Chapter 2
Dawn was cracking the smoke-grey sky in rosy ribbons, giving her an unpleasant itching sensation like small insects scuttling across her skin, by the time Emma wearily trudged up the steps of her building, wondered what the odds were of encountering one of her neighbors in the stairwell if she blitzed up it at immortal speed, and got into the elevator instead, just in case. She lived on the eleventh floor, which was a bit of a trek even for a vampire at the end of a long night, and watched the glowing numbers beep upwards until the car stopped, she stepped off, and jogged to her door at the end of the hall, fumbling for her keys. Technically, she probably didn't need to lock it, as most humans kept an instinctive distance from a bloodsucker's lair – not even by conscious knowledge, but by the same primeval cognitive function that warned them against walking down dark alleys late at night, or jumping into a tiger's pen at the zoo, or any of the normal ways not to place themselves at the mercy of a predator. But habit was habit, and besides if humans were drunk or on drugs or otherwise chemically enhanced, that part of their brain responsible for self-preservation shut down, and they could barge right in here while any number of their higher mental faculties were shrieking vainly at them. Emma was not about to take any chances of some pothead criminal, or perhaps one of the bail-jumpers she chased down, finding out where she lived and breaking in, and so she kept it locked.
Inside, she threw her stuff on the counter, pulled the drapes against the encroaching light, and tried to stay awake long enough to stumble to the bathroom and change into her pajamas. It was almost impossible to fight the physical shutdown of your body when the sun was above the horizon, which was why vampires preferred to be safely in their houses and in general reach of something soft and horizontal by the time it arrived. Otherwise, they could be knocked out for the count in some random public place, proved impossible to wake, carted off to the hospital, and discovered to be medically dead, which was hard to explain to the drop-jawed young resident in polka-dot scrubs who just wanted to take your blood pressure. Emma herself had learned that the hard way, and now made sure she left plenty of time between her last errand for the night and the scheduled sunrise; vampires had a smartphone app (someone with a rather diabolical sense of humor had named it SleepyTime) that customized itself to your geographical location and sent you alerts for astronomical, nautical, and civil twilight so you could make sure to hustle your undead ass out of the way beforehand. If it sensed you were still out and about even after these three warnings, it would then proceed to yell, "GET INSIDE, MOTHERFUCKER!" at the top of its tinny robotic voice-assistant lungs. It tended to have compatibility issues with iPhones. Siri's burning hatred of it could probably be blamed.
Emma struggled out of her clothes and washed her face. The no-reflection thing was a problem when you were trying to do your makeup or ensure you'd gotten it all off; she could make out a faint cloudy image of herself, but no details. She had wondered if the reason vampires had no reflections was to head off the fact that otherwise they'd probably spend the entire time taking selfies; they were so vain that the song was definitely about them, and well, they were, as a rule, very hot. But it was another reminder of your inhumanity, that you couldn't even see yourself anymore; you got used to catching glimpses of yourself in windows or walls or in the "beauty face" setting on your phone, remembered who you were, the image you presented to the outside world. To simply not show up in it anymore left you feeling truncated, invisible, cut off and isolated – a reminder that while you could mingle with humans all you wanted, you would never pass or blend in or truly feel like one again. Some geeks were working on inventing a vampire-compatible mirror, but they hadn't gotten anywhere close to a market version yet.
Emma swiped her face one more time, dabbed on some moisturizer, and headed for bed, plowing in headfirst like a crashing Star Destroyer. Even as she was succumbing to the abject thrall of unconsciousness, something small was niggling at her, some tiniest intuition that things were not precisely as she had left them, had been moved or disturbed in just the barest bit, but that was probably just her exhaustion playing tricks on her. After all, humans stayed away, and vampires would have needed an invitation in, which she had never given to anyone; this place was her sanctum, her refuge, her island. Even a potential Old One would have been bound by the protocol, and while there were tricks to get around it, none of which were exactly legal, Emma would have sensed it if there had been another supernatural here, and there hadn't been. She was being paranoid. Nothing more.
She slept, as usual, like the dead, and woke in the evening with the decision in mind, which she didn't remember consciously making but was there nonetheless, that she had to pay a visit to Henry's student, Lily Page, the one possibly responsible for giving the rogue open access to Harvard. Emma didn't know where she lived, but for someone of her particular skill set, this was nothing more than a minor deterrence, and once she had recourse to a few of her grey-market electronic databases, she was in possession of an address in Charlestown. This was a bit of an anomaly for a Harvard undergraduate, as it wasn't the kind of place that went in for continuing education and adult students focusing on work and family as well as academics, and almost all of them lived on campus. Had this been a recent development, perhaps? Leaving it judiciously after unleashing a monster?
In any event, there was only one way to find out. Emma gulped her usual evening glass of ONeg, finding that it tasted a bit thin and unsatisfactory; she was getting closer to the need for a real feed. Then she grabbed her things and headed out.
It wasn't all that hard to find Lily's apartment. It was on the third floor of an industrial red-brick tenement that had been converted into a coffee shop on the ground floor, with glass garage doors that could be opened in the summer, and a few small businesses on the second, and finally a narrow, moldy-smelling stairway led to the three residential units on the top. Emma checked the names on the mailboxes, then chose the one at the end, tucked awkwardly in the corner. She straightened her coat, trying to look vaguely official, and knocked.
It took several moments for a response, long enough in fact that she thought nobody was home. Then there was a cautious shuffling, the sound of several deadbolts being loosened, and a leery-sounding female voice. "Yes? Who is it?"
Emma cleared her throat. "Is this Miss Page? Lily Page?"
A brief but telling hesitation. "Yes," the young woman said again. "What do you want?"
"My name's Emma. I just need to ask you a few questions. You're not in any kind of trouble, I promise."
"Why? Who do you work for?" The door was open just a crack, but Lily's dark eyes were flat and guarded. "I don't want any more hassle. Go away."
"Any more hassle?" That was definitely a curious choice of wording. "Miss Page, as I said, you're not in trouble. Your friends are worried about you, and they sent me to talk with you."
"I don't have any friends," Lily said. "Who really sent you?"
"One of your teachers at Harvard has noticed you're acting a bit strangely. I'm his – his sister. He thinks I can help."
"You can't," Lily said. "There's nothing to help, because nothing's wrong. I'm fine. You should probably go now, Miss – ?"
Seeing as she was clearly fishing for a name, Emma smiled self-effacingly. "Just Emma is fine. But I just want you to know, if anything does come up, there are resources." She could smell the fear on the other woman, didn't know if it was just the natural physiological reaction of a human to an existential threat – the same they'd have had standing in front of a slavering wolf or a mugger with a gun, telling them to run – but didn't think so. She switched into the lulling, soothing tones, the mesmer, that a vampire used to calm down a panicky mortal, override their basic instinct switches, render them docile and suggestible. "It's all right. You don't have to be afraid. I'm here to help, I promise. How about you invite me in, and we can talk about it?"
Lily blinked, her suddenly glazed eyes losing some of their edge, hand falling from the door chain. "Maybe I should invite you in, and we can talk about it."
"Good, that's good." Emma didn't like using the mesmermuch for obvious reasons, as it was a holdover from the days when vampires had to bewitch and entrance their unwitting prey, and certainly a power ripe for abuse, but she wasn't about to walk out of here with nothing at all. "You want to let me in, don't you?"
"I do." Lily stepped back, unlatched the door, and held it open. "Come in."
Emma, pushing away the faint pricks of guilt, stepped over the threshold and into what looked like your run-of-the-mill college student accommodation, with books, papers, and energy drinks heaped on the kitchen table, clothes from the coin laundry tossed on the floor, and the unmistakable and delightful aroma of ramen noodles wafting up from the bowl perched atop the TV. She couldn't tell if Lily had any roommates, or if she lived alone, but she only detected one smell, which seemed to suggest the latter. "How long have you been a student at Harvard?"
"This is my. . . " Lily hesitated. "My second year. I think I want to major in English."
"Okay." Emma had let some of the mesmer slip, as she wanted genuine answers and not ones she coached Lily into, but retained enough that Lily wouldn't abruptly stop cooperating and kick her out. As with the invitation protocol, if a vampire was ordered point-blank to leave, they couldn't resist. It rarely happened, because most vampires arranged it one way or the other that their visitors wanted them there, but it could get messy if it did. "English, that's a great choice. Have you met anyone recently, anyone maybe new to the school? Talked with them about it?"
Lily's eyes flickered, as if trying to think of a lie or resist the silky-smooth compulsion of the mesmer, the little voice telling her to just give the nice lady what she wanted. In either event, she didn't succeed. "Naomi," she said. "Naomi said she'd help me with it. She's the only person who will."
Naomi? It could have been nothing, but that made Emma remember her visit to Ruby's last night, where Ruby said there had been some woman whose name she hadn't quite caught – she'd thought it was Nina. It was too much of a stretch to connect two female individuals whose names started (if they did) with the same letter, but it did at least make Emma's antennae prick up. "Who's Naomi?"
"Like I said. She's helping me." Lily's expression turned truculent. "After everything. . . I couldn't get kicked out of Harvard, not when I finally had one godforsaken good thing happening to me, I wasn't going to endanger that, so she helped me. It was the only choice."
"How did she help you?"
"She. . . " Lily trailed off, grimacing, her eyes behaving ever more strangely, the edges of the pupils turning as jagged as broken glass. Her cheeks flushed, veins standing out in her neck, as if there was some other force commanding her, and she shook her head like a dog splashing out of the lake. When she looked up, the fractured pupils had gone jet black, no trace of white or alleviating color or anything except the ink-dark flood, and the voice that emerged from her slender throat was a sepulchral, demonic roar. "GET OUT!"
Badly startled, Emma stumbled backwards, pushed by the invisible giant hand of the command. Her feet jerked up of their own accord, marching her over the lintel and slamming the door in her face; she supposed it was comparable to losing control over yourself when a vampire used the mesmer on you, and hence probably appropriate karmic payback, but that didn't matter. Whatever the hell was going on here, it stank, and made her far more certain than she'd been a minute ago that whoever Naomi/Nina was, there was quite a story to be unearthed. She turned tail and hurried down the creaky stairs, past the clouded-glass doors of the offices, and out past the coffee shop, which catered to students and thus kept student hours, into the night. Dropping in twice in a row, unannounced, on Regina was liable to start some sort of minor diplomatic incident, so she fished in her pocket for her phone and scrolled to a number, then hit Call. Snowflakes swirled out of the bitter black sky like cold tears, but at least they weren't sticking yet. The temperature wasn't a factor, but a blizzard made it as hard for vampires to get around as it did everyone else. Hopefully this one would hold off or fizzle out.
After a few rings, Sidney picked up. "Glass speaking. How may I direct your call?"
"Yeah, hi, it's me. Does Regina have that report she promised me yet? The one about the. . . ." Emma glanced around, in the event that a spy was lurking in the shadows of the residential street, but saw no one. Nonetheless, she lowered her voice. "The Old Ones?"
"Miss Swan, I am sure you understand that the Queen of Boston has far more urgent demands on her time than to hound the witanagemot about an administrative records request. It was put in promptly, you may be assured, and will be filled when seen fit. In the meantime – "
"Damn it, Sidney!" Unfortunately, supernaturals were just as susceptible to red tape and time-wasting bureaucracy as any mortal institution (Emma shuddered to imagine what a vampire DMV would look like; then again, a lot of vampires probably worked there as well). The witanagemot, or the witan for short, took its name from the royal advisory council in Anglo-Saxon England, and coincidentally often still seemed to think it was operating in the Dark Ages as well, as everything had to be hand-filed, written, double-checked, approved, and circulated through its creaky departmental offices before records could be added, removed, or released. They had bureaus in Washington D.C. and in London, which was where the Potentate had his or her official residence. This was the de facto president of the vampire world, usually given as a sinecure to reward a particularly long-lived or accomplished or glamorous individual. The position had virtually no real power, functioning as a rubber stamp for the decisions of the witan, and hence places on that august body were more avidly sought after by politically minded bloodsuckers (once again, a vocation where there appeared little difference from their mortal counterparts). Like any good modern democracy, it had nothing to do with merit and pure government process, but came down to bribes, lobbyists, cronies, and careerism. As the queen of only a mere city, Regina wasn't a big enough fish to warrant a seat on the witan, though Emma knew she coveted one; she'd have to up her control to, say, the eastern United States before they thought about taking notice. This was probably their passive-aggressive way of reminding her that she was still inferior in the pecking order, and they could take their sweet time about fulfilling her request, but Emma didn't have time for internal politics and bullshit procedurals. This was definite shit, and it was only getting deeper.
"Yes?" Sidney said. "You were saying?"
"Actually, you know what? Never mind." Emma hung up before he had time to protest, then shoved the phone back into her pocket, considering her options. None of them were particularly appetizing. Unless she wanted to take the night train to D.C. and march into the witan office – which was a tempting one, actually, if not for that first part. Vampires did have dedicated transit services, as it would otherwise be impossible to travel if you were automatically conked out every time the sun rose, but unfortunately the night train wasn't much of a step up from Greyhound in the sleaze department. The last time she'd ridden it, Emma had a twitchy young vampire all but opening up his proverbial trench coat trying to sell her vials of blood from various addicts. This was an ongoing problem in the supernatural community; human junkies tended to be undiscriminating about what they were willing to do if it gave them money for their next fix, so vampire drug dealers had no problem entering into this kind of commerce with them. Since cocaine or heroin or LSD or E or whatever couldn't measurably affect a vampire long-term, it gave them all the highs of getting, well, high with none of the lows and potentially fatal, life-destroying side effects: drug addiction in some weird Leibnizian best of all possible worlds. Even most regular vampires saw nothing wrong with passing around tokes of a pothead's blood at a party, if the person was a willing adult who had sold it for honest compensation. Some of them had been hard users in life who didn't see any need to quit now that they were dead. But since a vampire tripping on heroin was far, far more of a problem than a human tripping on heroin, the witan continued to try to furiously outlaw it. This worked exactly as well as any War on Drugs ever did, but that had never stopped anyone.
Emma briefly considered that the kind of people who rode the night train might be the same ones that this Naomi/Nina was interested in; in the course of her short conversation with Lily, she had gotten the distinct impression that N was someone who ingratiated herself with mortals and immortals alike of troubled backgrounds. Things they wanted to forget, opportunities they wanted to cling to, afraid of losing what little they had. All the profitable psychological manipulation that could so easily be deployed even if you weren't a very dangerous vampire. If Lily was afraid of losing her place at Harvard, possibly failing out, of course N would have smelled her weakness, and leveraged it to what she needed. But why? What for? This had to be for some kind of purpose, not just arbitrary chaos and terror. And that was a big fat nothing.
After a moment, Emma decided that if she didn't want to wait for the witan to eventually, possibly, someday fulfil Regina's request (after all, immortals didn't exactly have to worry about running out of time) then she would have to pay a visit to either D.C. or London herself and see if she could uncover any way to speed up the process. Which meant, in essence, deciding which pain in the ass she could more easily put up with. The Vice-Potentate lived in D.C, and George King could always be counted on to make things three times as obnoxious as they needed to be; he fit in exactly with all the other bejacketed, besuited briefcase-wielding soulless corporate politicos, and would definitely deplore any breakdown in law and order. He, however, could look like a beacon of sane, fair, and rational government and justice next to the Potentate, two words that were guaranteed to send a cold shiver questing off to find a vampire's spine to scurry down, no matter how powerful they were: Arthur Pendragon.
Arthur himself claimed that he was the King Arthur remembered throughout the ages in mortal legend, and that he held his position atop the vampire world on these merits alone. He was certainly old enough to make this at least remotely possible, but it was not likely to be quite that much. Since vampire ideas of term limits were rather different from human ones, he had been Potentate for the last fifty years or so, and it was generally held that he had been shut up in his nice mansion and left to play with his toys so that his dominant character traits (viz., a) being a dick, and b) several missing marbles short of a set) could not assert themselves to ill effect in supernatural politics. It was a delicate balancing act to keep an old and powerful vampire happy and convinced of his own relevance, as they certainly couldn't just chuck him in a mental hospital somewhere, not even a nice private one. He wasn't evil, per se, but he was obsessive, manipulative, unforgiving, rigidly unbending in his moral code, fixated on appearances, vain, unpredictable, and a born liar possessed of plenty of charm, all of which, unfortunately, tended to add up to dangerous. He was a bit like the crazy uncle that the vampire world didn't know exactly what to do with, but had to keep patting on the back and feeding treats in case said crazy uncle burned their entire house down while they weren't looking. And if Emma went to London, this whole unsettling mess, whether she liked it or not, became Arthur's business. That was far from the way to tamp down the whole thing.
Still, though. Even if she went to D.C. first, they'd still have to send for the records from the London office, and that added extra steps and extra time and further bureaucrats to go through. It was easier to just go straight there and cut out the middle man, and maybe she could actually impress on the cubicle jockeys that this was a pretty fucking serious matter and they should start acting like it. If nothing else, her visit to Lily Page had made that troublingly clear.
Mind made up, Emma still had to work out how she was going to get there. Flying in economy as a vampire was, if possible, worse than as a human, she didn't make nearly enough money to up and spring for a last-minute international first class ticket, and there was of course the entertaining complication that she would be (to use the technical term) knocked the fuck out for any daylight hours. But it wasn't as if she had a multitude of other choices. She couldn't turn into a bat and flap across the ocean, and she'd just have to grit her fangs and put up with a crappy coach class flight like the rest of the world – hey, way to share in some vestige of the human experience, right? If she hurried, she could get to Logan in time for the first red-eye the next morning. Sleep on the plane, wake up when they landed (it would definitely be dark in England at this time of year) and hope that if anyone grew at all concerned about the depth and duration of her slumber, they would just conclude that she was narcoleptic. And since vampires hadn't gotten around to founding their own airline yet, it would have to do.
Emma debated a moment more, then swung around, started to move, and made her way back across the river; her apartment building was in the West End, so it was a quick trip even by her standards. She headed in, packed a bag, and opened her bedside table drawer, rummaging around for her passport – making sure it was the new one with an updated birth date, as she obviously did not look fifty. Vampires had to periodically get new ID documents to match however old they physically appeared; there was a whole branch dedicated to that at the D.C. witan bureau. Explaining it to human government offices would have been far too much trouble.
Emma threw the passport into her bag, zipped it shut, and was just about to hoist it to her shoulder and head out when something on the window sill caught her eye, almost hidden by the curtains. She hadn't seen it before and didn't know how long it had been there, and when she caught sight of it, it made her stop short. She paused, then crossed to the window and picked it up. A lovely, long-stemmed pink rose, crisp and fresh as if it had just been plucked – ordinarily the kind of thing that one would expect had been left by a secret admirer, if not for the fact that leaving it in their house while they were out was an unqualifiedly stalkerish thing to do. And her brief impression the other night that someone had been here, or at least that her stuff had been disturbed. The fact that she still kept her door locked, just in case.
"What the hell," Emma muttered, turning it in her hand. If it had been meant to unnerve her, it had succeeded, and she crushed it rather more violently than necessary before dropping it into the kitchen garbage. Then she pulled up her jacket hood and stepped out into the hallway, glancing left and right before she twisted the key firmly in the lock, heard it clunk, and wondered if she needed to think about getting it changed. But not even Henry had a spare key to this place. Whoever had gotten in, if they had been in, likely weren't fazed by such things, either.
Shaking her head, she trotted to the elevator, rode it down, stepped out into the city night, and hailed a cab. By the time she made it to Logan, it was late enough that most overnighting travelers had decamped to the airport hotel, and she managed to book a standby seat on the first British Airways departure to Heathrow the next morning. It was closer to sunrise than she would have liked, increasing the chances that she might accidentally drop unconscious on the jetway, but fortunately the forecast was for thick fog, which would delay the effects. And of course, thanks to TSA security restrictions and their terrible fear of liquids over three ounces, she wouldn't be able to bring any ONeg on the plane. She'd just have to drink water (the one beverage other than blood that a vampire could stomach) and go hungry until she got to London.
Emma sat in the terminal with a cheap paperback from Hudson News, whiling away the time, until the place slowly started to come to life again around 4am, which of course was the end of the day for her. She was actively struggling against the urge to black out by the time she, having ensured her seat by suggesting that the guy who had been a jerk to the agent at the check-in counter would be happy to give it up to her and fly out six hours later (hey, nobody had ever said she was above using her powers for a little petty revenge) was on board the plane, and she barely managed to get her seatbelt buckled, thus ensuring the flight attendants wouldn't have to attempt to wake her, in time. She shut the window shade and passed out.
She didn't stir again until they had started the descent into London, which as per her calculations had already been dark for several hours, and was feeling somewhat more revived by the time they landed, whereupon she had to wait with everyone else in the glacial Heathrow customs queue. She had just put down "business" as the reason for the trip on her arrival card, which was true enough, and they let her into the country without any raised eyebrows or undue scrutiny. She got some pounds from an ATM, collected her bag, and set off.
Her first priority was to find some nourishment, so she stopped off at a bodega and bought a can of Red, which was the fancy European version of ONeg. After downing it in close to one gulp, she made it a double, and drank the second one more slowly, waiting for the night bus – which was unfortunately not a supernatural-only thing in London, and she had to terrify a few chavs who looked set to try their luck. The witan bureau was in Westminster with the rest of the political apparatus, so Emma arrived, took a number, and waited for twenty minutes until they called her forward. Whereupon hearing that she wanted access to the Old Ones registry, the pudgy, bespectacled drone from Basildon (plenty of supernatural civil servants were actually human, as boring office work was boring office work no matter how many sharp teeth your employer had) immediately turned suspicious. "Sorry, come again? That registry?"
"Yes," Emma said impatiently. "There aren't that many of them. Now, please. It's urgent."
He continued to squint at her dubiously. "Do you have authorization from your local queen?"
"Yes, because she sent in a request for this same information already. Regina Mills, from Boston, and believe me, this isn't for some middle school family history project." Emma crossed her arms. "Are you going to get it, or do I have to call and wake her up?"
This was an empty threat, as she didn't think Regina needed to know just yet that she had decided to make a clandestine side trip to London, but it was sufficient to exert compliance upon the recalcitrant bureaucrat. He led her through the door and to the reading room at the back, as the witan of course rarely bothered to just fucking digitize their records and print them out on a laserjet like the rest of the twenty-first century. The Old Ones registry was a massive leather-bound old book with gilted clasps and yellowing parchment pages, which looked like a sorcerer's grimoire. Part of this could be due to the fact that the Old Ones had to personally enter and sign their names in it, and if you thought your grandparents were bad with technology, several-hundred-year-old vampires were exponentially worse. Rather than stress out John Smythe from the seventeenth century by expecting him to know how to use a PC, they just kept things simple, quill-and-ink style. Which also possibly explained, now that Emma thought about it, the fact that they couldn't just attach a PDF file and send it along in an email, but still seemed like a major operational handicap.
Emma paged gingerly through the stiff leaves, trying not to look surprised every time she discovered some or other famous historical figure had actually been a vampire, as this would clearly be the rookiest of rookie mistakes. It took her a few minutes to work out how the registry functioned, as well as the fact that the ink the Old Ones had used was apparently their own blood, which gave her an instinctive human moment of revulsion. Still, though, it turned out to be simple enough. The Old Ones who were still alive showed up in bright red, the ones who were dead had faded to grey, and at the back of the book (naturally) there was a list of all the vampires over the age of two hundred and fifty (the benchmark at which you had to make yourself known to the witan) and their current locations. As she ran a finger down the crabbed, intricate columns of script, feeling a headache coming on, Emma noticed that all of them were indeed accounted for – except one. One Killian Bartholomew Jones, date of mortal birth 1702, date of immortal birth 1734, which meant he was – she calculated – three hundred and thirteen years old, two hundred and eighty-one of those spent as a vampire. According to this registry, he was supposed to be living at Russell Square in London, his home for approximately the past century or so. But unlike everyone else, his whereabouts could not be verified or confirmed. He was missing.
Emma stood staring down at the page for a long moment, wondering what the odds were of an Old One being conveniently unaccounted for right when an individual of similar ability was wreaking havoc on Harvard. It was definitely more than suspicious, even though the analytical part of her brain was warning her that the clues didn't necessarily match up. Both Ruby and Lily had clearly been talking to a woman, not a man, and as vampires couldn't shapeshift, that meant that if Naomi/Nina was in cahoots with Jones, there was more than one head to the snake. And if Jones had been living in London for over a hundred years, it would take something drastic for him to up stakes (so to speak) and trot across the Atlantic to Boston. Remembering what Regina had told her about older vampires getting more and more anchored to a place, that it wasn't in their nature to rush off on hot-tempered sorties the way younger vampires were prone to, Emma had to admit that this did not make a whole lot of sense or constitute an obvious answer to the mystery. Still, though. Russell Square wasn't far from here. Time for some investigation.
She double-checked the address, thanked the drone, showed herself out, and headed down to the Westminster Tube station. She took the train to Green Park, changed lines, then went a further five stops to Russell Square. It was one of the old deep-bore stations that had been used as an air raid shelter in the Blitz, and there were signs posted at the stairs warning people how long it took to get to the surface and that they should only be used in an emergency; as a result, all passengers took the lifts. Except of course for Emma, who flashed up them at full tilt and was pushing through the turnstiles far ahead of the rest of the peons. She emerged, turned left, and set off.
It was just a few steps down to the eponymous square, a small green public space with paths and benches and a fountain at the center, and she zipped across to the Victorian rowhouses on the far side; you could have thrown a stone from one of their roofs and hit the British Museum, which sat magisterially on the tree-lined drive beyond. She slowed, checking numbers, until she found the right one, and stood there regarding it. It did look deserted, or at least dark, which was of course unusual since this was a vampire's waking hours, the middle of their day. Killian Jones certainly did not appear to be home.
Emma considered, then went up the steps, jimimied the lock after a few moments of work, and swung the door open, then cautiously tried to cross the threshold. She was immediately shoved back in no uncertain terms, losing her balance and stumbling against the cast-iron fence; no matter if he was gone, the invitation protocol clearly held firm, and she would not be able to saunter in without one. Further invention was called for.
After a moment, Emma turned around, found the first passerby, loaded him up with a full dose of mesmer, and sent him up the stairs and into the house. From there, she had him invite her in, not at all sure it would work since he was not the owner, and already well aware that this was bending the rules to their fullest extent, if not breaking them entirely. She also recalled that Henry had said the rogue had bamboozled his or her victims at Harvard to forget what had happened to them, but she had to do the same, making the man forget that anything had happened or that he had met anyone out of the ordinary at all, continuing on his way with only a mildly bemused look for his trouble. Emma shut the door behind him – because indeed his invitation had worked, though she had a sense it might not hold forever and she would have to be quick – and turned, surveying the dim front hall. It was a handsome, stately residence, bereft of any obvious modern touches; it definitely looked preserved from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, in keeping with the age of its owner. She took a step. If he was going to embark on some strange overseas quest to America after a hundred years of solitude, where would a vampire decide to –
"You know, darling," an amused voice said from the shadows of the stairwell, directly above her head, "that was a very intriguing display. I wasn't aware it was possible to trick a human into doing that for you. But you know, you could always have just asked me."
Shock lacerated through Emma like a cold blade. She stumbled backwards, staring around wildly, and it took even her keen vampire eyesight a moment to resolve on the speaker – which when it did, gave her another shock for a far less welcome reason. The man – no, vampire, definitely vampire, and old vampire, she could sense it at a glance – leaning insouciantly against the staircase landing, watching her with every appearance of not giving a single fuck that another vampire had just broken into his house on false premises, was exactly the reason that crap vampire romances were so popular with impressionable young women. He really, really should have tried to be less of a walking stereotype; it was just too annoying at present. Tall, lean, dashing, with a gloriously disheveled tousle of inky-dark hair that flipped just so over his forehead and unnaturally blue eyes that shone like a cat's in the dimness, a flimsy black silk shirt that was open almost to his navel (did he have some kind of philosophical objection to buttons?) and tight leather trousers tucked into riding boots. Vampires generally wouldn't have been kicked out of bed for eating crackers in it (you know, if they ate crackers) but this one took the cake. She could practically taste him. Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit.
After a further moment in which she could do nothing but stare at him, the vampire pushed himself off the wall and in a flash, was standing in front of her at the foot of the stairs, so quick that even Emma hadn't been able to follow his movement. "May I have the honor of an introduction," he went on, smiling to reveal a slightly and charmingly crooked fang, "to such a clever and resourceful young lady who has come to visit me? I so rarely have the pleasure."
"Emma," she said automatically, finding herself holding out her hand, and briefly and panickingly wondering if he was using the mesmer on her. She didn't feel any different, and it was definitely a breach of etiquette to do that to another vampire, but considering she had just broken into his house while he was actually very much home, she wasn't really in position to give him lectures on supernatural law. "Swan."
"Emma Swan." He pressed a lingering kiss to her hand, which made her snatch it away; she'd just been expecting him to shake it, for some stupid reason. "A lovely name for a lovely lass. And for what reason, Emma, have you come to grace me with your company tonight?"
"I think there's been a mistake." Emma stepped back, trying to reestablish some distance between them; he was just on the edge of her personal space, not actively intruding but still closer than she cared for, and it was already clear that this one was trouble in any sort of way you cared to define the term. Maybe he was squatting, using this as a lair while Killian Jones was gone, thinking it was a convenient way to avoid detection. "Where's the owner of this place?"
"Do I look like a drone?" He raised one exquisite eyebrow, then bowed with a courtly flourish. "Everything you need is right in front of you, madam."
"You're Killian Jones?"
Again, that slight, impish flicker of the eyebrow. He really needed to do something about that. "Among other colorful monikers I've been known by, yes. And since it's a mood for questions, may I enquire once again, Emma Swan, just what you're doing in my house?"
"I'm from – I'm from the witan bureau," Emma lied. "It's just a routine check. You turned up as missing in the Old Ones registry, we have to pay a visit and establish your whereabouts. You're here so that's – that's fine, but I have to know, have you been to America recently?"
"America?" Jones echoed blankly. "Who the hell wants to go there? Horrible bloody place. No, I haven't been to America recently and I certainly don't plan to be going. And now, since you've already made me ask three times and I really don't appreciate it – " a flash of the crooked fang, no longer adorable but dangerous – "what are you actually doing here, Miss Swan?"
Emma took the opportunity to repeat several more profanities to herself, as well as glancing around for anything large and heavy that she could hit him with if the need arose – he wasn't in an openly threatening posture yet, but the air was far from friendly, despite his charm and courtesies. Still, she supposed she did owe him an explanation, and for whatever reason he had been marked down as missing, she had a hunch it wasn't because of a simple clerical error. "I'm from Boston," she said reluctantly. "Massachusetts. There have been several attacks at Harvard University that look like the possible work of an Old One, and I came to London to check the records at the bureau. You were the only one who turned up unaccounted for, so I – "
"Decided to delight me with the privilege of a visit, yes," Killian Jones completed. "However, as I said before, I am not in the least unaccounted for and have not been to America since, oh, the gold rush, so I can't be the one you're looking for. I do want to know, however, why it so happened that the registry would point you in my direction."
"What – you think someone's framing you?" Emma had to admit that she could taste the truth in his words, just as he'd caught her lie, and she was fairly sure he wasn't making it up. "Why would they do that?"
He shrugged. "I have plenty of enemies, love. You don't get this old without them."
Emma noted both by the casual endearment and a slight relaxation of tension in his stance that he no longer appeared to be on the brink of trying to rip her throat out (or else he was trying to put her off her guard). She was aware, however, that this was on the verge of turning from a simple missing-vampire case into the much darker and more complicated question of who would have the ability to falsify witan records and for what reason, and still leading her nowhere on the real question of who was snacking on Harvard. It occurred to her just then that she and Killian Jones might have common cause to band together, if both of their names were getting dragged through the mud by malfeasant or malfeasant(s) unknown, but she also knew it was a bad idea to establish any kind of partnership with this man. Even her best intentions might not be enough to keep things in control, if they went a certain way, and that was exactly what she did not need.
"Well," she said. "I – apologize for busting in on you. I'll just. . . be going."
"And whatever's the hurry, love?" He glanced at her with that deceptively innocent expression, as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, underneath the thick dark fringe of his lashes. "I'm not inclined to hold a grudge. What say we have a drink, a chat? Get to know each other better. I'm a lonely man. Wouldn't mind the company."
Emma had to fight down an absurd momentary temptation to accept his offer, especially that of a drink; she had a feeling he didn't mean ONeg or Red or whatever, and since she had already felt the need growing stronger for a real feed, her fangs pressed hard against her closed lips, putting in their vote that they thought this was actually a great idea, thanks. Still, she didn't see any human drones around, and feeding off another vampire on first acquaintance was comparable to having sex on the first date; it wasn't wrong, but it did imply a certain level of, well, jumping into things. And having arrived here under the impression that she was investigating a missing person and a possible criminal suspect, she wasn't about to fling responsibility to the winds and enjoy a debauched evening with the master of the house, no matter how handsome. Yet it had taken her too long to answer, and by that, he must know she'd been conflicted. "Thanks, but no."
"You're sure?" He seemed surprised and taken aback that she would turn him down, and honestly, if he smoldered at everyone with that face, she could see why this wouldn't be a common occurrence in his three centuries-odd of life. See there, she was probably just another conquest in a long line, to be slept with, fed off, and forgotten. "You're staying somewhere else for the day, then?"
"Yeah," Emma said, even though she had no idea where. She'd figure it out. "I'll just. . . be on my way."
"As you wish." Another one of those obnoxious, faux-courtly bows, even more so since he appeared to be performing it without irony. His gaze hadn't left hers, and she felt it deep in the pit of her stomach (and other places). Some part of her told her she was being stupid, she was denying herself pleasure that was clearly being more than freely offered, that if she walked up to him right now and kissed him senseless, he wasn't going to object. That it didn't have to be anything more than a hookup. People had them. Supernaturals had them. There was an entire section of Fangd devoted to it. So what if she'd just be another notch in the belt for an undead lothario? He didn't have to mean anything more to her. They could both use each other for whatever it was they presently wanted. No harm, no foul.
And yet. She couldn't quite bring herself to it. For some reason she wasn't sure, just that it was dangerous, and in a far different way than she'd expected. There was still plenty at stake here. Lives on the line. An investigation in Boston to get back to. And questions far more troubling than she had anticipated. No time for distractions. No sense in running the risk.
"Good night," she said, and left.
There was, because of course there was, an entire vast scientific literature on the subject of vampire sex. Technically, if you thought about it, it didn't seem like something a dead person should be able to do. (Then again, walking, talking, running around, and the rest of it also didn't seem like something they should be able to do either, but hey, here they were). A legion of vampire endocrinologists and developmental psychologists and biologists had published important and educated-sounding papers on what essentially boiled down to the question of how banging was still possible in the afterlife. There were theories which posited that supernaturals (being, after all, 99.9% Homo sapiens in their DNA) could not turn off the deep-rooted need for sexual intercourse which had governed them for thousands and thousands of years, ever since Grok the caveman gazed lustfully upon Urga the cavewoman and decided to get a-humpin' to produce junior cavepeople and thus secure the future of the species. It was just impossible to override that instinct, or so these hypotheses went. Immortals still slept, they still ate, they still performed the central basic functions of existence, albeit in a different way. It made sense that sex had been included on the short list. For werewolves it made more sense; they could have children the old-fashioned way, and thus it was possible to be born a werewolf, whereas a vampire could only ever be made into one as an adult (it was a terrible crime to turn a child). Therefore, logically, it seemed as if now that it was no longer tied to the biological necessity of reproduction, sex should have gone more or less by the wayside for them.
All of this was very scholarly and very detailed and argued over in academic journals. Smart people said smart things about it, tried to isolate if there was a certain chemical in vampire saliva that activated the same hormones normally associated with babymakin'. But for the rest of the immortal world, it seemed pretty obvious that the answer was far simpler: that natural selection wasn't fucking stupid. If you turned people into beautiful, all-powerful immortals, allowed them to live for hundreds of years and then required them to subsist only on human blood and never see sunlight again, and then didn't even allow them to make the beast with two backs to pass all that unending time, they would murder each other in a fit of carnal frustration before the first generation was out. By these lights, allowing vampires to have sex and indeed, amazing sex was what you might call a perk. Being a vampire wasn't that great most of the time, unless you were the kind of person who already skulked around being emo, keeping nocturnal hours, and were convinced you were misunderstood by the rest of the foolish human world (in short, your average My Chemical Romance fan) and taking sex away basically left nothing to recommend it. Hence, by simple logic, it remained. And if a vampire gentleman was having trouble raising the ol' mainsail, Viagra was always available and worked like a charm. It was doubtful whether Pfizer pharmaceuticals would have appreciated the endorsement.
Not that Emma had been thinking about this, even. Not that much. Just that it was something which had crossed her mind in a glancing way after her visit, and which was still lurking at the back of her head after she had checked into a cheap vampire hostel in Hammersmith, chewing over the question of whether she should just write this entire trip off as a loss and head back to Boston, or if there was a more sinister motive, and possible connection, to whoever was possibly trying to frame Killian Jones. But while she was still cogitating, and getting exactly nowhere, her phone abruptly buzzed against her leg, startling her.
She looked down with a grimace; international calling outside your plan tended to sock you with roaming charges. Then she looked at the screen, grimaced harder, and picked up. "Hello?"
"Emma?" It was Regina, sounding even less pleased than usual. "Where the hell are you?"
"I had a – little side trip to make. I'll be back soon. Why, what's going on?"
"Because," Regina said, "she's dead. They found her in her apartment, and apparently all the witnesses are saying that you were the last person to see and speak to her. Plus, the police are looking for a suspect of 'unusual abilities.' Do you want to explain yourself in thirty seconds before I really start expecting the worst?"
"What? What?" A chunk of ice split off and slid down Emma's throat. "Unusual abilities" was police blotter code for "supernatural." While the human world, as a rule, didn't know about the supernatural one, they also didn't not know; a certain amount of intelligence sharing had to take place, the U.S. President received briefings from the Vice-Potentate, and it was one of those things like Area 51 that the government kept the records sealed on. This meant this was a crime that had taken place in human remit, not vampire. "What happened? Who's dead?"
Regina paused. "Lily Page," she said grimly. "That student of your son's. Interviewing the clientele of the coffee shop and the businesses in the building of her apartment led to, as I said, the same conclusion. You better get back to Boston, Emma Swan. You're wanted for murder."