Salt and Iron (3 page)

He turns over one of the cards, and it’s a roughed-out sketch of
Justice
, unfinished, no color, no text. “Huh,” he says. He turns over another one of the cards. Then another. “Looks like it’s mostly major arcana.”

“Magic?”

“Definitely. But tarot’s mostly symbolic. There’s probably not enough text to worry about getting read-in.”

Rob turns back to the table and looks down, squashed face curious. “They making a homemade deck?”

“Looks like it. It’s….” He looks back down at the table, realizes something with a jolt. The cards aren’t just homemade generic divination tools, they’re incredibly specific. He looks again at the card he just turned over.

“The Lovers” is written in a sort of art nouveau script above, well, Rob and Yuko, two operatives who, as far as James knows, absolutely hate each other’s guts. Somebody’s idea of a joke. The next one is a very good likeness of James’s Great-uncle Abraham, dressed in a red robe and carrying a book, one hand extended in a gesture of benediction.
The Hierophant
. “Jesus,” James says.

“What?”

“Well, I think it’s a good sign somebody’s taken a pretty serious interest in the Firm.” He holds up
The
Lovers
so Rob can see it.

Rob stares. “What. The fuck.” He turns to the witches. The three of them are just starting to shuffle out of the room. “What the fuck is this?” he shouts.

One of the women, the one with the ink-stained fingers, lurches toward them. She looks at Rob, then the card, then flutters her hands at him and James.

“Listen, please,” she says, “I know it looks creepy, but I didn’t know you were real people. I just like to draw. Probably saw you on TV, that’s all. I don’t actually know who any of those people are.”

“You have never, ever seen her on TV,” Rob says softly.

The woman looks miserable, eyes wet, stained hands spread. “I just dream them, and then I make the cards. It doesn’t
mean
anything.”

Rob’s hand closes to a fist, like maybe he’s not convinced and he’d like to be. Nothing like pain to get somebody to say the thing you want to hear. James should know.

“Hey, hey,” he says, catching Rob’s arm. “These guys are going in front of a judge tomorrow.” He gives Rob what he hopes is a significant look, and Rob scowls. Rob points at the woman.

“You are so fucking lucky,” he whispers before Benecio starts back toward them to find out what’s going on.

“I got it, Dad,” Gabe calls, forestalling Benecio’s questions and his disapproval. “C’mon, get moving,” he tells the woman. Then he turns, frowning at Rob and James. “What’s going on? Everything okay?”

James looks down at the deck, spread out so the intricate card backs are all he can see.

“For some definitions of ‘okay,’” James says. “But this deck of cards is fucking weird.”

He turns the next card over.
The Sun
. Both he and Gabe snort. The man on the card is Abe, naked except for a flowing red cloak, which is doing the censor’s job. Another card, this one blank, unfinished, not even sketched. Another. This one is
The Fool
, and it’s a picture of him.

“Ouch,” Gabe whispers.

It stings, the idea that even people who don’t know him know all about him. It stings like hell, but James knows better than to show weakness. He shrugs. “Story of my life,” he says, and he even musters up a grin. The next card is
The Emperor
. That’s his father.
The Empress
, that’s his mother.
Strength
is Gabe’s dad, naked just like Abe was, but instead of red, Benecio is draped in blue. In the picture he’s either getting to his feet or going to his knees, a twisted, lion-mouthed creature reaching for him from the shadows.

“This is fucked right up,” Gabe whispers.

Rob grunts his agreement. James turns over the last card.

Death
rides a pale horse, and his standard is a circle of thorns like a coil of barbed wire. He has wings coming out of his back, his head, and his feet, like some kind of seraphim. There are people kneeling before him, people James knows. Abraham and Maria van Helsing lie under the horse’s feet. Rob kneels, hands clasped in supplication, begging, and James himself stands, hands outstretched to the figure on the horse. The rider’s eyes are looking at the viewers. James stares. The rider is Gabe.

“Jesus,” Gabe whispers when James looks at him. Gabe’s mouth has fallen open, the white of his eyes showing all around the brown. “Jesus,” he whispers again. “What the hell is this?”

“Look,” Rob says quietly, “can we move these? I don’t think anybody else should see them.”

James nods. “Yeah. Let’s get them put away. They’re pretty much dry. Who’s got an evidence bag? Not a clear one.”

Rob pulls one out of his pocket, and James thanks him and starts packing up the cards. Rob heads off to the wagon to oversee the piercing of the witches, and Gabe finishes up with the salt circle. Then James and Gabe take the brooms that were lying around and break the circle, swirling the colors into a mess on the floor, ruining the carefully drawn script, the interconnected lines. They mess up the circle, find a couple unfinished sketches for future cards, and methodically tag and bag all the books and printouts and journals lying around. They’re always careful, in a bust like this, to make sure to get everything that could have even a whiff of magic on it, or anything somebody might get read-in to, or learn bad habits from. They’re thorough. It takes them all damn night.

THEY’RE LEAVING
as the cleaners are coming in, as the sun is coming up over the big old manor house and throwing yellow light down through the trees. James has a glance at the facade on the way out.

Even the daylight can’t make the tumbled-down place look anything but creepy. All the tangled vines that drape it, the paint peeling away like scabs, the way it sags at the angles so nothing ends quite where you think it should.

He’d asked his dad last year if they should get the city to tear it down. That and the church across the road, which is in a similar state of dilapidation and disrepair. Couldn’t do it. Something about red-tape jurisdictional stuff, he can’t really remember the specifics. He’s too tired to think now, and he might have been drunk at the time. All he remembers is that they weren’t allowed to bulldoze it.

Should have done it anyway. Places like these just attract witches and ghosts and no end of troubles. He turns his back on it, but he’s pretty sure he’s going to be out here again, and probably soon.

YUKO IS
waiting with security at the door when they get back to the Firm. James doesn’t care much for her. She’s not friendly, she’s abrupt, and unlike Rob she doesn’t seem to care one way or another about the Firm. She’s just interested in whatever job’s in front of her. So he doesn’t like her, it doesn’t matter. It’s not like that’s a reason to be rude. He musters up an exhausted smile.

“Hey, Yuko, what brings you down to street level?”

She smiles back at him. It’s not warm; both of them are being professional.

“Your father’d like a word. He wants you to go right up.”

James nods. “I’ve got evidence for the cage.”

“He said to send you up right away, evidence and all.”

James frowns. “Everything okay?”

“Other than I’ve been told to send you up and you’re not going?” she asks. “Nope.”

That’s Yuko all over. Hard. Ass.

“On my way, then,” he says and steps around her and through the doors.

THIS PLACE
used to be a bank, way back. And then the Firm bought it and put offices on the main floor. That was in the late 1900s, after the younger branch of the van Helsings came over to America in the wake of Great-great-great Uncle van Helsing’s well-publicized doings in Whitby. They settled first in New England and then came south and settled in New Glamis. They came flush with fame and riches, and it kind of never stopped being that way. In a world full of minor gods and ghosts and sidhe, the monster-hunting business is
always
good.

Back in the day, they used to rent out the marble-clad lower halls to the city, and then in the thirties they took it back, and now it’s a spacious entryway; security and admin work down there. Below there’s the cages—the old iron bank vaults made sound and used for storing magic-related evidence.

Above there’s offices and living quarters. His mom and dad have the whole of the top floor, except for the little attic perched like a hat at the very top of the building—nobody uses that. He and Abe share the fourth floor between them; it’s split into two separate suites. The boardrooms and records and offices take up the other two floors.

He crosses the marble-clad entrance, goes to the elevator, and rides it right up to the top. His parents keep a couple of offices in their apartment on the top floor, and this early in the morning, that’s where they’re going to be.

He steps off the elevator into the wood-paneled hallway where the lights are still low and dim, and he goes down to his dad’s office. The place is as familiar as an old shoe. He and Abe used to measure their height on the door. They used to play out on the rooftop patio. Abe once told him there was a crazy old lady in the attic, and they used to try to see her through the topmost windows. Sometimes James convinced himself he did. Sometimes he told Abe the sound of the wind was the old lady screaming, and Abe would get quiet and afraid and tell him to shut up and stop being stupid and help him with the blanket fort.

When Gabe and his dad came to work at the firm, the boys used to play hide-and-seek and use all the secret doors and hidden passages and
trounce
Gabe, ’til Gabe got them all memorized. They spent a lot of time up here as kids.

There are actually three doors in the office, one to the hall, one to the library next door, and one that allows access to the roof. The rooftop door is standing open, and though the office is warm, the breeze coming in bites with the promise of oncoming fall.

The place always smells like the leather of the chairs and the blotter on the desk, and the citrus stuff they use to keep the wood paneling gleaming and yellow, and like coffee and sugar. His stomach rumbles, in spite of the acidic weight of the start of a hangover. It’s been a while since he put something that wasn’t a fermented liquid in his belly, and he’s starting to be sober enough to notice it.

“Dad?” he calls.

“Here,” his dad calls back.

Abraham van Helsing is standing on the balcony with a white ceramic cup of coffee in his hand. He is, in spite of the early hour, impeccably dressed, which makes James, who is rumpled, still smelling of his extracurricular activities, and unshaved, feel extra shabby. So James goes to the tray sitting on the desk and pours himself a cup of coffee. There’s a little bottle of Irish cream nearby, and that never goes amiss, so he pours a little of that in too, then takes the cup out onto the balcony, hoping he’ll look more fashionably disheveled than slapped together and up all night.

“Morning, Dad,” he says.

Abraham turns to him. He’s standing out near the rail in the exact spot where James and Abe once peed down into the concrete parking lot and got in a hell of a lot of trouble for splattering a security guard. He looks James up and down.

“You’re a mess,” he says.

Damn. “Long night. Witches. I guess you heard?”

“Rob called in a report. They didn’t give you any trouble, did they?”

James shakes his head. “No, they went pretty quiet.”

“Good, good.” Abraham sips his coffee and gazes out across the gray rooftops that terrace down to ground level. The city’s still gray and flat-looking, still quiet, the roads mostly empty, as if waiting for a starting pistol. “Rob said something about divination.”

James would like to be able to not feel a twinge of anxiety when people talk about divination. Why he thought it would be a good idea to specialize in that of all things, he’ll never know. Youth. Stupidity. He should have gone for something like salt circles. Then it would have been easier to pretend he wasn’t… whatever the hell he actually is. But he’d shown aptitude, as Uncle Abraham had put it, and he’d never been good at, well, anything before. Plus he’d been eleven years old and curious and didn’t know how else to find out about the weird stuff he could see that others couldn’t. At least he had been smart enough not to talk about it. So divination. He was good at it. Really good. Certainly better than he ought to have been.

“Yeah,” James says. “It looks like they were building a tarot deck.” He sips his coffee, wondering what his father’s looking for. They’re not such good friends that a casual debrief over coffee is the norm. It’s probably something to do with the deck, and probably about the pictures on it. Word about stuff like that gets around. “The deck was weird, Dad. Like, real weird. Did you hear?”

Abraham looks at him levelly, and James knows he’s got it.

“Rob said the cards all depicted high-level members of the Firm,” Abraham says.

“Yeah. I mean, what there was of them. The deck’s not done, just a couple of the major arcana. But those cards, I mean, the finished ones, well, there was you, Mom, me, Rob and Yuko….” He shrugs. “Like I said, it’s weird. I’m not going to lie. It freaked me out a little bit.”

“Did you bring them up with you?” Abraham asks.

“Yeah. Yuko said you wanted to see me right away.”

Abraham nods. “Good,” he says, “come inside, James. And pull the door closed.”

He follows his father inside, shuts the door after them. “You wanna see them?”

Abraham nods. “They’re safe?”

“Yeah. There’s probably not enough text to get read-in,” he says. He pulls the bag out of his pocket and drops it on the desk. The air above it splinters like a pane of ice. Time breaking, a fate changing. Prophecy can be like that. He’s seen it happen before. He’s seen it happen in funeral eulogies, seen it happen over the heads of fighting friends. He’s seen it happen like something in his eye, like looking through cheap glass, but he’s never seen time break quite like this.