Bleeding Out (20 page)

“It’s what I think might be causing the blackout.”

“Please don’t say it’s the Ferid.”

“Okay. I won’t. But it is. I think they’re coming for Ru. And for me. And possibly for my mother.”

“You’re teetering on incoherent.”

“Well, that feeling is kind of my life. Where’s Ru?”

“In his suite, as far as I know. I haven’t seen him. Tess, why would they come for him now?”

“All I understand,” I say, “is that, when Lord Nightingale died, a pact died with him. I think the Ferid are cleaning house. Trinovantum has lost all of its necromancers. Mr. Corvid no longer controls the drug trade. Even the Manticore doesn’t scare us at bedtime anymore. All the other monsters have fled. The Ferid are the only ones left.”

“As a species, they don’t live anywhere near us.”

“No. Not yet.”

“And you’re confident of this—because you saw a tapestry.”

“Think of it this way, boss. If a cosmic shit-storm was going to descend on anyone in this building, who would the target be? I think we both know the answer to that. The lightning loves me.”

She sighs. “All right. Get Ru, and I’ll evacuate the building.”

“And send all those people into the streets? That’s probably what the vampires are hoping for.”

“You could send them out slowly,” Lucian says. “With escorts. It will take longer, but they’ll be less vulnerable.”

Selena turns to address the crowd. “Everyone get into threes. One athame per group, set to flare. Let’s keep this
nice and orderly. We’re going to pick up everyone we see along the way and coordinate a safe exit.”

We head to Ru’s suite. The door is open, but he’s not there.

“This is way better than my apartment,” Lorenzo says.

“At least rent is low now.”

“It’s virtually nonexistent. But everyone still fights over property.”

“All right.” I stare down the hallway. “If I were a kid who could walk on walls, and the power was out, where would I go?”

“What exactly makes you think that the Ferid are coming for him?” Lucian asks. “So far, all you’ve got are vampires and a blackout. Selena was right. They haven’t made a peep about him staying in the lab for months.”

“He and his brother saw something. Basuram suggested that it was an experiment, something to do with long-distance travel. I think he’s on a list of loose ends that they need to annihilate.”

“Including you?”

“Well, it’s family. You’re never quite sure how they really feel about you. Maybe Arcadia was tearing through your old city on a whim, and we happened to run into each other. But she came through that wall like a bat out of hell. She saw me and didn’t stop coming.”

“You’re sure,” Lucian says, “absolutely sure, that the shadow you saw in that tapestry was your father, and not something else?”

“No. I can’t swear it. But I’d like to think that I could recognize my father’s shadow. I’ve seen it enough. He sold drugs to Lorenzo, which connects him with Trinovantum. He’s pretty much always on the edge of things. And now my murderous funnel of a sister wants to get rid of the bastard daughter.”

“You know,” Lorenzo says, “this is starting to sound like less of a forensic thriller and more of a science-fantasy.”

“I don’t have time to worry about the genre of this crisis. Our lab isn’t equipped to analyze the Ferid. Ru’s DNA practically broke our machines. The problem is that we got used to dealing with local demons, and the Ferid are global. They’re capitalists, and they obviously don’t give two cyclonic revolutions about us.”

“I’m bored,” Lorenzo says.

Lucian’s about to retort, but I cut him off. “Lorenzo, do you think you have any spells that could help us?”

He brightens. “A few, actually. I’ve got feather-fall, limited invisibility, super-fast hands—”

“Let me use limited invisibility. I can tell my athame to remember it. Air charms are probably my weakest area.”

He draws out a thin chain of materia, which he drapes over my athame. The knife eats the spell. I’ll have to wait about twenty minutes until it’s properly digested, but it could come in handy later.

“We need to reach the fail-safe,” I say. “I know it’s in the subbasement, but that’s all.”

“I’ll scout ahead,” Lorenzo says. “It will be more interesting.” Then he evaporates into the floor.

“I like him.”

“He has his moments.”

“I don’t think he hates you anymore.”

“That’s only because you couldn’t understand our conversation.”

“I’ll just go ahead and be optimistic anyway.”

It’s slightly heartbreaking walking down so many stairs after we worked so hard to climb them. If they weren’t such shitty concrete, they’d probably have the presence of mind to laugh at our misfortune. We get to the lobby, which is slowly emptying. Outside, I see a typical maneuver in action. There’s a burst water main on one side of Granville and a sparking cable on the other, neither of which was there before. Agents are escorting people out of their vehicles and taking them to safety. I can still feel the vampires, but they’ve divided. Where did the other half go? It’s a question I’d like answered sooner rather than later.

We go through the emergency exit and down two flights of stairs. The quality of the air changes. It’s thinner, colder, and I can smell industrial cleaning products, which puts us on the morgue level. Another two flights of steps, and we’re past the data archive and reference library. We come to a locked door. I’m about to touch it, stupidly, like someone who’s forgotten about a hot element. Before I can, however, Lorenzo appears.

“Do not think about touching that,” he says. “Listen. It’s putting out as much energy as a respectable white hole.”

I inch closer and examine the lock. It’s made of old metal that’s been painted to look new. I might be able to work with it.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s come at this logically. First of all, door, I’d like to greet you as a wielder of materia. I’d also like to remind you that my family has close ties with the wind, the seas, and the elder rocks, which means that you can trust me. I get that you were told not to open. But this is an emergency. The building might be under attack, and we need to activate the fail-safe. Surely, you were never ordered to put your own substrate in jeopardy.”

I protect
.

“What do you protect?”

The deep basement.

“Right. I respect that. But there’s something in the deep basement that we need to protect all the other basements, and the doors and carpet and everything else that makes the building possible. We just need to turn that thing on.”

Others asked, but were dismissed
.

“Dismissed how?”

Made to leave
.

“But no killing, right?”

The door doesn’t answer.

“Okay. I have a special deal for you, because you’re
such a good door. If you let us in, I promise to remove that awful paint from your lock. I’ll sand you down and give you oil.”

I want a mural
.

“Done. We’ll paint something nice and everyone will stop to check you out, just like they used to before you were moved to the subbasement.”

The door considers my offer. Then it opens.

“We’re in your debt.”

I want a mural.

“Right. Message received.”

We go down a hallway. I can smell iron in the air, and something else, which I can only describe as a dryer sheet gone bad. Then I smell vampires. I hug the wall and take Lucian’s hand before calling in the limited invisibility charm. My athame casts it, and we try not to move. Three vampires walk by. The Pharmakon has made them look slightly prehistoric, and extremely amped up. I think we could take them, but I remember how unpredictable the vampire was who attacked me on the beach. I don’t want to risk it.

They pass us and continue south. We go north. I keep trying to hear something from the fail-safe, at the very least the song of weak radioactivity, but all I get is static. I stop for a moment to listen more closely. It’s like standing in a blizzard. I close my eyes and cast a thought into the nullity:

Derrick
.

There’s no response at first. Then I hear something extremely faint. I hold on to an image of Derrick and cast my thought again. The faint noise comes back. I listen closely. He’s saying something, but I can’t make it out. I give up and listen for the fail-safe again, which yields only static.

“We could use Miles in this situation,” Lucian observes. “He’d be able to chat with the generator.”

“That’s funny,” Lorenzo says. “I almost met a guy named Miles the other day, but then I lost my nerve and left the café.”

Lucian frowns at him. “Why were you at a café?”

“I was waiting for the ghoul, and I had some time to kill. I went to a café on Commercial Drive and noticed a deaf guy who was totally into his smartphone. I don’t meet a lot of deaf people, and he looked young, so I almost made myself semi-visible, like, so I could talk to him. But then his boyfriend came back, and was like,
Miles, stop reading; pay attention to me
.”

“Was his name Derrick?”

“Yeah. Miles wasn’t really paying attention, but when the boyfriend looked in my direction, I thought he could almost see me. So I left. I made sure to walk through both their coffees, though, which makes them gross.”

“You practically touched them.” I’m captivated by the idea of my family meeting Lucian’s, if only through a weak electrical charge. The diss of a ghost. Then I remember, for the first time in days, what Derrick told
me after he examined Lord Nightingale’s body. That memory. “Lorenzo, what was Miles wearing?”

“I don’t usually pay attention to what dudes are wearing.”

“What color was his shirt?”

“I think it was blue.”

“You don’t think. You know.” I stare at him. “You were at the library that night. When you passed by Miles, you picked up the smell of his shirt. It would have been nothing to most people, but Derrick recalled it instantly. You left that stolen smell behind without even knowing it.”

Lucian’s eyes widen. “Lorenzo, is this true?”

He’s silent for a moment. Then he says: “He was dead when I got there. I was at the library looking for a cookbook. It’s easy to manifest because the university is so high above sea level. When I realized who it was, I didn’t know what to do, so I hid and watched. Your people came. I was surprised to see the boyfriend there. He almost saw me again, but I kept still.”

“Lorenzo, if that’s true, then you were the first person to arrive on the scene. Did you sense something? Did you see a possible weapon?”

“No. I felt sad, because he was kind to me. I felt the silence of his death. But there was nothing else.”

“Great. First you show up at a crime scene; then you start selling drugs. This is the kind of story that conservative moms love to hear.”

“Look. I barely dealt them, okay? The weird guy gave
them to me, and I gave them to the squid. I think a vampire bought most of it.”

“Which vampire?”

“I never met him. But the ghoul said that he runs a community center.”

I go cold. “Are you talking about Modred?”

“I don’t know his name. The ghoul couldn’t even understand what he was saying half the time.”

“That’s him.” I turn to Lucian. “Modred bought the Pharmakon. He’s the one who’s dosing them.”

“That doesn’t seem like something that he would do.”

“Neither of us really know him. Patrick looks up to him, but he’s never been the best judge of character. He’s too kind. When Modred and I were at the party, he made certain that I never spoke with Quartilla, who was probably the only other person there who knew anything. He kept telling me to leave it alone and let him sort it out. I was right about him managing me.”

“Do you trust anyone?”

“Sure. I trust lots of people. But I live with those people. If they were lying to me, I’d realize it. Modred is hard to read on a good day, and when he reaches for the poker face, good luck. I think that he’s been working against us from the start.”

“Vampires are tools,” Lorenzo says.

“Well, if that were the case, we’d have nothing to worry about. But the vampires who just walked by are blitzed on Pharmakon and looking for a fight. I already
used up our limited invisibility, so next time they appear, we’ll have to think of something while running.”

We continue down the passage. Eventually, it narrows and ends in a small enclosure. There’s a hole in the floor with a ladder leading down. I lay my fears about submarines aside, and use the ladder. It leads to a chamber that’s mostly dark, save for a pair of green eyes, which fasten on me the instant my feet touch the ground. I light my athame.

“Ru! We’ve been looking all over for you.”

“I’ve been here,” he says. “This is the safest part of the building. The storm outside is getting worse.”

I look around. In the center of the room is a glass chamber, which is empty. My athame starts to crackle as it picks up a bit of weak radiation still settling over the area.

“Is this the fail-safe?” I ask.

“It was,” Ru says. “But someone has stolen the battery.”

“Awesome.” I turn to Lucian. “If we can’t activate the building’s defenses, we’re humped. Anything can get in, if it hasn’t already.”

“It’s me that they want,” Ru says.

“Actually, they want both of us.”

“Did you also see something that you were not supposed to?”

“No. I’m just lucky that way.” I get down on one knee. “I may not be able to turn the power back on, but I can wake the building up. Everyone kneel and join hands.”

“I’m not solid enough to kneel,” Lorenzo says.

Ru notices him for the first time. “Where did he come from?”

“Everybody just fucking kneel. Now. And join hands.”

Ru takes my hand. “How do you wake a building up?”

“Like this.”

I touch my athame to the ground.

Wake up.

Floors, wake up. Windows, listen. Now is the moment to be who you are. Brackets, ducts, and pipes of every angle. Insulation. Carpet fibers, granite countertops, sleeping drywall: Now is the time to be. All you staples, frames, and hidden rebar, wake up. It’s a beautiful night for a battle. Marble, reveal your striae. Iron, remember your birth. Floors, shed your laminate; remember your ancestors who were Viking ships. Glass, look up and receive the moon. Walls, guard us and forgive us.