Chapter 180 The Journey
POV: Valentina | London, various locations
I have been tracking the embryo for nine days and I am learning what Fell wants me to learn, which is that he has been preparing for exactly this contingency for longer than I have been hunting him.
The first address from Silas's records leads me to a warehouse in Bermondsey that smells of preservation compound and recent occupation. Not recent like yesterday. Recent like four hours ago, the specific sharp quality of chemicals that have been moved and handled within the same day. The equipment is gone. The surfaces have been wiped with the particular thoroughness of someone who knows what forensic analysis can recover. A single stool left in the center of the floor, which I think is intentional, a way of saying I know you are here.
I find the second address through a contact Tom gave me, a supernatural community worker who maintains informal records of unusual activity in warehouse districts and who tells me that a refrigerated transport left a unit in Deptford at eleven that morning, heading east. I follow east to a cold storage facility in Barking and find the same thing: gone. Recent occupation. Wiped surfaces. This time no stool. He has decided I received the message.
The third address I find myself, through the logic of what Fell needs: a reliable power source, temperature control to within one degree, isolation from populated areas that might generate curiosity about what is stored there. There are not many locations in London that satisfy all three criteria and I have been working through them systematically because systematic is what I have in the absence of direct intelligence.
The third address is a substation building in Hackney Wick, converted, well-insulated, the kind of unremarkable structure that exists at the edge of industrial zones and which no one looks at twice. I am inside in ninety seconds and the compound smell hits me immediately and I follow it to the back room and find a refrigerated unit still running, still holding temperature, and I have my hand on the seal before I see the note taped to the front of it.
Stop chasing, or I destroy the embryo. Your choice, dhampir.
I stand in the room and look at the note for a long time.
The unit is empty. He moved the embryo before I arrived, again, and left the unit running and the note attached because he wanted me to get here in time to read it, wanted the message to land in a place where I could already smell the compound, where the presence of what had been here would make the threat more concrete.
Callum finds me there an hour later. He has been tracking my movements the way he tracks everyone's movements, not from distrust but from the specific responsibility of someone who has learned that people operating alone in Fell's orbit have bad outcomes.
He stands in the doorway and looks at the note and then at me.
"He knows how I move," I say. "Every time I get close he is already gone. Not close-gone. Gone with hours to spare." I am not performing calm. I am actually calm in the specific way I am calm when something is happening that I cannot resolve through action, which is a different kind of calm from the ordinary kind. "He has a source. Someone in my network or someone watching me directly."
"Or both."
"Or both," I agree.
Callum comes and stands beside me and looks at the empty unit for a moment. "He needs her alive," he says. "Threatening to destroy the embryo is a negotiating position. Not an intention."
"He might destroy her if he decides the research value is less than the risk of me continuing to hunt him." I have thought about this. I have thought about this every hour for nine days. "She is my daughter in the sense that she carries my blood and Cormac's blood and she is alive in the sense that she has a heartbeat and a developing nervous system. I have never thought of myself as a mother. I do not know what that word means in relation to me." I pause. "But I know what it means that she exists and that he has her."
"We'll find her," Callum says. "I promise."
I look at the note. I look at the empty room.
"He wants me to stop chasing," I say. "He wants me passive, waiting. That is what the note is asking for."
"Are you going to stop?"
I pick the note up and fold it and put it in my pocket. "No," I say. "But I am going to change how I move."