Charming (26 page)

“Sure.”

She looked at me a little sadly then. “You know Stanislav won’t eat this.”

The top of my skull exploded from the pressure of all the comments that were struggling to escape through my mouth. Well, OK, no it didn’t. But I thought it might for a second or two there. “Will you?” I asked.

A twitch tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Are you seriously asking me if I’ll eat your sausage?”

I tried not to smile and failed. The grin came out big, but I managed to tone it down to something wry. “You helped me today. I’m asking if you will accept my gift, which I am offering in good faith.”

She kept looking at me. I stared back. Her eyes were large and clear, and I couldn’t get to the bottom of them. “Yes,” she said.

Sig turned around abruptly and led me into the loft. The second floor was a series of small and large rooms that had once been offices and conference areas. I’m sure they were decorated with all kinds of distinct furnishings and personal touches, but I didn’t notice them.

Almost everyone in Sig’s ragtag band of would-be heroes was seated at a dining table in one of the larger rooms. Not
around
the dining table, mind you—everybody was on the side that put their backs to the wall so that they could view some kind of smart screen on the other side of the room. A diagram of a series of underground tunnels was illustrated there.

Dvornik was seated on the far left, looking like he should have been on a fishing vessel in a thick red flannel shirt and what looked like wool pants. Next to him was an empty seat, presumably Sig’s, with an open laptop on the table in front of it. Next were Cahill and Choo, both of whom looked like they were ready to play basketball at the Y, while Parth was wearing a white business suit with no shirt. One of the side effects of being an immortal is that for the older ones, the fashions of various decades tend to blend together. Molly was on the far right, still loaded down with cross-shaped jewelry and wearing a red sweater with reindeer on it.

It was an odd-looking crew. Sig seemed to be the only common link binding us all together.

Choo was smoking a cigar and greeted me with a discreet
wave of the fingers of his right hand. Cahill nodded and smirked an all-purpose smirk. Molly pulled out the chair next to her at the far end of her table as an invitation to sit down. Everyone else ignored me, including Sig, who walked back out of the room again, taking my gift with her. I sat down next to Molly.

“You’re late,” Molly told me.

“PMS,” I said. “What are Dvornik’s nephews doing?”

I hadn’t lowered my voice, and Dvornik answered. “Andrej and Andro are busy documenting and disposing of the bodies we found at Ellison’s house.”

“They’re downstairs,” I said.

Dvornik stared at me. “I keep a vat of acid in my sculpting studio.”

Well, I asked.

There was a tray of crackers and cheese and apple slices on the table, and two pitchers of water and tea respectively. On the table in front of my seat was a manila folder, a yellow legal pad, a mechanical pencil, and a picture of Anne Marie Padgett, whose angular face was glowering at me over a column of statistics about her age, weight, hair color, and distinguishing tattoos. I looked over and saw that Molly also had a picture of Anne Marie in front of her. She had drawn a little Adolf Hitler mustache on it.

I glanced through the manila folder. There was a thick sheaf of bearer bonds in it, at least two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. Everyone else at the table had a folder too.

“Hey, John. We were just talking about making you the human sacrif—I mean… point man of this little expedition,” Cahill announced. “Assuming that these vampires are actually making tunnels and that we can find them.”

“I’m the logical choice,” I agreed unenthusiastically.

“Good,” Cahill said. “Dvornik says he and his nephews can spot trip wires and pits pretty well, but we figured you probably know how to do that stuff too if all this knight talk isn’t a load of bullshit, and you heal fast and have sharper senses.”

“Also, no one will care if you die,” Dvornik added. It didn’t sound like he was joking.

Molly patted my forearm. “I will,” she said cheerfully.

Choo cleared his throat. “That sense of smell of yours is the big thing,” he said uncomfortably.

Sig came back into the room carrying two plates of cut sausage wedges. I hoped she wasn’t sending me a message. “Did I miss something?”

“We’ve all agreed that I smell better than your boyfriend and his nephews,” I said, and Molly pinched me.

Sig opened her mouth to say something, but Parth jumped in. “John has agreed to be your scout,” he said smoothly. “Now we need to figure out how to minimize the risk to him as much as possible.”

“Cahill had a point,” I said. “How likely is it that there will even be tunnels? I mean, I know vampires can dig like nobody’s business, and I think this Anne Marie is going to try, but it’s not that simple.”

I know a little about tunnels. Not a lot, but I’ve hunted things that burrow before. Gesturing at the drawing on the screen, I continued. “You can’t just start something like that in your backyard, not unless you excrete some kind of building material or adhesive. You need a low water table and soil that packs well and dries hard.”

Choo cleared his throat again. “We’re living in a place called
Clay
burg. You ever wonder how this city got that name?”

As a matter of fact, I had not.

Somewhere during all of that, Sig had put the sausage plates on the tray and seated herself behind the laptop. But Parth simply spoke and the picture on the screen scrolled through several other pictures and stopped on a map of Clayburg and its outlying counties. A large area between some mountains and a forest preserve was circled in black.

Parth cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention, and I wondered why he wasn’t the one set up to give this presentation in the first place. It was his material, after all, and the tech was reacting to his voice commands. He had a far better setup at his house. Then I looked at Dvornik sitting on the far side of the table with his arms crossed and his chin lowered as if he were about to ram his head into something. It occurred to me that I might not be the only supernatural being that Dvornik barely tolerated because of Sig.

And here I thought kresniks were supposed to be more tolerant and open-minded about working with monsters. Well, not all Irish people are poetic, not all Italians are good cooks, and not all Asians are hardworking. Maybe Dvornik was one of those people who justifies being an asshole under the guise of stubborn independence, or maybe kresniks had recently adopted some policy that supernatural beings are acceptable company only if they have blonde hair, blue eyes, and a nice rack. God knows how you would word that in a solemn oath or a secret kresnik ceremony. It was probably one of those unspoken rules.

“What’s with that area that’s all lit up?” I prodded.

“I’ve been tracing the positions of the cell phones that Anne Marie has been placing on buses and trucks,” Parth replied. “I have a computer program that has been backtracking them by
accessing the truck and bus routes and triangulating a common point of origin and blah blah blah some technical terms.”

Look, I’m not cell phone–savvy, okay? Basically, I got from what Parth said that Anne Marie’s tactic would have worked with a single cell phone, but ditching twelve cell phones in the same fashion had given Parth enough information to estimate the general locale where the phones were converging before being abandoned from different locations.

Cahill massaged his temples with both hands. “So basically this is what we’ve got: according to John, he can smell that there are at least four unaccounted-for vampires running around. According to Dvornik, they’re being led by someone who is big trouble waiting to happen. We have computer evidence that someone has been researching how to transfer blood from a living body and store it. We found actual drained corpses. We also know someone is researching how to build underground tunnel networks. And e-mails and phone records indicate that someone has been promising to turn hard-core vampire fans into the real thing for a ten-thousand-dollar fee and servitude.” He looked up. “Am I missing anything?”

“Most creatures who are extremely old and powerful are slow to adapt to new ways,” Parth said softly, and there was a hint of self-satisfaction in his tone. He clearly viewed himself as exempt from such folly. “And most vampire rulers are very old and powerful. It is why the species as a whole has been slow to take advantage of new technologies. But this Ann Marie creature is very adaptable. I find the way that she is utilizing network skills frankly terrifying. She is tapping into a potentially limitless supply of recruits.”

“The ten-thousand-dollar price tag is actually kind of inspired too,” Molly said. “It’ll help her weed out the posers
from real fanatics and get her hands on some seed money at the same time.”

Sig piped up. “I’ll tell you something we’re missing. There’s no way these vampires want to live in a dirty hole in the ground. They like soft, dry, warm places with electric lights and cable television just like we do. That’s not what this is about.”

“So what is it about, Sig?” Cahill asked. His voice was a caress. I don’t think he noticed.

“She’s building an out-of-the-way place to hide all the humans that she wants to abduct and keep alive as a constant source of blood,” Sig said. “This place isn’t a home. It’s going to be a dairy farm except with humans instead of cows and blood instead of milk. The vampires will probably work there in rotation.”

“But why?” Molly asked.

“One of the biggest problems vampires have is that they can’t gather in large numbers without becoming noticeable,” I said. “It’s why the knights knew what they were doing in New Orleans around the turn of the century. Too many predators hunting in the same hunting ground is going to draw attention sooner or later, Pax or no Pax. But this underground fast-food restaurant that Ann Marie is working on would make it a lot easier for large groups of vampires to meet and feed without logistics problems.”

“So basically, she’s found a way to recruit hundreds of potential fanatical followers,” Cahill summarized. “And she’s making preparations so that she’ll be able to discreetly feed large numbers of vampires gathered in one place without having them all out hunting at once. It sounds like our Little Miss Teen Scream has big plans.”

“How big an area we talking about here?” Choo asked, indicating the diagram on the wall. His voice sounded faintly strained.

Parth considered. “The search radius will be slightly less than a hundred miles.”

Cahill made a pained sound that suggested he’d been on more than one hunt for a missing person in a wilderness area. “That’s the radius,” he repeated.

“But John here will be able to smell them out, right?” Choo asked hopefully.

I nodded. “Eventually. It would be nice if we could narrow the target area down, though.”

“Well, if we do,” Choo said, “I still have that fogger that makes clouds out of holy water. We ought to be able to gas these things like gophers in their holes.”

Everyone in the room perked up at that. After a moment, though, I saw the drawback. “It probably won’t work,” I said reluctantly.

“Why not?” Choo demanded.

“He’s right, Childers,” Dvornik said tiredly.

“Why not?” Choo repeated.

Dvornik got up and turned to Parth. “Put that drawing of a tunnel network back up.” It wasn’t a request.

For a moment Parth looked like he was going to demand that Dvornik say please. Curiosity or maturity or both won out, though, and he pulled the picture up.

Dvornik walked up and pointed to several different tunnel points as he talked. “It wouldn’t matter if your mist was slightly lighter or heavier than air,” he said. “See how some tunnels go straight up and some drop straight down? The Viet Cong designed them that way to impede gas attacks. If the vampires are really sticking to the diagrams, somewhere on this level there will be a waterproof, airtight trapdoor leading to another level with its own ventilation shafts for an independent air supply. An escape shaft too.”

He looked at Sig. It was an ambiguous look. It might have been saying,
See? The old dog still knows a few tricks
. Or it might have been saying,
The herd bull is still a stud
. Or maybe it said,
If I look unhappy all the time, no one will know when I have gas.

“Well, yes, but their leader is a teenager,” Molly said argumentatively, and the jut of her chin and the uncharacteristic quarrelsomeness in her tone told me that she didn’t much like Dvornik. “A modern teenager who’s been a vampire for less than a year. Maybe she is some kind of genius, but do you really think they’ll have the patience or the experience to do that good of a job on their first try?” She turned to me. “What do you think, John?”

I appreciated the gesture and all, but I was still feeling a little tentative and raw and didn’t really want to get in the middle of it, so I passed the attention back to Dvornik. “Ask the Amazing Kreskin. He’s the one who says he can see the future.”

“It’s kresnik,” Choo said irritably. “Not Kreskin.” Sometimes I forget how old I am. I thought about explaining that Kreskin was a famous stage psychic whose name was an anagram of
kresnik
, but let it drop.

Then Dvornik scowled at me, and I found it hard to keep my mouth shut after all.

“Molly makes a good point, though,” I said. “The other thing to consider is whether or not we want to go in these tunnels at all.”

“I was thinking that too,” Cahill admitted. “Why not just find the tunnel entrance and wait outside with a sniper rifle? Or a crossbow, or whatever you use to take a vampire down? Just taking the girl out is the priority, right? We can take the rest of them anytime, any way we want.”

“A high-enough-caliber rifle and the right ammo would do it,” I assured him. “But getting a clear shot at a vampire from a
distance is kind of iffy. Trying to get a clear shot from up close is even worse.”

“It’s possible if you fire from far enough away and keep your emotions out of it,” Dvornik said, as if correcting me. Then he addressed Cahill and admitted, “But it is always chancy. They’re limited telepaths and have phenomenal hearing and scenting ability as well. They can sense when someone’s looking at them, especially with hostile intent. And if we didn’t kill her with the first shot… catching a supernaturally fast being with a lot of woods to run through at night is always problematic.”