'Qui: The Fall of Ottawa' Part 2, Chapter 12

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Previously: After a very long night and her first taste of Qui's Blood, Sam was accosted by a severely weakened vampire in her building's lobby. With the unexpected help of a vagrant she'd let in earlier, she managed to use a fire axe to chop off the creature's head. Unfortunately, the body was quickly discovered and the police would soon be involved. Sam headed back to her apartment to call Qui in the hopes that he could help make the problem go away.

Chapter 12:

Qui slipped on a pair of gloves and lifted the fire axe, holding it up to give it a once-over. He'd been around long enough to remember when such things were more common, but Sam had been unusually lucky to find one these days. The 70s were so soft; it seemed like every passing decade the humans made themselves more and more vulnerable to attack. 

He'd need to have a talk with Sam about getting herself properly kitted out with concealed weapons so she wouldn't be forced to rely on luck as a means of defence in the future. The strength he'd gifted her would carry her in a fight against any normal human, but a vampire was something else entirely, even one as badly wounded and practically starving as the Tzimisce she'd finished off. 

"I'll take it from here," he said to the officers who'd reported in with him. "Make sure the bodies get to our morgue, not a federal one. The last thing we need is the extra paperwork."

The beat cops nodded in approval and began loading the bodies into a waiting ambulance. None of Qui's municipal subordinates liked working with other departments. He was lucky enough to have an in with the provincial police, but the federal branch was a tough nut to crack safely, so he'd left them well enough alone after inserting a single mole he could trust. Tomorrow night he'd make sure that the vampire's body was properly disposed of before any inquisitive mortal could get too good a look at it. 

The last thing he needed was a cascade of failures that would give Prince Jonah cause to kick him out of the city. There would be no coming back after that and he'd be forced to surrender the sword to Cranston's agents for botching the assassination job. His reputation would be tarnished forever and that simply wouldn't do. Two months left. He had to keep himself in the clear for two more months and then all of this would be behind him.

Once the officers left the scene, Qui took one last look around the lobby. He'd noticed a few seemingly inconsequential items that the others had missed. Had this been a higher profile murder, they'd have been forced to go through the area with a fine tooth comb, but he'd made certain that it was reported as an unusually violent fight between two elderly homeless men. There wasn't much interest in the case after that–nobody wanted to touch it, and that worked well enough for him. 

He hunched down to pick up the first item–a pale grey shard that felt like light, flexible plastic. He'd seen this before; it was one of the quill-like protrusions that had been attached to the Tzimisce's hips. He turned it over in his hands, unsure what to make of it. If it had truly been a part of the vampire's body, it would have withered away at the point of final death, but these creatures were known for making radical alterations to themselves that didn't always end with the crafting of their own flesh. Grafting foreign items into their bodies–particularly to make themselves more deadly–wasn't exactly unheard of in the Sabbat community. But whatever this was, it didn't seem like a weapon. 

He slipped it into his coat pocket and moved on to the other item.

The homeless man's grimy coat lay abandoned in the lobby's far corner. It had been worn by both of the men involved in the attack, so he wanted to be sure that nothing important was left behind. 

Qui left the lobby and started up the stairs toward Sam's apartment while he riffled through the coat's pockets. He tried to hold back his disappointment as he encountered an empty cigarette pack, a cheap watch with no arm band, several bottle caps, a small pencil, a five dollar bill, and several crumpled pieces of paper. Wishing to be thorough, he opened the paper scraps up one by one and gave them a quick browse. 

His eyes widened and he returned to the text for a second look with far more care.

"Watch the cop. Write down when she leaves and returns. Describe anyone who comes with her or leaves with her."

The other slips of paper were filled with poorly scrawled times and dates written in pencil, presumably Sam's comings and goings as recorded by the vagrant. 

"We accidentally caught ourselves a spy," he muttered to himself before knocking on Sam's door. "It's James," he called out. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah!" he heard Sam say from the other side. Her voice sounded hoarse and far less confident than she'd seemed earlier in the night. He couldn't exactly blame her for that. All things considered, he felt like she'd acquitted herself marvelously. Surviving a Sabbat attack and killing the thing with an axe? That was no small feat for a newly-minted retainer. 

The door pulled open a few inches and Sam peeked out above a thick chain tethering it to the frame. "Just making sure you're you," she said. "You understand." She undid the chain and opened the door before slumping back into the dark apartment. "Please tell me that I didn't make as big a mess back there as I think I did."

Qui had to stoop down slightly to get through the door–he could swear that they made apartments smaller in Canada. "We're lucky you called when you did," he said. "Five minutes later and I'd have been on my way home. Day shift isn't an option for me." He closed the door softly behind him. "But no, you don't need to worry. At least not about the dead men. I'm having them taken care of."

"Taken care of?" Sam asked. "Do I want to know?"

He shook his head. "It's not like that. We just want to be sure that nobody takes too good a look at our friend with knives for teeth."

"Actually, I had a question." Sam crashed down on a rather comfortable looking couch. It was one of the only surfaces in the apartment that wasn't covered with stacks of paper, magazines, or books. "Why did the vampire turn into an old man when he died? I thought I was seeing things at first!"

He sat on the other end of the couch and stretched his legs, careful not to topple a tall stack of dog-eared paperbacks. "We don't die like mortals do since we've already died once," he said. "When we meet final death, our bodies revert to whatever age we would have been as a mortal. I'd say the guy you killed was at least seventy. You're lucky it works that way or I might not have been able to cover things up."

"I still can't believe any of this is real," Sam said. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, holding herself tight. "You talk about it like it's all normal."

"It is to me," Qui said. "I think you'll get accustomed to it with time. You're stronger than you give yourself credit for–I wouldn't have brought you into this world if I didn't think you could handle it." He stood back up and walked over to the windows. "Does this apartment have any rooms where sunlight can't get in?"

"Huh?" Sam asked. "Why?" She rolled her eyes at herself a second after she asked. Of course she knew why. She wasn't thinking clearly. "Sorry," she said before he could reply. "Yeah, I have a guest bedroom. It always felt a bit awkward to me without a window so I use it as a storage room."

"I hope it won't be too much of an imposition."

She shook her head. "Of course not. It's the least I could do after I made you come out here so close to sunrise."