Wild Hunt, page 1
Contents
Title Page
WILD HUNT
More from Gail Z. Martin
About the Author
WILD HUNT
A Deadly Curiosities Adventure
by Gail Z. Martin
ISBN: 978-1-939704-07-8
© 2013 Gail Z. Martin, all rights reserved. This story may not be retransmitted, posted or reused in any way without the written permission of the author.
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WILD HUNT
“I fear the bones are haunted.” The old woman fingered her rosary and looked down. “I hope I’ve done the right thing coming here, but I don’t know where else to go.”
My partner, Dietger, reached over to pat her hand, and smiled reassuringly. “We’ll do whatever we can to help,” he replied. “Go ahead and drink your tea; it’ll take away the chill.”
April in Antwerp could be cold, at least if you were mortal. I’d been dead for a hundred years—undead—and I still hadn’t gotten used to the lack of body heat. It was one of the things I missed the most about being mortal, other than the taste of food, and being able to go out into the sunlight without catching on fire.
“Isn’t that true, Sorren?” Dietger said, with a tone that let me know he’d caught me woolgathering. “I was just reassuring Mevr. Geerts that she made the right decision to trust us with her concern over the odd relic that traveling monk brought to the city.”
Ah, the traveling monk, I thought, grateful that Dietger had framed the question in a way to help me recover. “Absolutely,” I said. “You’d be surprised how many times we encounter old objects that have a darker past than the present owner realizes.”
That was putting it mildly. Vanities, the antique and curio shop Dietger inherited from his father, was much more than it appeared, part of an underground alliance to remove dangerous magical and supernatural items from circulation. And it sounded like this relic was going to turn into a job for us.
“If Father Verhelst found out that I’d come here, I might lose my position,” she said, shifting in her chair. She was a plump woman in her sixth decade, and a lifetime of hard work showed in her calloused hands and careworn face. I’d overheard her tell Dietger that she was the housekeeper at St. Walpurgis Church’s rectory, which explained her concern over seeking us out. While Vanities’ role in keeping Antwerp safe from dark magic wasn’t exactly well-known outside select company, I doubted the Church would look fondly on our activities, or on my existence, for that matter.
“I assure you, we’ll handle this discreetly,” Dietger promised. He was in his mid-twenties, and I guessed he looked just as his late father, Carel, would have looked when he was that age. Light brown hair, cold blue eyes, and a pleasantly earnest manner befitting a respectable young shopkeeper.
The old woman drew her shawl around her. “Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I’ve heard the bones rattle in the reliquary that strange monk brought, and once, when I was passing by, I heard a voice laughing. It was a nasty kind of laugh, and it made my blood run cold.”
“Tell me more about the traveling monk,” Dietger prodded gently, and held out the tray of shortbread to Mevr. Geerts. Dietger and our guest were nearest the fireplace in the cramped little office behind the store. I purposely sat further back, partly in shadow, the better to avoid questions on my pallor, and my cold, cold skin.
“He arrived at the beginning of March,” she replied. “We hadn’t received any letters to arrange the visit; he just showed up one day, along with that box.” Mevr. Geerts hadn’t sworn, but I was quite sure from her tone that she really meant “that damned box.”
“Is that unusual?” Dietger was listening attentively, and I knew he was leaving it to me to assess our “client” with my sharper-than-mortal vampire senses.
“Unexpected visits?” She chuckled. “Not entirely. St. Walpurgis is an old church, with a long history. We get the occasional scholar, the pilgrims who come to ask our saint for healing, that sort of thing. But to have someone show up with a relic and claim to have bones from our saint’s body, that’s very unusual.” She shivered and sipped her tea. “Suspicious, even.”
I could hear the old woman’s heart beating faster than usual, smell the scent of fear, and could see the sheen of sweat on her forehead. Her hands shook a bit, I was willing to bet, more from emotion than palsy. She was afraid, and I was certain it went well beyond being discovered chatting with the owner of an antique shop.
“Do you have other relics from St. Walpurga?” Dietger asked, with that charming smile that made every woman over a certain age treat him like their beloved son. Even when I was alive, I never evoked that response, not even from my own mother. I’d been in my late twenties when I’d been turned, so I would always appear young, though I was now a centenarian. Dark blond hair, wiry build, and average-looking features made me forgettable, not a bad thing back when I was a jewel thief. My eyes were the only thing remarkable about me, blue-gray eyes the color of the sea when a storm is coming. I turned my gaze back to Mevr. Geerts in time to see her shake her head vigorously.
“No, and that was the first thing that made me suspicious of Friar Jansen,” she said. She looked up, and met my gaze. If she had any suspicions that I was more than I appeared, she wasn’t frightened of me, yet a traveling monk made her nervous? I was increasingly curious.
“Why?” Dietger probed.
Mevr. Geerts looked surprised. “Our saint’s bones are supposed to be in Eichstatt,” she responded. “Surely you’ve heard the story, how her body was buried on a rock ledge, and the stones weep a healing oil?”
I’d never been very religious even before I was turned, and even so, I thought I’d heard the legend somewhere. Dietger, too, nodded although I’d have bet that he was indulging the woman.
“I’ve never heard tell that the saint’s bones were scattered,” Mevr. Geerts went on with a scandalized tone. “Such a thing has happened, of course, to other saints, but not to Saint Walpurga. So I wondered right away just whose bones were in the reliquary, and why Friar Jansen happened to have them.”
A good question, I thought. The rectory’s housekeeper had obviously paid attention to her catechism. And I wondered why the same questions hadn’t occurred to Father Verhelst.
“Did Father Verhelst seem to think anything was strange, either about the monk showing up or about the relic?” Dietger asked.
Mevr. Geerts sighed. “No, but then again, he wouldn’t. Father Verhelst is a very good priest, but he accepts things at face value. I’ve been at the rectory for ten years, and I’ve never seen him question anything, whether it’s the bill from the butcher or the price of a load of firewood. He’s not a curious man.”
Not a curious man. I suspected that what Mevr. Geerts really meant was that our good Father Verhelst was likely to have received his position based more from family connections than because of his theological intellect. Personally, I found that people devoid of curiosity made my job easier. Back when I was a thief, non-curious people tended to see no reason to remember my face—all the better for me. Now, when my work involved stealing back things that had been stolen in the first place, in order to return them to their proper location, I traded on the public’s indifference and lack of curiosity to hide in plain sight.
“Did you tell Father Verhelst your concerns?”
Mevr. Geerts looked down. “It’s not my place to say such a thing, directly. When the monk first came, I did ask a few questions, as if I were interested in the saint and the relic, figuring that Father couldn’t fault me for questions about the faith.”
“And?”
She sighed. “Father seemed completely distracted, like he couldn’t imagine what I was talking about. Later, when I asked more questions, he got quite angry.” She looked up, meeting Dietger’s gaze with a desperate expression.
“That’s what worries me the most. Since that awful monk and his box of bones came, Father Verhelst has changed.” She paused, and I worried that she might not continue, but then she got up her courage to go on.
“Father might never be bishop, but he is a good parish priest,” she said loyally. “He cared about the parish and he worried over the people and their troubles. I never heard him lose his temper, even when some of our parishioners vexed him sorely.”
She let out a long breath. “I see that Father has a hot meal three times a day, and we used to chat while he ate and I cleaned up the kitchen. I enjoyed those chats, especially when he would repeat a joke he’d heard from someone in the town.” Mevr. Geerts shook her head. “But once the monk came, Father Verhelst seemed to pull away from everyone—everybody except that monk. He gave instructions for me to leave food in the kitchen for them, but that my presence was not required.”
I could see the obvious hurt in her face. “But it’s not just that,” she went on. “He’s gotten snappish with the parishioners, and he barely gives a homily at mass. Then when the alms basket went missing, and I told him about it, he got so angry I thought he might cuff me, and shouted for me to keep to the kitchen and not bother him.”
Dietger and I exchanged glances. A stranger comes to town unannounced, bearing a questionable relic, and things begin to go topsy-turvy. Not a good sign, I thought. From the look on Dietger’s face, the same thoughts had occurred to him.
“Has anything else strange happened since the monk came, anything at all?” he asked.
Mevr. Geerts thought for a moment. “It’s been a bad two months,” she said. “Until you asked, I was ready to say we’d just had a run of hard luck, which happ
If I’d been suspicious of Friar Jansen before, a slew of dead bodies sealed it. I was just about to say something when Mevr. Geerts went on.
“Then there’s the relic box itself,” she said. “It bleeds.”
Dietger frowned. We’d both heard stories about statues or icons that bled. Tales like that had been part of the lore of the saints for a long time. But somehow, I suspected that this was different.
“When did it bleed?” Dietger pressed. “And did you see it yourself?”
Mevr. Geerts nodded. “I saw it, more than once. And each time, right after someone in the parish died.”
“How can we get a look at this reliquary, without making either Father Verhelst or Friar Jansen suspicious?” Dietger asked. A new look had come into his eyes, like a dog on a hunt. I suspected the same was true for me.
Buoyed by our acceptance of her fantastical tale, Mevr. Geerts seemed to regain a little starch in her spine. “The saint’s day is coming up, and Father Verhelst is saying a special mass each evening leading up to it. Friar Jansen should be at mass, with his reliquary.”
“We’ll take a look—and we’ll make sure no one can link us to you,” Dietger reassured her. “How can we contact you safely, if we need more information?”
Mevr. Geerts thought for a moment. “I walk to the dairy every morning at eighth bells for a fresh bottle of milk. The road is usually empty on that stretch, if you happened to be passing that way at that time,” she said with a crafty smile. “And Friday evenings, after supper, I visit my husband’s grave. It’s in the back corner of the churchyard by a stand of trees, behind the charnal house, so the grave can’t be seen from the rectory.” I decided right then that Mevr. Geerts was nobody’s fool.
“We’ll find you if we discover anything,” Dietger promised. “And we’ll do whatever we can to help Father Verhelst and the parish be rid of the monk and his bone box.”
Mevr. Geerts let out a long breath. “Thank you. You’re good boys, both of you. Now I’d best be going, before anyone misses me.”
She turned down Dietger’s offer to walk her part of the way back to the church, and slipped out of the back door to the shop, glancing both ways to make sure she would not be seen before heading down the alley. Dietger locked the door behind her. He poured a glass of wine for himself and returned to his chair by the fire, motioning for me to join him.
“Unless Mevr. Geerts has a very active imagination, I think we’ve got another dangerous item that’s gotten loose,” Dietger sighed. “Now what do we do?”
“Damned if I know,” I replied. “Your father and Alard were the brains of the operation.” Alard was my maker, my father in the Dark Gift. It was Alard who had recruited Dietger’s father, Carel, into the business of scouting out dangerous objects. Alard and Carel were killed during our last mission, and before he died, Carel made both Dietger and me swear to continue their work. Unfortunately, neither of us had been privy to the business long enough to know what exactly that meant.
“What did your father tell you about his work with Alard?” I asked.
Dietger shook his head and took a sip of wine. “Not much. I was off at university and I’m sad to say I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the shop. I had met Alard on occasion, but I discovered he was a vampire quite by accident, when I got nosy about the strange marks on father’s arm.”
“Did you know Alard was extending your father’s life?”
Dietger sighed. “No, although I thought it was remarkable that father was so spry for his age. He was longer-lived than the rest of the family, and I was happy to put it down to cautiousness and clean living,” he added with a deprecating smile.
“How about you? Do you know how Alard disposed of the items?”
It was my turn to look chagrinned. “If you mean, do I have a ready list of his contacts, no. For the first while after I’d been turned, Alard just told me what I needed to do for the job. I was in the business of stealing, and I figured Alard used the things I stole to maintain our rather comfortable lifestyle.”
If I had needed to breathe, I would have let out a long sigh. “As time went by, and Alard learned to trust me, I began to get a glimpse behind the curtain. Some of the items we destroyed. Some we had to return to the place they’d been taken from, because they were part of a binding spell or curse. Then there were the few that Alard ”took care of.””
“Do you know how he took care of them?” Dietger asked, taking another swallow of wine.
I grimaced. “Not really. Sometimes, Alard would go out with the object, and come back without it. Once or twice, he met someone, exchanged a few words, and the stranger took the package. No introductions were made.”
“So you have no idea who he contacted or how he set up the meetings,” Dietger summarized, “or how he decided which items to handle himself and which to hand off?”
“Not precisely,” I admitted. “As the years went on, I started to ask more questions. Alard always answered me, but now I see that his answers left a good bit unsaid.” I paused. “Although I may have overlooked something.”
Dietger raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
I looked away. “A number of years ago, after one of our “jobs” got a bit dicey and Alard and I nearly didn’t survive, Alard gave me a key to a flat outside of Antwerp and told me that I must only use the key if he had been destroyed.” I wondered now Alard had a premonition about the mission that killed him. In a hundred years, Alard had never brought me to Antwerp, though we traveled all over Europe together.
“What did you find?” Dietger asked, in a tone that let me know he had repeated the question more than once to jolt me out of my thoughts.
“Nothing. I mean, I haven’t gone yet.” Alard’s passing was so recent, and my grief so fresh, that I had put off going, as if procrastination could make his death less final.
“Father told me that, if anything happened to him, I should go to the Crooked Gate, an inn on the outskirts of town, and ask for a box they were keeping for “de Heer Oldman.””
“Oldman,” I chuckled. “An interesting nom de guerre. And did you go?”
Dietger nodded, and drained the rest of his wine. He stood and crossed to a large desk, which he unlocked, withdrawing a small iron box that was also locked. I watched as he withdrew the key from a chain around his neck, and opened the box. Inside was a yellowed piece of parchment, which he handed to me.
I read down through the cramped handwriting, and looked up. “It’s the deed to a burial vault in Groenplaats,” I said.
“With a note that I’m to ”pay my respects” to the vault in the event something were to happen to father,” Dietger remarked. “The wording is very specific. It says nothing about burying father there. Just a mandate for me to visit.” He paused. “And no, before you ask, I haven’t gone yet, either. It’s only been a few weeks … I just wasn’t ready.”
“Sounds like we’ve both got tasks to do—once we take care of Mevr. Geerts’ little relic problem.”
“She said Father Verhelst was holding special masses this week,” Dietger said. “Let’s go have ourselves a look at that box of bones.”
“I don’t know why you think I needed to come along,” I muttered as we approached St. Walpurgis Church. The old stone church was not as elaborate as the city’s newer cathedrals, but what it lacked in architectural ornamentation, it made up for in a sense of permanence, as if it sprang from the bedrock of the land beneath it.
“I want to get your impression of our good traveling monk,” Dietger replied. He paused and looked at me. “Unless there’s a reason you can’t enter?”
I knew what he meant. It was a common misunderstanding that vampires could not enter a church or stand in the presence of holy relics. Alard had explained these rumors, one of the few times his voice had grown bitter. Those of us with the Dark Gift were not cursed by God, as churchmen assured the masses. Nor were we abominations, Alard said, no more so than any other predators on the face of the Earth, including mortals, the deadliest of all nature’s killers. Vampires avoided churches for a single reason: we were certain most of the church-goers would happily murder us if we were revealed.
