He stared at her. “It is not only plants.”
“I can do it for animals and people. Anything that has some life left in it. That is why Donatien wants me. For the ones he hurts.” She stared at the fern. “Because I can keep them alive.”
Samantha started her shift on Halloween by stopping at the Chief of Homicide's office. “I’ve got some updates on the convent murder.”
Ernesto Garcia closed the file he was reading. “Tell me.”
She took out her PDA and punched up her notes. “Victim identified as Erik Bergen, age thirty-two, single, lives alone, no kids. Currently owns a fetish place called Club Dominion. No significant other, no family other than an elderly father in Brooklyn. NYPD will handle the notification.”
“Dominion’s that one across from the Ambassador’s Towers?” When she nodded, he said, “I thought that was a private B.Y.O.B. club.”
“Bergen got a liquor license and opened it to the public about a year ago,” she said. “Clientele’s been busted a few times since for indecent exposure, public sex during vice sweeps, but no working girls or anything else to blow air up the Mayor’s tasteful skirt. It’s a place to dress out and hookup. How long are we going to do this?”
“As long as it takes.” He glanced up and saw her expression. “If you’re talking about Suarez, he won’t be in. Kyn business.”
“I’m Kyn now, but I guess I don’t count.” Sam sat down and took a pocket recorder from her jacket. “This is voice-activated. For those times when you guys decide that Sam can’t handle that all-important, hush-hush Kyn business.”
She switched on the tape, which played a conversation first between Lucan and Rafael, and then between Lucan and Herbert Burke. When it was finished, she switched it off.
“I like the parts where everyone decides what’s good for me, and that no one is to speak to me about a guy who appears to be the prime suspect in my fucking murder case,” she said sweetly. “Don’t you?”
Garcia picked up the recorder and regarded it the same way he might a dead rat. “Somehow I doubt the suzerain will appreciate the fact that you’ve bugged his office.”
“I will deal with the suzerain later, I assure you.” Her temper, which had been simmering since she’d listened to the tape, flared. “Now can we stop dancing around this and you give me some answers? Or do I go start roughing up some vampires, starting with my partner?”
His expression shuttered. “I can’t tell you anything more than what is on that tape.”
“You’re Rafael’s tresora, of course you can.” She waited for him to reply. “I am a decent cop, you know. I can just go looking for them. Guy likes to cruise fetish clubs, right? We don’t have that many around here, and I’m in the mood to go beat the hell out of someone anyway.”
Garcia hissed in a breath. “You can’t. Samantha, there are some things about the Kyn that you’re better off not knowing. Donatien – the Marquis – is one of them.”
“So they are talking about the same person. Thought so.” She enjoyed his wince over the slip. “This Donatien may be Kyn, but he killed Erik Bergen, which makes it my business.”
“Donatien is not Kyn.” He rubbed a hand over his shaved scalp. “You remember Faryl, the changeling who tried to kill Lucan?”
“Snake-man, sure,” she said. “I cut off his tail. Made him kind of unforgettable.”
“Faryl was what happens to a Kyn when they live only on animal blood,” Garcia told her. “There have been Kyn who went the other way, who refused to curtail their hunger. They not only kill humans, they toy with them. Like cats with mice.”
“So he’s out of control.”
“That was how he began, and he was among the worst of us. Then something happened.” Garcia seemed to be choosing his words with great care. “It should have killed him, but instead it made him more powerful, more dangerous.”
She folded her arms. “I’m not leaving until you give me all the facts, Cap.”
Ernesto rose to his feet and went to the one window he had in his office, which overlooked the department parking lot. “If I do, Lucan will have my head.”
“I’ll have it if you don’t, and you have to work with me every day,” she reminded him. “Him you can dodge.”
He nodded and went to his filing cabinet, taking out a folder and handing it to her. “That is what current information we have. It’s not much. Rumors, a few unconfirmed sightings, unsolved murder sprees in the Middle East and Germany.”
She opened the folder and made an exasperated sound. “It’s written in French, which I don’t speak or read.” She pulled out a sketch of a man so beautiful he made Brad Pitt look like a troll. “This is the monster?”“That is Donatien Alphonse François,” Garcia told her. “Better known as Le Marquis de Sade.”
Five
Dani dreamed of the one place in the world where she had never felt afraid: the jungle beyond the compound. On warm, moonlit nights, when the Father's men had gone into the village to drink and chase women, she had slipped under the fence and into that cool, green darkness.
The Father had told her that it was impossible for her to remember her mother (she died birthing you, Cristál, he would always say, hating her with his eyes) but Dani felt her presence in every shadow, heard her whisper in every movement through the leaves. Mama had belonged to the jungle, had been buried by the Father somewhere in it, and so she had become a part of Dani’s rare night wanderings.
Tonight she felt her mother as if from a distance, but that hint of tender love was all she needed. She raced through the brush, chasing it not in desperation but in a playful, teasing fashion that made her mother's ghost laugh.
Until the dark man stepped out into the moonlight, blocking her path.
Daniela. He held out his hand, tiny golden lights filling the palm. Don’t run away from me.
She stayed. She had never like men very much – the Father often hurt her, and the guards despised and feared her – but the dark man felt different. He smelled wonderful, too, not at all like the sour odor that clung to everyone at the compound. She went to him, and when she reached for his hand, he tossed up the lights, showering her with their cool, tickling sparkles.
“Rafael.” She remembered his name from the other place. His name became poetry on her tongue, and she savored it twice more. “Rafael, Rafael. How did you find me?”
We are sharing a dream, he told her, clasping her wrists with his hands. Is this your home?
Dani had never thought of the jungle as anything but freedom. It did not belong to her, and the Father would never permit her to live in it. Home was the compound, where everyone feared the Father and what he did in the white-washed rooms. She did not want to think about that, not here. Here she came to be, to run, to forget.
“I wish it were,” she told him.
I had a place like this, once, a long time ago. A flock of green parrots fluttered around them, and he drew her closer, holding her to his side. Can you show me the compound?
Somewhere in the shadows, a jaguar growled.
“Do I have to?” When Rafael nodded, she sighed and guided him down the old path to the clearing where the Father had made the compound. The rusting, barbed wire fence sagged in places, some parts of it cut out and missing. A few ghosts scrounged around the burned and gutted buildings, the old ones who still thought they were alive, and could pick through the debris for scrap to sell in city.
Someone burned it to the ground?
“The Father did before he left the country.” She stared at the place where she had been so miserable. “Men came from Europe – not his men, but others that were angry with him – so he set fire to the top part.” She took him to one of the lower level entrances, pushing aside the tool shed that concealed it. “The soldiers came and took things and burned it, and I had to go live in the village. They never did find the bottom part.”
Dani hated going below, but knew Rafael should see it all. The sensors that still worked turned on the Father’s lights as they walked down the stairs and into the center corridor. Ghosts in wrinkled white coats shuffled past them. They wrote on blank clipboards with empty pens. Seeing the spirits made Dani’s arms throb.
Rafael ignored the spirits and looked through some of the dusty windows. This is a hospital.
“The Father called it that, but he never fixed anyone. He broke them and made me do it.” She surreptitiously checked the sleeves of her smock to see if she was bleeding again. “I didn’t like him. He pretended to be happy and kind, but underneath he was like Donatien. He didn’t really care about the tests he said he had to do, or the soldiers he was going to make to take back to his land. He simply liked doing the breaking.”
Rafael stopped in front of one of the many framed pictures the Father had left behind, and wiped the dust from the glass over it. What was his name?
“He never told us. We were made to call him ‘Doctor’ or ‘Father.’” She saw a portrait of the Father as a handsome young man and turned away. “Can we go back to the jungle now?”
In a moment. Rafael looked at some of the other pictures and then saw the birthing room, where the spirit of a village woman floated above the table, shrieking without sound as she struggled to deliver a baby that would never take a breath. Was he your father? Was his name Nieves?
“No. Daniela Nieves is not my name. Marguerite made it up for me, for my papers. The Father called me ‘Cristál’, or this.” She pulled up the sleeve of her smock and showed him the numbers on her left arm.
Six-one-two-seven. He ran his fingertips over the faded mark. What do they mean?
“He never told me, but I think they are when I was born.”
No one calls a child by a number.
She looked at the writhing ghost woman. “The Father did.” She pulled at his arm. “Can we leave now? Everything here is cold and dead.”