Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (35 page)

“Well, you found me. Give me a lift, huh?”

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Five minutes later I’m back at the B and B, where Cassius and Charlie are waiting, along with a swarm of agents, all in period clothes. Too bad the bait didn’t have the sense to stay in the trap and wait.

“What the hell,” I say, stalking up to Cassius. “I stalled her as long as I could. Where were you guys?”

“Are you all right?” Cassius says.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Got knocked over when she blew up the car. Pretty sure I put a bullet in her shoulder before she vanished, though.”

“She blacked us out,” Cassius says. “Some kind of large-scale glamour, affected the whole town. It was like you fell off the planet.”

“Well, I’m back, now. Didn’t do too well on the landing, though.”

A large and extremely strong hand grips the back of my neck.

“Uh-huh,” Charlie says. “When we first met, what did I tell you was the politically correct term for a golem?”

And now my brain decides to shut up.

“Look, it really is me,” I say. “Just give me a second to think, dammit—”

“Sure. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. If Selkie could mystically black out a whole town, doing a glamour-based impression of another human probably wouldn’t be that hard, would it?”

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“Thanks a lot, beach-breath. Let’s see you come up with a piece of meaningless trivia while your boulder-brained partner cuts off your oxygen supply—”

He lets go. “It’s her.”

I turn around and glare at him. “Mineral-American! I told you I’d get it, you pebbleheaded pigeon attractor—”

“You use a lot of alliteration when you’re upset, have you noticed that?”

“Jace,” Cassius interrupts. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing new. She wanted me to join her and Stoker, I was betraying the human race, yadda yadda yadda. And she had some kind of magic lie detector, so I couldn’t just bullshit her. Things went downhill from there.”

Cassius stares at me. “I’m amazed you’re still alive, frankly.”

“Thank Han Solo,” I said. “I shot first.”

That gets me a blank stare, but I don’t really care. A medic comes over and takes a look at my leg, which is bleeding but not broken.

“You were lucky,” the medic says.

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s me.”

We leave town immediately. No point in staying, and I think Cassius wants to get me as far away from the Purebloods as possible. I kind of feel the same way.

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On the way back to Seattle, I keep to myself. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do before they debrief me.

I got into law enforcement for a pretty simple reason: I was angry. It seemed to me that the world had too many bad people in it, and I wanted to A) understand why they were the way they were and B) stop them. Not fix them, just stop them—ergo, a criminal profiler as opposed to a psychiatrist.

Ultimately, I suppose I wanted to make the world a better place. Or at least make the ones who made the world a worse place pay a price for it. Either way, I thought I recognized the difference between right and wrong, and I was pretty determined to kick wrong’s ass.

Here, the whole world is wrong. So much so that it’s completely replaced right, and now the people I should be protecting are the people I’m trying to stop.

I hadn’t been completely truthful with Cassius. Maureen Selkie didn’t tell me exactly what Stoker was going to do—but she had told me what the pires had done, and why they’d done it. The knowledge was sitting in my head like a big malignant tumor, demanding that I do something about it. I had to do something, that was for sure—I just didn’t know what.

We go straight from the airport to the NSA building and Cassius’ office. Gretchen and Charlie don’t come along—Cassius wants to talk to me alone.

I don’t let him get behind his desk—he’s going to have to deal with me on his feet this time. I put a hand on his shoulder as soon as the door closes and say, “Before you start asking questions, I have a few of my own.”

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He turns around and faces me. His expression is smooth, unreadable, all his defenses up. I’m looking at several centuries’ worth of poker face, and it’s like staring at something carved in stone. Even Charlie would be impressed.

“Go ahead.”

“Tell me about HPLC.”

No hesitation at all. He’s anticipated this conversation and he’s prepared for it. “High Power Level Craft. The strongest and most dangerous kind of magic, restricted to government use only. It’s the kind of magic we used to bring you here.”

“At what cost?”

“A life. A human life, in fact—a man named Clarence Mills. Multiple rapist and child killer, sentenced to death. The Elder Gods literally don’t give a damn about the condition of someone’s soul—a monster will do as well as a virgin.”

I nod. “Okay. How is it that vampires can conceive?”

“It’s not that complicated, actually. The spell involved transfers—”

“I know about the process. Where did this spell come from?”

And for the first time he hesitates, just slightly. “I’m not a shaman; I don’t know the details—”

“You’re lying. Don’t do it again.”

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He stops, considering. He wants to know exactly how much I know, and suddenly I’m sick of all the fencing back and forth. “I know exactly how it works, okay? Selkie told me. The deal you made, the price you paid. The whole rotten, stinking thing.”

He sighs. I never realized just how theatrical a gesture that is in someone who doesn’t need to breathe. “We had no choice, Jace. For pires to survive as a race, we had to be able to reproduce. Otherwise, the thropes would simply outnumber us. That’s why the official policy of the Axis nations in World War Two was to slaughter all humans—if they could do that, it didn’t matter in the long run who won on the battlefield.”

“The plague at the end of the war. It wasn’t Hitler’s sorcerers that created that, was it?”

“No. They were ours.” He shakes his head. “You have to understand, Jace—we needed a global metaphysical shift. Do you know how much power something like that takes?

We were, essentially, rewriting a supernatural law; the only way to do that was with extradimensional assistance.”

“And you killed six million people to do it!”

He stares at me, and slowly the mask drops away. No defiance, no brittle defensiveness, no denial. It’s the face of a man who’s done something terrible, and has been staring that fact in the face for a very long time. He hasn’t come to peace with it; he’s simply accepted the horror and forced himself to live with it. “Yes,” he says, and his voice is as hollow as an empty grave.

Mine isn’t. I feel like I’m choking on the anger of every one of those corpses. “On my world, it was concentration camps. Gas chambers, mass graves. But not here—here people just got sick and dropped dead. A disease so virulent you had to burn the bodies.”

He says nothing. Looking into his eyes, I can almost feel sorry for him. Almost.
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“Except they weren’t dead.”

“No. No, they weren’t.”

“And all the crematoriums the government set up, they were more than that. They were altars. Altars to that—that thing you made a deal with.”

“Its name is Shub-Niggurath. An ancient fertility god, sometimes called the Goat with a Thousand Young. It demanded sacrifices that were . . . aware.”

I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around this. Six million people, paralyzed but still conscious, and burned alive. It made the Nazis on my world almost seem merciful.

“So Selkie told you what we had to do. Did she tell you what they were going to do in return?” He sounds a little more like his old self now, but still grim and resigned.

“Of course not. They want me to switch sides, but they’re not stupid. Unlike me.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“No? I’m working for a genocidal government, betraying my own species, and for what?

The chance to run away. Not power, not riches, just a ticket back to Kansas and good old Auntie Em. Who cares about all the dead Munchkins I’m leaving behind, right? Not my world, not my problem, just give me my thirty pieces of silver and I’ll get out of Dodge.”

“Jace. You aren’t a traitor. You’re a savior.”

“What?”

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“What we did was monstrous, but we’re no different than any other species fighting for survival. Every pire child born since then, every new pire life, has been a direct result of that. Those people have a right to live, too. I may be a monster, but they are not.”

“No. Except for the ones who want the remaining humans turned into cattle.”

“That’s not going to happen. Regardless of what Selkie may have told you, the Pureblood movement is a small, radical fringe element—”

“I’ll verify that for myself, if you don’t mind. Your credibility isn’t real high at the moment.”

“I meant what I said about you being a savior. I don’t know what Stoker has planned, but I know it involves HPLC. He stole an artifact from the McMurdo Station, one that could conceivably be used to contact an Elder God. These are beings that have the power to obliterate the planet, Jace. That might be exactly what Stoker is planning to do—unless you help us stop him.”

This is what it all comes down to. Save a planet from a madman, or condemn everyone on it to Hell for the crimes they’ve committed. My head feels like it’s going to explode and save me the trouble of making a decision.

“I’m sorry to put you in this position,” he says. “None of this is fair—not what we did to them, not what we’ve done to you. But this isn’t about fairness. It’s about life. No matter what you may think of the decisions we’ve made, it was always in the name of life. Ultimately, Stoker is on the other side of that equation. I don’t believe you are.”

“You think you know me, don’t you? You think you can just play me like a goddamn banjo.”

“That’s not—”

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“How do you feel about me, Cassius? What am I to you, exactly?”

We’ve been having this whole conversation on our feet, and now I step closer to him, get right into his personal space. His pupils dilate and he tenses up, more uncomfortable than I might have expected.

“You’re—” He stops, and looks a little angry. That’s good; that’s honest. He’s mad at himself for not knowing the answer, mad at me for asking it.

“We had a moment, back in that bar in Montana. Was that real, or just more manipulation?”

“I wasn’t trying to manipulate you.”

“That’s too bad.”

He frowns. “I don’t understand.” I get the feeling it’s a phrase he doesn’t use very often.

“If you were, I could write you off completely. But, crazy as it sounds, I think you have some genuine feelings for me. I just don’t know what that means, or where I rank in terms of importance. Probably not very high.”

“There are bigger issues at stake.”

My laugh has more than a little bitterness in it. “I can’t believe a world half-full of vampires still uses that phrase.” I step back, then head for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Home. I want a long, hot bath, a cold, stiff drink, and some solitude. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

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What I said about what I wanted was true. What I told him about where I was going wasn’t.

There’s a technique profilers use called geographic profiling. Simply put, it uses data about where a killer strikes to figure out where he lives or works. In a global case like this, it wasn’t very useful—but something Cassius had said had gotten me thinking about the killings in geographic terms.

A global metaphysical shift, he’d said. On a map, the killings are widely spaced and with no clear pattern. But on a globe, they form an arc: an arc that begins at the bottom of the world and curves around to the top. The distances between each killing aren’t exact, but they still form a basic pattern. Following it won’t give me the exact spot of the next murder, only a general area hundreds of square miles in size—but that area fell in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where there is only one significant landmass for several thousand miles.

Easter Island.

I don’t go home. I catch a cab to the airport and use the forged passport Selkie’s given me to book a flight to Chile. I do some research at an Internet terminal and some shopping for supplies at the duty-free. I have no trouble getting my gun through security, but my scythes have to go in my packed luggage.

It’s a long trip, fifteen hours in the air, every minute of it spent wondering if I’m doing the right thing. I’m now officially off the reservation, in intelligence terms. I didn’t agree to join them and Selkie didn’t reveal their plans, but I did accept her offer of some resources in case I change my mind. She told me I’ll be able to mask my trail using a spell attached to the passport itself, but I’m not so sure. Fifteen hours is forever in the intelligence community, and I’ll have Gretchen’s team scouring the planet for me. If I
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