“Oh, he’s around. Probably upstairs. Just a second.” She looked around the store and spotted a young man over in the only dark corner the store had, crowded between vibrating plastic penises and the green-painted dressing-room doors.
She called to him. “Jason, is Carlos upstairs?”
Jason raised his head out of a cardboard shipping container filled with videotapes and looked in our direction. “I… um, yeah, I guess I saw him go up there about half an hour ago. One of the girls came downstairs to get him.”
“Would you go up there and tell him someone down here wants to talk to him?” she asked, displaying the kind of patience mothers have for backward children.
“What about my box?”
“I’ll keep an eye on it,” she assured him. “OK?”
“Sure. OK. I’ll go get him.” Jason slumped off toward the door.
We stood there in the vague thump of music from the rooms upstairs. Her gaze kept flickering down to her notebook. “You can look around, if you want. Sometimes it takes a while for the guys to get back downstairs. I don’t know why. I mean, they’ve seen tits before.”
I nodded. “What are you studying?”
“I’m writing an article for The Stranger, about safe sex.”
“That should be a winner.” I wondered what qualified as safe from the point of view of someone who felt the need to chain her nose on. Not wanting to cramp her writing style, I wandered around.
I was examining a black and purple leather bustier with marabou feathers around the top when I felt my stomach fall toward the floor. I turned my head. A slab-bodied, bearded man strode toward me. He wore a clot of darkness like a cape, riding on the broad shoulders of his black leather jacket. His eyes were a couple of pits under lowering, cliff like brows. He stopped a scant two feet from me and looked me over. The desire to run far and fast, shrieking, electrified my legs and caught at my throat. I quashed the urge and pivoted to face him.
He clasped his hands in front of himself. “You wanted to see me?” he rumbled.
The breath. I tried not to flinch. “Alice sent me,” I stated.
“Alice.” Glaciers react more.
“Liddell.” I stared right back at him, even though it racked me. A tremor of fright moved under my skin.
He grunted. “Let’s go to the office.” He turned, assuming I would follow him. As we passed the counter, he glanced at the Goth girl.
“Keep Jason out.”
“OK,” she agreed, barely raising her head from her page.
A door next to the dressing rooms led to a small storage room with a desk and a couple of chairs shoved in among the boxes and files. Carlos went behind the desk and pointed at the chair on my side.
“Sit down.”
I did.
He folded his arms on the desktop, cupping his left elbow with his right hand. His fist was as big as a billboard against the black leather sleeve. “Now. What do want with me, ghost girl?”
I bridled. “Excuse me?”
“You got ‘em hangin all over you,” he growled, reaching toward me. I shied, but he hooked something out of my hair and pulled it back to the desktop. A wisp of Grey, like a steam-spun cobweb, wafted from his fingertips. He wadded it up and shoved it into his inside breast pocket. “Now, what do you want?”
“I—I’m a private investigator and I’m working for Cameron Shadley.”
“Edward’s little blond toy? That Cameron?”
“Yes, that Cameron.” I gave a sharp, annoyed nod. “But he’s not Edward’s ‘toy,’ as you put it, anymore.”
He sketched a shrug.
“I need to know more about Edward before I attempt to meet with him about Cameron,” I continued. “Alice suggested you might have something to say that I could use.”
Carlos raised an eyebrow and started laughing, bellowing shocks like a gale against a plate glass window.
“You have an ax to grind?” I prompted. I was quaking inside.
He lowered his laughter to a seismic chuckle. “You bet I’ve got an ax to grind, and when it’s good and sharp, I’d like to bury it in that bastard’s skull.”
“Why?” My voice did not shake, though by rights it should have.
“You wouldn’t like the story very much. Or understand it. And if I take you into my confidence, daylighter, I cross a line most of my kind would find unforgivable.”
“I can’t ask you to jeopardize yourself for my client’s sake.” I started to get up, relieved to have an excuse to leave.
“What do you plan to do with this information you’re seeking?”
“Raise trouble.”
Carlos frowned in thought. I shuddered at the rolling weight of his mental processes grinding over me. The Grey had been an encroaching sea near Alice. It was an inescapable drowning pool in his presence.
“You will tell no one what you learn from me.”
I fought the compulsion to agree. “I will tell my client, if he needs to know, and I will use whatever I have to to get to Edward.”
His stare ripped into me. “The details shall not go farther than this room until you face Edward.”
I swallowed dust and shuddered. “Yes. All right.” I sat back down, my knees shaking and my heart thumping weird syncopations.
Chapter Twenty-One
Carlos leaned across the desk and pinned me to the chair with his gaze. He spoke in a low, intense voice that enthralled and smothered me. “It’s not mere blood that sustains a vampire, but the life force that flows with the blood. Our own is weak. We must take this life force from others or we fade to crippled shadows, fall into madness, and drown by slow agony to the true death.
“The most vital and powerful of creatures offers the greatest quality of life. That is why we prey on daylighters, like you. You offer us so much that we need not hunt too frequently and death is not always necessary to acquire what we need. A vampire uses this energy to replace what he cannot produce himself. All creatures need it. Some rare few can give up this energy by will and use it for other purposes. When it is given up, it eats your own life as well. If the power required is great enough, it may devour every shred of life and death within you. You must have other lives—other blood—to draw upon. If the undertaking requires great power, it may require many lives. Or the blood of a vampire, which commingles life and death. Neither blood nor this power are to be coerced or commanded. The price for them is too high. But Edward demanded them—ripped them—from me.
“We met in Lisbon. Edward was still young, but his ambition burned like an equatorial sun. He schemed and clawed to raise himself, but only antagonized the rest of our kind. He had few friends but I—fool—was among them.”
His voice fell into older rhythms as he spoke, and I felt the past rise around us in a Grey curtain I could not turn back.
“He had a plan to destroy his enemies at a single blow, but it required that power which he, himself, did not command.”
His words began to press on me.
“He brought his plan to me. I told him it was too risky. The blood required, the deaths, would be noticed, and the spells were dangerous. We argued over it. I would not give up blood for him—nor would any other—but he agreed to a smaller conflagration bought with mere human lives.
“I went a safe distance, to Seville, and began gathering the men and women we would need, the materials, the place… I kept our prisoners and began to craft the great spell into the very walls. Edward arrived and I helped him to build the machine until I was near exhausted. He sent me away to rest until we were ready.”
Something half memory and half vision coiled around me. I shied from it, but it clutched me. I could see shadowy faces of the men and women in eighteenth-century rags and feel his labor burn in my own muscles.
“On All Hallows Eve, he came for me. We walked to the cathedral and descended into our cellar near La Giralda. New symbols lined the walls and floor in chalk and charcoal, gold and blood. I did not study them, for I was distracted by the sight o
f what we had built.”
Excitement. A hundred arcane words and shapes hemmed me in, hammering on dark stone.
“Deeper in the cellar, the two dozen men and women—all children of the streets, the unnoticeables, the lost—knelt on a platform, bound within the machine which poised silver blades to their necks, holding them in the spell, directed toward a single instant and purpose.” Cold, the edges kissed the back of my neck and the hair rose.
“They would know no pain nor the horror of watching their fellows die. I did not require torment, only death. Some had whimpered and moaned in distress as we entered, but they fell into enthralled silence when Edward passed them. Such has always been his power. We walked into the center of the room, to a place in the floor which was the focus of the machine and of the spell’s power. All the symbols in the room led to it and from it and already it throbbed with the potential of magic.”
I felt the humming of it in my bones, the sudden calm of the men and women smothering Carlos’s anticipation and creeping unease.
“He stopped beside a rope which hung from the ceiling, well away from the machine, leaving me to stand at the focus.
“A few of the glyphs disturbed me—black things, like mourners at a wedding feast—but I had no time to protest.
“ ‘Begin!’ he commanded.
“I spoke and the threads of the spell wove together, ghostly, in need of power. I opened my arms to the machine and Edward pulled the rope.”
Power thrummed and shook, then roared, and I felt the quick shock of the blades.
“Their heads tumbled and the hot, liquid force of their lives gouted forth, drenching me. My skin drank them, my body and mind absorbing them in life and death conjoined in that shocked instant. Their unvoiced gasp pushed into me and out my own mouth, staggering me, shivering through my flesh. The power of them flooded me and I reached into the spell, giving it their life through me.”
I trembled with his memory, quivered with the orgasmic flow of life and death through a body that was and wasn’t mine—then shocked into pain and despair.
“The ecstasy of their swift, clean deaths shattered as Edward drove a blade into my back. He spoke a word and flung the black blood which welled from my wound into the focus. The final, dark symbol flared and I fell to my knees.
“Edward stood above me and plunged his knife into my chest.”
“I cried out and the newly murdered cried within me. He twisted the knife, ripping into my heart which beat with them.” Agony. No way to scream. He continued.
“I screamed and died for them. Died each death at once, more horrible than they had died, each screaming, all screaming. Their blood, now my own, poured out again. And the power of their souls flashed like white fire, flooded into the cellar, blazed into the symbols, and the cellar erupted in the phosphor white burn of the spell, blinding me as it spent.” Silence.
“I felt something break within my chest. Darkness shrouded me, but I heard him, moving, laughing. He knelt beside me and touched my head.
“ ‘You have done very well,’ he said. Even blinded, I could see the fleeting nimbus of his stolen power pulsing around him.
“I reached for him, and agony tore through my chest. I fell to the floor like an injured babe, unable to move or speak.
“ ‘I shall always be in your heart.’ He laughed again and left me.” The touch of his telling began receding, draining me as he finished.
“I was awakened by the earthquake and the pealing of La Giralda’s bells as the tower shook. The sun had risen, shining through rents in walls and ceiling. I crawled to a niche in the basement to hide from the overwhelming fury our spell, powered by their deaths and my blood, had poured into the earth. It was far more, far worse, than I had meant. It was a grandiose and pointless rage of destruction fit to Edward’s own spite. Lisbon collapsed beneath the earthquakes, flood, and fire that swept it. Sixty thousand of your kind and mine ceased. And all for naught. Those of our kind who remained in Lisbon left the city and Edward was king of nothing.
“He ripped the sweetness of their souls from me and used it for himself, bled me, then left me bound to die. The tip of his knife is still lodged in my heart. When I find a way to remove it, he will die those two dozen deaths for me. One by one.”
He stopped speaking and I lurched up. I stumbled forward. He didn’t touch me, but walked me to the shop door and to the edge of the street. He rolled his shoulders and settled back into his modern guise as he stood beside me.
“Feelin OK?” he inquired.
I choked on an answer, gulping in normality and trying not to throw up.
“You’re resting your hand on your belly and I can tell you’re not pregnant. Weak stomach?”
I stammered against the bile in my throat. “I’m not a horror-movie fan and I’ve got too good an imagination.”
“You asked. You’ll be all right?”
“Just peachy,” I gritted.
“Good. You need anything, call me. I want to watch him writhing in agony, the same way he left me.”
I stepped away and walked to the corner, crossing the street against the light. I wanted to rush, to run, but didn’t dare until I could no longer see Carlos.
I hurried to the Rover and crawled in, locking the door behind me. My belly clenched with cramps and nausea, my limbs shook and my headache shrieked.
Halfway across the bridge to home, the cramps began to ease, but the rest stayed with me.
Once in bed, I slept hard, but not restfully: first too deeply, then tumbled by nightmares. I got up once to vomit, then collapsed into bed again until eleven.
I felt only a little better when I finally got up. I showered for a time under near-scalding water. Chaos looked into the tub, but chose not to join me. When I got out of the shower, she licked my feet ankles dry while dancing around me. The water is always sweeter off of someone else’s feet, and I laughed at her antics, even though it made my abs and head hurt.
I finished dressing, feeling bruised, putting on a skirt when the restrictive touch of jeans reminded me of ropes and sweat-tight sheets. Chaos and I contested for my breakfast until I declared victory by putting her back into her cage before I left for my office.
Lenore Fabrette called at 3:12. She was waiting to drive onto a ferry in Bremerton and needed directions. I gave them and said I’d look forward to seeing her soon. She tapped on my door a few minutes before five.
She was a too-thin woman with straw hair, her shoulders hunched against routine cruelty.
I stood up and extended my hand. “Ms. Fabrette? I’m Harper Blaine. Please sit down.”
She sagged into the client chair. “Can we just get this over with? I’ve been arguing with the navy all day and I just want to get home.”
“Sure. Can I ask you a question?”
“Oh, sure. I guess.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about the organ?”
She pinched her lower lip with nicotine-stained fingers. “Aside from how ugly it was? Not much but that it was god-awful and it used to give my boy nightmares.”
“Nightmares? How old is your son?”
“He’s twelve now. He was six when we moved in. And I just hope that museum isn’t having any trouble with it. ‘Cause I don’t want it back.” Fabrette picked at her lip. “So, do you want to see these papers or what?” she asked, laying her hand on her purse in her lap.
“Sure.”
She pulled out an envelope and slapped it onto the desk.
“There. Take a look, then tell me what you think.”
I pulled two sheets of photocopy from the envelope. One was an insurance appraisal, which put a value of twenty-five hundred dollars on the organ. The other sheet was the receipt for the donation of an organ with a description that seemed to match the one I had from Sergeyev.
“Damn,” I snickered, staring at the letterhead on the donation receipt.
“What’s the matter?” Fabrette demanded, reaching for the sheets.
“The org
an was donated to the Madison Forrest Historical House Museum, here in Seattle,” I said.
She cringed back a little. “So what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. It’s just… The organ was in Seattle for twenty years, moved to Anacortes for ten, and then came right back to within three miles of where we’re sitting.”
“Does that mean you don’t want those papers?”
“Oh, no. I want them and my client wants them and you’ve been very helpful to bring them to me.” I shoved the papers into a drawer and pulled out a check I’d already prepared. I held it out to her. “That’s the payment my client authorized. I just need you to sign this receipt for me,” I added, pushing over the form and a pen.
She looked at the check, then stared at me. “That’s five hundred dollars,” she whispered. “Are you sure that’s right?”
“Yes, that’s right. Just sign the receipt, please.”
Mute, she clutched the pen and scrawled quickly on the form.
She raised her eyebrows as she handed the paper back to me. “Are you sure?”
I took it and put it in the drawer with the donation receipt. I smiled at her. “Yes, I am. Thank you for coming down here, Lenore. You’ve been a lot of help.”
She nodded, mute, and got to her feet, edging out the door as if I might turn on her and snatch the check away.
As the door clicked closed, I shook my head, swallowing pity she wouldn’t have appreciated.
An hour later, I’d put Fabrette out of my mind as I plowed through routine chores. I was down in the lower drawers looking for more fanfold paper for my printer when I heard the door. “Just a second,” I called, grabbing the paper and pulling it up with me. I knocked my skull on the bottom of the desk. I raised my head, shaking back momentary giddiness, and found a man standing just behind the client chair. I blinked at him.
He was still and cold as wax, wearing a very plain dark suit and a white shirt with a strange collar that was buttoned all the way to his throat, but no tie. He was skinny, but had a round face with broad, flat cheekbones and slightly tilted eyes in translucent skin. His hair was dark brown. He blinked back at me. His left hand fluttered up over his coat buttons and rested on his chest.
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