by Jes Battis
“There’s only so much I’m authorized to tell you.”
I gestured to the armor. “We let you into our lab. We’ve given you access to materials involved in an ongoing investigation. That sounds like trust to me. The least you can do is give us a bit more info on Ordeño.”
“What would you like to know?”
I looked at him flatly. “All of his records are sealed. Aside from the bio on his website, we know virtually nothing about him. Date of birth. Family. Attachments. He has no paper trail.”
“Most of us don’t. You’re the ones who value files and archives and standardized tests. Your CORE may collect every scrap of information about its employees, but we’re not like that. Necromancers don’t have a union. There’s no online database that I can pull up for you, with information on all of Ordeño’s personal habits.”
“Then what do you know about him?”
He seemed to think about it for a moment. “Not a lot. And I’m telling the truth when I say that. I’m guessing that he was anywhere from three to four hundred years old. He was born in Valladolid. I think. No living relatives. He spent most of his time in court, in Trinovantum. He loved his job, and he was very good at it.”
“What cases was he working on?”
Lucian made a face. “That’s classified.”
“Fine. Is there anything you can tell me about his recent caseload? Anything remotely pertaining to this case?”
Lucian looked at Duessa. Something illegible passed between them. He shrugged, finally, and looked at me again.
“Ordeño was working on a very important piece of litigation. A political agreement of sorts. I can’t say much about it, because I don’t really know much. But it definitely would have made him a target.”
“A target to whom? Other necromancers? Vampires?”
“Both.”
“Great. And you have no idea how a sixteenth-century suit of armor ended up in his apartment, or why he’d be wearing it on the night that he died?”
“Honestly—I don’t.”
I looked at Duessa. “And you have nothing to add?” “Nothing that I haven’t already said.” She reached into her purse. “But I might know someone who can tell you a bit more.”
She wrote down something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. I looked at it.
“Are these GPS coordinates?”
Duessa nodded. “In Stanley Park. Follow those coordinates, and you’ll find an associate of mine. He’s called the Seneschal. Mention my name, and he’ll help you.”
“What kind of associate?”
“He’s a bit of a polymath, and a collector. He knows a little about a lot. But he can be a bit cranky sometimes, so don’t piss him off.”
I closed my eyes. “Is this associate human or demon?”
“Neither, really. You’ll see when you meet him.”
“Great. Because I love surprises.” I looked at Lucian. “Will you come with me at least? As moral support?”
He managed to look guilty. “I have a meeting. It’s sort of important.”
“Of course you do.” I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ll take Derrick. He loves surprises as much as I do.”
I walked out of the lab, leaving Cindée to deal with the two of them.
“Tess!” Duessa called after me. “Remember to bring a gift!”
I stopped in the hallway. “What kind of gift?”
Duessa leaned out of the doorway. “Something pretty. He likes things that are bedazzled. At least he used to.”
I stared at her. “Are you serious?”
She nodded slowly.
“Perfect.” I turned around and walked toward the reception desk. “But if I have to buy something from Forever 21, I’m debiting the department.”
6
It was a relief to step through the door of my house. The air was cool, and the smell of coffee drifted from the kitchen. I expected to find Mia studying in the living room, which would have explained the coffee brewing.
I tossed my bag on the table in the hallway. “I hope you’re not planning an all-night research fest on the wonders of attending Berkeley. You know, it would be a refreshing change to see you just being lazy for—”
Patrick looked up from where he was sitting on the couch, reading a math textbook. “Mia’s not here. She’s staying late at school for some yearbook thing.”
It was strange to see him home this early in the evening. “That’s fine. What are you up to tonight?”
He shrugged. “Nothing really. I might watch a movie later. I made coffee, and there’s some left if you want it.”
“Thank you. I’d love some.”
I walked into the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboard, looking for my favorite mug. In truth, I was just stalling until I came up with something interesting to say to him. We didn’t spend a lot of one-on-one time together, and even though I was the one who’d invited Patrick to live with us, I found myself growing increasingly uncomfortable around him.
Maybe it was because I had no idea what he spent most of his time doing. He was gone most nights. He’d return just before dawn and collapse into bed, then wake up a few hours later for school, looking exhausted. I knew that his constitution allowed him to spend a certain amount of time outside in the sun, without permanent side effects (such as self-immolation), but he wasn’t about to join the football team.
Aside from a few mumbled comments, I had no idea how he was fitting in with the rest of his peers in the twelfth grade. Did he have friends? A sweetheart? Maybe he was humping mortals left and right, like a horny vampire rabbit. He certainly wouldn’t tell me about it, if that were the case.
I didn’t even know what questions to ask. So, how are those vampire magnate duties coming along? Is it tough to regulate demonic traffic within the city? Do you get competitive health benefits?
To be honest, I had no idea what a magnate really did. Caitlin had carried an aura of power and glamour about her, like an undead celebrity. But Patrick just looked tired and confused most of the time. He could barely find his iPod every morning. He didn’t seem to have the fierce acumen necessary for controlling vampire affairs citywide.
I sat down in the overstuffed armchair next to the couch, which Derrick had rescued from the neighbor’s backyard. I thought about sharing the couch with Patrick, but it seemed too intimate somehow. We didn’t have that sort of convivial relationship. We kept a polite distance from each other at all times.
“How’s school?” It was the most inane question I could think of asking, but it still sprang from my lips. I couldn’t help it.
He groaned a little and stared at his textbook, which had colorful geometric shapes on it. “It’s killing me. Do you have any idea what molar calculus is?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither. But apparently we have to know it for the AP exam, which Mia is already going to get a hundred percent on. Because she’s a mutant.”
“I believe she prefers the term ‘magical savant.’ ”
He laughed. “Yeah. I’ve got weird shit in my blood, too, but it doesn’t give me the power to ace these exams. Mostly, it just drives me crazy.”
“Yeah?” I tried to sound only vaguely interested. This was the most personal information he’d shared in the last two months, and I didn’t want to scare him off. “I know that feeling. Sometimes I wish the earth would just shut up already and stop talking to me. Unless it knows how to get me out of my cell-phone contract.”
He smiled. “What does it sound like? When the earth talks, I mean?”
I thought about it, taking another sip of coffee. “Sort of like a vibration that starts somewhere in the back of my head. It gets louder, though. Sometimes the floorboards can sound downright pissed.”
“That must be weird.”
“Not really. It’s just part of my materia sensitivity. I’ve always heard it. The only thing that freaks me out is when I’m in a brand-new apartment on the thirty-second floor, and I can’t hear anything.
Just the fridge humming.”
“So the earth is like your background noise.”
“Basically.”
He put down the textbook. “It’s different for me.”
I held the mug in front of my face, so he wouldn’t see my smile of pleasure. “Different how? Because of your senses, you mean?”
He nodded. “It’s crazy. I can smell… everything. The neighbor’s dog. Mia’s hairspray. I know that you had a glazed chocolate doughnut today. Or maybe two.”
I lowered my eyes. “You’re right. It was two.”
He grinned. “If I concentrated, I could probably tell you what you ate for the last week. Except for Miles. I think that guy brushes his teeth, like, four times a day.”
“He is superclean.”
Patrick nodded. “And everyone’s smell is like a signature. I can sense when you’re all nearby. I know that Derrick came home for a few minutes today, around three, just to microwave a Sara Lee frozen cupcake.”
“Damn him. There was only one left.”
Privately, I was more than a little unnerved that Patrick could smell each one of us coming a mile away. But I didn’t want to make him feel weird. After all, it was pretty weird that rocks, trees, and crown molding talked to me. Who was I to judge someone for having above-average olfactory senses?
“It must feel overwhelming,” I said. This was one of Dr. Hinzelmann’s favorite evocative statements. It always seemed to work with me.
Patrick just shrugged. “It’s all relative, I guess. I’m really grateful that I have a place like this to come home to. I feel a lot luckier than some people.”
I couldn’t help myself. “You mean other vampires?”
He avoided my gaze. It wasn’t often that I used the “v” word, despite the fact that I was basically raising two of them. But we still considered Mia to be in remission.
“Yeah. It’s weird. I mean—” He finally looked up. “Okay, you and Derrick, you’re demons. I mean, basically, right?”
I nodded. “We’re mixed-race. Part of our DNA is demonic, but the human part is more dominant. It’s the recessive genetic material that allows us to channel materia.”
“Right. But vampires are different.” He managed to look slightly uncomfortable. “They all seem really… hungry. All the time. Like they’ve been forced onto a bad diet, and sharing the world with edible human beings is driving them crazy. You can see it in their eyes. The constant hunger.”
Do you feel like that? The question was stuck on the tip of my tongue. I chose to remain silent instead. Patrick just looked at me for a few seconds. Then he sighed.
“It’s not the same for me. I do get hungry for blood sometimes, but I can control it. I think it’s part of being the magnate. Whatever Caitlin passed along to me, it includes this weird sense of distance. Like, I know I want blood, but I also know that I don’t need it all the time. I could just have a V8 instead.”
“It is a healthy alternative,” I said stupidly.
He laughed. “Don’t worry, Tess. I’m not trying to freak you out. The way I feel about blood is probably the same way that you feel about materia. The desire is part of you, inside you, but it doesn’t rule you.”
Sometimes it does.
I blinked. “Okay. That makes sense.”
“Besides. There’s this whole subculture of vampires who don’t drink nearly as much blood as the others. They’re writers, and artists, and teachers. For them, being a vampire is like being a diabetic. They just deal with it, but they don’t get sucked into the bullshit hierarchy.”
“Do the teachers only work at night?”
Patrick grinned. “Mostly. You’d be surprised how many college instructors are actually undead.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t.”
He finished off his coffee, grimacing as he hit the dregs. There was a spot of coffee on his lip, but it looked like blood. I willed myself not to stare at it.
“There are these safe houses,” he continued. “They’re called daegred, and they’re all over the city. You can just chill out there, watch TV, sleep, whatever. It’s nice. All the blood-heads kind of keep to themselves, so everyone else can socialize.”
“Blood-heads?”
“Those are the vampires who just want to talk about blood. Sort of like jocks who just want to talk about hockey.”
I’d never seen the connection before. But I nodded. “It sounds like you’re learning a bit more about the scene.”
“Yeah. Slowly. They’ve been letting me set my own pace. The monitors, I mean. They were Caitlin’s council before, and now I guess they’re mine.”
He no longer looked sad at the mention of Caitlin’s name. I wasn’t sure if this was progress or not. She’d been a compassionate presence in his life, despite the fact that she’d also infected him with the vampiric retrovirus. I knew that he missed her, but he seldom talked about the events of last year, which had led to her death at the hands of the Iblis. In fact, he almost never talked about anything that had happened to him before he was transformed. Lucian had told me that he might not remember. Part of the brain actually died during the siring process, and that could include most of the memories from one’s mortal life.
“So… they’re helping you? These monitors?”
He nodded. “Cyrus especially. He’s been showing me a lot of cool stuff, especially how to focus my senses and control my hunger. Modred is a bit more intense. His lessons are more about hunting, and he’s kind of a fundamentalist sometimes. But he’s still cool.”
Hunting. Great.
As if I didn’t have enough to keep me awake at night.
I wanted to ask more, but I could see his attention beginning to wander. This was why you couldn’t interrogate a teenager. I decided to try a different tactic instead.
“Patrick, can I ask you for a favor?”
He gave me a funny look. “Is this about the gas money? Because I promise—”
I shook my head. “Forget about the gas money. I have to go to Stanley Park and meet a demon. At least, I think he’s a demon. I’m a little nervous about going alone. Do you want to come with me?”
He smiled. The pride on his face was unmistakable. “Sure. I mean, if you need protection, or whatever. I can totally come.”
“Great. We can grab dinner on the way.”
He stood up, looking excited. “Cool. Thanks for inviting me.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We may just end up wandering around the park looking for a demon hermit.”
“That sounds better than calculus.”
“Yeah. Most things are.”
We crossed the Lion’s Gate Bridge, which was oddly empty at this time in the evening, and parked in a pay lot near the edge of Lost Lagoon. I let Patrick drive so I could finish my chicken shawarma. To his credit, he obeyed the speed limit, and only freaked me out once by changing lanes without checking his blind spot.
This side of the park was mostly quiet, save for distant cars and the hum of night bugs. The tall Douglas firs—still recovering from storm damage—made me feel like I was in a primeval church, dark, powerful, and green-scented.
Patrick seemed slightly nervous as we walked along a gravel path. This sort of place seemed like his element, but maybe he was more accustomed to the urban daegred of Vancouver. I wondered if they had pinball machines and Wi-Fi. Probably.
I reached out briefly with my senses, but I couldn’t detect any vampires nearby. They had a distinctive genetic trace: rust-colored and salty, like blood itself. Brushing up against one was like sucking on a cut and feeling the blood on your tongue, acrid and always slightly surprising.
“Do you feel anything?” I asked him.
Patrick kept his eyes on the path. “A few kin. But they’re pretty far off, and they don’t seem interested in us.”
“Kin? Is that like peeps?”
He grinned. “Sort of. A lot of the older vampires still speak Anglo-Saxon, and it really alienates the younger crowd. They think we’ve fallen out of touch with
the old ways, that we’re all uncultured. But it’s not like learning how to read Beowulf is going to make me a better vampire.”
“Why do they speak Anglo-Saxon?”
He made a disinterested face. “It has something to do with the Norman Conquest. The alderfolc, the really old vampires, came over from Germany and Gaul, and they fought with the English vampires. After all the tribes had massacred each other, the only language they could seem to agree on was what they heard all the English villagers speaking. I guess it sounded pretty to them.”
“Right.” I stared at the formless shadows moving between the trees. “Are there vampire poets as well?”
“Of course. And playwrights. But they’re kind of bitchy.”
The path opened up slightly, and I consulted Duessa’s coordinates. “Okay. I think this is it.”
Patrick scanned the grove slowly. Then he pointed to a patch of darkness a few meters away. “That’s not supposed to be there.”
I looked where he was pointing. If I concentrated, I could see what looked like a dim, sulfur-colored outline within the shadows. Not quite a materia trace, but more like a paranormal shimmer caused by two realities overlapping. Patrick’s description was apt. The lines of space were stretched, and there was a kind of opening or corridor that wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Ready?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about this Seneschal, except that we’re supposed to bring him a present.”
“What kind of present?”
I reached into my purse and withdrew a folded T-shirt. The front of the shirt had a kitten’s face, made with bedazzled rhinestones.
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, yes. I had to go to three places in Gastown just to find this.”
He shook his head. “Demons are so weird sometimes.”
We walked over to the patch of shadows. There was a tangle of weeds and briars at the base of a large tree, and the wan yellow light was emanating from somewhere within the undergrowth.
I hesitated. Wasn’t this how people got carried off to Tir na nOg? Or did evil fairies eat your face? I could never keep the Celtic legends straight.
“How do we knock?” Patrick asked.