Iron Night

by M. L. Brennan

  It took me a minute to realize what I was seeing, but then I realized what my eyes were actually telling me. Whenever the shape moved a step, I’d lose track of it again until it took another, because in the moment when it was still, it blended perfectly into its background. It was like in Predator, which was not a comforting thought to have.

  Eventually it moved until it was just about two feet from us, then came to a halt, disappearing again. I could smell it now that it was close—strong, very salty; not necessarily a bad smell but not a good one either. It was like getting close to the seal exhibit at the aquarium.

  There was more movement and then something seemed to shift in the upper part of it, and suddenly, as if some kind of hood had been pushed back, two glowing green eyes came into view, each as big as a golf ball. They were set in a long, inhuman gray slab of a face that looked like it had been chipped out of granite, and a mouth suddenly gaped open below that, huge and black, but with big, long teeth that gleamed like pearls.

  Beside me, Chivalry nodded once. “Good morning, Brynja.”

  The glowing eyes focused on my brother, and, in a voice that was so low and grinding I could feel it rumble in my feet, like a Leonard Cohen CD with the bass turned way up, it said, “Velkommen, son of Scott.”

  “Has everything gone well this month?” Chivalry was as polite as last week, when the seventy-five-year-old head of the historical society, Mrs. Forbes, had stopped by for a lunch-and-gossip date with my mother.

  “Ja, ja. My family and I have been very comfortable this month.” Brynja’s big eyes almost closed, leaving two long, glowing slits watching us out of the darkness.

  “And have those humans who live and travel around you also been comfortable?” Under the extreme politeness in Chivalry’s tone was something very sharp, and the troll dropped its mouth open very wide and made that rough rock sound again, which I was starting to guess was its version of laughter. Its eyes rounded out again, the glow as brilliant as what was coming from the bridge.

  “You have so little trust in my family, Chivalry,” the troll said, sounding amused. “Nei, we have not been naughty, as you fear. The little goats keep us quite full, and we are content to watch the birds and the waves and the boats that pass us by.”

  “I am glad to hear that. I have brought this month’s goats.”

  “Ja, we smelled them as you arrived.” The troll’s voice dropped even further, becoming hungry and possessive. “We smelled their hot blood, their fat little bodies; felt their tame, content little minds. Ja, we are always pleased when you visit our home, vampire.” Those big eyes shifted then and focused on me. The troll’s voice changed again, becoming almost curious. “But not alone this time. Kva er dette? Not in half a century have you brought someone down to us.” Ten feet from us, closer to the shore, another pair of glowing green eyes suddenly appeared. Then another, huddled among the rocks.

  “This is my brother, Fortitude,” Chivalry said, dropping a hand on my shoulder. I was glad he did it, because I’d just glanced at the underside of the bridge and seen a sea of those glowing eyes staring down from the metal trusses. It was not a comforting sight.

  “Ahhhh . . .” The troll’s sigh was grinding on my eardrum. “Another son of Madeline Scott. But very young, very young. He does not smell as you do, Chivalry.” The green eyes drifted closer, and that large mouth was working, and I could hear a low sound like bellows being pumped at an old-fashioned forge. I realized that it was tasting my scent, bringing the air to sample in that massive maw. “He smells more human, this one. Smells like fear.”

  “Your fealty to him is equal to what you owe me,” Chivalry said, and now his voice was complete steel. His hand still gripping my shoulder, he took a step forward, toward Brynja, and dragged me along for the ride. Immediately the troll backed up, and around us those other glowing eyes disappeared, leaving only Brynja. Chivalry continued pulling me forward, advancing on the troll, who kept moving backward. “My brother will be delivering next month’s goats without me, and the next.” That was certainly news to me, but I didn’t let it show on my face. “But”—and Chivalry’s voice became silky here—“if my brother is not treated with the same respect I receive, I would become quite angry. As would my sister. Perhaps Prudence would feel the need to express her displeasure in person.”

  “Nei, nei,” the troll said immediately, ducking down and lowering himself almost to the ground, judging by those glowing eyes. “Unnskyld. My apologies. There will be no insults to your brother. No need for your sister to trouble herself with us.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Chivalry said coldly. “My brother will see you next month, and we will both be keeping an eye on your activities. Enjoy the goats, Brynja.”

  All the eyes opened again, and there was a chorus of whispering, grinding voices all around us in the darkness. “Takk for maten, Chivalry. Takk for maten, Fortitude, brother of Chivalry, son of Madeline Scott. Takk for maten.”

  Chivalry’s arm propelled me as we turned around and headed back up the path. It was extremely creepy to turn my back on all those eyes, knowing what huge bodies and shiny teeth they were attached to, but I did my best not to hurry away. Clearly the monthly feeding was combined with a monthly intimidation routine, and I didn’t want to mess up all of Chivalry’s work. Particularly since I had suddenly been volunteered for two months of goat delivery.

  Given their reaction to the thought of getting a visit from Prudence, though, I probably didn’t have too much to worry about. Not that I blamed them. Chivalry can be pretty scary when he wants to be, but Prudence is a century older than he is and has a violent streak. Like the trolls, I avoided her as much as possible.

  Back where we’d parked the car, which I now recognized as the worst make-out spot ever chosen, Chivalry leaned down and silently unhitched the trailer. He motioned me to the car, and I hesitated.

  “You’re just going to leave everything?” I asked.

  “I’ll send James down in a few hours to pick up the trailer.” James was one of my mother’s household staff. Like the rest of the staff, who were all human, he made great money and benefits from never asking any questions or showing any curiosity about any tasks he was asked to perform.

  I tried not to look at Titus as we drove off. As a vegetarian, I usually don’t have to deal with this kind of guilt.

  “So . . .” I said as we drove through the streets of Newport. The sky had lightened to a very pale gray when we reached the car, but it was still too early for many other cars to be around. “Trolls, huh?”

  Chivalry nodded. “Norwegian imports. They like rocky shorelines, and bridges give them extra coverage. They’re big, and their skin folds work even better than a chameleon’s for blending in. Stealth hunters for the most part, but they can be about as fast as a running crocodile when they really need to move. They’re not very active, but at your age it wouldn’t be a good idea to get in a fight with them on your own, since they are almost always in a group.”

  “And the goat deal?” I’d spent almost all my life trying to pretend that I was a regular human guy, and that included not learning anything about trolls or other critters that crept around in the dark. There were a few things I hadn’t been able to completely ignore, like my need to feed off of my mother’s blood every few months, but I’d tried to treat those instances as flukes in my otherwise normal life of post–college graduation underemployment. But I’d had to give up my state of willful ignorance, and now I spent a lot of my time with Chivalry, trying to catch up on the things I should’ve been learning for years.

  “Their low activity level and something kind of reptilian about their metabolism means that they don’t have to eat much. Most of the time they like to grab stray dogs and that kind of thing, but they won’t turn up their noses at the occasional wandering toddler or solitary boater. A lot of times humans are even easier to catch than animals, so when the troll colony first mo
ved in there were a bunch of disappearances. All you need is one person to see a troll grab a kid and you get the kind of publicity that no one around here wants, so Mother sent Prudence down here to teach them some manners.” A lifted eyebrow was enough for Chivalry to convey the level of destruction Prudence probably delivered. “After she’d made an impression, I sorted out an agreement. We provide small farm animals every month, enough to keep them fed and content, and in return they control their predations and occasionally do a service for the family.”

  “That sounded a little Mafia there,” I pointed out.

  Chivalry shrugged as he turned the Bentley off of Ocean Drive and down the long white gravel driveway that led to the mansion. With almost thirty acres of land, all of it immaculately landscaped by Madeline’s team of full-time gardeners, it’s a long driveway. “They are very good at hiding, not unintelligent, and are good at disposing of bodies without leaving much evidence behind. It’s a fact of the world that those qualities can be very useful.” We pulled into Chivalry’s parking space, which was between Madeline’s gleaming silver Rolls-Royce and my decaying yet faithful Ford Fiesta. The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, shading the sky with little orange and pink layers. My mother’s mansion is a huge two-story white marble structure with an unimpeded view of the ocean, and it was considered an exceptionally beautiful house even in the heyday of the Gilded Age, when Madeline’s neighbors were having entire rooms from French châteaus or Italian villas stripped down, boxed up, and shipped across the Atlantic to be recreated in their second drawing rooms. It’s the kind of house that you can never really get used to, and Chivalry and I both paused to give it a moment of appreciation as the sunrise hit it.

  After a second, Chivalry checked the car clock and said, “Okay, five a.m. We have time to eat breakfast, then fit in a quick three-hour training session.”

  There is nothing good about being awake at five in the morning. Especially when it’s in the company of my brother.

  Chapter 2

  At some point in the past century my mother had the old carriage house on her property converted into a fully outfitted gym for Chivalry. In the past, I’d avoided the gym just as I’d avoided anything that hinted of exertion or some kind of sporting event, but the events of several months ago, plus my new responsibilities within Madeline’s power structure, had forced me to admit that I needed to be less easy to beat up. So, not without a few reservations, I’d gone to Chivalry and asked him to help.

  What had followed was the most physically grueling summer I’d ever experienced. Every day I’d driven down to the estate and spent hours working with various cardio and weight-training devices of torture until I was nothing more than a limp rag on the floor, at which point I then got the pleasure of getting in my car and driving forty-five minutes back to my own apartment in Providence to head off to work.

  Realistically, it hadn’t made much sense to keep living in my apartment, working at whatever abysmal minimum-wage job I could find to eke out a living where I barely made my bills, and even then had to have a roommate. There was a large and luxurious room for me at the mansion, and I was well aware that my mother would’ve started paying my bills and providing me with a more-than-generous allowance the moment that I moved in.

  But I’d spent nine years living in the mansion, from the day my foster parents had been killed until the day I left for college, and I had no intention of going back. I never felt like I could really breathe there—not in the beautifully appointed rooms, not walking around the gorgeous grounds and looking out over the wide expanse of ocean, not even when I was just in the surrounding town of Newport. Everything was wonderful, and every part of it was a reminder that I wasn’t really human. I was turning into something else, my body transitioning, and I hated all reminders of that.

  After all, a vampire had killed my foster parents. It was my own older sister, Prudence, who’d sprayed their blood on the walls of their little house in Cranston, with the same emotional involvement that most people engage when swatting a fly. From what I’d recently seen of other vampires, she was the typical example of our species. There were a lot of reasons why I’d spent years pretending as hard as I could to be human.

  I’d had to give in a lot lately, though. In the old days I’d avoided Newport, coming down only when my biological needs couldn’t be put off any longer. At my age, I didn’t feed off of human blood; I drank my mother’s. I’d pushed it off for four or five months when I could, but once I’d started training with Chivalry I’d started feeding every other week. I hadn’t wanted to, but the results had been hard to argue with; fed by my mother, I healed far faster than any human could. I’d had a fractured arm at the beginning of Chivalry’s brutal training regimen, but the cast had come off in two weeks rather than six. Bruises went away faster; sore muscles recovered practically overnight.

  I benefitted from all of it, but I didn’t have to like it. All of it worried me, no matter how essential it was. I’d spent seventeen years waking up from nightmares about my foster parents’ deaths, dreams where I’d had to relive every horrible moment in Technicolor. Lately those dreams had changed. Now, Jill and Brian still died, but now I watched it happen and felt nothing. I woke up sweating and afraid after those dreams, worse than ever before.

  I tried to avoid the dreams by wearing myself out physically, hoping that if I could just get tired enough, I would drop into a sleep so deep that my brain wouldn’t start up the REM cycle. That motivation had helped me continue walking into the gym each day.

  Chivalry had a more purist approach to working out than I did, but he’d given in and had a TV installed in the gym after it became abundantly clear early in training that I was incapable of working out with nothing to distract my brain except counting my sweat droplets. With a degree in film theory, my previous favorite activity in the world had been lying on my couch and watching movies. Working out while watching movies wasn’t quite as fun, but it was an acceptable compromise. Since Chivalry always made sure that he was in the gym every minute I was, the better to monitor my every heartbeat, I’d taken the opportunity to expand his appreciation of movies. I liked a lot of Chivalry’s favorite movies, but his enjoyment of cinema started stagnating when color was introduced, and lately the only movies he showed any interest in seeing were foreign art-house flicks. What was any self-respecting younger brother to do except forcibly expose him to Hannah Montana: The Movie? It had been fun for a while, but I’d finally had to tone things back after Chivalry completely lost it and threw a seventy-pound kettlebell through the screen halfway through the Justin Bieber movie. He’d replaced the TV, and I’d agreed to moderate my movie selections.

  My film geekery was a freshman conversion in college, but the rest of my interests had deeper roots, harking back to eighth grade and my conversion into the lifestyle. Before then I’d spent a lot of years afraid to make close human friends after what had happened to my foster parents. But eventually I’d drifted into the orbit of a few other outcast boys, and in the hobbies and fandoms that I shared with them I had found a sense of community—and, better, a sense of escape. Playing video games or raiding an imaginary dungeon in a friend’s rec room had helped make me feel human. My mother had encouraged human friendships when I was younger—superficial ones, preferably, and with children who would bring good connections with them. She’d envisioned me forming social ties to the sons and daughters of the politicians and preeminent city lights who graced her dinner table. Her disappointment in my preferred companions had been palpable on the many afternoons that I’d headed to my friend John’s house for a day filled with Nintendo, Star Wars, and tabletop role-playing games rather than sailing, tennis, or any of the other activities that she and my siblings wished I’d embraced.

  After my television détente with Chivalry, I’d taken the chance to expose him to all five seasons of Babylon 5—a small piece of vengeance, perhaps, for the hours of lectures on preferred social
ization that I’d endured from him over the years.

  Today there had been an hour of workout, and then Chivalry had shifted us into his regulation boxing ring. He’d taken up boxing back in the late 1880s, when it had enjoyed a surge of popularity among the younger upper-class gentlemen that he was friends with, and had continued practicing on his own even when other fads eventually replaced it. Even with all of the new working out, I still lacked the strength and speed of a full vampire, so my brother had decreed that some self-defense work was in order. Accordingly, he had proceeded to instruct me in the correct Marquis of Queensberry rules of boxing.

  “You’re showing good improvement, Fort,” he said brightly to me. He was bouncing around in front of me, arms up in perfect form, having spent the last two hours doing nothing but blocking punches and giving me reminder taps with his fists whenever I dropped my guard. He looked crisp and fresh, practically a deodorant ad.

  I, on the other hand, had plopped on the floor like an exhausted toddler and was barely able to lift my arms anymore. I was sweating so badly that I looked like a miniature rain cloud must be directly above me, and I could actually track my recent movements by looking down at the damp trail on the canvas of the ring.

  “Stop trying to encourage me,” I panted.

  “No, I really mean it,” he said. “You have the strength and speed of an exceptional human.”

  “Which still leaves me well below the level of an asthmatic vampire.” I tried to wipe my face with my shirt, but since it was completely saturated with sweat, it was like using a warm washcloth. I gave up and just let it run down my face.