Ru was silent for a moment. Then: “What does the container look like?”
We’d thought about showing him the photo. But if it really was a kind of ossified organ, something that belonged inside another demon’s body, it seemed a bit obscene to produce a photo of viscera while we were having coffee. The consensus was that it would be easier on everyone to just describe it to him.
“It’s this big.” I measured about four inches with my hands. “It seems to be made of bone, but it’s tensile. And we found blue powder inside with a high nitrocellulose content, which is a chemical that can be quite dangerous if handled improperly.”
“Nitrocellulose,” he murmured. “An Aikon.”
“A what?”
His voice had changed. Quiet as it was, I could feel the anxiety creeping in as he spoke. “The Aikon is where we keep our life-text,” he said. “It’s an organ, below the heart. My grandsire’s Aikon had an infection, and he nearly died. But they managed to replace it with a new one.”
“Is it a recording of your life?” Selena asked.
“Not exactly. The word translates as ‘kitchen.’ It’s our kitchen, where all of our memories are gathered. It’s where we spend most of our time.”
“How does it hold your memories?”
Again, he looked uncomfortable. It must have been like answering questions about some stranger’s autopsied heart. “What you call ‘powder’ has viscosity during life. The memories swim in fluid. When we die, the medium dries up, like the rest of us.”
“You remembered having blue on your fingers,” Selena said. “Is there some way that you might have come in contact with this . . . Aikon?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember touching something? Carrying something, maybe?”
“You said it was buried. Do you think I buried it?”
Selena shook her head. “Not as yet. It was close to the surface, though, and we didn’t find any implements for digging. We’re still trying to figure out exactly how the debris got there.”
“Why would I bury someone’s Aikon? Would you bury a lung?”
“Possibly. Under extenuating circumstances.”
“Where do the memories go?” I asked. “When we die, our brains collapse, and everything that we were leaves us in a burst of electrical synapses. Do your memories just dry up and evaporate?”
“Ideally, there’s someone with you when you die,” Ru said. “They salvage the individual Aikon, and its serum can be added to the Uraikon. The family Aikon.”
“So your relatives get to watch your memories?”
He laughed. “It’s not a projection, like what you call TV. The serum is a liquid medium for thousands of intermingling memories. When you’re with the Uraikon, you can see glimpses of past lives. But you can’t pick and choose. I got to relive several embarrassing memories from a great-cousin.”
“The organic technology might be something that we can duplicate,” Selena said. “One of our technicians is working on passing alternating currents through the desiccated blue medium, in an attempt to unlock whatever may be recorded on it.”
“Did you submit her overtime authorization?”
She gave me an odd look. “I did, thank you very much.”
“You have to destroy it,” Ru said.
We both looked at him.
“Destroy what?” Selena asked.
“The medium. It’s the only way to release the memories. You can’t duplicate the conditions found within the Aikon. But if you pass negative energy through the powder, you’ll release what’s left of the recording.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Ferid learned how to do it.” He stared at the table. “They would kill us, then watch our lives from the beginning. Looking for secrets.”
I parked across the street from the
daegred
,
which seemed like any other apartment block in this area. The door had a small vampiric glyph, but it was in the top corner, obscured by wear, paint, and dust. You had to know precisely where to look. I rang the buzzer. A few seconds later, the door opened, and a large vampire appeared. She looked down at me.
“Yes? What do you need?”
“I’m here to see Patrick.”
“What’s your name?”
“Tess Corday.”
“Oh. You can come in.” She stepped aside. “He’s upstairs.”
“Thanks.”
A few young vampires were hanging out in the main room, reading or just talking. There was only one computer, and they had to sign a log when they used it. Even immortals had to relinquish the PC when their ten minutes were up.
I went upstairs. Patrick and Modred were in the office. When they saw me, they both stopped talking.
“Agent Corday.” Modred inclined his head. “How are you?”
“Okay. Mind if I talk to Patrick for a second?”
“Of course.” He looked at the Magnate. “We’ll continue our discussion when the timing is more agreeable.”
He left.
“What are you two scheming?”
“Not scheming. More like urban planning.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“I really can’t.”
I shrugged. “Understood. No fraternizing.”
“We’re not really fraternizing, Tess. I live in your house.”
“It’s your house, too.”
“I know. I just mean—I trust you. But there are some things we can’t talk about with nonvampires. Those are the rules.”
“I get it. I didn’t come to pump you for information. I really just wanted to see how things were going with you.”
“Fine, I guess.”
“How’s life as Magnate? It must be stressful.”
He frowned. “Tess, we could have talked about this at home. Why would you come all the way here just to shoot the breeze with me?”
I sat down. “I made a promise to Mia.”
“What sort of promise?”
“To stop being so antivampire.”
“You’re not antivampire. You live with a vampire.”
“I know. But lately, she’s been curious about that part of her. The vampirism that we’re suppressing with drugs. And I don’t want her to open that door, but I also understand that I don’t have a choice. I can’t force her to take the medication. If she wants to transition, I won’t be able to stop her.”
“No. You won’t.”
“What would you do? If you were me.”
“If I was Mia’s mom?” He sighed. “Probably lock her up.”
“I know, right? That’s always my first impulse. But teenagers don’t respond well to enforced confinement.”
“If she does decide that vampire unlife is for her,” Patrick said, “I can help her through the change. But that’s all. She has to make the choice.”
“I don’t want her to change, though.”
He smiled. “Yeah. Me, neither. I love her the way she is.”
“Do you have any idea what she might do?”
Patrick shook his head. “You live with her. She’s a tough fortune cookie to read. I’ve been watching her pretty closely, but for now, I think she’s on the fence.”
“Split evenly, or sort of listing to one side of the fence?”
“Is ‘listing’ a verb?”
“Yeah. It’s a nautical term.”
“Okay. Well, at this point, I think she’s ‘listing’ toward not doing anything. She hasn’t figured out who she wants to be yet.”
“That’s a relief.”
“But it could change. She could change, without any warning.” He met my gaze. “Look. I’ve spent a lot of time with her over the past few weeks. As far as I can tell, she’s been taking her shots. I’ve never seen her miss a dose.”
I looked at him. “It was scary for you, right? I mean, waking up in a strange place, not knowing how you got there. And you must have been hungry.”
“I was fed intravenously.”
“Oh. Well—it still must have been traumatic.”
He nodded slowly. “I do remember my old life. Bits and pieces of it. They say the memories come back as you get older. Right now, I can only see flashes. I don’t want Mia to have to know what that feels like. But she’s also different, right? She has the potential to channel materia, and that could change everything. I have no idea what it would feel like for her to transition.”
“Maybe she’ll be a brave new vampire.”
“Maybe she’ll retain her memories. It’s different for everyone. Some of us are turned more painfully than others.”
I sighed. “I do trust her.”
“But you also don’t. Or you can’t. I don’t think you’d totally be a parent if you weren’t somehow always worried about us.”
“I’m not always worried. I’d just like to know what both of you are up to. It would be nice to have some kind of permanent audio stream.”
“Is this a family, or a wiretap?”
I sighed. “The CORE may very well have bugged our phones a long time ago. So it could be a bit of both.”
15
When I was about six or seven, I used to watch
Jem and the Holograms
, which featured a beautiful female protagonist with dual lives. By day, she ran the Starlight Orphanage, taking in misfit children and endangered runaways. But secretly, she was also a dynamic performer, and she could switch between these roles simply by tweaking a set of magic earrings. She had also, at some point, inherited a holographic computer named Synergy who lived in the basement of her mansion, but even at seven, I felt that this plot element was never adequately explained.
I had brief love affairs with other cartoons. On occasion, I would imagine what it might be like to step into the shoes of other dramatic female characters: Evil-Lyn from
Masters of the Universe
, Serena from
Sailor Moon
, and even that kid from
Wildfire
who rode the horse and had the magic amulet. But I really and sincerely wanted to be Jem. It wasn’t that I had any interest in leading a band. I just wanted her power. The ability to step from one life into the next, seamlessly, day after day.
It also didn’t hurt that she had an attractive blue-haired boyfriend. And I’ll admit, I had more than a few fantasies about what I might do if I ever got a few minutes alone with Rio. But mostly, I was obsessed with the idea of a secret identity.
It didn’t take long, however, to learn some critical lessons. Jem was independently wealthy. Serena was an alien princess. Evil-Lyn was part of an oppressive republic, and, as her name suggested, she was pretty evil. None of these women resembled me in any way. It didn’t seem as if a blazing magical comet was going to visit my suburban neighborhood anytime soon. Unless I could get my hands on either a cosmic key or a moon prism, I was out of luck in terms of becoming a heroine.
But barely five years later, I woke up to find that something had changed. It didn’t seem monumental. I hadn’t grown horns or mastered the art of levitation. But I felt different, somehow. Later that day, when I was walking home from school, I came across a group of boys who were beating on a much smaller kid. I thought I could intervene, that maybe they’d listen to me. I had no idea why. Feminine mystique? At the very least, I figured they’d be afraid to hit me.
But I was wrong. One of them did hit me. At least he tried to. But before his fist connected with my body, I felt a rush of power, as if someone had plugged me into an unseen electrical current. I opened myself wide to something, and it swept through me, not frightening or angry, but strangely familiar.
That was the first time I channeled materia.
A few months later, my best friend, Eve, died in a fire. My powers weren’t enough to save her. I wasn’t strong or fast enough. It all seemed so cruelly unlike the cartoons I’d grown up watching. There was no magic earring to tweak. Eve burned to death, scared and alone, and no aliens or demons or talking cats arrived on the scene to rescue her. I saw her still, silent form in the hospital, blackened beyond recognition. That was when I learned my first lesson about real power.
It doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t listen to you. It just explodes, like a deadly solar flare, and everyone and everything that it touches is changed forever.
Tonight, I had to visit Mr. Corvid, the pureblood drug pusher who claimed to know my father. He also claimed to be old enough to have witnessed the dawn of the Celts, but demons were notorious braggarts. I was just hoping to return home in time to watch a few reruns of
American Dad
with Derrick. Miles was working late, which meant that I didn’t have to spend the rest of the night watching them cuddle and make stupid eyes at each other.
I had to wait for Mia to go to sleep before I left. Otherwise, she’d ask too many questions about where I was going so close to midnight. Patrick was out late for the second night in a row, and as much as I wanted to lecture him, I didn’t have the energy. I really had no idea what sort of effort was required to be a vampire Magnate. Maybe he also had late-night study sessions. Lucian had recently put it in perspective for me.
Just be thankful he hasn’t eaten any of us yet.
Meredith’s athame was still in my purse. I had no idea what to do with it, but for some reason, I didn’t want to set it down. I definitely felt a connection to it, but I still wasn’t convinced that it belonged to me. In all the time that I’d known Meredith, I’d never seen it far from her grasp. It had always been an extension of her body, and now I felt like an interloper trying to hold it.
I sent Lucian a text as I was starting the car.
Be ready in 5.
Sometimes he took as long as I did in the bathroom.
It wasn’t that I was afraid to meet with Corvid alone. I’d met with him before, and aside from the usual queasiness of being in the same room with a centuries-old killer, I’d never felt that my life was in immediate danger. I mostly just wanted the company. Not to mention the fact that having a necromancer standing behind you lent a certain emphasis to your arguments. Both Corvid and Lucian, despite their genealogical differences, knew a lot about death, entropy, and annihilation. They may as well have been old college buddies.
My phone buzzed. It wasn’t Lucian, but rather my mother, asking if Patrick and Mia had enjoyed the dinner that she’d made.