A Furnace Sealed Read online

  Besides, Miriam did pay me for doing this. So what if my bed was calling to me like the sirens to Odysseus?

  I got off the bus and went, not toward my townhouse on Johnson Avenue, but in the direction of a beautiful old house on Seward Place just off Netherland Avenue. And when I say old, I mean old—it was built in 1841 by William H. Seward, who was the New York State governor at the time. He never actually lived there, though. Later on, Seward became a senator, then President Lincoln’s Secretary of State—even helped write the Emancipation Proclamation. He was killed the same night as Lincoln in 1865, and sometime after that, the teeny cul-de-sac off Netherland Avenue got named after him.

  Nowadays, Seward Place was just a glorified alleyway, really: a small strip of pavement, the sole purpose of which was to lead to Miriam’s front door. Well, actually to the two ten-foot stone posts just wide enough to fit a car. Each post had a square near the top engraved with an ornate pattern. Those were wards that kept anyone Miriam didn’t want out of the house.

  For about half a second, I thought she was pissed off enough at me to keep me out, so I breathed a sigh of relief when I made it through the posts okay.

  I walked past the empty driveway—Miriam hadn’t owned a car since the accident—to the front porch, on which stood one of the four werewolves I’d be taking care of tonight, Anna Maria Weintraub, smoking a cigarette. Half-Italian, half-Jewish, and all attitude, Anna Maria glared at me through a cloud of smoke.

  “About time you showed up, honey. Miriam’s ripshit. Where you been, anyhow?”

  “Trying not to get killed by a unicorn.”

  Anna Maria regarded me with a raised eyebrow. “Seriously? Unicorns are real?”

  I held out my hands. “You’re half an hour from turning into a hairy mutt, but about this, you’re skeptical?”

  She shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess, but—unicorns? Anyhow, you missed the cannolis.” Anna Maria lived in Belmont, the Little Italy section of the Bronx, home to some of the finest bakeries in town, and she often brought pastries of some kind. Naturally, I was too late to get any. Story of my night …

  My ribs were throbbing to the point where I really wished I’d had the time to stop at home and grab my prescription painkillers, as the ibuprofen wasn’t really doing the trick. I felt my chest again to reassure myself that they weren’t broken, then followed Anna Maria—who dropped her cigarette and stepped on it—inside.

  Miriam was glaring up at me from her wheelchair in the house’s foyer. She was thirty, the same age as me, but had gone prematurely gray in her mid-twenties. Since the accident, she’d kept her hair short—she used to have it down to her waist, and it had been lovely. But with the chair, it just got in the way. Her porcelain skin had gotten a little blotchy the last couple of years, which, in my medical opinion, was due to stress.

  As I walked in, Miriam was flanked by the other three werewolves: Mark McAvoy, a nebbishy white guy; Tyrone Morris, a burly black guy; and Katie Gonzalez, a petite Latina woman. Tyrone was holding a big, empty backpack.

  Katie smiled and gave a small wave. “Hiya, Bram.”

  Miriam was not smiling. “Nice of you to turn up.”

  Holding up my hands, I said, “Look, I’m sorry, I forgot. The Cloisters hired me to wrangle a unicorn.”

  Now Miriam’s hazel eyes went wide. “It got out of the tapestry?”

  I nodded.

  “How the hell did that happen?”

  “I dunno, but Velez had a bitch of a time getting it back in there.”

  That turned the wide eyes into a dubious squint. “They hired Velez?”

  “Schmuck-nose at the Cloisters didn’t realize that Coursers don’t do spells, so I needed someone last minute.” I grinned. “’Sides, he was just gonna try to see Katrina again, so I saved him from that.”

  “And the public is grateful.” Miriam sighed as she reached into a pouch in her wheelchair, took out a stone disc, and handed it to me. “You know the drill. Put the ward on the fence, keep an eye on them, don’t let them eat anything they shouldn’t”—that part was given with a glare at Anna Maria—“and don’t forget to bring the ward back. See you at sunrise.”

  Dropping the disc—which was a ward that would keep anyone who wasn’t me or a werewolf out of the dog run—into the inner pocket of my denim jacket, I said, “No worries, Mimi, I’ll take care of them.”

  The five of us walked out the door, Katie calling behind her, “Thanks again for dinner, Miriam!”

  Smiling for the first time since I walked in, Miriam said, “My pleasure, Katie. Be safe.” Miriam always made a nice dinner for the werewolves before they had to go out on their run.

  Lighting up another cigarette as soon as her open-toed sandals hit the porch, Anna Maria muttered, “Don’t know why she was looking at me when she talked about eating shit.”

  Tyrone shot her a dubious look. “You serious? Girl, have you forgotten what happened last June?”

  “Look, I paid for the woman’s entire flowerbed to be replanted, didn’t I? And it was almost a year ago, can’t we just let it go?”

  I grinned. “Apparently not.”

  “You know,” Mark said in his usual subdued tone, “you really don’t have to stay all night. I mean, okay, put the ward in, but we can take care of ourselves.”

  “That’s not what I’m getting paid for. Besides, what if one of you jumps the fence?”

  Anna Maria snorted. “Not with these knees.”

  I looked at her. “You taking glucosamine like I told you to?” I know, I know, but once a doctor …

  She puffed on her cigarette as the three of us turned onto 232nd Street. “Yeah, and now they just hurt like hell instead of hurting like fuck.”

  “Seriously, though,” Mark said, “I don’t think we need to be watched the whole night. I mean, I’ve been doing this for two years now, and I’m the newbie. I think we’re capable of staying in the dog run. We can take care of ourselves,” he repeated.

  I didn’t really have anything to say to that, so I just kept walking, about a step or two ahead of the others, trying not to think about the pain in my shoulder and ribs and doing a pretty crummy job of it, all told.

  Mark sighed. “I bet the last wardein was a lot nicer.”

  I heard Katie inhale quickly. She’d been looking right at me, so while it was possible that she was reacting to what Mark said, it was more likely that she was reacting to the way I reacted to what Mark said.

  Which, for the record, wasn’t pretty.

  I stopped, turned, and faced Mark, who swallowed as I pointed a finger at his chest. “First of all, the last wardein also used to hire Coursers to deal with werewolves, except he hired us to shoot them down like dogs instead of letting them run around a park. Secondly, the reason why he’s the last wardein instead of the current one is because he was killed by a drunk driver, which is also why the current wardein, his daughter, is in a wheelchair, seeing as how she was in the passenger seat. And thirdly, I’m minding you for the whole night because Miriam said so, and when it comes to stuff like this, what the Wardein says, goes. Are we clear?”

  Mark just nodded quickly, audibly swallowing a second time.

  “Good. Let’s move.”

  I probably shouldn’t have mouthed off like that, but I was very protective of Miriam. A lot of folks thought she was too young to be wardein. It’s an inherited job—most didn’t even start until they were in their fifties. Not that it was her fault …

  After about ten seconds of awkward silence, Katie walked up alongside me and said, “You missed a really good dinner.”

  I grinned. Miriam was an excellent cook. “I’ll bet. What’d she make?”

  The rest of the walk went by quickly as Katie regaled me with tales of Miriam’s tomato-and-mozzarella salad, vegetable soup, and rigatoni with vodka sauce, followed by Anna Maria’s cannolis.

  Katie was just about to describe the Moscato d’Asti, the sweet dessert wine they’d had with the cannolis, when we arrived at Ewen Par
k. Built into a hill that used to be the estate of a Civil War general, right in the park’s center was a dog run.

  Proving that my luck might well have been improving, the run was empty. I stuck the ward in between two links of the fence while the other four walked through the gate and quickly stripped naked.

  Moments later, the full moon started to appear in the sky and they started gyrating and contorting. I hated watching this part, so I pointedly didn’t look as I gathered their clothes up into the backpack Tyrone had been holding.

  Once I heard snarling and howling, I turned to look, and four naked humans had been replaced by four wolves, running around the fenced area. Honestly, they looked more like a bunch of really big huskies or keeshonds or one of the Scandinavian breeds. This was handy. While the ward kept people away, the run was still visible from other parts of the park, including a fairly popular paved walkway.

  Only after the quartet settled into their galumphing did I realize just what a nightmare I had let myself in for. I had ibuprofen left, but nothing to wash it down with. I hadn’t had time to grab anything (like a cup of coffee, which would’ve been very welcome right now), and I just remembered that I left my water bottle in the truck in the parking lot. My ribs were doing a rhumba in my chest, my shoulder still ached, and somehow I had to stay awake without any caffeine until sunrise.

  At least the werewolves were pretty well-behaved. Honestly, Mark was right. I could probably have let them go for a bit while I ran to take a nap. Or at least grabbed a cup of coffee.

  But I didn’t trust my luck enough to do that. The microsecond I walked over to the deli on 231st, Tyrone would jump the fence or Anna Maria would pick a fight with Mark, or some damn thing. Wasn’t worth the risk.

  After the sun went down, the temperature plummeted, and the wind kicked up, plowing through my denim jacket and black T-shirt like they were made of toilet paper. The cold just made the shoulder and ribs throb more even through the ibuprofen that I’d dry swallowed. I started pacing and walking around the periphery of the run just to keep my circulation going.

  After my fifth turn around the run I decided to expand the perimeter of my perambulations. The wolves were barely moving—Tyrone was ambling around a bit, but Katie was asleep, and both Anna Maria and Mark were grooming themselves. Knowing that he was spending some serious quality time licking his testicles ameliorated my annoyance with Mark considerably.

  Wandering up the hill toward a giant oak tree that was a couple hundred feet from the edge of the dog run, I noticed a bunch of flies flitting about. That was odd in and of itself, since it was a little cold for that number of insects, but then I caught a whiff.

  As a doctor and a Courser, I knew the smell of dead body anywhere.

  Chapter 3

  The corpse was on the other side of the tree from the one facing the dog run.

  My first thought was that I did not need the aggravation. Dead bodies meant cops, and cops took forever at a crime scene. It was only midnight, but there was no guarantee they’d be done in six hours, and no way was I gonna be able to explain four “dogs” turning into naked people at dawn to a bunch of city cops.

  My second was that I now had a pounding headache to go with the achy shoulder and the bruised ribs, and my expert medical opinion was that this damn corpse brought it on.

  My third was identifying the body in question. Once I placed it, I realized that having cops around was gonna be the absolute least of my problems.

  What got me to recognize the corpse was the awful smell. Not so much the dead-body smell, but the extra stench of sweat and dirt, which meant a homeless guy, mixed with single malt Scotch, which meant a homeless guy I knew: Warren.

  People around the neighborhood knew Warren as one of the locals. He’d hang out at various spots around Riverdale and Kingsbridge, always with a large cardboard coffee cup that he’d rattle back and forth in one hand and a bottle of Glenlivet or Laphroaig or Macallan in the other. He was the only homeless guy in the history of the universe who drank single malt. Most people didn’t get how he could afford it.

  I did, though, because I knew that Warren was really Warham Mather. He first moved to the Bronx when he was assigned to be the minister of Lower Yonkers around 1700.

  Mather was immortal. That was why he could afford single malt on a panhandler’s salary—he didn’t have the same need to eat that the rest of us do. Killing an immortal was only possible through magickal means, which meant it fell more into my bailiwick than the cops’.

  Once I recognized Mather, I knew my first step was still to call the cops—or, rather, one cop in particular. As a general rule, Coursers didn’t get along with the police, but there were exceptions, and one of them worked this neighborhood. I didn’t have any means of disposing of the body (werewolves, for the record, don’t eat dead human flesh—hell, Mark was a vegetarian, that was why Miriam’s meal had no meat). Besides, this was what the NYPD did, and for a skell like this, they wouldn’t be wasting too much of the taxpayers’ money on investigating.

  After two rings, Detective Lydia Toscano of the 50th Precinct answered my cell phone call with her thick Bronx accent made scratchy by years of cigarette smoke. “This is Toscano—what kinda spook shit you dumpin’ on me this time, Brammy?”

  I winced. Someday I hoped to get Toscano to stop calling me “Brammy.” It’d probably happen the same day I stopped calling Miriam “Mimi.” “Sorry to bother you so late, Lyd,” I said, meaning it.

  “Can it, kid. I know you wouldn’t call without a reason, and if it’d been anyone but you, I wouldn’t’a even answered.”

  “I’ve got a body in Ewen Park in the dog run—it’s a homeless guy, but he’s from my end of things.”

  Toscano grunted. She had also been friends with Mike Zerelli—rumor had it that they’d been more than friends, but I never pried—when he was wardein, and knew the drill. Didn’t like it a whole helluva lot, but she also knew better than to complain. Unlike most cops, she’d seen our world, and she was just as happy to keep it out of her world as much as humanly possible.

  I added, “If you can get your people here about five minutes after sunup, that’d be perfect.”

  “Five minutes after—no, forget it, I don’t even wanna know. But if it’s one’a yours, whaddaya need my people for?”

  “Because I don’t have a morgue. Look, it’s Warren.”

  “That’s the panhandler who drinks Glenlivet, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Christ, he’s a fixture. How’d he die?”

  “The makings to do a full autopsy here in the dog run, I don’t have, Lyd. That’s why I need your morgue.”

  She snorted, followed quickly by a ragged cough. “Oh, so you want us to do the work on our pitiful budget for nothin’?”

  “Look, he’s a homeless drunk. He’ll just fall into the system like everyone else and be buried in Potter’s Field. It won’t interfere with your life at all, I promise.”

  “Last time you promised me that, Brammy, I had a case I couldn’t close, with two mountains’a paperwork. Sergeant still gives me shit about that, y’know.”

  I winced. That was the time that nixie started making trouble on City Island. I had been hired to take care of it by the family she was bothering, but when I stuck my oversized nose in, she showed up on Wave Hill. It was a big mess on my end, too, but I managed to banish the little monster, which meant there was nobody for Toscano to arrest in the end. Didn’t exactly goose her career along.

  Trying to sound reassuring, I said, “Look, Lyd, I’ll try my best, okay? But this—”

  “Is one’a yours, right.” Toscano let out a very long, raspy breath that sounded like a car running over glass. “There’ll be two unis there five minutes past sunrise. Talk to you later, and I hope you catch the fucker.”

  “Thanks, Lyd.”

  She hung up. I knew Toscano would keep the NYPD’s touch on this light—not that it’d be that hard. From their POV, it really was just what I said: a nobody
who’d be buried in Potter’s Field with all the John and Jane Does and the other people with no fixed address and no next of kin.

  From my POV, though, I still needed to know how someone killed an immortal.

  I knelt down to look at Mather, causing my ribs to do the rhumba a few more times. The hill the park was built on separated the neighborhoods of Kingsbridge and Riverdale. General John Ewen used to live on that property, and later on it became a city park named after him. The dog run was on one of the park’s plateaus.

  Because of the dog run—not to mention the paved footpath nearby—this part of the park was pretty well lit by streetlamps, plus, of course, it was a full moon. So I got a good look at Mather’s corpse, even though the tree blocked some of the light.

  The two main things I noticed were that he was incredibly pale, even by dead-body standards, and he had two puncture wounds in his neck.

  Okay, more explaining. Everything you think you know about vampires is totally wrong. Not that that should be much of a surprise, since half of what you know about vampires probably contradicts the other half. It ain’t Bram Stoker, it ain’t Anne Rice, it ain’t Joss Whedon, and it ain’t Stephenie Meyer.

  Reality, though, made for lousy fiction, which was why the fiction was all wrong. Vampires lived a lot longer than normal humans, yeah, and they were pale, allergic to garlic, and fed on blood. But mostly they were sickly and weak, they hated sunlight (though they didn’t burn when exposed to it; that was all F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu), and didn’t like to associate with people much. They almost never fed on humans, because—well, honestly, it’s way too much hassle. Most butchers’ll sell animal blood no problem—I knew a few down in Morrisania and Mott Haven that gave it away for free to the vamps who couldn’t really afford it. For that matter, Aunt Esther, aka Rabbi Lieberman, had a line on some blood that’s as close to kosher as possible for the Chosen People among the undead. (Basically, for meat to be kosher, the blood had to be drained a certain way, and that drained blood was what the Jewish vamps drank. The Reform ones, anyhow. The Orthodox vamps just starved to death; we generally treated turning one of them as a homicide.)