The envelope arrived on a Tuesday morning, which was appropriate, because Tuesday was the day Wei had died.
He didn't know that for certain—he had lost track of days in the way that the recently dead tended to, the hours blurring into a continuous present without meal schedules or alarm clocks to punctuate them. But Granduncle Bo had been keeping count with a kind of bureaucratic dedication that surprised nobody who had known him alive, marking time in the mental ledger he'd maintained for twenty-two years in whatever corner of the between-space he inhabited, and he said: Tuesday. Fourth day.
Four days dead. Wei had been a ghost for four days.
He found this both longer and shorter than he expected.
The envelope appeared under the back door of Madam Zhao's restaurant—the real back door, the one that opened onto the alley, not the one that led to her prep kitchen where seven people now burned incense on a small shelf and spoke to the air above a rice bowl as if someone might answer. The cream-colored envelope slid across the tile at 9:17 AM with the quiet confidence of something that expected to be obeyed, and then stopped, resting at an angle against the baseboard.
Wei saw it arrive. He was in the habit of being near the door, which was the closest he got to windows he could look through, which was the closest he got to daylight anymore.
The woman who slid it was visible through the door for only a moment—or rather, she was visible to Wei, who could see through the door well enough on his better mornings. She was young. Mid-twenties, he guessed. Chinese features under pale skin that sat slightly too evenly across her face, the kind of pallor that looked chosen rather than inherited. Her hair was natural and dark. She wore a very good coat.
She paused outside the door after releasing the envelope, and she looked directly at the space where Wei was standing.
She could not see him. He was certain of that—her gaze went through him rather than at him, tracking something in the air around the space he occupied the way you might track a sound that had already stopped. But she felt the bell. He could tell by the way she tilted her head, the almost-recognition of something that registered on a frequency she'd been trained to notice.
Then she said, clearly, to the alley behind her, to the empty room on the other side of the door, to whatever she sensed in the space between:
"You don't have to go. But he's less dangerous if he thinks he's managing the situation."
Wei stared at the door.
He waited for more. There wasn't any. She walked away with the same quiet confidence as the envelope, and was gone.
He picked up the envelope. This was one of the things about being four days dead that remained strange—his hands were solid enough to manipulate paper when he focused, but there was always a moment of uncertainty, a half-second where the paper might pass through him like smoke. It didn't. The envelope was thick stock, cream-white, sealed with a wax stamp he recognized: a set of stylized fangs framed in a Latin motto he didn't bother reading. The address was handwritten in ink so dark it looked wet:
For the Unclaimed. With the Consulate's Compliments.
"Ah," said Granduncle Bo, from somewhere near the refrigerator.
"Yeah," said Wei.
He opened it.
The invitation was two paragraphs and a time. The first paragraph was formal in the way that only institutions with centuries of practice could manage—courteous, specific, and somehow already halfway through a transaction Wei hadn't agreed to. The Blood Consulate (North American Bureau, Toronto Chapter) requested the pleasure of Wei Liang Chen's company for dinner. Private dining. A specific address on Hazelton Avenue in Yorkville. Eight PM.
The second paragraph was the interesting one. It noted that the dinner was to discuss matters of mutual benefit and that the Consulate wished to extend to Mr. Chen a proposal of cooperative arrangement that they believed he would find superior to his current circumstances.
Then the time. Then a phone number. Then, at the very bottom, in smaller script, a name:
Rosa Chen-Varro, on behalf of Consul Dominic Varro.
Madam Zhao read it over his shoulder—she was one of the living who could sense enough to function in his vicinity, and had given up pretending otherwise. She made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh and said, in Cantonese: "They called you 'Mister Chen.' Vampires have manners, at least."
"They also have files on my death," Wei said. He knew this because Granduncle Bo had told him, and Granduncle Bo had inferred it from the scouts the Consulate had been running near the bell for the past two days, cataloguing what they thought they were seeing with the kind of diligence that implied they already knew quite a lot and were simply filling in the gaps.
"So you're going?" said Madam Zhao.
Wei looked at the envelope. He thought about the woman in the good coat who had pressed it under the door and then told him—accurately, without being asked, for free—that going would put Varro at a disadvantage he would prefer to think of as his own management. Which was the first honest information anyone from any faction had given him since he'd died, and she had given it to the air in an alley without expecting anything in return.
"Refusing puts me at a disadvantage," he said. "I want to see what he's actually offering."
"And what he actually knows."
"That too."
Granduncle Bo made no comment, which was his most eloquent mode. Wei folded the envelope closed along its crease and set it on Madam Zhao's prep table, next to the rice bowl with the incense sticks.
He had until eight PM. That was, he realized with the flat irony that was becoming his default emotional register, approximately eleven hours to prepare for a dinner he could not eat.
Huang Qilin was in the alley when Wei slipped out that evening. The General had not been asked to wait there. He simply had the habit of occupying space near the bell in a way that suggested he had given the matter thought and arrived at a position.
Wei said: "I'm going to a meeting. You should stay."
Huang Qilin looked at him. The General's expression was difficult to read at the best of times—his face had the stillness of old lacquer, all the surface polish of something that had been preserved very deliberately for a very long time. But there was something in his eyes that Wei was learning to interpret, slowly, the way you learned to read warning signs in a language you didn't quite speak.
The General said nothing. He also did not leave.
"Not a request," Wei said.
Huang Qilin turned and walked precisely twelve feet down the alley and stopped there. His back was to Wei. His hands were at his sides.
Wei looked at him for a moment.
"That's not staying," Wei said.
The General said nothing.
Wei gave up. Some arguments were not worth having before a dinner. He walked toward Yorkville, the bell quiet in his jacket pocket, Granduncle Bo a murmur at the edge of his hearing, Cassiel somewhere above the roofline—he could feel her the way he felt weather, a change in pressure at the top of the sky—and behind him, twelve feet away, not-staying, Huang Qilin.
Hazelton Avenue at eight PM in late autumn smelled like old money and new construction. The kind of street where the restaurants had no signs you could read from the sidewalk and the parking was managed by someone in a uniform whose primary function was to make people feel they were in the right place. The Blood Consulate's private dining club occupied the ground floor of a Victorian brownstone that had been renovated to look exactly like a Victorian brownstone, which was itself a kind of statement.
Wei walked through the front door without touching it.
Inside: warm light, dark wood, the smell of things cooking that he couldn't quite categorize, the kind of place where every surface was chosen rather than accumulated. Two people at the host stand who looked at him without seeing him. He adjusted the bell's ambient effect—a small trick Granduncle Bo had taught him, a way of pressing his presence into the room so that human eyes slid over him without quite registering the absence—and walked past them down the corridor toward the private room at the back.
He paused at the door.
He thought about the woman in the good coat, who had told him the truth for free.
Then he opened it.