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“I’ve always wanted to know what happens when a werewolf breaks a bone,” I said as we walked out to the car. “I ought to send the X rays to Dr. Shumacher for her files, see what she makes of it.”
“You were damned lucky,” Ben said. “What if it had been more than a hairline fracture? What if it had been a break that needed to be set, and the fast healing made it heal wrong? Then what?”
I shrugged, not really wanting to think about what would have happened if I’d ended up lying on the bottom of that shaft with a snapped femur instead of a cracked pelvis. Ben grabbed my hand, raised it to his mouth, and kissed it. The worried crease on his brow, his pursed lips, suggested he was imagining that same scene.
“Let’s not dwell,” I said, pulling my hand free so I could wrap that arm around his middle and hold him close.
* * *
I MET with Rick in his comfortable office under the art gallery, hoping he could help me make sense of some of what had happened. I told the story, and for him I left in the weird bits. Well, the even weirder bits.
“Anastasia’s really gone?” he said when I’d finished. I nodded, grim. “It’s hard to imagine. She’s always been here.”
“She seemed happy, which was pretty amazing to see.”
Rick smiled in response. “Well, good for her. And now she’s left you to fight the good fight?”
I blushed. I still wasn’t entirely prepared to address that part of the story. But I had the coins, a point of access.
“The artifact Anastasia—Li Hua—was protecting, the Dragon’s Pearl, has the power to replicate objects. Food, gold, whatever. She thought he was trying to make a supply of these.” I placed them on the table for him to examine.
“Isn’t that the coin you found in Dodge City?”
“Anastasia recognized it. Roman’s followers and people under his power have them. Defacing them seems to neutralize them. We have to assume he used the pearl to make a bunch of them before we took it back.”
“He’s expanding his army,” Rick said. I nodded. Rick turned Anastasia’s abandoned coin over in his hand. He murmured, “I had no idea.”
“The Dodge City vampires were his, too. Who knows who else. Anastasia knew about the coins because she escaped him. I don’t know if anyone else does. Rick, did Arturo have one of these?”
Rick shook his head. “Arturo wasn’t directly Roman’s. He was the protégé of a pair of vampires in Philadelphia. But them—they’re probably Roman’s. Arturo—we might have been able to reach him, with a little more time.”
“You mean without interference. Mercedes Cook is Roman’s, isn’t she?” I thought of all the times I’d seen Mercedes, the Broadway star who came out as a vampire on my show, who’d seemed so ebullient and gracious—who’d manipulated Denver’s former vampire Master, hoping to get him to destroy Rick because she recognized the danger he posed. All that time, she’d probably been wearing one of Roman’s coins. If only I’d known. But I hadn’t even known about Roman then.
Roman was no longer the deep dark secret he once was. Not by a long shot.
“Definitely,” he said. His gaze went soft, lost in thought. When he spoke again, his voice was distant, too. “I killed my first Master, the one who made me. He and his clan trapped me, turned me against my will. They didn’t belong to Roman—they were destructive and evil all on their own. I killed them all to destroy a plague, so I could choose the way I lived. Make peace with the monster in my own way.”
I stayed very still, waiting for him to tell his own story, biting back the millions of questions I could have asked. This was a confession, a private secret, like Li Hua’s story.
“I was over a hundred years old before I met another vampire. I think I believed I was the only one in the whole world. Then the Madrid Family sent a branch over to establish its rule in the New World. Can you imagine how astonished they were to find me already here? It turns out the clan that made me was a rebel group, crazy anarchists who’d thought to escape the old Families of Europe by coming to New Spain. We spent some time being very confused by each other.” He shook his head, smiling at the memory. “In the meantime, I decided I didn’t much like the old Families, either. I spent the next two hundred years or so wandering. Worked in taverns, saloons, smuggled on the California coast when it was still Spanish, helped carve out the Santa Fe Trail. And once again, vampires came west and were surprised to find me already here, running a saloon in Santa Fe.
“I watched new nations come into being. Watched old ones struggle and drown in the face of the onslaught. I’ve spent my whole life, five hundred years of it, in this part of the world and never been bored.” He spoke with love and admiration in his voice, in his smile, in the glow of his eyes.
“Why are you telling me all this, Rick? Why now?” I asked softly.
“A story for a story, like we agreed. And because I think you’re right—history is important. Maybe more than ever. Most of those five hundred years I was cut off from vampire culture. I learned about our nature on my own, for the most part. Learned the rules by trial and error. Learned to blend in, eventually. But I’ve never really understood, and I don’t know the history. I don’t know all the stories about Roman—what vampires believe about him, what powers he has, what powers he’s thought to have, who knows of him and who doesn’t. This is the first time I’ve ever regretted the way I’ve lived my life. I wish I knew more.”
Smiling, I shook my head. “No. Don’t you see it? This is perfect. If you’d been part of a Family that whole time, if you knew everything about him, you’d already be tangled in a web—you’d be one of his servants, or you’d be one of the Families that are terrified of him, like Boss’s Family. The way you’ve lived, the way you are—you’re outside it all. Who better to oppose Roman than someone without any cultural baggage about him?” Anastasia had planted a huge weight on my shoulders. To carry it successfully, I couldn’t do it on my own. With allies like Rick, how could I fail? “How about it?” I asked. “Would you like to be a general in my opposing army?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and we shook on it.
* * *
WHEN I got back from the trip, I found a nine-by-twelve padded envelope in my stack of mail. The return address was a department at the University of Notre Dame. Curious, I tore it open and spilled the contents onto my desk: a one-page letter and a small plastic vial, sealed, that looked like it contained two hairs, dark brown, almost rust color. I held the vial up to the light and stared at the hair for a long, weightless moment.
I had to read the letter a couple of times before it started making any sense. It was from a grad student working at the library archives at the university, which turned out to have a good collection of Sherman correspondence, his family’s papers and memorabilia—including a lock of his hair. This grad student listened to the episode from last month about historical figures, heard my offhand remark about Sherman, wanted to help, and asked that I please not tell anyone that she’d smuggled out the stra
nds of his hair sample. But she could verify that this was Sherman’s hair, and maybe it would be enough for DNA testing.
