by Mindy Klasky
“Nora?” I laughed. My year-old goddaughter wasn’t exactly the type to haunt stationery stores.
“Go ahead,” Allison said. “Open it.”
I slipped my finger under the flap and extracted a handmade card. Allison’s perfect printing marched across the front: “Congratulations on your new job.” Inside, was a pretty pink Nora handprint. I wondered what Allison had used to make the impression; it had probably taken her an hour to get the baby cleaned up afterwards.
“Thank you!” I said, laughing at the sweet sentiment. “I’ll put it right beside my desk.”
“So?” Allison prompted. “How is everything going at the courthouse?”
“Well, the Banner wants to do a story on me.”
“What?” Allison almost spit out her chardonnay.
“A reporter showed up Wednesday night. Well, Thursday morning, I guess. It was after midnight.” I told Allison about Chris, about the profile that he wanted to do for the newspaper.
“And your boss was okay with that?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Okay. That sounded defensive. Allison didn’t know the first thing about James, or about the secrets he was charged to protect.
Allison twirled her wine glass between two fingers, her French manicure flashing a warning at me, a reminder to choose my words more carefully. “You said he was the Director of Security, right? I’d just expect him to be allergic to the press, that’s all. Sort of the way that anyone who knows anything runs a million miles in the opposite direction when they see Sixty Minutes coming.”
“The Banner isn’t Sixty Minutes,” I said. “And this isn’t that sort of article. It’s supposed to entertain readers, not unveil some great wrong that remains unpunished.”
I pictured Chris as he stood in front of me at the clerk’s counter, the way he’d grinned at me when he revealed that perfect row of colored pens. I’d phoned him that morning, right after I’d gotten home from work, and I could still hear the silly smile in my voice as I accepted his offer to be interviewed. Now, sitting in the dim restaurant with my best friend, I could feel my cheeks begin to flush.
“Wait a second,” Allison said. She hadn’t graduated law school magna cum laude for nothing. She was perceptive, dammit. “You like this guy!”
“I don’t even know this guy!” I said too quickly. I tried to back-pedal. “Besides, he’s a reporter. He has to stay disinterested. I don’t think we’re even allowed to buy each other a cup of coffee. Anyway, James would get upset if anything started between Chris and me.”
“James?” She managed to turn my boss’s name into a two-syllable playground taunt. “So, we’re on a first-name basis now?”
I glared at her. “How many bosses have you ever called Mr. Whoever? Wake up! It’s not 1950 anymore.”
“Oh!” Allison exclaimed, nodding vigorously. “So you’re interested in both of them!”
How did she do that? How could she read my mind? Especially when I didn’t even know my own thoughts on the matter? Not for sure, anyway.
Pretending like I needed to add sweetener to my iced tea, I reached for the container of packets on the table. Why couldn’t people keep things neat? My fingers flashed over the bits of colored paper, separating the blue stuff from the pink from the yellow.
I was still stirring real sugar into my tea—ten full circuits of the spoon, clock-wise within the glass—when our food arrived. I plunged into my omelet like it was the last meal I was ever going to eat. In fact, it was pretty good. I tried to forget that a few thick strips of bacon would have made it a hundred times better.
Allison enjoyed a few forkfuls of her disgustingly healthy Mediterranean chicken salad—vinaigrette on the side—before she prodded again. “So? Do you really have too many dates to the prom?”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not like that. Really. Chris is a total non-starter. We’re both bound by professional ethics, even if there actually were something there.” I flashed again on the neat row of staples in the articles he’d given me. The articles that I’d read that morning, cover to cover. I’d even gone online to read some of his shorter pieces, the bread-and-butter reporting that he added to the Arts and Style section, when he wasn’t putting together major feature articles for the Sunday edition.
“Then that leaves James,” Allison said, not to be deterred.
I glanced around the restaurant. Fortunately, it was early enough that we were the only diners in our little corner of the room. We had enough privacy that I could tell Allison my deep dark secret. But first, I had to guarantee that she wouldn’t tell anyone else.
“There’s something I have to tell you about James.” I put my fork down and leaned across the table. Allison met me halfway, clearly relishing her role as secret co-conspirator. Another glance. Another confirmation that no one could overhear us. “But you have to promise to keep it secret.”
She nodded. “I promise.”
“No. I mean, this is bigger than that.”
“How big?”
“Woof Woof big.” Woof Woof was a stuffed animal that had belonged to Allison’s baby sister. One day, when Al was eight years old and full of righteous indignation about some real or imagined slight by Meghan, she had torn the stupid pink dog into a half dozen pieces. To this day, Allison maintained that she was somehow justified, but at the time, she had blamed the destruction on the family dog. The family dog that had been banished to the basement overnight. The family dog that Meghan had never again played with or taken for walks. Allison had confessed her plushicide to me years ago, in a drunken session of Truth or Dare, claiming that it was the worst thing she’d ever done, to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Knowing Al, it probably was.
“You have got to be kidding,” she said now.
“Swear to keep my secret, or I’ll call Meghan tonight.”
“Okay,” she said, laughing and fortifying herself with a healthy swallow of wine. “I swear on the truth about Woof Woof. I won’t tell anyone whatever you’re about to tell me.”
I sighed. That was going to have to do. I didn’t have anything more serious to bind her. Besides, she was my best friend. She’d keep my confidence when I asked her. She always had before, flawlessly, without question. I looked her straight in the eye, lowered my voice to a whisper, and said, “James Morton is a vampire.”
Allison’s laughter was so loud, I suspected that James could hear it himself, wherever he spent his daylight hours. She toasted me with her glass, then leaned back in her chair. “Man, you really had me going!”
“I’m serious!”
“Let me guess,” she said, still chuckling. “He sparkles in the sunlight.”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t go out in sunlight.”
Allison rolled her eyes. “So he’s the traditional sort, huh? I vant to suck your blood?”
Transylvania called. It wants to file an action for perpetuation of negative stereotypes. I just stared.
Allison was on a roll, though. “Did he watch too much Sesame Street as a kid? One! Ha, ha, ha! Two! Ha, ha, ha!”
Leave it to a mother to bring childhood icons into the conversation. I shook my head and said, “He doesn’t sparkle, he doesn’t speak with a bad middle-European accent, and he absolutely isn’t purple.”
Allison’s fork clattered into her bowl. “You’re serious.”
I nodded.
“Come on!” she exclaimed, loud enough that our waiter looked up from the back of the restaurant. Allison waved him off before he could scurry over to find out what was wrong. She leaned close across the table. “Please tell me that you’re joking!”
“I know it sounds nuts. I know that I wouldn’t believe me, if the tables were turned. But this isn’t a joke. James is a vampire. They’re real.”
“They?”
“Everyone at Night Court. The judge, the lawyers. James. And there are other creatures, too. Griffins and sprites and lots of things I haven’t met yet.” As Allison gaped, I filled her in on the Eastern Empire,
on the secret proceedings that transpired after midnight. At first, I could tell that she was ready to whip out her cell phone, to call for an ambulance, to have me committed. I kept talking, though, giving as much time as I could for her to get used to the idea, to grasp the notion that imperials really walked among us. I told her all about Brauer, about how he’d, um, launched himself at me. About how James had saved me.
“You swear you’re not making this up?” she asked when I was through.
I shook my head. “I’d show you my scars, but there aren’t any.” And then I realized how I could convince her. “Come with me!”
“What?”
“Come with me to work tonight. I’ll show you the docket system. You can see the case against Schmidt. James will never let you into the courtroom, but I can show you the filings, prove it to you that way.”
Allison nodded slowly. I could tell that she was torn. Either I was lying to her, looping her into the greatest practical joke of all time, or else I was telling the truth. I could practically hear her asking herself which was worse.
She pushed her bowl away. “Let’s go, then. Before I lose my nerve and drag you off to the emergency psych ward.”
It was easy enough to get Allison past the building security—she just had to go through the metal detector, like everyone else. As we passed through the heavy glass doors, I glanced at the sunset behind us. I was secretly pleased that it was still daylight; I could show her the filing system and then get her out of the building before the imperials arrived.
Before James arrived.
I’d gone over what I was doing, testing it again and again against whatever passed for my moral compass. I knew that the imperials protected their privacy ferociously. I understood that they couldn’t let their presence be known, couldn’t let the human world find out that they really existed.
I understood that. Really, I did. Disclosing the actual presence of imperials—not just the storybook ideas that authors had spun out for centuries—would place all of them at risk. Some would be challenged by frightened humans, by terrified people who believed that their own lives were in danger. Other threats would come from freaks, from humans who wanted to hang out with the monsters, to offer up their own blood, to take a long, dramatic walk on the wild side, complete with too much black eyeliner and a few more piercings than was strictly mainstream.
I majored in this stuff. I’d written papers about it, for real academic credit. I knew that fear was never a good basis for a relationship—and the human race couldn’t help but be terrified of real, predatory vampires.
But Allison was my best friend. She’d already figured out that something was up, with James, with Chris, with my entire new life. I couldn’t hide the truth from her forever.
Besides, I trusted her. She would keep my secrets as closely as I would. Closer, even. No reporter was knocking on her door, asking to follow her around for hours. And she’d sworn on the ghost of Woof Woof.
I was confident in my decision, certain of the power of friendship. But I wasn’t an idiot. I was about one hundred percent certain that James would see things differently. So, I hurried Allison down the hallway, rushed her into my office, fully aware that our window of opportunity would close as soon as the sun sank fully below the horizon.
The day staff, of course, was long gone by the time I locked the office door behind us. I tossed my purse onto my desk chair, tapping my coral ring against the counter as I turned on the computer, as I waited impatiently for the machine to hum through its interminable connection to the network, its virus check, its endless search for updates to software that I supposedly couldn’t live without.
Allison nodded at the bulky, old-fashioned monitor. “I haven’t seen one of those since high school. Haven’t they ever heard of flat screens around here?”
“Not as long as this one continues to work,” I grumbled. At last, the login screen displayed. I was so nervous that I mistyped my password. Twice. My finger hovered over the Enter key after I typed in EENC. “Are you sure about this?” I asked.
Allison had caught on to my skittishness. She wiped her palms against her skirt before she nodded—a tight, controlled gesture that was more like a lawyer acknowledging a direct command from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, than a friend agreeing to take a quick look at an office project.
I pressed the key.
The sword-and-parchment logo glowed to life. I clicked on it quickly, throwing us into the Night Court database. My fingers raced across the keyboard as I pulled up the Schmidt case. I saw the instant that Allison registered “Clans”, the second that she read “Eastern Empire.” She was trained in legal jargon; she knew the words that were supposed to be there. The ordinary words. The human ones. Once the reality had registered on her face, I scrolled down to the criminal information, brought up the detailed listing of Karl Schmidt’s alleged crimes against humans and vampires alike.
I’d read through the words already. I knew the allegations that were set forth there in painstaking detail. Schmidt was accused of kidnapping at least one hundred twenty-seven humans from various locales in the Eastern Empire. The information read like a Poe short story—iron cells, drugged captives, blood rites.
Allison paled as she skimmed the screen. Her scattering of freckles stood out on her cheeks as if they’d been drawn with a child’s crayon. She clutched the counter in front of her, and when she swallowed, the sound practically echoed in the office. When she got to the end of the document, she stared at me with haunted eyes.
“They’re monsters,” she whispered.
“No!” I said. “I mean, not all of them! Schmidt is on trial—he’s like the Ted Bundy of vampires!”
“How can you stand there and talk like this is all perfectly normal? Don’t you realize what they can do to you?”
I shook my head. “Allison, if they wanted me dead, they would have let me die there in the courtroom. They didn’t have to restrain themselves when Brauer, um, came after me. James didn’t have to give me his blood.”
Allison stepped back, as if I were the one she feared. “You actually did that? You actually drank his blood?”
I’d already told her all this. I’d already explained what had happened. She hadn’t questioned me in the restaurant, hadn’t been afraid then. But now, with Schmidt’s information as additional background, she was horrified. I could see the revulsion on her face—equal measures of disgust and fear.
“Allison!” I said, reaching out to grab her hand, to make her understand.
“Don’t touch me!”
She leaped away as if I was going to burn her. Before I could say anything, before I could make any other motion, I heard a key turn in the lock. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Eight-thirty. Well after dark.
Allison whirled toward escape. I already knew what I’d see as I looked toward the door. I was already certain what would happen.
For a single heartbeat, James appeared surprised. In reflex, he pulled the door closed after him, turning the lock even as he took in the sheer panic on Allison’s face. He glanced at my computer screen, clearly recognizing the document, or at least the format. “What the —” he started, but he cut himself off as Allison cringed before him.
“James!” I said, struggling for a bright tone, for something that could soothe my poor best friend, that would let her know everything was all right. “I was just showing Allison around, letting her see where I work now. Allison Ward, this is my boss, James Morton.”
Neither my boss nor my friend gave the least acknowledgment of my introduction. Instead, James reached out to close his left hand around Allison’s wrist. She moaned at the contact, and I knew what she was feeling. I knew that she was registering his icy touch, that she was recognizing the stony strength beneath his flesh.
“James!” I said again, urgently. He ignored me, though. Instead, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a flask. Cold steel glinted between his fingers as Allison struggled to pull free from his gras
p. My best friend was whining, thrashing her head, fighting like a wild animal.
“Allison,” I cried, nausea rising in my throat as I realized that I had made this happen, that I had caused this disaster.
James snarled and raised the flask to Al’s lips. In the confusion, he’d somehow twisted off the cap. He tilted the bottle, shifting his grip from her wrist to her jaw, forcing her mouth to open. He poured slowly, steadily, and she had to swallow or drown. After she had gulped down three huge swallows of the drug, James threw the capped flask onto the counter. He settled his index finger in the center of Allison’s forehead with eerie precision. “Be mine,” he whispered.
She slumped forward instantly, her resistance evaporating so quickly that she would have fallen to the floor if he hadn’t adjusted his grip, if he hadn’t helped her keep her feet. Even as I registered that this was what a human looked like when she was Enfolded, that this was the mesmerism that neither James nor Judge DuBois had been able to complete with me, an acid flame kindled in my chest.
I didn’t like what I was seeing.
I didn’t like that Allison was absolutely helpless. I didn’t like that James was so offhand in his action, as if he’d Enfolded a thousand people before. I didn’t like that he had Enfolded a thousand people, maybe more. And, in a way that made absolutely no logical sense at all, I didn’t like that Allison could do what I could not, that she could yield to James’s power, that she could submit without being strange, without being a freak, without being different in some unique, bizarre, extraordinary way.
Most of all, though, I didn’t like the intensity in James’s eyes as he studied Allison’s face, as he memorized her perfect cheekbones, her flawless lips. She was my best friend, and I was used to her getting attention from every man in every room we ever occupied. But I wasn’t happy that she was getting James’s undivided attention, here, now. I swallowed the ridiculous urge to say something about Allison’s husband, to let James know that he had competition.
But James wasn’t fighting for Allison’s attention right now; he wasn’t trying to seduce her. In fact, James had a very different battle in mind. One that involved me, paying dearly for my disclosure.