Killer's Gambit

by Hermione Stark

  Even though Mrs Shahidi had insisted that none of Zezi’s belongings were there, I hoped I might pick up a feeling or vision. Mrs Shahidi had refused to allow me to visit the house while her other kids were there, saying that she hadn’t wanted to rile up all of those old and disturbing feelings for her kids again. She what hadn’t wanted to give them false hope.

  When I got to the house Mrs Shahidi was waiting for me. She thrust an old dusty plastic bag into my hands. “I found it under the floorboards,” she said excitedly. And then she began to pace with great agitation, wringing her hands. “I was tidying her old room and it was there. I knew it! It was the goblins. It was that horrible boy she went to school with. She kept it a secret from me!” She looked baffled and upset.

  The contents of the bag turned out to be a diary that Zezi had kept.She had written all of her diary entries as letters addressed to the so-called horrible boy, one Finch Greyiron.

  “He’s a goblin!” Mrs Shahidi shouted. “I told him to stay away from my girl. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.” She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands and started to cry.

  I sat down beside her and put my arm around her until she stopped crying. I made her a cup of tea and drank it with her and let her talk to me about Zezi before I left. I knew she hadn’t spoken about Zezi to anyone else but me in a long time.

  Afterwards I went to a cafe to scan through the diary, not wanting to read it in front of Mrs Shahidi. The contents were unexpected. They made me decide it was a good idea to find Finch Greyiron immediately. By the time I finally tracked down his current whereabouts and made his neighbor promise to tell Finch to call me, it was already past 6:00 pm and time for me to call it a day.

  I would normally have kept going, unable to rest once I was on the scent, but today I had bigger and more personal things on my mind. After all, I hoped Zezi was only missing, abut even if she had been dead, no killer was as important to me as DCK.

  I had already looked up the address of the Ronin nest. I couldn’t allow the fact that it was a rich man’s mansion deceive me into forgetting it was a vampire nest. I couldn’t go there unprepared.

  Stefan Ronin’s mesmerism might not have not worked on me, but that didn’t mean that the same would be true of the other vampires in the brood. They would be pure-blooded vampires rather than dhampirs. It was interesting though that he was a dhampir, that rare and almost mythical of things. I was so curious that looking it up was the first thing I planned to do when I got home.

  But first I had to make a pit stop at Grimshaw’s. The bell rang as I let myself in, and I found Theo in the back section of the shop behind the counter, his head bent over his ledger as he updated it. He looked up when he heard me, and smiled as if pleased to see me.

  “Diana!” he said. “What brings you here? I wasn’t expecting you.”

  Clearly he was distracted by whatever he was writing because his head was already bent over the ledger again and his round spectacles had slid down his nose. His brown hair had a dash of gray at the temples, and he pretty much always wore a tweed suit that looked surprisingly good on him. If you saw Theo walking down a street you would think he was an upper-class English gentleman, and never guess that he was a wizard.

  “Hey Teddy bear.” I went over to the counter opposite him and leaned my elbows onto it as I watched him scrawl his neat little notes.

  “Everything all right?” he said distractedly.

  “Do you sell truth serum?”

  That did get his attention. His eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. “Most certainly not. Why did you want it?”

  “Oh, you know me,” I said casually. “I’m always on the hunt for murderers. Truth serum would be a handy tool in my kit.”

  “You’ve never asked for it before.”

  “I’ve never interviewed vampires before.”

  “I see.” Theo pushed his glasses up his nose and eyed me thoughtfully.

  Theo’s knowledge of magic and otherkind was expansive and varied. He knew that it helped me to sense things about the people that I was interviewing if I was able to touch them. And he had probably already figured out that I wanted the truth serum because I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting within touching distance of a vampire.

  He pursed his lips, and then said mildly, “I’m not sure you want to be associating with vampires.”

  “This vampire knows who killed Magda.” I explained my conversation with Steffane Ronin to him.

  When I finished Theo looked a mixture of both understanding and pained, no doubt because he knew that nothing was going to sway me from my current course of action. He tried, bless him.

  “I’m not sure that your compulsion to hunt down this Devil Claw Killer is entirely healthy,” he said. “This man is a monster experienced in his savagery. You can’t seriously think that you’re going to be able to kill him?”

  Theo knew all about my compulsion for killing. I had been forced to tell him everything in the hopes that he might be able to help me from going out of control. We had made a pact that if it came down to it and I did have to kill someone, I must absolutely make sure that they were truly guilty. I had been very much surprised to find that mild mannered Theo had seemed to understand that some monsters deserved to die and that the world would be a better place without them. Maybe one of the reasons he hadn’t freaked out was because he felt some sense of responsibility for me. While he hadn’t told me that I must not kill a monster, we had never been truly tested yet. The opportunity for killing had not arisen.

  “Will you make a truth serum for me?” I asked. Theo was skilled wizard. I had no doubt he could whip up the complex potion without too much trouble.

  Theo shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. We agreed that if you go down this path, you would have to tread it alone. There are too many eyes on me, and it would be better if there is no trace of my magic on anything that you do. We are still agreed that no one must ever know if you do this? You must be extremely careful?”

  I nodded. “I will be careful. I promise.”

  Theo still looked worried. “I am not sure this Steffane Ronin sounds entirely trustworthy. Vampires never are. And the Ronin brood is especially powerful. If you must go to their nest then you will need to take precautions.”

  He hurried around the shop fetching me a few things, and came back with a little spray bottle, a little metal box, and a rather impressive-looking wooden stake. When I picked it up, it was surprisingly heavy.

  “It has a silver core,” he explained. “And you must not use this except under the direst of circumstances. Like the rest of otherkind, even vampires are protected under our legal system.”

  I picked up the little bottle. It had the look of a medical spray and the letters VX on front.

  “It’s holy water,” said Theo.

  “What’s with the weird bottle?”

  Theo made a bit of an embarrassed face. “It’s to fool vampires to think it’s got Vaerus X in it. It’s the only known pathogen that affects them. Gives them a nasty illness for weeks. Just waving the bottle around might persuade them to keep their distance.”

  “I would happily spray them with the Vaerus X if you’ve got any,” I said.

  “It’s very difficult to get hold of. And it’s no good in a fight. It takes a day or so for the pathogen to take effect.”

  “Too bad.” I put the bottle and stake in my satchel. “So what’s this?” I picked up the box. It was locked.

  Looking pained, Theo unlocked it. Inside was a sleek gun and a row of wicked -looking silver bullets. I whistled.

  “I am not sure it’s the best idea to give you this,” Theo said, still looking like he was on the verge of changing his mind. “It would be an extremely bad idea for you to turn up with this. If they saw it, they might think you were there to pick a fight.”

  I pushed the box back towards him. “It’s no good anyway. I don’t know how to use it.”

  Theo looked both relieved and upset and asto
nished at this. How could a would-be killer of monsters not know how to use a gun? “Do you want me to give you a lesson?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe later. For now I don’t plan on using the weapons. Now about this truth serum…?” I raised a hopeful eyebrow.

  He frowned. “How exactly were you planning on getting them to ingest it?” he asked.

  I made a face. “Perhaps they would have invited me in for tea.”

  That made Theo laugh. “I doubt it. And I am not certain what the effect would be on the undead. However, you’re welcome to take the ingredients and attempt to make it up yourself.” The encouraging smile he gave me when he said this made it clear that while he was glad I was taking an interest in expanding my repertoire of magical skills, he doubted I would succeed.

  Potion-making took magical skill and practice, of which I had none. Theo did say once that he had sensed some inherent magic in me, but I’d turned down his offer to teach me to use it. Knowing Theo’s cautious nature I was sure his methods would be more theory than practice and I was too impatient for that.

  Theo was looking at me slightly anxiously. “Diana, I’ve been doing some reading up on the Angel of Death and wanted to talk to you—”

  “Gaargh!” I said, interrupting him swiftly. “I really don’t want to talk about that now, Theo. Maybe later?” I added that last bit as a gesture of goodwill given how disappointed he looked. I didn’t really want to think about it. I didn’t know whether he or I would like what we discovered.

  Searching for a change of topic, I found myself asking, “Do you know anything about dhampirs?”

  Theo’s eyes lit up. “A very interesting question!” he said enthusiastically.

  He proceeded to give me a lesson on vampire genetics which was far more detailed than I had wanted. But at least he wasn’t talking about Angels of Death anymore. While vampires largely procreated by turning humans into vampires, he said, apparently in otherworld vampires valued their blood-kin highly. Therefore male vampires would try to sire their own genetic children on human women, but the chances of fertilization taking place using a vampire’s sperm were very low. Even when that did happen, such pregnancies were rarely viable, often ending in miscarriages. It was a highly celebratory event for the whole brood’s blood-kin if a baby did come to term. The children born of these pregnancies were known as sanguiths, sickly half-human half-vampires with all of a vampire’s weaknesses and none of their strengths. But if these sickly sanguiths survived to adulthood, their sire could turn them into a full blooded vampire in the usual way, thus creating a highly loyal new blood-kin member of his brood.

  “So that’s what a dhampir is?” I asked. “Steffane Ronin was awfully arrogant for someone who’d been a sickly kid all his life.” I couldn't quite imagine him as a vulnerable sanguith.

  “No, no.” Theo emphatically shook his head as if despairing of my impatience. “Sanguiths, if they survive the change, become normal vampires, no different from a vampire created from a human. A dhampir on the other hand has all of the strengths of a vampire and none of the weaknesses. A dhampir is born, not made.”

  “So you’re saying some of these sanguiths are actually dhampirs?”

  Theo shook his head again. He explained patiently that a dhampir was a child born of an unchanged sanguith woman and vampire father. But this almost never happened because sanguiths were so sickly that their vampire sires would not risk them to pregnancy when a human woman would do instead. Also, it was even rarer for a sanguith’s pregnancy to be carried to term given that the weak body of the mother could not sustain the growing baby.

  “However, and this was the interesting part,” he said, “If a sanguith does bear a living child, the resulting babies vary as to what creature they are in terms of their genetics. It is thought that a quarter are fully human, half are sanguiths, and a quarter should be dhampirs.”

  “Should be?”

  “Since a dhampir baby would have the strength of a vampire, such a fetus would kill its sanguith mother while it was still in the womb,” Theo explained. “Neither baby nor mother would survive. It’s one reason why dhampirs are so rare that they used to be thought to be myths. Another reason is that the genetics that make a dhampir are thought to lead to few viable embryos. And finally, vampires kill dhampir children, regarding them as abominations.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What? But dhampirs are like super-vampires, aren’t they? Able to walk in sunlight. Not really needing to drink blood to survive. Why would vampires kill them? Surely they would value them?”

  Theo looked thoughtful. “This is an aspect of vampire custom that vampires are highly secretive about. I have wondered if they regard dhampirs as abominations because they fear them. I read an ancient account which spoke of a dhampir boy gaining the skills of elder vampires quickly, making the elders feel threatened. They destroyed him. Perhaps that is why vampires do not suffer a dhampir to live.”

  “So why didn’t the Ronins kill off Steffane Ronin as a child?”

  Theo shrugged. “Only the Ronins know that. It could be the key to cracking your case.”

  Chapter 8

  DIANA

  Theo’s thoughts about dhampirs gave me much food for thought as I made my way home. I stalked down to Oxford Street tube station and made my way onto a central line train, finding it packed at the tail end of the commuters’ rush hour. A heap of shoppers jostled me to get onto the packed train when it arrived and I jostled back.

  Once inside it was impossible to get a seat so I didn’t even try for one. Instead I stood smack back in the middle of the train, my body sideways to the direction of travel and played a balancing game, testing how long I could stay upright. The other commuters clung to the handrails for dear life as the train jostled and sped to the next stop.

  I was so busy with my thoughts that I had to keep a careful eye out for my stop. I wondered if the Ronins been unable to kill off the dhampir Steffane Ronin and had conspired to put him in prison instead. What did that say about him if he was a vampire that even other vampires were afraid of? Did I really want to set him free?

  The truth was no. If he was that dangerous then he belonged in prison even if he was innocent of the crime that landed him in there. But that was leaping to a conclusion instead of doing my job of investigating, which was exactly what I planned to do. Steffane Ronin was the only one who could give me what I wanted. Devil Claw. So I had to hope that he really was innocent.

  Several hours later, back at my apartment in Notting Hill, I ended my third attempt to brew the truth serum. I’d botched it again. It had not turned into the colorless liquid that the spell book told me to expect, but into a gloopy gelatinous mess. And I had now run out of the ingredients Theo had given me. Sighing, I swept all of the empty little bottles and tubes off my small table and straight into the bin.

  AngelBeastie had been hovering in the vicinity of my ankles for the past hour. I scooped her up and settled with her and my laptop on my bed. If I was going to have to wing it, I had better know what to expect. I fell asleep googling vampires.

  In the morning I woke up feeling eager to go and pay my visit to the Ronin’s. But I knew there was little point going until evening. The vampires would be fast asleep at this hour. Going into Agency Headquarters was the last thing I felt like doing. I really didn’t want to have to see Storm again today because I was sure he would be able to sense that I had no intention of listening to him about staying away from the Ronins. Storm was able to read me like that.

  As soon as I had decided not to go into the office, I felt miserable. Or as mildly miserable as my buoyant mood would allow me to feel. I looked forward to Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays because they were the days of the week that I got to see Storm. For months now I’d been fighting my feelings for him, and working in the same office as him these past three weeks had only made my feelings stronger.

  Deciding to not go into the office today meant that I would not see Storm. I wouldn’t be able to loiter aro
und the coffee machines during my breaks and take peeks into his glass tank of an office. The days when he was out in the field only made my desire to see him grow greater.

  All of last week had been a drag knowing that he was not in the office and that I wouldn’t see him and not knowing what was keeping him away. If I don’t go in today, then I might miss my chance to find out. Not that I thought he would tell anyone his private business.

  If only he would, then maybe he would stop being such an attractive mystery. I’d realize that he was just Joe average. Any other guy. Just one who happened to be exceptionally tall and muscular and handsome, with those intensely deep and penetrating dark eyes that felt like they were looking right into my soul every time they looked at me.

  I groaned. Down girl. There was no use obsessing about a man who, if he had had any interest in me whatsoever, certainly wouldn’t have scarpered out of my bedroom so fast the other morning. How much more of a hint did a girl need before she would lose interest in a guy?