Bloodsong Ch. 03

Security had gone to the dogs in her absence, she could already tell. The Rivers' had done away with the number panel lock; Jo was frightful at remembering passwords, so they'd probably found the thing a hassle. In its place stood a reinforced door that might have been scrounged from a bank vault — good, approved, although insufficient to deter a Tsikalayan. In stark contrast, the locking system was one she could have bested easily, and Valerie was the first to admit that her lock picking skills were rubbish.

Destined to remain so, too, since she didn't practice them enough. She kicked the door down.

The alarm that should ring in the event of a breach had also been dismantled or turned off, since Valerie remembered it being both overly sensitive and brutal in its loudness and she'd just, well. Gone and kicked down the front door. She left Jack stuck under the latter before venturing inside, figuring that it was heavy enough to give him trouble moving from under it if he woke unexpectedly, and her the time to intercede.

There was an eldritch quality to the silence that greeted her, and a strange relief at finding the place empty, especially after she'd seen those corpses. The flowery wallpaper was the same she'd slapped on so many years back. It had aged badly. The living room furniture and the knickknacks were also her leftovers and stood as she'd left them, although there were fewer decorative plates and the sofa was new. The Rivers siblings hadn't made big overtures towards imprinting their personality in the space they'd overtaken, which didn't surprise her. Jo wouldn't be caught dead in a furniture store. Jonathan found old things atmospheric.

Valerie was pleased to discover that in among it all, they'd kept up her habit of tucking away a calamity kit in every room. There was one concealed behind the TV case, the same spot she'd used back in the day. There were essential supplies missing and no weapons save for a knife and a couple of loose slugs, but she did find a rolled-up length of chain.

She turned the links between her fingers, tugged to test it for strength. It was tough, made of tungsten carbide or some alloy of equal hardness, and the links were seamlessly fused. Bound with it, she would have been able to break free eventually, but not instantly and effortlessly.

She guessed it was as good as she could hope to get, found padlocks to go with it and dropped her haul on the coffee table. Next and last, she found a vial of what looked like diluted mercury hiding in an empty cartridge. She opened and sniffed it, to rule out the possibility that it was actually mercury, and despite wrinkling her nose at the cloying, ripe sweetness that invaded it, she was satisfied. Dumping paxpernia down Jack's throat would make him as susceptible to damage and slow to heal as a human. The askara sword lessened her need for it, but it remained a useful thing to have on hand.

Arms full, Valerie walked back to where she'd left her captive.

Was her mind playing tricks on her, or had Jack's breathing changed?

She took his pulse, found it snaillike enough. Reassured, she moved the door aside and turned over his prone form, looping the chain around his arms enough times to encircle the whole limb. It wouldn't hold up longer than a minute after he started forcing, but since he wouldn't be able to do so without her noticing, he'd have no way of launching a surprise attack. Next, she took off his shoes and socks, shook them to see if anything fell out, and went through the contents of his pockets. They were loaded with more trash than Nick's — men, honestly! — but also turned out to yield something better than the depleted calamity kit.

Valerie's hand closed around the silver circlet with something like reverence. It looked like a plain, bordering on crude, item of jewelry made for someone with massive hands and wrists as thick as ankles. A Willard & Barrington energy damper; they'd become rarities since their inventor had vanished from his workshop five years back, more so after his business partner had destroyed the leftover stock, closed up shop and fled to the Bermudas, never to be seen or heard from again. It was assumed that the High Council had done Willard in and caught up with Barrington later, leaving no one alive with an inkling of how to build the things.

Had she bothered to put together a wish list, it would have earned its place at the top.

Jack waking before she had the means to secure him had been Valerie's foremost concern, and it had just gone the way of the dodo. She was forced to undo all her previous work and remove the chains from his arms, since she'd made them swallow his hands also, but the setback was insignificant. With a damper on, he'd not only bleed like a human; he'd have the strength of a human and be rendered incapable of shifting as much as a nail. She hummed softly to herself as she slipped the band over his left hand. It was far too big a circumference for his wrist, but if she remembered how to do this . . .

She pressed her finger against a sharpened canine and squeezed the tip until she had a sizable drop of blood, which she smeared over the silver surface. Using both her hands, she then surrounded the damper with her fingers and tightened up the circle, distorting and compressing the metal underneath until it bit into Jack's skin. The second she released it, it glowed, shuddered and broke away from the wrist in two neat halves.

She held the hand up to eye level, examined the leftover marks. They could be mistaken for veins at first glance, if they weren't growing in the wrong direction and did not stand out so starkly against skin not pale enough to make such a thing plausible. They wound around his wrist, cyan ink marking the previous location of the damper, indelible unless one removed the limb, or earned the cooperation of the person to whose blood the damper was keyed.

As far as Valerie was concerned, Jack could either grow the balls to chop his hand off or keep the mark forever.

She pulled him with her, him still boneless, into the bathroom, where she dumped him inside the shower unit, chained his hands again and pulled him up so that he was backed against the wall. The end of the chain she tossed over the shower head, which was fixed in place so thoroughly that with diminished strength, he'd have a hard and noisy time trying to dislodge it and likely still fail. The other end she looped around the diverter pipe. Lastly, she padlocked the last link of the chain to the piece she'd left dangling from Jack's bound hands.

It was not a setup that she could see him getting out of on his own, and therefore it was with no small amount of relish that Valerie backed out and threw the door closed on him.

Having Jack handled was the removal of a weight she'd been all too conscious of carrying. Valerie pocketed the paxpernia. She hadn't resorted to it in the end, as using a damper already had a mild inhibiting effect over healing. Not as strong of one, but since she didn't know enough about the consequences of dumping paxpernia on top, she'd rather leave it at that.

She crossed the house. Slightly guilty at the prospect of invading the privacy of her colleagues, she walked into what used to be her room, backtracking once she realized that Jo had been the one to lay claim to it.

Jonathan had made his room in what had been her office space. Predictably and contrasting to the spartan minimalism of Jo's accommodations, it was cluttered to the point of overflow with occult thingamajigs of suspicious utility. There were books too, though. Were there ever books.

Valerie scanned the titles of those that had them, some being coverless or handwritten, leafed through the ones that didn't, and put aside everything that was in a language she could read. She returned to the kitchen armed with everything she could carry, spread her spoils over the table and went back for the rest.

On her last trip, she spent a minute on the assortment of swords, kris, athame and daggers that Jonathan kept in an umbrella stand. They all struck her as too ornamental to have ever seen a fight or do much good in one, but they'd been carefully sheathed in sensible leather scabbards. She found one matching the length of the askara sword, replaced the sword already in it and bound it to her waistband, so that she wouldn't have to keep fearing that she'd cut herself by having a blade dangling at her hip unprotected.

She also, after a moment of heated inner debate, grabbed a shirt from the closet, making sure it was the oldest, rattiest one she could find.

The sound of water whooshing from a tap, coming from the other side of the house, made Valerie briefly freeze and then sent her sprinting. She crashed through the corridor and living room with the sword drawn and barreled through the kitchen door, all in less than five seconds.

Once there, she tried and failed to comprehend the scene before her eyes.

How. Why? How was this, somehow, what her life had come to?

"You wouldn't happen to know where they keep the sugar, would you?" Jack's back was turned, but he had his arms raised in plain view, the blue mark on his left wrist displayed for her convenience as he perused the contents of the cabinet over the sink like he didn't have a care in the world. He clicked his tongue. "The humans who lived here don't value organization much. You do still take your coffee with sugar, right? Otherwise there's no point in trying to hunt it down in this pigsty."

It was the last drop. Like she'd woken from a dream, Valerie shook herself and stalked over, grabbed Jack by the shoulder, turned him around and backhanded him with such force that his head flipped around and hit the corner of the range hood. A small drip of blood trickled from the corner of his lip; he licked it clean, unfazed, a ghost of a smile threatening to turn his mouth.

Valerie tightened her grip on the sword and pointed it at the center of his chest, in case he got it in his head to shift. The damper's mark wouldn't let him, she reminded herself, but somehow, she was neither comforted nor calmed by the assurance.

"How in darkness did you get loose?"

"You need to do something about that temper of yours. It's getting out of hand."

"How?" she demanded. "I left you chained up after using a damper on you, you should—"

"You left me chained up in the company of a sizable and slippery bar of soap."

Soap.

Valerie's memory helpfully supplied a picture of the bathroom. There had been soap. Yellow soap with the brand print still intact, sitting on the side of the shower tray, against the bottom of the stall panel. She scoffed; there was no way for Jack to have reached it with his hands, even if she entertained the notion that he'd extracted himself from a bind like the one she'd left him in, in as short a timeframe as he'd been afforded, by making himself slippery.

"You didn't grab a soap bar with your hands chained above your head. You didn't get out of those chains with soap, period."

"Of course I didn't grab it with my hands. I grabbed it with my feet, which then lifted it up to my hands." Jack shrugged at her icy, skeptical expression and turned away as if there weren't a red silver blade aimed at him, as if he were concerned with nothing so much as fulfilling the task that had engrossed him before her arrival. "Go on, picture it. Or try to."

"I don't believe . . ." Valerie trailed off, let her sights stray to the counter and made an inventory of the objects set upon it. Mismatched cups on matched plates; an aluminum tin with the word COFFEE minted on the lid. A translucent container two thirds full of water that she deduced fit in the red and gold espresso machine taking up half the counter next to the stove. A new and expensive looking addition, she thought, with the detachment she only achieved when her brain was two thirds of the way elsewhere. "Tell me the truth. Now. Or—"

"Pink cup or blue cup? I'm afraid those are the options; these humans are extremely tasteless."

The impulse to defend her colleagues pulled stronger than the sensible voice telling Valerie to not engage, give no quarter.

"Those were mine. This used to be my place when I still lived in town."

The deadened, shellshocked statement had a dramatic effect on Jack's stance. His arrogant demeanor didn't vanish, but hair thin cracks threaded its surface as he looked around, considering his surroundings.

"I like the wallpaper," he volunteered. Valerie shook her head. It was that or bash it against the sink in a fit of pique at his refusal to take the situation, or her, with a semblance of seriousness. More so at her own failure to make him. "Where did you keep the sugar? Perhaps the rats haven't moved it."

"I don't know if you noticed, but," she started, because to be fair, it was possible that he hadn't. Jack wasn't entirely all there, after all. "You are a prisoner, in no position to do anything about it, and unlikely to be rescued soon, since your men didn't even try to prevent me from taking you in the first place."

"I know. I told them not to stop you, if it came to that." Jack waited for her to be done gaping, with a patience that was the provision of stereotypical Buddhist monks and certain subspecies of angler fish. When Valerie managed to seal her lips again, he grinned like they were sharing a private joke. "I won't lie, I went into that fight expecting to win, but I'm not bothered about this outcome. As I'm sure you've guessed already, since otherwise I'd have been out of the door before you noticed I'd come to."

Valerie hadn't guessed any such thing, what with her concept of reality having taken hit after hit after hit to the point where she wouldn't feel shocked if ripped open and candy fell out.

"Why?"

"This way I get to spend time with you," Jack said, as though that were a sane sort of answer. He slid two steps to his left to replace the water container in the espresso machine and place the pink cup under the tap. Valerie was too benumbed to do more than poke him halfheartedly with the sword as he moved about. "All we seem able to do when we stand on equal footing is argue. I thought that if I let you be in charge for once, we might—"

"You thought you could, what, induce some crazy sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome?" Valerie pressed a hand against her forehead and stared through her fingers, quivering with second hand embarrassment while Jack pried the lid off the coffee tin, calm as you please. "This is beyond . . . how absolutely out of your mind do you have to be . . ."

"Lima," he told her, selecting a capsule from the ones in the tin and clicking it in place. Valerie returned a look that was wearier than anything, having yet to move past the fact that Jack was really trying to brew espresso while held at sword point. "The phenomenon through which a captor develops feelings for their prisoner is commonly known, in this earthen vernacular which you insist on speaking, as Lima syndrome."

At some point she would have to remove her palm from her forehead.

Not just yet, though.

"I don't care what the proper terminology is. You're insane. Sit the fuck down while I—" No, that would mean leaving him to his own devices while she got the chains. She likewise couldn't knock him out the usual way, having used a damper on him. The chances of brain hemorrhage were slim, since his healing factor should remain active enough to account for such minor things, but it was an unnecessary risk. "Actually, come along. Move!"

Valerie found the chains piled up outside the shower unit, intact right down to the padlocks, speckled with water and exceedingly slippery. She snatched them from the floor without a word and hauled Jack out again, paying no heed to the smugness radiating from him.

Back in the kitchen, she set the chains down at a safe distance from the books and picked up the old shirt she'd tossed on top of those, all but pressing it into his face.

"Put this on."

Jack shook out the clothing and held it at arm's length, eyeing the holes and abstract patterns where Jonathan had spilled things that had never washed out with blatant scorn. Valerie remained disappointed that her colleague was too much of a sensible dresser to own some gag shirt that Jack would have rather expired than be caught wearing. Worn and unsightly would have to do.

"No. I'm not walking around in some human's rags."

"And I'm not inclined to allow you to either walk around or argue, so put it on."

"No, thank you." Jack dropped the shirt on the table and moved away as though convinced that she would let him. Valerie hauled him back with more force than advisable, considering his delicate condition, and threw the shirt at him again. Once again he batted it away, looking rather blighted as he did. "Why are you so dead set on me wearing this?"

"Because I can't have you out of my sight, and if you are going to be within my sight, it won't be chained up and shirtless." Though not shoeless, which left her both dumbfounded and indignant. She'd taken Jack's boots off by the entrance, implying that he had meandered there, seen the door not just ajar but on the floor, and elected repossessing his footwear and finding a coffee maker as his priorities. It didn't sit well with her. Neither did the way his eyes narrowed knowingly, as though he realized — or thought he realized — something she did not.

"Because it would disturb you, or distract you?"

"Put. It. On." Valerie slapped her forehead, willing the stress lines there to ease up. "I don't have the time or the inclination to deal with your bullshit, as I've got plenty of it to sort through already. If you are remotely serious about wanting to hang out without it being an endless row, start by making yourself decent and shutting the fuck up!"

She pushed the shirt onto him one last time. She was nothing short of stunned, although she quickly hid all signs of it, when Jack pulled it over his head with no further complaints.

"You're angry," he said, as Valerie stood bracing herself for the next annoyance and holding back her disbelief. "I apologize. I'm not trying to be difficult. I do want to make this work out."

"There's nothing to be made to work out," she told him. She gestured at the sturdiest looking of the mismatched chairs around the table. Maybe if she played it smartly, she would eke out a shred of peace from her stay at the house. "Sit."

There was a delay between Jack assimilating the command and him moving to occupy the chair, but at least she didn't have to force him into it. Valerie's eyebrows climbed so far up that the next bout of uncharacteristic complacency would get them lost in her hair. Her instincts would shout 'trap', were it not for the blue mark that restricted Jack's capacity for funny business and him obeying with the look of someone with a toothache chewing on salt.

"Is this the part where you threaten my life unless I tell you everything I know?" he asked, once she'd finished decking him in chains with what some would call an overabundance of zeal.

"No."

"No?"

"All the questions I have, I can get a better answer for from this almighty pile of books than off your lying lips. So be quiet and let me read." Her hand reached for a tome at random while her foot shuffled a chair from under the table so she could sink down on it.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the none too pleased twist of Jack's mouth.

Her first five minutes of reading were a waste. The weight of her captive audience's gaze, which she couldn't help but be aware of despite not once looking away from the pages, made it so that the sentences before her eyes blurred together and reached the inside of her head all jumbled. She wasn't so much making headway researching as she was killing time as she waited for the shriek of the proverbial kettle.