Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

Palliser Hotel, in Calgary. See if you can find anything online about the basement. I’m remembering something in the back of my head, but since we’re being chased by snakes right now, I don’t want to spend the brainpower to figure it out.

Snakes? Uh-oh. Not good. The word made her nervous enough that the walls were breaking down in our heads. I was starting to see our bedroom overlaid on the machinery. The furnace grate was wearing a burgundy coverlet and the brick walls had drapes.

Whoa, we’re fine. Okay? I’m here with Lucas and Carmine and we’re all armed. I don’t think they even know where we are. We booked it out of the room as soon as I smelled them. But Carmine’s hiding something and I need to know what. I’m going to shut the vault door now, so knock before you come back in.

She took a deep mental breath and calmed. Okay, sorry. I’m just still having nightmares about snakes from the attack last fall. It’ll pass. I’ll find what I can and get back to you.

I felt a bump against my shoulder and turned my head before I turned my gun. Sure, it was only Lucas, but still — Getting sloppy, Giodone.

He must have noticed that I was having trouble focusing, because he stopped and waited for a moment. “You back with us? Getting a vision?”

One of the nice things about Lucas is he’s been around seers his whole life, and he was mated up until he turned back human. “Having Sue do some research on her end while we’re getting out of here.”

He looked at me for a long moment, likely wondering just what I was having her research, but he didn’t say anything in front of Carmine. Instead, he motioned around the room with his Ruger. “Getting anything?”

I had done a quick scan when we stepped through the hidden door, but did another just to be safe. “All clear … although there have been snakes down here pretty recently. No more than a week.”

Carmine frowned, as well he should. The guys who beat the crap out of him were snake shifters. He was damned lucky he wasn’t turning on the moon like me. He’d originally attributed the attack to a South American mafia trying to get back an ancient artifact one of his people stole. Now, it looked like it might be something entirely different. “I just got here a week ago. Think it’s coincidence?”

Lucas and I turned at once and both stared at him. I mean … duh. “You tell me,” I said.

He didn’t respond, but just stared at me, which was weird. Here he’s worried about snakes, who have been in the room recently, and he’s only got my word the room is clear, but he’s not looking around the room, checking out every shadow. That’s very unlike him. He’s even more paranoid than me.

Tony? I’ve got your answer.

Not the warning I asked for, but there isn’t anything critical going on anyway. What’cha got?

There’s a secret tunnel in the boiler room of the Palliser.

Ah! That’s where I remember it. It was in one of those ‘Secrets of’ series of books — strange things about major cities. Okay. Just came down the tunnel. Staircase to the fourth floor, right?

There was a pause. Um … no. That’s not mentioned. This one is an old laundry tunnel that goes under the railroad tracks and veers east for a few blocks. Seems that years ago, the hotel cleaned all the linens a couple blocks away. It’s sealed off in the boiler room, but the tunnel’s still there.

Little pieces were starting to fall together in my head, but it would require a little private detecting later, when nobody was around.

There are a lot of times when the local police are handy to our kind. One of those times is when people ransack rooms looking for things. It was short work to install Carmine at a different hotel and have Babs — my private name for Barbara Herrera, call the hotel and complain that someone with a master key broke into the room and robbed her while she was napping. We got her back up to the room the same way as we got out, long after the snakes were gone. The security cameras would definitely show the door being opened with a key. Apparently, they’d been coming and going through the secret staircase to avoid cameras showing Carmine and Linda out of the country, so as far as the cameras were concerned, they’d never left the room.

Less than two hours after I’d left, I was back in the laundry room.

I didn’t smell anything I hadn’t smelled before and saw no glowing evidence of other Sazi in the room before I slipped inside. But when I felt the cold press of a gun barrel to my temple, I knew I hadn’t been careful enough. I dutifully raised my hands while I was relieved of my weapons. But since she was human, and it was the first night of the moon I still had an advantage.

The thick Russian accent from the woman was a surprise. “Where is the box?”

“Box?” This was news to me.