"But this thing didn't act like a zombie," I said.
"Because it didn't shamble around, moaning and trying to eat your brain?"
"Let me guess: more movie fiction?"
"Yep. Not that you guys would know that. Zombies are the dirty little secret of the supernatural world. We know they exist, but we try not to think about them. Most necros go their whole lives without ever raising one. They're just...nasty. And I don't just mean the smell. A zombie is a ghost returned to a corpse. Not nice for anyone, especially the spook. Last one I saw was a dog raised by a kid necro. Like in Pet Sematary...only the dog had been hit by a car, and the kid thought the raising would fix him, and of course it didn't, so his uncle calls me in and..." She paused. "And that story, while instructive to any teen necromancer, isn't going to help you. Where was I?"
"Zombies. Which don't normally disintegrate into dust."
"Right. If yours turned to dust, dimensional zombies must be different. I'll have to look that one up."
"You said this was a dimensional portal," Jeremy said. "And that we're dealing with corporeal ghosts. So is this another door into the afterlife?"
"Probably not. You're dealing with things that just don't happen often enough to be properly documented. It sounds like you have a spell-triggered dimensional portal. Spellcasters probably have a fancier term, but that's the gist of it. A spellcaster, usually a sorcerer, creates a...balloon or a pocket, something that exists between dimensions where he can shove inconvenient things--usually people--for safekeeping. They stay there, frozen in time, until someone releases them. You'll have to check with Lucas, but I'm pretty sure the spellcaster creates a 'trigger'--some item that will let him open and close the portal."
"The letter," Jeremy said.
"Probably."
"So how did we activate it?" I asked.
"A trigger is like a combination lock, and only the sorcerer knows the code. It's usually some special sequence or event that will set off the portal, but there can be alternate ways of triggering it. Backups, in case the first one fails."
"Would blood do it?" Jeremy asked.
"Blood?" I glanced at him. "How--?"
I stopped as I remembered the mosquito, and the dark blotch on the letter. That's why he hadn't wanted me seeing it in the hotel room. Because, in the light, I'd have realized that the dark patch wasn't only mosquito guts.
"The mosquito," I murmured. "It had my blood in it."
"That's a new one," Jaime said. "But sure. That could have been the backup trigger. It's not something that's likely to happen accidentally in storage. If the primary failed, the sorcerer could break in and activate the backup."
"So some sorcerer created the letter, stuffed two people into it, and then, before he could release them, it was stolen."
"If he ever planned to release them. That can be tricky, especially if you wait too long. When you seal up people like that, it's like a mini time capsule. Release them and...weird things can happen." She paused. "You haven't had anything weird happen, have you?"
"Besides possibly releasing and killing a zombie Jack the Ripper?"
"What else could happen?" Jeremy said.
"Hard to say. Creating portals isn't something you find in every spellbook, and not many sorcerers could make one if they had the recipe right in front of them. Oh, for example, there's a documented case of a sorcerer in the Wild West who caught some outlaw, tossed him into a portal and hauled his ass back to the East for trial. Caused a minor smallpox epidemic."
"Because the outlaw had smallpox," I said. "And he was brought into an area that didn't."
"Nope. The outlaw was smallpox free...but when he was tossed into the portal, it was in a region known for periodic outbreaks. It's like he took some of his environment with him."
That was all Jaime knew, but she promised to canvas her contacts.
When we'd signed off, I started lifting a hand to wave Clay back to the car, but Jeremy laid his fingers on my arm.
"When you tell him what Jaime said, leave out the part about the smallpox," he said.
"You think that's a concern? I've been immunized, and it sounds like something specific to the period, not to portals in general."
"I agree. However..."
His gaze slid to Clay, who was leaning against a tree, a pedestrian taking a shade break from the late-day heat, but his eyes were continually scanning the street, body tense, as if a horde of zombies might descend at any moment.
"No sense giving him one more thing to worry about," I said.
"Exactly."
When I went to put my cell phone away, I noticed I had a message. It was Robert, returning our earlier call. Robert Vasic was a former council delegate who now served as the go-to guy for esoteric research. Jeremy called him back, told him what had happened and he promised to start hunting through his library.
"We can't track this woman until after dark," I said when we were all back in the SUV. "The best source of information on the letter itself would be the original source...or as close to it as we can get. Patrick Shanahan's grandfather commissioned the theft of that letter, and I'm sure Shanahan knows why. We should pay him a visit." I glanced at Clay. "A friendly visit."
"Sure," Clay said. "We'll show up on his doorstep and say, 'Excuse me, we're the ones who stole your letter last night, and it's giving us some trouble. Can we ask you a few questions about it?' "
"Let me think about it," Jeremy murmured. "Just start driving over there."
Routine
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, WE WERE BACK WHERE IT ALL started, at Patrick Shanahan's house. His street looked different in daylight. You could see the houses through the trees, and they looked dead. Empty driveways, drawn blinds, blackened windows, a lawn-care crew the only sign of life. If you lived in an upscale neighborhood like this, you worked--both spouses, all day, every day.
A "wrong number" call to Shanahan's house on the way had confirmed that the sorcerer was home, either working from there or taking the day off to inventory his collection, making sure nothing besides the letter had been stolen.
At just past 4 p.m., Jeremy and Clay were striding up Shanahan's driveway. I got to eavesdrop at a window. As Clay said, I did have another option. I could wait in the car and let them fill me in later. So, eavesdropping it was.
As I waited around the corner, I heard Jeremy ring the bell. A moment later, the door opened.
"Are you Patrick Shanahan?" Jeremy asked.
"Yes..."
"Owner of a historical document once residing in the London Metropolitan Police files?"
"Do you have it?"
"You don't?" Jeremy glanced over his shoulder at Clay and they exchanged a tight-lipped look, then Jeremy turned back to Shanahan. "Mr. Shanahan, are you aware of certain occurrences in Toronto in the last twenty-four hours? Occurrences our employer believes are related to the document previously in your possession?"
In the silence that followed, I knew Shanahan was taking a second, longer look at the two men on his doorsteps, seeing them not as associates of whomever stole his letter, hoping to "sell" it back, but as supernatural agents, most likely dispatched from a sorcerer Cabal. While one could argue that the Cabals needed policing more than anyone outside their infrastructure, they often played the role of law enforcement in the supernatural world, if only to protect their own interests.
Shanahan let them inside.
As they moved through the house, I could catch only Shanahan's boom of a voice as he complained about the heat, the humidity, the smog--the kind of chatter that fills space and says nothing.
He didn't ask how Jeremy knew he'd owned the From Hell letter. As Xavier had said, it was common knowledge among a certain subset of supernatural society, and Cabals had plenty of access to that subset. Nor did he ask which Cabal his visitors were with, or even confirm that they were from one. When dealing with Cabals, curiosity could sound dangerously close to challenge.
They stopped in the living room. As they sat, I moved ar
ound to that window. It was closed, of course, as they all were to keep the air-conditioning inside, but with werewolf hearing I could make out enough to follow the conversation.
Jeremy explained the events taking place in downtown Toronto. Shanahan expressed surprise, which seemed genuine enough--blown transformers and missing senior citizens weren't the sort of news tidbits a man like Shanahan would follow, not while the stock exchange was still open.
"I'm not sure I understand what that has to do with my letter."
"It was the combination with a third event that caught my employer's interest. There were reports of a man and a woman, both dressed in Victorian garb, seen in the area of the power outage and the disappearance. Our experts detected signs of a dimensional disturbance--a recently opened portal."
"P-portal?" A too-hearty laugh. "I'd never own a letter that contained a portal. Dangerous things, you know. Very dangerous. And damned near impossible to make. Way outside my very limited magical abilities." A self-deprecating chuckle. "I can pick a stock a lot better than I can cast a spell, let me tell you. Ask anyone."
"Presumably the portal was already within the letter before it came into your possession. Otherwise, it wouldn't contain people from the nineteenth century."
"Oh, er, of course." Shanahan paused. "Listen, I'm a man of great practicality--particularly when it comes to money. If I'd inherited a letter containing an active portal, I would have put it on the market immediately. I know how much a Cabal would pay for such a thing. If that letter held a portal, which--no offense to your employers, but I doubt--I knew nothing about it."
I could smell the bullshit in every word, yet Jeremy was stuck. As much as Shanahan claimed to be a weak spellcaster, our experience with sorcerers had left us wary enough to know they could be formidable opponents. And Shanahan, already nervous, would be expecting attack.
Jeremy let Shanahan think he believed him, and promised that, if the letter was recovered, his employers would indeed want it and would pay a fair price to Shanahan, the rightful owner. As he and Clay left, Shanahan was handing out business cards, scribbling his home number on the back, and asking to be kept in the loop.
I met them by the road.
"He's lying," Clay said.
"I know," Jeremy replied, and kept walking.
Clay looked from me to the house, and I knew it killed him to leave it at that.
"We're going back, aren't we?" I asked. "When we can catch him off guard."
Jeremy nodded. "Tonight."
Robert had left a message. He'd found a mention of one case similar to ours, where a sorcerer had sacrificed a man in a portal creation spell. The soul of the sacrifice had been bound to the imbued object--in this case, a scroll--and when the portal was activated, the dead man had come through as a zombie.
That explained why we had rotting zombies. They weren't people who'd been stashed in the portal for safekeeping--as Jaime postulated--but those who'd been sacrificed to create it. As for the other case, according to the brief mention Robert had found, the zombie had been laid to rest and the portal closed. It just didn't say how the latter had been accomplished.
He'd e-mailed me some other stories. Since we still had a bit of time to kill before dinner, I found a cybercafe and read them, with Clay leaning over my shoulder, his chair pulled so close I might as well have sat on his lap.
Most of the "evidence" on portals was anecdotal. That's typical with anything supernatural, like the Pack's Legacy. Even those who seek to compile research, like Robert, are left with what really amounts to stories, and the closest thing to proof is multiple eyewitness accounts. Nice when you can get it, but how often does someone conducting a black magic ritual invite a dozen acquaintances over to watch? Even if he does, how many of them will take him up on the invitation...and how many will think "participate in a human sacrifice and risk being sucked into a faulty dimensional portal?" and decide they'd really rather stay home for the evening.
Although portal spells were available to any sorcerer willing to search enough and pay enough, there were few recorded instances of them being used. They were notoriously tough to cast, and the chances of them failing were rivaled only by the chances of them malfunctioning. Like the Austrian sorcerer who decided to use his portal to lie low until his legal troubles passed. A friend was supposed to free him after two years, and I'm sure he would have...if the paper that contained the portal trigger hadn't accidentally been sucked into the portal itself, leaving the sorcerer stuck in his dimensional bubble for eternity.
Then there was the genius in medieval Japan who'd tapped into the wrong dimension. His portal belched out a very pissed-off demi-demon, who'd proceeded to flay and disembowel the sorcerer, his family, and half the village before it figured out how to click its ruby slippers and return home. Start circulating a few stories like that, and your average sorcerer will decide dimensional portals aren't something he needs to add to his repertoire.
We headed out for dinner. We tried to find a quiet corner, and seemed to succeed, getting a table with a cushion of empty ones around us but it was not to be. Two tables over, a pair of emergency room nurses were complaining about an influx of stomach flu that had them working late that day and missing the commuter GO train home.
As sympathetic as I am to the plight of overworked hospital staff, I don't think a restaurant is the appropriate forum for airing complaints, especially when those complaints are sprinkled with graphic descriptions of the byproducts of gastronomic upset. When I started showing signs of losing my appetite, Jeremy asked the server to relocate us. We decided on the patio, which was hot enough to bake potatoes on, but quiet enough to discuss our next criminal enterprise.
The upside to our forthcoming home invasion? Having just invaded the same home the night before, we already knew the floor plans, security features and codes. The downside? Having been invaded the night before, Shanahan might have changed those codes.
"Nah," Clay said. "You get robbed, what's your first priority? Assessing damage and figuring out how it happened. Making sure it doesn't happen again comes later, after you remember where you filed the instruction book for your security system."
"What if he's a little more organized?" I said. "Or a little more paranoid?"
Clay shrugged. "We'll deal with it. This is an interrogation. Subterfuge is secondary."
At eleven-thirty at night, Patrick Shanahan's house was still ablaze with light. He hadn't gone to bed yet. Nor had he activated the outside lights, which made sneaking up to the side door very easy.
The side door was locked. Instead of trying Xavier's key, Jeremy and Clay made the rounds to check the other doors while I was consigned to the bushes again.
They got lucky with the oft-forgotten sliding patio door, and slipped inside. I bounced on my tiptoes, straining to hear voices, wondering whether I could interpret "stay there" as "stay outside," rather than "stay behind that particular bush." Just as I decided Jeremy's command was indeed open to wider interpretation, the patio door moved again.
Clay walked onto the deck and motioned me in. I jumped forward so fast I nearly impaled myself on a marble obelisk. Then I raced to the deck and leapt onto it, ignoring the set of stairs on the far side.
"Don't laugh," I muttered as I swept a sweat-soaked strand of hair from my face. "I'll make you hide in the bushes next time and see how fast you come running." I moved up beside him. "So what's up?"
"Not home."
"Shanahan? But the lights--and the doors--oh, shit." I met Clay's gaze. "He bolted, didn't he?"
"Looks that way."
There were no signs of foul play, as the cliche goes, nothing to indicate a real Cabal security agent had swooped down and snatched up Patrick Shanahan. We found clothing laid on the bed and a couple of drawers open, as if someone had packed in a hurry. A handwritten note on the kitchen counter told his housekeeper he'd be gone for a few days, and asked her to leave the mail in his home office.
Shanahan must have opted for an imprompt
u vacation until the mess was sorted out. Either that or he didn't want to be in the city while a dimensional portal was active.
Clay and I had experience conducting residential searches without the owner's knowledge, enough to earn a rookie's spot on a crime scene team. Trouble was, we were used to looking for evidence of a crime, usually homicide. Suspecting a mutt of man-killing wasn't enough. We needed evidence. Not an unreasonable requirement, considering the death penalty was at stake.
We also had experience searching for clues to help us find a mutt-on-the-run, but we weren't trying to find Shanahan. What we wanted from him we hoped to get right here: clues on how to close the portal.
Jeremy directed us to search books and files, the first on supernatural artifacts, portals or Jack the Ripper in general, and the second on Shanahan's collection--assuming, as a careful investment banker, he'd keep detailed records.
Jeremy went in search of hidden books or ones hiding in plain view. Most reference texts on the supernatural don't need to be hidden--anyone who stumbled on them would just think you had unusual reading tastes.
The file duties were split between old-fashioned and new--paper files and computer ones. I got the computer. While I knew how to recover files from the recycle bin or the "deleted" folder on my e-mail, when it comes to things like cracking encrypted data or finding files that have been wiped clean, I was lost. I read through Shanahan's e-mail and hard drive files, finding nothing useful. Clay saved me from further digging by announcing that he'd found paper-based files on Shanahan's collection.
"Where?" I asked, swinging around in the computer chair.
"Right here." He pointed at the file cabinet. "Bottom drawer."
"Out in the open? Are they written in code?"
"Don't need to be. He found an easier way. They're all listed as fakes--curiosities, not artifacts." He lifted a folder and flipped it open. "One Baphomet idol, reportedly taken from an unnamed Templar castle in Britain. Later discovered to be a late eighteenth-century forgery." He thumbed through a few pages. "It goes on to describe the significance of Baphomet in the persecution of the Knights Templar." He handed me the file. "The usual stuff. How they were accused of worshipping Baphomet, presumably a Pagan deity of some kind. Problem was that no one's ever found a Pagan deity called Baphomet."