Deadly Curiosities

by Gail Z. Martin

  Chuck looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “The blond one. You know what he is?”

  I deliberately misunderstood. “Belgian?”

  Chuck glowered. “Vampire.”

  “How did you know?”

  Chuck snorted. “Used to work with three of them, back in Dragon Unit. Me and the other guys used to donate blood to the company medics so they’d have a supply. Let them bite me more than once, in a pinch, when they got hurt bad.”

  Despite my first impressions, I found myself liking Chuck. He was cantankerous and headstrong, but he stood up for his friends and for what he believed. That was a rare trait. I couldn’t blame Sorren and Mirov for their caution, but I was convinced Chuck belonged in our group, along with Lucinda.

  Sorren and Mirov emerged from their discussion. Mirov glowered, but I couldn’t tell whether he had been overruled or whether that was his normal expression.

  “You’re in,” Sorren said abruptly, moving to stand directly in front of Chuck. Chuck lifted his chin to the challenge in Sorren’s voice, but he did not try to meet Sorren’s gaze.

  “Be clear on this. If you betray us, or cause harm to come to one of mine, you will not survive.”

  Sorren’s expression made it clear that the warning was not idle.

  “I’ll hold up my end,” Chuck snapped. “I’ll get you in and out. Just make sure I get my damned clocks.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow night,” Sorren replied. “There’s nothing to gain by waiting any longer, and the longer we wait, the more likely it is that Moran will change his plans and we’ll lose our chance.”

  “I borrowed my brother’s old panel van,” Teag said. “It’s beat up, but it runs well. And it’s nondescript, just a hard-used white van.” He grinned. “He won it in a card game, and it’s had a lot of owners – it would be tough for anyone to track it back to him, or us. That should be good to get Cassidy, Chuck and me to the Navy yard.”

  “Lucinda and Taras and I have our own transportation,” Sorren said. “We’ll meet you at Stor-Your Own.” “We’ll be there,” I said. “It’s about time Stor-Your-Own and the dead men got to rest in peace.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I WAS DRESSED for mayhem. Since I’d taken over Trifles and Folly, my all-black wardrobe had expanded, and not in the little-black-dress way. I’d found it prudent to acquire black jeans, black shirts, a couple of black hoodies, and shoes with really good traction. I even had my own lock picking kit, and had the best jewel thief in Antwerp as my mentor. This wasn’t what I had anticipated when I majored in Antiquities in college.

  Maybe I should have been concerned at how often breaking and entering seemed to come with the job. But I knew the danger that the objects we were dealing with presented, and the risk of getting caught seemed far less frightening than what the demon could do.

  Teag was dressed in all-black as well, looking a bit like a raven with his sharp features and dark eyes. I spotted his magical stole before he zipped his hoodie closed, and I saw the headscarf tied over his dark brown hair beneath his hood. In my mind, we looked like burglars, but I guess we could tell people we were on our way to a Goth outing.

  “You’ve got the head wrap and the stole,” I noted. “How about the hand loom and swords?”

  Teag nodded. “Yep. And I brought my fighting staff, too. Did you bring your lucky charms?” I knew he was trying to keep the mood light, but from the way he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, I also knew that he was nervous. So was I.

  “I’ve got them,” I replied. Bo’s collar was wrapped around my left wrist. I had a very strong sense of his presence, to the point of finding several of his hairs on my shirt, a shirt I had purchased after his passing.

  It could be that dog hair lingers forever in the carpet, but I chose to take it as a message of support from beyond the Rainbow Bridge.

  The amber spindle whorl was in my pocket. I had carefully removed it from its velvet bag so that I could get skin contact with it as soon as I put my hand in my pocket. I had the ring and the jet bracelet.

  And of course, I wore my agate necklace, purified and recharged in the light of last night’s moon. In the right sleeve of my hoodie, I had Grandma Sarah’s mixing spoon. I had Alard’s walking stick through a belt loop on my left hip.

  I spotted a bit of cloth sticking out of Teag’s pocket. “Did you bring something extra?”

  “Just something I thought about at the last minute,” he said. “I used to buy little things from Jimmy Redshoes once in a while, just to help the guy out. Sometimes, he would sit and whittle while he was waiting for a customer to come by, and he would sell some of the things he made.”

  Teag reached into his pocket and pulled out a carved wooden bird, then replaced it and zipped his pocket shut. “That was one of the last things I bought from him before he died. Since whatever’s haunting the storage facility probably killed Jimmy, I just had the feeling he’d want to go with us, at least in memory.”

  Memory, as I knew, had a powerful magic all its own. “I think he’d like that,” I said.

  Teag pulled out a short length of rope, knotted with nine knots. “The knots are a way of storing power,” he explained. “It’s part of a Weaver’s gift. I can use it to get a second wind, or give one of you a ‘recharge’.” He paused for a moment to steer. “I’ve got the hand loom pre-woven. It’s on my belt, so I can get to it fast if I need it.” As I was beginning to learn, magic is very personal, and items of power are not always what they appear to be.

  He glanced at me. “Let me anchor you if the ring isn’t enough. We don’t have much experience with the new pieces Sorren and Mirov gave us. You don’t need to get a full-fledged vision in the middle of a battle and go down for the count.”

  He wasn’t going to get an argument from me on that.

  It was after ten on a weeknight, and there wasn’t much going on. Once we left the historic district, traffic thinned out, and by the time we made our way to Chuck’s neighborhood, we went blocks without passing another car.

  The streetlight near Chuck’s house was dark, and there were no lights on inside his house when we drove up. “Think he lost his nerve?” Teag asked as we drifted to a stop by the curb. I looked around nervously.

  Then I spotted a figure moving out of the shadow of one of the tall trees in the front yard. I recognized the man’s gait before I saw the face, and knew that Chuck was up for the night’s work.

  I opened one of the van’s back doors from inside and Chuck jumped in. “Go!” he said, finding a spot on the floor and a hand-hold to keep himself from sliding around. I got back in my seat and Teag pulled away, making sure to stay well within the speed limit.

  I glanced back at Chuck. He wore a knit cap pulled down over his head and the collar of his black Eisenhower jacket turned up to partially hide his face. I wasn’t surprised that his jacket was ticking. Dark pants and work boots meant he was ready for action.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Chuck said. I could see a mix of emotions in his face: excitement, fear and maybe even a bit of hope that after tonight, his need to steal back his own clocks would be over. “I’m glad you got this arranged soon. I lost another clock today.”

  That would account for some of the fear I sensed, although any rational person would feel worried about the night’s agenda. “We’ll get you some new ones tonight,” I said. “And once we’ve gotten rid of the demon, we’ll move the rest somewhere safe where you can get to them easily.”

  “I kind of have a routine for going in,” Chuck said, zipping his jacket closed. “Like we used to have when we were going into a firefight. Soldiers are superstitious. When we come out of our first battle alive, we figure that we must have done something right, and after that, we try to do everything just the same before each fight, just in case.”

  He dug into a small pouch that hung on a lanyard beneath his vest. From it, he drew out a photograph. Chuck held it out for me to see. It was a picture of the same dark-
haired woman whose essence I had sensed when I was in his house, and the same children, at about the age I had glimpsed them in my vision.

  “That’s Emma,” Chuck said, and I noticed that a woman’s wedding ring also hung from the lanyard.

  “She’s gone, but sometimes, I think she’s still watching over me, you know? Those are my kids when they were little. Scott’s a truck driver out West – doesn’t get back to visit much. Diane’s married and has kids of her own.” He tucked the photo back into the pouch and slipped it under his vest.

  Chuck fixed me with a glare. “I’m glad you people aren’t any of those ghost hunters like on TV. God, those shows make me crazy. I started watching them, thinking I might learn something.”

  He made a disdainful gesture. “And what did I see? A lot of lousy video in bad lighting with everyone going, ‘Hey, did you hear something’ or ‘Wow, did you see that?’” He shook his head. “Bunch of wusses, the lot of them. They hear a couple of thumps and a whisper or two and they almost crap their pants.

  Take them somewhere like Stor-Your-Own, they’d be begging for their mommies.”

  Teag stifled a snicker, and I had to smile. Teag and I both watched those paranormal investigator shows as a guilty pleasure. We often compared notes the next day, laughing about the overblown reactions.

  I had met a couple of ghost hunters who were the real deal, and some urban explorers who had seen things they couldn’t explain. “Some of them do know what they’re doing,” I said. “Their producers are on their backs to make it look exciting, or they’ll get cancelled.”

  Chuck made a rude noise. “Yeah, well in my book, they’re all phonies. And what’s worse, they make it look easy to go up against the spooks. The worst that ever happens on those shows is that a door slams shut.” He met my gaze. “We know what happens when Moran’s demon catches up to someone.”

  We fell silent for the rest of the ride. In a few minutes, we got to the Navy yard entrance. Teag had intentionally kept the hood on his jacket down to avoid a second look from any cop who found hoodies suspicious. A couple of times, I thought I felt a tingle of magic as we passed some spots along the way, and I remembered that Lucinda had said that her friends had agreed to cast spells for our protection. I was grateful for the assistance.

  Teag drove on, slouched in his seat like a tired handyman. Nothing to see here, officer. Just finishing up a long day of work.

  I grabbed a bag next to my seat. Sorren had gotten us night-vision goggles. That kept us from shining our flashlights around like a beacon for the demon. I handed a pair to Chuck, who didn’t need any instruction on how to use them. I put mine in my lap and hung on to Teag’s until we got where we were going.

  Thanks to Sorren’s reconnaissance, Teag knew to pull the van into the parking lot of the business adjacent to Stor-Your-Own belonging to an abandoned shipping company.

  Teag had put an old license plate on the van and splattered it with mud. We turned and walked toward the street, then cut across in the shadows of a row of trees and made our way behind the dumpster to the Stor-Your-Own office.

  I stopped in front of the door, and looked down. “Salt,” I said quietly, and Teag glanced toward the ground and nodded. Someone had poured a thin line of salt all along the outside of the office wall, and it looked as if it ran to the fence, and maybe beyond.

  “Do you think it goes the whole way around?” Teag asked.

  “Could be,” I replied. If so, Lucinda’s friends had been busy. Salt was a protective barrier, and if magic had been added to the mix, then it might keep the shadow men and the akvenon from following us – but it wasn’t going to stop a demon.

  “Let’s get inside.” Sorren, as usual, had come up on us noiselessly, with Mirov a step behind. Lucinda was with them. I noticed that she was carrying the shaman’s staff from the Archive. Mirov and Lucinda were also wearing night vision goggles. Sorren didn’t need them.

  She smiled when she saw that I was looking at the staff. “I told Mrs. Morrissey that I needed it for a special event.” I thought I saw a faint glow from inside the large agate set in the top of the staff.

  “You’d better let me go first,” Chuck said. He had brought a small pair of wire cutters, and made an entrance for us through the chain link fence.

  Now that we were in the compound, I saw the old original brick warehouse more clearly, the one that had the long, bloody past. Even without going inside, I could feel a brooding heaviness that clung to the building. I wondered whether that was new since the triggering of the supernatural power. I doubted it; the building had too much history.

  Three other metal pole buildings filled the area inside the fence. Chuck’s clocks were in Building Three.

  He was pretty sure Moran and the demon were in the brick warehouse, Building Four.

  “Watch your step,” Chuck said. “There are places where the asphalt is split, and other places where it’s buckled. Easy to turn an ankle or worse. Once we get inside, watch where I walk. Some of the roof fell in with the last big storm. It’s a good thing there’s no power – bunch of electricty lines are down.”

  Chuck had insisted that he grab half a dozen clocks from his storage unit before we did anything else.

  Sorren agreed to remove the rest of his stash to another location after the demon had been handled. I was afraid that our delay would tip off Moran to our presence too early, but then again, I wasn’t in a hurry to face the demon, either.

  It seemed crazy to bother with the clocks when we had a demon to kill, but Chuck pointed out that in case things got out of hand – meaning that we blew up the entire compound – he wanted to make sure he got enough clocks to give him time to put his affairs in order before the rest ran down. Since blowing the place up wasn’t out of the question, and Chuck really thought he would die without his clocks, it made sense from a certain point of view.

  Chuck led the way, with Sorren and Mirov behind him. Lucinda insisted on being last, which put me behind Sorren and Teag behind me. I had one of those heavy, military-type flashlights on a carabiner on my belt loop, just in case. I had no desire to be trapped in the dark with a demon, night goggles or not.

  The closer we got to the storage buildings, the more uneasy I became. I had been careful to wear my hiking boots because the lug soles had good grip for running, and the rubber insulated me to an extent from contact with the ground. I had found out the hard way that I could ‘read’ the ground if there was enough emotional resonance.

  Even so, the collective memories of the storage facility vied for my attention, like distant voices just out of range. So many stories were tied up in the items people stored here. People made all kind of excuses for why they hung onto things they didn’t need, but often, the truth was simple. Storage units held the objects that were too disturbing to keep close at hand and too emotionally important to get rid of. I felt echoes of sadness, longing, and faint hope. So many people had come and gone through this space, both recently and in the Navy yard’s troubled past. The lug soles couldn’t completely insulate me from the power of the resonance.

  I glimpsed different emotions as I passed every unit, like feeling a draft of air conditioning on a hot day walking past open doorways. A few of the units were neutral or even happy, but most of the units gave off a sense of resignation and transience. Some of the units stood open, like gaping maws, their steel roll-down doors askew. Trash and leaves had blown into the vacant units that faced the outside. Empty boxes littered several of the units, and I got the distinct feeling that the renters had cleaned out their things in a hurry.

  “Cassidy?” Teag gave my arm a gentle shake. “Are you in there?”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m here. There’s just a lot of very strong resonance – much more than I usually get from just walking through a site.”

  I took a step and Teag pulled me back sharply by the arm. “Watch out!” he cautioned, and nodded toward where I had been about to walk.

  A sinkhole yawned dow
n into darkness. It had been hidden by the shadows cast by the other buildings.

  It looked deep, and I didn’t want to think about how far down the bottom might be. Not far from the sinkhole, the asphalt had cracked nearly down to the road bed, then buckled so that the crack gaped open and jutted several inches above the surface of the street. It seemed as if the compound itself had somehow conspired to make it as difficult and dangerous as possible for anyone to enter.

  “Mind your step,” Chuck cautioned. This time, a piece of sheet metal roofing lay twisted on the path.

  Chuck led us around the obstacle, kicking roofing nails and other debris out of his way. Chuck wasn’t taking any chances. He had his gun in his right hand, and his EMF disruptor in the other. He said he had fought demons with his Black Ops unit. I hoped he had stolen some of that equipment and brought it with him. He was a good guide, moving confidently through the rubble and wreckage.

  The green glow of the night vision goggles made the abandoned facility even creepier than it would have been, which was saying something. I liked not making a target of ourselves, but at the same time, broad daylight wouldn’t have been bright enough for me.

  Neglect was apparent as we walked closer to the buildings. Charleston’s heat and humidity make for a constant war against mold, mildew, and bugs. Since we’re on the Southeastern coastline, hurricanes and nasty storms are regular visitors. The summer’s brutally hot temperatures tend to fade paint, weaken wood and soften asphalt. Although Stor-Your-Own had only been out of business for six months, it was clear from looking around that it had not been properly maintained for some time.

  Were people so utterly deaf to natural energies that they could spend time in and around these buildings and not feel the evil? I wondered. I thought about Flora, whose job required her to walk through each building several times a day to clean up and monitor the site. And it cost Flora her sanity. Chuck led us to Building Three. “In here.”

  Stepping into the darkness, I felt as if I had been buried alive. One hand went to my agate necklace, while the other felt for the whorl in my pocket. I closed my hand over my ring, concentrating on dampening my gift and took several deep breaths. The darkness released its grip on me. The collar on my left hand felt warm, and I could feel Bo’s protective presence near me.