CHAPTER TWELVE
Cassius
Two days out from Friday, I find the first crossed-out name.
Perce Hallwood is thirty-eight, drives a Nissan with a dent in the tailgate, and sits in cars for people who cannot sit in cars in the daytime. He is not brave and I am not gentle and the whole thing takes about nine seconds.
What's in his glovebox is worse.
It's a printed list of six addresses in Ashmoor. Four of them are crossed out.
And a photograph of Trevor Ansel, taken through a restaurant window in April.
I stand on a wet street at two in the morning with a piece of paper in my hand and do the arithmetic, and it comes out badly.
Ansel is the fifth name.
Every address on that list is a feeder — a human on retainer, registered with the court, one of maybe twenty in this city who have made an arrangement and been paid for it.
And somebody has been going down the list, one a month since March, killing them, and dressing each one to look like a family provocation so that the court spends every Friday shouting about strike-marks instead of counting bodies.
The sixth name is a woman called Adaeze Nnamdi.
She lives on Cadger Row, four doors from the basement where a nameless three-week-old fledgling was left in the dark with Wren Kelleher's scent in his head.
I put her on a bus to her sister's in Rochester at six the next morning.
She asks me why, and I tell her the truth, which is that somebody has a list with her name on it and I do not yet know who, and she looks at me for a long moment and says, "Twenty-two years I've been doing this and nobody's ever come to the door to tell me anything," and gets on the bus.
◆ ◆ ◆
I sit with Adaeze Nnamdi in her kitchen for an hour before the bus, because she asks me to, and because I have not sat in a human being's kitchen and answered questions since 1974.
She's sixty-one. She has been a feeder in this city for twenty-two years, first for a man called Prosper who died in 2011, then for Vespera's household on a schedule of one draw every six weeks. She has a pension coming, a daughter in Rochester, and a framed photograph of a graduation on the wall.
"Twenty-two years," she says, "and nobody has ever come to the door to tell me anything."
"No."
"Not when Prosper died. Not when the Ferrow business started and there were suddenly men sitting in cars on this street.
" She pours tea I won't drink and sets it in front of me anyway.
"I found out about Trevor from the news, Mr. Rook.
Trevor and I did the same job. We had lunch twice a year.
I found out he'd been killed from a phone alert. "
There is no answer to that. I don't attempt one.
"Are we cattle?" she says.
I look at the graduation photograph.
"You are the only reason the arrangement works," I say, "and we have spent two hundred years making certain none of you ever meet each other, and I could give you nine reasons for that and every one of them would be about our safety and not yours."
Adaeze Nnamdi nods slowly.
"That's the first honest thing one of you has said to me since 2004," she says. "Have a biscuit."
"I can't."
"I know you can't. Take one anyway. It's rude not to."
I put a biscuit in my coat pocket and drive a sixty-one-year-old woman to a bus station at six in the morning, and I stand on the concourse until the coach pulls out, and I find the biscuit in that pocket eleven days later in a marble bathroom on Marlowe Terrace, and I want that written down somewhere.
◆ ◆ ◆
Marisol Ocampo arrives at the house on Wednesday night in her cousin's Corolla with a duffel bag, a machete, and a Tupperware of pancit.
"It's a bolo," she says, on the terrace, holding it up. "It was my lolo's. It's for coconuts."
"You brought a coconut knife to a vampire's house."
"I brought dinner to a vampire's house, the knife is a bonus." She looks past me at the concrete and the glass and the sea. "This is where she's been? This is nice. This is a whole architecture. Are we sure you're a vampire and not just, like, divorced?"
"Come in."
"That's the second-worst sentence I've ever been said." She squares her shoulders like a woman going into a job interview, and walks in.
What happens next is the strangest hour of my last two centuries.
She stops dead in the middle of the room and looks at me — five foot one, holding a machete, with a Tupperware under her arm.
"Did you kill Sofronio Ocampo."
"When?"
"1974 to whenever. Ashmoor. Made in the Philippines, came over on a container ship, my abuela's brother."
"I don't know the name."
"That's not a no."
"No, it isn't." I put my hands in my pockets. "I've killed forty-one of us. Two came out of Manila and both were before 1960. If he came in '74 and he's still here, he's one of eleven and I'd know his face. Do you have a photograph?"
And Marisol Ocampo — who has, I gather, held Wren on a bathroom floor, and once talked a grieving man out of a garage — gets out her phone with a shaking hand and shows a dead man a photograph of a boy in a barong shirt in 1969.
I look at it for a long time.
"He's not in Ashmoor," I say. "He may be nowhere.
Most fledglings from that decade were made in ports and lost in ports; if he'd stayed here he'd have broken the Covenant inside a year, they all did, and I'd have been the one sent.
" I hand the phone back. "But there's a register under the Custom House going back to 1802 and a man who keeps it who has never once been asked for anything.
It would take a week. And it would put your name in a room I'd rather it wasn't in. "
"Do it anyway," Mari says.
"That's not a small—"
"Do it anyway."
I incline my head, about a centimetre. "Then I'll do it."
She sits down on the sofa, sets the bolo on the coffee table, opens the Tupperware, and eats out of it with a fork, and does not stop shaking for about ten minutes, and nobody mentions that either.
◆ ◆ ◆
By eleven the three of us are around the table with a legal pad and this has somehow turned into a meeting.
"Right." Mari clicks a pen. "Friday. Talk me through it, because Wren explains things like a woman falling downstairs."
"That's—"
"You do, mahal, you start at the middle."
So I brief her properly. The Custom House. Vespera Thorne, Matriarch, hundred and ninety years, tea she never drinks. Eleven vampires in the city, of whom four matter: Vespera, Lucien Ivo, a Ferrow attaché called Ravensdale who represents an older family out east, and me.
The claim. Half-made. Illegal until it isn't.
I do not tell them about the list in my coat pocket with four names crossed out. That is a decision I make at the table, in the space of about a second, and I will be paying for it inside a fortnight.
"And if you finish it before Friday?" Mari says.
"Then she walks in as mine and the court has to deal with a fact instead of an opportunity."
"And if you don't?"
"Then she walks in as a resource," I say, "and eleven very old people start negotiating about her in front of her."
Mari writes something down. Underlines it twice.
"So finish it," she says.
"It's not a staple gun, Mari," Wren says.
"I know it's not a staple gun—"
"He has to drink from me and I have to drink from him, and it's binding, it's for as long as we're both alive, and he's not going to die—"
The pen stops.
The room goes quiet in a very particular way, and I watch her hear what she's said about a second after everyone else does.
"Yes," I say, to the table. "That's the part."
"I didn't mean—"
"You did, and you're right to." I get up and walk to the glass wall and stand with my back to them, looking at nothing, because there's nothing out there but black.
"A claim doesn't end. It thins, if the human dies.
It doesn't end. I have never made one and I have never wanted to and I am asking you to make one in a hurry, at thirty, under duress, because the alternative is a room with a window that isn't a window. "
Mari looks at Wren. Wren looks at the table.
"Okay," Mari says quietly, capping her pen. "Then we go to court with it half-done, and we lie our faces off, and Wren, you're going to need a dress."