by Anton Strout
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I can just sell off some of my psychometric finds piling up at home. I’ve been meaning to make the time for it somehow.”
“No, really, that’s okay. Just let me do lunch for now.”
“Why are you being so insistent?” I asked. I grabbed both of her hands and made her look at me. “What’s this really about, Jane?”
“It’s just that maybe it might be better if you didn’t read anything with your psychometry right now. Especially if it’s going to cause another emotional flare-up.”
“I have to use it,” I said. “It’s my job. Just give me some time with this. I’m working through it.”
Jane looked crestfallen. “That’s the thing, Simon. I don’t mean to rush you, but I don’t know how much time I have with this mark on me, do I? I’m sorry if that comes off as pushy.”
“I know.” I hugged her close to me. “You need to give us time to figure that out, too,” I said.
Jane nodded against my chest, staying pressed up against me.
A few moments later, a cough at the edge of my cube space had us pulling apart.
Aidan stood there, looking a little paler and more gaunt than usual with a pile of folders in his hands. It was odd seeing him in our offices, especially since I had just been woken up from sunlight pouring into my bedroom not more than an hour ago.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be in your coffin or something?”
“I wanted to make sure Connor and Argyle got back to the office safely from the bar,” he said. “By the time I took care of that, the sun was coming up so I ended up trapped here for the day. Thought I’d get some vampire liaison paperwork done on behalf of Brandon while I’m here. Luckily, your secret offices have no windows.”
“So, it’s totally a myth you need to sleep during the day,” Jane said.
Aidan nodded. “I think it’s more of an attitude thing for most of the vampires,” he said. “The brain needs to turn off every so often, you know? I just think a lot of my people take comfort in a bit of mental downtime.”
“You look a little run-down, too,” Jane said. “No offense. Hangover? Can you even get one?”
“Not really,” he said. “Although I did drink enough to start feeling it before my body kicked in and metabolized it right out of me. I think I’m more run-down because of all the protective runes you guys have carved into the walls around here. I feel. . . practically human.”
He said the word “human” with such distaste that I felt my blood rising at it.
“Poor you,” I said. “How you must suffer feeling for a second like the rest of us mortals.” Irrational anger flared up in me, the tattooist’s visions still lingering in me. I even felt a twinge of jealousy that Aidan was standing too close to Jane right now, and although it tore me apart, I told myself it was all unreal, merely a figment of the residual vision.
“Don’t get too agitated,” Aidan said with a wicked grin. “I’m famished on top of it and the more you get worked up, the more I can sense your blood working its way through your body.”
I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not but it helped to focus me on reality, and I calmed myself.
“You don’t look too bad, Simon,” Aidan continued. “I thought for sure you’d be in worse shape after all that drinking.”
“He is,” Jane said.
“I’ll have you know that I was actually working for part of that night,” I said.
“Yeah, he was,” Aidan said. “What was the name of that hot blonde with the bob haircut again? Elaine?”
“Elyse,” I corrected, cringing at Aidan’s mention of her. The last thing a guy wants in front of his girlfriend is any story involving a bar that intersects with one involving another woman.
Jane looked at me sideways.
“What?” I asked. “It was for a case. They were Professor Redfield’s students. I had to talk to them.”
“Oh, there was more than one?” she asked with doubt in her voice.
“Not more women,” I said. “Mostly guys.”
“But apparently she was the only one Aidan found interesting enough to mention.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “She was clearly the leader of the pack among the film students. I had to soften them up, so I bought everyone a round.”
Jane gathered up her pile of research. Aidan walked past her and over to Connor’s side of the desks, sitting down.
“So let me get this straight,” Jane said, a little of her lethargy shaking off and giving way to anger. “While I was sitting at home worrying over this mark and whatever the hell it’s doing to me, you were out drinking and chatting up this blonde?”
“Technically that’s true, but—”
Jane stepped out of my office area. “I don’t have time to be sitting around here, then,” she said. “If you can’t be bothered to help me get through this, I’m going back to Enchancellor Daniels. . . or maybe even Director Wesker.”
Jane stormed off before I could even process all of it. I looked over to Aidan, who was still sitting at Connor’s desk. “What the hell just happened?” I asked.
“Looks like you and your girlfriend just had a fight.”
“No thanks to you,” I said, anger building up in me. “Did you really think it was smart to bring Elyse up in front of her? You had to go there, didn’t you?”
“Hey, I didn’t know she’d go off like that,” he said. “I just like to make humans sweat a little. It gives the smell in the air such a pleasant hint of blood and fear, but I didn’t think it would get that much of a rise out of her. You must be doing something wrong at home.”
“Okay, genius, then why don’t you enlighten me? I mean, eternal youth has got to count for something after all, right?”
Aidan shrugged. “Don’t ask me for love advice,” he said. “I was the one dating the great vampire betrayer, remember?”
I was ready to jump on that given the trouble he had just stirred up for me, but the sad look on his face killed the words in my mouth.
Aidan set down the pile of papers and began rummaging through his brother’s desk.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m good.”
“What I mean is, what are you doing?” I asked. “Not cool to be rifling through Connor’s stuff. I know you are brothers and all, but I believe even the undead consider privacy something of import, yes?”
Aidan stopped and laid his hands on the desk. “Well, yeah,” he said, “but Connor said I could use his desk while he’s in a This Week in Haunts meeting.”
I checked my watch. “Running long, I see. Or maybe it’s taking longer with fewer agents out there in the field.”
“I guess,” Aidan said. “He looked a bit frantic and pissed off when he was heading in, but that kind of seems to be his thing, you know?”
I laughed at that. “That, I do know,” I said. “That I do.” I grabbed a pen off my desk and tossed it to him. He caught it in perfect position for writing like it was nothing. “Use his desk, then. Just try to make human sounds and all that while you’re working. When you’re all silent and moving about, it creeps me out.”
“I’ll try,” he said, “but sometimes I forget.” He paused. “Sorry about earlier. With getting Jane all riled up on you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “By the way, if HR comes through and asks why we have a teenage boy filling in at Connor’s desk, good luck explaining it to them.”
Aidan leaned forward and popped his fangs. “Think this will be explanation enough?”
“Doubtful,” I said. “If anything, it’ll just lead to more paperwork for you.”
Aidan retracted his fangs, looking a bit crestfallen. “More?”
I nodded. “For as much hitting squishy things with bats that I get to do, I end up stuck at this desk, writing out the details, an awful lot.”
“Exciting,” Aidan said and resumed looking through his pile of papers. He flew through
them with lightning speed.
“That’s one thing I envy about you vampires,” I said.
“Just one thing?” Aidan asked, with a surprised laugh.
“Just one,” I said. “Sorry. Not really keen on the rest of your deal.”
“Fine,” he said. “What is it?”
“Your kind strike me as minimalists,” I said.
Aidan cocked his head. “How so?”
“You dispense with paperwork for the most part,” I said. “I mean, look at the Gibson-Case Center. It’s a city unto itself and yet there wasn’t much of a paper trail when your people built it. Even your history. . . You’ve got some of it written down in that Vampinomicon or whatever it’s called, but let’s face it: if that thing burned up tomorrow, you’d be able to re-create it from an oral tradition because some of you who actually lived that history are still alive. I envy your lack of bureaucracy.”
“I suppose you have a point,” Aidan said, “but you’re forgetting something.”
“I am?” I asked. “What’s that?”
He patted the pile of papers before him. “Time bends for us differently . . .”
“I figured that out when I met your leader and discovered he had named himself after a character from Beverly Hills, 90210. So?”
Aidan grabbed the stack and slowly flipped down through it, page by page. “It means that I get shafted with the mundanely human task of your paperwork thanks to my role as liaison between our two people. For someone whose life is already an eternity, jumping through the hoops of an organization that will most likely wither while all of us still live on makes the task of doing this paperwork a different kind of eternity all its own.”
“Fair point,” I said. “Sorry.”
Aidan picked up a pen and started scrawling at inhuman speeds on one of the detail sheets in front of him. “It’s all right,” he said. “There is some consolation in all this.” Aidan looked up at me, grinning. “I’ll never get those bags under my eyes that you have from all this right now.”
“It’s not the job,” I said. “These are from the hangover.”
“Another thing I’m glad to not really experience,” he said, and fell to his pile of paperwork without another word, blazing through it in a way I could only dream of.
16
Despite the bustling sprawl of New York University from Greenwich Village down to Houston Street, I wasn’t too worried about just how the hell I was supposed to find any of the students I was looking for, thanks to the predictable and cliquish nature of film and theater people. Especially when it came to finding freshmen who were so new to the Big Apple that they latched onto one another like lost, lonely magnets. I started by hanging around Washington Square Park, and it didn’t take me too long to spy Trent and George making their way across the park. George’s platinum blond hair against the brown of his skin stuck out enough that I could have probably spotted him all the way from my apartment down in SoHo.
I followed the two students into one of the film studies buildings, thankful that my Department of Extraordinary Affairs ID was enough to get me in during normal school hours, unlike sneaking around the other night. I never knew when it would or wouldn’t work. It never quite held the weight that an actual police shield did around Manhattan. The two freshmen headed deep into the building’s twist of corridors. I kept losing them in my efforts to shadow them as discreetly as I could, and I had to use my psychometry a few times to flash on which way they had gone, but they were quick hits that didn’t flare up any residual anger issues. Before long, I came to a dead-end corridor with only one door marked with a sign that read EDITING SUITE—FILM & SOUND. I paused outside it to collect myself, trying to decide the best approach once I stepped through it. Last night’s conversation at Eccentric Circles had gone fairly well before they had brushed me off. Maybe the role of one of Mason Redfield’s old students would still hold up.
As I opened the door, I hoped it would, anyway. The students seemed nice enough and I wasn’t in the mood to threaten people with my bat, not unless they were something that went bump in the night, anyway.
The editing studio beyond the door was a large, dark, open space lit only by banks of computers along with various decks, boom mikes, speakers, and film equipment. Along the far side of the room was a glass-encased recording booth with a blank movie screen inside it. I thought I might be interrupting a class in session, but then I realized that the only students in the room were the group I had met the other night at the bar. At one of the computer consoles, cameraman Heavy Mike was working on film footage along side Darryl, who, even sitting, was taller than him. All I could see of Elyse was a shock of her blond hair poking above a cushion-covered acoustics screen that had a microphone hanging down into it. George had already set to work even though he had just entered and was sitting at a computer console near me. Trent had his back to me and was in the process of lugging a stack of books and binders across the floor, heading toward George.
“Hey, there,” I said to no one in particular.
Trent spun around, dropping the stack. George gave me a sleepy look from the computer at which he was working. He scratched his bleached shag of punk hair, and then waved. “Hey,” he said, and went back to watching whatever he was working on.
Trent swore under his breath.
“Nervous much?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” Trent said. He kneeled down and started gathering up the books and binders.
“Sorry,” I said, crossing to help him.
Elyse came into view from behind the acoustics screen in formfitting jeans and a Les Miserables T-shirt, her eyes intent on Trent and his cleanup efforts.
“Would you watch it, Trent?” she said, storming over, not even noticing me. “Some of that is all we have of the professor’s notes.”
Trent looked up at her. The young freshman looked worried. “Company,” he said, and then nodded his head toward me.
Elyse looked up, surprised to see me there, but her face shifted in an instant to something more collegial. “Oh, hello,” she said, giving me a smile. She snapped her fingers. “Simon, right?”
“Yes,” I said, squatting down to help with the books on the floor.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, quick and abrupt.
“I’m the reason he dropped them,” I said. I didn’t bother to tell her that just hearing they were some of the professor’s personal notes was enough to have me wanting to get my hands on them. His office had been empty of anything personal, after all.
Elyse, however, moved faster than me, dropping down with the agility of a gymnast and scooping up the few books and notebooks Trent hadn’t already reclaimed. I did get a chance to brush my hand against one of the notebooks as she stood, and I pressed my power into it for just a second before she pulled herself away and placed them next to a large piece of equipment over in the center of the room. A splash of a demonic red structure filled my mind’s eye, the familiar sight of a bridge set against a dark blue blast of water. My mind focused in on a bronze nameplate attached to one of its struts.
“What’s the Hell Gate Bridge?” I asked.
Elyse turned to me, suspicion in her eyes. “Excuse me?” she said.
“One of the notebooks fluttered open when they fell and the name caught my eye,” I lied.
Elyse seemed to buy the story, and once she finished putting everything down, she wandered back over to me.
“It’s one of the more structurally sound old-world bridges around Manhattan,” she said. “Hell Gate actually refers to the strait beneath the bridge. It comes from the Dutch phrase hellegat, which means both ‘hell gate’ as well as ‘bright passage,’ which was the name originally given to the entire East River.”
“Sure you’re not a history major?” I asked. “You sure have a lot of New York knowledge.”
“I should,” she said. “Professor Redfield was making a documentary on the bridge. It was the project he was working on, bef
ore. . . you know.”
“Gotcha,” I said. My spider-sense started to tingle. Was there something more sinister to its history than just its name? Was the East River a portal to Hell or something along those lines? It seemed kind of ludicrous, but Other Division did deal with the ludicrous on a pretty regular basis.
“So the professor was working on a documentary?” I asked. “Seems strange, given his filmic proclivities.”
“How do you mean?” Elyse said.
“You know. . . with his love of old-school horror and monster movies of the Sinbad variety,” I said. “Urban architecture just seems like a strange choice, is all.”
“Not really,” Elyse said, stiffening a little. “Do you only watch one kind of movies? I mean, genre cinema was his passion, but his scope wasn’t limited to just that. You don’t teach at NYU long if you can’t reach beyond your own personal passions. I mean, for instance, I dance, sing, and act, but I wouldn’t define myself through just any one of those things. Neither would Professor Redfield. But if you’re looking for a link to his love of all things horror film, the name of the bridge was Hell Gate. I think that appealed to Professor Redfield’s sense of horror, the kind that exists in the real world.”
“Bridges inspire a sense of horror?” I asked.
“They hold their own dark histories, don’t they?” she asked, putting on a dark dramatic tone, setting a bit of spooky mood.
I still wasn’t getting what she was driving at. “Such as. . . ?”
“Hell Gate was built as a commuter bridge,” she said. “We’re talking all kinds of potential chaos with that. Train accidents, people getting run down, jumpers. . . you name it.”
Just her delivery of her little speech here was enough to give me the chills. Elyse would graduate and find herself a working actress for sure. I stepped away from her and headed over to the closest computer station, where George was working.
“So, what?” I asked. “You’re going to finish the documentary for the dearly departed professor?”
Elyse danced around me with a graceful twirl, cutting me off before I could get over to George and his machine. “There are several projects of his that we’re working on.”
