by Jim Butcher
The Realtor stopped herself as words failed to form on her lips and her eyes drifted from the doors to the ground. Just what the hell had happened here?
After a moment, she regained her composure and smoothed down the lapels of her suit coat once more. “Still, there’s enough damage already to bring the value down considerably. As it stands, the repairs will be astronomical. I mean, you can’t just look up castle construction with the District Council of Carpenters.”
“So this is actually a real castle?” I blurted out. “Does it come complete with a dungeon?”
The woman’s face screwed up, and she looked over to me for the first time.
Connor’s gaze shot daggers, killing any further questions. I reminded myself to listen next time when my mentor told me to stay quiet.
“Sorry about my partner,” he said, his face softening as he turned back to the woman. “Beverly Rodell, this is my new partner, Simon Canderous.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Ms. Svenson is retired, then?”
Connor’s face went blank, a familiar coldness in it. “Something like that.”
Had this Ms. Svenson been his previous partner? Getting anything personal out of him had so far proven harder than finding a cab at one minute past five, and it seemed Beverly Rodell’s mention of the woman caused him to shut down the way he often did with me. The same sort of silence I had experienced alone with him in the elevator fell over the three of us. I needed to break its spell.
“So, is this place a real castle, and does it have a dungeon?” I repeated.
“Yes, it’s real,” the woman said, looking relieved that we were back on track with solving whatever her problem was. “And yes, there’s a dungeon. Racks and all. The Sedgwicks may have been eccentrics, but they were detail-oriented ones at that. A prominent New England family. Some of the New York–based clan took their pride more seriously than others, it seems, and moved their ancestral estate from England to here, stone by stone.”
I couldn’t help but smile at that, which only drew another look of disdain from Connor.
“Forgive Simon,” he said. “He’s a bit excitable . . . in a new-puppy-about-to-pee-on-the-floor kind of way.”
“I’m mostly house-trained,” I countered, unable to stop myself.
Connor turned with the same glare on his face, but the woman touched his arm, drawing his attention back to her.
“He can be whatever he likes to be, as long as you can take care of,” Beverly said, gesturing to the Sedgwick estate, “all this.”
Connor waved her toward the door. “Then by all means, lead on.”
The woman shook her head, her face going a sickly shade of green usually reserved for cartoon witches. “I’d rather not. I barely believe in this hoodoo of yours in the first place, but I don’t think my heart could bear to watch this place destroyed any further. I was nearly beaten to death in the main library by a flurry of books flying from the shelves. Thankfully, I didn’t escape through the kitchen. The scullery would have left me in bloody pieces on the floor.”
“We’ll keep damage to a minimum,” Connor assured her, then glanced over at me. “Well, at least one of us will, anyway.”
I fought the urge to protest, and instead pulled my jacket closed over the retractable bat that hung from my belt within. I had no plan to draw it unless absolutely necessary.
“See that you do,” the Realtor said, and headed down the steps toward the elevator off on the far side of the roof. “I’ll be at the bar across the street, awaiting the damage report. It is highly unlikely that I will be sober.”
The sound of Beverly’s heels rang out as she carefully descended the castle stairs, but once on the open roof, her feet quickened to the point that I thought she might break out in a full-on high-heeled sprint for the elevator leading back down to street level.
Once the Realtor was gone, I turned to Connor, suddenly unable to control a burst of anger I found welling up inside of me.
“An estate sale?” I spat out while also breaking into a sweat. “You brought me, of all people, to an estate sale?”
Connor stared, nonplussed, his eyes burning through my head. “Is that problematic?”
I nodded so hard I feared my head would fall off. I imagined it rolling across the roof, bouncing over the edge, and falling down into the streets of Manhattan. “This entire place is going to be brimming with psychometrically charged material. Estate sales always are, more so, I imagine, in a friggin’ castle!”
“So?”
“Not sure I can handle going into such a place,” I admitted, though it pained me to do so. I was pretty sure telling your superior that you couldn’t quite hack it in the paranormal-investigation business was the opposite of impressing him. In fact, it felt a hell of a lot like failure in my ongoing struggle to fit in with the department’s Other Division. Maybe if I could make him understand . . .
“Old landmarkish places like this are always filled with a psychometric energy that matches their rich history,” I explained. I wiped the sweat of my trepidation from my brow. “A place like this is the atomic bomb of power drains. Sorry.”
Connor’s eyes fell upon me, and much like Frodo under the gaze of Sauron, the judgment and disappointment in them was almost too much to bear. To my surprise, however, he gave a skeptical half smile. “Were you ever a Boy Scout?”
“What?” I asked, thrown. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Plenty,” he said. “You could learn a lot from them, you know.”
“Aren’t I Boy Scout enough, just being part of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs?”
“Fine, then,” Connor said, holding up one finger. “What’s the Scout motto?”
I stopped and searched my mind with the random turn the conversation had just taken, struggling for a moment until it came to me. “Be prepared?”
“Be prepared,” Connor said with a nod. “Well, are you?”
“For what?” I asked with building frustration. “I didn’t even know where we were going!”
“That shouldn’t matter,” he said, adopting a bit of the training tone his voice took when he attempted to drill something into my brain. “This is New York City. It’s an old town, relatively speaking. Everything here is potentially charged with rich history, right? So I can assume you’ve loaded up on Life Savers to keep your sugar up, yes?”
“To a point,” I said, my nerves creeping into my voice. “But come on! You brought me to a castle. You think I’m prepared for that level of potential power use? Maybe if I stuffed my pockets full of Life Savers—hell, even wore bandoliers of them—”
“You still think you’d probably drop from the blood-sugar drain of your psychometry going out of control in there? Really?”
I sighed as I thought out how to best explain it to someone who hadn’t had to live with my power. “Half the reason I joined the Department of Extraordinary Affairs was to avoid situations like this, Connor. I can’t always tell when or if a psychometric vision will kick in when I touch an object, and when it does, the preternatural price my body pays to do so is high. It’s not a hypoglycemia-inducing condition I can really talk to a normal doctor about, you know? How the hell do you expect me to keep it in check in this place? I’ll lose control.”
Connor shrugged, turning to take in the massive doors in front of us, silent sentinels guarding the mysteries within.
“Then don’t lose control,” he said with a tight-lipped smile. “Simple.”
I sighed, a sharp, staccato exhale. “You’re supposed to help me, you know,” I reminded him, “not kill me.”
“Think of it as tough love,” he said. He examined the iron rings that hung from the doors themselves.
I shook my head. “Worst. Teacher. Ever.”
“That’s Other Division for you,” he said. “Trial by fire.”
M
y mentor pulled the iron ring, and the door gave a long, slow creak as it cracked open. He let go of the ring and headed in.
“Other Division,” I grumbled as I watched him disappear into the darkness within. I resisted my knee-jerk urge to tell Connor in a swear-laden fashion what I really thought of being assigned to the office equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.
I followed my mentor/partner into what looked like the King’s Landing feast hall set from Game of Thrones. By Manhattan standards, its area certainly beat most loft spaces and one-bedrooms easily, by a factor of at least a thousand. Spacious to the nth degree, fit for either a festive dinner or competitive jousting.
Tapestries depicting unicorns in all manner of poses covered almost every inch of the walls. Medieval weapons of every size and shape hung alongside. Suits of armor—some mounted troops, even—sat displayed around the vast open space. Our footsteps echoed throughout the great hall, as if in a museum.
“Quick follow-up from the elevator,” I said when I could finally take my eyes from the mythological-beast tapestries. “Unicorns. Real?”
Connor held out his hand and waggled it back and forth in a gesture of uncertainty. “Not officially,” he said. “Not on the books, anyway. The archives have been trying to reclassify the existence of creatures documented before the past century. Might be a while before they confirm their existence. You know how much paperwork the DEA generates, so who knows?”
I took in the grandeur of the room, struck with an awe and reverence for the lives of all those who had passed through here over the centuries, long before this structure had been transported to Manhattan.
“So what the hell are we actually looking for?” I asked.
“You tell me, kid. Why do you think we came here?”
I shrugged, my eyes drifting back up to the tapestries all around us. “I dunno,” I said. “Zombies? Ghouls? Taking down a unicorn fight club, maybe?”
Connor’s face went stern, his brow furrowed, and then he pointed at his forehead in what I thought was a gesture for me to use my brain, but I discarded that notion when my eyes fell on the gray streak in Connor’s sandy brown hair.
“Ghosts,” I said, acknowledging the sure sign of his having been touched by one previously. “We’ve got a ghost sitch here, don’t we?”
Connor touched the gray streak itself, acknowledging with the gesture that I was indeed right. “There’s hope for you yet, kid.”
“Not for getting a streak of gray all my own, I hope.” It had been an adjustment learning how to handle the types of spirits Connor took in stride as his area of expertise. Years of training had built a callus over him, one that made him impervious to the plights, pains, and restlessness of these earthbound souls, but for me it was hard to ignore. Maybe it was years of psychometrically exposing the intimate details of other’s lives—experiencing them firsthand—that left my empathy dialed up to eleven, but there was little I could do to change that about myself. The knob on my emotional amplifier had snapped off years ago, stuck there. Instead, I worried about the things that I could hopefully control, and ran my fingers though my jet-black hair as I wondered how it would look with a ghost stripe like Connor’s.
“Just don’t let any of the deceased clan Sedgwick pass through you,” he said as if reading my mind. He moved into the great hall to scope it out. “Remember your training. If a ghost passes through you, it’s going to feel like your entire body is being pressed through a sieve, leaving you unconscious after you scream in pain and pass out. Who knows what’ll happen once they have you down?”
“Are you sure I don’t get to punch the time clock on this?” I asked, fanning off to the far side of the hall. I couldn’t hide the nerves in my voice. There was so much stuff here in the way of antiques, so much potential for my powers to go into overdrive.
“Relax, kid,” Connor’s voice echoed out. “This should be good for you, especially with your particular skills.”
“It’s easy for you to relax,” I said. “You touch something in here and you won’t end up flopping on the floor like a goddamned fish gasping for breath.”
“You’ve got your gloves on,” Connor said, pointing to my hands. “So I stick with my initial statement: relax. Besides, you might score something.”
I stopped and cocked my head at him, unable to ignore the hint of disdain in his last sentence.
“Excuse me,” I called out after him, “but what the hell was that about?”
Connor stopped and looked over at me, his face a blank mask. “What?”
“I might score something?” I said, repeating back to him as I locked eyes and refused to look away.
Connor broke eye contact first. “Just don’t touch anything—okay, kid?”
I stopped, holding up my right hand. I waggled the black leather fingers of my glove at him. “Yes, sir. I didn’t realize we had a problem. Sir.”
“Just keep your hands to yourself,” he repeated, this time with open toxicity in it.
I couldn’t hold back. “What’s this all about, Connor? What’s your problem with me?”
“The Inspectre told me all about you and your past,” he said.
My stomach clenched. “He did?”
“You think I’m going to partner up with someone new without knowing the score?” he asked with a laugh. “A former art thief is still an art thief in my book, kid.”
“So that’s what this is all about,” I said. “My criminal past. First of all, it was more of a personal hobby than a career path, really. . . .”
“Hobby, eh? Just a patron of the arts, then? How noble!”
I felt the blush of red rising in my cheeks, and hated how I felt I needed to justify my past to him. The lack of trust and compassion knotted my stomach, a sensation I was more than familiar with after years of social awkwardness while sorting out how to control my power.
“Listen,” I said. “You don’t grow up with a power like mine and not fall in love with arts and antiques, okay? Especially in New York City. And I admit that knowing the secret histories of their creation is a delicious drug all its own.”
“I’ll bet,” Connor said, disapproval thick in those two words. “A city like this? A veritable gold mine when it comes to them, right? Entirely understandable.”
I wanted to shake the condescension out of him. “I’m no saint,” I admitted. “Sure, I may have occasionally helped myself to a nugget or two, but I wouldn’t call that being a habitual recidivist. People can change. Show some compassion.”
“Right,” he said, drawing the word out, but there was no conviction in it. “Look. I need to know I can trust you, especially while we’re trying to hash out what is happening here that’s got Bev so spooked. For now, just keep your hands to yourself.”
“You do know what the word former in former art thief means, right?”
I locked eyes with him, then slowly stuck out my hand in defiance and rapped my knuckles hard on one of the nearby suits of armor.
Connor started for me in a straight line across the room. “You do know what the words don’t touch anything mean, right?”
“I am former,” I shouted at him as he got closer. “Criminal-wise, short of using my power to nail some choice antiques for my apartment. One too many brushes with the law and working with other, unreliable, bat-shit-crazy thieves will do that to a guy, you know?”
Apparently, he didn’t know, and kept charging me. I refused to back down.
His hand clamped over mine as he pulled me away from the armor. Even as covered up as I was by my leather jacket and gloves, the gesture exposed my wrist, and the electric crackle of my power kicking in slammed hard into my mind’s eye before I could stop it.
Psychometric flashes from an inert object were one thing, but direct contact with a living person was another, the pained mental equivalent of forcing a bowling ball through the pinhole of my mind. My
eyes and brain felt physically sucked out of my body and slammed into those of my partner; flashes and glimpses of his past flickered in bursts among my own thoughts. Driven by the agitation and trust issues he clearly had with me, I bent my focus toward anything connected to his own personal issues.
The narrow halls of a dark, abandoned school filled my mind’s eye, all of it through Connor’s perception, as if I were piloting him. While he had often refused to even mention his previous partner in Other Division, the woman in her late forties or early fifties who stood at Connor’s side amid a sea of what looked like the living dead was no doubt her. Because I was Connor, her name came to me. Evelyn Svenson.
Her wild mane of graying hair swung around as if in its own personal hurricane while she fought off a horde of zombies at his side in the close quarters of the school halls. Connor was holding his own, using a child’s tiny school chair to stave off the attacks, but it was clear the numbers were against the two of them.
Evelyn sensed their looming doom, as well. As the vision’s time rolled into slow motion, she slid her leg behind Connor’s, forcing him to the ground as she stepped past him and ran down the still-clear hallway behind them.
“Sorry,” she said with a grim smile. “Svenson’s rule thirty-four of the zombie apocalypse: I don’t have to be the fastest runner to survive. I only have to be faster than you.” She turned and, without a second look, left Connor to the zombie horde descending upon him.
My mind’s eye flickered as the undead closed in, reality forcing its way back in through the vision. Given my usual difficulty in pulling myself out of such visions, it surprised me, but what I found even more surprising as the real world took hold of me once again was the violence with which I was being slapped around.
“Snap out of it, kid,” Connor called out, his open hand connecting with a sharp sting on the side of my face.
“We’re in a slap fight, are we?” I said, weak from the short but intense psychometric burst.