“So why didn’t the Chimera Charm stop the Vencap Curse? ” I questioned.
Maude sighed as she extracted some of the liquid into the baster. “Because Morag was already quite dead. Some versions of Puppeteer allow for the animation of corpses. Maybe Ms. Devlin was afflicted by the same variant.”
Hector made an unhappy moan.
“Oh, I doubt that any of them would work on you, Hector,” Maude said, putting some drops into the tube. “You’re way too stubborn to…”
Her voice trailed off as the sample started to bubble in response to the freshly introduced liquid. Maude quickly put the tube back on the rack and picked up the next one. Eventually, every last one of the samples reacted the same way.
“Oh, Hattie,” Maude sighed. “Infirma is very, very lucky that you were on hand to save her life. We’re looking at a prime example of Unterkrieg.”
“Under war?” David asked, translating the German.
“I didn’t name it, Chief Para Inspector,” Maude protested, emptying the remaining liquid in the baster back into the beaker. “You can thank Paracelsus for that development.”
“So it’s a poison?” I asked.
Maude shook her head. “Not in the traditional sense. For it to work, it has to be coated in the molecules of the CONTAINER of the liquid you want to spoil. Attempting to introduce it directly into the liquid itself makes it harmlessly dissipate.”
“That makes no sense,” David said, wrinkling his brow.
“Does anything from Mag Mell usually?” Maude countered. “Anyway, with Unterkrieg death is usually somewhat painful, extremely quick and almost totally untraceable in the victim’s system afterward. It’s entirely Unseelie territory, I’m afraid.”
A thought occurred to me. “Infirma talked about how her regular apothecary went out of business just last week. That’d be convenient timing if someone gave her enough of the poison to kill her. Plus, the Unterkrieg would have had to have been introduced then, at the time of packaging, am I right, Maude?” I looked to my ghoul friend.
“Quite right. Unterkrieg leaches from the container at the time of packaging the medicine.”
“Bran the Blessed, won’t those Unseelies ever stop?” David’s fists balled at his sides, and for a moment I saw a blaze of light in his eyes. I blinked, or he did, and it was gone. “You think we’re looking at another Fae murder contract?” I asked.
I shuddered as I thought of Baphomet, the Unseelie Mag Mellian, and his contract with Hagatha Jinx to kill her mild-mannered husband, Aurel Nugget.
“While I defer to the both of you in investigative matters,” Maude said. “I would hazard to guess that you two have just found a lead worth pursuing.”
“Now, all we need is an address for this lead,” David said eyeing Infirma’s used medicine bottles. Maude cleared her throat as she lifted up one of the containers. On the bottom was a label. The name Grave Matters was written underneath a cartouche of an Eye of Ra and a prostrate body on a bed. There was some smaller, worn print underneath. We squinted to see the words.
“A few minutes and I should be able to get you both an address,” Maude assured us. “Hector, would you mind grabbing my print restoration kit from the storage room?”
While Hector shambled out the door to get Maude’s tool, I looked at David. “If this was a contract, then it may mean that the apothecary was sitting on a gate to Mag Mell. You know how the Unseelies like to make their lives easy.”
“Which we will need to close tout suite, if that’s the case,” David added. “ We’ve closed one before; we can do it again. I mean, I don’t know how we closed that one in the rock grumlin mines, but we certainly put it out of operation. For a spell at least.” The chief sighed and rubbed his face with fierce vigor. “But, ultimately, we’re going to have to figure out a way to stop this Fae energy for good. I don’t know what they’re up to in the end, but I don’t like the direction we’re headed in.”
My friend was right. Our whole world; our beloved Isles was becoming an unsafe place to live. The Fae needed to be stopped and stopped before they reached their master plan. That’s if they had one. But I didn’t believe that the Unseelies would create so much mayhem for nothing. They were undoubtedly working toward something big. Something final. My wand! I fished the applewood from my pocket and then frowned. My newly unlocked rune was great for opening gates to Mag Mell. But I wasn’t sure if it was up to the task of closing them. Then I remembered the kitty I’d brought with us.
“I’m going to go see if I can tempt Carbon into coming along for this ride,” I said, heading for the boiler room.
“Bingo!” Maude cheered. She pushed her kit to the side and scribbled on a piece of scrap paper. “Here’s your target, Hattie, my dear,” She danced her way across the room to me, proffering the address details of our lead.
“Maude, you’re the best,” I said. “Now to go and wrench Carbon away from his holy warm spot.” I turned to the door, and mumbled: “Wish me luck.”
An hour later, the gibbous moon lit our flight path back to Cathedral. Per the Orne mapping app on my phone, the address for Grave Matters was in as remote a spot as the Devlin estate. It overlooked the southern coastline, facing the west coast of Glessie Isle. The abandoned apothecary took up roughly three times the ground more than the cottage that led to Ankou. In the moonlight, it looked like it’d been left for years; crumbling in an advanced state of decay. Fluorescent mold colonies hung from the walls, creating a soft glow in the shadows.
“Sure, I can burn this down in a heartbeat,” were Carbon’s first words as he stepped from the broom.
“Shh, kitty. Not so fast. If there’s another way to close this gateway, then we’ll use that first. The fire comes last, okay?” Carbon said nothing, just kept staring at the apothecary, surveying its most flammable spots with focused eyes. “Carbon? Do you understand?”
I bent down to stroke his head, and my pyro cat purred a heat-emitting purr.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he conceded.
David landed his broom just behind us and immediately pulled out his smartphone. He activated the flashlight app and took point. The thin blue beam of the phone swept the walls with a practiced motion.
“You said that this place closed down a week ago?” he asked me, looking over his shoulder.
“That’s what Infirma told me,” I said. “We might be looking at another set-up like Mutley Crew.” I reminded David of the charity that Spithilda Roach had donated most of her money to. After Spithilda’s untimely death, the charitable offices of Mutley Crew had been turned into a Faery portal to Mag Mell. And, David and I had fallen for the ruse.
“I hope not,” David sighed, pushing the front door open with his free hand. “Once was enough.”
Carbon’s eyes took everything in as we stepped into the dilapidated place. His nose wrinkled as he sniffed the air. “It’s a little damp in here, and it reeks. But it’s nothing a good fire can’t cure.”
The pungent odor of the inside slammed into me and instantly burned my throat. The glowing mold riddled the walls like veins of ore in a mine. It gave the place an eerie greenish-blue glow. I noticed that the light made David’s skin take on a reddish hue. I looked at my hands. Weird. The light didn’t seem to affect me in the same way.
“So,” David said, turning around to illuminate the area with his flash. “Where do we start looking?”
I turned on my Fae Sight, and the glow in the room became brighter, turning into more of a soft white light. We all froze at the sound of footsteps
“What was that?” David asked cocking his head
“I…don’t see anything,” Carbon admitted with uncharacteristic nervousness. “Sure you don’t want me to torch this pl—“
“Not yet,” I said. I heard the footsteps again, this time from a different direction. I noticed how heavy it sounded; like it belonged to something with a weighty body mass.
I whirled my head around as I heard the footsteps pass close by.
&n
bsp; “I’m not seeing any—“
Another set of stomps, this time from a third direction.
“That does it,” Carbon said, fear and apprehension giving way to indignity and anger.
He then called out in his loudest voice, “Whoever in the hells you are, would you knock it off and just COME OUT?!”
A stomping sound directly in front of us, but there was nothing for us to see. A second stomp to the right, closer than the first one. A third…a fourth…a fifth…all different directions but they were getting closer to us in the room.
My heart started hammering as I began to wonder if we’d painted ourselves into a corner
We gravitated to the center of the room, all three of us with our backs to each other as we helplessly scanned the doors, the walls, everything.
“I think you just made it mad, kitty cat,” David said, the fear trying to break through his armor of courage.
Hard to argue with him on that point. Then came the next stomp…right behind me. Oh my goddess, what—
“Stop that!” an outraged voice yelled out to my right. “This instant!”
The tone reminded me of a mother dealing with a disobedient child. But the accent was all too familiar. Shutting off my Fae Sight revealed the owner of the voice, and it was as I suspected: Queen of the Faeries, Hinrika Jonsdottir.
She all but glided across the room to the doorway on the right, seething with anger at our unknown stalker. An indistinct shape formed up in the doorway, which I turned my Fae Sight onto. The blinding light from looking at it convinced me that it was a Fae being and that I needed to really think about getting something along the line of Fae Sight sunglasses.
“I will have you know, Cucui,” Hinrika went onto say. “These people are under my unconditional protection. Violating that by scaring them just because you are hungry is therefore unacceptable.”
The large shapeless form muttered something apologetically, belying his boogeyman persona.
“Spare me your belated apologies,” the Mad Fae Queen said, pointing at us. “Apologize to them…NOW.”
The Cucui started to say something in his own language.
“Louder,” Hinrika prompted him.
The Cucui started over and said it again in a tone that nearly blew us away. David and Carbon shook their heads to clear the loud noise from their ears.
I said slowly, “Umm…apology accepted?”
The Cucui made some more noises. Hard to tell what he was saying but they didn’t sound as threatening as his lurking around on foot had been.
“Now,” Hinrika added. “With that out of the way, back through the gate with you.”
No mistaking the tone of protest in the Cucui’s response as he groaned.
“You know the rules, boy,” Hinrika said, drawing up to her full height. “Now that you have broken them, you have lost the privilege of being here. So GO.” Hinrika barred her licorice stained teeth at the strange Fae creature, and that seemed to scare him enough to retreat. He disappeared in front of our eyes, almost as mysteriously as he had appeared.
David looked at Hinrika and asked a sensible question. “What the hells just happened?”
The fairy queen didn't seem to hear the question. “Really...I realize that he is Unseelie. But I KNOW for a fact that Ankou taught him better manners than that.”
She gave an exasperated sigh and then looked down at my cat. “Carbon, could you be a dear and burn this place to the ground?”
“Yeees!” Carbon cried out in almost orgasmic relief. He struck the ground with his claws, and two fire balls erupted between his fuzzy toes. He looked at me for final confirmation before casting his mini-infernos to the walls.
I nodded silently to my fire-starter moggie, and he struck his paws out in a stage-show magician flourish. The fireballs met with the tinder of the walls.
“Come along, darlings,” Hinrika said, waving us towards the front door. “It is time for us to depart.” But a wall of flame blocked our exit.
Hinrika began murmuring gently to every lick of flame in our path.
“Excuse us, pardon us.” The fires parted and granted us a clear departure, without rewarding us so much as a minor burn. Soon enough, we were out in the fresh night air while the apothecary building blazed in the background.
David winced at the scale of the blaze. “That’s going to attract the fire department.”
Hinrika shook her head. “By the time they arrive, this place will be nothing but ashes. No one will be the wiser.”
“What about the gate that this place sat on?” I asked. “Is it going up in flames too?”
“You have seen what I see, Hattie dearest,” Hinrika said as she stroked my cheek. “Therefore you know that it is. Good riddance, really…these mortal masquerades are popular with the Unseelie Court, but I just find them tiresome.”
Carbon trotted up and began rubbing his cheeks against Hinrika’s leg. “How’d you even know to come out here tonight?” He inquired as he surveyed her lemon-yellow, satin ball dress.
“Oh, I am assisting Portia this evening,” she said casually as she bent down to pet my flame-crazy moggie. “In light of the portal in the Glimmer Mountains, she and I are doing a little survey of any other potentially active ones.”
“So you’re a Custodian?” I asked.
Hinrika gave me a puzzled look. “Of course…I thought that was understood already.”
David’s features tightened. “Portia omits a few details sometimes.”
“Come to think of it,” Hinrika added, tapping her chin. “I did think it rather odd that Portia would be unearthing that time capsule without telling you, David.”
David got it. “The Cagliostro school.”
“Better get there ASAP,” I agreed. “Care to join us, Hinrika?”
“Only if I get to ride with this handsome beast,” she said with a smile.
I whirled to look at David. Was she making moves on my man? But, then I noticed that Hinrika was referring to the other handsome beast in my company: Carbon. The latter of which was proudly strutting his furry chest as he gazed fondly at his inferno.
Chapter Thirteen
From the air, Cagliostro school looked like a Mainland boarding school facing economic ruin. It was evident, even at the height we were, that the bloom had been off the rose for a while. The shool's facade was so weathered that its previous cheery blue facade had washed away in years worth of Cathedral storms. This building didn’t need Futura cauldron’s, I thought, it needed a new … well, everything. The Victorian architecture should have inspired awe, but it only served feelings of crushed hopes and faded dreams.
Portia stood in the open field just in front of the school. She was stooped over a particular spot in the grounds, looking intently at a freshly dug patch of earth. She glanced up at us as we circled above looking for a place to land, and I could feel her disapproval from the air. That impression was confirmed as we landed; Portia’s face screwed into a bitter frown.
“Given the information you already had in your possession, Chief Para Inspector,” she said by way of greeting. “Even I expected you out here much sooner.”
To head off another sniping session, I interjected, “We had a situation at the Devlin estate.”
Portia raised an eyebrow. “Explain.”
I gave her the full rundown of what had happened, including Maude’s toxicology report and the fake apothecary Carbon had just burnt down to the ground. Portia gave a thoughtful nod. “Well…I can hardly fault either of you from looking deeper into those matters.”
She looked at Hinrika. “The portal is shut fast?”
“Gone, Portia, never to return,” Hinrika said. “And I might add that the same goes double for that rude Cucui I sent packing.” The fairy queen swiveled her head toward Carbon. “This mighty feline here did us the honors, in fact.” She smiled sweetly at a strutting Carbon, who paraded before us with tiny flames between his toes. Portia gave my pyro-cat a curt nod, and Carbon beamed at the recognition
.
“I’m guessing this…from the maps you showed us before,” David said. “That you’re taking a proactive approach to tracking Fae movements, correct?” David was speaking of the set of maps in Portia’s cellar/lab — a host of charts that detailed all mischievous ‘happenings’ across the isles.
“In light of recent events, anything less would be careless,” Portia admitted.
“Why couldn’t the Unseelie Court have just listened to us?” Hinrika lamented. “Lots of unpleasantness might have been avoided.” The queen smoothed down her fabulously expensive ball dress and grimaced at us through black-stained lips.
Portia shot her Icelandic ally an exasperated look. Apparently, Hinrika had uttered something that Portia would have preferred stay under wraps. I wasn’t about to let that one go, though. Why weren’t we told about this development? I saw David narrow his eyes at the old witch, no doubt believing that Portia was up to no good. Old habits die hard.
“Wait, when did you talk to the Unseelie Court?” I asked, pointing my finger at Hinrika.
Portia took a deep breath and sighed before answering. “It was argued by Verdantia—who, as there is no sense of secrecy at this stage, is also a Custodian -- that we attempt a diplomatic approach with both the Seelie and Unseelie Courts in light of the increasing Fae incursions. The two of them visited Mag Mell—“
“And, had a charming time, I might add,” Hinrika added with a fond smile. “It’s always such a buzz to see so many of my kin in one place.”
Portia cleared her throat before continuing. “Despite the ‘very lovely time,' neither court was in any mood to cooperate. And so we fell back upon the spy-craft approach that we should have maintained in the first place.”
Hinrika chortled. “Oh, are you still sore that you went along with the idea, Portia?” The queen of the fae all but cooed. “I keep telling you that it never hurts to ask for help first, before resorting to dirty tricks.”
The Chimera Charm Page 15