Salt and Iron (4 page)

“Dad, I….” He hesitates. Abraham looks at him.

“Are they safe?” he asks again, a little harder edged this time.

He nods and shrugs. “Well, yeah.”

“Then let’s see them.”

“But—”

“James, I am your father. I’m not some gawker on the street. I’m also the acting director of the Firm, and if I can’t see them, I don’t know who could.”

James takes a breath and opens the bag. He spreads the cards out on the desk, and Abraham frowns down at them. James looks at his dad and almost can’t see for the way the air is breaking around him. It’s nauseating, impossible to get a fix on his dad’s face, and James can’t read his expression.

“You think these are legitimate?” Abraham asks.

James nods. He’d rather look at the cards than his dad. At least they don’t appear to be crawling out of their own shape. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, they’re legit. They’re… Dad, they’re dangerous. I think I want to put them—”

“What’s the matter, James?”

He blinks. He can’t really look his father in the eyes because his eyes appear to be crawling all over his head. “Headache,” he lies. “Migraine.”

His father makes a little noise, and James can’t tell if it’s disappointment or not, and it prickles the back of his neck.

“Go to bed,” Abraham says.

Disappointment, then. Not a tenth of the disappointment it would be if the truth came out.

“I’ll take these down to the cage,” Abraham adds.

“You sure?” he asks.

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Okay. My….” He’s not sure how to broach this delicately. His head hurts, and his eyes are making him nauseous. “Rob knows I’ve got them.”

“Well, good,” Abraham says, just this side of snarling. “Somebody ought to be keeping an eye on tools of witchcraft.”

“I gotta go down in the elevator anyway. I don’t mind taking them,” James says. Then he has a moment of genius and adds, “Look, I just don’t want anybody to think I get out of things because I’m the boss’s son.”

Abraham makes a small noise, a sound of approval. The nearest thing James ever gets to hearing
good job
.

“Well,” Abraham says. “Fair enough, but don’t worry about it. Anyone has a problem with it, send them to me. You’re a wreck. Go get some sleep.”

He nods. Out of options. “Okay. Okay, thanks.”

HE FALLS
into bed. He might think a bit about Cutie and about Gabe, and if he had a shred of decency in him he’d probably be ashamed about it, but instead he falls asleep. When he wakes up again it’s late, the sun is high and wan in that end-of-summer way, and the day is running into the arms of longer nights.

He heaves himself out of bed, head pounding with a hangover, and checks his phone. Two messages, one from his mom and another from Rob. Rob wants to know where the cards went. Easy. He texts him back
Dad’s got them. He’ll drop them off.
His mom wants to see him. He sighs and goes looking for an item of clothing that hasn’t spent multiple days on the floor.

When he gets up to Maria van Helsing’s little library, or the Red Room as he calls it when he names it for himself, since the couch and the chairs are all red leather and the oriental carpet on the floor is red too, when he gets up there she’s waiting for him. She’s got a glass of wine in one hand, and the remains of dinner, and there’s a Bill Ellis book lying abandoned on the coffee table.

“Hi, sweetie,” she says, rising and coming over to kiss him. “You look tired.”

“Could use a little more sleep,” he admits. “Is this about the cards? I gave them to Dad. Did he show you?”

She nods. “Yes, it’s not about that. You saw them, didn’t you?”

He blinks. “Yeah.” Then he nods. “Yeah. Of course I saw them.”

“Your father says we were all there. The van Helsings and the Marquezes.”

“And Rob and Yuko too. Yeah.” He sighs and tells her what he told his dad, even though he knows she knows. “They freaked me out a bit, but I think they were pretty harmless. The deck wasn’t finished, and,” he adds, feeling a little sick and a little relieved, “if they’re out of a fixer’s hands they’re probably inert.”

“You handled them, didn’t you?” she asks. That makes him uncomfortable.

“Yeah. I didn’t want Rob getting read-in.”

“And you’re all right?”

He smiles, because nobody knows about him, and that’s because he’s good at knowing how to manage people so he doesn’t have to lie and risk detection. Instead he uses a statement of fact. “Mom, divination’s my specialty.”

She ignores that. “Dad was
The Emperor
and I was
The Empress
. That’s what your dad says.” She stands, maybe musing on that for a moment. Then she smiles and goes to the drinks cabinet. “Uncle Abraham was
The Hierophant
, your dad says.”

“Yeah,” he answers. “Yuko and Rob were
The Lovers
.”

They both laugh. She looks over her shoulder at him. “What are you having?”

Oh thank God. A drink will take the headache away. “Whiskey.”

“Peaty or sweet?”

“Sweet.”

He hears the clink of glass and ice and then, “What do you think of those cards, James? Were they legitimate?”

He pretends he doesn’t know that they were shaking time all around them. He shrugs and settles onto the red leather couch. “I think so. I wouldn’t handle them unless I had to, Mom. Honestly. There was a salt circle on the floor around them about the size of a sandbox. Serious homebrew magic. Even Gabe was impressed.”

“Yes,” she says, and he detects something in her tone and in the cant of her mouth as she passes the whiskey to him, a generous two-finger measure, that the mention of Gabe has made her unhappy.

“But if you’re asking me my opinion on how safe they are”—she’s not, but he doesn’t want her to be unhappy, so he’ll try a distraction—“maybe bring them out as a last resort in the trial. I mean, we wouldn’t want anybody to suggest we’d been complicit in something like future fixing.”

“No,” she agrees, settling opposite him. “No, this family would never be a part of something like that. But it’s funny, don’t you think? Shouldn’t Uncle Abraham have been
The Emperor
?”

He shrugs. He sips. The whiskey tastes like caramel, and he wants it like water.

“Uncle Abe just handed the Firm over to you guys, more or less. I mean, sure, he’s still the head, but you and Dad do more and more around here. It doesn’t really surprise me.”

“You know,” his mother says quietly, leaning forward, “Uncle Abraham will leave everything to us. The Firm and all the money. I worry it’ll make the Marquez family jealous.”

James frowns and shakes his head. He knows his role here. This isn’t really about anxiety about Uncle Abraham or the Firm, or about the Marquez family. Not really. “Everybody knows you and Dad deserve it. Besides, you’re practically running the place now. Gabe knows that. I’m sure his dad knows too. Plus, you guys are blood.”

She smiles at him, and he tips the glass a little toward her. “This whiskey’s nice.”

“It’s the Birnam Wood.”

“The one Dad hates?”

She nods.

He grins and shrugs. “More for me.”

“James,” his mom says, leaning forward even more, like a conspirator, “I don’t want to be morbid, but I know you worry. You have
such
an imagination and you let it take you over sometimes. So I want to tell you that you and Abe are going to be well looked after when we go.”

James feels adrift. He smiles, because that always helps. “Mom, listen, I’m not—”

“I know, you don’t want to talk about us dying. I understand. But it’s dangerous work, this job we do, and we all have so many enemies. I just don’t want you to worry, sweetie.”

He laughs softly. “Mom, I worry about being useful. About not screwing up. Abe’s… he’s a hard act to follow.”

She nods. “You do your best, James. Your father and I both know it.”

“Thanks.” He looks into his glass. It’s empty already.

“Here,” she says, reaching for it. “I’ll top you up.”

HE’S LEAVING
when his phone buzzes against his backside, and he fishes it out of his pocket. It’s a text from Gabe.

Request for meeting from Lennox.

Lennox?
he texts back.

Old man witch from last night. Coming?

It turns his stomach, but he is free, and if he says he’s not it’d be easy for Gabe to find out he’s lying and then to wonder why, and Gabe’s persistent, like his old man. It’s part of why they’ve done so well in the Firm. The Marquezes are probably the most well-thought-of family in the monster-hunting business, second after the van Helsings. If Gabe starts asking questions, he’s going to either hear that James had a bad headache that sent him to bed and want to know if he’s okay now, and James’ll have to fake a migraine for a few days, or he’ll turn up at James’s doorway, asking him to explain why he ducked out of work. The truth isn’t an option.

When?

Two hours.

YY

James sighs and doesn’t think,
There but for the grace of God go I.

OKAY, SO
maybe he
does
think that. The thing is, it could be him. If he had been born into another family, or if he’d been unluckier or stupider and said something when he was young, it could be him there, waiting for interrogation, shackled in iron, the skin aching where it touches metal.

It’s not a pleasant thought. He washes his face, combs his hair, and finds a clean dress shirt and a pair of trousers to wear and hates the way the idea of doing his job makes a coward of him. He pours himself a little something from the cabinet. Just something small, a finger’s worth of good bourbon, the bottle his mom gave him, a little impromptu gift of exactly the sort he’d be likely to enjoy. He drinks it down like medicine and pours another, this one to enjoy. It’s three thirty; sun’s well over the yardarm now.

He sips, then showers and sips and fixes his hair, and decides against a tie. He unbuttons the sleeves and rolls them up to his elbows and looks at himself in the mirror, finishes the drink. Steady, cleaned up, respectable and professional. He starts for the police station.

IT’S JUST
down Cawdor Square, about six blocks from the Firm’s office in the old part of town.

In the 1800s Cawdor Square was a hanging square, but the only sign of its lurid past is a little interpretive plaque on one side of the green, though the two old cottonwood trees with their big, spreading branches are still there. Now it’s benches under them, not wooden steps, and people picnic in the park, where they used to howl like beasts at the dying and the dead.

The shadows are growing long and blue by the time he gets to the station. He goes up the four stone steps and through the old-fashioned glass doors with their curved, old-timey
New Glamis Police Station
printed in gold, as much for the tourists that flock here in spring when the chestnut trees start blooming as for the aid of the locals. Inside the place is a curious mix of modern and dated. Intricate cast-iron scrollwork on banisters and vents, modern safety-glass and key-card doors. He smiles at the tall sergeant—James can’t remember his name; Kareem, maybe?—on desk duty, signs the register, and waits to be buzzed in.

He knows his way, but he’s a civilian, so he has to go with an escort. Today it’s a neophyte blue he’s never met before and who’s too anxious about James’s celebrity last name to make a peep while they walk.

The two of them go down the hallway with its stuttering fluorescent lights and down the stairs to the interrogation rooms. He can hear the noises coming up from the cells on the level below, rumbling of conversation punctuated by the occasional sharp noise, a drunk shouting maybe, or the two guards at the desk sharing a good joke. The whole place smells like bleach and a little like a dentist’s office, and he wonders for the first time who has to clean up all the puke and shit and blood that must get splashed around down here. He might hate his job, but it could be worse.

The blue lets him into interrogation room number one. It’s the only one equipped for magic users. It’s concrete and iron, and there’s nothing reflective, so nobody will try to pull something through from Shadow or escape into it. If that’s really an escape. There are some things James didn’t pursue when he was studying for his magic certification; the land of Shadow, the sidhe realm of two courts, the seelie and the unseelie, were some of those things.

He steps past the blue and nods thanks but doesn’t say it because they’re real close and the guy might smell the bourbon on his breath. So he smiles and goes through and takes in the room.

Interrogation rooms are all more or less the same. Bare. Table molded to the floor so it looks like a mushroom sprung up out of it. There’s a chair just like it on the far side of the table, and that’s where the witch is sitting. It’s the older one, the one James figured was the dad.

Across from him there’s Gabe, standing with a woman in a suit who James knows from doing a lot of these. She’s Alexandra Ross, duty counsel for the district. He smiles at her and extends his hand. “Ms. Ross,” he says.

She shakes his hand and smiles right back at him.

“Mr. van Helsing.” She speaks sotto voce, hardly above a murmur. “I was just telling Mr. Marquez that I have advised Mr. Lennox to say nothing in this matter.”

“Is that right?” James asks, not speaking quietly. “Mr. Lennox asks for a meeting and then isn’t going to talk?” He looks at Lennox. The guy is middle years, bad haircut, hair going a little thin, gingery in color, cheeks ruddy from the sun. He looks more like a farmer than a witch, but then James is still waiting to take down somebody who actually looks like a Hallowe’en witch. When he does, he’s taking a selfie and posting it on
everything
. “You wasting my time, Mr. Lennox?”

“No, I want to talk,” Lennox says, lurching forward suddenly. Chains rattle. The blues are smart. They’ve dealt with a lot of supernatural stuff, and they keep their witches in iron, just in case. “I want to tell my side of the story. I can
explain
.”