The Necromancer's Gambit: Calm

Bishop is waiting by the front door, and opens up her lab as soon as I get there. Pawn’s sobered up enough that he and the King are laughing. Bishop rolls her eyes at the two of them; I have even less patience for their reverie.

“You did have more important things to do than investigating the King’s liquor. Like tracking down that vamp’s place in Camas.”

He looks hurt, like a pug with boxed ears. “I did. Place was torched. If I didn’t know better I’d say the Conservator tipped him off.”

“But you do.”

His eyes flash with what little cunning he has at his disposal. “Well, I know you’d hit me for implying anything being wrong with your fanged concubine.”

“Is that something I need to worry about?” King asks.

“His florid prose? It does indicate that his blood alcohol levels are still dangerously high. But he’s also got a high tolerance; I wouldn’t worry about calling an ambulance until he starts telling dirty limericks- and over-emphasizing his penis metaphors.”

“I don’t have to tell you the… complications that could arise, from a dalliance between a Knight and a Conservator.”

I sigh, and turn to him. “You ever met her?”

“From your tone I think I know the type. Beautiful. Dangerous. Makes your heart go pitter patter- though it’s always difficult to know if that’s excitement or fear- or both.”

“And that’s all it is. I wouldn’t even call it a flirtation. I’m not sure it goes beyond her having a nice rack and wanting me for a late night snack.”

“Not necessarily as unpleasant as it sounds.”

“You’re telling me you had an affair with a vampire?”

“No,” King says, and for an instant I think he’s going to leave it at his usual coy, but he doesn’t. “I’m telling you I loved one. All relationships are based on trust. But with a vampire, you have to trust them to ignore the basest of all instincts- to feed. It’s… exhilarating. Terrifying. And unlike any love you’ll ever try.”

“Hey, you two are alive,” I say with mock surprise as Bishop lets Queen and Rook in.

“So are you,” Rook says with bemusement.

“Yeah, the only reason any of that worked is Baldur and his idiots all believe Norse magic is so superior they won’t learn anything else; it’s Seiðr or the highway; just one sigil out of Kaballah could have screwed me in there.”

“It is kind of ironic that their superiority complex actually makes them inferior,” Bishop says with a grin. “But I really wish you hadn’t brought the police to Elise’s murder.”

“Couldn’t be helped. And I’m not thrilled about her corpse being interred as evidence, but what more did you want to accomplish?”

“The necromancer left semen behind. Blood. They aren’t going to find him in a DNA database. But maybe Rook and I could. Like we did with Han’s saliva. And if there were enough,”

“Maybe we could have reached out and hit him where he lives,” Rook finishes her thought, “or at least in the stones.”  

“Shit,” I say, because I should have thought of that days ago. But with everything happening…

Bishop sees my mind racing and groans. “You have to break into the PPB’s evidence storage, don’t you?”

“You want me to come with?” Rook asks, and it’s brave of her to volunteer even that much, even if it’s plain from her tone she wants nothing more than not to.

“Nope. This is dangerous and stupid. Worth the risk of losing one of us, but not two.”

“Then I should go,” she says, “If we lose someone”

“We’re guaranteed to lose you,” I say. “But I’ve got a chance.”

“A good chance, or, an ‘if I could only flip a few dozen more coins’ chance,” Bishop asks.  

“I’d give myself 6 in 10.” I don’t tell them that the 6 is me ending up in lockdown, because the combined power of their mother-henning would probably kill me- or at least deter me long enough to question the wisdom, and if I’ve learned anything, it’s that overthinking strategically important but conceptually terrifying things only makes it harder to do what needs to get done. “But if you want you can stay here and cast some helpful spells. Who knows, maybe shifting the probabilities a little is exactly what I need.”

Bishop knows me well enough that that worries her, but she tries not to betray it to anyone else. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I say, and leave before anyone tries to stop me.

I’ve been downtown, to the Portland Police Bureau a handful of times. Half the time I was in cuffs, and even the other times I wasn’t happy to be there. At least at night it was darker, with only the emergency lights on, and the occasional night officer’s desk lamp.

If you walked in wearing a shirt and a tie and moved like you had someplace to be you could make it decently far inside before anybody thought to ask who the hell you were. Unless you were unlucky enough to bump into a detective who’s arrested you at least once. Vergara smiles seeing me, but then notices I’m alone and not in cuffs.

“Damn,” she says, “for a second you had my hopes up.”

“I was shooting for dashing, but maybe I missed my mark.”

“So if you’re not here with an adult, why are you here?”

“To visit you. Conjugation optional.”

“We don’t do conjugal visits here. That’s prison.” One of the cops riding a desk perks up at that, and she glares him back into his work. But it makes her worry, too; she doesn’t really want to be seen with me, given that she’s still hoping to get a chance to perp-walking me through this place some day. “Let’s take a walk,” she says.

She leads me away from the desks, but stops in the doorway to the break room, because there’s someone in there, too, delicately cunnilinging a donut. So she leads me down another hall, and then another, and at that point the blank white government building walls have me turned around. And then she turns to face me, and smiles. “You’ve never come here willingly.”

“I wouldn’t want to join any club that’d have me for a member.”

She stops walking. “You’re using me to get access to the station.”

“Kind of,” I say, and start walking again. 

“Then I should just escort you out. Save you from yourself. Or follow you, and feather my nest with an arrest when you fuck this up.”

“Or, and I’ll admit this is unorthodox, but you could help me.”

“You know, that’s a strange coincidence: I had decided I hate my life and career, and was just waiting for an opportunity to flush both down the crapper.”

“People are dying. And I think I know a way to find the man responsible.”

“I’m listening.”

“I need some evidence. Specifically, the semen he left behind.”

“We ran it against the database. This man hasn’t so much as raped a basset hound- you know, unless he’s identified in one of the half a million untested rape kits in the country.” She’s not happy about that number- which maybe surprises me- but she projects more onto my reaction than is there. “What? Don’t look at me. It’s not like I’m the one who underfunds testing. But we didn’t get a single maybe from any of the tested specimens.” 

“Yes, but I have ways…”

“You’re not going to… ingest the semen in order to track him, are you?”

“No, and please stop making that face; you look like a worried shar pei.”

“I don’t know that I can stop, it’s just, ingesting week old semen collected out of a flesh wound that was humped into the corpse post mortem- I don’t know if there’s enough squinging in the world to cover it.”

“Okay, but nobody’s ingesting it. No one. You can put that thought out of your head- and that expression off of your face.”

“I don’t know if I can. Like how my mother used to say your fast could get stuck- I think mine’s stuck doing this.”

“You have never been less attractive than this moment,” I tell her, because it’s damn true.

“So you’re usually attracted to me?” she asks, and normally it’d be the gentle ribbing brand of flirting, but instead it just calls to mind a scene from Army of Darkness, and it’s hard for me not to tell her, “Honey, you got real ugly.”

“It’s a sliding scale, and right now you’re in danger of breaking it.”

She rubs her face with her hands. “We wouldn’t want to break your ‘scale’; especially since I can’t imagine mysterious rogue comes with good health insurance, and the cost of those little blue pills can really add up.” She looks at me from between her fingers and I raise an eyebrow. “I work with cops. High stress. Most of the ED here at the PD is stress or alcohol related, but the cure’s usually still the little blue pill.” She stops massaging her face, which is red from the pressure, but back to normal. “Better?”

“Eh,” I say, because she deserves it.

“That was mean. I should have anticipated, but still, mean. But I don’t think ‘I have ways’ qualifies as even approaching an explanation that would get me to help you.” 

“You know that Clarke quote, that sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic?”

“Yeah.” 

“Clarke was wrong. By its very definition, magic is something that defies the usual rules of existence. Except from a psychological standpoint- because humans actually do treat the unexplained as magical by default.”

“Technically, that’s what the Clarke quote was about- the way the lay monkey would observe advanced tech. And he’s completely right. I can play games on my phone more advanced than I had access to as a kid; I mean, seriously, my phone is more magical than technological to me, because I understand only the roughest ideas behind its construction.”

“But my point: I think I can use the genetic material this bastard left behind to track him. But there’s nothing even approaching a reasonable explanation I could give you that could hope to explain how, or why, or any of it, really. Running into you here, was an odd kind of serendipity, but I certainly hadn’t come armed with a convincing rationale to win you over with.”

“You’re a strange guy. I’d honestly think you were an alien, but I’m pretty sure you’d have probed me by now.”

“Is that an awkward come-on?”

“No.”

“Well if it was, I was going to say you got to buy a fella a piece of pie, maybe a cup of coffee first, before you demand to probed in the evidence room.”

“Evidence room?” She looks around, surprised. “How’d you do that?”

“Magic. Or I started to walk in this direction while you were embroiled in the conversation, and I led you where I needed to be.”

“And where you needed me to be.” She clinks her keyring against the bolted door keeping the evidence cages separate from the corridor. “Unless you really were planning on breaking in. And please tell me you’re not stupid enough to break into the police station storage to steal semen.”

“Of course, because that would be idiotic.”

“Oh my god. It’s fortunate I didn’t respect you, because I would have just lost all respect for you. But assuming you get your sample. Then what?”  

“Do you really want to know?”

“Is this what Tamsin warned me about?”

“You’ve talked to her?”

“Yeah. When she gets drunk, she calls me to warn me about you. I don’t think she remembers, though; like, I know call to call she doesn’t remember. It’s always like she’s talking to me for the first time. It was cute the second and third times, but it’s getting a little…”

“Sad?”

“Worrying, I think. I don’t know her, but does she have Alzheimer’s?”

“Alzheimer’s can make people really mean, because they’re angry they can’t remember and overcompensate by bullying people, right? Because if so, you might be onto something. But yeah. I worked with her a little, in my formative years. And when it came time where I felt I needed to tell her the truth about how I did what I do… she kind of freaked out. Angry denial sort of way. Some things are hard to explain. And sometimes those things are equally difficult to believe. She found it less trying to just assume I was a”

“Lying huckster who would do or say anything to get me into the sack. Her exact words. I can show you my interview notebook where I jotted them down. Though I’m not sure if she thinks you have a thing for me, or that had a thing for her… and I’ve looked at her driver’s license and I really hope it’s the former. Not that dating older women isn’t a totally valid lifestyle choice. It would just be kind of gross.”  

“You hope I have a thing for you?” I ask with a smirk.

“You are a crafty devil,” she says, putting her key into the lock, “convincing me to help you like this.” I’m fairly certain it’s a deflection- but it’s a deflection that gets me exactly where I need to be, so I’m fine with that. “But presuming that I believe you, which is presuming a lot, how were you planning on finding the samples you need?”

“I assumed there was some kind of an organizational system, folders, drawers, something. This is a bureaucracy; I assumed paperwork would be everywhere.”

“That’s fair. Although translating our arcane organizational data without a guide would be about as difficult as speaking Latin.”  

“Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.”

“Now you’re just making shit up in an attempt to impress me; it’s sad.” She stops to check a ledger. “See, without me here, it’s not likely you’d have had a case number. Without a case number, our system is basically meaningless. Beyond which, even if you lucked your way into finding where the evidence for this investigation is, DNA is special. It’s in the fridge. It’s over here.”

“I’m not examining this horse’s teeth, or anything, but why are you being so helpful?”

“Because the more I look into the things that have been happening around you, the less any of it seems to make sense. The only thing that I have been able to put a finger on is you. You seem to be at the center. But you seem to be there trying to put things right. I don’t know why you’re not a cop, or working for the government rather than just intimating that you do, but I think you’re on the side of the angels. And sometimes it’s nice when those ‘mysterious ways’ work in our direction.”

Then she turns to face me. “And also, I know that if you screw me on this, I’ll hunt you down myself, and plant whatever evidence on you I have to to ensure a looong stay in the State Penn. And I’ll pull every string I have access to to make sure they have you bunking with an enormous man with AIDS and a predilection for cellmate rape.”

“That is fairly harsh. But I’m on the up and up. So I’m not worried.”

“That’s good to hear, because here’s the fridge, and if there was going to be a moment for you to face heel turn and hit me in the head, this was it. And you didn’t. So hurray. For the moment.” She opens up the fridge and reaches into the back for a phial. 

“How much do you need?”

“The more the better,” I say.

For some reason that answer renews her skepticism. “And you’re not going to eat this, right?”

“No. And you’re making that face again.”

“And this really isn’t some disgusting sexual thing?”

“No. It’s scientific, or protoscientific, anyway.”

“Fine,” she says. She gets an empty phial and pours half the contents into it. She holds the one without the label out to me. “But remember, things go bad, rapey cellmate.” I take the phial from her, and hope to hell Bishop can make this work.