Blood Relation (Arcane Casebook Book 6) Read online

  “Yes,” he said.

  “While I do that, you need to wash up,” she said, not making eye contact. “You have lipstick on your…” She waved her hand in his general direction. “Face.”

  Alex remembered how red Sorsha had blushed when she opened her eyes next to him. He could guess what he must look like, and he made his way through the brownstone door to his little bathroom. The one in his vault was closer, but it didn’t have hot water.

  When he stood in front of the mirror, he saw why Sorsha didn’t want him going out into his office. Along his cheek and all around his mouth were the remnants of Sorsha’s burgundy lipstick. Clearly she hadn’t just kissed him, she’d been all over him. He started to laugh, but the sound died as he clenched his fists in sudden anger. He had no memory of those obviously passionate kisses thanks to his drink being drugged.

  “When I find the bastard who did that, I’m going to loosen his teeth for him,” he growled at his reflection.

  Ten minutes later Alex and Sorsha emerged from the vault in Alex’s office. Sorsha had tried to teleport to her home, but every time she tried, she developed a massive headache. The hangover from the drug was something else. Since that option was off the table, an FBI car was on its way to pick her up and bring her a spare pair of shoes. She decided to wait in Alex’s office rather than risk being seen, shoeless, in his waiting room.

  In the time it had taken Alex to clean up and change into one of his regular suits, she’d managed to repair her face and brush out her hair. Apparently she kept supplies for that in her dimensional pocket.

  “I’m going to start carrying extra shoes and a change of clothes too,” she said as she opened the door to Alex’s office. “Tell Miss Knox to call in when the FBI detail gets here.”

  Alex promised that he would and started to turn, but Sorsha grabbed his arm. She stood up on tiptoes and placed a chaste kiss on his cheek.

  “Thank you for the perfume,” she said, then she stepped into the office and closed the door.

  Whistling to himself, Alex made his way along the hall and emerged into the waiting room. Sherry sat, smirking behind her desk and Alex chuckled.

  “It wasn’t like that,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” Sherry said, in a voice that clearly communicated that she didn’t believe a word. “I’ve got several messages for you, but I think you’ll want this one first.” She handed him a note with a south-side, outer ring address on it. “Danny wants you to meet him there, said you’d know what it’s about.”

  Alex looked at the note in confusion for a moment, then swore.

  “When did you get this?” he demanded.

  Sherry looked taken aback for a moment, but rallied quickly.

  “About half an hour ago,” she said.

  Alex opened the door to the back hall, then ran to his vault and retrieved his crime scene kit.

  “If Danny calls, tell him I’m on my way,” he said as he returned to the waiting room. “And tell him to stay away from the blood rune.”

  Sherry nodded and Alex headed out the door and down the hall to the elevator.

  This time, Danny’s address led Alex to a crumbling pile of an apartment building lined with dirty windows. Pieces of the façade had broken free of the eves and a litter of shattered brickwork lay piled against the side, making Alex look up nervously as he hurried along the sidewalk from where the taxi had dropped him.

  The building had no lobby, just a bare stairwell that led upward through its three floors. A uniformed policeman on the main level pointed Alex up and toward the back.

  “Second floor,” he said as Alex mounted the stairs.

  When Alex reached the second floor, he found Danny, two officers, and a detective he didn’t know waiting in the hall. Several items seemed to have been removed from the apartment and were lined up against the wall in the hallway. If Alex had to guess, they were the ritual bric-a-brac that the killer had positioned around the body.

  “Good,” Alex said when he saw his friend. “I wanted to warn you keep away from the blood rune. No telling what would happen if it started collapsing with you inside the room.”

  Danny gave Alex a flat look.

  “Gee, I never would have figured that out on my own,” he said.

  “Point taken,” Alex chuckled.

  “Can you tell if that thing’s going to crumble away anytime soon?”

  Alex looked in through the open door. The apartment appeared to be two rooms, a front room with the kitchen in it and the bedroom beyond a door on the far wall. This place was furnished better than Katherine Biggs’ shack, but not by much. A table with two chairs stood near the stove, with a sink and a half-height ice box beyond. A broken-down sofa slumped against the opposite wall along with an end table supporting a radio.

  In the center of the room, a hole had been cut through the plaster of the ceiling, revealing the beams that supported the floor above. Alex wasn’t surprised to see the remains of a rope hanging down through the hole. Beneath the hole and rope was another blood rune. This one didn’t appear to be the same as the previous one, which gave Alex pause until he realized that the only thing different was the obfuscating symbol on top. From what he could see, the geometric shape underneath looked like the same one as before.

  Taking a deep breath, Alex stepped into the room. Remembering what happened the last time he’d touched a blood rune, he held his hand over it without making contact.

  “It’s degrading,” he reported, feeling the magic ebb and flow, rising and falling like a heartbeat. He knew from experience that the beat would get faster and faster until it felt like one, long, continuous pulse. That was when the magic would fail and the backlash would set in.

  “How long do we have?” Danny asked.

  “At least a half hour, I would guess,” Alex said. “Maybe longer but I can’t be sure.”

  “What happens when the rune runs out?” Danny asked. “Will it eat the floor and the walls?”

  Alex just shook his head. He’d never experienced a construct this unfocused before, so he had no frame of reference. He’d used magic that was powerful, probably much more powerful than whatever had been done here, but that magic was refined, controlled. This magic was just raw magical force being used as a blunt instrument. Which, now that he thought about it, explained the backlash.

  “If you’ve got anything else to do in here, you’d better do it,” Alex said.

  “I thought you wanted to try to reveal the blood rune under all that mess,” Danny said, indicating the bloody writing.

  “I do, but it might accelerate the backlash,” Alex explained. “Or just trigger it immediately.”

  Danny turned to the detective and the cops in the hall.

  “All right, move in and look around,” he said. “And make it fast.”

  One of the policeman knelt down and took a camera out of a thick leather bag on the floor. As he screwed a flash bulb into it, Danny grabbed his shoulder.

  “If a picture of this crime scene shows up in tomorrow’s paper, I’ll have your hide,” he growled.

  “I develop my own film,” the man said. “No paper is going to get these.”

  Danny just grunted as the man filed into the crime scene and began taking pictures.

  “Nicely done,” Alex complimented his friend.

  Danny laughed humorlessly at that.

  “I’m starting to understand why Callahan was angry all the time.”

  “So what’s the story here?”

  Danny pulled out his flip notebook and scanned it.

  “This place is rented to two women, a Miss Linsey O’Day, that’s our victim, and Miss Phoebe Green. Phoebe works nights, and when she came home, she found Linsey hanging from the rafters.”

  Alex could just imagine the shock and horror poor Phoebe must have gone through in that moment.

  “Did Linsey have a sweetheart?” Alex asked. “Maybe someone she just started seeing?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “No
thing like that, but…” he hesitated, and Alex turned to regard him. “According to Miss Green, Linsey was a clerk at a general store a few blocks down. With business being slow, she wasn’t getting as much work as she used to.”

  Alex nodded, seeing where this was going.

  “And she supplemented her income by bringing gentleman callers home,” he guessed.

  Danny nodded, flipping the pad closed.

  “With her roommate at work, she had the place to herself.”

  “That’s the second prostitute,” Alex observed. “It’s starting to look like this sicko has a pattern.”

  “Lucky us,” Danny said without any enthusiasm. “Do you have any idea what the papers are going to say about this? They’ll start a panic.”

  “Maybe you should leak it yourself,” Alex said. He hurried on when Danny gave him a dirty look. “Seriously, think about it. This guy appears to be targeting prostitutes. If you put the word out, the girls on the street might be more careful.”

  “Which will make it more difficult for our killer to hunt his victims,” Danny said. “Then what happens if he decides to move to easier prey?”

  Alex nodded. Danny had a point; as long as the killer stuck to ladies of the evening, outrage would be minimal. But if some nice housewife got killed, people would be calling for Danny’s badge…and his head.

  Alex sensed a change in the steady background beat of the magic.

  “The rune is degrading faster,” he said. “Better pull your boys back.” He glanced up at the ceiling, remembering that this was the second of three floors. “Did you evacuate the people upstairs?”

  Danny nodded as he waved his men out.

  “And the one below, and on either side.”

  As soon as Danny and the others were back in the hall, Alex pulled out his rune book and tore out one of the temporal restoration runes he’d written. Being careful not to touch the blood on the floor, Alex folded the rune and set it gently on the symbol covering up the rune.

  Taking a deep breath, he squeezed his lighter to life and touched the flame to the paper. The rune flared to life in a burst of red and orange, sparking and popping like oil poured into a hot pan. Instantly the bloody mark on the floor began to fade, rising up off the floor in a red vapor.

  Not waiting for it to finish, Alex took out his notepad and stood back in the doorway where he could get a good look at the floor. When the burning rune disappeared and the vapor finally cleared, Alex almost dropped his pencil.

  “What is that?” Danny asked, looking at the construct that had been revealed.

  It was definitely a construct. More than that, it was something Alex recognized.

  “What does it mean?” Danny prodded when Alex didn’t answer him.

  “It means,” Alex said, sketching quickly, “I have to catch a train upstate.”

  “To where?”

  “Sing-Sing,” Alex responded.

  15

  Demons

  One long train ride later, Alex found himself at the gates of the Sing-Sing penitentiary. Danny had called ahead so no one gave him any trouble, and within a few minutes of arriving, he had been shown to a small, windowless visiting room.

  “Someone will bring him out in a minute,” a bored guard said before leaving Alex alone in the bleak little room. A rough wooden table sat in the middle of the space, and Alex took the chair on the far side so he could face the door. He wasn’t too worried about the man he’d come to see, but Alex did put him in prison, so it never hurt to be careful.

  As the minutes stretched on, Alex took out his notebook. But before he could review any more than the first page, the door opened and a prison guard who appeared to have no discernible neck brought in a large man with bushy black eyebrows.

  “I’ll be right outside the door,” the no-necked man said, pushing his charge down into the chair opposite Alex. “Holler if this one makes trouble.”

  Alex waited until the guard withdrew before addressing the man across the table.

  “Hello, Jimmy,” he said.

  “Alex Lockerby,” Jimmy said with a chuckle. “I haven’t seen you in a couple years. You didn’t give up on me, did ya?”

  Jimmy Cortez had been the floor manager for Andrew Barton’s manufacturing facility on the West Side. He was a large, friendly fellow with olive skin, dark hair, and a Jersey accent you could cut with a knife. Alex had liked the man, right up ‘til he discovered that Jimmy was the leader of a gang that kidnapped a young engineer and forced him to tunnel into the American History Museum in order to rob it.

  None of that was why Alex was in a visiting room at Sing-Sing, however. That had to do with Jimmy’s other profession as a runewright of the heretofore unknown glyph school. In the months after Jimmy’s incarceration, Alex had visited him multiple times in an effort to learn about glyph runes. Each time Jimmy had told him, politely, to pound sand.

  “You told me not to come back,” Alex said with a shrug. “I know when I’m licked.”

  Jimmy gave Alex the once over and chuckled.

  “Nice suit,” he said. “Tailored. Not like those Sears catalogue numbers you used to wear. Looks like life’s been good to you.”

  “I’ve kept busy,” Alex said.

  “So what brings you back to me?” Jimmy said, his curiosity finally getting the better of him. “You want to go another round about rune magic? I gotta warn you, I’m a bit rusty. They don’t exactly let me use magic in here.”

  That was a joke. Runewrights could make basic runes with ink, mud, charcoal, or even blood. Fortunately, the kind of runes available without specialized inks were weak and basic. Not what a desperate convict would need to mount an escape.

  Alex pulled out his notepad and flipped to the drawing he’d made in Katherine Biggs’s apartment. It had the geometric shape he’d been able to see before, but inside, where runic text should be, was a Mayan glyph. It looked like a blocky snake’s head, but with some kind of hood along the back, like a cobra. That was what brought Alex to Sing-Sing and Jimmy Cortez.

  “I might have run into a friend of yours,” he said, tossing the notepad onto the table.

  Jimmy glanced at it, but didn’t move to pick it up.

  “What’s that?” he asked with a sardonic smile.

  “A glyph rune,” Alex answered. “Found on the floor in a dead girl’s apartment.”

  Jimmy’s smile disappeared and he glanced at the notepad again. This time when he looked up at Alex, there was suspicion in his eyes.

  “You think whoever wrote this,” he pointed at the pad, “murdered the girl?”

  Alex shook his head.

  “I don’t think it,” he said. “I know it. The glyph was written using the dead girl’s blood.”

  Jimmy reacted like he’d been slapped. His eyes went wide, then he seized the notepad and held it up into the light from the overhead bulb.

  A moment later he cursed and threw the notepad back at Alex.

  “El Diablo,” he spat. “Incubo.”

  “I take it you’ve met,” Alex said, leaning down to pick up the notepad from the floor.

  “No,” Jimmy said, seeming to get ahold of himself. “I never met that guy.”

  “But you know him,” Alex pressed.

  “Only stories,” he said. “When my family came to America, they brought me and my grandmother. She had stories, tales of a guy who came to their village when she was a young girl. He was like you.”

  “Like me?” Alex protested.

  “He wanted to learn about glyph runes too, but back then we weren’t smart enough to keep our mouths shut.”

  “So your people taught this man?” Alex asked. “What was his name?”

  Jimmy shook his head and leaned in, lowering his voice as if he were afraid of being overheard.

  “My grandma just called him, El Diablo. The Devil.”

  “What happened to make her call him that?”

  “He lived with the villagers for a while, but he wasn’t what you would call a goo
d guest. Apparently he was quite the charmer, and he didn’t consider married women off limits.”

  “Ah,” Alex said. “So the men ran him out of town?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  “Some of the husbands challenged him, but he beat them, even killed a few.”

  “Didn’t the women complain about that? I doubt many of them wanted their husbands dead over a dalliance.”

  “That’s the strange part. They all seemed…unaffected. My grandmother said he’d cast some kind of spell on them.”

  Visions of the Legion and their mind control rune flashed through Alex’s mind, and he kept his face deliberately blank.

  “What happened then?” he asked, leaning forward over the table as well.

  “Everything quieted down for a while, but the women who kept company with the stranger all began to get sick. Finally the village elder, my great grandfather, had enough and rallied the men to throw him out. When they got to his house, they found three of the women dead and that symbol,” Jimmy pointed at the notebook in Alex’s hand, “painted on the floor in blood.”

  Alex thought about that for a long moment. There was definitely some connection between this new killer and this El Diablo.

  “That’s some bedtime story,” he said at last. “Why did your grandmother tell you that?”

  “She saw what El Diablo did,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice even more. “She said that one of the men from her village, an experienced hunter, tracked down El Diablo and shot him, but he didn’t die. He got up and killed the hunter. My Grandma didn’t believe he could be killed, so she warned me what to look for.” Jimmy paused, looking from side to side as if he expected someone else to be in the little room with them. “I don’t know what this is about, Alex, but do yourself a favor — drop it. Nothing good comes from dancing with the Devil.”

  Alex put the notepad back on the table and pointed to the decagon around the glyph.

  “This looks like a geometric rune, but no rune I know uses this shape,” he said. “Do you have any idea what this hooded snake glyph is?”

  Jimmy didn’t look, but he nodded.