Just then, the timer sounded, and I went to get the pizza out of the oven. I brought it back and set it on the table, but I had lost my appetite. “What were those things that attacked the car?” Teag asked.
Sorren leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “They are akvenon, minions of fear,” he replied.
“Dangerous, but not nearly as deadly as their master.”
“Who is?” Teag prodded.
“A full Asmodius-level demon,” Sorren replied. “The akvenon are just attack dogs, doing their master’s bidding.”
“Does Moran control the demon?” I asked.
Sorren opened his eyes. “Moran may think he controls the demon,” he said. “But in the end, demons best their would-be masters.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said, beginning to pick at the pizza. Teag had already downed three slices. “Why the murders?”
“When a demon is first summoned, it’s weak,” Sorren replied. “It needs to feed in order to gain power, and it feeds on pain and death.”
“So the murders, you think they’ve been feeding the demon?” Teag asked.
Sorren nodded. “Almost certainly.”
“How does any of this connect to the opera glasses and the haunted objects at Gardenia Landing?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Sorren said. “But I think it all connects somehow.”
“We know that Moran was hanging around the B&B,” Teag said. “Maybe he could feel the magic in the haunted objects.”
“Captain Harrison, the man who built Gardenia Landing, went down with his ship after delivering part of the pirate’s cargo from Barbados,” I added. “And now there’s another salvage team missing.”
“Interesting about the salvage team,” Sorren said. By ‘interesting’ I was pretty sure he meant ‘bad’. I looked at him sharply. “You think they found the pirate ship?”
“It’s possible,” Sorren said. “The question is: what was onboard that ship that someone wanted badly enough to kill for it?”
“As soon as I get back to my computer, I’ll find out,” Teag said. “And I’ll see if there’s any link between Harrison, the salvage team and the Navy yard.”
“We’ve got to go back there,” I said, swallowing a bite of pizza. “The Navy yard. Somehow, it’s tied up with this whole thing, but I don’t know how.”
Sorren nodded. “We’ll go back – together,” he said, fixing Teag and me with a stern gaze.
He turned to look at me. “On a more mundane note, don’t panic when your car disappears. Someone will be by shortly to take care of things. Can’t leave it sitting around in that condition for anyone to notice.” He paused.
“And I’ve been remiss,” he continued. “You need more protection than that necklace can give you. All well and good that you and Teag have martial arts and weapons training, but that doesn’t do much against magic. I need to find better defenses for both of you – magical ones.”
“What does it want, the demon?” I asked.
Sorren looked down. “What Moran wants, we don’t know yet, but we’ll figure it out. But what the demon wants, that’s easy.” He met my gaze. “The blood of every living being in Charleston.”
“This is the biggest thing we’ve been up against since Teag and I came on board,” I said. “Can’t the Alliance do more to help? I mean they can fix my car, but can’t take care of a demon?”
Sorren leaned back in his chair and laughed before taking on a serious tone. “The Alliance isn’t fixing your car, Cassidy. I am. I’ve had the need over the years to keep special services on retainer for just such emergencies. The Alliance isn’t some kind of shadow military organization, or something like the CIA,”
he said. “That’s not why it was created.”
He crossed his arms. “Less than one hundred years before I was turned, a book was published, the Malleus Maleficarum. Have you heard of it?”
I nodded. The Hammer of Witches was one of the chief tools of the Inquisition, the defining book of the witch-hunter.
“There were demons moving unbound through Europe in the old days, as well as wizards of power who sought only their own ends,” Sorren said quietly. “The threat was real. Unfortunately, the men who went to hunt the demons and wizards had their own agenda, or had already been corrupted by the ones they said they were hunting. Nearly all of the lives lost were innocents, while the real perpetrators went free.”
I could hear the sorrow in his voice. The persecution and terror of the witch-hunters lasted for hundreds of years, taking thousands of lives.
“My maker, Alard, was a good man. He and others realized that allowing supernatural wrongdoers to go unpunished posed a danger to all of us, but the mortal authorities were not equipped for such a task.
Alard was among the small group of vampires, wizards, shape-shifters, shamans, and immortals who made a pact to take on this burden.”
Sorren was looking over my shoulder, as if he were seeing into the past. “Immortals have even less patience with bureaucracy than mortals. Those of us who are pledged to the Alliance hope to avoid another Inquisition by taking care of matters ourselves. We usually see to the needs of our own territories, calling on aid when needed. We catalog the problem artifacts, try to keep tabs on where they are, and safeguard pertinent information. Some help the Alliance by tracking and obtaining dangerous pieces. Others help by destroying malicious objects, or seeing to the storage of those that can’t be destroyed. And we step in when groups and individuals use magic to cause harm. ”
He shrugged. “The Alliance has always been a loose construct of trusted friends and associates. People are brought into the group on the vouchsafe of one of the members, who is personally liable for their discretion and conduct.”
He removed a ring from his finger and slid it across the table to me. The golden ring was quite old, set with a large garnet. It had been worn long enough that most of the engraving on its sides was gone.
“You’ll see my memories, one of the first jobs I did for the Alliance, a long time ago.” He said.
“Antwerp, 1565, focus on the ‘Black Dragon’ so you don’t get caught in other memories.”
I nodded, and took the ring, repeating Black Dragon over and over again in my mind. The vision folded around me. I was somewhere else, some-when else. And I was seeing the scene through Sorren’s eyes, hearing his thoughts, which was a little different from most of my visions.
Alard withdrew a folded piece of parchment from his vest pocket and laid it out carefully on the cluttered desk. Carel, the man who owned the store that fronted for the Alliance, and his son Dietger, clustered around it. I took a good look at the drawing. It was of a necklace with a pendant made from what appeared to be a cluster of small gemstones set in an unusual pattern.
“That’s the Verheen Brooch,” Carel said in a low voice. “No one’s seen it in over a hundred years. I thought it was lost.”
“Not lost. Purposely hidden. The Alliance made a deal with the Verhoeveren family to be the guardians of the brooch once we finally tracked the thing down the last time it got away.” I heard a note of anger creeping into Alard’s voice. “The fools were supposed to keep it inside the magical wards and out of sight.”
“What happened?” Carel asked. He looked worried, too. Even Dietger appeared concerned. I was obviously the only one who hadn’t been in on the story.