by Battis, Jes
There was a list of names under COMPLIANCE PRESENT. My own name, of course. Meredith Silver. Diane Troy.
“Diane Troy?” Selena asked.
“My mother’s maiden name.” I sighed. “So she was there. Just like she said. She and Meredith arranged everything.”
“Wait.” Selena frowned. “Scroll down.”
Beneath my mother’s name was Nicholas Tamsin, the acting field chief, who would have had more or less the same job as Selena (we preferred “unit supervisor” instead of “field chief” now). Below his name was Alec Reynolds, who’d been the head of DNA and Toxicology over thirteen years ago, when it was still one department. Lab supervisors had to sign as witnesses.
Beneath Alec’s name—
“Oh flying fuck,” I whispered. “I knew it!”
Selena took a step back from the monitor, as if the name alone might burn itself out of the screen.
Marcus Tremblay.
I hadn’t met Marcus until I’d already been here six, maybe seven years. He’d transferred into the unit supervisor position from some other department. There was absolutely no reason for him to appear on my intake file, seven years before we’d even been officially introduced. But I also wasn’t surprised to see it.
“He’s listed as ‘AP Research,’ ” I breathed. “What does that mean? Why would a researcher be present at an intake?”
“Advanced Projects Research,” Selena clarified slowly. “That division got absorbed into the Development branch—almost ten years ago, I think. APR was dissolved when I was barely an OSI-2.”
“Why was it dissolved?”
She frowned. “There were some—concerns—over what was coming out of that division. Procedural infractions. Funds that went missing, or that got channeled into bizarre side projects. The whole thing was a major shit show.”
“But Marcus was the head of this Advanced Projects division?”
She nodded. “I guess so. I never knew. It would make sense for someone high up in Development to be present during an intake, especially for the materia competency tests and physical exams. Marcus would have been roughly the equivalent at the time, so he signed as head of APR. After that division got torched, he must have taken a lateral transfer to some other admin job, and then he just kept spidering his way up until he made unit supervisor.”
“That means”—I closed my eyes—“Marcus and my mother did meet. Their signatures are practically right next to each other on the intake form. He could have easily found out about my father, and if he was head of research, he would have had a fuckload of resources at his disposal. You said money was flying all over the place, right? Getting channeled along all sorts of weird pathways?” I looked at her. “What if one of those pathways led to the Iblis?”
“You think Marcus summoned it before he died?”
I felt flushed. I was still exhausted, but energy was pouring through me. I knew I was close. So close I could feel the heat of the flames on my neck.
I turned to her. “Selena, you were complaining earlier about having to deal with all of Marcus’s old paperwork.”
She nodded. “I’ve still got a stack of it.”
“Do you know who handled his estate?”
Selena looked momentarily confused. “You mean a family member?”
“I doubt it. The CORE takes care of its own, remember. I wouldn’t be surprised if a third party dealt with everything.”
“The lab was in chaos back then. I hadn’t even been made acting unit supervisor yet, so I wasn’t part of the process.” She looked angry at herself. “I honestly don’t even know where the fucker is buried.”
“I get the impression that you weren’t supposed to,” I said. “None of us were. But I know someone who can find out.”
I ejected the flash drive, my hands shaking a little from excitement. Trying to appear level, I returned to the desk. Esther smiled at me. I handed her the memory stick, and she replaced it in the wall. The light next to it blinked orange. Then the opaque black wall reappeared, as if it had always been there. I had no idea how the spell—if it was a spell—worked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Is there anything else?” Esther asked. From her skeptical look, it was clear that she knew we had another question.
“We need to see another employee’s flash drive,” I said.
Her lenses went dark. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. These data mediums are protected under the Privacy Act.”
“This employee is deceased.”
Something like a comma of green light flickered across her lenses. Maybe she was establishing an uplink. She inclined her head.
“Usually,” she said, “when an employee dies—depending upon the circumstances—his or her data medium is wiped clean and destroyed.”
“You said usually.”
She nodded slowly. “If a deceased employee has high clearance, their records may be preserved in the system. But they’re on a different network. Whose profile are you looking for?”
“Marcus Tremblay.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment. “He was your old supervisor?”
“I was directly involved in his final case. He almost killed me. If anyone should have access to his file, it’s me.”
Esther drummed her fingers on the desk. Her lenses were nothing but a plane of shadow with a single, infinite blue line bisecting them.
“I have to make a call,” she said at last.
I looked at Selena. She shrugged, but her eyes betrayed surprise. Neither of us had any idea who—or what—Esther might be calling.
She punched a number into her cell. “Yes, it’s Esther, from Records.” A pause. “Yes. Both of them. Agent Corday would like to view Marcus Tremblay’s record.” Another pause. “Right. That’s what I thought. Thank you.”
She clicked the phone shut. The call had lasted only ten seconds at most, but I’d felt the tug of materia, the sharp tang of magic in the air. That was no basic long distance plan she was using. She may very well have been calling another dimension. Or maybe the call got routed to another hidden room in another dark corner of the building, someplace I was glad I’d never see.
“Well?” Selena leaned against the counter.
The wall behind her vanished again. Esther reached up to withdraw another flash drive, and I noticed that it had a blue light next to it.
“You’ll have to view this on my console,” she said, plugging the memory stick directly into the port of her computer. “You’ve been granted tertiary access, which means that you can only read certain parts of the file. You can ask me what you’re looking for, and if it’s not restricted, I’ll bring it up here on the monitor.”
What monitor—
But it had already slid soundlessly out of the desk. TREMBLAY, MARCUS HOWARD, PARTIAL RECORD glowed across the screen in white text.
“Who handled his funeral and estate?” Selena asked.
Esther’s fingers danced across a hidden keyboard. The screen refreshed, displaying a long page of data. There were gaps in the paragraphs, and some lines were blacked out. But most of it was legible.
“The record indicates that his estate was processed by a company called Delacroix Holdings,” Esther read. “They dealt with the funeral costs. It also appears that Marcus was cremated, and his ashes were disposed of.”
“Disposed where?” Selena asked.
Esther frowned. “That information isn’t available.” I guess that meant it was classified. “But nobody signed for the cremains. They were never processed.”
“Where is this Delacroix Holdings company based?” I asked.
Esther tapped. The screen refreshed again, and I saw an address.
“London, Ontario.” Selena’s hand was on my shoulder. “Only a few streets away from where Tamara Davies was killed. Jesus, Tess.” She looked at me. “Sometimes your intuition scares me. You’ve really found something here.”
I tried to smile, even though my “intuition” scared me as well.
&nb
sp; “What do they do,” I asked, “this Delacroix Holdings?”
“That’s not in the file,” Esther said.
I gave her a long look. “Aren’t they a publicly traded company? There must be a record somewhere of the majority shareholders.”
“I suppose—”
“I mean, we could hunt for it, right? But you’d be able to find it a lot faster with all of this specialized equipment.”
Her expression seemed to waver for a moment.
“It would save us a trip to the White Pages,” Selena said finally.
She knew damn well that the record Esther could pull up would be far more detailed than some PDF file we could track down on a corporate database. We were all shimmying around the truth.
Esther started tapping. I noticed that she was looking at an entirely different screen, though. She planned to control our access even further.
“They’re a real estate company,” Esther said finally. “They deal in condos, waterfront property, conversions, and very expensive renovations.” She peered at the screen. “The CEO is listed as Guillaume Delacroix. The majority shareholders are all from the same family. Thierry, Patrice, Sabine—”
“Bingo,” Selena said.
“Sabine Delacroix.” I turned to her. “It can’t be a coincidence. Especially after those two vamps attacked me in the subway. Sabine and Marcus had a lot of different entanglements, and this must have been some kind of failsafe on his part. If he died, Sabine’s ‘people’ would take care of everything,”
“The whole Delacroix family.” Selena shook her head. “They’ve probably been running that company in one form or another for centuries.”
“What about his personal effects?” I asked, turning back to Esther. “His condo, his car, everything—who has it now?”
She turned back to the screen. “I doubt I can give all of that information to you. But some of it might be available.” She tapped for a while. “It says here that most of his possessions were auctioned off, since no family member was named as a beneficiary in his will. Delacroix Holdings actually owned his condo.”
“I knew he shouldn’t have been able to afford that place,” Selena muttered. “It had a view of False Creek. The strata alone would have bankrupted him.”
“Was everything placed on auction?” I pressed. “What about the things he may have left at the lab?”
“It might help if I knew what I was looking for,” Esther said mildly.
“I want to know what happened to his athame.”
Selena looked at me. “I know what you’re thinking . . .”
“Really? I barely know myself.” I shook my head.
Esther frowned at the screen. “Sensitive items like that are impossible to ship through regular channels. It would have to go through a courier affiliated with us.” She tapped some more. “Okay. There’s no listing for the athame itself, but there was a shipment of ‘personal items’ sent from his former office.” She scratched her head. I’d never seen Esther do that before. “Odd.”
“What?”
“The parcel was shipped a day before he died.”
I slammed my hand on the desk. “That fucker! He knew. He knew ahead of time—or at least he suspected—what was going to go down that night, in Sebastian’s old apartment with Mia and me. So he got rid of anything that might be tainted.”
“So he has ties to the Iblis—if that’s what this is.” Selena tried to peer at the screen behind the desk, but it was out of view. “If Delacroix Holdings dealt with his estate, they probably dealt with the courier, too. One big happy vampire family.”
“You think . . .” Esther gave us a long, curious look. “You’re suggesting that someone, or something, is using a dead person’s athame?”
We both nodded.
She steepled her fingers on the desk. When she spoke, her voice was very quiet, almost a whisper. “That is possible. When a mage dies, his or her athame becomes an empty vessel, like a battery drained of its charge. But an echo of the soul remains. If someone was powerful—and patient—enough, they might be able to resurrect that echo and rekindle the blade.”
“But it would be—different,” Selena clarified.
“Twisted.” Her lenses flashed red. “Malformed. The athame could only be used for unlawful rituals.”
I exhaled. This was it. This was the missing piece. Marcus fucking Tremblay was haunting me from beyond the grave.
“Where were his personal effects shipped to?”
“That isn’t available.”
I scowled. “You mean it’s classified.”
“It isn’t available,” she repeated, her voice flat.
“Yeah, well—luckily, I’ve got another source.” I pulled out my cell and turned to Selena. “Miles has a Sidekick, right? That’s got a pager with two-way text messaging capabilities. What’s his number?”
She looked it up in her phone. “Here.”
I sent him a feverish text message:
Find out everything you can about Delacroix Holdings in Ontario. Use every contact. It’s vampire-owned, and I need their shipping manifest.
Testimony to Miles’s lightning fingers, a reply appeared a few seconds later: On it, Kojak. Meet us across the street at 12. If I get fired, you’re buying me lunch.
It seemed like a fair deal.
Esther was frowning at me. I had to remind myself that she’d jumped the chain of command in order to let me view Marcus’s file.
“Thanks, Esther. We really appreciate your help,” I said.
“Don’t thank me.” She adjusted her glasses, and I saw—of all things—a slowly expanding pool of blood reflected in the lenses. “At least not yet.”
21
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
I stood outside the entrance to the morgue with Patrick, who was so pale and still that he barely appeared to be breathing. Maybe his vampire instincts were finally starting to kick in. I watched his fingers, almost a shade of white gold, as they clutched the fabric of his rumpled painter jeans. A curl of dark hair fell across his face.
“You don’t have to go in there,” I told him again. “Tasha just requires a positive ID from someone who isn’t an employee with the CORE, but Lucian can always do that. There’s no need for you to see the . . .” For some reason, I didn’t want to say “body.” “I mean, it’s not really her anymore, right? It’s only what’s left behind.”
His mouth was clenched. “No. I have to.”
“You don’t.”
He stared at the steel doors. “You don’t understand. This—it’s a part of who I am. I have to see her. I’m not sure why. I just know that I do.”
I nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll be standing right next to you, then. It’ll only take a second, and then we can leave right away.”
He didn’t answer.
Lucian came walking down the hallway. We’d left Mia in the break room with Derrick and Miles, since a trip to the morgue seemed like it might stretch the definition of responsible parenting, even for us. It felt strange to be having these conversations about demons and serial murders in front of Mia, but I also understood that she was part of this world now. She had a right to know what was going on around her, and that knowledge could act as a safeguard, preparing her for what was to come. I didn’t want her traipsing down dark alleys, whistling to Mariah Carey on her iPod, totally unaware of what could be watching her. But I didn’t want her scared stiff either, afraid to move or even breathe. It was a tough line to walk. Generally, she surprised me with her maturity and her willingness to listen.
“How are the three musketeers?” I asked him.
“I think Miles is teaching Mia how to swear in ASL. Derrick’s checking out that Ontario contact that Miles gave him.”
“You think it’s on the level?”
“Could be. You’ll have to let Selena figure out the next step, though. I doubt she’ll let you run another solo mission. Not after what happened last time.”
“I do have the t
endency to get myself humped.”
“Not always.” He raised an eyebrow. “You can be pretty capable.”
I started to say something facile in return, but then I looked at Patrick again. This had to be done. If he was strong enough to come this far, it was the least I could do to lead him over the threshold.
I put a hand lightly on his shoulder. “Ready?”
He nodded, exhaling, which made me feel better. At least he still breathed.
Patrick glanced quickly at Lucian. The embarrassment was clear in his face, as if he were asking us to keep a night light on. “Are you—um . . .”
Lucian stood next to him. “I’ll be in there with you.”
“That’s good.” He looked away. Lucian might actually be the best influence for Patrick, which made a twisted kind of sense. It takes a village to raise a vampire.
The temperature dropped to a chill two degrees Celsius as we stepped into the morgue. I could see Tasha leaning over the stainless-steel autopsy table, speaking quietly into her digital recorder. I’d called down earlier, asking if she could do anything possible to make Caitlin’s obliterated body suitable for viewing. She promised to try.
She looked up, waving with a bloody glove. “Hey, Tess.” Her expression curdled slightly as she saw Lucian. “And Mr. Agrado. Hello.”
“Dr. Lieu.” He inclined his head. “It’s an honor to meet you.”
She seemed taken aback by his politeness. Then her eyes fell to Patrick, and I saw her whole face soften. “You must be Patrick.”
He nodded.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, sweetheart.” Her fingers hovered over the body, which was covered by a white sheet. “Normally, we’d do this over closed-circuit television. But this case is a little different. So I’m just going to pull this sheet down—only a little bit—so that you can see her face. If you recognize her, all you have to do is nod. Then it’ll be over. Okay?”
“I understand,” he said dully.
“Good. I’m going to lower the sheet, then. Remember, you only have to nod.”
Tasha pulled the white sheet down to Caitlin’s chin. I was amazed. She’d almost completely reconstructed the woman’s face. Caitlin’s hair was smooth, as if it had just been brushed. Tasha had sewn her scalp back on, and I assumed that she’d filled in the missing parts of her skull with mortuary-grade epoxy. Her eyes were closed, and I saw that the CME had done her best to clean up the surface around her right eye socket, which had been savagely mauled. The sutures were almost invisible. I looked again at Tasha, noticing for the first time the dark circles under her eyes, as well as the two empty coffee cups on the desk behind her. Obviously, she’d worked all day on this. I didn’t know quite how to thank her.