Authors: Nicholas Kaufmann
Philip looked like he was just barely managing to keep it together. There was more emotion on his face now than I’d seen in the whole time I’d known him. I wished I could believe Crixton was lying, but there would be no point to it. It was easy enough to picture Philip taking out a roomful of humans. Surprisingly easy.
“That was a long time ago, Crixton,” Philip said. “I’m not like that anymore.”
Crixton ignored him. “He left no survivors. He erased an entire bloodline from the earth, and that’s a no-no, even for us. He had to be punished. And so they punished you, didn’t they, Renshu? I’ve seen your eyes. I saw what they did to them. It’s enough to make shit crawl uphill. Tell me, Renshu, what punishment do you think they would give you if they could see you now?”
Isaac stared at Philip in shock. It was clear he hadn’t heard this story before. None of us had. An entire bloodline…?
Philip noticed the look on Isaac’s face. He gave Crixton one last shove against the wall, then released him. “You’re lucky I don’t send you into the sunlight myself. Just give us what we need and be gone.”
Crixton straightened up and brushed the dust and chunks of plaster off his shoulders. “You want the name of the other bidder for the Thracian Gauntlet? Fine. It’ll be in the ledger.”
“And we can trust what this ledger says?” Isaac asked, composing himself.
Crixton nodded. “We keep a record of every bid as they’re made, handwritten in kraken ink. It’s hearty stuff, and permanent, even against magic. We use it so the records can’t be tampered with afterward.” The vampire held up one pale hand and began his incantation. I shivered at the sound of it and tried not to listen. There was a sudden flash of light from his palm, accompanied by a puff of sulfurous smoke, and an oversized book appeared in his hand. The ledger, summoned from where it was being kept in “a pocket to our dimension,” whatever that meant. A hole, like a gap in space? Or was it more like a sack where you could store things? Trying to figure it out made my head hurt.
The ledger looked old and worn, its spine and the corners of its covers reinforced with brass. The metal creaked as Crixton opened the book. I moved to look over his shoulder as he flipped through pages of tiny, cursive handwriting. I kept my guard up. I wasn’t sure it was safe to stand this close to crazy.
Each page in the ledger had three columns. In the first were the dates of the auctions. In the second were the names of the bidders. In the third were the amounts of the bids. Some of the numbers sported a lot more zeroes than I would have imagined. Though maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Artifacts were rare, unique, and valuable. Probably, there were a hell of a lot of wealthy collectors like Clarence Bergeron out there.
My next thought hit me so hard and fast I didn’t see it coming. All those items I’d stolen for Underwood, the ones he’d ostensibly sold on the black market—had they wound up here? What if the things I’d stolen weren’t just pieces of art or precious stones or briefcases full of cash? Given who and what Underwood turned out to be, what if I’d been stealing artifacts? Artifacts that were then sold at the Ghost Market for quick cash?
How many of the items in Clarence Bergeron’s gallery had my fingerprints on them?
“Aha!” Crixton shouted. He held the book open for us to see as he drew a finger down one page. “The auction of the Thracian Gauntlet. As you can see here, a single name reappears over and over again, upping the dollar amount as each new bidder gets involved. This man was determined to have the gauntlet. Eventually the other bidders dropped out when the price got too high. For all intents and purposes, he was the winner. It was going once, going twice … and then
boom,
Clarence Bergeron topped his bid. Can you imagine how that must have felt? It’s a wonder he only stole the gauntlet and didn’t murder Bergeron when he had the chance.”
I looked at the names on the page. It was true, one name appeared more than any other. The only problem was, it wasn’t a name I’d heard before.
“Who the hell is Cargwirth Kroneski?” I asked.
Bethany shook her head. “That name hasn’t come up in our investigation at all.”
Crixton shrugged. “You asked, I answered. It’s not my fault if the name doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“Did your telepath have anything to say about Kroneski?” Isaac asked.
“Nothing,” Crixton said. “There are no notes here on the page, only the name. Kroneski must have bid over the phone.”
“Damn,” Isaac said. “Who is he? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“Cargwirth Kroneski doesn’t even sound like a real name,” I said.
Bethany bit her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, an expression I knew well. “You might be right about that. Hold on a moment.”
She went over to a window. With her fingertip, she wrote the name in the dust on the glass. The light from outside streamed through the letters, making them glow.
CARGWIRTH KRONESKI.
She crossed off the A and wrote it again under the name. She did the same with the R.
“An anagram?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said, still concentrating. “Hold on.”
The process continued, letter after letter, until she’d rearranged them all. Three new words glowed on the glass.
ARCHING TOWERS KIRK.
I’d seen those words before. “That’s from Calliope’s notebook.”
“Hold on,” Bethany said. She bit her lower lip and squinted at the window. Then she started crossing off letters again, rearranging them once more along a third line. It went a lot faster this time. When she was done, a new name glowed back at us from the dusty window. And this time it was one I recognized.
ERICKSON ARKWRIGHT.
“He’s alive,” Bethany said. “Calliope knew it, she just didn’t know how to find him. That’s why she needed Yrouel’s help. This is the proof we were looking for. Erickson Arkwright is alive, and he’s got the Thracian Gauntlet.”
“So that
was
Arkwright in Chinatown,” Philip said. “Damn. The son of a bitch is in good shape for someone who’s supposed to be dead. He runs like a goddamn Olympic sprinter.”
“There, you’ve figured out your little puzzle,” Crixton said. “Can I go now?”
Isaac held out his hand. “Not until you give me the ledger.”
Crixton pulled the book close to his chest. “You already have the name you were after. The ledger wasn’t part of our agreement.”
“We don’t
have
an agreement,” Isaac said. “Hand it over.”
Crixton smirked. “Sorry, this is nonnegotiable.”
With another flash of light and smoke, the ledger disappeared. Isaac’s face reddened. He thrust out one hand. Crixton flew up and backward, slamming into the wall halfway toward the ceiling. He hung there, laughing, writhing, and screaming all at the same time.
“Bring it back,” Isaac said.
Crixton laughed so hard, screamed so hard, that he spat all over his own face. “Or what, mage? How badly do you want it? How far are you willing to go?”
“I want that ledger, Crixton.”
Isaac closed his hand into a fist. Crixton screamed even louder. Whatever he was doing to the vampire, it sounded agonizing. Philip watched, looking smugly satisfied. He was enjoying this.
“What do you care about the ledger?” Crixton cried. “You have the name you wanted!”
“Because the ledger can point me to all the artifacts the Ghost Market sold. Every one of them. All the artifacts they’ve
ever
sold,” Isaac said. “I can get them back before anyone else gets hurt or killed. I can make this right. I can put right everything the Ghost Market did.
So give it to me!
”
Crixton screamed as if the pain had intensified.
“Do it, mage! Kill me! Feed the darkness inside you!” Crixton yelled. “Oh yes, I can see it. I can see the dark seed all that magic has planted inside you. Give in to it. Kill me and let it bloom!”
Isaac stared in horror at Crixton, the steely resolve leaving his eyes. He lowered his hand. Released from the spell, Crixton dropped to the floor. He landed in a crumpled ball and gripped his stomach in pain.
“Are you okay?” I asked Isaac.
He nodded, but he was breathing hard. “Too many artifacts have passed through here and ended up in the wrong hands. I’m a fool to think there’s any way to make that right. We’d need a hundred of us, a thousand to find them all.”
A strange noise came out of Crixton then. It sounded like a moan of pain at first, but then I realized he was chuckling. The chuckles grew into laughter as the vampire got to his feet.
“Oh, mage, you were so close to letting that dark seed inside you grow. But it’s not too late. Not yet. Demonwar is coming. Can’t you feel it in the air? Can’t you hear it, like the burning hot scream of a furnace? Give in to the darkness inside you, mage, let it fortify you, and maybe you will survive what’s coming the way
we
will. You call us infected. We call ourselves sanctified. And there are so many of us. So very many of us.”
Isaac shook his head in disgust. “Get out of here, Crixton, before I change my mind.”
With a grin, Crixton started toward the warehouse exit. Philip followed him to the door, glaring at him. Before Crixton left, he turned to Philip one last time.
“When your human friends are dead, your debt of service will die with them,” he said. “But don’t bother coming back to the clan. You won’t be welcome there. Not even by your father. You’re dead to him, Renshu. You’re dead to all of us.”
Then Crixton pulled the hood of his yellow rain slicker up over his head and walked out into the sun.
I wanted to tell Philip not to listen to him, but my tongue wasn’t working. No one’s seemed to be, because no one said a word. All I could see in my mind was Philip standing over the mangled, drained corpses of a family. An entire bloodline, wiped out in a single night. Grandparents, parents, children. A baby. Maybe that was all any of us could see.
Philip let out a frustrated roar and put his fist through the wall. The plaster and concrete cracked and split like dry earth.
Fifteen
As soon as we were back at Citadel, I found myself thinking about Jordana again. I wanted to hear more of what she had to say, to be with her, to kiss her again—it was an undeniable urge, stronger than anything I’d felt before. But the doubts came back, too. Did she really know me? Was I really Lucas West? It was driving me crazy. I needed advice. I needed to talk to Isaac. As I approached the door of his study, Philip came stalking out.
I thought of the dead family at the wedding again. The dead baby. I couldn’t help it. I knew Philip had a violent past. All vampires did, I supposed. But this was more than I could have imagined. I felt sick thinking about it. And yet, how many times had Philip saved my ass? Saved all our asses? Didn’t he deserve better than my disgust? As he approached, I pushed it down and forced myself to find my voice.
“Hey, you okay?”
He walked past me down the hall without a word. I watched him go down the stairs to the first floor. Philip wasn’t big on opening up. That was something he and I had in common. But I’d never seen him like he was at the warehouse before. I’d never seen anything get under his skin that badly. I supposed there was a reason I’d never heard Philip mention his clan before. Or his father.
Maybe we had more in common than I thought. It seemed to me we were both haunted by our victims in our own way. I had my list of names. He had the memory of wiping out an entire bloodline. We both had things we wanted to make up for. We were both striving to be something better than what we were, but the ghosts of our pasts just kept coming back to rub our faces in it.
I went into the study. Isaac was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
He looked up at me. “What can I do for you, Trent? I assume you didn’t come here just to check up on me.”
I pulled up a chair and sat across the desk from him. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Something happened when we met with Jordana Pike today. Something important.” I told him that Jordana had recognized me, that she said my name was Lucas West, that she’d filled in some of the blanks of my past. Not all of them, just a few, the tip of the iceberg. There was so much more to learn.
Isaac was surprised. “I thought for sure the Janus Endeavor would be how you found your identity, not someone you met by chance. What do you think? Do you trust her?”
I sighed. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. I
want
to trust her. It felt so real when I was there, but the more I think about it … I don’t know. I looked up Lucas West online, but I didn’t find anyone who looked like me. I thought that was strange. But then, the Janus Endeavor couldn’t find anyone who looked like me, either. I felt a connection with Jordana, one that makes me think she’s not lying. On the other hand, who the hell is Lucas West?”
“When you say a connection, are you talking about a romantic history?” he asked.
I thought of the kiss again, how it had thrilled through me like lightning, down to my core. “Maybe. What do you think? Should I trust her?”
Isaac leaned back in his chair. “I can’t answer that for you. But I can tell you this: If she says she has information about your past, you need to hear her out. You can’t afford not to. Right now, she’s the only lead you have. You owe it to yourself to find out.” He tented his fingers under his chin. “What does Bethany think about this connection between you and Jordana?”
The question took me by surprise. “Does it matter what Bethany thinks?”
“Doesn’t it?” He studied my face for a moment. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being in the spotlight. I preferred the shadows. “You and Bethany are close. I get the feeling that normally this is something you would talk to
her
about. So why come to me instead?”
It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer. Why
not
talk to Bethany? Was it because she didn’t trust Jordana? Was I just looking for someone to tell me to go for it? Or was it something else?
“Not that it’s my business, but you and Bethany are up in your room for hours every night,” Isaac said.