Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel

by M. L. Brennan

  I saw Kevin’s mouth move, and whatever he’d said, Carmen definitely wasn’t happy about it. That innocent smile dropped off her face with shocking speed, revealing something very cold and frighteningly familiar to me. Carmen would’ve enjoyed meeting my sister, I realized, because they probably had a lot in common. But Kevin’s comment made Carmen look at him, and even though her gun hand never wavered, that meant taking her eyes off Dahlia. And the other woman had been waiting for this chance, and was moving in an instant.

  I’d run out of time, and I couldn’t hesitate any longer. I had to take the shot, and so I just aimed as high above Kevin as I could while still keeping my chances of hitting Carmen alive, and I squeezed off the shot. Then several things happened at once—the bay window shattered from my shot, the gun inside fired, and Gil went crashing through the patio door like Rambo. Suze was already on her feet and running onto the porch to follow Gil in. I rolled, grabbed the Ithaca in my free hand, and was right on her tail a moment later.

  Inside was a mess. Gil had Carmen pinned to the floor. From the blood surrounding her, I figured my bullet had at least winged her, but she was fighting hard against her cousin and screeching curses like a banshee, so apparently I hadn’t gotten her anywhere particularly vital. Kevin’s chair, with him still tied to it, was knocked over, but when Suze leaned down to check on him, he immediately yelled, “I’m fine! But Dahlia’s been shot!” I looked around, and there was Dahlia, lying on the floor next to the table. She must’ve shifted as she went for the gun, because she was a weird mish-mash of bear and woman. Her shape was still human, but she’d suddenly acquired at least seventy additional pounds of bulk and a full layer of black fur, causing her clothing to snap open at every seam. Her pants were tangled in loose drapes of fabric around her legs, no longer attached to anything, and her blouse remained fixed only at the seams resting on her shoulders—the remainder was, again, draping. The bones of her face were completely distorted, with her dark brown eyes staring at me from above the distinct beginnings of a bear’s muzzle. Most disturbingly, there was a lot of blood at her midsection. I lunged forward immediately to try to put pressure on the wound, but found myself swatted away by a half hand–half paw that packed enough muscle to nearly send me sprawling.

  “Don’t worry about me.” Dahlia’s voice was lower, rougher, and having issues with forcing consonants through a mouth not designed for speaking. Her teeth were distinctly no longer human. “All I need is a dish towel, but Kevin might’ve hit his head when he went down.”

  “Don’t you dare listen to Dahlia!” her brother-in-law yelled, looking completely outraged. “She just got shot! She’s probably in shock! I just got tipped over!”

  There was a low, rumbling sound from Dahlia, and then she shook herself and shifted completely—proving that Gil and Kevin’s kitchen had definitely not been designed with a three-hundred-pound black bear in mind. She looked at me and gave a very serious growl, then jerked her head again toward Kevin.

  “Suze, maybe you’d better get Kevin untied, and maybe slap some ice on his noggin,” I said cautiously. “Gil? Care to weigh in on this situation?”

  “I’ve got Carmen’s gun, and it’s a .38. Dahlia? Did you shift fast enough before it hit you?” There was a low, chatty sound from the bear. “Okay, yeah, she’ll actually be okay. She shifted fast enough, and a bullet this size couldn’t penetrate her fat layers. We’ll have to tweezer it out, but she’ll be okay.” Gil nodded, though I noticed that he was using a lot of strength to keep Carmen in check. I crouched down and set the muzzle of my Colt right behind her ear, and let her hear me cock the gun. She was smart enough to stop struggling, but the expression in her eyes would probably show up in a few of my nightmares. No regret—just an incredible cold rage.

  “Carmen?” I asked, keeping my voice level. “I think it’s time for a bit of a chat.”

  “I should’ve been named karhu,” she snarled. “I deserved to be named karhu. I was taking what should’ve been given to me.”

  “That’s it?” Gil said, disbelieving. I wished I could’ve been as stunned as he was, but I’d seen too many people who weren’t bothered by killing anyone who stood in their way. Carmen would’ve gotten along well with the Ad-hene. “You killed your own father, you killed Alison and Peter, who must’ve loved you, you were going to shoot Kevin and Dahlia, and let the vampires kill me for that—Carmen, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  She turned her face very deliberately to look at her cousin, and disgust dripped from her voice. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong is that I didn’t just put a bomb in the kitchen during Thanksgiving dinner and let you all burn. But fucking Peter had to be a literature student instead of an engineer.”

  Gil let loose a torrent of Finnish, and Carmen smiled, her flat blue eyes gleaming. “I accept,” she replied.

  “What the hell did you just do, Gil?” I asked, very suspicious of anything that would make Carmen smile like the Joker.

  Gil got off Carmen slowly, letting her get up on her knees. I kept the gun trained on her, darting glances at him. “Gil?”

  “Carmen was willing to kill to become karhu, as if we’re back in the old days when the entire generation of a ruling family would rip itself to shreds until one of them was the sole survivor. Well, if that’s what she wants, that’s what she’ll get. I’ve challenged her to a dominance battle.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Suze snapped from where she was pressing a paper towel against a cut on Kevin’s forehead. “Don’t be a twit, Gil. Let Fort shoot the bitch and we’ll call it a day.”

  There was a sudden movement, and the bear was giving Suze an extremely unfriendly look, those black lips pulling back to give her an excellent view of ursine dental hygiene. Apparently Dahlia was on board with her brother on this. The kitsune shook her head in disgust. “The two of you are nuts,” she said flatly.

  Gil’s eyes never wavered from his cousin. “I held you when you were an hour old,” he said to Carmen. “You are my baby cousin, and I love you. So whatever horrible thing went wrong inside your brain, or whatever you think that the rest of us did to you that justified this, I am sorry. And I’ll let you have this chance of living and getting what you’ve apparently been willing to sacrifice your own family for, rather than just letting the vampire put you down like a rabid animal.” He didn’t look away, but he tilted his head just slightly at me. “Fort? I think I might need Scott permission for this one. Are you willing to sign off?”

  That put all the attention of the room on me while I weighed things. I knew even without looking that Suze was probably exerting all of her expressive power to get me to tell Gil not to be a moron, and shoot Carmen in the head. But that was the problem—I knew I would’ve been able to kill Carmen during the fight, and from the oozing cut on her left arm, I’d done my best to do so. But standing here, with all of us talking . . . that was different. That felt like an execution, and I didn’t want to do that. But telling Gil no and calling up my sister to come down to execute Carmen wasn’t any less a murder on my part.

  And then there was the look on Gil’s face—I still didn’t like him, but I understood him all too well. Carmen was a monster, but even knowing that, he and Dahlia still loved her. She was their cousin, and that tie wasn’t something you just shrugged away. It would’ve been easier for both of them to tell me to kill Carmen, just push it onto the Scotts and keep their own hands clean, but that wasn’t what they were going to do.

  “And if you win?” I asked. “How many more of the metsän kunigas die?” My hand tightened on the gun.

  “When I’m karhu, I’ll respect the will of the Scotts in all things,” Carmen promised, those blue eyes glittering like the sunlight on frost. A sly expression slid onto her face. “Unlike Gil, after all, I’ve never questioned the right of the vampires to rule.” A muscle twitched hard in her cousin’s cheek.

  I hesitated. I knew this wasn’t how Chivalry or Prudence would do things—they would choose who they wanted to l
ead the metsän kunigas and force everyone in line. It would be so easy to just ignore what Dahlia and Gil wanted—but I couldn’t help thinking of my conversations with Valentine and Lilah. Decisions were made by my mother and siblings, and then the other races were the ones who had to live with them, finding a way through the dictates that shaped their lives and community.

  One person in this room would be karhu. Two weeks ago I hadn’t even known any of them, but the ramifications of this decision would ripple out for decades. And I knew what it was like to have choices taken away from you, and to live with the burden of those outcomes. The names of my foster parents were written across my heart.

  Carmen saw the answer on my face, and laughed, high and loud.

  “Get in the backyard, Carmen,” Gil said roughly. “We’re settling this.”

  “Whoa!” a sudden protest emerged from Kevin. “Honey, wait a second, our fence is not that high!”

  Beside him, Suze sighed heavily. “Don’t worry. I can cover them up. This isn’t something that anyone would be expecting to see, so it’ll be easy to hide.”

  That was how we ended up in the backyard, watching Gil and Carmen disrobe with a complete disregard for the ambient temperature. The two were intent on each other, but something about the expression on Carmen’s face made me nervous, even with the clear size disparity between the two of them. She looked like someone finally living out a lifelong dream, while Gil just looked grimly resolved.

  Suze was to my left, working her fox tricks to make sure no one got an eyeful, while Kevin stood at my right. Dahlia had followed us all outside, apparently not bothered by the blood drying on her stomach, and now crouched next to her brother-in-law, her eyes fixed on Gil and Carmen as they stood silently, watching each other. There had been a brief break before the fight while Gil had pulled the bullet out of her belly wound with a set of tweezers.

  I looked over at Kevin, and said hesitantly, “Is this kind of weird for you? You know, with . . .” We were currently standing in his backyard while his husband prepared for a fight to the death with his cousin, not even thirty minutes after Kevin had been held hostage. It seemed rather hard to find the right way to phrase that, so I settled with, “. . . well, kind of everything?”

  Kevin shot me a short look. “Believe me, everything is weird when you marry a guy who can turn into a bear.” Beside him, Dahlia gave a low, bear grumble of mild protest, but rested her head against Kevin’s leg. He reached down and rubbed her round furry ears—both were clearly tense and extremely worried.

  The fight began suddenly—one minute it was just the two of them looking at each other, and then Carmen and Gil were both changing, a process that forced me to glance down at the ground as their bodies warped and shifted, gaining bulk, muscle, and paws while their skulls pulled and changed. Suze’s changes were always almost too fast for my eyes to process, but this was slower, more physical, and viscerally painful. Carmen was moving before her change was even complete, throwing herself straight at Gil, her jaws snapping and ripping at his throat. He smacked her away with his paws, but I saw blood on his fur when she finally pulled back. Then it was just a mass of ripping, snapping black fur as the two bears fought. Gil was larger and outweighed her, but Carmen was faster and seemed tireless, her jaws snapping and locking into any flesh she could get. Gil was taking her shots, using his larger bulk to keep knocking her back and away, but he wasn’t able to land any solid shots or bites.

  I felt Suze’s hand on my arm, and she leaned close and whispered, “It’s okay, Fort. This won’t last much longer.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” My hand wrapped around the handle of the Colt as Carmen ripped away a chunk of fur from Gil’s shoulder.

  “No, watch.” Her voice was completely confident, and I forced myself to trust Suze and let go of the Colt. A moment later, Carmen again lunged out, but this time Gil moved, dropping his head, and his jaws wrapped fully around his cousin’s neck. She thrashed, scrabbling wildly at him with her paws, but he rolled, bringing his weight down and onto her, and hung on, his jaws bearing down relentlessly. Carmen’s eyes rolled, her rage still burning, and then her movements became weaker. Her mouth opened and closed in a snapping motion, but there was no expression of fear, until finally her whole body went limp. Gil continued holding on for another long minute, then let go slowly and stepped back. In two steps his fur began to recede, his long tan muzzle pulling inward, and the heavy bulk of the bear tightening and forming a recognizable human shape. Then the fur was gone, and a naked man knelt on the grass, the deep bites on his shoulders, arms, and chest still dripping blood. But it was the expression on his face that seemed the most painful as he looked down at his cousin’s dead body in front of him.

  Kevin was running before any of the rest of us moved, and he threw his arms around his husband. He planted a solid kiss on Gil, and, holding his husband tightly against his chest, began a spirited rendition of what sounded like a series of reasons why Gil was a complete idiot for not just letting me shoot Carmen. Gil meekly accepted both Kevin’s berating and his help getting up, wrapping one long arm around his husband’s shoulders, and the two began a very slow walk back to where the rest of us were waiting.

  Dahlia shifted, and for the first time I had the experience of seeing her short, mom-cut black hair completely disheveled. She was also naked, but there was a lot of naked happening at the moment, and I decided that the polite thing would be just to ignore it. In human form, the bullet wound on her stomach looked smaller, and even though it was still seeping a little, I understood now why no one had seemed overly concerned before. When her brother approached, she gave him a deep, formal bow, and said, “My karhu.”

  Gil reached out with his free arm and yanked his sister into a hug, pressing his face into her neck and saying, “Forget that shit for a second. Are you okay?”

  That Vulcan calm of hers finally broke, and for just a brief second I saw exactly how much she loved her younger brother, and I realized that while Gil might wear everything on his sleeve while Dahlia kept it all bottled up, the siblings were actually very similar. I remembered Dahlia’s absolute rejection of the idea that Gil could’ve been the one framing her, and I couldn’t help but feel envious of how strong their bond was.

  “I’m fine,” Dahlia was saying. “Are you okay?”

  “Nothing that won’t heal,” he said. When they looked at each other, something deeper passed between them, and I wondered if this would be all they ever said to each other about Carmen’s betrayal. “But are you really okay?” Gil pressed, a deep look of worry crossing over his face. “With me being karhu? Uncle Matias wanted you to have it.”

  Dahlia shook her head vigorously. “You won it in combat, Gil. And I have no desire to fight you to the death for it.” A smile broke across Gil’s face, and his sister gave him a small peck on the cheek. “After all, we know I’d kick your ass, so you can have it. Unless”—she looked back at me—“the vampires are going to raise a fuss.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want it?” I asked, surprised. She’d seemed so natural in the role.

  “I’m actually a little relieved,” she replied. “I’m a businesswoman, not a politician.”

  “I’m not sure your brother is what I’d call diplomatic,” Suze muttered. It had, after all, been a bit of a long morning with Gil.

  A small smile tugged at Dahlia’s mouth. “Maybe not,” she acknowledged. “But he is political. And he wants the job, which I don’t.”

  “And as my first official action as karhu,” Gil said, his arms still draped over both his sister and Kevin, and looking like he needed the support, “I’m making you president of Kivela Mutual Insurance.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I know you’ll be so much better at it than I ever would’ve been.”

  I shook my head, accepting what was in front of me. “You’re a pain in the ass, Gil, but maybe you are the right one for the job. Carmen thought that she was going to have Prudence come out and just kill the firs
t most likely suspect—and that probably is what would’ve happened. So maybe you have a point about the metsän kunigas being able to investigate their own problems, not that I’m touching that one with a ten-foot pole today. So in my mother’s name, I support your ascension to karhu . . . ness. Whatever.” I looked around. We needed bandages, extra clothing for the naked people, a cleaning crew for inside the house, and frankly I really could’ve used a drink. But first things first. “We need to do something about the body.”

  Gil didn’t look over at it, and I realized that neither he nor Dahlia was acknowledging Carmen’s remains at all. Maybe that was cultural, or maybe it was just how they were handling things. “Dahlia and I will pull it into the forest in another few minutes,” he said. “If someone runs across her, no one will be worked up over the body of a bear.”

  * * *

  I called my mother as Suze drove us back to my apartment a few hours later. There’d been a lot of things to clear—publicly absolving Dahlia of the murder accusation, the revelation that it had been Carmen’s work all along, the pronouncement of Gil as the new karhu, the dispatching of a group of people to collect poor Alison’s body.

  “We found the real killer, and she’s dead,” I said to Madeline, feeling a mixture of exhaustion and a certain dull satisfaction. I regretted the death of Alison, and even the death of Peter, the apparent patsy, but I knew that I’d handled things a lot better than Prudence would’ve, and that I hadn’t been the cause of any innocent person’s death. “Everything is resolved with the metsän kunigas.”