Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel

Home > Other > Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel > Page 16
Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel Page 16

by Brennan, M. L.


  It was a dream that I’d had for almost two decades, but tonight’s rendition had been worse, and a recurring nightmare that had begun around the time that my transition started. The events of the dream were the same as ever, but this time my reaction had been different. I hadn’t cared when Brian came home to see Jill’s broken body, and I hadn’t even reacted when Prudence had torn open his throat. All I’d cared about was that arterial spray, and all the fear and terror and anger that had made his blood smell so good.

  I really, really didn’t want to talk about that dream. Not even with Suze.

  Her voice pulled me back to myself, and helped push the nightmare down. Not away—it could never really go away. But down was at least an improvement. “Do you need anything?” she asked.

  “Just you.” I wrapped my arms around her, pressing my cheek against hers, smelling her hair, feeling her bare skin against mine. “Just stay with me.”

  “Oh, that. That I’ve got covered. That I can rock out with.” Then her lips were pressing against mine, and I didn’t have to think at all.

  * * *

  The next time I woke up, the sun had risen and was shining through my wholly inadequate curtains. The woman I’d fallen asleep entwined with was gone, but there was a warm, fluffy lump between my knees. I pulled the covers up and peered down. A long, dark snout lifted up from where it was resting on my left thigh, and Suze gave me an annoyed glare and a small grf noise, though whether she was objecting to the influx of cold air from me lifting the covers or simply that I’d woken her up, I wasn’t sure.

  I dropped the covers and began the task of awkwardly wiggling out of bed. Suze made no move to leave her warm little den, and I had to tug my legs out while trying not to accidentally knock her or squish one of her little limbs. One of my previous roommates had had an elderly Siamese cat named Rousseau. Among his many other accomplishments, Rousseau was able to use his long, monkeylike paws to open doors, and I’d woken up on a number of mornings to discover that Rousseau had entered my room and slid under the covers at some point in the night to snuggle himself comfortably right in the v of my crotch. Having an unexpected furry guest that close to my testicles was never a comfortable discovery, particularly given Rousseau’s notably cranky and volatile temperament. So my history with furry bodies under the covers was a decidedly mixed one. As I finally extricated myself from the bed and began pulling on an assortment of warm clothes, the cold air of the apartment hitting me like a full-body slap, I also couldn’t deny that it nudged against the sore spot of our fight. As much as Suze clearly didn’t see a problem with having sex with me in human form, then spending the night cuddled against me as a fox, it was doing a pretty good job of weirding me out. Going to sleep next to a woman, I expected to wake up beside her as well.

  Standing under a stream of hot water in the shower, I acknowledged that this was probably going to have to require another relationship discussion. Ugh, was my immediate response. After the last two days, that was the last thing I wanted to do. I racked my brain for any way to avoid that particular branch of the decision tree. Maybe I could get her a little doggie bed for those times when she preferred being in fox form. I pondered that for barely half a second before shuddering. Somehow I’d managed to come up with a way to make the whole situation even weirder.

  Suze was slowly emerging from the bed when I went back into the room. Still in fox form, she’d gotten out from under the covers and was stretched out lazily. At the sight of me she gave a large yawn, exposing her sharp white teeth, then thumped her tail enthusiastically. I’d brought underwear, jeans, and a long-sleeved tee into the bathroom with me, so as she bounced playfully around the room, stealing a pair of clean socks from me before I could put them on, making happy little fox noises, and generally acting in a way that would’ve guaranteed viral video success, I pulled on a heavy cable sweater and finished getting ready.

  Wondering if she was just reluctant to make the shift to human form because it meant the loss of her fluffy winter coat, I collected her scattered clothing from around the room and put it in one convenient pile on the bed. She responded by rolling on her back and presenting her belly for rubs.

  “C’mon, Suze,” I said, unable to fully keep the irritation out of my voice. “I’d like to be able to get a response in human words.”

  She narrowed her eyes, and shifted. Between one moment and the next, the dark-furred fox was replaced by Suze, though the expression of annoyance in those eyes remained even as they changed from gold to dark brown.

  “Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she noted.

  I bit my tongue to avoid mentioning which part of the bed she’d woken up in.

  She continued looking at me steadily, tilting her head to one side as she assessed me.

  “Want to go out for breakfast?” I asked, shaking off the creeping discomfort of being examined so closely. “You’d be able to get real bacon.”

  “Is something bothering you?”

  She wasn’t really psychic, I reminded myself. She just had the unfair advantage of having increased senses that probably could pick up on my increased heart rate and the prickling of sweat. “I didn’t sleep too well,” I said, which was actually at least halfway true.

  After another assessing pause, she seemed to accept my justification, and nodded. She started getting dressed. “Hey, let’s go to that little diner we went to a while back. The one with the silver-dollar pancakes.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I agreed. “Want me to check if Dan and Jaison want to come?”

  Suze’s head popped out of the top of her turtleneck, and she made a face. “Are you sure we can’t just take Jaison and leave Dan behind?”

  “Ha-ha.” I had started to head out the door when my phone rang. I took it out of the charger and checked the caller ID—Chivalry. I cursed a little, remembering that I’d forgotten to give him a call after the metsän kunigas ceremony. Between that, checking in to see if he’d changed his mind about the succubi situation, and needing to update him about what Suze and I had seen the kobolds doing last night, I definitely owed him more than a prebreakfast text.

  “Go knock on Dan’s door,” I asked Suze as I hit the answer button. “Hey, Chivalry, listen—”

  My brother cut me off, his voice low. “You need to come home,” he said softly, and something about the way he spoke made me freeze and listen, and even as I did I realized that I’d been waiting for this call for a while now, and that part of me had known that this moment was coming without even realizing it.

  “It’s Mother,” I said—not asking, because I knew it wasn’t a question. I had a sense of unreality, of cliché. All of Madeline’s hundreds of years of life, and it came down to this—a call on a phone that interrupted plans for Saturday brunch. I was holding the phone with my right hand, but I was suddenly unsure about what to do with my left. If I reached up to touch my face, was I doing it because I needed to, or because I was acting out this moment? I shoved my free hand in my pocket.

  “It’s Mother,” Chivalry agreed. He cleared his throat loudly, and seemed to force himself to speak more regularly. His voice came out clipped, strained. “She’s very weak today, Fort. Prudence.” He coughed, cleared his throat again. “Prudence thinks that it isn’t going to be much longer. You need to be here.”

  “Should I—”

  “Pack a bag.”

  “Okay.” I accepted it, feeling the weight. I’d known yesterday that my mother was dying, but now it was different. I was a son whose mother was dying, and I needed to go home and wait until she was dead. I rubbed my hand hard against the back of my neck, and I realized that I didn’t even remember taking it out of my pocket. “Okay, I’ll be there soon.”

  “Thank you.” We both paused; then Chivalry was the one who said, “Good-bye,” and hung up.

  I just held the phone for a second, then put it back down beside it
s charger. I was going to pack that, I thought to myself. That was easier to think about. I’d have to call in to work, let Orlando know that I wouldn’t be coming in tomorrow, so that he’d have time to find someone else to fill in. I had to pack toothpaste and a toothbrush, or else I’d have to buy some down in Newport, at the grocery store. I knew that if I really wanted to I could just get in the car and drive down, and ask my mother’s staff to stock me with a complete wardrobe and toiletries set, but it felt better to be thinking about packing up my duffel and choosing what I’d need. It felt substantial, the only substantial thing in the world at this moment.

  I didn’t want to look at Suzume, because I didn’t really want to say the words yet. But she was right there, sitting on my bed, and there was only so long that I could avoid looking at her.

  She was looking at me, with that patience that she was wholly capable of but was always a surprise to be reminded about. It was the patience of a fox waiting for a mouse to move, to reveal its presence, and it was endless.

  “Do you want me to drive you down?” she asked. Of course she would’ve heard the whole conversation—even in her human form her hearing was excellent. But there she sat on my bed, in a turtleneck and a pair of underpants, her legs and feet still bare in the morning cold. She hadn’t even combed her hair yet, and the midnight strands were fluffy and tangled on one side of her head and completely flat on the other. Her dark eyes were focused on me, and there was nothing but patience from her.

  If I hadn’t loved her before that moment, I would’ve loved her then.

  “No,” I said, focusing on those clear options in front of me, grateful for the choice she’d given me. I wouldn’t have to talk about feelings or the future yet, just the mechanics of what to pack, how to travel. “No, if you drove me down, then you’d have to get someone to pick you up. I can drive myself.”

  After that, I just focused on getting out the door. My duffel bag came out from under the bed, and I stuffed it with clothes and toiletries. It was my family, so I stuffed in my Colt .45, along with some boxes of ammunition. I called Orlando to let him know that I wouldn’t be coming to work at Redbones, and I didn’t know for how long. I said that it was a family crisis, but didn’t bother to explain the details. I heard the irritation under his sympathy, and it didn’t really matter to me. He started to warn me not to stay away too long, or he might like the coverage person better than me, and I hung up.

  Suze told Dan what was going on, and he put coffee in one of his travel mugs for me and made a grilled cheese sandwich so that I could eat while I drove. Jaison said something to me that I registered as being heartfelt and meaningful, but a second later I couldn’t remember what he’d said at all.

  I got into the Scirocco, which Suze had started up while I was packing, so the air coming out of the vents was warm enough to dry out my eyes, and the steering wheel wasn’t so cold that I had to wrap my sleeve over my palm to touch it comfortably. Once I was in the driver’s seat, she leaned down to me.

  “If you need some company, give me a call,” she said. I nodded, and she kissed me. Then she backed up so that I could close the car door, and we waved to each other. As I was pulling out of the apartment’s lot, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw that she was still standing there, watching me as I went. I raised my hand to wave one last time, and she returned the gesture. Then I turned onto the road, and she was gone.

  I drove almost in a fugue state, taking every turn by habit and memory, both thankfully distracted by the minutiae of driving and all too much in my own head. And then, almost too quickly, I was pulling into the driveway of my mother’s mansion, where my brother was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.

  * * *

  Days went by.

  Madeline spent most of her time sleeping. We sat around her bed, talking quietly, or sometimes just reading. Chivalry’s new wife, Simone, was constantly at his side, and it was clear that he was leaning heavily on her. That left me and Prudence as a very uncomfortable pairing. When Madeline was awake, she would talk a little to us, but sometimes she was confused. She asked for people who had been dead for years, and then when she was reminded of that, she’d nod, then ask for them again. Other times she would wake up and be the same Madeline she’d been before her decline, but it was impossible to know when that would be the case, so we were always on edge when she first began talking, as we tried to figure out which Madeline we were speaking to. When she was fully cognizant, that tended to annoy her, and that tired her out faster, so even when we could really talk with her, it never lasted long.

  When she did sleep, it was restless, tossing back and forth. She muttered a lot, sometimes too low for me to understand, and other times in languages that I didn’t know. Whenever I did understand something, it was always fragmented, disjointed.

  Once, I was sitting next to Prudence when the muttering started, and I asked her if she knew what Madeline was talking about.

  “I wish I did,” my sister said, her blue eyes never shifting from our mother’s face. There was an angry edge to her voice, under the sadness that lay over all of us like a stifling winter quilt, pressing us down and making it hard to think or even register the passing of time. “She always kept so much back, always said that I wasn’t ready to know things, or that she’d tell me later. And now there’s no later left, and I still don’t understand.” Prudence’s mouth twisted, angry and sad in equal measures now, and I remembered the words that the kobold had taunted me with. I reminded myself forcibly that they were history’s best publicized con artists, but somehow it was harder to believe while sitting beside my mother’s deathbed than it had been in the alley.

  Maire was often present, checking my mother’s condition, giving her small shots of painkillers to try to make her more comfortable. Madeline’s staff flocked around her—on some days it felt as if every person my mother employed was finding a reason to come into the room. They brought flowers and get-well cards, and even a little teddy bear with GET WELL SOON embroidered in pink thread found its way into the room. Patricia agonized over arranging my mother’s pillows just so, and even though my mother hadn’t been able to eat solid food in a century, the cook kept putting together the most beautiful tiny sampling plates and sending them up, claiming that just smelling something delicious would perk my mother up.

  The hours ticked past. It felt like we’d been there forever, and at the same time everything going on outside of the mansion seemed to fade away.

  On the morning of the fourth day, I put on my last pair of clean underpants and realized that I would have to do my laundry, or go home and get more clothing, or go out and buy more clothes here. I sat next to Madeline’s bed and read articles from the New York Times to her, on the assumption that, even mostly unconscious and slipping into death, she’d probably still want to know what was going on with politics, and tried to decide what I was going to do about my underwear situation. It was the most basic decision, and one that was pretty easy to resolve, yet I found myself dithering. In the strange twilight world that I currently resided in, one where my mother was dying neither quickly nor slowly yet very, very immediately, I couldn’t even figure out how to provide myself with clean underwear. In a strange way, it almost began to seem to me that if I made a decision, then the situation would finally end and my mother would die, at which point I realized that I’d slid fully into magical thinking. Yet even identifying my own brand of temporary madness didn’t resolve the problem.

  What resolved the problem was when Suzume showed up just after lunch with a second duffel bag of clean clothing.

  “I was pretty sure that the kitsune weren’t psychic,” I said to her in the front hall of the mansion. It was the first thing I could think to say, given the completely unexpected sight before me.

  “We aren’t,” she assured me. “But I counted how many sets of clothing you packed before you left, and when I knew that you’d be running out I asked Dan
to pack some more for you.”

  She stayed with me for the rest of the afternoon, but in fox form. It was comforting to have her with me, because she was soft and nice to pet as she sat in my lap, but I would’ve significantly preferred to have her in human form. When she was getting ready to leave, just before dinner was going to be served, and had finally resumed her human form, I asked her why she’d stayed fox.

  “Low profile, Fort,” she said, sitting on my bed as she pulled on her shoes. “While I’m happy to be there emotionally for you, my grandmother was pretty specific about me staying under Prudence’s radar.”

  “What’s Atsuko worried about?”

  Suze’s feathery black eyebrows arched. “Your sister—who by the way was not exactly thrilled when your mother granted my grandmother and all her kick-ass unborn progeny, i.e., me, unprecedented levels of self-governance—is about to become head of the territory. Man friend, I know that you’re in a difficult emotional place right now, but think this one through.” She paused, then looked around. “Also, I’d consider trying to brighten your day by jumping you and defiling what is undoubtedly your virgin childhood bedroom, but I’m not sure that I can work up enthusiasm while surrounded by this many stereotypical teenage boy movie posters. What’s up with this?”

  “Summer blockbusters with copious explosions were my gateway drug to film theory,” I acknowledged. Then, refocusing on the important part of her statement, I asked, “Atsuko is worried?”

  “Everyone is worried,” she said. “But I can stay longer if you need me to.”

  I appreciated her offer, but turned it down, to her obvious relief.

  As I walked her to her car, a thought occurred to me. “Have I been fired yet?”

 

‹ Prev