Generation V (21 page)

At least Suzume was a lot easier to carry as a fox. She hung limply in my arms as I hauled myself up the stairs to my apartment and tucked her onto my bed. I thought about just collapsing, but there was a more urgent concern.

The pipes in my building are old, and they make a banging sound whenever someone takes a shower, but for once I didn’t give a crap about being a polite neighbor or roommate. Under the bright fluorescent lights I looked like I’d been playing in a slaughterhouse. My chest was caked in dried blood, along with a number of black fox hairs from Suzume’s brief period in my shirt. Under good light, I could now see all the smears of blood and dirt on my jeans as well, and I dumped them straight into the trash. The water running into the drain was pink as I scrubbed myself down with soap, and the hot water ran out long before I’d finished. I shivered as I scrubbed, feeling the sting as soap entered into the dozens of cuts that I found on my face, arms, back, and knees.

Finally I felt marginally cleaner and turned off the water. My teeth were chattering as I dried off and dry-swallowed a pair of Tylenol. I turned the light off without looking in the mirror, figuring that I’d have to see
my bruises again in the morning anyway. I shuffled into my room like an old man, wincing with every step. On the bed, Suzume opened those bright button eyes and looked at me for a long minute, then scooted over an inch and gave a soft yip of welcome.

I pulled on a pair of old brown cotton pajama bottoms that were worn smooth and thin from a thousand runs through the laundry, dropped the wet towel onto the floor, and crawled into the bed. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

I woke up at one point in the night, confused. There was a furry body snuggled against my chest, and my body was one throbbing ball of hurt. Then I remembered what had happened, and I remembered the way Jessica Grann had looked the last time I saw her.

I lay awake in the dark, thinking about what had been done to her, and remembering the way her blue eyes had stared up at me. Maria’s eyes had been a deep chocolate brown, but I wondered if they had looked the same way to whoever had found her—empty, yet somehow accusatory. I felt moisture on my face and scrubbed hard at my eyes with my hand. That wouldn’t bring Jessica or Maria back, or take away the image of their broken bodies. It was a long time until finally exhaustion and the soft whuffling of Suzume’s breathing pulled me back down into sleep.

I woke up slowly,
a lazy drift into consciousness. There wasn’t any confusion about where I was—I was in my bed. I had had the shit beaten out of me. I’d helped kill Phillip last night. Jessica and Amy Grann were dead. I had failed.

And judging by the furry weight on my chest, either I had a kitsune on top of me or feral cats had invaded the building.

I opened my eyes and looked directly into Suzume’s black button eyes. She whimpered happily and wagged her fluffy tail back and forth. I sighed deeply, feeling the soreness in my chest as I inhaled.

The sunlight was very bright in the room. An awful suspicion filled me, and I looked over at my bedside clock, then back at Suzume.

“I was supposed to be at work three hours ago,” I whispered.

Her fluffy head nodded vigorously, tail still wagging. I looked back at the clock. Sometime last night it had acquired small tooth marks around the alarm button.

“You turned off my alarm?”

Suzume’s tongue lolled out of her mouth; then she gave two sharp yips. She looked really proud.

“You’re trying to get me fired,” I said, the horror fully sinking in.

The fox snorted loudly, then hopped off my chest (that didn’t do my bruises any favors) and dropped down over the side of the bed with a soft thump. A minute went by; then Suzume’s head and shoulders popped up, fully human. The height of the bed cut off my view of anything really exciting, but it was very obvious that she was naked. What was also both sad and obvious was that the sight of her bare shoulders was much more erotic to me than it should’ve been. I focused on how she was trying to ruin my life. It shouldn’t matter how good she looked while she did it.

“Idiot,” Suzume said with another snort. She folded her arms on the bed and laid her head down to look at me sideways. “If I wanted to get you fired, I would’ve come up with something a lot more creative than just making you sleep in.”

“Oh yes, I never meant to impugn the artistry of your trickery,” I said sarcastically. “But after the way I cut out of work yesterday, how is missing the entire first half of my shift going to somehow convince Jeanine that I’m employee of the month?”

“I called in earlier and said that you’d had a family emergency and couldn’t make it in today.” She looked curious. “Do you actually want to go into work today?”

“No,” I admitted. If it had just been how badly I felt, and just how insane the bruises that I’d acquired last night probably looked right now, I would’ve dragged in no matter what. But failing the Grann girls so badly, and
with the memory of Jessica’s body so fresh in my mind…no, I definitely didn’t want to go anywhere near the banality of Busy Beans. Of course, there were other concerns. “But I really can’t skip work.”

“Because you’re broke,” she said.

“How do you know that?” Given the way that Suzume had treated me as her source of free food since she’d met me, I was pretty surprised that she’d known.

“A few subtle clues were evident.” Suzume mimed inhaling on a pipe, then began ticking them off on her fingers. “First, there was your car. It’s rusty, old, doesn’t like to start in the morning, and the bumper drags enough that I’m sure that one more speed bump is going to rip it right off. Second, there were your clothes. They suck. Third was your unspeakable cheapness in not buying me a beer last night to go with the pizza. I mean, pizza and beer. They just go together. You don’t mess with nature. But probably the most striking clue was when I accessed your online bank statement and looked at your balance.”

My jaw hung open, and I wasn’t able to force anything other than strangled sounds out of my throat.

“Really, it was elementary, my dear Watson.” Suzume mimed tucking away her pipe. When I continued to stare at her and blither, she sniffed, irked that I wasn’t praising her skills of detection. “Honestly, Fort, you shouldn’t use the same password for everything. Don’t worry. I changed it for you.”

I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the pillow. There was a short silence while I could feel her looking at me, then the soft crinkling sound of a paper bag being opened, and the ambrosial smell of a toasted bagel filled the room.

I cracked open one eye. Suzume had a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts in one hand and a fresh bagel in the other.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“You went out and bought bagels?” Clearly the shocks were just going to keep coming this morning.

“Of course not.” She looked offended. “I stole them from Larry.”

I paused and considered. Then, “I’m okay with that,” and I snagged the bagel she offered and began to eat it. As soon as the first bit went down, my stomach remembered that in addition to being extremely traumatized, it was also extremely empty. I pretty much inhaled the entire bagel. Without even being asked, Suzume handed me another bagel, along with a container of cream cheese. Bliss.

While I was eating, Suzume ducked down behind the bed for a minute, then reemerged wearing my old Brown T-shirt and a pair of my shorts. They completely dwarfed her, but instead of making her look ridiculous, they just made her look more adorably pixieish than usual.

Too adorable, actually. For a woman who last night had been sporting enough facial contusions to have earned a free ride to a battered women’s shelter, plus a deep head cut that bled profusely and a few cracked ribs, she was now completely unmarked, without even the slightest suggestion of a bruise or discomfort.

“Suzume, are you messing with me again?”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. I gestured to her face. “Are you keeping me from seeing your bruises?”

“Oh.” She grinned. “Nope. We heal faster in our natural states.”

I frowned. “But you went fox when we got back to the car. Did you change back after I went to sleep?”

The grin wiped off her face, and she leaned closer to me, menace suddenly seething in her dark eyes. I pulled back in surprise, the quick change from warm amusement to this icy anger startling me.

“Keep one thing in mind, Fortitude,” she hissed, low and dangerous. “I’m not some were-critter. I’m not a woman who can turn into a fox when she feels like it. I’m a fox who can become a woman. Try to remember that.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. She glared at me for another minute, then pulled back and scooted to the far side of the bed, pulling another bagel out of the bag and giving it a vicious bite. We ate in silence. After a few minutes she slowly seemed to thaw, even offering me the last bagel in the bag.

We were almost finished when she asked, almost normally, “So, why have you been paying all the rent for the last few months?”

I didn’t like talking about this, but I could see that this was Suzume’s version of an olive branch after how she’d lashed out, so I answered.

“About six months ago Larry said that he was having money trouble, and he only gave me a partial payment. The next month he gave me even less, and since then I haven’t gotten anything at all.”

Suzume chewed thoughtfully. “Are you friends with him?”

“No.” Definitely not. I hadn’t been too fond of him even before he’d slept with Beth.

“So make him pay it.”

I stared. She made it sound so simple, as if I’d just been letting it slide this whole time. “How would you suggest I do that?” I asked.

“Threats of violence have always worked very well for me,” Suzume said, completely serious.

I sighed. “And if threats don’t work?”

“Then use violence.” Suzume gave a smothered little laugh. “Jeez, Fort, you seem to
like
making things more complicated than they really are.”

After breakfast in bed, it was hard to get moving. Showering and then falling straight into bed might’ve been what I wanted to do last night, but apparently it hadn’t been the best thing for my bruised body. Everything was stiff, and even lifting my arms up enough to get a T-shirt over my head turned out to be a really bad idea. I eventually had to suck it up and ask Suzume for a hand.

She looked at me critically after I lay panting on the bed following my return to a toddler-era style of dressing.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“Fuck, Suze, can you pretend for a minute that you care about my ego?”

She ignored me. “Your mother will dock my pay if she sees you like this. And my family will never let me live it down if they know I let someone wipe the floor with you when it was my job to keep you safe.”

“I’m so sorry. I never stopped to think about how my pain was going to inconvenience you.”

“I understand, Fort, and you’re forgiven.”

I sighed as she rattled on. There were some areas of sarcasm that went right over her head.

“But I refuse to let you be a stain on my record. Get in the car.”

“What?” I blinked at her. “I thought you said that we were going to have a casual day. Not move any further than the couch? Let me cuddle up to some ice packs?” I was definitely harboring some carnal thoughts about a few bags of frozen vegetables. Plus…“What about
Star Wars
? You said you’d watch the original, undigitally fucked-over
Star Wars
with me!”

“No, this is way too serious. We’re going straight to a doctor’s office.”

Straight to a doctor’s office didn’t exactly happen. Suzume’s standards of hygiene were a bit higher than mine this morning, and while she indulged in the kind of thirty-minute shower that would knock out our ancient water heater for the rest of the day, I hobbled over to my computer to check the news. A bakery worker had found Jessica’s body in the early hours of the morning, just as Suzume had predicted. The hunt for Amy Grann was headline news, and I felt a sharp pang as I wondered how long it would be before they finally found her body, and where it had been dumped. I scrolled through the article, not reading the text too closely. The press had gotten more photos since yesterday, and in addition to the Grann family portrait, there were now several that were just of Amy. I saw her playing with the family dog, posed in her Sunday best, and giving a gap-toothed smile in her softball uniform.

I spent the most time looking at that picture. A few of her teammates were standing around her, and it was clear that she was the short one on the team. I’d played on Little League teams at around the same age. Because I’d
been about five inches shorter than all the other boys, I was front and center in every team photo.

My foster father had coached my Little League team. I was incredibly bad at sports, and would’ve been a lot happier spending my Saturdays sitting at home watching TV, but Jill and Brian had been determined to give me the perfect childhood, over my own objections if necessary. So I’d spent hours of time in left field, the place where I had the least opportunity for missed plays and throwing errors. There were a lot of hot afternoons when I’d stared at the sky and counted clouds while mosquitoes feasted on my exposed flesh and I waited impatiently for the innings to just be over already so that I could return to an air-conditioned environment. I wondered if Amy’s dad had coached her team. I wondered if her mom had been in the stands for every game, like Jill had always been for me.

My maudlin mood was broken when Suzume came out of the bathroom. She’d changed clothes, and was now dressed in what were apparently her standard bodyguarding clothes—black boots, close-fitting black pants, and a thin body-hugging T-shirt. Today the T-shirt was fire-engine red. She’d clipped her hair up so that half of it was in some kind of sleek twist, and the other half was falling around her face in little feathery strands. She practically glowed with vitality and good health.

By contrast I was wearing a much-laundered and half-faded Dalek shirt (
exterminate!
) with a few holes in the shoulders and the same cotton pajama bottoms that I’d worn to bed. Bending was really not agreeing with me right now, and so I’d chosen to turn down Suzume’s extremely generous offer to help me change pants (having
suffered through more than enough commentary on my physique when she helped me with my shirt) and hope that no one noticed my sartorial sins. Since my face looked like I’d just gotten into a fight with a city bus and lost, I was betting that my pants were going to be the least of my problems today.