Children in Need — Friday, March 1, 1991, 5:45 PM

Halsted (Pilsen) / Bridgeport / Loop / Prudential Building (41st Floor)

Chicago, Illinois

She was at the mouth of the alley between a laundromat and a bodega. Eight years old, maybe nine. The coat was a man’s, sleeves rolled twice past her hands. No hat. No gloves. Patent leather shoes with the buckle missing on the left one.

Darius was walking south on Halsted. Friday night, thirty-four degrees, wind out of the northeast. The clouds were lit orange from the sodium lamps. He saw her looking at him before he registered what she was.

The look was a buyer’s look. Somebody pricing a transaction.

He kept walking. Three steps closer. The Beast moved in him before the thought formed.

Her skin. Look at her skin.

No flush. No pink at the nostrils. No redness under the eyes from the wind. A child standing bare-handed in a March wind off the lake and her color was the color of the inside of a paper bag.

He stopped.

She gave ground. Stepped back into the alley. Eyes on him. Eyes on the larger predator.

“You’re one of them,” she said. “Like the scary man.”

He let the warmth open. Not full. A candle held out in the dark. Enough for a stranger to lean toward.

She felt it. Her shoulders dropped half an inch. The retreat stopped. She didn’t come closer.

“The man who comes at night,” she said. “To the house. He comes in through the window on the third floor. The one that doesn’t lock.”

Her body was wrong between sentences. Children fidget. They shift weight. They scratch. She stood. She did not move at all.

“He picks the little ones. The ones nobody checks on. He makes them go to sleep and then he —”

She stopped. Recalculating.

“He made me like this. Three nights ago. I woke up in the basement and I was so hungry and I didn’t know what —”

The mouth closed. The jaw set. A small dead thing in a coat too big for her, trying to find the word for what she was.

“I bit Marcus. He’s five. He cried. I stopped but I didn’t want to stop.”

The Awe held her but it didn’t make her stupid. She was reading him.

“Are you going to make me go to sleep too?”

“No,” Darius said. “I need you to lead me to this man. Or show me where he comes.”

She looked at him a beat longer than a child would have.

“What’s your name.”

“Becky.”

“Show me, Becky.”

She walked. Six blocks south, two east. Past the gates of the stockyards. Into Bridgeport, where the streetlights worked and the houses were aluminum-sided and the flags were faded but still up. Irish blocks. Polish blocks. A dog barked behind a chain-link fence and went quiet when she passed.

She stopped on the corner.

St. Brigid’s Home for Children. Three stories of brick. The diocese sign was half-eaten by rust: ST. BRI D’S HO FOR CH REN. First-floor windows lit. Third floor dark. A fire escape ran up the north corner, cast iron, painted black so long ago the paint had gone to scab.

She pointed at the third-floor window. Northeast corner. The frame splintered around the catch.

“There. He comes up the fire escape. Sister Ellen takes her medicine at nine. The other one sleeps in the basement.”

She looked at him. Waiting.

“I stay in the garden. Behind the fence. He doesn’t know I come back.”

He nodded once. She moved into the shadow of the neighboring lot. He did not hear her leave.

The garden was a square of frozen dirt behind a wooden fence with the slats warped outward. Tomato cages from last summer leaned against the brick. Darius set himself between two of them, shoulder against the fence, sightline clean to the fire escape.

He waited.

The radiator inside the building clanked once and settled. A child coughed on the second floor. Television blue moved on the first-floor windows and then went dark at ten fifty-one. Somebody in the next house ran water and shut it off.

Ten-fourteen.

Ten-thirty-eight.

A car passed on the cross street. Slowed at the corner. Didn’t stop. Kept going.

Eleven-oh-nine.

Movement on the fire escape.

He came up from the alley side, not the street. Darius hadn’t seen the approach. The shape was wrong on the rungs. Too smooth. No hesitation at the landings. No metal sound. A grown man’s weight on a hundred years of cast iron and the structure did not announce him.

He reached the third floor. One hand on the window frame. The warped wood gave under his palm. He had done it before.

The streetlight caught the side of his face when he turned to push the sash.

Three weeks ago that face had sat behind a desk on the forty-first floor of the Prudential Building and said weekly Thursday reports.

It was Neally Edwards.

He went up.

The fire escape was thin margin. Metal carries. He stepped on the edges of the grating where the bolts anchored to brick. Once the structure shifted under his weight and he froze and waited and the building did not answer. He moved again.

The window was still open. The hallway beyond was institutional linoleum, dim, an emergency exit sign at the far end throwing a thin red line down the wall. A radiator ticked. The air smelled like industrial soap and somebody else’s laundry.

The door at the end of the hall was open.

Four cots. Thin blankets. A crescent moon nightlight plugged into the baseboard, throwing pale yellow across the floor. Small bodies. Small breathing. The room had the shape of a room a nun would arrange.

Neally was bent over the nearest cot. The boy in the cot was maybe four. He was not sleeping. He was held still. Command-stillness, deep, four-year-old breathing slowed almost to nothing.

Neally’s mouth was at the boy’s throat.

No sound. Practiced. Decades of practiced. The technique was the technique of someone who had fed this way before and would feed this way again and had a working theory of how much was safe to take.

His left hand gripped the cot rail. The knuckles were white. There was a tremor running up the forearm into the shoulder.

Your clanmate, the Beast said. Your elder. The man who took your reports. Look at his hands.

He did not want to be there. He was there anyway.

Darius watched him for the length of two breaths he did not need to take. Then he pulled back from the window. Down the fire escape. Same edges. Same silence.

Becky was where she said she would be. Behind the fence. Watching the street.

“We’re leaving.”

She fell in beside him without asking.

The payphone was four blocks north on Halsted. Steel cord, glass three-walled, gum across the coin slot. He set her three feet away and put his back to her so she couldn’t read the dial. She watched the street.

He had the number. It was routed through Neally’s office. The night secretary was a ghoul whose voice he had heard twice before. The ghoul did not argue.

Two minutes on hold. Then Lodin.

The voice was the midnight voice. The voice of a man who was expecting a problem and resented whoever was bringing it.

“Speak.”

“Neally Edwards is feeding on children at St. Brigid’s orphanage in Bridgeport. I confirmed it visually tonight. Pattern feeding. The staff doesn’t know. He Embraced a child three nights ago. The girl is with me.”

The silence that came back was not surprise. It was the silence of a man revising a column of figures.

“The child. How old.”

“Eight. Maybe nine.”

“Does she know what she is.”

“She knows enough.”

The next silence was longer. A pen against paper, or a fingernail against wood. Hard to tell at the other end of a payphone.

“You will bring the child to the Prudential Building. Tonight. You will not speak of this to anyone. You will not return to the orphanage. I will handle Neally.”

The line went dead.

Darius hung up. The receiver was cold. He had been holding it tight enough to register that.

Becky was watching him.

“Who was that.”

“Someone who can help.”

She didn’t push it. She had already learned that asking didn’t change the answer.

You just handed a child to the Prince, the Beast said. The Prince who forced blood down your throat three weeks ago. Ask yourself what handle means when Lodin says it.

He walked her to the car.

Twenty-two minutes to the Loop. The Cutlass had a heater that worked and a radio he kept off. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands flat on her thighs. She didn’t touch the dashboard. She didn’t touch the door handle. She did not look at the window or the meters or the dark sliding past the glass. She looked at the floor of the car between her shoes.

Once she said, “Marcus is going to be okay, right.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

She nodded once and went back to the floor of the car.

He drove.

The Prudential Building lobby was empty at twelve-eighteen except for the night man at the security desk, who looked up, registered Darius’s face, and looked back down at his crossword without writing anything. The elevator took the forty-first floor at a speed that made the cables hum.

Lodin’s man was waiting in the hallway. Gray suit. Older. Military bearing through the shoulders. He looked at the child once. The expression on his face did not change.

“Wait here.”

He held a door open. Becky walked through it. She turned in the doorway and looked back at Darius. She did not say anything. Her face was a face Darius was going to remember.

The door closed.

He waited in the hallway.

The hallway had a carpet runner the color of dried blood and brass sconces every fifteen feet and a clock at the far end with a glass face. He watched the second hand. He watched it for forty-seven minutes.

The man came back alone.

“The Prince thanks you for your diligence. You are dismissed.”

There was no follow-up. No mention of Neally. No question, no instruction, no name. The man waited a beat to make sure Darius understood there would be no more, and then turned and went back through the same door, and the door closed, and the lock turned.

Darius rode the elevator down.

The lobby was empty. The night man did not look up.

He stepped out onto Michigan Avenue.

It had started snowing. Thin. Dry. The kind that didn’t accumulate, only blew. The streetlights cut through it and the snow made television static at the edge of every cone.

You did the right thing, the Beast said. The efficient thing. The Ventrue thing. Now go home and try not to think about what happens to an eight-year-old Kindred in Lodin’s custody.

He walked north.

The sandy-haired man came out of the all-night diner near Adams. Northwestern windbreaker under a heavy coat, paper cup in his hand with the lid off. He had not seen Darius until they were four feet apart. He startled. The cup jerked. Coffee came across the sleeve of Darius’s coat in a hot brown line.

“Oh God — I’m sorry, I’m so sorry —”

Darius had seen the man before. Bellevue Place. Weeks ago. Same coat. Same cup. Same apology.

He looked at the sleeve. The coffee was already cooling against the wool. Cheap diner coffee, burnt, the dregs of a pot that had sat too long.

Twice is a pattern, the Beast said. Three times is a message. Who sent him.

Nobody had sent him.

Darius stood on the sidewalk and let the man finish apologizing. The man finished. He walked north. He turned the corner at Adams and did not look back.

Darius stood there a moment longer. He looked at the sleeve. He looked at the snow blowing across Michigan. He looked at the lights still on in the forty-first floor of the Prudential Building, four blocks south, where a small dead girl with a missing shoe buckle was somewhere behind a door that had closed once.

He walked to the car.

He did not think about her face.

He drove south to Pilsen and down into the basement and locked the steel door and sat in the dark with his hands flat on his thighs and the only thing he could hear was Marcus crying, before she stopped.

He stayed in the dark a long time.

The hunger was gone. Everything else was still there.