Chapter Thirty-Eight
The mausoleum was there, still looking the same as always. I had no key, but it was an old lock, which had never been designed to keep professional burglars away. I took out my lockpicking kit and unrolled it, selecting a thick, curvy metal rod and a large tension wrench. With this lock, the problem would be mostly the rust, and not the actual lock. I knelt in front of it and inserted the tension wrench, twisting it, then started feeling for the pins with the rod.
“We used to come here whenever it rained and we couldn’t go to a shelter,” I said, nudging the first pin. “After the first night, we always tried to come with some sticks and newspapers.”
“Why?” Kane crouched next to me, watching my fingers as I picked the lock.
“For a fire. It was good at keeping the rain out, but it could get hella cold in there. I guess there’s no real insulation in the floor. The dead don’t mind the cold.”
“Didn’t you find it… creepy?”
“It might sound weird, but Isabel said her ancestors didn’t mind. And it’s not like she meant that they didn’t mind because they were dead. She literally meant she knew they didn’t mind. I had some weird dreams in there once or twice. Voices whispering in my ear, or the sensation of something touching my cheek. But maybe it was just my imagination. I was only fourteen.”
“Why do you think she hid the crystal here?”
“Even after we grew up, Isabel kept coming here. She would talk to her ancestors, ask for advice, tell them about her life… that sort of thing.”
“I can’t imagine it was much of a dialog.”
“Who knows, with Isabel. But I don’t think that was the point. She felt like she belonged here. We all tried fighting our loneliness in our own way, I guess. Sinead and I tried to find relationships that would fill the hole. And Isabel had her ancestors.”
“Did any of you find a relationship that satisfied your loneliness?”
I hesitated. “No. Mostly random flings. Sinead had a good thing for a while, with a really smart guy. And I…” I thought of a young man with a rakish smile, one of his front teeth slightly broken. And his nose and chin identical to Tammi’s. “Well, I had one very intense relationship. And it ended with me having a daughter.”
He said nothing.
I felt the first pin catch, and began playing with the second. It tended to stick because of the rust, and I had to keep poking it to set it loose. It was exhausting work.
“I didn’t know. That I was pregnant, I mean. I was working for Breadknife at the time, and he began pushing me harder and harder. I was breaking into homes almost every night. It was a never-ending cycle—scout the place in the morning, break into it at night. I was constantly on edge, afraid I was about to be caught. And some of the homes Breadknife chose… it seemed almost cruel. A man who’d recently lost his wife. A single mother with several kids. An old woman living alone. But I couldn’t refuse the jobs. You don’t say no to Breadknife.”
The tension pin nearly slipped in my grip, and I muttered a curse, forcing myself to work more carefully, ignoring the pain in my tired muscles.
“And then I got caught. I broke into a couple’s house while they were out on a date, but they came back home early. Saw movement in their house through the window and called the police. The lookout hadn’t noticed them; I guess he wasn’t paying attention. And when we suddenly heard the police sirens… he drove off. Leaving me behind.”
The memory floated back unbidden. The shocking moment of disappointment and betrayal. I’d thought he was so perfect. Quick to laugh, passionate, clever. I’d fallen in love with him when we were working together on a job, the excitement and adrenaline fueling our lust. That’s why you should never listen to your heart when pulling a job. Never.
“I was arrested, and got one year in prison. It probably would have been more, but it was a first offense—or so the judge thought. And I was an orphan, failed by the foster system. Inside, I found out I was nine weeks pregnant.”
The second pin caught, and I leaned back, keeping the tension on the lock while flexing my shoulders. Then I leaned back in, started working the third pin.
“What did you do?”
“I decided to keep the baby. Part of it was because I wanted a child. I had these fantasies about being a mother. And part of it…” I paused. “It’s really shitty. Part of it was that I thought it was a way out. For some reason, I assumed Breadknife wouldn’t keep me around if I was a mother. I tried to use my daughter as a one-way ticket out of my life. I even hoped they’d release me early. But they didn’t. And once she was born, I realized how selfish I’d been—using this child for leverage. Risking her exposure to people like Breadknife and his goons. I didn’t want my baby to grow up in a prison. And her father… I didn’t want him to know about her. So I gave her up for adoption. It was stupid. She wouldn’t have remembered the short time in the prison’s nursery ward anyway. I could have kept her. I just had a few months left. We would have been together now.”
“It’s not stupid,” Kane said quietly.
“Anyway, once I was out, I asked Isabel to find her for me. I still had the cloth they’d wrapped her in when she was born. Isabel said it was immersed with her essence, or whatever. She found her in less than an hour. I rented a place nearby, started working on my alchemy.”
“How did you get into alchemy?”
“My mother was an alchemist.”
The third pin caught, and the tension wrench turned, the lock clicking. I pulled the metal grate open, relieved that my success had interrupted our chat. If it hadn’t, he would have asked more about my mother and my knowledge of alchemy. And I wouldn’t have answered anything about that. He couldn’t know about the book. That was the one secret I had to keep.
“Hang on, I have a flashlight app,” Kane muttered, rummaging in his pocket for his phone.
“No need,” I said. I lifted my right hand and focused on it. Flames burst from my palm, licking my fingers, illuminating the mausoleum’s walls with their flickering orange light.
I stepped into the cold room, the memories flooding me. A small black smudge marred the floor where we used to light our campfires. We always made sure to clean the ashes the following day, but the black mark remained. The walls were lined with the family’s tombs, their names engraved in the ancient stone. An alcove across the room contained a line of urns. Isabel told me that when the space in the mausoleum began to run out, the family had begun cremating their dead. My eyes immediately went to the right-hand wall, and I knelt by the bottom tomb, looking at the engraved letters illuminated by the orange firelight, even though I knew what they said by heart.
Eleanor King, 1864-1886.
“This was my spot,” I said. “Where I’d sleep. I used to watch this engraving, imagining that Eleanor was lying on her side facing me. She was Isabel’s great-great-aunt. She died in childbirth.”
“Do we need to start opening these tombs to find the crystal?” Kane asked. He sounded uncomfortable, almost like the concept of a girl regularly sleeping next to an entombed skeleton bothered him.
“No.” I stood up. “We had a cache. The right urn over there is empty. We used to hide some stuff we needed there.”
Kane picked up the urn I pointed at. He removed the lid, and carefully upturned it on the floor, shaking it to empty the contents.
An assortment of items fell out. Two ten-year-old cigarette packs, a lighter, a small knife, a pack of cards. And in the midst of it all lay the crystal. Now, in the dark cemetery, there was no mistaking the light that pulsed in it. I let the flames on my hand dissipate, and the mausoleum was cast into a gloom, illuminated only by that strange, warm, pulsing light.
I picked up the crystal by the chain and looked at it closely. What did Breadknife want with it? Did he really intend to unleash the horrors we had seen in Isabel’s cards? In any case, it was obvious we couldn’t give it to him.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s time for you to create the fake crystal. And make it look real.”