Iron Night

by M. L. Brennan

  Lilah did make a notable face at her first sip, which she immediately tried to cover up by complimenting the apartment décor, but the answer to the foul taste was the same as with most alcohol: drink more. By our second glasses we’d both managed to move past the initial social awkwardness enough to be making eye contact again, and I was able to give Lilah a more detailed description of the situation to date, from Gage’s death to Matt’s discovery of the tattoo link to the missing persons’ reports, finishing with the morning’s visit to Iron Needle and the subsequent discoveries there.

  Finally, with no more background information left, I asked her what she knew.

  Lilah pondered the contents of her mug for a long moment before answering, and when she spoke it was very slowly and reluctantly. “Nothing more than you’re telling me, Fort, but I’m worried about which members of Neighbors Jacoby said were involved. I wouldn’t use his phrasing—”

  “You mean older, really snotty fucks, always brownnosing it up isn’t accurate?” I asked dryly.

  That made her laugh. “Okay, maybe it’s a little accurate,” she said with a hint of wry humor, but then she immediately sobered again. “We call ourselves the Neighbors because it was one of the politer terms used back in Ireland for the older race. We call the true ones who are left the Ad-hene, or Themselves if we’re not being entirely polite, but there are a bunch of other names they’d respond to. Sidhe, the Gentry, Tuatha Dé Danann, elves—all are accurate terms, plus dozens of others.” She tossed back the last of her drink, then looked at me seriously. “The vampires live a long time. How old is your mother?”

  “She was born the year that Edward II of England was deposed by his wife. Fourteenth century.”

  Lilah nodded. “And your brother and sister?”

  “Prudence was born during the American Revolution. Chivalry was born at the end of the Civil War.”

  “And there aren’t many other races that live half as long as vampires, right?”

  “As far as I know.” I couldn’t help feeling a small spasm of irritation. Lilah knew the answers to all of her questions, and the subject of exactly how many centuries of life I could reasonably expect to see always put me in a poor mood. “What’s your point?”

  “My grandfather was old when the Romans first stepped onto British soil. Old and in the middle of a war among the Ad-hene that had already lasted a thousand years and devastated the population, but they kept fighting and killing because that was what they liked to do. To them, having a child, raising it, training it—those were things that you did so that someday you’d have a worthy opponent to kill. They whittled themselves down from probably a million at their peak to less than a hundred before they actually started even trying to do something about it. When they finally stopped being able to kill each other, they turned to torture.” Lilah’s face paled under her freckles at some memory, and she swallowed hard, taking a long moment before she continued. “You don’t want to see the inside of Underhill, Fort. There are captive Ad-hene in there who will never die of old age, and who every morning are tortured and flayed, and every night are healed so that it can happen all over again.”

  “I didn’t know about that,” I said quietly. “My brother didn’t tell me.” There were a lot of things Chivalry hadn’t told me during the time we’d spent together during the summer, and I hadn’t pushed him on any of them. In that moment I was shamefully aware that I hadn’t pushed him because I hadn’t really wanted to know—that, transition or not, I still desperately wished that I could’ve continued running away from who, and what, I was. And Chivalry had let me, and told me only about what I needed to know at the moment, or the things that wouldn’t truly appall me, like goats for trolls or feral cat colonies for kobolds. Not a fifteen-percent surcharge squeezed from local supernatural businesses. Not the torturing practices of the elves.

  Lilah continued. “Underhill’s openings into Ireland were locked for a reason. The cost to do it was the potato famine, but they didn’t catch all of the Ad-hene. My grandfather, Nokke, was the one who came to America, and he’s the one who negotiated with your mother for a place in her territory where a gate to Underhill could be opened. One of the rules she made all of them swear to was that the only prey they could hunt or kill was themselves.” She set down her glass on the floor beside the sofa and scooted closer to me. It wasn’t a romantic scoot, but almost as if being closer to me was necessary to underscore how seriously she needed me to take what she was saying. Her voice dropped, intensified, and as she spoke about her people, I wondered if she’d ever said these things out loud to any outsider before. “This is why I’m telling you this, Fort. There are a few people among the Neighbors who know everything I’ve just told you, and probably even more than that, and they idolize Themselves. All they think about is how they can somehow breed their way back to a race that is closer to what the Ad-hene were—more longevity, more power, more”—she paused, fumbling for a moment, then her jaw tightened and she said what had stuck in her throat—“more of the bloodlust. My boss, Tomas, is one of them. Most of the parents of the three-quarter crosses are, to some degree.”

  “And you’re not?” I didn’t try to contain my curiosity. I was trusting her, and nothing so far had made me doubt that I was trusting her, but the fact remained that the people she was describing to me would consider her part in this conversation treachery.

  Lilah shrugged and leaned back, the intensity of the earlier moment diffusing as we switched topics. “My parents are both Neighbors. Growing up, so were all the kids that I was allowed to play with. Everyone lived in the same area, and were really tight-knit. It’s the secrecy, you know? It ties us together.” She smiled a little. “I remember in elementary school a bunch of the teachers thought that we were a cult. Not really wrong, either.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “A lot of things. I mean, the life itself is completely insane. My mom and dad are half siblings.” She laughed cynically at my expression. “Yeah, you heard me. My younger sister? She’s not just my half sister; she’s my aunt. My god, it’s like we’re damn show dogs with this obsession with genealogical charts. I wouldn’t be surprised if an AKC rep arrived to give me a pelvic exam. My prom date? I thought he was my second cousin. He thought he was my second cousin. Turns out, nope, he’s actually my dad’s son. Apparently Dad was getting put out for stud for a while. Would’ve been nice to know that before I got to third base with a biological brother.”

  “Wow,” I said, not exactly sure how to respond to that. One thing was clear—a conversation with this much incest in it required a third glass. I pulled a bottle of Banker’s Club over and poured us both three fingers’ worth, not even bothering to add Coke. I took a long drink, then said, “That is beyond fucked up.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I don’t know which was the biggest kicker—my baby sister or my prom date. But as soon as I graduated from high school, I was gone. Like, in-the-wind kind of gone. I moved out to Phoenix. Got a job, an apartment, a boyfriend I wasn’t related to, did everything I could to pretend I wasn’t what I was. I played human. Took a few philosophy courses at the community college, rethought a lot of the things I’d just accepted.”

  I recognized all of those things from my own life. My desire to escape my mother’s mansion and every part of being a vampire that I could had begun far earlier, but college and its aftermath had been my pantomime as well. “I get that,” I told her, and when we looked at each other it was with a deep sense of perfect understanding. There were large parts about ourselves that we each hated and would rather pretend didn’t exist, yet at the same time couldn’t escape. I knew what had pulled me back into my mother’s close orbit, but I didn’t know what had changed for Lilah, so I asked her. “Now you’re back in Providence and working with other Neighbors. What changed?”

  “It was really good. I lived like that for seven years.” For a long second, clearly thinking about those year
s, she seemed lighter, happier. I wondered what she’d been like away from her family and Providence when she was playing human. Just like I’d been doing until recently. It occurred to me how similar we were—and the thought surfaced that if I was with someone like Lilah, I could go back to pretending most of the time. The thought was both enticing and disturbing, and I almost missed it when Lilah said, “I came back home last year, after my boyfriend wanted to move in together.” She took a long sip of her drink.

  “A three-thousand-mile relocation is definitely one way to say no,” I noted.

  “Yeah, not my smoothest moment. And I still hate Themselves and their shit. I mean, honestly, I hate it. My grandfather and the others . . . all they care about is trying to inbreed us as much as possible to somehow get an end result that is more like them. And those seven years away from all of that were the best seven years of my life. But it was seven years of hiding. Not just my ears, but about how I grew up, what I thought about, what I was struggling with. And when he kept trying to get more serious, I imagined doing that for the rest of my life . . . and I came back. Because for all that shit, I didn’t have to lie. They knew who I was, what I was, and they could understand. We might argue about everything else, but at least they understand.”

  Looking at her, I wondered how much it must have cost her to make that decision. Because I knew that it hadn’t just been about leaving the boyfriend and Phoenix; it had also been about abandoning a dream. Once again, I knew how that felt.

  “Were your parents happy?” I asked, knowing what the response would be. Madeline had been over the moon with delight when I’d (as she put it) “come to my senses.”

  “Oh, thrilled,” Lilah said, and we shared rueful, knowing smiles. “Every time my dad visits my apartment he tries to toss my birth-control pills, my mom is frantic to set me up with a three-quarter Neighbor, and my baby sister has a few sociopathic personality quirks that we’re all trying to iron out.” I winced. At least Prudence left me alone. “But I can live some of my life around humans, and when I need to, there are Neighbors who are more like me to hang around. So, right now, it kind of works.” Her golden-brown eyes were considering as she looked at me. “How does it work for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She rearranged herself on the sofa, giving the impression of digging in and getting comfortable. “You live away from your family, with humans. I asked around about you after the first time you came by the store. The rumor was that you were living human for years.” She sounded honestly curious and slightly envious.

  “Yeah, I guess I was.” I thought about it. “It was easier to pretend to be one, and I thought I was happy.” Looking at Lilah, though, I was struck again that she was someone who really had walked in my shoes. I’d never doubted the depths of Chivalry’s love for me, but he’d made no secret of the fact that he couldn’t understand why I struggled with what we were. And as much as I valued Suze’s odd friendship, she walked through the world with utter confidence and comfort in who she was. So, looking at Lilah, I was honest. “But I think you’re right—it’s harder now, seeing my family more, being reminded of all the crap that comes with being a vampire, but it’s also . . . better, in some ways. Like with Suzume—it’s just easier to be friends with someone without having to self-edit every family anecdote or joke, or be afraid that someone is going to notice something that is physiologically inhuman and call the CDC or the National Enquirer.”

  It felt good to say it. And good to look at Lilah and know that she understood.

  There was a pause. Then Lilah asked, with a playful grin, “Hey, is it true that your mom owns that?”

  I laughed. “No, that one’s just a rumor. Someone else started it to throw cover.” Then, “But here’s a good one: my mother’s brother Edmund got Dracula published.”

  Lilah gaped. “No!”

  Finally, family history that was actually amusing. “Yeah, he owned Archibald Constable and Co. and thought that all of the mistakes would make it easier for real vampires to lie low. He also owned the magazine that published Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.”

  Lilah was now laughing so hard that she slipped sideways on the sofa. “Did he publish Anne Rice, too?” she managed.

  “No, apparently that just happened.”

  That set both of us off, and it wasn’t until we tapered off into small snickers and hiccupping giggles that we realized how close together we’d ended up. Her face was right next to mine now, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her breath on my face. Our shoulders were touching, and my hand, which a moment ago had been chastely sitting on my own leg, was now pressed between us. We froze, and a million possible outcomes flashed through my brain as we looked at each other, neither of us leaning in closer, but neither pulling away either.

  I wasn’t sure what would’ve happened, but the charged silence between us was shattered when a sudden rapping noise, coming from my bedroom, echoed through the apartment. We jumped apart, Lilah giving a startled squeak while I made a noise that, while definitely not feminine in any way, was certainly not how Rambo would’ve responded.

  Pulling together the shreds of my composure, I reached down for my inner spaghetti Western hero and said, “Stay here,” to Lilah. As she remained on the sofa, leaving me to the hosting duties of investigating creepy noises, I rushed into my bedroom, cursing myself internally for not stashing some kind of weapon under the sofa at some point.

  I flipped on the lights in my bedroom, but after a tense glance around, nothing looked out of place. I retrieved the Colt out from under my mattress, feeling deeply relieved once it was comfortably in my hand. The rapping noise repeated, coming from my window. I approached it cautiously, holding the Colt ready in a two-handed grip. With a deep breath, I stepped completely in front of the window, prepared to jump back or fire (or do both simultaneously) if Gage’s killer had returned.

  It was a distinct letdown to see Suze sitting casually in the tree outside my window.

  She smiled at the sight of me and wiggled her feet, looking completely unconcerned about just how high up she was perched.

  “Suze? What the hell’s wrong with using my front door?” I yelled out at her as I pulled up the window and its screen, entertaining very dark thoughts about the gun still in my hand. Not that I’d ever shoot her. But a warning shot might someday be in order. Suzume had made window entrances into my apartment before, but she’d always done so in fox form, and usually only for legitimate pranking purposes.

  “Just wanted to check out the lay of the land before I came in. Just in case exciting things were happening.” I gave her a very dirty look, and she made a shooing gesture with her hand. “Scoot over, I’ll hop in.”

  I watched in disgust as she climbed over the window ledge and inside. If she’d been parked outside for god only knew how long, then she’d certainly chosen her moment to knock loudly and scare the crap out of me and Lilah.

  “My neighbors are going to call the cops, you know,” I said, resenting how she somehow managed to climb inside the window with the grace of a prima ballerina.

  Suze made a very rude noise that conveyed her opinion of my neighbors. “They don’t expect to see me, so they didn’t see me.” She gave me a smug smile. “Yeah, I’m awesome. No JV-squad elf tricks here.”

  I’d seen Suzume’s fox-illusion magic in action often enough to know that she had some room to brag there, but I wasn’t sure that it was an entirely appropriate comment, given who she well knew was sitting in my living room.

  As if thinking about her had summoned her, Lilah’s head popped around my doorframe. “Oh, Suzume. I thought I heard your voice,” she said, sounding relieved. Then, confused, she asked, “Why didn’t you just come in the door?”

  Suzume rolled her eyes dramatically. “Lord, now I have two people who need the CliffsNotes version.” Then, with a thick layer of condescension, she said, “Fort can catch you up
later, Keebler. But if what I overheard was correct, and you don’t have a single new piece of information to add to what we already know . . . ?”

  “Well, I might’ve added context and nuance . . .” Lilah started, but trailed off and gave up at the expression on Suze’s face.

  “Exactly.” Suze clapped her hands loudly, making both of us jump again. “If you’re both done whining about family pasts, then I have an actual plan that will help out.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Suze gave me a brilliant smile. “We’re going to break into the Iron Needle and see what Jacoby wasn’t willing to tell us.”

  I stared at Suze in horror, and, glancing over, saw that Lilah was in a similar state of jaw-dropped surprise.

  “It’ll be fun!” Suze enthused.

  • • •

  An hour later Lilah and I were looking around nervously, still unclear how Suze had actually talked us into this scheme, while the architect of our discomfort occupied herself by picking the lock on the back door of the Iron Needle with a set of disturbingly professional implements. A security light from one of Jacoby’s neighboring businesses was giving us just enough light to both let Suzume work and make me feel far too exposed.

  “So . . . do you guys do this a lot?” Lilah asked awkwardly. Because of the need to be somewhat circumspect she’d had to exchange her blue jacket for my black hoodie, and it fit her about as well as a three-man tent, with the hem hitting just above her knees.