City of Shadows

by Declan Finn

  His entire focus was set on me. His teeth clenched as though he was in the middle of the most strenuous labor of his life.

  “Help. Me. Polly,” Fowler demanded, his voice strained.

  Lady Toynbee switched hands with the pistol and reached over to grab the Soul Stone.

  I reached forward and laid the very tips of my fingers on the forward tip of the stone. “I forgive you both. Don’t destroy yourselves. You can’t do this.”

  Fowler growled, an angry, feral animal. “Damn you, Nolan. Damn you. And your priest. And your church! And your God!”

  Considering what happened to Shaw, I knew what would happen next. “I’m sorry.”

  Fowler’s eyes widened, infuriated. “How dare you think you can apologize to me. You could never atone for your crimes.”

  “No. I’m sorry for you.”

  Fowler and Toynbee glared at me as though they could burn me down by glaring hard enough.

  The Soul Stone magnified hate, corruption, and sin. But it was in a church. It had been submerged in holy water overnight. It had been prayed over by a combat exorcist. It could magnify corruption and darkness all it liked … but it couldn’t absorb it.

  And I wouldn’t let it.

  Fowler screamed, first in range, then in pain. A flicker of flame started in his mid-chest, then spread. It broadened out in a circle of fire that consumed him.

  “Rest in peace,” I said gently.

  “No! Noooooo!”

  The fire flashed out, vaporizing both Fowler and Toynbee.

  I caught the Soul Stone before it could hit the ground.

  “Well done,” Pearson said. “Did you have to kill them?”

  I looked over my shoulder at Pearson. “I didn’t. I tried to warn them.”

  “So that wasn’t even a bit of reverse psychology?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. Sorry. I genuinely tried to save them. They couldn’t control the stone, and it magnified everything inside them. And let it fester there. It ate them up.”

  Pearson nodded, looking over at where they’d been. “And made an ash out of all of them. I see that.”

  I sighed, considering the next step. “We’re still fugitives. Even a bastard like Shaw probably wrote down our names and alleged crimes before coming out to kill us. Now that the lead investigator and the accusers are all dead, you can be sure everyone else on the police force will come after us.”

  Pearson simply smiled at that. He reached into his blazer pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “These are all cameras now, remember. I think I can talk some sense into the authorities.”

  22

  Tea in The Tower

  Father Pearson had turned over all of his video evidence to the police. And to the media. And streamed it to the Internet. All three sources went out of their way to purge, scrub, and delete it from memory. The police and the government were quite happy to forget that I, or the Soul Stone, even existed. In fact, they went out of their way to be hospitable about it. Some nameless government minister made certain to loan us Fowler’s private jet.

  Within twenty-four hours after the mysterious deaths of Fowler and his wife, their entire estate was confiscated by the British government for liquidation.

  It was all covered up in a very prim, proper, very British fashion.

  The day after the incident with Fowler and Toynbee, Pearson took me out to see the Tower of London. I spent some thirty minutes pondering the life and times of my baptismal patron, Thomas More. I then set about ignoring the tower’s history of false imprisonment and death and focused on it being a very picturesque spot next to the Thames. We stopped off at the Tower McDonald’s (Yes, it’s real. You might imagine that none of the people who worked at the Tower were very happy about it existing) and grabbed a tea.

  Pearson went off to talk with some people who worked there that he knew from “the old days,” and left me to my thoughts, looking out at the Thames. It was peaceful, quiet. Aside from the width, it was like every other river. Eyeing it, I couldn’t say it was any wider than the Hudson or East rivers. The flow was smooth and peaceful. The wind was gentle and calm…

  And then I smelled it. Evil. Not as corrupt as a demon, but certainly as vile as a human being seeped in sin and spiritual sewage.

  Before I turned to face it, I heard … applause. The noise was vigorous and excited. Even joyous.

  I turned to face the man who had jockeyed for the number one position in haunting my nightmares. He was tall and lanky. His skin was light brown, a color palate that could pass for anything in the Mediterranean. His smile was big and broad, with teeth so white they could be seen in the dark. He was bald as an egg. Today he wore a tourist board knockoff of kente cloth, swathed in a robe of yellow, with a pattern of red and green.

  He laughed with a great, booming, melodious voice, and said, in his Haitian accent, “Congratulations Detective Nolan! On your great success!”

  Bokor Baracus, Voodoo necromancer and bane of my existence, bent down his nearly seven-foot height, swept up his coffee mug, and strode over to join me. I stood to one side of a park bench, and he stood at the other.

  I looked him up and down. The last time I had seen him, he had been on fire, being burned away by a chemical so complex I didn’t ask how it set concrete on fire, as he expelled clouds of toxic acid that melted glass. By the time the fires burned out, there had been nothing left of him. And if there had been, they would have been consumed by the massive fireball of sulfur that fell out of the sky, struck the house, set it on fire, and created a temporary portal to Hell that sucked in Bokor’s boss, warlock Mayor Ricardo Hoynes.

  But Baracus looked none the worse for wear.

  I took a sip from my tea, my eyes never leaving him. “So. Why am I not shooting you?”

  Baracus laughed in that booming, melodic voice. “You have no gun. That’s why.” He shook his head as though I said something a little stupid and very funny. He looked out over the river Thames, sipping his own McDonald’s hot cup.

  I nodded. That made sense at least. “Then why aren’t you summoning a small zombie army to kill me?”

  “As though that worked last time. Ha!” Baracus grinned with those big white teeth. “Because no one is paying me to kill you.”

  I raised a brow, studying him. Baracus looked at me and sighed. “You seem to misunderstand me, Detective. I am merely a mercenary. I was paid already. Well over a month ago.”

  I squinted at him, trying to make him focus … or make myself focus on him. I wasn’t entirely clear at the time. “Didn’t Alex kill you? Should I even ask how?”

  Baracus laughed. “I am a necromancer. Killing me is more difficult than that.”

  I nodded. I felt stupid for even asking. “If you’ve been paid, then what are you doing here?”

  He shrugged casually, as though he were just in the neighborhood. “Nothing. I merely wanted to congratulate you on your latest victory.”

  I blinked, confused. “Why?”

  Baracus turned to face me now, taking a sip. He studied me for a moment this time. “Detective Nolan, I am very much the opposite of you in every sense of the word. I do not serve others for the sake of serving. I serve myself, and I work for money. Or favors. Or power. In terms of Heaven and Hell, I am a mercenary who works for Hell. If only because Heaven would not do the things I would want it to do. But in the grand scheme of the battle between good and evil, I want no one to win. If good wins, the source of my power stops, I die and go to Hell. If evil wins … I am no longer useful, so there is no reason for my Friends on the Other Side to grant me powers. I die, and I go to Hell. Either way, it does not end well for me. Controlling a city? That is fine. It will not end the world. Destroying a city? Again, it is not the end of all.”

  I tilted my head, thinking it over. Destroying a city? “You were involved with the Soul Stone?”

  Baracus shrugged. “After a fashion. I was a consultant. They wanted my expertise, and I left. To be honest, I was glad to be rid of them all.” />
  I blinked, taken aback. “They were too evil for you?”

  Baracus barked a laugh. “No. There is no such thing as too evil for me. But they did not understand. Kozbar believed he was working for God. The Lord and Lady thought they were dealing with an alien artifact. I told them what I could of the legends and moved along.”

  I raised one eyebrow. “You didn’t translate the glyphs for them?”

  Again, a big, exaggerated shrug. “They did not ask. I did not tell them.”

  I almost smiled. “Your friends on the other side wouldn’t object?”

  Baracus paused, his own smile fading. “That is a risk I decided to take. Besides, no one would believe me if I told them. Or if they did believe me, they would have thought it would not have applied to them. So the end results would be similar.”

  I nodded slowly, absorbing just how crafty Baracus had to be to keep alive without getting burned by his friends on the other side. “How about telling me what they mean?”

  Baracus’s mouth bunched up in one corner in a half smile. “Now now, that would be telling. Besides, Detective, I suspect you’ve gotten the gist of it already. Especially if I understood what happened to the Lord and Lady, and their pet policeman.”

  After a fashion, he was correct. “Should I ask where you’re going next?”

  “No. But you may ask where I’ve been.”

  “You were just in New York a few months ago.”

  “And between New York and London,” Baracus corrected, “I was in Germany.”

  I blinked. He had actually told me. I almost didn’t believe him. But then I realized that Fowler and Toynbee had also spent bundles of money bringing “refugees” into Germany as well as London. If they were the same type of refugee, I would be spending time there as well. And he had to be crafty enough to walk a fine line between serving the powers of Hell, but not yet

  “Why tell me about it?” I asked him. “Another way to keep Hell from winning?”

  Baracus smiled evilly this time, and his eyes narrow. “No. Their last check bounced.” He put the cup to his lips and drank deeply. “I will see you around, Detective. One day, you and I will meet again. I look forward to offering you up to my Friends. You will pay a great many debts one day. I might even retire from this life with you as my payment.”

  “As the kids say, bring it.”

  Baracus nodded, almost a theatrical bow. “I will. One day. But today is not your day.”

  Back in Rome, Auxiliary Bishop Xavier O’Brien leaned back in his chair and read my report. “Germany, he said?”

  I nodded. “It’s all there.”

  XO nodded, reading the report through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “We’ll keep an eye on Germany the best we can. If we’re lucky, all of those donations from Fowler to refugee causes will make it easy to trace what Baracus was doing there.”

  “And what about Baracus?” I asked.

  “While he’s a threat, we’re not in the business of assassination. Hunting him down isn’t on the agenda. If we can stop him, we can and we will. But if he’s just out and about, merely existing, that’s another conversation. He’s dangerous but not actively trying to destroy the world.”

  “This week.”

  XO laughed and coughed on some smoke. “True. This week. But we can only work on one week at a time.”

  I nodded. “And the Soul Stone?”

  “We’ll keep it in the basement,” XO said. “If we file it away, it’ll be safely lost in the backlog of artifacts and documents until long after the two of us are dead and gone. The nice thing everyone forgets is that secreta in the “secret” archives means “unsorter,” not “hidden” or “secret.” We’re going to bury it in the thousand years of paperwork. It’s the next step to filing it away in a warehouse of crates next to the ark of the covenant. Heck, we only just found the annulment papers filed by Henry VIII a few years ago. At the very least, when they find it again, I’ll be dust and a few scraps of bone.” XO eyed me up and down. “Though if you become one of the incorruptibles, I’ll be amused.”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t meant to ask about that, though it was nice that he told me about it. “I meant how does it operate?”

  XO gave me a look as though he didn’t believe me. “From this report, I think you have a fairly good guess.”

  “Humor me.”

  XO looked at me for several long, slow puffs. “You know what Enochian script is, yes?”

  “It’s a cipher made in the … what? Late medieval? Early modern period? Usually called the script of the angels?”

  XO nodded. “Close enough. Late fifteen hundreds.” He put down the report and let out a long, slow stream of smoke into the air, where the top window of his office was open. “You see, we have some of our own specialists and historians. They know actual Enochian script, the real language of the angels, not that half-assed cipher drawn up by some occultist.”

  XO moved the pipe to the corner of his mouth and brought the chair down, leaning forward. He reached into his desk drawer and came up with the Soul Stone. He handled it like he would any dust collector from his mantelpiece. He held it towards me, silver-side first, and ran his finger along the glyphs.

  “The silver glyphs tell you that ‘he who worships God and loves His people will wield this stone in joy for all the days of their life.’ ” XO turned the stone upside down. “The red glyphs mean that ‘those who dwell in sin and—”

  “—and live in corruption,” I filled in, “shall be destroyed by the stone.”

  XO looked over the stone at me. I shrugged. “For some reason, it just became really clear to me,” I explained.

  “Reading in tongues now, too? Gee, you’re a fricking Swiss army knife of charisms.” He placed the Soul Stone on his towering in-box pile as though it were a paperweight. “So you see, the stone isn’t pure evil in and of itself. Nothing pure evil can exist. It doesn’t absorb purely vile vibrations of the soul. It’s a metaphysical battery. It can be charged with feelings of pain or feelings of love. But as you guessed, it doesn’t take an evil person to use it, just someone of will to use it. The power itself isn’t evil. It’s simply power. Like a battery, it can be plugged into a bomb or into a light bulb. Even the Jihadists were able to power their small flecks just with the power of their own rage and hatred.”

  “But I don’t get it,” I told him. “Where did the stone come from? The legends say Anubis handed it over?”

  XO sighed, leaning on the desk heavily on one elbow. “Remember that history goes back only six thousand years, give or take. Humans themselves have been around for a few million years, also give or take. Even in the 1920s, archaeologists were digging up signs and artifacts that pointed to a monotheistic culture. Even before Abraham. So most people understood that there was one God. Over time, myths developed. Polytheism sprang up as cultures came, collided, and went.” He poked the Soul Stone with the butt of his cigarette. “This came from a time when giants walked the Earth. Back when Genesis was current events. The time of vampires and elves, and myths. If you’re a fan of Lord of the Rings, consider it a Silmaril—a stone of light. In the right hands, anyway.”

  I paused for a long moment, and we sat there in silence for a long moment. “So I gathered.” I shifted in my chair. “So, now what? Do I head out to Germany?”

  XO smiled around his cigarette. “And do what? Investigate every random crime until you hit upon the sinister plot? No. Get out of here. Spend time with your family. You’ve finished the mission. Take a break. I was told you should be having a daughter sometime soon. Get on the plane before she shows up. Your ticket is waiting for you in your cell.”

  My face broke out in a wide grin. “Thank you.”

  XO snorted, smoke coming out of his nostrils. “Don’t thank me. You’re the one who saved London from becoming a smoking crater. Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord, or whatever.”

  I laughed, shot out of the chair, and left. I was going home.

  Coming Soon
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  Come back next month for Crusader, book five of Saint Tommy, NYPD!

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