Chapter I (Puzzlebox)

[arantzain]

Chapter One
Noli Tangere!: Vampire: the Masquerade, associated terms, concepts, and products belong to White Wolf publishing. Don't own, don't shoot, don't sue.
Artifex: arantzain
Illa Digna Gratio Est: fallia
Alteris Gratiandum Est: Fallia, again, for the dashes. Also Dremelf, Myreitha, and Megwings for five years (give or take) of hand-holding. Bissou, bijoux.



She had very simple precepts:

When your job stopped being exciting, you found a new job.

When that new job stopped being a challenge, you changed focuses, abandoned your strengths, went after a weak spot.

You tried not to have to find a new job, because new jobs that paid as well as your present job were pretty few and far between. You also re-filed every piece of paper in your office at one in the morning, because it was better than admitting you might have really fucked up, and that you had no idea how to fix things if you had.

And when you got to the point of admitting it, she reflected, you ate Greek takeout and drank merlot in filched conference-room water glasses, and wasted an hour contemplating the surface of your desk like a penitent before the doors of hell. She counted hundreds of folders, newspaper-clippings, reams of printouts and handwritten notes, and imagined that an archaeologist might feel this way, confronting a blank plain: whole cities might be under there somewhere, but damned if she could find them without a backhoe.

Fourteen file folders, one hundred and sixty-eight pages later, she had a strident cramp in her lower back, another coiling in her hands, and gave in to the impulse for a walkabout. On the other side of her windows, San Diego made no waking threats --even the sky over the sea was still dark, with that pale fine smudging that suggested the eventuality of dawn. She set the heels of her palms in the hollow of her band and tried to force her elbows toward her heels: the crackle of bones up and down her spine was --not exactly refreshing, but at least the aches reorganized themselves into novel configurations. The merlot she pitched down the bathroom sink, then came back to fish the bottle off the floor and pour the lees out into the glass. When she swallowed, the alcohol started a russet burn at the back of her throat. The clock she didn't bother to check read two oh-four. A rhythm resolved itself, eventually: rim of glass tepid on front teeth, forgotten and then set aside; preemptory rattle of number pad, computer keys --she loved shorthand exactly as much as she hated transcribing it--fumbling for a pen, losing it under some new sheaf of papers. Note, question, sketch, check screen to page to screen. Repeat, through pages more, front of folder to back. Repeat.

She was on folder eighteen, excavating the relevant documentation from folders fourteen, nine, and two, when the tap came quiet and brisk and welcome at the door. The first time it had happened, she'd jack-knifed through the ceiling --now it was just slightly startling to look up, find her clock, and find him early. "Come in, please," standing even as she said it, flicking papers together even as she rose. Not out of any desire to hide the state of the desk, because they'd both seen it worse: just the impulse toward neatness where possible.

He nudged the door open and she felt him take one look at her desk, then heard his snort. "I heard rumors, but I didn't believe them. You must realize we are not paying you to do that -or to stand on ceremony, any more than we were last week. Sit down, Ms. Remy."

The order didn't surprise her, or his fluid, facile French; from him she was used to orders, and if her accent wasn’t as fine, her French was every bit as fluent. But the slight humor in his voice did catch her off guard, tempted her to look as though she hadn’t learned better than that before. "You're early, sir,”

"By a few minutes," he countered, but he knew her well enough to read the comment for the invitation that it was, summation of all the polite offers that she never quite managed to voice: take a seat, please make yourself comfortable. She heard him pick his chair -the right, which he preferred, but not consistently-and settle back into it. Soft groaning of upholstery, susurration of leather against wool. The folio jerked once between her palms, and she set it hastily aside.

"By a few minutes," he repeated, after a second, and then, "Why the transfer? Are you uncomfortable?"

Because she couldn't pretend away a direct question, she made herself look up -first to the computer monitor, buying just a little more time, a few keystrokes to save her work and settle the machine, while her palms prickled like a riot of needles. Then she pulled in a hard breath and said, "No." Added, because he would know, "Definitely not because of Mayer, if that's what you're implying." Which was true, though the memory of Mayer's profile averted from hers, the corner-of-the-eyes glances from her coworkers, still had the power to wake a roiling exasperation in her stomach. Fortuna was not a large company: one of its analysts did not get tipsy, suggest that his co-worker was sleeping with her boss, that she was transferring out of his chain of command only to make the relationship more acceptable, and then expect the word not to get back 'round. Cardinal had dropped by her desk to warn her at six-thirty two that morning; she'd spent the next three minutes deciding what to do, and the rest of the day quietly livid at the suspicion her coworkers might have taken Mayer seriously.

"I had heard about that, yes. Are you bothered by his assumptions?"

The desktop's murmur dwindled to high electronic whine, then silence. On the other side of her desk he shifted; irritation, impatience, maybe just discomfort at the sound. In case it might be either of the former, she made herself look past the screen and meet his eyes. "No, sir." She didn't add that, if it came down to it, she had text messages and an email from Mayer that indicated they'd shared two dates five months back, and that she'd been the one to lose interest.

Really it was -not ironic, except in the Alanis Morissette sense-but maybe painfully funny that Mayer thought she might sleep with Robert Jameson. That she had been sleeping, slept frequently with Jameson here in her office, as though a few sturdy chairs and a nice rug might a lovers' nest make. Mayer could have asked her what she thought of her boss as a man. She'd have told him what she'd told Cardinal months before, that she'd never, not with Jameson. Then maybe, in a momentary honest impulse, she would have added: because he scares me.

There wasn't a logical reason for it. No deformities, no unattractive personal habits, dentition perfectly normal, and she wasn't afraid of anyone else in the company-not even Mayer, whatever he suggested under his breath when the office went out drinking. But sitting across from Jameson now, she had to drag her spine straight, prop her chin on her hand to keep from averting her eyes. He wasn’t even bigger than her, nor ostentatiously muscled in the way of some of her co-workers. Maybe not as lean as Cardinal, but shorter, with no more than an inch on her.

So, so far as she could tell, the urge to squirm away had nothing to do with some internal calculation of comparative body mass. It had nothing to do, either, with any sense of violence he projected: she'd tried, and couldn't imagine him truly angry, or even truly cold. Just watchful, never anything but watchful, pallid blue eyes slow-blinking and intent, as sly as the false-gazing camouflage of butterfly wings. She saw nothing else pretty about him: terse mouth, prow of a nose, precipitous cheekbones. That lack of beauty should have reassured her: she didn't trust pretty. But Jameson still unnerved her, if not with the five-alarm full warning she would have had to heed, whether or not he was her boss. Just a low, two-bell hum: keep at somewhat further than arm-length. Avoid offering fingers or limbs.

But then Jameson raised an eyebrow at her, and she realized she evidently wasn't finished answering his question. She nearly fumbled, caught herself before she spoke. "I'll admit, what Mayer said doesn't make me want to work with him more closely. But it was time."

"To change fields?"

She knew she couldn't relax the muscles in her neck enough to make a nod look natural, so she satisfied herself with a hum instead.

"You were getting bored," he summarized quietly, and she flinched. "You were getting bored," he repeated, "but you do not want to leave, because you like it here, because we have prestige, and because you know no other company would allow you the freedom that we have. But more work is not harder work, and we don't have the resources to take all the risks you would like, all the risks you believe would benefit us. And it's making you uneasy and dissatisfied. Not enough to look anywhere else --but enough to regard minor irritancies, like Mayer's inability to keep his opinion to himself, as somewhat more substantial."

It took her a minute to say, "Yeah." And then, "Or that's it in a nutshell, anyway."

"Did I miss anything of substance?" Politely, honestly inquiring. Still totally disinterested. One more mark against Mayer's observational powers: she was attractive, knew she was attractive, and knew with the same degree of certainty that she'd never seen any consciousness of that fact in Jameson's eyes.

There was still his question, but she shook her head, not even tempted to tell him: there were times and places to talk about old family tragedies, scarring and silence. This time, with Jameson, never fell into those categories.

He surprised her by resettling in his chair. "Are you sure?"

Mystified -he never double-checked; claimed he trusted her to know her own mind-she said, "Yes."

He didn't let it go. "And will you be any happier, for any longer, working in biotech?"

That was one of the questions she'd refused to think about, had reassured herself she couldn't know, and she wasn't an honest person, by character or mores, but in three years she'd never once seen him angry over an unwelcome opinion.

So she admitted, "Probably not." Then added, "I mean, it's possible. Resource speculation was pretty well developed when I got here; it was mostly just learning the ropes. Our biotech is still on the ground. It might be five or six years --more if we keep investing the way we have, and I have to chivvy the cash out of Orsini. So getting it up and running to my satisfaction, that might take me a while."

"But not more than a decade," he concluded.

"Not more than a decade," and it made her sigh, add, "I'm sorry."

His eyebrows jerked --not more than a fraction of an inch, but she saw them tilt up his forehead. "Why are you apologizing? As far as I know, you have done nothing wrong."

"Fortuna gave me my start." It embarrassed her to mention it, but he had arrived the year after her and might not remember, might never have known. "I interned here, the first place I ever worked seriously. It was Rebecca who explained the finer points of corporate wardrobe to me, and took me out to lunch when I couldn't afford more than Ramen. The others were just as helpful, in their different ways. I feel like it's a little disloyal, to be dissatisfied with a good thing. God knows I'd be unhappier where I was."

"You were wasted where you were, as I understand it, but that does not mean that you are not wasted here, as well."

She shook her head, because "wasted" was overstating the case. "You're partial, I think, sir."

"Because you've worked for me, rather than the company, from time to time? If that were all it took--" a shake of his head. "Others do the same." She hadn't known that; she filed it away, for future reference, but he was already going on. "Ms. Remy, bluntly, what is it about this job that you do enjoy?"

That was easy. "The research. The challenge of picking at the data until it tells me what I need to know. Making assessments about the people in the company, the business plan, the market, the competitors -weighing all the factors, helping the company weigh the factors. Developing a plan with them that will work, makes the best use of what they've got. Thinking through the scenarios. Arguing for my choices. Helping people get good ideas off the ground, and making a healthy profit along the way." She found herself holding up her hands, dropped them. "There's not much to dislike, honestly."

"But you are not always doing those things."

"No. Sometimes it's reporting. Peer review -well, you know my thoughts on that, it's a waste of everybody's time. Meetings." She couldn't stifle the grimace, tried to turn it into a shrug. "Ham-handed corporate socializing," which was as close as she wanted to get again to the subject of Mayer.

"Yet you like John Cardinal."

She eyed him, tried to weigh his tone, his expression. Then, unable to glean anything, she gave up and answered honestly: "Yes. But we're friends for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with our work. This is just how we met. It isn't even how we got to know each other better."

He made a humming noise that seemed to indicate agreement, because he didn't press it any further. "Are there other aspects of your work you find objectionable?"

"The resource limitations, the politicking. Not because it's politics, but because people get their priorities so mixed around, and they don't recognize that. I like managing and working with the interns, the new analysts that come in, but I don't get to do that often. I guess I object to that."

"I have tried to keep you busy," he admitted, and it was the pronoun that surprised her, not the admission -the line of his gaze turned to the figures in the carpet under his heels, whole expression briefly, totally given to thought.

She was getting ready to open her mouth, no idea what she'd say, when he looked up and the flat, metallic calculation in his eyes had her bare heels scrabbling on the carpet, the long muscles in her thighs tightening in reflexive fear. She found no purchase, nylons sliding slickly over the carpet-pile.

Jameson watched, head slightly cocked, admitted conversationally, "You are more astute than I gave you credit for.” He reminded her now of the spiders she'd played with as a child, the tiny dark bodies that stretched out fine limbs like the ribs of cathedrals and rose upon them, thought that he unfolded like that but without moving at all. Some rabbit-instinct in the back of her skull clutched at the arms of her chair and shuddered, gibbered; she dug her nails into the wood and raised her chin, pinching her lips together so they wouldn't tremble, just now aware that there was a cold and spreading patch of wet between her back and her chair. It had been years, but she still recognized the acrid tinny stink of her own fear-sweat.

"Considerably more," he added, and he sounded pleased.

She couldn't think of a thing to say, clung to prudence and kept quiet. Her voice would have shaken, anyway.

"You can, if you like," he said it softly, "do as you've described to me. Change your field of expertise, cultivate some new branch of the apparatus. But you understand, and I understand, that whatever steps you take will be only a stop-gap. Eventually you will become dissatisfied again. Next time, it will be even harder to find diversions to suit you."

"You're flattering me," she managed to get out, proof that fear made her stupid, and the look he bent on her, the pointed, amused jerk of his eyebrow, said as much. She didn't try to speak again.

"I could let you go that route. And I may still --you have a choice in this, and whatever you may presently think of me, I would like you to remember that fact. You have a choice in this. You can continue as we have discussed, live a life disappointing to you but ultimately too short to be much disappointment to anyone else. Or you can accept an offer, one that will be more lucrative, and more challenging, and will force you to use those skills and strengths which you most enjoy." He paused. "Your new life will be more dangerous than your present life, by a factor of at least ten and possibly a good deal more. You will not have the respect you are automatically accorded in this world--" and a cursory flicker of his hand indicated her office, the building, Fortuna, San Diego. "You will have to earn every honorific, every acknowledgment. But you will have the satisfaction of having earned them."

"Is this some kind of racket?" She was briefly, bitterly disappointed. In both of them.

"No." For the first time, she saw him smile, a bend of his lips that was not at all cursory, not at all terse: a little crooked, a little wry, apt to his face. Only his eyes were still unmoved. "That would be very unimaginative of me."

"Specifically, then. What are you offering me?"

"The opportunity to do the sorts of things that you love, that you are uniquely adapted to do, and to do those things not merely for the natural duration of your life, but for millennia. To do them to a level of excellence unattainable except by practice and experience exceeding normal lifetimes. If you choose. Or," when she didn't protest, couldn't protest, "The opportunity to discover in two or three centuries that those things no longer fulfill you and you are ready to learn something else instead. Try your hand at running countries or boardrooms; spend years in museums. Learn any language you like, travel until you can name every village between the Atlantic and the Pacific, every rill and range. Master plein aire and harpsichord and arts rather more complex and more rewarding than either; invent your own. Learn," quietly, "research, reshape whatever you want, however you like. You will have the capacity, and you will have the time."

She hadn't been inside a church for eight years, hadn't seen the bayous or heard the old stories from someone who'd been there for them in even longer, but she hadn't been born in New Orleans for nothing. Stories stuck. Legends stuck. "That's quite a deal someone's offering me, anyway."

He blinked once -nonplussed, she thought-and that smile faded. "You believe I am some sort of intermediary, then, offering these things for a greater power? Presumably something infernal."

"I don't believe you at all," she heard herself say, tone just slightly pinched, tight enough that it admitted: No, I do. "But I wouldn't deal with you if I did."

"You wear a cross, yes?" He gestured and she grabbed for her throat in time to feel the chain snap, in time to watch as the pendant jerked out of the front of her blouse, darting to him and dropping into his palm like a called bird. "It was your niece's, before and while she died, your sister's before she gave it to her daughter, and then yours once she couldn't bear to keep it any more. Before that your mother's, and her mother's before her, back to seventeen eighty-one and a very unhappy marriage between a pretty bayou girl and a French captain with clever, sticky fingers, who stole it from a nun under questionable circumstances. You wear it for Anna as much as for her daughter, and you are not sure which one of them you hope all the prayers you don't make will save." He pitched it back onto the desk and it slid across the folders, caught, dropped over the edge and into her lap. "It was wrong to lie to your sister about what her daughter suffered, but you see that now." Then he held up his right hand: pale and unmarred, no scorching, no marks, nothing but the silent seams that did not explain how he knew what he knew. "There are no adverse effects. And I am sorry for prying."

"No adverse effects," she repeated, and they both heard the gut-kicked, the reeling airless distress in her voice. He inclined his head -as close as he would come, she thought, to repeating his apology.

"What are you, then?" She made herself ask it, over the cold and grinding fist in her gut: Anna's bloodless face before her, glossy pictures fallen across the hospital blanket, square after square of Addy still, Addy's flesh and blood become Addy-not-at-all, a perforated husk, no more.

"Cainite," he said, a word that meant nothing to her. "Progeny of the Biblical Cain, or so the ones who study these things would tell you. You would likely call me a vampire."

She looked up, then. Looked at him, really, and tallied up the pallid waxen skin that should have shown a deeper flush and did not, the perfect stillness of him, no subtle shaking in his flesh where blood moved. She'd never thought to look for the pulse at his throat before: now she did, and saw still skin. He blinked, once, and for the first time she recognized that his lids moved too slow, too infrequently: cultivated verisimilitude, not reflex. She spared the space of a heartbeat to wonder if he'd always been so unsubtle, or if she noticed now because he had decided to let her see.

"You really aren't alive, are you?" She did not sound small, as she'd feared she would. She sounded tired, and perhaps sad.

"Not in the sense that you are accustomed to mean." Then he amended, softly, "Nor do I miss it."

She didn't want to approach that argument, shook her head to dismiss it. Asked instead, "Why are you telling me this?" enunciating the words doggedly, as though placing diplomatic terms on the table between them. "Why are you offering this, to me?"

"Because I need you," gently, frankly, no play surprise, no artifice. She found she no longer had the urge to flinch under his direct gaze. He’d scared her out the other side into pragmatism. "As you are now, you have skills and insights I do not have. I can continue to use them as they are now. But you would be of better use to me, and of better use to yourself, as I would make you." A marginal pause. "But you will have to agree."

She didn't stop to ask whether that insistence was a nicety his part, or attention to some more binding force. "If I say no?"

"You will not remember that I was here, that I spoke, that you refused. You will move to biotech; I will approach someone else and offer them what you did not want. Someone else will accept. They will not be what you could have been, but they will be better than nothing. Ten years from now you will leave." He shifted his shoulders in an abbreviated but very Gallic shrug. "The company will still be here, and so will I."

"You can do that."

"I can do that." Gravely.

"But I can't have time to think it over." Then, and she wasn’t sure how she dared to ask, “Why did you think that I would accept?"

His eyes passed slowly over her -haunted and half-crumpled in her chair, her feet bent up beneath her. "Because," he said, "you are too proud to leave the spending of your light in stranger's hands." Quietly he added, "And you have found God not only strange, but spendthrift with small things."

"And the Devil looks after his own any better?" Her derisive retort lacked derision.

"I can't answer for the Devil. But for myself, yes.” Softly, "I do. And I defy you to get any better promise from God, or indeed any terms at all that He will keep."

"You can't bargain with God." She meant it for an argument, but it came out a stark admission instead: I tried.

He didn't say anything for long enough that she looked up and caught a twist of sympathy in his eyes, and a grief as old and brittle as blood dried in a shroud. But he only said, "You will be able to bargain with me."

"Yes," she said, and looked him in the eye.

"There is a price.” There was no mistaking the warning in his tone.

"There's a price for everything." She averted her face. "But you don't make a choice like this based on what it will cost you. You choose for what you'll gain. Principles of aggressive expansion. If you're not growing, you're dead."

He stood; she heard his weight sink into his shoes, his soles on the pile of the carpet hushing the quiet until it dwindled into something cold, something small and dense. Then he sank down on the balls of his feet before her, and she hadn't expected that, didn't know where to look until he touched the fist in her lap and her fingers uncurled. The cross had left divots in her palm, dark red bars in the sweat and the seams, 'x' over the intersection of the life and the heart lines. He touched a fingertip to the mark and her heart screamed under her ribs; she smelled cedar on him, acrid fear on herself.

When he closed her hand again, it was shaking. "It will hurt," he said quietly. "I will let you make this choice in ignorance of the consequences, but you will never afterwards be able lay that ignorance at my feet."

It went against every living, procreating, human instinct she possessed to say, "Okay. Yes." She jerked in a breath: it was like reeling in stones.

"Elyssa." His temple was against hers. He'd never used her name but she thought, giddily, that of course he would. It was just the logical way to put a word to this calling.

She lifted a hand and rested it on his shoulder, never afterwards sure why. "So has it been worth it, for you?"

"Sometimes," he murmured, as though it might be some kind of comfort, repeated so softly that there were no syllables. "Sometimes."

Then he bent to her neck, and she closed her eyes, felt him turn his head and bite.

She learned afterward that they call it the Kiss -a shitty euphemism for something that abraded every nerve in the body to a fluid, and did it with pleasure. If he hadn't already been using her throat, she would have screamed.

Instead, eyes shut, she slid down against him, her face wet against his neck, crying without sound, as the tips of her fingers and the ache in her feet and the pressure of her elbows clasped against her side faded out, and she died in the slow-jolting, stilling grayness behind her eyes.