Pockets of Darkness by Jean Rabe Read Free Book Online Page B

the scent of his soap. She cleared her mind and let the heavy silence of the warehouse close in. Bridget had spared no expense in having the building soundproofed so the city noise did not slip inside; nor did sounds from within travel out. The resulting quiet was eerie and thick, and helped Bridget focus and call up her talent.
    A quartz bottle stopper capped with an oval cut sapphire caught her eye. She held her palm above it. Then lower, lower, until her skin touched the crystal.
    She let the magic take over.
    “Show me,” she whispered.
    An image formed behind her eyes, of an artisan chipping away at the sapphire, polishing it, then another man setting the finished gem into the housing of the stopper. The image shifted and a manic, yet regal-looking man came to the fore. Bridget absorbed the face and dipped deeper.
    “Rurik,” she said. The stopper had been crafted for Rurik in … she strained to get the information … 872. He was a Varangian chieftain who gained power over Lagoda ten years prior and went on to found the Rurik Dynasty, which ruled Russia until the seventeenth century. The history of the piece rushed at her now. The stopper was presented as a birthday gift along with a case containing three bottles of plum wine from the vineyards of a monastery. Rurik, a pagan, had served the “Christian brew” to his servants because he feared one of the monks had poisoned it. There was no sheet detailing any this information, but Bridget had “read” it clearly nonetheless because of her arcane sight.
    With a little more effort Bridget saw Rurik’s age-spotted hand touching the bottle stopper, holding it up to admire the facets caught in the sunlight spilling through the window of the chieftain’s sitting room. There was pleasure in the man’s wild eyes; he seemed to delight in shiny things. Today, Bridget placed the stopper’s value at $11,700. Her gift of psychometry let her see—in her mind’s eye—not only the person who had owned a thing or touched it or crafted it, but the actual worth of it. And she always translated that worth into today’s American coinage. It wasn’t automatic or unconscious—she couldn’t simply touch a thing and discover its past. She had to center herself and concentrate before her mind could pull in the details.
    Near the stopper was a heavy silver comb dotted with tiny pearls. Her palm hovered above it. Ufanda, Rurik’s wife, used this, inherited it from her mother Umila. Bridget felt the beautiful Ufanda dragging it through her thick hair as she hummed a dissonant melody. Value in today’s market, more because of its pure silver content rather than historical merit: $700.
    Another elaborate comb, made of ivory and with a tine missing, could bring $400 from a collector if Bridget could prove the provenance of the tsar’s family. Other trinkets from the same lot, a bulky cameo on a silver chain: $2,800; a battered brass chalice festooned with mismatched pieces of topaz once belonging to Rurik’s grandfather Gostomysl: $2,100; a bronze cup set with a single large canary diamond also once held by Gostomysl: $38,500 for the stone alone; two balsa-rimmed mirrors inlaid with gold and ivory: $1,700 for the pair. Bridget saw Vadim, Rurik’s cousin, stealing the mirrors from the bedchamber of a young woman who had refused his drunken advances.
    There wasn’t a single document to explain the age or significance of any piece. Bridget’s gift precluded a need for such and let her differentiate originals from clever copies. She’d come into her “sight” when she was a little younger than Otter, but it took her a few years to fully develop it and understand that there was real magic in the world.
    She had briefly considered taking on a legitimate job because of her amazing talent—museum curator, archaeologist, historian. There was so much trafficking in stolen and forged artifacts that her gift to determine genuine from fake would have been put to a good use.
    But all