The Two Fangs

Chapter 9

"I came home and she was just gone."

Grid explained, both fury and a hitch in her voice. "But she got word to me. The Vampires took her."

They had relocated to the stand of trees outside the villa's walls, a private spot Dresden assured them even his attendants knew not to approach. Grid stood with her back against a tree, drumming the fingers of the hand she couldn't lift against its bark, eyes downcast. Valle only stood and listened, afraid to attract attention to himself.

"She said...she told me about Osah, the OSA, being secret police, and how when He zaps you it's just nanomachines or whatever that kill your cells. She gave me someone's name who could scrub those out of me, and she...said goodbye."

"Was she in the resistance?" Dresden asked.

"I put her name in our records, but that isn't what this was about. She..." Grid fell quiet, and with a grunt pounded her good fist against the tree a few times. "Whatever. The guy who scrubbed me told me the rest. Like about the Fang of Osah. I knew about that, about the 'avenging angel' people saw, but not his name, and that he's the one they send after dissidents who don't have the killer nanites

"I did some poking. Some really dangerous-ass poking, and I got a hold of her one more time. She told me all about Crucis, and that she sees him come and go, because Osah has her at His headquarters. And she told me that Crucis gives large sums of money to a twin brother. An identical twin brother."

Their host let out a huff. He picked something out of his teeth thoughtfully and looked to Valle.

"You said you didn't want me to do anything about it."

Valle was quiet for a long moment.

"I still don't," he said.

"It's suicide."

"I know it's goddamn suicide," Grid interjected.

"Suicide plus one," Dresden halted her with a finger. "Batslaughter. I can't be a party to it."

He turned back to his villa, cast in a dreamy twilight, itself a sign of ostentatious luxury. He gestured at the outstretched wings that enclosed the courtyard.

"I have ten zoans here being cared for," he said. "I have a heron who needed an entire new spine, and a lupine who needed extensive skin grafts and a number of muscles replaced. And a rodentine in hospice. There'll be twenty more before the month is out. I can only do this at the government's grace. I'm open about my stance, but I'm not a revolutionary. I can't be."

"We're not asking you to help," Valle said. He dropped his eyes to his feet. He knew what he was saying.

Dresden rested his hands on his hips, still facing the villa still.

"I wish you would," he said, softly. "I wish you'd ask me, or that you'd drop it. And stay here."

"I'm not dropping it," Grid said, her eyes on Valle. "I'm gonna see my wife again. I'd take that chance if Osah were an omniscient murder god waiting to send me to three kinds of Hell."

"Does it matter what Osah is?" Dresden turned back finally. "How different is the OSA from what people think He is?"

"I'm going."

A long silence.

"Not with that arm.

#

At Dresden's insistence, Grid accepted service to several of her bargain-quality bionics. While he couldn't offer much for her neck, not without keeping her in his bubble for months to recover, he had most of her hydraulic piston-muscles completely upgraded.