Better Off Undead: The Bloodhound Files Read online

  “Oh, certainly. Except for the occasional compulsion to bite the heads off kittens, I was entirely the same person.”

  I’m good at sarcasm, Charlie’s mastered the deadpan delivery, but nobody combines the two quite like Gretch. “Right. Anything you miss? Other than being able to stroll past pet store windows with a clear conscience?”

  “I used to quite like a dish my mother made, a soup with lots of garlic. The very thought turns my stomach now, so I can’t say I miss the dish itself … but I miss the idea of it. I miss the enjoyment it used to give me, sitting in front of the fire on a snowy day in London.”

  Her face softens, and for just a second I see the young girl she used to be, living in the same city that Dickens did, maybe even walking down the same streets at the same time.

  I hope it’s okay to ask this. “How did it happen, Gretch? Was it … voluntary?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes, absolutely. I’d thought about the matter long and hard. I think, in fact, it was the winters that decided me—London was never terribly sunny in those days, and giving up a meager amount of sunshine in return for immortality, eternal youth, and a good wage seemed far more attractive than an existence plagued with disease, hunger, and uncertainty—”

  “Wait. A good wage? You were paid to become a pire?”

  “Oh, yes. London was full of recruiters, offering competitive terms. The Royal Blood Bank had just been established and the National Sustenance Act had passed Parliament the previous year; no pire needed worry about starving to death, and employment opportunities abounded. I wound up working for Scotland Yard, myself—but my history is a long and convoluted one, and I doubt its particulars are what you’re after.”

  She pauses to take a sip of her tea. Like everything pires consume, it’s either been magicked to let the caffeine affect her or been cut with blood. I try to picture myself waking up to a nice Colombian-dark-roast-and-O-negative blend in the morning, and can’t quite do it.

  So I consider the alternatives. Life, death, or thropehood. Life is good—or at least preferable—while death is something a cop lives with every day; it’s always part of the equation, always lurking in the background. My attitude has always been that there’s no use worrying about the inevitable, so I decide to stick with that.

  Which leaves the furry option.

  It’s the one I hate the most. I shouldn’t; thropes are a lot closer to baseline human than pires. I wouldn’t have to give up garlic or sunlight, and I even have a pseudo-family willing to embrace me and help me through the rough bits. The worst part of the whole thing is the three nights of the full moon, when all thropes have to transform whether they want to or not, and even that comes with the compensation of the seventy-two-hour monthly party known as Moondays. Really, becoming a thrope should sound like a great deal.

  But it doesn’t. Because it wasn’t my choice. It was something that was done to me against my will, a violation of who and what I am, and I just can’t accept that.

  I won’t.

  “Thanks, Gretch,” I say. “I think I know what I have to do.”

  Three minutes later I’m back in Cassius’s office. “I’ve made my decision,” I say.

  I hope it’s the right one.

  SEVEN

  Which is right when Charlie barges in.

  Charlie is a champion barger. If there happens to be something in his way while he’s barging—like a door, a wall, or another person—that thing often ends up in less-than-pristine condition. Cassius’s door was lucky, but then it’s used to dealing with Charlie and may have had its pristineness fortified.

  “I’m here,” Charlie growls from the doorway. His usually immaculate suit—this one a soft dove gray with narrow lapels—is torn in several places. There are large stains here and there, of a decidedly red hue. And he’s not wearing a hat, which in Charlie’s universe is like walking down the street without any pants.

  “Good,” Cassius says. “As you can see, so is Jace. Stay by her side until further notice.”

  “Right,” Charlie says. He stalks into the room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Geez,” I say. “Get into a tiff with your sewing circle?”

  “There was a discussion with certain elements of the local community.”

  “I can see that. Looks like some pretty sharp verbs were thrown around.”

  “Nouns, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “Table. Mailbox. Refrigerator.”

  “You threw a fridge at someone?”

  “I didn’t say that. There was throwing, yes, and a refrigerator may have been involved. Don’t go jumping to conclusions.”

  “Sorry. Clearly, I was way out of line.”

  Cassius makes a sound halfway between an impatient sigh and an annoyed snort—a snigh, if you will. “Charlie, I’m afraid that until further notice will have to be amended to immediately after Jace and I are finished. Would you mind waiting outside?”

  “Nah. I should really pay a quick visit to the repair department, though. Could use a few patches.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll make sure she’s still here when you get back.”

  Charlie nods, then stomps back out, this time slamming the door a fraction more gently. It’s times like this that remind me that Charlie’s driven by the spiritual essence of a long-dead T. rex, carefully distilled by government shamans from crude oil. Part sandbox, part Jurassic Park—that’s my partner.

  “You were saying?” Cassius says.

  “Yeah. I guess I was.” I feel a sudden wavering of my resolve, which is very out of character and usually pushes me to do something drastic in order to prove it. “I hate that I have to make this decision, but I’m glad that at least I get a choice. The smart thing, it seems to me, would be to hunt Tair down and kill him.”

  “You’d be all right with that?”

  I shake my head. “No. It would make things easier, but I couldn’t just execute him. Anyway, I said that was the smart thing to do, and since when is that my first choice?”

  “Just catching him won’t help your situation, Jace.”

  “I know that. But he wouldn’t be on the loose if it weren’t for me, so I have to try.” I take a deep breath and let it out. “And whether we catch him or not, I’m not going to let what he did to me define me. Not without a fight.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Hell, no. But I don’t have time to be unsure, so let’s get this party started. You good with that?”

  He nods, slowly. “All right. But we need to bolster your immune system first. You’ll need to undress.”

  Sure, nothing weird about getting naked in your boss’s office. I take off my jacket, my socks and shoes, and then my pants, trying very hard to be brisk and professional. When I’m done, I stand there in only my silk top, arms crossed, not embarrassed or uncomfortable at all. I pretend I’m wearing a bikini under a T-shirt and I’m a lifeguard on duty at a beach. A military beach.

  Cassius opens a drawer, pulls out a few things, and places them on top of the desk. A vial, a Japanese flute, a long strand of leather with tiny bones tied to it at regular intervals. The leather goes around my neck, while the vial contains something red and earthy smelling that gets daubed onto my forehead, my stomach, my throat. When that’s done he positions himself a few inches away from each mark and plays a few odd, dissonant notes on the flute.

  I guess that’s it, because he straightens up, puts down the flute, and says, “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  There’s a leather couch in one corner of Cassius’s office; I remember sitting there, wearing nothing but a T-shirt with a panda on it, when I first got to Thropirelem. It’s where Cassius explained to me where I was and why I’d been brought here, and at the end of the explanation I’d thrown up and passed out. Not from the emotional impact of what I was going through, but the physical—being taken from one reality to another had given me a condition called RDT, Reality Dislocation Trauma. An herbal concoction called Urthbone had proven to be an effectiv
e treatment; maybe I’d get lucky again.

  One major difference, though: Last time it had been Dr. Pete who’d cured me. This time, he’s the cause.

  I can hear Cassius telling the NSA switchboard operator to hold all his calls. I lie down on the couch, the leather smooth and cool against the bare skin of my legs. At least the stitches on my thigh have stopped itching. I peel off the white gauze taped over them and see that not only is the wound healed, but the stitches themselves are gone. I find them stuck to the underside of the bandage in a little zigzag pattern.

  “Your body rejected the thread.” Cassius walks over and drops to a squat beside me. “It’s how thrope metabolism handles any foreign object not made of silver.”

  He reaches out with a forefinger. “May I?”

  I nod. He touches the tip of his finger to one end of the pink line that runs down the inside of my thigh like the border of a stocking. “It’s healed almost completely. By morning you won’t even have a scar.”

  “Too bad. I was looking forward to adding it to my collection.”

  “Will you settle for a replacement?” He has the barest trace of a smile on his lips.

  I swallow. “Guess I’ll have to.”

  “I’ll go slow. The initial incisions will sting, but the procedure itself will cause no pain.”

  Incisions. Procedure. He’s trying to make it sound as clinical as possible, but what’s going to happen is he’s going to bite me—with two very long, very sharp fangs—and then drink my blood. He’s going to feed on me, while I lie here half dressed and try not to pass out.

  “Just do it already,” I whisper.

  He takes his tie off first. Doesn’t want to get stains on it, of course. The smart-ass gland in my brain notes this, comes up with at least three good cracks, and seizes up before any of them can reach my suddenly dry mouth.

  His eyes flood with crimson. His incisors lengthen and sharpen. My pulse kicks up a notch, and my back-brain starts screaming about predators and survival and how running away would be a good thing. I ignore it.

  He places one hand on my hipbone, over the hem of the silk blouse I’m wearing. The other goes just above my knee. His hands are as smooth and cool as the leather I’m lying on.

  He leans over and puts his mouth to my skin. His lips are warmer than his hands. I feel two simultaneous sharp jabs, no worse than pricking myself on a rosebush. I gasp anyway.

  A little circle of warmth grows around the bite. Blood, spreading out, stopped by the boundary of his lips. I realize I’m all tensed up, and make a conscious effort to relax. My hands won’t stop trembling.

  When he starts to drink, something happens.

  The warmth pulses out in a ring, up my thigh and down my leg. I look down to make sure I’m not bleeding to death, but all I can see is the top of Cassius’s blond head.

  It’s more than warmth now. There’s a tingle that goes with it, a kind of almost-tickle that’s maddening and pleasurable at the same time. I’ve started to breathe harder, even though I’m doing nothing at all.

  I close my eyes.

  The warmth is radiating through my whole body now. This is all wrong, a voice in my head whispers. Exsanguination is typically accompanied by a feeling of cold, not heat. I tell it to shut up. What I’m feeling isn’t medical, it’s mystical; it’s him, the supernatural equivalent of his DNA, flooding my body.

  But it’s not alone.

  I didn’t feel this way when Tair sliced me open, but the thrope virus is on a lunar cycle while the pire one is obviously more immediate. Now I have both of them in me, and neither one is happy.

  I remember what happened to Roger, the man Stoker killed in front of me by exposing him to both pire and thrope blood and then adding sunlight and silver. Before the rays and the metal killed him, he’d gone into convulsions. One of his eyes had turned blood red, the other bright yellow.

  That doesn’t happen. I can feel the thrope virus waking up, biochemical alarms bellowing that an invasion is under way; a tremor goes through me from scalp to toes. I feel a weird spike of energy at the same time a kind of lethargy settles over me, like I’m about to run a marathon in my sleep. I can’t move, even to open my eyes, though every muscle in my body is tensed for action.

  My senses are going crazy. I can smell the starch in Cassius’s shirt, the polish on his shoes, the ink in the pen in his pocket. The couch is an overpowering burst of tanned animal skin and chemical dye. My mouth is a crazy blend of toothpaste, coffee, and this morning’s cinnamon bun.

  Other senses seem to have shut off completely—crack teams of virus commandos must be blowing up bridges all over my central nervous system. My body is suddenly gone, leaving me floating in a weightless void; my hearing contracts down to the single, steady throb of my own heartbeat.

  My eyes are still closed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see. Vivid bursts of color pinwheel across my vision, brilliant reds and yellows like the color of Roger’s eyes before he died. Some kind of symbolic representation of the battle going on, though it doesn’t make any sense—no neat little lines of soldiers fighting each other for possession of a lung, a foot, an endocrine gland.

  But when I focus on the red, I can feel Cassius.

  Not his lips on my thigh; that’s as far away as the rest of my body. No, I can feel him, his … I don’t know, his consciousness, his essence.

  His soul.

  The more I focus on the red, the more the yellow fades into the background. The explosions of color get a little more solid, coalescing into multiple radiating networks of lines, like a thousand scarlet spiderwebs hanging in space, branching in every direction. The longer I look, the more intricate and detailed the connections become, until I finally recognize what I’m seeing: his mind. Millions and billions of interconnected neurons, the memories and thoughts and feelings of centuries of existence, spread out like a cosmic skein of life. I’m a bug that’s blundered into the headquarters of the world’s most overachieving arachnid.

  But that’s not how it feels, not at all. It feels alive.

  It’s his emotions that come through the strongest. They pulse through the network in waves, one after the other, each with its own flavor. The sharp, metallic taste of aggression; the cold electricity of logic. The mind-set of a commander, one who’s devoting all his attention to a military campaign.

  There are other feelings, too, buried deeper in the web but just as strong. Without knowing how I’m doing it, I reach out and touch them.

  A surge of heat brings my body back into existence. I can feel every inch of my skin and everything it’s touching: the silkiness of my blouse, the grip of my underwear, the tension of the couch pushing back against my weight.

  And Cassius’s mouth on my thigh. I know the shape and texture of his lips as intimately as if they were crushed to my own. I feel the rhythmic pulse of his throat as he drinks. And I feel the growing insistence of his need.

  When Dr. Pete treated my RDT, he warned me that there might be side effects—specifically, that the Urthbone I was taking might heighten my empathy. That turned out to be true, so much so that I stopped taking it; I just couldn’t handle being constantly bombarded by other people’s emotions. But before I quit, I did develop some skill in probing what other people felt—especially if they were trying to hide something.

  Like Cassius is doing right now.

  It’s there, a few layers down, buried somewhere in the scarlet thicket of his mind. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to dwell on Cassius’s bloodlust, maybe it’s because I can’t stop being a cop; whatever the reason, I just have to know what’s in there. I reach out again—farther, deeper.

  I don’t get very far. He’s had a long time to build his defenses, and I’m just an intruder outside the castle walls with a rickety ladder. But he’s distracted and I’m better at this than he thinks, so I actually get the briefest glimpse of what’s behind the curtain.

  Pain. That’s it, that’s all I can tell. A fleeting sensation of something immen
se and suffering, like a giant squid washed up on the beach and dying by inches. Or maybe the kind of creature that would eat giant squids like calamari.

  His response is immediate. Fury surges through the network, overriding everything else—everything but the desire. That amps up as well, hunger and anger in a feedback loop of bloodlust.

  My leg starts to feel cold.

  I don’t think he even realizes what he’s doing. I can feel my life rushing out of my femoral artery and down his throat, and my head is spinning and I can’t think straight. If he doesn’t stop he’s going to kill me.

  No. No, he’s not.

  It’s the thrope infection that saves me. It wants to survive as much as I do, and it’s not going to let me just give up and get downed like a plasma shooter. I grab his blond, surfer-boy hairstyle in both hands and yank on his head as hard as I can, trying to break the seal and his concentration. It doesn’t work; he’s stuck on me like a leech.

  So I throw my head back and howl.

  That gets his attention. Probably the attention of everyone else in the office, too, but I’ve got other things to worry about than my reputation. He looks up, blood on his mouth, and hisses at me.

  I growl back.

  It’s a surreal moment, but it doesn’t last. He comes back to himself with a visible exertion of will, his fangs receding and his eyes returning to their normal deep blue. I stare at him, panting like we just went three rounds in the ring instead of three minutes on a couch. Or maybe it was thirty minutes—I’m a little hazy on that point.

  “My … apologies,” Cassius says. He gets to his feet in one swift, easy movement. “I didn’t expect that.”

  I get my breathing under control. “That?” I manage. “That? Just what the hell was … that?” I sit up, hugging myself. Funny, I expected to feel cold, but instead I’m all sweaty.

  “Your immune system—it’s been altered by the Urthbone you used to treat your RDT. I had thought you were fully acclimated, but I didn’t realize—” He breaks off and shakes his head. “I’m sorry. Battling your own defenses as well as the thrope virus was more difficult than I’d imagined. My instincts kicked in.”