Seven's the Devil His Own Self - Cayenne, garlic and coffee
Author: Loki Veidt
Tale: Black King series
Book One: 'Check' [Cayenne, Garlic, Coffee and Sea Salt]
Chapter One: Seven's the Devil His Own Self
Prompts: Cayenne #6 "first blood," Garlic #12 "counting crows," Coffee #25 "ashes."
Rating: PG (for mild adult language)
Teaser: For centuries, the global underworld, paranormal and otherwise, has been ruled by the dark elite organization known as Black King. Information brokers, assassins and power players, their fingers stretch long through the shadows. Among their highest ranking officers are the First Blood, the remaining echelon of the very oldest vampires. One of them, Verona Talisker, is the President of Black King. The other, Azrael Arden, an occasional associate, feared for his unstable nature. But now Verona appears to be dead, and Azrael has reappeared, and both circumstances force the brilliant but damaged young agent Logan Keating out of hiding...
Notes: The original 'One for Sorrow' rhyme used to count crows was originally applied to magpies, and magpies are the corvidae getting counted in this story. 'Check' as a story will contain homosexual and heterosexual romantic relationships, but the primary romance is Male/Male and may include some kink.
One for sorrow...
The first magpie dipped its head toward something hidden at the outer edge of the sill, regarding Logan Keating with an intelligent black eye. It feinted a rush at the mottled old window-glass but then turned and swooped off toward the tree-line where white branches were already thick with early apples. The birds were pretty and unassuming, and yet the sight of this one sent a chill down the man's spine. He turned back to the washing-up of breakfast dishes in the sink and turned it from his mind. Magpies weren't so uncommon here, he thought scathingly, that he ought to imagine the worst every time he glimpsed one.
The air was still crisp and chill with encroaching winter, and after he'd rinsed and set aside the dishes, he poured himself another cup of coffee, still hot and steaming from the carafe, wrapped it in his hands and went out on the veranda. The morning was mercury-colored and cloudy, but still enough sunlight streamed down to paint shadows across the edge of the porch and to dispel some of his lingering unease. His gut settled, his thoughts cleared, and he was the picture of relaxed confidence by the time the distant figure made her way up the rough, uncleared path through the orchard.
He had known who it was from the moment her car pulled off the road, though he didn't see her clearly for quite some time afterward. She looked better than when last they'd met: her pristine white jacket tailored elegantly over curves that could not be concealed, black hair worn short, at the length of her jaw, black leather boots that gave the flavor of the equestrian to the entire ensemble, as though she ought to have been sporting a riding crop in one gloved hand.
Given her cold, determined expression, had she carried one, Keating thought he might have fled back into the house. Instead, he rose as she reached the steps and held out a hand.
"Hello, Maya."
Maya Villafranca clasped his hand, dropped it almost instantly and tramped up the porch steps, her boot heels making pronounced cracks against the wood as if each step were a stab wound. She turned her cold blue eyes on Keating.
"Logan," she said neutrally.
"Coffee?" he offered.
She snorted.
"A beer?" he tried.
A beat, then, "Sure." She pushed open the old creaking screen door and headed unerringly for the fridge. "It's been a long flight. But I swear if there's nothing in here but Pabst, I'm going to put you out of your misery."
Keating followed her warily into the almost empty living area. Although he'd been holed up in the hidden little house for nearly a year, it had never felt like home. He'd never settled in, never bought any knick-knacks and had only fixed up what pissed him off too much broken. His only contribution to homey-ness at all was to keep the fridge stocked, his comic books and video games strewn around the downstairs den along with some porn he dearly hoped Maya Villafranca didn't stalk down the stairs and discover, and the bowl of fresh-picked apples, red enough to put a smile on a wicked witch's lips, on the table.
Maya picked herself out an IPA, grunting as if to admit she might have been mistaken about Keating's taste in beer, kicked back a chair at the table and sat down, tipping the frosted bottle against her mouth.
"Long flight," Keating observed, leaning against the counter across from her. "from London?"
She raised an eyebrow and kept drinking, having drained half the bottle before she set it down and steepled her long fingers in front of her. "Why do you think I'm here, Logan?"
"There's only one reason there could be." Keating sighed and sat down, turning his chair so that his back wasn't to the door. "Verona's dead."
Maya mimed pulling a trigger toward the ceiling. "And here they say you aren't very bright. Ashes were sent to the Parrot Cage Club two nights ago. Analysis revealed them to be the remains of a vampire, one with almost total genetic restructuring."
"So, one of the First Blood."
"Bingo. Which means unless someone managed to off your ex-boyfriend, the ashes belonged to Verona. And we haven't heard from her since, so the assumption has to be that Black King needs new management."
"You?" Keating inferred.
"I'm the logical choice. With Verona consigned to an urn, the entire original Council is gone."
"I'm not arguing. But there are a lot of people who will. Everyone's going to want to stake their claim, and in the meantime there'll be chaos." Keating finished his coffee and leaned back. "It all seems premature, anyway. Two nights? The whole thing could be a hoax. Verona has gone off the reservation for longer than that before. And... and how do we know the ashes don't belong to Azrael?"
"If they do, we have a serious problem. Someone who could take out that son of a bitch decides to gift-wrap the ashes and send them to us? I prefer to believe that isn't the case, because I prefer not to presume that I'm a dead girl walking."
"Well, what about a hoax?"
"Yeah." Maya drained the last of the beer and got up. "That's your job, agent. You're officially reinstated. Find out what's going on. I'll be busy wrangling the chaos as every jumped up little hit man and desk jockey makes a play for Command. And if you find out Verona's still alive, just tell her I made the call."
Keating shook his head, but the cold sick pit in the bottom of his stomach hadn't dissipated. If the experts at Command truly thought the ashes they'd received belonged to Verona Talisker, the ashes probably had. As hard as it was to shake himself from the stupor of laying low, the old thrill of a puzzle, of a chase coming on, began to sing through his blood.
Maya reached into her jacket pocket and placed a small box on the table. "I figured you wouldn't need much, and our analysts are still working with the rest." She strode across the room and paused halfway past the screen, holding it open with one hand. "Take care of yourself, Logan."
"Maya... good luck."
Two for mirth...
The empty beer bottle sat fornlornly on the table as if to tempt Logan Keating despite the early hour. He sighed and swept the box up in his hands, turning it over in his fingers. He glanced out the door before he opened it, noting the ramrod-straight posture of Maya's spine as she made the trek back through the orchard to her car. Behind her, another magpie had perched on the edge of the porch steps. The markings were subtly different from the first one, though they were both black-billed magpies common enough to the area.
Firmly, Keating closed the main door on the bird. It was ridiculous to let old superstition, even one that had proved to have a kernel of fact, distract and discombobulate him when a serious threat might loom ahead. Keating might never have particularly liked Verona (he'd met three of the First Blood, and he'd considered none of them particularly easy to like) but he'd respected her prowess as both a leader and a Machiavellian prince fully capable of keeping her boot firmly pressed on the necks of an entire organization of deadly, sociopathic bad guys. Maya was tough, but he didn't think she quite had it in her.
"So here's hoping this was lifted from the grave of one of the long-dead relatives," he muttered, and opened the box.
The ash was fine and of a pale gray color, indistinguishable from anything else that might have been burned to cinders. Keating dipped his fingertip into it and immediately, waves of color and sensation washed over him. The first was, unsurprisingly, flames- orange and yellow tongues that crept over his vision, seemed to lace along the walls and sent a backdraft blast of heat across his face so that even though he knew that the sensation wasn't real in that moment, Keating almost flinched.
The flames cleared, and next his probing thoughts drew into that shift of pattern, of odd and distinct emblems, that had fluttered through his mind long ago when Azrael forced his own blood into Logan's mouth. This pattern was different, although some crests were the same: a red phoenix, a black teardrop, a silver diamond... others were entirely new and couched in a much more complex pattern. Whether or not this spoke of Verona's DNA, it certainly represented a vampire with a fuller and more varied bloodline of descendents than the rather reclusive Azrael Arden.
Keating drew in a deep breath and pressed on. His ability was powerful and extensive, but it rarely answered questions too directly. The trick was to understand how to interpret the visions that touch brought. As the bright gossamer shimmer of the images swayed and danced and then disappeared like popping soap bubbles, the shape of something else took their place. This thing was primal and somewhere in his genetic structure fear of it seemed to be encoded, like the shapes of poisonous things.
Dark, weaving tendrils formed a weird silhouette, something his mind didn't want to find meaning in, and at the core of it, burning lambently, two deep yellow eyes. Yellow like Verona's. Yellow like Azrael's. But Keating was certain that what those eyes belonged to wasn't a vampire of any sort, not even the very oldest.
Shuddering, he opened his eyes. Sitting in a line now on the porch were the two magpies he'd seen before and one more.
Three for a funeral.
The birds sat there, still, regarding him. Magpies weren't generally skittish around people, but Keating suspected even those ordinary folks who weren't obsessed with old nursery rhymes would have considered their behavior mildly creepy. With the terror still coursing adrenaline through his body from the shape of that lambent-eyed thing in the dark, Logan grabbed the empty beer bottle off the table and opened both doors, chucking the bottle so hard that it shattered, brown glass cascading in glittering piles. The birds dodged and circled once overhead, then winged away.
Keating felt a twinge of remorse. This wasn't the kind of thing he did. He didn't let himself get worked up over these things. He floated over the top of them like a leaf on the breeze or water spilling over the lip of a glass. The ashes hadn't really told him anything that he couldn't have inferred from the conversation with Maya. Other than the gnawing fear in his belly that disturbed his earlier thrill of anticipation and eagerness for the chase, as though something primordial and hideous might lurk under every rock he overturned.
He watched the sunlight spark rainbows off the bits of broken glass on the peeling painted boards of the porch and tried to shuffle through the immediate impressions, to find some pattern or thread to follow. The flames gave him nothing; they were residual energy from the destructive force that had rendered ancient tissue to dust. The... thing at the end didn't help either. Keating didn't recognize it and couldn't distinguish anything about it other than a sense of wrongness, of terror, and those blinking, cruel, familiar eyes...
Familiar. That was the only lynchpin he could use. The bright swimming crests that represented vampiric bloodlines, passed from generation to generation, added to and expanded as each new fledgling was born into the blood. Three of those crests had been exactly the same as three from Azrael's bloodline. The red phoenix, the black teardrop and the silver diamond. From the relative positionings, Keating could infer that the red phoenix represented the common sire between all the First Blood. One of the other two was the owner of the ashes, the other Azrael himself.
Was there any way, short of asking Azrael, that he could determine who the First Blood had been and which ones might have survived their fates up until that awful death by fire? He racked his brains. He still had a number in his phone, hidden under the laughably telling moniker 'Magpie,' but couldn't be certain it would still work. Azrael was notoriously unpredictable and rarely kept anything for longer than a few months other than his chillingly extensive collection of canes, birches and whips.
Four for a birth.
Keating opened his contact list, thumbed down to the word and stared at it, then shook his head and put his phone away. There had to be something else. He went downstairs, stepping over the obstacle course of bachelor junk strewn across the floor and went to the stack of still-packed boxes he'd left in the corner by the fireplace. He noticed his hand shake slightly as he reached for the folded-shut flaps at the top of the smallest box.
"Get it together," he snarled under his breath.
He slipped the folds open and lifted out the few things inside. Mostly they were books, things Azrael had left at his old place. Some of them Keating had obediently read, but others were poetry in languages Azrael had, typically, forgotten that not everyone spoke. A toothbrush, rank from rolling around in the bottom of the cardboard box, brushed his hand as he rooted underneath the volumes for something possibly of use. Keating shuddered and tried to remember why he'd packed the damn thing instead of throwing it in the trash.
His fingers touched the warped edge of the box for a deck of playing cards, and just like that, the switch flipped in his mind. For the second time in only a few minutes, flames crawled over his vision, but the puff of heat was not so intense. Beyond it were flickering, confused images. The scent of cinnamon and leather.
Keating remembered the casual malice with which Azrael had tossed the deck into the fireplace, and also remembered fishing it out to examine it later, his curiosity getting the better of him even though he knew that crossing Azrael's wishes- or even whims- wasn't advisable. He'd never been able to resist.
Just like the first time, the cards were a disappointment when prized out of the half-destroyed box. They weren't in good condition, but it was clear they were typical, normal cards. Just playing cards. Keating leaned back and arranged his legs so he sat cross-legged on the faded white carpet, and spread each card out in front of him, seeking some sort of answer, some hint as to what had caused Azrael to consider it worth destroying.
Card after card laid down like the world's least helpful Tarot reading before Keating finally saw it. There were symbols, little marks, on the corners of some of the cards. They weren't placed on the back the way a typical cheat deck would have them, but in the front, looping over the suits and the numbers or initials in solid black scrawls. The only cards that were marked at all were in the suit of Diamonds.
Keating drew them aside and stared at them, but try as he might, he couldn't figure out a pattern. The shapes looked familiar, like messy versions of something he'd seen before, but they swam in front of his eyes until he got a headache. He let himself pitch over backward and threw his forearm over his eyes, the skin cool against throbbing, swollen-feeling oculars. When he finally opened his eyes again sparks flitted for a moment and a phantom irregularity hovered against the ceiling, forming the illusion of wings, of black and of white.
Five for heaven.
Keating growled and slipped his phone out of his pocket, stared again at the stupid nickname that made way too much sense, and too little, but then thumbed his way just a few names down the list until he reached 'Maya V.' She was doubtlessly on her way back to the airport already, but he snapped a quick photograph of the scrawls on the cards and messaged it to her.
The response was almost immediate. It's Greek, dumbass. Google it.
Laughter rumbled up his belly, visceral and somewhat diaphragmatic. He caught up the marked cards, rolled on to his knees and went to his computer. It was a matter of keystrokes to find a Greek alphabet with translation, and it also showed him how he could have missed something so painfully obvious: the handwriting was casual, messy and archaic. It was clear that he was deciphering a certain code, but he was also aware that he could be completely wasting his time, chasing a shadow that had nothing to do with the identity of the ashes lying upstairs on his kitchen table.
He put those thoughts aside and started to scrawl down numbers and letters, trying to create a sequence that made sense and not certain if the order the cards had been in the deck represented anything meaningful. After the work of more than an hour, and a significant crick in the neck, Keating had what he believed to be the solution. It was a place.
A churchyard cemetery in a small town in Southern Russia. Definitely not a place Keating wanted to rush off to, but if it came to it, he'd done many of this kind of quest. Darting from plane to plane, from clue to clue, until the truth was so close that his teeth itched to bite at it.
First, he got access to Google maps, trying to find if he could zero in on the location and see anything distinctive about it. He saw autumn leaves and a cracked disaster of old, vandalized graves, the yawning open mouth of a crypt...
And a magpie. A Eurasian one, this time, but nonetheless it turned its small head and stared directly, as though through the distant camera lens and the thousands of miles, it could see Keating behind his monitor screen.
Six for hell.
Keating's skin crawled. His spine felt like ice, but he zoomed out slowly, taking in the shape of the weathered broken stones: the tentacle hair, the outline of the body, the deep pit of the broken crypts that created the illusion of eyes... it was not, it could not be a coincidence, no more than magpie after magpie could be anything less than a portent, either the universe or something else warning him of what was to come. A calling card of who was near.
He slowly got up from his computer, combed fingers through his short blond hair, then climbed the soft carpeted stairs from the den. Sunlight was still bright, streaming down from the skylights and lighting the orchard with all the warm golden glow of early afternoon, but some of the old legends were more true than others. The ones about blood, and fire and death everyone typically got right. If the peasants huddled in their homes had realized that a black umbrella and a garnet could allow bloodsucking monsters to trouble them even by day, they would have lived their lives in unending fear.
Keating put on his shoes, lacing them tight, and then walked outside, his soles crushing the glass underfoot. He went out under the boughs of the trees, where a light breeze caressed his face, and started to make his way around the house in the direction that had once been called 'widdershins.'
The final, inevitable magpie flew from branch to branch ahead of him.
Seven's the Devil, his own self.
Keating slowly turned around, although he already knew who he'd find there. He could feel the presence somehow down to his marrow.
"Hello, Azrael."
Tale: Black King series
Book One: 'Check' [Cayenne, Garlic, Coffee and Sea Salt]
Chapter One: Seven's the Devil His Own Self
Prompts: Cayenne #6 "first blood," Garlic #12 "counting crows," Coffee #25 "ashes."
Rating: PG (for mild adult language)
Teaser: For centuries, the global underworld, paranormal and otherwise, has been ruled by the dark elite organization known as Black King. Information brokers, assassins and power players, their fingers stretch long through the shadows. Among their highest ranking officers are the First Blood, the remaining echelon of the very oldest vampires. One of them, Verona Talisker, is the President of Black King. The other, Azrael Arden, an occasional associate, feared for his unstable nature. But now Verona appears to be dead, and Azrael has reappeared, and both circumstances force the brilliant but damaged young agent Logan Keating out of hiding...
Notes: The original 'One for Sorrow' rhyme used to count crows was originally applied to magpies, and magpies are the corvidae getting counted in this story. 'Check' as a story will contain homosexual and heterosexual romantic relationships, but the primary romance is Male/Male and may include some kink.
One for sorrow...
The first magpie dipped its head toward something hidden at the outer edge of the sill, regarding Logan Keating with an intelligent black eye. It feinted a rush at the mottled old window-glass but then turned and swooped off toward the tree-line where white branches were already thick with early apples. The birds were pretty and unassuming, and yet the sight of this one sent a chill down the man's spine. He turned back to the washing-up of breakfast dishes in the sink and turned it from his mind. Magpies weren't so uncommon here, he thought scathingly, that he ought to imagine the worst every time he glimpsed one.
The air was still crisp and chill with encroaching winter, and after he'd rinsed and set aside the dishes, he poured himself another cup of coffee, still hot and steaming from the carafe, wrapped it in his hands and went out on the veranda. The morning was mercury-colored and cloudy, but still enough sunlight streamed down to paint shadows across the edge of the porch and to dispel some of his lingering unease. His gut settled, his thoughts cleared, and he was the picture of relaxed confidence by the time the distant figure made her way up the rough, uncleared path through the orchard.
He had known who it was from the moment her car pulled off the road, though he didn't see her clearly for quite some time afterward. She looked better than when last they'd met: her pristine white jacket tailored elegantly over curves that could not be concealed, black hair worn short, at the length of her jaw, black leather boots that gave the flavor of the equestrian to the entire ensemble, as though she ought to have been sporting a riding crop in one gloved hand.
Given her cold, determined expression, had she carried one, Keating thought he might have fled back into the house. Instead, he rose as she reached the steps and held out a hand.
"Hello, Maya."
Maya Villafranca clasped his hand, dropped it almost instantly and tramped up the porch steps, her boot heels making pronounced cracks against the wood as if each step were a stab wound. She turned her cold blue eyes on Keating.
"Logan," she said neutrally.
"Coffee?" he offered.
She snorted.
"A beer?" he tried.
A beat, then, "Sure." She pushed open the old creaking screen door and headed unerringly for the fridge. "It's been a long flight. But I swear if there's nothing in here but Pabst, I'm going to put you out of your misery."
Keating followed her warily into the almost empty living area. Although he'd been holed up in the hidden little house for nearly a year, it had never felt like home. He'd never settled in, never bought any knick-knacks and had only fixed up what pissed him off too much broken. His only contribution to homey-ness at all was to keep the fridge stocked, his comic books and video games strewn around the downstairs den along with some porn he dearly hoped Maya Villafranca didn't stalk down the stairs and discover, and the bowl of fresh-picked apples, red enough to put a smile on a wicked witch's lips, on the table.
Maya picked herself out an IPA, grunting as if to admit she might have been mistaken about Keating's taste in beer, kicked back a chair at the table and sat down, tipping the frosted bottle against her mouth.
"Long flight," Keating observed, leaning against the counter across from her. "from London?"
She raised an eyebrow and kept drinking, having drained half the bottle before she set it down and steepled her long fingers in front of her. "Why do you think I'm here, Logan?"
"There's only one reason there could be." Keating sighed and sat down, turning his chair so that his back wasn't to the door. "Verona's dead."
Maya mimed pulling a trigger toward the ceiling. "And here they say you aren't very bright. Ashes were sent to the Parrot Cage Club two nights ago. Analysis revealed them to be the remains of a vampire, one with almost total genetic restructuring."
"So, one of the First Blood."
"Bingo. Which means unless someone managed to off your ex-boyfriend, the ashes belonged to Verona. And we haven't heard from her since, so the assumption has to be that Black King needs new management."
"You?" Keating inferred.
"I'm the logical choice. With Verona consigned to an urn, the entire original Council is gone."
"I'm not arguing. But there are a lot of people who will. Everyone's going to want to stake their claim, and in the meantime there'll be chaos." Keating finished his coffee and leaned back. "It all seems premature, anyway. Two nights? The whole thing could be a hoax. Verona has gone off the reservation for longer than that before. And... and how do we know the ashes don't belong to Azrael?"
"If they do, we have a serious problem. Someone who could take out that son of a bitch decides to gift-wrap the ashes and send them to us? I prefer to believe that isn't the case, because I prefer not to presume that I'm a dead girl walking."
"Well, what about a hoax?"
"Yeah." Maya drained the last of the beer and got up. "That's your job, agent. You're officially reinstated. Find out what's going on. I'll be busy wrangling the chaos as every jumped up little hit man and desk jockey makes a play for Command. And if you find out Verona's still alive, just tell her I made the call."
Keating shook his head, but the cold sick pit in the bottom of his stomach hadn't dissipated. If the experts at Command truly thought the ashes they'd received belonged to Verona Talisker, the ashes probably had. As hard as it was to shake himself from the stupor of laying low, the old thrill of a puzzle, of a chase coming on, began to sing through his blood.
Maya reached into her jacket pocket and placed a small box on the table. "I figured you wouldn't need much, and our analysts are still working with the rest." She strode across the room and paused halfway past the screen, holding it open with one hand. "Take care of yourself, Logan."
"Maya... good luck."
Two for mirth...
The empty beer bottle sat fornlornly on the table as if to tempt Logan Keating despite the early hour. He sighed and swept the box up in his hands, turning it over in his fingers. He glanced out the door before he opened it, noting the ramrod-straight posture of Maya's spine as she made the trek back through the orchard to her car. Behind her, another magpie had perched on the edge of the porch steps. The markings were subtly different from the first one, though they were both black-billed magpies common enough to the area.
Firmly, Keating closed the main door on the bird. It was ridiculous to let old superstition, even one that had proved to have a kernel of fact, distract and discombobulate him when a serious threat might loom ahead. Keating might never have particularly liked Verona (he'd met three of the First Blood, and he'd considered none of them particularly easy to like) but he'd respected her prowess as both a leader and a Machiavellian prince fully capable of keeping her boot firmly pressed on the necks of an entire organization of deadly, sociopathic bad guys. Maya was tough, but he didn't think she quite had it in her.
"So here's hoping this was lifted from the grave of one of the long-dead relatives," he muttered, and opened the box.
The ash was fine and of a pale gray color, indistinguishable from anything else that might have been burned to cinders. Keating dipped his fingertip into it and immediately, waves of color and sensation washed over him. The first was, unsurprisingly, flames- orange and yellow tongues that crept over his vision, seemed to lace along the walls and sent a backdraft blast of heat across his face so that even though he knew that the sensation wasn't real in that moment, Keating almost flinched.
The flames cleared, and next his probing thoughts drew into that shift of pattern, of odd and distinct emblems, that had fluttered through his mind long ago when Azrael forced his own blood into Logan's mouth. This pattern was different, although some crests were the same: a red phoenix, a black teardrop, a silver diamond... others were entirely new and couched in a much more complex pattern. Whether or not this spoke of Verona's DNA, it certainly represented a vampire with a fuller and more varied bloodline of descendents than the rather reclusive Azrael Arden.
Keating drew in a deep breath and pressed on. His ability was powerful and extensive, but it rarely answered questions too directly. The trick was to understand how to interpret the visions that touch brought. As the bright gossamer shimmer of the images swayed and danced and then disappeared like popping soap bubbles, the shape of something else took their place. This thing was primal and somewhere in his genetic structure fear of it seemed to be encoded, like the shapes of poisonous things.
Dark, weaving tendrils formed a weird silhouette, something his mind didn't want to find meaning in, and at the core of it, burning lambently, two deep yellow eyes. Yellow like Verona's. Yellow like Azrael's. But Keating was certain that what those eyes belonged to wasn't a vampire of any sort, not even the very oldest.
Shuddering, he opened his eyes. Sitting in a line now on the porch were the two magpies he'd seen before and one more.
Three for a funeral.
The birds sat there, still, regarding him. Magpies weren't generally skittish around people, but Keating suspected even those ordinary folks who weren't obsessed with old nursery rhymes would have considered their behavior mildly creepy. With the terror still coursing adrenaline through his body from the shape of that lambent-eyed thing in the dark, Logan grabbed the empty beer bottle off the table and opened both doors, chucking the bottle so hard that it shattered, brown glass cascading in glittering piles. The birds dodged and circled once overhead, then winged away.
Keating felt a twinge of remorse. This wasn't the kind of thing he did. He didn't let himself get worked up over these things. He floated over the top of them like a leaf on the breeze or water spilling over the lip of a glass. The ashes hadn't really told him anything that he couldn't have inferred from the conversation with Maya. Other than the gnawing fear in his belly that disturbed his earlier thrill of anticipation and eagerness for the chase, as though something primordial and hideous might lurk under every rock he overturned.
He watched the sunlight spark rainbows off the bits of broken glass on the peeling painted boards of the porch and tried to shuffle through the immediate impressions, to find some pattern or thread to follow. The flames gave him nothing; they were residual energy from the destructive force that had rendered ancient tissue to dust. The... thing at the end didn't help either. Keating didn't recognize it and couldn't distinguish anything about it other than a sense of wrongness, of terror, and those blinking, cruel, familiar eyes...
Familiar. That was the only lynchpin he could use. The bright swimming crests that represented vampiric bloodlines, passed from generation to generation, added to and expanded as each new fledgling was born into the blood. Three of those crests had been exactly the same as three from Azrael's bloodline. The red phoenix, the black teardrop and the silver diamond. From the relative positionings, Keating could infer that the red phoenix represented the common sire between all the First Blood. One of the other two was the owner of the ashes, the other Azrael himself.
Was there any way, short of asking Azrael, that he could determine who the First Blood had been and which ones might have survived their fates up until that awful death by fire? He racked his brains. He still had a number in his phone, hidden under the laughably telling moniker 'Magpie,' but couldn't be certain it would still work. Azrael was notoriously unpredictable and rarely kept anything for longer than a few months other than his chillingly extensive collection of canes, birches and whips.
Four for a birth.
Keating opened his contact list, thumbed down to the word and stared at it, then shook his head and put his phone away. There had to be something else. He went downstairs, stepping over the obstacle course of bachelor junk strewn across the floor and went to the stack of still-packed boxes he'd left in the corner by the fireplace. He noticed his hand shake slightly as he reached for the folded-shut flaps at the top of the smallest box.
"Get it together," he snarled under his breath.
He slipped the folds open and lifted out the few things inside. Mostly they were books, things Azrael had left at his old place. Some of them Keating had obediently read, but others were poetry in languages Azrael had, typically, forgotten that not everyone spoke. A toothbrush, rank from rolling around in the bottom of the cardboard box, brushed his hand as he rooted underneath the volumes for something possibly of use. Keating shuddered and tried to remember why he'd packed the damn thing instead of throwing it in the trash.
His fingers touched the warped edge of the box for a deck of playing cards, and just like that, the switch flipped in his mind. For the second time in only a few minutes, flames crawled over his vision, but the puff of heat was not so intense. Beyond it were flickering, confused images. The scent of cinnamon and leather.
Keating remembered the casual malice with which Azrael had tossed the deck into the fireplace, and also remembered fishing it out to examine it later, his curiosity getting the better of him even though he knew that crossing Azrael's wishes- or even whims- wasn't advisable. He'd never been able to resist.
Just like the first time, the cards were a disappointment when prized out of the half-destroyed box. They weren't in good condition, but it was clear they were typical, normal cards. Just playing cards. Keating leaned back and arranged his legs so he sat cross-legged on the faded white carpet, and spread each card out in front of him, seeking some sort of answer, some hint as to what had caused Azrael to consider it worth destroying.
Card after card laid down like the world's least helpful Tarot reading before Keating finally saw it. There were symbols, little marks, on the corners of some of the cards. They weren't placed on the back the way a typical cheat deck would have them, but in the front, looping over the suits and the numbers or initials in solid black scrawls. The only cards that were marked at all were in the suit of Diamonds.
Keating drew them aside and stared at them, but try as he might, he couldn't figure out a pattern. The shapes looked familiar, like messy versions of something he'd seen before, but they swam in front of his eyes until he got a headache. He let himself pitch over backward and threw his forearm over his eyes, the skin cool against throbbing, swollen-feeling oculars. When he finally opened his eyes again sparks flitted for a moment and a phantom irregularity hovered against the ceiling, forming the illusion of wings, of black and of white.
Five for heaven.
Keating growled and slipped his phone out of his pocket, stared again at the stupid nickname that made way too much sense, and too little, but then thumbed his way just a few names down the list until he reached 'Maya V.' She was doubtlessly on her way back to the airport already, but he snapped a quick photograph of the scrawls on the cards and messaged it to her.
The response was almost immediate. It's Greek, dumbass. Google it.
Laughter rumbled up his belly, visceral and somewhat diaphragmatic. He caught up the marked cards, rolled on to his knees and went to his computer. It was a matter of keystrokes to find a Greek alphabet with translation, and it also showed him how he could have missed something so painfully obvious: the handwriting was casual, messy and archaic. It was clear that he was deciphering a certain code, but he was also aware that he could be completely wasting his time, chasing a shadow that had nothing to do with the identity of the ashes lying upstairs on his kitchen table.
He put those thoughts aside and started to scrawl down numbers and letters, trying to create a sequence that made sense and not certain if the order the cards had been in the deck represented anything meaningful. After the work of more than an hour, and a significant crick in the neck, Keating had what he believed to be the solution. It was a place.
A churchyard cemetery in a small town in Southern Russia. Definitely not a place Keating wanted to rush off to, but if it came to it, he'd done many of this kind of quest. Darting from plane to plane, from clue to clue, until the truth was so close that his teeth itched to bite at it.
First, he got access to Google maps, trying to find if he could zero in on the location and see anything distinctive about it. He saw autumn leaves and a cracked disaster of old, vandalized graves, the yawning open mouth of a crypt...
And a magpie. A Eurasian one, this time, but nonetheless it turned its small head and stared directly, as though through the distant camera lens and the thousands of miles, it could see Keating behind his monitor screen.
Six for hell.
Keating's skin crawled. His spine felt like ice, but he zoomed out slowly, taking in the shape of the weathered broken stones: the tentacle hair, the outline of the body, the deep pit of the broken crypts that created the illusion of eyes... it was not, it could not be a coincidence, no more than magpie after magpie could be anything less than a portent, either the universe or something else warning him of what was to come. A calling card of who was near.
He slowly got up from his computer, combed fingers through his short blond hair, then climbed the soft carpeted stairs from the den. Sunlight was still bright, streaming down from the skylights and lighting the orchard with all the warm golden glow of early afternoon, but some of the old legends were more true than others. The ones about blood, and fire and death everyone typically got right. If the peasants huddled in their homes had realized that a black umbrella and a garnet could allow bloodsucking monsters to trouble them even by day, they would have lived their lives in unending fear.
Keating put on his shoes, lacing them tight, and then walked outside, his soles crushing the glass underfoot. He went out under the boughs of the trees, where a light breeze caressed his face, and started to make his way around the house in the direction that had once been called 'widdershins.'
The final, inevitable magpie flew from branch to branch ahead of him.
Seven's the Devil, his own self.
Keating slowly turned around, although he already knew who he'd find there. He could feel the presence somehow down to his marrow.
"Hello, Azrael."