by Chris Vola
It was thought—based on a few photocopied documents and diagrams that looked similar to Arthur’s drawings—that there were eight of them. Two of the jaguars had been in Manhattan since before the colonial period, and another four had been purchased by the tribe over the last decade from museums and private collections.
What would happen when all of the statues were brought together was anyone’s guess. Individually they possessed a strange energy, the magnetic pull Ryan had felt outside the Brooklyn Museum and again when he’d removed Arthur’s jaguar from the cemetery. The Manhattan tribe knew, as Arthur had, that the statues had been used by the Lenape to allow dead warriors to travel, that the statues also served a wartime purpose, but no one had been able to figure out what that was. And furthermore, it seemed that no one who had come in contact with one of them, whether human or Ànkëlëk-ila, had been able to touch it without extensive bodily damage. There were photographs of charred fingers, wrists with hands no longer attached to them. There had been more than a few casualties. Maybe Vanessa and other younger members of the tribe were being ordered to turn people simply so that there would be new fodder for experimentation. After everything Ryan had read so far, it didn’t seem out of the question.
But regardless of the tribe’s ultimate intentions, there was still the issue of obtaining the remaining two statues.
The Manhattan tribe knew about Arthur Harker, that much was clear. The name had been mentioned in numerous cryptic e-mails with short, bullet-point paragraphs like “Last known Harker address (230 Frost Street) searched and scanned, new construction on lot, no promising ground radar results.” It was clear that they knew he’d left Brooklyn. They also knew that he’d turned someone before leaving, someone they’d been trying to find for at least the last few years—“Authorize status of probe re: Harker progeny location,” “Re: transmission of file including likely age/gender/alias of Arthur Harker heir with composite photographs.” If Frank had played a role in revealing Ryan’s identity, as Ryan was sure he had, there was strangely no mention of him in any of the correspondence.
There was another name that kept coming up in the documents, one that was unfamiliar to him: Xansati, a word that, according to Derrick’s handwritten notes, meant “older brother” in Lenape. There were notes confirming Skype calls with Xansati, making sure Xansati was being kept up to date about certain investigations or meetings with military officials, waiting for Xansati’s guidance regarding how to proceed on a wide range of critical-sounding matters.
Maybe Xansati was another name for the Committee, what Derrick would have called “in-group terminology.” Or maybe it was a smaller, older group within the Committee, or the group that had caused the split in leadership that Vanessa had talked about. The information Ryan had at his fingertips wasn’t enough to make him feel confident in any guess.
The last page of the packet was bare except for a color photograph of a man getting out of a black Cadillac Escalade, phone pressed against his bronze-colored cheek. Ryan knew him. It was the dead warrior who had absorbed the bullet in the basement of the processing facility, the guy who he’d seen with Nicki. Below the picture was one word in all caps that had been underlined three times in Derrick’s red ink: XANSATI.
Derrick had done his research. And now Ryan had a definitive target.
He closed the packet and flung it across the table. He took a deep breath and took another swig of bourbon. Besides the bottle, the only thing left in front of him was the scroll that Vanessa had allegedly taken from his knife.
He carefully unraveled the fragile piece of yellowed parchment. Spread out, it was a little smaller than a standard sheet of computer paper, its edges brown and crumbling. There were drawings of three humanlike figures in a row, encircled by a seemingly random assortment of circular and triangular shapes. The figure on the left looked exactly like the ones from Arthur’s other drawing, a dead warrior holding a statue in his hand, his neck craning skyward, his face calm yet resolute. The figure in the center—most likely the same one—was depicted head-on, cradling the statue with both hands and pressing it against its chest. In the third and final image, the figure had raised both of its arms above its head but the statue was still affixed to its chest, surrounded by what appeared to be a halo of light. Smaller beams were shooting outward from the halo, most of them in the direction the figure was pointing.
“Finding out anything interesting?” a voice asked, softly. She was leaning over Ryan, her mouth inches from the back of his head.
Ryan shot out of the chair he’d been sitting in and lashed out, an automatic reflex, landing a direct elbow blow to her sternum. Vanessa didn’t flinch; she smiled while he bent over the dining table and glared at her, trying to stop his heart from leaping out of his chest.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he managed to stammer after a few moments of catching what little breath he had left, steadying his whiskey-wobbling legs. “How did you get in here? How long have you been watching me?”
“Long enough to know that you’ve been wading knee-deep in some serious shit for the last few hours,” she replied. “Your jaw looked like it was going to explode. I’m sorry. I brought you dinner.”
She placed a plastic bag on the table and walked into the kitchen. The aroma that assaulted his nostrils was mouthwatering, notes of soy and garlic, possibly something from the Korean place they’d passed earlier on Bleecker Street. He almost allowed himself to be consumed by the smell until Vanessa returned and sat across from him, gripping a blood-filled Evian bottle. She was wearing the same tank top she’d had on earlier at the restaurant, the same skintight distressed jeans, but something was different. Her hair looked like it had been combed and intentionally tossed to one side. She had on pink-tinted lip gloss and thick winged eyeliner that made her look like a 1950s pinup girl, minus the plastic that had reshaped her once-beautiful features.
“Cheers,” she said, pushing the three-quarters-empty Old Grand-Dad bottle in his direction.
Ryan sat back down and took a long pull, and the worst part of his anger subsided. It was back to business, the only business that mattered. “Who is Xansati?” he asked.
Vanessa’s eyes widened as she sipped from the bottle. “You have been doing your research,” she said after she’d swallowed and wiped her lips. “He’s the oldest member of the tribe, the oldest living thing in Manhattan, unless there’s a tree somewhere that I don’t know about. He was old before the Dutch came here.”
“So he’s Lenape?”
She nodded. “The son of a chief or the head shaman, or something like that. Royalty. I’ve only met him in person a couple of times. He stays uptown, way uptown, since the disagreement with the Committee. It’s almost like he’s started his own tribe.”
“I’ve seen him twice,” Ryan said. “I saw him in an apartment near the High Line, south of the Lincoln Tunnel, fucking the girl I was following, the one I told you about. Then I saw him at the processing facility. I shot him point-blank in the head and he shook it off like it was nothing.”
“That’s impossible,” Vanessa said. “As far as I know, he hasn’t left Harlem in months. He owns the processing facility, uses it to feed himself and the ones who decided to follow him, maybe twenty of them. The rest of us get our blood from donors now, we’re trying to be as humane as possible. That’s why I could take you from the facility without any repercussions from the Committee. They’d probably be happy if I burned it down.”
Ryan rolled his eyes. “Apparently there’s a lot you don’t know. What about the military contracts? The experiments on humans? On your own kind? The jaguar statues you’ve been buying and stealing for years? You’re going to tell me that this Xansati guy has been acting alone?”
“The ancient vessels?” she asked. “Of course I know about them. Everyone does. They’re the relics of the original people. But the Committee stopped those experiments years ago. No one was able to figure out how to use them. They’re with Xansati now. They were the only things
besides the processing facility that he kept in the divorce.”
“Why was there a divorce in the first place, especially after so many years?”
Vanessa gave Ryan an exasperated glare. “I wasn’t in the room,” she snarled. “I assume he was sick of having to share power with a bunch of white venture capitalists. Caucasian males can be insufferable, or so I hear. No, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, it was stupid. As fascist as living under the Committee might seem, at least there’s a safety net. There’s a support network in place in case something like Derrick Rhodes happens. He’s forfeited that.”
Ryan took a pull from the bottle. “I’m sorry for the interrogation. I just need to know that Xansati is the one responsible for killing Jennifer. I need to be certain.”
“If you’re certain that the picture of Jennifer was taken in the processing facility in the last few weeks, then it’s fairly obvious that he’s the one who did it. Or more likely someone working for him. But you aren’t going to be able to kill him by coming at him directly. You need to relax, clear your head. Take some time and figure out another way.” She took a long sip from the water bottle, began to stroke her hair. “I have a mandatory one-on-one with a member of the Committee tomorrow. I think he’s going to give me another assignment. He might also be able to help give us some answers, as long as I ask the right questions.”
“I don’t need any more help,” Ryan muttered, starting to slur his words. “You’ve helped me enough.”
Vanessa stood up and placed the now-empty water bottle on the table. She walked over to Ryan, a mischievous half smile flickering across her face. She pulled on the back of the chair he was sitting in, sliding it and him across the floor as if he were weightless. She moved in front of him and sat down, pressing her face against his, her legs straddling his lap. Ryan could smell the iron reek of blood on her lips. He tried to sit up, but he was paralyzed by her weight and the alcohol.
“I haven’t forgotten that you saved my life,” she said softly, rubbing his cheek with her fingers. “I didn’t realize how much I missed you until I watched you sleeping yesterday. It brought back so many good memories, the good times we shared so long ago. I would do anything for you. I would even turn you, but I don’t know if I’m mom enough to handle twins.”
“I’d never let you,” Ryan said, trying to hold back the coughing spell he knew was coming. “I’d kill myself first. I’m done with tribes. I’m done with all of it.”
“I know you are,” she cooed, “but I still want to try to make you happy, even if it’s just for tonight, even if it’s just for a few moments.”
She kissed him with her unnaturally hard lips, silencing his protests. Whatever she was trying to do, he wasn’t in the mood. He wasn’t that kind of drunk. He tried to push her away and after a few seconds she let him, as if he were being a petulant child and she were humoring him temporarily. She started tugging at the straps of her tank top.
“You said you were going out to talk to people,” Ryan said, trying to kill whatever passion had possessed her, as she ground her hips into him. “Did you figure anything out? Like, why you had to turn someone? Where’s Karl?”
“Nothing worthwhile,” she said. “Which is why it’s good that they’re calling me in. In the morning we’ll find out everything you could ever want to know. But let’s worry about tomorrow … tomorrow.”
She pulled off the tank top and tossed it into the living room and guided Ryan’s hands to the exposed part of her hips, then up her slim stomach and onto small, pert breasts that had surprisingly been spared the scalpel, or whatever Karl had used to carve into her face.
“I can’t, I…” Ryan stammered. He was sweating, shivering, too weak and too intoxicated to stop her. Everything started moving in slow motion, then stop-motion, a series of dreamlike snapshots. He saw her pulling him out of the chair, across the room, pushing him onto the couch. There were a few moments of sunken silence when he thought it might be over, but then she was on top of him again, pants removed, lifting his shirt over his head, kneading her face against his chest and neck, grating his back with her fingernails.
This isn’t what I need right now. Ryan tried to form the words, but nothing came out. Instead, he arched his torso and sank deeper into the couch under Vanessa’s weight, flinching as she bit the space between his neck and shoulder.
At some point he heard what sounded like a vague hydraulic hiss and assumed in his stupor that it was his own body liquefying, that maybe there had been some remnants of the DXT spray in Vanessa’s mouth. But that was wrong. The sound had come from across the room. Vanessa paused and lifted her head, but before she could turn to look at what had caused it, something grabbed her by the hair, lifted her off Ryan, and flung her onto the floor, where she crumpled in a lanky, naked heap.
The sudden release of pressure sent Ryan into a fit of uncontrollable coughing. He closed his eyes and rode out the spell. When he opened them, a woman was standing over him in the dimmed track lighting, her mouth twisted in a scowl of pain and anger, her blue eyes wide in either terror or disgust. Her cheeks and neck and wavy chocolate-brown hair were covered in maroon patches of caked blood, her T-shirt was in tatters, and her fingers were pink and raw, as if the skin had just reclaimed them. Behind her, the door to the containment chamber had been flung open. Ryan could just make out what looked like the outline of two bodies piled, one on top of the other, in the chamber’s darkness, could smell the sharp odor of decay that had suddenly seeped into the apartment.
The woman took a step forward. Ryan looked at her face again and this time his overnumb synapses began to fire in a surge of recognition, shocking him upright.
It was Jennifer.
She opened her mouth and released a prolonged, high-pitched cry that seemed to tear at Ryan’s insides, stunning him further. He watched helplessly as she moved past the kitchen toward the apartment’s main entrance, letting out a series of softer shrieks that were no less disturbing.
She opened the door and dashed into the hallway before Ryan could move from the couch and before Vanessa could pick herself up from the floor.
Then she was gone.
26
“Everything was a blur,” Jennifer murmured as she paced back and forth from the spiral staircase to a few feet from the couch were Ryan was sitting. She clutched the belt of the bathrobe that Vanessa had given her to wear when she’d returned from her wandering. “It was like I was there the whole time, but I wasn’t.”
She paused to look at her reflection in the turned-off TV screen. She ran her hand through hair that was still wet from the shower she’d just taken, and over a face that looked, deceptively, like it always had, before the hood was placed over her head. Before she’d succumbed to a weeklong darkness she couldn’t explain or piece together, the shards of an out-of-body nightmare, the pain and starvation that seemed too intense to be real. She muttered something to herself and resumed pacing.
“You sure you don’t want to sit down?” Ryan asked; her frenetic movements were making him nervous. He wanted to embrace her, to tell her that the intensity of the changes she’d experienced would be decreasing, that soon she would begin to acclimate to her new life, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He and Vanessa had spent the last two hours explaining to her what had happened to her, the inadvertent role he had played, and the basics of what it meant to be a dead warrior, what she could expect from here on out. But her turning had been so unbelievably different from his that it was difficult to relate to anything that she’d gone through.
Except for the hunger.
Jennifer continued pacing for another minute before sighing and collapsing in exasperation on the couch next to Ryan. She leaned forward, cupping her head in her palms. “I can’t believe the door was unlocked the entire time,” she said, briefly glancing up at the entrance to the containment chamber. “I just had to figure out how to use the handle, but all I wanted to do was—”
“Eat,” Ryan said, finishing her sen
tence. He placed his hand on the small of her back and she flinched, violently. Her fists clenched. He let go of her, but not because he cared what happened to his own life. She had been operating from a place of pure aggression for long enough and needed to come back to reality, as completely fucked up as that reality now seemed to her. Attacking him would only prolong her metamorphosis.
Vanessa walked into the room from the kitchen, where she had been talking quietly with Karl, holding a glass filled with blood. “It’s AB negative,” she said, with an uncharacteristically cheerful lilt in her voice. Maybe, Ryan thought, she was trying to sound motherly. “Try it,” Vanessa coaxed. “You’ll love it.” She handed the glass to Jennifer and took a seat on a chair across the room.
Jennifer sniffed the blood, took a sip, then another, her eyebrows arching in pleasant surprise. She put the glass down on the coffee table in front of her, turned, and stared at Ryan. “I don’t think I’ve hated anyone more than when I came out of the room and saw you with her.” She nodded in Vanessa’s direction without looking at her. “The first person I recognized since I came out of the … fog, and I wanted to tear you apart. I needed to run out of here, immediately, or I would have done it. I could have kept running, maybe should have, but once I walked around the block a few times and calmed down a little, something drew me back here. Maybe it was curiosity. Or maybe—I can’t believe I’m actually saying this—there’s some kind of mind control thing going on that you guys haven’t told me about yet, some kind of mystical, unbreakable bond between me and my, uh, maker.”
Ryan chuckled. “This isn’t some old B movie,” he said. “I’d go with option A.”
“No, it’s not,” Jennifer snarled, not joining in the levity. “I should still want to kill you, especially for not warning me about what you were. But when it comes down to it, I never would have believed you. I would have chalked it up as one more ridiculous, commitment-phobic excuse.”
