The door swung open, slowly. It was very thick: not exactly bank-vault thick, but it looked like getting through it by force would be a chore. Behind it was a corridor with another, bigger, door at the far end. On the right, the wall was reinforced glass with a partition wall dividing the space in two and a door in each of the glass walls. On the left were three doors with no indication of what was behind them.
‘Okay,’ Dione said, ‘we’ve got autopsy and medical on the right.’
The closest of the two rooms had a pair of stainless steel benches in it and, at the back, the kind of doors you saw on medical cadaver drawers, three ranks of four. As they walked down, the second room became visible. It had a bed and a lot of medical instruments in it, and was divided in two with an observation window and a door into the other half.
‘We like to do our own autopsies when possible,’ Dione went on, ‘and we sometimes need to deal with patients. Patients with something dangerous go in the back room, which is an isolation unit, with airlock. Oh, and if it comes to it, that bed’s comfortable if we’re stuck here overnight.’ She turned to the last of the three doors on the left. ‘And now you get to meet Mary. She’s… shy. Once she gets to know you, it’ll be fine, but she doesn’t like new people.’ She opened the door and they walked into chaos.
The room was full of cabinets and boxes. Cables wound their way across the floor at random. Lights flashed in an out-of-sync, Pointillist painting of light. The focus of the room was an L-shaped desk with an inordinate number of flat-screen monitors on it, in two ranks, held up by a frame. The desk had six keyboards, four mice, and a game controller on it, and behind the desk was a girl, sitting upright in a large, black, leather swivel chair.
Mike was really not sure what to think. He assumed this was Mary, and Mary looked to be about fourteen. Sixteen at the absolute tops. She was not a lot over five feet in height, very slim, and quite long in the leg. You could sort of see the first bloom of adolescence in her: a slight push outward in the hips and breasts for which training bras had been invented. Her face was round with a cute, pert nose, cupid’s bow lips, and large, brown eyes. Her hair was brown with reddish hints through it and wound into a braid which curled over her right shoulder. She was nervously playing with the end of it while looking daggers at Mike. The loose-necked sweatshirt, faded jean-shorts, and flip-flops were not exactly standard police uniform either.
‘Hi,’ Mike said. ‘You must be Mary, I’m Mike.’
There was silence until Dione said, ‘You can at least be polite, Mary.’
‘Mary Collins,’ Mary blurted out, ‘detective specialist first-grade. Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’ She had some sort of English accent, probably from somewhere in London and not an especially rich area.
‘Mary is our computer and communications expert. I realise she looks like she’s not old enough to be that good, but she’s… How old are you now?’
‘A hundred and forty-four last July, Mother.’
Dione pursed her lips and gave Mary a withering look which seemed to have absolutely no effect. ‘She only calls me that when she’s annoyed with me. We’re not stopping, don’t worry. I just thought you should meet my new partner.’ Mary gave a grunt and frowned. ‘I know you don’t want a new person in here, but you know it’s necessary, and you know you’ll like him once you get to know him.’
Mary gave Mike a glower which looked entirely out of place on her young face. ‘Just… try not to have any technical support issues.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Mike told her and, at Dione’s gesture, backed out. He waited until the door was closed before he said, ‘You’re not really her mother, are you?’
‘In either sense,’ Dione replied, starting down the corridor. ‘For reference, the term is creator or creatrix when we’re discussing the vampire who converted you. When I left London for Boston, Mary came with me and we played mother and daughter until she felt secure enough to go it alone. Thankfully, bustles and corsets were in fashion so it wasn’t too hard to make her look like a pretty young woman rather than a teenager, but she’s stuck at sixteen for as long as she continues.’
‘She barely looks sixteen.’
‘Malnutrition tends to stunt development. She has ID to say she’s over twenty-one and explains it as a medical condition. Um… hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. Winthrop came up with it as something no one would ever have heard of which does, more or less, explain why she looks that age.’ She skipped the middle door and opened the next.
‘Winthrop. You’ve mentioned him before.’
‘Yeah, well now you get to meet him.’
They entered what had to be a laboratory. In some ways it was like a slightly more organised version of Mary’s computer room. Slightly more organised. There were machines of all sorts all over the place, one or two of them disassembled and lying in pieces on one of the two large benches. The room was L-shaped and so seemed to curl around the mysterious middle room and the computer room, but any available wall space had a machine against it, and you walked, at first, through a narrow corridor between them. Then you walked around to a larger area with the two benches and, right at the back, a desk with a computer, not that there were no others, and a comfortable-looking chair.
Winthrop was not at his desk but standing in front of a large machine, watching the display intently. ‘Wrinkled’ was the first word to come to mind: Mike guessed that the man was older than his mother. Bald as a coot, he had prominent ears and a large, wedge-shaped nose with deep hollows angling down from it under his cheekbones which stood out thanks to a thin face. His lips were thinning, his neck was wattled, and his thin legs a little bandy. He was not what you would call fat, but there was a paunch which was partially hidden by his pinstriped jacket under which he wore a cardigan. He appeared to be entirely oblivious to his guests.
Dione appeared to be aware of his focus. ‘Doctor Earnest Winthrop, meet Mike Williams.’
The old man blinked, turned to look at them as though aliens had teleported into the room, and then smiled a smile full of disarrayed teeth. ‘Ah! The new recruit. I’m sorry, I was running a sequence… Never mind that. Good morning, young man. Mike is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘A polite one, excellent! You’ll call me Winthrop. Everyone does. I don’t play on the doctor thing; once you have three there really doesn’t seem much point. Now, roll up your sleeve.’
Dione rolled her eyes. ‘You could let the man have coffee before you bleed him.’
‘Coffee! An excellent idea. Will you have some, my dear?’
‘Go on. Just to be sociable.’
Winthrop headed for his desk and Mike noticed that one of the many machines standing against a wall was an espresso machine which the doctor began to operate with practised ease. ‘Vampires,’ he said while he worked, ‘can eat and drink normal food, unlike in so many of the fictional depictions.’ Mike was trying to place the accent, coming up with New England somewhere, but that was the best he could do. ‘Indeed, they need to eat, just not as much as we do.’ Which seemed to indicate that Winthrop was human. Unless he was actually an alien, which Mike would not have been entirely shocked to discover.
‘One good meal a day,’ Dione said. She had dressed for the office in a short, tartan, pleated skirt and a scarlet blouse, and proceeded to ignore her hem length as she hopped up onto one of the workbenches to perch there, ankles crossed. Mike realised there was only one guest chair in the room and he was apparently supposed to take it. ‘Nubians can manage for far longer,’ Dione added.
Mike crossed to the chair, feeling self-conscious. ‘I read about the basic lineages. Nubians are African so I suppose being able to manage on less food would be good.’
‘Precisely,’ Winthrop said. ‘The virus they carry can do a lot, but it needs something to work with. Blood is not sufficient.’
‘Uh, why do you want mine?’
‘Type confirmation, health checking, and genetic analysis. I like to take a look at everyone who
comes through our doors, but you should be most interesting.’
Mike frowned. ‘Why?’
‘You’re a sensitive. Hasn’t she explained this yet?’
‘Slipped my mind,’ Dione said casually. ‘Just remember he had a few pints pulled out and put back in recently. You might get skewed results.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem. This is not my first rodeo, as they say.’
‘Sorry,’ Mike said, ‘I’m sensitive to what?’
‘Vampires, of course. It developed among the human population in Eastern Europe, but it’s spreading. Your grandfather was Polish. We believe your mother has the gene and passed it to you.’
‘And you know this because?’
‘Observation,’ Dione said. ‘We should slow down. You’re getting ahead of things again, Winthrop.’
‘I often do,’ Winthrop replied, handing out cups of steaming, brown fluid. ‘Apologies.’ He turned and walked over to his chair, sitting down with a sigh. ‘Very well. Mike, you get some form of aberrant sensation at times. You may not have associated it with vampires, because you were unaware of them. I believe you’ll find a connection if you search back through your memory. You may be feeling it now with Dione here, but it’s not absolutely reliable.’
Now he mentioned it… ‘Okay, yes. I think I’ve been kind of blocking it around Di, but it was there at the Black Candle and… and when I was in the shop with Mister Ross.’
‘If you feel it, there are likely vampires around, somewhere. It may or may not be a threat, of course. Most vampires are not a threat in this day and age, but the gene stems from what they were doing at the dawn of civilisation.’
‘I figured you had it,’ Dione said. ‘I watched you for a bit and it seemed like you did. I knew your mother had it because… I’ve met her before.’
Mike looked at her, eyes wide. ‘You have? When?’
‘Nineteen fifty-five. She was around six, I think. I doubt she’d remember me without prompting.’
‘Her father died in nineteen fifty-five.’
‘Yes, I attended his wake. He was one of the vampires ended in the Coney Island War, the first one I got to investigate.’
‘I… don’t think I understand.’
‘Your grandfather was converted not long after your mother was born. Vampires are sterile, obviously, but they make perfectly acceptable parents if they’re converted after conception. He lived as a straight for four years and then he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your mother may not even have known. I wasn’t going to interrogate a six-year-old to see whether she did.’
Mike picked up his cup and drained half of it. The bitter brew slammed into his brain stem like a hammer, and he still felt a little numb.
‘I’ll hold off on the bloodletting,’ Winthrop said. ‘Our boy looks a little faint.’
‘You’ve got all day,’ Dione replied. ‘Mike, I’m going to leave you to Winthrop’s tender mercies for a while. He’s going to go over any questions you have, get the security registrations done, all that good stuff. I have a few places to be and if I’m here, he’ll just get distracted on some point of vampire physiology or something.’
‘Okay,’ Mike said, his voice a little dull. ‘Do I make my own way home?’
‘I’ll be back this afternoon and we’ll go over armament.’ She hopped down off the bench. ‘Later, guys.’
Winthrop peered at Mike as Dione strutted out through the lab. ‘This is a lot to take in. I understand. I’m a firm believer in yanking the band aid off in one go rather than tickling at it.’
Mike nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s probably best. Any more shocks coming?’
‘I think we’ve got them all out of the way.’
‘Good. I think I lost some skin with that last one and I’d like it to heal over before we pull another.’
~~~
Dione pulled her car to a stop at the back of Kitty Has Claws, sighed, and then climbed out. Her heels clicked on the tarmac as she walked up to the back door and she smiled at the enormous black man standing guard there. He was bald and a little thickly set to be called handsome, and he had a body built of solid muscle squished into a very well-fitted, dark blue suit which still managed to bulge at the biceps and thighs.
‘Hey, Bar, you gorgeous hunk of muscle,’ Dione said. ‘Is he in?’
The huge man, who might easily have terrified armed troops with a stare, blushed. ‘Yes, Miss Dione. He’s in the office.’
Dione had figured that might be the case, but there was formality to take care of. Barney Watts left his boss’s side when the moon turned blue, but one of those occasions was when he was in the office, which was fully secured.
‘Okay. I’m going up if that’s okay?’
‘Of course, Miss Dione.’ He turned and opened the door for her. Throbbing music came from within, distant but quite audible: some of the girls were running practice sets.
KHC was a strip club. Bar was just as polite to the dancers as he was to Dione: Bar was the kind of man who considered women to be delicate things to be treated with due care, perhaps because he was so big and might break one accidentally, but Dione thought he was just a very nice man and always had been. Becoming a vampire during Prohibition had not changed that. And the club was a pretty up-market one, located on the Upper West Side. The girls who worked there were artists. Dione actually admired a few of them: they took their jobs seriously, they were professional, and it was easier to consider them ladies, if ones who took their clothes off in front of an audience.
Dione avoided the dancefloor and went up the back stairs before heading toward the front of the property where the office was located behind a locked, keycoded door. Dione knew the code and punched it in from memory, and stepped through the reinforced door into a very business-like, if comfortable, office space.
Leonard Darius was sitting behind his desk. The desk was functional rather than ostentatious; the man was both. Over six feet in height, he was no match for Bar in stature, but he gave him a run for his money. Leo was a good-looking man with dark brown skin and fairly classic African-American features. His hair was close to his head, hard, black curls which were surprisingly soft to the touch. His deep, brown eyes came up as Dione stepped into the room and then his head lifted and he smiled.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing,’ Dione said, returning the smile.
‘You are never a disturbance, Di, and you know it.’ He had a deep, warm, resonant voice, pleasing on the ear.
‘That is a lie, and you are a charmer.’
‘So?’
Dione flashed him a grin. ‘Dione, Hunter to the New York Concilium, reporting that I have taken on a new human partner, as per the Agreement. I left him with Winthrop to get the formalities done. And Winthrop wants some of his blood.’
‘For a man who isn’t a vampire, he certainly takes a lot of blood.’
‘Everyone has to have a hobby.’
‘You think this one’s going to work out? He’s a sensitive, that can get… difficult.’
Dione settled herself into a chair and crossed her legs. ‘If there’s going to be a problem, it’ll come from the girlfriend. She’s a rationalist. She’s going to find out what’s going on eventually. When she does…’
‘Winthrop’s a rationalist.’
‘Yes, and an outcome like that is the best we can hope for.’
Leo nodded. ‘All right, report duly noted. I’ll inform the others.’
‘Good. I have a few things to do before I go back. At least you were up here. I’m sure making me come to a strip joint to report to you constitutes sexual harassment or something.’
‘Like you mind. And it’s a gentlemen’s club.’
Dione got to her feet and started for the door. ‘Yeah, sure. Pull the other one and bells ring.’
~~~
The Black Candle was fairly quiet. There was music there too: a band was practising sets on the second floor. But by the time Dione had climbed the stairs to the top floor, past the office and the st
aff facilities, to Pat’s apartment, you could barely hear the stop-start performance below.
She did not knock: if Pat wanted privacy, she locked the door. The blonde bartender was sitting, cross-legged, on the armchair in her lounge with a bowl of cereal in one hand, a spoon in the other, and a mug of coffee balanced on the chair’s arm. Pat was wearing nothing but a pair of boy-short-style lace panties and she paused with a spoonful of cereal part way to her mouth as Dione stepped in and closed the door behind her.
‘I’m in the middle of breakfast,’ Pat pointed out.
Dione did not comment: vampires did not need to eat as regularly as humans, but some of them never got out of the habit and it did no harm. ‘Coffee fresh?’
‘About half an hour. I was going to have another–’ Pat stopped as Dione walked past her to the kitchen. ‘I can always make more.’
‘So,’ Dione called back, ‘Mike started today.’
‘You left him with Winthrop and Mary? Did he murder your favourite puppy in a past life or something?’
‘They aren’t that bad. Mary will ignore him as much as possible for at least a week and Winthrop just wanted to pull blood out of him as soon as he arrived.’ Dione walked back in with a mug of coffee and perched on the arm of Pat’s chair without the mug on it. ‘I did most of the damage. Dropped the whole business with the Coney Island War on him.’
‘I was eight when that happened.’
‘Older than his mother.’
Pat gave a grunt. ‘Don’t remind me. Being a vampire really fucks with your vision of appropriate age. I mean, he’s just so edible and I’m old enough to be his mother.’
‘You’re just about old enough to be his grandmother. His mother had him late.’
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