenport’s body and commit murders under the radar.”

  “Do we know it hasn’t done that?” Jerry asked. “This is LA. Surely there are unsolved murders?” He looked from one of them to the other.

  Henry swallowed. “We don’t know that,” he said finally. “What we do know is that we have to catch that thing and stop it before Davenport can do anything else.”

  “It’s not Davenport,” Jerry said, shaking his head as though bothered by a pesky fly. “It doesn’t matter about him, don’t you see? And that’s why the police can’t stop this. They can arrest Davenport, but the entity can jump to a new body. They’ll take Bill Davenport away in handcuffs, and tomorrow one of the policemen will be its host. Only we won’t know who. This thing can keep jumping from one host to another, so it doesn’t matter who they arrest. It’s going to keep doing this until we banish it or bind it.”

  Henry put his elbows on the desk. “How do we do that?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Jerry’s eyes were frank. “But I do know we’d better not lose track of him.”

  “If he left by plane,” Henry began.

  “He could have gotten a long way since yesterday,” Alma said. “But fortunately we still have the tablet.”

  “A material link,” Jerry said, as Henry frowned. “The entity was once bound by the tablet, so the tablet can serve as a material link for an operation intended to find it.”

  Henry nodded slowly. “Ok. What do you need me to do?”

  “A candle would be nice,” Alma said. “And an atlas.” She glanced around the bookcases in his office. “I expect you have an atlas?”

  “Of course,” Henry said, getting up and rummaging around on one of the shelves. “What else? Do you want to use the temple?”

  Jerry looked at Alma, then shook his head. “Not if it hasn’t been cleaned since Davenport used it. We’re fine in here. I assume you’ve got regular house wards?”

  “Of course,” Henry said, setting a taper in a bronze Mexican candlestick down on the desk beside the Motorist’s Atlas of the United States.

  Alma let out a deep breath and sat down in the chair as Jerry got up, trying to compose herself. He put one hand on her shoulder briefly, and she smiled up at him. “Just like old times,” she said.

  Jerry nodded, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a steel handled penknife. He flicked it open one handed, the sharp blade catching the light of the candle flame as Henry pulled the curtains at the window. “Which way is….”

  “That way,” Alma said, nodding toward the door.

  Jerry smiled. Jerry’s lack of a sense of direction was a long standing joke. He turned around, his back to her, facing east, and she heard him take a deep, centering breath. Henry sunk back into his desk chair, and Alma closed her eyes. This part was Jerry’s, and she had best use the time to relax.

  Another breath, and Jerry began, the Hebrew syllables falling resonantly from his lips. “Ateh malkuth ve-gevurah ve-gedulah le-olahm.” She did not need to see the movement of the blade tracing patterns of fire across his body. She could feel it like a familiar whisper, like the rustle of silk. “Amen.” She could feel the knife lift again, marking the pentagram in the air, feel it like the glow of the candle before her.

  The sound of his footsteps was muffled by the thick carpet, but she felt him pass her, journeying clockwise around her to face the bookcase to the south. Again the movement of the knife, blade channeling will.

  Another set of steps, now to the windows that let over the swimming pool, his back to Henry as he inscribed the symbol to the west. It felt like a breath of rain, as though a cool wet wind had stirred the curtains, and Alma bent her head. The first time she’d seen this she’d been frightened. Gil had reached over and squeezed her hand. Now it was comforting.

  Again, and Jerry was facing north now, another inscription before he moved back to where he’d begun, sealing the circle he had traced around. “Before me, Raphael,” Jerry said, his back almost against hers. “Behind me, Gabriel. On my right hand Michael, and on my left Uriel. About me shines the pentagram, and within me the six rayed star.”

  Alma opened her eyes. Though nothing had physically changed, the room seemed lighter, cooler. Jerry bent his head for a moment like a man in prayer, then turned about, closing the penknife. “I think we’re ready.”

  “Ok,” Henry said.

  Wordlessly, Alma flipped open the Motorist’s Atlas, turning to the road map of southern California, while Jerry unwrapped the tablet and laid it on the desk beside her. It gleamed dully in the candlelight. She took a deep breath and reached up to unfasten the chain around her neck, pulling the necklace off and laying it in front of her. She’d gotten used to wearing her wedding ring on a chain around her neck when she flew, because she hated having anything on her hands, and now it seemed like a compromise. She wore it next to her heart, not on her finger as a reproach to Lewis. Nor could she bear to leave it off entirely. There might be a time when she did. Almost surely someday there would be a time when she did, but not now.

  Henry’s eyebrows rose, but he said nothing.

  Alma refastened the chain, resting her right elbow on the desk and looping the chain around her ring finger, raising her arm at ninety degrees to the surface, so that the wedding band hung free beneath her palm an inch or two above the atlas. It turned slightly as it swung, the script inside the band catching the light. “Ok,” Alma said, looking up at Jerry.

  He nodded and moved the tablet closer, until the fingers of her left hand rested lightly on the edge of it. “She’s going to find the connection,” Jerry said quietly to Henry. “A creature like that leaves a big footprint, and we have a material connection with the tablet.”

  Metal. Alma closed her eyes again, her fingertips just touching the edge of the tablet. Incised metal. Lewis had tried to see, had tried to open a window into the past using his untapped clairvoyant potential. Alma had none, but she knew how to use what she had. Metal from the breast of the earth, lead forged long ago. Metal in her other hand, the gold ring swinging in the loop of its chain, turning and catching the light of the candle flame. Red fire. Forger’s fire. Tablet and ring were both born of flame, both born from the
breast of the earth.

  Show me, she whispered silently. Not Jerry’s focused will, not the power of words, but more primal than that. Like calls to like. Flame calls to flame, metal to metal, and the tablet to the creature it bound so long.

  And the last piece. Earth rendered into symbol, not in the banishing pentagrams of Jerry’s ritual phrases, but in the prosaic and easily understood symbols of the road map. Here are the Sierra Nevadas, here Banning Pass. Here is the highway that runs across the desert to Las Vegas, here, just as she had seen it from the air days ago, a ribbon on the map making plain the memory in her mind, the snake of black asphalt through red land. The map was a skillful symbolic representation, everything to scale, and like the best correspondences there was nothing occult or obscure about it. Anyone could understand it. And hence it had more power, not the power of secrecy but of omnipresent belief.

  Show me. She felt the pendulum begin to move, the ring swinging in wide circles. It tugged. It pulled. This way. She heard Henry stir, and perhaps he would have said something, but Jerry forestalled him.

  “Give her time,” Jerry said.

  There was a rustle, and for a moment the pendulum hesitated. Paper moved. Jerry was turning the page in the Atlas. She must have tracked off one border or another.

  Show me. Not nearly so far north as Las Vegas. The desert unspooled in her mind, rail lines running straight as a ruler across the land, like looking down from 5,000 feet, cruising along. Williams Junction. Flagstaff. Gallup.

  Another stirring. She was running off the map again, Jerry turning the pages, flying east as though she were winged herself, flying into afternoon. The shape of the plane raced ahead of her on the ground, her beloved Jenny. Albuquerque was an oasis of green, round circles of irrigation bright against the desert, growing oranges and lemons in the May heat.

  The tracks turned northward and now so did she, her shadow out over her right wing. Northward toward Colorado. Just south of Trinidad she saw the train, a streamlined silver streak against the earth, the Santa Fe’s Chief laboring up the grade at fifty miles an hour. The plane paced it, circling.

  Somewhere far away the ring was circling too, turning in a tight knot over the page of the atlas.

  “There’s nothing there,” Henry said. “Why the hell would Davenport go there?”

  “He’s on his way to Chicago,” Alma said, her voice sounding thready, as though the wind had taken it from her throat. “He’s on the Chief.”

  “The express train to Chicago,” Jerry supplied. “Well, that’s great.”

  Alma opened her eyes, letting the ring down where it stood. It lay on the paper, the circle of gold just touching Trinidad, Colorado.

  “He must have left last night,” Henry said.

  “Early last night,” Alma supplied. “The Chief leaves Los Angeles at six pm.”

  Jerry nodded. “Hire some thugs to kill us, hop on the Chief, have a nice dinner while the deed is done with miles between you and the ones you want out of the way.”

  “Can you catch him?” Henry asked.

  “With an airplane?” Jerry looked over the top of his glasses.

  “No, with a bicycle,” Henry snapped. “Of course I mean with your Terrier.”

  “My Terrier,” Alma said. She was owner and pilot both, while the amount Jerry didn’t know about aviation would fill volumes.

  “Don’t you have planes, Henry?” Jerry asked mildly.

  “I have lots of planes,” Henry replied. “But I also have mail routes and passenger routes, and I can’t cancel scheduled flights to send my pilots out chasing the Chief all the way to Chicago.”

  “Because that would cost a lot of money,” Alma said sharply. “That’s a hell of a lot of fuel, Henry.”

  Henry got up and went to the southward wall, lifting a rather ugly painting to reveal a wall safe beneath. Alma waited while he turned the knobs, then opened the door and drew out an envelope. He counted, frowning, and then handed the contents to her. “Think that will do it?”

  Twenty-five twenty dollar bills.

  “That will take us to Chicago,” Alma conceded. She met his eyes firmly. “Are you chartering us to catch your man for you?”

  Henry put his hands in his pants pockets, his coat bulging out over them. “Gil wouldn’t have charged me for expenses.”

  “Gil isn’t here,” Alma said. “And you look like a millionaire. While I am not.”

  Henry sighed. “Ok. You win. Catch Davenport for me and I’ll cover all your expenses.”

  “You’ll cover our expenses whether or not we catch him,” Alma said briskly. “We use the fuel either way.”

  “Fine.” Henry offered his hand reluctantly. “You drive a hard bargain.”

  “You could always use your own plane,” Alma said sweetly. “But I expect you’d lose a lot more than five hundred dollars plus whatever else.”

  “I’m not writing you a platinum ticket,” Henry grumbled, but he shook her hand firmly. “I’ll be behind you in a day or two on one of my planes as a passenger. I needed to get back to New York anyhow for the launch of the Independence.”

  “Your new zeppelin?” Jerry asked, looking up from apparent fascination with the road atlas while Alma bargained.

  “Yep,” Henry said with satisfaction. “Maiden flight. New York to Paris. I’m taking her up next week.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Jerry said, pushing his glasses up his nose.

  “How soon can you leave?”

  Alma looked at her watch. “In the morning.”

  “Oh for the love of….”

  “Henry, it’s nearly two o’clock. By the time we got to Grand Central and got fueled it would be four. And it’s a big field. We’d have to wait for a takeoff time between the scheduled traffic. If we’re lucky we’d be in the air by five, and we’re flying east. Unless it’s absolutely critical I’d rather not make a night leg, and it’s not critical.” Alma slipped the chain back around her neck, the ring disappearing down the front of her shirt. “We can get to Chicago ahead of him, especially since we know where he’s going and can take a more direct route. We can fly straight from Gallup to Denver and cut hours off. And there are a couple of other short cuts further east.” She looked at Jerry. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning. I’ll go to Grand Central now and file a flight plan. We can keep abreast of his progress as we go and we’ll send you a telegram if anything changes.”

  “For which we’ll need this,” Jerry said, tapping the tablet and taking a silk handkerchief out of his pocket.

  Henry shook his head. “It’s a good thing I trust you people,” he said.

  “It certainly is,” Alma said. “I’d like to see you explain this to your pilots.” She got to her feet. “It’s always a pleasure, Henry.”

  “For some value of pleasure,” Henry said.

  It had taken most of the afternoon and evening to get the Terrier re-rigged for the flight to Chicago, and it had only been Henry’s intervention that had gotten them the supplemental tank from Kershaw Aviation’s shop down the road. Mitch and Lewis had bolted it in place, rigged and tested and retested the fuel lines and the switch-over valve, and then they’d ditched the extra seats and strung a baggage net across the back of the passenger compartment. Not that they’d be carrying that much — they didn’t have that much, just what they’d brought to Hollywood, but Jerry flatly refused to leave his books behind. And he was probably right that they’d need them, Mitch thought. Assuming that they managed to catch up with Davenport — with the thing that was riding him, anyway, and also assuming that they could figure out what to do about it.

  Mitch looked around the passenger compartment again, checking that the remaining seats were bolted down, and that the narrow cot they’d gotten from the Kershaw shop fit tightly into the chocks. The Terriers were designed to take luxury fittings, like the cot with its thin, hard mattress — daybed, the shop manager had called it, or ‘chaise’ — but he’d never installed one before. But this was going to be a long fli
ght, sixteen hours at the absolute best, assuming they got fueled up fast each and every time, and never had to wait for a runway. And there would be hard work to do at the end of it.

  Mitch flexed his fingers, working knuckles he’d bruised the day before when one of the wrenches slipped, and swung down the steps to begin his walk-around. They had to stop Davenport, or the thing that was wearing him, but he wished they had a better plan for how. The sun was only barely up, throwing long shadows across the tarmac, sending his own shadow back toward the hangar. Everything was in order, the big rotary engines gleaming with oil, the control surfaces perfect, and he looked back toward the terminal, shading his eyes. Yep, there they were, Alma in the lead, Jerry beside her, his jerky movements unmistakable as he fought to keep up, and Lewis was behind them, lugging Jerry’s bag as well as his own. Lewis was willing, Mitch allowed. He was a good pilot, and he was willing to help without being asked, and he was willing to work with Jerry’s moods, so if he was what Alma wanted, Mitch thought, more power to him. But if he screwed up, hurt her in any way — Mitch nodded once. He wouldn’t let that happen.

  “With the tablet at least we can find it,” Jerry said, as they came into earshot, “but after that — banish or bind it, those are our only options, and I don’t see how to do it yet.”

  Alma was looking a little frayed around the edges, Mitch thought, and Lewis was starting to look positively mulish. “Good morning,” he said, with all the good humor he could muster, and Alma gave him a grateful glance. “Did you get the legal stuff straightened out?”

  “Yes,” Alma said firmly, before Jerry could expound on the topic. “We’ll have to come back for a hearing, but Henry’s lawyer got them to agree that we could carry on with normal business until then.”

  “That’s a relief,” Mitch said. He grabbed Jerry’s suitcase, swung it up into the plane. It landed with a thud, and Alma shook her head.