Dying Bites

by DD Barant

  He smiles. “It is. But David and I are old friends, and he knows I can do my job more effectively if I understand the situation—as can you. Please feel free to ask me anything, about the case or the world around you. I will do my best to provide answers.”

  “All right. What’s your official status in the investigation? You work for the NSA, local police, what?”

  “I am the official security liaison between your NSA and the Nipponese Shinto Investigative Branch. Our agencies perform similar functions in each of our respective countries.”

  “Not my country. . . .”

  He nods his head in acquiescence. “I was about to eat. Would you care to join me?”

  I notice for the first time he has a tray of nigirizushi in front of him on the low table between us. “Are you going to tell me the Batplane has its own sushi chef, too?”

  “I’m afraid not. I obtained this from the airport concourse before you arrived. I hope the food is amenable?”

  “I’m a vegetarian, but sushi is the exception to the rule.” I’ve already picked up chopsticks and grabbed a slab of glistening tuna on rice. I pour some soy sauce into a little ceramic bowl with one hand while I stuff the fish into my face with the other. It turns out I’m pretty damn hungry.

  Tanaka is staring at me with an unreadable expression on his face, but the Urthbone tells me exactly what he’s feeling: disbelief.

  “What?” I say around a mouthful of raw heaven. “My table manners bother you?”

  “No, it’s what you said. You . . . you are a vegetarian? Does that mean what I think?”

  “Well, it doesn’t mean that I think God looks like a head of broccoli.” I chew and swallow. “It means I don’t eat meat—with the exception of anything I can add wasabi to.” I grab a big green chunk of it with my chopsticks and drop it in my saucer of soy.

  “You must consume a great deal of fish.”

  I peck at the wasabi with the chopsticks, mashing it into the sauce. “Not really. I get most of my proteins from tofu, beans, dairy, and eggs.”

  He shakes his head. “That seems very . . . alien to me.”

  “I suppose it would.”

  “Why do you deny yourself meat?”

  I dab another piece of nigirizushi in my wasabi and soy. “I’m not denying myself anything. I’m choosing not to kill another being to fill my stomach.”

  “But . . . that is their purpose, is it not?”

  I pop the piece in my mouth. “Depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? If you think the planet and everything on it is here for your own personal use, then I guess the pain and suffering of other living beings doesn’t matter much. But where I come from, we look at things differently—or we’re starting to, anyway.”

  “So no one consumes meat where you are from?”

  “No, plenty of people do. I’m just not one of them.”

  “Without the natural cycle of predator and prey, the natural world becomes unbalanced.”

  “Sure. But that balance also gets thrown out of whack if one side of the equation becomes too dominant. If everybody eats beef, cattle need lots of room to graze. Forests get cut down to make pasture. Instead of trees absorbing carbon dioxide to make oxygen, we get cows absorbing grass to make methane. I don’t know about thropes, but I’d rather breathe air than cattle farts.”

  He considers this. “That is a very Eastern way of looking at things. Most Americans I know do not think like this.”

  “Well, most of the Americans you know probably aren’t from a parallel dimension.”

  “That is true.”

  The food is making me feel better, a little less culture-shocked. Strangely, it’s also making the Urthbone stronger; I can feel Tanaka’s emotions like an undercurrent in my own mind. It’s a bit like being drunk, when your own emotions seem bigger and more important than they are usually; I decide that now’s a good time to try to refine the effect, see if I can make it work for me. I try to focus on Tanaka’s emotions as opposed to my own, and find it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

  There’s just a touch of worry, but hardly any; he’s good at his job and knows it. Confident, but not arrogant. And there’s something else, something stronger, underneath that—it must be his lycanthrope nature, the wild part of him that he keeps in check. I close my eyes, pretending to enjoy a particularly succulent prawn, and probe the feeling like an invisible tongue searching for a sore tooth.

  The result, though, isn’t a jab of pain in my mouth—it’s a burst of another feeling entirely, and a lot farther south. Warmth spreads through my belly and groin, and the smell and taste of the food is suddenly much stronger. I breathe in sharply, almost inhaling half my ebi roll, and cough, spewing grains of sticky rice and bits of shrimp meat all over the table. Tanaka leans forward, suddenly concerned.

  “Are you all right?” He lays a hand on mine, and the feeling of his warm skin against my own makes me a little dizzy on top of the coughing fit.

  “Fine,” I manage to choke out, and pull my hand back.

  I get my share of male attention. I stand five eight, do a hundred crunches a day and have the abs to prove it. I’ve been told I have the neckline of a goddess, though nobody ever says which one. My hair is long, very black, and full, while my features tend more toward the Slavic definition of beauty than North American. I don’t put on a mini skirt unless I mean it, but when I do I can cause car accidents.

  But nobody’s ever responded the way Tanaka did.

  It wasn’t just the intensity of his lust that I felt; it was the depth. That’s the only way I can put it. All men have that automatic hindbrain trigger that fires whenever they see a beautiful woman, but if you could decode that signal and put it into words it would just come out as “want sex now!” in a demanding, Homer Simpsonesque voice.

  Tanaka’s signal was more like Barry White crooning in my ear. “Hey, baby. I want you. I want you bad. I want you all the way, every inch of you, inside and out. I don’t care how long it takes; I don’t care what I have to give up to get it. I’ll do anything, to anyone, just for the chance of spending one minute naked with you. Oooh, baby . . .”

  There was more than just desire in that burst of emotion. There was patience, and yearning. There was fascination, and hunger. And most of all, there was this tremendous focus, as if I were the last woman on Earth and he’d just gotten out of prison.

  “You have some prawn in your hair,” he says.

  “Uh, thanks,” I stammer. What the hell was that? Did this guy just gobble a handful of Viagra, or whatever the werewolf equivalent is?

  An explanation occurs to me, but I’m a little too rattled to be subtle about confirming it. “So. You’re a lycanthrope. Don’t know a lot about you people. Are you more like wolves or humans?”

  “That is a matter of much debate. Most consider themselves enhanced humans.”

  “Enhanced, right.” I try desperately to push away the image that comes to mind. “Are you—I mean, is there any downside to that? Disadvantages?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You know, biological stuff. Like having to shave hard-to-reach areas, or midnight cravings for rabbit, or . . . or certain times of the year making you, uh, behave differently.”

  “Yes, of course. Lycanthropes celebrate their heritage every lunar cycle with the Moondays festival. It’s quite the celebration—”

  “Do you go into heat?” I blurt out.

  There’s an endless moment of silence as he considers his response and I wait for the Earth to swallow me up—unlikely, since we’re actually in the air by now. Strangely, I don’t feel nearly as embarrassed as I should; Tanaka certainly isn’t, and his calm amusement seems to be dampening my own sense of discomfort. The lust is still there, but it’s not nearly as intense as when we touched.

  “Ah. Not as such, no. The tides of the female body, though, are still tied to the moon, much as they always have been. And the males of our kind are . . .”

  He hesitates
. He meets my eyes. Another surge goes through me, nearly as strong as the last.

  “Civilized,” he says, “but still wild at heart.”

  I smile weakly, and change the subject.

  After that I retreat to a far corner and spend most of the flight fiddling with the cell phone Eisfanger gave me before we took off and reviewing materials on my laptop. Tanaka leaves me alone; I don’t know if he’s sensitive to my mood—God, I hope not—or if it’s just some Japanese protocol thing, but I’m grateful for the solitude. Eisfanger’s doing something strange with chanting and incense in his cabin, while Charlie’s disappeared into the cockpit.

  There’s a lot of data to go over, including the recordings of the two killings the killer made and posted to the Internet. Gretchen’s working on that angle, but she told me before we left that she isn’t having much luck. “He’s using magic to cover his tracks,” she said. “Fox virus, looks like. Damn thing keeps doubling back over its own trail.”

  I watch the recordings, over and over. The first one begins with a simple wire cage, maybe fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and six feet high, against a backdrop so white and featureless, it looks artificial. It’s lit by a single bright spotlight behind the camera that throws sharp-edged jet-black shadows on the snow. A chain-link barrier divides the cage in two; one side holds five snarling, barking huskies, their silvered fangs giving them an alien, otherworldly appearance. The other contains the victim.

  I freeze the image and study him. According to the file, he’s an African-American vampire named Abraham Porter. He looks like he’s about forty, balding, with broad shoulders and a bit of a paunch. The way he’s dressed suggests late fall in Maine, but he doesn’t seem cold. No breath puffs out of his mouth, either, adding to the illusion; I have to remind myself that I’m looking at a scene where the mercury was somewhere around fifty degrees below zero.

  The look on Porter’s face is just as savage as the dogs; his fangs are extended, his eyes bloodred. I wonder how a human being managed to get him into the cage—brute strength seems unlikely. Could a vampire be drugged? I didn’t think so, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe it was more magic.

  Which I’m really, really, beginning to loathe. I feel like I’ve been dropped into the last minute of a basketball game, told I have to play by a new set of rules, then had the ball passed to me while the coach promised he’d get that rule book right out to me, yes ma’am, by next week at the latest.

  I hit the play button again. A rope attached to the divider leads upward to a pulley on top of a pole, then down and off-camera. Someone pulls on it, raising the divider, and the dogs lunge forward and attack.

  The rest is fairly predictable, though Porter lasts longer than I would have expected; if he had more room to maneuver, he might have had a chance. As it is, once two of the dogs latch on to his throat and pull in opposite directions, it’s all over. It takes a third to actually sever the spine.

  And then the body just kind of falls apart, disintegrating into big chunks that crumble into smaller chunks, until the whole thing is dust. Instantaneous decomp, right down to the molecular level.

  First no ballistics, now no body. Frustrating, though I’m slightly mollified by having an actual recording of the murder.

  I watch the second one. Same kind of flat, featureless terrain, but this time it’s red-brown instead of white, desert lit by the last rays of the setting sun. Once again the murder weapon is center stage, the sarcophagus standing mostly upright—it’s on some kind of stand, leaning back at about a seventy-five-degree angle—with the door open to show the victim inside. He’s muscular, looks like he’s in his thirties, has a bushy red beard and curly hair. He seems groggy. It must be possible to drug a lycanthrope, though I’m guessing it’s not easy—their immunity to disease and ability to heal rapidly suggest their bodies’ defenses would resist any kind of chemical.

  The silver blades on the lid gleam sunset red, looking as though they’re already coated in blood. Once again, a pole, pulley, and rope arrangement leads to the door on one end, off-camera at the other. When it’s yanked, the door flips shut. There’s a wet, punching sound beneath the loud click of the lock, and then the vic screams. The killer’s timed it perfectly; the light from the horizon dims just as the lid slams closed, signaling that the sun is down and the full moon is now dominant. The scream turns into a howl halfway through, though the anguish in it remains the same.

  Then it’s just the silver maiden rocking back and forth on its stand, as the victim inside thrashes and howls. It goes on for a long time. Eventually, dark liquid starts to drip from the base of the casket. Blood always looks black in moonlight.

  Both recordings were uploaded to a site called Televisionary, which seems to be this world’s version of YouTube. Viewers numbered in the thousands, at first—the footage was assumed to be faked, and the McMurdo site was remote enough to suppress news of the murder. When the Australian clip was released, though, the vic’s family recognized him and told the media. Removing the clips from the site didn’t help—they’d already gone viral, notoriety ensuring their survival in millions of downloaded copies. I know why the killer staggered the releases the way he has: he’s building an audience. The Japanese killing hasn’t been released yet, but everyone in the world knows it will be . . .

  When the killer’s added another victim to his résumé.

  I close my eyes and think. Two different methods of killing, both of them savage yet impersonal. A lycanthrope killed in a coffin, a vampire killed by silver and dogs. Almost a kind of homicidal dyslexia, a reversal of methods instead of letters. The staging of the scenes, the preparation involved, suggests a strong element of ritual—but the sadism of the killings seems much more personal. Either the killer enjoys torture, or he has a deep hatred of his victims.

  I look through the files on the vics. Not a lot in Porter’s; he was some kind of researcher working for the U.S. government near the South Pole. Everyone at the research station had been eliminated as a suspect, and Porter’s personal life seems devoid of psychopaths with a grudge.

  The lycanthrope was Andrew Fieldstone, a local who made a living running tourists out to Ayers Rock. He was a bit of a troublemaker, had several arrests for public drunkenness and assault—starting bar fights seems to be the equivalent of a sport in the small town he lived in. He hadn’t been involved in anything that would provoke this level of violence.

  According to the animist evidence, the killer’s a human male. According to my new boss, he’s also crazy . . . but by Cassius’ own admission, vampires and thropes don’t have a lot of experience with psychopathic behavior. So why are they so sure the killer is insane? The murders, while disturbing, look more to me like the killer’s trying to send a deliberate message—and while that might seem unbalanced to most people, it makes a little too much sense to be definitely attributed to the workings of an irrational mind.

  Something isn’t right. I’m not being given the whole picture, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it must have something to do with the research facility at McMurdo. Besides, I don’t think they’d yank someone out of a parallel dimension for a paltry three deaths, no matter how gruesome. No, I’m pretty sure my employers know exactly why Porter was killed; it’s the other two deaths that have them uneasy.

  And maybe the murders that haven’t occurred yet. . . .

  The jet prepares to touch down at the New Chitose Airport on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four islands. It’s not as densely populated as the others, big stretches of it still virgin wilderness dotted with remote lakes and the odd volcano. The murder took place in the Hidaka Mountains, at a place called the Ezo Wolf National Park; from what Eisfanger tells me, we’ll need a four-wheel drive to get out there.

  Charlie finally emerges from the pilot’s cabin and makes his way over to my seat. I’m staring down at the city through the window.

  “Ever been to Japan?” Charlie asks.

  “No,” I say. “Not on any w
orld. You?”

  “Once. Lots of pires, not as many thropes. In Tokyo, anyway.”

  “Maybe we should have brought Gretchen.”

  “Maybe. Most of the bloodlegging trade goes to Japan; they still have a thirst for the stuff.”

  “Bloodlegging?”

  “Black-market human blood. Hear they pay a thousand dollars an ounce.”

  “Nice to be wanted.”

  “Nah, you got nothing to worry about. That’s for virgin blood.”

  I wonder how much trouble I’ll get in for shooting my own enforcer.

  It’s just after 2:00 P.M., Hokkaido time. I used the onboard kitchen facilities to brew up some Urthbone tea shortly after we left, then poured it into a little plastic travel bottle I found in a cupboard; I take a healthy swig now. We’ve been in the air for a little under eleven hours, and all I’ve had to eat has been the sushi and some cheese and crackers—I stayed away from the raw haunch of lamb and the wax carton of sheep’s blood in the minifridge.

  The jet lands and rolls up to a gate, where one of those enclosed accordion ramps latches on. We disembark, and I realize I never saw or heard the pilot the entire time. Typical spook stuff: classify and compartmentalize, and never tell anyone anything except what you have to. He probably flew the plane wearing blinders—or maybe Charlie just sat there and glared threateningly at him the entire time.

  Unlike most of the airports I’ve been in, this one seems practically devoid of glass and almost deserted—it feels more like we’re in a big subway station at 3:00 A.M., lots of illuminated signs in Japanese and echoey concrete. Then I realize that, for vampires, this is the middle of the night; no doubt the place is much more active when the sun isn’t up.

  “Okay,” I say to Tanaka. “What’s next?”

  “The train station.”

  We head outside to an idling taxi. No waiting at customs, either; Tanka simply gives a guard stationed at a turnstile a curt nod, and he lets us through. NSA privileges, no doubt—or maybe Cassius is so well connected he doesn’t have to bother with little details like international borders. The cab’s built like they are in the UK, two seats facing each other in the back, and Charlie and I take one while Eisfanger and Tanaka take the other.