“Okay, that one was a little bad,” Dan admitted. “But seriously. No one wants to be the one to stick their neck out. And if the elves go down, or the bears, or whoever, no group wants to get pulled down with them. So the ghouls worry about ghoul business, and everyone else can go get burned.”
“That can’t be what everyone thinks,” I insisted.
“But enough of them do.” He pulled the last cookie out of the bag and gestured at me with it. “That’s what you don’t get, Fort, and it’s why the Occupy movement fizzled. Most people are getting along okay with the status quo, and they aren’t going to rock the boat.”
I thought about what my mother had openly discussed the day before, and wondered how much longer that status quo was going to continue to exist. Prudence’s idea of a great territory, which I’d been subjected to at length during my mother’s New Year’s State of the Territory financial review, was one where instead of it being vampire-only on Aquidneck Island, it was vampire-only for the entirety of my mother’s territory. I couldn’t help wondering how well avoiding fraternization would reward the races in the territory at that point. “Yeah . . . but what happens if the water suddenly gets choppy and the boat flips over anyway?”
Dan’s dark eyes were serious. “I guess that’s the question that would come up if a rogue wave came along,” he said quietly, and I knew that, beyond our tortured metaphor, we were both thinking about the same thing, but that neither of us was going to say it.
A loud knocking on the door broke the moment, and Suzume strolled in. I’d never given her a key, yet she had somehow acquired one on her own. I’d decided that it was in my own best interest not to investigate her sources too closely, so I hadn’t commented on it. Dan had very seriously proposed having the locks changed, but I’d pointed out that that would simply make it a fun challenge for her, and we’d be completely out the cost of getting the locks switched the moment that she successfully acquired a new key.
Unlike me, Suze had the uncanny ability to look as good after five hours of sleep as most people could only dream to look after eight. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would’ve missed that slight hint of caution around her eyes, the forced brightness in the smile that she flashed as she said, “Looking good, Fort!” I wondered whether she was maintaining a facade to attempt to gaslight Dan, or whether she was testing the waters to see whether last night’s argument might’ve blown over like a midsummer squall. “Dan tied your tie, didn’t he?”
“I might’ve outsourced some aspects of my appearance, yes,” I acknowledged loftily, letting her set the tone for now. “But in an entirely managerial sense.”
“He made use of local artisanal talent,” Dan added.
I nodded. “This is an organic, farm-to-table tie knot.”
She laughed. “C’mon, we need to hit the road. We only got half an inch of powder last night, so the Scirocco will be fine.”
“You’ve got studded winter tires on your Audi, Suze. Why can’t we just take that?” I didn’t bother to hide how irked I felt. While it was my own financial choices that had resulted in the same all-season tires that had been on the Scirocco when I bought it, I wasn’t above coveting the awesome tires on Suze’s car. And as unreasonable as it might’ve been at the moment, I also wasn’t above taking some of the residual hurt over last night’s fight out onto exposing her Audi’s underbody to the rock salt undoubtedly coating the Providence roads.
Suze made a show of running a hand along her temple to carefully adjust any strands of hair that had escaped from her perfectly constructed braided bun—though of course there weren’t any. “My Audi is sitting where it belongs—in my garage. Taka gave me a ride over this morning so that the road scuz can go where it belongs—on your car.” There was a slight narrowing of her eyes, a hint of a warning that she might not be happy with where we were right now, but that I shouldn’t expect any undue favors.
“And on Taka’s car, apparently,” I said wryly, privately accepting the message.
“Taka leases, so she doesn’t give a shit about what happens to that car, short of it being hit by a meteor.” Suze paused to consider. “Okay, actually a meteor would probably be okay as well, since I think that counts with the insurance as an act of God. Plus, as long as she wasn’t in the car at the time, that would just be awesome.”
Dan shook his head and picked his stack of flash cards back up. “Have a great day, guys.”
My one good formal coat was not meant for Rhode Island in January, so I did what guys almost always do in the winter, which was to pull on my regular winter coat, a battered yet exceptionally toasty parka. Once we got to the venue, my plan was to leave my coat in the car and just run the gauntlet inside, trusting in my suit jacket to keep me from getting hypothermia on the way. Once inside, I knew, things would probably swing in my favor as the men walked around in comfort in suit jackets and the women shivered in their dresses and thin cardigans. Game, set, and match to the patriarchy.
As I pulled the door shut behind us, Suze looked up at me, the mask of normality that she’d put on in front of Dan dropping. There was worry there, and a lot of unhappiness—probably that I’d made her worry, but I didn’t think that that was all of it. Some of it, I thought, was for me.
“I’m sorry that it hurt you,” she said, so quickly that her words almost ran over one another. She spoke as if the words were an unpleasant medicine, and she twisted her face away for a moment, a hard frown pressing her dark eyebrows together, before focusing her eyes on me again.
I heard what she said, and I could feel what she hadn’t. “But you don’t understand why it hurt me,” I said, filling in the blank.
There was a pause, and her mouth twisted, real anxiety curling the sides of her mouth down, her eyes darting away from me. A long silence passed. “Can’t it be enough that I’m sorry?” she said finally, quietly, her shoulders slumping almost in despair.
I looked at her, weighing it—that brutally honest apology, with all its flaws and gaps, almost beautiful in its truthful insufficiency. She didn’t understand—and she was admitting that she couldn’t.
When I’d told her that I wanted to date her, she warned me that she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, change who she was. I’d told her that I’d known that, but still wanted her. For the first time I was really faced with those words—had I been honest? Had I meant it? Or had I meant it, but been wrong?
Everything felt balanced for a moment, and I don’t think either of us breathed. I considered those questions.
“I don’t know if it’ll always be enough,” I said, trying to give her the same painful honesty she’d offered me. “But it’s enough now. It’s enough for today, and for tomorrow.”
A small smile curled at her mouth, and her dark eyes brightened. And then she was leaning up and I was leaning down, and that kiss was a relief like a sip of water in the middle of a heat wave in July.
* * *
On the way down, we passed Mrs. Bandyopadyay, who was bundled up with the kinds of layers normally associated with treks in the Yukon. Her bichon frise, Buttons, was snapped into his own insulated Lands’ End doggie coat, with matching booties on all four paws and a rather jaunty hat. They were beginning a slow promenade down the stairs, and I immediately stopped. Mrs. Bandyopadyay was somewhere in her upper eighties and increasingly delicate, and even the sight of her navigating the hall steps during the winter was enough to make anyone cringe, and taking Buttons for walks seemed like an invitation for breaking a hip and dying of exposure. I knew for a fact that she’d promised her adult children that she’d have Buttons do his business on pee pads during the winter—mostly because at some point all three of them had cornered me in the hallway to beg me about trying to prevent their mother from walking Buttons when the weather was bad. And by bad, they really meant “before May.”
“Mrs. Bandyopadyay,” I said, and at the sound of my voice she gave me a guilty look
—she hadn’t seen me earlier because of the size of her hat’s wool earflaps, which restricted any periphery vision, “if Buttons needs to be walked, you know that Dan or I are always happy to do it.”
“I know,” she replied, sounding fretful, “but I hate imposing. And I saw Daniel coming back from his run and considered asking, but you know how Buttons gives him trouble.”
I did, actually. For a ten-pound dog that seemed composed primarily of white and apricot fluff, Buttons had a very definite idea about who was in charge—and that was Buttons. Even now, dressed in his ridiculous getup, he was emitting a very seriously pissed-off growl at Suzume, who was responding by completely refusing to acknowledge his existence and exhibiting a demeanor of icy disdain. If Mrs. Bandyopadyay hadn’t been around, though, I wouldn’t have put it past Suze to change forms and throw down with Buttons to prove, once and for all, who was the top canid in this building. Buttons was probably the one area that Suze and Dan could agree on.
I knew for a fact that Suze had, in fox form, peed in every one of Buttons’s favorite spots, just to piss him off. It was kind of hard to figure out how I was supposed to respond to that one. Discussions of relationship boundaries, after all, so rarely involved actual urination boundaries.
“I don’t mind walking him,” I said. “And I used to walk dogs for a living—Buttons is no comparison to walking a Great Dane.”
That seemed to reassure her, and she handed over the leash and went back inside, presumably to start what had to be a half-hour process of delayering herself.
“No comparison, huh?” Suze asked as we continued downstairs, Buttons alternating between hauling on the leash so hard that he nearly choked himself and wheeling around to run at my ankles threateningly, mouth open to reveal his sharp little teeth.
“None at all,” I agreed. Paprika the Great Dane might’ve been a hundred and eighty pounds, but he’d been a dream to walk, with the only challenge coming when the fierce desire to be cuddled became too much for him, and he would attempt to rub his massive head against me, occasionally with enough enthusiasm to almost knock me over. “I would take ten Paprikas over one Buttons.”
Suze took the keys over to warm up the Scirocco and get the de-icing process going while I gave Buttons a quick morning constitutional. The little demon showed his gratitude for his successfully empty bladder by giving the leash a hard and unexpected yank just as we walked over a section of black ice, and I slipped and went down hard on my left knee. Then, while I was still cursing the heavens over that, Buttons took the opportunity to nip my right hand, hard enough to draw blood.
I used the first aid kit in the car to patch up my hand while Suze carried Buttons back to his owner by the scruff of his neck. When she arrived back at the car, I was examining the damage to my knee—I had a hell of a bruise and it was throbbing, but at least I’d somehow managed to avoid tearing my best pair of formal slacks—which was very lucky, since my second-best pair was my last pair, and those had a huge hole ripped in the right cuff that needed a tailor’s attention before they could be worn out in public again.
Suze shook her head at me. “Fort, why don’t you leave the good deeds to Jaison? He’s the only one apart from Mrs. Bandyopadyay who even likes that little shit of a dog.”
“That’s because Buttons likes him,” I muttered. It was typical—everyone liked Jaison, even Satan’s own bichon frise. “Besides, better me than Mrs. Bandyopadyay. Can you imagine that poor woman stepping on that ice? It would be like you and my best mixing bowl all over again. Nothing but wreckage.”
Suze snorted in amusement as I turned the engine over to start the car, patiently waiting through its initial sluggishness. Mechanically fuel-injected engines didn’t like the cold. “Mrs. Bandyopadyay apologizes for Buttons, by the way. She says that using the pee pads makes him cranky.”
“Breathing oxygen makes that dog cranky.”
She ignored me. “I told her about all the black ice, and said that maybe she should just try walking Buttons in the hallway.”
I paused in the act of merging into traffic and stared at her. “You what?”
“She was a little hesitant at first, but then I reminded her about what a dick your landlord was about fixing her stove that time she had a gas leak, and she seemed to warm up to the idea. She agreed that karma might need a little assistance in this situation.”
“Suze, I really don’t want to have to be walking through dog piss and shit every time I go home. Tell me that she’s not actually convinced.”
“Oh, stop worrying so much,” Suze said. “Besides, your landlord hasn’t cleaned that hallway any time this decade. I doubt you’ll even notice the dog piss, and Mrs. Bandyopadyay is pretty confident that she can use the pooper scooper to get his crap off the carpet without having to bend over too much. You know, ’cause of her back problems.”
“Suze, I say this from a place of deep and abiding affection: I’d rather think about the odds that the dog bite on my hand gets infected and gangrenous than about the ways that you’re trying to help out right now.”
Silence reigned for half the drive over to the metsän kunigas ceremony, at which point I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts to get her a salted caramel hot chocolate—a beverage that to me made my taste buds attempt ritualized suicide, yet always seemed to entirely satiate that portion of Suzume that was basically a hummingbird. It was apparently judged to be a worthy peace offering, and Suze was back to peppiness as we arrived at the East Providence Elks Lodge. I was almost entirely certain that the metsän kunigas had lied in some way on their rental application for today’s ceremony. Or this was a much looser fraternal order than I had previously been led to believe.
I mentioned this observation to Suze as I cruised through the overfull parking lot. She smiled beatifically in response. “The bears had a sixty-thousand-dollar bill to pay to my family for disguising the bodies of Matias Kivela and Peter Utrio from the police. Then we hit them with another thirty thousand to fake a suicide for their murdering psychopath of a cousin. My understanding is that Gil and Dahlia were practicing some austerity measures with this place.”
“That’s terrible, Suze. Why are you so happy about that?”
“Because, unlike you, I believe in the beauty of capitalism. I am proud to be an American, while you are showing suspiciously Canadian elements of socialistic inclination.”
I couldn’t restrain my laugh, and she gave a satisfied smile, then leaned over to give me a salt, caramel, and chocolate-flavored kiss, which managed to taste better than I would’ve expected. “Don’t get so worried, Fort. You have the financial paperwork on the Kivela family—their company is in great shape, and after we set up that suicide front for Carmen, Matias’s assets were able to get through probate and end up with his sister. They’re selling the house to another of the metsän kunigas, and once it goes through, they’ll be able to pay off those lines of home interest credit that both of them pulled to cover our bill.”
“Dan says that groups in this territory avoid fraternization. But you always seem to know plenty about what people outside the kitsune are up to. Why is that?”
Suze leaned over to tap the tip of my nose affectionately. But despite the playfulness of her gesture, her voice was completely serious. “Because this isn’t fraternization, Fort. It’s keeping a cautious eye on all the idiots around us who suffer under the weighty burden of not being foxes, and who therefore cannot be trusted to act in a rational manner.” She looked around the lot that we were currently taking a third circuit around—while I was sure that it was large enough to comfortably fit all of its fraternal member automobiles during the summer, it was suffering from the typical winter issue of snow removal. Their plow service had been pushing all the snow to the back third of the lot, which at this point had consolidated into an unmovable edifice of icy and very grimy snow, looking solid enough that I probably could’ve ascended it with an ice hammer and some pitons.
It definitely wasn’t going anywhere until at least late spring, and in the meantime had severely reduced the parking options. And given that we’d arrived after all the metsän kunigas, there was simply nowhere for me to stick the Scirocco. Even the handicapped spots and the fire lane had already been filled with cars. Suze gave a decisive gesture. “Now I think it’s time to stop dillydallying here and abuse your power the way it was meant to be abused—park one of these fuckers in. Preferably by the door. It’s as cold as Frosty the Snowman’s scrotum out there.”
There was no other way around it, so I ended up parking in a trio of Saabs. The bears were of Finnish extract, and clearly had a preference for Nordic cars. “I’m pretty sure that Frosty the Snowman was never constructed for anatomical correctness, Suze.”
“He was when my cousins and I used to make him.”
* * *
My introduction to the metsän kunigas had begun under extremely poor circumstances, when Suze and I got called in to investigate the murder of the then-karhu, Matias. Today’s ceremony was to formalize the passing of the title to his nephew, Gil. Gil hadn’t been a popular choice in my family—he was a hot-blooded guy, intensely devoted to his family and the well-being of the bears in the territory, and wasn’t afraid to be critical of what he saw as flaws in the way that the Scotts controlled and ruled the metsän kunigas. But his older sister, Dahlia, who’d been my brother’s pick to inherit, had supported her brother over herself.
When they greeted me at the door, I was struck once again by what a contrast the siblings presented. Dahlia was all poised, smooth control, her bobbed hair sleek and carefully presented, and her expressions so tightly tamped down that Vegas card champions would’ve envied her poker face. Gil, however, was an inch shorter than his sister and built like a wrestler, all boxy muscle, with a face that showed every emotion that went through his head. When Gil was pissed at you, you knew it—usually because he was bellowing at you. And when he liked you, there was no guessing at it.
Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel Page 12
