Redlisted (21 page)

“Over the
years he pretended to be my son, my lover, my husband. In the end, he
abandoned any pretense of human affection and appeared to me as a
god.”

I can help you
escape. Three days from tonight, I’ll send a cab to bring you
to Atlanta.

“In the
final world that he made for me to inhabit, he was the ultimate
authority, the arbiter of life, death, and all that lay between.”

It’ll be
waiting for you at midnight, at the entrance to the main hall. It’s
your only chance.

“I did
nothing he did not command me to do. I thought nothing he did not
command me to think. My world was reduced to what he allowed me to
believe, which was to believe in him.”

Don’t
believe anything they tell you. Don’t tell either of them what
I’ve said. They’ll do anything to keep you here. Do you
understand?

I closed my eyes
and wished I was dead.

“Adam,”
Aya said, leaning towards me, her voice barely louder than a whisper.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Nod
if you understand me
,
Mirabel said.

I nodded.

{Kate}

I awaken to pain
and the taste of blood in my mouth. I’m on the floor in the
guest room. My head is next to the base of the sink, and Aya is
sitting to my right, holding a gash on her wrist to my mouth with one
hand and a towel to my neck with the other.

“Why isn’t
it closing?” she mumbles.

I groan.

“Oh God. Oh
thank God. You’re awake.”

I turn my head to
try and look at Haruko.

“No! You
shouldn’t try to move. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

What
happened?
I wonder, knowing she can’t hear me.

“You don’t
need to worry about Gabriel. He’s sleeping.”

I’d much
rather he was dead.

“What
happened?!” Adam shouts from the living room.

“Adam—oh
God, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault—“

“Aya, answer
the question.”

“I’m
so sorry, Adam, I... I was waiting outside. Haruko told me to watch
the door to this room, to make sure he didn’t get to the
dhampyr, but... but I thought he was you. He looked just like you. So
I let him go in here, and...” She starts to cry.

Adam crouches down
by Gabriel and pulls the knife out of his back.

He
attacked me,
I tell him.
I
think he was going to kill me.

Aya sniffs
violently. “When—when I got here, he’d already
beaten Haruko unconscious.”

“How long do
we have until he wakes up?”

“I don’t
know... maybe an hour? I can never be sure...”

I catch Adam’s
eyes.
I
don’t want him to wake up.

“You want me
to kill him?” He doesn’t blink. “I’ll kill
him.”

I nod.

“Adam, no,
we shouldn’t—it’s not part of the parameters of the
mission...“

Adam stands up.
Aya shakes her head, but she doesn’t try to stop him; she stays
by me on the floor, her wrist still pressed to my lips, tears
trailing down her cheeks. Adam rolls Gabriel onto his back with his
foot, takes out a handgun from under his jacket, and shoots him once
in the chest. Aya flinches and turns away.

Adam stands still,
silent, watching the other vampire’s body for a full minute,
perhaps more.

“Close your
wound,” he finally says. “I’ll take over from
here.”

Aya nods and pulls
her wrist away from me. Adam crouches by my side and takes the towel
from her, still holding it to my neck.

“Bring him
down to the basement,” he tells Aya. “Tara will know what
to do with him.”

Aya loops her
little hands underneath Gabriel’s armpits and drags him out
into the hallway.

Adam lifts the
towel a little and looks at the bite. “It’s not closing
up...”

Why?

“Something
about his blood profile, I guess.”

I look away. I
can’t help but think of the attack, of the moments when I
thought he was the attacker. I don’t want to be afraid to be
alone with him, but...

“You thought
he was me?” Adam asks. “When he attacked?”

I close my eyes.
Yes.

“It’s
my fault. I should never have left you alone.”

Adam...

“Yes?”

Is it like that
for other people? When you feed on them?

“No, it
isn’t.” His voice sounds sad. “I... well, I can put
people in a trance state. They don’t feel anything, and,
well...”

And they can’t
resist.

“No. They
can’t.”

I feel sick.

“Kate, I
need to give you some of my blood now. We don’t have a choice.
You’re bleeding too much.”

I nod weakly.
Maybe it will be better to lose myself in a memory than to have to be
here now.

Adam tears his
wrist open with his teeth. He gives it to me without comment.

///

Another memory
overtakes me.

I’m in a
nearly empty coffeehouse, sitting alone at a little round table. It’s
close to midnight. I’m drinking what appears to be my third
cappuccino, judging from the two empty cups in front of me.

I’m waiting
for someone I’ve never met face-to-face before. I told them to
keep an eye out for a girl with a tattoo of an ammonite on her left
bicep, so I’m wearing a tank top even though it’s the
dead of winter. The coffee drinks are keeping me warm, but they’re
also making me even jumpier than normal.

I got this
particular tattoo when I was in college. I’ve always liked the
spira
mirabilis
,
the Golden Spiral. The ammonite is a naturally-occurring example of
the shape. I found a really fantastic line drawing of an ammonite in
a book of Haeckel’s life illustrations and taken it with me to
a tattoo parlor on a whim.

This same tattoo
basically landed me my current job. My evil overlord of a boss,
Mirabel Radcliffe, told me she saw a picture of it on a social
profile. She apparently shares my spiral fetish, maybe because of her
weird name. It’s probably the only thing we have in common. In
fact, the entire reason I’m meeting with this stranger tonight
is so that I can talk to them about the horror story that has been my
employment at Spira Communications, Mirabel’s company.

Oh, fuck. I’m
a dumbass. I provided this unknown person with a description of my
tattoo as my defining physical attribute. What was I thinking? I
might have given away my identity to one of Mirabel’s cronies.

Typical. I always
fuck things up when it comes to the details.

A petite teenage
girl with carrot-red hair pulled back in a high ponytail walks over
to my table. Her gaze flickers between my face and my arm. As my eyes
meet hers, my arms prickle with goosebumps.

“Pageslave?”

I nod. “Conspiracy
Theory?” She’s not at all what I was expecting.

She nods. “Can
I sit down?”

“Yeah, of
course.” I’ve already started to relax. It’s much
less awkward that she’s not some mouth-breathing guy.

“Thanks for
agreeing to meet me in person.” She pulls a thin laptop out
from her backpack. “I know you can never know what to expect
with people you meet online.”

“No, thank
you. I’m just glad to have someone to talk to about... you
know. Do you want something to drink? It’s on me.”

She shakes her
head no and opens her laptop. “Thanks anyway. Do you mind if we
just get down to business? I need to be somewhere in a few hours.”

“Sure, no
problem.”

“Can we
agree to keep this meeting confidential?”

“Absolutely.
I mean, I have to. I could lose my job otherwise.”

“Yeah, uh...
I think you might have more to worry about than losing your job,”
she says, grimacing. “But anyway... as we discussed via email,
we also need to avoid using given and brand names in public. Is that
okay?”

“Right. Of
course.”

“Also, I’m
going to give this to you now so I don’t forget.” She
hands me a white business card. A ten-digit phone number is written
on one side; it has no other markings, no names, nothing else. “I’m
not trying to freak you out or anything, but you should call this
number if you get into any trouble, okay?”

Who the hell is
this kid?

“I’m
here to help. Don’t worry.”

“Right.”
I smile awkwardly. “So, uh... where do you want me to start?”

She begins typing
as she talks. “Let’s start with how you came to work for
the Overlord.”

“All right.
I was a little over a year out of college. I graduated with a
journalism degree in 2002, but I hadn’t been able to find a job
in the field. I was working at a crappy temp job when I got called by
a recruiter for the company. They wanted me to come to Atlanta for an
interview and to send some writing samples. So I did.

“They seemed
really excited about the samples, and the interview went well. They
even brought me to the Overlord. She was a big fan of my
tattoo—which, at the time, I thought meant she was cool.”

Conspiracy exhales
sharply through her nose in something resembling a laugh.

“Yeah. So,
in any case, they paid for me to move to Atlanta. They even gave me a
stipend for this condo in a fancy co-op downtown. They gave me an
office with my name on the door—a real office, not a cubicle. I
thought I was hot shit. I really wanted to believe that this was my
chance, that they respected my work or whatever.” I smile
ruefully, looking down into my cappuccino.

“Did your
recruitment package include anything else of note?” she asks,
still typing rapidly.

“Well, I
mean, the salary wasn’t bad. A little over industry average.
They gave me benefits, too—health and dental and even vision.
And the moving bonus, and a hiring bonus, and the stipend.”

“Did they
ask you to do anything weird when you first signed on?”

“I actually
brought my contract with me,” I say, extracting it from my back
pocket, unfolding it, and handing it to her. “There was a
nondisclosure agreement too, but they didn’t give me a copy.”

She peruses the
papers. “This all looks pretty standard, actually.”

“I think
they do their best to hide all the weird shit at the beginning.”

She pulls out a
manila folder and places the contract inside.

“I have to
admit, I didn’t really do any research before I signed it,”
I say, shrugging. “I assumed that they’d have me working
at one of the subsidiaries—one of the magazines or something,
where I’d actually write articles from time to time. I quickly
came to understand that this was not the case.”

“What did
you end up doing for them, anyway?”

“I...
well...” I shift in my seat. “I read blogs, forums,
newsgroups—that kind of thing—looking for discussions
about... specific topics. And then I was supposed to report on my
findings.”

“What were
you supposed to be looking for? What topics?”

“It was a
broad category at first.” I scratch the back of my head. “So,
like... the paranormal, generally speaking. Ghosts. Psychics and
mediums. Ectoplasm. Telekinesis. Telepathy. Weirder things too, like
vampires.”

She raises an
eyebrow. “Vampires?”