“Because it didn’t shamble around, moaning and trying to eat your brain?”

“Let me guess: more movie fiction?”

“Yep. Not that you guys would know that. Zombies are the dirty little secret of the supernatural world. We know they exist, but we try not to think about them. Most necros go their whole lives without ever raising one. They’re just…nasty. And I don’t just mean the smell. A zombie is a ghost returned to a corpse. Not nice for anyone, especially the spook. Last one I saw was a dog raised by a kid necro. Like in Pet Sematary…only the dog had been hit by a car, and the kid thought the raising would fix him, and of course it didn’t, so his uncle calls me in and…” She paused. “And that story, while instructive to any teen necromancer, isn’t going to help you. Where was I?”

“Zombies. Which don’t normally disintegrate into dust.”

“Right. If yours turned to dust, dimensional zombies must be different. I’ll have to look that one up.”

“You said this was a dimensional portal,” Jeremy said. “And that we’re dealing with corporeal ghosts. So is this another door into the afterlife?”

“Probably not. You’re dealing with things that just don’t happen often enough to be properly documented. It sounds like you have a spell-triggered dimensional portal. Spellcasters probably have a fancier term, but that’s the gist of it. A spellcaster, usually a sorcerer, creates a…balloon or a pocket, something that exists between dimensions where he can shove inconvenient things-usually people-for safekeeping. They stay there, frozen in time, until someone releases them. You’ll have to check with Lucas, but I’m pretty sure the spellcaster creates a ‘trigger’-some item that will let him open and close the portal.”

“The letter,” Jeremy said.

“Probably.”

“So how did we activate it?” I asked.

“A trigger is like a combination lock, and only the sorcerer knows the code. It’s usually some special sequence or event that will set off the portal, but there can be alternate ways of triggering it. Backups, in case the first one fails.”

“Would blood do it?” Jeremy asked.

“Blood?” I glanced at him. “How-?”

I stopped as I remembered the mosquito, and the dark blotch on the letter. That’s why he hadn’t wanted me seeing it in the hotel room. Because, in the light, I’d have realized that the dark patch wasn’t only mosquito guts.

“The mosquito,” I murmured. “It had my blood in it.”

“That’s a new one,” Jaime said. “But sure. That could have been the backup trigger. It’s not something that’s likely to happen accidentally in storage. If the primary failed, the sorcerer could break in and activate the backup.”

“So some sorcerer created the letter, stuffed two people into it, and then, before he could release them, it was stolen.”

“If he ever planned to release them. That can be tricky, especially if you wait too long. When you seal up people like that, it’s like a mini time capsule. Release them and…weird things can happen.” She paused. “You haven’t had anything weird happen, have you?”

“Besides possibly releasing and killing a zombie Jack the Ripper?”

“What else could happen?” Jeremy said.

“Hard to say. Creating portals isn’t something you find in every spellbook, and not many sorcerers could make one if they had the recipe right in front of them. Oh, for example, there’s a documented case of a sorcerer in the Wild West who caught some outlaw, tossed him into a portal and hauled his ass back to the East for trial. Caused a minor smallpox epidemic.”

“Because the outlaw had smallpox,” I said. “And he was brought into an area that didn’t.”

“Nope. The outlaw was smallpox free…but when he was tossed into the portal, it was in a region known for periodic outbreaks. It’s like he took some of his environment with him.”

That was all Jaime knew, but she promised to canvas her contacts.

When we’d signed off, I started lifting a hand to wave Clay back to the car, but Jeremy laid his fingers on my arm.

“When you tell him what Jaime said, leave out the part about the smallpox,” he said.

“You think that’s a concern? I’ve been immunized, and it sounds like something specific to the period, not to portals in general.”

“I agree. However…”

His gaze slid to Clay, who was leaning against a tree, a pedestrian taking a shade break from the late-day heat, but his eyes were continually scanning the street, body tense, as if a horde of zombies might descend at any moment.

“No sense giving him one more thing to worry about,” I said.

“Exactly.”

When I went to put my cell phone away, I noticed I had a message. It was Robert, returning our earlier call. Robert Vasic was a former council delegate who now served as the go-to guy for esoteric research. Jeremy called him back, told him what had happened and he promised to start hunting through his library.

“We can’t track this woman until after dark,” I said when we were all back in the SUV. “The best source of information on the letter itself would be the original source…or as close to it as we can get. Patrick Shanahan’s grandfather commissioned the theft of that letter, and I’m sure Shanahan knows why. We should pay him a visit.” I glanced at Clay. “A friendly visit.”

“Sure,” Clay said. “We’ll show up on his doorstep and say, ‘Excuse me, we’re the ones who stole your letter last night, and it’s giving us some trouble. Can we ask you a few questions about it?’ ”

“Let me think about it,” Jeremy murmured. “Just start driving over there.”

Routine

LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, WE WERE BACK WHERE IT ALL started, at Patrick Shanahan’s house. His street looked different in daylight. You could see the houses through the trees, and they looked dead. Empty driveways, drawn blinds, blackened windows, a lawn-care crew the only sign of life. If you lived in an upscale neighborhood like this, you worked-both spouses, all day, every day.

A “wrong number” call to Shanahan’s house on the way had confirmed that the sorcerer was home, either working from there or taking the day off to inventory his collection, making sure nothing besides the letter had been stolen.

At just past 4 p.m., Jeremy and Clay were striding up Shanahan’s driveway. I got to eavesdrop at a window. As Clay said, I did have another option. I could wait in the car and let them fill me in later. So, eavesdropping it was.

As I waited around the corner, I heard Jeremy ring the bell. A moment later, the door opened.

“Are you Patrick Shanahan?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes…”

“Owner of a historical document once residing in the London Metropolitan Police files?”

“Do you have it?”

“You don’t?” Jeremy glanced over his shoulder at Clay and they exchanged a tight-lipped look, then Jeremy turned back to Shanahan. “Mr. Shanahan, are you aware of certain occurrences in Toronto in the last twenty-four hours? Occurrences our employer believes are related to the document previously in your possession?”

In the silence that followed, I knew Shanahan was taking a second, longer look at the two men on his doorsteps, seeing them not as associates of whomever stole his letter, hoping to “sell” it back, but as supernatural agents, most likely dispatched from a sorcerer Cabal. While one could argue that the Cabals needed policing more than anyone outside their infrastructure, they often played the role of law enforcement in the supernatural world, if only to protect their own interests.

Shanahan let them inside.

As they moved through the house, I could catch only Shanahan’s boom of a voice as he complained about the heat, the humidity, the smog-the kind of chatter that fills space and says nothing.

He didn’t ask how Jeremy knew he’d owned the From Hell letter. As Xavier had said, it was common knowledge among a certain subset of supernatural society, and Cabals had plenty of access to that subset. Nor did he ask which Cabal his visitors were with, or even confirm that they were from one. When dealing with Cabals, curiosity could sound dangerously close to challenge.