Whip Smart, page 12
part #6 of The Salt Mine Series
She had contemplated summoning the ghost of Sarah Pullman, but there was no guarantee that her spirit hadn’t crossed over into the Land of the Dead in peace. Not all people who died a violent death stuck around to haunt the mortal realm, and it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. If Sarah Pullman’s spirit reached out to her, that would have been a different matter, but the last thing Martinez wanted was to start her on the path to becoming a poltergeist or worse.
Which left scrying. It was a technically a form of summoning in that the practitioner had to beckon the guides to reveal things. As Martinez understood it, the guides were not of the mortal realm, but they resided in some nebulous state that also overlapped the mortal realm. The guides didn’t require a price per se, but that also gave them the right to refuse service. They only showed things to those they wanted to and weren’t compelled to do more. While it was generally considered safe it was not without risk. Whenever a connection was made between the mortal realm and those not of it, it was a crapshoot. On paper, scrying was the way to go.
The problem was that historically, Martinez sucked at it. She had scried minor things to demonstrate she could do it, but it didn’t suit her at all. She was willing to admit that some of it was prejudice on her part. All the trappings and woo-woo that came with popularization and commoditization drove her batty. Her fellow Salt Mine agent Aurora was the first magician skilled in scrying that didn’t annoy the living hell out of her, and Martinez was pretty sure that was because her other specialty was blades.
But it wasn’t only the insipid window dressing. At a gut level, Martinez simply didn’t get the guides, and the ability to use magic came from a deep subtextual understanding. In short, what a practitioner could and couldn’t do was keyed to that guttural comprehension. She parsed devils as esoteric lawyers literally from Hell. She appreciated that fae were basically the beautiful but cruel popular girls in high school who used cryptic speech for their amusement. But guides...who were they, what was their deal, and why did they voyeuristically watch humans do their thing?
Fortunately, Martinez wasn’t a lone magician slogging through it on her own, and Chloe and Dot had some helpful suggestions. If Martinez was going to do this, she had to do it her way. There was no faking authenticity when it came to magic.
She had taken LaSalle’s advice and stopped for lunch on her way back to Corktown. She’d called ahead to let Stigma know she was coming and bribed him out of the ritual room with promise of a bacon cheeseburger with fries. When he had gone into deep cover in the Russian Navy, he esoterically carried his gear on his skin, and over the past few weeks, he had been using the ritual room to systematically erase all traces of Boris Petrov from his skin, leaving it a blank canvas for whoever he was supposed to be next.
Martinez gathered her tools and she was pleased that there was nary a crystal ball or Ouija board. All she needed was her largest, deepest Pyrex dish, a bottle of water, the few strands of Sarah Pullman’s hair obtained from the mortuary, half a cup of the baking soda used to absorb the booby trap on Pullman’s journal, and—at the twins’ insistence—scented candles. Apparently, the guides had a soft spot for tradition.
The basement was chilly despite having a vent, because it wasn’t yet cold enough for the heater to kick on during the day. Martinez placed a space heater on either side of her before starting on the circle. She knelt on a gardening pad and placed her dish on the slate slab. She poured the clean water inside, filling it only halfway. With the chalk, she ringed it in a perfect circle and carefully marked each symbol, ensuring it contacted the curved circumference.
She unwrapped the candles—apple cider scented—and placed them around the circle. As she lit them with matches, the initial smell of singed wick was quickly overtaken by the spicy autumnal aroma. With the hair and baking soda on the ready, Martinez disrobed—the twins had suggested humbling herself to the guides to increase her chances of success, and it didn’t get more humbling than naked and prostrate.
Martinez cleared her mind and let the scent take her back to a simpler time—an apple pie that just finished baking in the oven. She was anxious to eat it, but her mother told her it was too hot. Her grandmother gave her a bowl of green beans to snap; when they were all snapped, the pie would be cool enough to cut. Martinez grounded herself in that memory and that kitchen and let all the anger of the day slide away in that perfect moment.
Only then did she summon her will and begin her incantation. “To the guides that watch over us, a great wrong has been done. Someone has taken the life and work of one of us. I beseech you to show me who has stolen her power. Touch a piece of the fallen,” she said as she dropped the hair into the water. “Taste her power,” she requested as she sprinkled the baking soda in the dish.
Martinez closed her eyes and lowered herself to the ground. She began her litany, winding her will around the same words repeated over and over again. “Hear my plea.”
Martinez’s will and words saturated the mortal realm and seeped its way into the native home of the guides. They heard her application, no louder than the wind blowing through the trees, but persistent, like a hungry baby bird chirping for its mother. They did as they always do: they deliberated. Only if all three agreed would they intervene.
They had received requests from this one before, many of which were rejected in the past. It would have been easy to follow suit and cite precedent, but the eldest of them shushed their critique and bid her confederates to listen more closely; to see not just with their eyes and hear with not just their ears.
As they peered into the mortal realm, they perceived her openness of spirit. That was new. They saw her wounds, old and new, laid bare in supplication. They tested the edge of her righteous anger, focused and forged into hardened steel. They probed her heart and found her intent honorable and true. With one look to each other, they came to a decision. They stirred the waters and spoke, “Be still, sister, and see what you seek.”
Martinez wasn’t sure if the voice was inside her head or inside the room, but she heard it as clear as a bell. She opened her eyes and looked into the dish. The water roiled and as it stilled, a scene played out before her. It was Samuel Johnson’s room, only he wasn’t inside. The absence of the plush brontosaurus made her think it was sometime after her visit this morning. Her point of view was from the doorway, and a man walked through her to the desk. He opened a drawer and dropped a red jade donut inside before closing it again. She finally caught a glimpse of his face when he turned around to leave: Dr. Walker.
Martinez’s heart was stirred by the vision, but she calmed herself before addressing the guides. “This man took an oath to first do no harm. Can you show me what possessed him to do something so heinous?”
The waters rippled and Samuel Johnson’s room disappeared. The disembodied voice spoke again, “Some oaths supersede others.” The waters stilled again to show the same man many years earlier. He was thinner in the middle and his hair was missing the gray of this morning. He was signing his name in a book: Jeffery Thomas Walker. “His fate is sealed, but there is still uncertainty in how all will come to pass. Not even we can know the whole of the future. Do what you must with this, sister.”
Martinez bowed three times and praised them for their insight. As soon as she dismissed her will, she quickly dressed, blew out the candles, turned off the space heaters, and made it up the stairs without spilling any water. Stigma was just finishing his lunch and was two fries away from putting himself into a calorie coma. “It’s all yours,” Martinez announced as she poured the water down the sink. She grabbed her bag and keys. “Gotta go.”
As her car warmed up, she sent off a message to LaSalle: resistor located, on rte; Jeffery Thomas Walker, MD—devil’s pact. She reached into her bag and made sure she still had Tiffany Morale’s work badge. She shifted into gear and headed toward Ann Arbor to retrieve Sarah Pullman’s missing necklace.
Chapter Nineteen
Detroit, Michigan, USA
27th of September, 2:30 p.m. (GMT-4)
––––––––
Leader’s desk was covered with all the files she had on Furfur, Great Earl of Hell, but currently, she was reading over Weber’s numbers and Dot’s projections. It would have taken the whole derby season to build enough power to reach the deepest level of the Salt Mine, but it was doable.
She had expected Furfur to try to escape, but she never thought he had the capability of something of this scale. How did he piece all this together from his confinement? She thought her wards had covered all contingencies, but apparently she was wrong. The pieces all fell into place when LaSalle had delivered Lancer’s message.
Pacts with devils go back as long as there have been fiends and mortals, and the esoteric link created by pacts was very primitive but binding. The practice warranted its own entire administrative system in Hell, and Hell, being Hell, had turned it into a bureaucratic nightmare. It would have taken tremendous will and patience for Furfur to make a direct connection to a pact-human, not to mention the social taboo. It was simply beneath a devil of Furfur’s stature to do anything more than wait out the clock and reap the souls in that numbers game.
Once she had that piece, she realized the single crack in the cage she’d put around the devil that Furfur had exploited. It was the only way of explaining what had happened. She cursed at herself for failing to think of it, but not too harshly. After all, she had to give credit where it was due. Routing an astral projection through the outer planes in order to contact a human in the mortal realm using the extremely tenuous connection of an old pact was ingenious and convoluted and nearly diametrically opposed to the social SOP of a powerful devil. More importantly, it didn’t technically break any stipulations in his imprisonment agreement.
The instant Lancer had discovered Furfur’s signature with her saltcaster, Leader had cut the power to his prison as a precaution, and it had proven wise. It stopped him from getting into any more mischief—no lights, no ability to use reflective surfaces to communicate through astral projection that wasn’t technically astral projection as it was really outer planes projection. Now it was a matter of undoing what was already done and preventing such from happening in the future.
What Leader needed now was the particulars of this pact, and there was only one place she thought she could get reliable answers without drawing Hell’s attention to the fact that she had a Great Earl of Hell bound in her basement. It meant phoning an old friend, one that she’d sort of lost touch with and should have called sooner but never seemed to find the time. Still, they had participated in more than one caper together over the years, and in a world where everyone else came and went, they still had each other, for better or worse.
She picked up the phone and requested an outside line. It rang three times before Meridiana picked up. “Hello?”
“Hey, Di,” Leader’s voice pitched higher than usual. “It’s Penny. We have a problem. It’s your dad.”
Meridiana sighed. “Pen, please tell me you didn’t lose him?”
“No, he’s still here,” she reassured the succubus, “but not as secure as I had originally planned. I’m calling because I need your help to lock down a loophole he’s created.”
Meridiana chuckled. Her caged father was like a toddler trying to escape a safety gate—relentless and resourceful. “He was always good at exploiting technicalities,” she acknowledged. “What do you need?”
Leader sweetened her tone. “Can you find out the details of the pact he has with a Jeffery Thomas Walker?”
It was greeted with dead silence, and when the succubus finally spoke, she enunciated each word incredulously, “You want me to phone home and speak to the pact department?”
“I know,” Leader acknowledged the gravity of her request. “But if I summon a devil and ask myself, there will be questions. It’s not like your father is a nobody, or that I’m asking about an errant magician. But if you ask about your dad’s affairs, it would raise less suspicion, especially considering your contentious history,” she tactfully alluded to the past.
“I don’t like it, Penny,” Meridiana objected. “The last thing I need is for Hell to figure out I helped you trap him. My whole strategy was to lay low. The hair that sticks up is the one that gets cut.”
“I don’t think any devil would have a hard time believing your father was messing with you in the mortal realm using pact-humans. It sounds like the petty bullshit he would do for fun,” Leader pointed out. “Plus, I have implicit faith in your creativity and charms.”
Meridiana didn’t speak for a few seconds, and Leader let her fume. She had made her argument and there was nothing to do but wait. Eventually, Meridiana begrudgingly agreed, “I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can dig up.”
Leader breathed a little easier. “Thanks. Any chance you could do it sooner rather than later?” she pressed her luck. “I’m kinda trying to avert a disaster.”
“Why is it that only call me with bad news or when you need something?” Meridiana inquired pointedly.
“Careful Di, you’re dangerously close to sounding like your mom,” Leader observed.
Meridiana’s temper flared. “Penelope, you take that back or you can call Hell yourself!”
Leader held back her laughter and kept her voice level. “Mea Culpa. It’s because I’m a shitty friend and a worse correspondent, and saving the world from itself is more than a full-time job.”
Meridiana accepted her prickly apology—thorns and all—and answered it with understated sarcasm. “I’m just saying, if you called, I would pick up. Even if the world wasn’t in grave peril.”
“Noted,” Leader said graciously.
“This doesn’t have anything to do with your Agent Martinez and Sadie Pullman’s death, does it?” Meridiana tested Leader after putting two and two together.
“And if it did?” Leader answered her question with a question.
“Second female magician around me to die within two months,” Meridiana observed. “Makes me wonder if he already knows.”
“Or he’s so restrained that his exploit can only work locally in Detroit,” Leader posited.
“Possibly,” she mouthed despite the fact that she was less than convinced. “How’s he doing it?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve got everything nailed shut again. But let’s be realistic—you’ve toughed it out here for a millennia, while he’s only been holed up less than three decades and whined about it the whole time. My money’s on you. You’ve got the scrappy underdog thing going for you,” Leader complimented her. “And unlike your father, you have friends. All he’s got is a bunch of sycophantic devils who would backstab him in a heartbeat if they thought they could win.”
Meridiana smiled. Penny always had a way with words. “Okay, I gotta go. Apparently, I have an important call to make.”
“We’ll talk soon,” Leader promised and hung up.
Meridiana stared at her mobile and weighed whether she needed caffeine or alcohol for this endeavor. She went with both and liberally Irished her Americano. Even though she was banished from Hell, she was still the spawn of a Great Earl. She just needed to get her game face on.
She decided the best approach would be to go full devil, horns and all; this was no time to be subtle. Although the sky was overcast, Meridiana drew the curtains in her bedroom. She didn’t want to have to explain to her neighbors why her Halloween costume looked so real. She put her mobile on vibrate and settled in with her drink.
As a succubus, she could adopt pretty much any combination of physical traits found in human variation, but when she transformed into her true form, it was always the same. Changing forms wasn’t hard, but it was a process, especially transitioning from devil to human. There was a knack to comfortably tucking away the tail, wings, and horns, and getting it wrong was like having your underwear bunched funny under your clothes.
However, shedding the human form was fairly straightforward—once you perforated enough skin, the rest would tear like a paper towel off the roll. If she were being dramatic about it, she would make a small cut and let her wings burst out of her back and peel the skin back to exposure her horns. Nothing went to waste—her body absorbed most of the organic material to be used at a later time. It was a bit of a bloody mess by human standards, but fiends were hardly put off by some gore.
Meridiana laid out the plastic tarp she kept in her closet for just such occasions and gently shrugged off Leigh Meyer. Her leathery wings unfurled, and she flapped them a few times to circulate air around them. Her muscle memory kicked in as she whipped her tail a few times, slicing the air with a crisp snap.
She appraised her nude lithe form in the full-length mirror and decided to leave the viscera dangling just as it was. It was really quite becoming, like waking up to a good hair day for mortal women.
She summoned her will and made her connection to the Pact Department. It was one of those solidly good jobs for devils that were feisty enough not to be culled but not ambitious enough to get out of a desk job. Lucky for her, she had an older brother who worked in the filing department.
She was transferred three times, but eventually, she got her brother on the line. He was stunned by her appearance and it took him a moment to speak. “Meridiana? I haven’t heard from you in ages!”
“It’s good to see you too, brother,” she greeted him warmly. “How are things with the family?”
“Oh, you know how it is,” he rolled his eyes, all four of them. “It’s hard to keep track of who isn’t talking to who and who is now in an alliance. I just keep my head down and show up when Mother calls me.”
“You always were the sensible one, Azazel,” she doted on him. “Perhaps I wouldn’t be in my current circumstance if I had done the same. I should have known better to butt heads with our father.”
