Business Class Exile
It was massive, chrome, and ungainly. It escaped most of Ms. Woeburne's vocabulary. It was sitting obtusely in a concrete court of Astroturf and diesel tracks, and it was underscored by the scent of seagull meat rotting in lake water.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a bean.
'You know. I don't claim it,' the Foreman mused, frowning, searching out a glimmer of black suit in the thing's reflection. She couldn't find herself, and this had nothing to do with being undead. 'I don't claim to be a Toreador. There is art I should appreciate that I don't. But given that, I have no idea—no idea—why someone drops a monster legume in the middle of an otherwise perfectly good city park. All that mob money, and this is what they do with it? 'Cloud Gate.' My supercilious Ventrue ass.'
If this is high art in Midwest America, the Foreman was satisfied with her status as a corporate troglodyte.
She stared at the lump a moment longer before enough was enough, and—shaking her head, feeling a little better having criticized something—Ms. Woeburne shouldered her bag to move on.
Miles away from the tumult of Los Angeles and you still could not find a slice of real peace. This modest pedestrian path she'd put herself on seemed cramped for being so late; it cobbled through what little August had left of Millennium Park's flower gardens, more ivy than petals, burnt leaves in the trees. Someone ate a meat sandwich; someone else reeked of alcohol. She didn't enjoy either smell, and so the woman pushed farther away from this well-lit main square, leaving the nighttime trickle off Michigan Avenue behind her. She went somewhere less conspicuous with cicadas and car engines at her back. It was just as well, anyway. Ms. Woeburne didn't believe in quiet walks—didn't believe that they'd help you heal, or clear your head—but she did believe in being alone.
It was late. All these fountains and light shows and niceties had been shut off. The city nudged and shoved and squawked in the pidgin of horns. They are all the same sort of beast, you know—cities are. Despite how fiercely they claim greatness, and swear how old their statues are. If she were to tune out the aromas and accents and this stuffy modern architecture, the unwanted Ventrue could easily pretend to be in California again. There were all the beeps, the oil fumes, the sound of water on sand. Strain a bit. Meditate (though she didn't believe in that, either)—and it might as well have been London, New York, a townhome in Leeds.
Her stout-heeled shoes became the primary noise as the Ventrue moved away. Ms. Woeburne dodged a beachbound cyclist and climbed the wide silver snake of an aluminum bridge, ignoring its spinal-cord artiness, until most of the park was lain out beneath her and she could see sailboats in the distance. It was a good place to watch. There came, just then, a nice freshwater breeze, rolling off the lake, thick with gasoline and shoal. To the east: massive oceanic blue. She stopped at the middle point and leant both elbows on the metal banister, looking down at the heave of taxis, buses, joggers, red lights stuck on oblivious cars. Though it was night, the metal felt hot beneath S.W.'s bare fingers, something that made no sense. She put her sleeves over it. She swatted a mosquito. She tried to be content.
Ms. Woeburne told herself, as she always did, that it wasn't so bad as it seemed.
The Foreman was not sent here for sightseeing. She focused, a finder among people who merely looked—looked for things to talk to, to take pictures of, to eat. The contempt growing in her for such people frightened Ms. Woeburne. It had not been so long ago. Or maybe it had been. Maybe inhumanity only needs a decade or three to husk a thing, to shake the first soul away, make it different than what she currently was. Who's to say if the resentment of predators for their prey is ever justified. It makes a convenient excuse for what has to be done to them. It makes a Darwin kind of sense.
Chicago had not been entirely welcoming.
The local hierarchy apparently didn't have time for her. Ms. Woeburne met briefly with the stooge they'd appointed Seneschal; she'd forgotten his first name. He was your typical turgid Tremere bastard with more self-esteem beneath his belt than genuine achievements, ego bloated with cantrips and dissertations. S.W. politely thanked him for receiving her and promised to operate with good manners and discretion in their transitioning Domain.
Ancillae (especially banished ones) shouldn't expect much courtesy from a foreign Domain, no, but Ms. Woeburne got none. None is a distressing figure for one scam-buried agent whose Prince had just steamily declared he could no longer stomach her "insipid, colorless face" puttering about his tower.
She'd made no attempt to deceive him. Oh, no; she wouldn't make that mistake again. He'd anticipated her self-preservation instinct, anyway. Or maybe the real word here is commoditized—he had made her fear into something useful to him.
Fear makes an awfully convincing I'm-telling-you-the-truth face.
It doesn't matter if sinking-ship syndrome is the universal nature of young Ventrue or mostly her own. LaCroix had predicted that a panicked Foreman would preserve Camarilla good intentions second only to her life, especially when she was balancing there on the stepping stool's edge, her neck in a noose. Who knew how he'd learned that himself. And, not to put too fine a point on it: who cared? The man who'd made Ms. Woeburne into this soldier, this new thing, had even foreseen the most lowly and embarrassing part. He'd just figured that, on the off-chance she was not murdered—in the unlikely scenario where he would not have a reason to execute her for crimes she did not commit—S.W. would come scrambling back to him like some feudal lord's birder, like a hunting lion on a chain.
The Prince was unimpressed to find her on his way out of Giovanni Mansion, sitting in a stolen car, composure closer to tatters than the dress she wore. For all that he'd guessed what she'd do, Mr. LaCroix wasn't one for to just forgive you lickety-split like that.
It was a moderate punishment, really—a psychological penance—a soft, productive exile.
It was an eight o'clock ticket into O'Hare. It was prepaid for one person. It was business class.
It was not roundtrip.
Ms. Woeburne had not needed a lecture to know she was in deep shit.
To say that she'd gone "scrambling back" was misleading, because her driving had never been as cool-headed as it was in the aftermath of that misstep. She disrespected no turn signals and rolled through no stop signs. And when Giovanni Manor reappeared through the thick late summer smog, there was no limping out, dignity dragging, dog-whimpering for his help. There was no neatly squeaking into their valet lot. Instead, the Foreman had parked under the dark leaves of a Valencia orange tree and did not leave her car. Ms. Woeburne felt a bigger trouble coming, surely as it had upon that pier. She would not risk a bad entrance. This could not be quick-fixed. These shred marks couldn't be scoured off with steaming water and bar soap in an arcade bathroom, no matter how hard her hands had worked.
So S.W. merely stopped. She waited in that unlit passenger car, kneecaps dotted with road-rash and pressed together, until the crowd filtered into warm summer darkness. Not an hour passed before out came Prince LaCroix.
He was easy to spot in his pristine suit. She opened the door, walked to his limousine, and waited with the grim look of a boxer who had lost her priciest fight.
The Foreman had used these inadequate forty-five minutes to map out what she might say to appease him. It was not enough time to be persuasive or eloquent. Lying to an older Ventrue is a poor option; their progeny know this best, the product of experience, and of being constantly baited to stick their pinkies in the velvet cake, just to see if they would. At best, attempting to mislead him would be a dim-witted waste of time; at worst, it could kill her. A concise, factual account was her best course of action. It was the safest route, albeit still not very safe at all. S.W. realized that he was quite possibly already informed. She'd prepared for the possibility that Mr. LaCroix would tell her what had really happened.
She was considerably less prepared for the slap in the mouth.
Peeling over a jumble of excuses, stunned into silence, Ms. Woeburne's fingers clung dumbly to her hit chin while Sebastian wrenched open his car door and coldly pushed them both in. She couldn't believe it had happened. She buckled her seat belt and sat.
Strange that this insignificant pop did not hurt. It did not hurt her—he could not really do so with his bare hands—but it was louder, somehow, than it should have been. S.W. was staring, struck stupid, at the silver buttons on the Prince's crisp jacket, palm attached to her swollen bottom lip. Did he really? Really, she wondered, but could not finish the thought.
It was an archaic way to treat a person. One you did not encounter these days, and one the Foreman had never expected to tolerate from him. Ms. Woeburne's world condensed to avoid the contemptuous iolite of a Prince glaring at her. Two pairs of pricey black shoes faced each other on the limousine carpet. Her messed hair cut her sight into fractions as she gummed on words that never quite formed.
LaCroix glowered at the hobbling attempt to make something up. She could take the rest of the night if she pleased. Days, perhaps, if the child was so inclined to sit there, thick-tongued, a club-footed toddler in a ragged gown. The insult made his mouth twitch at its precision. He had never been so disappointed with Ms. Woeburne. Not even that time she failed to pay a Hendon Harpy his protection fee.
"Tell me something, Ms. Woeburne," Mr. LaCroix began, turning the question thoughtfully, like one might a pretentious piece of chocolate. His voice was a windless night at sea. "Do you know what I find the most disappointing about you?"
She blinked at him like a slaughterhouse cow.
"It's not that I'm surprised. I understood you'd scuttle off to Santa Monica once you smelled your own blood in the air. And I don't fault you for it. It's your nature. It is our nature to try and control what lesser peoples, lower peoples, leave to fate. You are Ventrue," LaCroix reminded her, needlessly. He rolled his thumb and forefinger together; Ms. Woeburne waited for a strike of flame. "Contingencies were in place had you failed, of course. But I think you ought to be flattered. Flattered because—despite your limitations, which, lately, are severe—I thought you'd perform well. I thought you'd be the best end to this running joke. And, the whole long while, I was here, ready to bring you back and let you eat the harvest you sewed when you lied to me, and when you decided your own business was more important than ours. But, seeing as you haven't been killed—which would have suited my plans just fine—I can only assume you've done the lucky thing, and managed to eat yourself all the way through. So."
So—it's a horrible segue, a terrible omen, a very cruel way to make good on a threat.
"Twice I'm right: about you, and about the politics you've tried—so poorly—to play. And! And, in spite of your atrocious decisions, and all the chewed-up birds you've brought back to this doorstep, who came out ahead of you? Whose business survived." He did not wait for her to answer. "While we're at it—let's not beat around the bush—why not go another step? Suppose we say your incompetence has actually helped my cause. All these fumblings, all these errors in judgment that I knew you'd make. I knew you'd end up here from that first foolish step you took off my stoop. Appreciate that. Appreciate that, in the face of everything you've done against what you thought were my instructions, we are still here. You were either going to be the hero or the villain in this, Ms. Woeburne; if it looks like you might come out the hero tonight, that is only because of a fluke chance, and the Brujah proclivity to believe a lie. But please, by all means, be a hero. It's well and good; it doesn't matter to me. I fully thought I'd have to see you wrung out for this. I thought you'd be taking this responsibility to the grave. I should be happy. And yet I am not happy. Do you know why?"
"Me! I didn't do this because I wanted to be a—? You saw the reports. I gave everything to you. You didn't leave me any choi—" He smacked her again. Ms. Woeburne did not bother touching it this time. She leant swiftly back into the chair, lead-tongued, furious, nerves stinging wildly up and down either cheek.
Mr. LaCroix snorted fiercely—he almost laughed—it was a livid, snarling sound. His look was one riflers wear while scraping dirt from the treads of their boots. "Do not spittle excuses while I am speaking, child, or you can trudge home in the sunlight."
Ms. Woeburne disarmed. Her head turned aside to clear a blow she expected but that didn't come.
"It baffles me," he spat, "that some pocket of your mind thinks it can operate alone. You are my Childe, you straw-man of a girl. You did exactly as I thought you would. Dull little stone. You are always so desperate for a pat on the head," he observed, and she was in no position, stiff-backed and blanched, to hate him for it. "You are the polar opposite of extraordinary. You were chosen because you are not extraordinary. That is your place. Fill it or do not."
She might have said many things. But she said none.
"You have no stature to protect. You have no Domain. You are not a dauphin to fret over my favor against blood cousins. You are a corporal," said the Prince. "First you serve."
Ms. Woeburne wants to be correct. She wants to be correct in her accounts, and she wants you to have a correct idea of what this was, that's all. Maybe it was the need to be correct that makes the corporal hurt, then. She wanted to say she'd been 'serving' since she had been acquired—but sometimes service is biting everything back.
S.W. was practiced in the smart kind of silence; she knew how to bow her head toward her collarbone and chew on the tip of her punitive tongue. The Ventrue's nails were digging into her elbows unconsciously, worrying the skin. Correctness didn't bear thinking about. Why bother, you have to think sometimes. What's the use of planning out a hundred different scenarios for a hundred different situations when every one felt like—one night, far in her future or maybe too soon—it was all leading here?
Planning is just what Ms. Woeburne does. But she could not stomach it right now. If he killed her, then he killed her, and that would be the end of worrying about anything.
But he'd included a job description—the one tidbit that kept her from deciding yes, it was no use, her egg-timer had just chimed done.
"I'd thought that you, of all people, would have the court exposure to realize our Board won't tolerate this sort of ineptitude. No longer will I." The limousine navigated Main Street. Downtown rose around them, rectangular and threatening, a dense American grid of concrete. It had been the single longest car ride of Ms. Woeburne's life. She weathered it like a bomber does—mutely, compact, mouthed yeses and dim half-nods. "I see now that my flaw in your tutelage has been sparing the rod, hoping you might eventually take something valuable your mistakes. So, for you, I have one last piece of advice: Do not expect my forgiveness. In fact, do not 'expect' at all. What you can count on is that here on out I demand the respect due to a Sire from a Childe. Do I make myself clear?"
She nodded.
"Good. I should like you to figure it out," he chuffed, something stung terribly for some reason. You could hear the authoritarian click of his canines. She clung dismally to a missing slice of dress above her ribs. "For now, however, I would like you to go."
For all the anger, for all its unfairness, she was rattled at how badly the rejection burned. Victor de Luca had been an unimaginative, unlicensed heel-kisser—but had he ever disappointed his Prince so thoroughly? Had he done anything wrong in his measly lackey's life? Had Sebastian ever smarted the neonate's face with his palm? Ms. Woeburne felt a tepid, bullying surge of stickiness well; her vision began to blur. She panicked. 'No. No, no. For God's sake, not here.'
Cold composure fought against her tear ducts. She stiffened her nose, clenched her fists and hit her tongue harder, frantic for something to denigrate, something to make this seem not so bad.
"I cannot have you here right now. I won't risk it. Neither can you—presuming your gamble plays out well, and you want to outlive this. You will be relocated. You will be sent to Chicago until further notice," he told her. The terse list of Yous caught Ms. Woeburne off guard. The self-pity retreated, withering back into the depths from which feeble things like weeping and weakness came. Her compulsion to cry was replaced by the deadness that comes with being suddenly unsure. "There, you will meet with an antiquities expert on my behalf and discuss the purchase of his services. I will provide you with the tools you need. Is this understood?"
She nodded.
"You will do whatever he asks as though I had asked it, and you will do it well. Is this understood?"
She nodded.
"You will not leave that Domain unless I am preemptively made aware of it. When I decide that you have redeemed yourself, and that the situation has settled, I will send someone to fetch you," Mr. LaCroix informed her, frown roasting through a printless passenger window. The word 'fetch' flicked past his incisors with condescension. It hit her ego like a golf swing. "Until then, do not let me catch a whiff of you in my business, or in my city. Is this understood?"
She meant to nod again—she did—but the omen of what must be understood distracted S.W. There was a rising scent of rainwater on blacktop. Mr. LaCroix said nothing more to Ms. Woeburne—merely tilted back and stared towards the skyline, lights in an inkspill—the irritation of her was a monochrome, genderless static inside something female. The Foreman was not about to disturb him. She looked at her ankles, both twisted, now swelling. Aching ribs, sore shinbones, tingling hamstrings, kicked caps. Musket-hole smelling of garlic and struggling to heal in the paleness of a calf. Crumpled fingers, broken nose; teeth in the plum of her throat on an Anarch's basement floor. They were all the same distraction and all the same childish rage.
She had been so diligently considering her injured feet that Ms. Woeburne did not notice when the car stopped. It was Mr. LaCroix's cough that picked up her head to face the broad brick home—no, not-home—of Empire Hotel.
"Go," he said. She did not look up at him. It was "go" only.
Without looking, without speaking, she unbuckled herself and moved to leave—but before Ms. Woeburne could escape, Sebastian caught her. He did not suddenly think of something important. He did not grasp her arm. As she placed one foot on that familiar curb, the Prince seized a fistful of his protégé's black felt collar, yanking her back to face him. She staggered, half-seated and half-standing, eyes level with her Elder. It was like looking into salt water and hurt the bitter grape-skin of her own. Both sharp, both cruel, both Ventrue, and there is no one who understands more what seeing into another Ventrue's pupil might do to your head.
"Don't," she begged him, sullenly, flinching, because she did not want to look. "Don't. Don't, please."
"If you expect your freedom from me, listen. Do not forget yourself again. I couldn't care less who you seem to think you are. Be what you are. You are a Prince's Childe," LaCroix seared. "It is high time you start seeing like one."
And he released her, turning crossly, leaving the Foreman with a plane ticket in one hand and no idea where she ought to go.
"And Ms. Woeburne," Prince LaCroix warned, calling after her with all his fingers wrapped around the door handle. "If you disappoint me again, don't bother coming back."
Slam.
She watched his limousine leave, and like a bit in her mouth came the need to scream.
Lo and behold: here S. Woeburne was.
Her "expert" was late. But the weather was comfortable and her body was whole, two things you oughtn't take for granted in the United States. She would like to have been allowed to settle again, Ms. Woeburne thought, standing on that bridge, letting the aluminum cool her armbones and feeling, wincing quietly, the bullet sting in her still unhealed leg.
She looked at the face of her cell phone. There was nothing to suggest the man she came here to meet remembered her. Since S.W. left LA, Mr. LaCroix changed her number, closed her extra company accounts, and mailed her a new set of IDs. The micromanaging was more than irksome. It lifted tensions like fine hairs up the back of her neck.
Over these past few weeks, Ms. Woeburne had nursed a suspicion that Sebastian was still using her indiscretions to his tactical advantage. Or at least it had been made it look that way. One should never assume they know what lies at the end of a Ventrue's long-sight. And S.W. had no longing to ply some bureaucracy here; she did not care for the Americas. She had no desire, you know, to be dangled out on a meat hook before the Anarch Party, and there was nothing heroic about her—not to be poked at, not so to speak.
No, let's be honest with ourselves: she'd probably been stuck on this fishing pole for a while. Maybe the lure would to get soggy and fall off.
At least this district was safe. You know. Relatively.
Interestingly enough, the advisor Mr. LaCroix hoped to contract into his Antiquities Department was something of a wild card. Ms. Woeburne heard, mostly through rumor, that he'd arrived here six months ago intending to patch-up Chicago's Lupine woes. Perhaps this was why the local Camarilla's saluted him with outstretched arms while she was received by a tidy, over-important prick buttoned up in his best suit, sniffing at her to move along. Funny, that. Funny how the top cards tend to shuffle towards the bottom, and when the turn ends, they will do so face-down.
But you know, being shoved about by stodgy Elders didn't grief her much; you couldn't let it; and anyway, it wasn't as though stodginess had ever been a stranger to Ms. Woeburne's port of call.
Speaking of call.
Coolwater breeze rippled through her starchy black skirt; the informant was nowhere in sight. Moonlight glared off stark bridge sheeting. She did not recognize the number on her phone.
"Ms. Woeburne," Ms. Woeburne answered, free hand holding onto that broad safety partition between herself and the truck beds below. "LaCroix Foundation, Field Branch."
"Field branch? What happened to London, senator?"
S.W.'s teeth, small and orderly, bit down—hard. Acid in her gums; it hurt. She considered dial toning, and juggled the phone away to do so, but could not quite commit. She was now separated from this threat by miles of mountain and Great Plains. They were not close peoples. And they were not, she knew, not wanted—not satiable—not going away any time soon.
"How did you get this number?"
"It wouldn't kill you," he figured, "to give us just a little credit."
"Do you know. There is a saying about the Brujah in the East Coast, about what tends to happen in the West. Do you know this? We say it all the time. 'Stomp a roach,'" she said—you know, she really did say that—barren and broken-glass clear. "'Stomp a roach, and ten more will come scuttling out of the ground.' So it might have been vain of me, I think, to suppose we were done with this. Why are you calling? What do you want."
These are a Patrician's questions: what do you want, why have you done it, what are you going to do?
Perhaps he would have been right to leave it there, but he did not. Nothing wanted is ever as simple as what, why, and from whom.
"You don't sound so good, Woeburne. Where are you?" the Baron asked, more than a touch facetious, but nobody ought to be expected to handle roach-squashing analogies with a nod and smile? "Board meeting?"
"It's not your business."
"No, I think it is," he begged to differ, deceptively polite, agree-to-disagree, and the façade of friendliness was paper-thin. "Because I don't know if you're looking at it like me. But I just got shot, and it looks kind of suspicious, you think of it that way. You vanishing. Right from the scene. Some people, they might wonder that's a little off. I told them. I said: Maybe she just had something come up. Real quick. I said: Hey, we don't need to be making mountains out of molehills. I said what has this woman done in the past to make a jury of her peers think—"
"Chicago. This is Camarilla trade. That's all I care to say." It was a hesitant and—if you'd not tell anyone else this—a slightly flabbergasted admission. Less than two nights ago, there'd been all that blood beneath her fingernails, water steaming in a bathroom sink. The Foreman stiffened, noticed she'd started to pace down this click-clack runway, and did not bother hiding her disdain. "As if it's any business of 'some people' whatsoever."
He ignored that. Normally this surfeit of passive aggression would've narked Ms. Woeburne. But she was too distracted to burn energy on Brujah psychological warfare. She is a representative, by anyone's measure; she remembered her badge, and, hearing a Free State voice, she looked, just a little anxiously, around. "You are? Shit. You got to fit right in out there," the Anarch guessed, and not kindly. "You got to feel right at home. Why Chicago?"
"Do you suppose that's likely."
"It was worth a try."
"Why are we speaking?" Beneath the glaze of politeness, she is usually in this sort of mood. There was an uncomfortable bite to the breeze all of a sudden, and the Ventrue wrapped one arm protectively around her abdomen. "As I said, I'm busy. I don't have the time or the patience to waste on trying."
He paused. "Is that it for you? You coming back?"
"I can't say."
"Don't know, or can't say? This is more than a little worrying to me, Camarilla. I am full of shrapnel; I am in not a little bit of pain; and I am owed by you people an explanation why."
"I," Ms. Woeburne told him, thinly, absolutely done. "Don't care. At all."
The Baron breathed hard out his nose.
"You know," he observed. "I appreciate the Ventrue complex you've got going on, but it's not necessary to be a vile bitch one-hundred percent the time."
"Excuse me. Is that your professional opinion? Are you telling me I need an attitude adjustment?" She could feel cruelness peel across her face. Mockery with teeth. Ms. Woeburne's laughter is a contemptible and arrogant sound. "From you? From I should rip your fucking head off? From take the tongue out of your mouth? I will kill you right here...?"
"I was calling to thank you, but hey, whatever." Rodriguez gave her five foot-eating seconds of silence before tossing in: "It doesn't always have to be an episode between you and me."
Ms. Woeburne was unsure. Confusion stumbled through the hubris. She tried to decide if she was being goaded. "Fine, then. Acknowledged. I acknowledge your grandstand. You're so humble. Very impressed. And I assume—I really do hope—there's not a crosshair on my head anymore. It was not my fault. Not my call. You have no right to aggress against me; your people can't expect—"
"They won't. Whatever I told you, you can pretend like it never was. That pier was a scene. I won't speak on the politics. There's no use. And I'm not going say I was wrong about you, because Santa Monica was a moment in time, London; when it comes down to it, I still don't think I am. That's just where I stand. But you came through," the Brujah noted, not exactly complimentary, not wholly a grudge. She stilled herself and did not pace. Thank you is a foreign, castrating sound. "You have our gratitude. And I have to give you mine, too."
Ms. Woeburne could taste the aggression disbanding in her throat. The fight instinct stepped back, and she felt mollified, and nothing imminently mean dawned to her to say.
"Oh," she figured. "Well. Yes. All right, then. I suppose you're welcome."
That's what one does when thanked. You're Welcome is still the appropriate response, isn't it? The words of it, though—the actual saying—felt strange. They had a peculiar texture, roughage about them, one that was not entirely pleasant. There was another brief, uncomfortable intermission. Thank you is a troublesome thing. It is like a gift from a disliked friend—something a good corporal does not often receive—should not need—ought not, conscionably, accept.
"Good. I'm glad we made it through this conversation. Now that you mention, though, there is something else I thought of. Tell me what you'd say if I told you—"
"Didn't I already tell you? I. Don't. Care."
Click.
Yes. That was much better.
She pocketed the phone in time to face her objective: leather coat, adventurer's hat, mandarin eyes, disbelief.
"You must be Beckett," Ms. Woeburne said, and reached out to shake his hand.
