Blood Tally

Chapter 11

I spent the rest of the evening sleuthing, conducting a more thorough search on Boris and his background than I had before, even going so far as to call in a favor with a contact at the Cuyahoga County courthouse. Despite all my efforts, I found nothing beyond what I already knew. Boris did have a thriving antiques business, most of the buying and selling done online. His eBay store, the one run by his thralls, didn’t tell me anything else. It wasn’t until early the next morning, sitting at my kitchen table at home, that a thought suddenly hit me and I called up the Days Inn in Brecksville.

It took three tries to get through to the desk. A tired voice answered with a yawn. “Days Inn, how can I make your stay better?”

“Hi there,” I said in my most cheerful voice. “I was hoping you could help me with a problem. I attended a seminar there on July 16, and I promised the lovely old man who ran the seminar that I’d follow up with him. Unfortunately, I’ve misplaced his business card.”

Lovely old man? Maggie commented wryly.

The receptionist answered with another yawn. “Sorry, our ballroom gets rented out for a lot of stuff. Can’t help you.”

“Oh, surely you can check your logbooks. I was there!”

“Man, look, I’m …”

“If it helps,” I said cheerfully, “I can come down myself this afternoon and help you look!”

I could practically hear the guy roll his eyes. “No, no,” he said tiredly. “That’s not necessary. Give me a minute, I’ll look.”

I was on hold for significantly longer than a minute. I was beginning to think he’d hung up on me when the line switched over. “You still there?” he asked.

“I am!”

“All right. The only rental we had that day was to Humble Beginnings.”

“Gosh, that doesn’t sound familiar.” It certainly didn’t sound like a business run by someone like Boris. “You’re sure that was the only seminar that day?”

“I’m sure. It started at two and got out at four. Sorry, can’t help you any more.” He hung up.

I jotted down the name Humble Beginnings. “Well,” I said aloud to Maggie, “I’m not convinced this is the right thing, but four is when we met with Boris, so the timing lines up.” I typed the name into my phone and hit the search button. I muttered to myself, “Okay, tattoo parlor in California. A job search website. A …” I trailed off, clicking on the fourth website down.

At first glance, it looked like a therapist’s website. It had a tasteful picture of a flower garden at the top. Underneath were the words Have You Ever Wanted to Start Again? The middle of the page was taken up by a long, rambling box of text that went on for some time about how difficult life could be and how life could get better if you just decided to start a new life. I skimmed it, my eyes beginning to glaze over, when Maggie said, Go to the bottom of the page. You see that?

The word immortality caught my eye immediately. It was just kind of slipped in there, mentioned casually during this long essay. But the word was hyperlinked. I clicked it and found myself taken to a different part of the website. I leaned forward, intrigued, and began to read more carefully. I clicked four more hyperlinks and was taken to two different websites before I finally found what I didn’t know I was looking for. It said,

Beneath all that was a list of locations and dates all around the region, from Northern Michigan all the way over to the middle of New York State. I ticked off the dates that had already passed, then took a screenshot of the ones coming up. I now knew exactly where Boris had been – and was going to be for the next few weeks. It only took a quick internet search to find out that all the websites I’d been through on this weird little digital jaunt were registered to Boris’s antiques company. I let myself stew on this for almost an hour, clicking every hyperlink on all the websites and doing a handful more searches, before my phone rang.

It was Jenny, my contact at the Cuyahoga County courthouse.

“Hey, Alek,” she said slowly. Jenny and I had dated briefly five years ago before we quickly realized my insane schedule was not going to leave us happy for long. We still talked a few times a year. “You remember that guy you asked about yesterday? Boris Novak?”

I could feel Maggie perk up in the back of my head. “Yes?” I asked.

“Well, I was filling in for a coworker in the contracts department this morning and decided to do a search for Boris in our physical records. I found something kind of weird. He has an enormous file here. Nothing digital. All paper records, all stuffed into a miscellaneous bin in the basement.”

“Huh,” was the only answer I could manage. Contracts with the Other were technically public record, though few people knew how to get their hands on them. Cleveland had digitized their records years ago. They should have all come up in the searches I’d been doing over the last week. “Why weren’t they in a digital file?” I asked.

“No idea. The company who did the digitization was kind of a pain in the ass. The head of our contract department has been bitching about them for years. He claims they’re lazy, corrupt, or both.”

Corrupt, Maggie sniffed. I wonder …

You wonder what? I asked her.

I wonder if Boris paid them not to digitize his files.

“So what are these mysterious contracts?” I asked.

“I’m not really sure,” she told me. “They’re really long, and I don’t do contracts. There’s lots of stuff about ownership, property rights; that sort of thing. I’ve got nothing better to do. Give me an hour and I’ll send you some scans.”

True to her word, a half dozen scans came through to my email in short order. Now, I’m not a contract lawyer and I’m definitely not an Other contract lawyer. But I collect on debts for a living, so I’ve read thousands of these during my career. The first thing I noticed was that these were very long – almost a hundred pages each, which meant they were incredibly comprehensive. The second thing I noticed was that whole pages were redacted, which meant that these were copies of the contracts, not originals. Redacting was a way one company of Other could keep another from finding out the wording they used.

I picked one at random and spent the next couple hours reading it and rereading it carefully. All the legalese made my head hurt, but I could tell it was a work of art. It was crafted carefully, every word chosen for a reason, leaving no loopholes and allowing no wiggle room for either party involved. By the time I’d finished, I felt kind of ill. Even Maggie had long ago gone silent, reading along with me, and I could sense her palpable disgust from the corner of my mind.

I finally closed the PDF and set my phone aside. At some point in the last hour, Eddie had come along and sat in my lap.

The moment I set my phone down, he said, “We’re out of tuna.”

Deep in thought, I walked to my truck and grabbed a few cans of tuna I’d forgotten to bring in the night before, returning inside and opening one of them before setting it on the kitchen floor.

Eddie sniffed it once. “This isn’t albacore.”

“It’s all they had,” I said distractedly. I didn’t have time for him, to be honest, and I hoped he’d shut up and eat.

Eddie settled back on his haunches and stared at me. I ignored him. Okay, I said to Maggie. I know what’s in the blood tally that Jacques wants. I just can’t believe he’s kept it a secret this long. I picked up my phone and called Jenny back. “Hey, can you do me another favor?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“Look through those contracts – just the first page of each one – and find me one for someone named Sam. Should be pretty recent.”

“Hold on.” She set down the phone, and I could hear the shuffling of papers. It didn’t take very long before she was back. “Sam LASTNAME HERE??”

“That’s it. Can you scan it and send it to me?”

“Sure.”

I hung up, then looked through my notes until I found Boris’s landline. A familiar voice answered the phone.

“Is this Sam?” I asked.

“… Yes?” the thrall responded.

“Good. If you want to help Michael get through the next week alive, you’re going to meet me for lunch.”

Three hours later, I was sitting at a smoky little bar in a strip mall in Brook Park. The place was “outdoorsy,” with wood paneling and lots of shelving for knickknacks and a large bison head above the door. Not really my kind of place, but it was practically empty in the middle of the day, and the lone bartender sat in the back playing some game on his phone with the volume turned up while I conducted my meeting. Sam – Boris’s tall, overweight thrall – shoved himself into the booth across from me, glancing around the establishment like his master might be hiding behind the pinball machine in the corner. The poor guy was wearing cargo shorts and a League of Legends T-shirt, completely soaked with sweat, his brow wrinkled in consternation.

“Boris told me not to see you again,” he muttered, hunching his shoulders.

“But you’re here anyways,” I said. I sat straight in my own booth, fixing Sam with my I’m-done-with-this-shit gaze and drumming the fingers of my left hand on the table.

Sam’s own gaze settled on me. He swallowed hard. “I’m just trying to help Mike.”

“And I’m hoping you can,” I said. “But I need you to answer some questions for me.” I produced a printed-out version of a contract from the Cuyahoga County courthouse – his contract – and slid it across the table. “You know what this is?”

Sam flinched. His eyes didn’t linger on it for more than a second or two before he pointedly looked away. “Of course.”

“Good.” I pulled the contract back toward me and flipped absently through the pages. It was a thick stack of paper, printed on both sides. “There’s an awful lot of redacted stuff in here.”

“Yeah.” Sam didn’t meet my eyes. “It’s for … what’s the word? Propriety?”

“It’s proprietary?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Business stuff. I don’t understand it all, myself.”

“Yet you signed the contract.”

“I mean, I understood what I was signing. I just don’t know the business jargon.”

Maggie sighed. He totally didn’t understand everything in that contract. You do this shit for a living and you don’t understand it all.

I said as much to Sam and continued, “Look, I’m not here to ask you to spill your master’s secrets. I just want you to clarify a few things. On the surface, this contract appears far better for the thrall than most thrall-master agreements. From what I understand, most contracts go something like this: the thrall agrees to serve the master for a fixed period of time, after which the master will release the thrall from all debts, turn them into a vampire, and then cut them loose. Usually with a big cash payment to get them started on their new trip into immortality. Correct?”

Sam nodded unhappily.

“Standard agreement is twenty years?”

Another nod.

“And yet …” I shuffled through his contract again. “And yet, Boris’s contract is only five years. That’s barely a fourth of other vampires. Hell, that’s barely any servitude at all! Merely time you might otherwise spend on a college degree, and you’re a goddamn immortal. Pretty sweet deal. How long do you have left, by the way?”

“Two hundred and three days,” Sam answered, still not meeting my eye.

“Just keeping your head down? Waiting for it to be over? For you to have your own immortality and move out of that garbage heap and get your own place?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “What’s the catch?”

Sam finally looked up at me. He took a long, trembling breath, then looked back down at the contract. “It’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad?” I echoed. I turned to page thirty-four, where I’d highlighted a bit of language that Maggie had pointed out to me. I read, “The undersigned agrees to swear an oath of fealty from the moment of his immortality until he is truly, completely dead. Man, there isn’t even a release clause in here – at least not one I could find. Boris couldn’t let you out of this contract if he wanted to.” I leaned forward. “Do you know why vampires are only allowed to have four thralls at the same time? You ever heard of the country of Vlorech?” I know I hadn’t. It wasn’t even on Wikipedia. I got the story from Maggie, and she admitted she only knew the rumors. “It was a small country in Eastern Europe where a Vampire Lord made the entire population into thralls. He had such powerful will that he could command the populace like a goddamn hive queen. He committed atrocities that made Dracula look like a white knight. It took a coalition of the Ottomans and Christian powers of Europe to put him down, after which both sides agreed to salt the earth and remove all reference to Vlorech from their histories.”

Sam sulked across from me.

“Look, I know that when you sign on for a sweet deal like this you aren’t going to spend a lot of time on the overarching geopolitical implications. But in addition to those five years of thralldom, you also agreed to become Boris’s vassal vampire for eternity. You are contractually obligated to obey him.”

I continued, “He can compel you to do whatever he wants. Can you even comprehend eternity? Let’s say you only live to three hundred before you get bored and off yourself, or a Hunter corners and kills you. You’ve still lived four lifetimes. That’s a long time – and during that whole time, you’re still a slave of Boris.” I was finally getting to the crux of my problem with this whole thing. I rapped my knuckles on the table until Sam finally looked me in the eye again. “I need you to tell me something very important – something in here that is redacted.”

“What?” he asked.

“Does this contract provision for you to continue the cycle that Boris started, where your own thralls become vampire vassals to you, and then theirs to them, and so on?”

Sam shifted around in his seat. For a moment he looked like he was going to try and leave. Finally, he said, “Yeah. That’s the idea. Each of us gets our own little kingdom. The longer we live, the bigger the kingdom we get.”

“All of them, ad nauseum, vassals of Boris.” I breathed a sigh of disbelief. It’s kind of genius, I told Maggie.

It’s kind of terrifying, she responded. The Vampire Lords have their own vassals and coalitions, but nothing to this extent. Boris might already have a hundred vassal vampires. It won’t take him long to have thousands, then tens of thousands. If he survives long enough, he’ll have millions of full-fledged vampires who obey him. Sam himself will have thousands.

It’s a goddamned vampire multilevel marketing scheme, I snorted. Returning my attention to Sam, I said, “Have you considered the implications of all this?”

He shrugged.

“Right.” I got up, took off my hat, running one hand through my hair.

“Wait!” Sam suddenly said. “You told me this was all going to help Michael.”

“I was telling the truth.”

“How?”

I gave him a tight, businesslike smile. “Sorry. If I tell you, then Boris will just kill both of us.” I walked back to my truck, drove around for a few minutes to sort all the details out in my head before finding a shady place to park. I called Jacques. The dhampir answered on the first ring. “Alek, how is the hunt going?”

I put on my best exasperated voice. “Boris’s thrall is slippery. I tracked him down to the south side, but he was staying with … friends and they tipped him off.” I’d already decided not to tell him about the thrall halfway house. I was pissed about my tires getting slashed, but if a Vampire Lord found out about it, Father Orrock and all his charges would end up dead. “I got a glimpse of him, but he hopped across a freeway and lost me.”

“Did he have the blood tally?” No disappointing lecture. No ominous threats. Just a quick, succinct question.

“No idea,” I lied. “Is there anything I should be looking for?”

“Hmm.” Jacques typed something on a keyboard. “It should be quite large. A proper tome, probably. If you caught a glimpse of Michael, you would have seen the blood tally.”

“I don’t think so. He must have stashed it somewhere.”

Jacques was quiet for some time. I could hear him breathing on the other end, and his voice had just a tinge of annoyance when he finally said, “All right. Track him down. No more wasting time. No more worrying about Boris. The blood tally is all that matters. Deliver it to me by the end of the week and I’ll give you another ten thousand on top of what I offered last time. All of this will stay between you and I.”

“See,” I replied, “that’s what I’m worried about. If I take Michael back to Boris without the blood tally, Boris will find out what happened to it, and then he’ll come after me.”

“If you get me that book, I’ll take care of him and his thralls. Do your job, Agent Fitz.” Jacques hung up.

I took a few deep breaths. I’m out of my depth, I told Maggie.

I’ve gotten that impression, she replied demurely.

Boris’s blood tally contains the original contracts for this vampire MLM, without redactions.

That’s almost certain.

Can someone else use those contracts?

Maggie thought about this for a moment. The language itself will be valuable – that’s why the copies at the courthouse are redacted, after all. When it comes to the contacts themselves … most Other won’t fiddle with contracts because they’re afraid of OtherOps finding out, but Lord Ruthven might just be strong enough to take over another vampire’s blood tally. And if he’s not, he could probably find a magician willing to use that blood tally to bend Boris to his will. Blood rites can be complicated, and only the old gods know their power better than the Vampire Lords.

So if Lord Ruthven can get his hands on the blood tally, there’s a chance he just steals Boris’s MLM straight up?

And the feudal army that comes with it.

That thought brought up something else that had been bothering me. If Boris has an army of vampires at his call, why aren’t they looking for Michael?

Maggie sniffed. Contract or not, the stubborn old prick probably doesn’t want to admit to his subordinates that he lost the blood tally. They’re still predators. He can’t show weakness around them.

I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I said, Any advice?

I’ll be honest … I’m kind of out of my depth too. New, proprietary language in a contract? This is corporate-level shit. It’s the kind of thing Vampire Lords and Lao and the Lords of Hell deal with. Not jinn. At least not my kind of jinn. Wars get fought over this kind of thing.

Fuck. I lifted my phone again and called Ada. She listened in silence as I explained the whole situation, in detail, including the attempted bribe from Jacques. When I’d finished, I was met with a long silence and then she said,

“So?”

If I was expecting anything from her, that was not it. “What do you mean, so? One of our clients is creating a vampire MLM using contract language that would make any high-level attorney weep with joy. You know the implications of this, right? Boris could be the king of his own vampire nation in a hundred years. He could upend the Rules, make war on OtherOps. Shit, he could wipe out humanity.”

“You don’t think you’re being a little too dramatic?” Ada asked.

I thought about this for a minute. “No. No, I don’t. Have you ever met a vampire who wouldn’t do anything for more power if he thought he could get away with it?”

“Well … a hundred years, though. You and I will be long dead by then.”

I ran my hand through my hair, scoffing. “That’s really fucking callous, even for you.” I paused for just a moment. This was no help at all. “I know Jacques is blackmailing you.”

I could hear Ada grow still. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I’m not an idiot. Jacques has something over you, or you wouldn’t ever have agreed to a job in which we betray one client for another. You’re greedy, but you value your professional reputation too much.” I felt the barcode over my chest tighten slightly. I ignored it. “What is it? What’s he blackmailing you with?”

“Never you mind,” Ada snapped. “I always knew you were too clever for your own good. Get your nose out of this shit and do your job. Make the delivery. Keep the money from Jacques. Just get this over with.”

I gripped my steering wheel with the hand not holding the phone. “No,” I said.

The barcode tightened further. “What?” Ada demanded.

“I said no. The blood tally has all the original contract language that Boris has been using to set up his feudal system. It’s dangerous enough in his hands, but if one of the Vampire Lords gets their hands on it? Shit, I can’t even imagine. I’m not going to give it to him.” My chest hurt like hell now, and I could feel Maggie pacing around in the back of my head.

Alek, she could kill you, she warned.

I went on, “Be a coward if you want. Try to protect whatever gross secret that Jacques has. But he’s not blackmailing me. I’m going to find Michael, destroy the damned blood tally he’s carrying, and then hand Michael back to Boris. If any of them are pissed about the situation, they can go fuck themselves. I will have fulfilled my duties to my clients.” The last few words barely came out as a wheeze. I was doubled up now, gripping the wheel so hard my hand had gone numb. My chest felt like it was being stepped on by a giant.

“I could pop your heart like a zit,” Ada croaked.

“Do it,” I managed.

Then, without warning, the pain was gone. Ada hung up. I felt the blood rush to my head and I spent the next couple of minutes taking deep breaths and blinking the spots out of my vision.

Have you ever called her bluff before? Maggie asked. Her presence was close, more intimate than usual, like a friend leaning over another to check on their health after they fell.

I think that might be the first of those fights I’ve ever won. Winning didn’t feel good, though. Not even a little bit. The pain was gone, but the memory of it was fresh. I’d just put myself on a path against my boss and a Vampire Lord and Boris Novak. I was a walking dead man, and I knew it. But unless Ada ratted me out to one of the clients, I was going to destroy the blood tally before either Jacques or Boris had the chance to off me.

I was just beginning to think clearly again when Maggie hissed, Fucking hell. You’re being scryed.

My stomach lurched. “By who?” I asked aloud. “Is it Matthias? Is he coming for us?”

Not me. You. It’s … hold on. Unless it’s a god, they’re not going to get much out of their scrying but … well. Damn.

Who is it?

It’s Olivia Martin.

I let out a disappointed sigh. I was paying her to scry Michael, not put her nose into my business. Not as bad as Matthias, I suppose. I should have known not to trust a witch.

If she decides to be persistent and find out why her scrying failed, she might be a pain in our ass, Maggie warned.

I know. Let’s deal with this now. What was that you said? Witches can be dealt with by a swift punch to the nose?

Only if they don’t know it’s coming.

I pulled out of my shady parking spot and drove toward the highway to head east toward Chardon. She’s not going to know it’s coming. Shame. I really don’t want to break her face, but she picked the wrong time to come snooping.