I walked over to stand next to Suze, and silently passed her the drink. She took one long sip, then tilted her head to give me a look that was half banked anger, half begrudging sheepishness.
“You know, I wasn’t dating you because of the money,” she said, her voice low and reluctant.
I didn’t say anything, just accepted the glass when she handed it to me and drank. It had been hours since we sliced each other with words as sharp as glass, long enough for exhaustion to balance out the anger. Long enough for me to acknowledge that, as angry as we’d been (and still were) with each other, it meant something that she’d stayed. She could’ve walked right out the front door, but instead she’d stayed. Fumed, but stayed.
Even quieter, she said, “I didn’t know it would hurt you. It was mostly a joke—I could do it, so I did.”
I swallowed a second time, then passed it back to her. I could hear the honesty in her voice, and I recognized that ultimate truth about her nature in what she’d said. She could do it, so she did. Nogitsune, her grandmother had once said to me about Suzume. Forest fox. Trickster.
It should’ve made it hurt less, but it didn’t.
She was watching me, those dark clever eyes flicking over my face, picking up on who knows how much. After another long silence, she nodded to where her cousins were still dancing. “You gave a good tip to Hoshi. She moved the blond into the Reconnaissance stage.”
“That’s fantastic,” I lied. What I had rather unwillingly learned was that this meant that Hoshi hadn’t found anything to remove him from the genetic running tonight, and so the kitsune were going to now research him online, snoop into his financial records, and probably also break into his house at least once. It was also likely that they’d be obtaining some kind of genetic sample to send to those companies that offer a full DNA workup and print up a report about any dodgy genes or predispositions. If all that worked out, then she’d probably call him up for a date. The whole thing sounded pretty exhausting to me, and I had my moments when I wondered whether it was just another example of the kitsune’s propensity to make a game out of everything.
Suzume finished off the beer, then handed the empty back to me. “I should probably move the herd home.” There was the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth for a second, but it faded as she looked at me. “I’m the designated driver.”
I nodded. I was glad that the night was at least over.
“Fort,” she said, and there was just the slightest furrow in her forehead, the hint of worry in her eyes. “We’re okay, aren’t we?”
That worry loosened something in me, along with the question. Of anything I might ever have doubted about Suze, I could never doubt her intrinsic predator’s hatred of expressing vulnerability. I could feel my shoulders unkink just slightly, and I moved my left hand over, sliding it along her shoulder, around the back of her neck to stroke that soft place just below her hairline. I felt her relax into my touch, saw that furrow smooth and disappear from her forehead. “We’re okay for tonight,” I said, unable to truthfully say anything beyond that, but feeling my own intense gratitude for the words.
Surprise flitted briefly across her face, replaced almost immediately by careful assessment. She hadn’t expected my response to be conditional. But, then again, she hadn’t expected me to be hurt.
Suze gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “Well, then don’t forget to make sure you’ve got a clean shirt for tomorrow.”
I blinked at her.
She stared at me for a second, and then a smile tugged at her lips. “You forgot, didn’t you?”
“Forgot about wha— Oh, fuck that shit.” I mentally kicked myself. Tomorrow was the karhu crowning ceremony for the metsän kunigas. It had been on the calendar for over a month, and I’d been tapped to go to represent the family as a fairly obvious punishment for my actions regarding the elevation of the newest karhu. With the recent kerfuffle over the succubi, I’d honestly forgotten. “When does this thing start again?”
Her smile widened. “Sunrise. Seven thirteen a.m. Didn’t you read the e-vite?”
I cursed inventively.
A burble of a laugh escaped her, and she leaned over and into me, her right hand squeezing my knee as from shoulder to hip we fit against each other in that way that was still so new for us, yet was now so wonderfully familiar and natural. “For the bear-only part of the ceremony, Fort. We show up for the rest of it at nine.” She slid off the stool with that easy vulpine grace of a creature who always knew where her body was in space, and tugged on her jacket. “Formal dress.” She looked at me with fathomless dark eyes as she slowly fastened all her buttons. “I’ll be at your place at eight thirty.”
I nodded, acknowledging. But then she slid forward, her hips easing smoothly between my knees, her hands sliding up until her wrists were dangling loosely down my back, and she pressed one soft cheek against mine so that the smell of her hair filled my nose. “Do you see how much I like you, Fort?” she breathed into my ear. “I could’ve let you think that you had to attend the sunrise portion. And that part, BTW, is in fur. I think they’re doing a formal investiture of shitting in the woods.”
I knew there was no way that she could see the way that my mouth involuntarily curled into a smile, but I knew that she could feel the beat of my heart, and the way that my hands almost unconsciously wound around to rest at her waist. We stayed like that for a long moment, and all my anger from before couldn’t hide just how good it felt.
When she finally moved out of the embrace, it was slow, her cheek dragging against mine just enough to rasp the beginnings of my one a.m. stubble. Every cell in my body knew exactly how many micrometers her mouth was from mine, but she didn’t push for a kiss and I wasn’t ready yet to turn and take one. But I didn’t hurry to take my hands from her, letting them slide down from her waist and rest on her hips, my fingers pressing just harder than gentle into her flesh before I finally let them drop.
Whatever she read in my face, that signature strut was back in Suze’s step as she walked out the door, the rest of her cousins falling in behind her as if by some unspoken signal.
“Bunch of jackals,” Orlando muttered loudly behind me.
“Right genus, wrong species,” I replied.
Chapter Four
I didn’t mind working late-night hours, and in fact far preferred it to insanely early morning hours, but I wasn’t exactly at my most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I rolled out of bed the next morning after a mere five hours of sleep. A hot shower helped dispel some of the cobwebs from my brain and the steam removed wrinkles from my shirt. Typical for me, I had arrived home so tired from work that I’d completely forgotten Suze’s clothing advice, and wasn’t able to find any appropriately clean button-downs in my closet. After a quick pawing through several of the clothing piles that seemed to spring up around my room like mushrooms following a rainstorm, I finally managed to extract a nice white oxford that had only a minor sweat funk, easily cured by some strategic Febreze-ing. It did have a small tomato-sauce stain, but thankfully only where I was confident that my tie could cover it.
I spent extra time shellacking my hair down with extra-hold gel. I knew it made me look like I was trying to audition for a bit role in The Godfather, but my hair had two settings—gelled into submission or Rorschach test. The latter didn’t exactly seem suitable for today.
Dan was sitting at the table when I came into the main room, snacking on the leftover Redbones cookies that I’d brought home the previous night and quizzing himself with his ubiquitous stack of flash cards. He must’ve just gotten back from his morning jog, since he was dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt, and bless the man, he must’ve started the coffeepot before he left. He had a steaming mug in front of him, and there was just enough in the pot for a second cup.
“Hey, did Jaison stay over last night?” I asked, pondering the coffee.
“Nah, th
e rest is for you.”
Reassured, I poured out the rest, then dug around in the fridge for the creamer. During my leaner financial times, I’d gotten to the point of stuffing my pockets with extra nondairy creamers when I was at restaurants and just keeping them at home, and even with decent paychecks I’d kept the habit going. During our first week of living together, Dan had watched my preparation with silent horror. For his coffee he bought pint containers of heavy cream from the grocery store, and had finally broken and staged a coffee intervention on me. Jaison, who simply drank his coffee black, had watched the entire fracas with great amusement.
I sipped at my cup while I pondered my breakfast options. Already being dressed was leaving me leery about eating anything that could leave a stain, since with my luck this would be the day that I dropped breakfast all over myself. Wherever things had been left between me and Suzume, I knew for certain that I didn’t want to pick them up with a butter smear down my shirt. At last I dug out a half-petrified container of s’mores Pop-Tarts and set in on them.
“Big day today?” Dan asked as I settled myself and my breakfast at the table. He gestured at my suit, which was definitely not daily attire.
I nodded. “For the metsän kunigas, yeah. I have to go and be the Scott rep.” I tugged open one of the foil packets. “Hey, I look okay, right? Like, no holes in the back of my pants?” Suze was due over soon, but I’d learned the hard way that expecting her to point out holes in my pants was asking her to compromise her future hilarity at the expense of pointing out things that I should’ve caught myself, and that really wasn’t a fair position to put her into.
Yes, we’d had that conversation.
Dan shook his head. “I didn’t see any. But, Fort, the four-in-hand knot really doesn’t look good when you have a suit jacket on.” His expression was pained. Dan took personal presentation very seriously, and seemed eternally put upon that both Jaison and I completely failed to keep up.
“It’s the only one I know how to tie, Dan.” I knew that I sounded grumpy, but it matched how I felt.
Immediately Dan set down his flash cards and started tugging at my tie. “Gimme that.”
I let him, frankly somewhat relieved. I didn’t like showing up and knowing that people thought that I hadn’t made enough of a clothing effort, but at the same time I frankly just sucked at putting myself together and it was hard not to just feel irritated that we hadn’t reached the promised future of sci-fi fiction that consisted of easy-to-wear zip-up jumpsuits for every occasion. That, at least, I figured I could handle. I mean, assuming that the fabric also self-cleaned.
“Fort, your shirt has a stain.” From Dan’s expression I might as well have burned down an orphanage.
“The tie was covering it,” I defended.
He shuddered. This was why I preferred it when Jaison stayed over—yes, it put a strain on our tiny coffeemaker and required the drinker of the second cup to start a second batch, but at the same time it also gave me some backup whenever Dan gave me that look that suggested that I was practically a caveman, barely able to wrap animal skin around my nakedness as I gnawed at mastodon with my teeth.
“I’ll loan you a tie tack,” Dan offered. He quickly removed the last traces of my apparently substandard knot, then with a few quick passes around his own neck put together a frankly really impressive knot. He left it loose enough that he could take it off himself and hand it over to me. Maybe I should’ve had more pride to reject his mommy-bird-feeding-baby approach to formal wear, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue with results. I slid it over my own head, then tucked it under my collar and tightened it up. A quick look in the reflective surface of the microwave confirmed that it actually looked pretty damn good. Good enough that I had to restrain the urge to take a selfie and send it to Chivalry. The only thing that held me back was the knowledge that he would probably print it out and keep it in his wallet like a baby picture.
“That’s really cool, Dan. Where’d you learn how to do that one?”
“Ghouls are great at tying knots,” my roommate said. “It’s a cultural point of pride, since we spent so many years having to tie our human victims on spits to roast over the fire.”
I stared as he took another sanguine bite out of his chocolate-chip cookie.
Dan laughed. “You’re too easy, Fort. The knot is called a Euclid, and I learned it by watching a video on YouTube.”
“Oh, well, thanks.” I pondered the awesomeness of the tie for another minute, then asked, “Hey, do you know any of the bears?” I’d spent my early childhood living with my human foster parents, with no real contact with any of the supernatural elements beyond a monthly dinner with my mother and siblings. After my foster parents were murdered by my sister, I’d been brought down to live in the mansion, but even then I’d seen very few supernaturals beyond my family. Firstly, I’d tried as hard as I could to reject everything that wasn’t a strictly human life—as much as I could, of course, while at the same time living with three other vampires. But also there really weren’t that many to see, even had I wanted to.
There were two kinds of nonhumans who lived under my mother’s rule—the ones who could pass for human, and who spent much of their lives hiding right in plain sight, and the ones who would never be able to pass for human, and had to stay far away from humans. Newport was one of three towns on Aquidneck Island, which made up just under forty square miles in the mighty state of Rhode Island, and its entire supernatural population consisted of my family, plus a small colony of Norwegian-extract trolls that lived under the Claiborne Pell Bridge and did a better job of passing as boulders than as humans. So during my entire career in elementary, middle, and high school, I’d been the only nonhuman in the building. Which had not done my sense of isolation any great favors. When I left home for college, I’d played human with such an intent focus that I probably would’ve run in the other direction if I’d seen another nonhuman.
Dan was my first nonhuman roommate, and there was still a strangeness in being able to talk with him about all the things that I’d spent so many years never daring to talk about with anyone other than my family, who I’d been spending all my efforts to avoid seeing anyway. And despite my recent crash course in the running of the territory and the races who owed my mother fealty, it occurred to me suddenly that I actually didn’t know too much about how they functioned between their own separate groups. I mean, maybe they’d had their own Cub Scout troops.
“I went to high school with a few,” Dan said, giving a small shrug. “Never had much to do with them, of course.”
It was the “of course” that piqued my curiosity. Apparently that was a no to the Cub Scout question. “Why is that? I remember from when I was talking to Lilah Dwyer that she said that the Neighbors didn’t socialize with the bears, but I figured that that was a bear/elf thing. Is it actually normal?”
A cynical smile spread across Dan’s face and he shook his head slightly, as if my naïveté in this situation was something that he was trying to decide was infuriating or cute. “Fraternization isn’t exactly something your family encourages, Fort, so most of us keep to within our own kind.” He took a deep drink of his coffee. “I think one of my biggest teenage rebellion moments was when I was friends with a changeling kid for a while. Drove my father crazy, which was really half the reason I did it. I mean, Nate wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure I ever really liked him. Felt sorry for him, mostly. One minute he was living with a normal family in Connecticut, and the next minute his death gets faked and he gets told that he’s actually part elf. We still do Christmas cards, but we drifted after graduation. Poor guy got an arranged marriage with another changeling girl who is even more screwed up than he is, so now he’s got a wife with a drinking problem and four kids under the age of five. Talking with him is like dipping a toe in the Swamps of Sadness.”
“Huh.” I considered that for a seco
nd, adding it to the puzzle of what I’d already observed or been told. “But, depressing high school friends aside, I mean, even if my family isn’t big on different groups socializing, there’s no rule against it that I’ve seen. Besides, you outnumber us by a lot. Why not try to get some strength in numbers, use other groups to shore up your own weaknesses, or at least form some bonds and support?”
I said that last part while Dan was taking a swig of his coffee, and the ghoul laughed so hard that he ended up spitting liquid. Even then he continued to laugh until he was doubled over, tears coming out of his eyes, and he was slapping the top of the table with one open hand, as if his mirth was so great that mere laughter alone was insufficient to express it.
I tried not to feel insulted.
Finally, when he’d managed to calm himself sufficiently so that he was only making the occasional small snorting noise, Dan pulled himself together enough to answer, “Fort, if I didn’t know you by now, I’d wonder whether your family was using you to encourage every fringe wannabe Thomas Paine in this territory so that they could eventually just get them all in one place and kill them.”
There was a long pause between the two of us while I stared at him and tried to process what he’d just said. It took me a minute to realize that there had been nothing really amused about the way he’d laughed earlier, and that he was actually deadly serious in what he’d just said.
“Shit,” I said, stunned. “You actually thought that for a while, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did,” Dan replied honestly. “For, like, the first two weeks. But if that’s the plan, you sure as hell don’t know it. You’re the real deal, a vampire bleeding heart.”
“Ooh, blood joke for the vampire. Funny, Dan. Real funny.” I was grumping mostly because it was hard to fully respond to what he was saying while at the same time dealing with the dissonance of being handed an entirely new lens to view our first month of cohabitation through. No wonder he’d seemed so cranky and closemouthed at first.
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