by Jes Battis
“It’s awfully late for them to be calling,” Duessa said.
“But we like them because of the flexible hours they keep, remember?” He answered the phone, heading for the door.
“Is he running the House?” I asked her.
“Nearly. I do very little administrative work anymore. I have to tell you, it’s been an enormous relief.”
“You must need a vacation.”
“That only comes when you die. And I’m not quite ready to give up the ghost yet. But it’s nice to have some time off, at least.”
“I already miss my time off,” Derrick said. “I should have pretended that the pain was a lot worse. I was really getting used to sleeping in.”
“Yeah, sorry, buddy.” I patted his shoulder. “Those halcyon days are over now. You’re back in the trenches. Drink up.”
Duessa turned to me. “What were you going to tell me?”
“I can’t recall anything specific.”
“That’s strange. I was almost certain I heard it in your voice.”
It was nearly impossible to lie to her. I exhaled.
“We were interrogating a demon—the same one who attacked Derrick. The demon claimed to know my father.”
Derrick stared at me. “Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You’ve got enough on your plate.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to share plates.”
“I’d rather take my crazy to go. At least for right now.”
“What sort of demon?”
“I’m not allowed to say. I’m sorry. Maybe it was lying. Maybe it just wanted to get a rise out of me. But it didn’t seem like a lie.”
“Your dad was a pureblood, no?”
“I think so. I mean, that’s what my mother told me, although lately she’s become an unreliable source of information.”
“Well, it’s possible. They could run in the same circles.”
“The Iblis knew my father, too. He seems to be quite the popular guy with murderers and assassins.”
“And the manticore,” Derrick said softly. “It seemed to recognize you. It said, She’s something. Maybe it knew your dad as well.”
“Well, I wish we could have a psychotic family reunion, but two of those creatures are already dead. The third’s in a holding cell.”
“That may not last for long,” Duessa said. “I hope it’s under close watch. And very far underground.”
I started to say something. Then I blushed slightly, shaking my head. “Sorry. Never mind. I was about to ask something inappropriate.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well—” I gave Derrick a guilty look. “Is it true that Lord Nightingale used to be the Condessa of Portugal?”
“That gossip is nine centuries old. I imagine Lucito blabbed it to you?”
“He said they hooked up.”
“And you’re jealous.”
“Well. Yes.”
“I’m confused,” Derrick said. “Lucian hooked up with Lord Nightingale, when he used to be a woman?”
“No. He was a guy at the time.”
“Oh.” His eyes widened. “Oh. This must be killing you.”
“Shut up.” I turned back to Duessa. “I’ve got nothing to worry about, right? I mean, they hooked up while they were on vacation. Big deal.”
She chuckled. “Theresa’s a rover. Lucian’s always been just the opposite. When he’s with someone, he’s with them. He’d tell you if something was up.”
“So, wait.” Derrick was still a beat behind us. “He’s Portuguese?”
I sighed, returning my attention to Duessa. “I know I’m just being paranoid. And I mean, realistically, if he likes boys, too—there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Hear, hear.” Derrick took a drink. “Even though they’re all bastards.”
“Yes. In spite of that.”
“He seems to like only you, at the moment,” Duessa said. “I guess you’ll just have to be content with that.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Besides.” She drained her glass. “We’re not all the things we used to be. People change. Nothing can stand in the way of that.”
“We’ll need more beer soon,” Derrick observed.
Duessa looked at me. “You’re paying?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’d be delighted to have another pitcher.”
I stood up, taking out a twenty. “Derrick? Any special shots? I can get you the one with whipped cream again.”
“No. I’m done with blow jobs.”
“That’s a lie, and you know it.”
He sighed. “Get me something that tastes like candy.”
11
I arrived at the lab hungover, but focused. Derrick had agreed to meet me for coffee in the break room. I stifled a yawn as I was swiping my card to get in the building. That would definitely end up being the security snapshot of the day: me with my eyes closed, looking like I’m eating my own fist.
Cindée was examining a tray filled with fragments. They resembled grayish black shards of porcelain. They’d been charred, and bits of soil matrix still clung to them in places. They reminded me of a broken mug, or at least its aftermath. It’s a reality in forensics that we often have to work with small, broken, dirty things.
“There’s glass mixed in there,” Cindée said, “as well as what could be pottery shards. But they also have a faint porosity.”
“Like bone?”
“Possibly. We don’t know yet if they’re mineral or artificial.”
“How far down were they?”
“Less than two meters.”
I looked at the fragments. “They aren’t metal. The GPR only bounced off them because they’re radioactive.”
“They have a fraction of the energy released by a dental X-ray. But because it’s gamma radiation, it registers a lot stronger.”
The lab itself had materia-fed screens, which reconstituted nonexotic forms of radiation into low-band ultraviolet energy. The most I was going to get from these fragments was a mild suntan.
“What sort of trace are we looking for?”
“I doubt we’ll find a fingerprint. The pieces are too small. But we might find a few lazy amino acids still hanging around. We’ll bake the materia at a steady temperature. The charring may reveal something.”
I spaced out for a second. When I came back, Cindée was saying something about using a wet powder suspension on the fragments.
“Where’dja go, sweetheart?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I need a coffee.”
“Don’t taunt me.”
“Do you want one?”
“Nah. I just had my break, and I’m jittery as it is. Thanks, though.”
“Should I tell Selena something about the . . . wet powder suspension?”
Cindée grinned. “That’s not necessary. It’s kind of a Byzantine process, if you want to know the truth. Just tell her the fragments are being thoroughly analyzed. Oh—and Linus had a message for her. It’s on a Post-it he left.”
“Damn. I thought I was the only one using Post-its.”
“No, he pretty much invented it.” She pulled the Post-it off the keyboard and handed it to me. It read:
Boss, if you want me to run a Refractive Index test on any glass from the debris, we need to update our GRIM software. This will cost 1200.00.
“Really? I get to be the one who gives her this?”
“Just slip it under a file. She’ll notice it after you’ve left.”
“We’re awful employees.”
Cindée shrugged. “She has better things to worry about than a software update. And we don’t really need it tonight. But Linus will feel better if he knows that his request was delivered in due course.”
“You’re good, woman.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve survived this long.” She rapped her knuckles against the counter. “Knock on Pyrex.”
I headed for the break room. As I walked down the hallway, I notice
d that the door to Selena’s office was closed. I made sure that nobody was looking, then stuck the Post-it note to her office door. I needed Linus on my side as well.
Derrick was already sitting on the couch, unpacking something that smelled amazing. Patrick and Mia were both with him. When Mia saw me, she instantly rose and grabbed my arm. “Oh, my God, we need to talk right now.”
I followed her back into the hallway.
“Okay. Sorry; this is important.”
“I really just want to sit down and relax. The four of us are hardly ever in the same room anymore.”
“I know—we’re a broken family, et cetera. I don’t care. I’m talking about something far more important.” She lowered her voice. “Patrick got a tattoo.”
I walked past her. “Show it to me,” I said.
Patrick sighed. Then he lifted up his shirt slightly. There was a vampiric rune, red and blue, inked just below his navel.
“It’s my original mark, from the Magnate,” he said. “I just had it filled in, so that it’s more visible.”
“I don’t think you need to be outing yourself as a paranormal right now.”
“That’s kind of self-hating, don’t you think?”
I sat down. “Fine. I have no sensible advice for you. Just do whatever you feel like from now on.”
Derrick handed me a plate of chow mein.
“Is this from Sky Dragon?”
“It is.”
“How did you get them to deliver downtown?”
“I paid them a lot of money. Now, eat your noodles.”
“Mmm. They’re so fat. And there’s so many of them.”
“He got the tattoo at Sacred Heart,” Derrick said.
I stared at Patrick. “You went to a normate tattoo parlor and asked them to touch up your vampire rune?”
“I heard the girl there had really steady hands.”
“You had a crush. Shocking.”
“I chose her based on her reputation.”
“Uh-huh. I absolutely believe that.”
“I’m over eighteen.”
“You are. Which means”—I pointed a fork speared with noodles at him—“you get to make your own dumbass decisions.”
Patrick sat down, grabbing a plate. “Thanks. I think.”
“I think it’s kind of cool,” Mia said. “He’s proud of his heritage. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, right?”
“I just don’t want him to attract too much attention. He can wear his pride on the inside, but it’s quite another thing to brand himself.”
“Isn’t it like getting a rainbow tattoo?”
“Those aren’t especially attractive, either,” Derrick said.
The last thing I wanted to talk about right now was vampire pride. Mia was already curious as hell about Patrick’s “heritage,” as she called it. The problem was that her power and her vampire DNA were inseparable. If we tried to access one, we risked increasing the strength of the vampiric viral plasmids, which meant potentially losing a part of what made Mia who she was.
You must want to remember what happened.
I could have asked the same thing of Mia that I’d asked of Ru. So much about her life before the last five years was still buried, including the identity of her real parents. That was a secret that both Marcus Tremblay and Sabine Delacroix had taken with them to the grave (and, in Sabine’s case, to whatever alien shore awaited her after undeath).
“Tess?”
I looked at Mia. The expression on her face made my skin go cold.
This is it, I thought. She’s really going to say it. “I’m becoming a vampire, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
I swallowed. “What is it?”
“Don’t forget about your Dr Pepper.”
I smiled. “Thanks for remembering.”
“It was Patrick who remembered, actually. But I was the one who remembered that you didn’t like the vanilla flavor. Which averted a potential disaster.”
“You’re my hero,” I said. And it was true. “Why are you and Patrick both here, by the way? Did you really want Chinese food that bad?”
Derrick gave me a look. “Okay. Don’t freak. Selena asked Patrick if he’d be willing to examine the Kentauros demon.”
“Examine it how?”
“She wants me to smell it,” Patrick said. “She called it ‘olfactory trace detection.’ Maybe it’ll have some kind of bacteria that I’ll be able to distinguish or something.”
“Maybe it has a specific body odor,” Mia said. “And you get to identify that. How lucky does that make you?”
“Shut up.”
Selena popped her head into the break room. “Oh, Patrick, you’re here already. That’s good. Come with me.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere yet.” I turned to Selena. “Are you seriously going to put him in the same room as Basuram?”
“No. We’re putting him in the room next to the demon’s cell. The two of them can communicate by microphone.”
“I should be able to smell it through the walls,” Patrick said. “Modred’s been teaching me how to maximize my sense potential. He’s really nasal at the moment. So we’ve been smelling a lot of things together.”
I glared at Selena. “Were you even going to tell me about this?”
“I sent you two texts about it.”
“When?”
“Forty minutes ago, when I first had the idea.”
I looked down at my phone. It was pretty much a warzone of unanswered text messages, e-mails, and BBMs. I felt like I’d put it down for only a moment, but suddenly, I couldn’t remember when I’d last looked at it. I felt real panic. I’d become so conditioned by its regular updates that I feared missing anything, even a relevant Facebook announcement.
I got up. “Okay. I dropped the ball on that one. I’m still concerned, though. I don’t even like the fact that these two are in the same building, and you want to put them practically in the same cell.”
“In adjoining cells,” she repeated. “Both heavily reinforced. Neither of them are even going to get a look at each other.”
“Are you kidding? You have no idea if the Kentauros demon can see through walls. Can we at least disguise Patrick’s voice?”
“Yes. He’ll have a filter.”
“Like a real informant,” Patrick said. “It’s kind of cool.”
“No. This is not cool. It’s dangerous and unnecessary. And with all due respect, Selena, it pisses me off that you want to use him like this.”
“She’s not using me,” Patrick snapped. “I wanted to help. It also helps me focus my powers, and I need to learn more. It’s good experience.”
“He is right,” Selena said. “Although, touché about me being nasty and going over your head. I understand that Patrick’s old enough to be making his own decisions, but you and Derrick are also an important part of his life. I assure you, I don’t plan to put him in any significant danger. And there’s the real possibility that Basuram might let something slip.”
“I can also take care of myself,” Patrick said.
“Aww.” Mia sighed. “I remember when I used to think that. Then I woke up with my hands tied behind my back, and watched a guy get blown away, right in front of me. Now I just kind of assume that things are going to go south right away.”
“You probably get that from me,” I said.
“For the record,” Selena added, “Derrick already chewed me out about this very issue, twenty minutes ago.”
I looked at him. “Had you had coffee first? What kind of mood were you in?”
“I was curt,” Derrick said. “But respectful. In the end, though, I agreed with all of her points. I don’t think Patrick’s going to be in any immediate danger, and really, there’s no one else with his sensory abilities—at least, no one who’d be willing to work for us. It’s a bit of a win-win.”
“I’d just like to point out,” Mia said, eyes glued to her phone, “that nobody invited me here for anything. I came beca
use I was very bored, and Derrick promised that we’d go to Spartacus Books, after the smelling’s over.”
“You’re picking up a Marxist tract?”
“They have good ’zines. And I know the ‘moment’ of ’zines has already come and gone, or whatever, but I still like them.”
“Are ’zines over? I hadn’t realized.”
“They were pretty much over once you heard about them, Tess.”
“Ouch. You’re in a fine vapor today.”
“Sorry. I guess that was low even for me.”
“We’re going now,” Selena said. “Derrick, you’re not coming near Basuram again, for obvious reasons.”
“Understood,” he said. “I’ll chill with Mia.”
“Oh, can we chill? Like actual thugs?”
“Good luck with that,” I said.
The three of us left and took the elevator down to the level where Basuram had been relocated. It got distinctly colder as we hit the basement level. The lights were dim, and our shoes echoed on the hard floors.
“How many demons are kept down here?” Patrick asked.
“Depends if you’re counting the employees or not,” Selena replied. “Basuram is the only demon currently incarcerated. This facility was only designed for shortterm holding purposes.”
“Should I be nervous about this?” Patrick asked me.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a little nervous. But Selena’s right. The two of you will be segregated. You’ll be able to sense each other without seeing each other, and Basuram won’t ever hear your real voice.”
Linus met us at the cell door. He ushered us in, then retreated. “The audio’s set up. All Patrick has to do is speak into the microphone.”
“Thanks, Linus,” Selena said. “You can lock us in.”
Linus shut the door to the cell. “I’ll be out here recording.”
“You know what to do if something goes awry.”
“Yeah. I’ll get my ass out of here.”
Selena exhaled. “Do at least try to sound the alarm as you’re running in the opposite direction.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
I sat down next to Patrick. Selena remained standing.
“Should I say something?” Patrick asked.
“Not yet,” Selena said. “Just reach out with your senses. Tell us whatever you manage to pick up.”
