Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files

by DD Barant

  “Except this guy, he got impatient,” Ben tells me. “He’s had his lungs full of water for hours, which is agonizing—you’re basically drowning over and over again. So when he gets high enough to see sunlight, he loses it. Just starts swimming straight up, as fast as he can go.”

  I swallow. “What happened?”

  “What do you think? He exploded,” Tony says. “Well, more like ruptured, I guess. Different organs, arteries, all kinds of stuff. Real mess. Took him a couple weeks to heal.”

  “His skull even blew out,” Ben says. “He was never the same after that.”

  “Thanks, guys. One of you want to make sure I’ve got everything hooked up right?”

  Tony chuckles. “If you don’t,” he says, “you’ll find out pretty fast.”

  Ah, cop humor, so dark it would give a black hole indigestion. Not that I’m any different—just a lot more fragile, rupture-wise. Or at least I used to be …

  I slide into the cold, wet embrace of the water, on my back, the night sky above me going blurry and then fading away completely. I switch on my headlamp, orient myself, then check my wrist compass. I swim down and toward the south at a steep angle; what I’m looking for is right on the bottom.

  My field of vision doesn’t extend very far in this blackness, so it comes into sight abruptly. One second there’s nothing but silt swirling in my light’s beam; the next there’s a wall in front of me. A white, curving wall, encrusted with barnacles.

  The Black Port.

  I don’t see the entrance, so I swim to the right, running over the instructions I was given in my head. I can pick out details now, like the row of little square windows that line the wall.

  And then I come to the wing.

  It’s got a semi-trailer fuel tanker resting on top of it upside down, a big chrome cylinder with its wheels pointing up like a stranded turtle’s limbs. There’s a patchwork of steel plating connecting it to the 747’s fuselage at the base of the wing. That gives me a better idea of where I am; the entrance is on the other side.

  I swim up and over, the lamp’s beam sweeping along the structure. It’s grotesque and beautiful, an immense crippled mechanical hybrid lurking on the bottom of the ocean. The other wing is completely gone, but the body of the plane butts directly against the wreck of a large freighter. Rusting steel pipes welded to the ship’s hull extend from it like angular tentacles, ending in a variety of bulky shapes: shipping containers, smaller boats, even a few wheeled vehicles like panel trucks. I can’t decide if it looks like a larger creature feeding off a bunch of smaller ones, or giving birth to them.

  The hatch I’m looking for is inside the freighter itself. An agent is waiting for me, hovering in the inky water a few feet above the slope of the deck. This one’s a pire, and doesn’t need any breathing gear; in fact, all he’s got on is a pair of black swimming trunks and fins, and some sort of headset. He’s holding an agency-issued speargun in one hand and motions with the other one for me to follow him. He glides down and through a square black opening in the deck, not even bothering with a headlamp. I guess his night vision’s a lot better than mine.

  I’m not worried about running into resistance—like I said, the assault team did the heavy lifting before I got here. The Black Port is now in the hands of the NSA, and after we’ve learned all we can from it the whole facility will be destroyed.

  We’re in what must have been the hold. Curving walls, rusted iron strutwork. Seaweed sways gently, nudged by our passing. The agent leads me to a square steel box welded to one side of the hull, big enough to hold both of us, with a sealed oval hatch on one side. The agent grabs the spoked metal wheel in the center of the hatch and turns it. The hatch swings open, and the agent motions me inside. He doesn’t follow.

  Water conducts sounds quite well, and the noise the hatch makes as it shuts behind me reminds me of a safe door closing. The inside of the box is featureless except for a grille in the floor and a second hatch on the far side, this one with a small glass plate set into it.

  I hear the rumble of a motor starting up, then a chugging. I’m pulled toward the bottom of the box as pumps suck water through the grille. A few minutes later the box is full of air and wet NSA agent as opposed to liquid.

  A panel behind the glass plate slides aside, revealing it as a window. A familiar-looking pair of ice-blue eyes beneath snow-white eyebrows peer at me, and then the inner hatch opens.

  “Jace,” Damon Eisfanger says. He’s wearing a black neoprene wet suit, his wide, pale feet bare. His squat, powerful body looks like it’s about to bulge right through the fabric. “I haven’t finished processing the scene yet—there’s a lot to go through.”

  “As long as the site’s secure,” I say, unbuckling straps. I shuck off the diving rig, having already taken off the fins while I was waiting for the air lock to empty. “I didn’t bring much with me.”

  “That’s probably a good thing. Your weapon does have an unsettling tendency to make large holes in things, and down here that would be—bad.”

  Down here is the choke point for the trafficking trade in Seattle. It was run almost entirely by pires, who capitalized on the fact that they didn’t need to breathe to build their own little underwater way station. Not that they did any of the physical work themselves; they used Gray Market lems for that, since lems don’t breathe, either. The pires didn’t show up until after the place was finished—and, of course, all the workers had been destroyed to keep the place a secret.

  And then the merchandise had begun to move. Lems assembled in factories on land were marched across the seafloor to the Port, where they were transferred topside to ships bound for other countries. Those same ships would drop containers full of illegal immigrants into the water, and the process would happen all over again but going the other way. The containers themselves would become part of the Black Port, holding cells connected by pipeline tunnels where they could stick lems or illegals while waiting for a ship or a delivery run to the mainland.

  I take a look around. The forensics team that got here first has set up electric lanterns for light since the Port’s own power source was disrupted during the raid, and they throw harsh shadows onto the curving walls. I’m inside the fuselage of the 747, which has maybe a third of its seats remaining, all on one side of the plane; the doors to the overhead bins have been ripped out, and the windows covered with sheet metal. An inch or so of seawater sloshes underfoot, and the air reeks likes a New Jersey beach at low tide.

  I walk over and take a look at the seats. They’ve all been modified, heavy chains replacing the seat belts, with manacles for wrists. Like some warped, modernday version of a slave galley, without the oars.

  “We think this is where they processed them,” Eisfanger says. His voice doesn’t echo at all, damped down by the wonders of twenty-first-century aviation acoustic design. “The fuel tanker is basically a larger version of the air lock you came through. They were herded in here from there, where they could be evaluated and assigned to wherever they were going.”

  I try to imagine it. Row after row of lems, sitting stoically, chained to their seats. Waiting to be shipped off to become slave labor or part of some Third World dictator’s private army. Lems can be manufactured anywhere, but the United States has the highest proportion of skilled activators and lem-friendly minerals, mostly mined in Nevada. A brisk trade in illegal lem precursor soil has sprung up since the state declared itself a sovereign golem nation.

  But that image, chilling as it is, isn’t as bad as imagining row after row of pire women chained to these seats. The lems wouldn’t really understand what was happening to them; they’d only be days or even hours old. But the women … they’d be terrified. Starved for blood. Many of them wouldn’t even speak English—but that didn’t mean they didn’t know what was in store. What they’d be expected to do.

  “How many casualties?” I ask.

  “Nine on their side. Twelve captured. None of us.”

  “Good.” I wish I’d been
here to dust a few myself, but I’m not that handy with a speargun.

  Damon shows me around. The crew quarters in the freighter have been sealed and drained to provide a place for the smugglers to live; all the floors are at an angle, but other than that they’ve outfitted them very comfortably. Flatscreen TVs, DVD players, stereo systems, queen-size beds. Beanbag chairs seem to be the furniture of choice, and posters of naked porn stars the interior decoration. The galley has a walk-in freezer full of blood products, ranging from your basic A through O to more gourmet fare like hemovore ice cream. No shortage of chemical recreation, either; there’s a whole cabinet full of magicked beer, whiskey, and even a bale of marijuana.

  “I didn’t think pires smoked this stuff,” I say.

  “They don’t. Fire messes with the spell that lets drugs affect hemovores and lycanthropes, so they soak the pot in the booze and get it into their system that way. They call it ganja juice.”

  “Ah, the ingenuity of the American stoner,” I mutter. “Federal laws don’t stop you, why should supernatural ones?”

  Then Damon shows me where the women and the lems were kept.

  The lem cells are just big featureless metal boxes, empty shipping containers. Lems don’t need food or water or bathroom facilities, so none of those amenities were supplied. They do sleep, but the smugglers had thoughtfully provided a floor for that.

  The women’s facilities bother me a lot more. Again, no bathrooms or beds, but the floor is littered with hundreds of small plastic vials the size of a pill bottle. Many of them have been crushed, but I pick one up that’s still whole. There’s a tiny rime of something reddish brown in the very bottom.

  “This is how they fed them,” I say. “Minuscule amounts of blood, doled out carefully. Enough that they wouldn’t go berserk, but keep them in a weakened state.”

  Damon nods. “I need to get my samples back to the lab to verify, but I’ve already found traces of sorcery in the vials. I think they were drugging them, too.”

  Of course they were. Wanted to keep them nice and docile, not to mention disoriented. Until it was time for that long, dark march through the muck of the bottom to the shore of their new country. A country they wouldn’t get to see much of for a long, long time.

  If ever.

  When we raided the Black Port, we didn’t find any women or lems; we must have caught them between shipments. That’s a piece of very bad luck, but I don’t have the luxury of adjusting to someone else’s schedule. I’m on one of my own, and every time the moon rises it gets a little tighter.

  “There’s plenty of forensic evidence,” Damon says. “I can definitely prove they housed illegal lems here.”

  “How about the pire women?”

  Damon frowns. “Harder to do. Lems have the sorcerous equivalent of a serial number, but the pires don’t. We can make a case for the drugs we found, but we really need a material witness to verify the smuggling.”

  Which means Csilla. And she was too scared to even name the people involved—no way I can get her to testify against them. I just hope they haven’t made the connection between her and this raid.

  “What about Tair and the Don?” I ask.

  “Sorry. Haven’t found anything to indicate the presence of a thrope down here, at least not in a long time.”

  So did I just prevent my two suspects from fleeing the country, or screw up a chance to apprehend them? I shake my head, flinging little water droplets off my hair. Damn it, I can’t seem to catch a break, let alone an escaped prisoner and an insane Godfather.

  “Have you got any good news for me, Eisfanger?”

  And now a smile spreads across his wide, ruddy face. “I think I just might, actually. Take a look at this.” He opens a rubberized pouch on his belt and pulls out a small plastic evidence bag.

  Inside is what seems to be a piece of charred wood. “What is it?”

  “Trace I found under one of the airplane seats. Didn’t seem to belong there—fire is something they wouldn’t have any use for down here.”

  “So where’s it from?”

  “I think a lem brought it in. There are muddy tread marks all over the place—they must have given the lems boots to keep them from damaging their feet on the march here. The wood could have been caught in one of the boot treads.”

  “So, maybe from a ship that burned and sank?”

  “No. It’s not waterlogged. It must have come from the surface, not the bottom.”

  I think about that. From a campfire, maybe? That would suggest some kind of outdoor site—but pires don’t need to keep warm. Maybe a fireplace—I’ve seen pire-occupied houses that have them simply for ornamental value. But why would a lem foot be stomping around in an ornamental fireplace?

  Damon must understand the look on my face, because he says, “I’m going to run some tests on it, see what else it can tell me. I’ll try to come up with a location for you.”

  “Thanks.” I realize I’m shivering, which shouldn’t be a surprise; I’m cold and wet and hundreds of feet below the surface of the water.

  But looking around the dark, hollow shell that so many desperate women must have passed through, I don’t think the temperature has anything to do with it.

  I stare at the pire sitting on the other side of the interview table. He’s manacled at the wrists to the table itself, which is bolted to the floor. His name is Orrick Lynch, and his file says he’s over four hundred years old. He’s sort of pear-shaped, with a fringe of gray hair on an otherwise pale, bald head, and he’s got a bushy gray mustache. His eyes are dark and very, very cold.

  “So, Orrick. I understand you’ve been running a little import–export business. Seafood?”

  No response. Just a flat, unblinking stare.

  “Yeah. See, I have a problem with that. And while we may not have caught you with the goods this time, we have more than enough to charge you, anyway.”

  When he speaks, his voice is rough and accented with German—Austrian, I believe, rather than Swiss. “You do not know who you are interfering with.”

  “Sure I do. La Lupo Grigorio. But the Gray Wolves and I have an understanding. They gave you to me, Orrick. Because I’m doing a favor for them. They’ve got this problem with a runaway Don, and nobody’s better than me at hunting down a suspect.”

  He mutters a single word in German under his breath: “Bluthund.”

  Good, he knows who I am; that’ll make selling this easier. “They want him back pretty badly. They didn’t give you up easily, but hey—they can always relocate, right? Plenty of ocean floor out there, plenty of old freighters they can sink. The aircraft fuselage might be a little harder to come by, but the Wolves own their fair share of junkyards. And the labor’s free.”

  I lean over the table, a big smile on my face. “But here’s where it gets interesting. See, you can play the same game they can. Want a little payback, plus a reduced sentence? I can make that happen. Just think of me as a bribable referee in a really nasty play-off game.”

  For a second I think he might actually go for it. But then something shifts in his eyes and he shakes his head, slowly. I don’t know how many of his four centuries he’s spent on the wrong side of the law, but long enough to know you don’t survive by turning on your masters.

  I didn’t think he would, but it was important I try. It increases Csilla’s chances, makes it less likely she’ll be blamed for the raid.

  But it doesn’t get me any closer to finding Tair.

  ELEVEN

  I wouldn’t let Charlie come with me to the Black Port.

  He wanted to. Maybe he even had a right to. But Eisfanger warned me there might be booby traps, sorcerous ones specifically designed to prevent lems from escaping. “If Charlie trips one of those, he could find himself mind-wiped or worse.”

  But it’s not like my partner’s going to let me forget about it.

  “So, what part of personal enforcer do you not understand?” he says as I drive. We’re headed for the Mix and Match, though I�
��m not really sure why. “I can break it down for you, if you’d like. Enforcer stems from ‘to enforce,’ as in using force in the pursuit of a particular goal. I’d like to point out that it’s kinda difficult to use such force unless the conveyor of said force is actually present.”

  “Wow. You sound like a really pissed-off, macho version of Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

  “Then there’s the word personal. I realize this is a term you don’t have a lot of familiarity with, since it usually pops up next to words like relationships, feelings, or hygiene—”

  “Hey!”

  “—so I’ll try to keep it simple. Personal. As in your person. Your health, your safety, your life.”

  “What’s wrong with my hygiene?”

  “Again, it’s not like I really care whether or not you get attacked underwater by pire smugglers, because in order to kill you they’d have to go to unbelievable lengths—like, oh, yanking a hose out of your mouth—”

  “If you’d spent an hour trudging through rusty seawater, you’d stink, too. And wherever you’re going with that hose crack, I’d advise you to pick your next words very carefully.”

  “—so do me a tiny, minuscule favor, all right? The next time you decide to put your life at risk in a hostile environment—interior of a live volcano, middle of a buffalo stampede, jumping off a tall building—at least give me the option of, I don’t know, actually being in the same general vicinity!”

  He glares at me. I watch the road, trying not to grin. He’s adorable when he’s overprotective. “If I had let you come along, you’d smell like this, too.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Probably would have ruined that suit.”

  “I wouldn’t have worn the suit.”

  “What, so I’d have to see you naked? No thanks. Once was enough.”

  “Swimming trunks.”

  “Oh, sure. Pin-striped, no doubt. With lapels.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Hey, the last time I saw you without pants you stuck a fedora over it.”