Charming (21 page)

It’s probably not a literal story. It’s probably a teaching tale. And the moral it teaches is: don’t trust nagas when they’re obsessed with getting something.

“I want your oath,” Sig repeated.

“An oath made under duress is not binding,” he forced out. “Everyone knows that.”

I almost admired his tenacity.

“Humans know that,” she corrected. “I want your oath. Provided that satisfies John.”

“It doesn’t,” I said. “But I’m willing to trust your judgment.” The truth was, Parth was the only one I could see keeping Kimi quiet without killing her, and I wasn’t willing to go there. Yet.

“I appreciate that,” Sig said tonelessly.

“I can’t think with this pain in my—” Parth started to say, and Sig pulled the chains around his throat tight.

“I’m going to shut you in the furnace now,” she told Parth. Behind Sig, I saw Molly’s mouth open as if to protest, then shut again.

Sig released the chain. Somehow her voice carried over Parth’s gasping. “Last chance, Parth. I’m not kidding.”

She wasn’t. Or if she was, she was the best bluffer I’d ever seen.

He laid his head back against the tray. “I promise—” he began.

“Swear by Vasuki,” I interrupted. “Manasa too, and Apam Napat while you’re at it. In Hindi.”

Even under those circumstances, Parth gave me a startled look.

I speak pretty serviceable Hindi, but my language skills weren’t up to saying, “Yeah, that’s right, bitch,” without losing the context in translation. I still gave it a good try.

16

I
t was some time before we finally got our act together enough to actually have the conversation we’d come for in the first place. The atmosphere wasn’t genial, but once freed and cleaned up and having reassured Kimi with a lot of stroking and petting, Parth seemed to take Sig’s admonition about having violated the rules of hospitality to heart. He pointedly inquired after our needs at regular intervals, though his manner couldn’t be described as warm while he did so.

We were sitting in the room full of Papasan chairs and meditation cushions. Kimi was serving tea, which I smelled very carefully before sipping. Parth was drinking something that smelled like hot frog. I was wearing a bathrobe while my jacket and jeans and socks and underwear rotated in a dryer somewhere. The shirt with poison blood on it had gone into the furnace. I still had the Ruger and the knife holstered to my body, though.

Sig was the only person who seemed completely relaxed, smearing caviar on an unbroken graham cracker sheet. “You didn’t just lure us over here for this dumbass stunt, did you,
Parth? I mean, you do actually have some information that can help us track down this Anne Marie Padgett, right?”

A number of responses flickered behind his dark eyes, but he finally looked at me ruefully, shook his head, and uttered a dry bitter laugh. “Oh yes.”

The
oh
worried me. People don’t say
oh
like that unless the crap has gotten truly deep in a way that nobody has anticipated.

“OK,” I said. “Why are you smiling like that?”

“Because I know what kinds of things Anne Marie has been doing online besides researching blood-related topics,” Parth said. “And you aren’t going to like them.”

Sig indulged him. “What?”

“She’s been sending e-mails to the Netherkind,” Parth announced, patting a stack of printouts on a small table next to him. It was a fairly impressive pile.

If this was supposed to be a big dramatic moment, I wasn’t feeling it. “I’ve never heard of any monsters called the Netherkind,” I admitted. This was a somewhat difficult confession to make.

“I have,” Molly said chirpily.

Sig smiled faintly. “They’re not real monsters, John. They’re one of those movements for vampire wannabes. If you’d spent any time in big cities recently, you probably would have seen some of their hangouts.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like those people who say they have human bodies reincarnated with the souls of vampires or something like that?”

“Like them,” Sig affirmed. “But the Netherkind have taken it to the point of religion. They believe that if they try to live their lives by vampire values, vampires will come along and make them immortal.”

“What the hell are vampire values?” I demanded. “Besides an oxymoron.”

Sig rolled her eyes. “The usual clichés.”

“Avoiding sunlight?” I guessed. “Dressing in black? Drinking blood?”

“Yes.” Sig sighed. “Those. Promiscuity, S and M, anarchy, and bad taste in music too.”

Parth picked up the conversation smoothly. “As of two weeks ago, Anne Marie was negotiating with several of them.”

“Negotiating for what?” Sig asked suspiciously.

“With what?” I asked, equally suspiciously.

“She was offering to transform some of them into real vampires for money and allegiance,” Parth said with a certain malicious glee. “Lots of money by her standards. Ten thousand dollars.”

I leaned forward and pulled an e-mail out of the stack at random, then sat back in my chair staring at it. It was the first tangible proof that our smart vampire was really out there, that Anne Marie Padgett had become a thing of terror and need. Beneath the to and from signifiers and the date, the e-mail read:

Dylan.

Every rebirth requires two things: faith and sacrifice. You have crawled through this life mocked and afraid, and the only thing that has kept you going is a sense that somewhere, somehow, a greater destiny was calling you. The one great truth is that this world is cruel and ugly, and only strength can make it beautiful. Deep inside you know this. The world has told you that wanting power is something to be ashamed of, but you know in your soul that being a lamb will not lead to salvation. Your destiny is to be a tiger. I will have you, Dylan. You will serve me, and I will set you free. We will not walk on water. We will dance on the bodies of your enemies and drink their blood.

The e-mail wasn’t signed, and Anne Marie had deleted whatever messages had preceded it. Presumably the prior dialogues were in Parth’s stack.

“They all have the same pseudo-religious imagery and anger.” Parth still seemed to be enjoying himself. “They all appeal to a need to belong. For desperate souls with no sense of irony or awareness of cliché, it’s a potent mix.”

“I suppose these Netherkind would be more inclined to believe her than your average citizen,” I said reluctantly. Some of them would be posers or goths trying to get laid, of course, but the fanatical and the emotionally disturbed and the artistic have always been less susceptible to the influence of the Pax.

“As I said, they were in the middle of negotiations,” Parth said. “Protestations, conflicting claims about who the real vampire was, demands of proof. Some of it was quite amusing.”

“And this stopped a few weeks ago?” Sig asked.

Parth agreed that it had.

Sig looked at me. “She created a new e-mail address when she left the computer in Steve Ellison’s house behind. I’m thinking Steve Ellison is the one who made her into a vampire, and Anne Marie was trailing along in his group until she realized he was an idiot and began to make plans of her own.”

“But you have the e-mail addresses of the people she was talking to,” I said to Parth. “You can hack into those people’s accounts. Find their names. Find out what new e-mail tag she’s using to contact them. Get their cell phone numbers and addresses.”

He sipped from the frog broth. “I have and I am. This Anne Marie seems to require that her recruits go off the grid as part of their… contract. At least eight of the people she was in contact with have not used their cell phones or Internet services for weeks. I tracked the location of a few of her recruits’ cell
phones and discovered that they are traveling interstate all over this country in different directions, often stopping at warehouses and truck stops.”

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. I had been getting a lot of exercise and stress and not much sleep. “You’re saying she’s using burner phones and getting rid of her followers’ cell phones by hiding them on trucks or buses?”

Parth agreed. “And continually abandoning e-mail addresses and creating new accounts as well. Whatever her ultimate goal, this young woman obviously expects to be hunted at some point. You should find that ominous.”

“But she’s still just an adolescent,” I nudged. “And you’re how many years old?”

He gave me a hooded stare. “You understand that I have only been searching for twenty-four hours and have other interests.”

“Will you keep looking?” Sig asked gently.

Parth didn’t answer again for some time, and we let him mull that one over. I almost regretted stabbing a knife into his ear. Or I wanted to do it again. I wasn’t sure which.

“I suppose I will,” he said eventually. “Even without Stanislav’s warning, I don’t like how events are shaping up around this girl. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you learn that big wheels turn on small axles.”

He looked at me significantly as he said this. Or perhaps I should say
sssssignificantly
. I ignored the implication.

“What was the other thing?” I reminded him. “You said she was doing
things
online. Things plural.”

“I went into her system commands,” Parth acknowledged. “She’s been printing off every article about the making of Vietnamese tunnel networks that she can find.”

Oh.

17

I
t had been the second long night in a row, and I was a little surprised when Sig got out of Molly’s car at Rigby’s.

“I need a cup of coffee,” she said, though the bar was obviously closed.

“And Molly doesn’t?” I wondered, looking through the driver’s window. Molly waved a mitten at me tentatively.

“We need to talk,” Sig admitted. “I’ve been waiting for the right time, but I don’t think there’s going to be a better one.”

I didn’t accept this information happily, but I didn’t say anything either. I’d been waiting for some kind of ax to fall ever since Sig first used my real name. My movements were a little stiff as I let us into Rigby’s… and not from physical soreness. We stayed silent while I let myself behind the bar and made some coffee. My movements became more and more rapid as the numbness wore off, until I was yanking cherry danishes out of the mini-fridge angrily and clattering the plates around.