We ended up forcing open the rooftop door and meandering downward.
This was an apartment building, which was less than ideal. If it were a hotel, nobody would blink at people they’d never seen before wandering the halls. If it was an office building, the place would be mostly empty. But we were going past people’s living quarters, so we were bound to stick out. Also, we were covered in blood, and the night was full of police sirens. It would have been easy enough for anybody paying attention, to associate the bloody strangers with the law enforcement event taking place the street.
The stairwell got us straight down to the lobby, with three chance encounters on the way down. None of the three people made eye contact with us or looked in any way alarmed by our presence, so there was a chance we weren’t going to get noticed just thanks to the way people behaved in a city around strangers.
Then we got to the lobby. There was a rec room off to the side, containing four elderly women who were in the middle of a card game when we went by, and that was a different matter entirely, because they definitely noticed us.
I don’t know if this is true in every culture, but I’ve learned that older people have no problem with staring, and don’t bother themselves with whether or not it’s rude to out-and-out ask someone if they’re where they’re supposed to be. I think it may be that they just have nothing better to do, so they might as well become witnesses to things, in case someone ever needs an official statement. Plus, who’s going to get violent with an old person?
Even if none of the three residents in the stairwell elected to contact the police about our presence, I was pretty sure the old ladies in the card game would do exactly that just as soon as we’d exited the lobby.
Eloise asked the silent question, as one of the septuagenarians reached for her cell phone. I shook my head: no, let’s not murder grandma tonight.
The car was right around the corner anyway.
“Get us back,” Eloise said, just as soon as we were in. “Quickly.”
The driver she was speaking to was Han, the same guy who’d ferried us from the plane to the city.
He got the car moving (no limo this time, this was an SUV with tinted glass,) trying for a happy medium between very fast, and slow enough to not arouse attention. I just hoped none of the card players from the rec room got a look at the license plates.
“How are you doing?” I asked Mirella.
“I’m fantastic,” she muttered.
The car was large enough for all three of us to sit comfortably, with Mirella in the middle, against me.
Eloise sniffed, and leaned away from Mirella.
“She is sick,” Eloise said neutrally.
“She may be dying,” I said. “It’s kind of why we’re here.”
“Is this why? It’s something I have been wondering, in these days. Explain, please, why there is a roving assassination squad wanting your head. I do not know this city well, but I don’t think of this as normal.”
“It probably isn’t. There’s a contract on me. I don’t know why, or who’s paying for it. Or, I didn’t before tonight. I might now. Where are we going?”
“To the airstrip. And now that it’s clear your life is at risk in this city, I think we must depart. Do you have a safe place to escape to? If not, I can provide.”
“I do, but I’m not done here yet.”
She crinkled her nose, which was a thing she did when expressing perplexity. I always found it adorable.
From a purely mathematical standpoint, Eloise was my lover for longer than any other person in my life. That was mostly because she could live as long as she wanted, and also because neither of us had anything else going on for a century or so. (It was the Dark Ages and all that.) To say we had a history was an understatement. Seeing that little nose crinkle took me way back.
“This is not the behavior of the Lord Venice I know,” she said.
“Well, it sort of is. We killed a dragon together, remember?”
“Of course. Is there a dragon in Chicago? We can slay it together.”
“No. Something harder to kill than that.”
“What does this mean?
“No, hang on, you first,” I said. “What are you even doing here?”
Eloise and I met in France during the plague years, when she was a new vampire and I was the only guy in the village who knew what a vampire was. We ended up spending a century together while touring Europe, the Mediterranean, and northern Africa.
I’m a little hazy on how we ended up separating. It was a long time ago, so of course there’s the vicissitudes of memory to content with, but I probably went on a drinking bender for a while and she just decided not to keep up. It’s happened before.
I didn’t bother to try to track her down, because I knew from prior experience that vampires don’t typically make it past their third century. This isn’t because of something physiological; they just run out of things to do, and eventually depression kicks in. And when depression is coupled with immortality, in a being who can commit suicide just by watching the sunrise, it doesn’t end well.
By the mid-seventeen-hundreds, I assumed Eloise was dead. This is something I go through with everyone, which is why I also understand a vampire’s depression better than most. (It’s a good thing I’m not sun-sensitive, because I have had my moments.) She wasn’t dead, though. Evidently, having spent a century with an immortal, she learned a few tricks about keeping active, and dodged the three-hundred-year curse.
Or something. I can’t even begin to guess what it was I imparted, because I don’t have any survival tricks that don’t involve a pub, and alcohol doesn’t do much for vampires.
I didn’t learn that she was still alive until around the beginning of the twenty-first century. We were both being held captive on an old army base in a desert in the western United States at the time. Our escape involved her murdering about fifty people, which was bad for those fifty people but great for me, since I wasn’t one of them.
We left one another’s company in the desert. After that, knowing she was still among the living, I used a small part of my fortune to keep tabs on her. There was a five-year gap in there—falling between when we parted and when I was able to pick up her trail again in northern France. I didn’t know how she got there, but I knew where she was, and that was good enough. I figured if I ever needed her help I could reach out.
I didn’t, though. I thought about it a bunch of times, but inevitably decided it would be best if I left her alone. I figured it was indirectly my fault that she’d ended up half-starved in a box in the desert, so, all the better to let her live her life rather than risk dragging her into another one of my messes. And then I burned my old life down, and lost track of her again.
The two things I was missing: sometime between when we separated after a century together and the start of the twenty-first century, Eloise managed to amass a small fortune; and after we split up the second time, in the desert—in that missing five years—she used the Path to find her way back to that fortune.
She was familiar with the Path already, because I introduced her to it. It was one of the ways we used to travel across Europe.
When she came back to her senses in the desert, she couldn’t speak any English and barely knew where she was or who she was. I could have helped her with some of that, but she didn’t want my help. Instead, she struck off on her own. Her wanderings eventually landed her in Chicago, where she spotted the familiar three-hares symbol.
The Chicago way-station helped her get on her feet, and gain access to her money, and even got her some English lessons. She repaid them by literally paying them: the reason it seemed as if the Path was flush with cash was that it was. She put her own money in it.
Then came the day I turned up in England, looking for a ride to America. Not only did she send her own plane, she sent herself. She was sleeping in the cargo hold—in a coffin, which was sort of funny, because vampires hardly ever do this unless it’s a personal fetish—whe
n we flew across the Atlantic.
As to why Eloise didn’t announce herself sooner, her explanation essentially amounted to not realizing I didn’t already know she’d made the trip with us. She thought I would have figured it out from the champagne. Obviously, she overestimated my powers of observation.
That I didn’t use the phone immediately to contact her was proof—in her mind—that I didn’t want her around.
After Eloise explained all of that, it was my turn. It took the rest of the drive back to the airport to fill her in, starting with an explanation of what appeared to be killing Mirella, then to the corporate dragon named Holitix, ending with the league of assassins (or whatever) that evidently wanted me dead.
“They are connected, you’re thinking?” Eloise asked. The question was in reference to Holitix and the hit squad.
“I think they have to be,” I said.
“This makes little sense, if I am to follow the time correctly. You hear this name Holitix for the first time now, but the contract is from before now, and before you’ve left this island.”
Mirella grumbled loudly but incoherently. She’d already lodged a semi-audible complaint at my mentioning the island, so I assumed this was an extension of that.
“This is the part I’m having the most trouble with too,” I said, squeezing Mirella tighter. “They had to see me as a threat somehow, long before I knew anything about this. Then they had to decide it would be better if I was dead, at a time when, so far as the rest of the world knew, I already was dead.”
Eloise laughed.
“I did not think a moment that you were dead. Who is behind the contract had the same doubts.”
“That’s fine, but that only gets us so far. I’m not nearly this important. If a conglomerate decides to murder its clientele, I can’t imagine any scenario where I would be in a position to stop them.”
“I certainly consider you important,” she said. “Else I would not have gone through all of this to rescue you. And I remain in doubt regarding the conglomerate. I can neither imagine you stopping them from this than I can imagine them doing this.”
The car rolled to a stop. I took another look out of the window to confirm that we’d arrived.
“That really is my old plane, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It is. I bought it at auction. Your estate didn’t know what to be done with a Gulfstream, and having one enabled me to see more of the world, without a kidnapping.”
“I didn’t know you had that kind of money.”
“I do. It took some time to remember. Come, let us aboard. Sunrise is coming.”
We got Mirella aboard and onto the bed, then peeled her clothes off.
It was bad. I didn’t know if the disease had accelerated drastically over the previous eight hours, or if she’d been hiding it from me. It hadn’t been at all long ago, that she rolled up her sleeve to show the patch to Dr. Ignacius, so I was leaning toward an acceleration, possibly connected to her adrenaline. I would have asked her, but he wasn’t all that lucid so there was no point.
We got her some water, and made her as comfortable as possible, and then left her alone to finish our conversation regarding what was going to be happening next.
After securing the blinds to stave off the creeping sunrise, Eloise sat at the desk that used to be my desk.
“It is quite the problem, Lord Venice,” she said. “You have a disease you can’t explain, a company whose connection to it is either angelic or demonic, and a contract on your life that makes no rational sense. The contract, you connect to Holitix. The disease, you connect to Holitix.”
“And you’re dubious.”
“I think yes. You are so sure about this?”
“Like I said, that team showed up while I was on the phone with Holitix, and the guy on the other end of the line asked what room we were in. That seems pretty explicit.”
“Yes, I understand. And I recall well your disdain for coincidence. We will approach this from another angle. This company dominates an entire community, yes? For the purpose of the discussion, let’s say I made my fortune by catering specifically to the vampire community, in the form of exotic human and non-human blood.”
I smiled.
“Like, rare dragon blood?”
“This is just for example. I am not saying that is at all the case, I am using a hypothetical.”
“Of course.”
I immediately concluded that this was exactly how she’d made her money.
“This would mean I have exclusive access to a secret group of individuals. The fact that they happen to be a secret means I have no meaningful competition, which also means I can charge as much as I like, commanding enormous margins.”
“A blood monopoly.”
“If monopoly means what I think, then yes. But one day, I decide to spike the blood. I add something that makes my clients sick, until they die. Why would I do such a thing?”
“To make money on the cure?”
“This is a consideration, but why? I already have this monopoly. Killing my clients achieves no goal aside for something to cover up.”
“Maybe you just don’t like your clients.”
“Then I am in the wrong business. It makes no sense, do you see?”
“Maybe the why doesn’t matter,” I said. “Maybe just the fact that they appear to be doing it is enough right now.”
“I think that if you go to Holitix for an explanation, you will be going down a drain.”
“A dead end, you mean.”
“Yes, that.”
“All except for what happened to Eve,” I said.
“The redhead.”
“Yes.”
Eloise’s experience with Eve consisted of the two occasions during our century together in which I insisted I saw Eve from afar, and the time in the desert. Eve was another prisoner, but she escaped before Eloise did; I didn’t know if their paths crossed.
“She thought it was Holitix?” Eloise asked.
“I don’t know if she did or not. But we got to Chicago by retracing her steps, which was how we met Rick, and he was the first person to give us the name of the company. I still don’t know how she contracted the disease, but the disease is here, and she was here, and the company used to be here.”
“All right, this is stronger information.”
“He also said it was a genocide.”
“I see,” she said, nodding slowly. “I think perhaps this man knows more than he provided. Would you like for me to ask him for you? I have persuasions you may lack.”
“No, that’s all right.”
I thought she was underestimating how intimidating Mirella could be when she wanted, but Eloise did have a decent point. One of my remaining options was finding him again and questioning him more thoroughly.
“Then you say you are not done here, but you are. There is nothing else but assassins.”
“No, I have another reason to stick around. Finding Rick again is the second option. The first is more straightforward. I can visit Holitix directly.”
“You’ve already said they no longer do work here.”
“That’s true, their lab burned down. But the doctor we spoke to was of the opinion that not all the sub-levels were destroyed. I think there might be something down there worth checking out. If I’m wrong, I’ll find Rick.”
“You mean we, Lord Venice. This is your new dragon, and we will fight it together. Especially as you’re now lacking support.”
“Well that’s not at all true. Thelonius should be checking out any day now.”
She was about to argue the point that an imp could not in any way provide adequate backup, when she realized I was joking. She never quite got the hang of my sense of humor, which I always found amusing. I think I was probably the only one.
“You can’t go forward alone,” Eloise said, gravely. She never had much of a sense of humor herself, incidentally, so I had to have enough for both of us.
“I appreciate it, but I can handle
myself okay,” I said. “There’s something I want you to do instead.”
I took a pen and paper from her side of the desk and wrote down a set of GPS coordinates.
“Do you remember the secret island I told you about?”
“I do.”
“This is the location. I want you to take Mirella there.”
“She needs a doctor, not a trip to the beach.”
“You’re taking her to one. His name is Lew Cambridge, and right now he’s the only medical person I trust. Tell him I told you to do this, and also to not trust anything from Holitix. I’d call and tell him that last part myself, but I don’t know the number, and my phone is in the hotel room.”
She was shaking her head before I even finished.
“No, I don’t like this plan. Better we all go to the island, and you return to Chicago later. We have a plane. This will be not difficult.”
“It’s just a burned-out old lab.”
“Then we will go together and look at the burned-out old lab, and then we will fly to the island.”
“Please. You’re one of the few people alive I can trust, and right now I’m more worried about her than I am about me. I only need a few days, and by then you’ll be back. I’ll try to hold off on needing a last-minute rescue until then.”
She stared at me for a period of time that was probably less than it felt. The thing about vampires is that since they don’t breathe, they’re missing a core piece of non-verbal communication. It’s a little unnerving.
“Do you remember why we separated?” she asked.
“Honestly, I don’t. I figured I went on a bender and lost track of a decade or two, and you didn’t bother to go find me.”
“No. It was a circumstance much like this. You are more predisposed to recklessness than I think you realize, Lord Venice.”
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