"How about I call Promise to come let us in? It's an audacious plan, I realize, but don't dismiss it out of hand," Niko said dryly. He had his cell phone in his hand when Promise and another woman opened the door. The woman, the curator, was a foot taller than Promise … at the very least. She was also taller than Niko and me. Her hair was the color of bronze and pulled back into a tight French braid. Her eyes were a fierce ice blue, her breasts an entity unto themselves, and I could practically see the horned helmet and breastplate she should be wearing instead of a gray suit.
"Valkyrie?" I murmured to Nik.
"Missing her crow feathers," he answered in the same low tone, "but yes. Very good. You are learning, no matter how reluctantly."
Along with Niko, I took a few steps closer and looked up at her. I was going to offer my hand to shake, but decided I needed it for fighting and other…ah…nocturnal activities and hers looked as if it were capable of ripping off my arm to use as a back scratcher. Niko was braver and held his hand out and said gravely, "A friend of Promise is a friend of ours."
The large hand shook Niko's firmly. "Sangrida Odinsdóttir."
"Niko Leandros. My brother, Cal." To this day, he refused to call me Caliban. The meaning behind the name given to me by our ever-adoring mother had never escaped me. Even before I could read See Spot Run, much less Shakespeare, she'd been all too eager to tell me a monster deserved a monster name.
Mom did find ways to get her kicks. I was slowly getting used to the others, who knew the meaning of my name but not the intent, using it … just as I was still getting used to there being others. For years it had only been Niko and me on the run. Now there were friends and lovers and goddamn if that didn't still warp my reality on occasion.
Promise was one of those. Niko and her—hell, they'd been made for each other, the few hundred years' age difference aside. Despite the deep chocolate and pale blond stripes of hair pulled back into an Amazonian braid that reached the small of her back and eyes the color of spring violets, she was a quiet beauty. The exotic coloring didn't make her flashy, and it didn't touch her inner stillness, her innate tranquility. Of course under that tranquility she could be deadly. She and my brother were two of a kind that way. Now she curved her lips gently in a smile meant only for him. "Thank you for coming, Niko. Cal. I realize it's already been a long night for you both." She laid her fingers on Niko's arm for a fleeting moment, and then stepped back into the museum.
Sangrida moved with her as we followed. The inside of the museum was pretty much as I remembered it from the last time Niko had dragged me there for arts and crafts, art education, history stuff. Whatever. I liked the Natural History Museum better, myself. Dinosaurs. Who doesn't love dinosaurs? I remembered seeing an exhibit with a re-creation of a T. Rex towering tall. Robin had once said the Auphe used to hunt them in packs…not so much for the meat as for the fun.
Yeah…the fun.
"So, Promise, what's up?" I asked, my voice echoing against the marble.
Sangrida answered instead. "There has been an incident with one of the exhibits."
"It couldn't have been stolen," Niko commented. "Promise would know that is not our area of expertise."
"No, it was not stolen." She walked with long, muscular strides. "Not exactly." There was a faint glottal flavor to her words, but barely noticeable. "Best for you to see."
We entered the Arms and Armor section and walked past an exhibit of suits of plate armor. One of the galleries was labeled with a red and black exhibition sign that read famous serial killers throughout HISTORY AND LEGEND.
"Entertaining," Niko said wryly. "It puts impressionism to shame."
Sangrida sighed in annoyance. "It's a traveling exhibit of horrors. The board of directors, curse them, are responsible. Not you of course, Promise," she added gruffly. "Just the vultures and hyenas on the board. They are of the opinion that sensationalism keeps attendance high. The first exhibit to your right will be, of course, Jack the Ripper."
Promise gave a hint of a satisfied smile at the mention of the name, and I thought how Jack had disappeared, never to be heard from again. Not many serial killers stop, unless they're caught or someone does the stopping for them. In a time when vampires still relied on blood, it could be that Promise had taken from those who in turn took from others. As I stopped to take a look through the glass at old letters, photos, and period blades that could've been similar to the ones used, Promise took my arm and gently urged me on. "He liked attention then. Let us deny it to him now." Considering what I'd seen of the photos, I wasn't sorry to move on. I'd seen similar in living color just hours ago.
A few exhibits down, Sangrida stopped. The glass of this display case was blackened…scorched by what looked like a small explosion. Glass shards were lying everywhere.
"The case burst from within," Niko pointed out, obviously intrigued. "There is no glass within the exhibit itself, only on the floor."
Also on the floor was a stone box, the lid broken into pieces and scattered far and wide. I toed a piece with my black sneaker. Historical or not, I damn sure couldn't do any more harm to it. "What was in that?"
"Ashes. Fragments of bone." Sangrida shook her head, high forehead knit with worry. "Sawney."
"Sawney?" I repeated curiously, only to be instantly overridden by Niko.
"Sawney Beane? The Scottish mass murderer?" He sat on his heels to get a better look at the box. "The cannibal? I knew the women and the children of the clan were supposedly burned, but the men were executed differently."
"No one is quite sure what really happened. No one who wasn't there." I made a mental note to ask Goodfellow. If he wasn't there, he probably knew someone who was. Sangrida went on, "Of course, mankind doesn't know if Sawney was fact or fiction, but we know better. And although he ate close to a thousand people, he wasn't strictly a cannibal, as he wasn't human." She looked at the shattered box and corrected himself. "Isn't human."
Five words fought to be first out of my mouth. A thousand people and isn't human. I went with the one most pertinent to the immediate situation.
"Isn't?" I repeated. "He came back from ashes and bone? No goddamn way."
Sangrida didn't blink at that language. I guess if you hang around warriors for a few centuries, you get used to it. I had no doubt she could curse me under the table…probably while bench-pressing me with one hand and swilling ale with the other. "I'm not sure. I've never heard of such a thing in regards to him, but it is a chance I don't wish to take."
The explosion from within, the missing remains— I could see her point. "Was there anything else in the exhibit?"
She frowned. "His scythe. Or what was claimed to be. It was a handheld one, his weapon of choice. It is missing as well."
And that was the definition of didn't bode fucking well, now, wasn't it?
3
There was no way to search the entire museum including the rooms below where the unused collections were stored, not in the two hours before the staff would start arriving. We searched the first floor, found a metal exit door that was crumpled and askew and that said it all. At least the Cliff's Notes version. Either someone had taken Sawney's bits and pieces out of there or Sawney had taken himself.
With that good news under our belts, we left so Sangrida would trigger the alarm that would bring the police. The security, her special security, had turned off the alarm system the instant it went off, benefiting from the five-minute lag built into the system that most of the board of directors definitely didn't know about. There were a lot of old things in the place and not all of them were known to be completely "inactive," so to speak. There was checking to be done before the authorities showed up. With that now accomplished, Sangrida was ready to play the distressed curator. Well, with Sangrida's backbone, the mildly concerned curator.