Dead Matter (26 page)

“Point taken,” I said. “Again, I’m truly sorry.”

The wave of anger rolling off him emotionally was intense. “You sure all this rage is about me, Nicholas?”

Nicholas’s eyes burned into me. The last thing I needed after just having left Allorah was someone else’s smoldering anger coming at me. Something in my face must have convinced him I was asking out of genuine concern because his face softened and he put his hands to his eyes. He looked like he was going to cry, but then he laughed instead.

“Forgive me,” he said, walking back to his console and sitting down. “I am a bit touchy right now. Mostly overworked … The immortal body refreshes itself, but the mind, well …”

“So I see,” I said, trying to laugh it off myself. “Maybe it’s not all work? Maybe some of this is about Beatriz and Aidan, too … ?

The laughter died on Nicholas’s lips. He raised an eyebrow and gave me a wan smile. “So you know about that, do you?”

“A little,” I said. “I see the looks you give them. Besides, when my partner’s brother is part of the undead, these things come up.”

Nicholas thought for a moment. “Ah, yes,” he said, giving a shudder. “Aidan.” He walked back over to the console and sat back down. “Anyway, yes, I suppose you could say I’m a little touchy because of Beatriz. If in a roundabout way only.”

I sat down in one of the console chairs next to him. “I’m all ears,” I said. “I’m just thrilled I’m not back at my office getting yelled at.”

Nicholas paused, collected his thoughts, then spoke. “Back before I was turned several hundred years ago, I had been apprenticed to Christopher Wren. You know of him, yes?”

I nodded. Even though most of my art knowledge was psychometrically gained, I knew of Wren’s architectural achievements in Europe.

“All I had ever hoped for back then was to dedicate myself to a life of design, all for the glory of God. But then
this
happened to me.”

Nicholas looked disgusted.

“You didn’t want this?” I asked.

“Not then,” he said. “Some days, I’m not even sure if I want it now … but back then, Beatriz courted me on behalf of Brandon. She was quite the noblewoman.”

“Wait,” I said. “Noblewoman? Beatriz?”

Nicholas screwed up his face. “Yes,” he said, “her. She courted me under her master’s orders, but it seemed so real at the time. Of course back then, she was nothing like the pale shade of a woman you see today. She carried herself in a far more courtly manner. How could an Englishman not fall for her exotic Spanish beauty? Now to see her on the arm of that hideously fashioned Aidan …” He shook it off. “Back before I was turned, I had no idea what she truly was or what Brandon had planned for me …”

Parts of the puzzle started to fit together in my head. Previous to his conversion, Brandon had not only been an arrogant monster; he had been quite the user of others. “He needed you,” I said, “to build his castle.”

Nicholas nodded. “Yes. He set his pawn upon me to win me over, not to construct his castle, but to help him maintain it, to fortify it. And much, much later, they needed me to move it to America.” He gave a blank stare ahead at the computer screens as images flew by. “It took years of planning, and given what the world was like back then, years to accomplish, but Brandon knew what he had in me when he had Beatriz turn me. She was so sweet back then, so loving, but all of it a lie.” His brow darkened and the hints of his vampiric nature showed in his skin as it became more leathery and pulled across his features. “I hated them both for that. For denying me my service to God.”

I didn’t understand. “To
God
?”

“My boy,” he said, his features smoothing back to normal, “I worked with Christopher Wren. Architecture was considered a gentleman’s pursuit, one of applied mathematics with all eyes turned upward in supplication to God. It was the way of my time. But when you want to build churches—monuments to our Lord—well … it is hard to do so once you are a creature of the night in a world barely lit by torches. The Church doesn’t … approve of my kind, and being a vampire makes working for His glory a bit difficult, I’m afraid. When that realization hit me, I sulked for a good sixty years.”

“My God,” I said. “That’s practically a lifetime.”

Nicholas nodded in agreement. “It
was
a lifetime back then.”

I was perplexed. “So why not just leave all of them? Tell them to screw off and walk away from it all? It’s sure as hell what I would have done.”

Nicholas looked pained. “Don’t you see?” he said. “I know this may sound a little clichéd or ridiculous …” He opened his mouth, popping his fangs so I could see them. “But we
are
vampire. Once you’ve seen the world as we see it—the faces of the people around you growing old and dying—you start to realize the world is a much lonelier place than most can imagine. Like it or not, there is comfort in the faces of those who live as long as you do, those who never die. Brandon and his people were the only family I had after being turned. Yes, I spent those sixty years hating them for what they did to me, but I was far too cowardly to ever do anything to … end it. But when the twentieth century dawned, I felt a sense of hope again. I could tell that new things were on the rise. I had initially been tasked with simply moving the castle to America and hiding it, but even then I could imagine a day like today, when I could look into the sky and see God’s light again for myself …”

“You can’t go outside,” I said. “You’ll burst into flames. Or so I’ve read. In a pamphlet.”

“A pamphlet,” Nicholas said, shuddering. “How perfectly … pedestrian.”

“Yeah, well … we’re on a budget. What can I say?” I thought for a moment. “Unlike you. What’s a place like this cost to build?”

“More than you’ll ever make,” Nicholas said, giving a smile through his sadness. “Even if we gave you several lifetimes to do so.”

The idea of being turned filled me with a mix of dread and wonder, causing me to lapse back into silence. Nicholas went back to surveying his computer screen as image after image blipped by. I needed to get the focus back on Jane.

“Not to sound harsh,” I said, “but even with all this technology at your disposal, you can’t find one blond girl gumming up your works?”

Nicholas’s fingers flew with inhuman speed over the keyboard in front of him. “If we can isolate her in the system, I am hoping to download her into a smaller subsystem or perhaps some form of peripheral device.”

“That’s great,” I said, agitated, “but I can’t have a relationship with a programmable toaster … at least not without some serious burns. I just want my Jane back.”

“You mortals … so impatient,” Nicholas said. “Finding her lost among my masterwork, pulling her out of my systems, isn’t an easy task. Especially when I think someone is sabotaging my efforts to find her. Normally I would have thought I’d have located her by now.”

“Forgive my impatience,” I said, “but I think we mortals get that way probably because
we don’t live forever.
We
die
. It’s easy to get impatient when your days are numbered.”

Nicholas paused to consider this. “Perhaps you have a point, despite it being coated in that modern sarcasm of yours,” he said. “My apologies.”

“I really hoped we had found something on all those ferals escaping,” I said. “I figured there’d be footage of some kind on it.”

“I haven’t gone through all of it yet,” Nicholas said, “but it looks like a good amount of the footage has been compromised thanks to our mysterious saboteur.” The two of us looked at images together for a while, although truthfully they were flashing by far too quickly for me to do anything but catch one out of every twenty. “Oh,” Nicholas said, standing up. “Come with me. I forgot to show you something.”

Nicholas walked off across the control room to a smaller office set to one side full of electronic components lying everywhere along with piles of mail and boxes. He walked over to one particular box that was long and white, the kind used for delivering flowers. He put both his hands on top of it. “You have a package waiting for you.”

Nicholas stepped back from the box and I approached it. It definitely looked like a flower delivery box, all right. A red bow had even been tied around it. Not trusting anything, I moved with caution as I slipped the ribbon off the box.

“Who is it from?” I asked.

Nicholas shrugged. “There’s a card with it,” he said. “Shall I read it?”

“Please,” I said. With shaking fingers, I started to ease the top off the box.

“Very well,” Nicholas said, picking the card up. “ ‘Simon. Missing you. Saw what happened with those icky monsters. Here’s a little something for you.’ ”

The top came loose and I put it off to one side. The box was filled with red roses, long stemmed. I fished around under the paper that lined the box. My hand found what it was hoping for.

I pulled the object free and held it up, smiling.

“It’s a baseball bat,” Nicholas said.

“Affirmative,” I said and took a moment to look it over. It was fancier than the one that had been destroyed by the ferals, covered in silver plating with intricate Celtic knot-work adorning it. Its design was so sleek and customized that I could barely see the seams where I could collapse it down for storage. The grip part had a rubber pad on it that made it easier to hold as well as several buttons along it with a letter assigned to each of them. CDFJLS. “I don’t think this is National Baseball League standard issue, though.”

I looked at the letters for a moment, then, realizing what they were, held the bat away from me. I punched in Jane’s initials. JCF. The bat retracted down automatically with a tiny pneumatic
whoosh
. I punched them in again and the bat shot out to full extension. “Neat.”

I thought of the place we had met, the Sectarian Defense League, and punched in the letters SDL. The end of the handle flipped open, and something shot out of it and off through the door to the far end of the control room. There was a loud
thock
as that something lodged in the wall.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No apologies necessary,” he said with a smile. “I am unharmed.”

I ran out into the control room. A wooden stake was lodged three-quarters of the way into the far wall inches from another bank of computers. I pulled it out and reset it into the handle of the bat. I pushed in the spring mechanism and closed the tiny panel at the end of it. It clicked and locked in place. “Double neat,” I said, marveling at the new instrument of destruction in my hand. “How on earth could Jane do this?”

“Hold on,” Nicholas said, sitting down at the main console again. He punched in a few keystrokes and a list started scrolling down the screen. “This is part of our work-order system for building maintenance and such. I do see a request with our machine shop for the construction of this item from earlier this morning.”

“Wait,” I said. “This thing was created in a couple of hours? I can’t even get a bunch of pens from our supply room without twelve forms and a two-day wait!”

“I assure you,” he said, “our machine shop is quite functional. Most of the raw materials used in the Gibson-Case Center are refined here. If I do say so, my design schematics for this autonomous machine system are quite remarkable.”

“But even with the use of machines,” I said, “it would still take a craftsman days to plan this out.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said with a smile. “Our machine shop is quite literally that—a shop run by machines.”

“No humans?” I asked.

“None.”

I sighed. I was impressed. “That
would
explain the lack of red tape, I suppose.”

I swung the bat around in my hands, loving the balance of it.

“You might want to be careful with that around here,” he said, “considering the company.”

“Oh, right,” I said, stopping. I retracted the bat using the keypad on it and slid it into the empty holster on my belt. “Sorry. I should probably go see Brandon. I know he’s waiting to see how things went with the sample.”

“That,” Nicholas said, “and I suspect he’s still waiting to hear whether you’re going to help us with our book of prophecy or not.”

“We’ll see about that,” I said. “I’m not too keen on the whole idea of prophecies, but I think I understand a bit more of your leader now. Let me get moving.” I patted the bat at my side. “I promise I won’t stake any of you. At least not on purpose.” I started for the doors leading back to the elevators.

“Is that more of your modern sarcasm?” Nicholas said, spinning in his chair as his eyes followed me across the room toward the
Star Trek
doors.

“Something like it,” I said. “Yeah.”

“I like that,” he said. “You remind me of Wren.”

The warmth in his words stopped me in my tracks. I turned back to him. “Great,” I said, giving him a double thumbs-up. “I’ll be sure to let him know in the afterlife. Maybe we can get a cloud together.”

“Sarcasm again,” Nicholas said; then his eyes lit up. “Let me try one … umm, oh! Tell Aidan I said hello and that I hope he’s enjoying my beloved companion Beatriz.” Nicholas looked pleased with himself. “Did I do it right?”

I gave him a pained, halfhearted smile.

“Keep working on it,” I said. I spun around again, the doors opening for me as I walked out of them. “Sarcasm takes
time
to master … and if there’s one thing you vamps got, it’s time.”

When I arrived at Brandon’s chambers at the top of the castle, he was standing by the circle of chairs over by his viewing area. The screen was paused on a shot of Jason Priestley entering the Peach Pit, and Brandon watched me as I crossed the room to him.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” I said.

“Nicholas called ahead,” he said. “Is it true? Have you come to use your powers on the book?”

I walked past him and sat in one of the chairs opposite him by the long-dead fireplace. “I’m not sure yet.”