Undead to the World (27 page)

And now her lips quiver. Tears rise to her eyes, and she turns her head to look at
the still body on her couch. She sinks down beside him, and takes one hand in hers.
“Is it—is this really him?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “It really is.”

“I’m so confused,” she whispers. “I couldn’t believe it when he told me. He said there
was going to be a war, and we had to choose sides if we wanted to survive.”

“So you chose the one you love. But this is about more than a battle for turf in a
small town, Athena; it’s going to spread. If we don’t stop it here, right now, the
mystical fence that’s keeping the situation contained is going to break down. You
know what you’ve got then? Two viruses competing to outbreed each other. And both
of them will spread faster than the black death in the middle ages, because thropes
and pires can travel a lot farther and faster than rats.”

She shakes her head, now crying openly. “What can we do?”

“We need to find the identity of the master vampire. Take him out and we eliminate
one side entirely.”

“And what about the other side?”

“We’ll worry about that later. One thing at a time.”

She sniffles, then nods. “Okay. Whatever you’re going to do, just … just do it. Do
you need anything?”

“Just your TV and DVD player,” I say.

It doesn’t take long to get set up. I position myself next to our subject on the couch
and call up Azura with the remote. “It’s time,” I tell her.

She nods. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Me, too.”

There’s a flash of white light.

*   *   *

The memory is from before Tair and Doctor Pete diverged into separate personae. I
thought it might be the actual moment itself, but I’m wrong.

I’m tied to a chair. A youngish Peter Adams—not yet a doctor, not yet a monster—is
staring at me in consternation. I can feel a trickle of something wet down my face,
but it’s not a tear; it’s blood.

He’s dressed in a white lab coat over a T-shirt and jeans, but there’s no name tag.
We’re in a small, dingy room with newspaper covering the windows, trash in the corners,
and a desk missing two of its drawers. Pete’s leaning against the desk, his arms crossed.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“I’m—” He catches himself and shakes his head. “No. The question is, who are
you
?”

“Someone who could use a painkiller or seven.” I wince. “Clocked me pretty good, didn’t
you? That’s a helluva bedside manner you’ve got.”

“You’re the one who broke in.”

“Did I? Well, you can’t blame a girl for trying to make a buck, can you? Not exactly
easy for someone like me to get by in this world anymore.”

“A human being, you mean?”

I give him a nasty smile. “Don’t you mean an OR? That’s the clever, ironic term all
you toothy types are using these days.”

“I guess I’m not that clever. I don’t know what—”

“Original Recipe.”

He looks a little disgusted. Good. I can use that.

“I don’t think that’s clever or ironic,” he says. “It’s just cruel.”

“Oh, I’ve heard worse.
Breather, bloodbag, midnight snack, throatwich
 … but really, my favorite’s always been
tampon slurpee.
Not as widespread as some of the others due to exclusive pire usage, but crude, evocative,
and demeaning all at once. Has a certain rhythm to it, too, you know? Makes it easy
to chant.”

He uncrosses his arms. “Look, I’m not a speceist. I don’t use those terms, and I’m
sorry you’ve been given a life that’s not exactly fair—”

I snort. “Given? Nobody
gave
me anything, hairball. I had things taken
away.
Dignity. Respect. Any chance at making a decent life for myself or anyone I care
about. But what does that matter, right? My puny seventy or so years is barely a quarter
of
your
time on Earth, and an eyeblink to any pire.”

“The fact that we live longer is hardly our fault.”

“No, but everything else
is.
You killed us by the millions and then took over when there weren’t enough of us
to fight back.”

He sighs. “Oh. You’re one of those. Look, I may not be a doctor yet, but I’m in medical
school. And I can tell you that the plague that hit the human population after World
War Two wasn’t caused by pires
or
thropes.”

I laugh. “Sure. Only conspiracy fanatics believe that, right? And the whole pire pregnancy
spell that just happened to come along right after that was a
total
coincidence. Absolutely.”

I can see by the look on his face that I’m losing him. “Wait a minute, just listen
to me. I’m not someone who believes whatever she’s told. I’ve been
shown,
okay? I’ve seen actual hard evidence.”

“By whom?”

I hesitate. “People who know.
Serious
people.”

“What makes them so serious? They tell you all these things in a really sincere tone
of voice?”

There’s more amusement than mockery in his voice, but it pisses me off all the same.
“These are people who do more than just talk. They
do
stuff. Stuff that gets
noticed.
”

That gets his attention. “Wait. Are you talking about the Free Human Resistance?”

I don’t answer.

“You are, aren’t you?” The frown on his face deepens. “You can’t trust people like
that. They’re
terrorists,
for God’s sake.”

“No, they aren’t. They’re
freedom fighters.
” I can hear the passion in my own voice, but the feeling belongs to someone else.
“They want to
change
things.”

“How? By murdering people? That’s not change, it’s just mayhem.”

“No. Some people
have
to die. That’s just how things are. It’s how things have always been.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. I believe in life. In fact, I’m thinking of
studying human medicine—”

“Sure you are. That’s why you’re working in a gray-market lem factory.”

That stops him for a second. “One has nothing to do with the other.”

“’Course they don’t. One’s about studying a soon-to-be-extinct species, the other’s
about creating slaves.”

“Isn’t it better to be a slave than have no life at all?”

I shake my head. “That’s how you justify it, huh? Well, I don’t agree. If it thinks
and feels, you can’t simply use it up and throw it away. You’re not giving them life,
you’re just giving them existence. Big difference.”

He looks away, not sure how to answer that. Which is when the door opens and his boss
walks in.

His boss is a thrope too, but only in the sense that a Doberman pinscher and a poodle
are both dogs. This guy is a card-carrying member of
La Lupo Grigorio,
the Gray Wolf Mafia, and looks it—from his greased, jet-black hair to his hand-tailored
Italian suit. Thick gold rings adorn both hairy hands, and the expression on his bulldog-like
face is one of annoyed contempt.

“What?” he says to Pete. “
This
? You call me for
this
?”

“I caught her breaking in downstairs—”

The mobster waves away his explanation with one meaty hand. “Yeah, you already said.
She got an eyeful, huh?”

“I’m not sure how much she saw—”

“I saw enough,” I snap.

“Shuddup,” Pete’s boss says casually. He’s looking at me with less contempt now, and
considerably more interest. “You didn’t mention she was human.”

Pete frowns. “What difference does that make?”

“She’s a federally protected endangered species, that’s what difference it makes.”
He glares at Pete. “The last thing we need is the feds sniffin’ around. You did right
after all. I’m going to have to take care of this myself.”

“What are you going to do?” Pete asks.

“Get her out of the country. Keep her on ice for a while until this batch is done—we
were gonna move to a different location, anyway. Then whatever she knows don’t matter.”

It’s a plausible enough story, but I don’t believe it for a second. Mr. Wolfioso is
a professional criminal, one who crosses swords with the federal authorities all the
time; violating my protected status doesn’t mean anything more to him than breaking
any other federal law. He’s feeding Pete just enough misinformation to keep him quiet,
but once he’s got me out of here—

“Bullshit,” I say loudly. “C’mon, you really think he’s going to go to all that time
and trouble? He’ll be on his phone to the nearest yakuza blood farm the minute after
he locks me in his trunk.”

Pete glances from me to his employer and back again. He knows I’m telling the truth,
but he doesn’t want to. He wants to sink back into his nice warm web of rationalizations,
the one where he’s just making a little money under the table by bending a few rules.
All his boss has to do is feed him a few more sugar-coated lies—lies Pete will swallow
as fast as he can choke them down—and the status will return to quo.

But that doesn’t happen.

The Gray Wolf’s face hardens. Maybe Pete’s phone call interrupted something important;
maybe he just had a big deal go sour. Maybe someone higher up the food chain is squeezing
him, or previous encounters have left him with a grudge against human beings. It doesn’t
matter. What matter is that he holds my life in his hands, he doesn’t give a damn
what Pete thinks, and I’ve just pissed him off.

“You goddamn slice of
lunch meat,
” he growls. He stalks forward and grabs me by the arm, which is pinned behind my
back by the ropes. He hoists me one-handed into the air as easily as a man picking
up a sandwich. My own weight threatens to dislocate my shoulder, and I yell in pain.

“Hey!” Pete says, taking a step forward.

His boss ignores him, taking me through the open door and onto a small landing overlooking
the main floor of the warehouse. For a second I think he’s going to throw me down
the stairs or over the railing, but he doesn’t. He just shoves me forward and says,
“Take a look, girlie. Take a long,
hard
look, and tell me what you see.”

What I see is an illegal lem production facility, what’s called a gravel pit. Pens
full of goats and pigs, all of them oddly quiet. Crude ritual altars made of wooden
tables, crusted with dried blood. A gigantic yellow-brown pile of sand in one corner,
almost reaching the roof. Racks full of empty golem skins made of thick, transparent
plastic, like the ghosts of blow-up dolls waiting to be filled with breath and life.
And trundling along with wheelbarrows and shovels, brooms and buckets, are quite a
few of the finished product.

The Gray Wolf doesn’t wait for my answer. “What you see is an efficient operation.
Nice, tidy, profitable. Runs like clockwork—in fact, I
could
run it twenty-four/seven, except for one little problem: I don’t got enough activators.
Like your new friend, the one who’s so concerned about you.”

And now Pete steps out to join us. “Take it easy. You don’t have to—”

“I think I do. And I think what
you
need is a little dose of reality.” He points at the lems. “See, what you’re looking
at is a significant investment of time, effort, and money. But it didn’t come easy,
oh, no. I got all kinds of things to worry about: supply chains, distribution, production
deadlines. I got lots of people I have to keep happy, and even more I got to keep
quiet. It’s a juggling act.”

And suddenly he lifts me, chair and all, over the railing. The concrete floor is a
good thirty feet below me.

“Don’t!” Pete says.

“Sometimes,” the Gray Wolf says, “it’s all I can do to keep all those different things
in the air. And you, Mr. Peter Damien—or would you prefer Doctor Damien?—are one of
those things. An important thing, one I don’t wanna drop … but I can only do so much,
y’know? Sometimes, with so many things goin’ up and down, I gotta make a decision.
I gotta let something go, so I can keep everything else moving.”

“Please,” I say. I want to be brave, I want to be tough, but my voice betrays me.

“Killing her doesn’t—you
can’t
—”

“Oh, I can. It solves all kinds of problems. But I
won’t,
and you know why?”

When he answers, his voice is dull. “No, I don’t.”

The Gray Wolf chuckles. He knows a lie when he hears it. “Because you didn’t bargain.
You didn’t say,
if you kill her, I’ll quit.
That tells me a lot, right there. It tells me you understand things, and where you
fit in. It tells me you know where the line is, and not to push me past it. That’s
good. That’ll keep you alive.”

I swallow, and try to keep the quaver out of my voice. “What—what are you going to
do with me?”

“You?” He laughs, pulls his arm back, and sets the chair down on the landing. “You
got lucky, kid. Normally, I’d just make you disappear. But that would upset my activator
here, and I want to keep him happy. So—today only—you get a pass.”

“I—I’m free to go?”

He smiles. “Not just yet. We’re going to have a little talk in my car, first.
Then
you can go.” He turns to Pete. “That okay with you?”

Peter Damien—soon to be Doctor Peter Damien, then Doctor Peter Adams—blinks. His face
is pale. The lie his boss is offering is as thin and fragile as tissue paper, but
he wants to believe. Believing means he isn’t condemning me to a horrible death. Believing
means he doesn’t work for a monster. Believing means he still has a soul.

“Yes,” he says faintly. “That’s fine.”

“No,” I say, as the Gray Wolf carries me down the stairs, still bound to the chair.
“No! He’s lying!
He’s lying!
”

“She’s pretty upset,” the Gray Wolf says. He’s got me slung over his back one-handed,
like a jacket. I can see Pete’s pale face in the shadows of the landing above, slowly
receding as we descend. “I’ll keep her restrained until we get outside. Don’t worry,
she’ll calm down.”