Broken

Soundbite

WE MADE IT BACK TO TORONTO BY EARLY AFTERNOON AND headed for Cabbagetown.

When I walked toward the crime scene, it was Jeremy at my side. Clay would keep watch.

At the end of the street there were no obvious signs of trouble-no police cars, no ambulances, no fire trucks. Yet something was wrong. Residents were out in their yards and on the sidewalks, talking in pairs and trios. Gazes skittered up and down the road, and the clusters disintegrated at the first sign of an unfamiliar face, people making beelines for their front doors, as if suddenly remembering they’d left the kettle on.

The cause of their unease? Probably something to do with the small swarm of journalists buzzing along the street. Across the road, a camera operator was getting setting shots, filming the other side of the street, the peaceful side, preparing for the “Today, in this quiet Toronto neighborhood…” intro. As for “what” had happened in this particular quiet Toronto neighborhood, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to find out.

I steered Jeremy toward a scattering of print reporters, all scouting for contacts and sound bites. We stopped on the sidewalk.

“It looks like something happened,” I said in a stage whisper. “Do you think it has anything to do with our power going out last night?”

It took less than five seconds for a reporter to bite.

“Excuse me. You folks live around here?”

We turned to see a potbellied man in serious need of a hairbrush, razor, clothes iron and eye drops. I’m sure he cultivated that look-the rumpled newshound, always on the hunt, low on sleep, coasting on caffeine-but it was about fifty years out of date. Almost certainly not a representative of Toronto ’s journalistic constellations, the Star, the Globe or even the Sun.

“We’re a few blocks over,” I said with a vague wave.

“Did you know Mrs. Ashworth?” he asked, pen poised above his paper. “She lived right down there, in the green house. Old-older woman. Lived by herself.”

“I believe we met her at the barbecue last month,” Jeremy said. “You talked to her for a while, hon, remember? About her roses?” He frowned at the reporter. “She isn’t hurt, is she?”

“No one knows. Disappeared this morning. And I do mean disappeared. Neighbor claims he saw her crossing the road and then…poof.”

“Poof?” Jeremy’s frown deepened.

“Gone. Just like that.”

We stared at him. He leaned back on his heels, relishing the moment.

“She probably wandered off,” I said, then lowered my voice. “We have a lot of…older residents here.”

The reporter scowled, as if he’d already come to this conclusion, but would really rather be writing the “poof” story than another sad tale of Alzheimer’s.

“Still,” I said. “It is strange, coming right after those fireworks with the transformer last night.” I glanced at the reporter and tried to look nervous. “There’s no connection, is there?”

A smug smile. “You never know.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “No, hon, there’s no connection. A blown transformer and a missing elderly woman, just two random events, not uncommon-”

“Plus, the woman in petticoats,” the reporter said. “You did hear about that, didn’t you?”

“Petticoats?” I said slowly.

“The cops got two calls last night, right after that transformer blew, people seeing a woman in petticoats running down the middle of the road. This very road.”

“Probably a lady in her nightgown, running out to see what the fireworks were,” Jeremy said. “I hear it was quite a show.”

The reporter muttered something about a deadline, and stomped off to find a more receptive audience.

We’d returned to Toronto to reassure ourselves of two things: that the bowler-hatted man had been the only “portal escapee,” and that nothing else had happened as a result of last night’s events. The possible disappearance of the elderly woman thwarted our hopes of a hasty resolution on the second count. And now a sighting of a woman in petticoats suggested we weren’t going to have any more luck with the first. Something told me we wouldn’t be sleeping in our own beds tonight.

Jeremy and I spent the next hour discreetly scouting the area for a second trail with that distinctive rotting smell. Bad enough I couldn’t change to wolf form, but having the area under media and police scrutiny made the search twice as hard or, more aptly, twice as large. Instead of scouring the road where the bowler-hatted man had appeared, I had to search all the perimeter streets, while trying to look like a restless pregnant woman and her doting husband out for a prolonged neighborhood stroll.

We’d made it almost all the way around when I found a second trail. A woman’s scent, mingled with rot.

I bent and retied my shoes-a simple act that was getting increasingly difficult.

“Definitely a woman,” I said as I took a deep breath.

“We’ll pick up the trail after dark and find her, see what she can tell us.”

In the supernatural world, it’s sometimes tricky to know who to call when things go awry. Take a portal. It could be magical, in which case we’d want to contact a witch or a sorcerer. Or it could be connected to the nether realms, and then it would fall under the jurisdiction of a necromancer. The last time we’d been peripherally involved in a case with a portal connection, Paige and Lucas had been in charge, and they’d turned to a necromancer. So we did the same, and called Jaime Vegas.

We phoned from the hands-free setup in the Explorer so Jeremy and I could both hear Jaime. Clay waited outside, standing watch.

“Hey,” she said when she answered. “Let me guess. You’ve got that other matter settled, and you’re ready to work on my film.” Last time we’d spoken, she’d been returning my message, ready to meet to discuss her documentary, only to hear that I’d made other plans in the meantime.

“Mmm, not quite yet. Seems we ran into complications. Something you might be able to help with.”

When I described what had happened last night, she barely let me finish.

“Dimensional portal,” she said.

“That common, huh?”

A small laugh. “No, definitely not, thank God. But given the choice between that or a time tear, odds are way better on the dimensional. Time travel makes great fiction, but in real life, that’s where it stays.”

“Pure fiction.”

The connection crackled, as if she was getting comfortable. “I wouldn’t go that far. Never say never in this world. My Nan used to tell me stories about time tears, but even she said they were just that: stories. Anyway, you have the classic signs of a dimensional portal. I wouldn’t go looking for horse-drawn carriages to start galloping through downtown Toronto anytime soon.”

“And what are the classic signs?” Jeremy asked.

Silence.

“Jaime?” he said.

“Uh, Jeremy. Hi. I…didn’t know you were right there. You’re so…”

“Quiet?”

She gave a nervous laugh. “Umm, right. So, what did you ask? Oh, the classic signs. Well, zombies would be the big one.”

“Zombies?”

“That guy you dusted.” She laughed, more relaxed now. “I’ve always wanted to say that. You see it happen in movies all the time, but real life? Vamps don’t explode in a shower of dust.”

“But zombies do?”

“Er, no. Well, not usually. But any zombie I’ve ever met was raised by a necro. When a spirit materializes through a portal, you’ve got something a bit different. Probably shouldn’t even call them zombies but…well, we have enough beasties out there without inventing new names. When a formerly-human entity manifests in the living world, we call it a zombie. You get that rotting meat stink, which is a dead giveaway…pardon the pun.”

“But this thing didn’t act like a zombie,” I said.

“Because it didn’t shamble around, moaning and trying to eat your brain?”

“Let me guess: more movie fiction?”

“Yep. Not that you guys would know that. Zombies are the dirty little secret of the supernatural world. We know they exist, but we try not to think about them. Most necros go their whole lives without ever raising one. They’re just…nasty. And I don’t just mean the smell. A zombie is a ghost returned to a corpse. Not nice for anyone, especially the spook. Last one I saw was a dog raised by a kid necro. Like in Pet Sematary…only the dog had been hit by a car, and the kid thought the raising would fix him, and of course it didn’t, so his uncle calls me in and…” She paused. “And that story, while instructive to any teen necromancer, isn’t going to help you. Where was I?”

“Zombies. Which don’t normally disintegrate into dust.”

“Right. If yours turned to dust, dimensional zombies must be different. I’ll have to look that one up.”

“You said this was a dimensional portal,” Jeremy said. “And that we’re dealing with corporeal ghosts. So is this another door into the afterlife?”

“Probably not. You’re dealing with things that just don’t happen often enough to be properly documented. It sounds like you have a spell-triggered dimensional portal. Spellcasters probably have a fancier term, but that’s the gist of it. A spellcaster, usually a sorcerer, creates a…balloon or a pocket, something that exists between dimensions where he can shove inconvenient things-usually people-for safekeeping. They stay there, frozen in time, until someone releases them. You’ll have to check with Lucas, but I’m pretty sure the spellcaster creates a ‘trigger’-some item that will let him open and close the portal.”

“The letter,” Jeremy said.

“Probably.”

“So how did we activate it?” I asked.

“A trigger is like a combination lock, and only the sorcerer knows the code. It’s usually some special sequence or event that will set off the portal, but there can be alternate ways of triggering it. Backups, in case the first one fails.”

“Would blood do it?” Jeremy asked.

“Blood?” I glanced at him. “How-?”

I stopped as I remembered the mosquito, and the dark blotch on the letter. That’s why he hadn’t wanted me seeing it in the hotel room. Because, in the light, I’d have realized that the dark patch wasn’t only mosquito guts.

“The mosquito,” I murmured. “It had my blood in it.”

“That’s a new one,” Jaime said. “But sure. That could have been the backup trigger. It’s not something that’s likely to happen accidentally in storage. If the primary failed, the sorcerer could break in and activate the backup.”

“So some sorcerer created the letter, stuffed two people into it, and then, before he could release them, it was stolen.”

“If he ever planned to release them. That can be tricky, especially if you wait too long. When you seal up people like that, it’s like a mini time capsule. Release them and…weird things can happen.” She paused. “You haven’t had anything weird happen, have you?”

“Besides possibly releasing and killing a zombie Jack the Ripper?”

“What else could happen?” Jeremy said.

“Hard to say. Creating portals isn’t something you find in every spellbook, and not many sorcerers could make one if they had the recipe right in front of them. Oh, for example, there’s a documented case of a sorcerer in the Wild West who caught some outlaw, tossed him into a portal and hauled his ass back to the East for trial. Caused a minor smallpox epidemic.”

“Because the outlaw had smallpox,” I said. “And he was brought into an area that didn’t.”

“Nope. The outlaw was smallpox free…but when he was tossed into the portal, it was in a region known for periodic outbreaks. It’s like he took some of his environment with him.”

That was all Jaime knew, but she promised to canvas her contacts.

When we’d signed off, I started lifting a hand to wave Clay back to the car, but Jeremy laid his fingers on my arm.

“When you tell him what Jaime said, leave out the part about the smallpox,” he said.

“You think that’s a concern? I’ve been immunized, and it sounds like something specific to the period, not to portals in general.”

“I agree. However…”

His gaze slid to Clay, who was leaning against a tree, a pedestrian taking a shade break from the late-day heat, but his eyes were continually scanning the street, body tense, as if a horde of zombies might descend at any moment.

“No sense giving him one more thing to worry about,” I said.

“Exactly.”

When I went to put my cell phone away, I noticed I had a message. It was Robert, returning our earlier call. Robert Vasic was a former council delegate who now served as the go-to guy for esoteric research. Jeremy called him back, told him what had happened and he promised to start hunting through his library.

“We can’t track this woman until after dark,” I said when we were all back in the SUV. “The best source of information on the letter itself would be the original source…or as close to it as we can get. Patrick Shanahan’s grandfather commissioned the theft of that letter, and I’m sure Shanahan knows why. We should pay him a visit.” I glanced at Clay. “A friendly visit.”

“Sure,” Clay said. “We’ll show up on his doorstep and say, ‘Excuse me, we’re the ones who stole your letter last night, and it’s giving us some trouble. Can we ask you a few questions about it?’ ”

“Let me think about it,” Jeremy murmured. “Just start driving over there.”