Charming (25 page)

“So Anne Marie started out in Ellison’s hive as a human blood bag,” Sig reflected. “I guess now we know why she didn’t have much control over the hive at first.”

I took my ear off the safe. “You get that she was more dangerous than Ellison even before she became undead, right? She probably didn’t hang around any longer than it took to win over a few of his followers once she finally manipulated him into turning her into a vampire.”

“Oh, I get that,” Sig assured me. “She knew someone was going to come for Ellison eventually, and she left Ivan’s number
on an e-mail just on the off chance that someone got a hold of Ellison’s computer and hacked into her e-mail account.”

Sig had worked her blood-burning magic on her own spilled blood as well as mine this time, and we had both brought spare clothes along. Sig was wearing a red shirt with long sleeves, and I was in jeans and a gray cotton shirt.

“She used Ivan like a trip wire,” I said. “And she didn’t much care who got hurt in the explosion. Either we’d eliminate a future rival, or Ivan would take care of any hunters on her trail. And we’ll probably have a few days after we put the
CLOSED
sign up, but as soon as word about this strip club gets on the news, she’ll know we’re after her for sure.”

“What kind of seventeen-year-old thinks that way?” Sig asked, flipping through the books on Ivan’s bookcase. They all looked like the kind of books people buy as decorations instead of reading material. We hadn’t found any other vampires or captive humans when we searched the rest of the strip club, but Sig refused to sit on any of Ivan’s furniture.

“A technologically savvy seventeen-year-old who grew up knowing the world was out to get her,” I said.

Sig was obscurely offended. “We’re only out to get her because of the choices she’s been making.”

“Yeah, well, being a genius doesn’t guarantee self-awareness,” I commented. “Now be quiet.”

Sig gave me the finger.

I thought I had figured out which numbers were part of the key and was playing around with different combinations when Sig started talking again. “This girl is moving us all around like checkers on a checkerboard. We need to stop jumping where this Anne Marie wants us to jump.”

“What we need to do is to stop her before she crowns herself,” I suggested.

Instead of groaning at the checkers reference, Sig looked up sharply. “You really think this girl could become a queen?”

“I think this girl was a monster long before she became a vampire,” I said. “And yeah, I think she could become the kind of evil queen people will tell stories about a thousand years from now. She’s already using the Internet more effectively than any magic mirror.”

“She’s building tunnels like the ones she’s been researching, isn’t she?” It wasn’t really a question. “We’re going to have to go in some dark underground place to find her.”

“Probably,” I said.

Sig sighed. “Parth is looking into the tunnel-network thing. We should all get together and compare notes tonight.”

“The whole scream team?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes at the nickname. “Yes. Would you like to come?”

“Do I need to learn a secret handshake?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But you will have to pay dues.”

“I’m working on that,” I said.

Sig became silent again, which was just as well. I popped the safe open.

“I thought you were just showing off,” Sig admitted. “I’m pretty sure I saw an episode of
MythBusters
that said you can’t do what you just did.”

“I have enhanced senses,” I explained. “And it’s an old safe.”

“Stanislav could have opened this safe, but he would have gotten the combination from reading the psychic impressions.” There was something awkward about the way Sig added the comment. Like she was reminding me that Stanislav existed, but her heart really wasn’t in it.

“Mmmnnnn,” I grunted. I was carefully sifting through the safe in case Ivan had left any booby traps in it. The lower shelf
held a lot of false IDs and accompanying documentation. They were good quality. The only way I knew they were cover identities was that some of the same faces had different names. The top shelf held a load of bearer bonds that I handed over to Sig.

Some of the IDs must have been made for Ivan’s lieutenants. One of them was for someone named Jeff Holiday who was close enough to my height and weight that I could probably work something out. Jeff’s birth date indicated that this was an identity that Ivan was cultivating for a few years down the road. Jeff had a Social Security card, a driver’s license, and two credit cards that looked to have been used to start a credit history, if the bills beneath them were any indication.

Maybe Virginia wasn’t such a bust in terms of setting up a new identity after all.

“There must be two million dollars in bearer bonds here,” Sig said.

“How do you usually split stuff like this up with your group?” I asked absently while I was going over Jeff Holiday’s papers. “Do you split it eight ways every time, or do the people who actually do the work on a particular hunt get a larger percentage?”

Sig hesitated.

“What?” I said.

“It’s never come up before,” Sig explained awkwardly.

“Oh,” I said. “I’ve been on the run so long, ransacking places like this is second nature to me.”

“Andro and Andrej usually do the cleanup,” Sig admitted.

The comment hung in the air like a freeloader who won’t leave a funeral reception.

“OK,” I said. “Well, I’m planning on taking a ninth of the split.”

“Fine,” Sig said angrily.

“OK,” I repeated.

“I’m not a thief.” Sig had moved closer to me, her fists clenched.

I stood up and faced her. “I’m leaving the bonds with you, Sig. I haven’t counted them. Does that sound like I don’t trust you?”

“But you think Stanislav has been cheating my friends,” Sig gritted out.

This time I was the one who moved closer to her. Our faces were inches apart. “I’m not the one you’re angry at. I haven’t forgotten what you did for me this morning. I will never forget what you did for me this morning. But I am not your whipping boy.”

And I walked around her and started to head toward nowhere in particular.

“John,” Sig called after me.

I stopped and looked back. “What?”

“I wish you could have had more time,” she said.

I didn’t ask her to explain. “Thanks.”

20

Q
uitting my job at Rigby’s hadn’t been hard. I’d told Dave that someone close to me had just died, and it hadn’t been a lie.

The war council at Sig and Dvornik’s place was at eight o’clock, but the wolf wouldn’t just let me go straight there. Normally I can pretend that there isn’t a human side and a wolf side—it’s crowded enough having a me side and a geas side—but the closer it got to midnight, the more difficult it became to ignore my copilot. The human was feeling tentative and distracted, and the wolf was stronger and more focused than it had ever been.

Which is why I found myself parking at a point some two miles away from Sig and Dvornik’s home and walking around my destination in wide, slowly shrinking circles. I knew that I was doing this because it’s the way that a lone wolf compensates for the lack of a surrounding pack, but I couldn’t stop myself: instincts that were a part of me but were not my own were pulling at me in some kind of psychological undertow. And here’s the part I found really unsettling—somehow the wolf instincts were incorporating knowledge that came from the human part
of my consciousness. I was scoping out likely elevation points for snipers and looking for out-of-place vehicles.

This is why I hate days when there’s going to be a full moon. The wolf is almost strong enough to tear down the cage… and I’m the cage.

I finally made it to Sig and Dvornik’s loft about twenty minutes late. They lived on the second floor of a large downtown stone building that had been converted into a sculpting studio. The building had been a bank once, and it was obvious that whatever problems Sig and Dvornik were having, money wasn’t one of them.

At first I had assumed that the sculpting studio was just a great cover for Dvornik’s monster-hunting activities: Dvornik could make his own hours, and whenever he needed funding his kresnik society could finance him by paying whatever sum he needed for some crap piece of sculpture he tossed together. There would be a perfectly legitimate paper trail for the IRS and everything. With the ex-bank as a headquarters, he even had bulletproof windows and a large vault for locking away questionable discoveries.

The large windows of the front lobby were filled with statues, though, and I had no doubt that they really were Dvornik’s. Almost all of them portrayed supernatural creatures in the act of committing various depredations. In one piece a Boo Hag was skinning one of her victims, her emaciated arms still managing to suggest an unnatural sinewy strength. In another an adaro was standing up on his finned feet and scaled legs, preparing to hurl one of the small poisonous sea urchins that they use like throwing stars, his serrated teeth snarling over the stringy rubbery tendrils coming out of his chin. What, you really think that all boat disappearances are caused by pirates and storms?

The centerpiece of the window display was a vampire sucking on the fingers of a dismembered human hand as if nibbling from a bunch of grapes. The sculptures were disturbing, but they possessed an odd, dark beauty. The bastard had real talent.

I wondered if Dvornik made a sculpture every time he killed something. Was this his version of putting stuffed heads on a wall? Or was this what Dvornik did with bad dreams?

A fire escape on the side of the building led straight to the loft, and I set off several motion sensor lights as I made my way up. They had UV bulbs in them, which made me smile. I couldn’t hear a thing through the wall on the first floor. The soundproofing must have been exceptional. About ten stairs up I did hear a voice coming from a back alley. It sounded like Dvornik’s nephew, Andrej; he was talking—presumably on a cell phone—to a jealous lover. He was explaining in a thick Eastern European accent and perfect English (the sneaky bastard) that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, that his job just demanded strange work hours.

As soon as I got to the top of the fire escape, Sig opened the door. She was clean and watchful, wearing a tight blue Minnesota Vikings T-shirt. Her hair was unbraided and smelled like strawberries, and the shirt barely brushed against her black sweat pants, exposing flashes of firm stomach and navel.

“You’re late,” she said briskly. Which was her way of saying that she didn’t want to talk about anything that had happened earlier.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve been struggling with myself.”

“Who won?” Sig demanded, unimpressed.

I ignored this and offered her the thick cylinder of sausage I was carrying. “Here.”

She eyed the sausage doubtfully. “Is that thing Freudian?”

I smiled. “It’s cervelat. Good stuff, and Swiss. Flowers would have been awkward, and I’ve never seen you drink alcohol, so I didn’t know if wine would be appropriate.”

She hesitated. “It wouldn’t have been. But you know, there’s this thing called cheese.”

This observation flustered me more than it should have. “Of course there is, it’s just… oh hell.”

“John?” She sounded concerned. My heart was beating as if I were being attacked and I was blushing like a twelve-year-old. I wanted to turn around and run. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the wolf,” I babbled. “I just realized… It’s a full moon. I mean, I didn’t just realize that it’s a full moon, but the wolf… it never even occurred to me what I was doing.”

“What are you doing?” Sig asked curiously.

“Wolves like meat,” I observed inanely. “Nothing else even occurred to me because of the full moon.”

That’s not why I was acting like an idiot. The giving of meat is highly significant to wolves. I had just realized that the wolf was acting out a mating ritual.

“It’s OK; it’s not that big of a deal.” Sig laughed a little nervously. I wasn’t the only one who was flustered. She struggled for a moment before flushing and awkwardly adding, “Thank you.”