by DD Barant
Then something explodes behind my eyes, and the last thing I see is a brilliant flare of red.
SEVEN
When I open my eyes, I’m back in a hospital bed. There’s an IV in my arm and a bandage on my forehead.
“You gave us quite a scare,” Dr. Pete says. He’s sitting beside the bed on a chair, studying me intently. I wonder how long he’s been there, and if he gives this much attention to all his human patients.
Then I think about how many of us are left, and wonder if he has any other human patients.
“I’m fine,” I say, sitting up in bed and wincing. “I just—what happened again?”
“You had a severe dissociative episode, brought on by RDT. You haven’t been taking your Urthbone.”
There’s no point in lying to him. “I didn’t like the side effects.”
“Oh? Maybe you’d prefer a cerebral hemorrhage? Or to go into convulsions and die?” He sounds a little angry.
“Are those my choices? ’Cause all of them suck.”
“What other symptoms have you been having?” Yeah, that’s a definite growl in his voice.
“Headaches. Nausea. Hallucinations—though I’m not too sure about the last one. Kinda hard to tell in your world, you know?”
“Look, you can’t stop taking your medication. I know you hate depending on anything or anyone, but this isn’t up to you. Take it if you want to live.”
“Yeah?” I blurt. “And what if I don’t?”
Okay, that was unexpected. I realize how close I am to crying, and try to get myself under control. “You’ve already given me some of the damn stuff, haven’t you?” I say, sniffing back tears. “That’s why I’m so damn emotional.”
“Of course we did. When Charlie brought you in here you were bleeding from the ears and having trouble breathing. Or would you have preferred we just let you die?”
I don’t say anything.
“Suicidal ideation is part of RDT,” he says, his voice softer. “I told you, Jace—your body and this universe aren’t a match. They’re trying to reject each other.”
That provokes a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I know all about rejection. Got my own personal demon showing up to jeer me on, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t listen to it. I promise you, RDT does fade with time. I know you’re tough enough to hang on until it does.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” I say. “You don’t know about trying to crack the glass ceiling in the Bureau. You don’t know what it’s like to have your mother call you on your birthday and beg you, in tears, to quit your job. You don’t what it’s like to be yanked out of your world and into a nightmare. So stop pretending you do.”
He regards me calmly and waits. After a moment he says, “Feel better?”
“A little.”
“Maybe I don’t know everything about you, Jace, but I know you’re not shy about expressing yourself. I want you to promise to do that—tell someone about what you’re going through, don’t just lash out in frustration.”
“Who? I’m kind of a peer group of one.”
“Me, if you want. Call me anytime. We can go for coffee, talk about anything that’s bothering you. Just because I turn into a wolf under a full moon doesn’t mean I don’t know what it’s like to be human.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Or you could try talking to your partner.”
“Charlie? You want me to have a heart-to-heart with a walking statue?”
“He’s more than that, and you know it. He’s also been standing guard outside your room ever since he brought you in.”
“Sure he isn’t just asleep? It’s kind of hard to tell.”
“You can ask him yourself.” He walks over to the door and opens it. “She’s awake—you can come in.”
Charlie walks in, holding his fedora in both hands. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without it, and it makes him look oddly vulnerable. “Hey, lazybones. Done goofing off yet?”
“Sure. Let’s get back to work.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounds as flat as roadkill and about as enthusiastic. I find I don’t much care.
“Charlie?” Dr. Pete says. “Can I have a word with you?”
Charlie nods and follows him out into the hall. They’re only gone a few minutes, and I spend the time wondering what’ll happen if I don’t catch the Impaler. Will they fire me, just turf me out on the street? And how long will it be before Isamu or one of his men shows up in my bedroom one night and I just vanish? Not that they’ll kill me, of course . . .
Maybe suicide is actually the smart option.
Charlie comes back in with a wheelchair instead of Dr. Pete.
“I don’t need that,” I say. “Besides, I can’t go anywhere. I’m having dinner.” I motion to the IV drip in my arm.
“We’ll get it to go,” he says. “The stand’s on wheels. Now climb aboard—I got something I want you to see.”
I can tell by the tone of his voice he isn’t asking. I sigh and give in.
He takes me down the hall and to an elevator, then up to the fifth floor. The sign on the wall identifies it as Long Term Critical Care, which seems like a contradiction in terms to me; people in critical condition either get better or die.
“Why are we here, Charlie?”
“Consider it a field trip.”
He pushes me down the hall and up to the door of a private room. I can hear the steady, low thrum of a motor; it gets much louder when we go inside.
The noise is coming from the structure that dominates most of the room, a platform about three feet high and the size of a double bed. A corpse floats about eighteen inches above it, suspended in mid-air by the powerful air jets in the platform. The body is horrifically burned; in places, there are only clumps of charred flesh clinging to bare bone. Much of the skull is exposed, no lips or nose left. And the eyes—
The eyes are watching me.
My whisper is swallowed up by the motor’s noise, but Charlie hears me anyway. “It’s . . .”
“Not dead,” Charlie says. “No. This is what happens when you mix napalm with silver fulminate. It sticks and it burns. For a long, long time.”
“What happened?”
The eyes are fully formed. They stare at me, unblinking. It has no eyelids.
“You know where lems come from?”
“Uh—a spell. Some Chinese sorcerer.”
“He wasn’t Chinese. He was Jewish.” Charlie’s popped one of his silver ball bearings into his hand, and he plays with it idly as he talks. “China was where the spell was introduced, but the sorceror—Ahasuerus—was a Jew. Nobody knows exactly why he decided to spread that spell around the world, but that’s what he did. Pretty soon you could find lems almost anywhere: Asia, Europe, South America . . . and the Middle East.
“It’s funny how many human preconceptions and prejudices just won’t go away. Sometimes I wonder if the thropes took over the Catholic Church or if it was the other way around. . . . Anyway, in the Middle East it was Islam and vampires. Maybe in your world it’s different and all the big religions get along—but not here. Pires and thropes are one thing, but Catholic thropes and Muslim pires can work up a hatred for each other you wouldn’t believe.”
“I think I might.”
“Yeah? Well, the only thing a pire extremist hates more than a thrope fundamentalist is a Jew of any type. And since lems were created by one, we’re all considered Jewish by default.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this—”
“Certain Islamic vampire sects like to use golems in an unusual way. They implant one with pressurized tanks of napalm, cut with silver to make sure any burns are permanent. Multiple nozzles hidden just below the surface of the skin, pointing in every direction. Then send it into a crowd of Catholic thropes in a church or on a bus and activate it with a remote—the napalm sprays and ignites at the same time.”
I shake my head. “We have those, too—we call them suicide bombers.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah? We call them sandtraps.”
“Why are you showing me this, Charlie?”
“Golems were created to be protectors, Jace. It’s in our basic nature. Yeah, we’re weapons, but we’re weapons that think and feel. Weapons that can choose. To create one of us and take away that choice, to give someone a life that lasts a day and ends in mindless slaughter? That’s evil, Jace.” He stares at the burned body hovering before us. “That, right there, is evil.”
I realize that I’m not picking any emotions up from the burn victim, despite the Urthbone in my system. “Wait. This guy’s a pire, not a thrope.”
“I’m surprised you can tell. Yeah, see, making sandtraps is a tricky business. Silver fulminate and napalm is an unstable combination, can ignite prematurely. This guy here had one go up while he was still building it.”
My emotions do a somersault, and pity turns to anger. “Son of a—”
“Makes me wonder, you know? Pires are immortal. They take a few basic precautions, they can live forever. But clowns like this put their very long lives on the line, just for the chance to kill a few thropes who like to go to Sunday Mass.”
“There’s evil everywhere, Charlie.”
“Not my point. The doc said you were thinking about offing yourself.”
His bluntness almost makes me smile. “That’s not—”
“Don’t do it. Guys like this, they’re willing to die to kill other people. We want to stop them, we have to be willing to die, too. So, you want to die? At least go down fighting. Job like ours, you’ll get your chance soon enough.”
He stops. “That’s it. End of sermon. You want to go back to your room?”
“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”
Once we’re back in the hall I ask, “Charlie? I can’t believe that guy is still alive.”
“Pires are tough, but fire and silver are a nasty combination; his body’ll grow back, but it’ll take a long, long time. Years, maybe even decades. And it’ll hurt like hell, every second of every day.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here, okay? Hospitals depress me.”
Someone else is waiting for me when we get back to my room. Gretchen. She’s sitting on a chair beside my bed, reading a magazine. When Charlie wheels me in, she looks up, seeming entirely unconcerned.
“Well. How’s the invalid?”
“Grumpy.”
“Not surprising. Your physician tells me you’re lucky not to be in a coma.” Her tone is light, but there’s an undercurrent of concern in her voice. In my present sensitive state, it almost makes me tear up again.
“Dammit, cut that out,” I blurt. “This stuff turns me into a leaky emotional sponge.”
“I thought you couldn’t read pires.”
“I can’t,” I sniff. “So shut up.”
She smiles at me gently, and I abruptly realize she’s probably old enough to be my grandmother, at the very least. She reminds me a bit of her, too, what I can remember; she died when I was nine. A very sweet little old lady who liked to sneak cigarettes and coffee no matter what her doctor said. She could curse a blue streak, too.
“Perhaps this will cheer you up,” Gretchen says. “They have a pool going down at the office.”
“How long before Cassius fires me?”
“No, method of suicide. It’s leaning heavily toward jumping off a bridge, but deliberately getting yourself killed in the line of duty is gaining ground quickly. People see you as self-destructive, but with a strong work ethic. And a sense of drama, I suppose.”
I glare at her. “Okay, three things. First, I’m getting out of this chair, marching down to the office and setting fire to it. Second, you totally made that up, and third, thank you. Now go get me a damn coffee, please.”
“Your wish is my command, O serene one.” She gets to her feet and glides out of the room.
Okay, she could teach Granny a thing or two.
Dr. Pete agrees to release me on one condition: that I start taking my Urthbone again. He says that since the tea was obviously too strong, he’s giving me a weaker, powdered form that I can just add to a liquid.
Gretchen leaves after a short visit, citing work concerns. Charlie wants to take me home, but it’s the middle of the day and I insist on going back to the office. “I’m fine,” I say. “What am I going to do at home—watch thrope operas and play solitaire?”
“Being alone might not be such a bad thing. Let you get used to that stuff you’re taking again.”
“Ah, I’ll be okay as long as I avoid overhormonal thropes—lems and pires don’t seem to register. Anyway, I want to talk to our suspect as soon as I can.”
“Good luck. The woman we snagged is named Brigitte Sullivan—she was using a disguise spell called a glamour to pose as Selkie.”
“Damn. I was really hoping that was just a hallucination.” Like Roger, I add silently. Who is apparently trying to make up for being a lying scumbag in real life by becoming a spokesperson for the Truth in my head. But is he right? Am I on the wrong side?
“Aristotle Stoker,” I say. “Descendant of Bram. Tell me about him.”
“One of the big movers and shakers of the FHR. Raised and educated in secrecy, brought up to hate all thropes and pires. Supposedly a genius. Also supposedly dead, killed in a suspicious fire fifteen years ago. The Impaler showed up about five years after that.”
“So maybe he faked his own death, went even deeper underground.”
“Why?”
“To train. To take his campaign to the next level.” It was starting to make a kind of sense to me. “He’s a human being living in a supernatural world. To compete, he had to turn himself into something mythic. Something the monsters would fear.”
“The Impaler’s got an impressive rep, sure. But why not use that off the bat?”
“In show business, timing is everything. That’s what the killings are about—he’s building an audience. The revelation that the Impaler is behind them will drive the numbers even higher.”
“But why tell the person hunting him his real name?”
“He wants to create a connection between us. I don’t know how he knows about me—magic, maybe—but I’ve seen this before. Serials often view their crimes as a game, and a game is always more enjoyable with a good opponent.”
“Same kind of thing his great-great-granddaddy did.”
“Bram, yeah. Tell me about him.”
“Victorian London. Pire hookers started getting killed in the Whitechapel district. Decapitated, mainly, but a few of the younger ones that didn’t turn to dust were cut up with a silver blade. Letters were sent to the newspapers, the killer claiming he was going to murder a vampire prostitute every week until they were all gone. Police finally caught him when he bragged about what he’d done while drinking in a humans-only pub. One of his own turned him in.”
“What happened to him?”
“Hanged. But before that—when it got out that he wasn’t a pire or a thrope—there were riots. Two hundred and sixty-two humans were torn apart by mobs.”
“Christ.” I stare out the window. “So Junior’s got a legacy to live up to. Probably sees himself as some kind of savior.”
“Yeah. Except he’s more into getting other people nailed to pieces of wood.”
“He hasn’t used that one yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised. . . .”
I pretty much expect to get hauled on the carpet by Cassius, so I’m not really surprised to have the receptionist tell me he wants to see me. I consider blowing him off—I was serious when I laid down my attitude toward rules and regs—but decide I may as well get it over with.
I march in without knocking. “So I had a little episode. Big, hairy—”
Tanaka’s standing there, in front of Cassius’ desk. He stares at me with an unreadable expression on his face.
“—deal,” I finish. Now would be a good time to have another fit, fall down, and pass out.
Or maybe just have the earth swallow me up.
“Mr. Tanaka,” Cass
ius says, “has uncovered some intriguing information about your suspect. This information was important enough that he felt he had to deliver it in person.”
“Ah,” I say. “Good. Okay. Right.” I stay where I am and hope I’m far enough away.
“Agent Valchek,” Tanaka says formally, inclining his head. “I fear that my information is not as vital as Director Cassius makes it sound. Rather, my superiors felt that I could do more good here than in Japan.”
“International treaties work both ways,” Cassius says. “One of the crimes happened in their country, after all. If the suspect is on U.S. soil, they have every right to search for him here.” He keeps it out of his voice, but I can tell he’s not happy. Maybe the Urthbone works better on pires than I thought.
“I’ll debrief you,” I tell Tanaka. A microsecond later, when my brain informs me what it’s just tricked me into saying, every ounce of blood in my body surges into my face. I’m hoping it kills me quickly.
“Yes, good idea,” Cassius says flatly. “Bring him up to speed. You and I will talk later.”
“Come on,” I tell Tanaka. “Let’s get a drink. Of coffee, I mean.”
He nods and follows me out of the office. I try to stay ahead of him on the way to the elevator—
Oh, God. The elevator.
He doesn’t question my decision to take the stairs. I lead him down to the cafeteria, put him in a chair, grab two cups of tea from the counter, and sit down across from him. So far, so good.
“I must confess my motives are more personal than I admitted,” Tanaka begins. Not so good.
“Look, Tanaka—what happened between us shouldn’t have.”
“I know. You were in a vulnerable position, which I took advantage of. I am deeply sorry.”
Huh. While that’s technically correct, nobody likes to hear that someone’s sorry they slept with them. I don’t, anyway. “Apology accepted. I guess. So what’s the news?”