Contained #4
And Henry allowed himself to seem only Henry again.
The momentary tightening of Kenwick’s grip on the glass told him everything he needed to know.
“You had no guards in the garden and minimal security. You wanted me in the house. That makes sense—you don’t want to attract attention.
Once I’m safely out of sight, you’ll spring your trap.
” Henry spread his hands, and dried blood flaked off onto the carpet.
“But there isn’t a trap, at least not an obvious one.
You’re alone. Exposed. You know what I am, but you’re not afraid.
“James Chin wasn’t afraid either, but James Chin was mad. Soulless, although I’m sure modern medicine would make a different, inadequate diagnosis. You know what he did…”
“Know,” Kenwick scoffed. “I paid him to do what he did. To do something you’d notice.”
Henry ignored him. “Having two men without souls involved in attracting my attention is too much of a coincidence.” He paused, pulled over a leather club chair, and sat down.
“Robert Alistair Kenwick publishes tabloids. Kevin Groves worked at a tabloid. Not much of a leap to assume he said enough about me that you knew what I was. Knew that I was in Vancouver.”
“Poor Kevin.” Kenwick pursed fleshy lips in a parody of sympathy. “Life is very, very lonely for a man unable to lie.”
“Kevin was able to see the truth—not quite the same thing. But we’re not talking about Kevin.
We’re talking about you. About how knowing what I am means knowing my kind are possessive.
” And how it almost always ended badly. “If all you wanted was my attention, you could have sent Kevin to me with your business card and a threat against him if I didn’t respond.
” A thought occurred and Henry frowned. “I wonder: Did he see the truth about you? Never mind.” He waved it off.
Kevin was dead. What he’d seen or hadn’t seen no longer mattered.
All that mattered now was ending the charade.
“You didn’t just want my attention; you wanted me angry.
You wanted me to stop thinking, to allow the Darkness free rein.
Why?” The pause lengthened. When Kenwick refused to fill it, Henry continued, not actually needing his help.
He had all the pieces now, and he knew what he was building.
“With the Darkness released, I’d want blood for blood.
A life for a life. You wanted me to attack you.
You wanted me to attack you mindlessly. Unfortunate that you got so excited about what you could do, you made a mistake. ”
Kenwick raised both brows and took a drink.
“If you hadn’t left the drawing, if you hadn’t specifically said the message was for me, the police would have found the tabloid connection.
You’d have an alibi, of course, and I doubt they’d have found James Chin—he’s a well-camouflaged cuckoo in the nest. After talking to you—rich, alibied—the police would back off.
And I’d arrive. You’d admit to having Kevin killed, you’d goad me like you have been, and I’d attack you.
“But when you made Kevin’s death specially about me, that ensured I wouldn’t wait for the police, and in order to find you, I had to find the man with the knife.
In order to find him, well…” Henry indicated his bloodstained clothing.
“There’s a few less gangbangers around.” Kenwick didn’t need to know about Reynolds.
Reynolds was…was not his finest hour. And in case this didn’t end well, if Kenwick didn’t already know about the shifters, well, Henry wasn’t going to be the one who told him.
“The gangbangers burned off a lot of the unreasoning rage, and James Chin made me start thinking.”
“Ah yes, so you said.” Kenwick took another drink. “Two men with the absence of a soul would be too great a coincidence.”
Henry leaned back and crossed his legs, folding the sides of his coat up over his lap. “I started connecting the dots. Watching you from the shadows, I connected a few more.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about.”
“Connect the dots.” Henry sketched lines in the air.
More blood flaked off his hand. “You draw a line from one point to another until a picture forms. You’ve never done that.
You’re wearing a man-suit, but you’re not a man.
” He let his hand drop back down onto his lap. “Men don’t call me Nightwalker.”
Kenwick sighed. “I’m sure they call you any number of things,” he muttered.
Henry continued, ignoring him. “You wanted me to attack you mindlessly, so I assume you need blood in order to pass from one body to the next. You want mine because I’m immortal.
I expect the late Robert Kenwick picked you up from one of those souvenirs.
” He nodded toward the artifacts on the desk.
“Pricked a finger while buying something old and exotic on the black market, and there you were.”
Putting down his glass, the creature wearing Kenwick slow clapped. “Oh, well done.”
“Fuck you,” Henry said genially. “Why not attack me when it became clear I wasn’t following the script?”
“My physicality is limited by the body I inhabit, and this one couldn’t lay a finger on you if you didn’t want it to.” It smiled. “Your immortality is not the only reason I want to wear you.”
“Why not transfer to Kevin? You obviously gain the knowledge of the…” He paused. Frowned.
“Deceased,” it offered.
“Of the deceased. You’d have found me, exposed yourself, and I’d have attacked. You’d have got what you wanted.”
“Perhaps.” It spread Kenwick’s hands. “The whole truth thing made me nervous. Besides, just walking up to you wearing Kevin, where’s the artistry in that?”
Look what I can do.
“You remind me of my father.”
It inclined Kenwick’s head. “Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment.”
“So where do we go from here?” it asked, curious but unconcerned.
“You won’t attack me. I can’t attack you.
You need to be gone before sunrise. At which point I’ll acquire a new meat suit and you’ll never find me again.
Stalemate.” It gestured toward the board set up by one of the heavily curtained windows. “Kenwick played bad chess.”
Henry smiled. “So do you.”
He’d fought in two world wars. He knew how to handle guns, and a target a mere two meters away didn’t require precision shooting, not even through the pocket of his coat. He fired eighteen times—the seventeen in the magazine, the eighteenth in the chamber.
Then he waited, leaning forward, forearms braced on his thighs. If he’d been starving, he wouldn’t have been tempted by the blood pouring from Kenwick’s body.
Where did the thing go when the blood had no contact with anything but a corpse?
Hopefully, back to wherever it had come from.
“Hopefully?” Jack sputtered, walking shoulder to shoulder with Henry along the Stanley Park seawall.
Henry shrugged. “No way of knowing. I gathered up all the Asian artifacts, and then last night I poured holy water over them…”
“Holy water? Seriously?”
“Belt and suspenders, Inspector. Then I encased the artifacts in concrete…”
“Do I want to know…” Jack raised a hand, cutting himself off. “No, I don’t.”
“And then ‘asked’…”
“A vampire making air quotes. Now I’ve seen everything.”
“Asked,” Henry repeated, quoting more emphatically, “a young man on a container ship to drop them overboard mid-ocean.”
“Yeah, like I haven’t seen that plot before.”
“Safer than leaving them in Vancouver.”
“Fair enough.”
They walked a little further through fat snowflakes that melted as they hit the ground.
After a moment, Jack sighed. “So, VPD found a weapon in Kenwick’s library, no serial number, no prints, but ballistics traced it to a drive-by shooting we wanted the Pride for.
They also found some old blood at the scene that matched one of the victims of a Pride massacre in a condo down the block from yours.
The unofficial consensus is gang violence.
Same old, same old. A lot of that going around.
A lot of the other thing going around too.
” He paused, then added, “Your other thing. Ancient evil emerging from artifacts…”
“I understood what you meant.” And he wasn’t wrong. Like attracts like. Henry could see sinuous shadows moving under the water off the park. It might have been currents moving seaweed, but he doubted it. “I was thinking about moving back to Europe.”
“ ‘Was’?”
“After weighing the possibilities, I changed my mind.”
“Because you’re only hopeful that whatever the hell possessed Robert Kenwick is gone?”
“That too.” Henry watched a snowflake land on the back of his hand. After a moment, he shook it off.
Jack watched it float downward. “You know, I said possessed by a demon or a vengeful ghost right at the beginning.”
“In reference to the man who murdered Kevin Groves. And, as I said then, he was just a person.”
“Just?”
“Maybe not just.”
“Do we have the sick bastard?”
“No.” James Chin’s body hadn’t been found, but it had only been three days. The cold weather would keep the smell down; it might be weeks. Long enough that there’d be no dots to connect.
“Is the sick bastard going to cut again?”
Not Did you kill the sick bastard? Henry noted. “No.”
“Fair enough. This time.”
“You called me.” He thought of adding, You turned me loose, but they both knew Jack couldn’t have stopped him.
“Yeah. Well, after what that bastard put Groves through to get your attention, I figured he deserved to reap the benefit of having your attention.” The rage in Jack’s voice echoed Henry’s own.
They walked a little further, isolated by the hour and the weather.
“Just so we’re clear though,” Jack said at last, “this was a onetime thing. I don’t want any vampire vigilante shit happening. No matter what that buddy of yours is up to in Toronto.”
“She has no part in this.” She had her own territory. “I was thinking…”
“God help us.”
“That I might pay more attention to who’s shitting on my doorstep.”
“And what does that mean when it’s home?”
That people forget who the apex predator is when he stops hunting. When all they have left is rumor, they fill in the silences with what they want to hear. He’s not so tough, they think. I can take him. I can take his place.
But all he said aloud was, “Did you know that seven percent of American men think they’d win in a hand-to-hand fight with a grizzly bear? They’re wrong too.”