by DD Barant
“Well, what do you think of our fearless leader?” Gretchen asks. She jabs at the elevator button with one red-nailed finger.
“I don’t know,” I answer carefully. “I just—”
“Don’t underestimate him—he’s made his career out of people who’ve done that. He’s highly intelligent, Machiavellian to the extreme, and utterly ruthless. If you can get past that, he’s not bad to work for.”
Her honesty surprises me. “Yeah, he sounds like a real sweetheart.”
“He can be—but be careful. He doesn’t have many weaknesses, but women are one of them. Especially your type.”
“What, O Positive?”
“Really? I would have said B Negative. . . . You’re a smart woman, Jace. You’re also stubborn, aggressive—and human. That’s a combination he finds both rare and irresistible.”
“Why?”
She manages to shrug while only moving her eyebrows. “Who knows? It’s like the old joke: Why do vampires date humans?”
“I give up.”
“Yes, but not without a struggle.”
Great. I’m going to have to deal with “human being” jokes, too.
“David is loyal to a fault,” Gretchen says. “Give him your best—professionally, I mean—and he’ll put his very long life on the line for you. Cross him and he’ll wait twenty years for his revenge.”
“I’m not planning on being here that long,” I mutter. “But thanks for the whole carrot-and-stick pep talk.”
The elevator shows up, disgorges an agent in a business suit and a golem in a short-sleeved white shirt, his hairless head and exposed arms a dull yellow. His ears are just bumps. He nods at Charlie, but doesn’t say anything as he steps past.
“How about you, Charlie?” I ask as we step inside. “Do you agree with Gretch? Is Cassius all she says?”
“The Director knows what he’s doing. If that means making sacrifices to get the job done, that’s what he’ll do.”
“Yeah? Sacrificing himself, or just other people?”
“Whatever it takes.”
The forensics lab is on the top floor, a warren of rooms both large and small, all lit by fluorescents and as windowless and claustrophobic as a subbasement. My new colleagues guide me through the maze to a lab the size of a classroom, stocked with equipment that at first glance seems comfortingly familiar: comparison microscopes, glassdoored cabinets, centrifuges and computers. My laptop is on a long, wide table, plugged into an outlet with a new power cord, and my gun lies in pieces on a white piece of cloth next to it.
The man studying those pieces is perched on a stool next to the table, peering intently at a bullet he holds with a pair of forceps. He wears the standard white lab coat, but his hair is even whiter, as short, thick, and bristly as a toothbrush. His eyebrows are the same, dense and snowy over eyes so ice blue they look artificial. His face is wide and ruddy, and when he notices us he grins and springs to his feet.
“Hello, hello! You must be the new hire!” He puts out an enormous hand, his fingers short and stubby. He’s built like a weight lifter, his smock bulging across the chest and at the biceps, his legs just a little bowed. “Damon Eisfanger, very pleased to meet you.” He shakes my hand gently, as if afraid he’ll break it.
“Jace Valchek. I think that’s my property you’re vivisecting.”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, yes, the weapon. I haven’t damaged it, I assure you. I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to examine such . . . unusual technology.”
“Can I have it back?” Despite what Cassius promised, I didn’t really believe they’d ever let me hold my gun again; these people weren’t stupid, and the minute someone with an engineering degree understood what they had—
“Yes, of course. It may take me some time to reassemble it—”
“Don’t bother.” I grab pieces with both hands before he can change his mind. Click, snap, chunk, click, and I’m armed once more. Even though I know it’ll be ineffective against most of the locals, it still makes me feel better; if someone ticks me off, maybe I can shoot their car.
Eisfanger is looking at me with admiration. “That was quick,” he said. “I take it this is a hobby of yours?”
“Not really. All law enforcement officers are expected to maintain their firearms where I come from. That includes field-stripping and cleaning them on a regular basis—I’m just a little faster than most.”
“So all police agencies use these?” He sounds fascinated and a little incredulous, as if I’d just told him we also fly around and shoot laser beams from our eyes.
“Not just the police. The military, hunters, criminals, ordinary citizens; they’re about as common as staplers. You do have staplers?”
Eisfanger shakes his head. “No—I mean yes, of course we have staplers. It’s just the idea of a weapon so esoteric being so widespread—”
“Esoteric?” I frown. I’ve heard guns described a lot of ways: cheap, expensive, evil, fun, sexy, dangerous, scary, sneaky—but never esoteric. It’s like calling fast food exotic cuisine. Of course, “fast food” here may refer to fresh long-distance runner—
Dizziness surges in my head and gut. It’s like that feeling you get when you visit a foreign country and everything seems new but not that strange, and then some little detail jumps out and you realize, you truly understand, that the people here don’t think the same way you do; that you’re a lot farther away from home than you really knew.
Eisfanger doesn’t notice. He’s already talking about something else, my laptop I think: “. . . I was very careful, especially with the power supply, but it seems our worlds are compatible technologically, which, when you consider the complexity of machine code, is remarkable, quite remarkable—”
“So I can access your systems?”
“Oh, yes. Your account, e-mail, passcodes, they’re already installed. Tutorial programs will give you a tour of our databases. And of course, you’ll be able to review all the relevant information on the case you’re working on.”
Gretchen steps forward. “We’d like to take a look at the physical evidence, Damon.”
“Where would you like to start?”
“The McMurdo victim,” I say.
Throughout this exchange Charlie’s hung back, not saying a word, but he makes sure he’s right beside me as Eisfanger leads us through the lab and to a refrigerated room behind a large steel door. The corpse of a husky lies on a necropsy table on its back, its legs splayed to either side and held upright with clamps. It’s been split open, the internal organs removed and no doubt analyzed. I’m more interested in the murder weapons—the teeth.
I take the gloves Eisfanger offers and snap them on. The room is cold, but the excitement I’m getting off Eisfanger is anything but. He’s practically bouncing on the soles of his feet as he slips on gloves of his own—much thicker than mine but still rubberized.
“Take a look at this,” he says, grabbing the jaws and pulling them open. The teeth gleam dully, looking more like aluminum than silver, and I realize why Eisfanger’s gloves are thicker—he can’t handle the teeth directly. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“No. So the dogs had to be destroyed?”
“Oh, no. The vic managed to tear this one’s throat out before he went down—the others were anaesthetized and had the paint removed. We have samples.”
More trouble than my superiors probably would have gone to—but then, they wouldn’t have to worry they might be executing a distant cousin. “How were they drugged? Food?”
“No—tranquilizer darts.”
I lean in, pull back the black lip of the mouth. “Doesn’t look like he was all that gentle in applying the paint, either.” I can see cuts and abrasions on the inside of the mouth and the tongue.
“We think he used some sort of clamps to keep the mouth open while the dog was sedated, but something improvised as opposed to medical.”
I nod. “So not a veterinarian. The paint is precisely applied . . . he takes pride in his
work. Control is important to him, that’s obvious.”
I straighten up. “Did we recover anything else from the site? The darts, the rifle that fired them?”
Eisfanger looks at me blankly. “The what?”
Oh. Right. “How were the darts delivered?”
“I presume the usual way—thrown.”
Great. These people had no idea what ballistics even were. “Never mind. What else is there?”
“That’s it. No fingerprints, just some snowshoe tracks. The site itself was a modular metal pen, set up literally in the middle of nowhere. The dogs were used as transport there, but we don’t know how the killer left.”
“It’s Antarctica. How many ways could there be?”
Gretchen speaks up. “We’re working on that. We believe he may have access to unorthodox transport.”
“You mean like the way I was brought here?”
She shakes her head. “Not exactly. That sort of thing is very rarely done, and only by government agencies. No, we think he might be using a shape-shifting spell—transforming into something that can fly, or possibly swim.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Extremely. It’s a form of magic that both hemovores and lycanthropes are unable to use—and only a handful of human sorcerers have the necessary training.”
“Sounds like a good place to start.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy.” Gretchen sighs. “Unenhanced humans are not very well documented. Many live in isolation and have virtually no contact with anyone else. We know the number of human animists that could do something like this is small, but we don’t know exactly what that number is—or where, in fact, all of them are.”
“Oh, this just keeps getting better and better,” I mutter. “What next? Are you going to tell me the suspect is short, dresses all in green, and speaks with an Irish brogue? Were traces of shamrocks and breakfast cereal left at the crime scene?”
“Leprechauns are just as mythical here as on your world,” Gretchen says. She sounds more amused than annoyed. “We also have an appalling lack of elves, fairies, sprites, pixies, ogres, trolls, hobgoblins, and unicorns. The jury’s still out on UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster.”
Charlie’s voice rasps from behind me. “There’s always Santa.”
“If the murder happened near the North Pole instead of the South, I’d agree with you,” I say. “Still, I guess we can’t rule him out entirely; maybe he used flying reindeer for the getaway. . . .”
Eisfanger chimes in, his eyes bright. “Yes, and maybe the Easter Bunny painted the dog’s teeth!”
We all glance at him, but the line falls flat and nobody laughs. Even lycanthropes have their geeks, it seems, too-bright people with an obsessive interest in their field and slightly off-balance social skills. I’ve known my share—hell, some people would describe me the same way.
“Okay,” I say, “the Australian vic. Do we have the murder weapon?”
“Yes,” says Eisfanger. “Unless the gremlins have hidden it.” His smile confirms my analysis: the subtle cues that indicate a change in topic are more or less invisible to him.
“Take me to it,” I say. Directness usually works.
The sarcophagus is in a corner of the lab, covered with a white sheet. Eisfanger removes the sheet as carefully as if he’s revealing a body, and turns on twin spotlights over the table.
About the size and shape of a coffin, but maybe half as deep. Heavy-duty hinges and a thick metal latch, the kind that locks automatically when it closes. I touch the surface with one gloved hand. “So this is the silver maiden, huh? Cheap wood. Looks flimsy.”
“It’s not.” Eisfanger undoes the latch. “Open it.”
I grab the lid with both hands, hoping that Eisfanger’s sense of humor doesn’t lend itself to newbie hazing pranks. It’s much heavier than it looks, but I expected that. I open it fully, the lid coming to rest at an angle against the table. The smell that rises from it is rank and animal, blood and excrement and spoiled meat. The blades that jut up from the inside of the lid are caked with dried blood, bits of flesh, and clots of fur; there are nine of them, varying in length.
Eisfanger gives me a quick rundown. “These two went through at the calf, between the tibia and the fibula. These two slid between the ulna and radius bones in the forearms. This pair penetrated the lower abdomen just below the ribs, piercing the large intestine.”
“Pinned,” I murmur. “Like a butterfly on a board. What about these three on the top?” There was a trio of blades in a row at face level.
“These two would have pierced his cheeks. You can see that the middle one is shorter than the others, and angled slightly downward; it would have penetrated just above his lip, and not very deeply.”
“In his human form.”
“Well, yes. When he transformed, it would have been pushed through the muzzle, splitting the nose. The blades on either side kept him from turning his head.”
“And the angle is just enough that if he slams forward, it won’t push into his brain.” I’m thinking hard, in that zone where I let my thoughts turn into spoken words without much of a filter to stop them.
Charlie says, “That wood doesn’t look strong enough to hold a thrope, especially one half-crazy with pain.”
“That’s the idea,” I say. I tap the lid and glance at Eisfanger. “Sheet metal sandwiched between thin layers of wood, right?”
Eisfanger nods. “We’re not sure why he went to the trouble.”
“Incentive,” I say. “The wood’s there to create the illusion that escape is possible. He was supposed to struggle. He didn’t have the room to break free, but he did have enough to carve himself up from the inside out. But even then, note how the blades are positioned: between two bones in all four extremities, because bone will last longer than muscle. The blades are positioned so that the sharp edge faces away from the nearest artery—the killer didn’t want the vic to bleed out too soon.”
“To what end?” Gretchen asks. “Is this pure sadism, or is there a deeper purpose? Are we looking at retribution or ritual?”
“Too early to say. How about the third victim, the Japanese one?”
“We don’t have that evidence yet,” Eisfanger says. “The murder only took place”—he glances at his watch—“twenty-two hours ago.”
I stare at him. “And you let me lie around in a hospital bed?”
“I, uh, didn’t have any say in that—”
“Never mind. Gretchen—this case has leapfrogged three continents so far. Does our mandate cover international jurisdiction, or do we have to sit at home and wait for the phone to ring?”
“We are empowered to travel to countries that are signatories to the Transnational Supernatural Crimes and Activities Act,” she admits.
“Is Japan one of those countries?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suggest you pack your Dramamine, or whatever vampires take to prevent spewing their O-Negative breakfast into an airsickness bag. That crime scene is less than two days old, and I want to see it with my own eyes.”
THREE
The inside of the NSA jet looks more like a corporate Lear than a government transport: rich walnut paneling in the main cabin, onboard galley, butter-soft leather seats that recline all the way down. I’d expected Cassius to need some convincing, but he’d just nodded and told me the jet was already prepped; thinking back on it, I realize the reason I was probably zapped to Seattle in the first place was because of its position on the Pacific Rim—Cassius was thinking two steps ahead. When I mention that to Gretchen, she just grins and shakes her head. “Only two steps? My dear, Cassius was thinking two steps ahead when people still considered steam engines to be the epitome of high technology. Now he thinks in terms of the entire dance, not just the first few movements.”
Gretchen doesn’t come with us, but Cassius assures me she’ll be more valuable collating intelligence at HQ than in the field. I’m a little disappointed; she has the kind of
sharp, ironic wit that the British do better than anyone else, polished to a fine edge by what must be decades of use. She reminds me a little of a predatory Mary Poppins.
Who will be accompanying Eisfanger, Charlie, and me is our Japanese liaison, a lycanthrope already on the plane when we arrive. He quickly rises from his seat to greet us, an Asian man wearing a black business suit with a thin black tie. “Hello,” he says, bowing his head gently. “I am Kamakura Tanaka.”
Tanaka is elegant in that way certain Japanese men are, his features sharp but delicate, his jet-black hair worn long but pulled back and fastened behind his head with a clip. He reminds me immediately of a praying mantis, alert and hungry.
I bow back. “Thank you. I’m Special Agent Jace Valchek, and these are my colleagues Charlie Aleph and Damon Eisfanger.” The forensic animist bows, a little too deeply, and Charlie touches the brim of his fedora with a shiny black forefinger.
“I understand that you wish to see the crime site as quickly as possible,” Tanaka says. “I have arranged transportation on the other end, and I will be accompanying you. Your luggage will be taken care of, as well.” About all I have is the overnight bag Gretchen gave me before we left, my laptop under one arm and my gun in my pocket, but I don’t tell Tanaka that.
The plane is laid out with several seats facing each other near the tail and a small galley and individual cabins up front. Tanaka and I take seats opposite each other, while Eisfanger stows his luggage in a cabin and Charlie heads for the cockpit—could be he knows the pilot, or maybe he’s just reconnoitering.
Tanaka studies me frankly as the plane begins to taxi; maybe he’s never seen a real, live human before.
“Got something stuck in my teeth?” I ask.
“No. Forgive my curiosity. I have never met someone from . . . another place before.”
Ah. So that’s it. “Cassius told you, huh? Funny, I thought it’d be a bigger secret than that.”
