There’s just no other way, she decided. No other option that’s acceptable. We have to find her.
“I’m sorry,” Fred said, sniffing back tears. She hated to cry, especially in front of strangers. She knew she shouldn’t care what this guy thought of her; after all, she reasoned, he’s the bad guy. And he’d cut her, whipped out a sharp-bladed knife and drawn it across her upper arm for no reason but to make her scream and shake Angel up. But she couldn’t help the way she felt, and it was embarrassing to lose control of herself this way. She wiped at her eyes and nose with her free hand and glanced at the guy. He sat in his chair, barely seeming to notice that she was even alive.
“Look, I know you don’t really care about me and are probably just going to kill me and everything, so you don’t want to think of me as a person, but I am, you know?” she said. “So if you’re going to be sitting in here with me you might as well help pass the time by talking to me, okay?”
“Nothing to say,” the guy said.
“Well, that’s kind of a contradiction, isn’t it?” she asked. “You can only actually open your mouth to say that you have nothing to say? You’re a funny man. Evil, I’m sure. But still funny, in the peculiar way. Maybe when Angel comes to save me, he won’t kill you. Or maybe if he does it won’t hurt very much.”
Now the guy focused on her, a cloud of anger crossing his face. “Angel isn’t going to kill anybody,” he said curtly. “Angel is the one who’s going to die. I promise you that.”
“I talked to him on the phone,” she said. The guy had handed her his cell phone as soon as it had rung, after he’d worked out the details in a brief call from a compatriot somewhere. “He’ll just trace the call and find out where I am and he’ll come get me. It’s really not that complicated.”
“Angel made a deal,” the guy said, a sly smile spreading across his face. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, which seemed cold to Fred. Vibrant green, but cold as glass, or emeralds frozen in ice cubes for safekeeping. “Him for you. Fast and easy.”
She’d heard enough of the conversation to know that he was telling the truth, although if details of this deal had been worked out, it had been arranged with some confederate, not with this guy directly. But she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Angel would go through with it. “That’s what you’d like to think.”
“It’s what I know,” the guy said. His smile grew now, as if he understood that each of his words stabbed her like daggers, and he was enjoying the torture. “Come sunup, I’m turning you loose, but only once Angel is bursting into flames, standing in the rays of the rising sun. He fries, you fly. It’s a simple trade.”
“But…but he’s a hero,” Fred protested. “He saves people, helps people. I don’t…I’m just a scientist, a nobody. I’ve never saved the world, or even been to Greece. Not that going to Greece makes someone a hero, but you know, a lot of them came from there, in the old days. Angel helps more people in a week than I have in my whole life, probably.”
“That doesn’t always make him popular,” the kidnapper pointed out. Fred noticed that he seemed engaged in the conversation now, leaning toward her, responding immediately when she spoke. “In fact, it’s a good way to make enemies. Powerful enemies.”
“Like you?” Fred asked, sensing that he wanted to talk about himself but that he wanted to be drawn out. It wasn’t something she was good at—letting people stay in their shells was more her style. “Who are you, anyway?”
He looked away from her, toward the floor—but more, she thought, as if he were looking through the floor, at something she couldn’t begin to see. “You couldn’t pronounce my name if I bothered to tell you,” he said. “If you must label me, call me John.”
John, Jack, Fred thought. If this is all some kind of plot with fake names and everything, they could at least put a little more imagination into it.
But then again, it seems to be working, doesn’t it?
“And you consider Angel an enemy?”
“Angel is most assuredly an enemy,” John answered. “The worst enemy I know, because he is the most powerful. Fortunately, he’ll soon be the most dead.”
“The more evil enemies someone has, the better he is, I think,” Fred pressed. “Even if you get mad at Angel because he goes after your friends, don’t you recognize that he makes the world a better place to be? For everyone?”
“Let me explain something to you,” the guy said. “I don’t really care much about saving the world. I’m the one it needs saving from. I am interested in one thing: power. My associates and I have some, and we want more. A lot more. But there’s something in the way of us getting it—of me, getting my just due—and that’s Angel. I get rid of him, then I’m a hero, to my kind. And by capturing Angel’s power, I am instantly the most powerful of all. Do you get that?”
“I get that you’re an evil, nasty man with a killer inferiority complex that you’re trying to hide by pretending it’s a superiority complex,” Fred replied. “And you’re not someone that I think I would like, even if you weren’t also a kidnapper and…well…a jerk.”
John lurched out of the chair, rage flashing in his eyes, and she thought maybe she’d gone too far, because he looked like he had every intention of messing up the deal by killing her right now. He dug the knife from his pocket again and opened it, advancing on her. “I guess it’s time to cut you again,” he said. Fred tried to shrink back against the wall, but the handcuffs rattled against the radiator and there was no place she could go. She tried kicking at him, but he simply caught one of her legs in his strong hand. Fred writhed, trying to twist it from his grasp, but he was too powerful. With a thin smile, he drew the knife across her ankle and then released her, stepping back quickly out of her reach. A line of blood appeared where he had sliced her.
She started to cry again as he returned to his chair. But halfway across the room, a cell phone buried in one of his pockets rang, and he stopped, fishing it out and answering it. “What?” he growled.
He listened for a moment, said, “Okay,” and clicked it off, returning it to his pocket. He looked at Fred for a long few seconds, green eyes still smoldering, and then turned and walked out of the room, locking the door loudly after he went through it.
Fred was alone again. Which is just how I should be, she thought. She realized that her big mistake had been returning from Pylea with Angel and friends. Back there, she had lived alone, been responsible for no one but herself, couldn’t put anyone’s life in danger. Okay, she thought, I lived in a cave and slept on rocks and had to hide from the priests so they didn’t explode my head. But at least there was no one whose life might depend on my ability to not get captured, except me. If I messed up, I might get killed, but no big loss since I wasn’t really offering much to society in my cave, anyway.
Here, though, she had become part of a team. And being part of a team meant that she was dependent on them and they on her. Which also meant that she could endanger others, and they, in turn, could endanger her.
But right this minute, she was not particularly concerned about the danger she was in. Even the cuts, while painful, were minor injuries. It would take a lot of those to put her life in danger. She was mainly worried about Angel.
John was gone, though, and that meant she could continue with the only thing she could think of to do, which was to try to pick the lock on the handcuffs holding her to the radiator. She worked the hinge pin out of her waistband and studied it. It was nothing more than a tiny rod of metal, and she didn’t know if it would even work. From what little Fred understood about locks, there were some number of tumblers inside, the exact quantity depending upon the complexity of the lock. The tumblers had to be caused to line up, at which point the lock could be tripped. The ridges and slots in a key were configured in such a way as to push the tumblers into the correct alignment, but without a key, painstaking work would be needed to achieve the same result. And once the tumblers were lined up, tension was required—the turning of the key part.
Even if she could manipulate the tumblers, she didn’t know if she could hold the tumblers in line with the hinge pin and also use it to turn the lock.
As with any scientific experiment, there were multiple stages. One started with a hypothesis, and then proceeded to test that hypothesis, eventually arriving at a result. Her hypothesis was how she believed locks worked. The only way to test it was to get started with the hinge pin—at hand, she thought wryly. She raised the cuffed wrist to shoulder height so she could watch what she was doing, even though there wasn’t enough light to see much inside the dark chasm of the lock, and she slipped in the hinge pin. The cuff’s lock was probably a fairly simple one, so it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out.
At least, that’s what she hoped.
Chapter Fourteen
The stage was empty now, just recorded music filling the silence. Everyone was tired, Lorne included, and there were murmurs of resentment at being kept here so long. Lorne didn’t care—nobody was leaving until everyone had been spoken to, and whatever clues this bunch might have about Fred’s disappearance revealed. Subdued conversation took place at some tables, and at others silence reigned. In one corner, facedown on a blue table that glowed softly from within, a furry purple demon snored loudly. Sinatra played over the PA system, Lorne hoping the music would subtly remind the customers just who was Chairman of the Board tonight.
Lorne sat across from the pseudo-crustacean Shrenli who had come in alone and who sang soul and blues tunes like every phrase brought some fresh heartbreak. “You can really sing, Visssclorf,” he said.
“Did you like it?” she asked. He thought she was smiling, but what with the beak and no teeth, it was hard to tell. Lorne knew that the beak was useful for ripping and tearing—Shrenli demons usually ate the young of other demon species, which made them less than popular to have around, even at Caritas. Lorne felt a little uneasy himself, sitting here with her—the other tables around her were pointedly vacant.
“Don’t quit your day job,” he admonished her. “But to someone who has to listen to people who not only can’t carry a tune but wouldn’t recognize one if it climbed up their leg and got friendly, it was…well, sometimes the old cliché is the best cliché: It was music to my ears. You sang those songs like you felt them, which is really what music is all about. If you don’t have the passion, it’s just talking loud with instrumental accompaniment.” He took a sip from his mug—he’d moved on to coffee as the hour got later, just to help him stay alert.
“Did you…did you happen to read me?” Visssclorf asked. She sounded hesitant about the question, possibly afraid of the answer. “You know, my aura or whatever?”
Lorne set his mug down on the table. He knew what it had taken for her to come out in public like this. She was safe enough inside Caritas, but Shrenlis were such an unpopular species that she must have worried about leaving, afraid that she might be attacked and killed on her way home. And, he realized, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her. I mean, most of us can modify our diet if we have to. To her, of course, it’s not cannibalism, because they’re other species, but it’s still far from socially acceptable behavior. He reminded himself that she was a customer, one who had been particularly brave to come here, and that he might need information from her. “No, sweetheart,” he lied. He had, but what he’d gotten had nothing to do with Fred, and since she hadn’t asked him to, he didn’t want her to think he was prying. “Did you want me to? I’m sorry, I just have other things on my mind tonight, and didn’t even think to ask you.”
“Well,” she said, looking away from him and toward the floor, “kind of.”
“Is there something in particular you’re looking for?” he asked her, hoping she was maybe considering a dietary change. “Something troubling you?”
She nodded, still looking down. He guessed shyness was exhibited in similar fashion by many creatures. At this moment, she reminded him of Fred looking for an excuse to go to her room. “I have a…I guess, a major life change to consider.”
“Getting a job?” he prodded. “Boyfriend, girlfriend, new house?”
Finally she looked directly at him. Her eyes were small, round beads of black, like drops of ink that had been spilled on her hard shell. “I don’t know how much you know about Shrenlis, other than what everyone talks about, that we eat things we shouldn’t. We don’t seem to have much choice in that—we eat what sustains us, what gives us life, and whenever we’ve tried to change, it hasn’t really worked out. Many of us have gotten sick, and died, from avoiding the food that we know works for us.”
“You’re right,” Lorne admitted. “That’s about all I know.”
She took a sip of her beverage through a long straw. “Well, that’s part of what we are, but not the whole thing,” she told him. “That part makes us hated, and feared, and targeted. Your friend Angel, he’s killed several of my clan, some of my sisters. I try not to hold that against him, because I know how the rest of the world sees us. But something else about us is that we reproduce asexually. We divide. My time has come, and I’ve been giving serious thought to dividing. But do I want to bring a new Shrenli, my own shell and blood, into a world where she’ll be despised from the outset? Is that fair to her? That’s the question I’ve been struggling with, and I was hoping maybe you could help me.”
Lorne started to say something, and then held back, which was unusual for him. He knew that he had a habit of speaking first and thinking later. He’d occasionally been accused of loving the sound of his own voice, and there was, perhaps, some factual basis for that accusation. He turned his mug around on the glass tabletop for a few seconds, listening to the dull ringing sound it made as it spun. His first thought was that she should not divide, not reproduce, and that if every Shrenli made the same decision and this generation of Shrenlis was the last, he would have no problem with that.
But should I say that? he wondered. To her, eating the young of a Mofo, a Kailiff, or a Lister demon is no different from a human eating lamb or veal. Virtually every sentient species eats some form of meat, which means preying on some other creature’s offspring. For that matter, there are demons who’d object to the presence of a Shrenli in their midst, but would think nothing of feasting on humans. What’s repugnant to me is simply survival to her.
“You said Angel has killed some of your sisters,” Lorne said finally. “Does that mean you’re not willing to help me find his friend Fred?”
“Not at all,” Visssclorf said quickly. “I want your help, and I’m happy to help you. Like I said, Angel is just doing what he thinks he needs to do. That’s all we do too. So I’ll help if I can.”
“Fair enough,” Lorne said. “You help me, I’ll listen to you sing again and give you a reading. Maybe not right away, because I still have more folks to talk to, and the clock is ticking. But before you leave here tonight.”
“I think it’s more accurately this morning, at this point,” she observed.
“Oh, a stickler for detail, eh? Did you see Fred tonight? Last night, I mean, now that it’s tomorrow.”
“I saw Angel and his friends all sitting at the table together, yes. I’ve been here a couple of times before, not very often, but I’ve noticed them here before too. I remember feeling worried because I knew what Angel had done to my sisters, but inside here he always leaves me alone.”
“Those are the rules,” Lorne pointed out.
“Right, I know. So when I saw them tonight, or last night, whatever, I noticed that there was someone new. I gather that was Fred, the young lady with all the brown hair.”
“That’s Fred. If she shaved her head I think she’d lose a quarter of her body weight.”
“I saw her again, later on,” Visssclorf continued. Her words were perfectly understandable, but her beak clacked a little when she spoke, which Lorne found distracting. The color of her skin reminded Lorne of seafood restaurants near the shore, painted bright red long ago and then sun-faded to a pale rose. “I had gone to the females’ room
, which is where I feel most comfortable, even though we have, you know, just the one gender. When I came out, Fred was standing in the hallway, kind of blocking it, talking with a young human male.”
“Another one of Angel’s people?” Lorne asked. He hadn’t seen any other humans in the club all evening.
“No, someone else. Someone who hadn’t been at Angel’s table. Like I said, I recognized everyone sitting there except Fred, so this male was definitely not part of that group. This was just before the explosion that made everyone go outside. I didn’t go out, but when everybody came back in, some were starting to talk about Fred having vanished. I looked around then for the human male, and couldn’t find him. I didn’t see him again all night.”
Bingo! “Are you sure?” he pressed. “I didn’t notice any other humans in the club at all, so this could be an important point.”
“I’m positive,” Visssclorf confirmed. “I had to stand there in the hall while they talked—flirted, I’d say. I was about to finally say something, when the explosion happened.”
“What did he look like, this young man?”
Visssclorf considered the question for a moment before answering. “I can’t say if he was handsome or not,” she said eventually. “Shrenli standards of beauty are very different, I’m sure, from human standards, or even yours. But Fred was looking at him as if she thought he was. He was a good deal taller than she was, I remember. Powerful looking. Wearing a blue shirt with dark pants. His hair kind of stuck up all over, like yours does, but darker.”
Lorne unconsciously ran long green fingers through his own spiky blondish hair. She could have been describing Angel, except that his shirt tonight had been a deep maroon instead of blue. But that would make sense—Fred definitely had a crush on the hunky vamp, and if she had been as attracted to this guy as Visssclorf described, then it wouldn’t be surprising if he bore a resemblance to Angel.
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