“My housekeeper. She refused to leave Cambridge, unfortunately. I miss Janie, too, but not for her coffee. She made terrible coffee. Brilliant woman, but her coffee was even worse than mine, and that’s saying something. The kitchen’s this way.”
The kitchen was narrow and made narrower by more packing boxes. Most of these had at least been opened. “How long did you say you’d been here?”
“Priorities, dear boy, priorities. I had to work on the library first. Ah, here’s the coffee.” Fagin beamed and held out a foil package from Starbucks. “There’s a pan on the stove that I used to boil previous attempts.”
So there was. Surprisingly, it looked clean. Cullen handed it to Fagin. “Fill it halfway with water. Filters?”
“With the coffeepot, I imagine, wherever that may be.”
Paper towels would do, and Cullen saw a roll of those. “I need a strainer or a funnel and something to decant the brew into. Did you know there’s an earth elemental lurking beneath your porch?”
“A very small one, yes. It took some negotiating, which Sherry was kind enough to handle for me, but it agreed to keep an eye on the place in exchange for the traditional offerings. Will this do?”
Cullen accepted the large mesh strainer Fagin held out and tore off a couple paper towels. “Get the water boiling.”
“That much I know how to do. Why are you here?”
“That damn dagger. The one someone left in Senator Bixton.” Cullen dumped grounds into the paper-lined strainer. “Do you have another pot? A big one?”
“Hmm, yes, I think . . . here.” After clattering around in one of the boxes, he tried to hand the pot to Cullen.
“Put it in the sink. This goes on top.” Cullen followed and balanced the strainer over the pot. “Part of the spell on the dagger is Vodun. Part of it is something that . . . well, it sounds crazy, so I need to check. I went to see a Vodun priestess I know, but she wasn’t helpful.” Celeste had been royally pissed, in fact, when she learned he’d meant those marriage vows he took a few months ago. The offer of cash hadn’t eased her troubled spirit. “You told me you had a journal by Papa Araignée.”
“Oh, yes. It’s not long, but it is quite remarkable. So few Vodun priests write things down, and Araignée was . . . hmm. Twisted, but very bright. Do you read French? Are you sure that’s enough coffee?”
“Yes and yes. Do you have anything by Knoblauch or Czypsser?”
“Just that treatise Armand wrote on Knoblauch, which, as I’m sure you know, is mostly hogwash. However, I’ve got a copy of Czypsser’s Ars Magicka that was supposedly made from the original.”
A thrill went through Cullen. “The entire thing?”
“Alas, only fifty-two of what is reputed to have been eighty pages, and some of them are damaged.”
Fifty-two pages. Fifty-two pages of one of the most sought-after grimoires in the world. Czypsser hadn’t been an adept, but he’d studied under one as a youth. Five years ago, Cullen had paid five thousand dollars for a blurred copy of two pages from Czypsser’s Ars Magicka.
And Fagin was going to let him see fifty-two pages? Cullen twitched all over just thinking about it. “Do those pages include his list of elven runes?”
“Oh, yes. Most of them are legible, and some have brief definitions or notes on congruencies. Do you read medieval German?”
“No, but you do.”
“I’m fairly fluent. That doesn’t look like enough coffee. I’ve been using at least twice as much.”
“And drinking it?”
“I take your point.”
IT wasn’t the best coffee Cullen had ever had, but it wasn’t bad. He sipped from the mug Fagin had washed while they were waiting for the coffee to drip through its makeshift filter and nodded acceptance of Fagin’s grateful praise. Once the man paused Cullen said, “About that journal and the Czypsser manuscript . . .”
“Oh, yes. The library’s right through here.” Fagin headed for a door on the far end of the kitchen.
Cullen followed . . . and stepped into a room that bore no resemblance to the rest of the place.
Large, airy, and orderly, it ran the length of the house. The floor was wood. An area rug marked a reading zone at the far end, where two comfortable armchairs and a square table invited you to sit and browse in front of a bow window. Cable lighting zigzagged over the entire ceiling, but it wasn’t needed now. In addition to the bow window, two tall windows interrupted the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along the west wall.
In the center of the room rested a huge, battered desk flanked by a pair of low bookcases. It held the usual sort of detritus, both electronic and traditionaclass="underline" computer, printer, calendar, a small scattering of papers. And at this end, a long library table held court. A single, half-empty packing box sat on it.
There was even a card catalogue. An honest-to-God, old-fashioned wooden card catalog claimed pride of place in a section of wall clearly reserved for it. “Priorities,” Cullen murmured. “Yes. You’re a man after my own heart, Fagin.”
Fagin beamed proudly at his domain. “I had the wall removed and the shelves added. It started out as a bedroom and dining room, you see. This suits me better.” He lumbered into motion. “I don’t have my entire collection in here, but I think I unpacked Papa Araignée’s journal. It should be in the Vodun section . . . ah, yes. Here it is.” He held out a tattered, leather-bound journal. “You can take it with you, if you like.”
Cullen’s eyebrows lifted. That was an unusual degree of trust—but then, Fagin wasn’t a practitioner himself. He tucked the slim journal carefully inside his jacket. “Thank you. And the Ars Magicka?”
“You’re drooling.”
“Hardly at all,” Cullen said repressively. “I have tremendous self-control.”
Fagin chuckled. “The original is in my safety-deposit box back in Cambridge. I recently acquired a safety-deposit box here, but I haven’t made the trip to Cambridge to retrieve the items from my Cambridge box. But perhaps my translation will work better for you anyway, since you have some difficulty with medieval German.”
“I’ve never seen anyone actually twinkle before, but damned if you aren’t doing it. An English translation, I take it?”
“Of course.” Fagin headed for his desk. “It’s a work in progress, mind, not finished, but I have a decent rough draft you can see. I’ll burn you a disc so—”
The front window shattered.
Without blinking or thinking or any of the things there was no time for, Cullen flexed into a deep crouch. A shiny glass shower cascaded into the room. He sprang. A second projectile followed the first as he slammed into Fagin, grabbing him and twisting so momentum would spin them sideways as they fell—the desk, the desk, it will shield us—
The ground reached up and smacked them as the air ignited in a wall of stink, heat, and flame.
TWENTY
THE woman’s gray hair frizzed around her face in an untidy halo. Her eyes were small and suspicious, her skin as scuffed and worn as an old suitcase. She smelled of baby powder, sweat, and the chicken concoction she shoveled into a small, pursed mouth with all the dainty greed of a cat enjoying a dish of tuna. Her hands were small and immaculately clean, even under the nails he suspected she trimmed with her teeth. They looked chapped.
She did not smell of alcohol, unlike the man on Rule’s right. He gave off fumes that should have robbed everyone in a nine-yard radius of their appetites. “But you do know Birdie, I think,” Rule said. He didn’t say the woman’s name because he didn’t know it. She wouldn’t give it to him.