Dying Bites: The Bloodhound Files-1 (8 page)

THREE

The inside of the NSA jet looks more like a corporate Lear than a government transport: rich walnut paneling in the main cabin, onboard galley, butter-soft leather seats that recline all the way down. I’d expected Cassius to need some convincing, but he’d just nodded and told me the jet was already prepped; thinking back on it, I realize the reason I was probably zapped to Seattle in the first place was because of its position on the Pacific Rim—Cassius was thinking two steps ahead. When I mention that to Gretchen, she just grins and shakes her head. “Only two steps? My dear, Cassius was thinking two steps ahead when people still considered steam engines to be the epitome of high technology. Now he thinks in terms of the entire dance, not just the first few movements.”

Gretchen doesn’t come with us, but Cassius assures me she’ll be more valuable collating intelligence at HQ than in the field. I’m a little disappointed; she has the kind of
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sharp, ironic wit that the British do better than anyone else, polished to a fine edge by what must be decades of use. She reminds me a little of a predatory Mary Poppins.

Who will be accompanying Eisfanger, Charlie, and me is our Japanese liaison, a lycanthrope already on the plane when we arrive. He quickly rises from his seat to greet us, an Asian man wearing a black business suit with a thin black tie. “Hello,” he says, bowing his head gently. “I am Kamakura Tanaka.”

Tanaka is elegant in that way certain Japanese men are, his features sharp but delicate, his jet-black hair worn long but pulled back and fastened behind his head with a clip. He reminds me immediately of a praying mantis, alert and hungry.

I bow back. “Thank you. I’m Special Agent Jace Valchek, and these are my colleagues Charlie Aleph and Damon Eisfanger.” The forensic animist bows, a little too deeply, and Charlie touches the brim of his fedora with a shiny black forefinger.

“I understand that you wish to see the crime site as quickly as possible,” Tanaka says. “I have arranged transportation on the other end, and I will be accompanying you. Your luggage will be taken care of, as well.” About all I have is the overnight bag Gretchen gave me before we left, my laptop under one arm and my gun in my pocket, but I don’t tell Tanaka that.

The plane is laid out with several seats facing each other near the tail and a small galley and individual cabins up front. Tanaka and I take seats opposite each other, while Eisfanger stows his luggage in a cabin and Charlie heads for the cockpit—could be he knows the pilot, or maybe he’s just reconnoitering.

Tanaka studies me frankly as the plane begins to taxi; maybe he’s never seen a real, live human before.

“Got something stuck in my teeth?” I ask.

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“No. Forgive my curiosity. I have never met someone from . . . another place before.”

Ah. So that’s it. “Cassius told you, huh? Funny, I thought it’d be a bigger secret than that.”

He smiles. “It is. But David and I are old friends, and he knows I can do my job more effectively if I understand the situation—as can you. Please feel free to ask me anything, about the case or the world around you. I will do my best to provide answers.”

“All right. What’s your official status in the investigation? You work for the NSA, local police, what?”

“I am the official security liaison between your NSA and the Nipponese Shinto Investigative Branch. Our agencies perform similar functions in each of our respective countries.”

“Not my country. . . .”

He nods his head in acquiescence. “I was about to eat. Would you care to join me?”

I notice for the first time he has a tray of nigirizushi in front of him on the low table between us. “Are you going to tell me the Batplane has its own sushi chef, too?”

“I’m afraid not. I obtained this from the airport concourse before you arrived. I hope the food is amenable?”

“I’m a vegetarian, but sushi is the exception to the rule.” I’ve already picked up chopsticks and grabbed a slab of glistening tuna on rice. I pour some soy sauce into a little ceramic bowl with one hand while I stuff the fish into my face with the other. It turns out I’m pretty damn hungry.

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Tanaka is staring at me with an unreadable expression on his face, but the Urthbone tells me exactly what he’s feeling: disbelief.

“What?” I say around a mouthful of raw heaven. “My table manners bother you?”

“No, it’s what you said. You . . . you are a vegetarian? Does that mean what I think?”

“Well, it doesn’t mean that I think God looks like a head of broccoli.” I chew and swallow. “It means I don’t eat meat—with the exception of anything I can add wasabi to.” I grab a big green chunk of it with my chopsticks and drop it in my saucer of soy.

“You must consume a great deal of fish.”

I peck at the wasabi with the chopsticks, mashing it into the sauce. “Not really. I get most of my proteins from tofu, beans, dairy, and eggs.”

He shakes his head. “That seems very . . . alien to me.”

“I suppose it would.”

“Why do you deny yourself meat?”

I dab another piece of nigirizushi in my wasabi and soy. “I’m not denying myself anything. I’m choosing not to kill another being to fill my stomach.”

“But . . . that is their purpose, is it not?”

I pop the piece in my mouth. “Depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? If you think the planet and everything on it is here for your own personal use, then I guess the pain and
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suffering of other living beings doesn’t matter much. But where I come from, we look at things differently—or we’re starting to, anyway.”

“So no one consumes meat where you are from?”

“No, plenty of people do. I’m just not one of them.”

“Without the natural cycle of predator and prey, the natural world becomes unbalanced.”

“Sure. But that balance also gets thrown out of whack if one side of the equation becomes too dominant. If everybody eats beef, cattle need lots of room to graze. Forests get cut down to make pasture. Instead of trees absorbing carbon dioxide to make oxygen, we get cows absorbing grass to make methane. I don’t know about thropes, but I’d rather breathe air than cattle farts.”

He considers this. “That is a very Eastern way of looking at things. Most Americans I know do not think like this.”

“Well, most of the Americans you know probably aren’t from a parallel dimension.”

“That is true.”

The food is making me feel better, a little less culture-shocked. Strangely, it’s also making the Urthbone stronger; I can feel Tanaka’s emotions like an undercurrent in my own mind. It’s a bit like being drunk, when your own emotions seem bigger and more important than they are usually; I decide that now’s a good time to try to refine the effect, see if I can make it work for me. I try to focus on Tanaka’s emotions as opposed to my own, and find it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

There’s just a touch of worry, but hardly any; he’s good at his job and knows it. Confident, but not arrogant. And there’s something else, something stronger,
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underneath that—it must be his lycanthrope nature, the wild part of him that he keeps in check. I close my eyes, pretending to enjoy a particularly succulent prawn, and probe the feeling like an invisible tongue searching for a sore tooth.

The result, though, isn’t a jab of pain in my mouth—it’s a burst of another feeling entirely, and a lot farther south. Warmth spreads through my belly and groin, and the smell and taste of the food is suddenly much stronger. I breathe in sharply, almost inhaling half my ebi roll, and cough, spewing grains of sticky rice and bits of shrimp meat all over the table. Tanaka leans forward, suddenly concerned.

“Are you all right?” He lays a hand on mine, and the feeling of his warm skin against my own makes me a little dizzy on top of the coughing fit.

“Fine,” I manage to choke out, and pull my hand back.

I get my share of male attention. I stand five eight, do a hundred crunches a day and have the abs to prove it. I’ve been told I have the neckline of a goddess, though nobody ever says which one. My hair is long, very black, and full, while my features tend more toward the Slavic definition of beauty than North American. I don’t put on a mini skirt unless I mean it, but when I do I can cause car accidents.

But nobody’s ever responded the way Tanaka did.

It wasn’t just the intensity of his lust that I felt; it was the depth. That’s the only way I can put it. All men have that automatic hindbrain trigger that fires whenever they see a beautiful woman, but if you could decode that signal and put it into words it would just come out as “want sex now!” in a demanding, Homer Simpsonesque voice.

Tanaka’s signal was more like Barry White crooning in my ear. “Hey, baby. I want you. I want you bad. I want you all the way, every inch of you, inside and out. I don’t care how
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long it takes; I don’t care what I have to give up to get it. I’ll do anything, to anyone, just for the chance of spending one minute naked with you. Oooh, baby . . .”

There was more than just desire in that burst of emotion. There was patience, and yearning. There was fascination, and hunger. And most of all, there was this tremendous focus, as if I were the last woman on Earth and he’d just gotten out of prison.

“You have some prawn in your hair,” he says.

“Uh, thanks,” I stammer. What the hell was that? Did this guy just gobble a handful of Viagra, or whatever the werewolf equivalent is?

An explanation occurs to me, but I’m a little too rattled to be subtle about confirming it.

“So. You’re a lycanthrope. Don’t know a lot about you people. Are you more like wolves or humans?”

“That is a matter of much debate. Most consider themselves enhanced humans.”

“Enhanced, right.” I try desperately to push away the image that comes to mind. “Are you—I mean, is there any downside to that? Disadvantages?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You know, biological stuff. Like having to shave hard-to-reach areas, or midnight cravings for rabbit, or . . . or certain times of the year making you, uh, behave differently.”

“Yes, of course. Lycanthropes celebrate their heritage every lunar cycle with the Moondays festival. It’s quite the celebration—”

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“Do you go into heat?” I blurt out.

There’s an endless moment of silence as he considers his response and I wait for the Earth to swallow me up—unlikely, since we’re actually in the air by now. Strangely, I don’t feel nearly as embarrassed as I should; Tanaka certainly isn’t, and his calm amusement seems to be dampening my own sense of discomfort. The lust is still there, but it’s not nearly as intense as when we touched.

“Ah. Not as such, no. The tides of the female body, though, are still tied to the moon, much as they always have been. And the males of our kind are . . .”

He hesitates. He meets my eyes. Another surge goes through me, nearly as strong as the last.

“Civilized,” he says, “but still wild at heart.”

I smile weakly, and change the subject.

After that I retreat to a far corner and spend most of the flight fiddling with the cell phone Eisfanger gave me before we took off and reviewing materials on my laptop. Tanaka leaves me alone; I don’t know if he’s sensitive to my mood—God, I hope not—or if it’s just some Japanese protocol thing, but I’m grateful for the solitude. Eisfanger’s doing something strange with chanting and incense in his cabin, while Charlie’s disappeared into the cockpit.

There’s a lot of data to go over, including the recordings of the two killings the killer made and posted to the Internet. Gretchen’s working on that angle, but she told me before we left that she isn’t having much luck. “He’s using magic to cover his tracks,”

she said. “Fox virus, looks like. Damn thing keeps doubling back over its own trail.”

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I watch the recordings, over and over. The first one begins with a simple wire cage, maybe fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and six feet high, against a backdrop so white and featureless, it looks artificial. It’s lit by a single bright spotlight behind the camera that throws sharp-edged jet-black shadows on the snow. A chain-link barrier divides the cage in two; one side holds five snarling, barking huskies, their silvered fangs giving them an alien, otherworldly appearance. The other contains the victim.

I freeze the image and study him. According to the file, he’s an African-American vampire named Abraham Porter. He looks like he’s about forty, balding, with broad shoulders and a bit of a paunch. The way he’s dressed suggests late fall in Maine, but he doesn’t seem cold. No breath puffs out of his mouth, either, adding to the illusion; I have to remind myself that I’m looking at a scene where the mercury was somewhere around fifty degrees below zero.

The look on Porter’s face is just as savage as the dogs; his fangs are extended, his eyes bloodred. I wonder how a human being managed to get him into the cage—brute strength seems unlikely. Could a vampire be drugged? I didn’t think so, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe it was more magic.