The Grand Elusion — Tuesday, February 12, 1991, 4:35 PM

Kaspar & Sons, Pilsen / Succubus Club, State Street Chicago, Illinois

The thaw came in the afternoon while she slept, and by the time Sable woke the city had given up forty degrees of cold to the lake. She felt it before she heard it — the slow shift in the building’s old timbers, the click of pipes letting go of a week of frost, the particular quiet a Chicago February makes when the temperature climbs through the freezing line in the middle of the day. She sat up in the cot in the back bedroom at Kaspar & Sons and listened to the radiator unclench, and for one moment, the moment before memory arrived, she was a woman in a room.

Then it arrived.

Lodin’s blood was a hand on her shoulder. Not heavy. Not insistent. Present. She had three of them now. The first man she’d ever loved had given her one, the woman she wanted to save had given her one without knowing it, and the prince of Chicago had given her the third over a desk on Michigan Avenue while a clerk took notes. Three points of light pressed against the back of her eyes, each one a little brighter than the dark behind it.

She dressed. Black slip, the gray wool dress from Marshall Field’s, stockings, the boots with the low heel. Hair down. The gold pin at her collar had belonged to her grandmother — the only thing of value Ann Price had brought to Chicago in 1988. The mirror gave her a woman in her late twenties with snow-cold skin and a face that had become more useful since Saturday.

Tomás was at the kitchen table when she came down. Manila folder open. Yellow legal pad covered in his small handwriting. WBBM on low. The folder had Vienna’s seal on it.

“He sent a directive at five,” Tomás said. “Ehrich is in town. The Cave Saturday night. He performed the stake escape. Nicolai wants him by week’s end.”

Darius came down the stairs in his shirtsleeves. He had spent the day on the phone with the Allerton front desk and the building manager at the Prudential, and his face carried the gray of a man who had decided something in the night and had not yet said it out loud.

She poured herself a glass of water from the tap she would not drink and set it on the table because the gesture of having a glass to hold had become reflex even at home. Three vampires in a kitchen on a thaw afternoon in February. Two months into the Chicago job. The work in front of them was breaking a lock no Tremere elder had ever broken.

“The Cave is closed Tuesdays,” she said. “He’ll be at the Club.”

Tomás looked up. “Why.”

“Because everyone is at the Club on a Tuesday in February. The Cave is a stage. The Club is a meeting place. If he wants to see Erichtho, he sees her there. If he’s saying goodbye to friends before he disappears for another six months, the friends are there. He’s a performer. He won’t do his final escape in front of an empty room.”

“Final escape,” Darius said.

“He knows Nicolai is hunting him. Sixty years on the run. He came back to Chicago in the middle of a Sabbat advance for a reason.”

Tomás closed the folder.

The cab dropped her on State Street at six. The thaw was holding — slush in the gutters, the smell of wet pavement and exhaust. The line for the Succubus Club had begun forming an hour early. Tuesday crowd: art school kids, second-shift waiters, the small steady population of mortals who came here because nowhere else in Chicago let them be photographed near the people who got photographed.

Rex at the door touched the brim of his cap. She nodded and walked in.

The bass came up through her feet. She climbed to the balcony and took a booth with sightlines to the main bar, the Labyrinth stairs, and the door, and she opened her Auspex like a window.

Three Kindred on the floor. Brennon in his usual circuit. A Toreador she didn’t know in the corner booth with two Blood Dolls. And at the small table near the storage doors, a man she had never seen, in a tuxedo jacket over a black t-shirt, sipping nothing from a tall glass of soda water.

Late forties in appearance. Dark hair receding at the temples, parted on the left. Hands that did not stop moving — a coin walking across his knuckles, a half-deck of cards she had not seen him produce, the cards becoming a fan and the fan becoming a coin again. The aura was the strangest thing she had read in eight months of reading auras. Tremere lattice, the geometric watermark. But the lattice was broken. Whole sections of it had been cut out and patched with something else, something darker, organic, the color of old blood and certainty. Blood magic stitched to blood magic by hands that did not belong to either school. She thought of a violin rebuilt with parts taken from a different instrument, and of the sound the rebuilt thing would make.

He looked up at the mezzanine and saw her looking. Smiled. The smile of a man who had been recognized by a stranger and was not afraid of strangers.

The room tilted half a degree to the left.

A woman in a club uniform brought her a napkin she hadn’t ordered. Folded in thirds. The handwriting was not Keaton’s. Three words: He sees you.

Keaton himself was at the bar now — she had not seen him arrive — collecting a package wrapped in butcher paper from the bartender, signing a leather ledger, leaving. Two of his men loitering near the storage doors. Anarch teamsters, Karl among them. Posture of men told to be present but not active. A holding action.

Below, Darius crossed the floor with the courtesy of a man who could afford to be unhurried. Tomás was already at the mezzanine bar, ordering an untouched bourbon, his back to her booth so anyone reading the room would not pair them. They had not coordinated this. Each had chosen the angle that made sense.

She brought her gaze back to the magician.

Three Blood Dolls had moved into orbit around a booth on the lower floor. The booth held an elderly man with white hair and a wool sport coat and the still curiosity of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything a year before Sable was born. The aura on him was thaumaturgical but not Tremere — a Magus, then, the kind Erichtho had described once at the Drake. The three Blood Dolls were moving wrong. Two girls and a boy, all under twenty-five, faces washed in strobe. The auras were the giveaway. Mortal auras did not show that military gray, the gray of orders received and not yet executed.

She caught Darius in the crowd and tipped her chin one inch to the right. He saw the booth. He saw the three.

What happened next happened over twelve seconds.

The boy moved first, hand inside his jacket. Sable stood at the rail and let her Presence open and found his eyes across forty feet of dance floor and showed him what was waiting in her. Dread Gaze was a thing she did with her whole body — the shift in the air around her, the smile becoming a wall of teeth, the small adjustment of her shoulders that announced predator. The boy froze halfway out of the booth and went the color of milk and sat back down with his hand still in his jacket and a string of saliva on his lip. The first girl saw what had happened to him. The second saw her see. By the time Tomás had crossed from the mezzanine bar with his hand on the older Magus’s elbow and was murmuring something the older man could not quite hear but could not quite resist, both girls were sitting again, three syringes were on the table, and Darius was a foot from a man in his late twenties in a charcoal suit who had walked in from a service corridor Sable had not been watching.

Orloff, then. The mortal Magus the chantry files had mentioned. Telekinetic, the file said. Young and angry and convinced he was the protege of a man who deserved better than what Vienna had done to him. Twenty-six years old and willing to kill a vampire in the middle of a Camarilla nightclub because his teacher’s friend had picked the wrong lock once.

He looked at Darius and his hand went to his jacket and Darius caught his wrist and held it and said something low and very brief, and Orloff’s face went slack. Karl, across the room, saw it. Looked at Darius. Looked at his own men. Looked at the door.

Darius said one more word and Karl stood down. The teamsters peeled off toward the parking lot exit without a glance back. Whatever loyalty Keaton had bought from them did not extend to dying in a Ventrue’s eye-line.

Brennon was at her elbow. He had crossed the floor without making noise.

“Service corridor behind the back bar,” he said, without looking at her. “Takes you to a freight door. The freight door takes you to an alley. I would consider it a courtesy if Gibson left through that door in the next ninety seconds.”

She nodded. He moved off.

The old man — Gibson, a name on a chantry list and now a face — was on his feet. Tomás had his elbow with a gentleness he had not learned at the chantry and that Sable suspected he had picked up from her. The Blood Dolls sat in their booth like marionettes set down. Orloff stood between Darius and a velvet chair, and there was a silver chalice in his hand he had not been holding two minutes ago and that he was no longer entirely sure he wanted.

She left the mezzanine.

The magician had not moved.

She crossed the floor to him at her own pace. Forty feet, then twenty, then five. The cards walked between his fingers and he watched her come like a man watching a curtain rise on a play he had already seen. Brown eyes. The strange smooth pallor Tremere kept when their Thaumaturgy was constant and well-fed. He was, she realized as she sat down across from him, the first vampire she had ever met who looked at her with no hunger and no power calculation and no curiosity about her clan. He looked at her like a magician looking at a volunteer from the audience.

“You broke it,” she said.

The cards stopped. He set them on the table fanned. King of Cups.

“Friend,” he said. The accent was Hungarian under sixty years of Midwest. “You have walked here from a particular question. May I save us both the choreography?”

“Please.”

“You want what I did. You want it for someone.”

“For two people.”

He whistled, very low. “Two.”

“And I will offer you what nobody else in this room can offer you. We don’t work for Nicolai. We work for ourselves. You teach us the mechanism, you walk out of this club with us, you are gone before he knows you were here.”

He looked at her for a long moment with the particular sad professionalism of a man who had been about to disappoint a paying customer twice a night for sixty years.

“You think I am refusing because I do not want to.”

“I think you’ve been refusing for sixty years.”

“I have been refusing,” he said, “because I cannot do it again.”

She waited.

“The lock I picked was picked once. I had four years and I had help. The help was not free and I have paid for it every night since, in ways I will not describe to a Toreador in a public room. The mechanism does not repeat. It does not repeat for me. It will not repeat for your friend Tremere over there at the bar, who I think is also in this room for me tonight, and who I would respectfully ask not to draw the stake he is presently considering.”

She did not turn. She knew Tomás was at the mezzanine rail. She had felt the shift in the air the way a swimmer felt a current. He was working out his loyalty in real time, twenty feet up and forty feet north, with a stake in his coat pocket and a chantry directive in his folder and a coterie pact pulling against both.

“Then what was it for,” she said. “What did you get.”

“I got me,” the magician said. “And the strings.”

He turned his hand over on the table. The empty palm of a man who had once been famous for empty palms. But the lattice in his aura had moved, briefly, as a marionette’s strings move when the puppeteer breathes.

She looked at his face and understood he did not know.

“You’re not free,” she said.

“Friend.” He smiled. Tired and warm and absolutely accurate. “I have been telling myself I am free for so long that the lie has its own bones. You are correct. I am wearing a different leash.”

A step behind her, controlled and light. Tomás had decided. She did not yet know what.

“Walk out with us anyway,” she said.

“To Vienna.”

“To us. We will speak for you. We will arrange terms. You will live.”

“I will live in a cell.”

“You will live.”

He looked at her for the length of a held breath. Then his gaze moved past her shoulder and she felt Tomás stop ten feet away.

“Show me the stake, friend Navarro,” the magician said. “It is rude to carry it concealed in such a moment.”

Tomás did not move.

“Put it away,” Sable said, without turning her head. “He’s coming with us. I gave my word.”

A long beat. Under the bass, the sound of a coat closing.

The magician squared the cards and pushed them across the table to her.

“For your trouble,” he said. “I will come.”

The interrogation took an hour in a back room Brennon had loaned them on the third floor — windowless office, cedar paneling, the smell of old tobacco. Tomás ran it because Tomás was the one who would have to file the report. Darius sat in the corner. She stood by the door because the magician relaxed when she was visible, and because Tomás had spent the half-second outside Gibson’s booth weighing protocol against pact and had chosen pact, and she wanted him to see what that choice was worth.

The mechanism was not a method. It was a transaction. A Sabbat priestess in New York in 1929 had done something to him over four nights in a basement on the Lower East Side, and the something had taken pieces of him he had not noticed at the time and built a hollow in their place where the Bond used to live. He thought he was free because he could not feel the leash. He had spent sixty years not feeling it. He could not say whose hand was on the other end. He could not say what the leash would ask of him when it asked. He did not believe, until Sable said it aloud to him, that there was a leash at all.

He believed her by the end. She watched the belief arrive. It was the most painful thing she had ever watched a vampire learn.

Carna, then. Still Carna, in Milwaukee, with the route Erichtho had laid out at the Drake — the long route, the slow route, the one that took apart Allicia’s fifty-two years one season at a time. There was no shortcut. The magician’s escape was not an escape; it was a substitution. And Sable did not want for Allicia what had been done to him.

When Tomás had what he needed, she crossed to the magician and put her hand on his shoulder. He covered her hand with his. His skin was the cold of every Tremere’s skin and a little warmer.

“I leave him to you,” she said.

Tomás staked him with the brevity of a man who had decided to make peace with a thing he could not afford to enjoy. Keaton, who had been waiting in the parking lot since the moment Karl’s men walked out, took him in a delivery van. Vienna would have him by Friday.

Orloff went into Brennon’s custody with the chalice in an evidence bag. Gibson was a block away in a hired car before Orloff knew the magician was gone. Darius walked the bartender to the storage corridor and gave him back twenty minutes of his life rewritten so that none of them had been there.

She fed in the alley. The Blood Doll was nineteen and bored and had been doing this every Tuesday since November, and his blood tasted of cigarettes and the cosmetic chemistry of someone who had been buying his ID off a kid on Halsted. Two pulls. The Beast settled. She licked the wound closed and watched him stagger back into the club with his shirt loose and the dazed pleasure of a man who would tell his roommate later that something incredible had happened to him and would never know what.

The thaw was holding. State Street ran wet under the sodium lights.

She walked north for a block before she let herself think about it.

Three Bonds. The magician’s hollow. Allicia’s nocturne behind a door fifty miles south. Tomás had chosen the pact tonight, and Vienna would never know, and the structure the three of them had been pretending was a coterie had revealed itself, in one of Brennon’s back rooms, to be a treaty between empires. A treaty could survive. It would have to be renegotiated by Christmas. The magician’s last escape had been a deal with the devil, and he had lost — had been losing for sixty years and had not known it. The not-knowing was the cleanest demonstration she had been given of why she was choosing the slow road.

The sky was a wet grey. Somewhere a CTA train made its small lonely sound on the elevated tracks.

She pulled her coat tight.

She walked.