Sleep was fleeting, and Kate found herself making her way to the museum, hoping to get some background information on the stolen artifacts. The scattered bits of sleep she'd managed had been filled with drums and bright feathered birds, and mugs of perfect chocolate that kept being just out of reach. Maybe it meant something, maybe it meant she needed a shrink.
Kate would bet money one of the stolen artifacts was an obsidian blade, handle or hilt or whatever you called the gripping part of a volcanic glass knife just longer than a man's fist, the blade a tapered oval about seven inches long. The gripping part might have been wrapped in something that had once been a blue and yellow cord now spattered with blood, probably old dried blood if it was in a museum. The knife had appeared in her dreams, often but not always in the hands of a painted man.
No doubt Angel and his crew would be breaking out books and searching up some creepy portents and weird stuff those dreams meant. Maybe even breaking out foreign languages. If they were really unfortunate, perhaps a prophecy would be involved… no, that was too far. She could accept vampires, and demons, and magic talking sticks, and ghosts, but prophecies were just too much. Those couldn't be real, could they? Shaking her head, Kate decided they couldn't be real, she refused. That would be one too many weirdnesses about this mess.
She ended up with thirty minutes of traffic, twenty minutes to track down the right museum guy – who turned out to be a woman – and two hours of lecture about Aztec artifacts, culture, traditions, and the importance of each artifact, what it was used for, and the fragile nature of obsidian. The high points could be summed up as obsidian was glass, and inherently fragile, but very, very, very sharp. The stolen knife – wrapped with a cord of faded blue and a pale color that might have been white or yellow and stained with old blood – had been used in religious ceremonies and blood sacrifices. There was considerable debate over the nature and frequency of those sacrifices, but at least the occasional heart of an enemy had been carved out to offer to their gods. The sacrifice was often but not always alive when the priest started carving.
If Kate had been able to sleep peacefully before that lecture, she wouldn't any longer.
For a few moments, Kate considered how she might go about finding a Watcher in this area. Someone who knew demons and vampires and important artifacts of doom. Maybe looking at museums and odd university classes on weird languages and obscure history, the owners or managers or those new age shops, or… As she finished her coffee, Kate decided searching like that would be a waste of her time. She had too much she had to do and other things she'd rather do than slog though the city searching for a maybe Watcher that she'd still need to convince she wasn't crazy, she had some idea what was going on, and she wasn't trying to make things worse.
Instead she called Angel Investigations, leaving a message for Wesley, "This is Kate Lockley, and I need you – likely Wyndham-Price - to find me contact information for a Watcher in New York City. There's been an object stolen from a museum, some sort of sacrificial knife. The whole thing gives me a bad feeling, and I'd like someone local to touch base with on the matter. Top hope is discovering I've worried too much because of all the weird stuff, and it's not needed. Second hope is we can stop the problem before it gets too bad. I need at least one name and contact information. Thanks."
She didn't know how long it would take him, but he had to have a better starting point for such a search than she did. Best to have the information and not need it than need it and not have it…
This was supposed to be her night off from work. A night of relaxing, unpacking, settling in to her apartment. A night to go out and relax, maybe have fun. Not investigate creepy glass knives, and search for the names of people who talked about creepy stuff that ate people.
She saw the distinctive Ghostbusters car zoom past at one point, violating seven different traffic laws that she could see without thinking about it. She ignored it with a firm 'not my problem – not on duty', not even wanting to consider where they were going or why they were going so fast. And straddling the lines between the lanes. And why they'd run a red light. No, just… no.
One of the guys at the station had managed to get a copy of the report on the museum robbery. The cameras had malfunctioned along with the lights going out, so there wasn't film of the incident, but they could compare before and after images. It seemed fairly simple – the power had gone out, the glass door at the side of the building had been smashed, the glass case had also been smashed, and several artifacts had been removed. There had been the obsidian knife, and several items that were believed to have been part of the priest's ceremonial regalia. There were no obvious footprints or bloodstains from the shattered glass. Oddly, a blue feather had been left on the floor near the case, one since identified as coming from the blue and yellow Macaw. Never mind that both the door and the case were supposed to be bullet proof glass. Never mind the assorted security measures that were supposed to be in place.
Never mind the fact that steel knives could be bought in stores all over the state, cheap and legal. Or a variety of weapons and replicas in specialty shops and pawn shops. Someone had wanted a real obsidian sacrificial blade.
"Someone is planning something, and they want the real thing for their equipment," Kate whispered. She could see similar expressions on the faces of Tashir and O'Rourke.
"Didn't the Aztec ceremonies involve human sacrifice?" O'Rourke looked like he thought the papers might bite him.
"I'm no expert. I found a couple books at the library, and they aren't fun reading. Lots of kill the sacrifice ceremonies, though there were some that stuck with bleeding and mutilation. I don't know enough to even begin to guess, though I think the knife rules out anything involving drown them in a sacrificial well," Kate shuddered. If she hadn't already had plenty of fuel for nightmares, some of those stories, never mind the illustrations and speculations, would have fixed that deficiency.
"I'll talk to Tarrant, see what he and his Dad have to say. Any leads could make it less likely for us to be finding bodies with their hearts carved out," O'Rourke shoved the reports away.
Kate wondered if it would be worth asking if the Ghostbusters had seen anything that seemed South American or old-tec lately. She'd probably ask, even if she doubted they had it wouldn't hurt to have more people watching.
End part 13.