Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alexandru
“Yowza!” Ms. Renfield’s voice sounds from her office.
I set down my book and glance at the moon. It is early for her to wake—just after four in the morning.
Her footsteps sound down her small hall and across the vast marble expanse of the foyer and up the staircase to where I sit in the library.
I can feel her excess of excitement as she bursts in. A smile tugs at my lips as she comes to a standstill at the center of the room, laptop in hand. “You are not going to believe this!”
“Will I truly not?”
She sets the laptop on a side table, and there on the screen is Irina, one of the Renfield half-siblings.
A gap-toothed grin spreads across Irina’s face, a harder, sharper echo of Ms. Renfield’s. “Well, if it isn’t my least favorite person.”
“You could not have simply relayed this information?” I ask Ms. Renfield.
“She could have.” Irina adjusts her glasses. “But I wanted to let you know that you had better be treating our sister well, or we will be hunting you down.”
“Is that so.” I do not bother to suppress my smile. The Renfields are nothing if not consistent in their overestimation of human capability.
“I mean it,” she says, pointing at me through the screen.
“I would not dream of mistreating Ms. Renfield.”
“See that you don’t. Anyway, I’ll tell you what I told her. Somebody logged into Jerome’s computer from an external IP.” She ticks points off on her fingers. “Modified files, planted searches, left a back door in the system like an amateur. Well—not an amateur. But not good enough to hide from me.”
“So Jerome was telling the truth,” Ms. Renfield says.
“That’s not the interesting part.” Irina leans closer to the camera. “The IP bounced all over—Romania, Brazil, Singapore—but guess where it actually originated?”
“Must I?” I say.
Ms. Renfield watches my face, excited for me to learn this news which she apparently already knows.
Irina leans in. “The hack came from inside InovaSpire.”
“InovaSpire?” This is indeed interesting.
Ms. Renfield beams at me, savoring the moment. “Right?”
Irina sits back, looking enormously pleased with herself. “You’re welcome.”
It is not yet dawn when we reach “The Foundry,” a large brick structure perhaps a century old that houses InovaSpire.
Ms. Renfield tells me it was once an actual foundry where molten metal was hammered into tools.
Now it is a place where humans sit and tap at glowing screens, and the name is merely ironic.
We proceed up the short walk. There is a coffee shop on the ground floor, but it is dark, chairs stacked on tables behind the glass.
“Such a different world at night,” Ms. Renfield observes.
I inhale, savoring the stillness—the absence of that accursed sun and the villagers who clutter the streets by day. The creatures of the night are sleek and quiet and clever. “Far more agreeable,” I say.
She draws a card through a small slot beside the door—what passes for a key in this age. “I hope we can nail this before Serena gets here.” We head up the stairway to the top floor.
Ms. Renfield greatly admires Serena, though I do not see how this human is in any way superior to Ms. Renfield. “And you are certain she will not be unhappy with your presence at this strange hour?”
“It’s not so strange for me. If you recall, I was managing your European empire all winter. I was getting here at three in the morning all the time when I was doing both jobs.”
We reach the top floor and move silently past the warren of offices all the way to the front with its large windows framing the Silverton River, black under a sliver of moon. Ms. Renfield settles into the small desk and sets down her electronic ledger which again shows the face of Irina.
Irina waves. “Hi again, Grandpa!”
“You would do well not to address me thus.”
“What are you gonna do? Throw me in a bone pit?”
“Come on, guys. Let’s go.” Ms. Renfield shifts the angle of the screen so that Irina can read it.
“Pull up the network admin console—Tools, then Connection Logs.”
I wait, keenly aware of my growing hunger.
“I’m in,” Ms. Renfield says. “Now what?”
“Filter for outbound connections to Jerome’s IP address. I’ve got the timestamp from the intrusion...” Irina rattles off various nonsense. “We’re looking for which internal machine initiated contact.”
Ms. Renfield types. There seems to be some problem that requires them to access something called “archived logs.” Irina gives her instructions and Ms. Renfield types away
I wander along the window, focusing on Ms. Renfield’s heartbeat from across the room, steady as a metronome.
I thought I had settled this. I stood in the darkness of the dungeon and reminded myself what I am. The predator who sees when others cannot.
Not the fool who sits by a fire and feels his chest turn at a woman’s gratitude.
Thank you. For believing in me. It means a lot.
I cannot stop thinking about her revelation about James. This loss she endured, and the way she blames herself. Ms. Renfield is so outrageously conscientious. To have lost her brother in such a way—I can see how it would have pained her. It makes me want to hunt.
No. I do not like this. I do not like any of it.
Who took James, if not this Cuyahoga Killer? Or did he indeed wander off? Could he truly be alive?
I look over at her, typing away, face lit by the screen, animated by the hunt. I find I want to be beside her. To share in the thrill of the hunt.
“It means a lot.”
I gaze over the brightening countryside, feeling pleased about that fact. Even more.
And that is when I grip the steel frame that separates one massive swath of glass from another. Good God, what am I doing?
She is a human! And not just a human, but a Renfield! A Renfield of all things.
The memory rises, slow and foul.
The ritual chamber. The taste of blood and iron still on my tongue, my body strange and new and terrible. I had done it for Elisabeta. For her kingdom, her people, and mostly because she asked me to.
Because I loved her.
I looked up, expecting...what? That she would touch my face? Gaze upon me with warmth and affection?
Instead, something like triumph moved behind her eyes. She looked at me the way one might look at plundered jewels.
I told myself I was wrong. The torchlight. The shock of transformation. My own disorientation.
I did not yet understand that I had seen her true face. I did not yet know the horror that was coming.
I turn from the window.
Twenty-three days since I last fed. Diverting as these mysteries are, I cannot wait much longer.
I focus on my hunger. That, at least, is familiar. That, at least, is mine.
On the upside, we could find the killer today. I could drain somebody’s blood today. Warm and nourishing.
I move along the row of desks, considering who I would drain if Ms. Renfield were not so tediously ethical about such things.
I would start with Officer Maverick Cooper, naturally.
And then there was the man in the minivan who ran a stop sign and nearly struck Ms. Renfield some weeks back.
I naturally made a mental note of his face.
I would very much enjoy feeling him squirm as he recognizes that a superior predator has taken him.
Ms. Renfield’s conversation with Irina drones on—something about a bounced connection.
I stroll to the far window, thinking about the Snag Tooth Riders. Ms. Renfield hates how loud their motorcycles are. I would pick them off one by one, perhaps the one with the loudest motorcycle first. Some of the members of this gang are quite beefy. They would provide me with rich blood.
The sky outside is beginning to lighten at its edges. How long have we been here?
“Try filtering by the subnet,” Irina says.
A dark curl has escaped one of Ms. Renfield’s hair clips, and it hangs down, kissing her cheek bone. Her pulse has quickened slightly. Frustrated.
I turn back to the window.
There is also Harlan Delmere, the land developer who recently plotted to build upon Ms. Renfield’s favorite park, much to her distress. I remember how Ms. Renfield let her jaw hang open, as if to demonstrate the horror she felt.
There is also whoever shot at us when we were investigating the wedding killer mystery. They wore a mask, and we never did find out who it was, but they must have some idea what I am. That is never good.
And there is Sloane, who owns the stationary store, but I am not so sure Ms. Renfield would want her dead. They feud, it is true, but Ms. Renfield calls her “frenemy” which is a mix of friend and enemy...
“Alexandru!”
I turn to find Ms. Renfield behind me. “Did you not hear me come up?”
“I was ruminating.”
Her red lips quirk up at the side, and I turn back to the view. The horizon has gone fully pink now. “Do you have a result yet?”
“No. Something’s still processing, but it’s almost seven.
People will start coming in soon. I’m honestly surprised Serena isn’t here already.
When she does show up, I’m sticking to the truth—that I updated files, which I did, and that we’re doing deeper research connected to the case.
If she asks anything beyond that, I plan to be vague. I suggest you don’t contribute.”
“And I suggest you worry less about appearances and more about how little time remains.”
“We’re working as fast as we can.”
I turn to her. “Do you think it could be Serena behind all this?”
“I seriously doubt it. But when it comes to true crime, you learn pretty quickly that you never say never.” A chime sounds from her workstation, and she rushes back over.
I press my palm flat against the cold glass.
Twenty-three days without food. I can feel the feral rising. My thinking is fragmented. Jagged.
It is rare that I endure these long periods of hunger, but it has happened, most recently last month, when we were foiled in our quest to find the wedding killer.
The elevator hums. “They come.”
Ms. Renfield startles at my voice. “Okay! Thanks.” She nods and keeps working away.
“Harriet! Alexandru! You two are here early!” Serena strolls over in a cloud of chemical scent.
Ms. Renfield smiles. “Just had to jump on here really quick and then we’re gonna go out for a coffee.” The two of them have a brief conversation. Serena finds nothing amiss.
“You are very patient,” Serena says to me.
“Who’s patient?” Malik strolls in alongside KC and some of the others.
“Poor Alexandru’s patient. Harriet dragged him over here on the way to coffee.”
“Special mystery project?” KC asks.
“All my projects are special mystery projects!” Ms. Renfield says. I cannot help but notice she has removed Irina’s face from her electronic ledger.
Malik thanks her for something called a 982 doc, and KC jumps in with some suggested tweak on something.
I observe the group of them, Serena with her tightly wound brightness, Malik, driven and intensely private, and KC, hyper competitive and eager to show his talent.
The group of them drifts away.
Moments later, I feel her pulse kick.
I go to her, arms folded. “You know who. Tell me.”
She looks up at me. In a low voice, she says, “It traces back to Varla. You met her—the woman who has my old office. One of my replacements along with Malik.”
“The one who does not like you.”
“Could be that she doesn’t like a lot of people.”
I lower my voice. “Alive.”
“Maybe?” she whispers.
“We must talk to her.”
“I haven’t seen her come in yet.” She puts her things into her satchel. “Let’s ask Serena if she’s around.”
It smells like candy lemons in Serena’s office.
“All done for the day?” she asks.
“Mostly, but I really do want to follow up with Varla on something.”
“She’s not here yet?” Serena says. “That’s weird, we have a meeting with Singapore in ten.”
“Is it usual for her to roll in at the last minute?” Ms. Renfield asks.
“Very weird!”
Ms. Renfield furrows her brow. “Well...is there anything I can do?”
Serena raises an eyebrow. “Short of cutting the prince here loose and coming back on staff with me?”
“Hah.” Ms. Renfield’s laugh comes out strange. “I don’t think that’s in the cards.”
“No,” I say.
KC comes up beside us. “Singapore is happening in ten and Varla’s gone dark. Sorry to interrupt, guys.”
“No, we were just leaving!” Ms. Renfield pulls me out of there. “I found it,” she whispers. “While you were busy being insulted by Serena—the connection logs traced back to Varla’s machine.”
“Your Serena is indeed not shy about voicing her displeasure with me,” I say once we are in the car. “She is lucky she is on your ‘do not drain’ list. Especially now.”
“Don’t worry, Count Chocula, your meal might be at hand. Varla Sims rents a farmhouse up in the hills.”
“Count,” I sniff. “I am sovereign heir to a principality. A count would bow to me.”
“It’s settled, then; Count Chocula will bow to you and not the other way around. Anyway, I grabbed Varla’s address once I saw it was her doing the hacking.”
“You believe she is the Crossbow Killer.”
“The hack on Jerome came from her computer. Man, I didn’t give her enough credit for her technical chops. She was even giving Irina a run for her money with her clever concealment.”
“Varla did not like you. I will enjoy taking her blood.”
“Well, I envision speaking with her first. I want to ask her about these murders and see if she has an alibi, and maybe you can try and get a read on her. Ideally, she’ll confess the way Bo the wedding killer did.”
A growl rumbles deep in my throat. “Things will not proceed so far as that, I promise you.” The memory of Bo Richardson’s blade against her tender throat is still too vivid.
The road winds through early spring trees and open farmland. I adjust my hat to shield my eyes from the biting sun. We reach the top of a hill; a small farmhouse sits in the valley below, awash in blue and red flashing lights
“The police! No! How did they figure it out?” Ms. Renfield says. “No, no, no. This is bad.”
My sentiments exactly.
If the police have Varla in custody, I can hardly drain her blood. Not without additional inconvenience.