Paradigms Lost

by Ryk E. Spoor

  “I told you. You don’t get something for nothing. That means that if you want legal leverage, you’d damn well better be ready to accept the decisions of the law. There’s no guarantee I can get you cleared. As of yet, I have only your word that it was self-defense, and even if it was, proving that to what’s guaranteed to be a pretty hostile jury isn’t going to be a picnic. I’m going to be subject to a lot of public outcry for defending you at all; are you willing to take the risk for the gain?”

  She glared at me for a few moments, then took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again she was back to being the blonde pixie. “All right, Mr. Wood. I promise that I’ll go along with the court’s decision.”

  I laughed. “Nice try. I don’t trust you people as far as I can throw one of you in your real form. I want you to swear—on the name and honor of Virigar—that from this moment forth, you will comply with all human law and custom as regards criminal prosecution, exoneration, conviction, prison time or other penalties assessed against convicted criminals, up to and including execution for premeditated murder.”

  The name of the Wolf King had made her wince. I knew from experience that it was the only thing that meant a damn to the wolves; they feared Virigar more than silver. “I will not!”

  I turned for the door. “Then we have nothing to discuss.”

  “You human worm!” The last word dropped two octaves and I whirled to see her half-changed and already starting for me.

  “Virigar.” I reminded her.

  She froze, monstrously half-human face working with rage and fear, glowing eyes now on a level with mine. Finally, she snarled something in a language no human had ever used and collapsed back into her human form. “You win.”

  “Then promise, and don’t try any fancy word tricks on me. I promise—on my own honor, which you people know damn well is good—that I’ll do my best to get you off on this charge, just as if I were a real defense lawyer, but only if you play this dead straight with me.”

  Finally, she nodded slowly. “Very well. I begin to see the silver beneath your humanity, Mr. Wood. It is somewhat . . . disconcerting to encounter it in person, even though I knew how formidable you are from prior events.” She took another deep breath. “I swear, in the name and on the word and law of our King, Virigar, and in my own name of Tanmorrai, that I shall comply with human laws as you have specified, even . . . even unto accepting penalties in the case of conviction, up to and including . . . including my own execution.”

  “Satisfactory,” I said, sitting back down at the table. “Then let’s get to it, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 91

  Innocent Monster

  The facts of the case didn’t take too long to establish. Angela McIntyre had worked for the deceased, Frederic Delacroix, for the past year and a half. Delacroix ran an extremely high-priced escort service—one of those whose “escorts” might actually be top-end call girls, but which was circumspect enough and had customers with leverage enough to avoid investigation or prosecution.

  “So was it?” I asked. “Not that this has to come out in the trial, but I’d better know.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Angela said easily. “Not official, you understand, and we were given the latitude to decide if some particular, um, client didn’t meet our standards, but sexual interaction was definitely part of our job description.”

  I looked at her. I could certainly see that she could play such a role, but . . . “And what the hell do you get out of it? Or did you kill the real Angela and take her place?”

  “Oh, no, this isn’t anyone else’s form, Mr. Wood,” she said. “We can choose our own forms if we like. Most of us have at least one human shape that’s ours and ours alone. I live in this one most of the time. It’s comfortable.”

  “Still . . . I can’t imagine that you find us attractive, except for dinner purposes. So why this job? For that matter, why a job at all?”

  She sighed. “Let’s get into that later, shall we? First let me finish the story.”

  I nodded.

  While that kind of contact was part of the work, Angela insisted on keeping relations between her and Frederic strictly business. This had annoyed him, but Angela was a very, very large draw with his clientele and he wasn’t about to shoot himself in the foot by firing his most lucrative asset. “I’m guessing your nature gave you an advantage in pleasing the clients.”

  “How perceptive of you, Jason.” She gave another devastating smile. “While of course I couldn’t do the trick of becoming the Girl of Your Dreams without giving things away, at close range any wolf can read a lot from your soul. I could always tell the proper approach to take, the right moves to make, that would leave them utterly infatuated. Or not, if I didn’t want them around me long.”

  I nodded. That fit with what Verne had told me about the wolves way back when Virigar had first shown up. They couldn’t influence minds the way Verne could, at least not as blatantly, but they had some talents in that direction. “Go on. There’s going to be a lot of questions, but let’s finish the basic story.”

  Angela had thought the matter settled; Frederic was annoyed but had a vested interest in swallowing his pride and leaving Angela alone. Which had seemed to be the way it was, until that night. Business was good, and there had been a party at Delacroix’s headquarters for some of his top clients. Frederic had socialized and probably drank a lot more than was good for him. When he came across Angela in one of the hallways, he tried to corner her.

  A large man in the prime of health, Frederic wasn’t someone easily brushed off, but Angela of course had some inherent advantages. She was able to get away with minimal mussing, but she realized now that Frederic wasn’t going to give up. If it was just purely sexual attraction, she might have been able to figure out some way to “turn him off,” but it was clearly a matter of pride and possession, too. If these clients could have her, so could he. He owned her, after all.

  “That went beyond anything I wanted to put up with,” she said, “so I left. I figured I could get another job or even start up my own service; my clients would be glad to work with me on that. But it was when I was leaving that I made my mistake. Most of us girls stick together reasonably well, but there’s always some of them with knives out for your back. I think Trisha must have seen me leave and let Frederic know; the others would probably have just mentioned they saw me leave with one of the clients, and that would’ve been okay.”

  Delacroix had caught up with her at the parking garage. He’d threatened her, then chased her when she tried to get away. “Unfortunately,” she said with a wry grin, “this body’s legs just aren’t very good for outrunning former football players.” Delacroix ran her down, hit her, and was clearly preparing to rape her.

  Angela, while not viewing rape with the same traumatic horror that most human women would, wasn’t going to allow that to happen. “I allow humans to touch me when it’s part of my job, but for him to force himself on me was never to be borne.” I got the impression, despite the arrogant phrasing, that there had been some fear behind her actions, though why she might have been afraid I couldn’t figure out yet.

  So she’d shifted, struck, and shifted back just as the police arrived. “Ironic, of course. He might not have managed to finish his business before the cops arrived, but I didn’t know that. Besides, he’d already struck me, which was enough.”

  I looked at her askance. “You might want to try a different tone when you’re on the witness stand. No matter what the law says, whether you get convicted or not will depend—in part—on the impression the jury has of you, and you’ll be fighting an uphill battle as it is.”

  “Oh, I’m quite aware of that, Jason. I’m just being totally honest with you here because you would need to know the truth in order to know how we should ‘spin’ it. Right?”

  I nodded. “One thing that occurs to me is that we need some way of establishing that you really are this Angela. I mean, you say you didn’t kill and replace h
er, but how do we know that? And how can we trace you back to certain locations? You can change your shape and just about everything else. I don’t even know if you remain constant in your structure. I do know that Virigar, as a wolf, could change his anatomy while he was moving.”

  She smiled. Damn, but she was pretty. This girl would be dangerous even if she wasn’t a wolf. “Scientifically, you can link me by using DNA tests on the relevant locations—my apartment, the crime scene, so on. Certainly, we can duplicate other people on a genetic level—it’s necessary for what we do—but in this case, it’s my DNA footprint. Only another wolf could fake it.”

  “Or a Maelkodan, I suppose.”

  She shuddered. “Y . . . yes, they could. But I can prove I’m not a Maelkodan.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How?”

  “Maelkodan aren’t vulnerable to silver.”

  I nodded in understanding. Pulling a silver knife from its sheath on my leg, I laid it on the flat of her hand. She stoically held still; I withdrew the blade to see a red welt and blister on her hand, as though the knife had been as hot as a stove. “Okay, you’re a wolf all right,” I agreed. “Still, what about proving that Angela is in fact you, and you haven’t just substituted for her?”

  “There’s some decent evidence available. I suppose I can’t totally prove it—although I swear in the name of Virigar that I have told you the truth. If you’ll have your best professionals examine Angela’s background, they will eventually find that it ends as thoroughly as any faked identity does. I obviously didn’t spend years growing up from childhood. I started being Angela about eight years ago. The investigation will also show that I had a nondescript but rather decent job as a programmer-analyst up until I changed careers, a change that would be hard to explain for most people, but which makes perfect sense for a wolf.”

  The timing fit closely with my throwdown with Virigar. I began to understand. “You were doing a completely different job for your own people, using Delacroix’s service as cover.”

  “Oh, excellent!” She clapped her hands enthusiastically. “You really do have the talent for this kind of thing. Yes, and it was all your fault.”

  “I drove your people into hiding. With the CryWolf units being installed in more and more places, there were fewer and fewer safe locations for you—especially since you couldn’t count on any given place not having a CryWolf installed. That’s why one group of you had to take over Venice, Florida; only if you controlled the major events through the entire community could you have a chance of making sure that any CryWolf units installed would be useless.” I frowned. “But you can’t do the same in Los Angeles, New York, or any large city. There simply aren’t enough of you.”

  “Well, you know that many of the CryWolf installations were made as supplements or additions to already-existing monitoring units, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “I designed the retrofit kits for most of those approaches myself. Why?”

  “Many of our clients are married.” She watched me for a reaction.

  Of course. It made complete, if terrifying, sense. Wealthy, powerful married men were not going to want a record of them receiving female visitors outside of normal business proceedings. So they could arrange for the cameras to be shut off for a few seconds, especially if a hint was given.

  And with the camera off, the CryWolf device was useless.

  “But . . . obviously, you didn’t kill off these guys. That would’ve cut way into Frederic’s profit margins, and caused a lot of talk, at the least. So what did that get you?”

  “Tsk, tsk, Mr. Wood. The ability to get past the defenses of the building once allows me the opportunity to ensure that they will never operate again. It takes some considerable skill to perform the modifications such that self-checking will appear to work, and so on, but I have that skill.”

  Now I understood. “You basically were working on infiltrating as many business and residential areas as possible and subtly disabling the CryWolf units, allowing your people to return to the major cities.”

  “Exactly, Jason. There are a number of other tactics that I had to use since not everyone would turn off their cameras. I would have to engineer failures from a sufficient distance, but the point was that someone in my position simply wasn’t suspected. The advantages of a still-sexist society, you know; it’s easy to play dumb when you’re a cute little blonde.”

  I had to agree with that, and the whole situation was giving me the creeps again. At least Virigar had appeared to have some credible threat potential. Angela—or to use her wolf name, Tanmorrai—looked less threatening than Syl. And she was calmly admitting that the purpose behind playing a high-priced call girl was to help render useless the major defense we had against the wolves.

  “We probably won’t want to bring this up at the trial, ” she continued. “It would probably be better for me to just say that as long as we are stuck trying to live in your society, a girl has to do something to eat, and we don’t have your people’s hangups on sexual interaction. Not that we find your people attractive, but as a job, it’s no worse than many others. I’d rather do that than be a sewer maintenance worker, for instance.”

  “Speaking of eating,” I said, “how many people have you eaten in your last couple of years—aside from the not-too-lamented Frederic, that is?”

  She froze for a moment, then smiled again. “You know I don’t have to kill to survive, Jason. We might prefer it, but your shaking up of the power structure has made it inadvisable for us to do any more killing. Especially after you made your point so clearly in Venice, where poor little Hastrikas now has to make sure everyone keeps themselves on the straight and narrow, eating what we can get without killing the subject or giving them the suspicion that something isn’t right.”

  “That’s right, you can do that drain-the-energy trick from a distance,” I said. Now that I thought of it, that was probably what she meant by “engineering failure” of the cameras; if you drained the energy from the camera fast enough, it would shut down, then start back up again when you stopped the drain. According to Verne, they could eat essentially any form of energy, but the energy of life—the souls—was so vastly superior that they didn’t use that power on other energy sources unless they absolutely had to.

  “Exactly. So we might choose some tourist who’d been running themselves ragged, drain them from the adjoining hotel room, and leave them feeling like they overdid it and got some kind of the flu. In a day or so, they’re recovering and none the wiser.” She grinned, then reached out and touched my hand. “For other purposes, of course, you can reverse the process.”

  I felt a momentary flood of energy and almost ecstatic well-being, and knew it was due to this gorgeous girl smiling fondly at me. I shook my head, focusing on what I knew was true. The energy and alertness stayed, but I managed to force the attraction out. Well, mostly out. I’m not superhuman, and the cute pixieish types have always appealed to me—I married one, after all—and she was very, very cute. “Do not do that again.”

  “Of course, if that’s the way you feel. Consider the energy a gift; you’re jet-lagged, but now that shouldn’t be a problem.” She smiled again, but this time with a nasty edge. “Freddie’s soul had to be good for something.”

  I stared at her in revulsion. “That was . . .”

  “Well, yes, I had to get the extra energy from somewhere. Don’t worry, it really didn’t have much of him left in it.”

  I picked up the digital recorder and my laptop. “I think we’re done for today.”

  She was laughing quietly as they took her back to her cell.

  CHAPTER 92

  All So Different, They’re Exactly the Same

  “So she’s cooperating, Jason?”

  Just hearing Syl’s voice was settling me down. “Overall, yeah. Not without playing games, though. She’s a nasty one.”

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  I spluttered incoherently for a moment before I found my words again. �
�I like the way she looks, Syl. But she’s a monster, and she’s happy with that. She put a piece of a dead man’s essence into me as a demonstration of what she could do for me, what she’d already done to someone else, and I think just to entertain herself with my reactions.”

  “But you do like her.”

  It’s impossible to lie to your wife when she’s a psychic. “In some ways, yeah. She’s . . . well, she’s kinda like Virigar: straightforward, no attempt to pretend she’s anything other than what she is, honest in her intent, and I think she has some honest respect for me. But she’s also a monster in every sense of the word, and I hate the idea that I’m going to be trying to get her out of jail.” I paused. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

  She laughed, the sound bringing back memories of the time she’d confronted me with my own jealousy over her and Verne. “Jasie, I know you too well. I’m just making sure you know yourself.”

  “I’m not stupid. It’s obvious what she was doing.” I chewed my lower lip. “But that approach—without knowledge of its intent—boy, that would really work. She probably used that on some of her clients. They’d attribute their, um, increased energy and stamina to her, but not in the way it was really happening. That’d definitely keep her popular.” Something was nagging me about that, but it was the sort of thing that I’d have to wait on; it’d come clear, sooner or later.

  “So what now?”

  “The cops—CSIs, other agencies—are going to go over the evidence, trace her back, try to show that she’s been working there as she claims, dig up proof of her faked background, so that we know there isn’t a real Angela who’s gone missing, and so on. Mr. Achernar agreed to do extra digging to confirm it’s not a double trick, where they made a real person disappear and then eradicated proof that she existed. I have to cover all the bases.” There was a knock at the door. “What the . . . Syl, I gotta go. Call you later. Love you.”