Staked

“Only way to do it. Every second at the scene increases chances of capture. Ready for a spot of breakfast?” Oberon’s last meal had been on the plains of Ethiopia, during the episode that revealed to me the existence of the binder I’d just stolen. A tyromancer friend of mine named Mekera had pointed the way here after we’d hunted up some rennet for her, but she didn’t offer any snacks to us in the hours afterward.

“Of course I’m ready! When have I ever been unprepared to eat, Atticus?”

“Fair enough.”

I knew that it’s standard procedure to hole up in a nondescript warehouse or garage after robbing a bank, but I walked to Tim Hortons instead—affectionately known as Timmie’s—because I felt like having something hot and coffee-like and I didn’t have a big bag of money in a burlap sack to mark me as a dastardly villain. Instead, I had a backpack and an Irish wolfhound on a leash, so I looked like a local student instead of the mysterious thief who slipped past the security of the Royal Bank of Canada in downtown Toronto.

The Timmie’s on York Street sported a garish green-and-yellow-striped awning, a fire hydrant out front in case of donut grease fire, and a convenient signpost pointing the way to public parking. “What kind of ungodly breakfast meat do you want from here?” I asked Oberon as I tied him up to the sign.

“The religion of the meat doesn’t affect its taste,” my hound replied, a pedantic note creeping into his voice.

“What?”

“Godly bacon and ungodly bacon taste the same, Atticus.”

“Bacon it is. Now be nice to people who look scared of you while I’m inside. Do not pee on the hydrant, and no barking.”

“Awww. I like to watch them jump. Sometimes they make squeaky noises.”

“I know, but we can’t draw attention to ourselves right now.” Sirens wailed in the glass and steel canyons of downtown as police converged on the bank. The cars would get there eventually, but the two bicycle cops I saw pedaling the wrong way down York Street would get there first. “I’ll be back soon and we’ll eat.”

The teenager working the register judged me for ordering five bacon and egg sandwiches and a donut frosted in colors normally reserved for biohazard warnings. I could see it in her eyes: “Nice looking for a ginger, but shame about the diet.”

Well, as Oberon might say, I deserved a treat. Taking my maroon cup of coffee and a bag of greasy sandwiches outside, I sat next to my hound on the curb of York Street and unboxed breakfast for him as people emerged from the shop and wondered aloud what had the police in such an uproar.

“Whadda yanno, Ed,” a man said behind me. He hadn’t been there when I entered, but a quick glance over my shoulder revealed him standing next to a friend in front of the window, both of them holding maroon cups like mine, both dressed in jeans and work boots and wearing light jackets. “Sirens! That means crime. In Trahno.” I smiled at the local tendency to reduce their three-syllable city to two.

“Yep,” Ed replied. I waited for more, but Ed seemed to have exhausted his thoughts on the subject.

“Hey!” Oberon said, his tone accusatory as he gulped down the first sandwich. “This is bacon, Atticus!”

Didn’t you say you wanted bacon? I answered him mentally since I didn’t want Ed or his friend to worry about my sanity if they saw me talking out loud to my hound.

“But I thought it would be Canadian bacon! Aren’t we in Canada?”

Yes, but maybe you were trying to be too clever there. People in Canada do not call that kind of meat Canadian bacon, the same way people in Belgium do not call their waffles Belgian waffles.

“Well, it’s still good. Thanks.”

I snarfed the donut and slurped up some coffee and then pulled out the cause of all the trouble: a binder full of names and addresses, many of them international. There was no handy title page announcing their significance, but they were alphabetized, and I flipped to the H’s. There I found an entry for Leif Helgarson, providing his former location in Arizona. It told me two things: This was, as I’d hoped, a directory of every vampire in the world, stored offline and therefore unhackable. But it was also months out of date at the very least. Leif had still nominally been the vampire lord of Arizona’s sun-kissed humans around the time of Granuaile’s binding to the earth, but he’d shown up twice in Europe since then—once in Greece and once in France. Germany too, if I counted a handwritten note. He was clearly on the move, and I had to assume the same would hold true for many other names on the list since I had started to pick off vampires via Fae mercenaries. Once word got out that this binder had been stolen, they would move for sure. So if it were to be of any use, I would have to move quickly, before they knew I had this. A USB drive with a file on it would have been more convenient, but since I was sure the idea was to make everything inconvenient for hackers and keep the speed of technology on their side, they had saved a hard copy only.

The two who would hear about it first and perhaps spread the word were the safety deposit box’s owners: the ancient vampire Theophilus and the arcane lifeleech, Werner Drasche. The latter was most likely in Ethiopia where I’d left him, swearing in German and arranging a flight to Toronto. Theophilus, I knew, wouldn’t be traveling across an ocean to chase me.

I flipped to the T’s but found no entry there for Theophilus. Damn. Either he was using a different name or wasn’t listed here at all.

“May I join you, Mr. O’Sullivan?” a voice with a Russian accent asked. I whipped my head around to find the speaker, because no one should be calling me by that name anymore. A Hasidic Jew dressed all in black stood there, cup of coffee in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. His beard had been black the last time I saw him, but now it was shot with streaks of gray that fell from either side of his chin.

“Rabbi Yosef Bialik,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Sharing breakfast, I hope,” he replied. “I assure you that I have no wish to fight. Our past quarrels can remain in the past.”

“You’re alone?” I asked, scanning my surroundings for other figures in black with weaponized beards. The last time I’d seen him, more than a decade ago, he had ganged up on me with the rest of the Hammers of God.

“I’m alone.”

“Well, sit down then, and tell me what you want.”

He tossed the bag down next to me and then used his free hand to steady himself as he half-sat, half-collapsed to the curb with a grunt. “Getting old is no fun,” he said. “You look very well. Unchanged, in fact. How do you do it?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me how you knew where to find me. I’ve only been in town a few hours.”

“Ah! Easy. The Hammers of God are witch hunters, yes?”

“Yes.”

“We are sensitive to the use of magic. Any kind. So while we cannot track you, whenever you use magic nearby, we can feel it. And your magic I have felt before. It has a particular flavor. You used quite a lot of it a couple blocks away.”

“And you just happened to be in Toronto?”

“Yes. I live here now. Retirement.”

“Retirement? Here?”

He shrugged. “Toronto is great city. Many kinds of peoples, many kinds of food, few evils outside of the local government. The hockey team is bad, but you cannot ask for everything. And I am married now. My wife is from here.”