Page 18

17

THE HORROR

“ T here’s something here,” Nick muttered.

His voice vibrated with a hard edge of menace.

He knocked lightly on what looked like a stretch of unbroken corridor wall.

They were standing in the lowest level of the house, the basement, another area they’d been warned to stay away from by Rania Gorren.

By now, they had a pretty good idea why.

Three areas of the basement had apparently been recently refurbished. One appeared to be a gaming room filled with couches and screens and a refrigerator full of sodas and snacks. Cabinets were stocked with every type of chip and cookie and cracker imaginable, along with beef jerky, tea, and coffee. The second room was a personal movie theater, complete with popcorn machines and real, plush, movie theater-type seats done in soft red material.

The third space consisted of a lounge-like area done up mostly in mid-century furniture, including a fifties-style drink cart stocked with expensive bottles and a variety of different types of glasses. They’d found another humidor on the coffee table, a box of Cuban cigars, another box filled with rolled joints, another filled with cocaine, and a third filled with pot gummies.

In the wooden cabinets against one wall, Nick found mirrored trays, more bottles of expensive booze, rolled up one hundred dollar bills, and shelf after shelf crammed with more narcotics in a variety of different forms: pills, powders, gummies, pastes, stickers, gum, liquids and sugar cubes.

The only thing in the room that didn’t exactly “fit” was an augmented and virtual reality station so loaded with cutting-edge tech, including what looked like primitive semi-organic circuitry to Black’s aleimic light, Black doubted it was available for commercial purchase. It consisted of a desk console, an odd-looking reclining chair with an elaborate headset built into the headrest, heart and pulse monitors, goggles, and separate appendages for each limb.

Nick and Black each briefly experimented with the chair.

Once they had, its reason for being there became much more clear.

A few dozen “scenarios” had been pre-programmed, including: flight, swimming deep underwater, a speed boat, a space walk, bungee jumping, hang-gliding, walks on Mars, Jupiter, Mount Everest, standing inside a live volcano, cave diving. The chair used various physical enhancements to make the virtual experience feel more “real,” including vibration, wind, muscle manipulation, temperature, and motion controls.

Black clicked out immediately when he found a virtual recording that Rucker had apparently filmed himself. He saw the girl’s blue-green eyes (which looked even more like Miri’s than he’d initially thought), and ended the program at once.

Afterwards, he felt sick.

He broke the chip associated with that one, cracking it in half with his fingers. He second-guessed whether that had been a good idea after he did it, and shoved the two pieces in a pocket. He hadn’t told Nick about that.

In the end, it hadn’t mattered; they found a lot more memory cards.

Black hadn’t broken any more of them, but he and Nick piled them all in a box they’d emptied of gummies.

The thought of watching what that unbelievable fucker, Luc, had done to that child made Black feel sicker than he could stand, but he didn’t trust those recordings in the hands of other humans, particularly not any human who’d ever worked for Lucian Rucker. He also didn’t quite feel he had the right to destroy them all himself.

He definitely suspected nothing good would come of them if they left them behind.

Anyway, they might need those recordings at some point.

They might need them to help the cub, if nothing else.

Black shoved the thought from his mind, and removed his hand from the pocket where he’d been fingering the broken memory card. For a few seconds, he’d only been able to stand there, fighting a rage trying to choke him.

In the end, he threw the broken chip in with the rest they’d found.

Once Ace, Cowboy, and Dex got down to this part of the house, he’d have them remove the boxes of chips and that fucking chair and bring it all back to California Street. Fuck these people and their proprietary gadgets. He fully intended to steal as much of it as he could, if only to figure out exactly where Lucian found the girl, who else might be involved, and whatever else he could about the obviously illegal shit that fucker had going on.

They still hadn’t found any implants, unfortunately.

They’d only found one safe, in the wall of the gaming room.

It had been good-sized, with a number of compartments.

Those contained personal documents, passports issued by six different countries, a box of cut diamonds, more boxes of precious stones and jewelry, and a significant amount of cash, close to a million dollars.

No implants. No tech gadgets at all that Black had found.

He and Nick now stood in the corridor connecting the two sides of the basement. Ornate mahogany wainscoting decorated the bone-white walls up about four feet. The upper part of the corridor had iron sconces in the shape of dragons holding thick white candles every few yards. It all looked like part of a European chateau from the thirties or forties.

Or the man-cave of a rich prick who glorified that time period way too much.

“What?” Black asked belatedly, voice gruff. “What’s there?”

Nick didn’t answer.

He continued to feel over the edges of the wood, then jumped. He glanced at Black, then returned his stare to the wall with a harder grimace. Nick felt over some line in the wood Black couldn’t see, then began touching the wall in various places. It looked to Black like he was looking for a pressure panel, or maybe––

Nick grabbed the nearest iron sconce and tugged.

The candle-holder, and the candle itself, tilted forward under the pressure of his fingers.

Part of the wall popped inward.

Black grunted. “Great,” he muttered. “We’re dealing with a twelve-year-old.”

He absolutely didn’t want to go in there. Like Miri, the feeling he got from Rucker’s house was all bad. Lucian only lived here for a few months, according to Gorren, but he’d somehow managed to imbue it with his own brand of sick, twisted darkness.

Nick gave him a mirroring sour look.

“You ready for whatever the fuck this probably is?” Nick muttered.

“No,” Black said. “But we’d better get it over with.”

Nick rubbed a pale hand over his mouth. “Yeah,” he agreed. Without waiting, he shoved the door, widening the opening in the wall, and strode inside.

Black followed close on his heels.

“ I t’s bad,” Black admitted, fighting the churn in his gut. “It’s really fucking bad, doc.”

“We already knew that,” Miriam said, her voice empty, dismissive.

He felt more than that in her aleimi, of course, even over the headset. It coiled around him, exuding a faint nausea, like him just telling her that much, however vague, was enough to confirm her worst suspicions. She didn’t want to hear it, anymore than he’d wanted to see it, but he knew she would insist on knowing, anyway.

They were all stuck in this nightmare now.

There was no way out but through.

“We’ve got enough here to provide some serious fucking motive for someone,” he continued. “Quite a few someones, really. Anyone who might know or be related to the girl.” Black felt a coil of sickness slide through his light. “Most seers would kill him for this. A hell of a lot of humans… the ones with an ounce of compassion, at least… would kill him for this. But if it’s not Gorren herself, or someone else involved in the money side of things, I’d bet on a relative. Brother, mother, father, aunt, cousin. Anyone, really, who might hunt the cub down and discover he was holding her. Those kinds of murders were relatively common on Old Earth. Either way, this is much more of a real motive than their stupid brain chip.”

His voice turned colder by the end.

He cleared his throat.

“Anyway,” he continued. “That would also explain the shot from the balcony. It was the one, niggling detail that made me think this might not be Gorren after all… or anyone with a financial interest in this.”

“The shot?”

“Lucian,” Black explained. “At the back of the Prometharis building. I don’t know if you noticed the angle on that, or the distance, or the wind, but it was all pretty extreme. It would’ve been a hell of a shot, even for a skilled seer. I can only think of a few humans I’ve encountered over the years who would’ve even attempted a shot like that, much less pulled it off, and at least one of them is dead.” Black coughed. “Apparently it’s often windy and gusty like that out on the Point, but it was particularly bad that night.”

Remembering the details of the shot they’d seen, he felt even more certain.

He forced his mind back to the reason he’d called.

“In addition to what we found by that chair I told you about,” he continued. “We found recording equipment and headsets in the room Nick found behind the wall. We also found what we think is one of the brain implants,” he added. “Likely the first prototype, or one of them. That, one of the headsets, and the chair, all have semi-organic components, so there might be some link to Charles. It’s equally possible they bought it off the black market without any direct contact with seers at all. We knew there were machines circulating out there still.”

For the first time, Miri’s aleimi felt relieved.

“So you have the implant?” she asked.

“An early version of it, yes. Rucker had it locked up in that playroom. It should be enough for us to figure out what it’s supposed to do.”

“So Rucker had a safe in that hidden room?”

Black hedged. “Not exactly. But there was a locked, built-in cabinet in the wall. Nick found that, too, and broke it open…”

He hesitated, cleared his throat.

He considered telling her just how fucking psychotic her best mate looked while he’d been using all his vampire strength to rip the basement “playroom” wall apart to get at Rucker’s stashed recording equipment, not to mention the implant and the three headsets, presumably for recording both his and the girl’s experiences of his many, many rapes.

They’d also found a rather impressive collection of tranquilizers and paralytics, and so many thumb drives containing virtual recordings, they took up an entire wall.

“…Bastard had a whole fucking library,” Black went on bitterly. “Labeled with numbers that corresponded to a color-coded directory with names, dates, kinks. The recordings go back years, over a decade, assuming this is all there is. Obviously, the girl we found wasn’t the only victim, but she appears to have been his favorite…”

Black choked on that.

He paused, cleared his throat, then made himself go on.

“…Maybe for obvious reasons, as the rest were likely human. But the names of a few dozen girls are recorded in the directory. Some he seemed to have around for a year or so. Cowboy and Mika put a few on the monitor and a lot of the girls appear to be drugged. More than just the seer cub look to be underage. In fact, some were significantly younger. There were kids… and he let some of his rich pals have turns with them, too.”

Anger colored Black’s voice, making it hoarse.

“I recognized a few of them,” he added. “The other men.”

“From New York?” she asked perceptively.

“Yes,” he said, choosing not to be coy about it. “Frasier was one of them. I tried to call Jem to see what he could find out, but the fucker’s still not picking up.”

“Who’s not picking up? Jem?” Her voice grew a touch of alarm. “What do you mean, he’s not picking up? Is Jem in danger, Black? Is he––”

“No,” Black cut in. “I don’t think so.”

He hesitated.

Walking a little further away from the mansion’s front door, he glanced around to make sure Nick hadn’t come upstairs yet. Black left him, Cowboy, and Mika in that horror show of a “playroom,” and he doubted the vampire would be satisfied until he’d torn the rest of the place apart. Ace and Dex were working on getting the chair out of that other room.

Black should be alone right now.

He hadn’t yet told Miri everything else they’d found in that room, which included replicas of actual medieval torture devices, not to mention a shockingly diverse collection of knives, floggers, whips, surgical instruments, choke collars, and a wall of more “standard” b.d.s.m. toys unlike anything Black had ever seen… and he’d thought he’d seen a lot.

Some of those things wouldn’t have bothered Black particularly if he hadn’t seen the recordings, and if he hadn’t known Rucker’s particular brand of kink explicitly denied his partners anything remotely resembling consent, much less enthusiastic participation.

That, and Rucker clearly had a thing for kids.

He seemed to like them both pubescent or pre-pubescent.

Black wondered, his mouth still tasting sour, if any of the others had survived their time here. From the little he’d seen, Black had his doubts––about some of them, especially.

None but the seer cub had lasted more than eleven or twelve months before their names stopped appearing on recordings. Black guessed Rucker wouldn’t risk killing most of them here, or likely anywhere in the United States. A lot of the recordings clearly hadn’t happened in this house. Between that and the ethnicities Black had seen, Rucker had likely stolen some of them from countries where prosecution wasn’t much of a risk.

Some he might have simply dumped back in those same countries, in whatever condition he’d left them in, knowing his victims had no hope of holding him accountable.

If any were killed, it likely wasn’t by Rucker himself.

Either way, in most cases, their disposal likely involved a private plane, a remote location, and a handful of cash… if they were lucky.

It might also involve paid-off officials, but Black doubted it.

Rucker would want the circle small.

Miri’s voice interrupted his train of thought. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?” she asked. “What’s going on with Jem, Black? Why wouldn’t he pick up your call?”

Black forced his mind back to the present.

“Jem’s been acting weird for a while,” he admitted quietly. His eyes remained on the mansion’s front door. He knew how sensitive vampire ears were. “I’m pretty sure him not picking up the phone has more to do with that.”

Black’s answer seemed to stump her.

“Jem’s being weird?” she asked, bewildered. “Weird how?”

Black again glanced at the mansion’s open door.

He knew the room below-ground was soundproof. They’d tested it, including with Black screaming inside and Nick being outside with his sensitive vampire ears. Even so, Black was wary about talking about this with Nick even being in the same part of the city as him.

“We can talk about it later, Miri,” he said. “All I meant is, I’m positive Jem’s not in any physical danger. Certainly not from Frasier.” Black frowned, his eyes still on the door. “Well, as positive as I can be,” he muttered.

“Not reassuring, Black,” she said, annoyed.

“Doc, for fuck’s sake.” He focused on his wife. “I have absolutely no reason to think Jem is anything but perfectly okay.” Thinking, he added, “…But yes, we need to talk about what’s going on there. We need to talk to Jem when he gets back, too, even if it means cornering him, and having to endure him being an absolute prick about it. But I’d prefer if we did it without Nick, at least in the beginning. I don’t want to confuse things by mixing in a bunch of mate shit.”

She snorted. “Mate shit––”

“Yeah, Miriam,” Black cut in, even more annoyed. “Mate shit. You know. That hyper-sensitive, irrational, potentially explosive, dangerous shit that’s had us close to killing one another a few times. You want to deal with hyper-protective, hyper-paranoid, hyper-violent, vampire Nick losing his shit on me because he thinks I’m trying to turn Jem against him?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

He felt her turn over his words, then reluctantly agree.

“All right,” she said.

“How’s the kid?” Black asked, partly to change the subject.

“Vanessa finished with her,” Miri said. “Holo, too.”

She let out a sigh, and Black imagined her combing her fingers through her long, black, insanely soft hair. “Holo ran a bunch of tests,” she added, quieter. “He said he’d get back to us with results in a few hours.” Thinking, she grunted humorlessly. “I think Vanessa was a little offended we brought in a second doctor to ‘check her work,’ as she put it.”

Black grunted back. “Tough shit. I’m paying her a lot. More than enough to cover her ego as well as her expertise.”

Miri smiled wryly through the line. “I’ll be sure and let her know.”

“Don’t you dare,” Black said. “The last thing I need is to have to hunt down another doctor after you piss this one off.” Before Miri could answer, he added, “Anyway, when I asked about the kid, I didn’t only mean how she was physically. How is she? Is she calm?”

Miri seemed to think before she answered.

“As calm as can be expected,” she said carefully. “Maybe too calm in some ways.”

“Is she talking at all?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Does that mean not at all? Has she said anything to you, Miri?”

Miri exhaled, a trifle impatient. “You heard her give me her name. She keeps asking me about Nick… where he is, when he’ll be coming back, if he’s okay. That’s about it.”

“Has she mentioned Rucker?”

“No.”

“Anything else? Apart from her name and her fixation on Nick?”

Miriam paused, and Black felt a strange whisper of embarrassment around her light, even over the phone.

“What?” he pressed.

Miri sighed. “It’s nothing. She’s just been a little… I don’t know… clingy, I guess. With me. I don’t want to discourage her, but I’m worried about her getting dependent on all of us too quickly, or maybe dependent in the wrong ways.”

She paused, and her voice grew thoughtful.

“She’s been practically in my lap since we got back to the penthouse. Panther’s been great with her, of course,” she added. “He immediately sensed something was wrong and has been following her around wherever she goes, licking her fingers and sniffing her. She took to him immediately and started transferring some of that affection to him. She’s been really agitated, though. I think all the open space is causing her some anxiety.”

Her voice grew faintly worried, maybe a touch guilty.

“I finally buzzed Holo and he gave her a sedative, which is the only reason I’m able to talk to you right now… she’s asleep on the couch. Panther is with her.”

Something else seemed to occur to her.

“Oh, there was one thing,” she amended thoughtfully. “Aura got a little intense after she saw some of the photos in our penthouse, especially yours. She asked me for names of people on our team. She asked how I knew them, and where they were. She seemed particularly agitated by some of the photos you had on the dresser in our bedroom… the ones of you with your soldier pals in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Argentina? Those were mostly of humans, so that was a little strange… but I think they resonated with her somehow.”

“Why?” Black asked, blunt.

He practically saw Miri shake her head. “I couldn’t get her to say why. Then again, she might not know why, but she was clearly drawn to them.”

Black frowned. “Sounds like she’s said quite a lot to you, doc.”

“Not really.” Miri exhaled, sounding frustrated. “Since then, she hasn’t said much to me at all. Or to anyone else. But she was clingy, like I said. With me, and with the dog.”

She calmed her voice as she went on.

“She doesn’t want to be alone,” Miri added. “She seemed particularly afraid I was going to lock her in one of the smaller rooms and leave her there. She’d only use the bathroom with the door propped wide open. So the wide-open spaces might be stressing her out, but she’s understandably more worried about being caged.” Hesitating, Miri added, “We’ll probably need to make sure someone is with her at all times, at least for a while.”

Black’s jaw tightened a fraction.

“Are you sure you’re safe with her, doc?” he asked.

Miri sighed again. “I mean, I can’t know that for certain, can I? Not when we can’t read her light. But I have no reason to think she’d try to harm me.”

“Does Holo know why we can’t read her yet?” Black asked.

“That’s what some of the tests are about. He did tell me he thinks you’re right… that she’s got some kind of implant. No clue if Rucker put it there, or if it’s something someone else did to keep her from running away, but I’d guess Rucker, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Black said, cold.

“Well, Holo took a bunch of brain scans, but he’s already told me there’s definitely something there. Whether or not he can remove it, he doesn’t know.”

Black grimaced. “Keep me updated on that. If I have to, I’ll push someone from Prometharis to do it.”

“Right. I’ll tell Holo that might be an option.” She hesitated. “It’s odd though, isn’t it? Even with the block on her light, there’s something about her. Isn’t there?”

Black felt his shoulders stiffen.

He opened his mouth, closed it.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said, gruff. “But if you’re feeling things for her, doc, that’s pretty fucking understandable. All of us are feeling that, especially since––”

“No,” Miri cut in. “No, Black. I don’t mean only that. I was talking about something else. Something other than what Lucian did. There’s just…” She trailed, as if frustrated, like she was grasping for meaning. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. But I feel like it’s something more than just empathy or sympathy or grief. It’s something else.”

Black felt that hardness in his chest grow painful.

“Like what?” he asked. “I don’t understand, doc.”

“I’m not sure I do either,” she admitted with a sigh. “I wish I did.”

He could feel his own avoidance, his unwillingness to probe her.

“There’s just something there,” Miri said, trying again. “Something, I don’t know, familiar about her… or resonant in some way. Like we’re all connected. You. Me. Nick… the girl. I can’t put my finger on what that connection is, and I can’t read Nick, but I know I’m not imagining this. Am I, Black?”

Black frowned, staring out over the tree-covered grounds, the distant iron gate. He thought about Nick ripping that door apart inside Rucker’s playroom.

He thought about the look on the vampire’s face.

Nick had been pale as chalk, eyes blood-red with the contacts gone after he’d taken them out for the girl. His fangs had been extended.

Yeah, he felt it.

For some reason, he didn’t want to.

Miri waited at his silence, maybe letting him think, or maybe waiting for him to speak.

When he finally did, he felt like a coward.

“How long will she be asleep?” he asked.

There was a pause. He felt it, the instant his wife decided to let it go.

“I don’t know,” Miri said. “A few hours?”

“And you plan to just keep her there?” Black asked. “In our apartment? Is that the plan for where she’ll be staying from now on?”

There was a silence.

“Where else do you suggest we put her, Black?” Miri asked, a touch more prickly. “Should we build a new cage for her in one of the empty offices? Something with comfier chairs and less rape?”

“Miriam––”

“This is where she wanted to come. We didn’t have anywhere else for her that would have been better. What do you suggest?”

Black’s molars ground together.

He didn’t mind the cub being in their penthouse. He didn’t mind her attaching herself to his wife, or to their dog. He’d practically expected both things for some reason. So what was his problem? Why was he pretending he didn’t know what Miri was talking about? Was it the thought of the two of them adopting another stray? Now? After Charles finally went far enough away that he couldn’t fucking interfere in either of their lives anymore?

No, that wasn’t it.

Was it the prospect of possibly having to parent the kid?

The thought made the unease in him worse, but somehow, it didn’t repel him.

No, it wasn’t that.

As daunting as the responsibility sounded, he knew they’d have help from every seer in the building, not to mention a decent chunk of the humans.

Whatever his problem was, it wasn’t his usual scramble of annoyance and resentment about never seeming to get any normal time to be with his wife.

“We’ll talk when I get back,” he said finally.

He kept his voice stripped of emotion, of any inflection at all.

“Until then, see if you can get some rest, honey,” he said, softer. “Watch some t.v. with the kid. Hell, see if she wants a shower or a shit-ton of food when she wakes up. Maybe if she starts to trust us, she’ll actually want to talk to us.”

“And tell us what?” Miriam asked, still a little exasperated. “You don’t think she has any idea who killed Rucker, do you? How could she possibly know anything, given where we found her?” Her voice turned a touch dry. “Or were you thinking she did it herself?”

Black opened his mouth to answer, closed it.

He kept his voice calm.

“We’ll talk when I get back,” he repeated.

He ended the call before she could answer.