Undead to the World (17 page)

“I can be there in a minute.”

“That’s fine. The library is closed, but I’ll unlock the door. I’ll see you shortly.”
She hangs up.

I’ve walked a few steps away from Silver, the way you do when you’ve taken a call
on a cell phone, and now I just keep walking as I hang up. “Gotta go!” I toss over
my shoulder. “Remember what I told you!”

“But—” he says. I’m already halfway across the street.

The door to the library is open, just like she said it would be. I pull it open and
go in.

My brain is trying to get my attention. Something about Gretch.
Gretch? That seems awfully chummy. Since when do you call Miss Peters Gretch? She
can hardly stand you.

Most of the lights in the library are off, but I can see a dim glow coming from the
end of a long aisle. I head that way.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a library after hours. It’s a little unsettling, having
a mundane, normally well-lit environment turned into something full of towering shadows.
The passage seems awfully narrow, the shelves pressing in on me from both sides; I
become uncomfortably aware that someone one aisle over could be watching me over the
tops of the books. Someone could even reach through that gap with one long arm and
grab me …

I make it to the far end without being ambushed. The light is coming from the open
door of an office with a small plastic sign next to the jamb reading
HEAD LIBRARIAN
. I stick my own head in. “Gretch—uh, en?”

She’s seated at a cheap chrome and fiberboard desk, with a green-shaded lamp on it
spreading a pool of light. Beneath it is a large metal tube, three feet or so in length,
with roughly the diameter of a Mason jar.

“Good evening, Miss Valchek,” she says. “Please, sit down.”

I pull up a plastic-framed chair and do so, feeling absurdly like I’m about to be
reprimanded for smoking in the girls’ room. “You sounded a little upset. Everything
okay?”

“Yes, yes. Everything’s fine. But what I’ve discovered—well, it’s quite the find.
I simply had to show you, straight away.” Her face seems a little flushed, and her
eyes are practically shining; the look of an academic who’s successfully stalked and
captured a prize piece of information.

I point at the tube. “I guess this is it?”

“Oh, yes. Just wait until you see.” She unscrews the cap on the end and carefully
extracts a long, rolled-up piece of paper. Parchment?

She unrolls it, using four felt-padded clamps to secure it to the edges of the desk.
I peer at it curiously. “What exactly am I looking at?”

“A very old map, Miss Valchek—can I call you Jace? Yes, a map made when this town
was barely more than a few log cabins and tents. Hardly anything here at all … which
is why this is so fascinating.”

It looks to me like someone’s gone to the trouble of marking out a bunch of streets,
far more than you’d need in a settlement this size. Thinking ahead, I guess, or maybe
just someone with grandiose ideas.

But then I notice something else: The streets aren’t exactly straight, nor are they
arranged in an orderly grid. Some of them seem to run right through existing buildings.
“Wait a minute,” I say softly. “These aren’t streets—”

“No. They’re
tunnels.
” I can almost taste her excitement. “Very, very old tunnels. In fact, I believe they
were already here when the town was founded.”

I study the parchment a little closer. There are numbers marked here and there, and
I realize they must be depth indicators. There are other marks, too, that I can’t
decipher—but I recognize them just the same. They’re in the same unknown language
Longinus’s book is written in.

Déjà vu surges through me, but not because of the symbols. It’s this situation: sitting
in a room with this woman, studying vital yet arcane information. I know I—
we
—have done this before. “Any idea why the tunnels are there? What they were used for?”

She glances up, her eyes bright. She doesn’t seem quite so spinsterish any more. “That’s
the intriguing part. They approach almost every structure in town—gathering places,
residences—including the sites of buildings that didn’t exist yet.”

“So, a way to travel undetected from house to house? Secret entrances in basements,
that sort of thing?”

“You’d think so, but no. They almost always stay below the level of the foundations,
and when they do near the surface they skirt the buildings instead of going under
them. It’s as if whoever roamed those tunnels wanted to be in close proximity to the
residents, but not
too
close.”

I see what she means; the tunnels snake around Thropirelem like an invisible anaconda,
but I don’t see any places where they intersect with the upper world.

Except one.

I tap the paper. “Look. The tunnel dead-ends right here. And the depth marking is
only eight feet; that’s shallow enough to connect with a basement.”

She leans over to look herself. “I believe you’re correct. How odd that I didn’t notice
that myself…”

It’s funny, how smells can trigger memories. When she bends her head, some stray air
current in the room carries a trace of her perfume to me. I remember it well, because
I asked about it once and Gretch told me she had to have it imported from a little
aromatherapy shop in London.…

Gretch.

I remember.

“I’d like to describe someone to you,” I say. “Someone I think you may know.”

Her head is still down as she peers intently at the map. “Mmm?”

“She’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, an intelligence analyst for the National
Security Agency. Born in London. Dry, razor-sharp wit. She has a child, Anna, whom
she loves more than existence itself. She’d kill for Anna—in fact, she has. I was
there.”

No reaction. She doesn’t even look up—but she’s suddenly very, very still.

“The father of her child was killed by a lunatic who nearly killed Anna, too. I prevented
that. We’ve had a special bond ever since, which is probably why I’m Anna’s godmother.

“That woman’s name is Gretchen Petra. She’s a vampire. She’s
you,
Gretch.”

“I know,” Gretch says softly. She raises her head and smiles at me with two long incisors.
Her eyes are as red as blood. “But that’s who I
was,
Jace. Not who I
am.
”

And then she has me by the throat.

ELEVEN

I can feel my trachea trapped between Gretch’s fingers and thumb, her fingernails
cutting into the skin of my throat. It’s a hold that can let her rip out my windpipe
with one quick squeeze and pull, a very professional immobilization technique. Not
the kind of skill possessed by most librarians.

“Glurk,” I say. I can still breathe, but just barely. I grab her wrist with both hands,
more from reflex than anything else. She has me cold.

“Eloquent as always,” she says. She
sounds
like Gretch, too, that combination of quiet amusement and self-assurance. “You have
no idea how much I missed that. Which is to say, not at all.”

“Guh?”

“Oh, don’t sound so bewildered. You don’t really think I ever found you witty, do
you? I’m British, dear girl. Your japes were never anything to me but the crude vulgarity
of an unsophisticated and ill-tempered brat.”

“Nuh!”

“But I suppose I do owe you a debt of thanks. If not for you, I would never have known
this
world, never have known the freedom it confers. Being a pire here is very different,
Jace; it’s stronger, wilder, less cerebral. My blood is practically
singing
. I must confess, I feel a bit giddy.”

She looks it, too. I’ve never seen Gretch drunk—though pires on her world can and
do consume alcohol with the aid of a little sorcery—but she’s definitely under the
influence of something. I know what, too.

She leans across the desk, pulling me a little closer. “I feel like I could do
anything,
” she whispers. “I could tear off a man’s head and bathe in the spray of his arteries.
I could kill an army. I could conquer a
world
and drink the blood of its
children.
”

I believe her. Unrestrained by moral boundaries and with no real supernatural opposition,
Gretch could probably turn this whole planet into her personal blood bank within a
generation or two. Welcome to the new British invasion.

“You have no idea how
glorious
it is, Jace. My chains have been broken, my soul released; I’m free of the cloying
morass of petty human considerations like compassion or pity. No inhibitions, no restrictions—”

I let go of her wrist with one hand. I give her a look that says, “Yeah, but…” and
hold up my index finger.

She frowns. Emotional repression, when finally released, produces emotional lability;
she’s riding high right now, but look out for those mood swings. “Oh? Very well, then—tell
me what one thing still holds me back.”

She releases my throat, letting me talk. I gasp, then stumble back a step. It’s a
temporary reprieve, I know; Gretch is at least as dangerous as Zhang or Isamu. Probably
more so, because she’s smarter than either of them. And she’s fast enough to take
me down before I get anywhere near the door.

I take a second to get my breath back, then say, “Precon—”
cough “
—preconditions.”

“
What
preconditions?”

“You’re not here to rule the world, Gretch.” My voice is hoarse and it hurts to talk.
I keep going, though, because it’s the best weapon I have right now. “You’re a booby
trap. Sorry.”

Her frown deepens. I don’t have to explain it to her—all I needed to do was stall
out her emotional surge, then point her in the right direction. I just hope that Ahaseurus’s
spells have degraded enough to let her mind become aware of them; her own ferocious
intellect should take care of the rest.

“My … consciousness has been tampered with,” she murmurs. “I’m not
whole.
Access to memories is incomplete. Emotional responses have been significantly altered.…”

NSA training on Thropirelem—the
real
Thropirelem—includes anti-brainwashing techniques. Gretch helped develop some of
them. Right now she’s evaluating how bad the damage is, attempting to isolate the
worst of it with psychic firewalls, and activating deep-structure mnemonic repair
protocols—

“Oh, dear,” she says mildly. “That’s a shame.”

“What?” I manage.

“I hate you.”

“No, you don’t. You just think you do—”

She gives her head an impatient shake. “No, you don’t understand. I really, truly,
do hate you. I’m incapable of doing anything else. My entire emotional baseline has
been subverted and slaved to that one response. Quite an impressive job, really. I
hate you so much I’m incapable of killing you. Making you suffer is far more important.”

“You—you can beat it, right?”

Her smile returns. “I’m afraid not. But there is good news: I’m not actually
me.
I’m a crude imitation, created through stolen memories implanted in a woman only
recently turned into a pire. I can’t tell you by whom, though; those memories are
missing as well. You’re absolutely correct about me being a trap: I’m here to make
you doubt yourself, make you hesitate in crucial situations and/or wallow in guilt.
Instead, I’m going to give you a single word of advice.”

“Which is?”

She opens a drawer and pulls out a pencil, then meets my eyes with a steely glare.
“
Don’t.
”

She stabs herself in the chest.

With perfect precision, of course. The pencil slides under the breastbone and directly
into her heart. Her body bursts into flames, just like Isamu’s did, and she slumps
forward.

Onto the map.

I’m so horrified that I just freeze up. By the time my brain kicks into gear, it’s
too late; I manage to find a fire extinguisher on the wall, but by then the map is
gone. Whatever makes vampires self-immolate in this reality, it generates a lot of
heat in a very short period of time.

Once I’m sure the fire’s out, I go out into the darkness of the library. I slump down
at the end of a row, put my head in my hands, and let the tears out.

I know it wasn’t really Gretch. I know she did the best, smartest thing she could
have. But right now, I don’t care; I
miss
her. If anyone could have found a way to get me out of this damn place, it was her,
and now she’s gone.

Congratulations, Ahaseurus; guess this round goes to you.

*   *   *

I go home. I’m tired and depressed and all I want is a bottle of scotch, my dog, and
a little TV. If Jimmy Zhang is hanging around waiting for me, I’ll get the chance
to see how effective my improvised shotgun loads are.

But the only thing that greets me is my dog’s excited barking. I go in, pack a bag,
then take Gally out to the car and leave. As much as the comforts of home are calling,
this isn’t home. It never was.

I drive straight to Charlie’s place.

He’s already at the door when I jump out of the car. “No good, huh?” he says.

“No. See that storm cloud overhead? Apparently it’s keeping an eye on me. I try to
leave and I turn into a lightning rod.” Galahad bounds out of the truck and follows
me up the steps. “Cassiar talked to Terrance, and he’s got a solid alibi the sheriff
is ignoring. Deputy Silver verified it, and it’s confusing the hell out of him. Cassiar
back yet?”

“Not yet.”

We all go inside. I toss my bag down on the sofa and dig out my DVDs. I probably only
need the one, but I brought them all just in case. “Oh, and Miss Peters, the librarian?
She showed me an old map of a tunnel system beneath the town she found in the archives.
Then she grew fangs, threatened to take over the world, and killed herself.”

Charlie looks at me blankly, then slowly shakes his head. “That’s it. You’re not allowed
to go out anymore.”