by DD Barant
“Anthony Krabowski.”
I stop washing my hands and stare at her. “What?”
“That was his name. He was seventy-two years old. He had three previous convictions for rape, one for attempted murder. That was the life you ended.” She studies me, waiting for my reaction.
I nod, slowly. “Yeah. That was what I did.”
I process for a minute, wonder if I’m going to cry, and realize I’m not. “Thanks, Gretch.”
“We pires may have a different relationship with the Grim Reaper, but death is never easy to deal with. Some problems get worse the longer you put them off.”
“Really? ’Cause I’d of thought that after a few centuries of life, you might get tired of the whole thing.”
She laughs softly. “That’s how it is for some of us. For most, though, life becomes like blood itself—an addiction. No one will fight harder to survive than an old pire who refuses to kick her habit.”
“Or the bucket.” I hesitate, then ask, “Is that how it is for you?”
“Oh, I’m not that old—not by pire standards, anyway. And my reaction to my increasing age is disappointingly small town, I’m afraid.”
I frown. “You’re going to buy a rocking chair and take up knitting?”
“Possibly—but not for the reasons you’re thinking.”
I plainly don’t get it, so she spells it out. “I’m thinking of having a child.”
“That’s, uh—congratulations?”
“I’m only considering it. The commitment required is obviously enormous. But the desire to create life, rather than simply prolonging your own—even in a pire, it’s powerful.”
I smile. “The most powerful urge there is, Gretch. I think you’d make a terrific mother.”
“Well, that goes without saying. But for now, let’s concentrate on finding our quarry, shall we?”
When we get back to the table, I see two other people standing by our table and talking to Charlie and Cassius. I don’t need an introduction to figure out they both must be Purebloods.
The thrope is smaller than most, maybe six feet even in his were form, and dressed in nothing but gray fur. Most thropes wear at least a pouched belt or bandolier to carry things in, but not this guy. He’s got an oversize mug of beer in one paw, which he laps at like a dog from time to time.
The thrope isn’t the only one who doesn’t feel the need for clothes. The pire beside him is around the same height he is but skeletally thin; I can see every rib through his ghost-pale skin. He’s wearing a bloodred loincloth and nothing else. His finger- and toenails are long and curved, his hair long, black, and unkempt.
He’s also obviously the spokesman for the group that’s lurking a table over, six more Bloodborn and another thrope. They must have come in while Gretchen and I were in the bathroom.
“—someone of your age must see that,” the pire says. He sounds a little drunk. “You’ve been a blood drinker for far, far longer than you were ever a mere human.”
Cassius looks vaguely amused. “And how would you know how old I am?”
The pire grins, exposing fangs that seem a little larger than normal. “Oh, we Bloodborn can tell such things. And I can also tell that after having outlived so many ORs, you couldn’t possibly view them as anything more than temporary pets—”
“Hey there,” I say.
Skin-and-fangs turns to look me over. I guess there’s something to his claim for extrasensory abilities, because he wrinkles his nose and says, “You smell like a wolf. But you’re not—you’re human.”
“And you’re a mosquito with an annoying buzz,” I say. “But I won’t hold that against you.”
The thrope growls at me, plainly expecting me to be terrified. I probably should be; one swipe from those claws and either I’m dead or I join the Bark of the Month Club.
“Piss off, Fido,” I growl back. “In fact, why don’t you go find yourself a hydrant and check your p-mail?”
In retrospect, insulting a drunken, racist werewolf in a bar full of his friends might not have been such a good idea.
The thrope lunges forward, his jaws going for my throat. He gets halfway there and his trajectory is abruptly changed by Charlie’s fist slamming into the side of his head. That sends the furball smashing into his friends’ table—and they all leap to their feet and charge us.
Here’s where I should be describing an extremely vicious free-for-all. But the thing about bar fights is they happen very fast and all at once, and when you multiply that by the strength and speed of the parties involved . . . well, I really couldn’t keep track most of the time. Try to imagine a bunch of angry cats in an industrial-size tumble dryer and you might get the idea.
I do remember Charlie hitting someone with a piano. And I don’t mean he decked a piano player—I mean Charlie picked up a baby grand and hit someone with it.
Myself, I mainly try to stay out of the way. Spraying bullets in a crowded bar is not a good idea, and I’m not packing my scythes at the moment. So, as much as it galls me, I find some cover behind an overturned table and try to be inconspicuous.
And that’s where she finds me.
For a second I think it’s just someone else taking shelter from the brawl. But then I realize that the woman crouching next to me is Mona, the pire I met in Bethel. She’s dressed exactly the same as she was then and doesn’t look at all surprised to see me. “Hello, Jace,” she says.
I’ve got the Ruger out and jammed in her ribs before she can say another word. “Hello, Maureen,” I say. “That is you, right?”
“Indeed,” she says, her southern accent replaced by an Irish one. “I’m sorry for the deception. But if you’d like some truth to counter it, I can provide you with answers. Real answers, not the shite they’ve been feeding you.”
“Where’s Stoker?”
“Not here. But I can take you to him—just you, you understand.”
I know what she’s proposing, and it’s probably a very bad idea. But then, that’s kind of my stock-in-trade—it wouldn’t make much sense to change my strategy now. “Okay. How?”
“Follow me.”
She leads me to an emergency exit in the back and out into an alley. She’s got a car waiting—a little more mundane than I expected, but maybe that’s why she chose it. It’s a vintage Chevy, with huge tail fins and a chrome grille so big it’s like a whale wearing braces.
We get in. I still have the gun on her, but I don’t know what good that’ll actually do; she’s a witch, after all. She doesn’t seem worried by it, but that means nothing—
“Please, point that elsewhere while we’re driving,” she says, starting the car. “I wouldn’t want to hit a bump and have you blow a great messy hole in my guts.”
I lower the gun as we drive off. “You know what this is?”
“I know a great many things, lass. About you, about your world, about what’s really going on. Shoot me, and you won’t learn a single one of them.”
“Where are we going?”
“Patience. We’ll talk as I drive, how about that?”
We pull out of the alley and down a street. Pires walk past, many of them dressed like they just walked out of a Bogart movie; I half-expect Selkie to change into Lauren Bacall and ask me if I know how to whistle.
“How much have they told you about magic?” she asks.
“Just the basics. Animism, everything has a spirit in it. And humans can do magic that pires and thropes can’t.”
“That we can, lass, that we can. Shape-shifter spells, for one. But there’s another kind of magic entirely, one they don’t like to even admit exists, let alone talk about. HPLC. High Power Level Craft.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed mystics were big on acronyms.”
“We’re not. But the government is—and that’s just what HPLC is all about. Ruling the world. Power on a global scale.”
We’re headed out of town. I put my seat belt on without taking my eyes off Selkie. “Go on.”
“HPLC is our version o
f nuclear weapons. But in magic, there’s always a cost; for instance, it takes a year off my life every time I change shape.”
That wasn’t something Eisfanger had mentioned. “So?”
“So what do you think the cost was to bring you from another world?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been treated more like an agent transferred from another detail than some precious resource they had a lot invested in. Now that I thought about it, it was obvious Cassius had been reinforcing that attitude from day one.
“I don’t know myself,” she says, “but I’m sure the cost was dear. Using HPLC always is.”
“So how does it work, this kind of magic?”
“Through gods, of course. Ancient, terrible beings, who can be bargained with if you don’t mind risking death or insanity. Which, if you hadn’t noticed, both pires and thropes have a certain immunity to.”
“So that’s what all this is about? Sacrifices?”
“In a manner of speaking. But the sacrifices you should be asking about aren’t Stoker’s victims—they’re all the human beings who died so this abomination of a race could go on. Do you know what the Purebloods believe, Jace?”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“Is that so? Did they tell you how many of them there are? That they’re trying to get legislation passed to tag humans with Radio Frequency Identity chips? It’s all for our own good, of course. To protect an endangered species.” She laughs, a high, wild sound. “How noble of them, don’t you think?”
“This can’t go on, Maureen. You can’t—”
“But we can, lass. We can and we are. This isn’t random slaughter, or some pathetic attempt at revenge. Aristotle knows what he’s doing. He has a plan, and he wants you to join us. It’s not too late, you see. We can still take this planet back. We can have our world again.”
She slows down, turning off the highway and down a dirt road. We bump over a cattle grate, one of those metal grilles with the bars spaced so that hooves slip between them. Handy for keeping the livestock where you want them without inconveniencing the ranchers.
She stops. The lights of Missoula are no more than a mile away, but it’s still very quiet and very dark. Selkie’s face is lit by the green glow of the dash’s indicators and nothing else.
“Is Stoker meeting us here?”
“No. Before I take you to him, I need your answer. And don’t even think about lying to me; I’ll know.”
“I need more details.”
“You’ll have them. But you have to choose your side, first. For us or against us, Jace.”
God damn it.
TWELVE
“Well,” I say to myself, “that could have gone better.”
I’m limping down the road toward Missoula. Behind me, the car burns brightly, surrounded by curious cows that have apparently never heard that A) cows are supposed to come home after dark, thereby upholding a time-honored cliché, and B) dumb animals are supposed to be scared of fire. Guess they’re a little too dumb.
Yeah. Just like me.
I’ve reached the outskirts of town when a large, black vintage car—a Packard, I think—pulls up beside me with a screech. Two blocky guys in crew cuts jump out. One asks me if I’m okay, while the other cups his ear and says, “I’ve got her. Alive but injured, not seriously.”
“You guys are agents?” I say. “Where were you twenty minutes ago?”
Crew cut number one says, “Sorry, ma’am. Mystic blackout, knocked out all our eyes and ears. We’ve been looking for you ever since you disappeared.”
“Well, you found me. Give me a lift, huh?”
Five minutes later I’m back at the B and B, where Cassius and Charlie are waiting, along with a swarm of agents, all in period clothes. Too bad the bait didn’t have the sense to stay in the trap and wait.
“What the hell,” I say, stalking up to Cassius. “I stalled her as long as I could. Where were you guys?”
“Are you all right?” Cassius says.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Got knocked over when she blew up the car. Pretty sure I put a bullet in her shoulder before she vanished, though.”
“She blacked us out,” Cassius says. “Some kind of large-scale glamour, affected the whole town. It was like you fell off the planet.”
“Well, I’m back, now. Didn’t do too well on the landing, though.”
A large and extremely strong hand grips the back of my neck.
“Uh-huh,” Charlie says. “When we first met, what did I tell you was the politically correct term for a golem?”
And now my brain decides to shut up.
“Look, it really is me,” I say. “Just give me a second to think, dammit—”
“Sure. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. If Selkie could mystically black out a whole town, doing a glamour-based impression of another human probably wouldn’t be that hard, would it?”
“Thanks a lot, beach-breath. Let’s see you come up with a piece of meaningless trivia while your boulder-brained partner cuts off your oxygen supply—”
He lets go. “It’s her.”
I turn around and glare at him. “Mineral-American! I told you I’d get it, you pebble-headed pigeon attractor—”
“You use a lot of alliteration when you’re upset, have you noticed that?”
“Jace,” Cassius interrupts. “What did she say to you?”
“Nothing new. She wanted me to join her and Stoker, I was betraying the human race, yadda yadda yadda. And she had some kind of magic lie detector, so I couldn’t just bullshit her. Things went downhill from there.”
Cassius stares at me. “I’m amazed you’re still alive, frankly.”
“Thank Han Solo,” I said. “I shot first.”
That gets me a blank stare, but I don’t really care. A medic comes over and takes a look at my leg, which is bleeding but not broken.
“You were lucky,” the medic says.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s me.”
We leave town immediately. No point in staying, and I think Cassius wants to get me as far away from the Purebloods as possible. I kind of feel the same way.
On the way back to Seattle, I keep to myself. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do before they debrief me.
I got into law enforcement for a pretty simple reason: I was angry. It seemed to me that the world had too many bad people in it, and I wanted to A) understand why they were the way they were and B) stop them. Not fix them, just stop them—ergo, a criminal profiler as opposed to a psychiatrist.
Ultimately, I suppose I wanted to make the world a better place. Or at least make the ones who made the world a worse place pay a price for it. Either way, I thought I recognized the difference between right and wrong, and I was pretty determined to kick wrong’s ass.
Here, the whole world is wrong. So much so that it’s completely replaced right, and now the people I should be protecting are the people I’m trying to stop.
I hadn’t been completely truthful with Cassius. Maureen Selkie didn’t tell me exactly what Stoker was going to do—but she had told me what the pires had done, and why they’d done it. The knowledge was sitting in my head like a big malignant tumor, demanding that I do something about it. I had to do something, that was for sure—I just didn’t know what.
We go straight from the airport to the NSA building and Cassius’ office. Gretchen and Charlie don’t come along—Cassius wants to talk to me alone.
I don’t let him get behind his desk—he’s going to have to deal with me on his feet this time. I put a hand on his shoulder as soon as the door closes and say, “Before you start asking questions, I have a few of my own.”
He turns around and faces me. His expression is smooth, unreadable, all his defenses up. I’m looking at several centuries’ worth of poker face, and it’s like staring at something carved in stone. Even Charlie would be impressed.
“Go ahead.”
“Tell me about HPLC.”
No hesitation at all. He’s ant
icipated this conversation and he’s prepared for it. “High Power Level Craft. The strongest and most dangerous kind of magic, restricted to government use only. It’s the kind of magic we used to bring you here.”
“At what cost?”
“A life. A human life, in fact—a man named Clarence Mills. Multiple rapist and child killer, sentenced to death. The Elder Gods literally don’t give a damn about the condition of someone’s soul—a monster will do as well as a virgin.”
I nod. “Okay. How is it that vampires can conceive?”
“It’s not that complicated, actually. The spell involved transfers—”
“I know about the process. Where did this spell come from?”
And for the first time he hesitates, just slightly. “I’m not a shaman; I don’t know the details—”
“You’re lying. Don’t do it again.”
He stops, considering. He wants to know exactly how much I know, and suddenly I’m sick of all the fencing back and forth. “I know exactly how it works, okay? Selkie told me. The deal you made, the price you paid. The whole rotten, stinking thing.”
He sighs. I never realized just how theatrical a gesture that is in someone who doesn’t need to breathe. “We had no choice, Jace. For pires to survive as a race, we had to be able to reproduce. Otherwise, the thropes would simply outnumber us. That’s why the official policy of the Axis nations in World War Two was to slaughter all humans—if they could do that, it didn’t matter in the long run who won on the battlefield.”
“The plague at the end of the war. It wasn’t Hitler’s sorcerers that created that, was it?”
“No. They were ours.” He shakes his head. “You have to understand, Jace—we needed a global metaphysical shift. Do you know how much power something like that takes? We were, essentially, rewriting a supernatural law; the only way to do that was with extradimensional assistance.”
“And you killed six million people to do it!”
He stares at me, and slowly the mask drops away. No defiance, no brittle defensiveness, no denial. It’s the face of a man who’s done something terrible, and has been staring that fact in the face for a very long time. He hasn’t come to peace with it; he’s simply accepted the horror and forced himself to live with it. “Yes,” he says, and his voice is as hollow as an empty grave.