Blackthorne

9. Demonstrations

DEMONSTRATIONS

DRACO

Three floors below the club, past the staff lockers and the wine cellar that was not a wine cellar, the corridor ended at an iron door Celeste pretended she did not have a key to.

Beyond it was the working room.

It was square, windowless, and roughly the size of a small chapel, with unfinished concrete walls and four iron drains set into the floor because some rooms were built with cleanup in mind.

Helena had worked the warding sigils into the brick herself the year I bought the building, and she refreshed them every January because Helena believed in God, contracts, and preventative maintenance, in that order.

A single hooded bulb hung from the low ceiling. Above us, the bass from the club moved through the concrete in a slow, steady pulse, felt more than heard.

The room had been used for this kind of work for a hundred and three years. It had heard worse confessions than the church next door and kept fewer of them.

People thought torture was theatre.

It was not.

It was bookkeeping with blood involved. You sat with a man until the numbers came out of him, and you tried not to get any of them on your shirt.

Ilya had been bleeding for forty minutes, and I was bored.

He was tied to the chair in the middle of the floor, silver-cored cuffs at his wrists and ankles and a third loop of silver around his throat, snug enough that the skin under it had gone the color of old candle wax.

Amara had cut his shirt straight down the middle with one stroke and let it fall open, and I'd spent the last half hour opening a neat row of holes along his ribs, the way you punch new notches in a belt.

None of it had bled the way a healthy vampire bled.

It came out thin and pinkish, with an oily chemical sheen where it pooled on the concrete, and it smelled sour, and the smell had got into my coat, which meant I was going to have to burn the coat, and I was, if I am honest, more annoyed about the coat than anything Ilya had said all night.

Vampires don't bleed easy. Vampires of Ilya's age and station don't bleed at all, not from cuts like mine. They bleed when the blade cutting them is older than they are.

“Let's go again,” I said.

Ilya lifted his head. The bulb caught the planes of his face and made him look worse than he was.

“You think this scares me, Draco?”

“I don't think anything scares you, Ilya. I think you've been scared so long you've forgotten there was a before. That's a different thing, and it's a worse one, and it's not going to help you tonight.”

“You're old and you're slow and you're losing your grip on this whole fucking city, and the only reason you've still got the south side is nobody's bothered to come take it off you yet.”

I had been threatened by better men than Ilya, and most of them were ash, and the few who weren't paid me on the first of the month.

He was not telling me anything I didn't know.

He was talking because his mouth was the only part of him that still moved freely.

Desperate animals leaked information through their bravado.

It was almost the only good thing about them.

“The blood. Where's it coming from?”

“Eat me.”

“You've been running a corrupted product through three of my venues and four that aren't mine.

Whoever cooked it knew what they were doing.

The chemistry's not crude, it's designed, and you don't have the talent for it, and we both know you don't. So you're a courier. I want the chemist, the buyer, and the broker. Names, addresses, anything that resembles a useful sentence, and then we can both go home.”

“You think I'd give my people up to you?”

“I think you'd hand me your mother by the end of the hour, if you'd had one. I'm trying to save us both the time.”

He laughed. “You don't even know what you're standing in, do you?”

“Try me.”

“You're in it already. Both feet. Up to the fucking knee. You've been so busy polishing your little kingdom you haven't clocked what's been laid down right in front of you, and now you've gone and put your hand on it like it's yours, and you don't even...”

I crossed the floor before he finished the word, and the silver pick I'd been turning over in my fingers was suddenly resting in the soft place under his jaw.

“Finish the sentence,” I said.

“You don't even know about the...”

I pressed, and the skin split, and the thin pink blood ran down the silver and onto my knuckles, and his eye went wide, and I held it there until I felt the flutter of fear come up under my hand like a moth against a window.

“Remy Venn. Why route his debt through me?”

“I didn't.”

“Someone did.”

“It wasn't supposed to be him.” The words came out fast now, falling over each other, the way they always did once a man decided the truth was cheaper than the next thirty seconds. “It was the other one. The brother. The other brother. The one we were told to...”

“Tell me about the other brother,” I said, very quietly.

He opened his mouth.

The phone in my coat buzzed against my chest.

Once. Twice.

Mateo’s pattern.

I left it where it was. I knew what it meant. The lift was coming down, and Mateo was in it with Nico. The timing was either perfect or disastrous, and I would not know which until I saw Nico’s face.

On the drive over, I had told myself I was bringing him here because he needed to understand the world he had stumbled into. A man could not survive a country whose laws he had never read, and Nico had already proved he would keep walking into danger if no one showed him where the teeth were.

That was the practical reason.

I had several of those.

“Hold him,” I told Amara, and crossed to the door.

I heard Nico in the corridor demanding to know what the fuck was going on, swinging the word like a hammer, and under the anger ran a thin high wire of fear he was doing a genuinely creditable job of hiding.

I opened the door.

He was three feet off, one hand up mid-gesture, in the middle of telling Mateo something forceful, and the gesture died when he saw me. His eyes found my face, then found what was behind me, then came back, and the whole architecture of him changed.

“What the fuck?” he exclaimed.

“Inside.”

“No. What the fuck, Draco, what is...” He tried to look past me again, and I stepped into the line of it, and he came up short against my chest and shoved. “Don't you fucking herd me.”

“Inside, Nico. I don't want to have this conversation in a hallway.”

Mateo came in behind him and shut the door, and the click of the latch was the loudest thing in the room.

I watched him take it in. That was the work of the next ten seconds, and I gave it the attention it was owed.

“Who is that?”

“A complication.”

“What did he do?”

“He's the man who sold your brother the blood.”

I watched his brain go scrabbling for the nearest meaning that still fit the world he believed he lived in five minutes ago.

“What kind of blood, Draco?”

“The literal kind.”

“That's not an answer.”

“It is, in fact, the entire answer.”

Ilya laughed, and it bubbled.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, that's him. That's the fucking brother right there. Draco, do you even know what you've walked into this room with you, do you have any idea what's standing by your...”

“Be quiet, Ilya.”

“He smells like a door...”

“Amara.”

Amara gave the silver loop at his throat a quarter turn, just enough that the skin under it hissed and a thread of smoke came off it and Ilya made a thick choking sound and stopped talking, and her gloved hand was back at her side as though it had never left, and her face had not moved at all.

Nico had gone completely still.

“What is he, Draco? What's wrong with his teeth? What's wrong with his fucking eyes...”

“He's what your century calls a vampire. The word does a lot of work it hasn't earned, but it'll do for tonight.”

“No, this is, this is some kind of, this is a setup, this is cult shit, you put something in my coffee...”

“I didn't.”

“Tell me you're fucking with me.”

“I'm not.”

And that was when Ilya made his move.

He cleared the chair before Amara's hand closed on empty silver. He cleared Rowan's reach before Rowan finished his half-step. The loop at his throat tore him open as he rose, biting deeper because he hadn't stopped to slip it, and the thin blood went up in a wet arc across the concrete.

Nico saw it coming. There was no time to move. There was no time to do anything at all except stand there and watch the impossible cross the room at him.

I watched the exact second Nico's whole understanding of the world split clean down the middle.

Then Mateo changed.

I have watched my wolves change for longer than most languages have been alive, and I have never once stopped finding it beautiful. It was not the slow, screaming cinema people imagine. The body remembers an older shape and simply reaches for it.

What stood between Nico and Ilya was not the charming driver anymore. It was a wolf the size of a small horse, black-coated, gold-eyed, lips dragged off teeth built for a very different kind of conversation, and Rowan came up a half-beat later on the other flank, bigger, grayer, older in the bone.

“What the fuck?” Nico exclaimed.

Ilya twisted past Mateo. He should not have been able to, but a starving thin-blood with one fixed idea was a special kind of fast, and the idea was Nico's throat.

That’s was when I decided that enough was enough and I was already across the room.

The silver dagger was out of my coat and in my hand. I had the line of Ilya's neck as he leaned in toward Nico, and I put the blade in clean above the collarbone and through the spine and out the far side. Ilya’s head came off the body in one motion so complete I barely felt it through the grip.

The head hit the concrete. The body folded straight down where it stood and it came to rest against Nico's shoes.

I cleaned the dagger on what was left of Ilya's shirt and slid it back into my coat, because the alternative was to leave it dirty, and I do not leave things dirty.

“Nico.”

His eyes came to me.

“Breathe.”

“Don't you fucking tell me to breathe.” He pushed off the wall toward me, found the body with his foot, flinched back, caught the wall again. “You don't get to, you do not get to stand there with his blood on you and tell me to breathe like this is, like this is normal, like this is a...”

“It's not normal for you. It's an ordinary Tuesday for me, which is exactly the problem I brought you here to understand. I am not telling you to breathe. I'm asking. You're about to go down, and I'd rather you didn't, because the floor is not clean.”

He breathed.

“What are you?”

“I am a Vampire, Nico.”

“And them?” His chin jerked a quarter inch toward the wolves.

“They are both Werewolves.”

“And him?” His throat worked.

“A man who sold poison to your brother. A thin-blood, which is a word for a vampire made by a vampire who should never have been allowed to make anyone, off a line that's been making this city sick for forty years.

He was a problem of mine. Now he's a logistics question, and not even an interesting one.”

“You took his fucking head off.”

“No. I planned to keep him breathing long enough to give me names. He had other ideas, and he was going for your throat when he stopped having them, so I'd watch the resentment, if I were you. You're the reason he's in pieces, not me. I brought you here to learn.”

He made a sound that wasn't a laugh but might have been one in a kinder decade.

“Mateo will take you to the manor.”

“I'm not getting in a car with a wolf.”

He stared at me, and the math of that landed, and a small wild thing slipped out of him that was almost, this time, a laugh.

Behind me came the wet, sliding shift of bone putting itself back, Mateo first, then a longer one for Rowan, then the rustle of recovered clothes, and two men were breathing again in the shapes they wore by daylight.

Mateo came up at my shoulder, dressed, and pitched his voice low and past me, toward the wall, toward Nico.

“Hey. Nico. You with me?”

Nico's eyes went to him. “I'm with you.”

“You're shaking, carino. Let's get you in the car. Heat's already on. We'll get a drink in you at the house. You don't have to talk, you don't have to do anything, you just have to walk to the elevator with me.”

“Mateo.”

“Yeah.”

“You're a fucking wolf.”

“I'm a fucking wolf, boss.”

Mateo took the opening for what it was and stepped in. Nico didn't pull away. Mateo walked him to the door, and at the door, Nico stopped.

“You owe me an explanation.”

“I know.”

He held my eye a second longer than he had to, then let Mateo take him out, and the door shut.

I crouched and looked at Ilya's face a while longer. There was nothing in it now. Whatever he'd recognized, whatever he had seen in Nico that pulled him across that floor at the price of his own throat, had gone wherever dead thin-bloods go, and it had not left a forwarding address.

“Burn him. I want nothing left to ask a question of.”

“Yes,” Amara said.