She lowers her glasses and waves them at the syringe in the boy’s hand.

– This might hold answers for you. They would come with a price, naturally. You would arise from my couch with a new hunger, a second need. You would find yourself distracted from the hunt, contemplating how best to use your victim’s blood. Consume it? Or have another Vampyre infect it for you? You can’t use as anathema blood you’ve infected yourself, it will only make you ill. Nor can you use blood infected by the same Vampyre, not more than once or twice. You see how the complexities of this addiction multiply.

She points at the boy again. He pulls smoothly on the plunger.

She tilts her finger upward. He stops.

– With this amount, you will still be granted visions, likewise universal in their nature, but far more unpleasant. And accompanied not with warmth and relaxation, but muscles contracted so tightly they sometimes tear from the strain. Fever. Pain. In your bones. Particularly in the sternum, the spine, the hips, and the femurs. Odd, yes? And when it is over, you will be left not with the same addiction, but with one that demands these higher doses. An addiction that can only be sated through misery.

She moves her finger. More blood enters the syringe. Stops.

– With this amount, things become simpler. Agony. Harrowing phantasms. Blood at war with itself. And a lengthy, wracking, death.

The boy pulls the syringe free, wipes the needle. Offers it to Vandewater.

She takes it.

– Predo wants you. Knowing that, and knowing that I cannot afford to thoroughly alienate him, we can dispense with this dosage as an empty threat.

She presses the plunger, squirting a thread of the blood onto my chest. The smell burns my nostrils.

– Having done so, it only remains to decide.

She holds up the syringe.

– Will it be this? In which case I will save my questions until after you have recovered and are begging for further torture.

She holds her fingernail against the side of the syringe, indicating a smaller amount.

– Will it be this? In which case I will still hold my interrogation, waiting until you have suffered sweetly, and crave yet more sweetness.

She lowers the syringe.

– Or may I begin my questions now? Secure in the knowledge that you are aware I will not brook the barest shadow of a falsehood in your answers. Knowing you understand the price that will be paid.

And she shows me the needle again.

I rub my chin against my shoulder.

– Well, Mrs. Vandewater, it took you awhile to get there, but you finally managed to say, tell me what I want to know or I’ll fuck you up forever.

She waits.

I roll my eyes.

– I don’t know what you’re waiting for, I already told you once to fuck off.

There’s a knock at the door. One of the machine pistol boys answers it. He nods at Vandewater.

She sets the syringe on the tea table. The boy assisting her closes the briefcase full of anathema.

She stands.

– Of course, one of the components of anathema’s effectiveness as a weapon is its brief shelf life. It must be distributed immediately after it is harvested. This batch is meant for the Hood. And the courier is waiting.

She walks to the door.

– But not to worry, the dose in that syringe will last more than long enough to serve its purpose. In fact, a few minutes’ aging will make it much more effective.

She leaves, escorted by Briefcase Boy and one of the machine pistols.

I look at the syringe sitting on the table and then over at the machine pistol boy and the tongue slicer that remained behind. I look again at the syringe, secure in the knowledge that when the time comes, I will beg like a child to keep her from sticking it in my arm.

I’m a dead man. And not just in the way that I’m always sort of a dead man. Once I’m in Predo’s hands there will be considerably less talking and much more thrashing and questioning. And after that, I’ll get to see my first sunrise in a quarter century. That should be worth something, but I expect I’ll be distracted by the sensation of my eyelids melting. Being addicted to this shit will be the least of my concerns. Hell, the smart play here is to volunteer for the light dose. Lady wants to offer up a last gasp of nirvana, who am I to say no? That or just answer her damn questions outright. Figure I got no one to protect. Not like I owe anything to Digga. Not like I can tell her a hell of a lot about his setup anyway. Figure she won’t stop with questions about the Hood. That’s her obsession, but she’ll get around to asking about the Society, too. Figure I don’t much care about that either. Why should I? Only reason I ever stuck on that turf is because I like the neighborhood. Sell Terry out? Yep, no problem. The thing to do here is let her shoot a little of that shit into me and go out with something soft on my mind. And who knows, maybe there are some answers in that needle. I don’t really believe that, but a lie can be just as sweet as the truth. Sweeter, nine times out of ten. Yeah, all in all, I got no good reason to be hardass here. I’m a dead man and the lady is just giving me a chance to decide how hard I want to go out. Most guys, they’ll never be so lucky. No reason to be a hardass at all. No secrets worth keeping. No one worth protecting. Just me. Figure a better deal ain’t gonna come around for a long while.

Vandewater comes back in alone.

She takes her seat. Lays a hand over the syringe.

– You’ve had ample time for thought?

I shrug, feeling something that resembles freedom.

Her fingers curl around the syringe.

– If, by any chance, you should need any additional incentive to make this easy and less time consuming, I could point out to you that our distributor in the Society tells me you have a girl whom you are-

She doesn’t get to finish. It’s hard to finish what you’re saying when a guy lunges at you and bites one of your eyes out.

The boy who wired my hands together in the car knew what he was doing. He looped it around each wrist several times, then crisscrossed it back and forth between both wrists, drawing them tightly together, knotting the loose end and mashing that knot with a pair of pliers. The boy who rewired them after they had clipped me free for tea time? He didn’t take the same class. Probably the one who drove around the block over and over. He should have started with fresh wire. But he didn’t. He should have made sure my wrists weren’t flexed when he bound me. But he didn’t. No, he used the same wire that had already been stressed by all my wiggling and twisting when I was figuring out how good a job the first guy did. He wrapped it around my flexed wrists so that when he was done I could relax those muscles and have a little slack so the wire didn’t bite so deeply into my skin. And he took those loose ends and twisted them together like the bit of wire used to close a bag of sliced bread.

If I ever find out which of them it was, I’d like to give him my thanks. Because it’s his shitty job that makes it possible to wrench my hands free and keep this crazy witch from clawing my ears off when I spit her eye in her face.

I’ll give it to her, she doesn’t scream, much.

The one by the window is circling, looking for an open shot, a shot that won’t have to go through Vandewater. The tongue slicer is closer, his hand is inside his jacket, going for a weapon that is less indiscriminate than the machine pistol the other boy has. Vandewater is blind, one eye somewhere on the floor, the other covered in blood, she’s still raking her nails at my face. I throw her at the tongue slicer. He has his hand out of his jacket, holding a tiny automatic that looks like a mechanical wasp. The old lady is coming his way. He lets the gun fall from his hand and holds out his arms to catch her. I don’t watch what happens next, I’m busy picking up the tea table and throwing it at the boy with the machine pistol.