Dan came out of his room, slick and put together for another day spent studying the law and surviving the Socratic method of teaching. He shook his head at the sight of me.
“Fort, you need to work on getting more of a poker face. It’s a little too painfully obvious that you just got laid.”
“I’m just whistling,” I defended. “Besides, don’t pretend that you’re so good at keeping it hidden. You always look smug as shit after Jaison puts out.”
“You have no definitive proof of that,” Dan said as he pulled on his wool jacket and wrapped his scarf in a perfect just-so knot. Smugly. “Hey, I’m hitting the grocery store after classes. I’ve got the list, but can you think of anything else we need?”
“I’m out of tofu again.”
Dan made a face as he pulled the list out of his wallet and updated it. “You drink blood. I would think that that would make you comfortable with the consumption of meat.”
“Wow, that argument is so compelling, and one that I’ve never heard before. Let me forget the tofu and fry up some bacon.” Besides, I only drank my mother’s blood. For now.
“The bacon in the fridge is just waiting for you to backslide.”
I threw a balled-up paper towel at him, and he laughed as he headed out. My vegetarianism was definitely imperfect—I was never going to give up eggs or fish—and the truth that Dan was certainly aware of was that avoiding meat was an ongoing struggle for me. I’d made the switch to vegetarianism for the sake of a former girlfriend, but before my transition had begun in earnest it had helped suppress some of my more predatory instincts when I didn’t eat red meat. It was hard to tell whether it was still true—my instincts had taken control of me once, and I’d attacked one of my mother’s employees, James, before Thanksgiving, and had actually bitten him hard enough to draw blood. It had scared the shit out of me (it hadn’t done good things for James either, though thankfully he hadn’t been seriously hurt), and while I could’ve just thrown up my hands and assumed that if this was happening, then my meal plan was useless and I should just give in to my cravings (and believe me, my cravings for bacon were hard to ignore at times), but the truth was that it was possible that my vegetarian diet was actually helping me avoid causing more serious damage—and since none of my family members had been either willing or able to give me a definitive answer on that, I was sticking like glue to my no-meat approach.
Not that I still didn’t miss hamburgers. And while I’d certainly learned a lot of different ways to prepare tofu, the truth was that it was still pretty far down on my list of preferred meals.
Suze sauntered out of the bathroom then, rubbing her hair dry with a towel and giving me a smile. She’d gotten completely dressed—the sad fact was that the heating system in the apartment was sluggish at best, and no matter how often Dan and I dialed the thermostat up to eighty, the temperature in the rooms never seemed to inch above fifty. We had more than a few suspicions that Mr. Jennings had locked the main heating system. I knew that Mrs. Bandyopadyay relied on plug-in electric heaters in every room and a heavy robe from Land’s End.
Of course, Dan and I were manly men, so we just gritted our teeth and wore thermally layered shirts. The lack of exposed skin from our respective partners (and both Suze and Jaison seemed very willing to bitch about the ambient temperature) was the tragic result of Mr. Jennings’s suspected parsimoniousness.
After breakfast, Suze headed for the door. Whenever she wasn’t working with me, Suze helped out at her family’s business, Green Willow Escorts. Not that she actually did escort work herself—while her hugely intimidating grandmother, Atsuko, had been a geisha in Japan during the thirties and forties, she’d moved into a management position when she came to America.
“Getting to beat anyone up today?” I asked Suze as I leaned in for a good-bye kiss.
The kiss was good enough to pleasantly spin my head and make me wish that I didn’t have to hurry down to my mother’s mansion for the meeting. “Nah, I’m just helping out with scheduling. If I get really bored I might ask Taka if she wants any help with payroll.” Then her eyes took that extra foxy gleam that always made me act especially cautious. “So . . . you’re working at Redbones tonight?”
I could feel my mouth flatten into a thin line. After having to leave my last part-time job as a dog walker because of how the animals were responding to smelling Suze’s scent marks on me, I’d spent a soul-killing week as a telemarketer before picking up my current work. It wasn’t the worst job I’d had, but it definitely had its drawbacks. One being just how much Suze was enjoying it.
“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “Why do you ask?”
Her smile showed a lot of teeth. “Well, a day doing office drudgery needs something fun at the end of it. I was figuring that I’d swing by and say hello to you while you’re working. Maybe bring a few of my cousins.”
“How many of your cousins?” I asked, worried, but Suze was already strolling down the hall, giving me a cheerful wave over her shoulder. Shit. Suze had eighteen first cousins, and so far they’d all gotten far too much enjoyment out of my job.
A glance at my watch reminded me that that particular problem would have to wait. If I was going to make the ten a.m. meeting that Loren Noka had scheduled for me, I was going to have to leave soon. And since the succubi badly needed for me to bring them good news, it wouldn’t hurt to spend a little extra time on my appearance. While neatly combed hair and a clean shirt might not be enough to secure a yes vote from my sister and mother, the truth was that it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
* * *
At my mother’s Newport mansion, we convened the meeting promptly at ten minutes before ten. Loren Noka had put together binders for each of us that contained all of the pertinent information (neatly bullet-pointed) that she and I had collected yesterday, as well as the results of the credit scores and background checks that she must have done in the early-morning hours. It was the kind of presentation that would’ve warmed the soul of any corporate drone, which made it a strange counterpoint to my mother’s sitting room, where this meeting was being held. Antique furniture (though when my mother had purchased it, it was probably new) was upholstered in pink damask and satin, and mother-of-pearl was inlaid into as much of the woodwork as possible. For once the TV, constantly set to the twenty-four-hour-news network, was off.
Chivalry, casual in beige slacks and an argyle sweater, sat beside me, making thoughtful “hmm” sounds of active listening as he listened to my presentation on the succubi. His movie-star-vampire handsome face was carefully neutral, giving me plenty to worry about as I tried to emphasize the few benefits that the succubi had to offer while downplaying their notable issues. Loren had done her best with the documentation, hiding the financial information behind several stock photos that she must’ve grabbed from the Las Vegas tourism board, but it’s hard to fight against numbers, and these were all too clear.
My sister, Prudence, was sitting across from me on the matching love seat, and she was making it very plain from her expression that she was not being distracted by my emphasis on how easy it would be for us to help the succubi find gainful employment in the Connecticut casino industry. She was dressed for a day at her office, where she and a horde of stockbrokers did alchemic things with money and markets and turned profits in ways that I wasn’t even sure were feasible, much less legal.
Madeline, our mother, would normally have been orchestrating our meeting from her favorite chair, but that had been quietly replaced several weeks ago by an elegant chaise longue where she could recline in style. She was stretched out on it, the oversize nineteen eighties grandma glasses that she wore primarily for appearance perched neatly on her face as she perused the material and seemed to give me half her attention. All of us had been sneaking glances at her since we walked in. While she almost never left her suite of rooms before the sun went down (our sensitivity to sunlight increased with age—while I
had no problems walking around at any time of day, Madeline had been born in the fourteenth century, and her suite had been built to carefully obscure its lack of windows), she had always been precise in her personal presentation, even though her style might’ve mimicked Betty White on Golden Girls. Today, though, she was wrapped in a magnificent dressing gown of silver and pink that actually had small seed pearls sewn along the sleeves, and was swathed with blankets. She was in her pajamas.
I’d learned months ago that my mother, who was old even by vampire standards, was beginning to decline in health. But when I’d heard that, I assumed that she had decades left to live. I was starting to suspect that I was wrong. In the three days since I’d seen her last, she looked more fragile and delicate. Tinier, as if she was collapsing in on herself like an old barn. She’d been ensconced on her chaise longue when the three of us were ushered into her presence by her personal maid, Patricia. I was wondering whether she had been able to walk, or whether one of the staff members had carried her to the chair from her bed.
As if sensing my thoughts, she glanced up at me and smiled, deliberately flashing a set of long, fixed fangs that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a tiger. Fragile was definitely a relative thing when thinking about my mother. Prudence and Chivalry had thin, retractable fangs that were discreet and functioned like hypodermic needles. I had a set of teeth so innocuously normal that I still kept my six-month dental checkups.
I cleared my throat loudly. “And there you have it,” I said, addressing my family. “The succubi have suffered a major setback by a hostile force, but I think that they would be a good addition to this territory. Low-risk, hard workers, and willing to offer substantial tithes for the protection we can offer them. I move that we offer them immediate entry.”
Prudence gave me a flat stare. “Baby brother, that assessment has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Look at your own numbers, much as you’ve attempted to hide them behind pretty pictures. With their established income levels plus their adult-to-child ratio, they’ll be struggling for a subsistence existence for at least the next decade.”
“And what’s a decade to us?” I countered quickly. “You’re always telling me that vampires need to look at the long-term picture.”
“Yes, the long term.” Prudence flipped pages. “Let’s talk about their risk level. I’m not sure I’d categorize feeding side effects that can mimic syphilis as a ‘low’ threat. Even if we followed your suggestion and restricted their feeding to the tourist populations in the casino towns, it’s clear that careless actions on their parts could very easily leave us with the CDC breathing down our necks as they look for the source of a venereal disease outbreak hot spot.”
“An even larger population lived in Las Vegas and never drew attention like that. Besides, they express themselves as very willing to abide by guidelines that we put in place.” My brother was being ominously silent during Prudence’s cross-examination, and now I shot him a sidelong glance. “Plus, Chivalry has kept plenty of groups toeing the line who are way more of an exposure risk than the succubi. I mean, the kobolds aren’t exactly ready for prime time.”
Chivalry shifted his weight carefully, and flipped some pages. “The succubi probably benefited substantially in the past from Las Vegas’s reputation,” he said carefully. “Their recent tourism campaigns notwithstanding, I don’t think anyone hears the words VD outbreak and Las Vegas in the same sentence and exhibits much real surprise.”
“They might not have legalized brothel prostitution, but let’s not pretend that the Connecticut casinos have figured out a way to have blackjack coexist with Puritan ideals,” I pointed out, feeling serious worry creep its way up my spine. While I hadn’t expected Chivalry to embrace the succubi outright, I’d hoped for a little more support from his direction, or at the very least a little more postvacation optimism. “And the tithing rate that they were willing to sign on to for the next twenty years exceeds every other group currently in residence.”
“Tithes that come out of service workers’ salaries,” Prudence noted immediately. “You can’t tax what isn’t there, and I also noticed that your little asterisk on that sentence led to some very fine print noting that our tithe could only apply to income that exceeded the poverty line.”
I’d been hoping that she wouldn’t read the fine print.
“That’s not language that appears in any of our boilerplate contracts,” Chivalry said gently. “Loren wouldn’t have put it in there, and a group as desperate as this one sounds wouldn’t have dared suggest it. This was you, wasn’t it?”
I looked at him wordlessly. He rested a hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly. “This can be a difficult job,” he noted. “It’s clear that you feel sorry for this group—”
“Yes, and maybe instead of spending the next few minutes in feeling-sharing mode, we can talk about this patently obvious sob story that they’ve spun for Fortitude.” Prudence’s voice was like acid.
My own voice raised. “You weren’t there listening to them, Prudence. I was. They’re all clearly traumatized after most of their community was slaughtered right in front of them—”
“Conveniently out of sight, with no evidence, and by skinwalkers,” she snapped, flipping a strand of her red hair that had escaped her rigidly no-nonsense bob. “I don’t doubt that skinwalkers would enjoy nothing better than to terrorize a community, but the last time I checked, practically the entire continent’s population was ensconced in that cesspool we call Miami. I find it ridiculous to even conceive that the entire group suddenly relocated themselves across the country to Nevada—”
“Oh, my turtledove, that part is quite true.” Madeline spoke for the first time in this meeting, with breezy confidence.
There was a long pause while we all turned our heads to stare at her. Prudence’s jaw had even managed to slacken a bit, a sight that I tried to burn into my memory for later enjoyment. Madeline glanced up from the meeting handout, her brilliant blue eyes blinking in surprise. “I never mentioned that, dear hearts? I’m sure I did.”
“Not to my recollection, Mother,” Chivalry said carefully. “Would you mind perhaps . . . repeating . . . this information?”
She sighed and let her binder slip down onto her lap. “How tiresome. Well, it’s quite simple, really. Maximilián closed his borders about two months ago and cleared his entire territory. That included Miami, so the skinwalkers would’ve been casting about for a new area to live.”
We all blinked a bit. The name sounded familiar, and I asked cautiously, “Maximilián is the vampire who holds Florida and most of the Keys, right?” After spending most of my life trying to pretend that the supernatural didn’t have anything to do with me, I’d been on a steep learning curve in the last few months. I’d mostly been trying to catch up with the basic knowledge of our territory, but I’d always known that my family weren’t the only vampires in the New World. However, everyone had always downplayed the other vampires on our continent as being so beneath notice that I supposed that I’d absorbed their prejudice without really thinking it over. Certainly this was one of only a handful of times that I could even remember us mentioning one of the other vampires by name.
“Florida, the Keys, and a small slice of southern Alabama,” Chivalry acknowledged. Then, probably because he’d gotten so used to being my walking Wikipedia over the last few months, he continued. “Maximilián came over from Europe in 1886, and Mother allowed him to establish and hold that territory.”
“I felt terribly for the poor dear,” Madeline put in. “Really, so unprepossessing. In his late three hundreds, but so depressingly lacking in power. His original territory was in the Slovakian area of Europe—don’t even ask me what they were calling his country at the time he came begging, because the maps change so often in that area of the world that I didn’t even bother to ask—but when his father died unexpectedly, there was just no way that Maximilián was going to be able
to hold his borders against the Nests around him. And it is a crowded area of the world for our kind, with plenty of other vampires who were interested in helping their offspring set up territory.”
“Oh. That was kind of nice of you to let him have Florida,” I said.
Prudence snorted. “Mother drew a circle on the map in a spot where she had no intention of ever going to, was far enough away from us that she couldn’t imagine him ever being a bother, and where she couldn’t conceive of anything of real value ever emerging.”
“He hasn’t done too badly,” Chivalry said. “I mean, that deal he made with Walt Disney certainly worked out well. Plus, air-conditioning really turned things around down there.”
I held up a hand before they got started on that tangent. The delights of climate-controlled living were a favorite conversational topic with my family, challenged only by the thrills of window screens and refrigerators. I’d heard more maggoty food stories than anyone outside the range of a Ken Burns special. “Okay, with background now thoroughly established, why would this guy suddenly clear his territory?”
“Living the dream?” Prudence muttered.
“Be serious,” Chivalry chided her. “Fort has actually brought up a decent point.”
“It’s because he Brooded his first offspring,” Madeline said absently as she adjusted her blankets and reached for her cup of tea. At our expressions, she looked irritated. “Oh, stop playing with me. I must’ve mentioned it as some point. I put your names on the card.”
“We sent a card?” Chivalry asked. Prudence just rubbed her forehead, looking flummoxed. I was equally dazed. While Madeline had often kept many subjects on a need-to-know basis, she’d usually at least known what she had and hadn’t disclosed. This level of absentmindedness was new, and disturbing.
“Well, it seemed like a nice gesture,” Madeline said. “He’d been trying to Brood for over seventy years. Really, it’s a bit of a surprise that it even worked for him. Persistent little thing must’ve quite applied himself to the task. Female offspring, quite nice. Named her Amália—very pretty, I think. One has to at least pretend an interest, of course, so I asked our Patricia for a suggestion for a gift, and ended up sponsoring a tree in Israel in her name.”
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