Bleeding Out (19 page)

“Stop this,” Lucian tells him firmly. “It’s not doing you any good. What are you doing sneaking around the palace?”

“I live here now.” He stands up. “Nobody else does, so it’s the ideal place. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for answers.”

“The city’s empty.”

“We’ve been interviewing this tapestry,” I say.

He looks at me. “Sorry about that thing with the knife. You startled me. I guess I panicked a bit.”

“You’re in a world of shit,” I tell him. “We know you’ve been dealing Pharmakon. It was insultingly easy to find you, so I believe Lucian when he says that you’re no expert in the drug trade.”

“It was supposed to be fake! I mean, it looked fake. That stuff’s always just been an urban legend that necromancers use to frighten their kids.
If you don’t go to sleep, the day man will make Pharmakon out of you
. I didn’t think it was actually real.”

“Where did you get it from?” Lucian asks.

“A guy. I don’t know his name. I ran into him in the
square, just as things were starting to get crazy, and he offered me a huge cut. I’m a ghost who can barely corporealize. I don’t get offered a lot of good jobs.”

“You’re not the only ghost here,” Lucian says. “You’ve got plenty of company. They don’t feel the need to sell drugs.”

“They don’t do anything but moan and walk in circles. That’s nice if you’re into it, but I actually like consciousness. Not that you’d care.”

“Lorenzo, I love you. I can’t keep apologizing, okay? Right now, we need your help. Is there anything at all you can tell us about the person who gave you the Pharmakon? Was it a necromancer?”

“No. Demon.” He peers at me. “Kind of smelled like you, in fact. Only he was a lot taller. Eyes like dirty ice.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I murmur.

“What is it?” Lucian asks.

“The long shadow in the tapestry. The tall man. They’re the same. Lorenzo’s talking about my father.”

“That hardly seems possible.”

“Lucian, the Ferid are well traveled. We used to think they’d never been here, but I found an interview with a demon claiming to be one of them.” I think about the figures in the tapestry again. “The Manticore, who said I was something. Mr. Corvid, who convinced me to remember. Lord Nightingale, who touched me when we first met. They’d all met before.”

“You sound paranoid.”

“No. No, I finally get it. This is why I was never supposed to meet him. This is what she was protecting me from. My father—”

I look at the tapestry again. A new city rises from the stitches of Trinovantum. A city by the sea. As I watch, the thread forms a tall building, a tower of a sort, but much more familiar. It’s where I work. It’s my life.

“Could he have made them both?”

Lucian looks at me. “What do you mean?”

Before I can answer, I hear something strange, like rats in the walls. My senses prick up.

“What is—”

“Get down!” Lucian screams.

The far wall of the chamber explodes. Moonlight streams in, and with it, something that looks like a funnel of blood and flame. My sister. I recognize her eyes, and the glow of her strange heart mechanism. She doesn’t say anything. She simply heads straight for us. Her edges atomize whatever they touch. We run. She’s fast, but chewing through the palace slows her down a bit.

“What is that?” Lorenzo screams.

“She’s a Ferid,” I say. “Worse. She’s family.”

We run and try to avoid the debris. Arcadia saws through a bone table and keeps going, like it was a tapa. We run down a tight corridor, and she follows, bringing down the walls with her.

“Lorenzo! Do you have any spells? Something to stall her, maybe, or calm her down?”

“No. All my spells are self-centered.”

“Awesome.”

“If we can reach the nightmares,” Lucian yells, “we should be able to outrun her.”

“Should be?”

“Just keep going!”

We run across the square, while Arcadia devours the paving stones behind us. She’s like a flying mouth. A necromancer emerges from an alley that I thought was empty. He stares at Arcadia in shock. Then she goes right through him, leaving nothing behind.

We run through the gates, which are gone a moment later. All I can hear is the sound of her jaws. The nightmares are still tethered and waiting. The cat emerges from somewhere, licking her paws. Before she can protest, I scoop her up and jump on the nearest horse. I hold on to the nightmare’s mane, choked with shells, while the cat digs his claws into my face.

We ride. The journey, as usual, makes me sick. When we get to the conclusus, Lucian yells to the animals: “Run! Everybody, run!”

I hear her cutting through trees. I hear the rage of the owls. Then we break out of the garden. We fall through space and onto the floor of Lucian’s office, beneath the painting that granted us ingress.

“I don’t think she can follow,” Lucian says, breathing hard. “At least not through the painting. We never taught anyone else that trick.”

I can see right through Lorenzo, to where the cat now sits, furiously cleaning his paws. Aside from being translucent, Lorenzo looks exactly the same. He examines the office.

“So this is your place. I figured it would suck.”

“How long can you stay outside of Trinovantum?” I ask.

“A few hours. By that time, the cyclone should be gone.”

“She’s coming here,” I say. “She’s coming for me.”

Lucian touches my shoulder. “You don’t know that.”

“What part about her trying to eat us did you not understand? The tapestry said it all. Those four creatures—Mr. Corvid, Lord Nightingale, the Manticore, and my father—they created both Trinovantum and the CORE.”

“The CORE is a global corporation.”

“So were the Knights Templar. Lucian, don’t you get it? This is because of a medieval pact gone bad. They united to manage both demons and humans. Then we killed the Manticore. Arcadia killed Mr. Corvid. Now Lord Nightingale is dead. Both cities, Vancouver and Trinovantum, are under threat.”

“Do you think he killed Theresa?”

“I don’t know yet. What else could?”

“Not much. I don’t understand. If he helped found Trinovantum, why would he want to see it abandoned?”

“Maybe he’s done with it.”

“And the Pharmakon?”

“I haven’t figured out that part yet.”

“You don’t seem that great at solving mysteries,” Lorenzo says.

I ignore him. “There are three wild cards in this. I’m the first. My mother is the second. Then Ru. We can’t find her, but I do know where Ru is.”

“So does Arcadia.”

“That’s why we’re taking a cab. Come on.”

Lucian and Lorenzo will not shut up in the backseat
. I’m sitting between them, and we slide back and forth as the cab exceeds escape velocity going down Granville. Lorenzo doesn’t want to let anything go. I’m trying to think about two things at once. The first is the possibility that I might be wrong. Maybe Arcadia has no intention of coming for Ru. Maybe that wasn’t even her that we saw in Trinovantum. Can I really distinguish between Ferid? I’ve only ever seen one. Still, I feel like I recognized the twist of her heart, the particular weft of her visible RNA. I stare at my phone. This is the second thing. I can think of at least five people who I should be calling right now, but my fingers aren’t moving, only Lucian and Lorenzo, who are fighting through me.

I’m struck by their resemblance. They argue in the way that’s native to family members. Lorenzo frequently touches his hand to his nose with two fingers raised, then brings them down dismissively, which means “stupid.” I can only understand about a third of what their hands are saying. It’s begun to rain, and the traffic is getting ugly. Why haven’t I called Selena? Maybe it’s because I can’t think of what to say. I’m not sure how to report what I saw in a tapestry. Is there even a form for that?

When Vancouver appeared in shades of thread I never knew existed, when Trinovantum rose around Theresa and her demons, that was the moment when things started to make sense. I had never really considered the nature of what I worked for, just as I did not often consider the lives of tapestries. The CORE was something I lived in, something I’d come to depend on elementally, like a shower curtain, a keyboard, a house whose bones you don’t go looking for. But if what I’d seen was true, then this place that I worked for was actually a family business. My father had begun it centuries ago, with the help of a Manticore, a Bercilak-demon, and a necromancer. But why? I need a book on textile semiotics.

“Lucian,” I say. “Why Theresa?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why would a self-named monarch make a demon’s deal? I get what was in it for her, if she was able to unite the necromancers. What I don’t understand is how she would have met those demons.”

“We’ve never known anything about Lord Nightingale’s past. Some thought that he wasn’t really as old as he claimed to be. Under the light of Trinovantum, I suppose he was always indistinct. He could have been anyone. All we knew was that he’d always been there.”

“He must have told you something about his past while the two of you were making bad decisions in Lisbon.”

“We didn’t talk very much. I could tell that he was tracking something, but he never told me what it might be. The city held a lot of memories for him. I guess that was when I first considered that he might really have been another person once.”

“Not just another person. Another body. He went
Orlando
in the eleventh century, and nobody has any idea how. Did it never come up?”

“Frogs change their gender all the time,” Lorenzo observes. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

We get out a few blocks from the building and walk. All I can see are umbrellas and headlights. None of these people have any idea that we just came from an undead garden. They’re thinking about bridge traffic. I’m thinking about my family. How will we stay together? Video conferencing will keep us alive, but it won’t be the same. I won’t be close enough to keep them safe. Arcadia is also my sister. My family staggers beneath entropy. No part of me is prepared for this reunion, but now we’re in front of the building.

“Feel that?” Lucian asks.

I nod. “Vampires. Close, but out of sight. Could it be Modred and a friendly posse?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yeah. Me neither.”

“It might be worth it to call him, though. Or Patrick.”

“Do that. I have to call—”

My phone goes dead. I hear people shouting, and realize that all of the lights are gone. The cars have stopped moving. There’s no more neon. I see a crowd of people standing behind an automatic door that refuses to open, and others trapped halfway up escalators.

“It smells like electromagnetic interference,” Lucian says.

“The lab has a fail-safe. It should have activated by now.”

The windows of the CORE building stay dark. We get into the lobby, and people are everywhere, bumping into one another and trying to get their phones to work. The security desk is empty, and all the metal detectors have gone to sleep. We head for the emergency exit. We have to walk up fifteen flights of stairs. There are people coming down as well, but it’s dark, and everyone is concentrating on their feet. We don’t say anything to one another. It worries me that the emergency materia generator hasn’t been activated. It worries me that I haven’t heard from Derrick all day. It worries me that we never saw any of the vampires, even though we could feel them.

We reach the Forensic unit. The halls are full of people talking by the light of their athames. Selena sees me
and walks over. I don’t think she sees Lorenzo. It’s dim, and he’s pretty transparent.

She turns to me. “Where the hell have you been? You left without giving any kind of statement. We still can’t track down your mother.”

“Don’t bother. You’re not going to find her. Anyway, the Seneschal’s death was a suicide.”

“How do you know that?”

“I talked to his Lar. The bird was a phoenix.”

“Wow. He more closely resembled a vulture.”

“Maybe he’d let himself go. The point is that we came at this wrong. We thought his death was linked to the murder of Lord Nightingale, but it was random. He died of old age. Monsters trashed his place after, which is why it looked like a crime scene.”

“I suppose a statue told you that as well?”

“No. Lucian’s brother did, but that’s a discussion for another day. What’s wrong with the fail-safe?”

“It failed. Or rather, its connection failed. I’ve sent people to the subbasement to activate it manually, but it’s hard to communicate with them. Our telepaths are working overtime.”

“Is Derrick here?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him. At the moment, I’m more interested in why you and Lucian are here.”

“Well, that story begins with a tapestry, and ends with the possibility of my sister killing us all. I’m not sure how to put it into a nutshell.”

“Why don’t you try?”

“Fine. All I really understand is that the Ferid are behind this. They murdered Lord Nightingale. I don’t know how, but they’re pretty much the only ones who could have.”

“This seems elaborate, even for you.”

“I don’t know any other way to explain it.”

“We’ve heard nothing from them. As far as we know, they never tried to get Ru back. Why would they do this?”

“I—” All I can do is blink. “I don’t really know why. I just know. They’re written all over this, somehow.”

“Plus,” Lucian adds, “one of them chased us through Trinovantum.”

Selena stares at me. “You didn’t think to lead with that?”

“I was getting there!”

“There was a thing with a textile,” Lucian says. “You really had to be there. But some of what she’s saying actually makes sense.”

“Thank you. Right now, we have two problems. The first is that there are vampires clustered outside. Something’s up, and there’s no way of contacting the Magnate. I think we have to assume that they’re hungry and hostile.”

“We have people keeping an eye on them,” Selena says. “Probably not enough people, though. What’s the other problem, aside from the fact that this power outage is destroying whole rooms full of trace evidence?”