“So what can the Alliance do for us?”
“Personal connections – very valuable for getting things done out of sight,” Sorren said. “Money, if needed. Safe storage or disposal. Information. Hiding places. And the loan of specialized assets… supernatural artifacts, people with unique skills.”
“You mean, like Teag and me,” I said.
He nodded. “And a demon hunter.”
I raised an eyebrow. “A real one?”
He chuckled. “A fake one would hardly help, now would it?” He nodded. “I’ve asked the Alliance to loan me Taras Mirov. He’s good. And he’s come up against Asmodius-level demons before and lived to tell about it.”
“So that’s it? We turn it over to him?”
Sorren shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We’ve also got Moran to contend with. Taras will focus on the demon. Lucinda and I will take Moran. You and Teag are there for back-up.”
I paled. “I’m not sure I can be much help.”
Sorren met my gaze. “The Alliance doesn’t have armies, Cassidy, or SWAT teams. Just a few volunteers. We’ll be fortunate to have Mirov’s help. The five of us are all there is.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I TOLD YOU we wouldn’t stay in the car.” Teag shot me a sidelong glance. Although his voice was pitched whisper-low, I knew Sorren would hear, but he didn’t deign to comment.
We were behind the old house that Teag and I had spotted as a bad energy place near the old Navy yard. “I wonder if this place looked as bad when Old Lady Dennison ran it,” Teag mused under his breath.
I shrugged. “From the pictures you found, this might be an improvement.”
We’d had a full day (except for the part taking care of customers) to dig through Internet sites and property records on the suspicious buildings. The decrepit house had been a seedy rooming house, the stay-by-the-day kind of place favored by folks who were too down-and-out to even rent week-to-week.
Matilda Dennison was the last recorded owner. From the mug shot that turned up in a newspaper account online, she looked as hard-bitten as any of her clientele. Before she owned the rooming house, Dennison had been arrested for a string of petty crimes, and from the remorseless look in her eyes, I guessed that those arrests were just the times she got caught.
“You know, all those suspicious deaths in and around the rooming house make me wonder whether the bad juju was going on longer than we thought,” Teag said. He eyed the dark, hulking structure.
“Either that, or Madam Dennison was a poisoner.”
“She wouldn’t be the first landlady to think of it,” Sorren said over his shoulder, proof that he’d been listening to every word. “Back in the 1700s, there was a couple hanged at the Old Jail for killing the travelers who stayed at their inn and stealing their goods.”
He said it as casually as I might have commented that something happened ten years ago, but I recalled hearing about the incident from one of Drea’s tour guides. Maybe for Sorren, nearly three hundred years felt like decades.
“Yeah, but we don’t know where any of the latest killings actually happened,” I reminded them.
“I like my theory – that there’s just something wrong with this whole area,” Teag said. “When it was a base, it had a higher than average number of suicides and violence. Anthony heard the developer is having problems getting new tenants because so many of the businesses who moved here are struggling. Loan defaults, bankruptcies, suicides. As I said – bad juju.”
Sorren picked the locks and the door swung open. Maybe he really had been the best jewel thief in Belgium.
“Let’s get off the street, shall we?” he said.
I stepped just inside the door. “Won’t you come in?” Sorren assures me there are ways a vampire can enter without a formal invitation, but having one makes it simpler, and we were in a hurry.
After what happened the last time we were in the Navy yard, we came better prepared. Sorren wore his sword, which he said had been spelled against demon spawn by an Italian mage he had known in the 1700s. I didn’t care where it came from, so long as it worked.
Sorren had also brought with him something that looked like an old fashioned reflector lantern. It was a rectangular brass lantern with a mirror in the back, but the bluish-black candle it held looked to me more like something out of a Voodoo shrine than a reading lamp.
“Take this,” he said, shoving the lantern into Teag’s hands. “And this.” He dug a Bic lighter out of the pocket of his jeans and handed it over. “Don’t light it until we need it.”
Teag looked baffled. “I brought a flashlight. What do you mean, ‘until we need it’?" he asked.
Sorren gave him a look. “You’ll know.” He turned to me. “Here,” he said, and handed me what appeared to be an ornate walking stick, with a band of cloth wrapped around the middle. “Hold it by the cloth, since you’re touch-sensitive,” he instructed.
I turned it from side to side. “What does it do?” I asked, thinking that it looked too fragile to bash a demon or its minions over the head.
“If you need it, grip the wood and open yourself to the vision,” Sorren said. “The cane will know what to do.”
We followed Sorren into the front hall. His vampire senses were keener than ours, so he didn’t need light, but we did. Once the door was shut behind us, Teag and I withdrew our flashlights, each fitted with a red filter to dampen the glare. It might keep us from attracting attention, but the red glow gave the run down building a rooming-house-from-hell look.
“I’m hoping vandals did this, because I sure hope the place wasn’t quite this bad when Dennison was renting out rooms,” Teag said.
I had to agree. It looked like a hangout for crack addicts and heroin hustlers – maybe both. The entryway smelled of old vomit and dried urine. Used condoms and hypodermic needles littered the corners. The walls were stained with substances I didn’t want to identify.
My psychic gift told me that the people who had passed through this house had been in the process of dying. We all die, but the folks who found themselves at Dennison’s Rooming House had been in a little more of a hurry, whether they knew it or not.
“What are we looking for?” Teag asked.
“A room, a spot on the floor, an object that feels like the bad stuff we get at Trifles and Folly,” I said, guessing. “Something that might point to a reason old items are taking on dark power.”
Teag played his light around the room. There was a rustle and a squeak, and I deliberately did not look down. My guess was that we’d scared off a rat. I was surprised that they hadn’t bolted when Sorren entered. Vampires had that effect on a lot of creatures.
“Cassidy’s description is close enough,” Sorren said. “We’re looking for a nexus, a point of power. It could be an object. Anything.”
I took a deep breath and concentrated, feeling my senses flow out around me. It could be something used in the construction of the house, or even buried in the walls, given its long dishonorable reputation. But I didn’t think so.
Bad things had happened in this house, lots of bad things. Killers had moved through these rooms.
Some had been drug dealers and some of them were shooters, but the resonance of their remorseless lingered. Violence and death… If I stood completely still and listened, I could hear whispers and echoes. Some of the lost ones who moved through this space were hunting death. Their end was foreordained; all that remained uncertain was the means.
Fragments of conversations clung to the walls and the bare wood floor. Listening to any single one was like trying to hear a whisper in a crowded airport or a noisy subway. It didn’t matter what they said.