A Brush With Death

by Stokes, S. C.

  Something had put the fear into Vinnie. Perhaps he had been educating himself on the supernatural world, and in looking into Kasey's family he had found more than he bargained for.

  “Besides,” Vinnie said, “we have no reason to wish you harm. You've done more damage to the Night Crew than the NYPD has, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  Kasey didn't trust Vinnie any further than she could throw him, but nothing he had said was untrue. Kasey had been a persistent and deadly thorn in the side of New York City's newest criminal establishment and given their connection to the Feudal Court, she had no plan in stopping until she ran the lot of them out of town.

  “I don't suppose you have any information on their current whereabouts?” Kasey asked. “Most of them seem to be laying low.”

  “After what you did to their facility, I don't blame them,” Vinnie replied. “But there has been a lot of action at the harbor lately. They tried to buy off one of our men. We figure they're trying to ship something into or out of the city.”

  “Thanks, Vinnie,” Kasey replied. The information lined up with Cal's earlier discovery in Brooklyn’s harbor district. She needed to check that out, but first she needed backup. “You're free to go.”

  Vinnie's eyes traveled from Kasey to Bishop and back. “That's it?”

  “You said you weren't involved, and I believe you,” Kasey replied. “If I discover you're lying, or anyone visits my family again, well, I'll spare you the necessity of a funeral by performing your cremation myself. Am I understood?”

  “Yes,” Vinnie replied, standing up. “You stay out of our business, we'll stay out of yours.”

  “Which business is that exactly?” Bishop asked, a playful gleam in her eye.

  “Good evening, Detective,” Vinnie replied, and headed for the door, his lawyer falling into step behind him.

  Bishop watched them leave, before turning to Kasey. “Your mother made a video?”

  “She was trying to discourage others from participating in the bounty hunt,” Kasey replied.

  Bishop nodded. “It seems like it was effective. It may also get her arrested if anyone else winds up barbecued.”

  Kasey shrugged. “I couldn't have stopped her if I tried.”

  “Reminds me of someone else I know,” Bishop replied, rising to her feet.

  It had been effective. Kasey had to concede that much, but she really didn't feel like talking about her mother right now.

  The door to the meeting room opened and a female officer stuck her head inside. “Kasey, Bishop. There is a man out front. Says he's a friend of yours but we aren't taking any chances. Can you come vet him for us?”

  Kasey followed the officer back to the lobby where a stout man with a crew cut was locked in conversation with half a dozen officers.

  The man was easily three of Kasey wide and she could see why the officers around him were unsettled. If they had any idea about his true nature, they would have given him a far wider berth. When Cal shifted into his wereform, he only grew more intimidating and far more dangerous.

  On seeing Kasey, he raised his hand and waved. The officers breathed a sigh of relief.

  “It's all right, boys,” Bishop replied. “He's a friend. Let him through.”

  Cal lumbered past the officers. “They're wound up pretty tight around here.”

  “It's been that kind of day,” Bishop replied. “Good to see you, Cal.”

  “Good to see you too, Bishop,” he replied before turning to Kasey and tipping an imaginary hat. “Boss. What's going on?”

  “We’re running out of time,” Kasey replied quietly. “The Court is up to something. I can feel it. This bounty hunt is just a distraction to keep us chasing our tails. The real play is the tome. We need to find where they have stashed it and get it back before whatever they have planned comes to fruition.”

  “Any idea where we can start?” Cal asked.

  “Every indication is that something is going down at the docks. We also need to find the preacher. He is certainly one of them. He attacked me at Thompkins Square Park less than an hour ago.”

  “He was a vampire? You're sure of it?” Cal asked.

  “Definitely, and powerful. Knew how to use magic and made a right mess of the park on his way through it.”

  “Thompkins Square Park is close,” Cal said, “only a block or two. Did you wound him?”

  “We punched a few holes in him, why?”

  “If I move now, I might be able to pick up his scent,” Cal replied.

  “Good luck. He vanished into thin air when Bishop and her colleagues tried to turn him into Swiss cheese.”

  “Probably a glamour,” Cal said. “And most illusionists focus on hiding what you can see, not what you can smell. If I head out now, I might be able to pick up a trail.”

  “Anything at all would be more than we have now. It feels like we've been running in circles all day. Reacting instead of getting on the front foot. If you do find him though, wait for backup. He's dangerous, Cal.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cal replied, “I know the drill.”

  “Okay, get on it and see what you can find. Bishop and I are going to head downstairs and work out what the vampires are up to.”

  Kasey held up a fist and Cal bumped his against it, dwarfing hers.

  “Try not to lose your head,” Cal said as he headed for the door.

  “You wouldn't want to have to get a real job now, would you?” Kasey called after him.

  “Exactly,” Cal replied. “Always knew you were a team player.”

  Kasey made her way with Bishop down to the morgue. In the overcrowded Ninth Precinct, it was the only place where she was likely to get any space to think.

  As they were walking, Bishop turned to her and asked, “Do you really think he can track the vampire?”

  “I'm not sure. The vampires seem to be worried enough about it that they tried to drive the werewolves out of the neighborhood. Cal seems to think he might have a shot, so I figure it’s worth the attempt. If he doesn’t, he's just going to be sitting around here anyway and at this point we could use any break we can get.”

  Kasey pushed open the steel door of the morgue and found Vida and Kendra standing in front of the whiteboard, chatting excitedly.

  “So what you're saying,” Vida said, “is that any arcane component in the compound would tend to disperse unless it is combined with a suitably conductive substance?”

  “Exactly,” Kendra replied, turning to greet Kasey and Bishop. “For someone who hasn't spent any time at the Academy, you're a remarkably quick study.”

  “For a normal, you mean?” Vida replied, his English haughtiness showing through a little as he teased her.

  “For anyone,” Kendra replied. “How much are they paying you here? I could use someone like you on my staff.”

  Before Vida could reply, Bishop cut her off. “Hands off, moneybags. We didn't drag him out of a den of vampires so that he could run off to the glamour of the private sector the first chance he got.”

  “It's the little things that let you know they care,” Vida said conspiratorially to Kendra. “But for a purely academic discussion, how much are we talking?”

  “Enough,” Kasey said. “Go back to the useful part about the arcane component. What was that about?”

  Vida let out a mock sigh. “Fine. I had been speaking with Kendra about venom.”

  “Venom?” Kasey asked.

  “The compound we found in our John Doe here. It’s dangerous and turns people into hulking great beasts, like in Spiderman. It has to be venom,” Vida said with a shrug.

  “It fits. I like it,” Kasey replied. “Venom it is.”

  Vida beamed. “In my analysis, I came across a second set of DNA markers. Initially, I believed that they must have been trace residue resulting from the vampire’s venom. After all, the creatures were once human, right?”

  “A good assumption,” Kendra began, “until you consider that the chemical compound was carryi
ng considerable arcane energy. It is that stored arcana, combined with the other elements of the drug, that produced such a violent reaction in the human body. To contain that much energy in such a small sample, there is only one readily available conductive material—blood.”

  “And that explains the second set of DNA markers I found in our John Doe. It wasn't the vampire’s DNA. It belonged to the individual whose blood was used to make the compound.”

  “Surely we can trace that?” Kasey suggested.

  “Harder than you think,” Bishop replied. “And reliant on the donor being in one of our databases and the reality is that just isn't the case. Not if they are an average citizen.”

  “Precisely,” Vida answered, tapping his hand on the examination table, “which got me thinking. A coven of vampires moves into the city, and it takes months for the accumulated missing persons to draw our attention to their presence, and only then because one of their victims was dumped in Soho. We got lucky. We could have gone months without that sort of break. Which begs the question, how are they feeding? Surely if we had a bevy of unrestrained monsters loose in the city, we would have got whiff of it sooner. So, either the Feudal Court are the most disciplined eaters in the supernatural world or…” Vida paused to see who would finish his thought.

  “They found an easier way to secure their food supply,” Kasey replied, leaning forward on her elbows on the examination table. “You think they've been collecting blood from the public?”

  “Not think, know,” Vida replied. “You know how I was a little tight up for cash last month?”

  Bishop eyed him with a look that could have melted steel. “You mean, sold your soul to loan sharks to pay your exorbitant gambling debts? Sure, I remember a little about that.”

  “Well, when I was looking to make a little cash, I donated blood.”

  Kasey shook her head; she really should have seen the signs of danger sooner. She had noticed the gauze on his arm but had been too caught up to mention it.

  “The thing is, it paid really well. Better than I'd expected. So, I looked them up and discovered that even though the vans were sign written as a New York City Blood Drive, they weren't affiliated with the city at all. They were privately funded. Does anyone want to guess who funded them?”

  “First Medical,” Kasey answered. “The Feudal Court was behind the blood drive.”

  “Got it in one,” Vida replied. “One of their subsidiaries was behind it.”

  “And you never thought to mention it until now?” Bishop asked, distinctly unimpressed.

  “To be fair, initially I thought they were using the blood for their procedures in the private hospital. So when we burnt down their facility and killed their dark master, I figured it wasn't really relevant anymore.”

  Kasey sank onto a stool. The court had been harvesting blood donations on a wide scale for months, far more than they needed for any operations they had been performing. Clearly the blood drive had served multiple purposes, including feeding their growing coven and acting as a conductive component in their experimental compound.

  Kasey was convinced that far more was occurring in the medical center than they had explored. It was entirely possible that they'd been synthesizing the compound there. Shutting down the center had likely frustrated their operations, but what was their end game?

  When she'd killed their prince, he had been talking about bringing the city to its knees, and exacting revenge on the Arcane Council. The feud between vampires and wizards stretched back to the first appearance of the creatures. The Council had blocked their admission to the Arcane Covenant and left them an outsider in the supernatural community. They were unprotected by the laws that governed the other participating nations.

  If they wanted revenge against the Council, New York City was its beating heart. Kasey was growing more confident by the moment that the venom the John Doe had taken was an integral part of that revenge.

  The thought that they'd been harvesting blood for months meant they could have a truly terrifying stockpile of blood to work with.

  Then it hit her. The Libro Sanguis.

  This was precisely why they had stolen the tome. Carys' legacy would teach them everything there was to know about binding arcane power to blood. It was the secret at the heart of Druidic lore.

  The Libro Sanguis would give them access to knowledge that could help them refine their compound into something truly terrifying, or it could help them weaponize their stockpiled supply of blood for deadly Druidic rituals the world had not witnessed in a thousand years.

  Kasey's heart skipped a beat.

  The Libro Sanguis was the key, and she was the only one who had any idea what was in it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kasey squirmed internally as she tried to decide what to say. Withholding what she knew about the tome would put everyone's lives in danger, but she couldn't tell them everything, either. It was Carys' sharing of the Druidic legacy that had produced the deadly tome in the first place.

  Kasey cleared her throat, and the morgue went silent.

  “The threat posed by the Feudal Court is twofold,” Kasey began. “First, there is the danger posed by this new compound. I think it's safe to say that they are manufacturing and refining the process here in the city. What stage of evolution and their ultimate agenda we can only guess at, but who knows what chaos could be wrought by distributing it on a wider scale.”

  “That's horrifying,” Bishop said. “Giving people that sort of power and who knows what that poison might do to their minds.”

  “We’re dealing with monsters,” Kasey replied. “I think we are safe in assuming the very worst for their intentions. Second is the contents of the tome that was stolen this morning. It is full of dangerous rituals and blood magic that could wreak havoc on the city.”

  “How do you know that?” Kendra asked.

  “My mother told me. While she hasn't read the Libro Sanguis, she is familiar with the author, Carys Bloodborn. He wrought havoc and bloodshed throughout England and Wales during the height of the Roman Empire. That tome is his legacy, and it is full of rituals that would allow the vampires to weaponize the stockpile of blood they have accumulated and unleash terror and destruction on the city, the likes of which we've never seen.”

  “How do we stop them?” Bishop asked, moving to stand beside Kasey. “Surely the Arcane Council could put a stop to that kind of magic being unleashed.”

  “Only if we can find where the ritual is occurring in time. All we have is theories and a pile of dead vampires Cal found in a warehouse.”

  “That sounds like a good thing,” Vida said. “One might even say it's my favorite kind of vampire.”

  “You're not wrong.” Kasey flashed him a grin. “Mine too. The concerning part was a reference to an appointment this evening at midnight. It was simply labelled Nightmare. In light of everything else we’ve discovered, we should operate on the basis that whatever they have planned, it's happening tonight.”

  “Could they truly harness the power of the Libro Sanguis that swiftly?” Kendra asked. “Surely they would need more time.”

  “Perhaps,” Kasey replied, “but we need to be alert to the possibility. Something is happening tonight; I can feel it. This bounty hunt feels like a distraction to keep us occupied.”

  “Perhaps they wanted to drive you underground so that they could move about without interference,” Bishop added.

  “That was my thought too. Unfortunately for them, I've never been one to sit and hide,” Kasey replied.

  “You’re an insurance assessor’s worst nightmare, Kasey,” Vida said. “You have no regard for your own wellbeing and most of the buildings you enter seem to have terrible things happen to them.”

  “My general liability to combust aside, I can't burn down a building unless I know where to aim. At this rate, we’re going to be stuck going door-to-door looking for vampires. Hardly a promising prospect.”

  “Kasey, it’s after ten pm. If something is
happening at midnight, we’re almost out of time,” Bishop said.

  “Then we need to extend our eyes and ears, get more boots on the ground and find out where this is happening. If anyone sees anything out of the ordinary, we need to know about it as soon as possible. I'll send word to the Council.”

  “I can have my people hit the streets,” Kendra said. “I have a strike team inbound to pick me up, but I have plenty of manpower in the city. Let me put the word out.”

  “Do it,” Kasey replied, as she looked back at the whiteboard. There had to be something she was missing.

  Kendra picked up her phone and left the morgue.

  “I'll reach out to the other precincts,” Bishop said, heading for the door. “Let me know if you find anything that might be useful.”

  “Will do,” Kasey replied as Bishop disappeared through the door.

  Kasey turned to Vida. “I don't suppose I could borrow your phone?”

  Vida raised an eyebrow. “There's one in the office. Be gentle.”

  “No promises.”

  “That's exactly what I was afraid of,” he called back.

  In Vida’s office, she pulled up his chair, sank into it and dialed for an outside line. She needed to warn the Council. She needed Marion Strang.

  She would have called Sanders, but he'd been exhausted this morning and Kasey imagined he'd be unconscious by now. She didn't expect much at this hour but figured the Director of the ADI's phone might at least be monitored.

  She got voicemail and left a warning for the Director to deploy the ADI’s resources to detect any movement from the Feudal Court. The ADI had proved reluctant to help when she had gone in to rescue Vida, but at the time they had no idea of the true threat that they had faced. Sanders had been clear that dealing with the Feudal Court was a priority for the Council and the ADI. If Strang didn't respond, she risked Sanders coming down on her like a ton of bricks. There wasn't a witch or wizard anywhere that wanted to be on the bad side of Noah Sanders.

  As she hung up, Kasey considered calling Sanders but decided to leave the unenviable job of waking the Arcane Chancellor to the Director of the ADI.