The Curse Servant (The Dark Choir Book 2) (34 page)

“No additions. The deal is struck.”

“Not an addition, Gillette. A substitution.”

After a pause, she responded, “Go on.”

“There’s a friend of mine out here in Baltimore. Someone crafted a servitor and sent it to possess a human body. The thing’s been hopscotching through bodies, and now it’s trapped inside a thirteen-year-old.”

Gillette made a noise that could have either been disgust or amusement. Probably both at the same time.

“Is this what you people do for fun on the East Coast?”

“You see the problem, then?”

“I see several. None of which are mine.”

“Here’s my substitution. If I curse Carmody, instead of finding and securing my soul, I want you to remove this servitor from this girl.”

“That’s it?”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes. If she were here, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you really think I’m going to fly out there and do this little task for you? There’s no way the Presidium would even let me leave the airport before they bagged me and tossed me into the Potomac with a few dozen pounds of lead tied around my throat.”

“I don’t think I can move her. She’s in bad shape.”

“Sucks to be her, then.”

“Gillette! This is my friend. Actually, she’s more like family. You understand that? I know you’ve lost people who were close to you. I know that’s pushed you to hunt down Carmody like this. Do you even get why I’m asking you to do this for me?”

“I understand, Lake. I just don’t care.”

I took a deep breath and tried to get my blood pressure to drop. “Look. This is a simple exchange. Instead of my soul, which is out there somewhere, this is a Frankenstein thoughtform bottled up exactly where you’ll know where it is. If the Presidium wasn’t an issue here, would you agree to the change?”

“If you can manage a way to get her out here to Portland, then yes. I’ll agree to that.”

“What if I can guarantee your safety here?”

“Against the Presidium? There’s no such thing.”

“You seem to do okay.”

“No deal.”

I took a split second to reevaluate my options. “I have connections. People I can call.”

“I’ve never known the Presidium to keep their word.”

“Then I’ll push harder. I’ll make them agree.”

“How, exactly?”

“Leverage. It all comes down to leverage.”

Gillette mulled it over for a while, then answered, “I have an associate in Gresham. Her name is Judith Wilcom. If the Presidium delivers a sealed letter of guarantee to her, I’ll book my flight.”

“Um, okay.”

“But that had better not happen before Carmody is cursed.”

“Out of curiosity, how will a letter of guarantee change your mind if the Presidium always lies?”

“Judith is an expert sigilist. When someone gives her a written word, she can sanctify it as a
verum inviolata
.”

“Meaning?”

“She will turn that into the spoken Word of God. The Presidium will understand what I’m asking, and I guarantee they won’t agree to this.”

“Let me worry about that. I’ll be in touch.”

I hung up and laid my phone down on the desk next to McHenry’s envelope. I had Gillette on board to extract the servitor from Elle’s body before it consumed her soul. All I had to do now was find a way to get some of Carmody’s real blood, and find a way to convince myself to curse a man who was probably innocent. How could I do that? Osterhaus was one thing. He was utterly despicable. Carmody might not have been McHenry’s hitman. He was slippery, sure, but I didn’t suspect that he was clever enough to pull my strings to this degree. Anything was possible; I had certainly misjudged people before.

What it really came down to was family. Carmody was the one who had pulled me into this entanglement in the first place. Perhaps he had karma due in arrears. But Elle? She was family, and that was enough.

I reached for my phone and made a few calls.

The first was to Carmody. I fished out his business card and dialed his number.

“Who’s this then?” he asked directly.

“It’s Dorian Lake.”

“Twice in one day? I feel like a celebrity.”

“Good for you.”

“How can I be of service?”

Here came the bluff. “Actually, I need your knowledge. You know the Library of mine you’re hell-bent on plundering?”

“That I do.”

“Emil left me a kind of index. All handwritten. A kind of list of the texts he’s collected and from whom.”

“I’ll wager that’s a hell of a list.”

“I have a few holes here and there. Missing texts from his index. I suspect they were loaned out or otherwise pilfered. You can imagine how important it would be to me to find those texts.”

“And you figure I know how to sniff out the odd truffle, so to speak?”

“Something like that.” He was silent for a moment, to which I added, “I figured it’d be worth it to you just to lay eyes on this list of names.”

“It is something of a tease.”

“Look, if you’re not interested, no harm no foul. Just thought since we’d be working together, this might, I don’t know… be a team building exercise or something.”

He hummed to himself, then responded, “I read you, Lake. I’m a bit occupied at the moment, however.”

“How’s tomorrow look?”

“I can make time. What say Silver Lane Diner in Catonsville? Around and about noontime?”

“I’m writing it down now. Thanks, Del.”

He hung up without response. It was done.

I moved on to my next priority… Ches.

“Hey there,” she answered.

“Hope you’re having a better day than I am.”

“I’ve had worse. How’s Elle?”

“Tired. Possessed. Probably scared.”

“If it makes you feel better, I wasn’t aware of anything when it had taken me over.”

It did make me feel better, to a point. “Yeah, but it didn’t pitch a tent inside your skull for days.”

“She seemed to come through today. I took that as a good sign.”

“I don’t know. I kind of wish she hadn’t. I wanted her just to wake up from all this.”

Ches lingered on that for a moment. “Are you okay?”

“Hmm?”

“You sound a little lost.”

“Maybe a little, but I might have a plan.”

“Do tell.”

An intense longing to see Ches at that moment burned in my chest. “Look, I know I already saw you once today, but are you busy tonight? I could tell you all about my clever plan over dinner or something.”

After a second’s pause too long, she replied, “Actually, I kind of have plans.”

My stomach dropped. “Oh.”

“It’s not a big deal. You shouldn’t be worried or anything.”

“Why would I be worried?”

“Nothing. Forget I said that.”

“You have a date?”

Another second’s pause. “A guy from my class asked me out yesterday.”

I swallowed the lead weight in my throat that was threatening to jump out of my mouth and bludgeon me to death. “Hey, no problem. I should probably get ready for a ritual tonight, anyway. Besides, we’re not actually… I meant, we’re not exclusive. We’re not even dating. Or, what?” I broke down into a nervous laugh. “What are we, exactly?”

“Let’s start again tomorrow. Reboot the whole thing. What do you say?”

I nodded, then rubbed the bridge of my nose when I realized she couldn’t see me. “Morning coffee sound good?”

“I don’t think you’re allowed back at the café, to be honest.”

“Then swing by on your way in.”

“It’ll be early.”

“That’s okay,” I blurted. “I’m probably not going to sleep tonight.”

“Alright. Cool. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

Piece by piece, my life was stitching back together.

And I had a plan for Carmody. All I had to do was make one more phone call, and spend the rest of the night rifling through Emil’s Library for an appropriate curse, preferably one that didn’t require cadaverous reagents. It would be cold, draining work. Just touching those books made my skin crawl.

But as I dug through my research, a stray idea flew into my head. I made one more phone call, then fished Amy’s hair from my pocket. I spent the night on a very specific working. Very soon, and it would all be over.

he front door called with three quick knocks. I emerged from the basement with gauze on my forearm and a vicious case of the blinks. When I opened the door, I found Ches smiling back at me in her café apron. She dangled an expensive-looking bag of coffee in front of me.

“Hope you didn’t get the coffee going already,” she chimed. “Got this at the organic market.”

“Looks incredible.”

She nodded over her shoulder. “Oh, mind if I park my car in your drive? Won’t get towed or anything?”

I eyed her old blue Chrysler parked behind my Audi. She was far enough away from the street. “What, no bus?”

“I wanted to stop by the market for the coffee.”

I nodded her inside and shook my head. “You have a car and you take MTA every day?”

“Screw you, gas is expensive.”

“Especially in that thing.”

“Try driving here from Florida.”

“Pass.”

I searched my cabinets for my old French press, and tossed some bread into the toaster.

By the time the coffee was poured and I had spread some honey over my toast, I found Ches grinning at me.

“You look like a zombie.”

I nodded. “I wish the most complicated thing I had to deal with today was how many brains to eat.”

“You’ll figure this out. I know it.”

I stared at my shoes. Everyone kept saying that, for some reason. “You have more confidence than I do.”

“I’ll lend you some of mine, then.”

She reached out and put her hand on mine.

“Thanks. I need it.”

“I was just thinking about what you do. The magic stuff.”

“The scary stuff?”

“I told you I won’t let it scare me anymore, right? Well, I’m going to put this out there, and feel free to tell me butt out. But what if you brought me in?”

“Brought you in?”

“Your work. Teach me a thing or two?”

I rolled my head and tried to grin. “Okay, trying to find a pleasant way to tell you to forget it.”

“I’m serious. I think part of your problem is that you do this alone. You don’t have any backup. If these things are so dangerous, maybe you could use an extra pair of hands to carry the load.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in this stuff?”

“I have a bump on my head that’s making a believer out of me. What do you think? Is all of this something you feel like you could share with another person?”

I stared at Ches for a while, thinking it over. The last time I shared this Life was with Emil. That was over ten years ago. I had a routine, a way of working my career. None of that felt like something I could share.

But how much of that was keeping me from really connecting with someone?

“It’s not like candle-making, Ches. It takes years of study. Just straight study.”

“I’m a professional student, Dorian. Studying is all I do.”

“Dead languages, correspondences, constant meditation and energy awareness.”

“I’ll show you my psych text if you like. You’re not going to scare me away from boring reading that easily.”

I pulled my hand away. “I’ve never taught anyone before. I frankly don’t know if I can.”