Deep Deception (12 page)

“
You
did this.” Adin wanted to tear Boaz to pieces. “I can’t leave Donte.”

“There’s nothing you can do.”

“He’s in there. At their mercy… He…”

Boaz led him to the car without saying anything. Bran held himself stiffly. He followed painfully along after them. He carried what Adin now saw were clothes and shoes, and Adin wondered if he’d been interrupted trying to dress when their “guests” arrived.

It hurt to see Bran like that—clutching the clothes he’d chosen so proudly the day before. It tore at Adin’s heart. Bran had lived with so little and suffered so much in his short life. “It will be all right.”

“I’m sorry,” Bran whispered, when Adin finally coaxed him to lift his head. “I didn’t mean you any harm. You’ve been so—”

“I know.” Adin’s heart gave a painful squeeze. “I know you never meant to hurt Donte.”

“I don’t even know what I did!” Bran ran an arm under his nose, the gesture so childlike Adin couldn’t help pulling him closer. “If I did I’d have run away. I never would have—”

“Donte told me he wanted to protect you,” Adin told Bran firmly. “He said he wanted you to be safe.
We
want to keep you safe.”

Bran buried his face in Adin’s chest, pressing closer, until one of his shoes dropped onto the damp ground. Adin waited while he picked it up.

“We need to get out of here,” Boaz said grimly. “They’re considering this vampire business and Bran—whatever he is—appears to be some sort of a threat to them.”

“
Shit
.” Adin used his good arm, thankfully his left, to usher Bran into their car. He was grateful they’d packed before the outsiders arrived. At least they had their clothes. “I’ll get in back with you.”

Riding in the back with Bran served two purposes: it would reassure Bran and keep Adin from killing Boaz.

When Boaz keyed the ignition, Adin rolled his window down and put his head out, tilting it so he could see the window of the room he’d shared with Donte. He opened his mind and his heart. All he got back was silence. Boaz waited as if he knew why Adin needed time.

Finally, Adin pulled his head back inside and pushed the button to raise the window. He felt Bran’s hand reach out and clasp his, giving him strength. He would not cry, although he was experiencing the deepest grief he’d known since his parents passed away.

“Drive,” he told Boaz quietly.

As they rolled away from Donte’s house, he took one look back, trying again to feel his lover’s presence. Nothing. All Adin felt was silence as deep and empty as the life Adin had lived without him.

Chapter Twelve

Adin’s broken arm throbbed on the ride back to Paris. It swelled, becoming almost unbearable within an hour. Rain had begun to patter down onto the roof of the car and Boaz switched the wipers from intermittent to low. They made a slow and languorous
swish-swish
sound, almost perfectly timed to the music—Mendelssohn—Boaz played in the background. Soon, Adin’s eyelids grew heavy. He could hear Bran humming, a soothing, almost otherworldly sound that called him into sleep and then to dreams. He went with little or no fight to escape the pain of both his broken arm and frantic heart.

Adin put down the slide he’d prepared when the phone rang. He tucked his pen back into the pocket of his lab coat before answering. “Hello?”

“How’s my favorite minion,” Charles practically purred.

“I don’t know who your favorite minion is,” Adin replied, “so how could I possibly know?”

“Don’t be pithy. Of course you’re my favorite. Didn’t I make that clear enough in Vermont? Shep was very put out to be placed on the back burner. He rarely drinks the way he did that weekend. You should consider it a coup he feels so threatened by you.”

“I don’t.” They’d ostensibly gone for a ménage à trois but their mathematical equation ended up being more of a fractal containing three couples than a balanced love triangle. Shep had spent half of their ski trip blind drunk. Adin closed his eyes. He couldn’t help it; he just didn’t feel as strongly about Shep as Charles wanted him to. Shep sensed—rightly—that Adin didn’t find him particularly attractive, and it was this, Adin thought, more than jealousy that caused their problems.

What started out as a simple weekend away turned into a poorly staged road show of some sordid Albeesque drama, with Shep in the agonizing role of aging gay man pitted against Charles’s bitter recriminations over what he called bourgeois romantic fantasy, with Adin playing the part of hapless ingénue. In the end, no one was spared.

Shep and Charles were like children fighting over toys in a sandbox. The whole academic community knew it.
He who dies with the most acolytes wins
. Since they collected undergraduates like ceramic figurines, boys and—to be fair—plenty of girls, lined up for the honor. Adin had felt less honored than used by both men when he’d returned, and he didn’t intend to allow them to play with him anymore.

He was hard-pressed to keep the bitterness from his voice when he spoke. “I’m just finishing the tests on the ink now. I wish I had access to electron microscopy.”

“All in good time, my thorough friend. Did you get your tux from the cleaners?”

“Yes, I did. I’m still not happy about celebrating this find before we’re absolutely certain that it’s—”

“You worry too much, Adin. Everyone who has seen those letters agrees that they’re legitimate, and I’ve only assigned you these tests to broaden your horizons and expand your authority.”

“Thank you,” Adin managed. He was aware Charles had everything riding on these letters. So many experts in the field had already handled them; he was so certain what he would find.

That Charles was giving Adin this chance, placing his trust on Adin’s slender credibility, was more for Adin than to vet the items in question. Adin felt heat creep up his neck. He truly didn’t want to be singled out this way, certainly not because of his relationship to Charles. On the other hand, Charles assured him he’d been chosen for his scholarship, not their affair.

No matter; both he and Charles knew how others saw it.

“Don’t be late, Adin,” Charles admonished. “I’d like to have you there when they toast our success. The department chair will be wanting to thank the man behind the man, as it were, and I’d like you to be by my side.”

“I won’t be late,” Adin reassured him, although he knew that Shep, not Adin, would be by Charles’s side, or there would be serious hell to pay. Adin hoped Charles would see that. He glanced down and found the slide he’d been examining and frowned. “I’m following up on an interesting aberration in the text, and I’d like to document it before I leave.”

There was a palpable silence. A pause before Charles spoke. “What kind of an aberration?”

“Just some scratches on the vellum. I know they represent erasures, the scraping off of ink from the surface with a knife, but I like to hypothesize what’s been erased. It’s an interest of mine. Wanting to know what the writer has taken out, or as I suspect in this case, what mistake they made in spelling or whether the ink got out of control.”

Another long pause.

“I guess that makes me a dork, huh?”

Charles laughed subtly. “It certainly does. Are you finding many of those?”

“No, just a letter, here or there. It hardly matters. I promise I’ll be along and looking my very best in time for everyone to toast your success. Really, this is a terrific find, and you’re to be congratulated. The find of a lifetime.”

“Thank you. You make me very happy. Don’t dawdle.”

“I’m on my way.” Adin hung up and went back to work. He really did enjoy the work in the lab. Photographing a document and preparing a sample for analysis. The careful scraping of the ink and the parchment for testing. Disturbing as little as possible but enough to determine the artifact’s age. Guessing who wrote it if it remained unsigned, and building a picture in his mind about their daily lives.

Charles told him he’d found the documents on a recent trip to England, where he’d had to pester a family named Hodgkins to let him look at some papers before they sold them at auction. Apparently he’d overheard one of the family members in a pub talking about them. In the case of these letters, no one knew where or how the family had obtained them, but they’d appeared to be the genuine article, and Charles’s reputation as an astute document hunter had been further cemented. As fantastic a story as it was, it had turned up a number of letters in French signed by Marie Stuart, later to be known in England as Mary Stuart, first in the line of succession for the crown, after Elizabeth: Mary, Queen of Scots.

In the final letter, the one thought to be of most value, Mary discusses the restitution of Havre de Grace, and signs it, “Votre Bien Bonne Amie, Marie R.” Again, Adin noted the strange scratched-out bits of the letters, under the last part of the word Marie, and he thought it odd only because it was a signature. Possibly, she’d had an ink mishap, and scraped off the excess? It certainly could have happened, given that she’d have been working with a quill. He held a jeweler’s loupe over the tiny letters, and froze.

Unlike the earlier incidents of this kind of erasure, these letters had been neatly excised with nothing less than—possibly—a surgical instrument. If he hadn’t seen the others and hadn’t been looking for similar erasures, he’d never have seen it at all. The cut was clean and the paper that filled it exactly, flawlessly fit it. The glue that bound the edges in place couldn’t be seen, it was absolutely, positively perfect.

Perfectly fraudulent.

Excited to be the one among them to see the discrepancy, and completely naïve, Adin ran to the phone and picked it up. He dialed Charles at his home, knowing that he’d been there when they’d spoken only minutes before. That placed Charles less than five minutes away, and it would therefore be entirely possible to figure out the whole of the mystery before the party where his find would be announced to the world.

“Charles, it’s me, Adin.” He doubted Charles knew his voice well enough to distinguish it from all his other disciples. “Listen. I’ve found something important enough that I think you should get down here right away…”

Adin heard the door open behind him and turned to find Charles and Shep, resplendent in black tie, entering the tiny lab together.

“Oh, thank heavens.” Adin waved them over to his workspace. “I’ve found something—an anomaly in the third letter that I think you need to see right away.”

Charles looked closely at Shep, and Shep shrugged.

“That’s all right, Adin. I’ve seen it.” Charles nodded to Shep. “We both have.”

Adin woke with a start when the door he was resting against unlatched and Boaz opened it, leaning into the car to help him out.

“Sorry, sir,” Boaz murmured as he accidentally jostled Adin’s painfully swollen arm. “Donte would want you to have that looked at immediately.”

He’d brought Adin to a modern-looking clinic at the outskirts of Paris, where over the course of the next several hours, he and Bran helped Adin through the arduous and interminable process of getting his fractured arm examined, X-rayed and wrapped in a soft cast. Once the swelling went down, he’d have to have it examined further and address the possibility of surgery. For a lot of reasons, he’d have to go home to the U.S. for that.

He’d put aside his anger with Boaz to discuss their situation quietly and rationally. Bran was both a danger to Donte, and
in
danger himself. If they didn’t hear from Donte, all three of them would have to fly home to the United States and wait for him there. That was the safest course of action. The most difficult aspect would be obtaining papers for Bran. Numbly, Adin accepted Boaz’s assurances that within a matter of days, maybe even hours, he could procure what they needed, and they could be on their way.

Bran watched Adin with sad and curious eyes.

“What?” Adin finally asked the silent boy.

“I’m so sorry I brought this on you, Adin. If it weren’t for me, you would be with Donte right now.”

Adin wrapped his good arm around Bran’s shoulders, gathering strength from the solidity of his emotions if not from his small, thin frame. “If it weren’t for you Donte would have continued to brood and I would never have had these last few days with him. He would have stayed in Spain and I would have been alone. Who can say what might have happened?”

“But—”

“No, Bran. You did nothing to harm Donte. We should simply drop it now.”

Boaz returned from getting Adin a paper cup of tea that tasted like brackish fountain water. “We’ll need to wait for the last of the paperwork, and then you’re free to go. I have your medications right here.”

“Thank you, Boaz.”

“I went outside and made a few calls.”

Adin’s heart raced. “Donte?”

“I haven’t heard anything. I’m sorry.” Boaz gave him time to process it. “We should be ready to leave in two days, no more. In the meantime, I suggest we go someplace and lay low.”

“Fine.” Adin rested his eyes but a thought caused him to jump. “No. Wait. I have to see Ned Harwiche.”

“
What
?” Boaz and Bran stared at him as though he’d lost his mind.

“I have to see Ned Harwiche before we leave Paris. Donte told me he’d been attacked. If it weren’t for the fact that Donte showed up when he did, Harwiche would have died. How could I forget? I need to go see him and ask him to tell me everything he knows about Bran. He got me into this mess…and now he owes me.”

“Do you have any idea where to find him?” Boaz asked.

“No.” Adin closed his eyes again. “But I have no doubt you do, and you
will
take me as soon as we’re done here.”

“Dr. Tredeger—”

“For Bran.” Adin only opened one eye. “Take me there for Bran. All right? Maybe if it’s not too late, I can learn something.”

Boaz remained silent for a long time. “All right.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ned Harwiche looked awful. Adin fought back the urge to cringe when he was ushered into an unrelentingly bright white room and his eyes adjusted to all that light. He found the man, broken and bruised, sitting uncomfortably on an ultra-modern chair. The entire scene, including Harwiche, was straight out of Austin Powers—a parody of über-hip sixties spy films. Adin tried not to laugh when he pictured Donte’s reaction.

Harwiche was bandaged and stitched in several places that Adin could see and heaven knew what was hidden from view by his clothes. Since Adin’s arm was bound in a soft cast, held close to his body in a canvas sling they looked like embattled bookends.

“Adin.” Harwiche had the grace to look ashamed. “I believe I have you to thank for my life.”

Adin kept himself from saying,
I doubt you’d be alive if that were the case.

Once again, Adin chafed at ever having been confused for this man. They shared—maybe—height. Or lack of it. Adin guessed they were both about five feet nine inches tall, but Adin was svelte. He had small bones and a diminutive, distinctly planed face, high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, while Ned’s chubby face lacked discernable structure. He looked like a blancmange. That the men at the cemetery took him for Harwiche still rankled.

Adin merely shrugged. “That was Donte’s doing. Not mine.”

“He arrived exactly in the nick of time.” He said this with a pout of thick lips that was almost a sneer. “I must say he wasn’t what I expected at all. He kept me from bleeding to death, and called the paramedics.”

Adin took an uncomfortable seat across from him. “Did he? Now you have the chance to return the favor. What the hell did you get me into here, Harwiche?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Adin narrowed his eyes. “I could break the remaining bones in your body to see if it helps your memory. Boaz is very resourceful when it comes to getting me out of trouble with the police—”

“All right, although I should warn you, I’m no longer unprepared to deal with the threat of physical violence. I’m sorry about duping you in the cemetery. I just thought…” Harwiche waved his good hand impatiently. “I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that I’d get a chance to see the men I was dealing with before we met formally for the transfer of the boy. I never imagined you would go with them.”

“They had guns, Harwiche. They didn’t give me a choice.”

Ned closed his eyes. “I’m sorry about that.”

“You need to tell me about Bran. What the hell did you think you were doing, trying to buy a
boy
?”

Ned’s face remained impassive. “He’s not a boy. He’s not human.”

“I can’t argue that, but he is—at the very least—a fully sentient, intelligent being. You still can’t buy or sell him.
Chain him
.”

“For God’s sake, Adin. There’s always been a war between humans and…for lack of a word, inhuman entities. I descend from a long line of men and women who knew how to make the most of this. They make the world of the non-living run smoothly, much as your imp Boaz does for Fedeltà.”

“That doesn’t make what you’re doing—”

“We’ve been richly rewarded over time. A number of my ancestors even chose to become like Santos and Fedelta. In the last two centuries the Harwiches, living and undead, have made it their business to find out everything we can about all the worlds around us. Believe me, Fedeltà and his kind are the tip of the iceberg.”

“So you know what Bran is?” Adin sat forward. “Then tell me. Bran needs to know.”

“What he is? You mean what he was before he was exchanged for the human child?”

“I understand he’s a changeling.”

“You don’t understand at all.” Harwiche sighed. “There are a million changelings. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an ordinary changeling child or a man or woman who started out as something else. The
changeling
isn’t an entity. It’s not a type of otherworldly being like an imp, for example, your Boaz. A changeling is a part of a process. A magical contract, fulfilled when whatever entity has been entered into it becomes a human.”

Adin sat forward. “Boaz told me Bran never made the full transition to human, that his contract was interrupted somehow.”

“
Exactly.
Understand, the contract is bound by the blood of all participants. Bran’s original magical family and any living human grandparents, parents and siblings from his human family.”

“Everyone is bound by the contract?” Adin frowned. “Everyone in their extended family?”

“Everyone
living
. You can see how exceedingly rare it would be to find a magical being whose entire original nominal family line was dead. To find an orphan entity with not a single living relative. And then to add in the extremely unlikely event that one might find a child who had been exchanged with someone whose human family was in the exact same boat? To be adopted by the one family with few or
no
living relatives at all…?”

“Shit.” Adin cursed. The statistics were…

“It’s one in a hundred million. A
hundred
hundred million.”

“How would you know? Who’s to say there’s not a cousin or something, still alive who—”

“The only person who would know all the facts of the transaction would be the entity who oversaw the original contract. Genealogical studies would have been made—”

“But the odds of
everyone
dying are astronomically low. Someone, somewhere
must still be—”

“Not if one helps things along.” Ned waited for that to sink in, and when it did, Adin flinched.

“That’s monstrous!”

Harwiche shrugged but wouldn’t meet Adin’s eyes. “I didn’t
do
it. I merely put the word out that I meant to purchase the end result.”

Adin wanted to wipe the look of satisfaction from Harwiche’s fleshy face. He rubbed his temple, trying to prevent the headache building behind his eyes. The very idea Harwiche advanced twisted something inside his gut like a knife. “You should be
locked up
. What a
terrible
… Will we
never
learn what Bran was?”

“Probably not, no.”

“But why do this? What can he possibly be that you—”

“Oh…” Harwiche smiled. “Bran’s unique condition makes him very, very special.”

Adin waved a hand in the air. “I know all about his ability to probe memories and screen them in my dreams, I know that he can be in my head.” Adin suddenly wondered if that was how he’d been so good at chess. “He told me once that he can accompany a human into death, as if he were some sort of spirit guide, and return once they…acclimated. What the fuck does any of that matter? What can be so important to anyone that they’d eliminate—”

“That’s none of your business.”

“See here.” Adin grimaced, ready to moralize on Bran’s behalf. “Bran is an underage boy! I won’t allow—”

“Dear heavens, you’re obtuse.” Harwiche shook his head and
giggled
. “Fedeltà even told me so in a roundabout way, but I had trouble believing him. Don’t get your maidenly panties in a knot. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“Donte
never
discussed me with you.” Of that, Adin was certain.

“No, but he did say you wouldn’t allow him to turn you.” Harwiche settled more comfortably in his chair. He was firmly satisfied he was in control at last. “Which is very wise, considering the limitations placed on a vampire’s lifestyle. I, for one, would miss fine dining and wine.”

Adin could see that
.
“What has that got to do with Bran?”

“
Everything
. It’s time to think outside the box, Adin Tredeger.”

“That’s facile—”

“But it’s the answer to your question.”

Adin shook his head. “I still don’t understand you.”

“Bran’s magical contract was interrupted, and therefore he isn’t entirely, functionally human and he never will be. Each and every cell in his body has the potential to differentiate into human cells
of any kind
. He doesn’t have a blood type. But he still has blood. He makes bone marrow. He’s a walking, living, stem cell donor.”

Adin gasped. “Oh, my G—”

“
Yes!
” Harwiche seemed pleased with himself. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?”

“He doesn’t have a clue—”

“No one does.”

“You bastard,” Adin ground out. “How is it that he didn’t come with an outrageous price tag? Surely he’d be worth more to a billionaire than a trip into space, which costs, what? Twenty million? What are you leaving out?”

Harwiche reached for a button in the table beside him. “We’d like whiskey, please. Are you still a Bushmills man?”

Adin nodded.

Harwiche leaned into the intercom and clearly said, “Jameson’s.” He smiled pleasantly from his odd modern chair, giving Adin time to take it all in.

Had Harwiche read the Evil Genius Handbook?
What a tool.

“I don’t suppose it will come as any surprise that I absolutely loathe you.” Adin couldn’t believe his voice sounded so civil. His upbringing, his conscience, his tendency to think before he spoke, all of that finally snapped. “You’re Dr. Ned
fucking
Frankenstein. This is all speculation, isn’t it? You know absolutely nothing. You’ve pasted together ideas from medical mysteries and cultural myths and you’ve caused an impoverished
homeless
orphan to be kidnapped and held in chains for months on the off chance that it might be true. How the fuck are you going to get a doctor to listen to your nonsense?”

“Doctors are cheap,” he crowed. “You really have no idea why this might be important to me?”

A servant came in with a tray bearing the makings for drinks. She didn’t speak, but with hand gestures and eye contact asked Adin if he wanted ice. He declined, and she poured each man three fingers of whiskey and served them. Afterward, she left the room as silently as she came in.

Did Harwiche required physically mute servants? The drink wasn’t Adin’s usual choice, but it went down smoky and delicious.

Adin sifted through everything he’d learned from Harwiche until something teased at him and puzzle pieces finally began to fall into place. His heart sank.

“You’re dying.”

“I am.” Harwiche deflated. “I had a malignancy and it spread. There’s only so much the doctors can do for me.”

Adin looked more closely at Harwiche and realized he wore a wig. A very fine one, but once he looked…

“Ah, Ned. I’m so sorry.” Adin found he almost meant that. “But you have to see that using the boy that way is wrong. What do you plan to do? Force him into a marrow donation? Use him as your own personal Petri dish? That’s the stuff of horror novels.”

“We’ll have to agree to disagree. It’s possible a bone marrow transplant will kill me. It will require destroying my immune system, and doctors aren’t convinced I will survive that. If I do an autologous transplant there is no guarantee that the cells from my own body will be free of the cancer, so replacing them is risky.”

“I see.” Adin finished his drink in a single sacreligious gulp of the fine whisky. He wanted out of there.

“Of course, Bran has no cancer. If I make it through the preliminaries…a bone marrow transplant from your Bran comes without with the risk of rejection. It could be done more than once. Blood transfusions. Organ replacement. Virtual immortality if one were able to set aside the moral implications. And I am…” He frowned. “However it seems that once again, you got there first.”

Adin set his glass sharply on the table. What Ned was saying nauseated him. Had he intended to keep Bran forever, like some living farm of human cells? Harvesting organs and tissue and blood and bone marrow until such time as one or the other of them died?

“And they call Donte and his kind monsters.” Adin stood. “I warn you, I’ll kill you if you come after him again. If I don’t, Donte will. Bran is under our protection now.”

“I won’t.” Harwiche struggled not to cry. “Donte might have said something to that effect when last I saw him.”

“Who else will be looking for Bran? Who else knows?”

“No one knew why I wanted him, if that’s what you mean. It’s possible the men who sold him will come after you for the money now that they realize it wasn’t me who bought the boy. It seems to have disappeared from their coffers very mysteriously.”

“Imagine that.”

“And…”

“What?”

“It’s possible they might have put all the pieces together. Maybe they’ve realized what I conjectured and will try to get him back to sell him to the highest bidder. I don’t believe they fully understood when I began making my inquiries. If that’s the case, they’ll be difficult adversaries. They’ll kill anyone who stands in their way.”

“Who are
they
?”


Harwiche smiled. “Oh, hell no. That would be more than my life is worth.”

“Your life is worth nothing to me, Ned.”

“Suffice it to say that if they realize what they had, they can name their price for the boy and the world will come knocking at their door to meet it. The only thing left for you to do will be to get out of their way, or die.” Harwiche shook his head. “If they were to kill me that would only make the time fly. See him out,” he said to no one in particular.

A panel in the wall opened and a beefy blond man came to stand by Adin’s chair.

“Ned, you never fail to amuse me.” Adin rose and held his hand out to stay Harwiche’s Bond-film minion. “Don’t bother, I can see myself out.”

The blond shadowed him until he was on the sidewalk heading for the car, and Boaz and Bran, who waited for him. Both of them watched as he entered and slid into his seat. He remained silent long after he buckled his seat belt one-handed. Eventually, Boaz took his cue and keyed the ignition, pulling out into the damp traffic of the sixteenth arrondissement, ironically close to Santos’s Paris home.

“What did he say?” Bran appeared to have used up his patience. “What did he tell you about why he wanted to buy me?”

“He told me…” Adin searched his mind for a way to put it. “He told me that because your changeling process was interrupted you’re able to move between this world and the next at will. He told me that was the reason he wanted you. He didn’t know what you were before.”