by DD Barant
“Good. You were infected by a thrope claw as opposed to a bite, right?”
Not to mention having my femoral artery sliced open at the same time. “Yeah. So?”
“So the virus that lives on thrope claws is slightly different from the one that lives on our teeth.”
“I know, Cassius told me. He said the claw version was actually more virulent.”
Damon nods. “It is. But having survived it, your immune system is now producing antibodies. I can’t be completely certain, but I don’t think you could be infected that way again.”
“Wait. Are you trying to tell me that the next time I go toe-to-toe with an enraged, seven-foot werewolf I only have to worry about his jaws?”
“From a strictly infectious point of view, yes. Of course, you could still be disemboweled or decapitated or have your limbs torn off—”
“You’re really not clear on how the good news–bad news thing works, are you?”
“—or get slashed to pieces or die by exsanguination. But you don’t have to worry about being turned into a thrope from a simple claw wound.” He pauses. “I’m pretty sure, anyway.”
“Terrific,” I say as I head for the door. “Do me a favor and try to stay away from the sandwiches, okay?” I check my watch as I step into the elevator; I should just be able to make my class.
* * *
When I first got to Thropirelem, I was more than a little overwhelmed. I hid that behind my usual combination of bloody-minded stubbornness and sarcasm, but one fact was inescapable: I was no longer the baddest badass in the room. Or in one corner of the room. Or even in that little supply closet just off the room, the one with the sawdust you’re supposed to spread on vomit and the mop that smells like rotting spinach. In fact, that little old lady on the corner with the plastic supermarket bag could probably go half-were and rip my throat out in less time than it takes her to buy kitty litter.
I do have a few things that help balance the equation, of course. My gun—which nobody takes seriously until I actually put a very large hole in something, and sometimes not even then; my badge; a pair of modified eskrima sticks with snap-out blades that turn them into razor-sharp silver scythes. But really, one of my biggest assets has always been my martial arts training—I’ve been studying since I was ten. It’s helped give me the self-confidence you need in a male-dominated profession, which unfortunately seems to be most of them.
That asset is all but worthless here. Pires and thropes are stronger, faster, and really hard to hurt. Not that hard to kill, if you know what you’re doing, but lethal force is not always the best option. My knowledge of kali, Filippino stick fighting, helps a lot—but even with the scythes, I still have the speed and strength problems. Plus, it makes me far more reliant on my weapons than I’m comfortable with.
So I started my own dojo. Because, hey, those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.
I can practically feel my old sensei smack me in the back of the head for that remark, and I deserve it. I have nothing but the highest respect for the teachers I’ve had in my life; it’s myself as a purveyor of knowledge I’m a little down on. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time—make something here that was truly mine, create my own community—but the reality of the situation is proving a little less rosy.
“Okay, everyone, let’s practice our palm strikes. Csilla, get your stance right—feet farther apart. Galahad, get away from the snacks.”
My class consists of six wannabe kung fu masters: Xandra Adams, a teenage thrope; Vlad Varney, a thrope bouncer who likes to pretend he’s a pire; Csilla Janos and Ludmilla Radzic, two illegal immigrants I rescued from an undead trafficking ring; Teresa McKeever from the Seattle Human Enclave, curator of the Archive of Human Works; and my dog.
Yes, I said my dog. Galahad’s a dog were, one who spends his days as a St. Bernard and transforms into a large, potbellied man with a patchy brown-and-white haircut when the sun goes down. So far he’s one of my best students, when he’s not trying to snarf down everything on the refreshment table—though he has a distressing tendency to lick his opponent’s face during grapples.
Teresa puts up her hand. She’s a matronly woman in her fifties, in pretty good shape, currently dressed in a maroon tracksuit. “Jace?”
“Yes, Teresa?”
“I’m sorry, but my phone is vibrating.” She sounds apologetic. “We’re getting in a shipment from Paris, and I made them promise not to bother me unless it was urgent.”
“Go ahead,” I say. “Everybody else, back into position—”
Xandra puts up her hand. She’s a sixteen-year-old thrope I met through her uncle when we worked together, and we somehow became friends. Xandra likes to experiment with body modification, which in a world filled with magic translates into things like corpsing—using charms to imitate the rotting flesh of a zombie—or blading, where razors are embedded into the skin edge-out like some sort of lethal fins. I forbid either one at class, which made her a little grouchy.
“What is it, Xandra?”
“Can I put my earbuds in while we’re practicing? Listening to some tunage helps me get into a rhythm.”
“This isn’t aerobics, Xan. What are you going to do when you find yourself in a fight, ask the other guy to hang on a second while you make sure your iPod’s charged?”
“But this is just practice.”
“No, it’s programming. That’s what we’re doing, programming your reflexes by repeating the same actions over and over. That way, when you find yourself in a dangerous situation, you won’t have to think; your instincts will take over.”
She frowns. “But I already have instincts. Thrope, remember? Fur, four feet, waggable butt extension?”
I sigh. She’s got me there. “You already know how to use your fangs and claws, sure. I’m trying to give you some new instincts—ones that deal with leverage and pressure points and using your mass effectively. And that’s not going to work if you need to have the latest top forty pop song blasting in the background to jog your memory—”
Now Csilla puts up her hand. She’s a tall, strikingly beautiful pire, a refugee from a tiny war-torn country in Eastern Europe that I can’t even pronounce the name of. She and Ludmilla Radzic were smuggled here by the Gray Wolves and forced to work as prostitutes until Charlie and I put a stop to it. She swore she’d never let anyone force her to do anything against her will ever again, and I believe her. “Csilla?”
“Yes. When do we learn how to kill?” Ah, these Slavic types. Blunt, practical, ruthless.
“I’ll get to that, believe me. But you have to learn how to walk before you run—”
Which is when Gally tears to the front of the room and starts jumping up and down, yelling, “Walk! Walk! Walk!”
I decide now would be a good time for a short break.
* * *
As it turns out, Teresa isn’t the only one who gets interrupted by a call. We’re hardly getting warmed up when I get a call myself, from Gretch. Stoker’s sent us another message.
I adjourn the class, tell everyone they’re doing great, give them some homework to practice on their own, and say I’ll see them next week. Then I take Gally home and get back to the office as quickly as I can.
“Our shaman’s just finished checking it,” Gretch says as I sit down opposite her desk. She taps the screen of her tablet a few times, and one of the flatscreens switches to a shot of Stoker’s face. “No surprises, just a masking spell to make it impossible to backtrace.”
I study the monitor. The best description I can give of Stoker is a brainiac caveman; his broad forehead and clear eyes radiate intelligence, but the heavy brow, square chin, and wide face look more Neanderthal than Nobel Prize winning. The hair’s a long, shaggy brown mane.
Gretch taps her touchscreen again, and the image comes to life.
“Hello again, Jace.” The familiar deep rumble of his voice, but sounding a little less self-assured than he usually does. The camera’s in tight on his face, so
I can’t really make out much of the background. He looks off camera for a second, then quickly back. He blinks several times in quick succession, a visual clue that he’s reining in his emotions. When he speaks again, his voice is a little flatter in tone.
“I know you don’t have any reason to trust me. And I’m the last person in the world who should care about the welfare of pire children. But I’ve undergone some changes lately, and—” He breaks off, gives his head a little shake. “Never mind. That’s the cry of every reformed criminal alive, isn’t it? I’ve changed, really I have. I know you wouldn’t believe it from the lips of a wife beater—and I’ve done things much worse than that. So I’ll try to stick to the facts, and let you make up your own mind. You will anyway.”
He pauses. “First of all, I’ve ended my partnership with Ahaseurus. When I realized what he was, what he wanted you for … let’s just say we didn’t part on friendly terms. I don’t know if the NSA has any way to confirm that, though.”
I glance at Gretch. She pauses the recording and says, “We can’t track Ahaseurus with any deal of accuracy, but we collected a lot of mystic data about his abilities from the Nightshadow incident. Enough to alert us if he tries using similar spells. An NSA satellite got a spike of transdimensional energy out of Africa shortly after that, and nothing since.”
I frown at her. “Two things. First of all, the NSA has magic satellites? And second—why didn’t anyone tell me The Big A was in Africa?”
Gretch looks uncomfortable. “Because most likely he isn’t. It’s quite possible he’s no longer in this dimension at all.”
That’s not—I hope—a euphemism for being dead; it means that Ahaseurus has jumped out of this reality and into a completely different one. And since there are literally an infinite number of these alternate worlds, hunting him down has just gone from difficult to impossible.
Gretch sees the look on my face. “It’s not as bad as it seems, Jace. He’s been here long enough to become mystically attuned to this world; a great deal of his power is here. He’ll be back.” She turns the recording on again before I can muster a properly indignant reply.
“The Free Human Resistance comes into contact with many underground groups,” Stoker continues. “That doesn’t mean we endorse all of them, or condone their actions. It just means that we’re all hiding under the same rock, and no one can afford to blow the whistle on anyone else. If we don’t hang together, we’ll hang separately, right?
“But I can’t stay quiet about this, Jace. I just can’t.”
He pauses again, staring just off center of the camera. Collecting his thoughts, or trying to build dramatic tension? I can’t tell.
“Children are … everything. I don’t mean that to sound sentimental, either; it’s just that without a way to reproduce, a race dies. As monstrous as it was, I understand why the pires did what they did at the end of World War Two. It let their species survive. But that kind of global change, affecting that many people—there’s no way to fully understand the consequences, not until they rise up and hit you in the face.
“For one thing, nobody thought about the orphans.”
I glance over at Gretch. She flicks a glance back at me, but that’s all. I know we’re both thinking about Anna.
“The spell that lets pires have children has its dangers, too; even a pire aging at half speed is more vulnerable than a full immortal. Some of those pire parents have died—through accidents or violence—and left their children behind. Stranded in childhood. No parents, no siblings, sometimes no relatives at all. There’s no structure in place to take care of them. A thrope would just be absorbed into another pack, but pires are more solitary by nature.
“It gets worse. Not everyone is cut out to be a parent, and that includes pires. Some of them discover they don’t want to be parents after all, some of them just can’t handle aging after decades or centuries of immortality. Whatever the reason, they decide to rescind the spell—and abandon the child.
“Many of them wind up here, Jace. Vancouver is a dangerous place, a frontier city with little or no law. These children live on the streets, sleep under bridges, steal blood where they can or feed on urban wildlife: pigeons, rats, racoons. They prostitute themselves.
“And this is where they’re stuck, Jace. Forever.”
And now I see something else in his eyes. I’ve seen it before, usually on the faces of cops involved in really bad child-murder cases. Haunted is the only word for it; he’s seen something he can’t unsee, and he’d give just about anything to get it out of his head.
But he can’t. He’s going to have to live with it. There are a number of different methods, most of them unhealthy: booze, drugs, sex, adrenaline, suicide … or going the proactive route and deciding to do something. Get involved, try to change the world so you can prevent that terrible thing from happening again.
It doesn’t surprise me that Stoker would choose the world-changing method. Monster or revolutionary, that’s what he does.
“These children have been disappearing, Jace. The only ones who’ve even noticed are the evil bastards that prey on them. And me. My comrades in the FHR certainly don’t care—which is why I’ve quit.”
“What?” I blurt.
“Intriguing,” Gretch mutters.
“I don’t know who’s taking them, or why—not for sure, anyway. I have some leads, but I no longer have the resources to follow them up myself.
“I know what you’re thinking, Jace. Where’s the proof? How do I know this isn’t just another of Stoker’s elaborate plans?”
He shakes his head. “You can’t, I guess. Who’s to say I’m not the one responsible for this? I have every reason to lie, after all. So I guess I’ll just have to see if you believe someone else.”
He reaches out and grabs the camera, swings it around. It focuses on—
A child.
She looks about eight. Tangled, filthy hair that might be blond. Ragged clothes that don’t fit right. No shoes. The clear green eyes of an angel in a face badly needing soap and water. She’s perched in an armchair with her legs underneath her—not curled up comfortably, more like a wild animal ready to spring.
“Yeah, hi,” she says. “I’m Gertrude. I live in ’Couver, I guess. Five of my friends—Teddy, Jill, Goldy, Big Fred, and Kitty—are missing.” Her diction is clear and definite, with no hesitation. “Aristotle says you won’t believe him, but maybe you’ll believe me. I don’t know. I guess I’m supposed to convince you.” She frowns. “That’s hard. I could show you their stuff, I guess—but that won’t tell you much. Aristotle had a shaman try a locator spell, but it didn’t work. So that means somebody’s hiding them, right?”
She pauses, obviously thinking. “I guess you could get a shaman to see if I’m telling the truth, but then you’d have to come here. I told Aristotle I could visit you, I don’t mind, but he says I can’t do that. The border’s too hard to get across, he says. I knew that already—everybody knows that.”
I didn’t. But then, I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, like detonating my apartment and making my boss disappear into thin air.
“So I don’t know if you believe me.” She stares at the camera like she wishes she could reach right through it and yank us into the room. “But you have to. Please. Okay? They’re my friends and I love them and miss them and they have to come back and be all right.”
She stops then, glaring ferociously at me. If she’d burst into tears I would have felt manipulated, but it’s her sheer determination that reaches into my chest and squeezes.
That’s where the video ends, with her staring at me. I wonder how old she really is, and how good an actress she’s had to become.
Gretch turns back to me. “There was a second file attached to it, with a mobile number in it and nothing else. To contact him once you’re there, I assume. What do you think?”
“About what we just saw?” I shrug. “It’s hard to believe Stoker would walk away from the Free Human Resistance—he’s been
a member his entire life. On the other hand, he’s entirely capable of going it alone if he has to.
“As for Gertrude and what she told us? It didn’t seem rehearsed, or like she was reading from a script. She appeared sincere—but one of the first skills the disenfranchised learn is how to lie effectively. It does dangle some fairly effective bait, though.”
“Yes, I noticed that. If these children are being hidden using sorcerous means, a good forensics shaman would be able to detect the masking spell.”
“But we’d have to investigate personally for that,” I point out.
“So—despite what he originally claimed—he still hasn’t provided us with any hard evidence. Just a story designed to tug at the heartstrings.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “He could say he desperately needs our help to hunt down a cowboy leprechaun riding the last living unicorn, and I’d still go. Whether he’s telling the truth or not, one thing hasn’t changed.”
I get to my feet. “He’s still my only ride home. And this time, I’m not leaving without him.”
THREE
If I’m going, Charlie’s going—I don’t even have to ask. But if we’re taking Stoker’s claim seriously, we need to have a shaman along as well. Looks like Eisfanger’s ammo project will have to wait—though I’m not sure how enthusiastic he’ll be about the Wild West environment of Vancouver.
He surprises me by accepting my offer gladly, even eagerly. “Vancouver!” he chortles, sipping his hot chocolate. We’re down in the NSA cafeteria, strategizing. “I’ve always wanted to go there!”
“Yeah?” I say, gulping down half my cappuccino. “Why haven’t you? It’s what, two, two and a half hours away?”
“Oh, I’ve tried. But the paperwork alone is daunting. Plus, US government employees in the security field are required to travel in pairs—it can be a real bitch to coordinate. But official clearance from upstairs will get us right through!”
