Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “So you went all vacuum cleaner on me? Jesus, Cassius, I trusted you!”

  The look of shame on his face is real, and it reminds me of the buried emotion I’d encountered in his mind. But now doesn’t seem like a good time to bring it up.

  “Again, I’m sorry. But I’m afraid this changes things, Jace.”

  “You think? I’m not going to be able to look my boss in the eye again without wondering if he sees me or the blue-plate special!” I try to stand up, but I’m still a little dizzy; I sit back down again.

  “It won’t happen again.”

  “Damn straight it won’t! The next time you’re feeling peckish try takeout, ’cause the Jace buffet is closed.”

  “That’s not going to work, either. I’ve infected you, but in a very careful and measured way. Should we let matters run their natural course, you will not survive.”

  I let the careful and measured remark go. “So we’re locked in now? No turning back?”

  “Yes. We must—reconnect—in order for me to influence the course of the infection. But even that may not be enough.”

  This just keeps on getting better and better. “So now I have to add being sucked dry to my list of options?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” he says patiently. “But the situation has changed. I may need … additional resources.” He sounds reluctant.

  “Like what? A couple of really long straws?”

  “Like Tair. Alive.”

  “What? I thought you said—”

  “I know what I said. I was wrong. This is—Magic isn’t science, Jace. It’s inexact, it shifts and changes according to circumstance. I thought you knew that.” Now he sounds mildly disapproving, like a teacher chiding a student who isn’t living up to her potential.

  “Okay, whatever. We need Tair, I’ll find Tair. Just promise me this isn’t going to result in me being the main course at an all-you-can-eat thrope and pire banquet, all right? Being the chew toy of one supernatural being is already too much.”

  “I promise you, that will not happen.”

  “It better not.” I get to my feet again, slowly. Grab my clothes from the floor and get dressed, wipe the ritual marks off my skin. There are two tiny little slashes of dried blood on the inside of my leg, more like stripes than dots, a little equals sign.

  Equal to what, though?

  Charlie’s waiting for me when I leave Cassius’s office, perched on the edge of a desk and talking to a clerical lem named Seymour. They’re using that deep, almost subsonic rumble that passes for a lem language, one I hardly ever hear in public. Seymour looks at me, curiosity in his eyes, as I walk up.

  “Hey,” Charlie says. He’s wearing a different suit, a high-waisted zoot-style number with wide lapels in a houndstooth pattern, and a wide-brimmed Panama hat instead of a fedora. Anyone else would look like a pimp, but Charlie manages to give the ensemble a certain dignity.

  “All patched up?” I ask. Seymour’s still staring at me, so I add, “What?”

  “He’s just wondering something,” Charlie says.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  Seymour cocks his head to the side, studying me like an entomologist who’s run across a rare bug. “How did you get bitten by a monkey in Seattle?”

  “A what now?”

  “A cursed howler monkey,” Seymour clarifies. “You know, the one on the recording you played for Director Cassius.”

  “That wasn’t—that was—” I stop and just glare at Charlie.

  “Yeah, those howler monkey bites are nasty,” Charlie says. “Pretty soon, she’ll be making the same sounds. Swinging from the trees, too.”

  “My condolences,” Seymour says.

  “Thanks,” I manage. “It’s a real blow, what with the recent demise of my partner and all.”

  I stalk away from Seymour’s confused look and toward the elevators. Charlie catches up with me there.

  “Thanks for covering for me,” I snarl.

  “Hey, it’s what I live for.”

  “Cursed howler monkey?”

  “You know anything else that howls?”

  I think about it. “Well, no.”

  “You’re welcome. Hey, you want to swing by the cafeteria? I hear they have banana cream pie today.”

  “Thanks, but this primate thought she’d go talk to Gretch. We need to find Tair.”

  “I was working on that myself when I got called in.”

  The elevator shows up and we get on. “We have to take him alive, Charlie. Cassius is trying to put together a fix for my condition, and Tair’s an essential part of it.”

  “Yeah? You sure?” He sounds disappointed.

  “I’m sure.” I pause. “Okay, he doesn’t have to be in mint condition.”

  “That’s good, because I wasn’t planning anything spice-based.”

  We get off on Gretch’s floor, the intel division. We find her in her office, a large, windowless space with several flatscreen monitors mounted on the walls. Her desk is large, square, and made of steel. Her door is open, and she looks up when we walk in.

  “Hello,” she says. “Howler monkeys?”

  I just stare at her. Gretch doesn’t really have the whole office bugged, nor is her hearing so sharp she can hear conversations through several concrete floors—but nobody keeps on top of the flow of information like she does.

  “The length of an elevator ride,” I finally say. “I think that’s a new record, Gretch.”

  “Collecting information is my job, Jace. Just as it is to know what particular pieces of information in a vast sea of data will be of the most use at any given moment. I think, for instance, that you may find this especially valuable right now.” She hands me a file folder.

  I flip it open. It’s a copy of a local FBI file on a nightclub called the Mix and Match, including surveillance photos and the jackets of a number of known felons who frequent the place. A moment’s reading tells me that the M&M is just a front for a bookie operation, one run by the Mob.

  “Why am I looking at this?” I ask.

  “Because we just received a report that Tair and Don Falzo were spotted there about an hour ago.”

  “Thanks!” I call over my shoulder. Charlie’s already halfway to the elevator, fishing the car keys out of his pocket.

  EIGHT

  I read the file while Charlie drives. The Mix and Match isn’t your ordinary sort of bar; it’s a fetish club.

  On the world of my birth, that would mean leather and rubber, whips and chains, masters and slaves. On Thropirelem, though, it’s something very different. Whereas most thropes and pires seem attracted to only their own kind, there’s apparently a subculture known as crosskink where the opposite is true. And it’s not just about members of one supernatural race dating another—there’s also an aspect of it devoted to pires posing as thropes and vice versa. Transexual Transylvania, indeed—though maybe transpecies is a better way to describe it.

  I’m feeling a little transpecies myself. Everything seems unnaturally sharp and bright. I can smell the fast-food wrapper in the backseat, and the squeal the power steering makes every time we turn a corner is setting my teeth on edge. Speaking of my teeth, my gums are tender, and I can’t stop running my tongue over my canines and incisors, trying to tell if they’re any pointier. I think I can taste the inside of my own mouth, which is about as weird as it sounds.

  The bar is in Capitol Hill, an artsy and slightly seedy part of town, and by the time we get there I’m ready to jump out of my own skin. It’s nearly 3:00 AM when we pull up across the street, and I can hear the music booming from the place even before I step out of the car. Lots of bass, distorted guitars, deep growling vocals. Angsty, no-one-understands-me-and-it-pisses-me-off rock, closer to the violent than the whiny part of the spectrum. I kind of like it.

  “I’d advise earplugs,” Charlie says.

  “Don’t have any handy,” I say. “I’ll survive. We’ll use LSL when we get inside.” LSL stands for “Lycanthrope Sign Langu
age,” which I’ve gotten pretty fluent in. Handy when you’re interrogating a suspect who has a muzzle instead of a mouth.

  We cross the street. There’s a line to get in, the doorman one of the largest pires I’ve ever seen: a tall, bulky bald guy with a tattoo of a bat on his forehead like the world’s biggest unibrow. I walk right up to him and realize his mouth is deformed, too, his jaw unnaturally long.

  I pull out my badge. “NSA. We’re going in to look around.”

  He doesn’t say a word, just nods and motions for us to go in. Up close, I can see that he isn’t a pire at all; those red eyes are contacts, and his mouth is the beginning of a wolf’s snout. It takes a lot of willpower and effort to maintain a partial transformation like that—he must practice every day, and shave every few hours. It gives him the size and strength he needs to do his job, sure, but it would be a lot easier for him to just go half-were.

  Yeah. And it would be a lot easier for men in drag to not pluck their eyebrows or shave their legs or find high heels in a size 12. But they do.

  Inside, the club is about as noisy, dark, and crowded as I’d expected. The music is recorded, not live. The dance floor is crowded with people, and at first it just looks like an assortment of pires and thropes; it’s not until you peer a little closer that you notice the fake fur, the dental prosthetics, the artificial claws. It’s the fauxthropes that stand out the most; mimicking a seven-foot werewolf is a lot harder to pull off than pale skin, an overbite, and red eyes.

  We make our way over to the bar, where a slender woman who looks exactly like a pire but smells like a thrope is pouring shots of something crimson into plastic glasses shaped like test tubes. I order a glass of club soda—Charlie doesn’t drink. Or eat, for that matter. I asked him once what lems ran on, and he just said, “Willpower.” I didn’t argue the point.

  The file said the bookie business is run from the second floor. The only entrance is a stairwell behind a metal door, and that’s in a room behind the bar. There are, of course, ways for the staff to alert the guys upstairs, as well as security cameras that mean they probably already know we’re in here. Charlie isn’t exactly unobtrusive.

  That’s fine. Subtlety, in my opinion, is highly overrated.

  The DJ booth is on an elevated platform at the head of the room. I can see the DJ, a thrope or thrope wannabe with long, spiky fur and wearing a pair of shades and headphones, bopping along to his own groove.

  I know the bartender is keeping an eye on us. When I wave her over, her casual saunter is entirely feigned. I show her my ID, and lean in close so she’ll be able to hear me. “Get the DJ down here, now,” I say pleasantly.

  She cocks a dubious eyebrow. “Hey, I don’t always agree with his taste, either, but I wouldn’t arrest him for it—”

  “Yeah, you’re hilarious. He’s here in thirty seconds or you’re out of a job tomorrow.”

  Funny how threatening someone’s livelihood will often get results a lot faster than mentioning jail. She practically sprints over to the booth, has a short but intense exchange involving pointing, staring, and probably a lot of bad language. It produces the desired results, though: He pulls off the headphones, and he and the bartender leave the booth.

  Charlie nudges me and signs, What do you expect that to get you?

  A clear line of fire, I sign back, and draw my gun.

  There’s certain things I can get away with on Thropirelem that would land me in the unemployment office or prison on my own world. For instance, the fact that no one is even capable of taking my gun seriously means I can use it for the most frivolous purposes, with almost no legal consequences—like getting the attention of an entire club full of partying thropes and pires. The Ruger makes an impressive bang, but with the music this loud I know that’s not going to be enough.

  So I shoot the sound system.

  The music comes to an abrupt stop. Everybody on the dance floor looks confused, then annoyed. I climb up on the bar and hold out my ID for everyone to see.

  “This business is now closed, for reasons of national security! Please leave in an orderly fashion! Anyone still here in ten minutes will be going to jail!”

  I repeat this a few times for the sake of those hard of hearing, slow on the uptake, or just drunk. Then I climb down from the bar and take a sip of my club soda.

  “Nice,” Charlie says. “You could have just asked him to turn it down.”

  “Not the message I wanted to send.” Plus, sometimes I just really have to shoot something, and right now feels like three of those times.

  The DJ, a short little pire wearing what I can only describe as a punk thrope toupee, charges up to us quivering with righteous indignation. “You can’t do that! You can’t just barge in here and wreck expensive equipment—”

  “Charlie?”

  Charlie leans in close to the pire. Lets him see what’s in his eyes. “You pay for any of that equipment yourself?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Then shut the hell up, because the person who did is the one we want to talk to.”

  The DJ sees which way the wind is blowing, and decides to go with it. He stops long enough to grab a bag from his booth, and then he’s gone.

  The bartender’s standing a few feet away, her arms crossed, studying us. No telling how old she actually is, but she’s got the body of a twenty-year-old and is showing it off with tight-fitting jeans, a belly shirt, and no bra. Bigger tips that way, I’m sure.

  “Don’t you have someone to report to?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Hey, they know what’s going on.”

  I smile. “Then I guess we wait.”

  The crowd files out slowly. It takes closer to twenty minutes than ten, but time is cheap when you’re immortal. Thropes only have around three hundred years, give or take a decade, but they don’t seem to be moving any faster than the pires. Ah, the blissful ignorance of youth.

  Finally, there’s nobody left but us, the bartender, and the bouncer at the front. “Mind if we start cleaning up?” the bartender asks. “Since it looks like we’re closed for the night.”

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  And then—finally—I hear the big metal door in the back chunk open. A moment later a guy walks out and stops behind the bar. He’s a thrope, dressed in a pale blue linen shirt, hair black and shiny as an oil slick. Looks around thirty. He puts his hands on top of the bar, leaning forward in an open, relaxed sort of way. “I’m the proprietor,” he says. “There a problem, Officer?”

  “Not anymore,” I say. “You’ve had more than enough time to clean house upstairs, so you don’t have anything to worry about, do you?”

  He shrugs. “We try to look our best for visitors.”

  “Inconvenient, though. Slows things down, cuts into the profit margin.”

  He sighs. “Cost of doing business. That why you’re here? To talk to me about my profit margin, and how certain taxes are unavoidable?”

  I shake my head. “You’ve got the wrong idea. We’re after a little information, not a bribe. We don’t get it, we’ll have to do this again tomorrow night. And the night after that, and the night after that …”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “There was an escaped convict in here earlier tonight. He was in the company of a certain Sicilian gentleman. I’d really like to know where they went after they left.”

  He sighs, again. “Look, I’d like to help you out, I really would. But this is a busy place, dark, with a lot of people coming and going. People who might be attired in a way that would render them hard to recognize, if you get my drift. So even if these gentlemen were here—and I’m not saying they were—I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

  “Sure. I can see that. But the thing is, the Sicilian gentleman in question? Somebody would have recognized him, no question at all. And that somebody would have gotten word to you, very quickly. Which means you—quite understandably—are lying to me.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t even here until an hour ago
. Maybe this gentlemen came in ealier.”

  I’m having a hard time concentrating. The loud music and crowded room was actually easier, because it was such a torrent I could just shut it all out. Now I keep getting hit with specific sounds, specific images. The glint of the overheads off this mook’s oiled hair. That dripping tap under the bar. And the smells—good Lord, the smells. Spilled beer and vomit and wet fur and cigarette smoke and—

  Hold on.

  “Who are you, anyway?” I ask.

  “Ignacio Prinzini. I manage the bar.”

  “Uh-huh.” I lean in close, take a deep breath in through my nose. “That’s not all you do, Iggy. You reek of something else—what is that, exactly?”

  His easygoing grin gets a little wider. “Let’s just say I have an appreciation of the feminine form in all its varieties. You got a sharp nose.”

  I pull back, suddenly a little repulsed. Okay, so what I’m smelling is thrope musk, obviously from more than one donor. And when I concentrate on it, it is obvious—the different smells separate themselves out in my head, like listening to a piece of music and focusing on a single instrument at a time.

  But one of them doesn’t fit. It’s heavier, deeper, a bass drum booming over a string concerto. And it’s familiar.

  “Interesting,” I say. “A club like this, I guess you get your fair share of females. I wouldn’t have thought your tail wagged that particular way, but live and let live.”

  And now the grin is gone. “Hey, my bitches are real bitches, okay? Just because I sell them drinks doesn’t mean I—”

  “Oh, I know they’re real, Iggy. I can smell that. Just like I can smell the hair remover and white makeup they use to give themselves that nice, pale, smooth skin.” Every Mob guy I’ve ever met was a raging homophobe, so it’s not surprising that a thrope version would be deeply offended at my insulting his red-blooded wolfhood. Sometimes insulted is good; it can lead to a suspect saying things he shouldn’t.

  He glares at me. “I don’t got a thing for shampires, awright? I like my babes furry, four-legged, and howling at the moon.”