King of the Dead (Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) (25 page)

Demigods?

“What the hell is a Welsh … um, demigod, doing in New Orleans?” I asked, amazed I could even get the question, crazy as it was, out of my mouth.

“Stealing souls, obviously. But for what purpose, I don’t know.”

Neither did Denise.

At that point Dmitri joined us, having finally returned from the Sidhe enclave. He handed something to Gallagher, though I couldn’t see what it was, and then sat down at the table with us. He listened closely as we brought him up to speed.

As usual, Dmitri focused on the practical aspects and didn’t care too much about the reasons behind it all. “It doesn’t matter why he’s doing it,” he said. “I couldn’t care less, in fact. All that matters is that we put an end to it.”

In one sense he was right: stopping the Angeu was what was important, when you got right down to it. But understanding the how and why behind it all could very well provide us with the means to do that very thing. Without it, we were just shooting in the dark. We were having a hard enough time dealing with the Sorrows, never mind an entity that could control dozens of them at once.

And if it was really the personification of Death …

“How do you kill Death, for heaven’s sake?” I wanted to know.

“You don’t,” said Gallagher, “or rather, you can’t. Not really. But you
can
send him back where he belongs. According to legend, the Angeu isn’t native to this plane but resides in Annwyfn, the Welsh underworld, in a great fortress of glass known as Caer Wydyr. He comes here only to collect the souls of the dead and must return when he has done so.”

I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Apparently, no one bothered to tell him that.”

“Thankfully, there is a way to force him back.”

A moment later the sound of thick, heavy pages turning filled the air. “I asked Dmitri to stop by the council chambers on his way over and pick this up for me. I know they’re in here somewhere…,” Gallagher said, the second half more to himself than us. Eventually, he found whatever it was.

“Ah. Here we go. The Knives of Findias.”

“The who of what?”

I couldn’t see it, but I knew I was getting one of those looks, the ones that say, “Don’t be an idiot, Hunt.”

“The Knives of Findias, crafted by the druid Uicias in the city of the same name deep in the heart of Tir na nOg.”

Uh huh. So much clearer now, thanks.

Denise came to my rescue. “How will the knives help us against the Angeu?”

“Well, alone they’re no different than any other pair of ceremonial daggers: a bit of steel with a point and a sharp edge. But when they are used together, they have the power to return a soul to its rightful place.

“Which for the Angeu…”

“… is back in Caer Wydyr,” Denise finished for him.

I have to say that I wasn’t all that thrilled with the plan.

“So let me get this straight,” I said to them. “You’re suggesting that we hunt down a pair of knives that may or may not even exist, fight our way through that horde of Sorrows we saw at the boat, and get close enough to the King of the Dead to stab him with two ceremonial daggers without getting blasted to oblivion in the process? That’s your plan?”

Gallagher grunted. “Do you have a better one?”

Well, yeah, I did. Getting the hell out of town sounded like a great plan to me, but I knew it wasn’t going to go over very well with the rest of them, so I just kept my mouth shut, much as it galled me to do so.

Ever the practical one, Dmitri asked, “Where are they? The knives, that is?”

To my surprise, Gallagher had an answer for him.

“Chicago,” he said.

“For the last months they’ve been on display at the Field Museum, actually.”

40

CLEARWATER

They needed the soul knives if they were going to have any chance of defeating the Angeu, which meant someone had to go to Chicago and get them. With Jeremiah wanted by the FBI and Simon insisting that he continue to coordinate the wardens’ activities, Denise became the logical choice. Dmitri volunteered to go with her, confident that Denise could bail him out with a little judicious use of her Art if his fake ID didn’t stand up to airport security.

Which left only the question of how they were to obtain the knives once they arrived.

“Is there anyone we know who can pull some strings with the curator?” Denise asked. “We wouldn’t need them for long, maybe a week at most.”

The three men stared at her without saying anything.

Thinking they were upset with the time frame, she said, “Okay, let’s say two weeks to be safe, then.”

Simon cleared his throat, a habit he’d had from the old days when he wanted to say something uncomfortable to her. She picked up on it right away.

“What?” she asked, starting to get a bit irritated.
Did they think it was going to take them three weeks?

But that wasn’t it at all.

“They aren’t going to loan us the knives, Denise,” he said.

She frowned. “Well then how do you expect … Oh. I see.”

And she did.

They expected her to steal the knives right out of the museum!

“No way,” she said. “Not a chance!”

This time it was Hunt who answered her. “There isn’t any other way, Denise. They certainly aren’t going to give us the knives.”

She didn’t like it. Didn’t like it at all. She told the others as much.

“I understand your reticence,” Simon said, “and if there was any other way to do this, I wouldn’t ask. But with the Council dead we don’t have the luxury of taking that route, and doing so would take too long anyway.”

In the end, they managed to persuade her, but only by agreeing that the knives would be returned to their rightful place and an anonymous donation made to the museum to cover the cost of repairing any damage done.

The last flight to Chicago had already left for the evening, so they reserved their tickets online, checked in through the automated system, and then caught a decent night’s sleep.

First thing the next morning, they headed for the airport.

Denise was a little apprehensive as they approached the security checkpoint, but things went without a hitch and before she knew it, she and Dmitri were sitting in the gate area, waiting for their flight.

*   *   *

The purchase of two tickets using a credit card issued to Denise Clearwater hadn’t gone unnoticed by the FBI watchdogs, who notified Robertson, who in turn sent Doherty out to the airport with orders to secure a seat on the same flight and follow them to their destination.

Doherty did as he was told. When the two targets boarded flight 937, bound for Chicago, the special agent was seated three rows behind them on the opposite side of the aircraft.

Wherever they were going after arriving in the Windy City, he intended to be there too.

*   *   *

Because they were planning on staying only one night, they had a single carry-on bag each and didn’t have to wait for luggage after deplaning. They caught a taxi in front of the terminal and had it drop them off at their hotel, which was only a few blocks from their true destination, the Field Museum.

They checked in with the front desk and were given adjoining rooms. They ordered lunch from Denise’s room and while they ate they used a tourist map that had been kindly provided by the concierge to go over their plan step-by-step.

The museum had been built back in 1893 to house the biological and anthropological collections from the World’s Columbian Exposition of the same year. It was renamed the Field Museum of Natural History about ten years later in honor of its first major benefactor, Marshall Field, and today occupied a stretch of parkland that also housed the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium, making it one of the most visited locations in the city of Chicago.

That meant there would be a lot of people roaming around inside the place, which made things a little bit riskier for them than Denise would have preferred. Still, she couldn’t come up with a better idea to accomplish what they needed to accomplish.

Dmitri was a quick study and didn’t need more than a short review of what they’d discussed the night before, which reassured her that he’d done this kind of thing before. Rather than making her uncomfortable, the knowledge that an experienced hand was there only helped to steady her nerves. After all, she mused, she usually didn’t spend her days robbing a national museum.

Getting in was going to be easy. They’d simply buy two tickets at the front door and waltz on in. But getting out again, with the soul knives in hand? That was going to be the hard part.

Simon had told them that the knives were part of the exhibition of European treasures currently housed in the special exhibition gallery on the second floor. Unfortunately, the map they were looking at made it clear that there were actually four such galleries on that floor—one at either end of the main hall, as well as one each to the left and right of the two-story central gallery that split the building in half. It looked like they were going to have to figure out which was which and then finalize the details of their escape once inside. It was a detour, yes, but only a minor one and she didn’t think it would cause them too much trouble.

At least, she hoped it wouldn’t.

With lunch over, and the plan firmly in mind, the two of them set out to do what they had come to do.

They bought tickets like the hundreds of other tourists visiting the museum that day and walked in through the front door. The gallery they wanted turned out to be the first one they entered on the second floor. The large rectangular space was filled with artifacts from several different early European cultures, from the Vikings to the Welsh. The knives were laid out on a bed of black velvet in a glass case about halfway through the exhibit and Denise had no trouble locating them thanks to the shimmer of arcane energy they gave off.

They were wicked looking things: the blades as dark as midnight, their handles wrapped in bits of worn leather. They weren’t very long, the blades probably six or seven inches at most.

Now all they had to do was get them out of the case and then out of the museum.

In order to do that, they had to wait until the museum shut down for the day. And since they needed to still be inside the building when that happened, to avoid having to break in as well as break out, they set out to find a place to hide during the changeover.

A utility closet at the far end of the gallery turned out to be just what they needed. Once they knew where it was, they wandered around the rest of the museum, basically wasting time until an announcement over the intercom let the guests know that the museum would be closing in fifteen minutes.

Hearing it, they made their way back to the second floor, waited until they were certain no one was looking in their direction, and then slipped inside the closet. In order to keep the cleaning crew from walking in on them, Denise cast an obfuscation spell on the door, effectively masking it from the crew’s memory and sight. If the cleaning crew needed supplies, they’d wander down to the closet on the first floor instead, without giving the closet on the second floor even a passing thought. The spell would wear off in a few hours, but that was long enough for their purposes. The cleaning crew should be long gone by then. Denise and Dmitri settled in to wait.

*   *   *

Doherty had been reporting back to Robertson on an hourly basis. This time, when he got his superior on the phone, he thought he knew what was going on.

“They’re going to rob the museum,” he said.

Robertson, as expected, was incredulous. “You can’t be serious,” he replied.

But Doherty was. He explained how Clearwater and Alexandrov had been casing the place for the last hour and how they’d just done what they could to secret themselves in a utility closet. What else could they be doing?

“I don’t know,” Robertson said and Doherty could hear the concern in the other man’s voice. It was the unusual and the unexpected that got him every time.

“Stay with them,” his boss told him. “If they commit a crime, stop them, but otherwise, just continue to tail them for now.”

“Roger that,” Doherty replied and settled in to wait and see what Clearwater and Alexandrov would do.

*   *   *

The moment they left their hiding place behind, Denise used her Art to circumvent the alarm system, keeping the motion sensors from registering their presence as they moved across the gallery floor.

When they reached the exhibit, Dmitri waited until Denise had sent a surge of electricity through the sensors protecting the glass, burning them from the inside out, and then lifted one of his heavily booted feet and sent it smashing through the front of the glass case.

Denise scooped up the knives and turned to leave.

A man’s shout rang out across the gallery.

“FBI! No one move!”

Where in Gaia’s name did he come from?
Denise wondered.

The newcomer was in his midthirties with dark hair and a nervous expression on his face. He was dressed casually, in jeans and light jacket, but the badge on a lanyard around his neck and the pistol he was pointing at them made it hard to take him for anything but an officer of the law.

“Hands up where I can see them!”

Denise glanced at Dmitri, expecting him to make a move, but he simply shrugged and put his hands up.

Knowing he must have a good reason, Denise did the same.

The FBI agent crossed the gallery and stopped several feet away from them. The gun in his hand pointed first at Dmitri, then at her, and then back again at Dmitri, as if he couldn’t decide who was a bigger threat.

“Put the knives down, slowly, and then kick them over here,” the agent told her.

Any time now, Dmitri
, she thought.

Wanting to appear cooperative, she lowered herself into a squat and put the knives on the floor, one next to each foot. She stood back up again, slowly, just like she’d been told, and then used her right foot to slide the first one in his direction.

The agent kept his eyes on her and didn’t even look at the knife.