"I'm not sure I understand what that has to do with my letter."
"It was the combination with a third event that caught my employer's interest. There were reports of a man and a woman, both dressed in Victorian garb, seen in the area of the power outage and the disappearance. Our experts detected signs of a dimensional disturbance--a recently opened portal."
"P-portal?" A too-hearty laugh. "I'd never own a letter that contained a portal. Dangerous things, you know. Very dangerous. And damned near impossible to make. Way outside my very limited magical abilities." A self-deprecating chuckle. "I can pick a stock a lot better than I can cast a spell, let me tell you. Ask anyone."
"Presumably the portal was already within the letter before it came into your possession. Otherwise, it wouldn't contain people from the nineteenth century."
"Oh, er, of course." Shanahan paused. "Listen, I'm a man of great practicality--particularly when it comes to money. If I'd inherited a letter containing an active portal, I would have put it on the market immediately. I know how much a Cabal would pay for such a thing. If that letter held a portal, which--no offense to your employers, but I doubt--I knew nothing about it."
I could smell the bullshit in every word, yet Jeremy was stuck. As much as Shanahan claimed to be a weak spellcaster, our experience with sorcerers had left us wary enough to know they could be formidable opponents. And Shanahan, already nervous, would be expecting attack.
Jeremy let Shanahan think he believed him, and promised that, if the letter was recovered, his employers would indeed want it and would pay a fair price to Shanahan, the rightful owner. As he and Clay left, Shanahan was handing out business cards, scribbling his home number on the back, and asking to be kept in the loop.
I met them by the road.
"He's lying," Clay said.
"I know," Jeremy replied, and kept walking.
Clay looked from me to the house, and I knew it killed him to leave it at that.
"We're going back, aren't we?" I asked. "When we can catch him off guard."
Jeremy nodded. "Tonight."
Robert had left a message. He'd found a mention of one case similar to ours, where a sorcerer had sacrificed a man in a portal creation spell. The soul of the sacrifice had been bound to the imbued object--in this case, a scroll--and when the portal was activated, the dead man had come through as a zombie.
That explained why we had rotting zombies. They weren't people who'd been stashed in the portal for safekeeping--as Jaime postulated--but those who'd been sacrificed to create it. As for the other case, according to the brief mention Robert had found, the zombie had been laid to rest and the portal closed. It just didn't say how the latter had been accomplished.
He'd e-mailed me some other stories. Since we still had a bit of time to kill before dinner, I found a cybercafe and read them, with Clay leaning over my shoulder, his chair pulled so close I might as well have sat on his lap.
Most of the "evidence" on portals was anecdotal. That's typical with anything supernatural, like the Pack's Legacy. Even those who seek to compile research, like Robert, are left with what really amounts to stories, and the closest thing to proof is multiple eyewitness accounts. Nice when you can get it, but how often does someone conducting a black magic ritual invite a dozen acquaintances over to watch? Even if he does, how many of them will take him up on the invitation...and how many will think "participate in a human sacrifice and risk being sucked into a faulty dimensional portal?" and decide they'd really rather stay home for the evening.
Although portal spells were available to any sorcerer willing to search enough and pay enough, there were few recorded instances of them being used. They were notoriously tough to cast, and the chances of them failing were rivaled only by the chances of them malfunctioning. Like the Austrian sorcerer who decided to use his portal to lie low until his legal troubles passed. A friend was supposed to free him after two years, and I'm sure he would have...if the paper that contained the portal trigger hadn't accidentally been sucked into the portal itself, leaving the sorcerer stuck in his dimensional bubble for eternity.
Then there was the genius in medieval Japan who'd tapped into the wrong dimension. His portal belched out a very pissed-off demi-demon, who'd proceeded to flay and disembowel the sorcerer, his family, and half the village before it figured out how to click its ruby slippers and return home. Start circulating a few stories like that, and your average sorcerer will decide dimensional portals aren't something he needs to add to his repertoire.
We headed out for dinner. We tried to find a quiet corner, and seemed to succeed, getting a table with a cushion of empty ones around us but it was not to be. Two tables over, a pair of emergency room nurses were complaining about an influx of stomach flu that had them working late that day and missing the commuter GO train home.
As sympathetic as I am to the plight of overworked hospital staff, I don't think a restaurant is the appropriate forum for airing complaints, especially when those complaints are sprinkled with graphic descriptions of the byproducts of gastronomic upset. When I started showing signs of losing my appetite, Jeremy asked the server to relocate us. We decided on the patio, which was hot enough to bake potatoes on, but quiet enough to discuss our next criminal enterprise.
The upside to our forthcoming home invasion? Having just invaded the same home the night before, we already knew the floor plans, security features and codes. The downside? Having been invaded the night before, Shanahan might have changed those codes.
"Nah," Clay said. "You get robbed, what's your first priority? Assessing damage and figuring out how it happened. Making sure it doesn't happen again comes later, after you remember where you filed the instruction book for your security system."
"What if he's a little more organized?" I said. "Or a little more paranoid?"
Clay shrugged. "We'll deal with it. This is an interrogation. Subterfuge is secondary."
At eleven-thirty at night, Patrick Shanahan's house was still ablaze with light. He hadn't gone to bed yet. Nor had he activated the outside lights, which made sneaking up to the side door very easy.
The side door was locked. Instead of trying Xavier's key, Jeremy and Clay made the rounds to check the other doors while I was consigned to the bushes again.
They got lucky with the oft-forgotten sliding patio door, and slipped inside. I bounced on my tiptoes, straining to hear voices, wondering whether I could interpret "stay there" as "stay outside," rather than "stay behind that particular bush." Just as I decided Jeremy's command was indeed open to wider interpretation, the patio door moved again.
Clay walked onto the deck and motioned me in. I jumped forward so fast I nearly impaled myself on a marble obelisk. Then I raced to the deck and leapt onto it, ignoring the set of stairs on the far side.
"Don't laugh," I muttered as I swept a sweat-soaked strand of hair from my face. "I'll make you hide in the bushes next time and see how fast you come running." I moved up beside him. "So what's up?"