I went back through the tunnels and waited for Ambrose near Hell’s Belles. He pulled up in the Eternity Road van thirty minutes later. He’d brought Talbot, which made it easier. Ambrose was a big man with a wolfish grin, and I honestly wasn’t sure if he would have fit in the tunnels.
“Got any rope?” I asked. We needed something to keep its deadliest parts on lockdown while we brought it up.
“Take the dollies, too,” Ambrose told Talbot.
Ambrose waited in the van while Talbot and I went to retrieve the chimera.
“I can’t believe I’m actually going to get to see a chimera,” Talbot said as we walked.
I stepped around a heap of broken bottles. “It’s not as fun as it sounds,” I warned. “It bit me once already. The spell may have worn off and it moves fast.”
The chimera was where I’d left it, but the furious look in its eyes hadn’t dimmed. We loaded the chimera into the back and then Ambrose drove straight to Parsi Enterprises. Parsi Enterprises was housed in an old converted warehouse building in the North Loop neighborhood.
I missed my job there, but killing Deci had served as my official termination. I couldn’t really blame them.
“You’re serious about giving my aunts a chimera?”
“It’s safer with them than with Hecate.”
He backed into the loading dock, which was in the rear of the building, on the manufacturing side of Parsi, and flashed his lights three times. Nothing happened.
Eventually, there was a shine of silver and Morta appeared, her hair gleaming in the darkness.
My aunt’s habitual chilly expression thawed when she saw the chimera. She snapped her fingers and a silent factory worker helped us load the still-frozen chimera onto a flatbed cart.
We stopped at a freight elevator and the factory worker went back to the plant.
Morta punched a code into the keypad and the elevator descended. The doors opened into a huge space that spanned the entire Parsi Enterprise building and then some.
“Thank you for bringing the chimera to me, Mr. Bardoff,” she said.
“Don’t thank me,” Ambrose replied. “Nyx is the one who caught it.”
“Son of Fortuna, you managed to trap the beast?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” I told her.
I counted twelve occupied cages. They were state-of-the-art, large spaces that mimicked the occupant’s natural habitat. Instead of iron bars, there were wards crisscrossing the cages. Additional wards ran along the hallway where we stood.
Deep in the bowels of the building, the Fates had amassed a magical menagerie. Lerna, a giant crab known for its fighting ability, scuttled among the rocks and water of one habitat. A lone Phoenix sat on a perch in another cage. In a darkened cage containing a miniforest, three pixies, naked and toilet paper white, sat waiting, their little yellow eyes gleaming through the darkness.
Ambrose didn’t seem very surprised, but I was reeling.
“Did you know about this?” I asked him.
“I’d heard rumors,” he replied. “But I never thought I’d see it.”
“It’s like a friggin’ mythological zoo in the middle of Minneapolis,” I said.
“It’s not a zoo,” Morta said. “Or a prison.”
“Then why are you keeping them here?”
“Use your head for something other than decorating your shoulders,” Morta snapped. “What do you think would happen if these creatures were released upon the mortal world?”
“They’d be hunted.” The thought of trapping such wondrous creatures made me ill.
“Exactly,” she said. “These are the last of their kind. They are safe and happy here.”
Safe, maybe, but her “guests” didn’t seem happy.
There was a lamia’s dirt mound in the far cage, but no sign of the lamia. “What do you feed that one?” I asked curiously. Lamias fed on the blood of children. I couldn’t imagine even my aunts being that heartless.
“Adult virgin donors,” she said crisply. “She doesn’t like it as much as the blood of the innocent, but it keeps her full. She eats innocents for food, but will kill for fun, so stay away.”
“What’s in that one?” I pointed to the cage. Behind the wards, there was a round wooden door barely three feet wide. The door had a thick iron dead bolt on it, and salt encircled the door. White chrysanthemum hung in garlands and runes written in an old language decorated one wall.
“Don’t go near that cage” was my aunt’s succinct reply. So I didn’t.
Something about all those trapped creatures reminded me of the Fates’ late lamented Tracker. He’d been too busy harassing me to have rounded up all the creatures before us.
“Morta, do you have other Trackers on your payroll?” I asked.
She gave me a sour look. “You killed our Tracker,” she said.
“I killed Gaston,” I said. “But it’s not like you not to have a backup plan. Do you have others or not?”
“A few,” she admitted. “But none as talented as Gaston was.”
“Do you think he could track a flesh eater?”
“Yes,” she said. “But he is a she.”
“Can I meet her?”
“Perhaps,” my aunt said. “This Tracker is unpredictable.”
“Your last Tracker wasn’t exactly working with a complete deck of cards,” I said.
“You took care of that, didn’t you?” she glared.
I glared back. “I did. Gladly.”
Ambrose cleared his throat. “Nyx, it’s time we got back to the store.”
He said good-bye to my aunt, but I didn’t bother.
On the way home, I stared out the window as Ambrose drove through the city streets. What were my aunts doing to do with so many mythical animals? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.