Owl and the Japanese Circus (27 page)

“
Owl,
” Rynn said, warning in his voice, “that is not what I had in mind.” He reached for the cell.

“Just a sec, Alexander,” I said, muting the cell and stopping Rynn from hanging up for me. “Relax, they’re trapped in the tunnel and they’re staying there until this Sabine/Marie mess is over.”

Rynn wasn’t satisfied. “I said get information. Not bait vampires over the phone.”

“Stop worrying. I’ll keep it short. You wanted someone who’d know about vampires? Well, who better than a two-hundred-year-old vampire? Besides, serves you right for stealing my beer.”

Rynn rolled his eyes and made a derisive noise but otherwise didn’t interfere. I unmuted the phone.

“Sorry about that, Alexander. Look, I ran into Sabine—”

“Is she dead?” he said, not bothering to cover the hope in his voice.

I frowned. “Ummm, I’m flattered you think I could kill a vampire—”

Alexander tsked. “I doubt you could kill a dead gerbil. I’m referring to your companion, the blond mercenary.”

My mercenary companion—hunh. That meant Alexander had to have spoken to Charles in order to know about Rynn. I pushed back my gut response and went the diplomatic route. “No, Sabine’s not dead. She’s also not an old vampire like you. In fact, there’s no way in hell she’s over a year old.”

He was silent for a long moment. “That is impossible—”

“It
is
possible, because I knew her when she was alive. Last September, to be exact. You either think I’m really stupid or you’re hiding something.”

More silence. Then, in a measured and clipped voice, “Who is she?”

My turn to tsk. “You know I don’t work like that. You tell me something, I tell you something. Now, I’ll give you her real name, hell, I’ll even tell you her last known home address and toss in some bank account info, but you have to tell me something first.”

“What?”

“How did she do it? How did she get so powerful in less than a year, and why doesn’t sunlight torch her?”

I recognized just about every nasty term in French I knew and a handful I didn’t. “I
cannot
tell you that—”

I hung up.

Rynn was watching me, now thoughtful instead of angry. I had no idea what had warranted the change, but I’d take it. I nodded at
my beer, and he passed it back. I pointed the bottom of the Corona at Charles’s cell phone.

“Watch. He’ll call back as soon as he’s done throwing a tantrum,” I said.

“For someone who hates vampires, you’re building up quite the repertoire,” Rynn said finally.

“
No,
I’m using a resource.” I pointed the open end of my now empty beer at Rynn and almost dropped it on the bar. Maybe it was time to cut myself off . . . after the next one. I’d had one hell of a rough day. “Of course, if he has the chance, he’ll try to kill me and torture my cat.
Again
. But I’d be stupid not to use him for information while he can’t track me down. What’s so funny?”

Rynn took the empty bottle from my hand and replaced it with a new, cold Corona. “You referred to the vampire as ‘him.’ Twice,” he said.

“So?”

He shrugged. “Just that I never thought I’d hear you referring to supernatural monsters as ‘people’ instead of ‘things.’ ”

“They’re still things.”

“Your subconscious doesn’t refer to things as ‘he’ and ‘she.’ ”

I frowned. “I think I preferred it when you were scowling at me for getting into trouble.”

Rynn snickered, and the phone vibrated across the counter. “Fine. Prove me wrong. Stop baiting the vampire,” he said.

I made a face and answered, “Pest control. What kind of vermin would you like exterminated today?”

Rynn scowled.

“
Owl
—” Alexander said.

“Oh hi, Alexander, how are you? Spill or I’m hanging up.”

I heard him draw a sharp breath. “I will keep this short so as not to waste our time. I cannot tell you anything concerning how Sabine acquired her strength.”

“Well fine, I won’t tell you anything about Sabine either. We’re square, and this conversation is over.”

“You are the most infuriating—” I swore I heard Alexander kick one of his vampires. I had to admit, after a year of running from the Paris boys, part of me was really enjoying this.

“What I
am
willing to discuss with you is certain vampire laws that necessitate our compliance.”

I snorted. “I know enough about vampire laws to know none of you bother following any rules, unless it’s ‘Don’t get caught.’ ”

Alexander sighed. “While that is often true, there are a handful that are taken more seriously than others. A few are punishable by death—if one is, as you say, caught.”

“All right, I’m listening. Shoot. If it’s actually useful, I’ll give you what I know.”

Something grated; I think Alexander was grinding his teeth. “There are three laws that we may not break. The first is to not kill another vampire. The second, and more serious, is that it is forbidden to feed off another vampire.”

I rolled that over in my head. A little too slowly for my liking. OK, maybe I should cut back on the Coronas. “The killing vampires makes sense—though considering you guys multiply like cockroaches, my guess is it only counts if the other guy is bigger than you. What’s with the no cannibalism?”

“I do not know for certain, for I have little to no interest in such occult practices. However, I remember one saying to me many years ago it was because the blood of another vampire is poisonous.”

“How?”

“I do not know, though madness was loosely hinted at.”

“I’m getting ready to hang up—”

Alexander tsked. “So impatient. Even though I had little interest, I always wondered, ‘If the blood is poisonous, why make it a law punishable by death?’ ”

That clicked. In a warped vampire kind of logic, it even made sense. If feeding off other vampires made younger, weaker vampires stronger, it’d be in the upper cockroaches’ interest to keep the younger
ones from doing it. Hell, the madness thing might even be true; Marie was sure as hell well enough off the deep end to qualify. “Has there been a mass disappearance of vampires lately?” I asked, keeping the excitement out of my voice.

“I am afraid there are none I am aware of. I can tell you though that the Contingency takes missing vampires very seriously. This Sabine would need to be very careful to drain vampires and leave no witnesses. Very tricky, very careful.”

“Or just toss a few vampires into a river during daylight,” I said.

“Ah, yet that would result in some missing. We do keep track of our own.”

“Like overlords in a pyramid scheme?” I said.

Well, it was better than anything I had, but something still bothered me. Curiosity got the better of me. “Wait, you mentioned one more rule. What is it?”

“Ahhh, did I? It is simply that you must acquire permission from the Contingency before making any vampire. Population control, as it were.”

That clicked, and all the pieces slid into place. “You think Sabine is making her own vampires and feeding off them until they die?”

“An interesting academic question. If one needed to break one law, it reasons that it would be easier to break all three and leave no witnesses.”

I ran that against what I knew of Marie when she’d been human. It still wasn’t the smoking gun I wanted, but nothing about this entire job had been easy. “All right, Alexander. You’ve kept up your end.” I glanced over at Rynn and Nadya for their approval. Both nodded, even if Rynn did it begrudgingly. “Sabine’s name—or the one she was using before she turned vampire—is Marie Bouchard. I hired her to work the second case you gave me—the volcano over in Finland.”

“
You’re
somehow responsible for this?” Alexander hissed.

So much for friendly repartee. “Let me finish. If you bothered using your memory, you’d recall I needed help with new import licenses out
of Iceland. Your exact response, and I quote, was ‘What the hell do you think I pay you for?’ ” I even added in a French accent. “It was either risk getting caught smuggling my cargo into France, or find a good forger. I put out the word I needed someone, and Marie found me. She was a restoration artist in the archaeological museum, one of those people who do reproductions for tourists. She had a knack for documents and swore she could get past French customs, so I brought her on—
What
?” I said as Alexander snorted.

“I fail to see how this does anything but ‘dig your own grave.’ ”

I rolled my eyes. I’d never thought about it much before, but Alexander had a bad habit of using colloquial American phrases, not always accurately. It annoyed me when I was working for him, and it annoyed me now. Goddamn it, for something that lived over a hundred years, vampires sure picked the strangest hobbies.

“No background? No reference?” Alexander asked, conveying his contempt. I wasn’t about to add that it wasn’t until later—much later—that I’d found out she’d basically stolen the job posting off someone else. Considering my contacts had been in pretty low places, that said plenty about the kind of person Marie had been stealing from. Instead I offered, “I was under the gun, Alexander—
your
fault. You wanted the goods yesterday, and I didn’t have time to check. She said she could forge the customs documents to get your items clear, and she did.”

I glanced up at Nadya and winced. She couldn’t entirely hide the mixture of surprise and hurt. Guilt hit me. Nadya was my best friend and the only business partner I’d ever trusted. I’d never told her about Marie. I’d been too embarrassed.

I’d started taking supernatural-leaning jobs from Alexander at a low point in my life; I’d been freshly blacklisted from archaeology departments and universities everywhere. Needless to say, no one had wanted to hire me for anything other than trinkets and museum B&E’s, and that hadn’t paid enough to keep me under the radar. Hiding is expensive in the digital age. Anyone worth their weight as an
antiquities thief veers wide of any jobs that even smell of the supernatural, and at the start, at least, I’d had every intention of doing the same . . . but I’d needed cash, and the hostess part-time lifestyle Nadya had in Tokyo wasn’t for me. I’d swallowed my pride—and every ounce of good sense—and that’s how I’d ended up working for Alexander.

I’ve been in over my head ever since. It wasn’t worth it.

I’d spent almost a year fetching things for him before I’d figured out he was a vampire. He’d been my biggest bankroller. I’d built my career on fetching minor supernatural trinkets. That was why they’d had so little trouble tracing the cash they’d been paying me for almost a year. Right after my world imploded with the Paris boys, Nadya had put me up in Tokyo while I’d licked my wounds. I’d told her everything, including how stupid I’d been to take the supernatural jobs. She’d never judged me; she’d just listened and helped me get back on my feet.

But I’d never, ever mentioned Marie Bouchard. Hell, I don’t even like to remind
myself
about the details of that sorry fiasco.

I tried to look apologetic as I continued. “Marie worked out really well. For a while. I got a reputation for being able to slide anything past customs, and the jobs started pouring in. It wasn’t until Ephesus that I noticed the first discrepancies. There were some strange emails to your underlings from me asking for site details any first-year archaeology major should have known, and I hadn’t written them. She’d done it behind my back, and that’s when I started digging. Turns out a Marie Bouchard did take art history, but she died in a car accident right after she defended her thesis. I looked up the obituary photos; she didn’t look a thing like the Marie I knew. I did find mention of one of her classmates, Nicole Coutard, who had specialized in archaeological art restorations.
Her
class picture bore an uncanny resemblance to my Marie’s. To top it off, she was wanted along with three other students in a site theft that went seriously south.”

“She planned to steal from you?” Alexander said.

I shrugged. “I figured she was probably trying to get around needing me at all and loot the site behind my back. But that’s not why I was worried. The dead bodies piling up in that site theft did.”

Nadya swore in Russian. “She killed people at the site?”

I nodded. “The archaeologists died in a landslide, every last one, but the thieves forgot to take the catalogue. When the university realized pieces were missing, they suspected foul play and went looking for the four unaccounted students. They found three of them dead in fleabag hostels across France, each one poisoned and garroted.”

Nadya’s eyes went wide. Rynn just stared at the bar, his look reminiscent of the one I get when I’m knee-deep in a dig site, trying to piece all the details together.

“The worst part was it made no sense. The pieces they’d taken were in bad condition from weather exposure; broken, cracked, not worth much. None of them would have broken a few thousand. There was maybe—
maybe
—ten thousand total.” I pointed to the vase and scroll still resting on the bar. “I won’t lift a finger unless I can guarantee myself a profit of twenty.”

“Ten thousand is still a lot of money. There are people willing to get their hands dirty for much less,” Rynn said.

I pursed my lips. I wasn’t explaining it right—or not in mercenary terms. “It’s not just the body count. I’m talking about the effort and funds needed to orchestrate the whole thing. Funds need to be fronted, and then you need a guaranteed buyer with a set price—preferably half up front. Considering the pieces they took, I doubt there was a buyer.”

Rynn frowned, still not convinced.

“Think of it this way; you wouldn’t sell booze for less than it costs, right? But you don’t just factor in the cost of the booze, you factor in rent, your time, wages, taxes, and on and on. A well-planned theft is the same thing. There is capital that has to be factored in before you claim any profit.”

Rynn gave me a wry glare and shook his head. “Thieves with business plans.”

I ignored him. “No one remembered anything unusual, except for some pothead kid cleaning toilets at one of the hostels where one of the guys had died. He told the cops the murdered man had been drinking with a girl. He only remembered her because he was staring at her legs. I tracked him down before heading to Ephesus and showed him a picture of Marie. It was her.”