Deadly Curiosities (12 page)

A crash made my heart thud, and the world swirled around me as I lost my bearings. Another crash, and a spray of sharp splinters peppered my skin. The vision had lost its hold on me, but I was adrift, reeling. The third crash yanked me firmly back to the present.

As usual, I woke up screaming.

This time, I came back to myself on my own. I opened my eyes and saw Anthony standing over the broken remains of the Foo dog sculpture, a fireplace poker raised to strike again. Shards of the statue were scattered across the room, and fell from my skin and clothing.

Teag was throwing handfuls of salt, herbs, and charcoal onto the broken antique. Both men wore grim expressions, as if they had just gone to battle. If I hadn’t had such a rotten headache, the sight of them rushing to my rescue would have warmed my heart.

“It’s okay,” I managed. “I think the dog’s dead.”

“W
HAT DID
I miss while I was ‘out’?” I asked. By now, I was sitting in one of the fireside chairs as Teag swept up the remains of the Foo dog and placed them in a garbage bag. I had already given them a complete recounting of the vision.

“It was quite a show,” Anthony said, in a tone that made me wonder if he would ever consent to help out again. “When you first went into your trance, we just waited and watched. Teag got the things ready from his kit, and told me to grab the poker, just in case.”

“And?”

“Then all hell broke loose. We saw ghostly images moving in the mirror. A shadow man appeared on the wall and started to make his way toward us. I could hear wailing coming from the front hall, and a woman’s scream from the dining room. There were heavy footsteps coming up the hall, even though Rebecca had locked herself in her room. It was like all the ghosts that were linked to the haunted objects hit full strength at once,” he said.

“So even with the salt we scattered, the energy in the Foo dog could still summon up all that bad mojo,” I mused.

“Apparently so,” Teag replied.

“And that’s when Teag and I decided it was time to do something.”

“I threw salt at the shadow man, and it made him back off,” Teag said. “Then I poured a salt circle around the three of us so that nothing could sneak up while we were dealing with the statue. Anthony and I worked together so that I poured the crushed herbs and charcoal over the sculpture to weaken it, and then Anthony started whacking away with the poker.”

“I have to admit, that was rather satisfying in an afraid-for-your-life sort of way,” Anthony admitted sheepishly.

“As soon as the statue broke, the other phenomena stopped,” Teag added. “Poof. No wailing, no shadow men, no ghosts in the mirror. End of story.”

“That was a little more excitement than I expected,” I said, taking a deep breath. “If the Foo dog had been owned by a Chinese drug lord and was present for multiple murders, then it explains why it had acquired so much negative energy. But we still don’t know what activated it, or how it got the power to bring the other pieces to life.”

“We can work on that later,” Teag said. “But first, we should go make sure Rebecca is all right. She’s probably hiding under her bed.”

I nodded, and mustered the energy to get to my feet. “I’ll check,” I said, and headed up the steps to the third floor. I was alert for any remnants of ghostly energy, but felt nothing.

I knocked at the door at the top of the steps. “Rebecca? Are you okay? It’s safe to come out now.”

For a moment, it was silent, and then I heard footsteps coming closer. “Cassidy? Is that you?”

“It’s me,” I reassured her. “And we think we found the problem and took care of it. Why don’t you come out and we can tell you about it.”
Because I don’t think any of us is going to go to sleep right away,

I added silently.

The door opened slowly. Rebecca gave a sigh of relief when she saw me. “Oh thank goodness you’re safe. The shadow man was back, and this time, I think he meant to hurt me. Greta drove him away, and then all of a sudden, they both winked out.” She was pale and trembling.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go down to the kitchen. I can make hot chocolate. Then we can all tell ghost stories.”

W
HEN EVERYONE HAD
a steaming cup of hot chocolate, Rebecca slouched in her chair. “Do you think it’s over?” she asked.

“You’ve got a lot of history in this house,” I said. “I can’t promise that you’ll never see another ghost or have an odd feeling from time to time. But yes, I think we took care of what was causing the trouble.”

Except we don’t know what turned the Foo dog on.

Rebecca took another sip of her hot chocolate. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Right before the shadow man came, I was looking out the window. I saw the man with the hat again, just outside the garden wall.”

Teag and I exchanged glances. First shadow men, then our own personal stalker.

“Rebecca, do you know where the Foo dog statue came from?” I asked, deciding to change the subject.

Rebecca frowned, thinking. “I bought it at an estate sale from a lady who was getting rid of her mother’s things. She had quite a lot for sale between what was in the house and what they found tucked away in a storage unit.”

“And you don’t recall anything odd or unsettling about the statue when you saw it at the sale?” Teag asked.

Rebecca shook her head. “I certainly wouldn’t have bought it if it made me uncomfortable.”

“Did it seem to call you to it?” Teag pressed. “Sometimes, objects ‘select’ a new owner by becoming irresistible.”

Rebecca thought for a moment, then shook her head once more. “I liked the color and I thought it looked nicely done.” She paused. “But come to think of it, the owner seemed rather willing to give me a very good deal. She’s the one who drew my attention to it and offered it to me for a bargain price.”

“Did she say why?” I asked.

“No,” Rebecca said, “but she offered to throw the dog statue in with the rest of the things I was buying for an extra twenty-five dollars.” “Didn’t she realize it was from the 1800s?” Teag asked. “It would have been worth hundreds.”

“She said she really needed to clean the place out and to take it with her blessing.”

“And how long after you brought the dog here did the problems start?” I asked.

Rebecca took a drink from her hot chocolate as she thought. “I had the dog statue for a week or so before Debra brought me the things from Trifles and Folly. And it was just after that when the problems started.”

“So the Foo dog was already in the house before any of our items arrived,” Teag said. “Interesting.”

“If the dog statue had some kind of weird energy, it might have eventually activated the ghosts that were present in the house but couldn’t manifest by themselves,” I mused. “And as luck would have it, the items Debra brought all had histories of their own, but without the Foo dog’s energy, no one could tell.”

“Which goes back to the main question,” Anthony recapped. “What do all the items have in common?

And what juiced up the Foo dog to give it so much power?”

I looked back at Rebecca. “Would you happen to remember who the lady was who sold you the Foo dog?”

Rebecca sighed. “I can give you directions to the house, but it won’t do you any good. The woman who lived there was moving to Georgia.”

“I have a feeling there’s something we’re missing, a common thread,” I said, finishing my drink. “But I’m too tired to figure out what it is.” I yawned. “It’s way past my bedtime. Let’s see what we can come up with in the morning.”

W
HEN
I
WALKED
to Trifles and Folly the next morning, I was afraid that I’d find the man with the withered face watching at the street corner or that Teag would tell me that the rest of our items had gone haywire. Instead, Teag gave a merry wave when I entered, and went back to his phone call, scribbling notes as he murmured encouraging sounds to the person on the other end of the line.

I put my purse away, powered up my laptop, gave the puppy spa a quick call to check on Baxter, and then checked phone messages. Two of the people I had phoned the previous day returned my call, and while the shop was quiet, I took the opportunity to ask questions. By the time I was finished, Teag had wrapped up his conversation, and was chatting with a customer who had wandered in.

I checked the rest of the messages, and found one from Sorren. “
Expect me at 9 p.m. A situation’s come up that you and Teag need to know about. I’ll explain when I get there. In the meantime, be careful.
”

I stared at the phone after the message finished, pondering. Sorren, my silent partner, had bankrolled the founding of Trifles and Folly back in 1670. Sorren came and went on his own schedule, stopping in to alert us to a new danger, staying long enough to help face down some of the nastier haunts. He owned a home outside Charleston, one of many around the world. Sorren had the charm of a thief and the instincts of an assassin, and for more than three hundred and fifty years, he had proven an unwavering loyalty to my family.

Centuries had come and gone. Wars, hurricanes, and financial panics had left their mark. Trifles and Folly had occupied several buildings over its long life. Yet two things remained constant. One was our true mission, to find and neutralize dangerous magical objects that somehow found their way into unsuspecting hands. And the second was Sorren.

Much as I hated to admit it, I was stumped. We had shadow men, our stalker with the withered skin and broad hat, and haunted objects that seemed to be getting more dangerous every day. I really needed Sorren’s advice, and after what we had faced at Gardenia Landing, I was ready for some Alliance back-up.

Until now, in the time since I had taken over Trifles and Folly after Uncle Evanston died, nothing we had done quite prepared me for the kind of threat we were facing. Oh, Sorren and Teag and I had handled some nasty haunted or magical objects, but we had been able to tackle them one at a time.

Now, if felt as if every haunted object in Charleston was ganging up on us, with a shadowy someone behind it all. I really didn’t like the sound of that.

I started to pace. My office is small, and I never really got around to cleaning out Uncle Evanston’s books and knick-knacks. Manuscripts and leather-bound volumes filled the bookshelves that covered three of the small room’s walls. I had left things where they were when I took over the office. We had been so busy since then, I had never even had the chance to go through the books and trinkets. I winced at how dusty the shelves were.

And then something caught my attention. It was a feeling really, that directed my attention. I looked around the packed shelves and found myself in front of Dante’s watch. The watch was one of Uncle Evan’s favorite pieces, carefully kept under a glass dome. He was especially fond of pieces that had belonged to family members who had worked with Sorren in years gone by. I reached out to pick up the glass cover and touch the pocket watch. It was very old – from the late seventeen hundreds. Before I had given it thought, the watch pulled me into its story.

Two young men were fighting for their lives. One of the men, skinny with straw-blond hair, struggled to keep a shadow man at bay, slashing and poking at it with a lit torch. The other, a broad shouldered young man with lank, dark hair, held a sword two-handed, staring down a creature that was straight out of nightmares. Somehow I knew that the pocket watch belonged to him, my ancestor Dante.
The creature they fought had slick, greenish skin, the color of the film on rotting meat. It towered over Dante. Elongated arms and legs ended in sharp talons, and the creature’s bulbous head had a maw of wicked looking teeth, set row on row like a shark. Nothing about it was natural, but my mind supplied a word for the thing: demon.
The two young men were in the courtyard of a large home that looked abandoned, and between the dark-haired man and the demon was a large, brass-bound trunk, its lid thrown open. The red velvet lining was streaked with ichor and blood. From behind the demon, four dead men staggered forward.

Their eyes were dull and their ashen corpses bore wounds no mortal could have survived, but still they came, bound to the demon’s will.
From the look of them, the young men had been fighting hard for some time. Their clothing was torn and stained red. They were dirty and bruised, soaked with sweat. Now, they were fighting almost back to back, and from the grim looks on their faces, they expected to die here, soon.
A streak of white light, like a lightning bolt, crackled across the dimly lit space, striking the demon full in the chest. It roared, and fell back a step as its smooth skin blistered and sloughed off. The dead men kept moving forward, heedless to anything around them.
I saw a blur of motion, and the dead man on the right was lifted off the ground, its head ripped from its rotting body as if it were made of paper. Another blur, and the second dead man was hoisted into the air and bent backwards, its spine making a popping noise as it snapped, and the still-twitching corpse fell to the ground. A boot came down hard on the skull, shattering it.
Whoever had sent the streak of light was approaching from behind me, but in this vision, I was rooted to the spot. The demon howled and gave a mighty leap, ignoring the two young men, soaring over my head to land behind me, facing down this new threat.
I saw a slender, blond man grab the third corpse by the shoulder, tearing the arm from the decaying body, and with a movement almost too quick to see, thrusting one fist through the dead man’s rib cage as the other hand tore the skull from the neck. Sorren stood victorious, covered in dark blood, ready for the next attack.
Behind me, another blinding flash of light flared and the demon shrieked. My view shifted. I saw a woman with an ornate walking stick grasped in her hands. Its tip still flickered with light. She was dressed in ruined finery, as if she had just come from a ball. Her skirt was torn and her sleeves were ripped. Dark hair clouded around her face, come loose from an elaborate upsweep. A crystal necklace glowed with harnessed energy, and I knew this woman was a wizard of considerable power.