Dinner with Ballard — Wednesday, 2 January 1991, 4:29 PM

Daley’s Restaurant, Gold Coast Chicago, Illinois

The ghoul held the car door at the Hyatt’s lower entrance, and the cold came in like a blade — sixteen degrees and dropping, the kind of January that turns breath to glass before it leaves your mouth. Sable slid into the back seat. Darius followed. Neither spoke. The town car smelled like Armor All and something botanical, an air freshener that cost more than her first month’s rent on State Street.

Michigan Avenue at six o’clock. The Magnificent Mile in winter through tinted glass, all light and stone, and Sable could feel the difference between this city and Gary the way you feel the difference between a house where someone lives and a house where someone died. She had been here twice as a mortal — once on a school trip and once with a man whose name she kept in a locked room in her memory and did not open. Chicago looked the same both times. It looked the same now. Big and clean and indifferent, and the cold made the buildings taller.

The ghoul pulled to the curb on North State Street. No sign on the building, just brass numbers and a doorman who opened the car door before the engine stopped turning. Daley’s. She could see white tablecloths through the front window, the particular quality of light that means money has been spent on fixtures nobody will ever notice.

Inside: butter and old wood and the ghost of cigarette smoke that never quite leaves a room where powerful men have been eating since before the war. The maitre d’ walked them through the dining room without asking their names. Half-full — mortal couples, business dinners, a woman in pearls laughing at something that wasn’t funny. Nobody looked up. The frosted glass partition at the back. The velvet curtain.

Ballard.

He was enormous. Three hundred pounds in a suit tailored to accommodate the body rather than improve it, and his face had the florid, damp quality of a man who sweats in every season. Small eyes. Manicured nails, which made everything else worse — the precision of the grooming against the ruin of the flesh, like a clean collar on a dirty shirt. The table in front of him was covered with plates. Eleven of them, Sable counted as the waiter cleared them away, most scraped clean. He had been here for hours. He was eating bread and he did not stop when they came through the curtain.

“Sit,” he said. Butter on his lower lip. “Both of you.”

They sat. Sable took the chair across from him because geometry is a language she speaks and the position said: I am facing you. I am not hiding. She put her hands in her lap and her spine against the chair back and her chin level, the way she’d learned to sit in rooms where sitting is a statement — rooms she’d been in before she was dead, rooms with men who watched you sit down and decided what you were worth before you opened your mouth.

The wine arrived without being ordered. Red, heavy, French — the smell hit her like a wall, oak and tannin and the particular wrongness of anything that is not blood, her body identifying it instantly as nothing, as absence, as the opposite of what she needed. Ballard poured for her first. Filled the glass to the rim.

“Drink.”

She drank. A measured sip, the geometry of the gesture saying she had done this before. The wine hit dead tissue and sat there like a stone in an empty well, and for one second everything in her wanted to bring it back up — the body’s revulsion, absolute and mechanical — and she held it. She held it the way she held a smile when a hand moved wrong. Perfectly. At cost.

Darius drank. His face didn’t change. Ventrue discipline or just Darius.

Then the food. Ballard ordered for the table — porterhouse, lobster, risotto, Caesar salad, all of it, for three. “You look thin, dear,” he said to Sable, and the word dear landed the way a landlord says tenant. She picked up her fork. Cut a piece of the lobster. White flesh, butter pooling, steam carrying a sweetness that meant nothing to her, and she chewed and the texture was obscene (wet paper, dead protein, the mouth performing a function it had forgotten the reason for) and she swallowed and held it down and her face did not change.

Ballard turned to Darius. “Your name. Your real name, and who is your sire.”

Sable leaned forward. Drew the eye. The geometry of attention she’d learned before she was dead and perfected after. “Mr. Ballard, we appreciate your hospitality. The letter speaks for itself, and we’re happy to discuss Prince Modius’s intentions in whatever detail you—”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

He didn’t look at her. He was looking at Darius, and the dismissal was so complete that the room rearranged itself around the fact of her irrelevance. Not hostility. Something worse: she wasn’t worth the energy of hostility. A Ventrue talking to another Ventrue, and the Toreador in the room was furniture.

“Darius Cole,” Darius said. “Tenth generation.”

Ballard went still. The stillness of something large recalculating. “Tenth generation. Modius sent a tenth-generation Ventrue as a courier. Either he respects Chicago more than I thought, or he respects you less than you think.”

He ate another piece of steak. The knife moved through the meat with a surgeon’s ease.

“You came with this one.” The knife gestured toward Sable — small motion, blade wet. Not a threat. A dismissal. This one. Luggage. “Toreador?”

He didn’t wait.

“Your Prince sent you here with a letter, and the night you arrived, my Prince disappeared from his haven on Lake Shore Drive. You’re going to tell me that’s a coincidence.”

“We had nothing to do with it,” Darius said. “We’re just here to deliver the letter.”

Ballard set down his knife. Folded his hands — enormous hands, thick fingers, and Sable could see the manicure again, the nails filed to clean ovals, and thought of every man who had ever presented a groomed surface over a ruined interior and called it civilization.

“You’re being blamed. Whether you did it or not is secondary. You were here. You’re from Gary. You’re convenient.”

The curtain parted.

Edward Neally stepped through — double-breasted suit, wing tips, hairpiece that might as well have been real. The man who had played Lodin at the Field Museum two nights ago, performing a Prince’s authority with a bureaucrat’s precision. He sat beside Ballard without being invited.

“It’s done. The Primogen know.”

Something crossed Ballard’s face. Quick, absorbed by the fat before it could become an expression. Fear. The specific fear of a man sitting in a chair he didn’t build, holding an authority he didn’t earn, watching the structure he depends on develop cracks he can’t plaster over.

“Who told them.”

“I did. We had no choice.” Neally’s voice was smooth, bureaucratic — quarterly report cadence. “If we look for him ourselves, everyone will know something is wrong. The Primogen’s will is to keep it among themselves for a few days. That gives us time. But we need people looking. People no one in Chicago knows.”

He looked at Sable. At Darius. Back to Ballard.

“Them.”

The silence stretched. Restaurant sounds filled it — silverware, conversation, someone laughing three tables away in a world where Princes don’t vanish from their havens and three-hundred-pound vampires don’t eat bread with butter on their chins and two neonates from a dying steel town don’t sit in Gold Coast restaurants trying to keep lobster down.

“Fine,” Ballard said. He leaned forward. His voice dropped to the frequency that only dead ears were made to hear. “I will destroy you with my own hands if any among you speak to anyone about this. No one must know about the disappearance of Lodin. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal,” Sable said.

He held her gaze a moment longer than necessary. Then he grunted and lifted a hand. The frosted glass partition behind her clicked, and a figure stepped through — lean, dark-haired, long coat that didn’t hide the way he moved, which was the way people move when hurting other people is a practiced skill. He stood by the curtain and said nothing.

“Belthazar. He goes where you go. He sees what you see.”

Belthazar looked at Sable the way a man looks at a parking meter.

Ballard pushed back. The chair groaned under him. “As if you didn’t already know where he is. Do not play your game past tomorrow night, Neonates.”

The dinner was over. The plates were still full. The wine was still in her stomach, wrong, heavy, a reminder that every part of her body was a machine performing functions it had forgotten the reasons for. Somewhere in the restaurant a mortal was laughing, and the sound was the loneliest thing she had heard since Gary.

Belthazar was waiting by the door.