by Beth Dranoff
“Well,” he began...
I was seven years younger and far more innocent the first time we’d had this conversation. This time I needed straight answers to the questions I hadn’t known enough to ask.
“Why me?” I pushed myself upright on the layered pillows. “What’s your interest in me specifically?”
Ezra himself leaned back this time. Dropping the bullshit veneer and showing me his earnest, I’m-giving-it-to-you-straight face.
“What did we learn last section about the genetic compounds that compromise the human strand integrity of the average shifter’s molecular structure?”
“Uhhh...” Hard enough for me seven years ago when the lesson was fresh; now it felt like picking out lint from my belly button using tweezers while blindfolded. I poked around in the cobwebs of my brain until I found something potentially useful. “That shifter DNA looks like human DNA but crossed with something else, like the gene pool of whatever species they change into?”
Ezra nodded. “And what did we learn about the blood composition of magic users?”
“To the naked eye it looks exactly like everyone else’s,” I parroted, quoting him almost word-for-word from the lecture I’d sat through the week prior. Well, that week plus seven years and change. “But when you get it under the right kind of microscope, it has a glow—each of the molecules has its own kind of aura, and different kinds of magic-users have different molecular glows.” I stopped. “But what does this have to do with me?”
Ezra leaned forward, his white lab coat—covered elbows resting gently on the brown corduroy ridges of his pants. “Dana, your blood is special. It’s one of the things that showed up on those tests from right before you were attacked, and it’s why that blood-sucking lab technician couldn’t resist you.”
“And here I thought it was my girlish wiles and enticing personality,” I commented with a half-smile.
“Not quite,” Ezra replied. “Your father was studying this blood, his blood, your blood, when...”
Ezra didn’t fill in those blanks. He didn’t need to. My father’s mysterious disappearance happened on Ezra’s watch. Or at least in his general vicinity.
But there was more than one way to go fishing, and I decided to go with the bobbing orange plastic lure of misdirection.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Ezra got there before I did.
“What do you remember about your father?” Wide-eyed, innocent with guile. The man who scattered seeds of bullshit on the ground around him like a farmer tossing about handfuls of chicken feed to his waiting audience of hungry birds. Ezra—the farmer of birdseed bullshit. “Did he ever talk to you about his work?”
I narrowed my eyes at him, holding the question in my mind and turning it around. “No,” I said. “Not really.”
I added the “not really” because it was true. I’d been too young when he died for my father to have told me in any great detail what he’d been doing. But he had tried to explain to me in ten-year-old terms how he spent his days.
A chef, he’d said. Only instead of making food, I’m making science. I’m mixing ingredients together to see what makes people.
Like salt?
My father had humored my questions. I’d caught him on a good day.
And flour? Hot dogs?
My father had laughed, drawing me in to kiss the top of my head.
Something like that, he’d said. But maybe not the hot dog part.
Seven years ago when he’d asked this question, I’d said “no.” Because it was, ultimately, true.
My sense of self-preservation was different now, though. What did I know? What could Ezra tell me, the Ezra from back when there was trust?
Still. Thoughts of butterfly wings flapping change through time held my tongue.
“No,” I said. Again.
* * *
Younger. I could feel cloth swaddled around my hips, dampness between my legs. Uncomfortable, because I was wet, but maybe dreaming; bright lights overhead and men in robin’s-egg-blue masks with white edges and strings tied behind their matching white and blue cap-covered heads.
That same voice from before—my father? And another I’d heard so much more recently. Ezra.
“Don’t be a putz,” he was saying. “They saybabies can’t even feel pain the way we do.”
“Tell that to the boy in the middle of his bris,” my father muttered. Unconvinced.
“We’re not performing female circumcision here,” Ezra pointed out. So reasonable. “We’re giving her a little something extra, like an investment for later, and then the keys to help her find it.”
Conflicting desires warred for supremacy in the brown depths of my father’s eyes.
The needle was huge, and I held my baby hands up to touch it. If the men were surprised, they didn’t show it.
“Ssh, ssh, Danyankele,” my father murmured, stroking my head, distracting me from the rubber band being tied tight around my chubby forearm, two fingers tapping lightly to prime a vein before gently inserting the needle tip to extract my blood. Ezra took it from my father’s free hand and turned his back to us. When he returned, moments later, the vial was no longer red but rather a blue that swirled. It was the past, and I was powerless to stop either of the men as a new syringe was plunged back into my arm, a different vein, this time filling me with whatever they wanted. No control as I was rolled over onto my stomach and a cream of some kind was slathered onto my back, numbing where it touched. I felt a more precise pressure then, and the whirring of a needle. Was that a tattoo needle? What the...?
I couldn’t do anything.
So instead I tried to follow the path of the needle by the pressure I felt.
The first point, at the base of my skull, then several more, spaced wider apart, below. A final singular point at the base on my tailbone. The sequence reminded me of the drawing on my father’s wall.
I opened my mouth to cry. To ask. To try and understand.
But I was just a baby.
* * *
The next scene was mist and grass, with bits of frozen ice pepper-pricking at my face as I came back to the present. Disoriented. As I blinked and tried to re-focus my eyes, nausea gnawed its way up my throat. Heartburn? Indigestion? A side effect of my inter-dimensional sightseeing excursion? Maybe I was just hungry.
The grill behind me was smoking, and the greasy smells of charred flesh had my stomach growling. I saw Anshell standing over the fire, poking at the glowing bits with a stick. Was that coffee with cinnamon?
“Thanks,” I said, when Anshell put a steaming mug of the stuff between my chilled hands. The warmth of the cup jabbed pins of sensation into the nerve endings of my fingers, an accompanying sense memory of the pricks tattooed into my back.
“Hungry?” Anshell did something by the fire I couldn’t see, something that caused whatever was cooking to spit grease with a cackle and cough of smoke. I could tell it involved juicy goodness by the scented droplets of grease and fat that hung in the air around us.
“Yeah,” I said, flopping down into one of the metallic lawn chair rockers and taking a sip of caffeinated ecstasy.
“Here, take this,” Anshell said, turning around and handing me a burger, orange cheese oozing out from between the patty and the bun. Ciabatta, I noted approvingly. Not one of those mass-produced, over-processed buns.
“Mmmm.” My moan of culinary pleasure was involuntary but damn, the man could make burgers. Also, apparently spirit walks made a person hungry for meat.
“Did you get what you needed?” Anshell settled into the chair across the fire from me. The flames reflected in his eyes, changing them from one moment to the next—first yellow, then brown, then orange and back to brown again.
“How much did you see?” I tried to focus on the shape of Anshell’s
face, his head, the span between the back of his skull and the tip of his nose. More equine than feline. Lines and edges distorting in the encroaching darkness as the sun dipped into the tree line.
“Nothing,” he said. “It takes a lot of energy to keep it open.” Anshell shrugged his indifference to the effort he had just expended to help me. Or himself? Those lines were blurring like the edges of his jaw, partially obscured now as a puff of smoke pushed his way.
I didn’t hear him cough, but I did see him blink back what I assumed were grit-related tears. A manly man who cries only in the face of campfire smoke, or maybe chopped onions.
I pictured Anshell, bare-chested and well-oiled, beating his breast in an imitation of every King Kong movie ever made, and had to snort back a laugh. Which caused a whole chunk of burger to divert its passage from my throat to an alternate departure point out my nose. My turn to cough until I cried.
Anshell shook his head, a small smile playing on those full, brownish-pink lips. I wondered, again, if he could read my thoughts.
“Sometimes,” he said.
Awesome, I thought.
We sat quietly for a few minutes as we chewed our food. Then:
“What happened to Claude?” I asked.
Anshell’s eyes widened a moment. “We have him in custody,” he said after the briefest hesitation.
“Meaning?” It was just the two of us and I wasn’t letting him off the hook this time.
“Meaning,” Anshell replied, “our mutual friend Claude has been punished and is now recovering from the aftereffects of that punishment.”
I opened my mouth to ask but Anshell beat me to it.
“Yes,” he said, “Claude will be there tonight if he is up to it.”
“And what’s to keep him from finishing the job he started and killing me for real this time?”
“Nothing,” said Anshell. “But if he tries, we will stop him.”
“I feel so reassured,” I said. Yes, there were hints of acrid bitterness in my tone. The burger I’d been eating turned to a molten weight in my stomach and Anshell watched as I put the paper plate with the remnants of my uneaten, bun-encased patty down on the ground.
“He is pack,” Anshell said, his tone pointed. “You are not.”
“Nice. So we’re talking underhanded invitation here? Join or we’ll take the crazy cat’s side over yours?”
“Listen, Dana,” Anshell said, leaning forward. “It’s obvious there is some kind of connection between us. I shouldn’t be able to read your thoughts so clearly—not before you’ve been through the allegiance oath ceremony.”
“I’m not big on ceremony,” I commented.
“Be that as it may,” Anshell continued, as though I hadn’t interrupted. “Our paths do seem to be intertwined somehow.”
“I’m so sick of hearing that,” I snapped. “Everyone seems to be interested in my path, but nobody is telling what that path is or why they care so much about my every move. Or non-move.” I slammed my hands down on the arms of my chair, sending a few flakes of rust-encrusted paint up in a puff of blue. “No more bullshit, Anshell. Tell me what you know and I’ll share what I know and maybe we can figure out what’s supposed to happen tonight.”
Anshell stared at me across the fire, leaning back and steepling his fingers as the world around us got darker and darker. Twilight. Still he watched me and I watched him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Your ability to shift is the opposite of what we normally see. Being able to do a partial shift usually takes years of practice, and it’s the first thing you’ve learned to control. Meanwhile you are still struggling to do a full shift. It suggests there’s been some kind of mutation in the way your body processed the infection of Claude’s scratch.”
I’d studied the patterns and behaviors followed by shifter DNA strands against those found in the genetic structure of norms back in my Agency training days at the University of Toronto. A scratch like Claude’s enters the bloodstream, attacks the red blood cells, splits the white blood cells and introduces a new Y factor into the mix. That Y factor would replicate at a constant rate, coating and changing the consistency of the white blood cells so they’d become thicker and stronger. The entire sequence was predictable, with results validated enough times to be part of the core curriculum. What Anshell was suggesting didn’t make sense.
“Ever seen anything like it before?” Maybe he’d observed variances at the supe hospital.
“Never,” Anshell replied. “Because of that, we also have to consider the possibility we may not be able to predict what you’ll do under the full moon. Especially on the third night when the lunar power will be at peak strength.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s reassuring. So you think it’s my blood then?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Maybe. But then there’s that other thing. Have you noticed almost all of this unwanted attention you’ve been getting traces back, time-wise, to the night you and Sam disrupted the Feed ritual outside of the Swan?”
“We dusted anyone without a pulse,” I pointed out. “We didn’t see anything or anyone else. Plus what about Claude? He had nothing to do with raising Alina. Right?”
“He pled ignorance,” said Anshell. “At a time when he would have been motivated to tell truthful details of anything he knew.”
I didn’t want to think about what that meant. More than one way to skin a cat. No. Either way, Claude was a big question mark. I knew what he wanted, and what he’d been caught doing, but I wasn’t convinced he was responsible for it all. In fact, I was pretty sure he wasn’t.
Besides, if Anshell was correct, I had bigger problems than just Claude.
Whatever had been raised the night of the Feed was demon-style big, bad and chasing down my ass.
And I had one more night to figure out why.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It was almost time.
We were at Anshell’s house in the poshy-posh Summerhill area again, girding ourselves. Well, his fighters were. Me, I was back at the dining room table channeling my university cram sessions with a large chai soy latte and a stack of books on rituals involving numbers, blood rite patterning along with the philosophical and psycho-preternatural potentialities contained therein. There may have been a history book or two thrown in as well.
I was lucky my presence was not required dark and early. I was also lucky to have reinforcements with me: Mum and Lynna.
Yes, Mum had surreptitiously checked out Sam, glancing over at him while pretending to check email on her phone. He was a gentleman and pretended not to notice. Instead, he turned on the charm and passed by the table every few minutes to get his flirt on. No joke. Although, okay, it was kind of amusing to see my mum in a fluster.
But I couldn’t blame her. Even my breath caught when he tilted his head just so and glanced over at me. Damn it.
I looked away, anywhere but at him, and my eye twigged on a diagram of circles and lines the book referred to as the Tree of Life. The song I’d heard in religious school growing up hummed between my ears: “It is a tree of life to those that hold fast to it / and all of its supporters are happy...”
I fought the urge to clap to the beat of my memory. Maybe dance around a little with a tambourine and a hip shimmy.
“It’s a tree of life,” I said, staring at the picture on the page. That same picture, if I turned it clockwise, that my father had drawn on the wall of his super-secret room. I pulled up the photo on my phone to be sure.
“Huh,” said Sam, poking his head over my shoulder. “You’ve got that same pattern of dots on your back.”
I stared at him. Yes, my mouth was open. My mother, for her part, was doing her best to pretend the reason Sam knew the pattern of markings on my back was because the two of us had maybe been to the beach together and I had maybe be
en wearing a bikini. Never mind that it was the middle of February in Toronto—and that my skin was pasty-ish white even in the middle of July. And that I hadn’t owned (or been seen in) a bikini since junior high.
“Take a look at this,” Sam said, calling Anshell over. A dishtowel over one shoulder and an oversized clear slurpee cup with sliced lemons and carrots did nothing to diminish Anshell’s masculine, alpha presence as he padded into the room. Sam nudged the book toward Anshell, pointing to the top half of the diagram, an area surrounded by six points with a gap in the middle. “What does this remind you of?”
Anshell stared at the page, then at me. Oh yeah. Anshell had seen me naked too. Sam was nodding and smiling.
“Your father said your blood was a kind of amplifier,” Sam said. “Right?”
“Dana, you told...?” Mum’s tone echoed the note left for me by my father. But what could I do? I had to trust someone at some point, didn’t I?
“Yeah,” I said.
Mum went back to studying her phone for social media status updates. Pretending not to worry, pretending she wasn’t listening to every word.
“Hear me out,” Sam was saying. “What if Dana’s blood actually is an amplifier? Look at this picture. What does it make you think of?”
Anshell looked at the drawing again.
“It looks like an opening of some kind. A mouth. Or maybe a star.” Anshell looked back up at Sam. “You think it could be a portal?”
“A portal,” Sam repeated. “Exactly.” He pointed his finger to a specific spot in the upper center of the pattern. “What if this is the reason everyone is after Dana? Spill her blood,” he tapped the spot for emphasis, “here, and what happens? What happens if we turn the pattern upside down?”
“Reverse it, you mean?” Anshell fiddled with a loose thread on the dishtowel. Considering. “Except they’ve managed to open at least one other portal without her. The Feed you disrupted. The vampires spoke of raising Alina, and we know she is here now, therefore logic suggests that is also when and where she came through. So maybe Dana isn’t critical for the first part. Which then begs the question of why this Alina is interested in her at all.” Anshell turned to me. “Dana, when you were captured—”