“Mother, global warming is actually—”
“It’s a metaphor, darling,” she said wearily.
I let it go, and returned to the weird concept of a vampire activist. “What is his topic?”
My mother gave a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry, Fortitude, but I’m utterly wrung out. Please ring the bell. Patricia will bring me a cup of tea and perhaps read to me for a bit.” Over the course of our conversation, she had seemed to perk up a little, but now she was once again looking exhausted. I apologized and did as she asked. When the house had first been built, it had a full set of the old-fashioned bell-cords that snaked down to the servants’ areas of the house and alerted them that their masters had some whims to be fulfilled. Madeline had renovated the house many times, however, and those were all gone, replaced by newer technology. In my mother’s room was a small toggle on her bedside table that she could hit and summon one of her staff—it was a bit like the button on a plane that you could push to call over a flight attendant.
I slipped out of my mother’s rooms when Patricia bustled in, all solid solicitude. I wondered briefly if Patricia would offer my mother more than just a cup of tea—at one time or another I’d seen many of my mother’s staff members with small patches of gauze on their wrists or butterfly bandages discreetly placed on their necks. It certainly wasn’t often—I knew that most of my mother’s sustenance came from the political hopefuls and powerhouses that she so carefully nurtured—but it had slowly become a more common occurrence over the last year. I’d wondered if my mother was becoming slightly lazier, but now I realized that it had been an indication of her flagging strength.
The party was still in full swing in the main hall, so I took a back staircase rather than the grand main one that swept downward in carved and gilded glory. Down a hallway where I passed staff members making their way back to the kitchen with trays of empty wineglasses and half-nibbled plates of food, I headed to the small butler’s pantry that concealed the entrance to one of the house’s nastier secrets.
A staff member was always stationed in the pantry, endlessly scrubbing and polishing the silver, and the one on duty tonight gave me a solemn nod as she unlocked the door partially hidden behind the woodwork pattern, revealing the basement staircase that, in sharp contrast to everything else in the house, was purely functional and industrial.
Until the murderous scene that my sister instigated a month ago when she tried to kill my host father and push me into full transition, the rooms at the bottom of the stairs and behind a steel door with a keypad lock had belonged to Mr. Albert. He’d been my host parents’ guardian and keeper since I’d been a small child, and I took a short moment before keying in the code that would allow me entrance to gather myself together.
The door released, and I pulled it open, entering completely transformed rooms. The main room, with its full-length one-way mirror used to observe Henry at all times, had previously been decorated like an old, comfortable sitting room. But Mr. Albert’s scuffed shelves and ancient armchairs were gone, replaced by a set of Spartan, functional furniture, with the showpiece being a long metal desk, looking like it was straining under the massive computer setup on top of it, with three screens, two towers, and a total of three battery backups daisy-chained together. I had privately dubbed this collection “Skynet.”
Sitting with his back to me, and looking steadily out the glass and into Henry’s holding area was the new keeper, Conrad Miller. Mr. Alfred had been a former wrestler and a big man, but Conrad had the kind of build and muscle mass that should’ve been illegal under the Geneva Conventions. I was a tall guy, but next to Conrad’s six-foot-five frame and easily two-hundred fifty pounds (none of it fat), I felt like a wet kitten looking at a Saint Bernard. His dark hair was trimmed into a jarhead’s buzz, and I knew that the even brown of his skin was natural, since he hadn’t left these rooms once since my mother had employed him a month ago.
“Hey, Conrad,” I said. “Are you AFK?”
Conrad didn’t even glance over at me, but as I walked closer, I could see him smile. The computer screens were covered in the saturated colors of World of Warcraft, and his character was on the center screen, as much at rest as a night elf with purple skin and greenish blue hair could get. I wasn’t sure how exactly my mother found her employees, but Chivalry had shown me Conrad’s background information, and he was pretty much a perfect fit for the job. After almost eight years in the Marines and three combat tours, Conrad had been honorably discharged. With his experience, he would’ve been great in the private security business—except for the post-traumatic stress disorder that was the remaining legacy of his service in war zones. Because of his PTSD, he couldn’t stand being in any location that he didn’t feel was secure. That included just about anywhere he would travel in private security, plus his local grocery store and most of the rooms of his own house. Madeline’s fortified bunker of a basement, with its restricted access and top-of-the-line installations, had suited him very well. A few pieces of exercise equipment and a reliable Internet connection to support his WoW habit, and he’d settled right in.
We were still in the getting-to-know-you phase, but he seemed nice enough, and despite how I sometimes teased him about multitasking with WoW, he was serious about the job.
“Do you mind waiting until Maire is out?” he asked, his eyes never wavering from the glass. “It’s safer to cover only one person at a time.”
“It’s okay. I just came down for a look, not a visit.”
I hadn’t talked to Henry since he’d killed Mr. Albert. I’d been told my entire life that my host parents were dangerous, and I’d accepted it on an intellectual level, but the sight of Henry tearing at Mr. Albert with his hands and teeth had finally forced me to realize exactly what he was capable of. That would’ve been easier if he was always the wild, vicious, ravening thing that he’d been when he attacked Mr. Albert, but the problem was that he wasn’t. The process that had made him capable of becoming a part of the vampire life cycle had twisted and warped his mind, but it hadn’t broken it. And in some horrible way, I knew that Henry loved me, which somehow made Mr. Albert’s death even worse.
But the events that had led to Mr. Albert’s death hadn’t left Henry unmarked. I looked through the window and watched the other new addition to Madeline’s staff, Maire O’Riley. Small in stature and with curling strawberry blond hair that even her no-nonsense short cut couldn’t stop from looking angelic, Maire had been a combat medic until her left leg was blown off in an IED explosion. I’d seen her use a prosthetic that mimicked what her old leg had probably looked like a few times, but whenever she was inside Henry’s enclosure, she wore a carbon fiber blade attachment designed solely for function and quick motion rather than any aesthetic sensibilities. Both she and Conrad had, as part of the interview process, been shown photographs of all of Henry’s victims, including Mr. Albert.
Seeing Maire inside the enclosure made me nervous. “Why don’t you go in when she does, Conrad?”
Conrad’s smile widened. “She says I hover and get in her way.” He didn’t break his alert observation, but he tilted his head slightly toward me. “Don’t worry about Maire. She’s tough, and she knows what she’s doing.”
Henry didn’t look dangerous anymore. Inside his clear plastic cube prison (the outsides now heavily reinforced with steel following Prudence’s attack on the original), Maire was changing Henry’s feeding tube—never a pleasant sight. In her attempt to kill him, Prudence had done severe damage, which had never healed or even closed. In the process that made him a vampire host, my mother had replaced his entire blood supply with hers, a process that was extremely difficult for a vampire and nearly universally fatal for the prospective host. Henry had survived, and my mother’s blood had fundamentally changed him down to the DNA level; among other things, it had made him far tougher and stronger than a human. Yet at the same time, it made him vulnerable, because his body was unable to make new blood or heal itself without my mother’s ass
istance and donation of more of her own supply. All of Henry’s wounds from his fight were neatly sutured closed, but they continually seeped fluid and required constant attention. Some of the damage to his upper body had necessitated the feeding tube, as well as a catheter, which required constant maintenance and attention from Maire. They also required Henry to remain still, which he’d been unwilling (or unable) to do, so now he spent his days and nights completely immobilized, strapped to a hospital bed. This enforced inactivity had caused the formation of bedsores, which also needed regular tending.
Until now, I’d thought that Madeline had made a deliberate decision not to make the blood transfers needed for Henry to heal. I’d assumed that she had been punishing him, much like her breaking and rebreaking of Prudence’s leg. Looking at his pitiful condition, however, and thinking about how my mother had interrupted my feeding, I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was highly possible that Madeline was currently unable to spare the blood that Henry would need to return to full, or even partial, health.
Inside the cube, Maire completed her work, gathered her tools, and left the cell, locking the newly reinforced door behind her. Conrad’s hand never wavered from his stun gun until she had entered the room where we were sitting. Then he returned the instrument to his belt and started up his game again.
I greeted Maire, who looked completely unsurprised at my presence.
“He knows you’re here. Do you want to talk to him?”
“No,” I said, too quickly. I paused and took a deeper breath. “No, just tell him . . . Tell him that I’m not ready yet.”
Maire gave a one-shoulder shrug and began unpacking her supply bag and pockets onto a small table. I’d seen this before—every time she left Henry’s cube, she always went through everything and checked it against a list to make sure that she’d brought back everything that she’d intended to, and that Henry hadn’t somehow been able to steal an item from her. Considering that my host mother, Grace, had died after stabbing herself a dozen times in the chest with a toothbrush that she’d managed to pocket and then sharpen to a knife’s edge, Maire’s habit was one that was likely to help keep both her and Conrad safe.
“You know,” Maire said conversationally, “my grandma used to work at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.”
“I actually didn’t know that,” I replied, feeling a little confused at the non sequitur.
“She worked with the big cats. One day one of the feeding cage locks got stuck, and a leopard jumped on her and scratched her up pretty badly. She got out alive, but she had some really bad scarring on her neck and arm. When I was really little, I asked her one day if she’d been mad at the leopard that did it. She said no, that the leopard was just doing what its nature made it do, and that was no reason to be mad at an animal.” She glanced up when she was finished, fixing me with her Irish green eyes to make sure that I had figured out the meaning of this conversation.
“Thank you, Maire,” I said, giving her a quick glare.
It was about as effective as glaring at a moose. “Just saying,” she said, completely undaunted.
“I’ll see you both later. Have a good night.”
As I pulled the coded door shut behind me, I could hear Conrad say, “Sleeping dogs, Maire. Why can’t you ever let them lie?”
Having no desire to talk to either of my siblings again, I slipped around the party by going out the kitchen. That put me in the direct path of Madeline’s cook, who cornered me to ask if I’d had dinner yet. I had to admit that I hadn’t. I knew that she would’ve preferred to park me in the dining room and serve a three-course meal, but after I insisted that I had a lot to do tomorrow and needed to head back to Providence, she grumbled but settled for making me a sandwich for the road and forcing me to accept a piece of cake from the party food. I finally made my escape, but got all the way to the parking lines of cars before I remembered that James had my keys, which meant turning around and going back into the house.
“When you’re just rushing around, you’ll waste more minutes than if you’d just taken your time in the first place,” James scolded me when I finally located him. It seemed my night for unsolicited advice, so I just nodded and waited for my car to be brought around from whatever hole they’d stashed it in.
I ate my sandwich on the drive home, my head full of everything that had happened today. There was plenty to brood over, and my mood was pretty low by the time I finally got into Providence. The apartment was dark when I entered, except for the weak light by the front door that Dan and I would leave on if the other person was out late, so I knew that my roommate had already gone to bed. I ate the piece of cake straight from the plastic container that it had been packed in, but I was still feeling fairly in the dumps by the time I had scraped the last forkful of frosting into my mouth. It was well after midnight, and while I had plenty of people to follow up with on Matias Kivela’s murder, they would all have to wait until a more reasonable hour.
I took a quick shower to finally get rid of the combination of dog rub and jogging sweat that I’d been carrying around since that afternoon, then brushed my teeth and took a quick stop at the toilet. I was pulling off a few sheets of toilet paper when I suddenly felt a weird bump in the roll, and I paused. A dark suspicion filled me, and I unrolled more paper quickly. There they were—two small googly eyes, glued to the toilet paper roll, staring at me.
It took me almost a full second to process what I was seeing, and then I laughed hard enough that I actually had to wipe my eyes when I was done. What was really impressive was not only that Suzume had decided to do that, but that the eyes were at least halfway down into the toilet roll, meaning that she must’ve unrolled the paper, glued on the eyes, and then rerolled everything neatly enough that she hadn’t tipped off any of the people who regularly used the apartment’s toilet. I was also impressed that she’d put all that effort into a prank that might not have even gotten to me—after all, Dan, Jaison, and even Suzume herself regularly made stopovers here.
Still snickering, I pulled the roll down and tossed it into the trash, then dug a fresh toilet roll out from under the sink and set it up. I tugged the first sheet free from its little glue adhesive, then unrolled enough to complete my business.
I paused for a second, then eyed the roll.
I had to check.
I started pulling the toilet paper again, this time not yanking off a few squares, but unrolling the whole thing.
Halfway into it, there were the googly eyes staring up at me.
Chapter 5
Despite the late night, I was up and dressed early the next morning, and as soon as the clock ticked over to eight a.m. and it was socially acceptable, I started making phone calls. The first was to Chivalry’s witch, Rosamund. No one picked up, and I was shuttled to her voice mail. It was the standard “Leave a message” blah-blah, but then it was repeated in Spanish, and then in a third language that I couldn’t even identify beyond its being definitely of Asian origin. I left a brief variation on “I’m Chivalry Scott’s brother. Call me.”
The next call I placed was to Lilah, and it yielded better results. She picked up on the fifth ring with a sleepy, “Fort?”
“I’m sorry, Lilah. Did I wake you?” She had that tone of a person whose brain was still coming online.
“Little bit,” she admitted. “What’s up?”
“There’s a bit of a situation, and I need to talk with you.”
“If you’re free tonight, we can grab dinner.”
That sounded very nice, and friendly-casual, but unfortunately the situation was anything but that. “I’m sorry, but it’s pretty important. Family business.” God, I felt like a mobster as I said that, and I corrected myself. “What I mean is that it’s about the Ad-hene. Can you do any earlier?”
“Oh.” Her voice flattened, and became almost resigned. “Well, I guess it was a matter of time.”
Alone in my kitchen, I raised my eyebrows and wondered what that implied. Maybe the Ad-hene really
had found a way to hide their scent from kitsune noses. Well, I couldn’t pretend to feel sorry about the possibility of Prudence killing another of them. Frankly, they had it coming. Meanwhile, Lilah continued talking. “Yeah, just give me an hour or so to shower and swing over to my apartment. You remember where it is, right?”
I’d spent a few hours hiding in her closet and seen my sister break a woman’s neck in Lilah’s bedroom. Her address was well and truly seared into my brain, and I assured her that I’d be fine getting there. We exchanged good-byes; then I dialed Suzume to fill her in on the morning’s planned activities.
“No, you should head over alone,” she said to my surprise. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”
I wished she were in front of me. Glaring at a phone was very unsatisfying. “If you’re the victor, then I’m the spoils. Any plans to, you know, despoil me?” I knew that I sounded grumpy, but the day was still very young and now I was going to be heading into a potentially awkward situation with a very nice woman whose pass at me I’d had to turn down because of my feelings for Suze, and at this point, though it was rather churlish to note it, it had been a really long time since I’d had sex.
“You’re being awfully backtalky for spoils,” Suzume said, but there was an underlying sassiness in her voice that clearly said that she was enjoying this situation far more than she should’ve. “Go find out what Keebler knows, and call me when you’ve gotten the info we need to go kick some elfish ass.” Typical Suze, she sounded positively peppy at the thought of impending violence.
“Hey.”
“Hrm?”
“If you think that seeing Lilah again is going to change my mind, you’re wrong,” I said seriously.
There was a pause on her end, and if we’d been playing Battleship, she would’ve had to acknowledge a direct hit.
“Maybe I’m not sure if I want a boyfriend who would call me on my shit,” she said.
I snorted. If Suze had wanted a toady for a boyfriend, she could’ve had a dozen of them. Simultaneously. I’d seen guys get so distracted by her as she walked down the street that they’d bumped into walls. “Nice try. I’ll call you later, and I’ll still be single.” I hung up before she could respond.
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