The Tenants of 7C

by Alice Degan

  Contents

  Copyright

  The Tenants of 7C

  About the Author

  The Tenants of 7C

  Alice Degan

  Copyright © 2014 by Alice Degan

  Published May 2014 by Sexton’s Cottage Books.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design: Alice Degan

  The Tenants of 7C

  Clare came to work every day feeling pleased with herself. She would walk through the glass doors wearing one of her carefully chosen, fashionably casual work ensembles, and look around the high-ceilinged, brick-walled interior of Stake Inc., and sigh with satisfaction. Only inwardly, of course; if you wanted to fit in at Stake, Clare had realized early on, you had to behave as if you thought you were really just a little bit too good to be working there. It was an attitude she didn’t find hard to cultivate.

  On that particular morning, though, she was having trouble. She sat in her car, scrolling through the list of locations on her phone, wondering whether she was good enough. You never got very many instructions at Stake, but even for them, this was a little thin. “Use your instincts,” Seevers had told her. “Consult the software, but don’t rely on it. When in doubt, go with your gut.” Which sounded like it might be an ass-covering way of saying that the software wasn’t any good. He had sat on the edge of her desk and waxed poetic about getting back to the basics, pounding the pavement, diversifying core offerings.

  So she was finally getting a chance to do field agent work. It was what she had been waiting for—but she had expected a little more fanfare when the time finally came for her to do it. Instead what she’d got was a confusing app that had slowed her phone to a glacial speed, and Seevers’ vague pep-talk. But it was fine. Maybe he didn’t think she was going to even get far enough to need real instructions. Maybe—probably—it was a kind of test. She’d show him he’d been wrong to underestimate her.

  The places on her list were all over the city: some were just intersections, others whole neighbourhoods. As she scrolled down again, Kensington Market caught her eye. Well, that wasn’t too bad. She needed to pick up some spices to make that Indian thing for the potluck on the weekend, and the Sobey’s near her apartment didn’t carry all of them. She pocketed her phone, decision made, and turned the key in the ignition.

  In some moods, Clare liked Kensington Market in a way that she found hard to explain. The grubbiness of it, the weird smells: it seemed out of character for her to like it, but sometimes she did. She found a place on an upper storey of the parking garage, and headed out into the market.

  The snow had stopped by the time she came out of the House of Spice with her black cardamom pods and fenugreek. She clamped one glove under her arm and fumbled with her slowed-down phone. It was a weekday morning, and cold, so the market was not very busy. Clare stationed herself unobtrusively outside an army surplus shop and scrolled through the settings to DETECTION—MAP MODE.

  After some moments of CONNECTING TO NETWORK and ACQUIRING DATA, she was finally rewarded with a map of the surrounding streets, and a blinking blue triangle that must represent her target. It appeared to be in the middle of a block; but the image was not very detailed, and couldn’t be zoomed. (Yep, the software was a piece of crap; Seevers had been right.) Though maybe it was showing her something that was inside of a shop or a house.

  She felt a small buzz of excitement as she set off down one of the central streets of the market, heading towards the location of the blinking triangle. This was real fieldwork, after all. Anything could happen. She was in the front lines now. It would have seemed more appropriate if it had been after dark, or at least a grey, overcast day, rather than unexpectedly sunny in spite of the cold. But you had to start somewhere. Outside a fruit and vegetable store she stopped to check her phone again. The blue triangle was still blinking in the middle of the block; whatever it was, it didn’t appear to be on the move.

  She turned the corner and walked until she had come level with the triangle on what seemed to be the closest street. She was outside of a very tumbledown health food store, with faded posters in the windows advertising vitamins and herbal weight-loss pills. She looked at it doubtfully. It was the sort of store that looked closed even when it was open. If what was causing the blinking blue triangle was inside there, Clare doubted that it was really what she was looking for after all.

  But it wasn’t in the health food store. She walked all the way to the freezers at the back, and when she consulted her phone there, the red dot that represented her was still not quite on top of the blue triangle. Something behind the store, maybe?

  There was an alley down one side of the store, partially blocked by a delivery van which Clare had to squeeze apprehensively past. The snow had frozen into dirty ruts down the middle of the pavement, which was little more than a network of potholes.

  She arrived at the rear of the store. There was another alley here, with the backs of stores on one side, and on the other a row of small, connected houses, totally hidden from the street. Some of them had been jauntily painted and outfitted with window boxes and lace curtains; others looked neglected and pitiful. Down at the end of the row, the very last house bore a faded sign above its front window. Clare walked down to the end of the alley and looked up at the sign. Heaven and Earth Bakery, it said.

  Compared to the Heaven and Earth Bakery, the health food store had looked positively welcoming. This place looked more than closed; it looked abandoned. The front window was half covered in newspapers, and there was graffiti on the door. But a smell of fresh baking—magnificent, irresistible fresh baking—curled out from somewhere inside the dingy house. And when Clare looked down at the scanner, the red dot was just touching the edge of the blue triangle. This was what she had been looking for.

  The door opened, with a gently tinkling chime, into a small, warm, crowded shop. It was furnished with a haphazard mixture of Ikea chairs and plastic patio tables with garish vinyl tablecloths. The only decoration on the white walls was an out-of-date calendar and a faded piece of weaving. On the whole, rationally, Clare was unimpressed. But the part of her that revelled in the dirty streets of Kensington was jumping for joy. The smell of baking in the air was so good it made the whole place beautiful. Clare threaded her way between the full tables of the front room to the doorway which led into a back room. Here there were a few more tables, not all full, and a glass-fronted counter crammed with the most luscious baked goods she had ever seen. It was hard to explain why they looked so good. There were plain cakes, with no fancy icing or chocolate shavings, crusty loaves of bread, and different kinds of buns. But you could tell, somehow, that it would all taste better than any cake or bread or bun that you had ever had.

  The app was now flashing an unhelpful icon like a No Parking sign. Clare pocketed her phone, hung her purse off the back of a chair at an empty table, and went to look at the cakes. A teenaged girl with stringy, unconvincing black hair emerged from a door behind the counter, hefting a tray of buns. She gave Clare a resentful look and clattered the tray down on top of the counter.

  “Do you want something?” she asked, with a thick accent that Clare thought of as Russian.

  Clare ordered a slice of cake for here, and tried to get a coffee but was told with an incredulous sneer that they only served tea.

  “I guess that will have to do, then.”

  “Sit. I bring it to you.”

  She sat, and tried to get the app working again while she waited for the unfriendly girl to bring her cake and tea. She called up INTERIOR MODE, THREAT CLASSIFICATION, and SHORT RANGE IDENTIFICATION in succession—not that she had any clue what they did—but all showed the same flashing No Parking icon. Piece of crap.

  Another woman had come out fr
om the back of the bakery by the time Sulky Girl had finished cutting Clare’s cake, and she brought the plate and the mug of tea over herself. She was stopped as she came out from behind the counter by a greasy-haired man in a blue windbreaker, who seemed to have some urgent question to ask her. She arrived at Clare’s table finally, smiling and shaking her head.

  “He has it fixed in his mind that we used to serve dim sum here,” she told Clare as she set down the plate and mug. “‘When are you going to bring back the dim sum?’ he asks every time he comes in. I try to explain that we’re not a Chinese restaurant, but … ” She shrugged.

  She was a slight woman a little older than Clare, with dark hair cut in a short, careless style. She was dressed in an almost outrageously frumpy combination of a long floral skirt and a bulky grey sweatshirt. Maybe she hadn’t heard that you could buy fashionable maternity clothes, Clare though charitably. She wasn’t hugely pregnant yet, but she was getting there.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the woman asked. “And please don’t say barbecue pork buns.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” said Clare. On an impulse she added: “This place is pretty hard to find.”

  The woman cocked up one dark eyebrow quizzically. “We do try to keep it that way.”

  “What? Don’t you like having customers?”

  She studied Clare a moment longer. “How did you find out about my bakery?”

  Her bakery? She couldn’t be the owner, Clare thought. Dressed like that? But then, the bakery wasn’t much to look at, either.

  “Oh, I just happened by.”

  The woman looked for a moment as though she didn’t believe her. Then she smiled. “Enjoy your cake.”

  Clare did enjoy the cake. She had chosen something which she had thought was chocolate, but it turned out to be a sort of gingerbread. It was just as she had imagined from the smell: quite simple, but nearly perfect. The tea she didn’t care for; it tasted strangely of flowers.

  Her cake finished, she sat thinking about what to do next. According to the map, she was at the right place, but that was worth nothing if she couldn’t visually verify and classify the actual target. There might be a glitch in the app; it might have been reading residual energy from something that was here a long time ago. If that was even the right term. Energy? I mean, she thought, it must be something like that. “Go with your gut,” Seevers had said. Back to the basics, blah blah. She needed to come back with a lot more information than she had now, if she was going to turn this into the basis for a successful hunt. There was just one other thing she thought she could rely on, which might save her having to creep back to the office, mission unaccomplished, to make her boss’s day. There was the smell.

  It wasn’t something that you sensed in the same way as an ordinary smell; you had to concentrate in a certain way, a bit like listening to the sound of your own heart. Clare had never heard the principle behind it explained, though she assumed it was something that all of Stake’s field agents could do. She tried it now. The result was strange; there was definitely something here, but it was hard to tell what. When she focussed her attention she still smelled the warm, sweet food scents of the bakery. It was like hearing music when you tried to listen for your heartbeat. As far as she knew, it shouldn’t have been possible. She closed her eyes and concentrated harder.

  At first she got nothing, then underlying the bakery smell there was something a little salty, faintly like the sea. It was unfamiliar, not what she was looking for, but obviously somehow the same type of thing. It grew stronger for a moment, and then, just briefly, she caught a whiff of the earthy, metallic smell that she was used to: the vampire smell. She opened her eyes. The frumpy pregnant woman was standing beside her table, regarding her with faint amusement. Out of the corner of her eye, Clare saw the sulky girl disappearing back into the kitchen. Well, yes, that would be typical. The stringy black hair and everything.

  “How did you like your cake?” the frumpy woman asked.

  “Oh, um … ” Clare felt her cheeks heating up with embarrassment. “Excellent. It was excellent.”

  “Can I bring you anything else?”

  “No, no—just the bill, please.”

  The woman took Clare’s empty plate and fork. “How would you like to pay?”

  Clare glanced at the ancient-looking cash register on the counter. There was no sign of a debit machine, no Mastercard sticker on the register. It seemed a dumb question. “Cash?”

  The woman nodded and went away.

  The cake proved surprisingly cheap, and it looked to Clare, from the hand-written bill, as if she hadn’t been charged for the tea at all; since she hadn’t liked it, she was not inclined to argue. She paid and left the bakery, considering her options.

  It was pretty plain now what the state of affairs in there was. Not only was there at least one genuine vampire on the premises, but the place appeared to be guarded in some weird way. Something had been determinedly trying to prevent her from smelling anything but the baked goods.

  Outside in the snow in the grubby alley, it occurred to Clare that her reaction to the bakery’s wares had been a little strange. Cakes didn’t normally get her so excited; and the way that she had felt sure that those cakes would be better than any others in the world had been decidedly peculiar. She also realized she hadn’t paid nearly as much attention to the bakery’s customers as she should have; she could barely call to mind anything about them, although she knew that the place had been full. She slid her phone out of her pocket and thumbed it on. Sure enough, the app was back up, showing the map screen with the blue triangle.

  Something inside the bakery must have been jamming the signal as well as interfering with her sense of smell. And that might mean that something more was being hidden there than just one unfriendly Russian vampire. Perhaps she had stumbled upon a whole nest, like the one Jake and Laurence were always boastingly reminiscing about at the office. No, not stumbled upon, she thought. Ferreted out. Hunted down. She clenched her teeth as she thought of the months spent listening to Jake and Laurence talk about their hunts, thinking, How silly, like teenagers reminiscing about a roleplaying game, before she’d been unofficially given the security clearance to learn that not all of the “urban adventures” her company organized were fake.

  She noticed something now that she hadn’t seen on the way into the bakery. In the window, among the faded newspapers, was a hand-written sign, equally faded: Room for Rent—Contact Rose.

  On the left side of the bakery, where it was not connected to an adjoining house, a flight of wooden stairs led up to a side door, presumably of a second-storey apartment. That must be where the Room for Rent was, Clare thought. Probably the sign was long out of date, and someone had already taken the room. Still, it was worth a try. If she could get above the bakery, maybe her phone could get a reading. She looked down at her clothes, wondering whether there was anything she could do to make herself look like the sort of person who might actually want to live in a place like this. No, she decided. No one who might consider calling a rented room in a Kensington Market back alley home could have afforded her boots. But it wasn’t likely anyone here would suspect her motives, either. Thinking ahead, she put her phone in her jeans’ pocket, so she would have it on her even if she took off her coat, and climbed the wooden stairs.

  The door at the top was labelled, inexplicably, 7C. There was no sign of a doorbell or even a knocker, so Clare hammered soundly with a gloved fist. After a few moments she heard movement inside, then a bolt being drawn back. The door opened and a blond boy stood looking at her with surprise.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Clare. I’m here about the room?”

  “Oh!” The boy’s face filled with relief. “Sure. Rose sent you, right? Come in.”

  He held the door open, and Clare stepped past him into a poky entryway crowded with straggly potted plants.

  “So, um … ” The boy was looking at her with a kind of nervous admiration. “Welcome to Seven C. Did Ros
e tell you very much about the apartment?”

  “No, she was kind of busy.” Was Rose the frumpy pregnant woman? Clare wondered. And did this boy live here with his parents? He didn’t look quite old enough be living on his own.

  “Well, it’s kind of different—oh, you can leave your boots anywhere, it’s all right. Um—can I take your coat?”

  Clare pushed her boots into a corner and handed over her coat. The boy took Clare’s coat gingerly, as if he was afraid he might damage it, and opened two different doors before he found the coat closet.

  “The plants are supposed to stop that happening,” he mumbled apologetically, to Clare’s complete puzzlement. “I’m Nick, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you, Nick.”

  It wasn’t, really. Nick was a pale, bony teenager who wore striped pyjama pants with flip-flops, and a greyish T-shirt with New Moon Soy Sauce written in red lettering across the chest. His streaky blond hair was longer than it needed to be, and had a tendency to fall in his eyes.

  “Well, I’ll show you around.”

  “Sure.”

  Clare took a surreptitious sniff at the entryway as the boy turned away from her. It was worse than the bakery. The potted plants smelled of nothing in the ordinary way, but when Clare concentrated all she got was a startling blast of green. That made even less sense than the baking smells downstairs.

  “The kitchen is always through here,” the boy was saying, bizarrely. “It’s one thing you can count on.”

  Clare forced a slight laugh, as this was probably meant to be some sort of joke. Nick gave her a worried look.

  “No, really,” he said. “The kitchen is the only room that’s always in the same place. It’s sort of like the anchor. Everything else moves around.”

  Clare looked around the kitchen. It was a large, airy room, with windows in places that didn’t make sense, considering where they must have been in the house. But everything else about it seemed ordinary: old-looking appliances, cracked flooring, mismatched tea towels, dishes piled in the sink. A big, plain wooden table stood in the middle of the room, with a clutter of what looked like math homework spread out on it.