Written in Red (17 page)

He waited a few moments, then called Vlad.

“Simon,” Vlad said. “Nyx and I need to talk to you.”

“Later,” Simon replied, trying not to snap. “The Business Association has something to discuss. I need you to call them. I want everyone who’s available in the meeting room in an hour. And call Blair and Jester. I want them there too. And a representative from the Owlgard, Hawkgard, and Crowgard.”

“Anyone else?” Vlad asked quietly.

He knew why Vlad asked the question, just like he knew which group of
terra indigene
was being left out of this discussion. But
they
were never interested in such things.

“No, that should be sufficient,” Simon said.

“In an hour, then. But, Simon, we still need to talk. It’s important.”

Simon hung up. Then he shouted for Heather, passing her on his way to the stockroom. “Man the register and work on filling the orders. Call John. Tell him to come in.”

He put on his coat and boots for the walk to the Liaison’s Office. That was acting civilized and controlled. If he didn’t stay in control . . .

She
lied
to him.

. . . he was going to shift to Wolf, and they would never be able to clean up the blood well enough to hire someone else after he tore
her
throat out so she couldn’t lie to him anymore.

The office’s back door wasn’t locked, so he slipped inside, removed his boots, and padded across the back room in his socks. He could hear low music even through the closed door that connected to the sorting room. As he entered the room, he saw Meg take a CD out of the player and say, “I don’t like that music.”

“Then why listen to it?” he asked.

She whirled around, wobbling to keep her balance. She put the CD back in its case and made a notation on a notebook sitting next to the player before answering him. “I’m listening to a variety of music to discover what I like.”

Why don’t you know what you like?

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Wolfgard? Today’s mailbag hasn’t arrived yet, but there are a few pieces of old mail. I put them in HGR’s spot.” She indicated the cubbyholes in the sorting room’s back wall. “Also, I’m still not clear if the ponies deliver mail to the Market Square businesses or if someone from the businesses is supposed to stop in for that mail.”

Right now he didn’t care about the mail or packages or any other damn monkey thing.

He took the poster out of his pocket, opened it, and set it on the table. “No more lies,” he said, his voice a growl of restrained menace. “What happens next will depend on whether you answer two questions honestly.”

She stared at the poster. Her face paled. She swayed, and he told himself to let the bitch fall if she fainted.

“He found me,” she whispered. “I wondered after the other night, but I thought . . . hoped . . .” She swallowed, then looked at him. “What do you want to know?”

The bleakness in her eyes made him just as angry as her lies.

“What was your name, and what did you steal?” Couldn’t have been a small thing. They wouldn’t be hunting for her like this if it was a small thing.

“My name is Meg Corbyn.”

“That’s the name you took when you came here,” he snapped. “What was it before?”

Her expression was an odd blend of anger and pride. It made him wary because it reminded him that she was inexplicably
not prey
.

“My designation was
cs759
,” she said.

“That’s not a name!”

“No, it isn’t. But it’s all they gave me. All they gave any of us. A designation. People give names to their pets, but
property
isn’t deserving of a name. If you give them designations instead of names, then you don’t have to think about what you’re doing to them, don’t have to consider if
property
has feelings when you . . .”

Her eyes stayed locked on his, despite her sudden effort to breathe.

Simon stayed perfectly still. If he moved, fangs and fury would break loose.
What did they do to you, Meg?

“As for what I stole, I took this.” She pulled something out of her pocket and set it on the wanted poster.

He picked it up. Silver. One side was decorated with pretty leaves and flowers. The other side had
cs759
engraved into it in plain lettering. He found the spot that accommodated a fingernail and opened the thing to reveal the shining blade of a thin razor.

He had seen one of these twenty years ago. Seeing another one now made him shiver.

“It’s pretty, but it can’t be worth all that much.” His voice sounded rough, uncertain. He felt as if he’d been chasing a rabbit that suddenly turned into a Grizzly. Something wasn’t right about this. So many things weren’t right about this.

“By itself, it probably isn’t worth much,” Meg replied. “The second thing I stole is this.” She pulled off her sweater and tossed it aside. She pushed up the left sleeve of the turtleneck until it was above her elbow. Then she held out her arm.

He stared at the evenly spaced scars.

An old woman, her bare arms browned by the sun so the thin scars showed white, sitting behind a little table where she set out cards and told fortunes to earn the money that paid for her room and board. A little community of humans who eked out a living at the edge of an earth-native settlement that amused itself by taking tourists into the wilds for pictures and stories and sometimes even movies that would be shown in theaters. Some taught the Others basic skills like weaving or carpentry. Some assisted with the tours. And there were always a few who were looking for an excuse to die and were just biding their time, knowing the Wolves and Grizzlies would oblige them eventually.

She sat there in the baking sun, her head covered by a straw hat, smiling at the youngsters, human and Other, who laughed at her as they went by in their various groups.

But he hadn’t laughed, hadn’t walked by. The scars intrigued him, bothered him. The look in her eyes unnerved him. And then . . .

“Not much good skin left, but this was meant for you . . .”

The silver razor flashed in the sun as she took it from the pocket of her dress. A precise cut on her cheek, its distance from an existing scar the width of the blade.

What he saw that day, what she said that day, had shaped his life.

“Blood prophet
,
” Simon whispered as he continued to stare at Meg. “You’re a
cassandra sangue
.”

“Yes,” she replied, lowering her arm and pushing down her sleeve.

“But . . . why did you run? Your kind live in special places. You’re pampered, given the best of . . .”

“Whether you’re beaten or pampered, fed the best foods or starved, kept in filth or kept clean, a cage is still a cage,” Meg said with fierce passion. “We are taught what the Walking Names want us to know because what good is a prophet if she can’t describe what she sees? We sit in classrooms, day after day, looking at pictures that describe things that exist in the world, but we’re never allowed to know one another, never allowed to have friends, never allowed to speak unless it’s part of an exercise. We are told when to eat, when to sleep, when to walk on the treadmill for exercise. They even schedule when we take a shit! We are alive, but we’re never allowed to live. How long would
you
last if you were kept like that?”

She was shaking. He couldn’t tell if she was cold or upset, even when she retrieved the sweater and put it on.

“Why don’t more of you run away?” he asked.

“I guess living in a cage and not having a name doesn’t bother most of them. Besides, where would they go?” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Will you let me stay until dark? I might be able to slip past whoever the Controller sent after me if I can stay here until dark.”

Simon tipped his head, struggling to understand her. “You’re going to run again?”

Now she looked at him. “I would rather die than go back there.”

A quiet statement. The honesty scared him because there was a little too much Wolf in her voice when she said those words. She wasn’t
terra indigene
,
but she also wasn’t human like other humans. She was a confusion, and until he understood more, all he had to work with was instinct.

A few days ago, she came looking for a job because she wanted to live. If that wasn’t true, she would have gone to sleep in a snowbank somewhere. Now she was willing to die?

He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all.

He pocketed the silver razor and the wanted poster.

“The razor is mine,” she protested.

“Then you’ll have to stay until I give it back.”

“Mr. Wolfgard . . .”

“You’re staying, Meg,” he snarled. “Until I say different, you’re staying.” He heard a truck pull in, then another. “You’ve got work.”

As he passed through the back room, he grabbed his boots but didn’t stop to put them on. Instead, he ran back to HGR.

Cs759.
The meaning of the letters was clear enough. He didn’t want to think about the significance of the number.

That Controller was trying to set the police on her trail. Were other kinds of hunters searching for Meg? Was it a hired predator who had tried to break in the other night?

After telling John and Heather he was back, he went up to his office and put on dry socks. While he waited for the members of the Business Association to arrive for the meeting, he stared out the window that gave him a view of the Liaison’s Office.

Power. When the
terra indigene
dealt with humans, it always came down to power and potential conflict.

He was the leader of the Lakeside Courtyard and what he wanted would carry weight, but this choice was too big for him to make alone.

Meg turned off the CD player. There was no point in playing music to learn what she liked. Instead, she pulled mail out of the last old sack and tried to keep her mind on sorting it, on finishing
something
before she herself was finished.

A white room and one of those awful beds. And Simon Wolfgard. She had seen those things in the prophecy that had revealed her own future.

Was he going to hand her over to the Controller, maybe even barter for some prophecies? Or now that he knew what she was, would he do the same thing the Controller had done? Would he know how? Was that why she’d seen the bed that was used when the girls were bound for the most intimate kinds of cuts?

She focused so hard on not thinking about what Simon would decide, she jolted when she heard the neighing outside the sorting room’s outside door.

“Oh, gods,” she muttered, glancing at the clock. She’d meant to run over to the grocery store for carrots or apples. No time to do that now. “Just a minute,” she yelled when the neighing became a chorus. She could imagine what Elliot Wolfgard would say about the noise if the workers at the consulate were disturbed.

Rushing into the back room for her coat, she looked around for
something
that would serve as a treat. She didn’t want to think about the reaction the ponies would have if she
didn’t
have something for them.

The only things in the kitchen area besides a jar of instant coffee and bags of herbal tea were a box of sugar lumps, a box of crackers, and a storage tin that held an open package of chocolate cookies.

She shrugged into her coat, grabbed the box of sugar lumps, then rushed to open the door, because the next chorus of neighs was now accompanied by the cawing of the Crows.

“I’m here, I’m here,” she panted as she got the door open, set the box on the sorting table, grabbed the first stack of mail, and began filling the baskets.

The ponies shifted, jostled, nipped at her coat in a way that made her think of a child tugging on an adult’s sleeve in a bid for attention.

She didn’t have enough mail sorted to fill the baskets for the eight ponies who had shown up, but she made sure they all had something to carry. Then she opened the box of sugar lumps.

“A special Moonsday treat,” she said, holding out two lumps to Thunder. He took them happily. They all did. So happily, in fact, they all tried to get in line again for another serving.

When she closed the box and waved bye-bye, they all stared at her—and the box—for a long moment before trotting off to deliver the mail.

Sighing and shivering, Meg closed the door, returned the sugar to the cupboard in the back room, and continued with her work.

The Business Association’s meeting room had a ring of wooden chairs set around a low, round sectional table. It also had a secretary desk and filing cabinets, as well as a computer on another desk that could be used for e-mail or placing orders with human companies.

Since the Business Association’s office filled the other half of HGR’s second floor, Simon was the first to arrive. He chose a seat and waited through the usual shuffling for position that took place because the bird gards wouldn’t willingly sit next to one another and
none
of them wanted to sit next to the Sanguinati.

Vlad and Nyx arrived a minute after he did. Everyone else came in a moment later, leaving their outer garments on the coatrack in the small waiting room and delaying their entrance long enough for the Sanguinati to choose their seats.

Vlad sat next to him and Nyx sat on Vlad’s right. From there, the chairs around the table filled in—Jester, Blair, Jenni Crowgard, Tess, Julia Hawkgard, and Henry. Allison Owlgard took the last chair.

Jenni was part of the Business Association, but Julia and Allison weren’t. Which meant the leaders of their gards had probably chosen them as representatives because they did work around or in the businesses that had contact with humans.

“We’re all here, Simon,” Henry said in a quiet rumble.

“Lieutenant Montgomery came to see me this morning,” Simon said.

“We stayed on our own land yesterday,” Blair growled. “Or on the sidewalks that butt up against it, which are considered public property. The humans have no cause for complaint about that.”

“I heard some youngsters had fun digging in the compost pile,” Jester said. “Could someone have reported that?”