“Definitely not,” I answered.
“Speak for yourself,” Suze said. There was a soft clicking sound, and she smiled widely. Carefully removing her tools and tucking them back into her front pocket, she crouched down and motioned for me and Lilah to imitate her. Still hunkered down, she reached up, turned the knob, and pushed the door open just enough to poke her head into the building. It was pitch-black inside and after a tense moment, Suze dropped to her hands and knees and slunk her entire upper body through the doorway. A second later there was a loud crash, and I jumped a mile, feeling Lilah’s hands grip my arm hard in surprise.
“Suze,” I hissed loudly.
She pulled back and gave us both her best pityingly superior look. “Calm down for a second,” she scolded. “I just pushed over his trash can.” With that, she turned her attention back to the store, listening attentively.
While we waited, it slowly occurred to me that Suzume was deliberately testing to make sure that the building was unoccupied. We’d known from our earlier visit that the Iron Needle closed its doors at nine p.m., but whether Jacoby left the premises at that point was unclear. Lilah said that he’d been reduced to living in his store a few times that she knew of but wasn’t sure if that was still the case, and glancing in all the windows (while doing our best to look completely surreptitious) had revealed nothing except that Jacoby had some aversion to sunlight and had blacked them all out, even the ones in the back. If someone was inside they would’ve come and investigated the noise that Suzume had just made, and we’d still be in a position to run away in a very Monty Python–esque manner.
I realized glumly that I was probably going to have to compliment Suze on her tactics later on. Nothing was more insufferable than Suzume accepting a compliment.
After a very long and stressful pause, with Lilah slowly cutting off the circulation of blood in my arm, Suze stood up and brushed off her pants. “Okay, all clear,” she said, her voice pitched low. “If you find a light switch, hit it.”
“No need,” I said, taking my moment to prove that I was at least marginally prepared for this outing and pulling my extra big Maglite out of the small duffel bag I had grabbed on the way out of my apartment. Lilah finally noticed that she was clinging and disengaged herself with a muttered apology.
Suzume’s expression as I switched on the flashlight was not quite as admiring as I’d expected. “What the hell, Fort?” she asked. “I thought that bulge was from your shotgun.”
“Are you crazy?” I responded, shocked. “No!”
She frowned, then pointed at the misshapen pocket of my Windbreaker. “Did you stuff your .45 in there, then?”
“No.”
“Then what did you bring?”
“Glow sticks,” I said, pulling them out. “From my blackout emergency kit.” She stared at me, appalled, and I said, “What? We’re engaged in crime. That means flashlights and . . . you know.” I waved the glow sticks, wishing that I hadn’t chosen the multicolored pack.
“I’ll take a glow stick,” Lilah piped up helpfully.
“Quiet, you,” Suzume said with a dangerous undertone before turning and laying into me. “Are you seriously telling me that you didn’t bring a gun? Are you nuts?”
Her voice had gone up several octaves, and I had to fight to keep my own low when my natural impulse was just to snap back at her. “B and E my mother can cover up,” I bit out. “That plus a firearm that I haven’t actually registered and don’t have a permit to carry? I’d rather not run up legal bills that exceed my college tuition, if you don’t mind.”
Suze shook her head in disgust, then shifted her dark gaze to Lilah. “And you? Tell me that you at least have a stun gun in that purse.”
We all looked down at Lilah’s purse, which was small and made out of some nubby red fabric. My experience with my ex-girlfriend told me that it was the kind of purse that women referred to as adorable, and I strongly doubted that it contained a stun gun.
“Sorry, I really didn’t expect the evening to go in a direction where weaponry was required,” Lilah said dryly. “But I do have a spare tampon if you need one.”
Suzume threw her hands up. I eyed her suspiciously, not liking what the conversation had suggested about her own assumptions for this trip. Wearing a long-sleeved jersey shirt and a pair of very close-fitting black pants (very close-fitting, and I’d been having trouble keeping my eyes in polite areas while she was picking the lock), and having mocked my earlier suggestion that she bring a coat given the early-October bite in the air, I couldn’t imagine she had anything stashed beyond her usual switchblade. Knowing her too well, though, I asked anyway. “Suze, are you carrying?”
She rolled her eyes at me and suddenly produced a very long, very serious-looking fixed knife that was almost the length of her own forearm. There was no ornamentation to it at all—it was just very straight, slim, extremely sharp steel with a leather-wrapped black handle. There were no doubts that this was a knife made solely for the business of cutting things.
I jumped nearly out of my own skin at the suddenness and sheer implausibility of its appearance. “Holy crap!” I said, completely forgetting the importance of keeping my voice down. I lowered it immediately as my voice echoed through the empty back parking area, but couldn’t help pointing out, “You brought a freaking sword!”
Suzume scoffed. “It’s twelve inches. Still counts as a knife.” She glanced at it, considering, then amended, “Maybe counts as a machete.”
It was only through strong effort that I kept my voice low. “How the hell did I not see that?” I gestured generally to her clothing, which looked incapable of hiding that kind of weaponry unless she had taken off her shirt and rolled the knife up in it.
“’Cuz I’m awesome like that,” Suzume said, her smirk wide and shining in the light from my flashlight. She pointed at Lilah, then at herself. “Respect.”
Lilah, who had been as surprised as I was when the sword emerged, hung behind me. “I didn’t see a glamour,” she said, sounding shaken.
Suzume snorted. “That’s where elves always go wrong. I didn’t try to hide the knife. I just used a little push that redirected where people looked so that they never noticed this was strapped to my leg.”
“Redirected where?” I asked.
“My ass.”
“Oh, thank god,” Lilah said loudly, clearly relieved. We both looked over at her inquisitively, and she blushed brightly enough to be noticeable even in the poor lighting. “I’m just, you know . . . glad. That it was because of magic that I was noticing . . .” She trailed off, her mortification clearly only getting worse the more she talked. Then she gathered herself up and said, “And, hey, why don’t we start looking for something incriminating instead of just standing around yapping.” She grabbed one of my glow sticks, cracked it, and shook it decisively. It was bright pink. She frowned at it—apparently this wasn’t quite the punctuation mark she’d had in mind—then pushed past both of us to walk in the back door of the building. There was a soft scuffle; then she snapped on a wall switch. The light in the room came on weakly, one of those cheap fluorescent overheads that needed time to warm up before they offered anything except an almost sullen glow. All the front windows were blacked out, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing anything suspicious from the street, even though this already looked like the kind of neighborhood where people minded their own business. We followed her inside, and I pushed the door closed behind us and relocked it before looking around.
We were inside Jacoby’s office, which previously I’d only partially seen through a cracked door. A full view was even less prepossessing than the partial had been. Every surface was coated with paper—from old tattoo sketches to unopened mail with FINAL NOTICE stamped across the front. There appeared to be some furniture in the room, but it was observable only as vague shapes beneath the avalanche of junk. Bulging file folders sat stac
ked on the floors, topped off with partially eaten Hot Pockets and overflowing ash trays.
Lilah flipped her hair over her shoulder and resolutely started sifting through the top pile on Jacoby’s desk, and I felt bad for not sticking up for her a moment ago. After all, I’d also found myself pondering Suzume’s posterior assets with more than the usual intensity that evening and castigating myself for it. At least I hadn’t been dealing with sudden internal sexuality concerns on top of it.
That brought my thoughts back to the root of the situation, and I eyed Suzume’s monster knife, which she was still holding. “Isn’t that a bit extreme?” I asked, in what I hoped was a withering tone of voice.
Suzume looked at me, surprisingly serious. “Fort, do you know what we’re hunting?” she asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Me neither.”
I waited. Then, “. . . So?”
“So I’m keeping my options open here. I’d rather not be wishing at some point down the road that I’d brought my big-girl knife.”
“Do you seriously call it that?” I asked.
The ghost of a smile played at her lips. “Well, I also call it Arlene.”
I couldn’t help it; I gave a brief, smothered laugh. Her point made, Suze slid the knife back in its sheath, which I now registered was indeed strapped to her right thigh and gave her a very Lara Croft kind of appeal. I forced myself to turn my attention to the piles of folders on the floor, but when I glanced back at Suzume a few minutes later, I couldn’t see the knife again, even though I knew where to look. I did, however, notice again what a very nice backside Suzume had.
With three of us looking, we made good progress, but found nothing beyond useless papers, past-due bills, one disturbing discovery of at least twenty dirty needles sitting in an old soup take-out container filled with bleach, a few stashes of white powder that we all moved quickly past, and one comparatively innocent drawer filled with pot. We found the pile of glamoured Dreamcatching fliers that he’d described to us, and whole boxes full of apparently standard tattooing ink, but nothing that gave us any more clues than before. Lilah checked all of them, identifying each time that the glamours had been set by members of the Ad-hene. When we’d pulled her into the break-in party, it had been in the hope that she could identify the glamours of more participants in whatever the hell was going on, but our search was yielding no new leads.
We ended up in the part of the shop with the tattoo chair, with me poring through the thick binder of Jacoby’s client list, looking for any names that he might not have given to us, while Suzume and Lilah made one last pass through his under-counter storage and broom closet, still finding nothing except more needles; more ink; a small stash of what may have been meth; and not a single mop, broom, or plunger (this also explained the state of his bathroom, which we had all agreed upon first sight could hold no clues whatsoever, and closed the door on firmly).
That was where we all were when the sound of a key being wiggled in an uncooperative lock suddenly emanated from the front door. There was no time for all of us to run for the back, and Suze shoved Lilah hard into the broom closet she was investigating and slammed it shut. I was relieved—Jacoby might not have been a big fan of the Neighbors, but with his willingness to exchange information for cash it was definitely not in our best interests for him to know that we were working with a mole.
But it wasn’t Jacoby who walked in the door. Instead it was a tall woman with a figure that would politely be referred to as statuesque and impolitely referred to as slammin’. A great deal of it was on display in a short, fire-engine red dress liberally coated in sequins that was practically spray-painted onto her and definitely fit into the category of club wear. She held the keys to the store in her right hand, and in her left was an old-fashioned glass bottle, the kind usually seen in rows in antiques stores or old-timey seashore shops. The contents were distorted by the older style of thick glass, but it was filled barely a quarter of the way up with a black substance that, as it sloshed the sides, revealed a weird reddish undertone, as if oil and red paint had been poured into the same container but were failing to mix.
This, I realized, was undoubtedly Jacoby’s “real sexy Latina,” here to deliver some of the special ink for the band tattoos. We definitely weren’t what she’d been expecting to find, but there was only a brief pause and a flicker of surprise on her perfect face, with its shockingly high cheekbones, and she strolled in, pushing the door closed behind her.
“Madeleine Scott’s baby,” she said, and gave a taunting, throaty laugh. “Stupid little vampire, poking your head out of the nest.” She gave a nasty smile, showing a mouthful of teeth that were just slightly sharper than they should’ve been. “Poking your head where it doesn’t belong. You’d better watch out, or someone will cut it off. Maybe me.”
“Soli, I presume,” I said, ripping off H. M. Stanley without a qualm, as I closed the binder I’d been looking at with a loud thump. Suze stayed behind me, in front of the closet where Lilah was stuffed. She wasn’t hiding her sniffing, practically whuffling as she sampled the air surrounding the new visitor. I glanced from Soli, who simply curled her lips into an approximation of a smile, back to Suzume. Suze caught my eyes and nodded once, and I knew from her face that the scents matched. This was the one who’d dumped Gage’s body into his room like a sack of garbage.
I wasn’t thinking of much when I started walking toward her other than the conviction that while I needed information from her, my first priority was going to be to hit her. That must’ve shown in my face, because she paused at the long counter that divided the front of the parlor from the back and set down the bottle of ink very carefully next to a pile of our belongings, which included the hoodie I’d lent Lilah and my heavy Maglite.
Her smile stretched across her face as she watched me come toward her. As I swung my first punch, she laughed.
I didn’t connect. She was faster than I was, faster even than Suze had been when we’d sparred. Past my first punch I found myself suddenly busy blocking the blows she was directing at me. One fist slid right through my defenses, slamming into my stomach with a power that didn’t remotely match her size. I gulped air, but when she paused to savor it I was able to grab her arm and shoulder and shove her back against the counter, then nail her in the ribs with a punch. It was like punching a brick wall, with none of the slight give and flex that even a strike that landed directly on bone should’ve yielded. Pain blossomed through my hand, and I gave a sharp yell.
Distracted by my hand, I wasn’t able to block in time, and her return strike landed directly on my face, knocking me down and onto my ass. She followed me down, her hands wrapping around my throat in a way that should’ve been reminiscent of all the fighting I’d done with Suze, but instead suddenly showed me just how careful the kitsune had been to hold back with me. Her hands went straight for the vulnerable, pounding pulse in my throat and bore down mercilessly. I wrapped my hands around her wrists, but couldn’t break her grip. All too quickly, red flared in my vision and my lungs screamed for air.
One barely heard footfall was the only warning Soli had before Suzume tackled her full-out, knocking Soli’s hands away and allowing me to gasp in a breath. For the first moment the two women were sprawled out on me, but Soli rolled quickly, taking Suze with her, and the two were immediately scrabbling on the floor, wrestling for the top position. Height and weight were against Suzume, and as I sucked in needed oxygen I saw Soli end up on top, and she again went for the throat. Suzume knocked her hands away and tried to throw her body far enough to one side to knock the taller woman off, but Soli rode her down again and punched her hard enough in the face to daze Suze.
I pushed off the floor, managing to get only as high as my knees, but that was enough, and I threw one arm around Soli’s neck and the other around her torso and used my weight to yank her bodily off of Suzume. As I pulled her away Soli scratched violently at Su
ze, and I realized that there was something very wrong with her hands—a long black claw, curved like a heavy bird of prey’s talon, was punching through the tip of each of Soli’s fingers, jutting out beneath and sometimes even through the beds of her perfectly human-looking and French-manicured nails. There were long, deep slices in Suzume’s shirt at her upper chest, with swiftly darkening edges that spoke of deep cuts in the skin beneath that were bleeding freely.
Soli’s elbow slammed into the side of my head as I concentrated on trying to pull her farther away from Suze and I fell backward, losing my grip on her as she hopped up with eerie dexterity. On my back, I managed to kick her as hard as I could in the back of her right knee, making her wobble and struggle to keep her balance. She did, and the brief opening gave Suzume the chance she needed to get back up, and now that long, deadly knife was in the kitsune’s hands. Suze struck, the long knife whipping so quickly that I would’ve had no chance to avoid it, but Soli was too fast, pulling to one side and letting Suze cut only air.
Suze had thrown too much weight into the strike, and for a second she was off-balance and unable to pull back, and Soli took the chance to rake a hand of those black claws across Suze’s side, hard enough that Suze made a loud exclamation of pain and surprise. She pulled back sharply, barely getting out of the way before Soli’s other hand swatted down on a similar path.
We were outclassed, I realized as I pulled myself up again. Getting close to Soli wasn’t an option again with those claws, and I looked desperately for something heavy to throw, and finally spotted my heavy Maglite sitting on the counter. I yanked hard at the edge of my sweatshirt that it was resting on, pulling it into my reach but at the same time giving a hard knock to the glass bottle of ink that Soli had set down. It fell loudly to its side at my pull and then was swept off the counter completely as I grabbed the long flashlight, and hit the floor with an unmistakable shattering sound.
Iron Night Page 17
