The Handshake — Sunday, 22 July 1990, 8:21 PM

Kendrick’s Auto / Seventeenth Street / Fifth Avenue Studio Gary, Indiana

Rain found the cracks in the cinderblock and came through as a seep, a thin mineral sweat that darkened the floor near the roll-up door and smelled like wet concrete and iron. She opened her eyes to Sunday night and the sound of water on metal and two men breathing and the specific weight of being responsible for people who hadn’t asked to be hers.

DeShawn gave the report before she asked. Spoon. The lot. The side door. Gone south on foot.

She sat on the couch and looked at the two of them and asked what they thought, and the answers split along the line she’d expected: DeShawn offered a grave and Pete offered a story, and the difference between them was the difference between a soldier and a kid who still remembered what it felt like to trust someone. She went with the story.

She coached Pete in the lamplight. The bones of the lie: Six owed Chicago money, the calls got worse, he took the cash and ran. Between the bones, Pete’s own voice, Pete’s own details, the gym bag in the trunk that might have been real or might have been a nineteen-year-old’s instinct for the kind of truth that makes a fiction breathe. She listened to him repeat it and watched his face and thought: this boy is going to be good at this, and that’s something I’m building, and the thing I’m building is a machine that makes liars out of children.

Humanity five. The thought filed itself and closed.

Seventeenth Street in the rain. Tanya’s house. Brown siding, white trim, a light in the front room. She parked three houses down and sent Pete in and waited with the wipers on low and the .38 under her thigh and her senses wide open, listening to heartbeats through walls.

Seven minutes. Pete came back. Spoon already knew something was wrong. Spoon already suspected Chicago. The story landed in soil that was ready for it, and the roots took hold before Pete finished talking.

She had Pete bring him to the car.

Antoine. Spoon. Twenty-two or twenty-three, lean, dreads pulled back, a face built for watching and a voice built for not talking. He got in the backseat and looked at her with the eyes of a lot watcher evaluating a new variable, and she looked back and opened the Presence and let it fill the car like a change in pressure, like warmth from a source he couldn’t see, and his guard dissolved the way ice dissolves in water you don’t realize is warm until you’re already in it.

Two successes. Shallow. Twenty-four hours of devotion made from chemistry and fear and the need to feel safe. She bit her wrist and told him to drink and he did and the shudder went through him like voltage and his pupils blew and his grip on her arm tightened and she pulled back and the wound closed and that was it. One mouthful. One step on a three-step ladder that ended in ownership.

She sent him back to Tanya’s house. Tomorrow he’d come to Pete. Pete would bring him to her. By then the Entrancement would be wearing off but the blood would still be singing in him, and the singing would be enough.

The burgundy Oldsmobile was parked at the south end of the block under a dead streetlight with the engine off and the window cracked an inch despite the rain.

Third time. Same car. Same tint. Same patience.

She read the aura through the crack in the glass. Mortal. No pale wash of undeath, no gold of faith. A living man with a focused amber aura doing a job he’d been hired to do. Professional. Patient. The emotional color of someone getting paid by the hour and worth every cent.

Six’s blocks. The watcher was covering Six’s territory, cataloguing what moved in and out of the space where a man used to operate and didn’t anymore. Whoever held Six’s Chicago debt had sent an accountant of a different kind, and the accountant had been sitting on these streets for two nights writing down license plates and faces, and tonight one of those faces was hers.

She sent DeShawn. Porch at Sixteenth and Grant, line of sight, ball cap, the particular invisibility of a Black man sitting on a porch on the west side on a Sunday night doing nothing.

She called Darius from the payphone. His voice came through careful and clipped because someone else was in his apartment, and she talked fast: the burgundy Olds, the mortal watcher, Six’s blocks, the Chicago connection. He said he’d call her back in an hour at the studio. The line went dead.

On the way to Fifth Avenue she stopped at a bar off Fifteenth and took two blood points from a man in work boots who was drinking alone because Monday was coming and Monday meant something he didn’t want to face. Quick. Professional. She left him against the wall and drove east and thought about the fact that she’d hit two west side bars in two nights and her face was the kind of face bartenders remembered and the hunting ground was burning down one visit at a time.

The studio on Fifth Avenue. The lamp. The chaise. The paintings Michael left behind like a man leaving furniture in a house he knows he’ll never come back to. The phone on the floor, silent, the fifteen minutes before Darius called back passing in the particular silence of a room that contains a phone that could ring with either of two voices.

It didn’t ring.

At 10:30 Darius called and she said the thing she’d been building toward all night. Coterie. Full disclosure. Cards on the table, face to face, not on a phone line.

She dressed for war. The black blazer over bare skin, the single button doing work that architecture does, the pumps that changed the geometry of how she occupied a room. Not seduction. Statement. Two predators meeting at a table, and the one who controls the frame controls the conversation, and Sable had been controlling frames since she was sixteen in a VIP booth on Cottage Grove knowing exactly what she was selling and exactly what it cost.

Pete on the landing. Chair against the wall. Visible.

Darius arrived at 11:42. Navy jacket, white shirt, the stillness of a man who had already decided what he was going to say and in what order. He scanned the room the way she’d seen him scan rooms at Elysium: exits, threats, angles, power dynamics, all of it catalogued in two seconds and filed in a system she couldn’t see but could feel operating behind his eyes.

He sat in the wooden chair by the window. Folded his hands.

“You first or me first?”

“Does it matter? You and I are not so different, Darius. Not so different at all.”

He went first. The name she’d never heard: Darius Cole. The generation she’d never suspected: tenth, not twelfth. The sire: Chuc Luc, Pham Hong, ninth generation, Lodin’s brood. Planted in Gary to build a pipeline through the docks. Every interaction she’d had with Warren Birch, every phone call, every intel exchange, recalculated in real time with the new variable inserted, and the new variable changed everything and changed nothing because the man in the chair was the same man who’d been in the chair before he said his name. Just more of him.

She matched it. All of it. Michael Payne, eighth generation, the painter, the absent sire. Sharon Payne, seventh generation, Presence 5, the vendetta. She told him about Big Six without flinching and watched his face not flinch back, the single blink of a man updating a file. The ghouls. Kendrick’s Auto. The Allicia bond, the spy assignment inverted, the mutual blood exchange on the chaise where they were sitting right now, which she told him because full disclosure meant full disclosure and the chaise still smelled faintly of turpentine and blood.

“Humanity five,” she said.

He didn’t react to that either. He filed it where he filed everything, in the architecture behind his eyes, and what came back was not judgment but assessment, the Ventrue reading the structural integrity of a wall he was about to lean against.

They spent an hour building. His docks, her west side. His Dominate, her Presence. His pipeline to Chicago money, her window into Modius’s household. They divided the threats between them like men dividing a bill: Dane, Shepard, Cantone, Sharon, the prince, the archon that hadn’t arrived yet but would.

Court: separately. Communication: payphones, Tuesday and Friday. Never on the studio line, because the studio line belonged to a woman in Chicago with swollen hands who hadn’t stopped calling and wouldn’t stop calling because mothers don’t.

He stood. Buttoned his jacket. Offered his hand.

“Coterie. No formal pact, no blood oath. Just the understanding that we both have enough to bury the other, and the arrangement only works if neither of us does.”

She took his hand. The grip was cool and firm and brief, the handshake of two people who had just given each other loaded weapons and called it partnership.

He left. Pete on the landing. The Cutlass in the rain. The building settling around her.

She sat on the chaise longue. The lamp hummed. The moth tapped the screen. The phone on the floor held its silence like a held breath.

She had a coterie. She had a partner who knew her name and her generation and her body count and the name of the woman whose blood she could still taste when she thought about Tuesday night on this same chaise, and the partner had shown her every card in his hand and the cards included a ninth-generation sire in Chicago and a pipeline worth more than anything in Gary and a mortal whose mind was being rewritten one session at a time into a person who had never existed.

Mutual assured destruction. The only foundation that lasts.

She closed her eyes. The rain slowed. Somewhere on Sixteenth Street, DeShawn sat on a porch watching a burgundy Oldsmobile watching nothing, and somewhere on the highway a navy Buick Century carried a mortal man whose name was becoming someone else’s, and somewhere in Chicago a hairdresser with swollen hands was asleep with a phone number on a scrap of paper on the nightstand, and the phone hadn’t rung tonight but it would ring, because the things that are coming always come, and the only question is whether you’ve built something strong enough to stand in front of when they arrive.

Dawn at 5:29 AM. The sun rose over Lake Michigan and burned the rain off the streets and the streets dried and forgot they’d been wet, which was what streets did, which was what Gary did, which was what everything did except the things that refused to forget, and Sable Price was one of those things, and Darius Cole was another, and together they might be enough or they might not, and the night was over, and the night had been Sunday, and Monday was coming for everyone.