Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel

by M. L. Brennan

  Dressing was trickier than usual. On the one hand, Lilah had kissed me once, and there was an element of masculine pride in not wanting to show up looking like a hobo and making her regret her past attraction. On the other hand, if I put too much effort into this, I might accidentally give her the wrong impression, and that would be a jerk move. However, I was going over there in a fairly official capacity, which suggested that jeans were not the order of the day. But then again, Lilah and I were kind of friends, and I didn’t want to seem like I was showing off. Looking at it a different way, though, it was entirely possible that Lilah wasn’t the only person I’d be talking to about this today, which pushed me back into the direction of dressing carefully. But if at some point the day erupted into violence, I really didn’t want a pair of business dress slacks destroyed.

  There were too many branches on this particular decision tree, so I gave up and went with a clean pair of khakis and a striped button-down shirt. True, once dressed, I looked like I was ready to go volunteer at a Christian ministry program, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad look. I pulled on a hat and parka and headed out, knowing that in the cold morning air it would take at least four tries for the Fiesta’s engine to catch.

  Lilah lived in a ground-floor unit of a squat brick apartment building. There were four side-by-side units, with one shared slanted roof, and it was one of those places that real estate moguls had pooped out by the dozens in the 1950s during the clamor for cheap housing. When it was first built, there had probably been open green space behind each of the small units, maybe a garden for each, since there was one window in Lilah’s living room that was weirdly placed, as if its spot had once held a back door, but that area had long ago been paved over and turned into an almost identical building that faced the opposite road, with only a small strip of pavement just barely wide enough for the Dumpsters in between. In front, there was a narrow band of grass between the building and carefully marked resident parking. At least the uniform bushes along the front were pruned back, though their bare branches certainly weren’t winning any beauty contests.

  The temperature had dropped from yesterday, and I could see my breath in the air as I picked my way up the walkway, listening to the quiet crunch of the frost-covered cement under my shoes. Lilah pulled the door open before I could even lift my hand to ring the bell. She was simply dressed in jeans and a sweater, and her bright coppery gold hair was still damp from the shower. As she ushered me inside, I noticed that she hadn’t put on her glamour yet, and the delicately curved and furred tip of her left ear was poking through the wet strands of her hair.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

  “It’s no problem. I still haven’t found another job yet, so it’s not like I have to head to work.” When I’d met her, Lilah had been the store manager at a New Age store. Unfortunately it had turned out that her boss was a murdering fanatic, and after he’d been killed, the store, which had never turned much of a profit to begin with, had closed.

  “I’m really sorry.” I never knew quite what to say after those kinds of disclosures. I’d spent plenty of time myself in that between-jobs twilight, and knew from experience that there wasn’t really anything you wanted to hear except news of a job opening.

  She gave a loose shrug. “Yeah, everyone is telling me that retail is tough right now if you want a manager’s spot. But I’ve got five more months of unemployment before I have to give up and take a cashiering position, and I’ve done a little under-the-table housecleaning to make ends meet.” Lilah looked at me, and I saw that there was more gold than brown in her eyes, a clear sign that she wasn’t quite as calm as she’d like me to believe. “But a few things have come up lately, and having a free schedule has actually come in handy.”

  I was about to ask her what she meant, but then the door to her bedroom opened, and Iris, her younger sister, walked out. The last time I’d seen the nineteen-year-old, she’d been drugged, naked, and sitting in an inflatable kiddie pool with a very grim immediate future ahead of her.

  Unlike Lilah, who was half human, three-quarters of Iris’s heritage was Ad-hene. Apparently morning in the Dwyer household was a break from the glamours that they would have to make and maintain for the rest of the day, because Iris was also walking in her natural state, and unlike Lilah, there was no way that she could’ve just covered up her ears and gone without.

  Iris’s straight hair gleamed like polished copper piping, a shade that no human had been born with and no dye could’ve achieved, and the face that her shoulder-length bob framed had more in common with a Komodo dragon than with any primate. I’d seen a three-quarter elf hybrid before, but never one without a glamour, and it was a sight that forced me to repress the urge to look away. The Ad-hene themselves had even more severe features, but they’d also had an eerie and dangerous beauty to them that this scion lacked—she looked like one of those weird crossbred Chihuahuas and Chinese Crested that always seemed to win the annual World’s Ugliest Dog Competition—which I was sad to say I watched religiously every year.

  There was a blankness to that bizarre face as Iris looked at me, everything that might be going on in her head tucked in so well that nothing showed on the surface. She was probably amazing at poker. “So, what are the vampires interested in talking to my sister about?” she asked with an undercurrent of hostility. I felt a tug of relief—not from her words, which put me in an awkward spot, but because I could at least pick up a bit of emotion from her voice.

  Lilah answered her sister before I could think of anything to say. “Iris, this is Fortitude Scott, the one who helped us.”

  There was something flat about her eyes when Iris looked at me. “Oh.” The hostility was gone now, leaving her voice expressionless, almost like a computer reader. I missed the hostility—it had felt more human. She moved a little closer to me and stepped in the sunbeam coming in from the window. As the light hit her face, those flat eyes adjusted, and I realized that the pupil wasn’t formed like a human’s. Instead of being round, it was vertical, like a lizard’s. The colored area around it was also disturbing—it lacked the softening brown that Lilah’s eyes had, leaving just a bright, buttery gold. “Didn’t see much that night,” Iris said. She took one more slow, precise step closer to me, then tilted her head carefully. “Heard you shot Nokke in the knee.”

  I nodded, wondering where this was leading. Nokke, after all, was Lilah and Iris’s grandfather. And also Iris’s father, but that wasn’t something that was generally discussed. Incest wasn’t exactly the most genteel of conversation topics, and the Ad-hene had engaged in it regularly, resulting in some very weird biological relationships among the Neighbors. “Yes, I did.”

  Iris’s mouth twisted in some private amusement, the first emotion to cross that blank face. “Too bad you didn’t shoot higher.”

  Lilah saved me from that particular conversational anvil. “Iris, you should put your glamour on and head to school. You don’t want to miss class.”

  That glimmer of emotion vanished like smoke, and Iris gave a small one-shouldered shrug. “Failing half of them.”

  Lilah’s voice was firm. “Then there are still half of them that you can pass.”

  That impressive display of big-sistering broke through even Iris’s near-lobotomized lack of involvement, and she snorted. Then she paused, and for a brief second I almost thought she looked concerned as those eerie yellow eyes flicked from her sister, to me, and back again. “You’ll be okay?” she asked Lilah.

  Lilah walked over to Iris and put her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and leaned in to kiss Iris’s cheek. “Now get going.”

  Iris blinked slowly, which did not help alleviate her resemblance to an iguana; then as I watched, her face changed, the glamour filling things out and making her look like one of those crazy-cheekboned high-fashion models that look more creepy than attractive—which was still a definite improvement. The metallic gleam of her hair dulled slightly, enough that while it
still drew the eye, it no longer looked unnatural, the furred tips of her ears disappeared, and her pupils softened and rounded. It wasn’t like the kitsune’s fox tricks, because unlike with the foxes, my knowledge of the truth made her glamour weaker. When I looked at it, there was a haziness to her false face, and if I stared hard, I could get glimpses of the reality that lay beneath it.

  Lilah handed Iris her backpack and ushered her out the door, giving her emotionless sister one last kiss on the cheek before she left. She gave a cheery wave, probably as her sister drove off, then dropped her hand and closed the door slowly. When she turned to face me again, I could see a weariness in her that she’d hidden from her little sister.

  There was a brief silence, and then I asked, “So how long has she been staying with you?”

  “Since that night. My parents gave her those drugs and handed her over to Tomas and the others. They say that they didn’t know what they had planned for her, but that was because they never even thought to ask.” Lilah rubbed her hands hard on her arm, and I could see that the last month hadn’t made a dent in her anger toward her parents. “Iris can’t go back to them, not now. There’d be bodies on the ground if she did.” The look on Lilah’s face suggested that she was trying hard to convince herself that that would be a bad thing. Then she visibly shook off the thoughts of her parents and shifted the topic. “So someone tipped you off about what’s been going on. I guess I should be glad I’m talking to you and not Prudence.” She sat down on her sofa and looked at me bleakly. “What are you going to do?”

  I felt a sharp sting of betrayal—not because the elves were the killers, but because Lilah had known, and she hadn’t called me. She at least wasn’t trying to hide it now that I knew, but it was hard for me to push down my irritation at her and force my tone to be strictly professional. “Tell me which of the Ad-hene killed the karhu, and if anyone helped him. Then we can decide—”

  “Wait, what?” Lilah cut me off, confused. “The karhu? Someone killed a bear? You think an Ad-hene killed a bear?”

  Lilah’s poker face had never been great, and we stared at each other for a second, both of us realizing that we’d been talking about completely different subjects. I clarified. “Sometime either Monday night or early on Tuesday, Matias Kivela was stabbed to death. Are you saying you didn’t know that?” It was a relief that she hadn’t been sitting on a murderer, but on the other hand, I had a very bad feeling that this situation had suddenly gotten a lot more complicated.

  “Why would I know that, Fort?” she asked testily. “The metsän kunigas have a right to use the Lincoln Woods, but we don’t do much socializing. If either group has a problem, our treaties say that we have to take it straight to the Scotts. I’m not sure I’ve even seen any of the bears in their human forms, much less talked to one. I definitely don’t get e-mail blasts about dead karhus.”

  “Okay, you didn’t know,” I conceded, though that didn’t mean the elves were off the hook. “Do you know whether any of the Ad-hene killed him?”

  Lilah was shaking her head immediately. “Fort, the Ad-hene haven’t left Underhill since your sister killed Shoney. As for stabbing . . .” She paused, and suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Fort, don’t you know the punishment your mother levied on Themselves?”

  “Just that there was one.” Frankly, for the first week Suzume and I had been chasing selkies in Maine, and once home, I’d still had my hands full figuring out Chivalry’s job. “Why, what happened?”

  Lilah cleared her throat awkwardly, then muttered, “Chivalry cut off the hands of each of the remaining Ad-hene.”

  “What?” My brother was not the enforcer for the territory. That job lay with—and abruptly I realized why it had been my brother. Prudence had been suffering her own punishment.

  Lilah began speaking quickly, apparently deciding now that she’d rather just get the revelations over with. “That was for being involved in the murders. Nokke and Amadon fought against you and your sister, though, so Chivalry cut off their tongues and . . . well, you know.”

  I dropped onto the sofa next to her. “Whoa.” I’d known that my brother was willing to get his hands dirty for our mother, but apparently I hadn’t realized how dirty. And while a part of me felt a very nasty sense of justice done with the Ad-hene having to experience some of the suffering that they’d forced onto my friend Gage and several other young men, I recoiled at the thought of my brother inflicting it.

  “It’ll all grow back, of course. I mean, it’ll take a while. They can heal a lot of wounds pretty fast, but amputations are apparently more complicated.” For a moment I thought that Lilah was trying to cover her discomfort with babble, but a moment later I realized that I’d underestimated her, and that unlike me, she’d kept her mind on the topic at hand when she said, “But believe me, none of them could’ve held a knife.”

  That definitely shot a hole in Gil’s suspicions. Hands were definitely needed to stab someone to death. Of course, the last time the elves had been involved in murders, other hands had held the weapons. “What about their fanatics? It was the Neighbors who did most of their dirty work during the sacrifices.”

  Lilah had seemed to calm down, but now her eyes got rabbity again, and there was a long pause. I narrowed my eyes and looked at her. “Do you want a drink?” she asked suddenly. “I need a drink right now.”

  I followed her into the kitchen and watched as she opened the fridge and removed a half-empty bottle of vodka and a pitcher of orange juice. “It’s nine thirty, Lilah,” I reminded her.

  “I’m unemployed, Fort,” she snapped. “You can drink in the morning when you’re unemployed.” She pulled a mug out of a cabinet and mixed a quick screwdriver, then took a swig. She blinked her too-bright eyes, then took another sip, and I noticed that the color began fading back to her usual, human-looking golden brown. She cleared her throat, removed a second mug from the cabinet, and filled it with straight orange juice. Then she slid the mug toward me wordlessly.

  I took it, watching her carefully, and took a drink. High pulp. I waited another moment, then asked, “Lilah? What don’t you want to tell me?”

  She toyed with her mug, which, like mine, had a comic from the Oatmeal printed incongruously on its side. “When you said that you needed to come over, I thought that meant you’d found out somehow.” She took a deep breath, and, not meeting my eyes, said, “Whoever killed your bear, Fort, it wasn’t the Ad-hene’s pet fanatics. It couldn’t have been, since they’re all dead.”

  The words hung there between us for a long moment while I tried to wrap my head around them. “What?”

  “Really dead,” Lilah clarified, and took another drink of her screwdriver. “All of them.”

  I stared at Lilah, putting the pieces of what I was seeing together. The Ad-hene were what one could term murder-enthusiasts, and I’d seen them kill one of their most loyal followers with less concern than I showed when throwing out fruit that had gone squishy. If frustrated and maimed, or even if they were having a cranky day, I could certainly see the elves going on a killing spree of their followers. But I had a bad feeling that that wasn’t going to be the explanation here. “Lilah,” I said slowly, “if the Ad-hene were the ones who killed them, you wouldn’t be drinking right now. Tell me what happened.”

  She still didn’t look at me, but she did nod, once. “People were killed, Fort.” Her voice was very soft. “If we hadn’t arrived when we did, Felix would’ve been killed. Four women were raped—it doesn’t matter if they were given drugs that made them willing, or that made them forget afterward. It was rape. More was planned.” She looked up at me, and her expression was grim. “You put me in charge, Fort, and I made sure that every single person in the community heard the truth of what happened. I had to do it, to make sure that we couldn’t gloss it over or look the other way—that we had to face the hard truth of what the Ad-hene were willing to do, and what those of our own were willing to do in their names.”

  My voice was just as soft as
hers. “What happened?”

  She laughed suddenly, but with no humor whatsoever. With quick movements she tossed the remainder of her screwdriver into the sink, and turned on the tap to send it all down the drain. “Well, for one thing, they got pretty pissed.” She looked pensively at the water. “It wasn’t my parents’ generation—they were shocked, yeah, but they wouldn’t have done anything. But Dr. Leamaro and the others did their work well—the largest numbers of the Neighbors are my age and younger.” She shrugged and turned the tap off. “So we acted.”

  “This was your idea?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.

  “We lack the equipment for any kind of long-term imprisonment,” she said defensively, but then she looked over and met my eyes, and seemed to calm down. “I argued that we could try some sort of house-arrest situation, and there were a lot who agreed with me. But there were those who wanted blood—and they started grouping around Cole, one of the older three-quarters.” She grabbed a sponge and started wiping down her counter as she spoke, and I remembered that she was a stress-cleaner. “It would’ve happened with or without my permission. By agreeing to it, I was at least able to get Cole to agree that all the names had to be voted on before anyone was executed. It’s a very Star Chamber–style of justice, but at least it’s better than a vengeful mob.” Lilah found a spot on her counter and scrubbed it with more vigor than necessary. “We killed the last of them more than a week ago, so I’m sorry to say that whoever murdered the bear wasn’t one of them.”

  This lead was drying up before my eyes, and I had an uncomfortable flashback to my mother’s directive to either find the murderer or locate a scapegoat. “So the Ad-hene couldn’t. There are none of their flunkies left who would’ve—Lilah, do you know any of the Neighbors at all who might’ve wanted to hurt one of the metsän kunigas?”