Publish and Perish Read online

  “By analyzing the Hunters, I think we can begin to postulate the attributes of the parasite, attributes that the Hunters have been created to sense and eradicate.”

  “So, you don’t think the predator is just a legend?”

  “Absolutely not. I’ve only had access to one badly decayed Hunter body before it was whisked away by the Powers, but the surface of its skin appears to be covered with pheromone-sensing receptacles.”

  “So the predator is a creature like the Hunters?”

  “No, I think it’s much smaller, a true parasite that needs a host. I think it’s carried in a host body until circumstances are right for it to propagate. The Hunters are designed to destroy the host body before that gestation is complete.”

  “So the Hunters are like bloodhounds, Dr. Zhèng?” I asked.

  Zhèng nodded enthusiastically, which sent the glasses sliding down his nose. He pushed them up again. “That’s a really good analogy. Oh, and call me Ken. Zhèng is kinda hard to say.”

  “What kind of host are we talking about?” I had stopped looking at this like a lawyer. As someone who had been fostered in a vampire household and who had worked in a vampire law firm, this was fascinating.

  “I’ve studied documents dating back to the Middle Ages and even one from the Roman era that came out of the Villa of the Papari in Herculaneum. All of which, together with my exam and tests of samples of the Hunter body lead me to believe that the predator can only survive and mature in an XX environment—”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Women have two X chromosomes, which means the parasite can only be hosted by a human woman, and that fact has led to the absolute prohibition on female Making. It has defined the very structure of Powers society.”

  I leaned back in my chair and sat with that for a few moments. “So, you’re saying the ban on female vampires or werewolves is because of this parasite?”

  “Exactly. Yes.” He was nodding enthusiastically with the expected slide and forefinger push between each nod to restore the glasses to the bridge of his nose.

  Unable to sit still I stood up and took two short steps and two steps back. “So, what would this parasite do?”

  “Given the severity of the punishment for turning a woman into a vampire or werewolf—death to both parties—one can only assume that the effect of the parasite would be calamitous to the Powers.” The pedantic delivery left no doubt that Ken was an academic.

  But I saw a female vampire.

  My world was slowly turning upside down. I took a deep breath. “Okay. So how does Jolly—Mr. Bryce—come into all this?”

  “Several months ago he approached me about my research. Then when all this trouble started he said he and his organization could privately fund my research, but I want tenure.”

  “What’s his organization?” I asked faintly.

  “I don’t know. He never said and I didn’t ask because I want to do it under the auspices of NYU and my research grant.”

  “So you were funded to do this research?”

  “Well, sort of. It started because werewolves are so much tougher than normal humans. I wanted to see what diseases might affect them, but then I found this trail and I followed it, and then all the craziness started when I turned in my first draft for peer review. So,” he added hesitantly, “are you going to take my case?”

  “I will absolutely take your case, Doctor.” I leaned across the desk and we shook hands.

  “Would you like to read my paper?”

  “Uh, sure. I’m not certain how much I’ll understand if it’s written in science talk, but send it along.”

  “Great. I’ll shoot a copy over to you.”

  I gulped. This was the part I hated. “My hourly rate is two hundred and twenty-five an hour. I pro-rate in fifteen-minute increments, and I have a timer on my computer. You are entitled to see that report to verify the time I spend working on your case. You’re responsible for all court and filing costs. Is that acceptable?” I braced myself.

  “Wow.” The brace became a whole-body muscle clench. “That’s really cheap. The rate for that guy at your old firm was five hundred an hour.”

  I slumped with relief. “Well, this isn’t a giant white-fang law firm. I’m a sole practitioner and I’ve only been at this a few days.”

  “Hey, works for me,” Ken said as he stood up. I followed suit and we shook hands again. “So, what’s our first move? You sue ’em?” he added eagerly.

  “No.” I reacted to his evident disappointment. “Look, it’s never good when things actually make it all the way to court. It means you’ve spent a ton of money and we’re down to our final moves. What we do is, I contact the university, tell them I’ve been retained, and ask for a meeting. With luck, we can handle this before it ever reaches a courtroom.”

  “That would be great.” Then he frowned. “Though I’d kind of like to stick it to these guys.”

  “Not if you want to keep working at NYU you don’t,” I said rather dryly.

  “Good point.”

  He left and I sat frowning off into space while I nervously tapped a pen on my desk. So Jolly had approached an obscure researcher in an esoteric field, and then told him to hire me? Why? I grabbed the phone and called the hospital again. The nurses’ station reported no change. I had to hope John could find some answers and not more questions.

  * * *

  After Ken left I wandered over to Syd’s office and stuck my head around the door. He was speaking slowly and carefully at his computer. “Therefore plaintiff requests a full and timely—son of a bitch! Timely, timely. Not tiny—” He broke off and looked up at me.

  “Sorry, damn word-recognition program.” He held up his artificial arm. “I can do a lot, but I still can’t type worth a damn. What do you need?”

  “I’m going to take off a little early—”

  “Linnet. You don’t work for me. You’re your own boss. You set your own hours. You don’t need my permission. Taste the freedom, baby.”

  “Yeah, right. Okay.”

  “Oh, one thing.” I leaned back into the office. “I need a number where I can reach you.”

  “Yeah, I guess that would be good. I’m staying with friends.” I gave him Ray and Gregory’s home number, and added the address as well. “Eventually I’ve got to find an apartment closer to the office.”

  “It’s nice out here. Prices are way better than Manhattan too,” Syd said.

  I paused to load up my computer case and the laptop. I wasn’t sure there was anything for me to ride back out at the stable, but I needed to get on a horse to clear my head. I also needed to check in with Kim and get an update on Vento. The big trucks crisscrossed the country going coast to coast loaded with expensive show horses and racehorses and the occasional family horse, and the carriers were always kind and professional, but Vento was special and I wanted to track his progress. I knew Kim would have done the same and could give me an update.

  After a few subway rides and a bus ride I stood at the top of the long driveway that led to the old stable. It was crisp and a bit cold, but a number of early spring robins were putting up a twittering racket in the trees that lined the drive. Spring cleaning and remolding-the-nest day, I thought as I watched one of the birds swoop past with a clot of shredded horse hair in its beak. It was hard slogging, dragging the rolling computer case down the gravel drive. The strap of the duffel was digging into my shoulder. The tires of a car crunched on the rocks and stopped. I glanced back. An older woman rolled down the window and smiled at me. There were three little girls somewhere between five and ten years old giggling in the backseat.

  “Would you like a ride?” the woman offered.

  “Oh yeah,” I breathed. She leaned down and released the catch on the truck. I loaded in my computer and duffel and climbed in the front seat next to her.

  “Hi, I’m Dorinda,” she said as she put the car in gear and drove on.

  “Linnet.”

  “I know, my
daughter, Jessica, and her friends come home and talk about watching you ride. They’re in the jump class with Kim, but they sure do like to watch you and that white horse work. I do too, and I don’t know anything about horses.”

  “But you drive them,” I jerked my head toward the giggling trio, “out here to ride.”

  “Absolutely. Friend of mine got both her girls all the way into college before they even noticed there were boys. She swore it was the horses that did it.”

  “She’s right,” I said.

  We nattered other meaningless pleasantries until we reached the barn and parked. Jessica and her two friends boiled out of the car and ran toward the barn only to be stopped by Kim’s barked command,

  “No running in the barn!” They slowed to a sedate walk and entered the dimness of the breezeway. “Jessica, you’re riding Rosi today, Merl, you’re on Martini, and Gretchen, you get Larry. Now go get tacked up.”

  By now I had retrieved my belongings and reached the entrance. Kim was in her mid-thirties, red-haired, a pretty South Carolinian with a rich treacle accent. She usually had a cheerful smile, but I could see the shadows in her eyes and the frown between her brows.

  “Oh, Linnet. I don’t know if we have anything for you to ride. Now that the weather is getting nice everybody wants to come back,” Kim said.

  “That’s all right. I knew there was only a small chance, and I’m out here more as Jolly’s attorney.”

  She glanced toward the house, which was surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. “Any word?”

  I shook my head. “No change.”

  She sighed. “Let’s go in the office while the kids get tacked up. I got questions for you.”

  There was a cluttered and comfortable lounge that abutted the small indoor arena that hung off one end of the barn. A tiny office had been carved out of the lounge space.

  “Did Jolly ever tell you anything about his people?” Kim asked. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was asking. She sensed my confusion. “Sorry, I’m Southern. Family, kin. Anybody we should be contacting?”

  “No. No, he never said anything to me,” I answered and felt that coil of discomfort in the belly that comes from telling fibs. I didn’t think the barn manager needed to know that Jolly had a number of aliases. A new thought occurred. “Is this just your office, or did Jolly do any work down here?”

  “He used it too.”

  “Mind if I look around?”

  “Be my guest. I better go check on the kids and get teaching.”

  She left and I moved to take the chair behind the messy desk. I began going through the piles and scraps of paper, which brought on a momentary flashback of going through my boss’s cluttered office after he’d been killed by a werewolf. Was my life always to be paper, paper, and more paper? You decided to become a lawyer, I reminded myself. I sorted through receipts for stall shavings, grain, hay, and farriers’ bills, setting them in discreet piles. There were telephone numbers scribbled in the margins of bills; inexplicable sentence fragments in two different hands. I created a new pile to accommodate the pages with notes, however brief and cryptic.

  A few papers were in the well under the desk. I rolled back the chair, dropped to my knees, and crawled in after them. One had a note on it and it leaped out at me because I saw my name. I scrambled back out to where I had better light.

  Linnet/Hattie = good?

  It had been dug into the paper and traced over several times as if Jolly hadn’t been sure or had been thinking about it during a conversation. I had certainly done the same thing more than a few times. I eyed the landline phone on the desk. I couldn’t get a list of numbers that had been called on that phone. But I knew someone who could.

  10

  By six o’clock I was sitting at Detective Lucius Washington’s desk at the 19th Precinct. The smell of stale, day-old coffee was very strong in the bullpen. He held the piece of paper with the barn telephone number on it and eyed me.

  “As you rightly pointed out, this case is way out of my jurisdiction. So, why should I contact Frontier Communications and give you this information instead of passing this on to the Brooklyn PD?”

  “You could do both,” and opting for total honesty I added, “But if you just give it to them they won’t tell me what they find.”

  Lucius gave a snort and shook his head. “You’ve got some chutzpah, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t tell them. I was just hoping you would check too, and give me those numbers. I might notice something they would miss.”

  “And why is that?”

  My eyes slid away from his piercing gaze. I noticed he had a bulging satchel next to his desk. “I’m sorry, I’m keeping you from going home.”

  “It’s okay. I’d just heat up a frozen dinner and watch TV. And you haven’t answered my question.”

  “It’s … um … complicated. How about I buy you dinner and try to explain,” I offered.

  Lucius stood and grabbed his satchel. “That’s sounds like a hell of a deal. Do I get to pick the place?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I had expected a steakhouse, but he’d picked a sushi restaurant in the area. Since this was roughly the neighborhood where my old office stood I was familiar with the place. It was good, relatively inexpensive, and had small and private tatami rooms. I was curled up on a pillow in one of those rooms. Across the low table Lucius was watching me closely as I concluded, “… so I think Jolly was attacked to prevent him from telling me what’s going on with … well, me and my crazy sort of super power.” I then stirred a tiny dollop of wasabi mustard into the small bowl of soy sauce, clacked my chopsticks together, and grabbed up another piece of my spider roll. The mustard hit the back of my nose and set my eyes to watering. Coughing, I grabbed for my glass of water.

  Lucius didn’t respond. Instead he scooped up a giant amount of the evil green substance, added it to his sauce, carefully dipped a piece of salmon, slowly masticated it.

  “I can’t tell if you’re taking this so calmly because you accept it, or if you’re trying to decide whether to call for men in white coats to come and take me away,” I said finally.

  “In a world where we have vampires, werewolves, and Álfar, why would I be surprised by anything? And in a weird way this makes me feel better. I desperately needed an explanation for how you survived all those werewolf attacks. Especially since I’m a werewolf, and I wasn’t sure whether to be nervous or not.” He gave me a smile. “Apparently if I don’t attack you I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re a … you’re a … Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t seem relevant, and it’s not something you just plop into a conversation.”

  “When did— How did it happen?”

  “My brother was a marine. Fought in Iraq. He got taken down by some of Saddam’s elite werewolf guards. I was close to my brother. I wanted to give it back to those bastards courtesy of an American wolf. I enlisted. Found a mentor. Ended up in a Ranger division. We called ourselves the Pack.” He paused and leaned over to refill my tea cup from the steaming iron pot. “You’ve intrigued me. Watching a five-foot-nothing girl take down a pack of hounds? I wanted to know more. There’s something about you…” His voice trailed away.

  “We still don’t have an explanation for how I can do that,” I pointed out. “We have somebody who claims to have an explanation but who can’t tell us since he’s in a coma, which is why—well, one of the reasons why—I need to learn everything about him.”

  “You know you probably saved your friend’s life. If they really wanted to silence him before he talked to you they meant to kill him.”

  A parade of people marched past. People I had hurt—Chip, Syd, John, David, Jolly.

  Lucius reacted to my expression. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “I may have survived, but the people around me…” I shook my head and swallowed hard several times. “So, are you going to get the phone numbers? And tell me what you find
?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it, but you have to keep me in the loop too. This is not a one-way street,” Lucius said.

  “Okay.”

  “So, have you told me everything?” he asked, pinning me with an all-too-knowing look. There was a reason he was an NYPD homicide detective; he was no dumb bunny.

  I squirmed then decided in for a penny in for a pound. “There was a female vampire in Jolly’s house that night.”

  “They’re not supposed to exist. Any more than female wolves exist.” He gave me a stern look. “You didn’t think that was a detail you needed to mention?”

  “I think it’s an incredibly dangerous detail, which is why I initially told you I didn’t want to get you involved.”

  “Well, I’m involved now, but if I’m going to help you, you don’t hold back anything. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  We ate in silence for a few moments. “How did your family take your … change?”

  “Pretty well. I was mostly worried about my granddad. He’s a Baptist minister and I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t tell me I was damned to Hell, but he just said God don’t make mistakes and he figured even the Spooks were God’s creatures too. Yeah, he talks that way, but you make allowances.”

  “He sounds like a good guy.”

  “He is.” Lucius pulled out his smartphone. “Give me the number you want me to research and let me give you my personal numbers.” He held it out, obviously intending to have the numbers beamed over.

  I shook my head. “I’m using a dumb phone right now. I’ll have to actually type.”

  “Do I want to know why?”

  “John wanted me off the grid, or going dark, or however you want to put it.”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody broke into my apartment. It’s one of the reasons I’m not staying there right now.”