Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “Almost.” Dino’s voice is very flat, very cold, all the Mediterranean charm drained out of it. He got what he wanted, and he doesn’t have to pretend to be polite anymore. “There’s still the little matter of the Don.”

  “What? I did what you asked me—”

  “No. You were supposed to have a little talk with him, feel him out. What you did was drive him over the edge.”

  “Hey, I am not responsible for your Dogfather flipping out—”

  “You know who those four men were? The ones you just talked to?”

  I know exactly who they must be, but I’m not in a cooperative mood. “A barbershop quartet that forgot to pay their light bill?”

  “Those were four of the heads of the Five Families. Don Falzo being number five. And now he’s out in the world, running around with a skull full of crazy, and I’m the one that’s got to hold things together until we resolve this.”

  “Isn’t that what we just did? Can’t you remove him from power now?”

  Dino scowls at me. “No. There are rules, a procedure that has to be followed. He’s got to be brought back and put down—until then, nothing can be decided. And you’re the one who’s going to do it.”

  I stare at him in disbelief. “Looks like he’s not the only one that’s short a few aces in his deck. Why should I—”

  “Because if you don’t, we’ll kill you.” Dino meets my eyes calmly, not bothering to ramp up the scary. He doesn’t have to. “And your friends. And your family. And your little dog, too.”

  FOUR

  And then they take me and Anna home.

  I’ve got a lot to think about on the drive back. A lot of it is pointless revenge fantasies about what I’d like to do to Dino with a silver meat cleaver, but I force myself to calm down and strategize.

  It’s obvious why they want me to catch the Don—I’m the one with loads of experience hunting homicidal lunatics. If I fail, Dino has a ready-made scapegoat to publicly slaughter, and if I succeed he can take all the credit. Basic office politics, applicable in the boardroom and the back room.

  They drop me off in front of my building, and I get Anna inside and upstairs just before the first rays of dawn creep over the horizon. In typical toddler fashion, she’s fallen asleep again. I put her down in the play yard set up in the living room and sink onto the couch.

  Galahad pads out of the bedroom. With the sunrise he’s become a big brown-and-white St. Bernard, no longer able to pee standing up but compensating for it by generating prodigious amounts of drool. Not really a fair trade, in my opinion.

  He comes over, sniffs at the play yard, then puts his head on my lap and gazes at me soulfully. “Thanks, big guy,” I say. “Frankly, I could use a little support. How are you at chasing down renegade Mafia Dons?”

  He licks my hand, which I take to mean, I have no idea what you’re talking about but I love you. It helps.

  And now I have to figure out what to do.

  The first and most attractive option is massive retaliation. Threaten an NSA agent and you’re essentially threatening the intelligence agency charged with keeping the United States safe. One brief conversation with my boss and I can have that whole estate overrun with cold-eyed professional soldiers who make the Don’s men seem like pimply-faced high school bullies. If I happen to mention that Anna was along for the ride, they might just burn the whole thing to the ground to make a point.

  But that’s not going to get Dr. Pete back.

  I can’t really let the NSA know what’s happening until after Tair lives up to his end of the deal. Then I can call in reinforcements—but not before.

  Looks like I’m going back to prison.

  Gretchen shows up about fifteen minutes later. Gretchen is blond, British, and a pire. She’s also an NSA intelligence analyst, one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and a very good friend.

  She’s already shed her UV-resistant mask, goggles, and gloves by the time I answer the door. “Hello,” she says. “How’s the little nightcrawler?”

  “Fast asleep. Went through three bottles and two naps.”

  She strides inside, leans over the edge of the play yard, and sighs. “Good God,” she murmurs. “She’s so perfect, isn’t she?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. When it comes to her child, all the other things Gretch is fade away and she’s just a mom. A mom who knows about fifteen different ways to kill you with her bare hands, but just as gooey-eyed and sentimental as every parent is when looking at the love of their life. Me, I have to make do with a dog.

  She asks me the usual questions about feeding and diaper changes and so on, and I don’t have to lie to her once. That’s good, because Gretch is far, far too experienced at picking up on the slightest thread of falsehood.

  “How did things go at Stanhope?” she asks.

  I tell her. “So apparently the Don is loopy. I’ve agreed to do an evaluation for them later today—I can’t really see any downside to it.”

  “Make sure you take appropriate precautions.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Nothing to worry about.”

  Which is how, a little less than five hours later, I find myself in a room at the Tsubaki Grand Shrine School, observing a Shinto ritual being performed by a vampire on a werewolf.

  Shinto is big on Thropirelem, though it’s evolved into something considerably different from the Japanese religion I’m familiar with. Here it’s a magic system, one based on an intricate bureaucracy of deities, spirits, and ancestors. It’s animistic in nature, which means one of its central tenets is the belief that everything has a soul: people, animals, plants, weather, even rivers and mountains. The Shinto on my world relies on praying to these spirits and hoping they do you a favor; here it’s less about sucking up and more about negotiation. A high-powered Shinto priest is essentially a wizard, with various forces of nature at his command.

  The one in the center of the room is a man named Julian Wiebe, a pire with wispy blond hair wearing a loose white robe belted with a wide red sash. He’s kneeling before a small stone shrine shaped like a miniature pagoda, while Tair—somewhat incongruous in his bright orange prison jumpsuit—kneels beside him. I’m standing just inside the door, observing.

  Tair’s not wearing manacles, which makes me nervous. Julian insisted they be removed because they’d interfere with the ritual, and I had no choice but to agree.

  I know Julian Wiebe through his brother, Helmut, a bail jumper who once took me hostage for all of two minutes. After a bounty hunter named Silverado hauled Helmut’s sorry, Cloven-dealing ass back to jail, I had Gretchen verify Julian’s story that he’d been trying to get his brother back on the straight and narrow; when it proved to be true, I’d pulled a few strings and helped Helmut get a reduced sentence. Julian had been grateful—and gracious—enough to thank me by offering me the use of his dojo. The Tsubaki School is in Granite Falls, a little too far from Seattle to drive on a regular basis, but I had gone out once or twice; Julian’s head of Aikido Studies there, and we’d even sparred a few times. He took it easy on me, for which I was grateful—a pire is hard to beat in a fight as it is, but fighting a pire with martial arts training is like trying to hit lightning with a Wiffle bat.

  So why am I nervous? I’ve got armed guards outside the door. I’ve got a high-powered sorcerer and aikido master keeping a lid on things. My own .454-caliber insurance is slung in a holster under my arm. Everything’s under control.

  Uh-huh.

  The air is heavy with the smell of burning incense. Julian is chanting in a regular, sonorous voice, an invocation for the Spirit of Beneficent Restructuring to intercede on our behalf. When I said the Shinto spirit-realm was a bureaucracy, I wasn’t kidding; the whole thing is intricately layered in a hierarchy that covers everything from bacteria to the sun. The Spirit of Beneficent Restructuring is apparently a popular guy in corporate circles.

  But what we want him to do here is restructure not only memory, but a little bit of time itself. To take Dr. Pete�
��s memories from the last moment they actually existed, and bring them into the here and now. Normally the present is continually overwriting the past, but Julian is going to try to subvert that, getting the historical to impose itself on the current—bringing in a ghost to repossess the body it once inhabited.

  Bringing back Dr. Pete, and killing Tair.

  Okay, it’s not really murder. Magic created Tair and magic will uncreate him, but it still feels like a coldblooded execution to me. I’m trying to view it as a medical procedure, like removing a brain tumor that’s changed someone’s personality, but it’s not working. Tumors don’t generally make passes at you.

  The chanting stops. I can feel something electric in the air, a building charge of mystic energy. Without a word, Tair and Julian pivot on their knees so they’re facing each other. Julian places one hand against Tair’s chest, palm flat and fingers spread, and the other on his forehead. A white light begins to emanate from where Julian’s skin touches Tair’s.

  Time stops. I mean it literally freezes—all sound, all motion just ends, like somebody hit the PAUSE button on a really high-quality TV.

  And then it starts going backward.

  Julian warned me about this beforehand, but it’s still kind of a shock. The weirdest part is how it feels; you might not think you’d notice the difference between the blood flowing in your veins one way and then flowing the other, but you do. I can hear Julian chanting in reverse, which will apparently stop once he gets to the beginning of the ceremony—

  But he never reaches it.

  The ritual trappings of magic are usually just methods of focusing the user’s will, and past experience has shown me that Tair has plenty of that. Which is how he somehow manages to raise his hand, knocking Julian’s away from his chest.

  The effect is immediate and explosive. A flare bright enough to sear retinas bursts from the broken connection, the whole world going an agonizing white. Time remains suspended, and in the eternal instant that follows I realize that Tair’s eyes were closed.

  And then everything shudders forward again, like a train jerking a line of boxcars into motion. All I can see are dancing spots, but I go for my gun just the same.

  It’s not there anymore. Pires are fast, but thropes are no slowpokes, either.

  The spell that makes it impossible to take firearms in this reality seriously affects Tair the same way it does everyone else—so he uses it to club Julian instead. It’s not easy to coldcock a pire with something that isn’t made of silver or wood, but the backlash from the interrupted spell has already knocked Julian for a loop; being smacked between the eyes by a desperate thrope wielding a few pounds of cold steel is enough to knock the priest out for the next hour.

  I reconstructed all this later, of course. At the time, I was still trying to blink away the damn spots in front of my eyes and yelling my head off for the guards to get in there.

  Stupid. That was exactly what he wanted.

  My vision’s still blurry, but I can see that Tair’s shifted into half-were mode, a snarling, six-and-a-half-foot wolfman with claws as long as his fangs. He doesn’t seem to have my gun anymore, but he’s picked up the stone shrine itself and pitches it overhand at the guard charging through the doorway, smashing the lem out of the room and into the hall.

  The other guard, a thrope, has his bow drawn and ready. He does his best to put a silver-tipped shaft into his target’s heart, but Tair’s already moved, putting me in between him and the guard. That’s not going to work for long—

  And then I feel something very, very sharp slice through the fabric of my pants, on the inside of my thigh.

  I look down. There’s a thin line of red getting thicker every second, blood welling up from the deep cut. Tair’s just slashed open my femoral artery with his claw.

  It’s a fatal wound. Without medical assistance I’ll bleed out in minutes. I look up at Tair in shock.

  Save her or chase me, he signs to the guard. Your choice.

  And then he bounds straight through one of the ricepaper walls.

  Gone.

  FIVE

  Twelve hours later I’m standing in front of my boss, David Cassius, trying to explain myself. I’d really rather be sitting—my stitches hurt like hell—but some combination of guilt and stubborn pride won’t let me.

  Cassius stares at me with an unreadable expression on his face. He’s a pire who’s probably thousands of years old—nobody seems to know for sure—but he looks like a blond college-aged student who’d rather be at the beach. He wears an immaculately tailored dark blue suit and gray tie, and his blue eyes bore into mine as I give my report.

  “After that,” I say, “the guard stayed with me and called for medical attention. Tair ripped his way through several more walls and exited the facility on the south side, where it’s heavily wooded. Trackers chased him to the banks of the Stillaguamish River, where they lost the trail.”

  “We’ll find him.”

  “Yes, sir.” I never call Cassius sir, but this is all my fault.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “I’m still standing.”

  “You’re lucky one of the pupils at the school was minoring in baseline human physiology. It’s not exactly a robust science anymore.”

  He’s right—the last time I tried to get some medical attention, they were ready to use leeches on me. But a faculty comprised of powerful shamans—plus one eager student with an esoteric interest in an endangered species—meant all I had to show for the encounter was another interesting scar to add to my collection. They even had my blood type in storage.

  Except, of course, for one other, teeny-tiny detail. Nobody’s said much to me about it, and I haven’t had the nerve to ask. Right now it’s the elephant in the room—the big, bad, hairy elephant.

  I take a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “So.”

  Cassius doesn’t rush me. He lets me get to it in my own time, which I appreciate.

  “I guess that time of the month is about to take on a whole new meaning, huh?” I say.

  He doesn’t respond, just sits there and looks at me. Trying to figure out if I’m about to go batshit myself, I suppose. I’m really not sure, either.

  “Well, it’s an excuse to go shopping for a whole new wardrobe,” I say. “Should I go stretchy or tearaway? And hey, I can finally celebrate Moondays with all the other whu—whuh—”

  And suddenly I can’t breathe. Cassius is at my side so fast I swear he must have teleported, and then he’s got his arms around me as I let go with what sounds a lot more like wailing than crying. I’m not much of a bawler, but when I do I can howl with the best of them …

  And now, I guess I can do even better.

  It goes on for a while, and he just holds me and lets it happen. It finishes as abruptly as it started—with me, that’s usually the case—and he hands me a tissue when I finally pull away and step back. I hate him a little for that—he must have had it ready and waiting, because what the hell does a vampire need a Kleenex for?

  “It’s not as bad as you think,” he starts, but I cut him off with an angry wave of my hand.

  “No, it really is. I’m not human anymore, do you get that? I’m not me.”

  “Not true. You’ve been infected, but you haven’t changed, not yet. You’re still human—that wound, for instance, would have killed you.”

  I laugh, then blow my nose for added emphasis. “Thanks for putting things in perspective. I almost died, and I’ve been turned into a—” I still can’t say it.

  “Maybe not,” Cassius says.

  “What?”

  “There may be other options.”

  “You mean like a cure?”

  “Nothing as simple as that. But I don’t want to get your hopes up—before I say anything else, I need to have you examined.”

  “I thought the shamans at Tsubaki did a pretty thorough job.”

  “I’m sure they did. But I want to have one of our own people do it, because there are very specifi
c things I need them to check.”

  “Like what? What size collar I take? An allergy to flea powder?”

  He shakes his head. “I’ve already briefed Eisfanger. Get over to his lab as soon as you can.”

  “Eisfanger?” That doesn’t make any sense to me—Damon’s a forensic shaman, one who specializes in evidence collection and analysis. “What’s he going to do, take claw impressions? We know who did this, remember?”

  “I’ll tell you afterward, all right?” Now the worry is evident in his voice and face, which tells me just how serious this is. Cassius doesn’t usually worry about anything less than the collapse of a country.

  “Okay, okay. But before I go, there’s something else you need to know.”

  With Tair on the loose, there’s no reason to keep our deal a secret—in fact, right about now I need all the help I can get. Cassius listens without comment as I tell him about the favor Tair asked for, my abduction by the Gray Wolves, the Don’s breakdown, and the subsequent threats.

  “I wish you would have come to me with this earlier, but I understand why you didn’t,” he says when I’m finished. “We’ll keep you safe, of course. I doubt they’d have actually gone through with any of their threats; La Lupo Grigorio are vicious, but they’re not stupid. Probably thought they could simply intimidate you into doing what they wanted.”

  “About what I figured. After all, they’re the big scary monsters and I’m just a puny little human, right?” I shake my head. “At least, I used to be.”

  “Go see Eisfanger,” Cassius says. “Please.”

  Damon Eisfanger’s lab is equal parts clean, modern research space and primitive anthropology museum. He has tribal masks in large, Plexiglas display cases, mummified snakes stored under bell jars, gleaming chrome autopsy tables adorned with feather-and-bone fetishes. I usually find it creepy yet entertaining, like a morgue built from parts of an old amusement park haunted house.

  But not today. Today all that whimsy is stripped away, and I see everything for exactly what it is. Those shrunken heads aren’t made of rubber, that ceremonial knife isn’t a prop. I’m surrounded by the tools of an ancient, world-shaping technology that I don’t understand, made to influence powers completely beyond my control. It’s all very, very real.