Iron Night (28 page)

Lilah blushed a little and smiled at me, unable to resist reaching up with one hand to self-consciously pat at her headband to make sure that her ears were tucked away. “You think so?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I was no expert on women, but I'd learned enough from the dating world to know that hairstyle changes should always be responded to with a compliment. “It's very fluffy.” Not that I had a particularly deep reserve of compliments, of course, but Lilah's smile widened appreciatively, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back.

Her smile dimmed for a second, and she nodded to where Suze had staked out a table already. Somehow she'd managed to get her hands on a copy of the
Kama Sutra
, which she'd plunked down right in front of her. Her arms were now crossed just behind it and there was a very definite
Go on . . . ask me about it, chump
look on her face. I felt a distinct twinge of sympathy for every other guy in the room, most of whom were looking at her like weekend backpackers put down in the base camp of K2. They really, really wanted a summit, but were also slightly concerned that they might die in the attempt.

“Suzume looks very pretty,” Lilah said. There was a distinct undertone in her voice.

“She likes causing riots,” I said. But seeing the way that Lilah's smile kept drooping like a wilting daisy, I noted brightly, “But you look really nice too. In an undercover CIA-agent kind of way.” I wondered briefly if that was going to read as well as it had sounded in my head. Thank God she was apparently willing to go with me on it, because she laughed.

I appreciated that she had politely avoided commenting on my own appearance. There hadn't been time to change, so I'd just taken off my bow tie, unbuttoned the top button on my white shirt, and done my best to turn my shellacked hair into something that looked effortless and spiky, but was more spray-glued clumpy. Suze had tried to remove a few of the worst stains on my shirt with a napkin and a bottle of water, but without much success, so I now looked like a stained and slightly dripped-on waiter on his smoke break.

I reminded myself that this was an undercover-surveillance mission to try to save lives, and that any rejection I suffered during it therefore did not count toward my life total.

The event started. At its core it was pretty simple, based on the idea that you would know within five minutes whether you had any interest at all in the person sitting in front of you. We sat at the little tables and made five-minutes of polite chitchat; then the timer would go off, we would thank each other, and the guys would get up and have to move to the next table, during this process trying to mark up our little spreadsheets without being obvious about whether rejection was actually happening.

On top of everything else, I also had to do my best to check out my five-minute dates' wrists for any new tattoos. There hadn't been any female victims yet, but it seemed better to be thorough, though I was extremely glad that it was Suze's job to check the men. Whenever I was near her table, I was able to admire her technique of using very flirtatious hand-holding as a method of sliding cuffs up wrists.

The weather had been mild enough today that most of the women were in short sleeves or no sleeves, giving me an easy way to check them, but a few were wearing sensible cardigans, and those proved very difficult. Sleeve nudging within fifteen seconds of an introduction apparently came off as creepy and sleazy when I tried it, as opposed to salacious and irresistible like when Suze did it. Several times I just gave in and pretended that “So, do you have any tattoos?” was an acceptable conversation starter.

What I had also failed to realize was just how exhausting it was to meet a new person every five minutes and attempt to sparkle as a potential mate. As the time ground along, I noticed that the women stopped being as polite to me—once they'd decided that they were not going to put a check next to my name, several dropped even the pretense of a conversation and began either scoping out the room for more likely prospects, eyeing guys that they'd liked better than me, or (in several cases) shooting looks of death over to the table where Suzume was holding court. I decided that I would never get desperate enough to do this for actual dating purposes.

Or if I did, I would choose a much better wingman than Suze. My wingman would definitely be a guy. And preferably with the kind of Quasimodo face and Hulk-like manners that would make me shine in comparison.

We were down to the last three dates, and I was desperately clinging to the light at the end of the tunnel when I sat at the next table and found myself face-to-face with my ex-girlfriend, Beth.

Or, at least, face-to-face with her skin.

That was Beth's face, with her olive skin and the one small chicken-pox scar under her left eye. Those were her rich black curls tumbling down to her shoulders. But Beth's dark brown eyes had never looked at me with that kind of icy malice and barely contained violence that froze me in place as I stared.
This isn't happening. This isn't happening
—my brain was stuck on repeat, like a trapped bee battering itself against glass. I couldn't be sitting here staring at that
thing
that was looking back at me from Beth's eyes.

“Soli,” I managed to whisper between numb lips. I was carved out of ice, disbelieving, the shock rattling through me with the force of a storm.

A nasty smile spread across that familiar face, its features emphasized with more makeup than Beth had ever even owned. “I told you that you'd be paying for my new suit,” she said, and even her voice was Beth's but with a different phrasing, a different accent. It was throbbingly familiar—the voice that used to whisper activist pillow-talk to me in the dark—but it was a stranger moving her mouth, forcing words up her throat, over her tongue and lips.

I'd only ever seen Beth in baggy peasant blouses, long beaded skirts, and the occasional maxi dress on more formal occasions. Now I saw what she would've looked like in a sleek black top and a pair of leather pants. I wanted to vomit—it was treating Beth's body, her flesh, as its own dress-up mannequin.

“What did you do?” I couldn't wrap my brain around it; I couldn't accept it. Beth, with her bright mind, her resolute idealism, her cheerfully cheating ways,
couldn't
be dead.

“Went shopping, dear.” And that thing grinned so widely that I could see that there were teeth in the back of its mouth that were much too sharp to be molars. “You should be more careful with the privacy settings on your Facebook.” She stretched out her hands, examining Beth's long artist's fingers with a connoisseur's eye.

This was worse than just Beth's death. This was a horror, a perversion, a
desecration
to see her move Beth's fingers.

Somewhere under that smooth surface was that hard black thing that I'd seen last night—crouching there and pulling the strings to Beth's body.

I wanted to tear it out with my bare hands.

My hands shook from the effort it took not to wrap themselves around the skinwalker's neck and squeeze. But she'd done this on purpose—we were surrounded by the banal chitchat of two dozen humans, none of them remotely aware that they were like blissful beachgoers in the opening scenes of a
Jaws
movie, completely unaware that death was gliding in their midst.

Soli continued smugly. “They might find the skin's meat. I wrapped it in a plastic bag and threw it down her building's garbage shaft.” She giggled. “Those things are so convenient.”

Somehow that horrible image of Beth's tortured remains cut through just enough of the urge to kill. My mind raced, trying to determine some foothold on the creature in front of me, some way to coax information out of it that would trip it up. Something that would expose enough of a vulnerability that I could slice it out of Beth like an excised tumor. I grasped the last thing she'd said. “So, convenience is important to you? Then why haul Gage's body up our fire escape and leave it in his own bedroom?”

She giggled again, and the sound was like a knife scraping down a chalkboard. “I figured that the vampires would have plenty of practice making bodies disappear, especially ones with no blood left in them.” Then the pleasure leached out of her face and she pouted, Beth's full lower lip overly emphasized in dark red lipstick. “Staging an accident is boring, and the incinerator at the doctor's office is so slow that you have to wait half the night for it to finish. It's annoying. I wanted to have some fun. Hit a club.” The pout was replaced by a frown, and in a mercurial change of mood, that malicious anger was back. “You weren't supposed to get that curious about a dead human. So this”—she tapped one long finger against the side of Beth's face—“is a warning. You and the fox can stay out of my business.”

Part of me knew I should try to signal Suzume, or, hell, even try to text Prudence under the table, but I couldn't pull enough of my brain away from the rising bubble of rage that was keeping me fixated on the skinwalker, and suddenly I wasn't feeling like a frozen deer but like a rabid dog pulling against the end of its leash.

I leaned forward, across the table, and very deliberately said, “I'm going to kill you.” My eyes felt strangely warm, but for once I didn't feel panic as I wondered whether the pupils were expanding past where a human's would. I didn't care if I looked like a vampire at this moment—in fact, I hoped that I did.

Whatever was happening, Soli didn't look impressed. Instead she gave a slow smile. “You're going to try,” she corrected me.

The egg timer went off, indicating that our five-minute date was up. As soon as the sound registered through the room, Soli was out of her chair and moving fast for the back door of the store. I jumped up quickly enough that my chair fell backward and chased her. She was faster than me, and I had to dodge around all of the other men who had just gotten up to change tables, so she beat me out the door, but not by much.

The back door led to a small gravel customer parking lot that was lit only by a weak security light on the back of the building. As the door slammed behind me, I saw Soli running toward a car parked in the fire zone with its four-ways on. I raced after her and caught up enough that I was able to snag a handful of her dark, curling hair in my hand. It felt familiar—I'd run my hand a thousand times through Beth's hair. Now I wrapped my fist in it and yanked backward with all my weight, snapping her head back and arresting her forward movement. She stumbled hard but didn't go down, instead pivoting toward me, and then we were grappling tightly. I briefly got a hand around her throat, but she was still a lot stronger than me, and I was thrown hard to the ground, which knocked the wind out of me.

Instead of following up her strike, I heard the sound of running feet on the gravel and knew that she was heading for the car. I managed to roll to my side, but I knew I wouldn't be able to catch her in time. As I started to pull myself up, the sound of spinning tires on gravel filled the air, and I suddenly saw a set of headlights coming straight toward me. Then there was a hand at the back of my shirt and another on my arm, grabbing and yanking me out of the way just in time, and I could feel the rush of the displaced air as the car barely missed running me down.

I heard the panting breath in my ear, and I knew even without looking that it was Suze who had pulled me out of the way. We both watched as the car screeched out of the lot and disappeared.

“It was her, the skinwalker,” I panted to Suze.

She nodded, then whispered to me, “There were too many people and smells in the room—I didn't know what was going on until I saw how you were looking at her.”

“She has Beth's skin. Why didn't I notice her from the beginning?”

Suze's voice was grim. “I don't think she was there from the start.” She yanked at me, tugging me back toward the store. When we reached the back door I could hear Lilah's voice, talking to people still in the shop, making up a story about a participant who had to leave early and how she'd forgotten her phone at the table, which her date had run off to try to return to her. I could hear the cooing murmur of the speed-daters as they accepted the story, talking helpfully about possible ways to locate the phone's owner.

The evening's events broke up soon after that, with the speed-daters all shooed back to the front of the store, where the bookstore workers clearly hoped that they'd top the night off with a book purchase. Suze ducked her horde of admirers and slipped out the back door again. I made a show of helping Lilah pack up her table as everyone else moved out. Not that I helped much. I couldn't get the image of Beth's marionette body out of my mind, and my hands shook uncontrollably. A polished geode slipped out of my grip and fell onto the table with a loud crack. I winced, and Lilah shot me a sympathetic look and started to open her mouth to say something, but I shook my head quickly, cutting her off, and took a deep breath and shoved down what had happened just far enough to fake functional for a little while longer. Ah, compartmentalization—my old friend.

Most of the daters had left when Suzume slid back in ten minutes later, shuffling up to where Lilah and I were putting candles into boxes.

“There's a dead woman behind the Dumpster in the back parking lot,” she said quietly. “That's the person whose table Soli took over to talk with Fort.”

A fat vanilla candle dropped out of Lilah's hand. “She killed someone? Just to do that?”

I thought back grimly to Chivalry's descriptions of the skinwalkers. “My brother told me that skinwalkers leave trails of bodies. I think we're getting a good idea of how they like to operate.”

“What do we do about the body?” Lilah whispered, her eyes darting over to the front checkout desk, where blissfully ignorant literary commerce was taking place as everyone got in their last purchases before closing time, then back to us, pinballing between me and Suzume for a moment before locking onto the kitsune as the one most likely to have a plan. She was right—I was using everything I had right now to look passably normal even as Beth's death rattled through me. Constructing an actual response to this situation was far beyond me.