Dying Bites

by DD Barant

  Mine isn’t. I feel like I’m choking on the anger of every one of those corpses. “On my world, it was concentration camps. Gas chambers, mass graves. But not here—here people just got sick and dropped dead. A disease so virulent you had to burn the bodies.”

  He says nothing. Looking into his eyes, I can almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

  “Except they weren’t dead.”

  “No. No, they weren’t.”

  “And all the crematoriums the government set up, they were more than that. They were altars. Altars to that—that thing you made a deal with.”

  “Its name is Shub-Niggurath. An ancient fertility god, sometimes called the Goat with a Thousand Young. It demanded sacrifices that were . . . aware.”

  I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around this. Six million people, paralyzed but still conscious, and burned alive. It made the Nazis on my world almost seem merciful.

  “So Selkie told you what we had to do. Did she tell you what they were going to do in return?” He sounds a little more like his old self now, but still grim and resigned.

  “Of course not. They want me to switch sides, but they’re not stupid. Unlike me.”

  “You’re not stupid.”

  “No? I’m working for a genocidal government, betraying my own species, and for what? The chance to run away. Not power, not riches, just a ticket back to Kansas and good old Auntie Em. Who cares about all the dead Munchkins I’m leaving behind, right? Not my world, not my problem, just give me my thirty pieces of silver and I’ll get out of Dodge.”

  “Jace. You aren’t a traitor. You’re a savior.”

  “What?”

  “What we did was monstrous, but we’re no different than any other species fighting for survival. Every pire child born since then, every new pire life, has been a direct result of that. Those people have a right to live, too. I may be a monster, but they are not.”

  “No. Except for the ones who want the remaining humans turned into cattle.”

  “That’s not going to happen. Regardless of what Selkie may have told you, the Pureblood movement is a small, radical fringe element—”

  “I’ll verify that for myself, if you don’t mind. Your credibility isn’t real high at the moment.”

  “I meant what I said about you being a savior. I don’t know what Stoker has planned, but I know it involves HPLC. He stole an artifact from the McMurdo Station, one that could conceivably be used to contact an Elder God. These are beings that have the power to obliterate the planet, Jace. That might be exactly what Stoker is planning to do—unless you help us stop him.”

  This is what it all comes down to. Save a planet from a madman, or condemn everyone on it to Hell for the crimes they’ve committed. My head feels like it’s going to explode and save me the trouble of making a decision.

  “I’m sorry to put you in this position,” he says. “None of this is fair—not what we did to them, not what we’ve done to you. But this isn’t about fairness. It’s about life. No matter what you may think of the decisions we’ve made, it was always in the name of life. Ultimately, Stoker is on the other side of that equation. I don’t believe you are.”

  “You think you know me, don’t you? You think you can just play me like a goddamn banjo.”

  “That’s not—”

  “How do you feel about me, Cassius? What am I to you, exactly?”

  We’ve been having this whole conversation on our feet, and now I step closer to him, get right into his personal space. His pupils dilate and he tenses up, more uncomfortable than I might have expected.

  “You’re—” He stops, and looks a little angry. That’s good; that’s honest. He’s mad at himself for not knowing the answer, mad at me for asking it.

  “We had a moment, back in that bar in Montana. Was that real, or just more manipulation?”

  “I wasn’t trying to manipulate you.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  He frowns. “I don’t understand.” I get the feeling it’s a phrase he doesn’t use very often.

  “If you were, I could write you off completely. But, crazy as it sounds, I think you have some genuine feelings for me. I just don’t know what that means, or where I rank in terms of importance. Probably not very high.”

  “There are bigger issues at stake.”

  My laugh has more than a little bitterness in it. “I can’t believe a world half-full of vampires still uses that phrase.” I step back, then head for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home. I want a long, hot bath, a cold, stiff drink, and some solitude. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

  What I said about what I wanted was true. What I told him about where I was going wasn’t.

  There’s a technique profilers use called geographic profiling. Simply put, it uses data about where a killer strikes to figure out where he lives or works. In a global case like this, it wasn’t very useful—but something Cassius had said had gotten me thinking about the killings in geographic terms.

  A global metaphysical shift, he’d said. On a map, the killings are widely spaced and with no clear pattern. But on a globe, they form an arc: an arc that begins at the bottom of the world and curves around to the top. The distances between each killing aren’t exact, but they still form a basic pattern. Following it won’t give me the exact spot of the next murder, only a general area hundreds of square miles in size—but that area fell in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there is only one significant landmass for several thousand miles.

  Easter Island.

  I don’t go home. I catch a cab to the airport and use the forged passport Selkie’s given me to book a flight to Chile. I do some research at an Internet terminal and some shopping for supplies at the duty-free. I have no trouble getting my gun through security, but my scythes have to go in my packed luggage.

  It’s a long trip, fifteen hours in the air, every minute of it spent wondering if I’m doing the right thing. I’m now officially off the reservation, in intelligence terms. I didn’t agree to join them and Selkie didn’t reveal their plans, but I did accept her offer of some resources in case I change my mind. She told me I’ll be able to mask my trail using a spell attached to the passport itself, but I’m not so sure. Fifteen hours is forever in the intelligence community, and I’ll have Gretchen’s team scouring the planet for me. If I can figure out Stoker’s next target, so can they; the one advantage I have is that Easter Island is a legal territory of Chile, and Chile isn’t a signatory to the Transnational Supernatural Crimes and Activities Act. So even if they figure out where I’ve gone, they’ll still have to deal with a certain amount of red tape before they can come after me—unless Cassius decides stopping Stoker is worth causing an international incident, which could very well be the case.

  I pull out my flask and slug back some Urthbone, then try to get some sleep—who knows when I’ll have another chance. This turns out to be a bad combination, as the emotional spectrum of every thrope on the plane seems eager to seep into my psyche as I drift off. I have disjointed, savage dreams, where every person I’ve ever known transforms into a werewolf and then chases me down an endless hallway lined with coffin-shaped mirrors. The one that catches me is Roger, and he keeps saying, “I told you so. I told you so,” over and over as he claws me apart. . . .

  No one’s waiting to arrest me when I get off the plane in Santiago. I don’t even leave the airport, booking a charter flight straight to Easter Island. I run into some difficulty there, as it turns out the place is in fact a protected human sanctuary, one of the last such places on the face of the Earth. Thropes and pires traveling there have to have a special visa, and the thrope at the counter won’t take my booking without one until I go to the bathroom and scrub off every trace of the wolf pheromone. She sniffs me carefully, even transforming into a half-were state to hone her acuity, but finally accepts that I am in fact not a thrope.

  Easter Island—or Rapa Nui, its Polynesian name—is extremely isolated. In
the past, the Polynesians have also called it Tepito o he Henua and Mata-ki-te-rangi; the first means Navel of the World, the second Eyes That Talk to the Sky. The latter is probably a reference to the giant stone figures, the moai, that guard the coastline.

  I don’t know much about the Easter Island of my world, but here it’s a place with a nasty history: slave raids, tribal wars, cannibalism. Virtually the entire population was massacred at one point, and disease from the mainland has decimated them more than once.

  But not the sorcerous post-war plague inflicted by the Allies. That didn’t kill a single person there.

  I don’t know why, but I suspect Stoker does. I also think this might be his last ritual murder; it completes the global loop he’s established, and the site obviously has some kind of major arcane significance. The other locations were all remote, a few were important in a historical or political way, but this place is different. It’s a specifically human outpost, full of human history, and I know that’s no coincidence.

  The pilot of the floatplane I charter is human too, a grizzled old man named Diego with more white stubble on his cheeks and chin than hair on his head. He doesn’t want to know why I want to go to the island, he doesn’t want to know why I want to leave immediately, he doesn’t want to talk much at all. He communicates mainly in grunts, nods, and a few rapid-fire words in Spanish, and as soon as the plane’s in the air it’s like I cease to exist.

  It’s over two thousand miles from the Chilean coast to Rapa Nui; the little chunk of volcanic rock I’m heading to is one of the remotest places on Earth. Only about five hundred people live there, but it’s still one of the largest human settlements left. It’s a five-hour flight from Chile, and by the time we get there I’ve been traveling for almost twenty-four hours; I’m relieved to finally see the triangular shape of the island appear beneath us, a dormant volcano at each of the three points.

  The plane taxis to a stop at a wooden pier jutting out into the bay. Several small boats and one large motor launch are tied up there already, but no one comes out to greet us. With a population of only half a thousand people, I would have figured visitors would be a bigger deal—but from what I can see, nobody’s even noticed we’ve arrived.

  Diego starts refueling immediately. I get the impression he’ll be leaving about thirty seconds after he’s finished.

  I shoulder my pack and head off down the pier. Despite the long trip, I feel weirdly pumped up; there’s something about the atmosphere, some kind of building charge in the air that makes me want to break into a run or maybe climb a tree and beat my chest. Not that there seem to be any trees; one of the disasters that befell the place was an ecological collapse that followed its complete deforestation. Others included bloody civil wars, famine, and the rise of strange religious cults that promised salvation from the island’s problems. It was like a weird little microcosm of humanity itself, running through a condensed version of all the bad decisions the rest of the world made.

  At the base of the pier is the island’s only village, Hanga Roa. The buildings are all one story, quarried stone with wooden roofs. The roads aren’t paved.

  And it’s utterly, completely empty.

  No dogs, no birds, not even insect noise. It’s like walking onto an elaborate movie set inside a sealed building, one that just happens to contain the Pacific Ocean. I walk down the main street and hear the roar of the seaplane starting up behind me—Diego isn’t sticking around, either.

  One of the giant stone heads that Easter Island is famous for stands in the middle of town. I look up into his obsidian eyes and ask, “Okay, big guy—where am I supposed to go now?”

  There’s a rumble of distant thunder, even though the sky is clear. I realize that it’s neither thunder nor distant; the sound is coming from the stone head itself, and forming into words.

  “The one you seek waits for you at Orongo.”

  Right. Considering who my partner is, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by a talking statue. “Okay. I guess that’s where everyone else is, too?”

  “No. They hide in the caves on the other side of the island. They do not wish to be destroyed by the powerful forces about to be unleashed.”

  And now the stone head—which actually has a body, too, just a much smaller one—does more than talk. It moves from its hands-on-knees crouching position to fully upright and takes a step toward me.

  “Come. I will take you to Orongo.”

  “After you.”

  It takes a step past me, moving more like something made out of foam rubber than solid rock. The fist that catches me on the side of the head doesn’t feel like rock either, but it definitely isn’t foam rubber.

  Out go the lights. Nap time.

  I don’t know how long I’m out for, but I open my eyes to the flicker of firelight. My head, oddly enough, doesn’t hurt. I half-expect to find myself tied to a wooden post with a bunch of kindling at my feet, but only the upright part is accurate. I’m on my feet, hands at my sides, not bound but for some reason unable to move. It feels as if I’m wrapped in invisible cling wrap.

  “I thought you’d rather be standing,” Aristotle Stoker says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground before me, dressed in khaki shorts and leather sandals, his chest bare. There’s a small fire blazing beside him, and my knapsack a few feet away from that. He’s got my gun in his hands and is inspecting it carefully.

  “A chair would have been nice, actually.”

  He shrugs his massive shoulders. “Sorry. Creature comforts are in short supply out here.”

  I try to move, find I can turn my head and wiggle my fingers. That should be enough to escape and overpower him, sure. “I suppose I have Miss Selkie to thank for my involuntary tree impersonation?”

  He cracks open the Ruger’s chamber and extracts a bullet carefully before closing it again. “Yeah. She’s sorry about clocking you, tried to make up for it with a healing spell. You feel all right?”

  “Dandy.”

  “I’m glad you came. Didn’t know if you’d figure it out, but I’m not that surprised you did.” He holds the bullet between thumb and forefinger, studying it. The silver glints in the campfire’s glow. “Really glad you came alone.”

  “And if I hadn’t?”

  “We wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be saying much of anything to anyone, come right down to it.” He sounds more regretful than threatening.

  “Where’s Selkie?”

  “Around. It’s a shame you didn’t wake up sooner, Jace; now that it’s dark you can’t really appreciate the view.” He drops the bullet to the ground, then tosses the Ruger onto my knapsack and stands up. “Let me describe it for you. We’re on the lip of the Rano Kau crater, at the southwestern tip of the island. One side slopes down into the bowl of an extinct volcano, the bottom mostly filled by a freshwater lake. The other ends in a sheer cliff three hundred feet above the ocean. You can’t really see them, but there are over fifty stone houses around here, left over from when this was the focal point of the birdman cult.”

  “Are you going to kill me, Aristotle? Because if you aren’t, I’d appreciate it if you’d turn off the quadriplegic force field.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Jace. Still not quite sure what you have in mind for me, but I don’t want you dead. With our numbers the way they are, killing someone like you would literally be a crime against humanity.”

  In some ways, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Strangely enough, it doesn’t improve my mood. “Stoker—”

  “Bear with me. You should know that Selkie’s sealed off the entire island. No supernatural creature—not thrope, pire, or lem—can come within a mile of the coast. If you’ve got some kind of last-minute rescue planned, you can forget it; for now, this is a humans-only zone.”

  “I came on my own.”

  “Why?”

  “To get some answers. So far, you’ve given me more of the truth than the people I’m supposed to be working for.”


  “Truth. Truth is a nasty drug, Jace. Might seem like what you want, until you’ve swallowed it. By then it’s too late—you can’t unlearn it. Ignorance is a lot less painful.”

  “Spare me the philosophical bullshit. Six million people burned alive to pay off an extradimensional deity—I don’t think it can get much uglier than that.”

  “No?” He sighs. “I wish that were true. But all those people were strangers who died a long time ago, Jace. They’re history, not reality. You want to join my cause, you’re going to have to get a lot closer than that.”

  He steps behind me, grabs me by my upper arms, and lifts. My feet leave the ground. I wonder for a second if he’s about to throw me off the cliff, but he’s just turning me around. He sets me back down facing the other way, and now I can see the stone altar that was behind me. There’s a man tied to it in a spread-eagled position, obviously Stoker’s next victim.

  It’s Roger.

  THIRTEEN

  It can’t be.

  I gape. I should probably pretend I don’t know him, that he means nothing to me, but the shock of seeing him is just too unexpected. At least I keep myself from blurting out his name.

  “Like Maureen told you, we can do all sorts of things.” Stoker still has me held by the upper arms; his hands are very warm, probably from the fire. “The next sacrifice has to be human, Jace. What do you think of who we picked?”

  “That’s—that’s not Roger.”

  “No,” Stoker admits. “It’s not. The sacrifice has to be a native of this dimension, for one thing. And it takes a huge amount of energy to yank someone from a parallel universe; bringing them here just to kill them seems like a waste of resources to me. Of course, you may feel differently.”

  “He’s from here. He’s this universe’s Roger.”