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Stock Management




Look, detective, my name is George Drake. My parents had a sense of humor, which — I see, from your blank expression — you don't appreciate.

You stare at me, from the side of your beat-up grey desk. Your eyes peek, menacing and dark, above your reports. How can you stand to eat your greasy fish sandwich and drink that bitter, acid-smelling coffee?

You're not here to answer any questions.

True. But what good is me answering yours?

Oh, you saw the scene in that hotel as well as I did.  

No, maybe you saw it better since I was busy fighting with all my might, with open mouth and flashing tooth and furled wings...

But do you remember what you saw?

You don't think so.

Your little ape-brain, working in the way your ancestors learned when they peeked out of their dark caves and saw something that defied their reason — your little ape-brain, I say, has erased all traces of what you saw.

You and your trained investigators will have collected charred bodies, and bitten bodies and bloodless bodies, and people in inexplicable comatose states.

Yet, you're treating this as a typical gangland killing.

Oh, you lean back and snicker at me, your best mocking-ape laughter, exposing those ridiculous stubby teeth of yours that are not good for chewing anything except cooked meat, and you tell me, "Try me, just try me."

Oh. I'll try you all right, because otherwise they will win and if they do—

What did you scribble on that pad? Paranoid delusions?

The paranoid part is true, I suppose. I do feel I'm being persecuted. So would you. So should you, because both of us are being chased down a blind alley — herded into death. Both of us and humanity, besides.

But the only deluded ones are you and your kind, thinking you're safe, and the night terrors banished forever, even while they control your every move.

I suppose your granny didn't tell you about dragons, or werewolves, fairies, vampires.... No, she wouldn't have.

But you must have heard about these creatures. In comic books, cheap novels, late-night movies— 

I'm sure you think all those creatures are imaginary, dreamed up by your ape-ancestors, with their little ape-brains— 

Evolution, yes, of course I believe in evolution. Most of your science is on target — if incomplete. It's not that evolution isn't true, just woefully narrow. Scientists, sifting through bones and digs, choose the evidence they think makes sense, ignoring all other: the human footprint on a million-year-old rock; the five-hundred-thousand-year-old Homo sapiens skeleton.

They don't fit the picture and so off they go, treated as so much white noise in the beautiful music of evolution.

Only suppose, detective, suppose, for a moment that this weren't true. Suppose that humans — not necessarily Homo sapiens — came from the stars, long ago, while nothing but a few pathetic mammals skittered about sucking dinosaur eggs. Suppose they then created Homo sapiens— 

No, I don't read the Enquirer, either.

Last night's events. Ah. Last night's events. It will be hard to explain without telling you what came before.

My — uh — in your terms, the family I belong to got a summons, six months or so back. A summons to a summit.

This was important, because my family has had the ruling of human history these last two hundred years.

How, you ask? Oh, nothing illegal. Patient scouting out of opportunities, patient waiting, like a cat by a mouse hole. It is said that of all of ... the families, ours is the most patient, the most articulate. It probably doesn't hurt that we're not inclined to eat human flesh — yes, I mean that literally — and that we live long. Very long. Longer than any other sentient.

So, when we — the Drakes — got the summons, it came as an unpleasant shock. For obvious reasons, when one family assumes prominence, it tries to sweep the other ones from positions of power, to drive them to the dark never-never of half-legality and mythical existence. There are several ways to do this, among them assassination. The Lupus clan ruled the Middle Ages. The burning piles of the Inquisition were their last attempt at keeping power, but they'd lost the battle long before it came to that. They'd lost it when people started reading about Greece and Rome and rediscovering an age before the sword and blood were the mightier—

Yes, the summons came from the Lupus and, in your blessedly enlightened age — thanks to us, Drakes — it came by fax.

Our... my father... our ruler, looked it over and evaluated it. It was his opinion — and how right it was — that it was a trap, and therefore he decided to put as many of our people as he could around the location of the meeting.

I didn't know exactly where our people were — you understand — I'm the hundredth son — no, such profuse spawning isn't rare — and as such I have no need to be informed of all decisions.

In fact, it was decided I shouldn't know, just in case something went wrong and I was capture by the other side.

We had reason to suspect the Puck family might be in with the Lupus, as might the Vlads — they've long ago shed the other name that confused them with us.

Anyway, I was expendable, so I was sent to the meeting as my father's representative. The other side has trouble telling us apart and would never be able to distinguish me from my older brother, the heir, or even, maybe from my father. As I said, we age slower than the other races.

Mind if I smoke? A cigarette, I mean. Thank you. It is a comfort. My mouth still tastes foul from the flaming last night. And tell me, detective, have you never found it odd that on the Internet the term flaming was so widely used for destructive attacks? Our fingerprint, if only you could see it.

The meeting took place at the Garth-Nemes. Owned by a relative of mine. We do own most of the wealth in the world. And create most of it. That is our sustenance, wealth, and we've learned to accumulate it.

You'd never think it, to look at him, but a computer tycoon who surprised the world with his meteoric rise to success in recent years — and some Drake's hoard he's accumulated — is, of course, one of us, as are others — others you'd be shocked should I disclose it.

No, I don't intend to. No use challenging me. Not because it's such a secret, but because you wouldn't believe it anymore than you would believe anything else.

I went confidently to the meeting, knowing our people would be in the area and, besides, my father had assured me that there wasn't much the damn wolves could do to bring us down.

Our fortresses are secure, the prominent members of our race well sheltered and guarded. And we are, physically, larger than any of the werewolves, or the fairies, or even the damn vampires.

Yes, of course, that's the families I referred to. Those are their natures and their family names: Lupus, Puck, Vlad.

Although, understand, very few of them go under those names in the real world. And very few of them can be spotted, when in human form.

Certainly no one in the lobby of that expensive hotel looked other than human.

The valets and maids slid around on the high-pile white carpeting like ships across a smooth sea. And none of them — not one — smelled.

And right at the entrance, as I asked the help where the room 3F was, where I was supposed to meet the others, the lack of smell bothered me.

When one of the valets — a small, blond young man — smiled at me, I noticed he had sharp, small teeth. Not enough to deviate alarmingly from pattern human but... it scared me, made me feel uneasy.

None of them seemed to see anything wrong with me. No. I wasn't naked. I only lost my clothes when I shifted shape.

When I went into the hotel, I wore a jade-green suit. Our family wears jade-green a lot. Look at the cover of computer magazines and you'll see that he, too, wears them.

I walked down an unexceptionable corridor, to an unexceptionable hotel meeting room.

Furniture, of the massive and pseudo-Mediterranean type — dressers and chairs in pickled oak — cluttered the hallway.

The meeting room was also massive: a salon with oatmeal-colored textured-fabric walls, oatmeal-colored Berber carpeting, an oval golden-oak table, and oatmeal-upholstered arm chairs around it.

On the chairs sat, definitely not your average people — although your eye might not have spotted their strangeness.

I knew I had trouble the moment I saw them.

Unlike us — egg-spawned and therefore running in similar-looking groups — look at any computer company in the country — werewolves have a definite hierarchy that can be gauged on sight. Their rulers are always the largest of the pack.

The werewolf present... well, he stood at least six-eight, perhaps six-nine. He had sharp vulpine features, a mass of black hair that grew not only on his head but also on his arms, and across the backs of his hands. Tufts of black hair burst between the barely-joined-together front halves of his shirt. His gold watch band just showed amid the black forest.

He grinned at me, as I entered, a wolf-grin displaying his prominent canines.

Beside him, the Vlad — no one you'd know, they avoid the limelight...listen to me!  They avoid all light, of course. She was a mousy woman, with dark hair caught up in a bun, and spectacles, and she looked at me and smiled, displaying her fangs.

I didn't like the smiles, but what I liked even less was the representative of the Puck family. You'd recognize him instantly. His amiable face has gazed at you from a thousand photographs in a thousand magazine covers — his winsome smile has graced supermarket-checkout scandal sheets and serious publications dealing with policy. Particularly after his recent marital difficulties.

Oh, your eyes widen. You didn't recognize his corpse, then?

He was one of the first I flamed, but perhaps I flamed him too thoroughly. I'm amazed, though, that his disappearance hasn't been noted yet. But then, the Pucks, too, tend to be born in large pods, and perhaps one of his brothers has taken his place. Or perhaps this was one of his pod-brothers who died.

Anyway, when I saw him, I knew I was in trouble. This was not a meeting to challenge my family's supremacy. It was a meeting to inform us that we'd already lost the battle.

I started sweating and my change-reflexes attempted to take over.

I swear I'd never guessed the Pucks were in any way making a bid for power. Of their own accord, they can't organize anything, not even themselves. For most of humanity's history, the power balance has gone between our family and the Lupus, with the other two families shifting alliances as needed.

The French revolution was probably the only bid the Vlads ever made for power, and though they weren't exactly our allies, their eruption allowed us to overturn the werewolves for good and all.

They did rule the countries behind the Iron Curtain, too, but only for seventy years, a flick of a finger on the eternal dial and the long life-spans of our families.

So... I didn't suspect the Pucks of ruling ambitions, and I never recognized him for one of them. Though I suppose only the glamoury of which his kind is capable can explain his survival in power this long, particularly given the lack of organization that is also typical of his kind.

As I said, they all stood and smiled at me.

I was sweating and shaking, but I managed to say, "I am Drake. You have summoned me."

The werewolf smiled and said, "Yes. We have summoned you to give you a chance to cut a deal. As you can see we have allies in high places." He gestured towards the Puck, who smiled his slickly persuasive smile in my direction.

"Wait," I said. "Wait.” My skin had started beading with the peculiar ichor sweat that lubricated the way for the scales that would follow my transformation. My incipient stump of a tail twitched impatiently within my well-tailored pants. Stumps of wings beat at the back of my shirt, between my shoulders. They had the highest political offices. I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself, trying to avert panic, trying not to show my fear. "Wait, you can't be so sure of your position. Yes, you might have the politics, but we have business and in this dual world we live in, politics are no longer the hinge of it all. It's not like your benighted Middle Ages when taking the king meant taking it all. The chess game has changed a little, Lupus, my friend."

He laughed. It is something awful to see one of them laugh. "Oh, yes, you have the business. But do you, now? Your people might hold the high offices and rake in the money, but aren't they dependent on hundreds of humbler servants?” He smiled at the Vlad. "Drake, while your people took over the computer industry and built your vaunted Internet and started talking of taking humanity out of the planet and into space, we have been working. We, and our allies.” The Vlad smiled back, her little black eyes twinkling behind pince-nez glasses. "One by one, at our request, the Vlads have penetrated, subverted, taken over offices everywhere. They abandoned their blood banks to join forces with us. You even find them all over your computer companies. Not every office worker is a Vlad, only the influential ones. And influence and power isn't always where you expect them. They're secretaries, humble file clerks, bureaucrats. And they hold the real power.”

He grinned at me. "If you don't believe me, think why else office buildings would be forests of little cubicles, lit only by artificial light. In how many office buildings have you seen partitions blocking out daylight from the broad windows? All the work of the Vlads. They've worked in other ways, too, promoting the political power of the Pucks. The Pucks started infiltrating politics in the beginning of the twentieth century. Now they dominate all countries and most parties. We haven't changed much. The wolves remain the military might of the world. Some of us might have made inroads in politics and religion — you'll recognize us, if you think about it, by the hairiness and the disposition, but mostly we stayed in the shadow. This time we're working through our allies. And we're ready to give you an ultimatum.” 

He grinned wolfishly. "We only demand a share of the stock management.” His beetling eyebrows rose and fell. "The livestock management. You are the smart ones, the clever ones, cook us up a war or a rebellion, a confusion large enough to create many corpses on which the rest of us can feed, unseen. It is a lamentable thing that my race needs human blood to survive, as do the Vlads. Oh, they have their blood banks, for everyday sustenance, but they still crave and need the living blood.” He shrugged, apologetically, huge shoulders rising and falling and causing the hair to poke out further between the over-strained halves of his checkered shirt. "And blood of live humans is in short supply in your sanitized, demographically accurate modern societies. There's only so many trips one can take to third world countries. As for the Pucks, they do not need blood, but they appreciate the turmoil and feeling that comes from wars, revolutions. Feeding on human feeling, as they do, they like the raw emotions better than the bland ones. So provide us with wars and revolutions, with sieges and devastation enough on a regular basis, so we can feed, and we'll leave your little wealth-creating empire alone. Otherwise, you've seen we have the power to crush you. We'll bring the anti-monopoly laws down on your computer megaliths, and the Vlads will sabotage you from the inside, ensuring that your released products are full of bugs. So, tell me, Drake, which will it be?"

All right, so I reacted without thinking — or without thinking it through. My panic at the realization that I'd been trapped, my paranoid fear that my own family had known just what would happen and had sent me in, as a sacrificial lamb, to give themselves the time to think through and negotiate a better deal... All those emotions caught up in me in a knot.

A little war, a little revolution...

But my family needed stable times for the computer era to continue flourishing. We needed our wealth as much as the other races needed their odd fodder.

My wings, growing to their full seven-foot span, tore though my shirt, brushing the chandelier on the ceiling. My forked tail poked through the pants at the back. The rest of my suit and my expensive white silk shirt…well, my guess is that they tore as my body expanded to ten times its normal size.

Since the mass remains the same — only more spread out — this made it possible for me to fly to the ceiling of the room and flame, left and right.

The Puck was the first one to go — an expression of extreme wounded surprise in his blue-grey eyes — engulfed in flames and burned away. I took out the Vlad, too, though I had to flame her longer to ensure she was truly dead.

The werewolf made it out of the room, though.

I was right. There was something wrong about the valets. Most of them were Pucks, I think, with a few carefully shaved Lupus thrown in. However, my people had taken over the maids and, if my people had truly decided to sacrifice me, yet they helped me fight.

The battle was nasty, though I don't know — and you probably can't remember — how nasty.

I have no idea how I escaped unharmed. I bit and clawed, and flamed. Oh, boy, did I flame. Not even the fire sprinklers could prevent my burning half the treacherous bastards who would wrest power from my family and send all races of humans into primordial violence to satisfy their animal hungers....

I woke up with you putting handcuffs on me, while I sat, dazed, on the floor of a hallway that had been charred, flooded and bloodied beyond recognition.

Do you mind if I smoke another cigarette?

Thank you.

You see, I'm not exactly afraid of your justice, detective. Your ape-peace-enforcement doesn't scare me.

I've rested long enough. When I'm done with this cigarette, I shall change form, rush out of the station and fly through the clear blue air to my family home.

Conspicuous? Nah. No one, not even yourself, will actually believe what he sees. Faced with what it has been taught is only mythological, Homo sapiens edits it out. It's a defense mechanism, like possums playing dead. Doesn't always work, but it's comforting enough.

No, I don't fear your justice.

No, what I fear is that my father, savvy creature of the world that he is, will have cut a deal...a deal involving a few disasters, a few revolutions, a few wars.

He won't realize this is just the slippery slope into a new dark age that will allow the werewolves to rage amid the humans once more and raise their bloodied muzzles to the sky in triumph.

Which is why I decided to speak frankly to you, detective. All the supernaturals are allied against the Drakes but, as I said, we're the ones who don't feed on human flesh or human suffering — we could forget that once our ancestors created you from the native life forms. We might be willing to treat you as humans, as allies, if you put aside your ape-fears and stand beside us and help us.

We could start with you, and your closest friends; quietly spread the word of what is really going on. Drag the Vlads out of the offices into the full noon-day sun. Surround your local politician with cold metal... no need for knives, just wrap them in iron chain. As for the werewolves, lock your doors at night, secure them, do not allow hairy strangers in.

The apes and the drakes, allied, we can do great things. The apes and the serpents....

So, take a sip of your coffee, detective, and tell me what are you going to do?

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Framed