Unbitten (29 page)

The two men looked at each other, and nodded agreement. The
problem, of course, was how to proceed without startling
their quarry. And there was a possible necessity to move
quickly, since, as Tristan reminded himself, the only two
options were not death and happily ever after. Callie
Armstrong could be somewhere in the middle, needing their
help, and needing it now.

David galloped down the staircase, feeling as though he
were flying, leaping seven or eight stairs at a time,
laughing so loud it hurt his ears. When he got to the
bottom he stumbled again, catching himself on the banister.

So this is “drunk,” he thought. No wonder
humans like it! He gleefully sailed out into the night, on
his way to the lab, to share his conviviality with his
brother.

Henri was in the back room where he worked with chemicals.
He was wearing a protective lab coat, engaged in a
particularly sensitive operation involving pouring a minute
quantity of a liquid painstakingly distilled, drop by drop,
into another liquid that at the moment had billows of
fearsome black smoke pouring off the top.

He heard the banging on the door and rolled his eyes.
Pierre again, he assumed, putting down the beaker and
peeling off his latex gloves. He was not prepared at all to
see David when he opened the door, lounging in the doorway
like a prostitute, his pants half unbuttoned, with a most
un-Davidlike expression on his face.

“What is the matter?” Henri asked, grabbing him
by the lapels and dragging him inside.

David threw his head back and laughed. “Jo says
I’m drunk!” he shouted.

Both brothers put their hands over their ears.

“You are yelling!” said Henri in amazement.
Vampires, because of their noise sensitivity, are not
yellers. They get angry, excited, scared, and all the other
states that could lead a human to yell, but a
vampire’s voice almost never rises above a certain
level, simply out of self-protection.

“I don’t know why,” said David, giggling.

Henri leaned close to David and inhaled through his nose.
“You do smell of alcohol,” he said. “Were
you drinking wine at dinner? It smells like a red, a
pinot noir
?”

“A bit,” answered David. “Maybe a glass.
But…” he dissolved into giggling again, as he
did a little dance step in the middle of the lab,
“…what I drank at dinner doesn’t matter.
It’s what I drank after dinner that has put me in
this happy, happy state of inebriation. Henri! I want you
to try it too!”

“Try what?”

“A drunk
man
!” David laughed again as
he fell into an armchair with his legs over the arm.
“You know the British couple, Francis and Penelope I
think they are, down in Cottage Six. After dinner, she went
on ahead and he was sitting there on a bench like, like,
like…a plump, tasty bird just waiting to be gobbled
up!”

Henri squinted at David. A man. Really?

“First, have we not spoken about your leaving the
guests alone? Second, a man? Why? Why would you do
that?”

David was singing in Polish again, waving his arms as
conductor, encouraging the brasses and using his palm to
quiet down the strings; he was convincing as a conductor,
you had to give him that. Henri had not had much experience
lately with drunken people and he had no idea how long this
would take to wear off. With an irritated sigh he searched
his desk for his cell to call Angélique.

Angélique would know what to do. Henri needed to get
back to work.

While he waited for her to answer her cell, he moved around
his desk putting papers into files. Henri’s mind was
logical and organized; his desk, not so much. Scraps of
paper with important notes fluttered to the floor, an empty
bag of Hemo-Yum was stuck to a folder, a sock was under a
stack of test results. He sighed at the never-ending,
hopeless job of neatening and straightening.

Just as he was thinking this, he heard a pop and a shower
of glass rained down on the floor by the doorway.

“Sorry, errant thoughtburst!” said David, with
a cackle. “That was
so. fun
.”

“Angélique, it’s Henri. Sorry to bother
you yet again. We have another problem.” He glanced
at David, who was upside down in the chair, his head almost
touching the floor and his feet up in the air, still
singing, and conducting vigorously with both arms.

“David needs a minder. If you could come to my lab
and take him to his room, and make sure he does not have
any contact with guests if possible?”

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, you will see when you get here. I don’t
understand how it happened, but it appears that David is
drunk.”

“I’m on my way,” said Angélique.

Pierre was not drunk, and his balls were feeling rather
tender, but all things considered he was practically on top
of the world at the moment, his prospects having gone from
shit to gold quite quickly, thanks to Henri de la Motte. He
was on his way to the inn to pay a visit to Dominic and
that idiot Maloney, a thick sheaf of papers in a handsome
leather briefcase Henri had given him, papers that he and
Henri had every hope would take Dominic and Maloney and
their boss a very long time to figure out were not nearly
as useful as they appeared to be.

What Henri had planned, in his meticulous way, was a sort
of scientific booby trap. The Americans would use his
information to manufacture their own bandages, and concoct
their own version of Hemo-Yum, and the products would seem
to work perfectly…until they did not. The bandages
would indeed cover a vampire’s bite marks perfectly,
and be invisible until the wounds were completely healed at
which point the bandages would dissolve without ever being
noticed. However, the vampires who used them often would
notice a fungus begin to grow on their hands that was
extremely difficult to get rid of as well as socially
embarrassing.

Hemo-Yum would be just as delicious as the stuff made in
Paris by PolyLabs, the flavors just as complex and
appealing. But over time, the deficiencies of the recipe
would become apparent, in what Henri hoped was dramatically
and comically disfiguring ways–permanent hair loss,
chronically bloodshot eyes, perhaps in some cases, green
teeth–which would result in such a public relations
disaster that the American vampire corporation might not
survive.

Henri had hesitated a moment over his plan, not wanting to
do harm to any vampire group, no matter how badly behaved.
But only a moment. His next feeling had been a deep desire
to crush them into tiny indistinguishable vampire scraps
for violating his lab and daring to try to fuck with him.
As for retaliation, he would deal with that when it
happened, if it ever did. Henri wasn’t going to lose
any sleep over it.

But Pierre still had this little hump to get over, where he
had to convince Dominic and Maloney that he had managed to
get the right papers from Henri. He had worked up a story
to tell them, and practiced it up in his hayloft, but he
was nervous. The image of the
labri
, waiting for
him, shimmered in the immediate future, and he did not want
to screw this up.

At the inn, Madame was nowhere to be seen, and Pierre flew
up the stairs and down the corridor to the Americans’
room without seeing anyone. The corridor had a distinct
odor, the concentrations of generations of feet and armpit
in a space that was not aired properly, along with the
smell of dust that had worked into the cracks in the floor
and along the baseboards and gone through a kind of
transformation that Henri could probably express in
chemical equations but that anyone could identify with a
quick sniff: old, musty dirt, the slough-off of the
innumerable strangers that had passed through the corridor
over the decades.

Pierre was about to knock when he had a flash of memory of
the last time he had come into this room, bound up by
whipster, the cords holding him, tightening when he tried
to move, relaxing when he did. He remembered how it had
coiled itself up as though following orders. The coolest
thing ever, he thought to himself.

Pierre knocked gently. He could hear movement inside, the
thudding of Maloney most likely as he plodded towards the
door. Pierre took a deep breath, trying to hold on to his
confidence.

“Wondered what had happened to you,” sneered
Dominic. He was reaching for a tone of domination in his
voice, but what came out was greed, and anxiety. “We
were about to pay you a visit in that ridiculous hayloft
you call home.” Dominic’s eyes had immediately
gone to the briefcase and they had not wavered from it.

Apparently the housekeeper had not been allowed in the
room. There were dirty clothes draped over chairs, empty
bags of blood littering the floor, and a heap of candy
wrappers spilling out from under one bed. The smell was
distinctly more pungent than it had been in the corridor.

“I’ve got what you want,” said Pierre.
“Two products. Going to be massive sellers. If you
move quickly enough, you could even beat la Motte to the
market.”

Dominic’s self control left him completely and he
grinned. “Let’s see what you’ve
got,” he said, his voice trembling just a little.

Maloney lumbered over and grabbed at the briefcase but
Pierre was too quick for him.

“A few things left to discuss,” said Pierre.
“Number one, that
labri
you promised me. I
want her now. Number two, I think we can agree that mutual
trade is good for us both. Good for our countries, our
vampire brethren –”

“Shut up, Pierre. What else do you want?”

“Details on that whipster. How to make it, etc. and
etc.”

Dominic sucked in his cheeks and said, “Hmm.”

“Whipster rules,” said Maloney.

“Shut up, Maloney,” said Dominic.
“I’m not even sure how I would get that
information,” he said to Pierre, lying his ass off.

“Sure, right,” said Pierre sarcastically.
“I’ll just let you know then, that the
documents in this case are only half of what you need.
You’ll see when you have your scientists evaluate it,
that it’s legit. But you won’t be able to move
forward without the rest. And you’re not getting the
rest until I get the goods on whipster.”

The idea for extortion had only occurred to him as he
entered the hotel room. Acting quickly on his feet made
Pierre both nervous and exhilarated. He had a flicker of
imagining how pleased Henri would be with him, saw him
rubbing his hands together and then clapping him on the
back as though they were equals, for a moment at least.

Dominic was scowling. Maloney saw Dominic’s unhappy
face and lumbered over and put Pierre in a chokehold.
Pierre beat Maloney’s leg with the briefcase and with
his other hand struggled to find some part of Maloney to
hurt, gasping for breath, but Dominic waved Maloney off.

“Let him go, it’s all right,” he said.
“I figure the boss probably expected he’d have
to give something up, after all,” he said, thinking
out loud. “All right, let’s do it like
this,” he said. "Give me what you have. I will get it
to my boss, and put your proposal in front of him, and then
we’ll see where we stand.

“How did you get the papers, anyway? Your last try
was so pathetic, I admit, I was worried you’d show up
with another steaming pile of crap.”

Like any good liar, Pierre decided that the fewer details,
the better. “You convinced me it was in my
interest,” he said, smirking. “Now what about
that
labri
?” he asked, hoping he
wasn’t compromising his position by seeming too
eager.

“At the end of the deal,” said Dominic, holding
his hands out for the briefcase, and Pierre reluctantly
handed it over.