by Mindy Klasky
“Jimmy,” he croaked to James, stirring himself to stand. I felt like I needed a shower after he studied my body, starting and ending with the scabs on my neck. “Got yerself a feeder?”
James didn’t respond—not to the nickname, and not to the crude word for a Source. Instead, he tapped a number into the keypad that took the place of a lock on the door—the first sign that the house we were entering was different from the others on the block.
“C’mon, Chief,” the vampire whined. “Give us a taste, yeah?” He licked his chapped lips. “Just a sip. I’ll be careful. No sloppy seconds for Jimmy.”
James might have been deaf, for all his reaction to the plea. Something whined inside the door—or maybe that was the other vampire, realizing he was going to be left high and dry. The door creaked open.
James stepped in first. That lapse of courtesy set my nerves a-jangle. His action meant he worried more about what waited inside the house than he did the lackey on the front porch.
I swallowed hard and followed him. In my mind, I recited all the reasons James couldn’t want to hurt me now.
He could have drunk his revenge months ago.
He could have drained me dry in the foyer of his house, just the other night.
He didn’t have to send the Bitcoin phone; he could have left me—and the courthouse—to our fates.
He could have executed me in the privacy of my own home.
Nevertheless, my mind flashed on the wall of weapons in the Old Library far beneath Judge Finch’s courtroom. I’d give a month’s salary for any one of those blades. Hell, I’d easily drop my next paycheck for a single length of silver chain.
I’d sworn off agriotis. I’d promised I would never again access a sphinx’s supreme speed, the lightning perception that could turn me into a murdering machine. But in that moment, on that porch, staring at James’s tautly muscled back and bracing myself to enter Maurice Richardson’s lair, I shoved my senses toward my only superpower.
I felt the edge, as if I were a blindfolded child pushing a toe past the drop-off of a curb. I knew it was there. I sensed the danger.
But I couldn’t reach the other side. After a day of short sleep, after the tension of breaking into the museum, after my wild ride through the darkness with Sheut, I was exhausted. I didn’t have the strength, the raw energy to convert my terror into rage. I couldn’t use my agriotis, even if I hadn’t made a vow. Even if I were willing to forfeit a little more of my soul.
I followed James into the room.
And I almost laughed when I saw the interior. The rowhouse was narrow, no more than fifteen feet across. Just inside the front door, stairs launched upstairs, disappearing in shadows. Richardson was nowhere in sight.
The ground floor consisted of three rooms. In better times, they’d probably been a parlor, a dining room, and a kitchen. Now, they were stripped of conventional furniture. Even the stove and refrigerator had been ripped out, pipes inexpertly capped at awkward angles.
Of course the kitchen was bare. Vampires didn’t need kitchens.
But apparently vampires needed computers. Two dozen of them, balanced on uneven tables and plugged into grimy surge suppressors. In front of each screen sat a vampire, fingers poised over clacking keyboards.
Each man—and they were all male—was mesmerized by his screen. From across the room, I could make out swiftly flowing columns of numbers. A couple of screens sported horizontal rivers of data instead, ticker tapes reeling by.
Like fishermen plucking trout from a river, the vampires typed into their keyboards, slamming in letters and numbers, trying to beat some unseen clock. Every one of them was singularly focused, apparently oblivious to James or me or the world outside the rowhouse front door.
“What are they doing?” I finally asked, barely voicing the words.
James answered in his normal voice, which seemed like he was shouting. “Tracking Richardson’s investments. Trading mutual funds. Stocks. Bonds. That one’s following Bitcoin.” He nodded toward a vampire in the middle of the devastated kitchen.
So that was the secret to the million-dollar account. “You got tips from him?”
James bit off his humorless laugh. “I got tips from all of them. I’ve skimmed more money in the past six months then I’ve earned in the rest of my life combined.”
He wasn’t boasting. He was simply stating a fact.
“And those guys?” I asked, taking in the entire boiler room operation. “Are they skimming too?”
“They’re too busy searching for trends. Companies filing bankruptcy. Companies bringing innovations to market.”
A tiny piece of a jigsaw puzzle slipped into place. “So the attack on the courthouse…”
“Part intelligence work,” James said. “To find vulnerable companies in the mundane records, insider trading at its finest. But part rearguard action, too, to keep the imperial court from interfering here.”
I stared at the mesmerized men. Not one had shifted in his chair—only their fingers moved, typing furiously. Their fingers and their eyes, studying the screens, scanning, scanning, scanning. “How long do they sit there?” I whispered.
Again, James replied at his usual volume. “From sunset to sunrise. Richardson used to keep them working an hour after dawn, but they made too many mistakes. The extra hour of trading resulted in lower income.”
“What keeps them there?”
James looked at me as if I were insane. Or maybe just very naive. “They’re Impressed.”
I squeaked my surprise. “All of them?”
James’s voice was grim. “Every last one.”
I’d known Richardson had no qualms about Impressing vampires. He’d done it to James, decades ago. Technically, it wasn’t even a crime. Vampires did it to other vampires, and if anyone took exception, they could fight it out amongst themselves. The Eastern Empire wouldn’t enforce the situation.
“But the guy outside… Is he supposed to be in here?”
James scowled. “He flunked out.”
“What does that mean?”
“Even Impressed, he couldn’t make a decent trade. He lost more for Richardson in a month then all the other traders combined.”
“Then why is he allowed to stick around?”
“He keeps the stock in line.”
“Stocks?”
James shook his head. “Stock. Singular. Livestock.” He gestured toward the stairs.
I had no idea what waited at the top of those steps. I was reasonably sure it wasn’t Richardson—not with James speaking at full volume, disclosing the kingpin’s secrets. Unless this was all an elaborate ploy to turn me over to the most heinous criminal the Eastern Empire had ever known.
I shook my head and said, “Just tell me.”
James ignored me and moved into the darkness.
I could stay with the traders—with the charming possibility that the guy on the porch might decide to take a break inside the house—or I could follow James to the second floor.
Rock, meet hard place.
I climbed.
The air was stifling upstairs, as if it hadn’t stirred for centuries. A bathroom was carved into the space at the top of the stairs, but like the kitchen below, it had been gutted. A stained mattress lay where a bathtub used to rest. A pile of rags rested beneath the capped off faucet.
As I made the turn around the banister, ready to follow James down the hall, the rags moved.
A face peered out at me. Flat eyes stared without blinking, pupils dilated wide in the almost total darkness. The nose had been broken at least twice. Thin lips stretched over jagged teeth, with a single fang jutting off at an unlikely angle.
The woman—because that’s what she was, or had been—reached toward me with a wrist like parchment over bone. Her throat worked, but she couldn’t manage words. Instead, she hissed, long and low, like a tire crushed to death in a vise.
I backed away, only to find myself in front of another door. Another mattress. Another wasted, ru
ined vampire.
My legs were shaking. My knees threatened to buckle, reporting that they’d done enough work for one day and had absolutely no reason to carry me any farther.
But James waited at the end of the hall. I had to reach James. He was the only reason I made it to the last door.
“What are they doing here?” I asked, my voice a quaking whisper.
“They’re livestock. They feed on humans. And the Impressed feed on them.”
“They aren’t Impressed?” I whirled to look back at the woman in the bathroom, but she’d disappeared into her pile of rags.
James shook his head, a single tight gesture.
“Then what in the name of Sekhmet keeps them there?”
“Where else would they go?”
“They have to have family. Friends.”
“Richardson chooses carefully. No one will ever miss these women.” He took a step back, gesturing so that I had to look inside the last room. “Girls,” he said, correcting himself.
A child slept on the mattress there. Her eyes were sunken. Her lips were chapped. Her dark hair lay in tangles, but I could still make out her youth, the obvious beauty she’d enjoyed before she Turned. If I had to guess, I’d say she was thirteen. Maybe, possibly sixteen, but only if she was a late bloomer.
My gorge rose as I stared at her, at her nest of filthy rags, at her jagged, broken fingernails. I whirled, thinking I’d return to the bathroom, but there was no toilet there, no sink. I made it to the corner of the hall instead, emptying my stomach in the darkness.
Acid burned my throat. Tears stung my eyes and streamed down my cheeks. My nose ran. And still my belly convulsed, seizing over and over, as if it were the engine of James’s decaying Ford Fiesta.
Finally, my stomach was empty. I started to wipe my face with the back of my hand, but I felt James behind me. He pressed something into my fingers, and I found myself staring at an impossibly white handkerchief.
I cleaned myself up as best I could, and then I followed him down the stairs. Not one of the women had spoken.
James led me to the front door. The vampire on the porch stirred, but he didn’t manage a single proposition before we cleared the porch and regained the relative refuge of the Fiesta. James held my door for me, waiting until I nodded before he closed it and crossed in front of the car.
Taking his own seat, James turned the key in the ignition—once, twice, a third time before the emphysemic engine finally caught. He jerked the wheel hard, lurching out of the parking space, and part of my mind registered that gesture as the first awkward movement I’d ever seen him make. He left rubber on the street as he peeled away from the hellhouse.
I didn’t speak until James pulled into the empty parking space in front of my apartment, the one created by the fire hydrant. Even then, I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t stare him in the face. Instead, I focused on the hydrant’s neat metal caps, trying to forget the blood-like rusty stains I’d seen in front of Richardson’s lair.
Questions spun through my mind, each more urgent than the one before. I finally settled on the most basic. I swallowed hard and asked, “Where the hell is Richardson?”
28
“Philadelphia.”
“But you said I was going to meet—”
“I needed to get you there. I needed you to understand what’s at stake.”
When I’d first gotten involved with the insane world of vampires, I might have made a bad joke about stakes. Now, I merely grimaced and said, “You failed, then. Because I don’t understand a thing. How the hell can you be working with a man who would do that?”
“I’m not working with him.” James’s flat denial was automatic.
“You have the right to come and go from his house. You aren’t Impressed, when all those other men are. That creature on the porch called you Chief! What the hell is going on, James?”
His fingers clenched on the steering wheel. I didn’t have the patience to let him debate whether he was going to tell me a lie, the truth, or some tortured half-truth.
“There’s a child back there who needs our help,” I said. “We need to get those women out of there.”
“And do what with them?”
I clutched at straws. “We’ll take them to the Den. The sphinxes can help.”
“Ah,” James said, his lips curling with bitter sarcasm. “The tender mercies of the Ancient Commission.”
“No!” I said. “There are other options!”
Damn. Not two hours ago, I’d kept Chris from sharing his plan, and now I was trotting it out like some gold standard?
But James didn’t give me a chance to explain. Instead, he said. “Forget the women.” His voice was grim. “I’m going to destroy Richardson, once and for all. And I need your help to do it.”
Vampires hated being indebted to people. But here James was, making an outright statement, asking me to give him something he desired. That fact sobered me more than anything I’d seen at the rowhouse.
I said, “The two of us can’t possibly fight—”
“I’m not asking you to fight. Not physically anyway.”
That answer chilled me. James’s solution was always to fight. That’s why he’d dragged me down to the Old Library when I’d first started working for him. Everything ended in a fight, and he wanted me to be properly prepared. But if he didn’t intend to grapple with Richardson… “What, then? What do you want me to do?”
“Delete every case ever brought against Richardson in the Eastern Empire night court.”
“Are you insane?” My response was immediate.
In the first place, someone was certain to notice as soon as the records disappeared. Dozens of cases had been filed against Richardson over the centuries. Even though he’d escaped imprisonment every single time, the old files were routinely reviewed by prosecutors trying to find some new way to block him, some novel approach to pen him in with the law.
In the second place, I was personally sworn to protect those records. That’s why James had hired me two years ago. I’d invested countless hours organizing the files, bringing order to the chaos engendered by decades of haphazard clerks before me.
In the third place—
I didn’t need a third place. James was simply asking too much.
And that was before I considered that I might have been wrong all along. James might really be working for Richardson. This entire field trip might have been orchestrated somehow, in some way, to make me cave. To make me eradicate the Empire’s records on Richardson.
“What the hell are you doing, James? How can it possibly help for me to erase Richardson’s record?”
“It’s safer for you if you don’t know.”
“That’s crap, and you know it. It’s not safer for me to commit a felony on behalf of Maurice Richardson. Anyone with the computer skills of an eighth grader would know I’m the one who did it.”
James stared straight ahead, as if the secrets of the universe were written on the bumper of the Camry parked in front of us. “I’m running out of time. He ordered me to procure another cow.”
“Don’t call them that.” I protested automatically, even as my stomach threatened to reprise its star role in The Exorcist remake.
“He calls them that. He thinks of them that way. You don’t get to forget that.”
“I don’t get to forget any of this!” I protested. “You made sure of that.”
“She was eight years old.”
This time, my stomach didn’t rebel. It didn’t have a chance to, because my heart was clenching tight enough that I gasped for mercy.
“It was a test,” James said. “I knew that. When I failed, I did my best to make it look like an unavoidable mistake. I never could have predicted the girl would have an oak chair in her bedroom. I never could have planned that the mother would break the chair, would grab a leg, would have the presence of mind to stab me.”
He pressed his hand against his chest, just south of his heart. How close had he
come to dying, staging his injury?
“So what happens next?” I demanded. “Will he Impress you again?”
His jaw tightened. “He doesn’t have the strength to do that. Not after I broke his hold, the first time.”
After Judge DuBois saved him. “What then?” I asked.
“He’ll have to kill me outright.”
James was younger, both in vampire years and in human ones. He kept his body lean; he took advantage of every training tool in the Old Library. I asked, “You can beat him in a fair fight, can’t you?”
“In a fair fight? Probably. But do you really think Richardson will fight fair?”
Of course Richardson would tilt the odds. He’d make sure that James fought with damaged weapons. Or he’d spike his own gear with silver, wash edged weapons with the corrosive metal or conceal a deadly stake. If he didn’t salt the weaponry, he’d bring in extra men.
And even if James somehow managed to defeat an army, Richardson would gain some other advantage. He’d make the battle public, guaranteeing the Empire Bureau of Investigation would get involved. Worse, he’d bring in mundane authorities—see that James was locked up in a maximum-security prison or the proverbial padded room, forever.
Richardson had no scruples. And he’d had centuries to plot his takeover—of the Eastern Empire, of Washington DC, of the world.
I sighed in a futile effort to bleed off some of my despair. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What do you gain by my destroying court records?”
“Richardson’s on to me. He can’t prove I sent you the Bitcoins to meet his ransom demand, but he suspects I did. If I convince you to delete the files, he’ll believe he still controls me. That will buy me all the time I need.”
“Time for what?”
For the first time since we’d left the rowhouse, he looked at me. I knew his eyes were blue, but they looked black in the moonlight that streamed through the car’s windshield.
He reached out, and I thought he was going to touch my face, but he wrapped his finger around a lock of hair that had escaped my ponytail. He tucked it behind my ear, as if he actually cared about keeping things neat, about restoring order. His hand dropped back to his lap.