Page 23 of Curiosity Killed The Vampire

Julian’s image flickered into view, his pale features illuminated by the soft glow of a monitor behind him. “Good,” he said. “Because you’re going to want to see what we just found.”

As he turned the camera toward a stack of ancient ledgers and a carved stone tablet covered in unfamiliar sigils, I caught my reflection in the glass for the briefest second—standing too close to Constantine, my heart still unsteady, the memory of his gaze on the bed haunting me more than I was willing to admit.

CHAPTER 7

Julian’s image steadied on the phone screen, his face half-lit by the pale glow of whatever monitor he was hunched over. Behind him, I could just make out the cluttered sprawl of papers, ledgers, and old tomes spread across a worktable.

He looked tired. Focused. The kind of tired that meant he hadn’t slept in days and didn’t care to.

“Alright,” he began, voice low and fast, the way he always spoke when he was piecing too many threads together at once. “Manu and I have gone through everything—archives, ledgers, old trade manifests from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I even found a few records in an older dialect of French that had been mislabeled in the database.”

He lifted a stack of papers into view. The pages were yellowed and brittle, covered in looping handwriting. “These were the original inventories for the coven that occupied this area before the clans moved in. They catalogued everything—ritual items, relics, spell components, even burial artifacts. From there, I cross-referenced the oldest entries with shipping manifests from the nineteenth century—specifically those tied to black-market antiquities that moved through Montreal and Quebec ports.”

He smirked, glancing down at his laptop. “And then I hacked the modern equivalents. Turns out, the routes haven’t changed much. Some of the same surnames keep popping up—different generations, same families. It’s an entire network operating beneath the radar. Smugglers, collectors, and a few entities that don’t officially exist anymore.”

Manu’s voice drifted from somewhere offscreen. “He’s being modest. It’s an underground empire, Cassara. You could buy a cathedral or a cursed crown with what these people are trading.”

I frowned. “Julian… what does this all mean? Are you saying someone else is looking for the piece?”

Julian looked up, meeting my gaze through the grainy feed. “That’s what it looks like. There’s movement—shipments being rerouted, coded messages embedded in old trade documents, even forged permissions for excavation sites. Whoever’s behind it knows about the artifacts. They might not know what they do, but they know they’re valuable.”

I exhaled slowly, sinking into the chair beside the hearth. The glow from the fire painted the walls in warm amber, contrasting with the cold blue light spilling from my phone. “So there’s a whole underground network operating right under us,” I said. “And of course, I set up a clan near a hub of criminal activity.”

Manu’s laughter carried through the speaker. “You always did have impeccable timing.”

“Any chance this is new?” I asked, rubbing my temples. “Something that started after the clan settled here?”

Julian shook his head immediately. “No. This has been going on for hundreds of years—long before Shadow Thorn was founded. An old coven that originally built the chapel used this region as a trading post for magical contraband. Their networks evolved, expanded, but the roots never died. The families that controlled those channels just shifted their allegiances when the covens fell. Vampires, humans, warlocks—it doesn’t matter. Power always finds a market.”

I leaned back, watching the light flicker across the screen, thinking about the quiet streets of Quebec City above—the cobblestone lanes and lamplight masking centuries of buried deals and blood-soaked history.

“So the artifact might have been traded through this network,” I said.

Julian nodded. “Or hidden within it. Someone might’ve used the smuggling lines to conceal it in plain sight. That would explain why none of the official records mention it—too many hands involved in keeping it off the books.”

Con, who had been silent beside me until now, shifted his stance. “If they’re still operating, it means they’re protected. Which means we’ll have to be careful how we approach.”

Julian nodded again. “Exactly. There’s power here, Cassara—ancient, organized power. You’re walking into a city with a secret economy built on forbidden relics, and someone else might already be one step ahead of you.”

I looked into the fire, its glow catching on the edges of my leather jacket. “Then I guess it’s time to meet whoever’s been trading in my city.”

Julian’s mouth curved, though there was no humor in it. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.”

The screen flickered once, then dimmed as he switched feeds to show a map—Quebec’s old port district marked with half a dozen red dots, the ancient smuggling lines traced like veins through the stone.

And as I studied them, a chill crept through me—not from fear, but from something older. Recognition.

Shadow Thorn wasn’t just a refuge. It had been built on top of something alive, something that had never stopped moving beneath the surface.

Julian shifted the camera, the soft light from his screen glinting off his glasses as he adjusted the angle to show a map spread out across the table. The edges were weighed down by books and loose sheets, the surface scrawled over with his looping, precise handwriting. Candlelight shivered across the worn paper, highlighting the markings in red ink—circles, notations, coordinates, and a single name underlined twice.

“I kept cross-referencing,” Julian said, his voice low but threaded with that restless energy that always came when he was onto something. “The trade routes, the ledger discrepancies, the oldest of the shipping manifests—they all intersect in one place. Every clue, every smuggling line, every false archive trail leads back to an abandoned cave system outside. While we initially thought the piece was under the old chapel, it's more likely it's hidden in the old cave system.”

He leaned closer to the camera, pushing a strand of pale hair from his face. “It’s about thirty kilometers northeast of the city, near the old limestone quarries. The tunnels were sealed off in the mid-1800s after a collapse killed a dozen miners. Officially, it was abandoned. Unofficially…” He reached for another paper, one stamped with faded ink. “The mining company that operated there—Duval et Fils—was a front for a coven at the time. They were extracting something they shouldn’t have been—rare stones with magical resonance. Fragments of binding quartz, lunar glass, and something older. The same kind of material we found embedded in the artifact you recovered from Prague.”

Con stepped closer to the table, his hand braced on the edge beside me. “So the coven hid the piece there?”

Julian nodded. “Most likely. Once the tunnels collapsed, it would’ve been the perfect hiding spot. No one would dare reopen them with the kind of stories that came out afterward.”