Bleeding Out (3 page)

Selena looks at Derrick. “All right. You’re up first. I need you to see if any part of his mind is still broadcasting.”

Derrick pulls on a pair of gloves and kneels before the body. He touches the cold hand, slick with blood. He closes his eyes. I feel nothing. The way his mind interprets materia is a mystery to me. I wouldn’t want his ability. I already know what people are thinking most of the time. The last thing I need is to hear that neurotic tapestry in surround sound.

He’s still for a moment. Then he stands cautiously.

“Was there anything?” Selena asks.

Derrick is expressionless. He blinks, and the veil is gone. He doesn’t look at me, only at Selena, and his voice is flat, tired.

“The usual. Pain and fear.”

Deonara sighs. “You people had best work quickly. After you’re finished, I will purify the site.”

We gather samples in silence while the body sucks in everything around us, like a crumbling event horizon. I’m distracted, not because of the situation, but because I know that Derrick is lying.

At four thirty a.m. the cleaning crew arrives, and
we’re allowed to go. I know I should sleep, but the thought of lying down suddenly frightens me. I’d rather be productive than vibrate with anxiety in bed.

“Do you need anything else from me?”

“I don’t think so. Thank you.”

“I was happy to help.”

We neither tell the truth nor lie. Selena and I shake hands and get into our respective vehicles. Deonara vanished hours ago. She just stepped oddly out of a door and was gone. You never know what to expect when dealing with people who can travel through apertures. They’re way too good at sneaking up on you.

Derrick takes us through the Tim Hortons drive-through.
We drink our coffee in silence until he parks in the driveway. I want to get out of the car, but I have a suspicious mind; I can’t help it.

“Wait.”

He pauses in the act of removing his seat belt. “What did we forget?”

“Nothing. I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“What did you see in Lord Nightingale’s mind?”

His expression changes. He’s not angry or even rueful, since he knows that I can tell when he’s lying. He merely looks anxious.

“It was hard to tell for sure.”

“Derrick.”

“Okay. He was thinking about sex before he died.”

“How could you tell?”

“He was aroused.”

“Whoa. Was it angel lust?”

“No, that’s postmortem wood. This erection was antemortem. I guess he was fantasizing about someone.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell Selena that?”

“It just seemed inconsequential.”

“But it’s interesting. Maybe it will supply further context.”

“The guy’s, like, a prince, right? It just seemed a little undignified to say that he had a boner a few seconds before dying.”

“I take back my ‘whoa’ and replace it with ‘wow.’”

“Excuse me?”

“Earlier, I said ‘whoa,’ because what you were describing was kinky. Now I say ‘wow,’ because I realize that you’re still lying to me.”

“Tess.”

“You’re seriously going to play me this way?”

“Please don’t try to sound like our kids.”

“Derrick, just spit it out. What else did you see?”

He exhales and sinks into the seat. “Okay. I didn’t exactly see anything, but I did smell something.”

“That’s physical evidence—”

“It barely smelled like anything.”

“What did it barely smell like?”

“Miles.”

“Wow. Whoa. Both. You have to tell Selena.”

“What should I tell her? For a second, Lord Nightingale smelled like my boyfriend? That makes no sense.”

“Did he smell like Miles, or was he smelling Miles?”

“I don’t know. I could just smell one of his shirts. The blue one that makes his arms look really good. Maybe my own mind interfered with the reading. Maybe I only thought I smelled it.”

“Maybe they knew each other.”

“Miles is a bit prejudiced where necromancers are concerned. Lord Nightingale spent most of his time in Trinovantum. When would they have met?”

“This is why you kept your mouth shut. You’re afraid they’re connected.”

“Of course I’m afraid of that!”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Look. I’m the queen of murky decisions; we both know that. But I really don’t think Miles is cheating on you with a necromancer. Maybe they met by accident once, and he smelled so good that day that—”

“I’ll tell her tomorrow morning.”

We get out of the van and walk up the driveway. I’m angry, but we both need to chill and this isn’t the time for a fight. I can understand lying in the heat of the moment. I’ve done that. But in the silence of the van’s interior, which has always been a confessional cabinet for us, he’d lied again. It’s not like him.

Lucian’s gone. Mia and Patrick are both asleep. Miles comes into the living room holding a mug of tea. Derrick hugs him, then signs something too quickly for me to translate. Both of them walk down the hallway and into Derrick’s room. I sit on the couch and try not to go crazy. The coffee has turned my stomach into a battlefield. I close my eyes and try to be still, but there’s too much sugar in my body. I feel warm and slightly damp. I wish for a pool in the living room, and for immortals to stop dying so late at night, and for a peppermint to calm my gut-rot.

I go outside and sit on the patio. The sky is changing color. I start to light a cigarette, but then I hear my mother telling me how it doesn’t seem very reasonable to poison yourself slowly, like a torturer.
It’s a bit macabre, if you ask me, darling.

I take the athame out of my purse and lay it next to the pack of king-sized silvers. I place my empty coffee cup next to the dagger. These are all vices that have taught me extraordinary things about myself. The athame allows me to work with flows of materia that would normally be too dense and temperamental to manipulate. The blade bears most of the pain, and for a few seconds, I feel like I’m touching solar wind, convection currents, monsoons. That sense of enlargement can be addictive. It’s not a high—it’s not even pleasant most of the time—but it does remind me that I exist alongside purposeful forces, animals as old as the universe itself. Surely they or something else must know what’s supposed to be going on.

I watch the sun come up. I turn on the coffeemaker. I leave out a few fixings for breakfast, along with a Post-it reminding Mia to take her shot. Then I throw on a jacket and walk out the door. I’m overdue for a meeting with my occupational therapist. If I pass out in the middle of the day and his office calls, that doesn’t seem like quite the same thing as avoidance, more like a happy accident. Sometimes, the burn of exhaustion is actually what allows me to do my job. It numbs the sounds and colors. I think about how good it will feel to come home, have supper with my family, and crawl into a bed that isn’t bloodstained or covered in shrink-wrap.

I walk to Seventh and take the SkyTrain downtown. The brakes on the Expo Line car sound like angry monkeys. The lights flicker only a few times. I get off at
Waterfront Station, which is buzzing. When I walk outside, I can see the harbor and the slick bars that surround it. Harbour Centre gleams on the corner, the perfect fusion of campus, mall, and tourist attraction. You can see the North Shore Mountains from the top of the tower, but the elevator ride will cost you.

I cross the street and walk to our lab, which resembles a government building next to an underground car park. Very few people outside of the occult community know of our existence, but the ones who do are very good at erasing us from view. Like any large city, Vancouver is home to a group of immortals and things whose lives are touched by other worlds. Our lab was designed to investigate crimes within this group, which, for lack of a better word, we call “mystical.” Recently, our truce with the vampire nation and the necromancers has started to go south. Luiz Ordeño died to make peace between them, but we’ve failed to keep it. And now Theresa is gone. I remember the last words that he spoke to me before he vanished into the rain.
If I don’t get back, I’ll turn into a pumpkin. A very dangerous pumpkin
.

I get past security, all the way to the Trace unit, before I realize that I have no reason for being here. Selena didn’t call. I’m not an investigator and I have no business asking questions about an active case. So why did I come here? I’m like an escaped mental patient who’s wandered back to her old life in a fugue state. I should leave, but curiosity and lack of professionalism win out. I head to Selena’s office.

Her door is closed, and I can hear that she’s talking to
someone. There’s a trick I can do with the door to shake up its molecules like ginger ale, which would allow me to hear a tin-can version of their conversation. I resist. Whenever I hear my supervisor talking quietly with someone behind a closed door, I assume I’m being fired. It’s a weird prey instinct that I’ve had since I was a girl, ears back, always waiting for the claw to fall. Probably she’s just arguing with Linus about the results of an agarose gel test. I once heard him saying irritably to her:
Cut the crap; you and I both know that DNA always migrates toward the camera
.

I lean against the wall. I know that I’m punishing myself. A normal person on approved leave from their job would go home and nap with the dog. I think about going over to Lucian’s place. We cannot talk about Theresa, or at least we should not. We play dangerous Parcheesi with vampires and necromancers. There are no darkened safe spaces. We play from our nests and try to get to the heart of the board. Lucian lives in my city, but he’s still an antagonist.

It’s been a few weeks since we did anything but snore next to each other in bed. We’ve kissed, but it’s all surface kissing, the kind that leads nowhere specific. He was grossed out the other day when he saw me peeling a Dr. Scholl’s disc off my heel. I saw his expression change. It was as if I’d just urinated on his socks or thrown a clump of bloody hair at him. I get that he’s not going to find corns sexy, but this is real life, and my body does all sorts of crazy shit.

“Tess.”

I turn. It’s Ru. He’s lived in the lab ever since he crashed here from the world of P’tahl, which is apparently a lot like Jupiter. His gray scales remind me of delicate shingles. His horns are well-groomed. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but no shoes.

“Good morning, Ru.”

“Good morning, Tess. I dispensed with vermin today.”

I’m not expecting this. “What did you kill them with?” For some reason, this is the only question that enters my mind. Ru’s civilization was colonized by another. He’s not what I’d traditionally think of as a warrior, but I did once see him spit acid in the face of a horse demon.

“I didn’t kill them. I reasoned with them.”

“How did you do that?”

“It was difficult, because rat grammar is full of exceptions and everything is in the subjunctive, but I managed to convince them to relocate.”

“That’s very considerate of you, but you really shouldn’t be wandering around the lab at night looking for rats to charm.”

“Tess—” He gives me a funny look. I realize that he’s trying to save me from embarrassment. “There is not much to do here. I grew up in the middle of a red storm five times larger than Earth. On P’tahl, there are sheets of lightning that stretch fifty miles, devouring the sky. Here it mostly rains.”

“I’m sorry, Ru. I wish we had better lightning.”

“We must work with what we are given.” He glances at Selena’s door. “I know who she’s talking to.”

“Did you see them walk in together?”

“No. But I can hear them now. Lucian Agrado is telling Detective Ward that he has no idea what someone named Theresa was doing in a library.”

“Lucian?” I blink. “Is he consulting? If that were the case—”

The door opens before I can finish mumbling. Selena steps out, followed by Lucian, who smiles when he sees me. But my boss isn’t smiling.

“Tess. I’m confused. Did we schedule a meeting?”

“No. I—”

Why am I here? It’s a simple question, but I have no answer. I’m here because this lab has been my life since I was a teenager. I’m here because I’m a piss-poor homemaker who’d rather be consulting on a homicide. I’m here because I have no idea how to have a mental health vacation, because here is a place whose rules I’ve internalized, however messed up they might be.

“She is here,” Ru says, “to take me for breakfast.”

His words are like a small miracle. Selena relaxes. “Sure. Just don’t go too far, and put on your people face.”

Ru nods. His features ripple, and he becomes a boy, without scales.

“I would like a simian bun,” he says.

“You mean cinnamon bun. No problem.”

Ru looks at Lucian. “Mr. Agrado, would you like to join us? I believe there will be enough buns.”

I don’t know what he’s playing at, but he’s doing a bang-up job of it.

“I’d love to,” Lucian says. “If Agent Corday doesn’t mind.”

“It’s fine. The more buns, the merrier.”

“That sounds—”

“I know how it sounds. Let’s just go. I could use a coffee.”

Selena looks at me for a second. I see the wheels turning. I feel like she’s about to tell me that I’ve violated the terms of my leave, or that my information grubbing is transparent. But she simply reaches into her wallet and gives Ru a toonie.

“Bring me back something glazed,” she says. “No walnuts.”

Ru never leaves the lab unescorted. He’s strong and resourceful, but this isn’t his world. It’s not safe for him here. It’s not really safe for anyone here. He walks between us while we head down Robson. The hot dog carts have lines, and the clouds are indecisive, which means that everyone’s in T-shirts and Birkenstocks.

“Can we visit the musical archive?” Ru asks.

“Do you mean HMV?”

“Yes. The place with the listening booths.”

I look at Lucian. He shrugs. The store is loud and crowded, but I doubt that anything will happen.

“Fine,” I say. “They probably have a fully functioning restaurant by now. We can hang out there for a bit; then we’ll grab a coffee and take you back.”