Iron Night

by M. L. Brennan

  This sounded useful, and I felt a tug of excitement, wondering if this was an actual lead at last. “And on a human? Like this?” There were a few pads of paper on the counter, and I pulled one toward me, along with a pencil, and sketched out a quick outline of a human form, then drew in my best effort at the tattoo bands, admittedly somewhat crudely. I pushed the sketch close enough for Ambrose to look at.

  He gave it a long, considering examination, then looked up at me and said, in a carefully bland voice, “Not really an artist, are you?” He looked down again at my sketch, his large beetle brows pulling together in thought. He leaned forward cautiously, reaching for the pencil, watching Prudence out of the corner of his eye. After a moment she removed her finger from his stomach and shifted just a breath farther away from him, but it was enough to indicate permission, and he quickly ripped off my piece of paper and on a fresh sheet sketched out a series of designs, then pushed the pad back to me. “Did it look like any of those?”

  I checked. They were all a series of interconnected knots, but as I scanned through them, the last one jumped out at me. I’d seen it too many times over the past several days to mistake it, and I tapped it hard.

  “That one? Bit old school, I guess,” Ambrose said. Then, sounding almost reluctantly impressed, he continued, “The elves are pulling that shit? Well, I can tell you that no witch in the country did that for them.”

  “How do you know?”

  Sounding more relaxed, Ambrose explained, “Firstly, death sacrifices are a work-around. You don’t need to be a witch to make one work. Making the ink, sure, that’s a witch, but you could buy that. Must be half a dozen witches in the Scott territory alone who would sell it to someone. But to actually off a human with it, karmically that is not”—he gave a sudden glance to Prudence and then rephrased whatever he’d been about to say, finishing lamely—“a good idea. No sane witch would do that for someone else. You do that if your town gets firebombed by Nazis, not because some dick elf hired you for it.” I grimaced at what I was hearing. I’d been hoping that accidentally smashing the bottle of ink during the fight with Soli would’ve been more of a setback to their operation.

  “Did your employer ever ask you to do that?” Prudence asked, and he flinched at the sound of her voice.

  “Never,” he said, sounding subdued and frightened again. “Ma’am, this is what I do all day.” He gestured at the beakers on the table. “Fertility potions and more fertility potions.” He paused, then looked uncomfortable, his tongue darting out to run nervously over his upper lip. “Though lately she has asked me to cook the occasional roofie.”

  That completely distracted me. “Um, roofies?” Worried, I asked, “What is Lulu doing to her patients?”

  Ambrose frowned at me, looking annoyed rather than terrified. “Not her patients, dumbsh—” A subtle movement from Prudence reminded him of her presence, and he caught the word at the last minute, rephrasing it as, “Young man. No, those bakeless-oven gals are nice and desperate. They’ll do anything already. Boss said it was Neighbor business. Anyway, my potion wouldn’t hurt someone; just fogs the memory, makes the drinker nice and suggestible, gets them to do all sorts of things they would refuse to do under normal circumstances.”

  That sounded plenty hurtful to me. “You made that for her? That’s horrible!”

  Ambrose looked surprised, and shrugged. “Leamaro asked for it; I made it. What she does with it is her damn business.”

  “That is completely unethical,” I said.

  “Sir, do I look like I’m a pharmacist? Because I am not. I just cooked what she asked for.”

  “And didn’t ask any questions.” Disgust filled me and I didn’t bother to hide it.

  “Not my job to notice things,” Ambrose said mutinously. Prudence made another small move, and he jumped a little, rushing to say, “But I may have noticed a few mornings in the past few months that the incinerator was used overnight. On something bigger than just some files.” Prudence just stared at him, and he hedged. “Might’ve had some bones shards left, like a pig or something.” She didn’t blink, and he muttered, “Probably bigger than a pig.” One last glare, and he admitted, “Could’ve been a person.”

  “Why would someone cut off a death sacrifice’s hands? And the tongue? And genitals?” I asked.

  Ambrose looked impressed at the list. “Every spell has more components and steps. The bigger the oomph, the farther you’re trying to get from the natural workings, the more steps involved. But a death spell plus parts cut off? That’s some serious shit.”

  Prudence leaned in and said, very quietly in his ear, “Tell me what the elves want, Ambrose.”

  “What they’ve always wanted, lady,” Ambrose said respectfully. “More elves.” He pointed again at the row of potions lining his table. “A human-elf cross occurs naturally. The potions just help it happen more frequently. The elves wanted more than just a half-blood, something that wouldn’t happen normally, and my magic and potions were able to bend the rules a little to get them that—a cross between a half-blood and a full, with some extra help, gets you a three-quarter. But that’s as far as it goes.” He shook his head. “The true elves are going the way of the Neanderthal. Some genes left in a hybrid, and maybe the hybrids will eventually stabilize a full population, but the real elves will be long gone. And no great loss, if you ask me.”

  “And yet you serve,” Prudence said.

  “Ma’am, it’s a living.”

  “Fortitude?” Prudence turned to look at me. “Mother placed this investigation in your hands, so I ask you, little brother.” One fast move, and her hand was in what was left of Ambrose’s hair, pulling his head far back, enough that he was yanked hard backward over her waiting leg, forcing his back into a steep arch. His whole body hovered off-balance, his feet pushed almost onto his toes. His shirt slid back, revealing a very pale stomach lightly dusted with wiry black hair, looking horribly exposed and vulnerable. The cut my sister had left before was a long, raw mark, and she reached past it and, very slowly and deliberately, raked all four fingers across his belly, leaving a trail of shallow cuts that sullenly oozed blood. She never looked away from me as she did it, and asked, in a perfectly polite and conversational voice, “Does he live? Or does he die?”

  Ambrose made a high, helpless sound, too terrified to stay silent, but also too afraid to try to escape my sister’s hold. I swallowed hard; the suddenness and the very controlled nature of my sister’s violence had thrown me badly, but I fought to stay calm. I reminded myself of what Suze had said: I had to be smart about this, to act in a way that kept Prudence under control but also justified my actions to her in a way that she would respect and abide. I struggled to keep my face blank as I looked down at the frightened witch. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like how willing he was to cook something like a roofie potion with no concerns at all about how it was going to be used and on who, but I also wasn’t sure that criminal indifference was enough to kill someone over—at least until I found out exactly how that potion had been administered.

  Admittedly, I wasn’t feeling too sorry about the man’s bleeding stomach or the small, spreading stain in the crotch of his pants.

  While I was figuring out what to say, my sister was looking substantially less polite. Her pupils were bleeding out, covering the blue of her eyes. Her fingers dug into his cuts, deepening them, and Ambrose cried out again.

  “Sniveling rat,” my sister muttered, her lip curling. “All you witches—scampering and gnawing at the edges. Would the other rats care if a cat ate one of you?” She dropped her tone almost to a whisper and spoke into his ear. “Of course not. More cheese for them.”

  Her fingers were flexing ominously, and I knew it was definitely time to derail this—if I could.

  I made my voice as neutral as possible and said, “Witches are bought, Prudence. We should’ve been more aware of what Lulu was doing.” I looked direc
tly into my sister’s sociopathic eyes and gave her a reason she would agree with. “And a witch can be a useful thing to have, especially one who knows who is in charge.”

  She paused, then nodded slowly, her pupils receding enough to show just a hint of blue. She let go of Ambrose, allowing him to fall into a boneless lump on the floor, staring up at us with the blink-free terror of a bunny facing predators. “True enough, brother,” she said mildly. Looking down at the witch at her feet, she sneered. “Tell me where the half-elf is today.”

  Ambrose pressed his eyes closed and whispered, “I don’t know—I swear by blood and bone that I don’t know.”

  Prudence leaned down, examining him like a bug that she was still contemplating crushing. I cut in, reminding her, “If she didn’t involve him in the planning, she wouldn’t have told him where she was. After last night, they have to know that we’re looking where they don’t want us to.”

  Prudence clicked her tongue. “True enough,” she acknowledged, and nudged Ambrose with the tip of her high heel. “Find new employment, witch. And if you learn something new about Leamaro, something that might be of interest to me, you’ll contact us, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” he slathered desperately.

  “As it should be,” Prudence said, satisfied.

  I still didn’t like the look in her eyes, and I said, “If there’s nothing else, Prudence, we should probably go.” I picked up her hat and gloves and held them out to her. After one last, almost longing look at the huddled wreck at her feet, she nodded slowly, but with an expression that was almost pouting.

  We left the room. My heart was thumping wildly in my chest, but I was relieved that I’d managed to avert the maiming (if not outright murder) that I knew that Prudence would’ve preferred meting out in the interests of making an example of the costs of landing on her radar. Suzume was waiting for us in the hallway, her face very carefully arranged into an expression of emotionless obedience that was probably the best mask I’d ever seen her present. There was a set of folders tucked under her arm.

  “Did you find something?” I asked her as she fell neatly into step beside me. Prudence’s heels tip-tapped behind us, an uncomfortable reminder of the very real danger she presented at my undefended back. We headed out the door, past the nurse who gave us a nervous look but added a professional smile as we went. Suzume had clearly taken the opportunity to work a little fox magic and smooth out our departure.

  Suze tapped the folders. “I convinced my new buddy to check Lulu’s records. All the victims were conceived here. Got the files, so we can look through to see what made them special.”

  Outside, the cloud cover had burned off, revealing a perfect blue-sky autumn day and a bright sun. Closing the office door behind her, Prudence winced and quickly replaced her hat and adjusted her sunglasses.

  Noticing her discomfort, I started to ask, “Prudence, do you need to—”

  She nodded, cutting me off. “Yes, it is time I returned to my hotel.”

  Relief filled me, but my mind was also working, trying to determine how best to utilize my sister’s undeniable talent at eliciting honest answers from shady individuals. “Okay. We’ll look into the files. If it’s sunny all day, when will you be comfortable coming outside again?”

  “Four, perhaps four thirty.” She tilted her head forward, considering me briefly over the top of her sunglasses. “What would you like me to do, brother?”

  “I want you to find Lulu. Soli knew who I was, so if Lulu’s hiding, she’s hiding from us. Can you find her?”

  She gave me a small smile. “It will be a pleasure.” She tugged her black silk gloves over her hands, protecting the exposed skin from the sun, and made another minute adjustment to her hat. “I will make inquiries while I rest in my room, and this evening I will start my pursuit.”

  The expression on her face made me deeply grateful that at this point the odds that Lulu was not neck-deep in this situation were minuscule. “Thank you,” I said politely.

  Prudence paused, then said, “That was good work back there, Fortitude.” Then, with that staggeringly unusual statement still rattling in my head as I struggled to deal with the shock of being given yet another compliment from her in less than twenty-four hours, she turned quickly and was in her car and pulling out without waiting for a reply.

  As we both watched Prudence’s Lexus make a turn out of the complex and disappear into traffic, I said to Suze, “I assume you heard everything that happened in the back room.”

  She shrugged. “Might have.”

  “What do you—” the Tetris theme song erupted from my pants pocket, cutting off my question, and I reached down and pulled out my phone. I checked the screen, saw Lilah’s name, and immediately flipped it open, raising my eyebrows at Suze. “Hello?”

  Lilah was speaking quickly and excitedly. “Hey, Fort. I’m at Dreamcatching now. It’s just me here, and I was looking around and I think I found something. Can you come over now?”

  I glanced at the files under Suze’s arm. “Yeah, Suze and I will be right over. We just found something too, and we can swap notes.”

  After an exchange of good-byes, we both hung up.

  While we headed over to Dreamcatching, Suze paged through the files, reading with an intensity that would’ve left me with a distinct case of car sickness. As I stopped at a red light, I flipped my phone out and dialed Matt, checking in to see what he was doing. The call was a quick one—Matt was at the first college on his list, trying to run down any clubs and activities that could’ve brought the victims into contact with one another. I felt relief knowing that he was running down a fake lead that would keep him well out of danger for the day, and when he asked what I was up to, I assured him that Suze and I were just waiting to see if he could turn anything up, as both of us had to work that day and couldn’t go anywhere ourselves.

  I actually did have to go to work that afternoon, and I hoped that no one would notice that I had not had either the time or the inclination to wash my uniform in almost a week.

  I said good-bye to Matt, and hung up.

  Without looking up from the file in front of her, Suze began, “I—”

  “If it’s about Matt, don’t say it,” I said, cutting her off.

  There was a long pause and then she glanced up at me, looking at me steadily. “If you want to keep that man alive, you need to separate from him. Soon.”

  My temper sparked and caught like dry grass in the summer. “You think I haven’t considered that? You think I like having him in danger?”

  Suze stared at me, her dark eyes narrowing. “I think that you and my sister have a lot in common.”

  The memory of Keiko watching her human boyfriend, and the almost visible subtext of their impending tragedy, filled my mind, and my anger guttered and died. Was my own attachment to Matt like that? But whenever I thought of giving him up, of dodging his calls or picking a fight and pretending that I didn’t want to see him, or, worst of all, convincing him that the bond between us didn’t matter and that I didn’t care about him anymore, I just couldn’t think about it. Matt was the last link back to my foster parents—he could tell me about anecdotes of Brian on the job, or reminisce about how he and Jill would argue politics over the table on the many nights he’d eaten dinner with us. I wasn’t ready to lose that.

  “Not now, Suze. Please not now.” She started to say something, and I shook my head. “Let’s just focus on the elves.” I nodded at the file. “Anything useful?”

  She didn’t like it; it was clear, but she allowed me to change the subject. That didn’t mean she had to be happy about it, and her tone was lethal. “It’s a medical file, and I am not a doctor. Right now I’ve got fuck-all except a detailed description of some woman’s vagina.”

  “That’s great. Keep on that,” I said, and returned my attention to driving, grateful for the reprieve, while she muttered
darkly under her breath.

  Chapter 8

  At Dreamcatching, Lilah was watching for us, waiting anxiously just inside the door. She waved us in and closed the door behind us, flipping the little sign from OPEN to CLOSED.

  “Aren’t you worried about what your boss will think about your new definition of standard hours?” Suze asked, sounding almost unwillingly amused.

  Lilah snorted. “I rang up a pack of incense as today’s total sales. No one will notice, or if they do they’ll celebrate our improving solvency.” She led us through the beaded curtain and into the back rooms. I was entertained to note that in contrast to the soothing turquoise walls and careful ambiance of the front of the store, the areas where customers were not welcome looked like any other place I’d worked at—cement floors, piles of brown boxes, and the occasional ancient office chair that any OSHA agent worth his salt would wrap in hazardous-materials tape.

  “Allegra went into labor early this morning,” she said, leading us through the warren of boxes and into an old, dusty office with orange shag carpeting and a few motivational pictures framed on the walls—clearly the den of a manager. “Tomas is staying with her, and Felix works after he gets out of school, so I had a chance to search everything.”

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  “Well, mostly that Tomas cheats on his taxes. And this.” She slid open the bottom drawer of the desk, pulled out the folders that hung in it, and gestured for me to look.

  I peered in. On the bottom of the drawer, where it must’ve slipped out of a file and worked its way down, was one page that was a partial view of an illustration that had been photocopied out of a book. Someone had clearly enlarged the image when they were copying it—there were a few squiggles of handwritten words around the image, but they were mostly cut off, and even the ones that I could decipher were in a foreign language. It was an ink drawing of a very familiar band of intricate knots, and beside it an anonymous male figure hung upside down from a tree, with those bands drawn on his skin at bicep and wrist.