Contained
Tanya Huff
When he woke and turned on his phone, he had a message from Jack Elson. Sent twenty-three minutes after sunset, the message included an address and a terse Body. Get here ASAP.
Henry considered Jack a friend. In almost five hundred–odd years, there’d never been so many who’d been trusted with the knowledge of what he was.
RCMP Inspector Jack Elson had seen a few inexplicable things and—to Henry’s amusement—had more trouble accepting that Henry had been the Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the Marshal of the North, and the bastard son of Henry VIII than he did with Henry’s being a vampire.
Bottom line, Henry knew Jack wouldn’t waste his time. The word body, as a sentence on its own, could refer to any number of things, but given the context, its meaning seemed obvious. The body itself—condition, manner of death—had to be beyond the scope of the police.
He wondered what it said about the times that he’d become a de facto police consultant.
At five p.m. on a December Tuesday, the traffic on Marine Drive was appalling.
It had grown worse over the years Henry had lived in Vancouver, and he had no idea how anyone without his advantages survived the number of idiots now careening around on the road.
He turned left onto Ontario Street, crossed Kent and the railway tracks, and entered a warehouse parking lot a stone’s throw from the Fraser River.
It had to be the right place given the number of government vehicles.
His headlights picked out two uniformed officers vomiting onto the scrubby grass at the edge of the lot.
One had fallen forward onto his knees, back arched as he convulsed and dribbled bile onto the asphalt.
One might have been a rookie; the other was far too old.
Henry spotted another pair as he pulled into a parking spot, the younger squatting by a squad car bumper with her head between her knees, gulping for air, the elder rummaging in a first aid kit spread out on the hood, tears pouring down his face.
Henry turned off the engine and spent a moment considering the situation.
If the police were here in these numbers, if the police were this affected, he had to assume multiple bodies rather than the single body implied in Jack’s message.
Moreover, the bodies had to be in the kind of condition that overwhelmed the coping methods of the VPD.
He locked down the potential reaction to what would no doubt be ungodly amounts of blood and got out of the car.
The blood scent was surprisingly faint.
But the strong smell of bleach coming from the warehouse meant nothing good.
Jack stood in the open doorway. The tie he’d been forced to wear since his promotion to inspector had been violently loosened, and he was breathing shallowly through his nose.
The rapid slam of his heart against his ribs suggested he’d armored himself in professionalism in order to maintain a semblance of outward calm.
“I have seen some shit, Fitzroy,” he said when Henry drew close enough. “On my own. With you.” He shook his head and entered the warehouse. “Normally, I’d call Tony for something like this but…”
“But he’s in San Diego.”
“Yeah. That too.”
Following Jack between the stacks of crates toward the blaze of what looked like a half dozen circled spotlights hanging from catwalks, Henry breathed shallowly through his mouth so as not to be overwhelmed by the bleach fumes.
A pile of crates blocking the end of the passage forced them to turn left down another passage toward an opening marked by a spill of light.
A quick glance up at the ceiling suggested the opening would lead to the center of the warehouse.
When Henry moved toward it, Jack stopped him.
He ran a hand through his short pale blond hair. “Not yet. You go in there now with your eyes, you’ll go blind. Give them a minute to…”
Before he could finish, all but one of the spotlights up on the catwalks went out.
“Right.” He swallowed. “Let’s go then.”
The remaining spotlight shone into the center of a roughly circular open area three, maybe four meters across.
In front of a body propped upright on a low pedestal, a short, heavyset man in a turban placed equipment back into his case with the kind of care that suggested he was barely maintaining control.
Jack cleared his throat. “Doc?”
“I’m done.” He closed the case and turned.
“Anything?”
“Alive while it happened. Probably for a while after. Dead when he was mounted on that post at least, poor bastard.” He walked past them, gaze locked on the middle distance, as though acknowledging another person on anything but the most superficial level would shatter his composure.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, Inspector, I’m going to wait outside for the wagon. ”
As the doctor’s footsteps faded, Henry stepped forward.
Once. Twice. Close enough that blood and flesh and terror and pain overwhelmed the bleach.
“Saint Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles,” he said.
“He was flayed for converting an Armenian king to Christianity. In 1562, Marco d’Agrate sculpted the saint holding a book and wearing his skin like a stole.
” Confined by the limitations of stone, the sculpted stole was less dramatic than the stole in front of him.
D’Agrate had omitted dangling feet and hands, the bristle of chest hair, the face still wearing duct tape over its mouth.
Stone genitalia had been covered. Flesh was not.
The weight of the skin held open the book.
Saint Bartholomew held a Bible. This non-saint held one of Henry’s books.
For the last five years, Henry had been writing graphic novels under the name Henry Richmond.
He took a step closer. Blood obscured all but the panel that held the drawing of D’Agrate’s Saint Bartholomew Flayed in the Duomo di Milano.
“Figured this is a message for you.” Jack’s voice sounded muffled, distanced by the fingernail grip Henry had on his control. “Both the book and the…extremes the creature went to. So the question is, what’s come into my city?”
Henry drew a deep breath in through his nose and exhaled through his mouth, tasting the residue left beneath the bleach. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Are you saying something that could do this has been here all along and you didn’t…” The pause stretched. Lengthened. “Fuck me,” Jack muttered at last. “A person did this? A basic, non-mythic human?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe possessed by, like, a demon or a vengeful ghost or something?”
“No. Just a person. But you’re right,” he continued, before Jack could respond, “this is a message for me. Both the book and the victim. This body…” Once belonged to. Once held. Once was. “It’s Kevin Groves.”
“The truth guy who writes for the tabloids?”
“The truth guy who writes for the tabloids,” Henry agreed.
“Kevin Groves. Who knew when he was being lied to. Probably why he got divorced last year. He always said it was a curse. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been trying to become an investigative reporter and failing.
Kept trying though. But more importantly…
” He could feel his control slipping and turned to face Jack in the hope of containing the Darkness just a little longer. “More importantly…He. Was. Mine.”
Jack had one hand on his weapon and the other outstretched, as though flesh and bone and willpower could stop what Henry barely held in check. “What now?”
“Now? Now I’m going to find out who sent the message and answer it.”
“It’ll be a trap.”
“I know.” He couldn’t stop the snarl.
One step back. Almost two, but Jack managed to hold his ground. “What can I do?”
“Clear the way to my car.”
“Is it safe for you to drive?”
“It isn’t safe to stop me.”
It should have taken Henry an hour and fifteen minutes to get out to the Pitt River Bridge.
It took him forty-seven minutes, and he had to force himself to release the steering wheel once he was parked.
He didn’t know of anyone capable of skinning a man alive, but he knew someone who would.
Someone who kept track of the worst humanity could offer.
Someone Henry had allowed to hunt around the edges of his territory.
The noise level in the River’s Pit slammed at Henry’s ears when he opened the door, but the smell was almost welcome.
Whiskey and beer and urine and unwashed bodies chased the bleach from his nose.
The place was half-full, heat cranked high, blood pulsing under sweat-streaked skin.
Two men, their bulk run to fat, shoved each other, back and forth, in one corner.
No one paid any attention. A working girl looked up as Henry closed the door behind him, looked hopeful, and hurriedly looked away.
Three disgusting pay phones on the wall to Henry’s right hung under a handwritten sign that warned potential customers the machines were tapped by the VPD.
The man Henry wanted sat where he had a good view of both exits, his back against the wall, his gaze sweeping the room.
He smiled at Henry, a smile that didn’t pretend to be anything but a challenging show of teeth.
A younger man sat with him, leg jittering, fingers tapping, a scar cutting up the left side of his face almost to his eye.
He turned to watch as Henry approached, opened his mouth, and was cut off by a terse “Fitzroy” from his companion.
“Baden.” Henry leaned in. “I need the name and location of a man with a skinning knife and the skills to wield it.”
“No hello? No ‘It’s been a long time’? No concern over how I’ve been?”
“None. Just the name.”
“Fuck you. You sure it’s a man?”
“Yes. Gender and species.”
“All right then.” Baden leaned back in his chair. “You want to hire this guy or kill them? Don’t answer that,” he continued before Henry could answer. “You stink of death. You want to rip the world apart right now, but you’ll settle for this knife wielder. Too bad. I don’t know who he is.”
“I do.”