Pockets of Darkness (11 page)

If only another thief in the city had cobbled onto the lure first.

Tavio would still be alive.

Otter would be at Tavio’s condo.

Bridget wouldn’t be shivering somewhere under the Bronx.

Dustin? Certainly he was in danger too. And Michael.

Her fault, but that blame was something she needed to discard. She couldn’t undo what she’d done, and regrets couldn’t bring Tavio to life or put everything back in its proper, comfortable order.

Bridget realized how quiet it had become. There was the faintest vibration, a subway train trundling on some track, and Adiella’s monotone voice. But the beast was not prattling. It had quieted the moment the witch started on her serious magic. It was shaking.

“The demon—”

“Is still here,” Bridget said. “But you have its full attention. I think maybe it’s actually worried.”

This time Adiella’s words were faster and spirited, her hand gestures exaggerated and wild. Her scarf fell back and Bridget saw that the witch had a polished bald section on the top of her head, the white hair framing it, a tonsure like a friar’s. There was something like a tattoo on the bald space, but Bridget wasn’t close enough to make it out; she guessed it was another arcane sigil.

Adiella’s voice rose and the demon howled, a mournful baying that reverberated off the bricks and jarred Bridget to her bones. Bridget threw her hands over his ears, finding that the noise lanced its way in nevertheless.

As Adiella sprang to her feet the briefcase burst into flames, and the stench that billowed away brought Bridget to her knees. A wind came again, violent, mean, and wicked, disregarding Bridget’s coat and shoes and settling a cold so deep inside her she feared it would be her death. The wind went on for minutes, the demon’s scream accompanying its keening. When it finally subsided, Bridget raised her head to see Adiella slumped unconscious in front of the space heater, wrinkles thicker than she’d ever seen them, like old tree bark.

The briefcase, powders, shavings, candles were gone too … not a trace of them even against the walls. But the demon was still there, in the entranceway, and it had started to chatter again. Its demeanor had changed for the worse, and the drool that spilled from its lips was acidic, striking the floor and sizzling.

Was she free? Had Adiella freed Bridget of the demon? She stepped into the crevasse, the demon edging toward her, stretching out a claw. Maybe Adiella had broken the curse, but had not chased away the creature.

“Christ on a tricycle,” Bridget muttered. She looked between the beast and Adiella; the witch had started to stir.

Adiella struggled to her hands and knees, picked up something on the rug in front of her and tossed it to Bridget. She reflexively reached out and caught it. The buckle from the briefcase was searing cold like dry ice and she dropped it. But the freezing metal had done its damage. Leaving behind an image of the buckle’s symbol scarred into the palm of Bridget’s hand as surely as if she’d been branded.

“That clasp,” Adiella said, as she levered herself up using the trunk. She righted herself and adjusted the scarf. Her breathing slowed and the wrinkles melted. “That sigil, clasp if you will, is what binds the foul soul beast to this world and to you. I can’t destroy it. I can’t get rid of the beast. That piece of metal, it is an anchor, ancient and powerful, and beyond my ability to affect. And unless you can get some unwitting fool to steal it from—”

“I said I won’t do that. I won’t let that thing pass to someone else, the slaughtering continue. It stops here somehow, and—”

“How the sigil came to be on that briefcase case is a mystery perhaps unsolvable, especially since the case is no more. That I was able to destroy that part of it, however, was some minor victory. But that odd clasp … it was fashioned by a witch far more powerful than I, long long dead and from far away, certainly filled with a hatred or purpose stronger than even mine. The witch involved in the making of that metal, I get the sense that she hated something beyond demons, perhaps ironically championing them … or at least the demon that crawls in your shadow. I get that sense from the magic.”

“How can you tell—”

The witch waved away Bridget’s question. “I used my strongest magic and could only best the skin of the briefcase.” Her eyes tore into Bridget. “That creature—” she pointed a finger, guessing correctly at its position.

“—is still here,” Bridget said. “Try again.”

“I know it’s still here.” The witch cackled, the sound adding to Bridget’s shivers.

“Then try—”

“There is no ‘again’ for me. I told you it defies my magic.”

“But Otter—”

“Otter is the only family I have left … you’ve seen to that, Irish bitch. And you’ll keep him safe, no matter what you have to do to ensure that. On your very life—”

“The demon—”

“That demon is bound to you, Bridget O’Shea, and to a cause. Settle up with the demon. Maybe it wants something … find a way to provide it.” Adiella eased herself into the rocking chair and thrust her hands in her pockets. “Satisfy the soul beast, meet whatever condition it demands, and pray that it will be mollified and simply go away. The magic involved in its binding is complex, but I believe that somehow that is the crux of it … satisfying either the demon or the condition of its binding. Now leave me to grieve for my dear Tavio. Leave me to grieve and find your way home.”

“Adiella, I don’t know what it wants. And I can’t possibly figure that out. I just can’t—”

“Can’t?”

“It babbles. Not words. Not anything I can understand.”

“Find a way to talk to it, Bridget. Find a way. You’re a resourceful skel. Elijah Stone couldn’t talk to it, so it killed the women in his life. The demon’s attendants before Stone apparently couldn’t communicate either … hence the string of dead bodies you mentioned. Threats, those corpses were; threats to force the attendant to do its bidding, most likely. But you’re inventive, creative, or so my dear Tavio believed.” She puffed herself up, eyes red-rimmed. “If Tavio had never met you’d he’d be alive today. A curse to him you were, Bridget O’Shea. A poison pill he swallowed. So you find a way to communicate with that demon. Because if that demon kills my grandson, you Irish
târfă
, I will do far worse than kill you. Find a way to talk to it and give it what it wants, or you will discover that your personal demon is just the beginning of your troubles and pain. I’ll find a way to bring all of hell’s minions after your soul. Now get out of my pit.”

***

Seventeen

“Find out what the demon wants, she said. Satisfy it. The witch makes it sound so feckin’ easy.” Bridget stood in front of the gas-burning fireplace in her study, absorbing the heat; finally sensation returned to her feet. She thought about a hot shower, as she’d picked up some funk from the underground and wanted to steam the stink away, but that could wait, as she had no company that would be offended. Everyone else in the house slept. When she finally stopped shivering, she laid her coat across a chair and settled onto the over-dyed Turkish oushak rug.

The buckle—it wasn’t really a buckle, but that word came to mind—was in front of her, faintly glowing in the light that stretched from the fire. Bridget was exhausted, having arrived back at her brownstone slightly before three a.m. Adiella’s magic had taken many hours, and now it was time to try her own.

Without realizing it, her fingers lingered on the rug fibers, and in the back of her mind she saw the image of one of the women who’d woven the oushak a little more than a hundred years ago. The weaver had a long face and kind eyes, and Bridget sometimes found a little peace just by watching this particular woman. She had a family, as Bridget had noticed a wedding ring on her very first foray into the rug and had spotted a young boy interrupt the weaver’s work a few times, and calling out “
babaanne
,” which she’d learned was Turkish for grandmother. And once she’d seen an aging man shuffle by, kiss the top of the weaver’s head, and move on. Perhaps a husband. Bridget had only briefly known what it was like to be part of a blood-family. Her father had brought them to New York when Bridget was eleven. He immediately joined the Westies, rose in their ranks, and was killed by police the day after Bridget’s thirteenth birthday. He’d drawn a gun on a couple of patrol officers. Perhaps that was the reason Bridget refused to own any firearms.

Bridget’s mother had never approved of the Westies and their illegal doings, and after her husband’s death had tried to make an honest living working part-time in a department store and doing bookkeeping at night. She was so absorbed with work that it was easy for Bridget to sneak out. Their savings dwindled as the cost of rent rose. Bridget’s mother decided the city was too expensive. And she feared Bridget would follow her father’s dark path—discovering that the girl indeed ran with Westies boys despite her pleas not to. So she made plans to return to Ireland for a better life and to take Bridget with her.

Bridget, fifteen by this time, impetuous and bullheaded, ran away before she could be plucked from her beloved city. The Westies hid her and took her in, and that became her family, and in the gang’s ranks she found purpose and clarity. If her mother had searched for her, she’d been unaware. But she had learned that her mother had eventually returned to Galway. Bridget sometimes wondered if she’d made a mistake, if she should have gone with her mother. Or at the very least, if she should have kept in touch.

She envied the little Turkish boy who again appeared in the back of her mind, hugged the rug weaver, and said: “
Seni seviyorum babaanne
.”

“
Seni seviyorum
,” the weaver returned.

Bridget couldn’t remember if her own mother had ever said she’d loved her. Probably; mothers did that, didn’t they? But her mother had worked so many hours that she’d spent little time with Bridget.

Bridget’s grandparents? They’d been pictures only, faces of people from Kilkenny. Probably dead, maybe her mother was dead too. In the past eighteen years, Bridget had made no attempt to contact her mother.

She should have. One more regret to heap onto her soul.

One more.

Bridget had gotten her magical talent from somewhere in her roots—mother, father, or more likely grandparents or farther back, often talents skipped generations. Her parents had never displayed any arcane gifts. She knew that Tavio had inherited nothing arcane from Adiella, and for that, both she and Tavio had been thankful. Otter? Would some gift pass to him?

And could Bridget somehow satisfy the demon so Otter would be safe? How could she learn what it wanted?

The demon perched on a bench across the room, slimy face pressed to the window, the image calling up a dog looking out on the world. It babbled, but not loudly, the sound more of a susurrus that blended with the crackling from the fireplace.

“What do you want? So what the bloody blue hell do you want?”

It looked over its warty shoulder, four eyes locked onto her, fifth eye closed with its lid twitching. There was a definite pattern to its prattle, and it repeated something over and over.

Bridget dropped her connection with the rug and placed her hand against the buckle. The disturbing design of it had been frost-branded into her skin and looked shiny, like that part of her palm was wet. It didn’t hurt. In fact, when Bridget pressed on the scar, she didn’t feel anything.

She rubbed her thumbs against the metal like the thing was a worry stone, centered herself, and then concentrated. Sometimes the psychometry came easy. Dipping into the memories of the Turkish rug, for example, had become welcome and effortless, like looking upon the faces of old friends. The brick beneath the subway had not been difficult either; the brick had been thick with memories, the dipping almost effortless. Cool Papa Bell’s baseball had been a simple read, too, even through its plastic case. But the buckle was taking serious work. To connect with the buckle was like jogging to the top of the Empire State Building … with weights strapped to her ankles.

To communicate with the demon, she would first need to discover someone who spoke its language, and despite the difficulty to connect with the buckle, whoever fashioned this piece was Bridget’s best bet to act as a translator.

“C’mon. C’mon.” There was a barrier, something arcane. Serious magic had been involved in the piece’s crafting, and it was acting like a ward, keeping Bridget’s senses out. “C’mon!”

She could only use psychometry on inanimate objects, and so she needed someone from the buckle’s past to mirror the language of the demon. Touching the demon would yield up nothing other than disgust. She couldn’t talk to it that way.

“Give me your secrets,” she urged the odd metal. “Stop fighting me.”

The demon babbled in the background and returned to staring out the window.

After several minutes of effort, Bridget gained an image of a forge and a cloaked figure that was crushing and grinding ore on a stone table. Breaking through and gaining a memory from this piece had a price, it felt like Bridget’s chest was being squeezed by a vice, her breath came in shallow gasps. She forced the connection stronger, and was handed a pounding headache for her success. The cloaked figure was a woman, she guessed, by the delicate thinness of the fingers. Old, judging by the wrinkles and age spots on the back of her hands. The figure, stooped and with rounded shoulders, painstakingly separated valuable bits of metal from the waste. She collected silver, copper, and gold particles as Bridget watched, then brought in lead and shiny grit, melting it all together to form an alloy that she poured into a mold to produce the buckle. Bridget had connected with the base elements of the buckle and was watching the piece being made.

There was someone in the background, but Bridget couldn’t quite make out the figure—tall and with an odd silhouette, maybe just the play of shadows.

All the while the stranger worked, she spoke in a monotonous, flat tone that Bridget could not decipher. But it was tinny, an old woman’s voice. Always Bridget somehow automatically translated words heard during a delving, turning it all into English in her mind. But this confounded her, what the woman was saying. And so she assumed it was a spell the metallurgist wove, the words having the same sense as Adiella’s mumblings, and therefore her mind not able to comprehend. The ache in Bridget’s chest and head intensified, but she didn’t release the image. Instead, she searched for more and accepted the resulting pain.

Bridget didn’t see her toady demon in the vision, though she’d expected it. The metallurgist must have called and bound the beast to the buckle somehow. So where was the demon? Not yet present at this stage in the buckle’s existence and so not yet bound? Would the metallurgist summon it? Would someone else do that for her?

Bridget fought to stay linked with the buckle and continued to send her senses outward from the now-cooling metal, seeing the cave-like alchemist shop with primitive furnishings, and getting no better look at the cloaked figure, the hood keeping the face in shadows. The place smelled of charred wood, smoke, and stale sweat. There were tall shelves covered with broken clay bowls, narrow shelves arrayed with pouches and folded animal skins, more skins on the floor and hanging across the shop’s door and window, a plate of dates on a low table. Bridget could not tell what time of day the buckle was being made, the fire from the forge the only light. Never could she see what was beyond the “line of sight” of the object she probed, and so she had no clue to the country or the year in which the alchemist worked. But she could hear beyond the object. Through a dark doorway voices crept into the workroom. Two voices, men; and they spoke a language that tickled her memories. Bridget had not heard this exact dialect before, though she had heard something
like
it. If circumstances were different, she would take time to delight in this new discovery. Again, there was that shadowy tall image at the edge of the image, and when it turned sideways, it looked to be wearing a bird’s mask. Odd.

The headache worsened and her nose started to bleed.

Bridget understood the other speakers clearly—the men beyond the doorway, but she couldn’t put a name to the tongue. The words had a similar quality to the demon’s rants, but nothing precisely matched. And with no match, she could not understand the demon. She felt herself drifting off and deliberately bit her tongue, the jolt helping to keep her alert.

“She will bind,” one voice said. “Others can catch. She can bind.”

“This you promise?”

“This I pray. She can make a slave of evil that will in time conquer. That will allow us victory. A slave that she can bind like a mother unto a child. A free and powerful life for us.”

Slave—that word matched with the demon’s chatter.

Free.

Life—that matched too. Bridget had three words in the ancient tongue, and she stashed them in her memory. Slave. Life. Free.

The conversation went on, but turning to markets and the rivers, harvesting a crop called gongai, but Bridget found that uninteresting. She struggled to return her focus to the alchemist when one of the unseen speakers provided another clue. He ascribed a name to a river, and that translated into English as “Euphrates.” One word was repeated three times: “enlil,” and her mind provided no translation. The demon had uttered that—“enlil.” Since in Bridget’s vision the word did not have an English translation, it was therefore meaningless. Unless it was name, maybe a person’s name, Bridget guessed.

Bridget’s nose gushed blood.

“Enlil.” She tried it out, tasting blood on her tongue.

Bridget listened in for a while longer, and then the voices stopped. The alchemist destroyed the mold, curled on a rug on the floor and slept. The forge fire died, plunging the room into darkness. She considered pushing the image forward in time, but she was already spent. She could scarcely breathe. The connection broke, despite her attempts to hang onto it. She would delve again into it later when she was fully rested. Bridget couldn’t remember a piece so difficult and exhausting to “read.” And never had something exacted so much physical pain.

“Euphrates.” Bridget leaned back and tipped her head up, fighting the dizziness from exerting so much to get that brief glimpse. She wiped the blood off her face with a sleeve. A stream had dripped onto her shirt. She pressed her nostrils together and her voice came nasally. “Euphrates. Enlil. What else? Slave, life, and free.” She worked a kink out of her neck and slowly got to her feet, feeling stiff and thinking another exercise session might help to reinvigorate her—that or sleep. Either way replenish her energy so she could send her pounding head into the defiant buckle again. But the demon might not follow her up to the roof or down into the basement for an exercise session. It might disappear and kill someone—Otter, Dustin, Adiella. Again she thought about her exercise session on the roof with Jimmy … that was when the beast had killed Tavio.

She hated the witch who had been her mother-in-law—if only because Adiella had always tried to drive a wedge between her and Tavio. But Bridget actually might need the old woman now. Adiella had managed to destroy the damnable briefcase; maybe she could still prove necessary. And the demon had certainly looked nervous in the pit in the subway tunnels.

“I’m stumped,” Bridget told the demon. She tugged her shirt up, found a clean spot, and wiped more blood off her face. At least it was easy to breathe again, but her temples still throbbed. “I can’t try again, not for a little while, not with the buckle.” She couldn’t stay connected to any one object indefinitely; her gift didn’t work that way. Psychometry taxed her, save for with her beloved oushak, and there was too little inner energy left at the moment to have another round with the buckle. “I should get some sleep.” She knew she desperately needed it, but more than that she needed to keep her eyes on the demon. “Christ on a tricycle. What the hell am I going to do?”

It looked away from the window; still its fifth eye was closed. The thing hissed and a thick line of acidic drool spilled over its lower lip and extended to the floor, sizzling and smoking when it hit the hardwood.

“That’s endearing,” Bridget said.

Its four open eyes narrowed and it raised its incomprehensible voice.

“Slave. Life. Euphrates. Euphrates.” Bridget wiped the sweat off her forehead. “Euphrates.”

The demon cocked its head and parroted the last word. Bridget clearly understood: “Euphrates,” though even in that one word, a guttural-sounding accent was evident.

“Euphrates.” Bridget’s heart sped. “Tigris,” she tried.