Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “Fine, it stays in the car.”

  Charlie’s good at rolling with the punches, but when confronted with the yawning abyss of the unknown—me giving up without a fight—he’s not sure how to respond. So he settles for trying to drill twin holes in the side of my head with his stare.

  “I don’t like putting civilians at risk,” I finally say.

  “There won’t be any civilians there. Just a crooked biothaumaturge, some hired muscle, and a bunch of illegal lems.”

  “I don’t consider the last group to be criminals.”

  “The US government disagrees.”

  “How about you? Do you disagree?”

  He doesn’t answer for a while. He turns his head, stares out the windshield at the road. “I do my job,” he says at last.

  “Yeah? And what happens to illegal lems when they’re discovered?”

  “They’re confiscated. And destroyed.” His voice is flat.

  I shake my head. “And you’re okay with that? Really?”

  “Let it go, Jace.”

  “Jesus, Charlie—”

  “Jace. Please.”

  I’ve seen and done a lot of things since I came to Thropirelem, but the one thing I never thought I’d encounter would be a note of pleading in Charlie Aleph’s voice. It shocks me into silence, and it takes me a full minute or so to answer.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He doesn’t reply. Just stares out the window at the road rolling past.

  Charlie gives me directions to an industrial park. Upscale, busy, lots of different kinds of businesses: software, import–export, wholesalers. One of those areas with weird little cul-de-sacs and lots of one-story bland shoebox buildings jammed together in a continuous row, like council houses in England but lower and flatter. Everything lit by the harsh glow of sodium vapor streetlights, with a moon hanging in a predawn sky. A moon that’s a little too close to full for me—and after it sets I only have three more moonrises to catch Tair before I leave my humanity behind forever. I park next to a chrome-and-glass sign with a list of six different companies on it.

  “Which one—” I say, and then Charlie cuts me off.

  “I want you to stay here,” he says.

  “What? Come on, I’m sorry if I stepped on your size thirteens—”

  “It’s not that. But some of these places—they react the same way a drug dealer does when you knock. Try to flush everything down the toilet before you kick the door in.”

  My reply is out of my mouth before I can stop it. “So? Thought you didn’t care about what these places produce.”

  He doesn’t get upset, though. He just says, “If I go in first, I can play it soft. Convince them all we want to do is talk. Less threatening than both of us.”

  I never thought I’d see the day when Charlie would describe himself as “less threatening,” but it seems today is full of surprises. “And if you get into trouble?”

  “I’ll have one hand on my phone, on speed dial. Your cell beeps, you charge in. You can even bring your gun.”

  I don’t like the idea of sending my partner into an illegal operation on his own, but if anyone can take care of himself, it’s Charlie. I give him a grudging nod. “I guess. But I’m setting a time limit—five minutes, no more. Then I’m coming in.”

  “Five minutes is fine.” He starts to get out of the car.

  “Hey, what’s the name of this place?” I say.

  He pauses, one leg already outside. “Karma Imports. Just like the sign says.”

  “All right. Be careful.”

  He gets out and shuts the door. Walks up to the glass door, pulls it open, and steps inside. The glass is tinted, so I can’t see him after that.

  And then I start to worry.

  Five minutes is a long time. And if things go bad, they’ll go bad with swords and crossbows and steel-cored ball bearings thrown just under the speed of sound. No gunfire to tip me off.

  Tick, tick, tick.

  It doesn’t smell right. It doesn’t feel right. I’ve always trusted my instincts, and right now they’re screaming at me. Problem is, I don’t know if it’s the thrope virus ramping them up or something more genuine. Whatever the root cause, it keeps telling me something’s wrong.

  And four and a half minutes later, I realize what it is.

  You can even bring your gun.

  At the beginning of the conversation he specifically asked me not to bring my gun. Not because it’s dangerous—he doesn’t think of it that way—but because it’s loud.

  Then he reverses himself completely a few minutes later. At first I thought it was because he doesn’t take my gun seriously—he can’t help it, nobody on this world does—but that’s not it. His previous objection still stands. So why the abrupt change of heart?

  Because it doesn’t matter. I can bring any damn thing I want, no matter how noisy or ridiculous, because I’m not going to the same place he is.

  I get out of the car, walk into the building. Karma Imports isn’t hard to find; there’s a central lobby with a hall going left and right, and signs telling you which way to go. A brown-skinned pire with a bindi on her forehead looks up when I walk into the Karma Imports office, and asks if she can help me. I ask if a lem in a panama hat has been by in the last few minutes, and she shakes her head. I show her my badge and ask if I can look around, and she looks mystified but gives her okay.

  I don’t find anything. Just an office, filled with cubicles and people working in them. No gravel pit, no lems, no Charlie. He probably left by a rear exit; he could be anywhere in this whole complex by now.

  I try calling him. No answer, straight to voice mail: “This is Charlie. Thrill me.”

  Oh, I’ll thrill him, all right.

  I go back to the car and wait. I spend the first few minutes envisioning what I’m going to do to my conniving, devious partner when he returns … and then I cool off a little and start thinking about exactly why he did what he did.

  He comes back about twenty minutes later. He gets in and closes the door, then looks at me expectantly. Waiting for the explosion.

  “I know it’s not because you don’t trust me,” I say. “But reassure me, all right? I deserve that much.”

  “I trust you with my life, Jace.”

  I nod. “Just checking. So let’s play a what-if game. What if a federal agent were to stumble across an illegal lem-making operation? By law, she’d have to report it, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And if she didn’t—and someone ever found that out—there would be some nasty repercussions.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “She might even lose her job.”

  “Yeah. Which wouldn’t be so bad. Unless, you know, she had some sort of contract to return her to her own world that would become null and void if she were fired.”

  “Right. And reporting this illegal operation would result in the destruction of all the lems—lems whose only crime was existing in the first place.”

  Charlie doesn’t respond right away. When he does answer, his voice is soft. “Golems have to be careful. Deactivation for Gray Market lems is automatic—but so is assisting lems like that in any way. The big monster in the closet for thropes and pires is the idea of lems controlling their own production. Afraid we’re going to start breeding like rabbits or something. They bring the hammer down hard on anything like that.”

  “So helping illegal lems is a death sentence for another lem?”

  “Yes.”

  I pause for a moment to let that sink in. “It’s a real shame,” I say at last, “that the tip we got didn’t pan out.”

  “Waste of a whole morning.”

  I shrug. “What can you do? That’s life …”

  Charlie doesn’t smile often, and he doesn’t smile big. But that little upturn of his lips is the best thing that’s happened to me in a couple of days.

  “Any brilliant and completely spontaneous ideas about where to go next?” I ask, starting the car.
r />   “As a matter of fact, I have this sudden hunch.”

  “Is that what that is? I thought you just slept funny and something shifted.”

  “I think we’re approaching this from the wrong angle.”

  “Angle? Most hunches are kind of round …”

  “I don’t think Tair is looking for work. I think he’s looking for an exit, and he’s planning on taking the Don with him.”

  “Exit? To where?”

  “Out of the country. He was hooked up with an international arms dealer for a while—he’ll have contacts overseas.”

  Makes sense. “So why were he and the Don talking to Ignacio?”

  “Because Iggy’s connected to a smuggling network, one that moves lems across borders.”

  “Ah. So we need to take a harder look at Iggy?”

  “We need to take a harder look at the club.”

  By the time we get back to the Mix and Match the sun is coming up. I park a block away and Charlie and I strategize; this time, we’re going to use a little more discretion. Okay, a lot more.

  “Hey, I thought they closed the place for the night,” I say.

  “Looks like somebody forgot to tell her,” Charlie says.

  There’s a woman standing in front of the club. Even from this distance, I can tell she’s a Fake Furry; the shaggy boots and gloves are more like a fetish version of lycanthropy than any attempt to duplicate the real thing. She’s wearing a little black dress, her legs long and pale and her cleavage pronounced. Three-inch heels, an oversize fur hat, and some kind of toothy necklace.

  She raps on the door. A moment later it opens, and she steps in.

  “Maybe she works there,” Charlie says.

  “Not in those heels. She’s dressed more like a customer than an employee.”

  And then a long, black car pulls up in front of the club. No more than a minute later, the same woman steps out and gets in the car. Backseat.

  “Uh-huh,” I say. Things are starting to make sense. I start the car and pull out. “Charlie, get out the bubble, will you?”

  He pulls the light out from its nook and puts it on the dash. “We doing a traffic stop?”

  “Yeah. I have a reasonable suspicion that we’re witnessing a violation of the law.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’ll decide later.”

  I get behind the car and hit the switch, flooding the street with blue and red light. The car pulls over to the curb. Charlie and I park behind them and get out.

  The driver of the car is a thrope, a young, tough-looking guy in a flashy suit—from his appearance, he might even be related to Iggy. He stares at us with no expression at all on his face. “There a problem?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But not with you. Can you exit the car, miss?”

  The door opens slowly, and the woman gets out. Up close I can see how beautiful she is; one of those classic, high-cheekboned faces, full lips, large, expressive eyes. The fur accessories make her look more like some exotic Russian aristocrat than a thrope wannabe.

  “Do you have any ID?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “I left it at home.”

  “Funny thing to forget when you’re out clubbing. Let’s go have a little chat, okay?” I nod at Charlie, who’s keeping a careful eye on the driver.

  The woman looks … bewildered. A little afraid, a little confused. She glances in the driver’s direction, but she can’t make eye contact from where she’s standing. She’s on her own.

  “Strictly routine,” I say. “You’re not in trouble. Just take a minute.”

  She nods hesitantly, then follows me over to my car. I open the rear door and motion for her to get in, then go around to the other side and do the same.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Csilla. Csilla Janos.”

  Her accent is Hungarian, as is her name. “Csilla, I know what you’ve been doing. But that’s not what I want to talk about.”

  “I’ve—I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “I don’t care about the prostitution, Csilla. But I need to know how you entered the country. I need to know where the lems are going out and the women are coming in. Tell me that, and I promise I’ll protect you.”

  Now she looks miserable. “I can’t tell you anything. They’ll kill me.”

  “No, they won’t. See, you’re going to tell your boss this is a shakedown for money. They’ll believe that. And all I want is an address—I’m not asking for names.” I pause. “Look, I understand you’re trapped. But don’t you want to make a friend? A friend who can help you from the inside? I can be that friend, Csilla. You think I like seeing women treated the way you are?”

  She gives me a troubled glance. I know what she’s thinking. She’s played this scenario out in her head before, maybe even fantasized about it, wondered what she will do if offered the chance.

  A chance she decides to take.

  “The place you are searching for,” she says quietly, “is called the Black Port.”

  TEN

  Iggy isn’t just a nightclub owner, or a pimp, or a lem smuggler. He’s a human trafficker—or in this case notso-human.

  I’m familiar with the practice from my own world. Desperate women from impoverished countries agree to exorbitant fees to be smuggled into the United States. They work off their debt through prostitution, which is bad enough, but the people they’re in debt to are professional thugs like Iggy; thugs who make sure the debt is never quite paid off.

  That’s why the Mix and Match is the perfect front. Nobody notices if women come and go all night long, and the crosskink angle lets them disguise the women as something else. No hookers here, Officer; just freaky party-people playing dress-up.

  It might seem a little elaborate for an escort service, but there’s more than that going on here. This is slavery, plain and simple. Iggy’s got a pipeline going, and in typical wise-guy fashion has decided to make it twice as profitable by having it operate both ways. Lems go out, women come in. He’s not keeping them at the club, though—it’s just an intermediary station, in case something goes wrong. The women and lems are kept somewhere else—probably two separate locations.

  But that’s not what I’m after. I want the Black Port.

  As it turns out, Iggy’s specialty is pires. The reason for it is simple, one a famous fictional vampire figured out over a century ago: If you’re one of the living dead and you want to travel undetected from one country to another, the best way to go is as freight. A coffin in a ship’s hold will work, but you have to ensure you can come and go during the trip; a sea voyage is relatively slow, so you’ll need to duck out to snack on crew members now and then. Going by air is much quicker, but in a world full of pires you can’t get away with something that obvious.

  Iggy hit upon the same solution human smugglers did in my world: freight containers. Big metal boxes full of manufactured goods, which crisscross the globe in such large quantities that it’s fairly easy to hide one in the middle of a bunch of others. Punch a few airholes in it, provide some basic amenities like a bucket and maybe some water—

  But wait. Pires don’t need air. Or water. Or a bucket, for that matter. They need blood, but that’s about it. And they’re really, really resilient.

  So forget about all those amenities. Run a hose through a hole, one you can stick a funnel in. Bribe someone on the ship to pour some blood down it every now and then.

  And then stack the pires like cordwood.

  “It was horrible,” Csilla whispers. She’s not looking at me, having gone someplace inside her head. Not a good place. She stares out the car window, her voice low and strained. “The ones on the bottom rows had it the worst. The hose would not quite reach. We tried to cup some in our hands and pass it to them, but there was no room to move. And the blood ran out on the third day, anyway.”

  I can’t imagine what it must have been like. Hundreds of pires, crammed together, filling the container to the top. Csilla was somewhere near the middle.
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  “A pire deprived of blood is a beast,” she says. “The ones on the bottom, the hungriest ones—they lost the ability to reason. They began to scream. It went on for days … they tried to bite those nearest them. This is not possible, of course—pire teeth will not penetrate pire skin. But they tried. They searched us beforehand, to make sure we had no wood or silver. That was a good thing—if the ones on the bottom had possessed such items, they would have killed those around them in an attempt to feed.”

  There’s more, much more, but I don’t have time to hear it. The longer I listen, the more danger I put her in, so I gently interrupt her and ask her what I need to know. She tells me. I send her back to her driver, and hope I haven’t just signed her death warrant.

  And then Charlie and I go back to the office to get some warrants of our own.

  Sometimes working for the NSA has its benefits.

  For instance, you can whistle up a covert ops team with highly specialized skills and equipment on a moment’s notice—as long as you can convince your boss you actually need them—and let them do the heavy lifting. Or in this case, the heavy swimming.

  Almost twenty hours after my little chat with Csilla Janos, I’m sitting in an inflatable Zodiac boat out in the harbor. Seattle’s lights twinkle at me, far enough away that the skyline is no more than a suggestion of blocky peaks and valleys. The moon looms overhead, an inescapable reminder that I’m down to two days of prewolfiness.

  I’ve taken scuba training before, but I’m a little nervous; this equipment was designed for thropes, and thropes can’t actually drown—though the agents who are ferrying me out here, Tony and Ben, have plenty of stories about thropes who tried.

  “Hey, you remember that guy on the Hawaii dive?” Tony asks. He’s a big guy with a black crew cut.

  “The one who spaced out, got rapture of the deep?” Ben asks. He’s Puerto Rican, small and wiry.

  “Yeah. Drifted right down to the bottom, passed out. Took a long time to bring him up after we finally found him.” You can’t raise someone too fast when they’ve gone really deep; nitrogen bubbles will form in the bloodstream, causing intense pain.