A Furnace Sealed Read online

  I always knew about what Toscano had called “spook shit” from when I was a kid. It was always part of the world for me. I first met Miriam when our synagogue held a cookout on Labor Day weekend. Mike Zerelli—who had been friends with Aunt Esther for ages—showed up with his daughter, and we started talking. Miriam was shy and was scared of all the grown-ups, and I was fearless and would talk to anyone, so we hit it off pretty quick. She only spit on me once, which for a ten-year-old girl is practically a declaration of eternal friendship to a ten-year-old boy.

  The position of wardein was inherited, and Miriam had been trained from birth to take on the mantle when her father died. After that Labor Day cookout, Miriam and I became playmates, and I’d actually studied a bit alongside her from time to time. I’d found it fascinating. In fact, when we were teenagers, we’d seriously discussed talking with the Curia—the one-hundred-person council that supervised the wardeins—about making an exception, letting me take over as wardein instead of Miriam, allowing her to become an English teacher like she’d always wanted.

  But the Curia said no, the wardeins had to be a hereditary line, and ultimately, my parents’ desires trumped everything anyhow, and I was soon off to Harvard as a premed student.

  It was during my first semester that some jackass animated a golem, which went on a rampage, killing, among others, Rachel and Mordechai Goldblume.

  Yeah.

  I was a complete mess after that. Aunt Esther hired a Courser named Hugues Baptiste to stop the golem. Hugues was short, stocky, always smiling, and absolutely merciless in a fight. Took him four days to track down the golem and destroy it.

  All my life, I’d been told by my parents I was going to be a doctor. Now they were dead, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was hop on Amtrak back up to Cambridge. No, I wanted to do what Hugues did. I didn’t want anyone else to have to face living without their parents because nobody could stop the things that went bump in the night.

  I practically begged Hugues to take me on as an apprentice. It turned out that all Coursers were required to train at least one apprentice, and Hugues had been avoiding that particular duty for years. (In fact, I was gonna need to start thinking about taking one of my own soon.) Miriam had told me that her father was gonna have to sanction him if he didn’t get up off his ass and do it, and I thought I’d be the perfect guy. I already knew about spells and magick and dimensional portals and all that other garbage. Who better?

  After I hounded Hugues for the better part of a week, he finally made me a deal. In his thick Haitian accent, he said, “Look, child, your parents, they wanted you to go to medical school, okay?”

  “Well, yeah,” I replied reluctantly.

  “They be payin’ for it and they want you to be a doctor, okay? So here’s what we’ll be doin’. You return to school, achieve your MD, become an actual doctor person, and then we shall speak about my training you. That’s what is best, okay?”

  I didn’t like it. I was eighteen, my parents had just died, and I wanted what I wanted, not what was best.

  But I didn’t have a choice—especially once I found out that the notion for that particular deal came, not from Hugues, but from Aunt Esther. Nobody busybodies quite like a Jewish aunt, except maybe a rabbi, and Esther’s both. She knew my parents as well as anyone, and she also knew that if I hadn’t gotten my MD, I’d have regretted it.

  Of course, it was a lot easier for my thirty-year-old self to understand that now than it was for my grieving younger self twelve years ago.

  But it all worked out in the end. I did the full premed-to-med-school program at Harvard, graduated near the top of my class, got my shiny degree, and put two letters after my name forevermore. Then Hugues started training me.

  Within a year, Mike Zerelli presented me with my Courser’s license, and I had found my calling.

  I also sold my parents’ co-op and bought the townhouse. I’d inherited enough so that I could manage until the Courser business picked up.

  Being friends with Miriam and Mike helped. Honestly, I wouldn’t have survived any of what had happened without Miriam there. She was my rock.

  Which was handy for her, because it meant I was there to return the favor after the accident.

  After showering, which made my shoulder feel almost workable again, I dried off, slid on the comfy flannel bathrobe that my aunt and uncle gave me for my last birthday, and dug into my denim jacket’s pocket for my cell phone.

  The battery was, of course, dead. Knew I forgot to do something last night.

  After I plugged it into the charger, it activated and had three status updates: a text message from Velez and a missed call and a voicemail, both from van Owen. The latter was actually a relief—meant I didn’t have to actually talk to the persnickety old bastard.

  Velez’s text message didn’t bode well for what would be in the voicemail, as it read: “The fuck, yo? van Owen just bitched me out. I don’t need that shit from a paying client.”

  With a due sense of anticipation and dread, I played van Owen’s voicemail.

  “Gold, it’s van Owen. Got your message. Glad you managed to retrieve the unicorn—that would’ve been a damned mess. Wish you hadn’t used Velez to put it back—apparently he rubbed Rodzinski the wrong way. So did you, actually, but that’s hardly surprising. I’m dealing with Rodzinski, but he’s got more problems. Apparently another animal got out of another piece of art. This time it was a crane in a painting in the Asian galleries in the Met. This one’s not as much of an issue—the crane comes and goes as he pleases, apparently, but he usually just comes out when the museum’s closed. This time, however, he wandered out unexpectedly during the middle of a Saturday morning, when there were half a dozen witnesses. I’ll have a Courser look into it—but not you. Rodzinski didn’t like you—advised me to take away your license, in fact—and wanted someone else. Again, hardly a surprise. I’d rather a professional handled this.”

  I stared at the phone with a look of disgust on my face. “He hired me, you schmuck!” Then I sighed and restrained myself from throwing the phone across the room. The thing was still plugged in, anyhow, so that would’ve been difficult. Van Owen had never thought highly of Hugues, and since Hugues trained me, that meant I had to suck, too. And it looked like he took time out of his busy schedule to share Rodzinski’s complaints about him with Velez. Which was just uncalled for, if you asked me. In the same situation, Miriam would’ve defended whoever the Courser she hired had subcontracted, and certainly wouldn’t have turned around and bitched at the subcontractor in question. She’d probably give me crap about it afterward, but that’s as far as it’d go.

  I was grumpy, and also starving, so I called the deli around the corner and made a delivery order of corned beef on rye (hey, I’m perfectly happy to live the cliché when it’s corned beef), then poured myself a glass of tap water and sat down at my computer. I downloaded my email, which included a notification that Miriam had electronically sent me my fee for babysitting the werewolves. That reminded me that I’d promised her I’d get the word out about the possibility of a new vampire in town, so I popped onto the private, encrypted bulletin board that the Coursers used to keep in touch. I started a new topic saying that there might have been a new vampire in the Bronx and gave what I knew about Warren’s death.

  I ended with: “Screams vampire, though the fact that it’s an immortal makes me wonder if there’s more.”

  Within a minute, I got three chat requests. One was from Charlie Kalani, which I ignored on general principle. Charlie worked Hawai‘i, and he seemed to spend all his time online chatting with anyone who was dumb enough to accept his chat request rather than, y’know, hunting things. Tonight, I was not that dumb. The second was from Nishanda Castro, a Courser out of Los Angeles, who was wondering if I had a line on silver-tipped crossbow bolts. I quickly told her that my supplier didn’t ship across the country, but put her in touch with a friend in San Francisco who might’ve been able to help.

  The third I accepted for more than the two seconds it took to answer Nishanda’s question: it was from Hugues.

  We caught each other up on what we’d been doing. I told him about the unicorn and the werewolves and Warren.

  Hugues typed back at me. I should mention that Hugues always capitalized to symbolize italics, and he couldn’t spell worth a damn. Also he didn’t believe in apostrophes or commas.

  “A couple hired me to track down a DJINN that got loose from the storage closset in the bsmt of there apt bldg. DONT ask me why they kept it in their bldgs bsmt.”

  That got my attention. “Got loose? Was it a binding spell?”

  “I think so ya. Why?”

  I told him about the unicorn and that crane that van Owen mentioned. “You should contact van Owen and Miriam and let them know. There may be some kind of weird thingie that’s causing spells to unbind.”

  “Wierd thingie huh? Very desscriptive.”

  “At least I spelled ‘weird’ right.” I laughed as I typed.

  “O that reminds me I have a job for you if you want it.”

  That surprised me. Hugues very rarely passed on work—and when he did, he rarely passed it on to me. “What is it?”

  “Family in Edenwald discovered a neighbors doing a ritual to trap one of the LOA in Seton Falls Park tomorrow at noon. Its the vernal equinox.”

  I started to type a question about why it had to wait until tomorrow—trying to capture any of the loa was serious business—when more text showed up: “They dont know where the spell components are so they have to be caught in the act.”

  “Why can’t you do it?”

  “Jesus shit child were you dropped on your head as a baby?” Hugues always asked me that question for some reason. “Tomorrow is Tonis graduatio
n!”

  I had totally forgotten that Hugues’s daughter Antoinette was graduating from New York University this weekend. “Mazel tov!” I typed.

  “Thats what you said when I told you the FIRST 40 times.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Email me the details on the job, okay?”

  Hugues said he would, we exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he signed off, right when the doorbell rang with my sandwich.

  As usual, the deli gave me a sandwich big enough to feed a family of five. I put half in the fridge and put the other half on a plate. I read the rest of my email while wolfing it down. I also checked around various social media sites. While doing so, I got a notification that Katie Gonzalez was doing a live video.

  Curious, I clicked on it, and Katie’s face smiled out at me, standing on a sidewalk in front of a Japanese restaurant. “Hi, everyone! So I’m finally doing it. I know I’ve been saying I’d eat sushi for months, but today’s the day I do it. I saw something horrible early this morning, and it made me realize that I need to start living, not just existing. And that means getting over my fear of raw fish and just having it already! Wish me luck!”

  As I chewed my corned beef, I put a few things together. Based on how Anna Maria had acted, Katie had been thinking of asking me out for a while. Based on this video, seeing Warham Mather’s dead body emboldened her enough to eat sushi for the first time. It probably was why she asked me out, too.

  I thought about maybe not waiting for her to call me and instead going ahead and calling her—but not now. She was obviously in the middle of her big sushi experiment, and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

  By the time I finished the sandwich and tossed the plate into the sink, Hugues’s email had finally shown up.

  The client was a Haitian couple who lived on De Reimer Avenue near the park in question. Their neighbor was gloating about how she was going to subsume one of the loa—the spirits of the Vodou religion still practiced by many Haitians—to her will. Apparently this same woman had served as a healer in the neighborhood, which made me wonder how popular I’d be if I took her away.

  I called the number for the client and got a deep male voice with a thick patois.

  “’Allo?”

  “Hello, my name is Bram Gold, I’m a Courser. I was told to call this number by Hugues Baptiste. Is this Trevor Alty?”

  “Yes, this is he. Mr. Baptiste told us he would be unable to accept our commission.”

  “It’s for a personal engagement he couldn’t get out of. However, Mr. Baptiste was the man who trained me, so I know everything he knows.” That was a lie—Hugues was a very reluctant trainer, and I honestly think that if I hadn’t already had plenty of grounding in magick from growing up alongside Miriam, I would’ve become the world’s worst Courser under his tutelage.

  Some would argue I had anyhow, of course …

  “You need to get to the Seton Falls Park before noon tomorrow please, Mr. Gold. Madame Vérité will be performing the ritual at precisely noon on the equinox at the falls in the park.”

  “Please tell me that Madame Vérité isn’t her real name.”

  “No. I looked her up on the Internet, and she is not even Haitian—she is Dominican!” Alty’s outrage was palpable. “She is called Bonita Soriano. My wife and I, we have tried to sign a petition to get her away, but no matter how many signatures we obtain, she will not go.”

  Okay, so maybe the neighborhood wouldn’t be so peeved. Either way, though, binding gods and spirits were near the top of the Curia’s no-no list, so Miriam would come down hard on “Mrs. Truth.”

  Assuming I caught her.

  “Mr. Alty, I have your email address—if you don’t mind, I’ll send you my standard contract.”

  That seemed to bring him up short. “Mr. Baptiste did not have a contract.”

  Yeah, and he and I had argued about that, y’know, a lot. “Be that as it may, I do. I’ve had some bad experiences, and I’m afraid I need to have the agreement in writing.”

  There was a very long pause before: “Very well. I do not know you, you do not know me, so we have a contract.”

  “I’ll send it in within the next thirty minutes, all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Mr. Gold.”

  “You’re very welcome, Mr. Alty.”

  After I tailored my boilerplate contract to this job and converted the file to a PDF, I sent it off to Alty. Then I stared at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen, which told me that it was now almost six. It was too late to go to Ahondjon’s to discuss the shortcomings of his talismans—he closed early on Saturdays—and I was at the computer anyhow, so I composed an email to Miriam detailing everything that happened with the werewolves and with Warren. I threw in what van Owen told me about the crane and Hugues said about the djinn.

  By the time I hit send, I yawned for the fifth time in thirty seconds and I realized that, now that I’d caught up on Friday night’s sleep, my body was crying out for tonight’s sleep. I had at least three things on my agenda tomorrow—Ahondjon, calling Katie, and “Madame Vérité”—plus whatever else I had to do that I’d forgotten about, so more sleep was probably a good idea.

  My throbbing ribs agreed with me very wholeheartedly.

  So I gave Mittens a final scritch and crawled back into bed.

  Just as my head hit the pillow, I remembered that I never got the truck out of the parking lot and back to the rental place. The latter was closed now, and was also closed on Sunday, but I made a mental note as I faded into the sandman’s embrace to take care of it first thing Monday morning.

  That also reminded me that I still had to pull together an invoice for Rodzinski. Somehow, I didn’t think I would get away with billing him for the extra two days on the truck …

  Chapter 5

  Late Sunday morning—sue me, I needed to recover, and that meant a lot of rest for my poor bruised ribs—I threw on my denim jacket and hopped into my beat-up old 2003 Toyota Corolla. Like I did every time I got into it, I imagined Dad turning over in his grave. He had a thing for high-performance cars—a Mercedes here, a Lexus there, plus an ongoing stream of sports cars. Me, I preferred a car that worked—beyond that, I could give a damn. I’d kept the Maxima they’d given me when I got into Harvard right up until graduation. Then, when I had come back home, I’d switched to the Corolla. More fuel-efficient, especially right after I’d gotten it, which was when gas had hit four bucks a gallon …

  I was already on my third mug of coffee—the first when I got up, the second after my shower, the third in a travel mug with me in the car—when I drove over to Jerome Avenue. The 4 train ran elevated over Jerome from Bainbridge Avenue all the way down to 170th Street, and that subway meant there were tons of shops all up and down the street. The one I wanted was one of about a billion little shops that sold newspapers, magazines, candy, cigarettes, and lottery tickets, located on the corner of 193rd. Like a lot of them, it catered mostly to people coming on and off the 4 at the Kingsbridge Road station a block away, or going into or out of St. James Park across the street.

  Well, okay, they also catered to another clientele, but we weren’t interested in anything on or under the counter on the left as you came in the narrow shop. (That had bulletproof glass protecting the guy behind the counter, currently a Pakistani guy who nodded hi and waved me back—one of these days, I needed to get the guy’s name.) We didn’t want the magazines and papers that took up the entire right-hand-side wall, either. No, we went past those, and past the big rack of greeting cards that blocked the view of the back wall—including the door that led to the steep metal staircase that went down to the basement.

  Downstairs was Ahondjon’s magick shop. The man himself wasn’t in—his nephew Medawe was, and he was talking on the cordless phone.

  He waved at me as I came down the metal stairs. The place was dank, lit only by crummy fluorescent lights, since there weren’t any windows.

  “Nah, he ain’t here,” Medawe was saying. Unlike his uncle, he was born in the Bronx, so he didn’t have Ahondjon’s thick West African accent. “It’s Sunday, he’s in church.… Nah, I ain’t telling you what church.… What, you telling me you found Jesus now? Bullshit. Just gimme the message, I’ll let him know when he gets back.… I don’t know when, I ain’t found no Jesus, neither. ’Sides, you know how he likes talking to folks. Could be hours.… Yeah, well, fuck you too.”