Relinquished Hood

by Kendrai Meeks

  “As much as I appreciated the old-fashioned feel of a hand-delivered letter, I’ll remind you that you do know my email address.”

  Karmarov kept his eye anchored to the end of a microscope. “Until your generation figures out how to hack ink and paper, I’ll use it whenever possible.”

  “There are so many holes in that thinking, swiss cheese would be jealous.”

  My sarcastic quip was rewarded by a half smile from the vampire. “I don’t like email. In my day, if something was important enough to write down, it was done with delicate penmanship, a sharp quill, fine linen paper, and sealing wax. Nowadays, Hueys cut out half the letters from each word, constantly fire messages back and forth, and yet don’t seem to communicate much at all. Sad. Did F. Scott Fitzgerald perfect the play of syntax and lexicon only for modern men to slice it as thin as stir fry ginger?”

  “Fitzgerald? You seem more a Beowulf guy to me.”

  Karmarov huffed. “I’m not that old, Geri.”

  Pulling back from the microscope, he jerked his head at it, inviting me to look. I pressed my eye to the viewer and took in a cosmic starry sky balanced on the surface of a glass slide. It was a genetic sample, a small slice of bio material not unlike those I had been scanning into a machine earlier in the semester for the professor. The goal? Build a slayer genetic catalog, the first step in an attempt to resurrect the species.

  “What am I looking at?”

  He hesitated, then reached down to the base of the microscope, nudging the device with expert precision. Under the scope, the sample went from being inert, to dancing a salsa, almost as if the blood and tissue still was attempting to carry out its biological impetus.

  I couldn’t stop the gasp. “Whose is this?”

  “Mine,” he answered in a stoic tone. “But whose it is is not nearly as important as when it was taken. Ask me that question.”

  “Okay, when was it taken?”

  “1968.”

  My back went rigid as I jerked myself up. “A sample taken from you fifty years ago is still alive?”

  “Alive as I am. It shouldn’t still be alive. It really shouldn’t. I admit, it has me thrown for a loop.” A coy smile brightened Karmarov’s face. “Me calling myself alive is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose that’s why we have the term ‘undead.’ You’re clearly not alive in the traditional sense. You don’t get sick. You don’t age.”

  He crossed his arms and leaned back against one of the nearby lab tables, where a few months ago, Jess Harmond and I had worked side by side. “Life is a fatal disease, Geri, no matter how it’s manipulated. It kills all of us in the end. Immortality is relative. As best as I’ve been able to deduce, what vampirism does is arrest the aging process in the soft tissues. Organs, flesh, hair. But in the bones, in the marrow, it—”

  He trailed off when he caught me gawking.

  “It’s not relevant to our current predicament,” Karmarov concluded, waving a hand vaguely through the air.

  “Is it relative to what Cynthia was doing?” I asked.

  Despite Igor betraying his own kind in helping me to kill Cynthia, he still hadn’t been forthcoming about why he’d played along with her act for two days, all while I was held prisoner. Nor had he volunteered any further details of what she had actually been doing in his lab.

  “Not in the least,” he said. “And just so you know in no uncertain terms, the community in which Cynthia was operating isn’t the same as the one I move in.”

  “So you know who she was working with?”

  My hopes fell to the floor together with his downcast eyes. “I do and I don’t. I accused her of certain associations, but I cannot be sure that she was actually acting directly with them, or only because of them. Until we’re able to confirm that, I think it best, for your own safety, that I withhold that bit of information. Vampires are not fond of notoriety.”

  “Except Dracula,” I chuffed.

  Igor complemented with a laugh of his own as well. “Even he would tell you he’d have been much happier if Bram Stoker had never written the book, even it if is mostly wrong. As for this slide—” he tapped the microscope with his finger, “—I was curious is all. Think of it more like giving myself a health screening. Tell me, how is Mr. Somfield doing?”

  “Last I heard from Paradise, not too good,” I said, relaying the facts as best I could without letting my emotions bleed into my tone. “He’s still in mourning, of course. It’s a permanent state for a wolf that loses a mate. The bitterness and hopelessness fade, but they never shake the sorrow. It’s with them constantly in the empty spaces between breathing in and breathing out. Add to that that he was forced to submit to a new alpha half a world from home, and that he’s basically dependent on strangers for everything from food to a place to sleep to toilet paper, and he’s in rough shape.”

  “When he has reached a place where he feels he can see to his dead, they are here waiting for him. I will make certain that any cost associated with a proper burial is mitigated.”

  “That could be a while. Professor—”

  “Geri, call me Igor. Unnecessary Huey honorifics annoy me.”

  “Okay, then, Igor. How is it that Tobias’s brother ended up in Chicago?”

  “When Cynthia showed up demanding lab space, she had his body with her in tow. I wanted nothing to do with her research, but I had to oblige. Politics, I’m afraid. To bar her from the facilities would have resulted in too many consequences.”

  I tilted my head, inspecting his features. “You told me once that she was someone you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of. Care to expound on that?”

  “No, and for your sake, you’re better off not knowing.” He smoothed out his lab coat. “What you do need to know is that my contacts at WWL launched an investigation, but they accepted my rendition of events as truth. I told them that the wolf in custody crossed into lunacity. Cynthia unwisely attempted to subdue the wolf, but it overpowered her and killed her. I tried to fight, but was only able to slay it after it had destroyed her.”

  “Did you ever notice how you refer to Cynthia as she and Kara as it.”

  The professor’s eyes searched the ground. “I am an old vampire, and some of my oldest habits are difficult to break. In any case, as much as I hate to say it, you should get used to me using some rather dismissive language, both about wolves and you, when we begin our work at WWL next week.”

  My eyes became saucers. “What?”

  “Your internship starts Monday.” Concern crept into the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Don’t tell me they didn’t give you the orientation letter?”

  “Would it have come through a courier like your messages do? I...” Wait, what was I going on about? “I still have the internship?”

  “They bought my story about how Cynthia died. There’s no reason for them to retract the offer. Unless you no longer feel you’d be safe?”

  “I’m the daughter of a red matron, I’m never safe.”

  A bitter reality, but a true one. In the hood hierarchy, my mother wasn’t the only matron of the Red Hood bloodline. There were two others, one still in Germany, and one in Australia. Like the Hueys we posed as being, so too had supes been forced to migrate away from ancestral homes through history. My mother, however, was infamous, the most powerful of her status. Because of that, Brünhild Kline had been branded by wolves as a sort of boogie man with whom they scared their cubs. More than once I’d heard even the Paradise mothers warn unruly children that “Red Matron comes for cubs who don’t behave.” As much as I drew shame from it, my mother’s reputation as a hardnosed, vindictive executioner afforded me some protections. I’d been away from my clan for almost a year and hadn’t been hunted down by one of her enemies or, worse, an ally.

  My reality fractured, dual impulses of dread and excitement swirling together to form a directionless miasma of purpose. If I still had the internship, I wouldn’t have to leave Chicago, retreating to Paradise like an asham
ed puppy with her tail between her legs, relying on the charity of friends to keep her clothed and fed. If I did take the internship, I’d likely be in the midst of vampires who knew, at least tangentially, I was connected with the deaths of, not one but, two vampires in the last few months. Surely if my mother knew I’d killed Donovan, others did as well?

  “After everything that happened, do you think going into a den of vampires – corporate vampires – is safe?”

  “All corporations are vampiric in their own way. It’s their nature.” He examined me at length, trying to diagnose my wrinkled nose and bitten bottom lip. “I’m not going to pretend that this endeavor is devoid of danger. Some are still uncomfortable with you killing of one of Cynthia’s children was handled. The only form of death a vampire respects is at the hands of a slayer. Your mother had to offer some serious money to the crèche to make the problem go away.”

  “My mother what?” I interjected.

  The professor reached to the mat of thin brown hair atop his head and scratched. “You didn’t know,” he concluded. “Cynthia demanded compensation from your bloodline, even though she sent Donovan after you with the hopes you’d kill him. We’re contrary creatures in so many ways. Being a vampire maker means having your cake and eating it too. Your mother paid. In silver, of course.”

  “She does have a preference for metal over paper.”

  A half-smile lifted the right side of Igor’s face. “She’s a hood, that goes without saying. But we prefer tradable currency. Still better than lead, I suppose.”

  I wondered if the debt had come from our family’s silver stores, or if my mother had lifted the trinkets off tourists passing through Paradise over spring break. One of the tactics she’d taught me at a young age was that a hood is never without a weapon, if Hueys adorned in silver are near.

  Not in my case, of course. I wouldn’t have the talent to steal the finery of passing crowds by commandeering their silver until I took my rites.

  If I took my rites.

  “In any case,” Igor resumed, “I’ll be moving my work over to their facilities this weekend. You’re expected at orientation on Monday morning, eight-thirty. Most of WWL’s operations are legitimate Huey-world activities; all interns – even those working for me – have to make the lawyers happy. Of course, in your case, you’re also going to have to convince a few supes that you’re trustworthy.”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?”

  He looked at me like a child who didn’t understand the adult world. “Yes, you’re a hood. We’re not traditional adversaries, but trust won’t come easy, and you and I both know, you’re not entirely deserving of it.”

  I put on my best poker face. “What do you mean?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You’ll be watched closely until they come to trust you. They might also suspect you’re a mole working for your mother. Rumor is that the Red Matron has been poking her nose around down here, trying to find out what you’re up to. You must convince WWL that you have turned your back on your family, that you are not your mother’s shill.”

  It was like asking me to prove it was night by pointing out the stars, all while yelling at me for the sun being gone from the sky. “That won’t be difficult at all. It’s true.”

  Chapter Three

  A third ring taunted me with the promise of conflict diversion. Voicemail would be a blessing. I wondered momentarily why I should be nervous. Wasn’t working at WWL going to help with the whole “spy on the vampires and figure out what the hell they’re doing kidnapping and killing wolves” thing? They didn’t seem to be using them for food. Kara hadn’t had any fang marks on her that I’d noticed. Although I’d only had a passing look at the body of Tobias’s brother, Nick, nothing gruesome suggesting a violent vampire-induced death sparked in my memory. I knew whatever ever they did to Kara messed up the mating bond she shared with Tobias; she couldn’t even sense her own mate standing in the same room. It still didn’t mean I knew why, though. What reason would there be for a vampire to unmate wolves?

  During a pause between ring two and three, moments away from safety, I realized my nerves had nothing to do with vampires, and everything to do with the werewolf whose number I’d just dialed, one who I wished to high heaven I could stop loving as easily as he’d stopped loving me.

  “Geri?”

  “Hi, Cody. You got a few minutes to talk?”

  “For you? Always!”

  How could he do it? How could he so happily receive a call from me, and talk to me like I was a fifth grader trying to sell him Girl Scout cookies? Bouncy and cheery, like he wasn’t the man who had been able to make my head spin without ever technically having slept with me?

  “What’s up?”

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. Stay focused. “Did Kim get home all right?”

  His voice took on a hesitant vibration of awkwardness. “Of course. She got a flat outside of Green Bay, but she changed it easy enough. You know Kim. She’d carry that old Chevy of hers home if she had to.”

  The image of Cody’s burly shewolf cousin hoisting a pickup over her head filled my mind’s eye. I wasn’t sure she was that strong, but I bet she came damned close.

  “Good to hear. Did she, um, tell you and Rick that I was coming back home to work for the summer?”

  “Sure did. Glad to hear it, too. It’s hard to keep Tobias from hitchhiking to Chicago as it is. He thinks you’re knee-deep in vampires down there, having all the revenge fun without him. Now that you’re coming back for a little while, maybe he’ll kick back and actually work on getting to know the pack. For a communal animal, he does have a terrible introverted personality.”

  My bottom lip called out for mercy as I bit away my nerves. “What do you think he’d do if I didn’t come home for the summer?”

  The alpha on the other end of the line measured out some silence before asking, “Why would that happen?”

  I pushed a thumbnail into a bar of soap on the edge of the bathroom sink. “Because I still kinda, sorta have an internship with WWL.”

  “That vampire corporation? You can’t be serious. Not after what happened. No, Geri, I won’t allow it.”

  The nerves that had danced on the edge of my tongue moments before stood to attention and declared war. “You won’t allow it?”

  “No, I won’t. Jesus Christ, it’s bad enough as it is that you’re still in Chicago. Kimmy said you were coming home in a few days, or I’d never have let you stay there alone as it is.”

  Suddenly, my blood boiled for an entirely different reason. “I’m not a member of your pack, Cody Ryland. You can’t command me to do anything.”

  “You may not be pack, but you’re family. I protect you just like I protect them.”

  The wounds of my broken heart still festered, and the sharpness of the pain made me lash out. How could he tug me around like this? Sure, I could stomach being Cody’s friend, but assuming he was responsible for my safety, like he had when we were together? Had he no mercy?

  Poison laced my words. “Exactly which part of your family am I? I’m certainly not your girlfriend any more, unless your wife is an exceptionally open-minded shewolf.”

  “Don’t get that way, Geri. Don’t act like a... Like a...”

  “Like a hood?” I interjected. “Is that the word you’re looking for? Because, whether you like it or not—whether I like it or not, that’s what I am.”

  “Which is all the more reason why you can’t go waltzing into some big city company run by vampires!” He huffed. He puffed. He, I was willing to bet, ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sending Kimmy back tomorrow to get you and bring you home.”

  “You do, and I’ll silver her the second she walks through the door.”

  “You, silver Kim?” A low chuckle filtered over the line. “Yeah, that’s really going to happen.”

  Heat shot up my spine, arched across my neck, and landed on my tongue. “You seem to be confused. I didn’t call to get your permission to stay here, oh Gre
at Alpha Wolf of the Paradise Pack. You have no alpha’s prerogative with me. I’m telling you what I’m planning on doing. Three wolves are dead that we know about. One of them, your dad. Now, I may not be a righteous hood. I know I’d have no hope of defending myself if I ever got in a real fight with a supe. You don’t have to remind me of my weaknesses. My mother spent years making me well aware. But it appears I do need to remind you of my strengths.”

  “Geri, I didn’t mean that—”

  “Nascent or not, I’m still going to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on. I’ve been trained in defense, espionage, and negotiation. I may not know as much about vampires as I do about wolves, but I know a hell of a lot more than you do. Remember, the slayers are all dead; they can’t protect you. The hoods are all prejudice; they won’t protect you. So either you can get with the program that I am going to protect you, or you can go fuck yourself.”

  “Geri, come on, I’m only thinking about your safety. I’m not saying you couldn’t—.”

  I heard the flat door open and close behind me. That alone was reason enough to hang up, but I didn’t need any further motivation.

  “I’ve said all I need to say. Good-bye.”

  Amy did a double take as I pressed my screen to end the call and threw my phone into the couch cushions with the power of a major league pitcher.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d call that a break-up call. But you don’t have a boyfriend, so what’s up?”

  Fuming, balled fists on my hips, I paced. “It was my ex.”

  “The one you told me yesterday was god’s gift to women?” Amy asked, amplifying my comments with an extra-large speaker. I nodded. “Reassessing that assessment, are you?”