“Both hands,” Vivienne said, and put the package into them.
It was flat, about the size of a folded newspaper, wrapped in oiled leather and sealed along three seams with wax gone the brown of old blood.
No writing on it anywhere.
It weighed almost nothing, which made the care she’d used carrying it across the parlor a piece of information all by itself.
“Area 5,” she said.
“Shreveport.
The Sheriff’s domain.
You’ll take it to his establishment.
Fangtasia.”
“Fangtasia, ma’am.”
“Don’t say it in that voice.
He named it himself, and he’s older than every idea you’ve ever had.” She stepped back and went over him from collar to boots, the inspection a woman gives a horse she intends to lend out.
“Do not deviate from the route.
Do not feed on the road.
Do not draw attention.
Say it back.”
“Don’t deviate.
Don’t feed.
Don’t draw attention.”
“The Sheriff’s territory isn’t forgiving.
Fledglings who make mistakes in it don’t come back, and nobody sends the maker an apology, because there’s nothing left to send.” Her hand found the mantel and rested there, three rings clicking once against the marble.
“You’ll be back before dawn.
If you’re not, the sun will find you.
If the sun finds you, I’ll have wasted a turning.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t waste my turning.”
She wanted a flinch.
He could hear her waiting for one in the half-beat she left after the sentence, the small open pocket where a frightened childe would fill the air with promises.
He gave her nothing to grade, and the pocket closed.
“How much fuel is in the car?” he asked.
“Half a tank.”
“Then I’ll need to stop, ma’am.
I’d rather you hear that from me now than wonder about it later.”
Vivienne’s chin came up a fraction.
“Baton Rouge.
Nowhere north of it.
And you pay cash, you keep your mouth closed, and you don’t look at the girl behind the counter for longer than it takes to hand over the money.” She turned toward the sideboard.
“Shreveport sits at the top of Area 5.
Everything under it belongs to the same office.
Monroe.
The parishes.
Bon Temps, which is a hole with a stoplight.
If you break down anywhere between here and there you are standing in another vampire’s kitchen, uninvited, and you will be treated accordingly.”
“Understood.”
“You don’t understand.
You’ve been dead nine days.” She poured herself three fingers of something she wouldn’t drink.
“But you’ll remember I said it.”
“Is there an answer I give, ma’am?
If somebody stops me on that road and asks whose I am.”
“You give my name and nothing after it.” She set the glass down untouched.
“Vivienne Marchand, out of New Orleans, and then you close your mouth and you let the name do what the name does.
Every explanation you add makes it smaller.” A pause.
“And if the name isn’t enough, then whoever’s stopped you already knew who I was before they asked, and there was never going to be an answer.”
He carried the package out through the back of the house, past the shuttered windows with their seams tarred against the daylight, and the parlor door closed behind him with the soft finality of a woman who’d already gone back to her own evening.
The car was a grey sedan with a rosary snapped off the mirror and the stub still glued there.
He put the package on the passenger seat, on the floor, then on the seat again, and drove out through the gate at a speed no patrolman would ever notice.
I-10 north and west out of the city, and the mask stayed on.
That was the part he wanted to understand about himself.
There was no one in the car.
There was no one for forty miles of black water and concrete, and still he drove with his hands at ten and two and his face arranged in the mild, obliging, faintly stupid expression he’d been wearing since the cellar.
He didn’t take it off in private.
He’d learned in his first life that the men who caught you were never the men in the room, they were the men reviewing the tape three days later, and a face you only wore in company was a face that slipped at the worst possible hour.
So he wore it alone.
He wore it at eighty miles an hour with nothing but cypress on either side.
It was becoming the truth of his skull, and that was fine.
Truth was cheaper to maintain.
Past Baton Rouge the interstate gave out into two-lane highway and the state stopped pretending.
Livonia.
Krotz Springs.
Towns that amounted to a feed store, a church, and a sign telling you what the population had been at some point in the past.
The bayous on either side breathed mist up over the asphalt in long slow exhalations, and the mist held the headlights and gave them back milky.
He drove with the windows down.
That was new.
Air moving over his face at speed did nothing to him now, no cold, no sting, nothing his skin was interested in reporting.
But it carried the country in through the window in layers he could take apart.
Standing water.
Diesel.
A dead armadillo a quarter mile before he passed it.
Somebody’s dog.
Somebody’s cook fire.
Woodsmoke from a house he never saw, a mile off the road, where a family was awake at eleven at night doing whatever families did.
The hunger sat behind his still heart with its chain on, and didn’t care about any of it.
Vivienne thought she was testing obedience.
She’d designed the errand to prove the leash reached to Shreveport and back, and to see whether the leash chafed.
That was fair.
That was what a maker did with a new one, and she’d have been a fool not to.
What she’d actually handed him was a map.
Because he’d been shut in one house for nine nights with one door and one staircase and one room where the food came, and a man who lives in one room believes the room is the world.
Now the world had a top and a bottom.
Shreveport at the crown of it, the Sheriff’s office at the crown of Shreveport.
Under that, a long shallow spread of nothing towns where the dead lived quietly and the living pretended not to notice.
Every mile of it was a rung, or the absence of one.
He counted the exits and the gas stations and the places a car could turn off the highway and not be seen from it.
He noted which parishes had a state trooper presence and which had the specific emptiness that comes from a department with four cars and a dispatcher who goes home at nine.
None of it was useful yet.
That wasn’t the point.
Information you gathered when it was free was information you didn’t have to pay for later, in a hurry, with a knife somewhere.
Shreveport came up over the trees an hour before midnight, orange and low, a city built on a river and a casino industry and not much interested in either.
Fangtasia sat on the edge of it in a strip of commercial nothing, between a shuttered carpet outlet and a lot full of dead boats.
Black paint over a cinderblock box.
The windows had been blacked out from the inside and the red light behind them bled through at the seams in thin bright lines, so the whole building looked like something with the wrong thing burning inside it.
The line went thirty deep along the wall.
Fangbangers, all of them, and the word he’d learned from Reynard didn’t cover what it looked like in person.
They’d dressed for it.
Lace and dog collars and a great deal of black, throats bared to the November air, everybody standing a half step closer to the door than they needed to.
He watched a girl at the back of the line adjust her hair to fall clear of one side of her neck and then check the effect in her friend’s phone.
The bass came through the wall and up through the gravel and into the soles of his boots.
He got out with the package under his arm, and the smell of thirty warm bodies hit him in one wave and the chain went tight.
He walked past all of them to the front.
The bouncer at the door was human and built like a vending machine and had the flat, bored, entirely unimpressed eyes of somebody who’d thrown out better than Caleb twice already tonight.
“Line’s back there.”
“I’m not here for the room.”
“Everybody’s here for the room.”
Caleb held up the leather package so the wax seals caught the red light.
“I carry for Vivienne Marchand, out of New Orleans.
It goes to the Sheriff, tonight, in his hand.”
The name did the work.
The bouncer’s face didn’t move much, but his weight came off the doorframe, and something behind his eyes recalculated what he was looking at and didn’t enjoy the result.
“Marchand,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Straight back.
Don’t stop at the bar.
Don’t touch anybody.” He stepped aside, and then, lower, not unkindly, “And kid.
Whatever he asks you, answer it short.”
The door came open, and the red and the bass and the smell of it all came out over the gravel to meet him, and Caleb walked in.
Streets talk.
Want the next move before the cops, the heroes, or anyone else?
The Syndicate reads first.
Hustler.
$5.
Twelve chapters ahead.
Enforcer.
$9.
Nineteen chapters ahead.
Kingpin.
$15.
Twenty-six chapters ahead.
Drops are periodic.
Schedule’s on the page.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
P.S.
— there’s a back alley where the rest of this story runs cold and free.
address: unwrittenrealm.com.
you know what to do.