SEVENTEEN

When Athena Shaker answers her door, her green eyes go wide and her pale skin flushes. It’s a natural enough reaction; we’ve got the unconscious body of her boyfriend’s brother propped up between us, his limp arms draped over our shoulders.

“Oh! What—what happened?”

“Can we come in?” I say. “It’s not safe out here.”

“Yes, of course!”

She stands aside and we haul our comatose cargo in. We put him on the couch in a sitting position, his head leaning back like he fell asleep studying the ceiling.

“Here’s the deal,” I say to Athena. “First off, this isn’t who you think. It’s Peter, not Terrance. I know, his hair’s too long and those tattoos don’t belong, but that’s illusion magic for you; it can fool you right down to the level of bad teenage judgment.”

She frowns, clearly confused. “I don’t know what you—”

“Stop. We don’t have time for the wide-eyed innocent act. You and Doctor Pete are a couple. You’ve been keeping it a secret, but that’s not the only one.”

Now she looks less confused and more angry. “That’s hardly any of your business—”

“We don’t have TIME for this!” I shout. I take a fast step forward, getting right in her face. “We were jumped by a pack of vampires on the way here! I know this looks like Terrance, but it’s not. It’s his brother—your lover—and he knows where the master vampire’s lair is. He was kidnapped and dragged away before he could tell me, then brainwashed with sorcery and swapped with his brother; they thought the last place I’d look for him would be in a jail cell.”

She meets my eyes coolly. The pretense of ignorance is gone. “What do you want?” she asks me flatly.

“We need help. I know a magic ritual that’ll unlock Doctor Pete’s mind, but I need somewhere to do it, and I’ll be helpless while it happens. We can’t use my place or Charlie’s—they’ve both been compromised.”

“Vampires. You know how crazy that sounds?”

“About as crazy as werewolves, but less hairy?” Her only reaction to that is a single blink, but that and the second of hesitation are enough to tell me I’m on the right track. “I know you know,” I say. “About Doctor Pete, and what he’s going to become the first time the full moon rises. He’s being forced to do something he doesn’t want to do, and I know you want to help. Don’t you?”

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.”

Pete doesn’t say anything. He just stares.

We make it down to the floor. The lems stare at me with curious eyes, then quickly look away.

“No!” I scream. “No, you can’t let him do this! He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me!”

“Ssshh,” the Gray Wolf says. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“He won’t let me go! He told me your real name, you bastard!”

And then he drags me through the door and out into the alley.

That’s where the memory ends.