Deadly Curiosities

by Gail Z. Martin

  I nodded. The Hammer of Witches was one of the chief tools of the Inquisition, the defining book of the witch-hunter.

  “There were demons moving unbound through Europe in the old days, as well as wizards of power who sought only their own ends,” Sorren said quietly. “The threat was real. Unfortunately, the men who went to hunt the demons and wizards had their own agenda, or had already been corrupted by the ones they said they were hunting. Nearly all of the lives lost were innocents, while the real perpetrators went free.”

  I could hear the sorrow in his voice. The persecution and terror of the witch-hunters lasted for hundreds of years, taking thousands of lives.

  “My maker, Alard, was a good man. He and others realized that allowing supernatural wrongdoers to go unpunished posed a danger to all of us, but the mortal authorities were not equipped for such a task.

  Alard was among the small group of vampires, wizards, shape-shifters, shamans, and immortals who made a pact to take on this burden.”

  Sorren was looking over my shoulder, as if he were seeing into the past. “Immortals have even less patience with bureaucracy than mortals. Those of us who are pledged to the Alliance hope to avoid another Inquisition by taking care of matters ourselves. We usually see to the needs of our own territories, calling on aid when needed. We catalog the problem artifacts, try to keep tabs on where they are, and safeguard pertinent information. Some help the Alliance by tracking and obtaining dangerous pieces. Others help by destroying malicious objects, or seeing to the storage of those that can’t be destroyed. And we step in when groups and individuals use magic to cause harm. ”

  He shrugged. “The Alliance has always been a loose construct of trusted friends and associates. People are brought into the group on the vouchsafe of one of the members, who is personally liable for their discretion and conduct.”

  He removed a ring from his finger and slid it across the table to me. The golden ring was quite old, set with a large garnet. It had been worn long enough that most of the engraving on its sides was gone.

  “You’ll see my memories, one of the first jobs I did for the Alliance, a long time ago.” He said.

  “Antwerp, 1565, focus on the ‘Black Dragon’ so you don’t get caught in other memories.”

  I nodded, and took the ring, repeating Black Dragon over and over again in my mind. The vision folded around me. I was somewhere else, some-when else. And I was seeing the scene through Sorren’s eyes, hearing his thoughts, which was a little different from most of my visions.

  Alard withdrew a folded piece of parchment from his vest pocket and laid it out carefully on the cluttered desk. Carel, the man who owned the store that fronted for the Alliance, and his son Dietger, clustered around it. I took a good look at the drawing. It was of a necklace with a pendant made from what appeared to be a cluster of small gemstones set in an unusual pattern.

  “That’s the Verheen Brooch,” Carel said in a low voice. “No one’s seen it in over a hundred years. I thought it was lost.”

  “Not lost. Purposely hidden. The Alliance made a deal with the Verhoeveren family to be the guardians of the brooch once we finally tracked the thing down the last time it got away.” I heard a note of anger creeping into Alard’s voice. “The fools were supposed to keep it inside the magical wards and out of sight.”

  “What happened?” Carel asked. He looked worried, too. Even Dietger appeared concerned. I was obviously the only one who hadn’t been in on the story.

  “Their dim-witted granddaughter, Anique, found it after her parents died in that carriage accident a few months ago. I’d brokered the arrangement myself with the grandfather, and come back for good measure when he died to make my point to his eldest son. They understood how dangerous the brooch was. Obviously,” Alard said, disdain clear in his voice, “the girl’s parents never took her into their

  confidence. So we’ve got a debutante planning to wear the Verheen Brooch out in public at Lady Evelien’s ball.”

  “The only thing more dangerous than wearing that… thing… is trying to sell it. Are you trying to get us all killed?” Dietger was angry now. I could smell his anger. Underneath it lay fear.

  “I’m not going to sell the brooch,” Carel replied calmly. “Alard and I are just going to make sure it gets into the hands of a responsible guardian, someone with the Alliance.”

  “If the brooch is so dangerous, why not just destroy it?” As soon as I’d spoken, I felt like I must have sprouted a second head. Everyone stared at me. It was my turn to feel righteously annoyed. “How come the mortals here know all about this, and I don’t—even though I’m the one stealing it? You said this was a ‘big’ job. You didn’t tell me there was a dragon involved.”

  Carel sighed and exchanged glances with Alard. “Perhaps we should all sit down. This could take a while. I’ll fetch more tea, and blood.”

  “I’ll get those, father.” Dietger looked happy to leave the room.

  “The Black Dragon isn’t a dragon,” Alard said. “He’s a very old spirit, one that finds a new body to possess every lifetime or so. I don’t think he ever was completely human. Someone imprisoned him long ago in the New World, but the damned Spaniards set him free in their quest for gold and silver, and brought him over with their loot. That idiot, Pizarro, never even wondered why the people he conquered had so many relics hidden and locked away. All he saw was treasure. Never occurred to him that it could be anything else.”

  “What was it, if not treasure?”

  “Oh, some of the pieces were decoys. But several of those beautiful breastplates and necklaces of gold, silver, and gemstones were magical. They were objects of power, and strong magic users had charged them with spells to keep what was bound beneath those towers bound forever.”

  “And it’s taken us several lifetimes to find those pieces again and get them back into the hands of people the Alliance trained to use them as intended,” Carel said tartly as Dietger returned with the drinks, and a hunk of bread and cheese with ale for himself.

  “So this Verheen Brooch is an object of power?” I sipped the blood. That kept me from watching the pulse beat in Dietger’s neck.

  “And if the granddaughter is wearing it, that means the brooch has been taken out of the vault where it was sealing in something that really shouldn’t get out,” Carel finished.

  “Antwerp is built on a very old, very large, mound of earth. There are stories from the city’s beginning about strange creatures exacting a terrible price for crossing the river,” Alard said, picking up the tale.

  “Legend says that the city was made possible when a hero battled a giant and cut off his hand,” Alard added. “Hundreds of years ago, those dark creatures were imprisoned in the mound beneath the city, and in the deepest caves. Objects of power guard the entrances to that prison. In this case, the home of our debutante lies directly over one of the main shafts into the caves where the spirits are imprisoned.

  That’s why we felt the need to ward it with the brooch. Now that the warding is compromised…” Alard let his voice drift.

  “The Black Dragon may be able to escape.” Dietger concluded.

  “Who, exactly, did the imprisoning? Who’s the ‘Alliance’ you mention?” I didn’t like what I was hearing, and I liked less that Alard had obviously had just this kind of thing in mind when he turned me.

  “‘We’ are a loose coalition of vampires, shifters, magic users, and mortals who would prefer to keep the dark things buried,” Alard replied. “A similar faction imprisoned the Black Dragon and spirits like him.

  This sort of thing has been going on since before I was turned. I’m one of the elders now, and, unfortunately, these kind of responsibilities fall to me.” “What happens if they get out, these spirits?”

  Alard’s eyes grew dark. “Imagine beings whose hunger for blood is never sated. Things that are unwilling to slake their thirst from goats and deer. The Black Dragon and his kin feed off blood, but they also feed from life itself. They can drain
a man’s life without opening a vein. Can you picture what that would be like, loosed across the kingdoms? Even the Black Death would pale in comparison to the horror.”

  “So my job is to steal the brooch – and then what?”

  Alard turned away. I had a bad feeling that this job even made him nervous. “We steal the brooch.

  Carel helps us get it into the hands of a trusted guardian. The Black Dragon stays buried.”

  “Alard was your maker?” I asked when the vision let go of me. I gave him back his ring.

  Sorren nodded, his expression unusually pensive. “He saved my life by turning me, taught me to be the best jewel thief in Belgium. He was my master – and my friend.”

  “If he’s a vampire, then isn’t he –”

  “Destroyed,” Sorren said, his accent creeping in, thicker than I’d heard it in a long time. His eyes were clouded with sadness. “It was a long time ago.”

  “How long ago?” I asked quietly.

  “Fifteen sixty-five,” he replied without needing to think about it. “I was still young in the Dark Gift.

  Without Alard I was… adrift.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It happened – in fact, it was the hunt for the Black Dragon that killed him, the vision you saw from my ring. Alard and his mortal partner Carel – who ran a store much like Trifles and Folly – died fighting a monster that never should have been set free. Carel’s son Dietger and I took up as best we could after that, until…”

  His voice faded away, but I took his meaning. Eventually, something had claimed Dietger as well, either the dangers of the job or old age. How many mortal partners has he outlived? I wondered. The loss still hurt him; that much was obvious. For all the history he had seen and all the abilities he had gained from his Dark Gift, I did not envy him the grief.

  I looked at Sorren as if seeing him for the first time. He had been much younger in the vision, unsure and inexperienced. It was difficult to imagine him that way.

  “And the Family?” I asked as I recovered my wits.

  Sorren shrugged as he slipped the ring back onto his finger. “If you’re expecting a magical Mafia, you’re out of luck. The Family is a group of powerful individuals – immortals and mortals with magic – who run in the same circles and want what maximizes their own profit and position.” He gave a wry smile. “You can see why such a group is hardly going to band together for any long-term purpose, since greed triumphs loyalty. Short-term, yes – if the profit is big enough. But betrayal and squabbles get the best of them in the end.”

  “So what can the Alliance do for us?”

  “Personal connections – very valuable for getting things done out of sight,” Sorren said. “Money, if needed. Safe storage or disposal. Information. Hiding places. And the loan of specialized assets… supernatural artifacts, people with unique skills.”

  “You mean, like Teag and me,” I said.

  He nodded. “And a demon hunter.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “A real one?”

  He chuckled. “A fake one would hardly help, now would it?” He nodded. “I’ve asked the Alliance to loan me Taras Mirov. He’s good. And he’s come up against Asmodius-level demons before and lived to tell about it.”

  “So that’s it? We turn it over to him?”

  Sorren shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We’ve also got Moran to contend with. Taras will focus on the demon. Lucinda and I will take Moran. You and Teag are there for back-up.”

  I paled. “I’m not sure I can be much help.”

  Sorren met my gaze. “The Alliance doesn’t have armies, Cassidy, or SWAT teams. Just a few volunteers. We’ll be fortunate to have Mirov’s help. The five of us are all there is.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I TOLD YOU we wouldn’t stay in the car.” Teag shot me a sidelong glance. Although his voice was pitched whisper-low, I knew Sorren would hear, but he didn’t deign to comment.

  We were behind the old house that Teag and I had spotted as a bad energy place near the old Navy yard. “I wonder if this place looked as bad when Old Lady Dennison ran it,” Teag mused under his breath.

  I shrugged. “From the pictures you found, this might be an improvement.”

  We’d had a full day (except for the part taking care of customers) to dig through Internet sites and property records on the suspicious buildings. The decrepit house had been a seedy rooming house, the stay-by-the-day kind of place favored by folks who were too down-and-out to even rent week-to-week.

  Matilda Dennison was the last recorded owner. From the mug shot that turned up in a newspaper account online, she looked as hard-bitten as any of her clientele. Before she owned the rooming house, Dennison had been arrested for a string of petty crimes, and from the remorseless look in her eyes, I guessed that those arrests were just the times she got caught.

  “You know, all those suspicious deaths in and around the rooming house make me wonder whether the bad juju was going on longer than we thought,” Teag said. He eyed the dark, hulking structure.

  “Either that, or Madam Dennison was a poisoner.”

  “She wouldn’t be the first landlady to think of it,” Sorren said over his shoulder, proof that he’d been listening to every word. “Back in the 1700s, there was a couple hanged at the Old Jail for killing the travelers who stayed at their inn and stealing their goods.”

  He said it as casually as I might have commented that something happened ten years ago, but I recalled hearing about the incident from one of Drea’s tour guides. Maybe for Sorren, nearly three hundred years felt like decades.

  “Yeah, but we don’t know where any of the latest killings actually happened,” I reminded them.

  “I like my theory – that there’s just something wrong with this whole area,” Teag said. “When it was a base, it had a higher than average number of suicides and violence. Anthony heard the developer is having problems getting new tenants because so many of the businesses who moved here are struggling. Loan defaults, bankruptcies, suicides. As I said – bad juju.”

  Sorren picked the locks and the door swung open. Maybe he really had been the best jewel thief in Belgium.

  “Let’s get off the street, shall we?” he said.

  I stepped just inside the door. “Won’t you come in?” Sorren assures me there are ways a vampire can enter without a formal invitation, but having one makes it simpler, and we were in a hurry.

  After what happened the last time we were in the Navy yard, we came better prepared. Sorren wore his sword, which he said had been spelled against demon spawn by an Italian mage he had known in the 1700s. I didn’t care where it came from, so long as it worked.

  Sorren had also brought with him something that looked like an old fashioned reflector lantern. It was a rectangular brass lantern with a mirror in the back, but the bluish-black candle it held looked to me more like something out of a Voodoo shrine than a reading lamp.

  “Take this,” he said, shoving the lantern into Teag’s hands. “And this.” He dug a Bic lighter out of the pocket of his jeans and handed it over. “Don’t light it until we need it.”

  Teag looked baffled. “I brought a flashlight. What do you mean, ‘until we need it’?" he asked.

  Sorren gave him a look. “You’ll know.” He turned to me. “Here,” he said, and handed me what appeared to be an ornate walking stick, with a band of cloth wrapped around the middle. “Hold it by the cloth, since you’re touch-sensitive,” he instructed.

  I turned it from side to side. “What does it do?” I asked, thinking that it looked too fragile to bash a demon or its minions over the head.

  “If you need it, grip the wood and open yourself to the vision,” Sorren said. “The cane will know what to do.”

  We followed Sorren into the front hall. His vampire senses were keener than ours, so he didn’t need light, but we did. Once the door was shut behind us, Teag and I withdrew our flashlights, each fitted with a red filter to dampen the glare. It might
keep us from attracting attention, but the red glow gave the run down building a rooming-house-from-hell look.

  “I’m hoping vandals did this, because I sure hope the place wasn’t quite this bad when Dennison was renting out rooms,” Teag said.

  I had to agree. It looked like a hangout for crack addicts and heroin hustlers – maybe both. The entryway smelled of old vomit and dried urine. Used condoms and hypodermic needles littered the corners. The walls were stained with substances I didn’t want to identify.

  My psychic gift told me that the people who had passed through this house had been in the process of dying. We all die, but the folks who found themselves at Dennison’s Rooming House had been in a little more of a hurry, whether they knew it or not.

  “What are we looking for?” Teag asked.

  “A room, a spot on the floor, an object that feels like the bad stuff we get at Trifles and Folly,” I said, guessing. “Something that might point to a reason old items are taking on dark power.”

  Teag played his light around the room. There was a rustle and a squeak, and I deliberately did not look down. My guess was that we’d scared off a rat. I was surprised that they hadn’t bolted when Sorren entered. Vampires had that effect on a lot of creatures.

  “Cassidy’s description is close enough,” Sorren said. “We’re looking for a nexus, a point of power. It could be an object. Anything.”

  I took a deep breath and concentrated, feeling my senses flow out around me. It could be something used in the construction of the house, or even buried in the walls, given its long dishonorable reputation. But I didn’t think so.

  Bad things had happened in this house, lots of bad things. Killers had moved through these rooms.

  Some had been drug dealers and some of them were shooters, but the resonance of their remorseless lingered. Violence and death… If I stood completely still and listened, I could hear whispers and echoes. Some of the lost ones who moved through this space were hunting death. Their end was foreordained; all that remained uncertain was the means.