Authors: A.J. Aalto
“Aren’t orcs notorious liars?”
“Pretty sure that’s leprechauns.”
“Pretty sure?” His teasing glint returned to his eyes; it was subtle, and if you didn’t know him, you’d have missed it, but it was there. “You’re a preternatural biologist, right?”
“That doesn't make me a preternatural psychologist or parapsychologist or behaviorist, mister smarty-pants.” I made the tactical error of looking at his pants. The extremely flattering cut of blue jeans he favored was still doing its best to make me want to tear them off with my teeth. Instead, I shuffled through my mail, separating the handwritten ones from the pre-printed; bill, bill, bill. Opening a business wasn’t cheap. Insurance. Electricity. Internet. “Get lucky in Bolivia?”
“Lucky as in laid?” he asked. “Would that matter?”
Tricky question. I’d been mostly joking, but since I expected to have an undead companion for the remainder of my life, there wasn’t a whole lot I could say to Batten about monogamy, could I?
“Of course not,” I bluffed, feigning casual.
Me, feelings? Pshaw!
“We’re not exclusive. Hell, I was just updating my online dating profile.”
Batten’s dark eyebrow danced up playfully. “Can I read it?”
“No.”
“I’ll find it later. One question?”
“No.”
“Are the words ‘doom chasm’ on it? Only fair to warn the male population, babe.”
I stopped flipping through my mail to nail him with my warning-est glare, but the slow grin that spread across his lips was contagious. “You’ve been cautioned. Doesn’t stop you.”
“Rotten impulse control,” was his excuse, punctuated by a one-shouldered shrug.
Liar.
Aside from our initial romp in Buffalo, Batten had always shown excellent impulse control. If he unbuckled his belt, I could count on the fact that he’d thought it through at least as far as how it would affect his life temporarily.
There was that word again
. I fought off discomfort by focusing on the bills.
There was one envelope that didn’t fit the growing profile of
stuff that is obviously annoying and responsible
-- a large square with no postage. Having come straight from Hell via who-knows-what service, it didn’t much need stamps. I slid it out of the stack. The writing was all too familiar despite only having seen it a couple of times: a filigreed golden scrawl on plain, off-white parchment. If there was one here with my name on it, there would doubtless be one at the cabin addressed to Harry. I left my gloves on and clumsily opened the envelope, bracing against a wave of dread to wash over me any second. When it didn’t, I let out an
hmph
of amazement; figuring that the lack of fear meant I was finally dead inside, I made a mental note to write my soul a eulogy – or at least a solid limerick – and slid the card out, opening it under the soft light of the desk lamp.
In that same flowing gold script, the invitation enumerated its demands. Scanning the list, my scalp prickled when I saw Harry’s name, relieved to find I was still capable of anxiety.
Batten was watching me steadily from the client chair, slouched back, knees apart, pretending not to be curious. The sharp, calculating look in his eye gave him away. When I went back to the top of the card to read it a second time, he prompted, “News?”
I texted Harry one word:
Pack.
“I’m going to Norway.”
“Yeah, right.”
I made
no-for-realsies
eyes at him. “Well,
we’re
going to Norway.”
“I’m not going to Norway in the winter.” He emphasized this with a firm drumming of his thumb on the arm of the chair. “Nope. Never gonna happen. I’m staying right here to finish the paint job you botched.”
I waved the card at him. “Wanna bet, Kill-Notch?”
“Nothing on that card is going to change my mind,” he promised.
He was very, very wrong about that. I began to read. For fun and entertainment, I put on Harry’s posh London accent, matching it a lot better than my brother ever had from my years of being chided by it.
“The following are hereby immediately summoned to Court, to appear before his Excellency, the Speaker Aristoxenus, no later than the Third of January. Of House Vulvolak, Alastor Vulvolak, Crowned Prince of the Blood, and his DaySitter, Mrs. Elana Vulvolak. Of House Nazaire, Malas d’Sébastien Nazaire, maréchal Toussaint, vicomte de Brisbois, and his DaySitter, Monsieur Jean-Etienne Auguste Dufort Dreppenstedt-Nazaire.” Jean-Etienne d'Gobbledygook was known to me and Batten as Dr. Declan Edgar, my Irish ex-assistant.
Batten’s eyebrows shot up, both of them, but he didn’t interrupt my reading.
“Of House Prost,” I read, carefully monitoring Batten’s reaction, “Jeremiah Prost and his DaySitter, Umayma Eyasi.”
Batten set his beer bottle on the floor beside the chair and leaned forward. I could see him do an almost unconscious weapons check, and his eyes shot to where, not coincidentally, two of Prost's bullets had hit me on a certain ill-fated stakeout in a Buffalo alley with a certain hard-assed vampire hunter standing nearby.
I agreed with his silent assessment. “Holy shit, right?”
While Malas had escaped an arrest-and-stake warrant, Jeremiah Prost was a much bigger ass to slap, an immortal serial killer preying on children in New York, back when I was working for Gold-Drake & Cross. Prost had mindfucked both Batten and me before escaping. I’d always regretted letting him slip away; I knew he was one kill-notch tattoo that Batten craved badly. Now we knew exactly where Prost was going to be, and when, and though we probably couldn’t arrest and stake the creep in front of a bunch of ancient revenants, we’d at least get the dubious satisfaction of facing him. I’d never even heard that he had a DaySitter, but since he preferred what revenants once called “love by the dram,” I was afraid to wonder at her age. The invitation shook in my hand a little, and I had to take a slow, deep breath to calm myself. The idea of seeing Prost’s face made me feel like I might panic-puke on my Keds. It felt like it was both plus and minus a million degrees in the little office.
I continued, “Of House Buryshkin, Yulian Sergeyevich Buryshkin and his DaySitter, Ms. Georgina Harris. Of House Dreppenstedt, Lord Guy Harrick Dreppenstedt, Viscount Baldgate, and his DaySitter, Dr. Marnie-Jean Baranuik. Of House Duchoslav, Tomas Duchoslav, Crowned Prince of the Blood, and his DaySitter, Dr. Marek Rys. Of House Van Solms, Hendrik Van Solms, Crowned Prince of the Blood, and his DaySitter, Mrs. Lisa Pivratsky-Churchill.”
“No Strickland?” he asked, clearly thinking of Wesley’s maker and house. I shook my head.
“Also, no Cuthbert, no Ledesma, no Domitrovich, no Cross…” I drifted off. There were a few other house names that popped into my mind, but I could see now that Batten was keeping count. Long ago, I’d told him there were four princes, four bloodlines of the
Falskaar Vouras
. I’d believed it at the time, but only because the number hadn’t seemed important and I’d never taken the time to really count. Due to the vagaries of revenant surnames, it wasn’t always easy to trace one of them back to a specific house. We’d since learned from Declan Edgar that the four is always a lie when it came to revenants, and, apparently, this was true all the way up to the top.
Cuthbert was a house of clairvoyants, George Cuthbert being Danika Sherlock’s revenant companion before he’d been staked by off-duty NYPD officers who thought they were doing society a favor, and she’d been turned into a ghoul by a combo platter of Gregori Nazaire and his twisted old wench of a DaySitter, both of whom bought their respective farms on the rickety wooden dock behind my cabin. Strickland was a house of telepaths, which we’d discovered when Wesley rapidly developed his peculiar and annoying revenant skills. The Cross family were also a house of telepaths, the DaySitters of which had formed Gold-Drake & Cross in the late nineties to assist law enforcement with their psychic Talents. I wondered if the invitation had intentionally excluded all of the telepathic and clairvoyant lines, but that much seemed obvious. What wasn't nearly so clear to me was why?
I continued reading aloud. “Each house may bring one (1) mortal human to serve as the DaySitter’s Second, should he or she Fall.”
“Fall,” Batten repeated.
“Y’know, die,” I translated, trying to sound casual. “Harry gets to bring a backup, uh, nutritional supplement in case I go tits-up while I’m there.”
“Gee, that’s…” He finished with a long, unhappy noise, apparently finding no words in his vocabulary.
“The opposite of encouraging?” I offered. “Other than the tits part, I mean.”
“You thought I’d be your Second?” His boots dropped off my desk and he sat forward. “Why the fuck would I set myself up as Harry’s backup snack?”
“Before you entertain any thoughts that I see you as some sort of romantic knight in shining armor, I did have a perfectly practical reason to believe you’d want to join us,” I said with a sour half-smile, “and it wasn't because you've already done time on dead-guy watch. If I wanted someone who was just there to be munchies, I could ask Gary.” Our former boss, Supervisory Special Agent Chapel, had allowed both Harry and Wes to feed from him in a pinch.
I shook the card in his face again, and read the name I’d saved to secure Batten’s interest. “From House Sarokhanian, Aston Sarokhanian, Crowned Prince of the Blood, and his DaySitter, Sayomi Mochizuki.”
Batten let his eyelids close, and his lips started an interesting sequence of twist, bite, push, and tuck; it made me have second thoughts about revealing this name. Batten was a psychic null for me, a neutral, and I’d never been able to feel him with either of my Talents; I never felt this lack more acutely than I did when we were discussing his past. Batten had lost his grandfather, hunter Colonel Jack Batten, during a mission to stake Aston Sarokhanian. I had no idea whether Jack Batten was alive or dead. I’m not sure Mark knew, either, but he had a knotted scar from where Sarokhanian force-fed from Batten’s femoral artery, a visible reminder of his loss. There were invisible scars that might never heal, too, scars that meant failure, regret, and violation. His whole life had been driven by revenge for this loss: first as a cop in Michigan, then gaining fame as the nation’s most notorious vampire hunter, then expanding his reach through international hunts and working for Chapel in the FBI’s Preternatural Crimes Unit.
When he finally spoke, it wasn’t to ask about Sarokhanian. He opened his eyes and they darted back and forth across my face, like he was puzzling something out. “Who is Speaker Aristoxenus?”
He said it as though he believed that Harry would have ever shared the darkest secrets of the
Falskaar Vouras
with me. It was both flattering and a little depressing, since I had to shrug like the know-nothing goober I was on that score. I could have made something up; Batten might have fallen for it and been impressed for a little while with my worldly knowledge. Alas, there was no point in fibbing to someone; as soon as we got there, if not as soon as Harry showed up, he'd find out how deep my ignorance truly ran. I took a stab at it, if only to offer him some reassurance that I wasn’t a total knob.
“I can say with confidence that he’s a dude who speaks at a court. Since this is the same kind of invitation with the fancy gold writing that I got when the Overlord accepted my invitation to show up at Shaw’s Fist that one time, I’m gonna go ahead and give you a solid
sixty
percent chance that the court has something to do with revenants.” It’s not every day you get a formal invitation from the demon king Asmodeus hizzownself, and that’s something you don’t tend to forget.
Batten glared. “Sixty percent?”
“Fifty,” I said, pointing at him with the card. “Okay, forty. But those revenant names are a big clue to, uh, bad stuff. And my presence probably makes the bad stuff forecast like a hundred and six percent with a chance of shit storm overnight.”
“Why are
you
being invited to court?”
“I get invited places,” I said defensively, complete with bluffing scowl.
“No you don’t.” Batten scowled back. “Not for
good
reasons.”
“Cocktail party?” I guessed. “Witness an execution? Orgy? Man, I hope it’s not an orgy. That’s a lot of undead wang.”
Batten held up a hand to cut me off, and sought patience in the darkness of his closed eyelids again. He ran his tongue along the front of his teeth before speaking. “I don’t like sharing you with one bloodsucker; I’m not sharing you with seventeen others.”
I did a quick head count. “There were only eight.”
“Eight is out, too,” he said loudly, as though it shouldn’t need saying. That made me forget my impending death for a moment, and I grinned at him.
“You like me lots, huh?”
Those deep, lake water blue eyes warned of a storm brewing. “Less by the moment, so keep talking.”
I put the invitation down and came around to his side of the desk, propping my butt on it. “The card says a guide will meet us in Hammerfest, Norway. I am assuming they take us through the Bitter Pass to this court.”
He shook his head slowly. “You’re not going to Hammerfest.”
“I have to. Besides, you’re missing something.”
“There’s more?”
“Remember BugBelly the weird, smelly orc mystic?”
“Choosing to forget the weird, smelly orc mystic,” he informed me tiredly.
“Well, sorry to fuck your brain right in the eye, but that orc mentioned Hammerfest, too,” I reminded him, reaching back onto the desk for my lime Moleskine. I flipped the pages and then showed him my scribbled notes. Mostly it said
Hammerfest?
And:
What a bitchin’ name for a town
. And then:
The exiles return
. On the back of the page, I’d written the last note:
What the figgity-fuck is a “worm forge?”
I didn’t let Batten see that bit.
He asked, “It doesn’t say why you’re supposed to show up?”
“Nope.” I shook my head. “But I can promise you that if Harry is summoned to the Bitter Pass, he’ll go. And I’m expected to go with him. I can’t imagine he’ll ask you to go without my input, but you seem like the obvious choice to me. I wouldn’t bring Golden or de Cabrera. Bringing Wes would be even worse.” With his penchant for feeding revenants and the ability of immortals for sniffing out willing throats, Gary Chapel would be the
last
person I’d take to face a whole group of them. I left this unsaid, but I suspected Batten was thinking the same thing. I watched emotions flit across his face, wishing for the millionth time that I could use my psychic Talents to suss him out.