Legacy Read online

  Legacy

  A Deadly Curiosities Novel

  Gail Z. Martin

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-64795-019-4

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64795-020-0

  Legacy: Copyright © 2021 by Gail Z. Martin.

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  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), locales, and incidents are either coincidental or used fictitiously. Any trademarks used belong to their owners. No infringement is intended.

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  Cover art by Lou Harper

  SOL Publishing is an imprint of DreamSpinner Communications, LLC

  For my wonderful husband Larry and our family, Kyrie, Nick, Chandler, Zach, Cody, and Sarah. Much love and gratitude to you.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Gail Z. Martin

  Chapter One

  “Where’s Evan?” The old man glared at me, his bushy white eyebrows gathering like storm clouds. I’d never seen him before, but his question told me that he was acquainted with Trifles and Folly—and the store’s previous owner, my great-uncle Evan.

  “Evan passed away several years ago,” I said gently. “I’m his great-niece, Cassidy Kincaide—the new owner.”

  The gentleman gave me the once-over. Given the gap in our ages, I couldn’t blame him for being skeptical. My bet put him on the far side of ninety, while I was in my late twenties—probably younger than his great-grandchildren.

  “Sorry to hear that,” the man said, with a stoic nod in acknowledgment. He’d probably been tall in his younger days, and from his broad shoulders, I guessed he’d been muscular and craggily handsome before time and age thinned his frame and bowed his back.

  The seersucker suit and bow tie suggested he was a true Charlestonian. He had a white-knuckle grip on a cypress walking stick with his left hand.

  “D’you take after Evan?” He met my gaze, and I knew what he meant.

  He wants to know if I’ve got Evan’s magic.

  On the other side of the store, my assistant manager, best friend, and sometimes bodyguard, Teag Logan, looked up and shot me a concerned glance, silently asking if I needed backup. I gave a barely-there shake of the head, and he went back to rearranging the silver tea sets.

  “Yes. I’m definitely his heir,” I replied. The wording could be taken more than one way because I had been the one Evan chose to inherit the shop. I assumed that whatever brought him to the store today needed special talents to handle.

  “Good.” He reached into his pocket, withdrawing a picture of a really old bottle of liquor. He set the photo on the counter. I could see binding sigils painted onto the glass and over the label, with more scratched into the glass itself. The top was sealed with wax and what looked to be threads of silver. As I bent to look closer, I saw what looked like a faint glow and a blur that might have been something moving inside the bottle when the photo was taken.

  “You’ve heard of a genie in a bottle?” the old man asked. “Well, seventy-five years ago, my friends and I put a djinn in the gin.” He laughed at his joke, but Teag and I exchanged a worried look.

  Worried but not overly surprised. Because dealing with situations like this—that’s kinda our job.

  I’m Cassidy Kincaide, and I own Trifles and Folly, which has been in my family for more than three centuries, almost since Charleston’s founding. Most people think of the shop as a great place to find a perfect piece of heirloom jewelry or old silver—and it is—but the truth is a lot more interesting. Since the beginning, we’ve also been part of an alliance between mortals and immortals to get dangerous magical items out of the wrong hands and keep the world safe from supernatural threats.

  Great-uncle Evan chose me as his successor because I have the same special ability as he did—I’m a psychometric who can read the history and magic of an object by touching it. That definitely comes in handy when weeding out cursed and haunted items, but it’s also useful when we’ve been trying to stop something really bad from happening.

  Teag had crossed the room to get a closer look. A lock of straight, black hair fell into his eyes as he peered at the photograph. He looks more like a skater-boy, but he was all-but-dissertation on his History Ph.D. before he started working here and decided saving the world was more interesting.

  “A djinn?” Teag repeated. “Like Robin Williams in Aladdin? Like in the Arabian Nights?” He sounded cautious and curious, which mirrored my feelings. I looked at the photo of the bottle as if it might bite, and because of my touch magic, I didn’t want to get too close.

  The old man chuckled, a sound that ended with a rattle deep in his chest. “Not quite.” He shook his head. “Where are my manners? I’m Clyde Kenner.”

  Teag introduced himself and shook hands. “We’d love to hear the story about the bottle,” I said. “Would you like to come into the break room and have a glass of sweet tea? You could sit down, and we’d have privacy.”

  Maggie, our part-time helper, came out from the back room just then. “Go.” She scooted us with a flick of her hands. “I’ll cover the front if customers come in.”

  Mr. Kenner picked up the photo and carried it with us into the little kitchen area. He set it in the middle of the scuffed table and sighed as he settled into a chair. I brought him a glass of tea, and he nodded his thanks.

  “Originally, there were six of us,” Kenner said. “We fought in Korea together. We were twenty years old, full of piss and vinegar, headstrong and stupid,” he said with a sad laugh. “Best damn friends I ever had. Ben and Ricky didn’t make it home,” he added, sobering. “Carl, Eddie, John, and I were thicker than ever after they passed. Like being in each other’s pockets would get us home safe.”

  Kenner paused to take a sip of the tea. It didn’t ease the rasp of his voice, and I wondered if he’d been a smoker. He smelled of peppermint and eucalyptus, not cigarettes, but maybe the damage was done long ago.

  “We had gone into Seoul on leave, four crazy kids a long way from home. We had too much to drink, got all turned around, and ended up lost in a part of town that doesn’t get tourists. Eddie saw a strange little shop and said he needed to buy something for his mama for her birthday. So we all went in, and it was full of candles and statues and dried plants. I got this weird feeling like we shouldn’t be there, but the guys wouldn’t listen,” Kenner recalled.

  “Anyhow, Eddie told the lady behind the counter that he wanted something to bring good luck to his mama. She kinda gave me the creeps because I never saw her blink. She picked out a shiny black stone and told him it would keep his mother safe. Then Carl pointed to a fancy bottle and asked what it was. She said it would make our wishes come true. Carl thought it was a big joke, and he bought it.” Kenner stared into the middle distance as he talked, and I knew that in his mind, he was decades and thousands of miles away.

  “I’ll never forget the look on her face when she told him that, about the wishes,” Kenner
said, shuddering. “She smiled, but I swear there was something evil about it. Like getting suckered into a practical joke, a bad one that’s going to hurt.”

  Teag and I waited, letting him tell his story at his own pace. I already had the feeling that it wasn’t going to end well.

  “She told him to make the wishes count because there was no telling when the spirit would stop granting them. And she said it would be happy if we fed it alcohol.” He shook his head at the naïveté of his younger self. “Carl was so excited. Like someone gave him a million dollars. He was joking with us when he paid her, and I didn’t quite catch the last thing she said, but it was something about wishes having a price.”

  “What happened after that?” Teag asked.

  “Eddie and I were freaked out, but Carl and John thought it was all a big gag. We went back to the base that night, and since we had a mission the next day, Carl wanted to prove that this magic spirit was a good thing. So he broke the seal on the bottle, and there was light and fog, and then this ugly little goblin thing was sitting on the floor,” Kenner recounted.

  “Carl ordered him to protect us the next day. The thing said it would. I gave it some of my beer, and it went away.” Kenner’s expression grew pensive. “The next day, our convoy came under fire. We were at the front. The Jeep that the four of us were in never got a scratch, but the one right behind us hit a land mine.” He looked up, guilt still clear in his eyes after all these years.

  “There’s no way we should have been able to drive over that mine and not have it blow us sky-high,” he said. “Except that goblin kept us safe—and it cost the lives of the men in the truck behind us.”

  “Doesn’t that happen a lot in a war zone?” Teag asked. “You always hear stories about someone whose buddy gets shot when they’re standing next to each other, or one tent gets hit and another doesn’t?”

  Kenner nodded. “And if it had been sniper fire or shelling, I’d be inclined to believe that. But our Jeep should have triggered that mine.” He shook his head. “We all looked at each other, and we knew.”

  “What did you do?” I found myself holding my breath.

  “Carl still wanted to prove this was a good thing—maybe more to himself than to us,” Kenner remembered. “So he said we hadn’t thought big enough. The next time we went out on a mission, he asked for the whole unit to be safe. We came under heavy fire. Got pinned down, had a hell of a fight. When the dust settled, our unit hadn’t lost a man. But the unit we’d partnered with? They lost everyone.”

  I could see that although more than seventy years had passed since the incident, Kenner still felt responsible for those deaths, even though without the spirit’s help, he and his friends might never have survived.

  “Carl panicked. He wanted to take the bottle to the chaplain—a priest—and confess everything, maybe ask for an exorcism. Eddie—he was the smart one. He went to a fortune teller in the village outside our base and asked how to stop a spirit—hypothetically,” he added with a bitter laugh.

  “She said to get it drunk on strong liquor and shut it in a new bottle, then say a spell and seal it up just so. So we bought some homemade hooch and offered it to the little goblin-thing. We did what the fortune teller told us. And we made a pact to watch over it and drew up an order for it to be inherited as we died. I’m the last one, and I want to make sure it doesn’t hurt anyone else. My time is short, so here I am.”

  He somehow looked even older with the telling, and I could see how the burden weighed on him. At the same time, Kenner had lost the tension that stiffened his shoulders and clenched his jaw, and I thought of the old saying about how confession is good for the soul. He had carried the weight long enough.

  “Where is the bottle now?” I asked.

  “That’s the damnedest thing,” Kenner replied. “I was working up my nerve to bring it here—I’ve been on borrowed time for a while, and I need to get my affairs in order. Strange things started happening, so I figured I’d better hand off the bottle sooner rather than later. And then this morning, someone broke in and stole it.”

  “Just the bottle?” Teag asked, eyebrows raised in suspicion.

  Kenner nodded. “I’d kept it locked up tight all these years, but since I intended to bring it to the shop, I got it out. I should have known something was up. When the bottle was in the safe, I couldn’t hear it anymore. Started up again as soon as I took the darned thing out.”

  “Hear it?” I asked, suddenly on alert.

  “Not like it spoke out loud,” Kenner said. “But it had a way of getting into your thoughts, into your dreams, unless it was locked up under a bunch of lead or iron. It slithered in and started to weigh you down like it wanted you to drown…” He shook his head as if he were clearing away bad memories. “Sometimes it screamed.”

  “Screamed? Did anything…unusual happen before the bottle was stolen?” Teag asked.

  Kenner thought for a moment. “No, nothing.” A pause: “Wait. There were strangers in the neighborhood. I saw a man in a fancy, expensive car that didn’t belong. Most of us have lived there since the Sixties. Raised our kids, saw them grow up, threw retirement parties. Regular folks. Then there was a construction truck parked on the street, but I couldn’t figure out where they were working. Seemed unusual, at least thinking about it now.”

  He sighed. “Maybe someone was casing the joint, as they say on TV. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched, even though no one was around. But that’s probably just an old soldier’s paranoia.”

  Teag and I exchanged a look. It seemed likely to me that Kenner wasn’t being paranoid—and I bet Teag felt the same way. Someone—or something—with magic could have had their eye on him. “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Yeah. There was a commotion in the backyard, and I went to see what was going on,” Kenner said.

  “Commotion?” I pressed. “What do you mean?”

  “It was the damnedest thing,” he said. “I’d had a metal shed behind my house for twenty years. Didn’t blow away in all the hurricanes. And that day, it just fell apart. Made a hell of a racket. I went out to see what happened. The shed had just collapsed. I figured I would have to call someone to haul it away. And when I came back to the living room, the front door was open. The bottle was gone. Left my TV set and my good watch that was on the table and just took the weird old bottle.”

  He leaned in like he was imparting a secret. “I think the spirit knew I was going to get rid of it.”

  “Did you mention the bottle or the story to anyone?” I thought it sounded more like someone had gotten wind of the bottle and took the chance to grab it.

  Kenner scowled. “I don’t need anyone thinking I’m not right in the head. I never told anyone—not even my wife, God rest her soul.”

  “Did you report the theft to the police?” Teag refilled Kenner’s glass without being asked.

  “Of course not. They wouldn’t have believed me. But you do, don’t you? Believe me?”

  “We do,” I replied. “And we’ll do everything we can to find it—before it can cause problems.” It might already be too late for that, but we had a stolen bottle with a captive djinn on the loose, and both possibilities sounded like a heap of trouble.

  “We can make sure that once the bottle is found, it’s handled properly so that no more harm comes to anyone,” I told him, already thinking of a couple of allies I could pull in to help. “Thank you for trusting us with your story.”

  He grabbed my hand without warning, and his gnarled grip was tighter than I expected. His blue eyes turned fierce. “It gets into your dreams if you’re not careful,” he warned. “It wants to get loose. You’ve got to lock it up in a lead safe, on a bed of rock salt. Doesn’t hurt to put a crucifix and a rosary in with it for good measure. The bottle with the sigils contains it, but to shut it up, you need to keep it in the safe. I painted the same marks on the outside of the safe that are on the bottle, just to be sure. You don’t know what it’s like to hear it screami
ng in your head.”

  I covered his hand with mine and hoped he couldn’t see the worry in my eyes. “Thank you,” I said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  I walked Kenner to the door and thanked him again. He turned to me when we reached the doorway and laid his hand on my arm.

  “Doc says I’ve got a month left, give or take. Told me to get my house in order. That was the last thing on my list. Now it’s done, and so am I. It’ll be good to rest. I hope Eddie and the boys have some cold beer waiting for me on the other side,” Kenner said with a smile. Then he turned and walked away.

  When I went back to the break room, Teag had pulled a woven net out of the gear bag we kept in the office. Teag’s a Weaver witch, which means he can weave magic into cloth. I knew the net was one he had woven himself.

  “Between the salted holy water and colloidal silver that the net was soaked in, along with my magic woven into the net, that should be good to contain even a very strong spirit once we find the bottle. Then we can put it in the lead safe until we can destroy it or hand it off safely,” Teag said.

  We’d put some sketchy supernatural items in the safe before to keep them neutralized, and I hoped it would work now until we could pass the bottle off to friends who could make sure it wouldn’t hurt anyone again.

  “I’ll let Sorren and Donnelly know,” I replied.

  “He called it a djinn. What kind of spirit do you think it is?”

  I tipped my head. “No idea. It could actually be a djinn…or an ifrit. Maybe some other kind of wish-granting demon. The folklore blends them all together. There are so many possibilities.”