by DD Barant
“I’ve got some news about David.” Gretch is one of the few people I know who call him by his first name—even I still think of him as Cassius. “He’s on assignment.”
“Assignment? I thought he was the assigner, not the assignee.”
“Yes. Well, this is a … special situation. And, needless to say, a situation that calls for the personal involvement of the director is not one I can divulge details about.”
She’s right, but it still feels like he’s ditching me and getting his secretary to call with a message that he’ll be working late. I push that thought angrily away—not only is Gretch practically family, she’d never tolerate that sort of behavior from Cassius. She’s loyal to a fault, but she also has a backbone that steel would envy.
I nod and force a smile in return. “I get it. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even be telling me this much, right?”
She leans back, brushing behind her ear a strand of blond hair that’s come loose from her normally tidy bun. Yeah, her body language is definitely exhausted; slack shoulders, bad posture. “Probably. But I have no choice; I’m operating under a direct order from Director Cassius himself. He said—and I quote—‘Tell Jace I’m sorry about this but it couldn’t be avoided. Don’t worry, the solution is elementary.’”
The last word makes my smile tremble a little; not sure if it’s trying to run away or metamorphose into a grin. “Direct quote, huh?”
And then Gretch does something I’ve never seen her do before: She yawns. Not that pires don’t yawn—they sleep, after all—it’s just that Gretch usually seems tireless.
“You okay?” I ask.
She nods. “Just a long night. Anna’s teething.”
I wince. “Ouch.”
“Yes. I’m glad pire fangs can’t pierce pire flesh—but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.”
Anna is Gretch’s child. A spell cast here at the end of World War II lets pires have kids, but there’s a catch: Both parents have to age six months for every year their offspring does, until the parents judge that the child is an adult and call a halt to the aging process, locking the whole family back into immortality again. Gretch is a single mom, but Cassius offered to share the time-debt with her after Anna’s father was killed. She’s still as strong and hard to kill as all pires are, but it looks like even her stamina is being tested by a blood-drinking toddler with teeth issues.
“So. Any idea when the bossman will be back?”
“I’m afraid not. It could be days—but it might be weeks. He’s appointed me acting director in his place.”
I frown. Not that I disapprove of his choice—Gretch could run the entire world quite efficiently, given the chance—but because it’s a bad sign. It means …
It means nothing, oh paranoid brain of mine. It doesn’t matter if you’re planning on being gone overnight or for a few months, you leave your best in charge. This is the NSA, not an advertising firm—you don’t just call up a temp agency: Yeah, I’m gonna need someone to fill in for me for a few days. Make sure they have some experience in running a national security agency, maybe a little background in black ops, some international diplomatic credentials … oh, and they have to be proficient in Word.
“Thanks, Gretch. I appreciate the heads-up.” I start to get to my feet.
She waves me back down. “That’s not all. I have other information for you—information that’s considerably more positive.”
“You’re giving me a muzzle for Charlie?”
“Funny, he asked me the same thing about you … no, this concerns an old acquaintance of ours.”
She leans forward, her eyes intent. “Aristotle Stoker.”
Now she’s got my attention.
Aristotle Stoker. Descendant of the infamous Bram, who on Thropirelem gained fame not only for writing Dracula but also for the Whitechapel Vampire Murders—sometimes carving up prostitutes with a silver-edged blade, sometimes killing them with a wooden crucifix sharpened into a stake. On my world, Stoker never had children; here he did.
And a few generations later, Aristotle was born. He became a legend in the human underground, a killer of pires and thropes as elusive as a shadow and as a lethal as a silver guillotine. He racked up quite the body count before he used an internal political dispute to fake his own death and reinvent himself with an even scarier persona, that of the Impaler. The Impaler leapt from serial killing to mass murder, and hid so efficiently that for years no one knew for sure if he was even a real person or some kind of urban myth. I was the one who uncovered his real identity—well, he revealed it to me, actually—and I was the one who stopped his plan to turn a large percentage of Thropirelem’s supernatural residents into immobile, living mummies.
We’ve run into each other since then. Despite the fact that he was a homicidal lunatic, I had a certain amount of grudging respect for him, at least at first; he was a human being on a planet full of monsters, doing his best to fight back against a status quo that had seen six million of his own kind sacrificed to an Elder God. It was hard not to see him as a heroic revolutionary—until I processed a few of the crime scenes he left behind.
He wasn’t a revolutionary, he was a terrorist. His plan had nothing to do with righting wrongs or seeking freedom; it was about revenge, carried out indiscriminately. What was done to the human race here was horrible, but killing a bunch of innocent civilians decades later isn’t the answer. I’m not sure what the answer is, or if there even is one, but I know Stoker’s approach isn’t going to solve anything.
He can help me solve something, though.
He can help me get back home.
TWO
“We have a confirmed sighting?” I ask.
“Yes. But there’s both bad news and worse news attached to it,” Gretch says.
“Lovely. What’s the bad?”
“He’s contacted us directly. Seems he wants our help—more specifically, he wants your help.”
Uh-oh. Gretch is right, this can’t be good. Stoker is every bit as cunning and manipulative as Cassius, with the added bonus of fanaticism. Whatever he wants from me, it won’t be pretty.
But Stoker is the reason I was brought here in the first place. I signed a contract with the NSA—nothing satanic, just regular lawyer evil—stating that I would be returned to my own plane of existence when I captured or killed whoever was murdering thropes and pires in remote locations using bizarre yet ritual means.
That turned out to be Aristotle Stoker. He’s my ticket home—and he knows it.
“What’s the deal?”
“He claims he’s uncovered a pire trafficking ring. Slave traders. Says he needs your help to eradicate it.”
I scowl. I took down a ring just like that not long ago, a Mafioso operation that was smuggling pire women from Third World countries into the US to work as prostitutes and using the same network to send Gray Market lems from here to South America. “So he knows what I’ve been up to. Baiting the hook with something he thinks I’ll chomp at.”
“Perhaps. But this operation isn’t trafficking in pire women, Jace; Stoker claims its stock-in-trade is pire children.”
That stops me for a second. Just when you think the scum can’t get any worse, you find another layer of filth below the last one. If he’s being honest, and not just looking for a way to push my buttons. “Is he telling the truth?”
“Not necessarily. Pire children are highly valued, of course—one child is all that most pire couples ever have—but the NSA hasn’t seen any rise in reported child disappearances.”
“So he’s lying.”
“Perhaps not. Which brings us to the worse news: Stoker says he’s in Vancouver. Canada, not Washington State.”
I blink. I’ve been to Vancouver—on my world, not here—and it struck me as a perfectly lovely city. Gorgeous mountains that seem close enough to touch, great beaches, a huge park just off downtown full of ancient spruce and pine. Sort of a San Francisco vibe to the whole place, like all the hippie draft dodgers
settled just over the border. “Yeah, so? Are we at war with Canada or something?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. The so-called War on Drugs—Vancouver is a major center for the narcotics trade. We estimate there are thousands of Bane and Cloven labs and grow-ops scattered through the province of British Columbia.” Bane is wolfsbane cut with PCP—popular with thrope street gangs—while Cloven is garlic-infused methamphetamine, used by pire meth-heads. “They export it through the port, but they also smuggle a great deal into the US. The US–Canadian border is heavily barricaded and guarded, of course, but they keep finding ways across.”
I get a little rush of that feeling that used to be a lot more prevalent when I first got to Thropirelem: the sudden impact of a piece of information letting me know just how alien this place truly is. On my world, the US–Canadian border is the longest undefended border in the world; here, it sounds like Checkpoint Charlie.
“Okay. How’s our relationship with the Canadian cops?”
“Abysmal. The drug cartels dominate local politics, but they’re not the only players in town; Vancouver’s sort of a multicultural criminal melting pot. Zerkers control the waterfront. Chinese Triads and the Yakuza are prevalent in the downtown core, while the east side belongs largely to gangs from South America. Outlying areas like Burnaby, Surrey, and New Westminister are fought over by Vietnamese and Southeast Asian groups, notably the Death Dragons and the Sikh Warlords.” She pauses. “And then, of course, there’s the movie industry.”
“Sure. Of course.”
“Gangsters are always attracted to glamour. In Vancouver—much like in Las Vegas—they’ve decided to create their own. There’s an entire studio system in place, heavily financed by racketeering money and largely modeled after Hong Kong. Battles between the studios can be just as epic and violent as struggles over the drug trade, and frequently involve the same players.”
“On my world, people called Vancouver Hollywood North,” I say. “Lots of American film and TV production based there.” I shake my head. “This place sounds more like Juarez meets East LA.”
“It’s the homicide capital of the world, Jace. It’s entirely possible that pire children are disappearing there; that either the crime isn’t being reported, or it’s being covered up.”
“And we have no official jurisdiction?”
“Very little. Canada is a signatory to the Transnational Supernatural Crimes and Activities Act, but that presupposes the cooperation of local law enforcement—and that’s hard to come by. Should you decide to cross the border, the Agency won’t be able to offer you much in the way of support.”
“Which is probably exactly what Stoker wants. I have to say, Gretch, it doesn’t sound promising. I mean, Stoker’s a member of the Free Human Resistance—I find it hard to believe he cares about any supernatural, especially pire children. Pire children were why six million human beings were sacrificed to Shub-Niggurath, remember?”
Gretchen shrugs. “I know. It makes little sense—except as bait for a trap. Which suggests a rather darker possibility.”
“Ahaseurus.” It’s the name of the sorcerer who brought me across the dimensional divide at the behest of the NSA, though it turned out he had his own agenda. Ahaseurus is much more than just a government shaman; he’s a very old, very powerful wizard from yet another parallel world, and his hobby turned out to be killing me. Not me specifically; rather, all the different versions of me from all the different parallel worlds in the multiverse. The last time we’d met I’d thrown a very large monkey wrench into his plans, and he’d barely managed to escape with his life.
Thanks to Aristotle Stoker.
If they’re still working together, it’s another good news–bad news thing. Bad because, well, serial-killing immortal wizard with a Jace Valchek fixation. But good because I need to catch both of them in order to return home; my contract only specifies Stoker, but I need Ahaseurus for the actual spell. One way or another, I need to find both anyway.
“Stoker’s promised to send evidence supporting his claims,” Gretch says. “If and when such evidence arrives, my staff will analyze it thoroughly—if Ahaseurus is working with Stoker, we’ll be able to detect any mystical tampering and identify his signature. But if the intel turns out to be good, how would you like to proceed?”
I lean back in my chair and think about it. The fact that Gretch is asking is really only a formality; as acting director, she has the power to order me to do whatever she thinks is appropriate. Not that Gretch would pull that kind of power play—she’s much too smart. Which means she’s already figured out what my answer will be and has begun preparing for it.
“I go,” I say. “The proof will be good, or he wouldn’t bother. He knows I have to go after him anyway; I predict his information will provide a reason to keep him alive when I do.”
“It could still be a trap. He—or Ahaseurus—might be the ones taking the children.”
“Maybe so. But Stoker’s had the chance to kill me before, and hasn’t taken it.” Actually, it runs a little deeper than that—Stoker told me that killing me would be “a crime against humanity.” I don’t know about that, but I know he won’t kill any human if he can help it. “And if he is telling the truth—well, we can’t just ignore that, can we?”
“No. We cannot.” There’s no creature more bloodthirsty or savage than a mother protecting her young, and I’ve seen firsthand what Gretch is willing to do to protect hers. Even the prospect of children being threatened is enough to make my new boss’s eyes a little redder and her incisors a little pointier.
A thought crosses my mind. “Hey, I won’t have any trouble getting Charlie across the border, will I?”
“No, golems are fine. It’s human beings that have to show caution—you could very well become a kidnapping target yourself.”
“With Charlie around? Fat chance.” I get to my feet. “Of course, in an environment like that he’ll be breathing down my neck like a giant stone neck-breather…”
“I’ll let you know when we hear from Stoker again.”
“Do that,” I say over my shoulder. “In the meantime, I’m going to go see if I can do something about my ammo problem.”
* * *
“This—this is absolutely weird,” Damon Eisfanger says. He sounds very happy, which makes me want to throttle him.
I’m in his lab, a few floors away from the intel division. Eisfanger’s a forensics shaman, which means he combines sorcerous rituals and talismans with a scientific approach to pull data of all kinds from crime scenes. On my world, a good CSI can almost make a corpse talk; Eisfanger’s specialty is removing the word almost.
Damon’s a thrope from a mixed pit bull–Arctic wolf heritage, which gives him the stocky build of a linebacker; pale, ice-blue eyes; and hair like a polar bear’s pelt. He’s something of a geek, in that overly friendly, not-clear-on-the-concept-of-personal-space way, but he’s got the IQ of a mad genius and the wide-eyed cheerfulness of a puppy. It’s impossible to hate Damon, but extremely easy to be irritated by him.
He’s perched on a stool, dressed in his usual white lab coat over a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, peering into a comparison microscope. He looks into one eyepiece, then the other, chuckling gleefully to himself. “I don’t believe it! I mean, I literally don’t believe it. I don’t think I can!”
“You do this every time,” I say tiredly. “I give you the sample. You take a look at it. You exclaim a few times about how bizarre it is. Then you wander away, get a sandwich, and completely forget about what you were doing.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Every time.”
“Huh. Do I always get a sandwich, or is that just verbal shorthand for any random task?”
“Four out of five times, sandwich. Once you went to the bathroom. Maybe you had a sandwich while you were in there, I don’t know.”
He looks thoughtful. “I see. Interesting. Brief amnesiac episodes, triggering basal metabolism functions—that’s mnemonic program
ming on a deep level…” He falls silent, an expression of intense concentration on his face.
“Damon.”
“What?”
“This is the part where you forget everything you just said.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We were just talking about—” He frowns. “Going to the bathroom?”
I sigh. “We were talking about gunpowder, Damon. You know, the chemical mixture that explodes when ignited, causing bullets to fly out of the barrel of my gun really, really fast?”
He looks skeptical. “You know, every time you tell me that I have the feeling you’re pulling my leg.”
“I know. The spell, remember?”
“Oh, right. So what do you want, again?”
“I want you to analyze it, Damon. Break the gunpowder down to its component elements, tell me what each one is and the proportion that they’re mixed together in. Basic science. You can do that, right?”
“Hey, I’m kind of hungry. You want a sandwich?”
I am not going to shoot him. I’m not. I can’t waste the ammo.
“Look, I’ll make this simple. Just—just run a whole bunch of unmarked samples, okay? Like, two dozen. Don’t even try to match a particular analysis to a particular sample, just run them all, print out the results, and stick them in a box. If we can’t beat the spell, we’ll try to fool it.”
“I guess I can do that.” He still looks doubtful, but I can’t spend all day babysitting him while trying to outwit an ancient enchantment.
“I’ll call you later.”
“Uh, hang on,” he says. “Speaking of forgetting, I almost forgot. Your blood work came back this morning.”
Damon isn’t a doctor, per se, but I trust him—that’s why I had an analysis of my blood done by him instead of someone else. My immune system has just been through an epic battle with both the vampirism and lycanthropic viruses, and I want to verify that I’m still 100 percent human. “Yeah? Good news or bad news?”