Generation V (13 page)

“Hey!” I looked up and into Suzume’s triumphant face as she shoved an open Mac in front of me. The browser was already at the
Journal-Observer
’s Web page, where Maria’s picture was still headline news.

“Suzume,” I said, startled. “This is great—”

“Paying customers only,” Jeanine snapped beside me. “Fort is paid to work, not look at whatever LOLcat’s picture you’ve found now.”

“No problem,” Suzume said, with a smile that was more teeth than good intent. She made a little “come here” gesture with one hand over her shoulder. “Dougie?”

Freeloader Hipster shuffled forward, a slightly glazed look on his face as he dragged his eyes up from Suzume’s ass. “Uh, yeah?” he asked.

“Scone me,” she said, never breaking eye contact with Jeanine.

“Oh yeah, sure. Uh, one scone, please.”

This was impressive, and the expression on Jeanine’s face was one to savor, but I took advantage of her distraction to scroll through the article. There wasn’t anything new here. They hadn’t released any information about Maria’s body, just a renewed request for any information, and a few sound bite interviews with representatives from a local homeless shelter and youth advocacy groups.

I reached the bottom of the article, not sure what I was even hoping to find. There would never be any justice for Maria. Madeline had already made it clear that she wasn’t going to do anything, and the one other person who might also be outraged by this, Chivalry, had been told he
couldn’t
do anything.

Then the next headline on the page caught my eye: H
OME
I
NVASION
E
NDS
I
N
M
ASSACRE
. Rubbernecking instincts at play, I clicked on it, opening up the article. The first thing that loaded was a family photo—the portrait kind that was taken around the holidays, with a fake fire in the background and everyone in matching sweaters. Mom, Dad, tween sister, kid sister, and the dog. Even the dog was blond.

Suzume had performed some kind of miracle, because
now Dougie the Freeloader was regaling Jeanine with stories of his triumphs as a fifteenth-level night elf assassin. I skimmed the article. The wife’s jogging partner had gone over for their morning run and no one had answered her knock. Doors had been locked, and most people would’ve just assumed something had come up, but apparently this woman had been the nosy kind. She’d peered into the window, and the next minute she was dialing 911. Both adults and the dog had been killed, fairly gruesomely judging by the quotes the woman gave, and the girls—

That’s when I felt a chill go down my spine. Both girls were missing. I looked back up at the photo. The article listed the girls’ ages at thirteen and nine, but they looked a lot younger. Both were blond and tiny, with rosy cheeks and a porcelain-doll prettiness.

Maria had been found just after one in the morning. I checked the article again. Police were estimating that the invasion of the Grann home had happened sometime after two, when another neighbor remembered hearing the dog barking like crazy.

If Madeline had told Luca that his efforts with Maria were effectively useless, and she no longer held any physical interest for him, I could believe that he would’ve killed her. But I looked at the picture of the two girls and felt increasingly certain that he would’ve gone looking for a replacement.

I looked up and met Suzume’s eyes. “I need to talk to my mother.”

Two hours later my
employment was hanging by a thread and Suzume and I had just crossed the bridge into Newport. Had Tamara not already quit that morning, I think Jeanine would’ve fired me, but she settled for not paying me for the time I had worked and calling it a personal day. I had a strong feeling that she’d be conducting interviews, though, and that it would take a lot of groveling for me to stay a member of the Busy Beans team.

The only thing more depressing about a shitty job is having to struggle to keep that shitty job. But for once I was refusing to think about my employment situation. Besides, having Suzume as a driving companion had been a new experience. Suzume had immediately appointed herself as arbiter of the radio, and she operated much like a scan button gone mad. Then there had been a series of increasingly convoluted verbal car games. Then she began taunting truck drivers.

“Listen,” I said to her, distracting her from her current efforts to make the golden retriever in the car beside us go insane with barking. “I have a question for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“You think I’m right about the Grann girls and Luca, right?” Somewhere between having to sing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in a round and watching her flash an elderly female driver, I had begun to suspect that she was not entirely committed to this trip. Or that she had the attention span of a gnat. It was also possible that both were true.

“Absolutely not,” Suzume said, not even glancing away from the window. “I think you’re going Nancy Drew on two unrelated articles. And, yes, I do mean that as a diss on both your investigative abilities and your masculinity.”

I felt nostalgic for that younger, more innocent time in my life twenty-four hours ago, when I hadn’t met her. “Then why are you in this car with me, driving down to Newport?”

“Good question. First, remember the part where I’m being paid to guard you? The exchange of currency for services requires that I be in this car, even though it does not have functional air-conditioning. Second, hanging around in that coffee shop was making me regret my life choices, and the only person who needs to be doing that is you. Ten more minutes and I probably would’ve been forced to either set a fire or get you fired.”

There was a short moment of silence while I digested that.

“I kind of appreciate your honesty,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she replied. Then she squealed, “Ooh, lobster special at that restaurant! After your mom slaps you down, let’s go there for lunch!”

“I’m right, though,” I told her. “I can feel it.” I could. Every time I remembered the way that Luca had looked
at Maria, and the way he’d subtly sneered when he’d told us about his disappointment in Maria hitting puberty. She hadn’t been a person to him; she’d been a toy to be replaced when it broke.

“Keep feeling that, Fort. Just remember that I like extra butter, and I’m going to want a few extra of those lobster bibs to take home.”

“Do I want to know why?”

“Most likely not.”

When I had parked in Madeline’s driveway and was getting out, I was surprised to see Suzume stretch out in her seat and prop her feet up on the dashboard, clearly settling in for a wait.

“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “And guard you from what? My employer? Go in, get laughed out, and I’ll wait out here.”

“You should look into becoming a life coach, Suzume,” I said. “I don’t know what I did before having you and your support and positive feedback in my life.”

“Made poor relationship choices,” she said, sticking her hand out. “Keys, please.”

Suzume, my unsupervised car, and the keys. The thought struck me as almost certainly disastrous. “No.”

Surprise filled her face, chased quickly by hurt. Her lower lip trembled. “I just want to listen to the radio while I wait. You don’t trust me?”

I forced myself to ignore the large part of me that now felt like an absolute jerk. “No.”

She grinned. “You’re getting smarter.”

There just wasn’t a good response for that one.

I knocked lightly on the door to Madeline’s suite, and
went inside when I heard her immediate call. It had been years since I’d seen her this early in the day, which she always spent in her private rooms, tucked far away from the sun.

Inside, Madeline was partially reclined on her pink satin chaise longue. There was the ever-present cup of tea on a small table positioned precisely at her elbow. She was dressed in light brown slacks and a cream blouse, with flat orthopedic shoes, like any fashionable old lady ready for a casual day around the house that she didn’t have to clean. Her deceptive granny glasses were back in place after their absence last night, and there was an open book of half-completed Sudoku puzzles on her lap. Her flat-screen television was normally concealed by a large custom-built cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl, but today the doors had been opened and she was watching Wolf Blitzer reporting from the Situation Room.

“Why, Fortitude!” she trilled with exaggerated surprise. “Three visits in three days! I must admit, all of this attention is quite going to my head.”

“This is serious, Mother,” I told her. “I think that Luca murdered two people last night and kidnapped their daughters.”

Madeline gave a large sigh. “My darling, one day you will simply have to learn how to work your way up to news. I understand that conversation is a dying art, but it isn’t yet in its grave, despite your best attempts. Now.” She patted the chair next to her. “Why don’t you have a seat and walk me through this slowly?”

I sat down in the spindly little chair she had indicated. I’m not a particular fan of antique furniture, a fact that is
due almost entirely to spending most of my adolescence absolutely surrounded by it. Damaging a normal piece of furniture is upsetting, but whenever I accidentally bumped or stained an antique it was always treated as some sort of deliberate assault.

I explained about Maria’s body and the Grann home invasion to Madeline. She put CNN on mute and listened without any comments, giving me her full attention. Her attitude surprised me a little, and in response I tried to be as analytical as possible, knowing that she’d respond best to that.

When I finished, she took off her glasses and gave them a thorough cleaning with a linen napkin. She held them up to her lamp, looking for any remaining dust or streaks, then carefully put them on again.

“I can see why you brought this to my attention, Fortitude,” she said. “The two events are very suspicious, and both your timeline and suggestions of Luca’s motives do make sense. But have you also considered that this might simply be a figment of coincidence and your suspicious mind? Tragic events have been known to happen without the help of vampires. Why are you so certain that a human wasn’t the cause of the Grann family’s misery?”

“Because it’s not what a human would do,” I told her. “I have thought about this, Mother, I truly have. A human wouldn’t act like this. Someone trying to break in and take money might’ve killed the parents and the dog, but he would never have grabbed the kids. That’s too much trouble. He would’ve either killed them too or locked them in a closet for the police to find. If it was a pedophile, he would’ve grabbed the girls out of the backyard, or on the way to school, or maybe even out of
their bedrooms if he could. But he would’ve avoided the parents.” The more I talked, the more certain I felt.

“Perhaps. But humans are infinitely variable, Fortitude, and a sociopath could have done this.” Madeline was watching me intently.

“Maybe,” I conceded. “But everything about this would make sense if a vampire did it.”

Madeline’s eyebrows raised. I flushed a little, but pushed forward. “If Luca saw the girls, and wanted them, then the parents are just impediments to what he wants. Killing them makes sense to him, because they’re just obstacles and don’t matter. Also, vampires avoid attention. A murder-kidnapping is a big splash, but vampires think long-term. If he grabbed the girls while they were going to school, or took them out of their beds, then the parents would spend the rest of their lives looking for their daughters. Other people might give up or lose interest, but not the parents. So they would always be a little bit dangerous. It makes more sense to kill them and grab the girls at once. Then it’s just one shocking tragedy that the community will eventually forget about.” I was shaking a little when I finished.

Madeline nodded slowly. “Very good, Fortitude. Very, very good. I am impressed. You forced yourself to stop thinking like a human, and to think like a vampire, even though that is what you spend all your waking hours avoiding. Yes, I am quite impressed.”

“So you agree?” I asked. “You think I’m right?”

Madeline said nothing, simply looked at me. I felt a deep sinking in my stomach.

“You knew,” I whispered. My throat was tight, and I had to force the words out. “You knew before I even got here that Luca took the girls.”

She nodded once.

“You’re not going to do anything about it. He killed two people. He’s probably already raping two little girls. And you’re not going to do anything at all.”

“I granted him hospitality,” Madeline said softly. She didn’t look at me; she looked at the television, where the muted Wolf Blitzer was gesturing at a series of graphs. “Hospitality grants him the same rights that my children enjoy. To move freely in my territory. To engage with those who live within my borders. To seek prey as he wishes.” She shot a look at me from slitted eyes. “I had not claimed that family, either as prey or as servants. To interfere with his hunt is to break hospitality. I will not do that.”

I could taste the acid edge of bile. I got up and walked to the door. I was slow. Every bone in my body seemed to ache, as if I’d aged a hundred years in that chair.

“Fortitude.” Madeline’s voice stopped me when my hand touched the doorknob. I glanced back. There was something unusual in her expression as she looked at me. It almost looked like regret. “I’m sorry that this hurts you so much, my darling,” she said. Her voice was gentle. “I don’t understand what it feels like to care for the lives or the suffering of people you have never met. I will not break our oldest laws for you. But I am sorry for your pain.”

She’d never apologized like this to me, not even when she ordered the deaths of my foster parents. Something had changed between us in the last few minutes. I opened my mouth to say something, I’m not sure what, but then I remembered the Grann family portrait, and the big smiles on the faces of the daughters. Maria had probably smiled like that once, before Luca took her.

I turned away from Madeline, saying nothing, and quietly left. Behind me, the sound returned to the television.