The Bait and the Window — Monday, March 4, 1991, 5:43 PM

Kaspar & Sons / West Garfield Park / Succubus Club — Brennon’s Back Office

Chicago, Illinois

The boarded window did the work the door used to do. Plywood, four inches of dead air behind it, then nothing — the steel frame where the door had been, hinges still bolted to the jamb like a dental impression of something that used to close. Saturday’s work. Somebody had draped a moving blanket across the opening and weighted the bottom with a length of rebar. Kaspar & Sons, second-floor back room, the radiator cycling its tin music against the cold.

Darius woke on the cot Sable had dragged in from the front office. Six in the blood. The cold came through the doorway that wasn’t a doorway and he felt the deduction in his spine, a thinning at the edges of every thought.

The television in the front office was on. Sable’s habit. The volume low but the loop unmistakable: Channel Seven running the LAPD footage for the third time since dusk. The camcorder shake. The boots, the boots, the boots. The anchor’s voice underneath, professional and too calm.

The phone on the workbench had been ringing. Not now — but the answering machine’s red light blinked. Three messages. The first two from before sunset. The third, the tape spool told him, had come in within the last twenty minutes.

He thumbed the bar. Two business calls he didn’t recognize. The third was a click and silence and then —

“Mister Cole. Brennon. The Prince has business he’d like communicated. Pleased if you’d meet me in the back office of the Succubus Club tonight. Eleven sharp. Bring the lady if she’s available. I’d appreciate the courtesy of not being kept.”

A pause on the tape. Two breaths.

“It’s a Hunt call.”

Click.

The tape rewound itself with a small mechanical sigh. The boots looped on the television in the next room. Outside, somewhere south on Morgan, somebody was leaning on a car horn and not letting up.

Sable was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t heard her cross the floor.

“We got work to do,” he said. “And I need to hunt.”

She was leaning on the doorframe with one shoulder, arms crossed, the .38 he’d handed her Saturday still on her hip in a leather holster she hadn’t owned yesterday. She’d gotten the holster somewhere between the Matthews estate and Pilsen and Annabelle’s private door. He didn’t ask where.

She rewound the tape herself. Didn’t play it. Just rewound it.

“Eleven sharp,” she said. “He’s giving us five hours.”

Outside, the car horn on Morgan stopped. Then started again. Different car.

He did the inventory before he said anything else.

The door. Compromised haven, daylight in fifteen hours, no plywood crew this side of dawn unless he called Bear Construction’s after-hours line and paid the night rate plus the premium for not remembering. He had the cash. He didn’t have a face for the crew that wouldn’t stick.

The Hunt call. Brennon at eleven. Lodin telling Brennon to tell him in advance was a status fact — Ventrue clanmate, witness, trigger man. The tape didn’t say come tell me what you saw. It said come receive instruction. Those were different meetings.

The blood. Six. He could ride six through a meeting. He couldn’t ride six through a meeting and whatever Brennon handed him after.

The window. Five hours of dark before eleven. Rodney King was on every television south of Roosevelt and west of Ashland, and that meant CPD was occupied somewhere they usually weren’t, and the people who usually watched the street were watching their own televisions or their own corners. Hunt windows in controlled spaces. It was a hunt window.

He pulled the workbench phone over by the cord. The number was in his head; he hadn’t written it down because the kind of crew that rebuilt a steel storefront door at seven on a Monday night wasn’t a crew that wanted its number in a Rolodex. Three rings.

A man picked up. Not a hello. A pause.

“Bear.”

“Cole. West Loop. Steel storefront door, frame’s intact. Window’s boarded but I want the door tonight.”

“Tonight.”

“Now.”

A second pause — what was on the truck, who was sober, what the highway looked like.

“Two hours. Twelve hundred.”

“One hour. Fifteen.”

“Hour and a half. Fifteen.”

“Done. Rear of Kaspar and Sons, Morgan and Sangamon. Knock once. Cash on completion. Don’t bring a new face.”

“Same crew as November.”

“Same crew.”

The line went dead. He set the receiver down. Sable was watching the side of his head with the half-smile she got when he spent money fast.

He took the Cutlass out the back, left Sable at the haven with the .38 and the moving blanket and instructions to thumb the radio for anything coming in on the Brennon line. Up Sangamon, west on Madison through the cold-snap empty, the heater doing a rattle it had been doing since New Year’s. Past Western. Past California. Into Garfield Park — his territory, his grant from court.

The radio said Daley, Daley, Daley, Rodney King, weather. He turned it off two blocks in. The streetlamps west of Western were the old high-pressure sodium and they made the snow look like dirty butter where it was still piled along the curbs.

Three blocks south on Pulaski. Slim Ed’s — the kind of bar that didn’t have a sign, just a steel door painted the color the city painted fire hydrants and an Old Style placard in the window with one of the bulbs out. The kind of place a foreman drank when he didn’t want his crew to drink with him.

Darius didn’t go in cold. He parked the Cutlass at the corner, held a cigarette he wouldn’t smoke — cover, the prop that let a man stand on a corner in winter without being a man standing on a corner in winter — and watched the door for ninety seconds. A woman came out, two men went in, the door swung, the placard buzzed. Through the buzz he could hear the jukebox: bass and the suggestion of Aretha.

The foreman was at the second stool from the end. Darius knew him the second the door swung the third time — heavyset, Carhartt jacket on the stool back, a glass of something amber already half down, the posture of a man who’d been in his second drink for forty minutes and had decided the third was a problem for the man he’d be after he had it.

Mid-forties. Wedding ring. The skin around the ring was darker than the skin on either side — he’d worn it twenty years and the sun did what the sun did. Wallet on the bar. He tipped the bartender in cash, not on a tab, which was how a man drank when his wife checked the credit card statement.

Darius didn’t go in. He walked to the alley behind the bar instead — the alley a foreman in a Carhartt walked into when he wanted to take a piss without paying Slim Ed’s the dignity of using the bathroom. The alley was salt and brick and the back of a Chinese restaurant’s exhaust hood, three days of frozen kitchen grease coating the dumpster lid. He put the cigarette out on the brick and waited.

Six minutes. The back door banged open.

The foreman was bigger than he’d looked from the corner. Six-two, two-twenty, hands the size of catcher’s mitts. He didn’t see Darius until he was three feet away, and when he did he did what big men did when they were surprised — the shoulders squared, the chin dropped half an inch, the weight came forward.

“You lost?”

Darius didn’t answer. He made eye contact and let the eye contact be the entire transaction. The foreman’s posture changed in pieces. First the shoulders eased. Then the chin lifted back to where it had been before he came out the door. Then the eyes went from the surface-aggressive of you lost to something further back, further in — a man who had stopped being entirely present in the alley.

“What’s your name.”

“Wojcik. Mike Wojcik.”

“Mike. I’m Mr. Cole. We’ve met before. Last summer at the Cermak job.”

“Last summer.” Slow. Hooking into something the foreman didn’t have but was now sure he should have. “Yeah, Cermak. Mr. Cole.”

“Good. Two things, Mike. Listen carefully because we’re going to have a short conversation and then we’re going to take care of something for me.”

“Okay.”

“Number one. You’re going to give me your home phone number and your work site number. You’re going to write them on this.” He handed the foreman a matchbook from Slim Ed’s. The foreman wrote. Carhartt sleeves pushed up to the elbow, forearm tattoo from 1968 — a USMC anchor and the letters VN.

“Number two. The next time the phone rings and it’s me, you say yes. You don’t ask what. You say yes and you tell me when you’re available. Do you understand.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

He took the matchbook. Wojcik’s writing was the writing of a man who filled out city paperwork all day — block letters, careful, no flourish.

“Last thing, Mike. Come here.”

Wojcik took the two steps. He didn’t ask why. The next minute felt like the obvious next minute. Darius put a hand on the foreman’s shoulder and turned him to the brick wall — courteous, almost — and the foreman braced both palms on the brick because that was what the body did.

The pulse was in the carotid before the bite was. Heavy and slow, the heart of a man who walked job sites all day and drank at night.

The bite was brief and clinical and the blood was what Wojcik was. The first swallow tasted like Old Style and the second tasted like the marriage and the third tasted like the daughter — the daughter back in the house, the daughter who didn’t make sophomore year, the daughter who was twenty and sleeping on the couch in the front room because the second bedroom was now an office and the office was full of paperwork his wife wasn’t allowed to see. The fourth swallow tasted like the resentment proper. A man who knew the math of his own life and had decided not to tell anybody.

He licked the punctures sealed. Wojcik’s eyes were open but he wasn’t in them yet. Darius walked him three doors south to where his truck was parked — a 1986 F-250 with a city demolition permit on the dash and a clipboard on the passenger seat — opened the driver door, set him in, closed it gently, and walked back to the Cutlass without looking at the alley again.

Back at Kaspar at 7:45. Five minutes to spare. The moving blanket was still pinned in place. Sable opened it from inside before he knocked; she’d heard the Cutlass two blocks away. She didn’t ask how it went. She read his color, saw what eight blood looked like on him, and went back to the television in the front office.

Bear’s truck pulled up at 7:51. A panel van and a flatbed. Three men. The crew foreman was the same one from November — Polish, fifties, didn’t make eye contact with anyone he was working for, which was exactly what you paid Bear for. The door came off the flatbed under a tarp. They had the old frame stripped and the new door hung and locked in fifty-three minutes. Cash in an envelope. The crew foreman counted it once, nodded once, and the van and the flatbed were gone.

Kaspar had a door again. It locked. The plywood on the window stayed.

Ten minutes at the haven before they left. The new door changed the room. Steel did what steel did — it made the cold stop being a participant. The radiator sounded different now that it wasn’t fighting the door-shaped hole. Sable had already turned the television off. The only sound in the front office was the fluorescent in the ceiling doing its tic-tic above the workbench.

Darius took the chair behind the workbench. Sable sat on the workbench itself, one leg crossed over the other, the .38 still on her hip and the wool coat thrown over the chair next to her. She was already in eveningwear underneath — the black silk shell, the pencil skirt, the heels by the door — because she’d gone to dress while Bear’s crew was hanging the door and she was faster at it than he was.

He spread the loadout on the bench between them. Colt .45, magazine two, eight rounds. The empty magazine one. The .357 that had jammed Saturday and that he hadn’t had time to take apart and clean. The .38 snub-nose she was wearing. The matchbook from Slim Ed’s with Wojcik’s two numbers in block print.

“Brennon hands us a Hunt call,” he said. “We need a posture before we walk in.”

She picked up the matchbook, read the numbers, set it down. “Posture about what specifically.”

“Three things. What we tell him about Saturday. What we ask him for tonight. What we do about Neally between now and the formal declaration.”

“Saturday.” She chose between two registers. “Saturday is the one that matters. Brennon’s going to know the broad shape because Annabelle knows and Annabelle reports up. He won’t have details unless Annabelle gave him details.”

“She didn’t.”

“She didn’t.” Confirmation, not repetition — Sable had been carrying that certainty since Sunday morning. “So Brennon will fish. He’ll mention Saturday in some shape and watch us. We need a story that’s compatible with whatever Annabelle eventually says and that doesn’t owe Brennon anything we can’t afford to owe.”

Darius nodded once.

“Working draft,” he said. “We were tracking a reported Masquerade breach in Pilsen. We came on the situation already in progress. We secured the asset and removed the threat. The asset is safe. The threat is wounded and at large. We are reporting through Primogen channels.”

“You don’t say Neally.”

“I don’t say Neally. Brennon says Neally. I respond to what Brennon says.”

“Good.” She ran a thumb along the edge of the workbench. “What about Becky.”

A silence. The kind a man took when the question landed on the part of his ledger he hadn’t reconciled.

“Becky doesn’t enter the room,” he said. “Not unless Brennon brings her in, and he won’t, because Lodin won’t have given Becky to Brennon.”

“Annabelle might have.”

“Annabelle wouldn’t. Becky compromises Annabelle’s read of Neally. She holds that one.”

Sable weighed it. “Agreed. But if Brennon does name her — say Lodin briefed him wider than I think — we don’t lie about her. We confirm and decline to elaborate.”

“Confirm and decline. Yes.”

“What we ask him for.” She picked the second question up cleanly. “We can ask Brennon for two things at the meeting and not look greedy. What are they.”

He’d been thinking about this on the Pulaski drive. “One. The procedural shape of the Hunt — when the formal declaration drops, what the deadline looks like, whether Lodin wants us as participants or as witnesses. We need to know if we’re hunters or spectators.”

“And if we’re hunters?”

“Then we’re the hunters who shot the target Saturday and let him walk. Lodin is testing us.”

The fluorescent ticked.

“Two,” he said. “We ask Brennon — sideways — about the Sabbat read. Was Saturday Neally acting alone, or was Saturday Neally being run. The Hunt call doesn’t make sense unless Lodin has decided which one he believes.”

“And we want to know which Lodin believes because—”

“Because if Lodin believes Neally was acting alone, the Hunt is punishment and we are clean. If Lodin believes Neally was being run, the Hunt is bait and the runner is watching to see who bites.”

Sable was quiet for a beat. “Tomás carries the second question better than we do.”

“Yes. He does. We hand him the second one in the car.”

“Astor pickup or Succubus separate?”

“Separate. Per your read on Annabelle — two arrivals through Brennon’s door reads cleaner. Tomás meets us in Brennon’s office at five to. He uses the Astor to Drake to Succubus route. We come in from the south. Brennon’s doormen log two arrivals, neither of which is a Tremere riding in a Ventrue’s car.”

“Agreed.”

“Third question. Neally between now and the declaration.”

She let the silence do the asking.

“He’s going to come to us,” Darius said. “Tonight, tomorrow, the night after. He has nowhere else. He knows we have the Settebello relationship. He’ll pitch us on brokering Bach.”

“He will.”

“We don’t decide tonight whether we broker. We decide tonight whether we’re available to him at all. If we’re available, he comes here or to your place or to a public location and we hear him out. If we’re not available, he reads it as the door closing and goes for the next-best move, which is throwing himself on Lodin’s mercy directly — and Lodin has no mercy.”

“So we’re available.”

“We’re available. Which means we have to decide how we receive him. The haven is one option. A public is another. Annabelle’s drawing room would be the third and it’s the one Brennon would choose if Brennon were running our coterie, which he isn’t.”

Sable smiled, small. “I like Annabelle’s drawing room.”

“Of course you do. We’ll consider it after we’ve heard Brennon.”

She uncrossed her leg, crossed it the other way. “One more thing before we leave. Tomás needs to know about Becky.”

A slower silence.

“He doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t. I checked when you called him. Whatever Nicolai’s heard, it isn’t Becky. The handoff hasn’t reached the chantry.”

“Tell him in the car after Brennon. Not before. He doesn’t need to be carrying that through the meeting.”

“Agreed.”

She slid off the workbench. The Cutlass keys were on the bench between the .357 and the empty magazine one. He took the keys. She took the wool coat off the chair and shouldered into it. The .38 disappeared under the silhouette.

“What are you wearing,” she said.

He considered the workbench. The ruined leather jacket from Saturday was hanging on the back of the chair — the shoulder still stiff with brick dust and the faint salt of his own dried blood from where the cinder block had grazed him. Not Brennon-appropriate.

“The grey suit. The black overcoat. No tie.”

“No tie reads Director.”

“Tie reads applicant. Brennon needs to read Director.”

“Then no tie.”

Eight minutes. Lights off in the front office. The new door locked behind them with the sound of a door doing what a door was supposed to do.

The Succubus Club at 9:25. The Cutlass parked on Dearborn half a block south. The entrance did what it always did at this hour — the line of mortals down the sidewalk in the cold, overdressed and underdressed in equal measure, the bass coming through the walls like a second heartbeat. March wind off the lake at forty-three degrees and nobody leaving. Two bouncers at the rope. Brennon’s people behind the bouncers, the ones who didn’t check IDs because IDs weren’t what they were checking.

Darius killed the engine. Sable hadn’t moved.

“Hour and a half,” she said. “We could go inside.”

“We could.”

“Brennon’s people will clock the car. They’ll tell him we’re early. That’s already a statement.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

She looked at the line. Mortals in leather and silk, some beautiful, most trying. The Club’s energy came through the car — the music, the warmth of two hundred bodies, the particular hum the Succubus put off that wasn’t music and wasn’t warmth but that every Kindred within a block could feel in the roof of the mouth.

“If we go inside we’re in Brennon’s house for ninety minutes before his meeting. He reads us as eager.”

“If we don’t go inside we’re two people sitting in a Cutlass on Dearborn for ninety minutes and we look like cops.”

“Walk, then.”

They walked. North on Dearborn, away from the Club. The lakefront cold was real and the streets were busy in the specific way Chicago streets were busy the night after a national broadcast — people moving with purpose, talking louder than usual, the kind of sidewalk energy that came from everybody having seen the same thing on television and nobody knowing what to do about it. A woman in a fur coat talking on a payphone outside a restaurant. Two men in Bulls jackets having a conversation that involved a lot of hand gestures. A patrol car rolling south on State with no lights, slow, the officers inside doing what Darius was doing — watching.

Time passed. The walk was cover and reconnaissance. Darius clocked the Succubus entrance from three different angles over ninety minutes without approaching it. The doormen saw the Cutlass. They didn’t see him walk. At 10:40, Sable peeled off — she went in first, through the front, the way a woman who belonged at the Succubus Club went in. Five minutes later, Darius came in through the service entrance on the alley side.

Brennon’s back office. 10:55 PM.

The office was behind the VIP bar, through a hallway that smelled like cigarette smoke and industrial cleaner, past two doors that were closed and one that was open. The open door was the one Brennon wanted you to walk through, which was why it was open. The room behind it was small and warm. A desk that wasn’t expensive. Two chairs in front of the desk, one behind it. A coat rack with nothing on it. A bottle on the desk with two glasses — the glasses clean and the bottle full and nobody in the room going to drink, which was the point of the bottle. A lamp, not the overhead. The overhead was off.

Brennon was behind the desk. He was standing when they came in, because Brennon stood when guests arrived and sat when they’d sat. Mid-fifties in appearance, dark suit, no tie — the same choice Darius had made, for different reasons. The Succubus Club’s master looked like a man who ran a business because he did run a business. The business just happened to serve two clienteles and only one of them paid a cover charge.

“Mr. Cole. Ms. Price. Thank you for the courtesy of your time.”

He gestured to the chairs. They sat. The bottle stayed between them.

A knock on the open door. Tomás, on time — 10:56 by the desk clock — in the charcoal wool coat and the dark turtleneck that was the Tremere’s version of no-tie. He was carrying nothing. His hands were empty.

Brennon didn’t blink at the third chair. He pulled one from behind the door — he’d had it there already — and set it at the desk without comment.

“Mr. Navarro. I’m glad the coterie thinks collectively.”

“The coterie appreciates the advance notice,” Tomás said.

“The advance notice is the Prince’s courtesy, not mine.” Brennon sat. “I’ll be brief. The Prince has decided to declare a Lextalionis on Neally Edwards. The formal announcement goes to the Primogen tomorrow night. The Hunt is open as of midnight Wednesday.”

He let that sentence do its work. The lamp made his face half-shadow. The bottle caught the light.

“The charges are three. Unauthorized Embrace, repeated. Predation on a consort of the court. Sustained Masquerade breach through conduct unbecoming. The Prince considers each individually sufficient. Together they are comprehensive.”

Brennon folded his hands on the desk. He looked at Darius first, because Darius was clan, and then at Sable, because Sable had delivered Lorraine, and then at Tomás, because a Tremere presence at a Ventrue Blood Hunt briefing was a fact that needed noting.

“The Prince asked me to extend three items beyond the declaration itself.”

He held up one finger. Not counting — framing.

“First. The coterie’s actions on Saturday evening are known to the Prince. Favorably. The asset is secure. The Prince considers the coterie’s intervention appropriate and timely.”

Second finger.

“Second. The coterie is not obligated to participate in the Hunt. The Prince recognizes that the coterie has a prior professional relationship with the subject and that participation may present complications. However — and I want to be precise here — the Prince would consider active participation a distinct service.”

Third.

“Third. The Prince wishes to know whether the coterie has any intelligence regarding the subject’s current whereabouts or associations that would be material to the Hunt’s prosecution.”

The third item was a question, not a statement, and the question had Lodin’s fingerprints on it. Do you know where Neally is? Do you know who’s running him? Tell me now and I’ll remember you told me. Don’t tell me now and I’ll remember that too.

Brennon unfolded his hands. Refolded them. Waited.

Darius didn’t look at Tomás. He didn’t look at Sable. He looked at Brennon, because this was a Ventrue talking to a Toreador about a Ventrue problem in a Ventrue Prince’s city, and that geometry mattered.

“We have intelligence on the third item.”

Brennon’s hands didn’t move. His eyes did — a fractional shift, the pupils adjusting to a different register. He didn’t say anything. He waited.

“Neally is Blood Bonded. Not to the Prince, not to anyone in the Camarilla. He’s being run.”

“By whom.”

“Jefferson Foster.”

The name went into the room like a coin into still water. Brennon’s face didn’t change, but the quality of the stillness behind his face changed — the difference between a man who was listening and a man who was recording.

“Foster was entombed in the Auditorium Theatre wall. The Prince referred to this as a personal matter in our February briefing. He is no longer in the wall. He was freed during the Sabbat incursion at the opera — the same event that began this sequence.”

Brennon’s hands unfolded. He put them flat on the desk, palms down. The gesture was almost involuntary — a man stabilizing himself against something that had rearranged a room he thought he understood.

“Continue.”

“Foster is Sabbat. Converted in Toronto. He has been operating in Chicago since his release, using Neally’s prior relationship with him to reestablish a Blood Bond. The Bond is driving Neally’s behavior — the public feeding, the unauthorized Embraces, the predation on Lorraine. These are not Neally’s decisions. They are Foster’s commands.”

“How do you know this.”

“Observation over four weeks. Neally’s behavior at the Succubus Club, witnessed directly. The pattern of escalation — each violation worse than the last, each one more public. That isn’t a man losing control. That’s a man being pushed. The siring of the child confirmed it. Neally has neither the motive nor the disposition to Embrace children. Someone is making him do things that will destroy him in Lodin’s eyes, systematically, on a schedule.”

Sable hadn’t moved. Tomás hadn’t moved. Darius could feel both of them in the room — present, structural, holding weight without drawing attention.

“The operational vector is a woman named Emily Carter. She’s Foster’s ghoul. She moves between Neally and Foster — she carries the blood that maintains the Bond. We’ve identified her at multiple locations associated with Neally’s activities.”

Brennon was quiet for three seconds. The Succubus Club’s bass line was audible through the wall behind him, a pulse that had nothing to do with anything in this room.

“You’re telling me the Blood Hunt target is a victim.”

“I’m telling you the Blood Hunt target is being operated by a Sabbat elder who has been in this city since February. The Hunt on Neally may be procedurally correct. It doesn’t address the threat.”

Another silence. Brennon picked up the bottle — the one nobody was going to drink from — and moved it two inches to the left. Pure displacement. He set it down.

“Mr. Navarro.”

Tomás straightened. Not performatively — a quarter-inch adjustment that changed everything about how he occupied the space.

“This assessment. Is it the coterie’s, or is it supported by your House’s analysis.”

Tomás took his half-second. “The assessment is the coterie’s, drawn from direct observation. I have not yet reported to my Regent on this specific matter. The Chantry’s analytical resources have not been applied.”

“Yet.”

“That word was deliberate.”

The faintest crease at the corner of Brennon’s mouth. Tomás had told him three things in two sentences: the Tremere didn’t know yet, the Tremere would know soon, and the coterie was giving Brennon the lead time to act before the Chantry acted.

Brennon looked back at Darius.

“The Prince will want this directly. Not through me.”

“We understand.”

“Tomorrow night. I’ll arrange the audience. Same protocol — all three of you, if the coterie is willing.”

“The coterie is willing.”

Brennon stood. The meeting was over. He didn’t shake hands — Kindred don’t — but he walked them to the door in a way that was its own form of contact, the body language of a host who had received something he hadn’t expected and was recalibrating every assumption he’d walked into the room with.

At the door, he said one more thing. Not to Darius — to the space between all three of them.

“The Hunt stands as declared. The Primogen receive it tomorrow. What the Prince does with your intelligence is the Prince’s decision. But I will tell you this much — the Prince does not waste useful instruments.”

The door closed behind them. The hallway smelled like cigarette smoke and industrial cleaner, same as before, but the building felt different. The bass line from the club floor came up through the floor like a heartbeat that belonged to someone else.

The hallway. The exit. 11:22 PM.

The coterie came out into Brennon’s hallway and Darius didn’t wait until the Cutlass.

“The Hunt’s the cover. Every Kindred in this city is going to be looking at Neally for forty-eight hours. Lodin will be running the Hunt. The Primogen will be repositioning. Brennon’s people will be working the Club doubled up. The Tremere will be answering inquiries instead of generating them.”

He kept his voice down.

“This is the window.”

Sable didn’t slow her pace. “Window for what.”

“For everything we’ve been holding. Anything that needs to happen quiet and needs to happen now — this is the forty-eight hours.”

Tomás took the half-second. “The Pyramid will notice the absence of inquiries before it notices anything else.”

“The Pyramid is not running the Hunt.”

“No. But the Pyramid is observing the Hunt. And the Pyramid notices what other people do during the Hunt at least as carefully as it notices the Hunt.”

Darius nodded once. Conceded the point without conceding the play.

“Then the moves we make during the Hunt have to be moves the Pyramid would expect us to make. Or moves the Pyramid wouldn’t see at all.”

They reached the service door. Darius paused with his hand on the bar.

“Inventory,” he said. “What’s been waiting.”

The three of them, fast, no preamble.

“Maldavis tonight,” he said. “I’ll find a payphone south of here, somewhere off the Brennon grid. Make the call. See what comes back.”

“Allicia,” Sable said. Not tonight. Tonight she got the route. Tomorrow night she drove.

Tomás: “I will need to debrief Nicolai before the Pyramid hears about Jefferson Foster from any other channel. That will happen tonight. I have a separate matter at the Chantry that is, I think, related to the question of who else in this city is being run on Bonds without their knowledge. The Hunt is the right window for that inquiry. I will not discuss it further in the hallway.”

Three operations, one window.

“Sequence,” Darius said.

“You and Sable first. Pyramid second. We reconvene tomorrow before the audience with the Prince. I will have whatever I have by then.”

“Reconvene where.”

“The Drake, the bar at the back. Six PM. Public, neutral, both clans use it, no one notes a Tremere and a Ventrue having a drink there because that’s what the Drake is for.”

“Done.”

Darius pushed the bar. The alley was colder than expected. The wind off the lake came around the corner of the Succubus and found the gap between the overcoat and the collar of the suit.

Tomás peeled off east. Sable fell in beside Darius and they walked south on Dearborn toward the Cutlass.

Halfway there, she said, quiet:

“You haven’t said what you’re doing during the Hunt. The list was the things that have been waiting. Which ones are you actually doing.”

“Maldavis tonight. Then we see what Brennon’s audience gives us tomorrow.”

“And me?”

“Allicia. Tomorrow night. I’ll have the cash and a clean car ready by sunset.”

She nodded once. The decision was already made.

“The Lodin audience tomorrow — you and Tomás carry the room. I’ll be late, with a reason that isn’t a lie.”

“Annabelle. Lorraine.”

“Annabelle. Lorraine.”

The Cutlass was where they’d left it. The engine started on the first turn. They drove west on Madison, into the part of the city where nobody Brennon employed was likely to be standing near a payphone at eleven thirty on a Monday night.