The word immortality caught my eye immediately. It was just kind of slipped in there, mentioned casually during this long essay. But the word was hyperlinked. I clicked it and found myself taken to a different part of the website. I leaned forward, intrigued, and began to read more carefully. I clicked four more hyperlinks and was taken to two different websites before I finally found what I didn’t know I was looking for. It said,
Would you like to become a vampire in a quarter the amount of time it takes normal thralls? Would you like to join a growing community of immortals bound together by friendship and sacred covenants, spread all throughout the Great Lakes area? Come to one of Boris’s seminars!
Seminar: $200
Enthrallment: $5000 plus admin fees. Seminar fee waived.
Beneath all that was a list of locations and dates all around the region, from Northern Michigan all the way over to the middle of New York State. I ticked off the dates that had already passed, then took a screenshot of the ones coming up. I now knew exactly where Boris had been – and was going to be for the next few weeks. It only took a quick internet search to find out that all the websites I’d been through on this weird little digital jaunt were registered to Boris’s antiques company. I let myself stew on this for almost an hour, clicking every hyperlink on all the websites and doing a handful more searches, before my phone rang.
It was Jenny, my contact at the Cuyahoga County courthouse.
“Hey, Alek,” she said slowly. Jenny and I had dated briefly five years ago before we quickly realized my insane schedule was not going to leave us happy for long. We still talked a few times a year. “You remember that guy you asked about yesterday? Boris Novak?”
I could feel Maggie perk up in the back of my head. “Yes?” I asked.
“Well, I was filling in for a coworker in the contracts department this morning and decided to do a search for Boris in our physical records. I found something kind of weird. He has an enormous file here. Nothing digital. All paper records, all stuffed into a miscellaneous bin in the basement.”
“Huh,” was the only answer I could manage. Contracts with the Other were technically public record, though few people knew how to get their hands on them. Cleveland had digitized their records years ago. They should have all come up in the searches I’d been doing over the last week. “Why weren’t they in a digital file?” I asked.
“No idea. The company who did the digitization was kind of a pain in the ass. The head of our contract department has been bitching about them for years. He claims they’re lazy, corrupt, or both.”
Corrupt, Maggie sniffed. I wonder …
You wonder what? I asked her.
I wonder if Boris paid them not to digitize his files.
“So what are these mysterious contracts?” I asked.
“I’m not really sure,” she told me. “They’re really long, and I don’t do contracts. There’s lots of stuff about ownership, property rights; that sort of thing. I’ve got nothing better to do. Give me an hour and I’ll send you some scans.”
True to her word, a half dozen scans came through to my email in short order. Now, I’m not a contract lawyer and I’m definitely not an Other contract lawyer. But I collect on debts for a living, so I’ve read thousands of these during my career. The first thing I noticed was that these were very long – almost a hundred pages each, which meant they were incredibly comprehensive. The second thing I noticed was that whole pages were redacted, which meant that these were copies of the contracts, not originals. Redacting was a way one company of Other could keep another from finding out the wording they used.
I picked one at random and spent the next couple hours reading it and rereading it carefully. All the legalese made my head hurt, but I could tell it was a work of art. It was crafted carefully, every word chosen for a reason, leaving no loopholes and allowing no wiggle room for either party involved. By the time I’d finished, I felt kind of ill. Even Maggie had long ago gone silent, reading along with me, and I could sense her palpable disgust from the corner of my mind.
I finally closed the PDF and set my phone aside. At some point in the last hour, Eddie had come along and sat in my lap.
The moment I set my phone down, he said, “We’re out of tuna.”
Deep in thought, I walked to my truck and grabbed a few cans of tuna I’d forgotten to bring in the night before, returning inside and opening one of them before setting it on the kitchen floor.
Eddie sniffed it once. “This isn’t albacore.”
“It’s all they had,” I said distractedly. I didn’t have time for him, to be honest, and I hoped he’d shut up and eat.
Eddie settled back on his haunches and stared at me. I ignored him. Okay, I said to Maggie. I know what’s in the blood tally that Jacques wants. I just can’t believe he’s kept it a secret this long. I picked up my phone and called Jenny back. “Hey, can you do me another favor?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“Look through those contracts – just the first page of each one – and find me one for someone named Sam. Should be pretty recent.”
“Hold on.” She set down the phone, and I could hear the shuffling of papers. It didn’t take very long before she was back. “Sam LASTNAME HERE??”
“That’s it. Can you scan it and send it to me?”
“Sure.”
I hung up, then looked through my notes until I found Boris’s landline. A familiar voice answered the phone.
“Is this Sam?” I asked.
“… Yes?” the thrall responded.
“Good. If you want to help Michael get through the next week alive, you’re going to meet me for lunch.”
Three hours later, I was sitting at a smoky little bar in a strip mall in Brook Park. The place was “outdoorsy,” with wood paneling and lots of shelving for knickknacks and a large bison head above the door. Not really my kind of place, but it was practically empty in the middle of the day, and the lone bartender sat in the back playing some game on his phone with the volume turned up while I conducted my meeting. Sam – Boris’s tall, overweight thrall – shoved himself into the booth across from me, glancing around the establishment like his master might be hiding behind the pinball machine in the corner. The poor guy was wearing cargo shorts and a League of Legends T-shirt, completely soaked with sweat, his brow wrinkled in consternation.
“Boris told me not to see you again,” he muttered, hunching his shoulders.
“But you’re here anyways,” I said. I sat straight in my own booth, fixing Sam with my I’m-done-with-this-shit gaze and drumming the fingers of my left hand on the table.
Sam’s own gaze settled on me. He swallowed hard. “I’m just trying to help Mike.”
“And I’m hoping you can,” I said. “But I need you to answer some questions for me.” I produced a printed-out version of a contract from the Cuyahoga County courthouse – his contract – and slid it across the table. “You know what this is?”
Sam flinched. His eyes didn’t linger on it for more than a second or two before he pointedly looked away. “Of course.”
“Good.” I pulled the contract back toward me and flipped absently through the pages. It was a thick stack of paper, printed on both sides. “There’s an awful lot of redacted stuff in here.”