8. Chapter 8
Bastien
Crowe keeps an office above a transmission shop on the east side of the river, and it hasn’t changed since my last visit. Same steel desk. Same two chairs. Same window painted shut over the yard, where a man is running an engine with the hood up and the light going blue-white off the concrete.
He doesn’t stand when I come in. He caps his pen and sits back.
“After I told you what we wanted, I thought you weren’t coming back,” he says.
“I’m here.”
“Nine days later.”
“I went to look for myself instead.” I take the other chair. It’s a bad chair, low in the seat, and I don’t settle into it so much as perch on the edge, elbows on my knees.
Two nights since I sat in a different chair, across a different kind of table, and I haven’t gone back yet. I’ve been telling myself that’s discipline.
“You’d have shown me files. Photographs. Timelines. I dislike being told what a thing is when I can go and see it.”
“And?”
“And now I’m in your bad chair. Tell me what the Court actually wants.”
“The source.” He rolls the pen once across the blotter and stops it under two fingers.
“The people running that place answer to nobody. No Court law, no territory rights, no rules on the stock. When quotas tighten, they drain to the floor. Bodies surface. Bodies get autopsied. Two dry corpses in the wrong county and some mortal coroner with a vampire hobby puts every one of us on the evening news. The Court has spent hundreds of years staying out of the news.” He leaves the pen alone.
“You know all this. I said most of it when you came for our meeting, and you poured a drink and let it bounce off you.”
“You appealed to my civic feeling. I don’t carry one.”
“I appealed to your conscience. It bounced. So what got past it?”
The engine in the yard shuts off. The quiet comes up through the floor.
“Boredom,” I say. “You should have led with that.”
Crowe lets the question sit. He has a patient face. He’s waited out better liars than most, and I let him wait now.
“Nine days ago, you were bored,” he says.
“You’d been bored for a decade. I put the job in front of you and boredom didn’t take it.
Then you spent one evening inside that place on your own account, and now you’re here volunteering.
” He tips his head half an inch. “Something in that building landed.”
“The brandy’s excellent.”
“I’m sure.”
“You wanted a buyer nobody questions. You have one. I’ll trace their supply to whoever holds the top of it. I’ll hand your Court the name. I’ll be entertained. Everyone profits.”
“And your terms?”
“Not yours to hear. I’ll give them to the woman herself.”
Crowe checks his watch. It’s the first thing he’s done all evening that wasn’t deliberate.
“Convenient,” he says. “They’re sitting tonight.
” He stands and takes his coat off the hook.
“I’ll drive. You’ll wait while I call ahead, because even you don’t walk in on the Court unannounced.
And, Val-Serein…” He pauses at the door.
“Whatever this is, keep it out of that room. She’ll find it if you don’t. ”
He drives without wasted motion, the same as he does everything else. Neither of us talks, not over the river, not through the city center. I watch the tower come up through the windshield, its private floor dark against the lit ones below.
The Court doesn’t meet in castles anymore. It meets where the money is. And a stock exchange sees more than most.
Crowe badges us through a garage, rides the elevator with me as far as the anteroom, and stops there.
“This is where I wait,” he says. “I work near her. Not for her.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“It bears repeating in this building.”
The chamber takes the whole north face of the floor, glass on three sides, the city laid out underneath and none of its light reaching in.
A long table of black wood, centuries older than the tower, shipped from wherever they sat last. The room smells of old blood and new carpet.
The blood is ceremonial. The carpet cost more.
Sixteen seats filled tonight, and not one chest in the room rises and falls.
I know most of the faces, which is to say I knew them under their previous names.
Ysabelle Faine presides from the middle of the long side.
The head of the table is where challengers aim, and she stopped sitting within reach of that longer ago than anyone at this table can remember.
Dark hair touched silver. Hands folded on the wood in front of her. She was old when I was made, and nobody living knows by how much. Whatever age sits in that chair stopped being a number a long time ago. I feel it in the room before she ever speaks.
The contested seat at her left holds Mattia Valdieri, and he holds it carefully. Young for this table. Young enough that I sometimes hear him breathe, when he forgets he doesn’t need to. He watches me cross the room, weighing me the way a man does when he assumes everyone is a rival.
“Sébastien-Laurent de Val-Serein.” Faine’s voice is mild. It’s always mild. “Crowe says you’ve been inside. The Court will hear it.”
I stay standing. Sitting at that table means I’m entering her circle. I left it a long time ago.
“Ask,” I say.
A ripple down the table. Faine’s hands don’t move.
“The facility. How large?” she says.
“Built for forty. Holding around twenty.”
“Holding what?”
“Witch, mostly. Some shifter stock. Everything either hybrid or magic-blood.”
Faine’s eyes narrow. “Syndicate sourced. As we suspected.”
“And the product?” This from a heavyset lord halfway down whose name has changed more times than anyone bothers tracking anymore. “How does it move?”
“Daily extraction, sold down in volume. Private sessions upstairs for anyone with the price of the door. The house is mortal-fronted and competent, but I’d say they don’t know who they’re working for. The manager takes quotas from a superior he’s never seen.”
“Then the house is a branch,” Faine says.
“One of several, or the volume makes no sense. Stock is committed upward—standing arrangements, designations reserved for buyers the house can’t name.
Somebody sets the quotas. Somebody sets the prices.
Trace the committed stock far enough, and it ends at one destination. That’s who you’re looking for.”
“How long?”
“Till I find out who we’re dealing with?” I shrug. “Hard to say. Weeks. Months. A house like that doesn’t trust a buyer until they become a regular.”
“And your method?” Valdieri, leaning in. The right question. I note it.
“I go in as what I am. I buy what a buyer buys. I do what a buyer does.”
“So you’ll be sampling the goods,” Faine says. “They’ve approved this?”
“Who wouldn’t believe Val-Serein was there to slake his thirst, legal or not?” someone down the table says. There’s a low murmur of chuckles.
I don’t deny it. “I’m already in,” I say. “They have a retainer, and they’re running a book. The rest will unfold.”
“Good.” Faine nods. “We’ll establish a report mechanism and—”
I raise a hand. “I work at my own discretion, and I don’t file itineraries. The Court gets the source. How I do it is my business. That’s the arrangement.”
The table stirs. Faine lets it move through the room and settle before she speaks.
“The Court can accept discretion,” she says. “It cannot accept exposure. You’ll stay inside our law, Seigneur.”
“When have I ever left it?”
Nobody answers.
“At minimum,” Valdieri says, dry, into the quiet, “leave no trail. We’ve had enough bodies without adding more from our own people.”
“I never do.”
“And you will keep it that way,” says Faine. “This is not a sanction to make that world your new playground, Val-Serein. We’re there to put an end to it.”
“Bien entendu, madame,” I say. “I understand entirely.”
“Do you?” She doesn’t look away. “I’ve spent too long ensuring that our kind remain hidden.
This blood trade risks all of that.” Her mouth thins.
“Creatures abducted. Facilities designed for blood draining. Unsanctioned deaths. It’s only a matter of time before that all falls back on us. I won’t have it.”
“And you will not, madame,” I say. “You have my word.”
“Good.” She nods after eyeing me. “Contract terms through Crowe.” The table settles for good. “Reports at your discretion. The Court’s patience runs to months, Seigneur. It has never once run to years.”
Heads incline down the black wood. Done. Conversations start up at the room’s edges in the old tongues. Chairs ease back. I’m collecting my coat from the rail when Faine speaks again, exactly as mild as before, not looking up from her folded hands.
“You’ve been inside once. What is making you go back?”
The room doesn’t stop. The room is very good at not stopping. But the edges of it go slightly quiet. I stand there with my coat over my arm and do not think about a gray dress in a lit corridor, or a heartbeat going flat out behind a still face.
“Curiosity,” I say.
“Mm,” says Faine.
She unfolds her hands, which is how the Court learns the sitting is over.
When I walk out, Crowe is waiting where he said he’d be, coat on. He reads my expression as the elevator doors close on us both.
“Sanctioned?”
“Sanctioned.”
“Good,” he says.
Neither of us says anything else the rest of the way down.