Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel

by M. L. Brennan

  “It burns, it burns, it burns!” Her voice was suddenly very high and very young.

  I tensed at the sound, but Dr. Sassoon looked completely unperturbed. “It will do that, Crystal. Now,” he rubbed one last dollop of the stuff into her line of stitches, which resulted in a full-throated scream that left me flinching. He remained unaffected, and simply gave a small nod as he removed his hands from her leg. “You’re going to stay still for the next hour and give that a chance to soak in. Then I’ll be back, and I’ll put another layer on.” I’d thought Crystal was pale before, but now she went stark white at the knowledge that she was going to have to sit through a second round of that, but Sassoon wasn’t even done yet. “You’ll be back in here every morning for the next two weeks for another two layers. Keep the knee lightly wrapped between treatments, stay out of the gym, and, Crystal, this one is very important, don’t shower. Don’t even wash your hands. Do all of this, and when two weeks are over, you can go straight back into a full training and competition schedule, and the knee will do everything you need it to.”

  Crystal blinked at him owlishly, the combination of the pain in her leg and the strange barrage of directions apparently overwhelming her. Sassoon put the top back on the jar, slipped the jar into his shirt pocket, and stood up, turning his attention to me and Suze just long enough to indicate that we were all heading out together. He gave Crystal one last, thin smile. “I’ll send Bill back in, and you can bring him up to speed on the plan.”

  We followed behind Sassoon as he led us up the stairs to the second floor of the restored house, and into an office that had probably begun life as one of the bedrooms. The decoration style was more of the same from his waiting room, though I noticed one of the collages sitting unhung, propped on the wall behind his desk. This one featured Lance Armstrong, and, given recent events, I had a strong feeling that it used to hang in a point of pride downstairs.

  “So what was all of that, Sassoon?” I snapped as we all settled into chairs. These, I couldn’t help but note despite my irritation, were much comfier than the ones in the examination room.

  “Please, Fortitude, call me Valentine.” He steepled his fingers, and I again felt the full weight of his attention fix on me. “You don’t like the choice I offered Crystal.” He didn’t bother to phrase it as a question, just as a statement.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied flatly. “I don’t think a seventeen-year-old has the perspective to make the decision to trade a lifetime’s use of her joint in exchange for a short-term goal.”

  “Interesting,” the doctor said, and meant it. He leaned forward, his brown eyes intent. “And who should’ve made that decision instead? Her coach has a very strong financial incentive for getting that young woman on an Olympic podium, and very little concern about whether she’ll be capable of walking without a cane at thirty. Her parents stood back and watched while she ignored every doctor’s order and competed on a severely compromised joint. Maybe they’ll wring their hands later, but if they’d had worries about her future health, they would’ve pulled her from her current trainer months ago.”

  “You could’ve made the decision,” I said, my voice icy. “Told her that gymnastics were over and sent her on to the rest of her life with a functioning left leg.”

  “And assumed that I knew better than Crystal herself about what she needed to be happy in life. Seems a bit paternalistic, I think.” For the first time since we entered the room, Sassoon looked over at Suzume, who’d been watching this exchange with interest. “I wasn’t expecting you to bring company, but given what I’ve heard about your activities, Fortitude Scott, I should have. I presume that you are one of the White Fox’s granddaughters?”

  “That’s right,” Suzume said coolly. “I notice that you don’t seem interested in my thoughts about the gymnast.”

  “I’m not, actually, though of course it’s somewhat rude of me to admit,” Sassoon was definitely going for bluntness here. “Do you agree with your companion, however?”

  Suze gave a sharp smile that showed off her teeth. “It was her body to ruin. Why fuss?” She leaned forward, and all joking was gone as she focused on the doctor. “The gymnast isn’t important, of course. You knew very well what she was going to choose before you even brought the subject up. What you were interested in was how Fort was going to react. Why don’t you tell us why that is?”

  Sassoon registered Suze’s demand, but when he answered, he spoke directly to me again. “I believe you are acquainted with one of my colleagues, Ambrose?”

  “The witch who used to work for Lavinia Leamaro? Yes, we met a few times.” I didn’t try to pretend to be anything other than grim when I spoke about him. At the behest of his fanatical employer, Ambrose had cooked up the roofie potions that had been fed to the Neighbor girls who had found themselves unwillingly involved in the Ad-hene’s murderous plan to breed themselves back to power. Ambrose hadn’t known what his potions had been used to do—but he also hadn’t asked why his boss wanted a potion that would render its drinker compliant and without memories of certain events. I’d prevented my sister from killing him, but I hadn’t been sorry when she left him with several long gouges in his stomach.

  “I spoke with him recently, and he told me that you had stopped your sister from gutting him like a fish. I find that extremely interesting.”

  A few pieces were beginning to come together for me. “Interesting enough that you convinced Rosamund’s assistant to give me your contact information,” I noted.

  Sassoon nodded. “Yes. I wanted very much to meet you.” He spread his hands gracefully, and a thoroughly charming smile spread across his face. Clearly salesmanship was among his many talents, and some used-car lot had missed out big when Valentine Sassoon had applied to medical school. “And, whatever you were contacting Rosamund about, I’m confident enough to say that I can do just as well. A bit better, possibly. Certainly better than poor old Esmé would’ve.”

  I eyed him carefully. That too-charming smile did nothing but inspire suspicion in me, and my feelings about the doctor at the moment were pretty far from signing up for his fan club, but there was clearly something that Sassoon wanted from me. I weighed my options, then decided to go ahead. “All right. Here’s the situation.”

  Sassoon was attentive while I explained, taking notes and occasionally stopping me to ask a clarifying question, but otherwise quiet. I finally finished, and looked at him expectantly, curious to hear his response.

  Suzume had been unusually silent during this exchange, watching Sassoon with all the close attention of a cat that has spotted a mouse. Now she gave a slow, taunting smile, and said, “Go ahead, Valentine. Here’s that chance you’ve wanted so badly to impress the youngest of the Scotts.”

  Sassoon allowed only the briefest flicker of a look toward Suze, but it was a revealing one, and I realized during that moment that she’d hit on something important, and something very true. Then the witch’s expression smoothed again, resetting to pleasantly professional, and he focused on me when he spoke. “When I was very young, my grandmother told me that she had once been able to make a corpse’s body bleed fresh in the presence of its killer. But that magic would work only when the body still carried an imprint of the killer, and that would’ve been gone by the time rigor mortis set in.”

  “That’s very helpful of you, telling us what you can’t do.” There was a lot of sarcasm from Suzume’s corner, but this time Sassoon must’ve been ready for her, and he didn’t acknowledge her comment except for just the slightest twitching around his left eye.

  I’d already lost a lot of time today, and while a full list of what witches could do with a murder victim’s body was academically interesting, I needed something a bit more focused now. “Why don’t you just tell me what can be done?”

  Sassoon smiled thinly at me. “You are tracking down a killer, so I understand a certain amount of disinterest in background. Very well. You tell me that the murder weapon is missing, and I’m sure that to fi
nd it would be helpful. Well, then. Blood calls to blood, Fortitude. If your killer was clever and tossed the weapon in a bucket of bleach, there will be nothing that any witch could do for you. But if even a trace of that blood remains on the blade, I can help you find it. Stabbings are very intimate—a lot of blood, and a lot of direct emotion. It’s not an easy thing to do, and I’ll need to call some of my colleagues to assist me, but I can give you an object, a compass of sorts, that will lead you straight to that knife as long as even a speck of blood remains on it.”

  That was definitely something useful, no doubt about it. I readied myself for the weight of the other shoe dropping. “And what will this assistance cost me?” Not that my mother was hurting for money, but that would probably determine the price tag. I’d worked briefly in landscaping, and I’d seen my boss throw more than a few rich-bastard tax line-items on a job estimate.

  Sassoon smiled, his perfect teeth gleaming. “On the house. I am, of course, quite happy to assist the Scott family.”

  “Shenanigans,” I said bluntly. “Either you come clean now, or I hit the road for Vermont and see if Rosamund’s substitute can do this.”

  His mouth pursed, and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. “She wouldn’t, that I can tell you.”

  I didn’t bother to respond, just watched him. He stared back at me for a long minute, but then he broke and glanced over to Suzume. Answering his unspoken question, she said, “Your song and dance in the exam room was to find out if Ambrose was telling the truth about Fort. You got your answer, but in case you’re still wondering, I’ll confirm. Yes, Fort will absolutely go out to the car and leave you in his dust for a principle.” Sassoon looked at me, just a bit nervously this time, and I did my best to stay calm and cool as I stared at him. I wasn’t sure whether Suze was completely right on her last statement—I’d made plenty of compromises in the past when other people had been in danger—but I trusted that Suze was figuring out a way to get the witch to spill about his ulterior motive in getting involved.

  It worked. Sassoon dropped the act and sat back heavily in his chair, annoyance now showing clearly on his expression. “Plain dealings seem odd when speaking to a vampire, but very well.” Something about him relaxed just slightly, the overt and almost annoying effort to charm being dialed back. “How much do you know about the witches, Fortitude? About our history in your mother’s territory?”

  “You want to tell me something about that history, so why don’t you go ahead and do it?” I suggested.

  Sassoon’s smile seemed more natural now. “You don’t like me very much. But you didn’t like Ambrose, or what he’d done, but you wouldn’t let your sister kill him. Let me talk about witches, then.” He dropped his hands onto the arms of his chair and leaned backward, clearly settling in for a long session. “Most witches earn a livelihood in medicine. Some of us went to medical school, but others find ways to work around that. Magic works with the body—some of us will lay our hands on our patients and change their bodies, but most of us choose to use the intermediary of potions and salves. The results are the same, but it is easier for our patients to assume that the cure came from a concoction rather than magic. Safer as well, of course. Witches, after all, have always had trouble hiding from the eye of humanity.”

  “I believe Salem has a tourist trade based solely on that fact,” Suze noted.

  “Salem gets all the attention, but Connecticut was the first colony to execute a suspected witch,” Sassoon said. “And there are a few countries today that still maintain official legislation against sorcery, though only in Saudi Arabia will the state still perform an execution. But to be what we are isn’t a choice—unless a witch regularly uses their power, siphoning it out and into humans, we sicken. And when we begin to sicken, the power will force its way out, oozing out and seeking humans. Without control and direction, our power will twist human bodies. Cancer rates will skyrocket, and there will be sudden increases in birth defects or miscarriages. Today that will result in a visit from the CDC and investigation of local chemical plants, but in past years that led to a witch hunt.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said, and I meant it, since that was a fact that I had been previously unaware of, “but what does this have to do with me?”

  “Witches don’t live in close communities beyond the immediate family structure. Large numbers meant a greater risk of detection, and for a very long time, doctors and healers whose patients showed a high instance of surviving as a result of attention were more suspect than those whose patients died by the cartload. So when witches came to your mother’s territory, we didn’t do so as one group, like the metsän kunigas or the ghouls, and we didn’t have a strong position to bargain with. And your mother had a strong desire to keep us from getting attention. We aren’t allowed to live close to one another outside the immediate nuclear family, or work together, and we’re strongly discouraged from any large gatherings. Children have to leave the family home at eighteen and settle elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they have the means to support themselves.” The smooth charm from before was completely gone now, and Sassoon’s voice was getting charged and excited. There was an expression of barely leashed outrage on his face, and for the first time I recognized who Valentine Sassoon really was—he was a believer and an activist, just like those people I’d known at Brown who had gone into the Peace Corps or taken gap years to work for Habitat for Humanity. It was a strange thing, this recognition, because suddenly he seemed much more like a person to me, and I very unwillingly found myself associating him with a dozen old friends who I’d listened to late into the night in bars, and I liked him better for it. And because he was being truly honest with us, he didn’t even notice and capitalize on that change of heart I was experiencing, instead rolling forward, his voice getting louder and more worked up as he went. “And things have tightened. It’s been fifty years since any new witch was given permission to settle inside Madeline Scott’s borders. Your sister Prudence was open about the fact that she was behind that. She also began harassing witch couples who had large families. Twenty years ago she murdered two witches and their six children, giving the justification that the family was too large and would’ve drawn attention—not was drawing attention, but would have. Since then, any couple who has more than three children lives in fear that Prudence Scott will show up at the door, because once she does, that family has twenty-four hours to be out of Scott territory, or Prudence comes hunting.”

  He paused for a second, breathing deeply and clearly trying to pull himself back on track. I watched but didn’t say anything—my sister’s dislike of witches was something that she certainly had never hidden from me, but I hadn’t known the extent of what she’d done. I didn’t doubt what Sassoon was telling me—I knew Prudence, and I’d seen her murder my foster parents in front of me in the name of how they could have been a risk to our secrecy. It wasn’t hard to picture her killing a family of eight, and then using that to terrorize and control something as fundamental as family size.

  Sassoon picked up his narrative again, and as much as he tried to control it, I could hear the thrumming excitement in his voice. After all, I remembered it from a dozen phone calls from Brown alumni telling me about how they’d quit their jobs to join Occupy Wall Street and be part of the movement that changed America. “But things are changing. Science has caught up with a lot of what magic does. The illness that our magic cures is often the same one that would be cleared up with antibiotics. We can make a tumor smaller, and over time even eliminate it. Chemotherapy can do the same thing. We can allow an infertile woman to carry a child to term—just like countless clinics. And better yet, when I do something with magic that goes beyond the boundaries of medicine, my patients simply regard it as a scientific marvel. Even if a scientist saw under a microscope that something I had done would not be possible, she would bend over backward and simply credit it as being beyond current scientific knowledge rather than even suggesting for a moment that magic could possi
bly exist.” Yeah, I definitely recognized that look on his face as he described what could be. “There are places that are still dangerous for us to live, but the cities in America are bastions for weirdness. Wiccans set up shop in Salem, and I see flyers for spiritual healing and crystal healing and alternative medicine covering public bulletin boards. This part of the world is safer for us now, safe enough that many of the old rules aren’t necessary anymore.”

  “And you think I’ll be more open to changing these rules than my sister?” I asked.

  Sassoon nodded eagerly. “Yes, but not just changing the rules. Allowing us to build a community, and to negotiate with your family as a group rather than as many individuals.”

  Suze’s jaw dropped. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—you’re trying to unionize the witches?”

  “Is that accurate?” I asked. “Because that actually sounds a bit accurate.”

  He nodded. “It is.”

  The kitsune whistled, long and low, and I saw that she was, despite herself, impressed. “Well, look at this. Sisters doing for themselves.” She’d always had an interesting way of showing that she was impressed. Then she became deadly serious. “You know that Prudence will never go for this, and neither will Chivalry.”

  “But would Fortitude?” And he looked at me, both fiercely determined and painfully vulnerable.

  I held up my hands. “Listen, Valentine, you’re making some good arguments here—I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But this is something that I’d have to look into a lot more, and I’m certainly not going to just agree with you based on a five-minute spiel.”