Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel

by M. L. Brennan

  “Bravo, my dove,” my mother said, sounding pleased. “Will you be joining us for dinner to tell us all the details?”

  I glanced over to Suze, whose face was illuminated in the early-afternoon sunlight. She looked back at me, and the expression in her eyes made my heart pound. “Actually, I don’t think so,” I said to my mother, never glancing away from Suze. “I’ll come down tomorrow. My car is wrecked, though, so I’ll need a ride.”

  “Very well, dear. I’ll send the car at five.” We exchanged good-byes, and then I shut the phone off. It was Suzume’s, my own still being completely destroyed and in need of replacement. But I wasn’t thinking about that.

  We walked into my apartment, not speaking. Dan was still at classes, so it was just the two of us, looking at each other from across the living room.

  “You’ve decided,” I said, not even bothering to phrase it as a question. The room suddenly seemed very warm, but I didn’t move, not even to take off my jacket.

  Suze gave me that slow, lazy smile that made all of my insides give a flip. “I think you’ve gotten all the warnings you need about who I am,” she said, her voice rubbing me like velvet, and she began walking toward me.

  A pang of worry slid through me, even as her hands began sliding up my arms, and her face was so very close to mine. “Suze, if this doesn’t work—”

  Her hands wrapped in my hair, and my head was very firmly yanked down to hers, and her mouth pressed against mine. My brain was spinning when she let me up and said, “Then we deal with it. But right now we’re both on the same page, so . . .”

  That was enough, and this time I kissed her, feeling a deluge of joy when she kissed me back eagerly, her tongue sliding into my mouth while her hands began busily working at my clothing. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her up, her legs looping around my hips and her mouth never leaving mine. I walked us blind into my bedroom, kicking the door shut behind us. I eased us both down onto the bed, and then it was a flurry of clothing removal and skin, and as I pressed my mouth against the smooth line of her collarbone while I reached behind her back to unhook her bra, I decided that everything in my life was worth it just to end up in this moment.

  Then Suze gave my shoulders a playful shove, and I dropped back against the bed. Her hands were unhooking my belt, then sliding the button free, and easing the zipper down. The sight of her there, her dark hair swinging forward, her long fingers easing the fabric away, was almost too much, and I forced my eyes up at the ceiling to distract myself and avoid possible embarrassment.

  Directly above my bed, glued to the ceiling, was a pair of googly eyes, each one bigger around than my hand. They stared down at me, and I stared up at them, my jaw completely dropping. Suze’s hands were still below my waist, tugging at the resistant denim, and I started laughing, a deep, belly laugh that filled my entire body. I tore my eyes away from the ceiling and looked down at Suze. I was still laughing uncontrollably, and I saw her smile, a pure, wide smile of unadulterated pleasure and foxy glee. My heart beat faster, and I reached up and pulled her down to kiss that smile, feeling the echoes of the laughter still rattling in my chest as I rolled us over and felt her skin against mine.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up slowly, with a general feeling of goodwill toward everything and anything, but most particularly toward the black fox curled up on my pillow. I had a small crick in my neck from my head having been slowly nudged off that pillow while I was sleeping, but given the very pleasant state of the rest of my body, I considered it a fair trade. I reached over and ran a finger over the soft, downy fur behind Suze’s ear. Her ear flicked under my hand, and then her eyes opened, all amber and vertical pupil.

  “Good morning,” I said, feeling bemused at this morning after.

  In response, Suze got up and gave a bone-defying stretch, then rubbed her vulpine face affectionately against me in long, smooth strokes, her tail flipping lazily from side to side. After a few minutes of this, she stopped, stretched again, and then there was a very content and very naked woman lying beside me.

  “Right back atcha,” she said with another full-body stretch that had me blessing that complete absence of body-consciousness that all the shape-shifters seemed to possess. I rested my hand on her hip, feeling the smoothness and warmth of her skin.

  “So, what changed your mind, Suze?” I hadn’t asked last night, because we’d been thoroughly occupied, and I’d decided that deep conversations could wait. Our one break had been when I’d pulled on some clothing and made us omelets for dinner.

  She gave me that amused, foxy grin. “I’ve been window-shopping you awhile. I guess yesterday I decided it was time to try you on and wear you home.”

  I leaned over and kissed her, sliding my hand upward to press lightly against the curve of her shoulder blade. Everywhere my hand ran over, I felt lean, powerful muscle. Well—almost everywhere, I amended, as my hand slid forward and over her chest. “So, our relationship is like a pair of jeans to you. Sexy.” She laughed against my mouth, and then rolled on top of me, and that was the last conversation that we had for a while.

  We finally made it out of bed an hour later, for a very leisurely brunch. I cracked the remaining googly-eyed eggs and made French toast, while Suze eyed me with an expression of approval as I prepared food for her. Later, she took a shower, and I cruised the Internet’s offerings of used cars, addressing the challenge of filling a certain Fiesta-shaped hole in my life.

  Suze came up behind me, rubbing her hair dry with a towel. She’d gotten her pants and her shirt on, but hadn’t bothered with socks, which I found both extremely adorable and rather impressive, given the limited effectiveness of the old-fashioned steam radiators in the building. She glanced at the screen.

  “You know, Fort, your car got destroyed in a completely work-related incident. I say have your mom buy you an actual new car.”

  I tugged at the neck of her shirt until she’d leaned down close enough for me to press a kiss against her mouth, marveling internally even as I did it. “You knew what you were signing up for.” I knew that it was probably a good idea to play things cool at the beginning of a new relationship, but I couldn’t stop the big, shmoopy grin that I knew was spreading across my face. But since my brain was basically engaging in the hamster dance at the moment, maybe this was as cool as I was going to be able to manage.

  Suze, meanwhile, was definitely occupied by the thought of my impending automotive purchase. “Just remember that I’m now dating the owner of this car.” She peered closer at the screen, and then said flatly, “You’re not buying someone’s old Cadillac DeVille. Aren’t you at least going to get some insurance money out of the Fiesta?”

  I shook my head. “All I had on it was liability.” It had been the cheapest plan I’d been able to find. I considered. “Though I do have some connections with Kivela Mutual Insurance, now. Maybe they’ll give me a good deal on a new policy.” Technically I’d saved Dahlia’s life—that had to be worth a decent monthly rate.

  “So how long will I be chauffeuring you? Remember that my no-eating-in-the-car rule is nonnegotiable.”

  I wrapped my arm around her waist. “Don’t worry. I had some money saved up to fix the Fiesta, so I can get a car with it.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “This is less than a thousand dollars, isn’t it?”

  “Considerably less,” I admitted.

  “You know, most people just get a car loan instead of buying whatever wreck they can get with their couch-cushion cash.”

  I regarded her seriously. “Most people should read Elizabeth Warren’s books.” I had read them in college, and her sections about controlling fixed expenses had made a serious impact on me. And given the jobs I typically ended up with, her lessons had been very useful.

  Suze looked very unimpressed. “Hey, are you going to work today?”

  I shrugged. “Hank e-mailed me to offer some afternoon stuff.” Then I slid my hand a few inches lower and smiled at her. “But I don’t have
to.”

  She gave me the foxy smile that made my stomach tie in knots, and then a kiss that sent my brain pleasantly spinning. When she finally let me up for air, she grinned. “Nah, take the work. Maybe it’ll help you get something other than”—leaning over, she snagged my mouse, clicked onto my other tab, shook her head, and sighed—“a Yugo.”

  “Are you sure?” I’d just had more sex in the last twelve hours than I’d had in the last six months, but I was more than willing to add some more, just to well and thoroughly declare the dry spell over.

  “This is day three in these clothes, Fort. I want you to fully appreciate just how much I sacrificed to bang you last night.”

  I laughed. “At least that sacrifice was not in vain, right?”

  Suze snickered, and then began kissing me again, which eventually led straight back into bed. When I finally walked her to the door forty-five minutes later, we were both in very nicely mellow moods.

  Dan was sitting on the couch, ostensibly working on his flash cards, but as soon as the door had closed behind Suze, he stood up and gave me a slow clap. I pumped my fist and made a victory lap around the room.

  “Congratulations, Fort,” Dan said once we’d completed the celebration and were slacked out on the couch. “Maybe now she’ll have something else to do rather than set up pranks.”

  I looked at him seriously. “Do you really think so?”

  His face fell comically. “No, but I can dream, can’t I?”

  I was reminded of that conversation when I went to work. The dogs definitely didn’t like whatever scent mark Suze had left on me, and I received something very different from the usual tail-wagging, tongue-lolling greeting. Pip, the long-haired dachshund, came straight at me with the intent to kill (or at least to maim my ankles), and it was only his elderly owner’s solid obedience training that called him back. The rest of the dogs had more moderated reactions, but they made it extremely clear that they were walking with me under extreme duress, and that it was only for the sake of their suffering bladders that they were consenting to this. Even Codex and Fawkes, usually the most exercise-centric dogs, looked very unhappy about the situation, giving me grumbling growls whenever one accidentally came too close to me. When I delivered them back to their house, I reflected that this was the end of yet another job.

  Not that I minded. I would very gladly trade sleeping with a kitsune for walking other people’s dogs. And, after all, if there was one thing I had learned over my years of underemployment, it was that there was always another shitty job out there, just waiting for me.

  My mother’s Rolls-Royce pulled into the parking lot precisely at five. I had showered and changed into a clean pair of khakis and a sweater that passed the sniff-test with flying colors. The temperature had plummeted, and not only was my breath visible in the evening air, but there were mutterings on the weather channel about possible snow flurries. There was no accumulation predicted, but Dan volunteered to do our duty as New Englanders and join in the rush to divest the grocery store of all its stock of toilet paper, milk, and eggs. After all, there was an established record of predicted snow flurries suddenly turning into three feet of accumulation, and it was never a bad idea to be on the safe side.

  I started toward the car, then stopped when I realized who was getting out of the driver side to hold the back door open for me. It was James, the white edge of his bandage just visible under a sliding fold in his scarf.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, the words bursting out of me and sounding so terribly pathetic when weighed against my memory of my attack on him. “So very, very sorry.”

  His grandfatherly face looked at me with compassion that I knew I didn’t deserve. “I know, Mr. Scott,” he said. “That’s why I volunteered when your mother asked one of the staff to drive up and fetch you tonight.”

  He was shivering in the cold, and I allowed myself to be ushered into the backseat so that he could tuck himself back up front. With the doors closed, the car was actually better heated than my apartment, and I loosened the neck of my parka. “Why would you want to see me again?” I asked, looking at his eyes in the reflection of the rearview mirror, and wishing that I could see more of his face. “I bit you. I hurt you. I was trying to kill you.”

  There was a long silence as James merged the car into traffic and settled in for the drive. Then he met my eyes in the mirror, just once, and very quickly, and I saw wisdom and hard-earned knowledge there. “But you didn’t want to kill me,” he said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear him, even with the smooth purr of the Rolls’s engine. “Maybe for a second there you would have killed me, when you didn’t know who I was and all you saw was food, but you didn’t want to. And I’ve lived among your family since I was fourteen and got a job raking the leaves in the autumn, and I know what you are.” The word vampire hung in the air, unsaid even in this moment, so complete and engrained was James’s loyalty to our secret. “I know how rare that is, that not wanting to kill.”

  I didn’t have any response to that, and James didn’t seem to expect one, since he reached out and turned on the radio, and the dulcet and measured strains of the NPR All Things Considered hosts filled the car as we continued down to Newport.

  When James dropped me off on the mansion’s doorstep and drove off, probably to tuck the Rolls safely away in the small carriage house nestled against the side of the property, I could feel the steady pulse of all of my family gathered together, and I followed it unerringly into the side parlor.

  I stepped into the room, and all of my attention focused on my brother, who hopped off a small sofa and hurried to meet me. The lines of strain and unhappiness were gone from his face, and his weight was back where it usually was, giving him the tall, lean, yet muscled appearance of an A-list action star. All of the roiling, painful energy from the last time I’d seen him was gone, and for the first time I was truly conscious of how, when his hand touched my shoulder in affectionate greeting, my own control over that dark, cold part of myself became stronger, the effort of doing so becoming lighter and easier.

  I knew even before the words came out of his mouth that Chivalry was in love again, and had found his newest spouse/victim. Whatever he said rolled over me unheard as he hooked a hand under my elbow and steered me to the sofa, where a tall woman with a riot of beautiful black curls and an almost palpable aura of vitality and health was already standing to meet me, a wide smile of greeting spreading across her face. She wanted me to like her, of course. They always wanted me to like them, since they loved my brother so very, very much.

  I forced a mechanical smile across my face and returned her half hug of greeting cordially, if awkwardly. My mother, bundled into an armchair and swathed with brilliantly colored chenille throw blankets, was looking tired yet quietly amused at the interplay. Prudence was dressed to impress, in a floor-length gown of blood-red silk that should’ve clashed with her red hair yet didn’t. Leaning dramatically against the fireplace mantel, she was watching Chivalry’s new love with an expression of barely concealed irritation.

  I stayed quiet while Chivalry fell over himself to introduce me to Simone Gastel, an expression of deep pleasure filling his face just from the act of saying her name. Her skin was a rich gleaming brown, and whereas Bhumika had been tiny, Simone was tall, her head nearly at level with my brother’s. There was a strange pattern of dimpled scars across the tops of her cheekbones that I tried to examine without being obvious, but she immediately caught me and smiled.

  “Everyone wonders, so don’t feel bad,” Simone said, completely unruffled. “When I climbed Makalu, my balaclava slipped and I didn’t realize it for hours. I got just a little line of frostbite where the skin was exposed.”

  “Did it hurt?” I asked, knowing that I was asking the question that everyone always asked her, yet completely unable to restrain myself.

  “Like the very devil,” she said, a smile playing at her lovely full mouth at my predictability. But it wasn’t a mean smile, just an amused one. �
�Taught me a good lesson, though, and respect for the Himalayas. Makalu was my first eight-thousand-meter peak.”

  “Simone is a mountain climber,” Chivalry said, staring at her with completely unveiled rapture. “She’s climbed to the summits of Makalu, Lhotse, Broad Peak—and that one that I’m still working on pronouncing.”

  “Cho Oyu,” Simone said, smiling back at him, and so clearly, unreservedly, and tragically happy. I remembered meeting Bhumika in this very room, and seeing that same expression on her face. “I’m training for Annapurna right now,” she continued, oblivious to the direction of my thoughts. “There’s an expedition next May that I’m hoping to travel with that has an open spot on their visa.”

  “That sounds really incredible,” I said, and meant it. A Himalayan mountain climber—no wonder she looked so incredibly fit and vital. “Do you get sponsorships or something?” A big part of me really wanted to find out that she worked at Best Buy or Walmart when she wasn’t climbing. Like those Olympic athletes in sports like curling or rowing who had completely innocuous day jobs.

  “Not yet, but maybe if Annapurna works out. I work as a winter guide on Mount Washington.”

  “Fort,” Chivalry said as he rushed in, his enthusiasm almost bubbling over, “did you know that the high parts of Mount Washington can have winds up to two hundred thirty-one miles per hour, and temperatures as low as fifty degrees below? Right over in New Hampshire!”

  “Yes, Chivalry, you were very eloquent on the subject over dinner last night,” Prudence said shortly. I blinked hard. The moment felt too similar to when I’d met Bhumika and Chivalry had extolled about the world of competitive rose breeding. The conversation swept past me—Simone was packing up her apartment in New Hampshire and moving down to the mansion. The wedding was already scheduled for the day before Thanksgiving.

  “But, you know . . . You’re sure about . . .” I couldn’t stop myself from asking, interrupting the stream of discussion about dresses and colors and food. Chivalry always did love a wedding. And why not—he was so good at it.