Chapter 4

CHAPTER

FOUR

Zane did not appreciate my summer picnic-themed freezer bag.

Apparently, storing cadaver parts in a bag covered in smiling sun and fluffy clouds was somehow inappropriate. I disagreed, because what was more summertime than fresh meat and meeting an informant? Plus, it was all I had.

“Are you going to fill me in on the plan or is this a classic ‘I’m winging it like an idiot’ sort of day?”

“It’s a classic, ‘Fuck you,’ sort of day.” I adjusted the absolutely appropriate and functional bag on my shoulder as we hopped off the bus. “But as a treat, I’ll let you know we’re meeting an old friend. They work at a lot of places Marthas frequents and overhears a lot from the kitchens.”

Zane strolled beside me, hands tucked into the leather jacket that didn’t need to try and warm him up. I had noticed how cold his body felt beside me on the bus, almost matching the smuggled dead meat in my summer bag.

“And you pay for them with body parts?”

“Everyone has a price. This is theirs.”

Zane grunted a response, tired. “This’ll be interesting.”

Midtown was bustling by mid-morning, the local shops open and the family-owned restaurants leaking customers waiting in line for breakfast. The smell of coffee and frying sausage hung in the air, snippets of passing conversations ranged from family gossip to complaints about the economy. Small children not yet old enough to be shoved into a classroom followed parents trying to hustle at the outdoor market.

During the weekday mornings, Ushen worked a few different locations throughout Midtown, so it took me a few failed attempts to find them. I struck out at two diners and a cafe before finally tracking the tall, mild-mannered wendigo down at a breakfast nook next to a flower shop.

The place was small, maybe enough for ten people to sit inside comfortably, with a long counter in view of the kitchen. Ushen’s antlers were capped with tiny socks to keep them from scraping paint off the ceiling, the serving window just big enough for them to stretch a bony arm through to pass along orders. Each of the barstools at the bar had asses in them, so we inched past the munching crowd to find the swinging kitchen doors.

The waitress was an imp woman with a messy bun and blunt horns, she held up two fingers to ask us how many menus. I countered with one and she passed it over someone’s shoulder.

“If you two don’t mind waiting, I’ll get to you when I can,” she said. “I think the two at the end are about to finish up.”

“No problem.” I snagged the menu and strolled toward the kitchen doors, pretending to look over the plastic offerings of fried eggs and buttery toast. Her attention was divided in several directions, so it was a breeze to pass the menu to Zane and dip into the kitchen.

Ushen moved in the kitchen with the grace of a spider; long limbs floating from one task to the other like they were spinning a web of breakfast foods. Pancakes were flipped as eggs were cracked in clawed hands, their body hunched over a griddle with the type of placid grin only a skeletal face could have. There was no work uniform that day, only an apron over bone and moonlight silver fur.

Their face turned to me, head lifting to sniff from the hole where a nose should be. Fiery red orbs in their eye sockets drifted from me to my cute bag, then back to me.

“Dallas,” Ushen said, voice calm and haunting. “What do you have for me?”

“Prime goodness, fresh from last night.” I gave the bag a pat. “Thought maybe my good friend Ushen needed a nice dinner.”

“Your good friend Ushen is grateful.” They scrambled some eggs with cheese, plating it next to some perfectly made toast before sliding it through the window. Ushen held out their hand, claws curled out so I could place the offering without nicking myself on the tips.

To keep things sanitary, I decided to give Ushen my whole bag instead of pulling the meat out inside of the very small kitchen. They lifted it curiously, still managing to flip hash browns before pulling the zipper aside to peek inside.

Ushen’s eyes flared, and the bag was closed again.

“Choice cuts. Very fresh. I will return the bag.”

“Keep it. My treat.”

Ushen nodded, placing the bag into the freezer before starting on some toast dipped in a sweet egg batter.

“Speak your request, Dallas.”

“I need to know where Marthas might be stashing something important and very valuable. Not just drugs or guns, but something he’d want to protect, something that would make him a lot of money.”

Ushen tilted their head in thought, reaching up to adjust a sock that went crooked from the gesture.

“There’s an old warehouse near the Swallows, it has a picture of a top hat faded on the side.” Ushen paused to consider something, tossing the egg-soaked toast onto the griddle. “He stashes valuables there, where the machines used to be on the third floor.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Ushen. Always a fountain of information. I know where you’re talking about, it’s near?—”

“Or,” Ushen interrupted, and my triumphant stroll out of the kitchen was stalled.

“Or? You’re not sure?”

“It’s one of two places, that I know.” The wendigo scratched at their cheek with the very tip of the razer claw, the sound of bone scraping terrible. Did they have an itch or was it a gesture they learned from watching fleshy friends contemplate?

They continued, “The top hat warehouse, or a club called Rubber Gloves.”

“Never heard of it.”

Ushen made a noise that sounded like a rock tumbling in a dryer. Their broad shoulders shook, antlers knocking a sock loose. It took me a few dazed seconds to realize the skeletal chef with a hobby of eating human flesh was laughing.

“That is very telling,” Ushen commented after the rock settled down in his ribs.

“What does that mean?”

Ushen plucked an old ticket from the line and reached into the pocket of their apron, extracting a pen. It was fascinating to watch them manipulate an ink pen with such massive claws, their penmanship was neat and crisp. Scrawled across the wrinkled receipt was an address near the business district of the city.

“The door is around back. Ask for ‘rubber gloves’ when they answer the door.”

“Where the hell are you sending me, Ushen?”

“Somewhere you’ve never been before,” the cheeky monster joked, the toothy smile ever present. “Good luck, Dallas Wilde.”

“I’m not loving how ominous you’re being.” I waved the receipt in thanks, taking the hint when Ushen shooed me out of the kitchen with their claw. I almost asked for something to go, but the waitress handling the front of the house was throwing a ton of tickets onto the line by the time I was slipping out.

Zane followed me as we started inching our way through the crowd, people hovering near seats waiting for a chance to pounce. The outside air was crisp, morning starting to fade into early afternoon.

Zane took the receipt when I held it up, examining the address.

“This where we’re going?”

“Second stop,” I corrected. “Ushen wasn’t sure if Marthas has the stuff stashed at that shady address they didn’t want to elaborate on, or the old textiles factory near the Swallows. We’ll start with the old building then try out the mystery joke Ushen wrote down.”

A paper bag was placed against my chest and I caught it before it fell to the ground. The bottom was warm, the contents inside sweet and delicious.

“What’s this?”

“Pancakes.” Zane shrugged his shoulders up defensively when I cut him a look. “She asked me what I wanted and I just picked something.”

“Are you serious?”

“You handed me the menu.”

“This is the second time you got me something to eat.” I folded one of the warm, flat confections and took a bite. “You keep this up and I’m going to start thinking you tolerate me.”

“Those are business pancakes.”

I laughed, because despite the fact it came from Zane, it was funny. I decided to let him have the victory because the business pancakes were good.

We had a decent walk ahead of us to get to the old factory, and I wasn’t exactly in a rush to scope the place out in the middle of the day. It would be extremely obvious for two guys to be casually strolling through a long-abandoned area of town, one that was fenced off and covered in weeds. The only people who made it a habit to hop the failing security measures were usually peddling hard drugs or doing something equally dicey.

It doesn’t get much more illegal than infiltrating a crumbling building to look for a gang leaders secret stash, so in this specific scenario, I think we were worse than the drug dealers in the realm of dicey.

“How did you meet a wendigo in this massive city?” Zane filled the silence while I finished chewing a massive bite of pancake.

“Wendigos don’t sleep,” I said around my bite. “So Ushen works in kitchens in the Swallows at night. Most of the places they work are the same ones these big leaders run or operate. I made friends with them when I was trying to locate a necromancer who did some dealings with the Broken Horns a while ago. When I asked them what it would take for intel, Ushen didn’t hesitate to let me know.”

Zane’s brows lifted, almost impressed. “Bold. DHAP would arrest them for defiling corpses, wouldn’t they?”

“Big time.” I stuffed the trash into a bin and shoved my freezing hands into my jacket. “But at the time I was also running odd jobs for Marthas, doing some wet work stuff on the side. Ushen figured I’d know where to find some fresh meat. They weren’t wrong.”

“You’ve been moonlighting as an assassin for a while then,” Zane mused out loud, like it was a piece of a puzzle.

“Few years.”

“You could have used your training to be a DHAP officer. Why not go that route?”

The question didn’t so much take me off guard, but the reference to my “training” sure did. I knew he felt the bouncing squirrel of anxiety climbing up my chest, digging its icy claws in deep.

“You’re going to be surprised,” I deadpanned. “But I don’t do well with authority.”

Zane’s snort was the second time that day I had been surprised by a nocturnal creature laughing. His didn’t sound like a rock rattling in a dryer, so much as a low tumble down a cliffside.

I focused on the sidewalk, an unsettling bundle of nerves winding up in my stomach.

“I guess you had plenty of run-ins with Saint’s Army.”

“I have,” Zane admitted coolly. “It’s been a few decades, but there’s no mistaking the fighting style. Only a mercenary group hellbent on eradicating vampires wield swords like you do.”

I said nothing, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but he wasn’t done.

“You never mentioned it before,” he said.

“That’s right, and I don’t plan on starting now.”

“It couldn’t have been easy, being part of that group with your abhorrence of authority. That’s about as authoritative as it gets.”

Zane stopped when I did, a frown creasing his forehead when I jabbed his cold chest.

“Fuck off, Zane. Boundaries. I said we’re not talking about it.”

“I’m not trying to provoke you, hunter.”

“Then shut up. I don’t ask you about your shit, right?” I kept walking, trying to shake the knot from my stomach. “Nosy, undead butthole.”

“Alright,” the vampire said somewhere behind me, the bustle of the busy Midtown starting to drop away. “Then ask.”

I was half paying attention, turning us down a calmer side street to avoid street construction. The old factory’s retired exhaust pillar stood as a beacon in the distance, the faded lettering almost washed away completely. The height of the thing made it seem deceptively close.

“Ask what?”

“My past, my time with the necromancers. Whatever you want to know.” He wasn’t fazed when I gave him a dismissive snort. “You’re right, if I’m asking you about your past, you should have the same luxury.”

“The difference is I can’t feel the barbs going into your stomach when I ask you about crap you don’t want to talk about. Or keep pushing after you said to fuck off.”

Bitterness and anger coiled in me like a viper, and I knew he could feel it slithering around just as strongly as I could. The quiet apartments we passed had a lady outside sweeping salt from her stoop, the rhythmic brushstrokes matching the surge of blood in my ears.

“If I could make it go the other way, I would,” he said after a stretch, the understanding in his voice a needle in my heart. It was a prod into a tender spot, a jolt that sent me into a knee-jerk reaction of malice. I didn’t want this vampire’s sympathy. I didn’t want his friendship, and I sure as hell didn’t want him knowing any part of me that was vulnerable.

That wasn’t fair, and I reacted in kind.

I whirled on him, temper hot and voice lethal.

“You wanna do this? Fine. What the hell happened to your necromancer? Not Edras, but the one that pulled you from the void. You were his bodyguard, his protector, so you either betrayed him for Edras or you fucking failed him like Edras. Which is it?”

The assault was brutal, unforgiving, and I had meant it to hurt. I wanted him to feel sore and tender, poked at and exposed.

Zane’s face was always a slab of ice, a blank, dead thing with two stains of blood for eyes. He was starving, which made the veins in the thin skin near his tear ducts blue, his lips colorless with cheeks that had stopped growing dark stubble.

As far as dead things went, his emotional range had been a short scale of annoyed, angry, bored or apathetic. I had seen him both in writhing pain and ecstasy only once.

I’d never seen him emotionally hurt.

Until that moment.

It melted the ice, a slow drip of a memory I couldn’t see or feel, but he didn’t try to hide it even though I knew he could have. It would have been easy for him to keep those walls up, the door shut tight, but he kicked it open to let me know the blow had landed as viciously as I had wanted it to.

When he spoke, his voice carried the burden of a lifetime of regret.

“I failed him.”

We stood together on the street, two people unfortunately bound together by circumstances neither wanted, having just flayed each other open to bleed out a few decades of unresolved trauma. I had hit a damn vein.

“You cared about him,” I told him, because I knew. I could see it all over the melting ice.

“I did.”

“Did you love him?”

“Deeply,” Zane admitted immediately, the knife of my question twisting. “He was a dear friend, a man I respected immensely, and someone I miss every day.”

“He was like…?” I almost pantomimed a sex act, but decided maybe that was a little crass in this situation. I know, I was shocked too. “A boyfriend? Husband?”

“No, not at all,” he corrected. “More like a brother. Platonic admiration and affection, a man with a love for life and passion to help others.”

“Bullshit,” I spat out of reflex. “No one who manipulates the dead does it for altruistic reasons, Zane.”

“Of course they do.” He said it so easily, like he was telling me a truth as obvious as the color of the damn sky. “He wanted to keep people from dying, to extend life by controlling death itself.”

“Yeah? How? By murdering people and turning them into hungry husks that rip people apart? By unleashing hordes of vampires into neighborhoods?” I tossed my hands up, frustrated with his delusions about his bestie. “What the fuck are you talking about, Zane?”

“Sandros didn’t make vampires, Dallas. Not a single one, besides me, and I wasn’t a tool for destruction. I was his friend.”

“Dude needed to rip a soul from the void to have someone to talk to? Is that what you’re spinning right now?” I laughed at the absurdity of it. “So what did you two do then if he wasn’t toying with human lives or trying to dominate the living to his will? Movie night and fucking checkers?”

“We worked to prolong lives in the terminally ill. Sandros could push death back by weeks, sometimes months, while healers tried to knit things back together, fight off sicknesses that spawned too fast for magic to extinguish.” Zane placed his hands into his pockets, eyes unfocussed as a memory swept over him. I knew that look; he was years away. “The frustration and anger he carried with him was like the cancers he fought, all-consuming and rotten. It pushed him to make the wrong connections. Trust the wrong people.”

“Zane.” I waited until he came back from the memory, eyes blinking toward me. “I’m not finding this easy to believe.”

“Why would I lie about him?”

“To have empathy for your story? Unless you can make this guy sound really likeable, there was no way I would mourn another dead vampire factory. I think if altruistic necromancers were floating around, I would have heard about them by now,” I scoffed. “I think you want me to like Sandros.”

Saint, he looked exhausted from dredging up the memory of his necromancer, from the verbal assault I had slashed him with. The sigh that left him was silent, his shoulders sagging under the weight of the day. I knew better than to assume the vampire Thrall was harmless; I had seen Zane tear lesser vampires in half looking more tired than this. I was ready for the next barrage, the new maze to navigate, the new string of bullshit he was going to try and choke me with.

Instead of an attack, or what I had thought was manipulation, Zane knocked me off balance with the hurt in his blood-red eyes.

“Of course I do,” he admitted, the raw honesty punching me in my cold, mean heart. “Hate me all you want, hunter, but know my maker was a good man. That’s deeply important to me.”

I hadn’t just hurt him. I wounded him.

We both stood in silence as a wave of cold shame hit me like a wall of spikes.

The chilly guilt made me shuffle my feet like a kid who just realized right from wrong.

“I feel a little bit like a dick.”

“You didn’t know,” he whispered after a time. “Plus, I had been asking you tough questions. I guess we’re even.”

“I um…” I huffed a cloud of steam into the air, envious I couldn’t disappear into vapor from the situation. “I didn’t leave the Saint’s Army on good terms. Sort of bailed in the middle of the night after torching some bridges. I guess you could say I failed them.”

Massive understatement. It was like saying a volcanic eruption was a tiny upset in the planet’s tummy. The comparison was similar to what my gut was doing while still being as vague as possible.

I had made the mistake of thinking the quiet Thrall was done bleeding, but he got in one last bite to level the playing field.

“Did you love them?” he asked me, the same way I had asked about Sandros.

Ouch. Fucking ouch , man.

“They were all I had. I loved the idea of people caring about me.” My body shivered as anxiety forced my feet to move. I felt too naked, too exposed, too much of myself open. Zane had been the first to ever ask, and the only soul to know.

“Okay, now we’re even,” I tossed over my shoulder. “No more deep, dark secrets today.”