Kindling the Moon (Arcadia Bell #1)(82)

“I thought you said Spooner didn’t work.”

“He doesn’t. He’s a collector. This is where he cons people out of money.” Lon battered the metal door with his fist, cigarette dangling between his lips. He leaned forward, ear to the door, and listened for a response inside. Seconds ticked by, ten stretching to twenty … a minute.

“I hear movement,” Lon reported before banging on the door again and yelling, “Delivery!”

I heard it too, then a series of approaching steps. Locks began clicking open from the other side of the door. When the door swung inside, Spooner stood a few feet away in the same garish suit he’d worn the night before. With shocks of orange hair shooting out at all angles from his head and bloodshot eyes, he looked even worse than we did.

He was also very, very surprised to see us.

Lightning fast, he shoved at the door to shut it, but Lon wedged his foot against the kickplate before it closed. He stuck his Remington inside the humble opening and racked it once. Slowly, the door opened again. Spooner stood in the doorway, hands apathetically raised in submission.

“Hello again,” I said brightly.

“Let’s talk,” Lon added, prodding Spooner’s chest with the gun’s barrel.

We dogged Spooner down a sterile hallway until he halted in front of a frosted glass door. He opened it and entered.

All four walls of the intimate room were lined with locked glass display cabinets. In the center, a low, square metal table was surrounded by four green armchairs and a swing-arm lamp.

Lon was wrong; this wasn’t the room of a collector. It wasn’t carefully arranged and tended like his library, and the items weren’t cherished or admired. They were displayed with the care of a pawnshop owner. Spooner was a fence, not a lover of rare mysteries.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t a jackpot in here. A multicolored supernatural fog swirled around the haphazard arrangements. Pink, green, yellow, blue—nearly every item in the cabinets was Æthyric in origin. Hundreds of them.

I looked closer. Horns, bones, teeth, and talons cluttered one crowded shelf. They gave off the strongest visual marker, but they weren’t the only occult treasures. He also had a staggering selection of metal and clay pendants and charms … dozens of books and scrolls. The earthly items were nearly as interesting and varied as the Æthyric ones: a small animal skull covered in precious gems, a leaf-shaped Aztec sacrificial blade, a golden Middle Eastern puzzle box with Jinn markings.

“Shut the f*ck up,” I whispered, in awe at the breadth of the collection.

“Your collection has grown since I last saw it,” Lon commented. “You used to specialize in earthly amulets, now half of this shit is glowing with Æthyric dust.”

“I’ve expanded.”

Lon glanced at the shelf I was inspecting. “The Æthyric demon body parts are new.”

“To be fair, some of them are angel. One Banshee tooth, or at least that’s what the former owner claimed.”

“Go big or go home, huh?” Lon observed.

Spooner shrugged and straightened his green ascot. “I only discovered their existence a few years ago. Most collectors aren’t willing to sell what they’ve acquired. It’s a tough but profitable market.”

“Tough enough that you had to steal back the glass talon from Craig Bailey?”

A cruel smile boosted Spooner’s freckled cheeks. “He knew he didn’t have much time left on this plane. He wanted to … give it back to a fellow collector.”

I investigated the shelf of talons and bones. Nothing remotely glass. However, one empty display stand cowered alone in a back corner, a wire clamp attached to an indented metal base. The right size to hold a talon?

“Where is it now?” I asked.

Spooner squinted his eyes. “Hmm, I’m not sure if I remember. Cady, isn’t it?”

Lon looked at me and nodded. “You’re up to bat.”

Right. I surveyed the amount of space I’d need. The chairs would have to go. I began moving them aside.

“What are you doing?” Spooner asked.

I left one chair in front of the table and motioned to Lon.

“Have a seat,” Lon said, raising his gun. Spooner complied.

From the small pocket in my wrap dress, I removed a fat stick of red ochre chalk that we’d purchased from a local occult shop on the way over—the only one in La Sirena: more of a catch-all New Age-slash-Pagan supply shop, really, but it was convenient and they had what I needed so no sense in being too snobby about it.

The chalk marked the cement floor beautifully. A dark red, dusty line trailed behind my sketching hand as I bent at the waist to sketch the binding triangle, nice and big, to enclose Spooner right where he sat.

“What are you doing?” Spooner asked.

“What does it look like?”

His eyes followed me, head swiveling. I began hashing out the binding symbols surrounding the borders. Ancient symbols, arcane fortifications. It flowered at my feet like a beautiful, complex math equation scribbled on a scientist’s blackboard.

“It looks like one of the Hellfire’s vermilion seals,” Spooner noted, his voice betraying the tiniest bit of panic. “Which, by the way, is going to cost us thousands of dollars to repair.”

“Bill me.” I finished my work with a flourish, snapping my wrist, then stepped back to admire my work. Flawless. Retreating to scour the glass cases behind Spooner, I found what I needed without much effort. “Aha!” My eyes focused on a small caduceus lying next to some Nordic broadswords. “Do you have a key to this?”