Staked Read online

  “You’re a twat, Gary,” Hardbody muttered.

  Gary—a much better name than Doughboy—blinked. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  “I said you’re right, Gary. That’s what I should have said to the robber we can’t see.” Gary didn’t look convinced that he’d heard him incorrectly the first time, but the cut guard didn’t give him time to pursue it. He stepped past the threshold of the vault and said, “Maybe he’s in the private room in the back.”

  I turned around to see what he was talking about and spotted another door in the rear of the vault. Normally when customers removed their safety deposit boxes, they would step into that private room and fondle their deposits in safety until they were ready to return it. Hardbody was heading for that door, and I pressed myself against the row of boxes to let him pass by. Gary followed only to the glass doorway. He stood there, blocking my exit, and frowned at the dissolved lock.

  “Somebody’s got to be here,” he said. “This doesn’t just happen by itself.”

  Hardbody tried the door to the private room and found it secure. He punched in a code on a mounted keypad and peered inside once it opened.

  “Anything there, Chuy?” Gary asked, finally giving me a better name for him.

  “Nah.”

  “Well, what the hell is going on? Is this guy a ninja or something?”

  Oberon would have loved to hear that, and I nearly made a noise that would have given me away had they the sense to turn off the alarm and listen. As it was, the electronic shriek gave me cover to sneak right up to Gary. Since I was fueling my camouflage on the limited battery of my bear charm, I couldn’t stick around for much longer and wait for him to clear out of my way. Proper police would be around soon, and I didn’t want to have to deal with them too.

  I reached out with both hands and shoved Gary hard through the threshold and to the left, leaving me a clear path to the vault door.

  “Chuy called you a twat, Gary,” I said as I ran past. “I heard him.” It made me laugh, because Gary would have to report what Chuy called him since the perpetrator had said it.

  Much cursing and outrage followed in my wake from both of the guards. A manager type was just outside the vault on a cell phone, talking to police. “Yes, sorry. There’s something a bit odd going on here at the bank. Our door has been melted. Sorry.”

  The front doors to the bank had been automatically locked as part of the security protocols once the alarm went off, but Ferris gave me one more assist and I was out in the street. Whatever movement the cameras caught was fine; they would never get enough to identify me.

  I thanked Ferris for his help and asked him to remain in the area for his reward. I’d have to scrounge up something suitably delicious for him before leaving.

  Oberon said through our mental link when I dropped my camouflage in the alley and chucked him under the chin.

  “Only way to do it. Every second at the scene increases chances of capture. Ready for a spot of breakfast?” Oberon’s last meal had been on the plains of Ethiopia, during the episode that revealed to me the existence of the binder I’d just stolen. A tyromancer friend of mine named Mekera had pointed the way here after we’d hunted up some rennet for her, but she didn’t offer any snacks to us in the hours afterward.

 

  “Fair enough.”

  I knew that it’s standard procedure to hole up in a nondescript warehouse or garage after robbing a bank, but I walked to Tim Hortons instead—affectionately known as Timmie’s—because I felt like having something hot and coffee-like and I didn’t have a big bag of money in a burlap sack to mark me as a dastardly villain. Instead, I had a backpack and an Irish wolfhound on a leash, so I looked like a local student instead of the mysterious thief who slipped past the security of the Royal Bank of Canada in downtown Toronto.

  The Timmie’s on York Street sported a garish green-and-yellow-striped awning, a fire hydrant out front in case of donut grease fire, and a convenient signpost pointing the way to public parking. “What kind of ungodly breakfast meat do you want from here?” I asked Oberon as I tied him up to the sign.

  my hound replied, a pedantic note creeping into his voice.

  “What?”

 

  “Bacon it is. Now be nice to people who look scared of you while I’m inside. Do not pee on the hydrant, and no barking.”

 

  “I know, but we can’t draw attention to ourselves right now.” Sirens wailed in the glass and steel canyons of downtown as police converged on the bank. The cars would get there eventually, but the two bicycle cops I saw pedaling the wrong way down York Street would get there first. “I’ll be back soon and we’ll eat.”

  The teenager working the register judged me for ordering five bacon and egg sandwiches and a donut frosted in colors normally reserved for biohazard warnings. I could see it in her eyes: “Nice looking for a ginger, but shame about the diet.”

  Well, as Oberon might say, I deserved a treat. Taking my maroon cup of coffee and a bag of greasy sandwiches outside, I sat next to my hound on the curb of York Street and unboxed breakfast for him as people emerged from the shop and wondered aloud what had the police in such an uproar.

  “Whadda yanno, Ed,” a man said behind me. He hadn’t been there when I entered, but a quick glance over my shoulder revealed him standing next to a friend in front of the window, both of them holding maroon cups like mine, both dressed in jeans and work boots and wearing light jackets. “Sirens! That means crime. In Trahno.” I smiled at the local tendency to reduce their three-syllable city to two.

  “Yep,” Ed replied. I waited for more, but Ed seemed to have exhausted his thoughts on the subject.

  Oberon said, his tone accusatory as he gulped down the first sandwich.

  Didn’t you say you wanted bacon? I answered him mentally since I didn’t want Ed or his friend to worry about my sanity if they saw me talking out loud to my hound.

 

  Yes, but maybe you were trying to be too clever there. People in Canada do not call that kind of meat Canadian bacon, the same way people in Belgium do not call their waffles Belgian waffles.

 

  I snarfed the donut and slurped up some coffee and then pulled out the cause of all the trouble: a binder full of names and addresses, many of them international. There was no handy title page announcing their significance, but they were alphabetized, and I flipped to the H’s. There I found an entry for Leif Helgarson, providing his former location in Arizona. It told me two things: This was, as I’d hoped, a directory of every vampire in the world, stored offline and therefore unhackable. But it was also months out of date at the very least. Leif had still nominally been the vampire lord of Arizona’s sun-kissed humans around the time of Granuaile’s binding to the earth, but he’d shown up twice in Europe since then—once in Greece and once in France. Germany too, if I counted a handwritten note. He was clearly on the move, and I had to assume the same would hold true for many other names on the list since I had started to pick off vampires via Fae mercenaries. Once word got out that this binder had been stolen, they would move for sure. So if it were to be of any use, I would have to move quickly, before they knew I had this. A USB drive with a file on it would have been more convenient, but since I was sure the idea was to make everything inconvenient for hackers and keep the speed of technology on their side, they had saved a hard copy only.

  The two who would hear about it first and perhaps spread the word were the safety deposit box’s owners: the ancient vampire Theophilus and the arcane lifeleech, Werner Drasche. The latter was most likely in Ethiopia where
I’d left him, swearing in German and arranging a flight to Toronto. Theophilus, I knew, wouldn’t be traveling across an ocean to chase me.

  I flipped to the T’s but found no entry there for Theophilus. Damn. Either he was using a different name or wasn’t listed here at all.

  “May I join you, Mr. O’Sullivan?” a voice with a Russian accent asked. I whipped my head around to find the speaker, because no one should be calling me by that name anymore. A Hasidic Jew dressed all in black stood there, cup of coffee in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. His beard had been black the last time I saw him, but now it was shot with streaks of gray that fell from either side of his chin.

  “Rabbi Yosef Bialik,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Sharing breakfast, I hope,” he replied. “I assure you that I have no wish to fight. Our past quarrels can remain in the past.”

  “You’re alone?” I asked, scanning my surroundings for other figures in black with weaponized beards. The last time I’d seen him, more than a decade ago, he had ganged up on me with the rest of the Hammers of God.

  “I’m alone.”

  “Well, sit down then, and tell me what you want.”

  He tossed the bag down next to me and then used his free hand to steady himself as he half-sat, half-collapsed to the curb with a grunt. “Getting old is no fun,” he said. “You look very well. Unchanged, in fact. How do you do it?”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me how you knew where to find me. I’ve only been in town a few hours.”

  “Ah! Easy. The Hammers of God are witch hunters, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are sensitive to the use of magic. Any kind. So while we cannot track you, whenever you use magic nearby, we can feel it. And your magic I have felt before. It has a particular flavor. You used quite a lot of it a couple blocks away.”

  “And you just happened to be in Toronto?”

  “Yes. I live here now. Retirement.”

  “Retirement? Here?”

  He shrugged. “Toronto is great city. Many kinds of peoples, many kinds of food, few evils outside of the local government. The hockey team is bad, but you cannot ask for everything. And I am married now. My wife is from here.”

  “Oh! Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Rabbi, it’s great to see you when you’re not trying to kill me, but … what do you want?”

  He picked up his bag and fished out an everything bagel with cream cheese. The bag crackled loudly, and he didn’t speak until he had crumpled it into a ball and set it beside him. “I suppose what I want is fair warning if something horrible is going to happen here. You and horrible go together like pickle spears and sandwiches.”

  I could say the same for him, but instead I said, “Nothing will happen. Nothing I’m planning anyway. I’ll be gone in a few days.”

  “Then I wish to deliver an apology.”

  “You do? For what?”

 

  He hasn’t even met you yet, Oberon.

 

  We’ll review manners later.

  “For my behavior years ago,” the rabbi said. “I did many things for which I may not be forgiven.”

  “Like killing the youngest, weakest member of the Sisters of the Three Auroras with your fucking Cthulhu beard tentacles there—sorry, I didn’t mean to get so intense. It’s just that I still have nightmares about that.”

  “Understandable. And deserved. It was that episode and the next one, with that man who claimed to be Jesus—”

  “Uh, that really was Jesus.”

  “As you say.”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure he would say it too. And to be clear, Rabbi, his existence doesn’t negate or invalidate—much less eradicate—the existence of your god. Or any of my gods, or anyone else’s. He just is. As is Yahweh and Brighid and Odin and the rest.”

  He nodded, and his beard, thankfully, did not move of its own volition. “I can accept that now. I couldn’t back then. It requires a flexibility of thought, yes? A certain openness to the idea that people must walk their own road to salvation and not necessarily follow me on mine. I had taken my faith too far.” He shook his head. “It is difficult for me, now, to think of my younger self. I wince at the memories. I was filled with so much anger and had lost the contemplative peace of Kabbalism. But those encounters with you—and watching, from afar, how the Sisters of the Three Auroras conducted themselves afterward, among other things—caused me to reevaluate. I saw that I was wrong to judge them. I should not have judged them. That is the business of a perfect being, yes?”

  “I suppose it is. Does that mean the Hammers of God don’t hunt witches anymore, despite that line in Exodus about not suffering a witch to live?”

  He sipped his coffee before answering. “Some still do. I personally do not. But I have convinced many of them that focusing on clear evil—demons walking this plane, for example—is much more morally defensible than pursuing witches who may yet be redeemed.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Yes, I think it is good. I do not know if it will ever be enough to pay for what I did—guilt is a heavy burden. When a man leaps into the fire, how many steps must he take to walk out of it? Have you ever overstepped yourself, Mr. O’Sullivan?”

  “Oh, gods below, yes. Horribly. Still paying for some of my missteps. I think there are some I haven’t paid for yet. Trying to make it right, though.”

  “What’s the difficulty, if I may ask?”

  I made a raspberry noise at the enormity of the question. “I have plenty of difficulties, but right now I’m worried most about the vampires. They all want to kill me, and I don’t think I can talk them out of it. They’re actively pursuing me now.”

  The hedge of hair above the rabbi’s eyes dipped, and his mustache drooped in a frown. “There are vampires here? Is this why you are in town?”

  “I’m sure there are some here, but I’m in town for this,” I said, pointing to the binder. “The names and addresses of vampires around the world.”

  The rabbi froze except for his beard, which began to stir even though there was no wind. I was beginning to recognize that as an emotional tell and I had to suppress a shudder, because semi-sentient facial hair is viscerally disturbing.

  “How did you acquire that?” the rabbi asked.

  “Using the magic you sensed. I stole this from the bank on Front and York. There are thousands of names here. Maybe tens of thousands—the type is small. I’m not sure which ones are the leaders, though. And I’m also unsure how I’ll make much of a dent in the list before it becomes moot. The leadership will soon know that I have this list and alert everyone to move. But maybe some of them will be stupid enough to keep the same names. I can at least use that to track some of them.”

  “Extraordinary.” Keeping his eyes on the binder, his hands moved that sad, smooshed everything bagel to his mouth. The schmear of cream cheese drooped out from the edges and some of it fell, ignored, onto the precipice of his beard, hanging. It bobbed up and down as he ate mechanically, thinking.

 

  You just had five bacon sandwiches for breakfast.

 

  I doubted the rabbi was a Tolkien fan, so I said to my hound, I don’t think he knows about that.

  “Perhaps … well. Mr. O’Sullivan, I would like to offer my assistance if you would accept it.”

  “You’d come out of retirement for this?”

  “Absolutely. Vampires are one of the clear evils that the Hammers of God still fight. We would relish the chance to take advantage of this.”

  “We? You’re speaking for all of them?”

  “I believe I can safely say they will join us with enthusiasm. They have been finding more vampires recently in any case. Something has been disturbing them, making them mo
ve in the open.”

  “That would be my doing. I’ve had mercenaries hunting them, and some are trying to hide while others are trying to fill the power vacuum left by those we already staked.”

  “Admirable. We are on the same side, then.” He grinned at me, a brief flash of white underneath the hair. “Is refreshing, yes?” He nodded as he spoke, and the cream cheese fell onto his coat. I wanted to point it out to him but also didn’t want to let slip this moment of accord.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “How many of your friends might join in?”

  “There are hundreds of us scattered around the world.”

  “All right,” I said. “Rabbi Yosef, I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go scan this and you can send the file to your associates. For every thousand vampires the Hammers of God eliminate, I’ll give you five years of youth.”

  “How?”

  “Immortali-Tea. It’s just natural herbs and some bindings, nothing diabolical about it. You see the results before you.”

  “Hmm. We would stake a thousand vampires if we could in any case. It’s our duty.”

  “Great, so it’s win-win. I guess you’re not able to sense vampires the way you can sense me?”

  “No. Our power comes from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, so they are invisible to us as dead things. And I should stress that we cannot sense you personally, only the use of your magic, which is very attuned to life.”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling at him, “being bound to Gaia will do that. Hey, uh, you got a little schmear there—”

  “Oh! Thanks for telling me.”

  We set about the scheme immediately. It would take us hours to scan and get the files out, and before the day was through, Werner Drasche would definitively know I had them. The Hammers of God would have a short window in which to act.

  “If you move to catch the ones in this hemisphere before sundown,” I said, “that will be your best chance. The ones in Europe—the really old and powerful ones—are going to hear about the security breach while they’re awake and have a chance to move tonight.”

  “We must take what the Almighty offers us, then.”