Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  It takes her a full minute. At the end of that time, I have a great deal more respect for Crystal Faraday than I did before.

  “Okay,” she says quietly, wiping her face with the back of one hand. “Now we can go.”

  Charlie and I don’t take her downtown. We take her to this little out-of-the-way diner I know about, where they serve shoestring fries with jalapeño mayo to dip them in and a decent cup of coffee. We put her on one side of the booth and me and Charlie on the other; I don’t want her to feel trapped. She doesn’t order anything except a glass of water, and I think she’s feeling more than a little nauseous.

  “I wasn’t always a bartender at the Mix and Match,” Crystal says. She’s left her lab coat in the car, and she’s wearing jeans and some sort of faded orange T-shirt with a cartoon character on it. “I used to just go there. I was a regular, I guess.”

  I nod. Not that surprising; bars that specialize in alternative lifestyles tend to hire from within their own community.

  “Anyway, I only work part-time at the morgue, and I’m going to school, too. I needed some extra cash.”

  “Iggy offered you a job?” I ask.

  “No, I didn’t meet him for months. This was another bartender; he just mentioned they needed some help. I said sure, why not? I was there all the time already.”

  She gives her head the tiniest shake, as if she’s denying something to herself. “You have to understand. I’m studying to be a biothaumaturge.”

  “Tuition’s expensive, I know.”

  “No, that’s not it. My family has money, school is taken care of. I work because—well, whatever I make bartending is my money. I earn it, and that means a lot to me. The morgue is mostly for study credit.”

  “Two jobs and school. Doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else.”

  She shrugs. “Like I said, if I wasn’t working there I’d be hanging out there anyway—the bar, not the morgue. Might as well get paid for it, right?”

  “Makes sense.”

  “What you have to understand is that people in the crosskink community are very secretive. A lot of people don’t use their real names, a lot of people never show you the face the rest of the world sees.”

  “So they’re paranoid.”

  “Paranoia is when you think people are out to get you when nobody is. I wish that were the case, but it’s not. We’re discriminated against, we’re attacked. People call us race traitors. If my family knew about me, they’d never speak to me again.”

  “So you weren’t just afraid of the Gray Wolves—you were afraid of being outed.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how he found out, but when Iggy learned about my other job and what I was studying, he made me an offer. Only it wasn’t really an offer, it was a threat.”

  I fork some fries into my mouth as I listen. It might be rude, but I’m starving again.

  “The morgue has very finely calibrated equipment for draining, storing, and measuring residual life force for forensic purposes. Iggy figured I could repurpose it, use the same technology to make temporary containers for transporting lem energy.”

  “Bone batteries,” Charlie says.

  “Essentially. I’d get a delivery of bones once a week, use the equipment to prep them whenever we hit a slow period and no one was around. I didn’t charge them, that was done somewhere else—I just got them ready.”

  I hold up a hand, finish chewing, and swallow before speaking. “Hang on. Beta said all he did was drop stuff off. Once you’d gotten the bones ready, how’d they get off-site?”

  “In the garbage. I’d wrap them up and throw them out—somebody would retrieve them after that.”

  “Don’t you have an on-site incinerator?”

  “No, just a dedicated crematorium for actual bodies. Everything else is handled by a medical waste disposal company called Envirocrypt.”

  I glance at Charlie. What passes for his eyebrows go up, just a notch.

  “Envirocrypt,” I say. “A private garbage collection agency and the Mob—what a shocking and entirely unusual juxtaposition of bedfellows.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Charlie grunts. “You’ll have to forgive her. Vital information makes her mouthy.”

  I wipe my lips with a paper napkin. “I think you mean verbose.”

  “I know what I said.”

  We wind up Crystal’s interview and then see about getting her into protective custody. Things are starting to speed up, I can feel it—or maybe it’s just my overcharged primal instincts, informing me that the prey is in sight and the kill is only minutes away. I call Gretch and tell her to get me whatever she can on Envirocrypt; she calls me back only minutes later, as Charlie and I are handing our new informant off to two agents at a safe house. Crystal looks nervous, but not sorry—she’s made her choice and plans to stand by it.

  “Let me guess, Gretch—Envirocrypt is owned by someone with an Italian last name.”

  She sounds mildly puzzled. “Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not the case at all. Envirocrypt is a highly respected company that handles all the government contracts in Washington and has branches in several neighboring states. They are a family business, but the family in question is hardly one known for its criminal affiliations. Are you familiar with the name Broadstone?”

  “Can’t say that I am.”

  “Old money, old in the pire sense. Very rich, very well connected. One of them’s a congressman—in fact, that’s who’s listed as the principal shareholder and CEO of Envirocrypt. Emerson Hearst Broadstone.”

  This is starting to make sense, and I know Gretch is sharp enough to see it, too. Her dismissive tone is camouflage in case anyone else is listening. Crystal’s words come back to me: Paranoia is when you think people are out to get you when nobody is. I wish that were the case, but it’s not. “Looks like I got it wrong. Thanks, Gretch—we’ll talk soon, okay?”

  “Absolutely,” she says, and hangs up.

  A congressman. One with deep pockets and deeper connections. One who’s obviously in business with the Mob, knows I’m investigating him, and isn’t happy about it. At least now I know who’s pulling the strings, though linking Broadstone with the Gray Wolves is going to be difficult at best. He’ll have multiple layers of flunkies between himself and whoever’s making the actual pickups from the morgue—probably lem truck drivers who will simply disappear. I need more ammunition if I’m going to go after this guy, more hard evidence.

  What I have at the moment is a bone. Fortunately, I also have someone who might be able to turn that into something a little more useful.

  I plunk the bone in its plastic evidence bag down on Eisfanger’s steel table and say, “Got something for you.”

  Eisfanger pulls on a pair of gloves. “You bring me the nicest things,” he says cheerfully. “Looks bovine. You hunting cattle rustlers now?”

  “It was going to be used as a temporary battery for lem life force. Charlie’s hauling a crateful of others just like it down to the evidence locker as we speak.”

  His ice-blue eyes widen with interest. “Really? Now, that is interesting … organic-sourced calcium as a mystical substrate instead of living wood. Warding would be tricky—not to mention unstable—and it wouldn’t be nearly as energy-efficient—”

  “Strictly short-term and leaky as hell, I know. What I need is any other information you can pull from it.”

  He eyes it thoughtfully, scratching one ruddy cheek with a pale, stubby fingernail. “I’ll see what I can do.” He goes over to a rolling steel cabinet, opens a wide, thin drawer, and considers the interior. “Are you looking for anything in particular, or just going on a forensic fishing mission?”

  I pull up a rolling stool and straddle it. “I’m not sure. Would finding the fingerprints of a prominent congressman be expecting too much?”

  He makes a decision and selects an instrument, a wishbone inscribed with tiny, intricate kanji symbols in scarlet and a miniature steel cylinder projecting straight up from the he
ad. “I will dust it for prints, but I sense you’re being ironic.”

  “You won’t find any prints—not obvious ones, anyway. The person who gave it to me has forensics training.”

  Eisfanger places the wishbone on the table and opens another drawer. Pulls out a twelve-inch length of very thin but stiff wire, with an eyelet at one end and a tiny screw at the other. He screws the wire into the wishbone’s cylinder with a thumb and forefinger. “Then we’re unlikely to find any trace or transfer. But that’s okay; the essential nature of the bone itself may give something up.”

  I sigh. “Like what? A fondness for grass? A lifelong relationship with a milking machine?”

  He takes a third item, a small glass vial, from a shelf. He pops it open and dumps the contents into his hand: a six-inch length of crimson thread with a tiny bead at the end. He ties the thread to the eyelet at the end of the wire, giving him something that looks a little like a miniature fishing rod with a Y-shaped handle.

  “I’m hoping for something both more and less specific.” He takes a long tube down from another shelf, and pulls out a rolled-up length of parchment. Once it’s unfurled I can see that it’s a map of the United States; Eisfanger places small paperweights at each corner to hold it down. “Cattle aren’t generally big travelers; dairy or beef, they usually spend most of their lives on one range. That gives them a real geographic affinity for the place.”

  He takes the bone out of the evidence bag and places it on the table beside the map, then strips off his gloves. Holding the wishbone between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, he lowers the dangling bead into contact with the bone and starts muttering an incantation. Animist magic is mostly based on either Shinto or African shamanism; what’s coming out of Eisfanger’s mouth sounds more like Swahili than Japanese.

  After a minute, he raises the bead, then moves it over the map. It sways gently back and forth, then seems to tug south and west. Eisfanger lets it guide him over the Virginias, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida … and right off the edge of the map.

  “Huh,” he says. “Our cow isn’t local.”

  He grabs another map and tries again. Starting in Mexico and moving southwest once more, gliding over Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica …

  And then it stops dead.

  “Panama,” Eisfanger says. “Huh. I would have guessed Argentina.”

  “Argentina isn’t an international trade center for the illegal lem trade.” I’m staring at the little bead, stuck to the map like it was glued there. “But Panama is. And somebody that owns a cattle ranch there is supplying a local restaurant here. And using not just the flesh, but the bones and spirit of the animals. Makes sense—but none of this ties Congressman Broadstone to what’s going on.”

  Eisfanger sets the miniature divining rod down on the map. “A congressman, huh? Going after the big game. Dangerous.”

  “I’ll bring him down.”

  “Don’t doubt it. You pretty far along the trail?”

  “No, just got the scent, actually—”

  I stop. I stare at Eisfanger, my mouth open. I’ll give Damon credit—you embarrass him, that complexion of his goes from ghostly pale to blazing red in about half a second; that’s what happens now, when he realizes what’s going on.

  “What—what are we doing?” I say. I’m aghast.

  “Talking shop?” he offers weakly.

  “Yeah, but not as colleagues. We were talking shop as thropes.” I’m still aghast. In fact, I may be multiple ghasts at this point.

  “I’m sorry—it wasn’t intentional!” If Eisfanger had a tail at the moment, it would be between his legs. “I—it’s just—I fall into it naturally when I’m talking with another thrope—”

  “I’m not a thrope!”

  “I know. I know. But—well, you smell like one, and I wasn’t thinking—”

  “Stop. Talking.”

  I can’t believe it. Tair enrolls me in thrope kindergarten, Xandra’s ready to help me pick out curtains for my new kennel, and now the people I work with are acting like my humanity is already obsolete. It makes me so angry I want to—

  Oh, no.

  It’s happening. I can feel it. My bones, wanting to twist and shift. My teeth, aching to lengthen. Every inch of my skin prickles with the fur about to erupt from its surface. The fury I’m feeling is the beast clawing its way out of my soul.

  “Jace!” Damon says. “You—you look like you’re about to—”

  Everything comes into abrupt, incredibly sharp focus. I can see every single thing in front of me in minute, high-resolution detail, the colors so bright and vivid they’re surreal. Sound amplifies and divides into a hundred discrete rustles, squeaks, thumps, and scrapes, everything from the buzz of the fly in the hall outside to Damon’s heartbeat a few feet away. And the smells—my God, the smells. Aromas and odors I don’t even have names for, just impressions—things that smell heavy or purplish or jingly or smooth.

  “This—this is a bit much,” I manage to croak. I look down at my hands, amazed they aren’t hairy yet.

  “You’re having a prechange episode,” Damon says. “Tomorrow night’s the full moon. I understand they can be intense, but it won’t last. It won’t be like this when—” He stops.

  “When what?” I gasp. “When I’m a thrope, right? Or maybe you mean when I’m dead. Or a pire. Maybe I’ll get to have these sorts of delightful conversations with Gretch and Cassius instead.”

  Damon’s smell changes. He smells … guilty.

  No, that’s not it. He smells like he’s hiding something, something I should know but don’t, a secret that’s … tragic, yes, the twin scents of doom and inevitability twining around each other, the bitterness of regret, the whole thing wrapped in a layer of compassion and just a touch of hope.

  I grab Eisfanger by the lapels of his lab coat. He’s a sturdy, muscular guy, but I whip him off his feet and around into the wall with even thinking about it. He yelps in surprise.

  “You’re hiding something from me,” I growl. “What is it? Something about my condition?”

  “Just calm down, please. You’re not in control.”

  “Tell me or I’ll show you just how out of control I am.” I’m not bluffing; I’m ready to rip him and his lab apart. Instinct is driving and it’s locked the rational part of my brain in the trunk.

  Eisfanger knows it, too. I’d like to think he respects me enough to consider me a genuine physical threat—even without the novelty item I call a gun—but he’s probably more worried about damage to his lab. “You should talk to Cassius,” he says carefully.

  Instinct doesn’t bother with careful processing and analysis; it just leaps ahead. “Not my condition, my treatment,” I say. “The tests Cassius had you do. It told you something.”

  He looks into my eyes for a second and then glances away. He’s afraid, but not of me; he’s afraid of something he knows. Something tragic.

  It sinks in slowly. I let him go and take a step back. “Am I going to die?”

  “No,” he says quietly. “Cassius is.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The thrope symptoms that rode in on a tide of anger wash out again with a cold surge of shock. “What?”

  “The treatment he’s devised requires a great deal of sorcerous power. He’s fueling it with his own life force. He thought he could do it and still survive, but the thrope virus is proving too strong. He can still beat it, but it’s going to take everything he has.”

  I sink back onto the stool. Suddenly everything seems smaller, diminished, hollow. My vision is blurred, my hearing’s fuzzy, it’s all very far away. No more supersenses, just the regular old world; I don’t know if it’s a relief to have it back or a disappointment.

  Then the planet goes sideways and decides for me. Damon catches me before I fall off the stool, and lowers me carefully to a sitting position on the floor. “Take it easy,” he says. He sounds concerned, but he smells like an ordinary lab tech again. “You’re going to need to lie down. We
should get you to the infirmary.”

  “No, no.” I try to get to my feet and find it takes all my strength. “No infirmary. I’ll just—just go home.” If I don’t pass out first.

  Damon calls Charlie, who shows up thirty seconds later. He asks what’s wrong with me, gets the short version from Damon, and agrees to take me home if I promise to lie down and get some rest. I don’t tell him about Cassius, and neither does Damon; I’m too exhausted to go into it and Damon obviously doesn’t believe it’s his decision to make. He’s right.

  I think about it as Charlie drives me home. It’s not that there’s any good reason to keep it from him, it’s more like I’m so overloaded I’m not sure what to do. Charlie will be supportive regardless—the only thing that can overcome his loyalty to me is heavy-duty magic, and even that’s not a sure thing. But how is he going to take it when I tell him that in order for me to survive, Cassius has to die?

  Charlie’d kill him, of course. Dumb question.

  I’m so brain-dead that for a minute I’m actually worried Charlie might try to do that. Then reason seeps in and it becomes blatantly obvious that not only would that not solve anything, it’s the sort of basic logic that a clever orangutan wouldn’t have trouble with. I decide the best course of action would be a short nap, and when I wake up I’m on my couch.

  Charlie’s sitting in a nearby armchair, reading a newspaper.

  “Whuzza time?” I say, yawning and sitting up.

  “You’ve been out around an hour. I took your shoes off.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. You know you talk in your sleep?”

  I glare at him and stifle another yawn. “Do not.”

  “I distinctly heard you say, ‘Waffle my carborundum.’”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “You put a lot of emphasis on the waffle part. It was almost obscene.”