Finale – Now Available!
Things were moving faster, thought Tycho. But maybe they needed to?
The need to “intercept” the third canvas was greater than ever now, and they’d agreed to do so before leaving Hark House and its diminished matriarch behind. They were oh for three now on these things. Certainly, it would be nice to have more than zero. More shards of a sorcerous painting prison were always better. That more or less went without saying.
What he didn’t understand was why Dr. Blood wanted the paintings.
Oh yes, he was quite sure it had been Doctor Blood underneath that mongrel heap of glamours and costume shop excess. His interest in the Necrowombicon had been… interesting, his arrival timely, and his motivations nebulous. That book was always promising things to people, and a scholar of the occult was as big and dumb a mark as it could hope for.
This theory was complicating things at the office, because Gabriel had determined that Dr. Raven was the nexus point of every incredible thing possible on the Earth. To this end, he had begun wearing a cape of his own devising, fixed with a tiny skull pin, much too tiny to generate any authentic fear. It looked as if it might have come from some rodent shaman, bobbing bare and white in its demitasse cauldron. He been warned about digging through the Brahe collection, for spooky jewelry or for any other purpose, as there remained trinkets here and there whose effects had not been completely catalogued. Tycho had suggested that, just as an example, his dick could catch on fire. Gabriel agreed that sounded pretty bad, but he needed something to keep up his cape.
Sensing that the moment had passed, the heir of Brahe began collecting things he might need from the selfsame collection he’d just decried as dangerously unpredictable. When he felt confident that he had amassed a broad enough suite of capabilities, one that combined the eclectic with the practical, he collected his associate with a snap and made his way out the door of the Startling Developments Detective Agency.
Tycho had done his part, or what he’d perceived to be his part, at every juncture. Some junctures had required the absence of action; he’d made it look convincing. Occasionally he’d been called upon to use shotguns. Now, he was being asked to steal something from a thief.
He was excited. He’d never robbed a bank before.