BLOODSTONE #2
“I'm a survivor. There's a difference, and one of us is gonna need to know it eventually.”
I let it go, because pushing him was going to get me nowhere good, and because at the far end of the aisle I had spotted a stall I didn't recognize, and it pulled my attention before I had decided to let it.
I drifted toward it, and Mateo drifted with me.
The dealer was a thin man in his sixties with hands that hadn't stopped moving since I'd walked into his line of sight.
He was rearranging cases that were locked, which was already unusual for a show like this one, where most dealers wanted people handling the merchandise.
These cases held pieces that explained the locks: old blades, most too old to be legal without paperwork I didn't see displayed; religious tokens with the brass blackened from handling; a handful of rings, heavy in the way old silver got when it had been in the ground a while.
And on a square of dark velvet, under its own light, in its own case, a necklace.
I stopped walking.
“Boss?”
“Hold on.”
The pendant was a bloodstone, dark green and nearly black under the light, with red flecks scattered through the surface, dense in some places and thin in others.
The setting was hand hammered metal I couldn't name on sight, and the chain was an old loop in loop weave nobody had the patience for anymore. None of that was what stopped me.
In the center of the pendant, set into the stone itself, was a chamber the size of a fingernail, with glass on one side, and behind the glass sat a dark liquid I took for old blood, or a very convincing imitation of it.
“How old?” I said.
The dealer had been watching me from the corner of his eye. He straightened and gave me a thin smile that didn't reach the rest of his face. “I've got a paper from a man at the Met, off the record. He says at least a thousand years. Maybe older.”
“From where?”
“From an old family.” He watched me the way I was watching him. “I'll be honest with you, friend. I've had it three weeks, and I want it gone.”
“Why?”
“Because my wife won't sleep in the same house with it.”
He unlocked the case, set the necklace on the velvet in front of me, and stepped back, touching it no more than he had to.
Mateo went very still at my shoulder, and the noise of the hall pulled away from my ears in a way that had nothing to do with the acoustics. I touched the bloodstone.
Moonlight, and a cold that belonged to a field where bodies were settling into the ground.
A hand closing around mine, slick, gripping so tight it was almost angry.
A mouth at a throat. A voice, low and broken open, saying words in a language I did not speak and understood anyway.
Stay. Please. Don't. A name that was not Nico.
And grief, grief that was not mine and that I had no right to, moving through my chest and down through my fingertips, back into the stone.
Whatever lived in the stone recognized me back.
I let go. My hands fell to my sides, and they were shaking. The drill hall was loud again, and Mateo's hand was on my elbow, his face close to mine, and his eyes were not quite the color I remembered them being.
“Boss?”
“I'm fine. Low blood sugar. I skipped breakfast.”
“You had a bagel.”
“I had half a bagel.”
“Nico.”
It was the first time he had used my name all morning. I straightened, rolled my shoulders, and made my hands stop.
“I'm fine,” I said. “I'm buying it.”
The dealer named a number, and I was already working out in the back of my head which pieces in the shop I could resell to absorb the hit, and which I absolutely was not going to touch.
The necklace was not going back out a door once I had it.
I paid in cash. He boxed it in dark fabric, pressed the lid down with both hands, firm and final, and handed it across.
“Be careful with it at night,” he said. “I mean it, friend.”
“I will.”
I put the box in my bag.
Mateo didn't speak for the next aisle and a half.
I bought the brass hardware I had come for, a small Federal mirror with original glass, and a set of estate napkins that Carmen pretended not to notice, and I moved through the rest of it barely present, aware of the box in my bag the entire time.
By the time we walked out into the cold, the sun was already going.
The shop was wrong before I got the key in the door.
The lights were on their timer and the window display looked the way I'd left it, but the radiator was silent, and the cushion in the front window where Drake slept was empty, which I'd been bracing for, because Mateo had told me that morning the cat had been collected and taken to the manor.
I had not been bracing for the rest of it.
“Evie?”
Nothing.
“Ev?”
I set my bag on the counter. The note was on the receipt roll, torn off and folded once.
Family thing, had to go, sorry, will explain, don't burn the place down. E.
I looked at it for a long time, then checked my phone.
Nothing from her. I told myself she'd been in a hurry, because people got into hurries, and her mother had been escalating for months.
There were a hundred ordinary explanations and one that was not, and I was not naming the one that was not, yet.
Mateo had come in behind me and locked the door, which I hadn't asked him to do, and he was standing by the window watching the street in the reflection.
He went to the back door and felt the lock without turning it, then checked the alley window latch, then came back and stood at my shoulder, and his face was not the face he'd been wearing all morning. A different gear entirely.
“Help me unload,” I said.
He carried boxes without being told which were fragile, set things down softly, and asked me twice where I wanted a piece. The second time he caught himself putting the Federal mirror down on the wrong end of the bench.
“Sorry. Glass side. Got it.”
“You don't have to do this.”
“I know.”
“This is the boring part.”
He shrugged, sleeves rolled, a smear of dust on his forearm. “There are worse ways to spend an afternoon than helping pretty antiques survive capitalism.”
I laughed.
“He really took my cat.”
“He really did.”
“Without asking.”
“He had somebody ask the cat.”
“Mateo.”
“Drake said yes, boss. Drake's a businessman. He went where the heated floors were.”
“You're a liar.”
For about ninety seconds, the shop felt all right. Then I opened the box.
I'd told myself I was going to leave it sealed until I got home, then sealed until I had a chance to research the metal, then sealed forever, possibly. But I was at the bench and my hand was on the lid, and the lid lifted before the rest of me caught up to the decision.
The bloodstone sat on its dark fabric, and the red liquid in the chamber caught the work light, and I couldn't look away from it.
The color shifted as I turned the box, deep and wet, alive in a way a thousand-year-old object had no business being.
My fingers itched to pick it up. My ribs ached on the left side.
I shut the box hard enough that the hinge complained, and I stood there with my hand flat on the lid and breathed.
Mateo's phone rang. He answered without taking his eyes off me, and the voice on the other end was too quiet for me to hear, but I didn't need to hear it, because I watched the answer hit his face instead.
He listened. “Yeah. How long ago? On our way.” He hung up and looked at the front windows, then the back door, then at me. “Grab your coat.”
My hand went to the box. “Why?”
“Because the boss wants us at the Crimson Room. Now.”
I did not remember deciding to put the box in my bag.
I remembered my hand closing around it, and the weight of it through the canvas as I shouldered the strap, and the empty cushion in the window as Mateo turned the lock behind us.
And I remembered thinking, with a clarity I had not earned, that the stone in my bag was not done with me.
It had only remembered my name.