Blood Hound

Chapter 7

Vincent Manelli’s mansion on Turner Drive was faced with high fences that protected lawns so large and lush they looked like golf courses. The pavement here was new and uncracked, the cars clean, and my overall impression was that the whole street was strangely sterile and vacant. Vincent’s house was a huge Colonial villa that loomed over a winding gravel driveway lined with solar lamps. They cast muted light over the empty driveway and the clean-raked paths leading up to the front porch.

B&E is the one time you will ever find me in anything other than slacks and collared shirts. Some men do all black, but it’s a color that stands out under the muggy New York summer sky. Charcoal and brown work better. I like sportsgear for this: riding breeches, a light tracksuit jacket, and shoes with restaurant tread for extra grip. In this wealthy part of town, the outfit doesn’t stand out too much, either.

I have a toolkit especially for this kind of work, and none of it is particularly supernatural in nature. The problem with B&E is that thresholds of all kind—walls, doorways, and especially circles—have strange power of their own. They are built with the intent to keep outside things out and inside things in. Intent is the basis of magic, and the focus which underlies the construction of any barrier acts as a weak enchantment of sorts. On the physical level, walls and locks don’t mean a whole lot. Without wards, the worst you get is the skin-prickling, uncomfortable sensation which accompanies trespass, the ghostly understanding that you are somewhere you do not belong. However, walls and doors that don’t belong to you make even easy magic harder than it ought to be. Lockpicking, for example: I can pick a practice deadbolt with magic, but not a deadbolt mounted on someone else’s door. I’ve never been that good. For this kind of work, I have effective, but mundane tools.

After the drive-by, I parked down the road and covered the distance on foot. The front gate was unlocked, so I let myself in and had a look over the barriers to entry. They were formidable: The front facade was separated from the rear yard by a high brick-and-steel spiked fence. The front door was locked, the windows closed and locked with roller shutters. There was going to be an electronic security system, maybe even cameras.

The gate into the backyard was locked with a classic cylinder deadbolt. I set my messenger bag down there and crouched, removing a ring of keys. They were evenly notched along their lengths, crafted with deep, regular cuts. Three of the keys had small rubber O-rings fitted near the head. To use bump keys, you match a key to the size of the lock and insert it, slowly, while tapping it with a heavy object. I took my knife from my pocket, fixed my eyes ahead on nothing, and used the key to feel for the tumblers and bump them open. One, two, three, four. It clicked, and I was in. Sticking to the shadows, alert for the sounds and smell of dogs, I made my way down the white pebbled path that led into the rear yard.

Vincent’s backyard was a gaudy concrete courtyard full of statues, pots, and cheap-looking—though undoubtedly expensive—Faux-Classical ornaments. A swimming pool lapped and gurgled in the darkness, storm-gray under the heavy, smoggy sky. The night wind had a bitter edge that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck, and I held the knife low, the blade turned away, as I advanced around towards the back door.

The garden bed just next to the attached sunroom was planted with rows of mature angel’s trumpets, and my nose was full of the dizzying vanilla smell of them as I unlocked the door with my bump keys. It was a strange plant to grown in a heavily trafficked place like this. Angel’s Trumpets, Datura, are very poisonous and are used to make one of the more terrifying drugs to come out of Colombia, scopolamine. I knew of it because it was an ingredient used to create zombies: the living slave sort, not the walking dead.

I turned on a small flashlight to scrutinize the second lock on the inside door. It was of better make than the last one, with a heavy bump-proof cylinder. Frowning, I put the keys away and, with the flashlight clutched between my teeth, got out a small tension wrench and picks. After five minutes and two broken picks, I was finally able to press in the trick tumbler and carefully, delicately turn the lock. Done.

I pulled a cap down over my ears, shouldered my tool bag, and padded inside with the knife up and ready, warily navigating the sunroom in the dark. Light spilled across the floor from a door further down. I let my eyes adjust, my breathing harsh in my own ears. The sunroom was pretty enough, like the rest of the house, though the plants that lined the glass sill along the far wall were brown-lipped and dying. Something about the stillness of the air was acutely uncomfortable, an eerie disturbance of the ear like a badly tuned violin being sawed at its highest key. Nothing was visibly wrong, but the place felt… hollow. Wounded and bleeding, like Nacari’s dump site.

The kitchen was expensively furnished, the air of the interior house cool and temperate, but I did not step inside. Every room had a motion sensor, but judging by the sensor lights, only the rooms beyond the kitchen were armed. The control panel was just outside the kitchen door in the sunroom, a ten-digit number pad with newish numbers.

The unsubtle way to deal with any electronic device is to draw a sigil on it and blow it with a push of blunt force power. A more skilled mage could probably do it without setting the wall on fire, but they’d still probably draw the cops. The problem a lot of spooks have is that as a true magus, capable of the Art, they tend to over-rely on their eldritch might. Being caught out by a problem that can’t be solved with magic has been the downfall of many spooks better than me. They have a prison just for us, somewhere out in Wisconsin, and you can bet there are mages in the police force: The Adepts of the Vigiles Magicarum. They track and profile spooks. Legends say that magi are a subtle breed, and it is always good to prove them right.

I took my flashlight and a small mirror and used the intense, reflected light to scan the surface of the keypad. The thing about ten-digit number locks like this one is that the owners very rarely change the numbers. If there are no breakins, they forget to change the code, or they do it infrequently—perhaps twice a year, if that. The codes are always four digits. People also often use their birth day and month or the year of their birth. I knew Vincent’s, but it was important to look and check first.

The light caught the delicate prints and smears of grease on the buttons. I leaned in and exhaled hoarsely against the metal a few times until they could be seen more clearly. To my surprise, only three digits were highlighted: Vincent had better sense than most. Three buttons, four numbers. One of them was a repeat. Zero had the heaviest prints and the most smearing, followed by one and four. I tried it: 0104. When I hit the key button, the sensor lights shut off.

Yes. Good password, but he had greasy hands.

Something clicked overhead. I froze, gut tightening, and only eased down when a puff of cold, crisp air blew against my face from an overhead vent. Air conditioning. There was mail on the kitchen counter, but it was all bills and junk. I rubbed my gloves on a soft cloth, and then started my investigation from the counter outwards. The pantry was stocked with snacks, and the refrigerator shelves were packed full of food of all kinds: amongst them was a box of reasonably fresh pizza with a half-empty bottle of beer beside it. The lit lights, the air-con, the alarms, the lack of mess… everything told me the same story. Vincent’s home had not been invaded and its occupant removed. It had been abandoned.

I trod quietly through the rest of the house, which was unlit, and the lights behind me gleamed off the knife blade. I passed through spills of cold, stale-smelling scent. The air of the den was heavy, humming with faint electrical discharge from the abandoned appliances. Signs of Vincent and Yuri’s habitation remained: impressions of their buttocks on the plastic sheets that covered the Romanesque furniture, an empty bottle of beer on the table, the small flask of cheap Polish vodka beside it. Two half-filled glasses and a stack of video cassettes sat beside the VCR.

Something nagged at me. There was no planning, but also no signs of a hasty, panicked exit. It was like they’d gotten up to go to the store and never returned. I glanced over the shelf of videotapes: half of them were pornography, the rest racing and action movies. The bottom shelf was devoted to videotaped TV shows Vincent had wanted to catch later on, recorded while sleeping or working. I ran a gloved finger over the stickers. The last date was the second day of the month. Vincent recorded the late-night wrestling for the morning.

I eyed the VCR, sitting on its shelf underneath the television. It was still turned on, and a red light blinked fitfully next to its shuttered mouth.

Tape slithered, and the cassette clicked and clacked its way to my hand when I hit the button. The sticker had no date or topic, but the tape had rewound. I pushed it back into the machine and turned the television on, cycling through the channels until I found the one which showed the video. After a flicker came the characteristic fanfare of the WWF theme music blaring while a wrestler stalked the studio hallways with a scowl. Satisfied, I reached out to turn it off but then paused, hand extended, as the video began to bleed to gray. The image and voices flickered, wavered, and then dissolved into black-and-white snow with an ear-splitting, hair-raising whine. The sound rose and fell, and as I watched, the fizzing snow began to separate and congeal into shapes like crawling insects. Like a carpet of bees. My skin crawled on my flesh, mouth full of the blinding white the sound created in my mouth and behind my eyes. Hastily, I turned it off and backed away. Well away.

The next thing was to see when the wrestling had been on. I took the TV guide to the lit kitchen to flip through it. WWF was on Friday nights, starting at nine p.m. The distortion had begun not five minutes afterward, and the four-hour tape had recorded all the way through to the end of its feed and rewound. My imagination filled in the blanks. Vincent and Yuri, nervously trying to develop some rapport over junk food and alcohol, had settled down to watch the wrestling after a trip out to the store, and then… something happened. Something which removed them from the living room as if they’d vanished.

I pulled my gloves up along my wrists before pressing on deeper into the silence of the house, up the spiral stairs that led to the bedrooms. I was accompanied by an eerie sense of displacement as I trod down the carpeted hallway, opening doors to peer inside. There was a personal gym, a studio, and a monstrously large bathroom. Nothing was upset. Nothing was broken or rushed. There should have been something other than the confirmation that Vincent, and probably Yuri as well, had both gone missing between eight and eleven the night before, but there was nothing. No scattered clothes. No missing toiletries. No sign of violence.

Vincent’s bedroom was easily the messiest room in the house, a tragedy of Baroque lacquered furniture and leopard-print velvet. Dirty laundry was strewn on the floor next to the bed—a silk robe, boxers, and a T-shirt with pizza stains down the front. I dropped it as soon as I picked it up, disgusted. My eyes flicked from the wallet bulging with money that had been left on the dresser, to the picture of a captured unicorn that dominated one wall of the bedroom, to the line of photos mounted on the wall beside it. The beam of the flashlight lit on one of them, an ornate silver frame holding a faded photo of a woman with the dark skin and proud aquiline face of a Sicilian. Even in sepia, her black eyes glittered, full of quiet power. One hand was resting palm-down on an arrangement of large cards on a tabletop, the other held out of sight. Her hair was covered, but what drew my attention were the details of her shawl. It was decorated in planetary symbols. I took the picture off the wall and carefully pried the back off the frame. As I suspected, the photo had writing on it, in Italian. I could discern a name, though, and the date. Drina Mercurio, 1942.

Inside the dresser, I found a vial of testosterone and needles sitting next to a deck of cards carefully wrapped in pink fabric. I knew what they were before I unwrapped them. The tarot deck was very old, the edges worn and waxy. The topmost card was La Torre, The Tower. Frowning, I turned it over. The back face of the deck was the same unicorn image Vincent had on his wall. It was the last panel of seven famous tapestries, The Hunt of the Unicorn. I’d seen this image many times in the course of my Occult study, as it was often featured in books on the Rosicrucian tradition. The tapestry was titled ‘The unicorn is in captivity and no longer dead’, and it showed the chained unicorn resting in a small corral. In the six previous panels, people had hunted it with dogs and spears, until it was caught by a virgin woman and then killed and eaten. In this seventh panel, it was alive again, but enslaved; a tree grew behind it, strung with yellow fruit. The unicorn wore a collar. Its expression was one of stoic grief.

From the dresser, I wandered to the bed. Amongst the cast-off socks and candy wrappers was a quarto notebook. The cover had handwriting on it in Sharpie. Sogno Diario. I wasn’t sure what the first word meant, but I cracked it open to the last used pages to see what I could make from it.

“La scorsa notte, ho sognato la bianco donna di nuovo. She was running away from the dog again. She says they killed her Hound. Why does she think I can do it?”

I froze, careful not to bend the spine as I read the first line over and over again. I spoke minimal Italian but knew enough to get the gist of the sentence. Last night… something, the white woman.

“L’ho inseguito nella foresta di cristallo… and when we came to a stop, lei mi ha detto: Scegliere!” Vincent’s dream diary read. “Per favore, scegliere!”

“Choose… please, choose,” I muttered, frowning. I could only make out pieces here and there. Something about running after her, “like a dog.” I flipped the page, and on the back was a crudely drawn series of figures. One of them was a spiked ball, scribbled over with filaments and labeled “the fruit.” There was a tree—or at least, I thought it was a tree. It looked like a coral polyp with drooping willow branches and diamond-shaped leaves. Its branches were thrown around itself, as if it were recoiling in pain or terror.

Something banged downstairs. I dropped the book with a clatter and brought the knife up. My heart leaped; my body flushed hot, and I sniffed, snorting out the stale air as I cross-stepped to the doorway and looked around the jamb. I could see nothing, but as the moments passed, a rushing, deep-rooted sense of wrongness built in my chest. My pulse hammered in my throat as I strained to hear any and all sound in the house. As time crept and nothing happened, I eased down, breathing quickly, and turned back to look at the book I’d dropped on the floor.

And then, I heard it. Downstairs, the unmistakable sounds of yipping and snarling and claws clicking against tiles. Dogs. Someone was here, and they’d brought dogs. Large, quick dogs, which were already on my scent.

My next breath flared through tight nostrils. I pushed myself away from the doorway, temples throbbing, and toed the door closed. This was definitely time for a gun, so I drew the Wardbreaker as I backed away into the room, twisting the silencer onto it and holding it up in a teacup grip. Ghostly baying rang out from the downstairs kitchen, followed by the thunder of feet up the spiral stairs that cut off abruptly when the dogs hit the carpet.

I licked my teeth, steadying my breathing, and the tip of the barrel stopped trembling. Dogs. They were just dogs. Why was Vincent dreaming about dogs?

Something huge and heavy hit the door, scrambling at it. I dropped to a crouch, breathing deeply, and barely got my second hand on the grip to hold it steady when the door burst open and a flaming pinscher the size of a pony lunged for me with a mouth of huge, glowing basalt fangs.

I emptied half the clip on reflex as the massive weight surged towards my face. The dog’s momentum carried it screaming, bleeding, and then crashing into the end of the bed, riddled with gunshot. A second dog was hot on the heels of the first, moving with unnatural alacrity as I fired once, twice. I caught a glimpse of cracking black skin rippling over glowing molten rock before the wind tore from my chest and my world narrowed to a square foot of snapping jaws, blasted heat, and ear-shattering noise. Pain lanced through my forearm and filled my mouth with sulfur. Heat washed over me in a dizzying wave. I smashed the butt of the pistol into the animal’s ear, desperately trying to get away from the wall and throw it off. The heat grew—it was overwhelmingly, scaldingly hot. The dog’s eyes were blazing, filled with inhuman intelligence. They were the hot red-orange of a caldera.

The other dog was getting up, the bullet wounds sealing with small gouts of flame. My eyes widened in the skipped heartbeat before jaws clamped shut on my hand. I roared, jamming the gun in against its ribs, but as my finger depressed the trigger, the weapon was ripped away by invisible hands. Shock built on shock, and the dog, foaming with animal rage, threw me away from the wall with a twist of its neck. I careened and landed heavily, rolling and smashing into the foot of the dresser to roll, choking, onto my side.

The gun. Where was the Wardbreaker? I saw it near the corner of the bed.

Ears full of the sound of claws, I scrambled to my hands and feet, but before I could throw myself forward, my wrist was grasped, yanked, and twisted. I fell on my chest, only to be wrenched up to my knees like a puppet. I couldn’t see anyone. The same force contorted my fingers into knots, and my shout of anger turned to a choking cry of agony as white fire flashed through my mouth.

“Attaboy.” A thick Jersey accent penetrated the room from the doorway.

I heaved, staggering forward, and tried to turn around to look at whoever was behind me. No such luck. The invisible vice on my body tightened. Through watering eyes, I watched the huge dog limp past me, back to the doorway. The other one was struggling, but it was healing. The bullet wounds smoked and sputtered as they filled in… with magma.

The other man’s footfall was soft as he approached. Each step increased the pressure on my hand. I gagged, retching with pain. Caught in a tightening vice of nothingness, I could only jerk fractionally as a bag was pulled down over my head.

“Well, you ain’t no Rasputin.” The voice that filtered through the back of the bag was snide. “Guess they don’t always make wizards like the old days, huh?”

My mouth was full of knives. I managed to choke out a sound of pain and confusion just before something solid hit me across the back of my skull and pitched me down into darkness.