Ivy is twelve weeks pregnant. She claims it is Ben’s, but all three of us in the room know vampires are sterile. All three of us also know beyond every shadow of a doubt that Ivy is special in ways far beyond what any of us had ever suspected. Even Grandma with her family prophecy that someone in her line would bring a child into the world that would irrevocably change the vampire lines, never suspected that it would be a child with vampire blood that would do it. Yet here Ivy is, and Grandma cannot deny that the child in her womb has vampire blood.
He also has wolf blood and demon blood in him. The baby growing within her is the son of a human mother and three fathers that are other than human. There are still so many things that I do not understand about my child, about what he will be and what he will do. I don’t feel too bad, though. Even Emily and Nathan who have their own abilities to see pieces of the future do not know exactly how everything will play out.
What does concern me, though, is that Ivy’s health is deteriorating rapidly. Emily says she’s never seen a case of morning sickness as bad as Ivy has had. We have tried every possible food or beverage we can, to try and see if anything will stay down, but almost nothing does. The few things we can get her to take, skim milk, plain rice, sometimes bread with a smear of butter on it, just don’t have the calories or the nutrients to keep a pregnant woman and her baby alive. We have even tried raw blood, in case the vampire part of our son cannot tolerate anything different, but that turns Ivy’s stomach immediately, and she throws up whatever else we have managed to get into her.
Sometimes Nathan and I go out and he uses some of his trickery here and there, and we bring home IV bags full of whatever people who can’t eat get. Grandma has long held that a witch should know both old and new ways, so she has taken formal medical training – and has used it before when she’s come across accidents while on the road – so we are able to sustain Ivy somewhat that way, but there’s still no way we can keep up with the demands of the young life inside of her.
Nathan taps me on the shoulder and looks toward the door. The two of us leave Emily to cleaning up after her spellwork, and go out to my backyard. In the short time between when Ivy moved in with me and when she became too weak to leave bed, she had started making changes to the place. There are field stones along the fence line, one stone in front of every fifth fence slat, alternating between a darker and lighter gray. Pots of herbs are growing along edges of the porch, which I am managing to remember to water for her. She has done something, and there are now more spiders in the yard than there ever were before. In the basement, are several bottles of silver iodide she had me buy, but I can’t do anything with them for her.
We sit down on a nice bench Ivy had Grandma bring over from their yard. This, I think, has absolutely no magical purpose, it is just a bench that Ivy is especially fond of.
“Any luck on your part of our little search?” he asks me.
Now that school is over for the summer, I’ve had time to see if I can find any sign of where Ben has gone. Since I do have some understanding of computers, I handle the electronic angles. Nathan does his part in other ways.
“You know I’m better than you, but I’m definitely not good,” I say.
“And there is an upper limit to what I can do from here with people,” Nathan says. Nathan would like to go farther afield, but he is by far the most powerful of the three of us caring for Ivy. He has access to magic and to powers that even Grandma has only heard rumor of, but there are some solutions you cannot solve by brute force. This is why Nathan and I are quietly seeing if we can find Ben. It is a long shot, but there may be a chance that somehow Ben can unlock the secret to helping Ivy through the pregnancy. It may be that a child as unique as the one Ivy is carrying needs the presence of all of its fathers to thrive.
“I am still only finding limited assistance from my kind as well,” Nathan says.
None of the demons of his position have been willing to muddle in mortal affairs again, and even the ones a few steps weaker have been uninterested. He has had some minor demons out searching, but they are spread very thin, and ones even below them are typically very close to specific places in the mortal world.
“I think I just need to move around,” I say. “Go out into the world and look for him. That’s how I found him last time.”
“Last time, he was just ninety miles away. He could be anywhere in the world now.”
I shake my head. “Ivy has taught me a lot about her magic. She says when you have nothing else, intent is everything.”
Nathan tilts his head to the side, considering this. “It can do no more harm than anything else,” he says.
While we’re sitting there, I hear Kate’s car pull into the driveway. I look over my shoulder as I see her coming into the yard. She has her laptop bag slung over her shoulder, which she usually doesn’t travel with, so I hope it’s good news.
Nathan and I slide over to make room between us. “Graylock,” she says, kissing me lightly on the cheek, and then she nods to Nathan. Now that he’s graduated, and with Ivy being in such dire straits, Nathan has moved out of his foster-family’s home, and into Grandma’s guest bedroom.
Because of the long closeness between Ivy and Kate, Grandma has decided to bring her in. It became very quickly apparent that we’d never be able to sustain any sort of lie about Ivy’s health with Kate, and for all of us – Grandma, Ivy, Nathan, and me, to all up and leave in short order would destroy both Kate and Ivy. They are too close, have been for too long, to be separated like that again. And Ivy needs everything she can get right now. Kate’s visits are one of the few things that can get Ivy looking alive for a bit anymore.
“You have something?” Nathan asks, touching her laptop bag.
“Maybe,” Kate says. She pulls her computer out and goes to one of the dozen open tabs in her browser. “Very tenuous, I know, but check this out.”
It’s a classified ad for a motorcycle, from out in Ohio. It means nothing to me, but Nathan is immediately interested. “Still for sale?”
“No,” Kate says. I have been tracking the KTM 690 Duke IIIs on every used bike site I can find. That model was only made for three years, ’08 to ’11, and there’ve got a small, but really dedicated fan base. You mentioned a lot of vampires are really bad creatures of habit,” Kate says, nudging me. “So maybe she just might try to find the same ride she used to have. This listing went up this morning, and I got in touch with the seller, played myself as somebody really interested, but needing to check in with the bank about a loan. Turned on some charm, didn’t try to bargain him down. So he just emailed me twenty minutes ago. Somebody straight up wired him the asking price, and says she can be there later this afternoon to pick it up. Could this mean she’s in Ohio tracking Ben?”
“She could have the capacity to travel quickly, or to have somebody take possession for her. The Negre have a good network that can do things like this really fast,” I say.
“If I can get there before the pickup happens, I’ll be able to tell if it’s her or a Negre associate,” Nathan says. He looks up at the sun. “Next flight from Denver to wherever in Ohio that seller is.”
Kate starts clacking at keys on her computer. “Ninety minutes,” she says.
Nathan shakes his head.
She does a little more searching. “11:15, arrives at 4:30.”
“I can barely make the airport,” he says, and is on his feet.
“Need me to book the flight?” Kate calls to him, but he’s already fishing keys out of his pocket and single-mindedly focused on getting to his car.
“He just needs to get to the airport. Trust me on this,” I say.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ben Wake
I simply can’t believe that Heather is hopping on a plane right now to fly to Ohio to buy a motorcycle. The BMW G650 GSs she is riding is perfect for what she needs. But the Duke III is just that much more perfect, apparently.
Maybe separating our paths for a while isn’t a bad t
hing, though. It will muddle the trail for a while, and it is in character for her to be obsessive about her equipment. I remember from the days when I was first training her, the one thing I wished she would lose was her tendency to find one thing she liked, and stubbornly stick to it to an impractical degree.
I should back up eleven weeks or so. I had stayed in Omaha for a few days activating a burner identity I’d set up, to hold me over until I could establish somewhere new again. The wonders of the modern age are that all of the work for the burner can be done online, as long as I and a few forged documents had a way of meeting each other. I was just waiting on my passport to be delivered to a local delivery service for an in person pickup. I was literally an hour or two from getting the call when the door to the room I was renting opened suddenly, and there was Heather, the Negre hunter that had picked up my trail. She had weapons out already. I was reworking the calculations of whether killing myself then and there would actually get them completely off the trail or not, when she set her gun and knife down on the table between us.
“You got yourself out. Can you help me?” she asked.
One thing I know about vampires, and especially Negre, is to always assume there is a layer of deception involved in any dealings we have with each other.
The thing is, I trained her. I had learned to tell when she was lying. And she is terribly resistant to change. That was the thing that kept her from ever evolving beyond being a good hunter to a great one. And it is why I chose to stay at the cabin and lay as low as I could with Ivy instead of immediately running. I knew her methods, and I knew that she would try to find people that might know where I had gone, and watch what they did, while she also cast the net around hubs that I would be likely to travel through. She has a great mind for that kind of coordination of the Negre network to do the grunt work while she would split her personal investigation across multiple fronts. And that was why the moment I saw Carl on the property, I had to assume she would likely be out there within hours, and that I had to separate from Ivy and get noticed by her network.
“You know I can’t believe you,” I said. But I am reworking my calculations. If she is being honest with me, which I can count as a definite possibility, Ivy is safe. If she is lying to me, I can at least see if Ivy is of any interest to her. And if Ivy is of interest, I last saw her in the company of Nathan, who strikes me as somebody that can protect her, at least for a while, especially if Ivy will open up to him. So throwing myself out the window and taking one of my own weapons to myself could be discarded as an option.
“I know that. Just like I can’t trust you, because at the first sign you think I’m a risk to you, you’re going to kill me.”
“This puts us at an impasse,” I told her.
“Can you extend your stay in this room?” she asks me. Keeping half an eye on her, I pull out my phone and check the app. “Two more days,” I say.
“Do it, then find another room somewhere nearby. We’ll leave all of our weapons in this one, and we’ll go to the other room, both unarmed, and we’ll see if we can reach some sort of trust framework.”
So we did that. We took full advantage of the two days that we knew our arms were in a separate location, with nothing in our possession but the clothes on our backs and my phone, while she told me everything that had happened since she left my tutelage in 1965. It was an ongoing interrogation, me looking for places her story might have been inconsistent or contradicted itself. I found none. And in that time, she asked nothing of me, only telling me what she had picked up about me when she realized I had moved to Colorado. Yes, she knew I moved socially with a thrope and that I’d taken a warm lover. What surprised me is when she revealed that Nathan is a demon. When she explained to me the chain of logic by which she deduced it, I could come to no other conclusion myself.
“So the hunter that was after me, that something killed out in the woods in January. Nathan did that?” I ask.
“Yes. You had correctly deduced it was a demon, but you were fooled by trappings of a completely random encounter that he had laid around the entire thing. The whole time you were in Stokers Mill, you spoke daily with a demon. One that was letting you live, and one that I realize had actually spoken to me once, knowing full well what I was, and had probably been within feet of me at least one other time, and it did not touch me. I had started hunting you, thinking that this conversation we are having right now might happen. The second time I realized that the demon had been within striking distance and did nothing but mess with my bike, I realized things in the world are starting to change, and that it’s way past time for me to get on the side of right.”
At the end of the two days, wisdom and my survival instincts told me to still distrust her on principal, but I was tentatively willing to take her at her word enough to work with her. We went to pick up the last of my burner identity credentials, and decided to start moving around the country, to give the illusion she was still following me, and to take eyes away from Stokers Mill. She hadn’t reported to her handlers that she suspected she was on my trail, just that she had detected a high-value target in the area. That would usually indicate somebody in a leadership position in one of the other clans that the Negre were not in temporary alliance with. Negre hunters are given a good degree or autonomy in their work as long as a head is delivered to the castle within six months to a year.
As of this moment, having just dropped Heather at the airport, we’re only four months into her actively hunting me. She has a little more time before she needs to either bring a head, or call in help for the hunt. Two months, at least, that we can travel around together while we pretend I have been flushed into the open and she is in pursuit.
I decide to spend the two days it will take her to pick up the motorcycle and meet me again seeing what I can find out about Ivy from a distance. I know that I cannot directly contact anybody in Stokers Mill. Paul and Carol, even if I would dare to contact them, would know nothing. I kept my life as opaque from them as I could. None of Ivy’s closest circle would be safe to contact, because I have no idea how they would take me getting in touch. The might create the kind of noise that would draw others of my kind to town, just because they sensed the disruption. Logging into any of my social networking would be a bad idea, in case any of my false identity had been discovered. But logging into the site of the local newspaper, creating sock puppets to just see what people in Stokers Mill are saying in public posts are safe.
I pick up nothing about Ivy that really says anything. She graduated, but she is not on the scholarship roll for one of the most prestigious ones she had applied for. Probably because she’d missed some critical tests while she was hiding in the woods with me. I could make up for that financially easy enough. Money is not a problem for me, even getting a large amount of it is easy enough. But I owe her way more than compensation for the money she lost to make up for what I had done to her. For what may still happen to her as a result of our brief relationship.
I burn more than an afternoon on the endeavor, and know barely more when I started. I find myself terribly agitated and feeling helpless. The thought crosses my mind that I must feel like Carl does when he feels caged and unable to act directly to remedy a situation he is in.
The thought of Carl sparks something in me. It is afternoon, I have been hiding out indoors, away from the sun, all day. You can traverse a good distance overnight. I could make it to Stokers Mill by morning. At least pass near the house, long enough to just put eyes on Ivy for a moment, make sure she is well.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Nathan Marsh
I drive as fast as I dare in a stolen rental car from the airport to a little motorsports shop on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. There is no KTM 690 Duke III in the parking lot or visible through the windows of the small showroom. I walk inside and there isn’t one there, either. I find somebody that looks like they’re in sales, and they tell me it just went out the door an hour ago.
I ask to speak to the employ
ee that completed the transaction, and am led to a desk near the service bays. I sit down at the desk and inquire about the buyer. Even without using any powers, I can put people at ease in conversation. He apologizes, but says he cannot remember anything about the buyer. I ask again for any information he can give me, this time using some powerful influence on him. I tried subtlety once. I do not have the time to keep playing. The fact that he can give me absolutely nothing, even with me leaning on his psyche tells me the hunter had used some compulsion on him to blank herself from his memory.
“I need to see the sales contract,” I say. He produces it from a desk drawer. Everything on it is in perfect order, for a vehicle purchased by the representative of a holding corporation. I am sure that looking up the corporation name will get me nothing useful in a timely manner, if at all.
I leave the building and call Kate to tell her it was a good lead, but that I had just missed contacting the hunter. “This close, I don’t want to give up just yet. Will Ivy be alright until morning without me?”
“I’m going to spend the night here,” Kate says. “I will get in touch right away if anything changes, alright?”
Kate’s promise does little to reassure me, but I also cannot walk away from this chance to find the hunter, and through her, perhaps locate Ben. I stand next to the car I stole, and look at the streets leading away from it, trying to feel out which one might be the one the hunter took. I get a sudden and powerful sense of a vampire coming up from the east. Too strong to be the hunter, for one, but also very different than her presence. I think very obscure thoughts as a car pulls into the parking lot next to mine, and the driver gets out. This one is handsome and slick, looking like a twenty-something startup superhero from the Silicon Valley, and carrying himself like somebody long used to a mantle of authority. This vampire is not insignificant in whichever clan he is in. I follow at a discreet distance, and see him work his way to the same employee I had talked to. His use of compulsion glows in my true sight, and I see him get nothing more for his trouble than a look at the same tax and title forms I had seen. I shed my mortal body as fast as I can, and tail, slipping invisibly into his back seat. As he drives off, he makes a phone call over the hands-free, in French. That narrows him down to one of three clans.
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