Chapter 2:

Warm Hands

Bloodbound

The message came at dusk, while the noodle steam was still curling up through my floorboards.

Where do we begin? —E.V.

Initials. Like a letter sealed with wax. I looked at it longer than it deserved.

There were a dozen sensible places to start. Kettle Street, where nobody had bothered to draw a chalk line around Dex. The clinic that had signed Mags off as street sickness. The docks. I sent him none of them. I sent him an address under the Ninth Street overpass, and one word.

Midnight.

Mags Ferro’s shop.

I told myself it was procedure. First victim, first scene. You start where the pattern starts. That was true. It wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that Mags had been dead three weeks and I had never once walked past her door, and some debts you pay standing up.

There was another reason, too. I didn’t let myself say it, even inside my own head, until I was already pulling on my coat.

I wanted to watch my client look at a dead woman’s workbench.

People lie with their mouths. Their bodies are worse at it. A man who has never stood in a killing room stands in one like it might bite him. A man who has stands in it like a guest.

I got there at ten to midnight. I like being first. First means you choose where to stand.

The overpass ran black and dripping above a strip of shuttered shops, and the rain came off its edge in a solid gray curtain. Mags’s sign was still up, hand-painted in her blocky capitals: FERRO — ENGINES, BIKES, NO QUESTIONS. The padlock on her shutter had rusted orange.

He was already there.

Under the concrete, a foot from that curtain of water, perfectly dry. The same coat. The same gloves. That same stillness, like a photograph somebody had forgotten to take down. He didn’t turn when I came up behind him. He didn’t need to.

Ten minutes early, and he’d still beaten me. I filed it. Clients who pay in hard scrip tend to be punctual. I told myself that, and then I filed the fact that I’d needed to tell myself.

“You don’t breathe,” I said.

No greeting. I’d been carrying that sentence since dawn. It had worn smooth in my pocket like a stone.

He turned. For a second something crossed his face that I’d have sworn was relief, like a man who’d been holding a heavy door for a long time and had finally been allowed to set it down.

“No,” he said.

Just that.

“You know what that makes you.”

“You’ve already said it to yourself.” His voice was mild. “I won’t argue with you.”

I’d prepared for denial. I had lines ready for denial. I had nothing ready for honesty, and he knew it, and I didn’t like that he knew it.

“My family does not kill,” he said. “We have not killed in a very long time.”

“Somebody’s killing.”

“Yes.” He looked out through the rain toward the dark end of the street. “Bodies drained dry are Thorne’s work. Another family. They trade in blood down here.”

“Convenient.”

He turned back to me.

“For you, I mean. Having another family to blame.”

“You are right to be suspicious.”

That wasn’t an answer I’d expected, either.

“Thorne,” I repeated.

He had said Thorne the way people in the Barrens say flood season. No heat in it. Just weather. I put the name away. A name from Ezra wasn’t proof of anything.

“How many of you are there?”

“Enough.”

“Who told you where to find me?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “Then I’ll tell you one day.”

Fear would have been sensible. A dead man in a good coat, admitting it under a bridge at midnight. Most people would have run, or prayed, or reached for a gun.

But I’ve carried a god in my blood. A spider with a velvet voice who told me I was chosen while he used my hands to burn people alive. After that, the dead don’t frighten me much.

What frightened me was how calm he was. Calm is what very old things wear. I know. I wore it once, when I was carrying one of them.

He was watching my hands.

Not my face. My hands. The way you’d look at something you had heard described a hundred times, checking it against the story. I put them in my coat pockets. Then I was annoyed with myself for doing it, and more annoyed that some quiet part of me had liked being looked at like that.

Ezra stepped past me to the shutter. He took the rusted padlock in one gloved hand and closed his fingers, and it came apart like wet bread.

“After you,” he said.

I went in first. I’d come here to watch him. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that he might have come to watch me.

* * * *

Mags’s shop smelled like her. That was the first thing, and the worst.

Engine grease and cheap solder and the burnt-sugar coffee she used to brew on a hot plate by the door. Three weeks shut up in the dark had only made it stronger. They’d taken her body away the morning she was found. Nobody had come for anything else.

A half-rebuilt bike engine sat on the bench with its guts laid out in a neat row on a rag, waiting for hands that weren’t coming back. Her coveralls hung on a hook, the knees worn shiny. A chipped mug on the shelf said WORLD’S OKAYEST MECHANIC. I’d seen her drink out of it. I’d laughed at it.

I stopped looking at the mug.

Ezra stepped over the sill behind me, and Raven went quiet.

She’d returned sometime that afternoon, settling back at the edge of my awareness as though nothing had happened at the safehouse. I’d almost convinced myself that the her absence had meant nothing.

Now she had gone again.

Not the way a spirit goes quiet when it’s resting. The way a room goes quiet when someone it doesn’t like walks in. Second time now. Once is a mood. Twice, I start a list.

I’d come here to watch him, so I watched him.

He didn’t stand in the room like it might bite him. He didn’t stand in it like a guest, either. He walked to the middle of the floor and turned slowly, taking it in, the way you’d walk into a church you’d seen pictures of all your life.

I let my sight slip sideways.

The astral remembers what people feel in a place, and it doesn’t forgive. Three-week-old fear still soaked the bench where Mags had been found slumped, dark and sour, like a stain on cloth that’s been washed too many times to come out. Under it, oil and sweat and a long thin loneliness I hadn’t known she carried.

That hurt worse than I expected. I’d known Mags for years. I’d known the sound of her laugh and which hand she used to throw things when she was annoyed. I hadn’t known she was lonely.

I came back to my own eyes.

The concrete beneath the workbench was clean. No blood in the cracks. Nothing on the bench legs. Somebody had been tidy here, too.

Ezra was standing by the stool at the end of the bench.

It was an ordinary shop stool with a cushion lashed to the seat with electrical tape. Mags’s idea of a medical device.

“She went back to work on that leg before it had healed,” he said softly. “Stubborn.”

He said it the way you say something fond about an old friend. He didn’t look at me when he said it. I don’t think he knew he’d said it at all.

I had told her to stay off it for a week. She’d lasted a day. I knew that because I’d come back and found her on that stool, cursing at a carburetor, and I’d called her an idiot, and she’d thrown a rag at me.

I hadn’t told Ezra about the leg. Not the turbine blade. Not which leg. Not the cushion. I’d told him nothing about Mags at all except her name and her address.

I wanted to ask how he knew. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. If he’d given something away, I wasn’t going to help him take it back.

I went to the toolbox.

It was a big red roller chest, dented, every drawer labeled in Mags’s capitals. The bottom drawer was shallower inside than outside. Old trick. I found the catch with my thumb and lifted the false floor.

A roll of hard scrip, rubber-banded. A stack of paper chits, printed with a code and a date. And a small cap off a cold-chain vial, sealed in black wax stamped with a twist of briar.

I knew what I was looking at before my brain finished saying it. Mags had been broke. Mags had a body that worked. In the Barrens, that’s an asset.

She’d been selling her blood.

I sat back on my heels. Of all the things to sell. I’d knelt in her blood once, on this floor, and put it back where it belonged. I’d left a piece of myself in her to keep it there. And she’d tapped it off into vials, a bag at a time, for scrip.

She sold the part of her I’d saved.

I wasn’t angry with her. I wanted to be. It would have been easier.

Ezra crouched beside me. He pulled off his right glove, one finger at a time, and picked up the wax-sealed cap with two bare fingertips. He held it the way a sommelier holds a glass. Then he closed his eyes.

He kept them closed a beat too long. Two beats. Something moved under the stillness of his face, there and gone, like a fish turning in deep water.

“Thorne’s seal,” he said, and opened his eyes. “Then Thorne knew her.”

It clicked. I felt it click. A broke woman selling blood to a family that trades in it. A family Ezra claimed was draining bodies dry. It fit so neatly I could almost hear it lock.

I reached for the chits.

The top one flared before I touched it. A ward, laid flat into the paper, woke up red-black and cold as frostbite. I saw the shape of it a half second too late: a tripwire, the kind that bites whoever trips it and rings a bell somewhere else.

A hand closed around my wrist and pulled me back.

His bare hand. The one without the glove.

It was warm.

Not the cool of a man who’d been standing in the rain. Not the cold of a body in a flophouse stairwell. Warm, the way skin is warm when there’s a fever under it and a heart pushing blood through it fast.

The ward hissed against nothing and went out, but I couldn’t tell whether its warning had gone with it.

“You’re warm,” I said.

“I fed tonight.” He said it simply, like a man admitting he’d had a drink. “It passes.”

That answered why he was warm. It didn't answer whose blood had done it. I should have asked.

He didn’t let go.

His thumb lay across the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and I felt my own heartbeat knock against it. His eyes dropped to it. Stayed there. Then came back up to mine, very slowly, the way you look up from something you’ve been told not to touch.

I should have pulled away. I’m good at pulling away. I’ve had practice.

He let go first.

It cost him. I watched it cost him: a stillness on top of his stillness, like a man setting down something heavy and finding his hands didn’t want to open. He stood, drew the glove back on finger by finger, and looked at the door.

I picked up the top chit. The ward in it was spent now, just paper and ink and a buyer’s code printed small in the corner. I put it in my pocket.

Two things went into that pocket that night. Only one of them was paper.

* * * *

He said goodnight under the overpass, the way he’d said it at my door: properly, like it mattered. Then he turned up his collar and walked off into the rain.

I didn’t watch him go this time.

That was a choice too. I filed it with the others.

I reached for Raven.

Nothing.

I made it half a block before my commlink clicked.

“Your client,” Lancer said in my ear, “opened a padlock like it was a candy wrapper.”

I looked up. On the lip of the overpass, tucked between two dead floodlights, something small and four-legged blinked a single amber light at me and went dark.

“You’ve been up there all night.”

“I’ve been up there since eleven. I got bored at eleven-oh-four. Then your boyfriend showed up and didn’t get wet, and I got interested again.” Static crackled, her version of a shrug. “You want the background check or not?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Didn’t say he was a good one.”

“Lancer.”

“Fine. You want the check or not?”

I put my hands in my pockets and walked. “Go.”

“Ezra Vael. Papers are perfect. I mean perfect, Valk. Every stamp, every seal, every cross-reference. Nobody’s papers are perfect. Mine aren’t, and I forge them.” A pause. “His birth record’s been reissued. The original comes out of an archive that’s been dead for seventy years.”

“Inherited name. Old family.”

“Sure. Old family. With all its money stacked in corporate shells like nesting dolls. I opened five of them and found a sixth. I stopped there, because I like my brain where it is.”

I let that go. Plenty of rich people hide money. Hiding it is half of what being rich means.

“Medical,” Lancer said.

“And?”

“Nothing. Not a clinic visit. Not a vaccination. Not a broken finger in kindergarten. Nobody gets through life without a clinic visit, Valk.” “People pay to have records erased.”

"Sure they do. But even erased records leave holes. This is different. Whoever built this identity went to a lot of trouble to make sure Ezra Vael exists, then forgot to give him a life."

I didn’t answer. Rain ran off my collar and down my back.

“Last thing. I rigged this heap with thermal and pulse radar. Got a clean reading when you two came out of the shop.”

Her voice changed. The sarcasm thinned out, and what was under it was curious and a little wary.

“No heartbeat. None. Flat.”

“I know.”

There was a pause. “You know.”

“I noticed.”

“But he’s running warm. Not room-warm. Fever-warm. A corpse with a fever.” Static. “Make that make sense.”

I could have. He’d told me he’d fed tonight. I could have told Lancer about Mags’ stool, and the cushion, and a sentence about Mags’s leg that nobody but Mags and I should have been able to say.

I opened my mouth to do it. I closed it again. I told myself I wasn’t ready to say it out loud until I understood it. That was half true. The other half was a thumb resting on the inside of my wrist, and I wasn’t ready to look at that either.

“Valk.”

“I’m here.”

"You know what I think?"

"Frequently."

“I think you’re about to date a client.”

“He’s a client.”

“That’s what I said.”

I could hear her waiting for me to argue.

I didn't.

"Look," she said, and the teasing went out of her voice. "I don't know what he wants. But the man has no medical history, no heartbeat, and enough money to buy half the Barrens. And he's walking around opening locks with his fingers."

"He hasn't threatened me."

"Neither does a trap. Not until you step in it."

"Lancer."

"Be careful. Things that don't breathe don't get tired."

The amber light winked once more on the overpass behind me, then went out for good.

She cut the line before I could tell her I was always careful.

It would have been a lie anyway.

I was two streets from home when the commlink buzzed again. Not Lancer. Sister Hale, the street nurse, the one who’d held the girl from the alley while she slept and never once asked me how I’d kept her alive.

“Valkyrie.” She never wasted words. “Kiri didn’t come in.”

I stopped.

Kiri. The courier. Her bike had gone under a delivery truck a year ago and folded her spine like a hinge. I’d knelt in the road and knit it straight while she screamed at me to stop.

She’d been back on that bike six weeks later.

“Didn’t come in when?”

“Her shift. Last night, or tonight. Two nights now.” A pause. “Her bike’s still chained outside her building. Kiri doesn’t go anywhere without that bike.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll find her.”

I meant it. I hung up and stood in the rain with the commlink still in my hand, and my thumb was already moving down the short list of names I trust, or pay, or both.

It stopped on his.

Ezra Vael. Client. Old family. Perfect papers. Warm hands.

I thought about a shop stool with a cushion taped to the seat.

I thought about how he'd known which leg I'd healed.

His family owned buildings all over the Barrens. He could probably get into places Lancer couldn't. He might have information that would help me find Kiri.

He might already know where she was.

I moved my thumb past his name.

I called Lancer.

"Valk? Change your mind about the boyfriend?"

"Kiri's missing."

The line went quiet.

"The courier?"

"Two nights. No sign of her. Her bike's still home."

"That's not like her."

"No."

"What do you need?"

"Her last known location. Anything you can find between then and now. I'm going to her apartment."