by Jes Battis
She gestures at us with one of her tentacles. “These two want to buy from the strange one. Are you picking up tonight?”
“Yes. But he said to come alone.”
I point to Lucian. “He literally has money coming out of his ass. We could just wait in the car while you talk to him.”
“I have a bike,” the ghoul says flatly. “And I never talk to him. I just pick up the package from the mailbox.”
“Fine. Let us come with you, and we’ll leave some money and a nice note in the mailbox. We’ll even pay you a retainer.”
He frowns. “What’s that?”
“Fifty bucks.” I turn to Lucian. “Give the ghoul fifty bucks.”
The waiter’s eyes widen. “How did you know?”
“Your cheek is decomposing.”
“Oh, shit.”
Lucian gives me a look that speaks volumes. Extremely pissed-off volumes. Then he reaches into his billfold and pulls out a fifty. I knew it. He always carries an emergency bribe. Grudgingly, he gives the money to the ghoul, who pockets it.
“Fine,” he says. “Meet me back here at seven thirty, and I’ll take you there. You have to stay out of sight, though. He’s crazy.”
“I thought you said you never talked to him.”
“I’ve seen him, though. I know crazy when I see it.”
The sentiment seems odd coming from an undead creature, but considering the fact that I just grifted him, I can’t judge. The truth is that this was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Which makes me nervous.
“We really appreciate it,” I say. “We’ll come back.”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Of course not.”
I extend my hand to the squid. “It was very nice to meet you.”
She offers me one of her tentacles. It’s rubbery and cold. I’m not sure if I should squeeze or not, so I just shake it slightly. Then Lucian and I leave.
Once we’re outside, he glares at me again. “Mute? Really?”
“Think about it,” I say. “If anyone asks, they’re both going to remember a mute entrepreneur and some girl. That sounds nothing like us.”
“Why couldn’t you be the mute one?”
“Because you’re too sweet and charming. I’m far more believable as a small-time drug addict.”
“You scare me sometimes.”
“In a good way?”
“In just about every way.”
I smile. “I’ll take it.”
“What are we going to do until seven thirty?”
“I should probably talk to Derrick. If you want to be extremely useful, you can chat with Modred and see if he’s learned anything.”
“You’re sending a necromancer to talk to a vampire. You must have an odd sense of political correctness.”
“Modred doesn’t really take me seriously. But if he knows that you’re involved, he might let something slip.”
“Involved in your unsanctioned investigation, you mean.”
“Yes. Exactly that.”
“Are you sure you know how to play this game?”
“I’m sure that you’ll bail me out in the end. That’s almost as good.”
He takes my hand. “I’m not kidding. You don’t have the CORE behind you this time. You’re on your own. Please be careful.”
“I never am. But thanks.” I kiss him. “See you later tonight.”
11
I come home feeling as if I’ve used up all my good words. It’s just as well, because Derrick is asleep on the couch, slumped over Miles like a beautiful marionette. Both of them are snoring. Miles has one hand on the clicker, the other on Derrick’s chest. My boys. They sound like dueling banjos. I wonder what they’re dreaming about. Secret things that only queer boys understand, like Tori Amos liner notes, or the language of scarves. Considering that Derrick can read thoughts, I find it incredible that he’s managed to fall in love. Maybe Miles thinks only proper things. Maybe he has the mind of a unicorn. He certainly knows how to be dirty in ASL, though. Maybe the thought isn’t really what counts, but rather, the voice, the hand, the look. Thoughts come cheap, but when someone puts their hand on your back, gently, to guide you into a room, that matters. These small, mothlike gestures that form the geometry of care.
I sit down at the kitchen table to write Derrick a note. In my head, the note is hundreds of pages long and full of superlatives. I choose brevity. Derrick. I love you, and I’m sorry I hit you. I’ll be home later tonight. Don’t forget that we need paper towels and vegetable thins.
I add a semi-hysterical PS for Mia. Text me when you get home. I could keep going forever: text me when you get to Berkeley, when you sleep with a boy/girl for the first time, if the power goes out, when you graduate, when you’re sad or scared, if you need sweaters, when you get your heart broken, text me and I’ll cross any surface to get to you. But I can settle for knowing where she is tonight. Letting go is a work in progress.
It’s hot outside. I find a patio and order a beer. It mixes with the coffee already in my stomach, and the two embark on a power struggle. I watch the Rollerbladers, the dog walkers, and the street punks blowing smoke. When I was little, I was an angry kitten, full of smoke and savage power. When I was little, a bird demon watched over me, and now he’s dead. All of my teachers die or disappear. Is it me? Am I radioactive? Am I a poisoned well?
I stare at my fingers. If I concentrated, if I parted the atomic curtain and reached in, if I tugged just a little on the margins of the world, I could set this patio on fire. But the truth is that I’ve always hated fire. I chose the earth, not just because stones asked me the time of day, but because the earth seemed like a book I was willing to read. The earth was something I could crawl into. I could be a blind worm digging, a submerged root, a sealed bulb with no intention of breaking the surface. I trust the earth, but not the other elements. They whisper behind my back like popular girls.
I was born with spines. I was born with opinions and occult specialties. I was born out of demonic wedlock. I was born out of mercy. My mother felt the alien plasmids in her blood, the foreign DNA, and instead of eradicating them, she said: I call truce. She injected a drug that solved everything. And here I am. It’s the same thing that we did to Mia. Here, take this shot, and you get to be human. But origins can’t be quiet. They clamor for attention, a litter of oracular piglets eating everything in sight.
What does it mean to be a demon’s daughter? Should I be living in another world? Should I be getting more discounts? My father is a false rib that I’ve always felt but never known. Every day, I get closer to breaking through my chest plate and exhuming him, destroying him into consciousness. My mother must have realized this, and that’s why she’s disappeared. My beautiful mother, who, like Frigga, would protect me from anything with thorns if she could. But she forgot about the mistletoe.
I joined the CORE because it seemed to offer a way out, a solution to the daily feeling of being misunderstood, ignored, feared. The fire that consumed Eve taunted me from one direction, while the CORE beckoned me from another. But who was it who watched me from the sidelines? Was it you? Were you what I saw, in spite of the wind? You might have been a siren or a house on fire; I couldn’t tell. I was always nearsighted. And so, I chose the CORE.
But I know nothing about them, this coven, this company. They block my questions at every turn. They give me things to do, cases to occupy my time, junctions to puzzle over, but never a real answer. I’m tired of agnosis. I’ve had enough of their protection. I need to expose their roots. Doing this, I realize, will not end well. But it will end. Love may be circular, but knowing is ending. I pay the bill and step onto the street. I’ve made my decision. I’m going to sin against those who offered me shelter. I have no other choice. Selena was wrong about retirement. I can’t walk away from the CORE until I’ve seen its face. At least then I’ll know what’s hunting me. I’ll recognize its scent.
I go to the Forensics unit. Everyone moves crisply beneath the industrial air-condition
ing. My body feels frozen into relief. All my sins and freckles show. I linger in a peripheral hallway until two thirty, when I know that Selena will take a fifteen-minute coffee break. Then I make my way to Ru’s place. Like a political prisoner trapped forever between time zones, Ru lives in this suite, dreaming of his home world and its beautiful methane storms. When I come in, he’s listening to a CNN podcast. He takes out the earbuds, pausing to disentangle the cord from his left horn, then smiles at me.
“Tess. I am glad to see you. This day has been highly unproductive so far. Would you like to give me five and accompany me to the music library?”
“You mean take five,” I say. “‘Give me five’ is a high five.”
“Nothing that you just said made sense.”
I extend my palm. “See? We’ve both got five fingers—”
“Actually, I have talons.”
“Just slap my hand. That’s what ‘giving five’ is all about. You give me your five fingers, and I give you mine. It’s a greeting.”
He slaps my palm uncertainly. “How was my gift?”
“It was great. Look, I need your help with something. Do you feel like going to the basement?”
He brightens. “There could be rats.”
“Excellent. You can brush up on your colloquial rodent.”
We leave the suite. The security camera records our exit. I’m not concerned, since people stopped checking the tape a while ago. There’s only so much trouble that a Ptah’li child can get into, even in this building. We take the elevator to the subbasement. Ru studies the blue walls in fascination. I use my card to open the door to the reference library.
“What is this place?” Ru asks.
“It’s an archive. How would you feel about messing around with the computer? Selena tells me that you’ve reprogrammed the Nerve before, so this operating system shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
“Does it require an upgrade?”
“Not exactly. Watch.” I activate the tabletop computer. “Give me information on Lord Nightingale,” I say.
Majel Barrett’s voice returns. “Did you mean ‘Ode to a Nightingale’?”
“No. Lord Nightingale.”
“Did you mean Florence Nightingale?”
I turn to Ru. “This is the only search term that stumps the computer. Is there anything you can do to loosen its tongue?”
The look that Ru gives me is not odd, but simply curious. “Are you asking me to override the machine’s security protocol?”
“It sounds so break-and-entry when you say it like that. But yes.”
He studies the screen for a few moments. Then he opens the keyboard interface and begins typing. His fingers are a blur. Every once in a while, the computer starts to say something, as if protesting, but he cuts it off with another stroke. Finally, it emits a tone, almost like an old 2400 bps modem scrabbling to connect to another line. I hear static. Then silence. Ru looks up.
“Ask it again,” he says.
“Give me information on Lord Nightingale,” I repeat.
The computer is silent for a few seconds. I wonder if we’ve broken it. Then the voice returns. But it doesn’t say anything that I can understand:
Non me tanqas, ya habibi
Fincad y en esu
Al-gilala rajisa
Bastate, ou fermosu.
I look at Ru. “Is this another glitch?”
“This is the sector that was encrypted.”
I ask about Lord Nightingale again. The voice repeats its message. It’s obviously a poem, but in what language?
“Fermosu,” I murmur. “It kinds of sounds like hermoso, which means ‘handsome’ in Spanish. The rest sounds Arabic.”
“I do not understand the dialect.”
I look in my purse for a pen and paper. All I can find is a pencil and an old phone bill. I tear off part of it and write down the words.
“Tess. I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
He spits green acid on the far wall. The metal bubbles and melts. I realize that idioms can be dangerous when used carelessly.
“I meant,” I say, “ask me your question.”
“Oh.” He looks slightly embarrassed. “Why do you think someone would go to such trouble to encrypt a poem?”
“It looks to me like a game of hide-and-seek. Someone made sure that this reference computer held no information about Lord Nightingale. However, they did leave a small piece of data in exchange, like a bread crumb.”
“Will it lead to fowls?”
“Danger and disarticulation, most likely.”
“But you are going to follow it.”
“Yeah. I’m dumb like Gretel that way.”
When I get to Lucian’s place, Modred is there. The two of them are sharing a pot of tea. It would be normal, except that Modred doesn’t actually swallow anything. He savors it in his mouth for a moment, then deposits it politely in a spit cup. This does not look like gathering information. It looks like a darker version of As Time Goes By.
“Tess.” Modred isn’t pleased. “I see you’ve spoken with Lucian about what transpired at Quartilla’s party.”
“It’s not like we were making a lot of headway on our own. I thought involving another brain would help.”
“You’re only making things more complicated.”
“We’ve been cruising the shores of complicated for a while now. Wait until I show you the verse in my purse.”
“Who else have you spoken to?”
“Lady Duessa.”
He sighs. “Only the dead can keep secrets. I often forget that.”
“Turn that frown upside down, buddy, because I got an address and talked to a little bronze lady. What have you managed to come up with?”
“Nothing. You should stay out of this, Tess.”
I ignore him and pull out my phone. “No word from Selena. I guess we’re on our own. Lucian and I are going to meet with the supplier tonight.”
Modred’s face darkens. “That would be stupid. Even with a necromancer in tow—”
“Hey, nobody’s towing me anywhere,” Lucian interjects.
“We’ll be out of sight,” I say.
“I’m coming with you.”
“Dude, we’re fine.”
“I am not asking. I am coming.”
“I don’t know,” Lucian says. “You’ve got a loud aura. It increases the chances of the supplier noticing us.”
“They won’t sense me. If I wished it, neither of you would sense me, no matter how close I was.”
“Okay, okay, everyone’s aura is the cock of the walk. Let’s not argue about this. Modred, I need you to translate something for me.”
“Do we really have time for this?”
“It could be significant.”
“I would prefer to spend some time with the text, if possible. Translating on-site seems vulgar.”
I hand him the crumpled edge of my cell-phone statement. He peers at the verse. Then he hands it back to me.
“I believe it is a jarcha. An eleventh-century poetic fragment from Iberia. It’s written in a mixture of Arabic, Occitan, and Gallician-Portuguese.”
“Can you read it?”
“No.”
“Shit. Really?”
“It’s older than me. Non me tanqas could mean ‘don’t touch me.’”
“Bastate sounds like ‘stop it,’” Lucian says. “That’s all I can make out. Why are we looking at this poem?”
“Because this is what a CORE computer spit out when I asked it a question about Lord Nightingale.”
“It gave you a jarcha?” Modred frowns. “That makes no sense.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“He was still human then,” Lucian says. “Still Theresa of Portugal. Whoever planted the poem must know of his former life.”
“But is it a joke?” I ask. “Or a password of some kind? I could ask Duessa, but she never tells me anything straight, and she already thinks that I’m way out of my depth.”
“Quartilla might be able to read it,” Modred says. “She’s older.”
“I’m a little weirded out by her finger-bone cuff links.”
“She’s actually not that bad once you get to know her.”
“First things first. We’re meeting Albert at the restaurant.”
“Albert?”
“The zombie waiter.”
“Lovely,” he mutters.
On our way to the restaurant, I arrange several marbles. Lord Nightingale. The Seneschal. My mother. These people should not be related. As a necromancer, Lord Nightingale is connected to Pharmakon, but only obliquely. I guess my mother must have known the Seneschal, but what could his connection be to the drug? That was Mr. Corvid’s world, not his. The Seneschal was more of a friendly uncle who collected antique weapons.
I have managed to read a bit about Theresa of Portugal. She was the bastard daughter of King Alfonso. She fought with her sister, Urraca, for control of peninsular Spain, and was eventually defeated by her own son. She died in political exile. It’s hard to believe that this woman, looking slyly at me from a manuscript, could have become the person that I met, whose throne room was hung with glowworms. Theresa, you touched my hand. Non me tanqas. That was what Lucian said. Don’t let him touch you.
We pick up Albert. He’s nervous when he sees Modred, although the vampire barely notices him. Albert hands me a paper bag.
“The cook made you baklava,” he says.
“Wow. Thanks.”
“Do not eat that,” Lucian murmurs.
We head to the apartment. It’s a tidy walk-up, basically a shuffled house, with six mailboxes. We hang back while Albert goes to the door. He opens the fourth mailbox and withdraws a parcel. He leaves our note, then hurries away. I don’t blame him. I feel like we’ve chosen a pretty good spot, though. Modred has turned down his aura. We wait.
Ten minutes pass. Just as I start to think that we should have brought Chex Mix, the door opens. A guy in a mask walks out. He reaches into the mailbox and examines the note. We left a phone number that, should he call it, will connect him to the WestJet customer service line. He looks in our direction. The mask covers his face, but I notice that he’s wearing an earpiece. I can’t tell if it’s a headset or a hearing aid.