by Battis, Jes
I immediately thought of what Devorah said to Selena. Even if I locked him in the basement, he’d find a way to wiggle out and escape through a window. Suddenly I wanted to bolt the doors and keep Mia from leaving the house until she was twenty. Or maybe never. But I knew better. The kind of shit we were trying to protect her from didn’t find locked doors to be a problem. It could get in if it wanted to. It could always get in. That was why I’d stopped sleeping at night.
“How was school?” I asked her.
“Oh my God, it was amazing. In social studies we learned all about the Mesopotamian empire, and it was like—mmmm—the knowledge just poured into my brain like a magical rainbow.”
I gave her a level look.
“Same as always. I argued with my fascist English teacher, who’s forcing us to read Catcher in the Rye but won’t let me talk about how, like, ridiculously gay it is. And apparently the boys in class are allowed to say ‘bros before hos’ all the time, but when I mention Emma Goldman, it’s like I said a bad word.”
“Can’t you just watch Family Guy like other kids?”
“Seriously? Would it make you feel better if I was normal?”
“We wouldn’t recognize normal if we saw it,” Derrick observed.
“Sometimes, it’s like”—Mia shook her head—“gaaahhh, all I want to do is burn the whole stupid school to the ground. And it’s like, I could, and nobody knows that, and it just drives me crazy!”
Derrick and I both stared at her.
“I wouldn’t do it.”
“You couldn’t,” I corrected. “You don’t have that kind of focus yet.”
“It doesn’t take a lot of focus to burn down a building,” Derrick said.
“Okay, responsible parenting tip number one: When I tell Mia not to burn down the school, you’re supposed to back me up. We need an undivided stance on arson.”
“No to arson,” Derrick said. “Unequivocally.”
“Want a beer?” Mia asked.
“No to underage drinking!”
“Geez, it’s not like I want one. Besides, you buy PBR. That’s just gross.”
Derrick turned to me. “What’s the policy on sending our teenage ward to the kitchen to bring me a beer?”
“I think you should get your own.”
“Yeah.” He rose. “Fair enough.”
I looked hard at Mia.
“What?”
“You’re not drinking, are you?”
“No, I really prefer the powder, Tess.”
“Be serious.”
She laughed in exasperation. “No, I’m not drinking! I’m not smoking pot, or doing any other drugs. I don’t have time—I’m trying to get ready for my AP exams.”
“I thought those weren’t for, like, three years.”
“Hello? I’d like to not go to some state school, thanks. I’m preparing.”
“What about Douglas College?”
“Eww, Dougie Day-Care? Please!” She shook her head. “And UBC is for surfers and burnouts who, like, want to learn creative writing and bang their drums or whatever. I’m thinking Berkeley, maybe Penn State.”
Derrick returned to the living room, handing me a beer. “Those schools are pretty far away,” he said.
“That’s kind of the point.”
“Why must you wound your guardians like this?” Derrick sighed. “After we provide you with the finest in discount clothing and Costco products?”
“You guys have powers. I’m sure you’ll find a way to visit me.”
“It’ll take some magic to afford that tuition,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’m sure the CORE will cough up something. I mean, they’re, like, totally afraid of me, right?”
Derrick and I exchanged a look.
“So,” Derrick said, “have you decided what department you’ll be terrorizing yet?”
She shrugged. “They’re pretty much all the same.”
We were silent for a while after that. I watched the meerkats on television. Derrick sipped his beer, and I stared at mine, still unopened.
“Is Idol on?” Derrick asked.
“In twenty minutes,” Mia replied.
I popped the top off the beer. It was bitter, but nice. Like it should be.
8
I woke up to a message from Lucian Agrado on my voice mail, which was odd, since normally I just got calls from BC Hydro or my mother:Tess. Duessa wants to meet with you tonight, 11 p.m. at the Sawbones. She may have gotten Wolfie to come around. Don’t be late, and go alone. [A pause.] But don’t worry. I think she likes you.
That was supposed to put me at ease? The Sawbones was an infamous pub in the Downtown Eastside that made the Cambie look elegant. It was a known locus for the mystical sex trade in particular, and folks of all persuasions could be seen nursing a beer there, waiting for their fetish to walk by. Mages often had kinks that only a certain type of professional could satisfy, and even less savory demons could get a little touch, if the price was right and the particulars were agreed to in advance. Vampire pimps often facilitated the deals, although some pros still managed to work alone. The sections of the Canadian Criminal Code designed to punish sex workers for “communicating” and pimps for “living off the avails” of prostitution didn’t really extend to places like the Sawbones. There was a police presence nearby, sure, but most cops were afraid to make a bust there. Over the years, it had become—like the Downtown Eastside itself—a gray area.
The next message was from Ben Foster, the head of our DNA lab. Ben was supercilious to a fault, but he knew his job inside and out, and was regularly published in normate forensic journals. He sounded almost—rattled.
Tess, it’s Ben from DNA. I’ve found something on the—ah—coire, or cauldron, left behind at your crime scene. It’s—well, it’s a bit odd. Beyond my purview, I think. You should come down and have a look as soon as you can.
Ben spent most of his time manipulating gel probes of warlock and gargoyle DNA; once, he’d seen a Hydra blood sample spontaneously regenerate and attack one of the interns. If he was describing something to do with Jacob Kynan’s case as “a bit odd,” I needed to get my ass in gear.
I headed to the bathroom for a shower, and found Derrick standing outside in his pajamas, looking defeated.
“Colonized?” I asked him.
“She’s been in there for at least twenty minutes. Can I pee out the window?”
“Just aim away from the garden.” I banged on the door. “Mia! You may have forgotten, but there are other humans living in this house. Humans with biological functions. Derrick is about to embrace public urination.”
“God! Go use the bathroom downstairs!”
“The plumbing still needs to be fixed, and I’m not in the mood to wield a plunger. Just hurry it up, emo.”
“I’ll be done when I’m done.”
“You’ll be done when I come in there and axe-murder you!” Derrick yelled. “And don’t think I can’t read your mind through this door!”
“Ooh, so scared, Jean Grey! What am I thinking right now?”
Derrick concentrated for a moment. Then he scowled. “We really need to stop buying her thesauri. She has a frightening vocabulary.”
“Maybe we should buy a parenting manual,” I suggested. “They might caution against threatening to axe-murder your adopted kid.”
“I was only kidding.”
“No you weren’t!” Mia called back. “I’m dialing social services!”
“Jesus, why did we get her that cell?”
“Because it had lots of weekend and evening minutes.” I sighed. “Okay, I’m using the downstairs bathroom. Wish me luck.”
Derrick made the sign of the cross. “Go with God.”
After fifteen minutes and some creative moves with a plumber’s snake—thanks for the tutorial, Dad—I was off and running for the train. Derrick needed the car, since he was driving Mia to school, and I didn’t relish the thought of waiting for both of those drama queens to get dressed and rea
dy. It’s like, you have three matching pairs of jeans and a million T-shirts that look exactly the same, except for a cool button here and a pocket there—why must it take forty minutes to choose an outfit?
That’s why I woke up early. This ensemble didn’t arrange itself.
Ten minutes later, I’d already spilled coffee on the new brown leather jacket from Zara (luckily it was a coffee-colored shade). The goal was to protect the blouse, at least, since I could always throw the jacket over my shoulder. The train downtown was packed like Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, except that everyone on this train had sideburns and was reading Mc-Sweeney’s. Well, not everyone. There was one pissed-off red-head, furiously scrubbing at a corner of her jacket while balancing a coffee cup on her knees.
Guess who that was?
By the time I got to the lab, residual caffeine had made me jittery, and I was afraid that my pupils might be dilated to scary Amy Winehouse levels. Ben Foster greeted me with a curt nod, which was about all you’d ever get from him. I wondered if his PhD in genetics from Duke had required some sort of complete personality erasure, or the forcible injection of academic bitchiness.
“Tess. Thanks for coming.”
“You used the word ‘odd,’ ” I said, removing my sunglasses. “That’s very bad. It made me move twice as fast.”
“Well, it’s the only descriptor I could think of, to be honest.” He gestured to the nearby computer. “Come take a look.”
There was a copy of D-AFIS running, our more extensive version of the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Indexing System. The print displayed on the screen was slightly fuzzy, and its tented arches and loops seemed to fluoresce with green light, like underwater lichen. Fingerprints are hard to read. The lines and contours of each print form a delicate, dermal calligraphy—loop, whorl, arch, tented arch—and even the prints of identical twins can be different, since minute genetic or stochastic changes occur in the womb. But seeing those differences requires a great deal of expertise, and even our computers get fooled sometimes.
Some demons don’t produce visible prints, since a friction ridge on your fingertip or palm needs oil and amino acids to leave something behind. Not everyone sweats. That’s why we’re often reduced to hunting for aura traces.
“This print looks old,” I said.
“It is. The sample we found was quite degraded. There was also a trace of blood left behind with the print.”
“Not surprising. There was a lot of blood in that hotel room.”
“This blood didn’t belong to Jacob Kynan.”
I stared at him. “You think it’s from the killer? Did you get a hit in D-CODIS?”
“Well—yes, and no.”
“Spit it out, Ben.”
He scratched his head. “The sample was old. Very old. We had to use a Teichmann Test to analyze it.” He smiled as his inner geek was activated. “It’s sort of interesting, actually. You have to heat up the bloodstain, and then you put it next to a solution of glacial acetic acid and chloride. The fumes mix to form these hematin crystals, which look out of this world under the SEM. You know, a few years back I wrote this paper on crystal nucleation for the Journal of Forensic Studies . . .”
I stared at him levelly.
Ben blinked. “Right. Anyways, we did eventually get a hit on D-AFIS, as well as D-CODIS. But it’s not what you think.”
“So what is it?”
Ben tapped a key, and a new window opened on the screen. It was a woman’s mugshot. Grainy and distorted, as if it had been transferred from old film, or maybe even microform. She was young and sporting a black eye, which her curling red hair couldn’t quite obscure. Unlike most mugshots, her expression wasn’t one of defeat, or lip-curling defiance. There was a silent strength in her eyes. A certainty.
“No,” I whispered. “No way.”
She’d obviously looked different when I saw her last. Older. Far more beautiful, with an aura that could burn you alive. But the resemblance was there all the same. Caitlin, the former vampire magnate, had once been this girl who was staring at me with sharp green eyes.
Staring at me, however impossibly, from an arrest record marked June 18, 1908.
“Back then, fingerprinting technology was brand new,” Ben said. “But we started transferring the archival stuff to digital memory about fifteen years ago. Now we use the same WSQ storage system as the FBI, which compresses each image to 500 pixels. This old ten-card came up as soon as we ran it through D-AFIS. Back then, of course, we didn’t have DNA, and ABO-TYPING had only just been invented by Karl Landsteiner. But the police sometimes took samples for what were called ‘venal cases.’ That’s how we got a match through D-CODIS.”
Height and weight measurements were all handwritten in faded script, as well as curious “trunk” and “middle” stats. Under COMPLEXION was written: “sallow.” I half expected to see “opium-eater” penciled somewhere. The charges included pimping, prostitution, and crimes of nature.
“This would have been only a few years after Faurot introduced fingerprinting in New York,” I breathed. “Our records go back that far?”
“This is the CORE,” Ben replied. “I’d be surprised if their records didn’t go back to well before the Flood.”
“Maybe Noah was one of the founding members.” I peered at the faded image. “Caitlin Siobhan. So that’s your real name.”
“The Contagious Diseases Act was on the books in Canada by 1865,” Ben said, “so the police took special care to detain any prostitutes who might be infected. Back then, a client could catch up to five years in jail. And sometimes a flogging.”
I stared at him. “This is crazy. She gets arrested in 1908, and her print ends up at a crime scene literally a century later?”
Ben shrugged. “I don’t know how it got there. But I can tell you this: There’s no way a severely degraded print could survive for that long. With a nonporous surface like cast iron, a print could last fifty, maybe even sixty years. But not a hundred. And not in any condition for us to actually make a match.”
I blinked. “So you’re saying—what—someone got ahold of a hundred-year-old print and stuck it on the cauldron? Planted it? Is that even possible?”
“I guess there are some mediums that a print could survive on for that long. I mean, if the conditions were right—”
“Like, in a museum?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. On some kind of gelatin plate, kept away from the elements—I suppose it might be possible. Quite improbable, though.”
“So, either this print was passed down like a family heirloom—”
“Or,” he said simply.
“Or?”
Ben swallowed. “Or it was taken and kept by someone who knew Caitlin Siobhan when she was still a sex worker. Back in 1908.”
I started to leave a frantic message on Derrick’s cell—mostly just a mix of screaming, profanity, and creative adjectives—but then I thought the better of it and just texted him: Heidi Klum, our agreed-upon holy-shit page. I didn’t want to risk bleeding any case details over the phone. And this was a world-class hemorrhage.
Caitlin Siobhan.
The vampire magnate, whom I hadn’t seen in nearly a year. Not since she’d exiled Sabine, who’d tried to kill me several times. Caitlin, one of the most powerful immortals in the city, who’d vanished immediately afterward, leaving the vampire line of succession in absolute chaos. Leaving a poor seventeen-year-old boy named Patrick lying in a hospital room somewhere.
And there she was. A young, scared sex worker, or maybe even a madam, staring at me from a hundred-year-old arrest record. Not Caitlin the magnate, but just Caitlin, so young and far away. A century-old fingerprint. A tracery of shadow and silver that barely cohered on our monitors.
What happened to her? Did she get bitten after the photo was taken? Maybe she was working for some turn-of-the-century vampire pimp. Of course, back then, we wouldn’t have been able to detect the vampiric viral plasmids in her blood. So she could have already been a vampire. J
ust patiently making her way through the ranks. But she must have pissed someone off. Someone with a very long memory.
I walked along Cordova, wishing I’d worn flats as the pockmarked street sloped down toward Gastown. The Sawbones was at the end of an alley, flanked by an expensive antiques dealer and a tacky tourist gift shop. Beavers and snow globes next to Georgian end tables and rugs that would cost a year’s pay. Vancouver in a nutshell.
The normate crowd knew of this bar’s existence, but anyone who went there was tied to the mystical underground in some way. Nobody was innocent.
There was no glowing sign at the end of the alley, just a door with a rune painted on it. Basically, Welcome, warlocks, necros, liars, thieves, and anyone else looking to get their mystical freak on. I touched the handle and felt an unpleasant tingle move across my body. Much better than a security camera. Materia flows hung like streamers around the door, without even an attempt to hide them. No funny business, and no normates allowed without express invitation.
The door clicked open, and as the air flows designed to conceal the noise inside parted for me to enter, I heard laughing, shouting, and demonic expletives. Some of the languages you might overhear in the Sawbones were mostly all consonants, so even when the demons weren’t pissed off, they still sounded like it. Normally I brought Derrick to translate, but he was spending the night in, and he hated coming here. He claimed that some of the patrons didn’t have “minds” to read, so much as big, gaping black holes of synaptic evil that sucked him in, giving him nightmares.
The décor was not what you’d expect from a paranormal bar. The floors were refinished hardwood mixed with tile, and the bar itself was a stainless steel L with vintage diner stools placed evenly. The space was a warehouse conversion, so tall pillars with their Doric capitals intact supported a bronze-paneled ceiling, and industrial fans moved lazily overhead, recirculating the stale and beer-soaked air. There was no chalkboard with specials—if you didn’t know what you wanted, you shouldn’t be here. And they pretty much had everything, from four-dollar bottles of Canadian to Henbane and Dragonroot on the rocks with a splash of Pepsi Lime.
