Iron Night

by M. L. Brennan

  I paused, surprised. Suze didn’t apologize often. Equally rare was her willingness to make food, and that she’d made food that was solely for me? This was blue-lobster levels of rare.

  “I’m still right,” she said, looking up at me. “But I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to protect him because you care about him.” I’d never seen Suze look that uncomfortable before—it was a foreign expression on someone who seemed to walk through life with the confidence and self-assurance of a small army. I felt both touched that she’d show me that face and also a little regretful that it was there.

  “Thank you,” I said, picking up the sandwich and biting in. Grilled cheese. So this was what apology tasted like. I swallowed. “Suze, I—”

  She cut me off quickly. “Let’s not get psychological about this. Just eat the sandwich and let’s forget about it.”

  I looked at her until she met my eyes. “Okay,” I said, and took another bite.

  Her face brightened, her shoulders straightened, and I could almost feel the force of her confidence reasserting itself, like the gravity well of a gas giant. “Okay,” she said, relaxing. “Now let’s talk about this weasel-fuck speed-dating thing.”

  There wasn’t enough time after I’d eaten to drive Suze back to her place and still get to work on time, so we worked out a plan that she would drop me off at Peláez and drive the Fiesta the rest of the day until she came back to get me for the speed-dating.

  “Do not wreck my car,” I warned her as the car idled behind the kitchen entrance of the restaurant.

  “Of course not,” she promised as she shimmied bonelessly into the driver’s seat.

  “Or alter it in any way.”

  “Well, now you’re just being unreasonable.” She gave me a wholly untrustworthy smile and pulled away before I could say anything else. I watched her merge into traffic, wondering bleakly if I’d ever see the Fiesta again.

  Daria was extremely displeased when I told her that I’d have to leave early that night, and spent ten minutes emphasizing to me exactly how thin the ice was beneath the feet of my continued employment. But apparently never having missed a night of work before this was enough to prevent her from openly firing me, though the look in her eyes suggested that if someone had been standing beside me with a resume in hand at that moment I would’ve found myself out on my ass. I swore over and over that it would never happen again—and, with my current level of expenses, I was pretty sure that I couldn’t afford for it to happen again.

  I gave my best hustle that afternoon, assisted by the fact that Chef Jerome was still refining the bombe fruit flowers’ alcohol mix in a corner and was less interested than usual in harassing me. When five thirty rolled around I ignored Daria’s death glare and slipped out the back door, where, true to her word, Suze was waiting for me in the Fiesta, which, thankfully, looked to be in the same state of disrepair that it had been six hours ago, with no new additions.

  Suze hopped out of the driver’s seat and tossed me the keys, which I caught only because of my increasing vampire reflexes, as the vast majority of my brain was taking in her appearance. Apparently Suze had decided to embrace our activity that night, and had gone full shock and awe in her clothing choice. High heels and a short yet swishy gold dress were definitely a change from what I usually saw her in.

  “Planning on breaking hearts and crushing dreams tonight?” I finally managed to force out of my dry throat.

  “You know it,” she said with a sassy smile. “If this wraps up early, we can go salsa dancing.”

  “Don’t count on it,” I said, watching as she strutted over to the other side of the car and poured herself into the passenger’s seat. I shook my head and got in myself, slamming the door hard to make it stick. “I called Prudence half an hour ago from the bathroom. She went to the address Lilah gave us. It’s definitely Tomas’s house, but no one was there. Once we finish with this, we should probably swing around and help her hunt.”

  “No worries,” Suze said, and flipped up the skirt of her dress, revealing not only a long, perfectly toned thigh, but also a very familiar knife strapped to that thigh. Apparently Arlene was along for the ride tonight.

  “That is a textbook definition of a mixed message,” I noted. Forcing my eyes away, I turned to start backing the car up, then froze again. “Suze,” I said, impressed at how controlled my voice sounded. “Why is there a plushy Cthulhu doll staring at me from the back window?” From tentacles to wings to fuzzy green fur, never had the Elder God looked that cuddly.

  She smiled at me, eyes glittering in the light from the setting sun. “I was going to give him to you for Christmas, but I didn’t have much time to work with.”

  I shook my head and reached back to snag it, pulling it down from my back windshield and into the backseat. It was very soft, almost asking to be squeezed. I looked around the interior of the car but couldn’t see anything else out of place. The wide grin on Suze’s face gave me no hints—either I was missing whatever else she’d done to my poor Fiesta or it really had just been the Cthulhu, and now she was just seeing if she could trick me into thinking that she’d pulled another prank. Those were always her favorite types of jokes anyway—no work on her part, yet months of potential dividends.

  I didn’t have time to examine the entire car, so I just shook my head and concentrated on the drive to the bookstore, reminding myself sternly not to try to overanalyze Suze’s wicked little snicker. I discovered halfway through the drive that she had also changed all of my radio presets to synth-pop stations, and apparently figured out a new way to save the settings so that I couldn’t reprogram them.

  • • •

  A few of Providence’s independent bookstores had survived the massive Barnes & Noble influx of the nineties, and the ones that had lasted were managing to hold on as the big-box Goliaths closed one by one, victims of their own business model. The site of tonight’s speed-dating was in my own neighborhood of College Hill, holding on through that most reliable of clientele: college students, college professors, and intellectual hangers-on. As we walked into Books on the Hill, the intensely evocative aroma of brand-new books hit me, and I sighed deeply, my eyes immediately gravitating to at least three titles that I knew I had to own. On months like this I usually avoided Books on the Hill like the plague, because it could always be relied on to ravage my budget with the virulence of Ebola-Zaire.

  “Suze, can I bum a twenty?” I whispered as we passed the new arrivals table.

  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Suze said piously, speeding past me. We’d discussed the importance of not looking like we were together, but I glared at her back as she took complete advantage of the circumstances.

  Books on the Hill had a small back room where author readings and signings usually took place, and tonight it had been stuffed with about two dozen small folding tables, each just large enough to accommodate a pair of chairs tucked under it. Lilah stood at a long side table covered with the tools of her trade—shiny geodes, scented candles, and the egg timer that would be dictating our romantic lives for the next two hours. Her hair was down and secured in place with another wide fabric headband that very conveniently covered the upper half of her ears. It matched her lilac-colored sweater and sensible khaki slacks—this was the most conservatively that I’d ever seen her dress, and I wondered if there was some unspoken rule about the speed-date moderator making sure not to outshine any of the participants.

  “Your hair looks nice like that,” I complimented her as she checked me off of the list and handed me a pen and a gridded sheet of paper that I would apparently be using to grade all of my five-minute dates.

  Lilah blushed a little and smiled at me, unable to resist reaching up with one hand to self-consciously pat at her headband to make sure that her ears were tucked away. “You think so?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was no expert on women, but I’d learned enough fr
om the dating world to know that hairstyle changes should always be responded to with a compliment. “It’s very fluffy.” Not that I had a particularly deep reserve of compliments, of course, but Lilah’s smile widened appreciatively, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back.

  Her smile dimmed for a second, and she nodded to where Suze had staked out a table already. Somehow she’d managed to get her hands on a copy of the Kama Sutra, which she’d plunked down right in front of her. Her arms were now crossed just behind it and there was a very definite Go on . . . ask me about it, chump look on her face. I felt a distinct twinge of sympathy for every other guy in the room, most of whom were looking at her like weekend backpackers put down in the base camp of K2. They really, really wanted a summit, but were also slightly concerned that they might die in the attempt.

  “Suzume looks very pretty,” Lilah said. There was a distinct undertone in her voice.

  “She likes causing riots,” I said. But seeing the way that Lilah’s smile kept drooping like a wilting daisy, I noted brightly, “But you look really nice too. In an undercover CIA-agent kind of way.” I wondered briefly if that was going to read as well as it had sounded in my head. Thank God she was apparently willing to go with me on it, because she laughed.

  I appreciated that she had politely avoided commenting on my own appearance. There hadn’t been time to change, so I’d just taken off my bow tie, unbuttoned the top button on my white shirt, and done my best to turn my shellacked hair into something that looked effortless and spiky, but was more spray-glued clumpy. Suze had tried to remove a few of the worst stains on my shirt with a napkin and a bottle of water, but without much success, so I now looked like a stained and slightly dripped-on waiter on his smoke break.

  I reminded myself that this was an undercover-surveillance mission to try to save lives, and that any rejection I suffered during it therefore did not count toward my life total.

  The event started. At its core it was pretty simple, based on the idea that you would know within five minutes whether you had any interest at all in the person sitting in front of you. We sat at the little tables and made five-minutes of polite chitchat; then the timer would go off, we would thank each other, and the guys would get up and have to move to the next table, during this process trying to mark up our little spreadsheets without being obvious about whether rejection was actually happening.

  On top of everything else, I also had to do my best to check out my five-minute dates’ wrists for any new tattoos. There hadn’t been any female victims yet, but it seemed better to be thorough, though I was extremely glad that it was Suze’s job to check the men. Whenever I was near her table, I was able to admire her technique of using very flirtatious hand-holding as a method of sliding cuffs up wrists.

  The weather had been mild enough today that most of the women were in short sleeves or no sleeves, giving me an easy way to check them, but a few were wearing sensible cardigans, and those proved very difficult. Sleeve nudging within fifteen seconds of an introduction apparently came off as creepy and sleazy when I tried it, as opposed to salacious and irresistible like when Suze did it. Several times I just gave in and pretended that “So, do you have any tattoos?” was an acceptable conversation starter.

  What I had also failed to realize was just how exhausting it was to meet a new person every five minutes and attempt to sparkle as a potential mate. As the time ground along, I noticed that the women stopped being as polite to me—once they’d decided that they were not going to put a check next to my name, several dropped even the pretense of a conversation and began either scoping out the room for more likely prospects, eyeing guys that they’d liked better than me, or (in several cases) shooting looks of death over to the table where Suzume was holding court. I decided that I would never get desperate enough to do this for actual dating purposes.

  Or if I did, I would choose a much better wingman than Suze. My wingman would definitely be a guy. And preferably with the kind of Quasimodo face and Hulk-like manners that would make me shine in comparison.

  We were down to the last three dates, and I was desperately clinging to the light at the end of the tunnel when I sat at the next table and found myself face-to-face with my ex-girlfriend, Beth.

  Or, at least, face-to-face with her skin.

  That was Beth’s face, with her olive skin and the one small chicken-pox scar under her left eye. Those were her rich black curls tumbling down to her shoulders. But Beth’s dark brown eyes had never looked at me with that kind of icy malice and barely contained violence that froze me in place as I stared. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening—my brain was stuck on repeat, like a trapped bee battering itself against glass. I couldn’t be sitting here staring at that thing that was looking back at me from Beth’s eyes.

  “Soli,” I managed to whisper between numb lips. I was carved out of ice, disbelieving, the shock rattling through me with the force of a storm.

  A nasty smile spread across that familiar face, its features emphasized with more makeup than Beth had ever even owned. “I told you that you’d be paying for my new suit,” she said, and even her voice was Beth’s but with a different phrasing, a different accent. It was throbbingly familiar—the voice that used to whisper activist pillow-talk to me in the dark—but it was a stranger moving her mouth, forcing words up her throat, over her tongue and lips.

  I’d only ever seen Beth in baggy peasant blouses, long beaded skirts, and the occasional maxi dress on more formal occasions. Now I saw what she would’ve looked like in a sleek black top and a pair of leather pants. I wanted to vomit—it was treating Beth’s body, her flesh, as its own dress-up mannequin.

  “What did you do?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around it; I couldn’t accept it. Beth, with her bright mind, her resolute idealism, her cheerfully cheating ways, couldn’t be dead.

  “Went shopping, dear.” And that thing grinned so widely that I could see that there were teeth in the back of its mouth that were much too sharp to be molars. “You should be more careful with the privacy settings on your Facebook.” She stretched out her hands, examining Beth’s long artist’s fingers with a connoisseur’s eye.

  This was worse than just Beth’s death. This was a horror, a perversion, a desecration to see her move Beth’s fingers.

  Somewhere under that smooth surface was that hard black thing that I’d seen last night—crouching there and pulling the strings to Beth’s body.

  I wanted to tear it out with my bare hands.

  My hands shook from the effort it took not to wrap themselves around the skinwalker’s neck and squeeze. But she’d done this on purpose—we were surrounded by the banal chitchat of two dozen humans, none of them remotely aware that they were like blissful beachgoers in the opening scenes of a Jaws movie, completely unaware that death was gliding in their midst.

  Soli continued smugly. “They might find the skin’s meat. I wrapped it in a plastic bag and threw it down her building’s garbage shaft.” She giggled. “Those things are so convenient.”

  Somehow that horrible image of Beth’s tortured remains cut through just enough of the urge to kill. My mind raced, trying to determine some foothold on the creature in front of me, some way to coax information out of it that would trip it up. Something that would expose enough of a vulnerability that I could slice it out of Beth like an excised tumor. I grasped the last thing she’d said. “So, convenience is important to you? Then why haul Gage’s body up our fire escape and leave it in his own bedroom?”

  She giggled again, and the sound was like a knife scraping down a chalkboard. “I figured that the vampires would have plenty of practice making bodies disappear, especially ones with no blood left in them.” Then the pleasure leached out of her face and she pouted, Beth’s full lower lip overly emphasized in dark red lipstick. “Staging an accident is boring, and the incinerator at the doctor’s office is so slow that you have to wait half the night for it
to finish. It’s annoying. I wanted to have some fun. Hit a club.” The pout was replaced by a frown, and in a mercurial change of mood, that malicious anger was back. “You weren’t supposed to get that curious about a dead human. So this”—she tapped one long finger against the side of Beth’s face—“is a warning. You and the fox can stay out of my business.”

  Part of me knew I should try to signal Suzume, or, hell, even try to text Prudence under the table, but I couldn’t pull enough of my brain away from the rising bubble of rage that was keeping me fixated on the skinwalker, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling like a frozen deer but like a rabid dog pulling against the end of its leash.

  I leaned forward, across the table, and very deliberately said, “I’m going to kill you.” My eyes felt strangely warm, but for once I didn’t feel panic as I wondered whether the pupils were expanding past where a human’s would. I didn’t care if I looked like a vampire at this moment—in fact, I hoped that I did.

  Whatever was happening, Soli didn’t look impressed. Instead she gave a slow smile. “You’re going to try,” she corrected me.

  The egg timer went off, indicating that our five-minute date was up. As soon as the sound registered through the room, Soli was out of her chair and moving fast for the back door of the store. I jumped up quickly enough that my chair fell backward and chased her. She was faster than me, and I had to dodge around all of the other men who had just gotten up to change tables, so she beat me out the door, but not by much.

  The back door led to a small gravel customer parking lot that was lit only by a weak security light on the back of the building. As the door slammed behind me, I saw Soli running toward a car parked in the fire zone with its four-ways on. I raced after her and caught up enough that I was able to snag a handful of her dark, curling hair in my hand. It felt familiar—I’d run my hand a thousand times through Beth’s hair. Now I wrapped my fist in it and yanked backward with all my weight, snapping her head back and arresting her forward movement. She stumbled hard but didn’t go down, instead pivoting toward me, and then we were grappling tightly. I briefly got a hand around her throat, but she was still a lot stronger than me, and I was thrown hard to the ground, which knocked the wind out of me.