Generation V (18 page)

“What did she do?”

She sighed, and reached across the table to pat my cheek lightly. “You’re good peeps, but even category Fort has a rating system.” She mimed locking up her mouth and throwing away the key. I snorted. As if that was even possible.

“You’re not going to tell me?” I asked, torn between just being surprised and being somewhat miffed.

“Nope.” This time she was serious.

Two could play at her game. I picked up the pizza slice, which now was sporting a giant Suze-size bite hole, and dared, “Even if I totally broke vegetarian commandments and ate the rest of that slice?”

Her wide grin was back. I’d known that she’d love that offer, and the sheer happiness she exuded at being
played along with radiated through me. But she still shook her head. “Even then, buddy. Sorry.” At least she meant that sorry.

“Fine.” I tapped my fingers on the table and something from what she’d just told me popped its way back to the front of my brain for review. “Your sister was picked to be the heir when she was ten?” Talk about an early achiever. When I’d been ten it had been a big deal to have a teacher ask you to wipe the chalkboard down. It was years before I realized that they’d been totally Tom Sawyering us.

“Yeah.” Suzume didn’t look eager to discuss it.

I pushed her. “She must’ve been one amazing little kid.”

“You’d think that, right? But not really. Well, she was amazing, I mean, how could anyone that closely related to me not be amazing, right? But she was just normal.”

“So why…?”

“Well, a couple reasons. None of this is really a secret, so I’ll tell you. One, Grandmother has a little bit of a, shall we say, genetic preference. My aunts all went local, if you catch my drift, so the cousins, they’re all quarter Japanese. I mean, you saw Yui’s hair. Grandmother’s first great-grandchild, and she’s only an eighth Japanese. It’s kind of like a shot of sake being poured into a vat of Baileys. But my mom, well, she was kind of an overachiever. First of all, she was Atsuko’s oldest, so there was always a little favoritism. But then, when she wanted to get pregnant, she slept with this total Tokyo-grown guy who was getting his doctorate in something or other over at MIT. Believe me, the heritage thing doesn’t make any difference where it matters—a kitsune is a kitsune.
There are one or two caveats, but we pretty much breed true. My cousins shift just as quickly as I do, doesn’t matter how diluted things are. But to the White Fox, it kind of does matter. So Keiko being three-quarters Japanese was big for Grandmother. Then”—Suze shrugged—“once our mother died, Grandmother decided that Keiko was the heir.”

I paused, taking that all in. Or, mostly, filed it in the back to think about later, while I focused on the important thing to come out of all of that. “I didn’t know your mother was dead.” I knew what that felt like. Who knew what the circumstances had been? But I knew what it had felt like to lose Jill.

“I know. It’s okay.” She wasn’t smiling, and wasn’t trying to laugh this one off. But she wasn’t giving me “back off” vibes either. We both just paused a second, letting it all sink in.

“What was her name?” I asked. That felt important.

“Izumi.” And I knew from the way that she said the name that Suzume had loved her mother.

I reached across the table. I didn’t take her hand, I didn’t think she would’ve accepted anything so Hallmark channel, but I did brush the back of my fingers against her forearm. Not much. Just enough that I could feel her and she could feel me, and that she knew that I was being sincere in what I said next.

“I’m sorry, Suzume.”

“It’s okay.” She nodded, letting me know that she meant it. Then she glanced back to the front of the store, and the moment was over. “Come on, it’s dark enough now to start hunting.”

With a total of eleven dollars in my wallet and even less
in the bank, we drove to the address where Maria’s body had been found. It was in one of those areas of the city where the mayor had offered incentives for business investors to go into derelict factory areas and revitalize them into trendy lofts, chain store shopping, and unhygienic nightclubs. Parking in one of the maintained lots was expensive, so I circled around until I finally found a spot that was far enough from the main drag and poorly lit enough that no one had wanted to chance it. There was a spray of shattered glass under my door, indicating that someone had parked here before me and regretted the decision.

“Lock my duffel bag in the trunk,” Suzume said.

“No one is going to bother to break into the Fiesta,” I said, a lot more confidently than I actually felt. There were more expensive cars closer to the clubs that I hoped would distract potential thieves. But I put the duffel into the trunk just to be on the safe side, along with my CD collection.

“Hold on,” Suzume called from inside the car. “Open up the side pocket and pull out what’s in there.”

I unzipped it, then sighed. “Suzume, these are your underpants.”

“No, under the underpants.”

Muttering, I looked under the tangle of bikini briefs and thongs, telling myself over and over that it was just fabric. Just silky, brightly covered fabric that happened to have a narrow string that went right into a certain place on Suzume’s body—

Then I found the gun.

“Suzume, I’m not going to carry this,” I called.

“Why not? Don’t worry, it’s stolen. No one’s tracing that thing.”

I sighed. “Not really the point.”

“Fine, you want to go hunting a vampire with your bare hands? Be my guest.”

I considered the gun in a new light. I’d once seen Prudence punch through a wall without breaking a nail. Having a projectile weapon to threaten Luca with did have a certain basic intelligence to it.

I pulled it out. It was a .38 pistol packed with hollow-point bullets. That was the same size as a standard-issue police revolver, so it had stopping power, but I wouldn’t risk removing an arm if I shot someone with it. Hollow-point bullets, though, are designed to mushroom out when they make contact, maximizing damage, and that suggested that Suzume might’ve stolen this from someone who hadn’t exactly been owning this for the right reasons. While I might’ve been a regular voter for Democrat candidates, I didn’t inherently dislike guns, and I wasn’t unfamiliar with them.

My foster father had strongly believed that if he locked his service gun in a box and hid it away from me, then it would just be something forbidden that I’d be driven to explore whenever I got the chance. So instead he’d made sure that I understood what it meant to him, and that it was a tool rather than a toy. He used to take me down to the gun range a lot of weekends, and I’d watch him work on his aim. He taught me how to shoot at the range, even though my scrawny little-kid arms had barely been able to lift his gun, and the recoil would’ve knocked me on my ass if he hadn’t always been there, his hands wrapped around mine, his body bracing me against the kick of the gun as it fired. We’d even done one of those father-son gun-safety courses that had been
held in a more rural area of the state. It had been kind of like Boy Scouts, but with more guns and flannel. About the same number of s’mores and sing-alongs.

I checked to make sure the safety was on. It wasn’t, which made me shudder at the memory of how Suzume and I had been tossing the duffel around. Between this and the knife I’d seen her flash at Delaney’s, I made a mental note to ask Suzume how many more deadly and concealed weapons she had stashed.

Which reminded me that right now I was the only person standing on the dark street. Suzume had seemed really confident that she could track Luca from the dump site, but as I closed the trunk I couldn’t even see her in the car.

“Come on, Suzume,” I bitched. “This isn’t the time for a postmeal nap.”

I walked around to the passenger door and looked in, then jumped back.

A coal black fox sat on a pile of clothing in the car seat. Seeing me, Suzume wagged her long dark tail ecstatically and began bouncing up and down in place. Little whining noises emerged from her throat, but those bright button eyes were full of human intelligence and her retracted switchblade was clutched tightly between her teeth.

There was no doubt in my mind—this twenty-pound ball of fur was ready to kick ass. I tucked the gun in the back waistband of my pants, checking to make sure that my flannel overshirt concealed it and trying not to remember how many different state firearm laws I was currently breaking, and opened the door.

Suzume hopped gracefully down, then gave me a little grunty “ugr” sort of yip, slightly muffled behind the
switchblade, and began walking down the middle of the sidewalk toward our destination. I followed, praying we wouldn’t bump into anyone. Looking at Suzume walking in front of me, I realized that there was the same kind of implied strut to her step as a fox as there was when she was a woman.

In the car, with the sense of camaraderie surrounding us, I’d been completely confident in what we were doing, and that Suzume would back me up. Now, as we walked through the dark streets of Providence, I had to work hard to ignore Atsuko’s warning. I reassured myself that, from the prance in her steps, at least Suzume still seemed to be having fun.

It took a while to make our way to where Maria’s body had been found. Suzume’s large pointed ears were cranking around on her head like independent satellite dishes, and every time she heard someone approaching we had to duck into the nearest alley until they passed. There wasn’t a single spot of white on Suzume’s body, so she could drop into small shadows and practically disappear, but I had a harder time. Usually there were some empty boxes or a Dumpster for me to hide behind, though on a few occasions I just hugged the walls and hoped no one glanced the wrong way. Along the way, I stepped into many things that I regretted.

It made sense for Suzume to avoid being seen—after all, someone would have to be intoxicated to the point of brain damage to mistake her for a dog, and the last thing we needed was someone calling animal control. But I was hunkering down for another simple reason—we really didn’t have time for me to get mugged again.

After a lot of close calls with drunken sorority girls (who,
given my luck the last few days, would still probably have mugged me), we reached the spot. There were a few strips of police tape still clinging to the side of the alley, and I ducked under them. I looked around. There was a closed-down bar on one side of us, and a florist’s shop that closed at the end of normal business hours on the other. It was more of the same across the street, so Luca had minimized his chances of getting caught.

Suzume was canvassing the alley, nose to the ground, crossing and recrossing as she formed what I realized was a grid formation. I tried to imagine how many different smells there must be in this alley, and how she could possibly sort through them, and I could feel my hope start waning. We were basing everything on Suzume’s ability to sort out one single thread of scent that was almost twenty-four hours old and that she’d never even encountered before. I hadn’t even been able to offer her Luca’s old pillow case, like in movies where bloodhounds were being used.

A thought occurred to me. “How are you even going to be able to figure out which scent you should try to follow?” I asked.

Suzume gave a deep sigh, then set down her knife. She hunched up her shoulders, rolled her eyes, and lifted her upper lip to display her impressive canine teeth. Then she gave a long hiss and dragged herself forward a few steps. Then she dropped down to her belly, covered her nose with both front paws, and whimpered.

I’m not usually that good at charades, but, “Vampires smell bad?” Well, that was a bit of a hit to the ego. I made a mental note to slap on a little Old Spice tomorrow, then gave myself a mental slap to remember that I
was definitely not trying to get a fox interested in me. If she thought I smelled bad, then that was a good thing, right?

Suzume bobbled her head back and forth in a so-so sort of gesture.

“Okay, we don’t really smell bad…we smell different than humans?”

Suzume nodded, and I felt relieved. Then she shot me a long-suffering look.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I won’t interrupt you again.”

She gave a little huff, picked her knife back up, and returned to the important business of sniffing.

I leaned up against the alley wall and watched. A few times Suzume would backtrack, her eyes slitted in concentration. Her tail was low to the ground now, held only just high enough to keep from dragging, all business. Once she licked the ground, and I shuddered. If the sight of that didn’t convince me that wanting to kiss this woman was a bad idea, nothing would.

It was a warm night, with just enough breeze that I was grateful for my flannel shirt. Suzume’s fur was sleek and thin, a fox’s summer coat, but she seemed completely at ease. I wondered if Maria had been cold in her last minutes, or warm. Were these alley walls the last thing she saw, or was she already dead by the time she was brought here? The police commissioner had promised to e-mail Suzume scanned copies of the reports, but in all our running around this afternoon there hadn’t been time to grab time at a computer. My phone was dead, and Suzume wasn’t even carrying one. She said that she’d broken so many of them that now her cell phone lived in its charger in her apartment. If this didn’t
work, hopefully we could tease out some sort of clue from the accident reports.

A low yip brought me out of my depressing thoughts. Suzume was staring off into the distance, in perfect profile to me, executing a pointing position worthy of an oil painting. When she saw that she had my attention, she carefully set down her switchblade, then dropped her jaw open to loll her tongue in a foxy grin. Her tail was flipping in a way that could only be described as smug.

“You got something? Something real?” She bobbed her head. “You’re amazing, Suzume!” She gave a little shrug of her shoulders and wiggled one paw as if to say,
Tell me something I don’t know
.

Now she was tracking something, and Suzume moved fast, running through alleys and along sidewalks. I jogged to keep up with her, and as we moved farther and farther away from the dump site, the trail never going openly into streets or buildings, but always hugging the edges, I took great comfort in the gun stuffed in my waistband, reaching back to press my hand against it. The flaws in my plan (or, rather, lack of a plan) were feeling very obvious as I followed a fox toward an unknown destination.