Vintage soul

FIVE

Donovan reached Johndrow’s assistant on the third ring, and was patched straight through. His call was obviously expected, and though Johndrow kept his voice calm, tension crackled at the edges of his words. It was the first such breach in the other’s icy persona that Donovan had ever detected, and he knew from this that things had not improved since the note had been penned. He almost wished he didn’t have to deliver worse news of his own.

“You’ll look into it then?” Johndrow said immediately. “I knew you would, but I was worried you’d be tied up with something else, or …”

“I would look into it even if you hadn’t asked me,” Donovan replied, measuring his words carefully. “I’ve had a visitor of my own. I think there’s more to this than a simple kidnapping.”

“What do you mean?” Johndrow asked. “I had a hard enough time convincing certain of the elders that Vanessa didn’t take off on her own. How could you already know something?”

“Because,” Donovan said, “whoever took her was here, as well.”

There was a momentary silence, and then Johndrow asked. “You were robbed while you were away?”

“No,” Donovan replied. “I was here, right in the room, when it happened. All that was taken was a single book. I didn’t get a good shot at the intruder, though Cleo tore a few tail feathers out of his familiar. It was a crow, a very large one, maybe a raven. I’ve never seen it before.”

There was silence on the line again, and Donovan knew that Johndrow was considering the wisdom of putting his faith into someone who’d already come face to face with the one he sought — and had not come out on top. It was a natural reaction, but still irritating.

“It took all he had to get a breach large enough for his bird to enter,” Donovan said. “If I’d been ready for him, we’d have caught the thing and put an end to it. As it is, he made it in through the fireplace, and he escaped with an old journal.”

“A journal?” Johndrow said. “What does a journal have to do with Vanessa? How do you know it’s the same person at all?”

“It wasn’t just any journal,” Donovan answered. “It belonged to a French alchemist named Jean Claude Le Duc. He was a very single minded man — the volume is not a thick one. It is concentrated on the formula for a single spell, and Le Duc never lived to see that spell put into use.”

“What spell?” Johndrow asked. “That name is familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

“It should be familiar,” Donovan said. “The formula is for the Perpetuum Vitae potion, and the ingredient that caused Le Duc’s death?”

There was a hiss on Johndrow’s end of the line. “The blood drained from a vampire,” he whispered. “From a very old vampire.”

“Vanessa fits that description,” Donovan said, softening his tone. “She’s in more danger than you realized.”

“But surely,” Johndrow said, “There are other difficult items on that list. Could he have gathered them all without drawing attention to himself?”

“It might have been a problem to find that out,” Donovan replied, “if technology hadn’t become so advanced. I scan all of the books I acquire into my computer before putting them on the shelves. It allows me to preserve very old and fragile texts, and to protect against an emergency. I have a copy of the formula, and I don’t believe he’s quite got everything he needs. We have some time, though not a great deal of it. The blood must be extracted immediately preceding the mixing process, so we can expect he is keeping Vanessa — alive — until he’s ready.”

“What does he need?” Johndrow asked. “If I knew…”

“Let me handle that,” Donovan cut in. There was silence on Johndrow’s end.

“This is what you are hiring me to do,” Donovan continued. “I will have a better chance of tracing this without others blundering around muddying the waters, and despite what just happened here, I have the better chance of saving her once I’ve found her. Even if you managed to track him, what would you do? I have your letter — I know what happened with Kline.”

“What happened with Kline is the reason I don’t feel comfortable trusting this to only one man,” Johndrow replied. “Kline’s people have resources, and I can call in my own people…”

“Kline’s people are not trained to work in the field,” Donovan replied calmly, “and your own people aren’t trained for this type of work at all. Let’s be honest, Preston, it’s been a long time since any of your kind has needed to march into real battle. Even the elders, yourself included, are decades from the last serious conflict. This is what I do, let me handle it.”

“I will give you two days,” Johndrow replied. “I won’t lose her through foolish trust.”

“I understand,” Donovan replied. “I don’t want this guy succeeding any more than you do, though admittedly for selfish reasons.”

“Keep me informed, Mr. DeChance,” Johndrow said softly. “Don’t leave me sitting at home and wondering. Idle hands, you know…”

“I’ll be in touch,” Donovan replied. He hung up the phone and stared at the wall.

He slid the computer’s keyboard and mouse back into place and tapped the keyboard. When prompted, he logged in and watched as the machine loaded. He smiled as mechanical drives whirred, lights flashed, and complex patterns of logical numbers whirled through machine. Men could say what they wanted about magic not existing, but they understood the concepts of ritual and reaction quite well. Their methods were slow and relatively crude, but the outcome was solid and workable. The Personal Computer was one of the finest magical achievements of the age.

Once the logon sequence ended he opened the encryption software he used to scramble the more esoteric texts he’d scanned. The computer had more than standard firewall protections, and a number of enhancements that had nothing to do with microchips or wires. A series of symbols rotated into place on the screen, and in the center a large gold colored disk spun lazily. At each point corresponding with the correct pattern, Donovan tapped the button on his mouse, and the disk slowed, stopped, and then spun the opposite direction. After seven flip-flops, there was a sound like a key sliding into a lock, and the disk spun inward, disappearing from the screen. What appeared was a single folder, and Donovan opened this quickly.

He flipped through the directories until he found one titled “Journals” and opened this, then chose Le Duc’s manuscript. The pages had been scanned in at very high resolution, and the program he viewed them in had singularly amazing magnification properties, as well as a translation algorithm Donovan had designed himself. Alchemy in the twenty-first century, he liked to call it. An electronic philosopher’s stone.

The manuscript was not difficult to read. The French was archaic, but the script was clear and clean, and Le Duc had taken great pains to separate the lines evenly and to make no mistakes. Mistakes in such a text could be disastrous, at the one end causing a spell to fail with no result, and at the other sending forces crashing out of control. Le Duc had been meticulous to the end.

The formula itself had been developed over a long period of trial and error, gathered piece by piece from a wide variety of sources. Donovan recognized several of the sources cited, and had to admit that for a fanatic, Le Duc had been very clever. It was unfortunate when such genius coupled itself with a sociopathic disregard for life or the fragile lines of balance that held the world together.

There were six ingredients in all. Two of them were simple powders that anyone could have located. Donovan knew he could assume that these had already been collected. That left three ingredients to go. One of those, Vanessa, had already been scratched off the list. The remaining three might pose more of a problem.

A certain crystal was required for the wand that had to be manufactured for this spell. It was one of the rarest of stones, and Donovan knew the location of the only store of it that was known. It was, coincidentally or not, held in San Valencez — very likely this unknown magician knew this well enough, and had planned his assaults to confine them to the smallest area possible. Either that or it was pure luck. In any case, Donovan did not worry immediately about the theft of the crystal. He turned his concentration on the final ingredient.

Next was an extremely rare item. The spell required a pair of perfectly matched Timeline Crystals. These were used in the creation of certain higher level portals, and were cherished for their rarity, and for the complexity of preserving their potential. There was a pair in San Valencez, but it was not accessible. Not without an army, anyway, and certainly not after Donovan warned their owner of trouble to come.

That left the final ingredient. He frowned. “The dust formed of the marrow of the spinal cord of a priest who has performed both last rites and exorcism.”

This was a truly problematic ingredient. It would only be stockpiled by a necromancer, and there were less than a handful of these unsavory wizards in existence. It was possible to retrieve the powder without the aid of necromancy, but grave digging posed problems of its own, and the circumstances of the priest’s life and death needed to be rather singular. Of the existing necromancers, Donovan could think of neither an easy mark for extortion, nor one likely to give this sort of assistance to any other. Necromancers were more comfortable with their once-dead companions.

That left the more direct approach. If he could locate a priest that fit the description in the formula, the thief could extract the powder himself. It wouldn’t’ be easy. The Last Rites were not rare, but there had been few sanctioned exorcists over the past century, and a crackpot wouldn’t do. There was also the fact that relics recovered from such graves were rare, powerful and valuable. That meant that every collector in existence would cherish them and the older graves from days when exorcism was more common, would have been sought out and violated long ago.

In modern times, the ritual was still practiced, though rarely. If he moved quickly enough, Donovan knew he’d be able to localize possible gravesites for a source of the powder. Maybe, with his connections and the additional electronic resources he commanded, he could find such a grave more quickly than their unknown thief could manage it. It was hard to believe that others would band together with anyone proposing to cast such a spell as the Perpetuum Vitae, because it benefited only he or she who cast it. It wasn’t the kind of magic one shared, and if he was forced to work on his own, or with secretive mercenary assistance, then Donovan’s new enemy was at a disadvantage. No one who heard what was going on would want the spell to succeed.

There was no time to lose. Donovan rose, gathered a few objects from the shelves that he tucked into his pocket, and double-checked the security wards. Before he left, he picked Cleo up unceremoniously and plopped her into the center of the symbol on his desk. The cat meowed at him, possibly in complaint, possibly just in irritation, but he paid no attention.

“I need your help, Cleo,” he said softly. “You need to find Amethyst. Tell her I missed her, and then warn her about what happened here. Tell her I’ll be in contact soon.”

Cleo returned his gaze unblinkingly. Donovan closed his eyes and raised one hand. In an intricate and graceful scrawl, he drew symbols in the air. These gathered substance, like silver mist, or smoke, and when he drew his finger down with a final slash and spoke aloud, reciting in ancient Egyptian, the mist whirled in a circular motion around Cleo, who sat very still, never breaking eye contact. The mist spun faster, thickened into a milky white wall, and then, with a sudden release of energy that sounded like the popping of a huge bubble, it was gone.

No trace of Cleo remained on the desktop. Donovan turned, opened the door, and stepped out into the night. The sun was just dipping beneath the horizon, and he knew Club Chaos would soon be opening their doors.