Authors: Kat Richardson
The hotel’s concierge was very helpful when it came to finding the right places to ask questions about the import duties and real estate issues I’d glimpsed at John Purcell’s.
The rents turned out to be a group of terraced houses in the suburb of Bishop’s Stortford that had been, as the agent said when I found him in his office, in the Purcell family for a donkey’s age. In fact, he couldn’t find a record of the land ever having belonged to anyone else. The same was true for the narrow house in Jerusalem Passage—land and building had been the property of a Purcell since the beginning of record keeping.
“Pro’ly back to the Romans,” the estate agent joked. It wasn’t impossible that it had been the same Purcell then, too, though it was unlikely. Vampires would have stood out a bit more back when the population was smaller. And whoever heard of a Roman named Purcell? So the land was Purcell’s own little nest egg. His kidnappers wouldn’t have cared about it if they were only interested in making trouble for Edward. They’d done nothing about his properties, which argued that Purcell’s value to them was strictly as a lever against Edward.
The estate agent started rambling off on some tangent about what a lovely little town it was and he could find me another terrace or a semidetached in the area if I were interested. . . . I wasn’t and had to shut him down rather harshly just to get out of his office. Clinging like a remora appeared to be a trait common to real estate agents on both sides of the Atlantic.
Having wasted a few hours with the real estate question, I then went after the remaining lead: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. I’d been advised that it would be easier to telephone than appear in person. Finding the correct office for the question you needed answered could be a right trial, the concierge had said. I paused for lunch in a prefab café sort of place called Pret before returning to my hotel to make the phone call at Edward’s expense.
It was the sort of phone call that causes some people to go to the government bureau in question with fully automatic weapons and a duffel bag full of ammunition. I lost track of how many offices I was bounced through before anyone was willing to talk to me at all, and the person I got was, just like an IRS agent in the US, a recent immigrant whose English was heavily colored with an accent.
“Look,” I said to the woman, who finally agreed to help, “we want to pay the duty, but I need to find out what my client is being billed for.”
She sighed. “Importation of six amphorae from Greece. Not considered historically significant pieces. It’s on your letter.”
“Yeah, a letter that’s been destroyed. When and where were these amphorae delivered? Because we don’t have them.” I certainly hadn’t seen anything like that at Purcell’s home.
“That might be because you’re over a year delinquent in paying the duty.”
“That was before my time, so fill me in. When were they delivered and to where?”
She heaved another sigh and I could hear her typing and shuffling papers before she answered. “On twelfth July 2007, the six amphorae were held in the Excise and Customs warehouse in the Docklands and shipped on later that week. As they weren’t bonded goods, they weren’t held pending duty. Your client was billed but never paid. I’ve notes indicating he challenged the billing several times—claimed they were not his goods. These challenges are still in the process of resolution. Although . . . this past April he agreed to pay, but he has not yet.”
“Where were the amphorae moved to? You must have a record of who picked them up, at least.”
“Oh, yes. I do have that. Sotheby’s—the auction house, you know.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Will had told me Sotheby’s moved a tremendous volume of goods from all over the world every year, so the coincidence of the amphorae being sent to the place he worked wasn’t outrageous. And it wouldn’t have anything to do with Will: He handled western European furniture, not Mediterranean antiquities. I did wonder why Purcell had suddenly decided to pay the duty after a year of contention. I still wasn’t sure if he’d ever owed it or not.
I didn’t get much more out of the woman and hung up feeling slightly trampled. A trip to Sotheby’s was in order—the sooner the better—and it didn’t hurt that I’d have an excuse to check in on Will. The increasing frequency of my bad dreams and my vision about him was worrying. I wanted to see for myself that he was all right, and I wanted to know if my sudden dreams of him were somehow connected to my search for my father and the truth about my own Grey past.
It took a bit of flipping back and forth in my maps to work out a route to Sotheby’s on New Bond Street. It was longer than I could walk in a short time and I wanted to be there well before they closed up for the day. I’d have to take the Tube, and that seemed to mean walking to Embankment Station so I could get a train to Oxford Circus and walk on from there.
Since it was a classy business dealing in antiques and things most of us can’t afford, I dressed up, but I didn’t go out the front door. I was pretty certain that it had been Marsden who’d followed me the day before, but I wasn’t sure that others couldn’t find me now that I’d been rummaging about among Clerkenwell’s vampires. I slipped out the side door again and around the block to the Strand so I could join the crowds of students at King’s College next door before I exited the school on the water side.
The walk along the Embankment to the Underground station was lovely and busy enough to make losing a possible tail easy, though no one appeared to follow me. There were already plenty of students and workers heading for the trains, so I merged into the stream, just another businesswoman on the move.
The trip from Embankment to Oxford was hot and crowded, and I emerged into chaos.
Technically a circus in England is a traffic circle, but you could have thought of it as a big-top show just as well. The place was insanely busy, packed with workers, and tourists, and mothers chivvying children who had no interest in behaving, and I couldn’t tell which direction I was facing. The pedestrians were a lot less polite than those I’d encountered in Farringdon Station, pushing and scurrying to get to the street crossings since most of the curbs were fenced away from the motorized traffic by chest-high iron railings. The openings in those railings were narrow, the walk signals were short, and the vehicles in the road were aggressively oblivious. I had to stop short of being shoved in front of a truck and then dash with a group of young men in bankers’ suits to make it to the other side before the light changed. Then I wasn’t sure where I was or which direction I was facing, and the other people on the sidewalk seemed to resent my stopping to look at my map while trying to orient myself.
People in more casual clothes stood in the middle of the sidewalks offering free newspapers from hip-high piles in plywood frames and further bottlenecking the foot traffic flow. I tried to work into the lee of one of these news pushers, but there was no lee. Rushing pedestrians, tourists, and commuters filled every space and I had to back up against a stone wall to get even a tiny relief from their pressure to keep moving at all cost.
I turned my back to the traffic circle and tried to find a street sign. The nearest building had a white placard on it that seemed to read “John Prince’s Swallow.” A closer look showed it was two streets: John Prince’s Street to the right and Swallow Place to the left, which met as they joined Oxford Street. Regent Street was behind me, Oxford Street running past me. I looked at the map, twisted it around a few times, and finally got the gist of where I was: only three blocks from New Bond Street, straight ahead.
I walked, passing one shop after another jammed with clothes from the fashionable to the outrageous. The preoccupied commuters and the ogling sightseers were joined in their throng by shoppers weighted with bags that smacked into the legs and elbows of everyone nearby.
As soon as I turned onto New Bond, the foot traffic waned. Down a side street I saw a crowd gathering around the black-painted facade of a public house, the sidewalk and street choked impassably by their numbers. At first I thought the crowd was waiting for the pub to open, but then I noticed the glasses in hands, the clink and rattle of post-work social drinkers chattering like starlings and raising a fog of cigarette smoke.
The farther I walked, the lighter all traffic became until I could see little sign of the bustle at Oxford Circus and even the pubs had disappeared. The buildings were dignified and sat right at the edge of the wide sidewalks with no greenbelt or setbacks, putting up their predominately white fronts in an aloof row. The numbering system was not the orderly odds-on-one-side, evens-on-the-other of most US cities, and as I walked south I kept glancing across the street to be sure I hadn’t passed the building I sought on the wrong side.
A blue banner hanging over the sidewalk let me know when I’d found my destination. I stopped in front of the wide cream-colored building and looked it over. Two arch-topped plate glass windows flanked an arch-and-column doorway. In one window there was a photo display of Chinese ceramics and a sign giving information on their auction date. The other window showcased an upcoming auction of Asian metalware. Over the door a basalt bust of Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess of something, looked out at the street from her small shelf. The figure radiated spokes of white and red light.
Then it moved.
A shape of light moved away from the carved black stone bust above the doorway and trickled to the pavement beside me, manifesting as the misty image of the goddess—a thin, bronze-skinned woman with the head of a lioness and a false mane created by her heavy, braided wig. She wore a thin dress of crimson linen that left her small breasts bare. Her hands were slim and graceful, but the fingernails were black claws. A sword and a knife were loosely belted at her hips. Gold bracelets and bands decorated her muscled arms and she had a bow slung on her back. A golden cobra sat on her head, holding up a disk that was as red as the sun seen through clouds of battle smoke. The cobra moved restlessly side to side, making the small sun sizzle.
Sekhmet looked me over with kohl-darkened eyes in her leonine face and licked her chops. “I have seen something like you before. . . .” she said. “Speak up: What are you?” she commanded. Her voice was an angry growl in my head, without substance in the air. “I may have to kill you.”
“You’d be the second in as many days to try,” I replied. She spooked me, but I wasn’t going to let her know that. Lionesses are the ones that do the killing, after all, and last night I’d done all the running from predators I intended to do for a while.
She turned her head a little and looked at me from the corner of her eyes. “Have you an enemy? Are you a hunter that your prey turned upon? Speak!”
“I guess I’m a sort of hunter,” I replied, glancing at the few people passing on the street. They pretended not to notice my conversation apparently with myself, but hurried on. Maybe they thought I was using a cell phone with one of those ear widgets. “I look for things, for people, for answers.”
“And you come to my house on what business?”
“Your house?”
She sniffed in disdain. “They are soft and care not for blood-shed and war—they prefer gold as their weapon and baubles as their love—but they have taken me as their own for these past years when others had forgotten me. I do not let them suffer if it is in my power to stop it. You touch darkness and death. I shall not let you spread them here. What brings you? And do not prevaricate. My patience thins.”
“A man—a sort of frog-man—named Jakob came here a few weeks ago on an errand. I want to know what it was.”
“The river spawn. He brought a charmed letter for one of my people within. He had a stink to him I did not care for. I made him leave it and go.”
“He’s the servant of a vampire.”
“Ah! The asetem-ankh-astet.”
“The what?” I asked, wincing internally at having interrupted a goddess—they tend to be cranky about that.
She showed her teeth but forbore from attacking me. “The tribe that are the life of Astet—the priest who died, yet lived. They are numerous here, but not like the kind of my home. Those—the true asetem—are few, and you can tell them from the common blood drinkers by their fine white skins and cobra forms. They do not feed on blood, but on the ka—the soul. Once they helped me, but now . . . even they do not honor my name! Ambitious fools! I did not think your river spawn reeked of their habits, but perhaps his own odor and that strange charm confused me. . . .” Sekhmet scowled. “I should have sent him away the first time with an arrow in his spine. He would have been better as a frog on a pike, roasting in the sun for crocodiles.”
My mind was spinning and I felt a sense of doom rising in me. Some shrieking, distant voice in my mind was insisting that something horrible from the past was repeating itself, swelling out of history into the present like poison gas. The vampiress in the club—surely she was one of the asetem-ankh-astet? The description fit. It rang another bell as well: Hadn’t my father described his “white worm-man” in similar terms? The thought made me queasy and I wanted to ask her about it, but I knew she wouldn’t have much patience. And what about Alice? The white vampire I’d spoken with last night hadn’t even liked her, so what was the connection? If the asetem were responsible for Purcell’s disappearance, how was Alice connected? Or was she? She hadn’t been connected to my father or she’d have taunted me with that information long ago.
I chided myself. I wasn’t seeing something. I was letting myself be distracted by my fear and incredulity. I needed to stick to the most immediate question. “Jakob was here before?” I asked.
“I say it; it is so! He has been here several times in two cycles. He did not stink so badly at first, but he began to rot once he touched the wine jars. The corruption sealed in those vessels offends me even yet. What waste of blood! The asetem took them away, but the smell lingered.”
“These wine jars . . . were they Greek ones? Amphorae?”
“They were the Greek style, but they never came from the clay of Greece. No Greek stores blood in jars such as those.”
“There was blood in the jars? Old blood?”
“No! Corrupted with death and magic but fresh enough. I should have slaughtered them all!” And she gave a roar of fury, snatching at her blades to clang them together over her head. She whirled back to face me, menacing and enraged. “Now you say you seek these things?”
“I don’t. I wanted to know what was in them. I have a bad feeling they’re meant for something terrible, that they have something to do with my past and my father’s, but I don’t know what. And I have a friend here I’m worried about. Someone who shouldn’t have had anything to do with these jars, but I’m starting to wonder. . . .”
“Who? Which of mine do you care for?”
“His name is Will.”
She shook her dreadlocked mane and growled. “Describe him to me!”
“Tall, talks like me, has silver hair, but he’s young—”
“Gone! He has not come here since he took the letter your Jakob creature brought.”
“The charmed letter? Was for Will?” Cold clutched my chest, strangling the breath in my lungs. My dreams weren’t just dreams: Will was in trouble and it was Purcell who was behind it—Edward’s agent, Edward’s “friend.” Or the asetem who seemed to know Alice and Wygan and white worm-men who’d probably killed Christelle and driven my father to suicide.
I started to bolt, to find Will wherever he was. The goddess snatched my arm, jerking me back around. I should have been able to pull free, but I couldn’t. Sekhmet sliced the palm of my left hand with the tip of her knife, releasing a fine bead of blood. She bent her head and lapped the wound, which closed again as she touched it. Then she narrowed her eyes at me.
“I taste life and death in you, hunter. You are of my charge—a warrior—but you shall have to choose your course yourself. I will not help you this time. You must first prove your worth. I charge you to choose justice. Or I shall see you at the gates of hell and Anubis shall eat your heart. Do not betray me—I am a forgotten god, but not powerless where you go.”
She threw down my hand, spinning me back to face Oxford Street. “Now. Run,” she commanded.
I ran, twisting back only once to look for her, but she’d returned to her plinth above the door, cold stone, black and patient. It wasn’t fear of a god that made me go, or even fear of the past that chilled my bones, but fear for the living. I didn’t understand how it had come about. I was here on Edward’s business and it was Edward’s broken empire that had been used to set this up, I had no doubt. Alice had tried to topple Edward before and it seemed she ought to be the one I found at the core, but the leads somehow came back to me and my father and whatever had happened to him. This was the cycle again, whatever it led to: The asetem had wanted something from my father, so they took Christelle. Now they may have taken Will. . . .