Trifles and Folly 3, page 10
The longer we stayed in the house, the more I could sense the evil, the sheer malice of the curse. I couldn’t imagine how Amy managed to live there, except that she had already given up hope. We were likely her last chance, and that firmed my resolve to find a way to ease her suffering even if we couldn’t set things back to how they were before.
“Do you have any enemies? Anyone who would hate you enough to do this?” I asked. Of all the supernatural phenomena I run into, I hate dark magic the most because of the intentional cruelty.
“I didn’t think so,” Amy replied, toying with the e-cig. She took a sip of the whiskey in her mug. “I mean, you never know in a corporate job. Someone who wanted my job, someone who got passed over for a promotion and blamed me, someone I fired.” She shrugged. “I tried not to be a bitch, you know? Didn’t have a problem giving orders but tried not to be a dick about it. Got good 360-reviews from bosses, co-workers, subordinates. Outside vendors asked to work with me. Never gave the neighbors any reason to call the cops.” She shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“Your ex-husband?”
“Rob? He wasn’t a vengeful kind of guy. Decided to go into the priesthood. Imagine that. Wasn’t even Catholic. Kinda hard to argue that he shoulda picked me over God, you know?”
“Anyone who might have known about your magic?”
She gave me a hard stare, trying to figure out whether I was mocking her. “No. My mother was disappointed that I couldn’t do more, but she died five years ago. No sisters. I mean, the plant magic I can’t use without getting a rash isn’t much of a threat to anyone.”
“And you have no idea who sent it?”
Amy shook her head. “No. I went over the packaging to figure out where it came from so I could send a ‘thank-you’ note.” She shrugged. “My mom was a real stickler for manners. Even took it to the post office and the UPS place, but they couldn’t trace it back to anyone. Apparently, someone paid cash to mail it from a small town on the way to Myrtle Beach. There’s no trail.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the vase that ruined your life.”
Even in the basement inside an old refrigerator, the vase still polluted the house with so much dark magic I could feel it like a coating on my tongue.
“I put it down here, trying to see if I could get away from it,” Amy said. “Maybe I should have tried putting plants in it and getting them to grow over it, but I figured it would give me poison ivy.”
Up close, the curse felt old and complex. “Whoever sent this to you didn’t create the bad magic,” I said, struggling not to recoil even from several feet away. “It’s a very old vase, centuries maybe. It should be in a museum.”
That triggered a thought. I excused myself and walked up the basement steps to get a signal on my phone, then speed-dialed Alistair. When I described the vase, he recognized it immediately as one of his stolen treasures.
“Um, I don’t think you want it back,” I said and told him briefly about its curse. “Since it’s already ‘missing,’ how about we agree this conversation never happened, and I get some friends with special abilities to make it go away, so it never hurts anyone again?” Alistair agreed faster than I expected, so I could do what I intended to do anyhow with a clear conscience.
“One more thing,” I said before Alistair could hang up. “Do you know who the collector was who owned the vase?” I listened and closed my eyes when I heard “Massachusetts.” “All right. Thanks. We’ll handle it.”
“It’s Etruscan. Even older than I thought,” I told Amy. “Somebody stole it from a museum. I just spoke to the curator. Some temple cults had ‘curse jars’ they believed drew on the power of the gods. I can’t say for sure where this thing gets its juju, but I can get rid of it for you.”
“Will that fix anything?” Amy asked, although the look on her face told me she already knew the answer.
“Probably not,” I replied reluctantly. “But it should stop more from going wrong. And maybe things will take a turn for the better.”
The old refrigerator looked like it had been in the basement for a long time, because it was probably from the 1950s. I remembered a movie where a guy climbed in one to survive a nuclear bomb. And yet, it hadn’t completely stopped the curse.
Kell and I went out to my car and returned with a lead box that was heavy as hell and a big canister of salt.
“I don’t know whether this vase has some kind of evil spirit attached to it, but it might fight us getting rid of it until it’s finished its mission.”
Amy blanched, guessing that the “mission” had been to kill her. “All right. What do you need me to do?”
I smiled at the first sign of fighting spirit Amy had shown since we arrived. “For now, just stand out of the way—unless any killer plants sneak up on us,” I added with a tight smile.
“Gotcha,” Amy replied.
I took a deep breath and let my left hand rest on the protective stones of my agate necklace. I kept its energy charged up by placing it out in the light of the full moon each month and having the blessing of a Voudon mambo renewed every time I relied on its power to help me out of a tight spot. In my right hand, I gripped a big canister of salt.
Kell stood behind me with a pair of iron tongs coated in silver and blessed with holy water. The lead box had a protective coating of salt inside, and inscribed runes and sigils covered every surface, creating additional levels of protection. It was the supernatural equivalent of a hazmat container, and I was really glad we had brought it along.
Touching something with that kind of evil magic would be a big mistake, considering my psychometry. But I couldn’t let Kell—a guy who believed in the paranormal but had zero magic of his own—take the first shot.
“Okay,” I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt, “I’m going to dump the salt into the vase. No idea how it will react, but I doubt it will go over well. Assuming we don’t get a mushroom cloud, you grab it with the tongs and put it in the box. Try not to break it—if there’s a spirit or demon trapped inside, we don’t want to make things worse by setting it free.”
Kell accepted my instructions like they were the most normal thing in the world. Amy stared at us, and I could tell she was wondering what kind of batshit crazy people were loose in her house.
“Trust me, I’m a professional,” I said with a wry smirk. “This probably won’t be the worst thing I’ll see this month.” True, but also depressing. I didn’t have time to dwell on it.
I lunged forward, hoping the vase didn’t have a sentient spirit possessing it and pulled the sliding refrigerator shelf forward, then dumped the salt out as fast as it would pour. An enraged shriek split the air, making the walls tremble, and I wondered if my ears were going to bleed. If I had laid my head on top of the most obnoxious and loud ambulance/police/fire siren in the world when it was going off full-tilt, it couldn’t have been more deafening or painful. I gritted my teeth and kept the salt stream steady, vowing to make a bigger hole in the canister next time, because it was taking too damn long.
Thick black smoke began to pour from the vase. It smelled like a funeral pyre.
“Hold your breath!” I shouted to the others, ducking my face inside the collar of my shirt to try to keep the noxious, greasy smoke from getting in my nose and mouth. My head felt like it was going to crack open from the shrieking, and my lungs burned as I tried not to breathe. The canister grew lighter in my grip, but the thing inside the vase wasn’t subdued.
“Water!” I shouted at Kell, who ran forward and sloshed a generous amount of holy water onto the vase and a fair amount of spillage onto me. The smoke turned to sizzle, like meat cooking on hot coals. I choked back the need to puke and decided right then I wasn’t eating steak for a long time.
“Go!” I yelled as I poured out the last of the salt.
Kell’s mouth was a grim line of determination as he grabbed the tongs in a relay from hell and clamped on to the lip of the vase, lifting it gingerly from the shelf and carrying it a few feet away to the lead box. When he snapped the lid shut and wound silver chains around it, just for good measure, the air cleared like the break in the clouds after a tornado.
“Is it…gone?” Amy asked.
I shook my head. “Contained. Still dangerous, but that’s spell-worked, blessed lead with silver and salt. It’ll hold just about everything except Lucifer himself.” Maybe.
“Don’t think I’m not grateful, but…what are you?” Amy asked hesitantly.
“An antique dealer and a ghost hunter,” I replied truthfully.
She let that slide. “What are you going to do with it? Can something like that be destroyed?”
I intended to give the box and its problematic contents to Sorren to dispose of. My guess was we’d have Father Anne do an exorcism, just in case, and then Sorren would probably hand it off to the Briggs Society, an odd, secretive group that served as the supernatural equivalent of a bomb disposal unit.
“We’ll make sure it never hurts anyone again,” I promised her. “And if you like, I can have a priest or a mambo stop by to dispel any remaining bad energy.” I paused. “Amy, you haven’t seen a man with auburn hair and scruff of red beard—you know, the trimmed stubble style—have you?”
Amy thought hard. “That sounds familiar, but it’s not anyone I know. I might have seen someone like that. Wait,” she said, and I didn’t blame her for being a little scrambled after all she had been through. “I did see him. I thought maybe he was new in the neighborhood. He’s been around for the last week or so. Not stalkerish, just passing on the sidewalk, sitting on a bench in the park down the street, and I wondered if he’d just moved in.”
“He didn’t try to talk to you or get into the house?” I pressed.
Her eyes widened. “Hell, no! Why, do you think he will? Break in, I mean.”
I knew Amy had been through a lot, and I didn’t want to needlessly worry her, but I also knew that forewarned is forearmed. “I’m not sure,” I replied truthfully. “He’s turned up in some odd situations lately, and we don’t know who he is. If he does approach you, don’t tell him anything about the vase and get away quickly. You might want to stay in well-traveled areas. And if he comes to the house—”
“Don’t worry. I won’t let him in,” she said with a tired smile. She took a deep breath and let it out again, willing herself to relax.
“It’s over,” she murmured, more to herself than for our benefit. “It’s finally over.” But it wasn’t, not really. Whoever had hated her enough to ruin her life had done a damn fine job of it, with damage that couldn’t be set right. What we could do was find the person behind the attack and make sure they paid for what they had done.
“Thank you,” Amy said, walking us to the door as Kell and I carried the lead box between us. “And when you find out who did this—kick their asses for me.”
Kell and I agreed to take a raincheck on dinner since neither of us wanted to leave the lead box and its toxic treasure in my trunk any longer than necessary. I called Sorren, and he was waiting at the back door of Trifles and Folly when I arrived, with Teag behind him, looking worried and curious.
“Got a new wrinkle,” I reported as Sorren transferred the box to his car. “The victim is a witch.”
Sorren and Teag listened intently as I told them what had happened at Amy’s home. At my description of the vase—and Alistair’s confirmation of its origin—Sorren actually winced.
“I’ll give Archibald Donnelly a call,” he said when I finished. “He’s best prepared to deal with something like that. He can either find a way to dispose of it without bringing about an apocalypse or put it in that damned wunderkammern of his with the rest of the things that should never see the light of day.”
Donnelly was a powerful necromancer and the guardian of the Briggs Society, an arcane organization that slipped through time and space, removing particularly dangerous objects and providing shelter for those explorers unfortunate enough to be caught in a time glitch. If anyone could deal with a murderous Etruscan curse pot, it would be Donnelly.
“It turns out Amy was friends with Maria and accidentally got her caught up in the curse. So now we know what was going on at the auction. And we’ve got a Massachusetts connection,” I added, recounting what I’d learned. “Did you find out anything from your Boston people?”
“I have them working with contacts in the Haven Harbor community,” Sorren replied. “That town was founded by the witches and their families lucky enough to flee Salem and escape the Trials. Among themselves, they’re pretty open about their magic, but you can understand why they’d be hesitant to trust outsiders.”
Sorren had told me all about what happened in Salem from a unique point of view, since he had been living in the Colonies at the time. He’d avoided the more religious settlements since they liked vampires as much as they liked witches, but members of the supernatural community took any persecution of other paranormals personally. Sorren recalled horrors the history books had long forgotten. I shivered.
“Do you think someone from there is behind the attacks?” I asked. Something about that theory struck me wrong, although the link provided strong circumstantial evidence.
Sorren frowned. “I doubt it, unless they’ve got a rogue. In which case, I would expect they’d be trying to stop the perpetrator themselves and contain the damage.”
“That red-haired guy,” Teag said, just as the same thought crossed my mind.
“I didn’t see him, but Amy said he’s been around in the neighborhood. She thought he was a new neighbor.”
Teag went to fetch his laptop. “Let me see if there are any security cameras I can hack in that area,” he said. “Of course, if it’s like the last time, he gets lost in a lens flare,” he muttered. “I’m still betting witch or shapeshifter.”
“I’m betting perp or P.I.,” I replied. “What do you think the odds are that he’s either the one behind the attacks or he’s been sent by the Haven Harbor people to get their items back or stop a witch who’s gone off the rails?”
“Pretty high, actually,” Sorren replied. “Let me give them his description and see what they come up with. You know I remember what happened in Salem—and some of the original settlers in Haven Harbor were friends of mine. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy, but there could be a bad apple. I promise you, I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
CHAPTER 4
“How do people figure this stuff is harmless?” Teag muttered under his breath as we made the rounds a special exhibit at one of Charleston’s many galleries. As fellow merchants on King Street, showing face at neighboring shop’s open houses and receptions was part of doing business, even if I sometimes just longed for an evening at home binge-watching old movies and snuggling my little Maltese dog, Baxter.
“Because they don’t watch TV or read horror novels,” I replied. “Or they think all that stuff is just pretend.” As if.
Normally I adored the displays at the Glassworks shop. The Dale Chihuly exhibit had me swooning, and the Murano glass spectacular dazzled me with color and craftsmanship. I could only fault Halloween enthusiasm for the unfortunate theme of the current end of October event. “Lucifer-Morningstar: The Lightbringer.”
“You’d think the church people would be picketing or something,” Teag murmured. “After all, this is the ‘Holy City.’” Charleston has a historic church on just about every corner, and it has its Old School adherents. Either the kinds of folks who took to picketing on a Saturday night thought they’d get more bang for their buck protesting a violent movie, or they didn’t keep track of what the chi-chi art galleries were up to. Either way, to my relief, the street outside was empty of anything more than the usual traffic.
The tourist rush was over, but late October was a wonderful time to see the city when the heat and humidity hovered at more reasonable levels. Cool breezes tempered the remaining warmth, and I’d probably be able to turn off my air conditioning soon. Still, shoppers packed the gallery, and I hoped as we queued up to enter, that the provocative title was just a stroke of marketing genius.
“Uh-oh.” Teag pointed, and I followed his direction to see arcane sigils etched into the glass of an elaborate set of hurricane lanterns, twining up and around the crystal chimneys in an intricate, magically significant pattern.
“Recognize them?” I asked quietly.
Teag frowned. “Nothing dark there, mostly protection runes. Handy in a hurricane, but you’d be better off with a good generator.”
I greeted David and Ed, the shop owners, and complimented them on the beautiful exhibit. Despite my reservations from a magical perspective, the gallery looked wonderful, filled with candlelight reflecting and refracting through crystal lamps, candelabra, candlesticks, and lanterns, made even more beautiful with silver knick-knacks and handmade mirrors.
David and Ed thanked us for coming and accepted my gushing remarks, but they both seemed edgy. I wanted to ask what possessed—no pun intended—them to go with a Lucifer theme, but I couldn’t quite figure out the right way to bring it up. When Ed slipped outside to talk to someone, I followed discreetly, leaving Teag to work the room and scope out potentially dangerous baubles.
Tonight, the gallery had a wine bar set up just inside the big front windows, so I had an excuse to work my way up to where I could see the street. Ed was talking with a couple of cops, and from his expression and gestures, he seemed pretty worked up about something.
Just then, three fire engines raced down the street, sirens blaring.
I took my glass of wine and one for Teag and turned back to the exhibit, having lost my pretense to hover by the window. When I rejoined Teag, he looked worried.
“Ed’s talking to the cops. Something’s wrong,” I reported.
“Dave looks a little twitchy,” Teag agreed. “He should be working the room like a boss, and he’s not. That’s unusual.”
I nodded. “How about the display pieces? Anything likely to summon the Antichrist or open the gates of hell?”
