Kelley Armstrong - Broken

A “wrong number” call to Shanahan’s house on the way had confirmed that the sorcerer was home, either working from there or taking the day off to inventory his collection, making sure nothing besides the letter had been stolen.

At just past 4 p.m., Jeremy and Clay were striding up Shanahan’s driveway. I got to eavesdrop at a window. As Clay said, I did have another option. I could wait in the car and let them fill me in later. So, eavesdropping it was.

As I waited around the corner, I heard Jeremy ring the bell. A moment later, the door opened.

“Are you Patrick Shanahan?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes…”

“Owner of a historical document once residing in the London Metropolitan Police files?”

“Do you have it?”

“You don’t?” Jeremy glanced over his shoulder at Clay and they exchanged a tight-lipped look, then Jeremy turned back to Shanahan. “Mr. Shanahan, are you aware of certain occurrences in Toronto in the last twenty-four hours? Occurrences our employer believes are related to the document previously in your possession?”

In the silence that followed, I knew Shanahan was taking a second, longer look at the two men on his doorsteps, seeing them not as associates of whomever stole his letter, hoping to “sell” it back, but as supernatural agents, most likely dispatched from a sorcerer Cabal. While one could argue that the Cabals needed policing more than anyone outside their infrastructure, they often played the role of law enforcement in the supernatural world, if only to protect their own interests.

Shanahan let them inside.

As they moved through the house, I could catch only Shanahan’s boom of a voice as he complained about the heat, the humidity, the smog-the kind of chatter that fills space and says nothing.

He didn’t ask how Jeremy knew he’d owned the From Hell letter. As Xavier had said, it was common knowledge among a certain subset of supernatural society, and Cabals had plenty of access to that subset. Nor did he ask which Cabal his visitors were with, or even confirm that they were from one. When dealing with Cabals, curiosity could sound dangerously close to challenge.

They stopped in the living room. As they sat, I moved around to that window. It was closed, of course, as they all were to keep the air-conditioning inside, but with werewolf hearing I could make out enough to follow the conversation.

Jeremy explained the events taking place in downtown Toronto. Shanahan expressed surprise, which seemed genuine enough-blown transformers and missing senior citizens weren’t the sort of news tidbits a man like Shanahan would follow, not while the stock exchange was still open.

“I’m not sure I understand what that has to do with my letter.”

“It was the combination with a third event that caught my employer’s interest. There were reports of a man and a woman, both dressed in Victorian garb, seen in the area of the power outage and the disappearance. Our experts detected signs of a dimensional disturbance-a recently opened portal.”

“P-portal?” A too-hearty laugh. “I’d never own a letter that contained a portal. Dangerous things, you know. Very dangerous. And damned near impossible to make. Way outside my very limited magical abilities.” A self-deprecating chuckle. “I can pick a stock a lot better than I can cast a spell, let me tell you. Ask anyone.”

“Presumably the portal was already within the letter before it came into your possession. Otherwise, it wouldn’t contain people from the nineteenth century.”

“Oh, er, of course.” Shanahan paused. “Listen, I’m a man of great practicality-particularly when it comes to money. If I’d inherited a letter containing an active portal, I would have put it on the market immediately. I know how much a Cabal would pay for such a thing. If that letter held a portal, which-no offense to your employers, but I doubt-I knew nothing about it.”

I could smell the bullshit in every word, yet Jeremy was stuck. As much as Shanahan claimed to be a weak spellcaster, our experience with sorcerers had left us wary enough to know they could be formidable opponents. And Shanahan, already nervous, would be expecting attack.

Jeremy let Shanahan think he believed him, and promised that, if the letter was recovered, his employers would indeed want it and would pay a fair price to Shanahan, the rightful owner. As he and Clay left, Shanahan was handing out business cards, scribbling his home number on the back, and asking to be kept in the loop.

I met them by the road.

“He’s lying,” Clay said.

“I know,” Jeremy replied, and kept walking.

Clay looked from me to the house, and I knew it killed him to leave it at that.

“We’re going back, aren’t we?” I asked. “When we can catch him off guard.”

Jeremy nodded. “Tonight.”

Robert had left a message. He’d found a mention of one case similar to ours, where a sorcerer had sacrificed a man in a portal creation spell. The soul of the sacrifice had been bound to the imbued object-in this case, a scroll-and when the portal was activated, the dead man had come through as a zombie.

That explained why we had rotting zombies. They weren’t people who’d been stashed in the portal for safekeeping-as Jaime postulated-but those who’d been sacrificed to create it. As for the other case, according to the brief mention Robert had found, the zombie had been laid to rest and the portal closed. It just didn’t say how the latter had been accomplished.

He’d e-mailed me some other stories. Since we still had a bit of time to kill before dinner, I found a cybercafe and read them, with Clay leaning over my shoulder, his chair pulled so close I might as well have sat on his lap.

Most of the “evidence” on portals was anecdotal. That’s typical with anything supernatural, like the Pack’s Legacy. Even those who seek to compile research, like Robert, are left with what really amounts to stories, and the closest thing to proof is multiple eyewitness accounts. Nice when you can get it, but how often does someone conducting a black magic ritual invite a dozen acquaintances over to watch? Even if he does, how many of them will take him up on the invitation…and how many will think “participate in a human sacrifice and risk being sucked into a faulty dimensional portal?” and decide they’d really rather stay home for the evening.

Although portal spells were available to any sorcerer willing to search enough and pay enough, there were few recorded instances of them being used. They were notoriously tough to cast, and the chances of them failing were rivaled only by the chances of them malfunctioning. Like the Austrian sorcerer who decided to use his portal to lie low until his legal troubles passed. A friend was supposed to free him after two years, and I’m sure he would have…if the paper that contained the portal trigger hadn’t accidentally been sucked into the portal itself, leaving the sorcerer stuck in his dimensional bubble for eternity.

Then there was the genius in medieval Japan who’d tapped into the wrong dimension. His portal belched out a very pissed-off demi-demon, who’d proceeded to flay and disembowel the sorcerer, his family, and half the village before it figured out how to click its ruby slippers and return home. Start circulating a few stories like that, and your average sorcerer will decide dimensional portals aren’t something he needs to add to his repertoire.

We headed out for dinner. We tried to find a quiet corner, and seemed to succeed, getting a table with a cushion of empty ones around us but it was not to be. Two tables over, a pair of emergency room nurses were complaining about an influx of stomach flu that had them working late that day and missing the commuter GO train home.