Immortal at the Edge of the World (31 page)

Either fortunately or unfortunately, there were other people in the room who knew we had to be up early and driving to the airport to get to Boston to steal an astrolabe to find a faery kingdom to show to a cabal of multimillionaires to buy back the son of Clara and someone I didn’t know. There was no time for drunken benders and accidental fires and blackouts that lasted a few weeks. Sure, it took Mirella tying Jerry back up in the sack and Clara physically removing bottles from my hand, locking the bar, and hiding the key before either of us agreed that it was maybe best if we just got some sleep, but we did it.

“I give up, I don’t want to live anymore,” I moaned as Clara attempted to get a jacket on me. I had succeeded in putting on pants by myself, and a T-shirt, but I required assistance for everything else. Shoes were next.

“Sixty thousand was long enough?” she asked.

“And not a second longer. Go ahead, have Mirella do it. She probably wants to right now.”

“Don’t test me,” Mirella said. She was holding the sack of writhing iffrit as far away from her body as she could and looking like the other side of the window was a good place to put it.

“How you feeling, Jerry?” I asked. I don’t imagine I said it loudly but it sure sounded loud.

“Fuck you, Adam,” Jerry said.

“Good, that’s normal.” Clara was shaking her head.

“What?” I asked her.

“I think I might owe you an apology.”

“Really?” I could think of a dozen things she could apologize to me for, but basically none of them were things she would ever think were her fault. “What for?”

“All those years I gave you a hard time about drinking and you told me you
were
practicing moderation. I always thought you were just a bad liar.”

“Apology accepted. Now before you find my shoes I think I need to go throw up again.”

*
 
*
 
*

We didn’t let Jerry out of his sack until we were in the air, and then he spent basically the entire flight being impressed by the plane and trying to figure out which locked cabinet hid the liquor. Happily, he never discovered Iza sleeping in her transparent box. I spent the whole trip trying to make my head stop hurting, telling Jerry to shut the hell up, and figuring out which woman was more angry with me. Mirella seemed to be the best bet, which was a little surprising. Maybe Clara was right about her.

We did not land in Boston. We were very obvious about ourselves in Philadelphia, which was fine because there was no way anybody following us was going to grasp why we were there or what we found, because even if iffrits are known to the people Mr. Smith unquestionably had following us, the idea that one might be important was surely beyond their ken. And given how much more annoying Jerry was when he thought I wasn’t about to kill him, I had to agree that usefulness was difficult to see.

But upon leaving Philly we were back on track to fetch the necessary artifact, and I preferred not to have anybody know that, so we flew in to Providence instead. After landing we rented a car like normal people instead of buying one, and to rent it we used one of three spare IDs I had that came with a credit card. The identity was set up by Tchekhy and the card was funded through the financial machinations of Heintz, so as long as both of those people had kept that information to themselves we were not likely to be found in a credit search. Granted, the plane was not unobvious and we were pretty easy to pick out of a crowd, so if Smith had someone standing at the auto rental counter we were still marked. Hopefully Providence was the kind of destination that made a man on the ground unlikely.

From there we drove straight to Boston, a trip that took about twice as long as it probably should have because of the traffic between the two cities. By nightfall we were holed up in an inexpensive motel at the edge of Cambridge and I was ready for solid foods again.

“There’s no bar,” Jerry complained as soon as he reached fresh air. “This room sucks.”

“We’re on the down-low,” I explained.

“On the what? I don’t think you know how to be rich, Adam. Seriously.”

“I bought a plane and an island.”

“You bought an island?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it floating in beer?”

“You’re like a tiny frat party.”

“Is that supposed to be an insult?”
 

*
 
*
 
*

It took a long shower, a shave, and a large meal at the Chinese buffet next to the motel before I felt enough like myself to proceed with the plan. Since that coincided with nightfall it worked out well for everyone, although maybe I was the only one who thought so.

“Can we at least buy him some underwear or something?” Mirella asked me. Jerry was now stuffed in a backpack that I had on the ground next to the chair I was sitting in. The chair was beside a table and part of a large collection of similar chairs and tables that made up an outdoor plaza that filled up the space between old Harvard Yard and some of the slightly more modern buildings that also belonged to the university. Beneath us was a tunnel that shuffled traffic from one edge of Harvard Square to all points beyond.

“He’s really hard to shop for,” I said. “We could maybe make him a loincloth out of a diaper, but he won’t like it.”

“I am incredibly unconcerned with his likes and dislikes.”

We were facing the Oxford Street building that was soon going to be the target of a criminal act. It took us a little while longer than it should have to locate it, only because it was not technically adjacent to any street, so there was some confusion. It was at the edge of the highly occupied public plaza in which we were sitting, and the plaza was very well-lit indeed.

The building was well-lit, too. It was the kind of modern architectural glass-and-stone structure one might have expected from the MIT campus down the road, but not from a place as old as Harvard University. In fairness, it
was
their science center, and that’s the sort of thing that screams for a modern touch.

It was open twenty-four hours a day, thanks mainly to the computer lab in the basement. I couldn’t hope to understand why anyone needed a computer lab when basically every rectangular device on the planet was now a computer of some kind, but there it was.

“Are we waiting for something?” Mirella asked. “I could throw him through the front door if you’re looking for a way to get him inside.”

“No, we’re waiting for some
one
. I called ahead. And there she is. I think.”

A striking young woman in a dressy pantsuit and heels made her way across the cobblestones. She had her black hair pulled back and a pair of glasses on her face that I knew she would never need. One might mistake her for a busy executive were it not ten o’clock at night and the fact that she looked seventeen.

I stood up to greet her with a hug. “It’s good to see you again, Brenda.”

“You, too, Apollo,” she said.

“This is Mirella.”

Mirella stood and shook her hand, and shot me a worried look. “She’s a friend,” I said, just in case that wasn’t abundantly clear already.

Brenda was a vampire, and that was what had Mirella concerned, although I couldn’t imagine it was
that
big a deal. Vampires aren’t really terrible. They just tend to be moody, which I think is mainly due to an extreme version of seasonal affective disorder.

When I first met Brenda she was a hooker with terrible fashion sense and a poor grasp of current events. She appeared to have stepped up.

“You look good,” I said.

“I’m a little overdressed, I know. But I like the suit and I never get to wear it. And hey, I’m auditing a class here and my professor is super cute, so I really wore it for him, if you’re getting all flustered or something. I think we might be the same age. The professor, not you.”

I laughed. “I’m glad you’re doing well. You know I can help you if you want.”

“Nah, it’s more fun this way. I’m gonna be the first vampire entrepreneur.”

“Yes you are.” I held up my expensive gourmet coffee as a toast.

There have actually been a lot of vampire inventors, a few vampire statesmen, and one or two business entrepreneurs that I knew of. They aren’t great with money, but they’re good for big picture stuff as long as someone else handles the details.

“So what’s in here that’s got you two all excited?” Brenda asked. “Does it have to do with that smelly thing in the backpack?”

“Sort of,” I said. “It’s the end of a thousand-year quest, if you can believe it.”

“Sure, why not? So this is the building you told me to check out, but, like, it’s
open
, so I wasn’t sure if I had it right.”

“I’m trying not to let anybody know I am interested in something in there.”

“Oh, okay, cuz you could just walk in but . . . all right, so I think what you’re after is on the third or fourth floor. That’s where the science history stuff is kept. I didn’t look around because it’s only open during the day, and you know I have a thing about daytime. There’s a security desk that’s got a guy at it most times. You don’t really need a Harvard ID to get around, since the ground floor is open at both ends, but I have one you can use if there’s a room that will take a keycard swipe.”

“If an alarm is triggered,” Mirella said, “who responds?”

“I’m assuming the guy at the guard desk, and after that, campus police. Their cars look just like regular cop cars, though, which was way confusing.”

“You set off an alarm?” I asked.

“Not here. Campus police covers everything, and all of the buildings have the same kinda alarm system. I cracked a window at the Fogg Museum last night to see what would happen. It took them about ten minutes to get to the window, and then all they did was close it again and drive off. I wasn’t real impressed.”

“Perhaps more alarms would have been triggered if you had gone inside,” Mirella said.

“Yes. Perhaps,” Brenda said, rolling the word over in her mouth like it was something she was going to start saying more often in the future. “Anyway, that’s about all I got.”

“That’s plenty, thanks,” I said.

“No problem. So are you gonna show me the thing in the backpack?”

“Only if you want to see him.”

“Oh, it’s a
him
. What happened to the pixie?”

“She’s still around. She says hi.” I actually didn’t tell Iza I’d be meeting with Brenda, but it seemed polite to say otherwise. Iza and Clara had stayed behind in the hotel room. Clara was supposed to be using the Internet to find out what she could about possible CIA black sites in Scotland, but she was probably fumigating the room instead, on the assumption that Jerry would not be returning.

I checked around the plaza. There were a half-dozen other people there, in various states of motion, and one or two sitting on the other end of the place. It didn’t look like anyone was paying attention to us. I opened the bag.

“Did you get all of that?” I asked Jerry.

“I got it. Hey lady, is there food in there?”

“Uhhhm, is he talking to me?” Brenda asked.

“Yeah, sweetheart, I’m talking to you.”

“I don’t eat food, little whatever-you-are, but there’s a cafeteria and some candy machines.”

“How about a bar? A liquor cabinet maybe.”

Brenda looked at me, confused. “No, I don’t think so?”

“Ahh, okay fine.” Jerry hopped out of the bag and scurried away. If anyone other than us saw him, they didn’t react.

“Iffrit,” I said in response to Brenda’s bewildered look. “That’s what they’re called.”

“Ew.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“What’s he going to do in there?”

“He’ll run in through a side door and live in the walls for as long as it takes to find what I’m looking for. Probably set off every alarm in there once or twice, but at worst they’ll think they have a vermin problem.”

“They do,” Mirella said.

*
 
*
 
*

Mirella and I returned to the plaza the following night to wait for Jerry to emerge. He didn’t, but it was too soon to have expected him to, really. He also didn’t turn up on the second night, or the third. By the fifth we were starting to get worried.

“I should go in and look for him,” Mirella said.

“If the campus security can’t find him you won’t be able to either.”

“They don’t know what to look for. I can take your pixie for help. Or your vampire friend. I’m sure she can track him.”

Brenda had returned twice to say hello, and Mirella was now well aware of what her name was but had no evident intention of using it. It was becoming difficult to pretend she wasn’t acting jealous. In fairness, every time we turned around it probably seemed as if there was another woman from my past turning up. And I suppose both Clara and Brenda were difficult to compete with in the eyes of an immortal man, given neither of them are going to age. But Brenda? I was inclined to explain that we’d never been romantic beyond letting her drink my blood that one time, but it seemed like it would be a better idea to leave Mirella’s dissatisfaction unrecognized.