Chapter 5
There was a definite list of things that Tommy Crane did not want to wake up to in the wee hours of the morning. That list included but was certainly not limited to, fires or loss of limb, a spider in her bed, or a spectral in the corner of her room. Somewhere near the top of that list, tucked neatly below a flood and high above an atomic bomb, was Dmitri Kallizov.
Thankfully, by the time Dmitri crept into the room's shadows to lounge with his feet up on her coffee table, Tommy had already filled that table with two empty cups. She then took a shower and brewed a third carafe. She lay across the floor, books at her sides, front, and toes, their pages spread wide to showcase anatomy, artifacts, and poetry in various forms. When hunting down an ancient relic, such as the death mask, fictional literature was hardly necessary. But what good would a mind be if one did not go to the lengths of broadening it?
Tommy had known Dmitri for three years and ten days, and she knew that certain discomforts were part and parcel of that relationship. Notably, she often expected his crooked mouth to open and pour obscenities all over the bedroom floor before breakfast. Or, worse, stretch the hem of his white tee shirt, light a cigarette with the stoked flames of the hearth, and start speaking of ghosts that inhabited the rafters. The latter was only problematic when he sighed gusts of smoke at her with the window closed.
Arkady, the elder of the Kallizov twins, was the only person in the house who ever had an idea of how to handle Dmitri. An idea that he rarely exercised. Tommy had only seen Arkady truly admonish his brother on one occasion, and the fallout of that argument had lasted for a peaceful three months. It was unlikely that he would ever do it again. Those sorts of miracles were fleeting things that one had to grab once in a lifetime. Any further action would have been diminishing at best and catastrophic at worst.
They were both headstrong creatures with stronger cheekbones and weaker appetites. Arkady was tall and thin from throat to heel in a limber way, making him appear half tree branch. Dmitri was thin like a snake. They were handsome, in a chilling way. As if Satan, cast down upon the earth, had split in two upon impact.
“Does our queen allow council?” Dmitri asked after a long oration on salt to keep ghosts at bay. He lowered himself to the floor beside Tommy and flicked ash over an open copy of an alchemic text. “I am a wise man, you know.”
“I’m not sure why they always write wise men into fables,” Tommy replied. She also wasn’t sure that Dmitri was one. “I’ve never read of a true king that let anyone speak.”
Dmitri smirked, which looked cannibalistic in the dim light. “But you’ll let me speak because I have something to say.”
“Then speak it then,” she ordered.
Dmitri cleared his throat, rapt his knuckles on the hardwood, and took an excruciatingly long moment to form his words. “You’re looking for the death mask in an ocean of artifacts. How does one find a needle in a haystack?”
“That is a riddle, not council,” Tommy rolled her eyes.
“Sometimes they’re the same thing,” he whispered. His mouth was so close to hers that she could smell the peppermint on his breath, muted only by the tobacco that billowed between his index and pointer fingers.
Tommy considered what the answer to such a question could be. Perhaps Dmitri was the wise one. Between the early hour and the anguish of a sleepless night, she thought only of coffee and headaches. “They hire someone to look for them?” She asked, then closed her eyes to his narrowed gaze. “We don’t have that sort of money in the coffers.”
“Wrong,” he snapped. “They turn out the lights but keep the shine on it.”
Dmitri looked lost in madness, more so than usual. His flaxen hair had grown curly and wild about his cheekbones which aided in accentuating his hollow eyes. The Kallizovs had been the last boys standing at Durmstrang once the Deatheaters had picked the school apart. Their final days on the property were spent in a version of the Triwizard tournament that sought to judge how far a man was willing to go to keep himself alive. Arkady had been spared the torment, but Dmitri was named champion and fought some weeks in a makeshift hedge ring with students and adults alike. According to the records in Enoch’s locked cabinet, Dmitri had won the games by snapping the neck of an older participant with his bare hands before disfiguring his eye socket on the sharp edge of a boulder. He had only spoken of it once, which was to say, he looked at me funny.
There was no doubt that the Ouroboros house was haunted. But a significant number of Dmitri’s ghosts lived only in his mind.
“Needles are reflective,” Tommy nodded, “It would shine under a flashlight. The death mask is made of obsidian. Does such blackness catch the light?”
Dmitri smiled, “What’s the darkest place you can think of? I’m speaking literally this time.”
Tommy mulled it over, “The bottom of the sea.”
He grasped for her hand on the hardwood, taking it in his and placing it on the concave of his chest. “The heart of a man.”
“That’s still figurative, not literal.”
“Is it?”
She pulled her hand back, “You’re not helping me at all. Only twisting me in circles. What do you even propose? I go about flirting my way through the wizarding world until I stumble across the mask in some man's bed?”
“The masks men wear to get women into bed are usually less intricately crafted,” he shrugged, “I heard your Crane call cawing through the boards last night. Regulus Black offered it to you, didn’t he?”
Tommy looked away, as far over his shoulder as her eyes would adjust. “You’re an eavesdropper.”
“And smarter than Sinai,” he retorted. “Kill the light.” And this time, Tommy knew he truly was being figurative. The light, the Vitruvian. “And use your charm to shine on that boys Black heart.”
“You hate the Deatheaters more than anyone,” she returned. “Why now of all times to convince me to make a ceasefire with them? If the Vitruvian fall, it is only us against them with no buffer.”
Dmitri raised a brow, “Maybe I am more than ready for that confrontation.”
A gale blew at the drapes, flickering the candlelight until the room was half made of dark. Dmitri didn’t break his stare, but Tommy lowered her gaze altogether. She had thought about Regulus’s proposition while sitting next to Enoch half of the night and listening to him take great gasps of air to ease the rattle in his lungs. It was risky. It was too risky to waste time on if it didn’t yield anything, and that was only if she succeeded in achieving the one thing that so many had tried before. The Vitruvians were hard to kill, especially the leader of the pack. Light magic wielders, sure, but they didn’t shy away from brutal uses of their hands.
“No,” she settled on. “There will be another way.”
Dmitri narrowed his eyes, pouted lips ready to burst with further insanities and riddles. Then, he pulled back, retrieved another cigarette from the waistband of his shorts, and held it taut between his teeth. The tip sparked as he took a long drag. “Of course you will. You’re the smartest among us. It was only a suggestion. If anyone is to achieve what seems lost, it is you.”
He was the wise man, and Tommy was the king at his grasp having hubris breathed down her throat. Only she didn’t feel very inflated. She waited for him to say something, then regretted giving him the time to do so.
“Do you fuck Atlan?” He asked, “He’s always following you around like a puppy.”
“Of course not,” she raised her top lip. Her patience had worn down to its second joint. She closed the book her arm was resting on and leaned closer to him. “I’m done with this conversation.”
“I didn’t mean offense,” he mocked her with an eye roll. “Well, if not him, then my door is always open.”
“Get out,” she ordered.
Dmitri smirked, rose to his feet, and trailed toward the door. At the cusp, he rapt his knuckles on the frame and turned to her again. “There’s a vampire in the kitchen.”
“And how long has he been there?” She shot back.
Dmitri rocked his head back and forth, “an hour before I came in here.”
Tommy huffed and pulled herself into a stance. Of course, there was a vampire in the kitchen. Likely annoyed and volatile at the near break of the day. The morning was not yet full enough of inconveniences. It needed more piled on until the seams were ready to bust.
“Where is Arkady?” She asked. Sinai and Atlan were certainly still asleep. At least she might hold out hope that the other Kallizov had intervened in some way.
Dmitri laughed, “What am I? The fucking brother keeper?”
The vampire in the parlor had never known boyhood. Indubitably, all grown men have been a child at one point. A babe wrapped in their mother's grasp and swaddled to the point of growing blue in the face. Raised on milk and honey, weaned from days spent in the dirt and rolling about the orchard wood. It was a promise that kept Tommy standing tall in front of the men she was burdened to be in the company of. All of them at one time had cried out from their cribs, grasped their hands in search of some swollen comfort, and then proceeded to bawl themselves silly when they weren’t offered such a prize. She could rest easy knowing that despite their large stature, on the inside, they were weeping for the swaddle.
That was the problem with the vampire. She doubted anyone could have ever wrapped him in cotton and caressed his fussy bones.
Artemi, she thought his name was or a Greek derivative, anyway. However, his accent was French, as were the ruffles that surrounded the cuffs of his coat. Even vampires had been human for some time, but that didn’t mean they had childhoods. He had been born during the medieval period if his general disposition and choice of ornate leather bootstraps were any inclination. The scars of long bled sores on his clavicle were a giveaway of the black plague. Now, if there were points in history where a man could have skipped childhood altogether, the days of sweeping fevers over French hillsides certainly made that list.
This vampire had traded in the surety of death for the pleasure of everlasting life. All that was required of him now was bleeding carcasses until their veins snapped from the empty tension. It wasn’t the brand of immortality that Tommy was keen to find. What served certain princes was death for the paupers. She didn’t mind death. It was simply the way they went about it.
Tommy watched Artemi cross his ruffle-clad arms on the lounge sofa and wondered what another human blood tasted like. “You’ve been waiting long. It is almost day break. I will ensure the inconvenience does not happen again.” She wasn’t going to apologize. Every time she uttered the words, I’m sorry, it felt like taking a brick out of the house's walls. Enough apologies, and the whole edifice would crumble.
“Where is Enoch?” He asked, dropping all of the vowels. “We come to visit, he does not answer. He sends the child serpent again and again. Has he died?”
Tommy brushed off the insult of child serpent. It was a name preferable to bastard orphan, at the very least.
Artemi himself had never set foot in the house, but it was not uncommon to find other members of his coven standing acrid in the doorway. The vampires worked the forests surrounding London, tearing apart any members of the Vitruvian or Deatheater cults that they could find. In return, Enoch promised them seats in his new version of the ministry whenever that dream came to fruition. This was against Tommy’s council, she might add. The vampires were loyal only to themselves, even when they pretended to be noble mercenaries.
Tommy crossed her hands and sighed. “He has gone to Scotland for a business venture.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“What reason do I have to lie?” She pressed, “I have admitted to you that we are having trouble keeping organized in his absence. Once he returns, he will meet with you in the flesh and sort out any grievances you might have.”
Artemi chortled, “my grievances are many.”
“Then let this child serpent be of assistance,” Tommy leaned forward, elbows on her thighs.
He craned his neck toward the window and licked his teeth as if he had tasted something unpleasant. “When did you say Enoch would return?”
“When he is finished with his work.”
“And how long will that take?”
“You’re guess is as good as mine. Do those in your coven with titles below your station press you on such matters? It is not my duty to question him.”
Artemi chuckled, “Those below my station would never be left in the darkness on such matters. It seems to me that you know nothing at all.”
In Tommy’s peripheral, she caught Sinai leaning against the kitchen's doorframe. She was still wearing her satin robe, hair braided up in an intricate bun and clasped at the frays with a leather strap. Sinai scraped the tip of her index nail on the wood. Tommy eyed her momentarily and returned her gaze to Artemi.
“You must run a tight ship,” she said. “Impressive. That is why we revere your friendship so very much.”
To this, Artemi spat on the floor. “My camaraderie means nothing to Enoch and will not sit and have it mocked by his petulant bastard daughter.” He stood, robes sashaying and eyes wild. “We are not yours to toy about.”
“I would never imply such.”
It was certainly the plague that had killed him the first time. Artemi’s throat still wore the purple bruises of a trachea that had coughed up too much blood to ever pale. The closer he moved, the easier it was to spot the splotches of black that resided between his fingers and made homes of the crooks in his knuckles. The ones whose skin took lilac never lived. Nor, did the ones who toiled in the gravediggers pits, stacking bodies atop bodies until they were a mishmash of skeleton and puss. His clothes said aristocracy, a seigneur even, but those garbs were almost certainly stolen. This was a paupers son given the gift of a second go round.
How could someone live on having seen so much death? Tommy thought of Dmitri caving a boy's skull in with a rock.
“We’ve taken a better deal,” Artemi said, quite matter of factly. He was close enough that Tommy could smell the rot in his throat.
“There are no better deals,” she shot back, only partially of her fingers digging into the soft velvet of the lounge chair. “The Vitruvian will cut out your tongue and the Deatheaters will only make you false promises.”
He ran his tongue over his sharpened canines as he placed one hand on the lounge chair and the other near the soft skin of Tommy’s throat. “I still have a tongue.”
Tommy dropped her eyes to his piercing gaze to fiddle with the hem of her dress. Hornets crawled across the floor and landed on her thigh. They burrowed in her flesh and made waxen cells of her muscle membrane. They flittered in her lungs, laying eggs in the soft tissue until every breath she took was accompanied by a larva crawling out of her sinus cavity.
She blinked, and the hornets were gone. They were never there, really, but weren’t they? Wasn’t death hanging inches from her face with beady blackened eyes and an itch to drain her body of life?
There was a crack in the corner of the room. Perhaps, lightning had struck the dining room table. The candles went out, anyway, because when Tommy closed her eyes there was no dim amber glow sneaking through her paper thin lids. It had begun to rain inside the house; she was wet, and the water tasted like copper and woodland as it slipped into the corners of her mouth.
Artemi slumped into her lap, his heavy head racking against the lounge before she tossed the rest of his body onto the floor to disintegrate between the boards into a pile of ash and crumpled satin. It was the exact location that he had spat minutes prior. The only proof he existed were the accumulated droplets of saliva and a ruby emblem that had adorned his robes.
Tommy wiped her mouth; she knew better than to swallow any of that blood accidentally.
Sinai stood over her, a sentinel against the sun that slipped through the curtains; no storm, only Sinai. Those two things were possibly mutually exclusive to one another. She held the edge of the doorframe in her white knuckle grip, the end of which had been thrust into Artemi’s back and had snapped off in the cavity where his heart was supposed to be.
“I shouldn’t have made you do that,” Tommy said.
It wasn’t an apology.
“I wanted to,” Sinai rasped. “But, if you ever put yourself in a situation like that again, I will kill you myself and save you the trouble of having your head severed and sucked dry, do you understand me?”
It was an empty threat. Words were wielded from a mouth that truly wanted to whisper sweeter ones, to check if Tommy was alright, to ask after any injuries, and to settle her into bed with a smile and a cup of tea. Sinai would have said a lot of kinder things if she were capable of doing so. Yet, all Tommy could think about was the lingering smell of a storm that had never come to pass, the stake in Sinai’s grasp, and the excruciating feeling that some debt had suddenly been settled between them.
Tommy checked Sinai’s eyes for a flicker of regret or a memory long past. She found only pride.
“The Vitruvian has the coven,” Sinai said. “Are we fucked?”
Tommy stood and reached for the ruby emblem, toying its sharpened edges around in her grasp. “I need to go somewhere.”
“You need a shower,” Sinai ordered. It was as close as she was going to get to maternal.
“Tell Dmitri to turn off all of the lights.”