“Nokke didn’t set this,” she said, her voice low and much throatier than usual, different in a way that both set my own instincts on edge and at the same time rubbed down my spine like velvet. “Maybe Hobany,” Lilah muttered. “Maybe Amadon.” Moving as suddenly as a startled deer, Lilah dropped the circular back on the counter and pressed the heels of her hands hard against her mouth. Her eyes squeezed closed in a way that I recognized all too well, and when they opened again their brilliance was gone, faded back into the unusually pretty, yet passable for human, golden brown that I remembered. She looked straight at me and I could feel her fear in the back of my throat. “We need to talk,” she said, quiet and intense, “but we can’t do it here.”
“What do you—”
She dropped her voice even further, low enough that I had to lean in to understand her. “Tomas is in the back today.”
“Do you think we could ask him—”
She shook her head hard and interrupted me. “You don’t understand. He’s loyal, Fort. Human murders won’t matter to him, not with this.” She tapped the edge of the circular with one finger, suddenly looking unwilling to touch it again, like it was dangerous. Lilah whispered, “For some of the Neighbors, it goes beyond loyalty to the Ad-hene. It’s beyond devotion.” Her eyes bore into mine, begging me to understand.
There was a rustling behind her, the scrape of a shoe against cheap carpeting, and she jumped like a girl watching a slasher film. Her hand shot out, grabbing her thick copy of Middlemarch and yanking it quickly on top of the circular, blocking it from sight. Automatically following her example, I stuffed the advertisement in my hand back into my jeans pocket.
The beaded curtain behind her parted, and a tall guy with a weediness and awkwardness that screamed high school student leaned into the main store with an air of general apology for his very existence. From the straight dark hair that hung over his ears and his skin tone I would’ve guessed he was Hispanic, but his eyes were a brilliant, unnatural emerald green, indicating that wherever his mother had hailed from, his father was from somewhere very different. He was carrying a large brown box with an overflow of packing peanuts that scattered around him like a lazy snowfall.
“Hey, Lilah,” he started, then caught sight of us and froze, a dark flush filling his cheeks. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize you were with customers.” I felt a distinct flash of empathy as his voice cracked painfully twice in that simple comment, his blush darkening each time.
Lilah turned partially to look at him, her face and voice immediately becoming warm and reassuring, reminding me of how she’d acted around Allegra. Her shaking hands, hidden from the boy by her body, were the only sign of her real emotions. “It’s not a problem, Felix. What do you need?”
He coughed twice, and, apparently realizing that he now had no choice but to talk in front of strangers, muttered, “I was opening up today’s shipment and I was wondering where you wanted me to set up about twenty crystal unicorns.”
“I’m not sure. Give me a second and I’ll come back and look them over.”
Felix nodded, looking relieved, and hurried backward so fast that his box tilted dangerously and released a huge puff of packing material, but thankfully no crystal unicorns.
When he was completely out of sight, Lilah turned back to us. “He’s just a little shy,” she said apologetically. “He’ll grow out of it.” Her hands, still shaking, fluttered a little, and she cleared her throat hard before continuing, “and the teen years are always so hard for the changelings.” I wondered if she was thinking of Jacoby, who had clearly not grown out of whatever exacerbated hard times the changelings suffered through in high school. Then she leaned over the counter and whispered, “Listen, I’ll call you and we’ll meet somewhere to talk.” She pulled her book off of the circular and nodded at it, clearly wanting me to collect it without her having to touch it again. I stuffed it back in my pocket, her own revulsion translating to me. “I’ll call you soon,” she repeated forcefully, and I wondered if she was talking to me or to herself.
I mouthed a good-bye, and Suze and I headed out to the car. I glanced around automatically in the parking lot, but if Matt was still following us, he’d found a hiding spot that I couldn’t locate.
We were both quiet during the three attempts it took for the Fiesta’s engine to catch, but as we pulled out and into traffic I looked over at Suze.
“Well?” I asked expectantly.
“Hm?” She gave me her most innocent look, the kind she would probably give if found in the dead of night in the middle of a chicken coop with blood and feathers stuck to her mouth.
“Don’t give me that. What do you think about what just went down?”
Suze dropped the act and looked back at Dreamcatching with suspicion written all over her face. “Lilah was being awfully helpful for someone answering questions that could implicate others of her own kind.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, then considered. “But it sounded like she was trying to protect and exonerate Jacoby when I first showed her the circular. She was worried about him. She didn’t sound like she was trying to protect those full elves, though. I thought she actually sounded scared of them.” I glanced over at the kitsune.
Suze spoke slowly, almost reluctantly. “Unless she’s got a better poker face than I think she does, she was really shocked when she saw the card. And she wasn’t faking being afraid. And I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think she lied to us.”
I thought about it while we sat at a stoplight. “Jacoby was talking about the differences between the Neighbors and Themselves, and Lilah talked about some of the Neighbors being extra loyal. Do you think there are splits in the elf and half-elf community?”
“Makes sense with what I’ve heard.” She mulled it over, stretching her legs out as far as the Fiesta’s limited leg room would allow, then added, “Lilah doesn’t strike me as someone drinking the elf Kool-Aid.”
Part of me relaxed. My gut had been telling me that Lilah had been honest, but I’d wanted some independent confirmation. In the arts of detecting deception, I trusted Suze’s gut more than mine—in the same way that people consulted art thieves when building museum security systems.
With that out of the way, I turned to my second-most-pressing question. “Who was Lilah talking about? Hobany? Is that actually a person’s name?”
“Fort, doesn’t your brother tell you anything? The elves are in single digits on the real ones, the full-bloods. Those guys have life spans that are so damn long that the rest of us just call them immortal and leave it at that. No one except them and the Neighbors know exactly how many of them there actually are right now, but there are only five names that get thrown around.”
“Amadon, Hobany, Nokke. Who are the others?”
My phone rang, my ringtone cutting through the conversation very effectively. At Suze’s very expressive glance, I considered that if I was going to be tracking down a killer and unraveling secret plans much longer, I would probably need a more serious ringtone than the Tetris theme song.
Looking down at the number displayed, Suze raised her eyebrows. “How about you ask your new girlfriend? Guess she wasn’t kidding about calling you soon.”
I’d already answered the call, so there was nothing to do except make a face at Suze that promised retribution. She looked extremely unimpressed.
Lilah was talking fast and with a slight echoing sound in the background that made me wonder if she was calling me from a bathroom.
“Hey, can I meet up with you somewhere after the store closes at six?”
“Yeah,” I said “I’m working a partial shift. Can you come to my apartment around eight?”
She immediately agreed, and I gave her the address.
I paused, then just went ahead and asked. “Lilah, why are you being this helpful?”
“I know about our treaty agreements that the Ad-hene made with Mad
eline Scott,” she answered grimly. “And I’ve heard about what Prudence Scott does to people who break the rules. Whatever the hell the Ad-hene are cooking up here, I don’t want innocent Neighbors to pay the price for it.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that. “Okay,” I said, talking through the awkward moment. “I’ll see you at eight. Call me if you get lost.” Thank God for inane social niceties, I thought as I hung up.
Suze was looking at me, assessing, clearly weighing something but not saying a word.
Irritated, I asked, “What, Suze? You’re looking at me like I’ve got stuff on my face.”
“No, just thinking.” There were subtexts to her subtexts in that comment.
I sighed heavily. “Are you going to share it with me?”
“Just remembering that I still have my old boom box in a closet.”
“What?” It was a good thing that I’d just stopped at a red light, because the completely left-field nature of that comment gave my brain whiplash.
“You can borrow it.”
“I’m going to need more help on this non sequitur, Suze.”
There was a gleam in her eyes that I didn’t know how to interpret, but I was pretty sure that it boded poorly for me. “You know, to hold up outside Lilah’s window.”
“You’re nuts,” I said flatly.
“I can already see you composing your mix tape. Don’t forget to put ‘In Your Eyes’ on it. Chicks dig that one,” she said, with a little twist of viciousness on the last part.
I shook my head. “I have to go to work and earn back some of that money I just spent bribing a junkie, so I’ll drop you off at your place so that you can keep yourself company with the crazy.”
She made an affronted sniff, and we drove in silence for several long, uncomfortable minutes until finally she internally forgave me and made an innocuous and clearly peace-making joke about a particularly obnoxious billboard ad, which started a normal conversation. It allowed both of us to ignore the suddenly tense undertone that had emerged, and when I dropped her off we said good-bye with an unusual level of politeness.
As she started to walk to her door, I abruptly leaned out my window and said, “Listen, Suze, about the roommate thing—”
“Oh, don’t worry, Fort.” And the expression on her face was definitely enough to make me concerned. “I am all over that.”
I shuddered and went to work.
I brooded through my work shift, wishing that carrying tiny plates of expensive food could occupy more of my thoughts and give me less time to try to puzzle through either why elves would want to kill Gage in such a confusingly convoluted manner or Suze’s moodiness. I was able to come up with an equal number of theories for both.
As if in answer to my inner desire for distraction, it was a slow night on service and I had the misfortune to be tapped as the test server for Chef Jerome. Whenever he was working on new dishes, some unfortunate member of the waitstaff was picked to see how the dishes would work when introduced to the movement of a serving platter. Tonight that unfortunate person was me.
Most of the dishes that night were pretty usual. Delicate, ornate, yet surprisingly sturdy. Chef Jerome’s experiment with halved coconut shells turned out to be not quite perfectly balanced yet, much to my dismay and Chef Jerome’s invective-laden rage. And the final capper on the evening was working with Chef Jerome’s newest creation, a strange variation on bombe Alaska that involved several pieces of fruit that had been exquisitely carved into flower shapes and then drenched in some mysterious combination of alcohol, and which Chef Jerome envisioned as being carried out while on fire. Unfortunately the mix on the alcohol was a little off, and sparks kept catching on my shirt and having to be beaten down by Chef Jerome’s alert sous-chef, Melissa.
By the end of the ordeal Chef Jerome was busily working on adjusting the alcohol mix to retain flavor but burn slightly more manageably, and I was reflecting that my wish for distraction had come at the high price of my work shirt, which now had several burns.
I finished my shift at seven. Paying the fee at the parking garage made me wince and remember why I usually took the bus to work. There was a lot behind Peláez, but it was only for the customers to park in. Those of us who actually worked there and drove in had to fend for ourselves, which in this part of town generally meant dedicated parking lots. The Peláez managers were extremely ruthless in enforcing their parking preferences. One of the busboys earned extra money by going into the lot and cataloguing the parked cars every thirty minutes. If a car was parked in the lot for more than three hours, then steps were immediately taken to determine if it actually belonged to a customer. If it wasn’t, then the tow truck was called.
I called Suzume while I worked on getting the Fiesta started. I waited impatiently while the phone rang, then was surprised to find myself in voice mail, which had somehow never happened before. Even more surprising was how professional Suze’s voice mail message was.
“Hey, just wanted to remind you to head over to meet up with Lilah,” I said. I paused, racking my brain for something to say, then heard the incoming call beep. “Oh, good, that’s you,” I said in relief. “Crap, I shouldn’t have said that out loud. Shit, I— Okay, I’m just going to give up now. Delete this message.”
I had a bad feeling that that message would come back to torment me in some way. Deciding to deal with that hurdle when it came, I picked up Suze’s call and repeated the less idiotic portion of my voice-mail message.
“Can’t make it, Fort. Sorry.”
“What?” I was shocked, and felt a pang of hurt feelings. I had to ask, “Is this about before? In the car? Or later? I swear, I have at least seventy-eight percent faith that you are doing a good job trying to find me a nonhuman roommate.”
“Keep your skirt down, Louise; your slip is showing.” Her derisive snort and insult to my masculinity were so quintessentially Suze that I relaxed. “I’m not ditching you; I’m at work. My cousin Midori has been covering for me the past few days, but one guy asked for me by name, so I couldn’t bail. I’ll finish this as soon as I can and come over, but in the meantime I’m sure you can handle Lilah if she starts getting feisty.”
“Feisty in what way?” I asked suspiciously. Suze responded with a combination of cat meows and cracking whip noises, and I hung up on her.
After I put the phone away and wrestled the Fiesta into gear (the clutch was slowly dying and needed to be replaced—which was unfortunately what I’d been saving up for before I’d had to bribe Jacoby), I froze, weighing Suze’s words. Was this a date? I pondered that for a second, then relaxed. No, this was a strategic meet-up to discuss serious territorial business.
Besides, if it was a date, I still had a half hour after I got home to change clothes before she showed up.
• • •
As it turned out, I did not have that time. When I reached the top of the third set of stairs, I found Lilah sitting in the hallway next to my door. She was still wearing the yellow dress from this morning, with the addition of a bright blue coat that fell into that category of coats that seem to straddle the line between heavy button-up sweater and dedicated outerwear. Her coppery hair was loose for the first time, falling down her back in a wavy mass that suggested a much higher wind outside than I had personally experienced. A stretchy white headband with a cheery fake sunflower attached to it was doing double duty of both keeping her hair out of her eyes and providing backup cover for her ears.
Seeing me, Lilah scrambled to her feet. I noticed that her ability to blush extended not just to her cheeks, but down her neck and presumably to lower reaches as well.
“Sorry I’m early,” she said, making a noble attempt to brush off her backside without being obvious about it. “It’s a really bad habit of mine. Usually I bring a book and wait in my car until I’m only fifteen minutes early, but I took a cab tonight.”
Despite the ci
rcumstances that had led to this meeting and my own brooding over it, I smiled at the image of Lilah waiting outside parties until some invisible social acceptability clock counted down. “No problem, as long as you don’t mind that I’m still dressed for work.” I gestured to my charred shirt and my pants, which had been on the receiving end of one overfilled serving of Chef Jerome’s coconut soup. I’d tried some, and it was an extremely delicious dish, but balancing something that came served in a hollowed-out half of a coconut had been too much of a challenge for me.
Looking down, Lilah laughed. “Not at all,” she assured me. Then: “It’s not like it’s a date.”
From the look on her face, she knew her mistake the moment it came out of her mouth. I gave a very strained, very fake laugh as I agreed, “No, not a date at all.”
She faked an answering laugh. Then we both laughed together. It was horribly painful.
“Because it’s not,” she said, still fake chortling heartily.
“Nope,” I answered.
There was a long pause as we stared at each other, caught in a social nightmare.
It was totally like a date.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked, desperate to do something to salvage the situation.
“Oh, sweet Jesus, yes.”
• • •
The last time Chivalry had asked me if I wanted something to drink, the result had been Macallan 1926, which was part of the impressive collection of alcohol that he had built up during Newport’s days as a port for the booze runners during Prohibition. I’d learned later that the bottle he’d brought out with absolutely no show or ceremony would’ve run upward of sixty thousand dollars on the open market.
In stocking my own personal liquor cabinet, I’d had to take a more restrained approach. For one thing, there wasn’t a lot of cabinet space in my apartment, and my liquor cabinet actually doubled as my cleaning-agent cabinet. So when I needed the social-lubricating benefits of hard alcohol, I pulled out my trusty bottle of Banker’s Club—a brand of rum so cheap that it actually came in a plastic bottle. The taste matched the price, and as I mixed us each a rum and coke, I hoped that the comparatively high quality of the Coca-Cola would cover up the worst of my cost-cutting sins. Or that it would be so horrible that she’d overlook the fact that, lacking clean glasses, I’d poured our drinks into matching coffee mugs.
Iron Night Page 15
