Iron Night (29 page)

Fortunately, Suzume was more than willing to take command. “Soli grabbed her purse, might have taken her jewelry. Right now it looks like a mugging gone wrong—like it happened when she was walking to her car. I put a small illusion down to hide her for now, but I'll drop it when we leave. Someone will find her.” I'd seen Suzume put a fox illusion on a dead body before, and knew how well she could hide something from unsuspecting minds. People walking to their cars could walk through the poor woman's blood and not even know it.

“Why did she do this? Just to taunt me?” I couldn't understand why Soli had taken the trouble to come tonight but then just run out.

Suze narrowed her eyes, considering. “She's working for the elves, and right now we're closing in on them. Maybe she was working on getting our attention focused on her and off her employers.”

“Why? That won't help them in the long run,” I noted.

Lilah suddenly lit up. “But it would in the short run,” she said in a eureka tone of voice. She glanced around, confirming that we were still alone at the back of the store, and whispered, “Allegra's son was born this afternoon. A lot of people were excited. Even Themselves were excited.”

I frowned, not following. “But Allegra's a three-quarter. That's still rare, right?”

Lilah nodded. “Yes, but it was more than that. There have been three-quarter-to-three-quarter babies born before—that generation is just coming of age, but it turned out that they're a lot like the half-bloods. They can have children with each other easily; they don't even need a witch potion. It's like the human part of our heritage stabilizes us, lets us breed. So they shouldn't have been that excited, but they
are
.”

“Breakthrough-level excited?” Suze asked slowly, and Lilah nodded.

“I talked to a friend. His brother is a three-quarter and when he was talking about the baby, he was saying that this was important for the whole community.”

The pieces were starting to come together for me. “Allegra had a baby today. So when would that baby have been conceived?”

Suzume shrugged. “Nine-month gestation. February-ish, right?” She looked at Lilah for confirmation, and Lilah paused to do a little mental arithmetic, then nodded in agreement.

I remembered standing in Matt's office, listening as he listed off the names and dates of the missing men. “Rian Orbon went missing in February. He was the first one with the tattoos.”

Suze hissed slowly under her breath. “Death-sacrifice tattoos,” she muttered, realizing what I was saying. She looked over at Lilah, whose eyes had popped wide at the implications. “February death, February conception. The speed-dates started being held away from Dreamcatching after New Year's—so January. And what have the elves been trying for that would make them excited?”

“A seven-eighths cross,” she murmured despairingly. Then a thought clearly crossed her mind, and she looked almost physically ill. “There are more than forty women who are three-quarter crosses and are the right age to have a baby.”

“And they'd apparently need to kill one guy for each,” I agreed. “That's forty deaths.”

Suze added on, “And who says that the women could only have one baby each? Lulu's practice has been producing recessive changelings for thirty years. That's a big pool of resources to draw from if your goal is to produce a whole breeding generation of seven-eighths crosses.”

“All those speed-dates scheduled just for next month,” Lilah said, still looking ready to puke at the scale of what was going one. “I think we can assume they're already working on that goal.”

The implications were horrific, and I felt a surge of adrenaline as I realized how many people were at risk. “We need Tomas or Lulu—someone who can lead us right to the heart of this so that we can stop the whole thing.” To Lilah, I said, “My sister checked the address you gave us; it's empty. If they knew my family was looking into this, where would they hide?”

She shook her head, her coppery hair glinting in the light. “I don't know. I've never been involved with them that far. They've never told me these things.”

I rubbed the back of my hand hard against my forehead as some of the bookstore staff members came in to start cleaning up the tables and chairs from the speed-dating. “We need to head out of here. Lilah, can you talk to anyone who might know more about this?”

With clear effort, Lilah pulled herself together. “I'll try.” She sounded exhausted. “A few of the Neighbors are having informal parties tonight—I'll hit a few and see if I can hear any gossip.”

“Okay. Call me if you find anything out.” Awkwardly I patted her shoulder, wishing there were a Hallmark card for
I'm sorry you had to learn that people you are related to are murdering psychopaths, and that to prevent even more killings you have to betray even more people you've known since before you were potty trained.
And wouldn't that look cute in a kitten's thought bubble? Lilah gave me a small nod, and I knew that a little of that had translated.

Suze and I made our way to the car, both feeling very jumpy as we went. Once there, I called my sister—Prudence was still hunting for Lulu and not getting results, but after hearing about our encounter with Soli and that she was now wearing my ex-girlfriend, Prudence told me in no uncertain terms that unless I had special information or Suze had the ability to track a car by scent, the best thing we could do was find a safe place to set up for the night and to be ready to head out and join her if she was able to find someone involved in the murders.

“They have kept the details of their operation very close to the chest, apparently,” my sister said, and in the background I heard a muffled scream that I decided not to think about very closely. “But I am confident my inquiries will eventually bear fruit.”

“That's great, Prudence,” I said. “Just remember that you need my permission to kill someone.” There was another, less muffled scream, and I immediately amended that to, “Or maim.”

“Very well, but you are limiting my options somewhat,” she said, but there was amusement rather than irritation in her voice. Violence apparently put a little pep in her step.

Maybe it was knowing she was mellower than usual, or maybe I would've asked anyway. “Listen, Prudence, about the skinwalker—”

“Yes?”

I turned away from Suze, not wanting to look at her when I asked this. “The humans they kill to . . . use. It's just their body, right? There are no other . . . effects?”

“What do you mean, effects?”

“You know—mannerisms, memories. They don't
get
those things . . . do they?” I was dancing around it, not wanting to say the word
soul
. On one hand I felt almost silly and superstitious—nothing in my experience had ever suggested that we even had souls. But at the same time it felt deadly important, and saying it out loud would make my fear too real, too possible.

“Oh, that. No, none of that transfers.” Prudence's voice was almost, well, on someone else I would've assumed that she was trying to reassure me. With it coming from my sister, I just felt confused. “No need to worry about the creature knowing phone numbers or whatever odd little pillow talk you might've shared with the meat. Don't let the creature try to fool you either—they are very accomplished manipulators and usually pick up plenty of information from the home of the skin.”

Prudence's easy use of the words
meat
and
skin
ripped through me, but was no less than I could've expected. Her easy dismissal of Beth—I'd known better than to expect otherwise, but it didn't mean that it didn't hurt, and I wanted to end the phone call. “Thanks, that's—”

“Although . . .”

“Yes?” The skin on the back of my neck prickled.

“Well, I've never seen it happen to a vampire before, but just as a bit of trivia, the skinwalker
can
use the skin as a talisman for dreamwalking.”

“What?”
I didn't know what that was, but it sounded bad.

“Yes,” Prudence practically chirped, as if she were sharing a delightful anecdote over coffee. “They can use it to torment the relatives and loved ones of the skin. No actual gain of information, just projection. Silly and useless, really.” Her voice warmed and became that almost-reassuring tone again that set me on edge. “I've never even heard of a vampire succumbing—and a skinwalker once paraded around in my favorite bridge partner for weeks. I can't even
tell
you how enraged I was. Another one actually wore Chivalry's wife.”

“That's horrible,” I said.

“Well, she was quite tiresome—incredibly gauche and whiny thing; don't even get me started on her bad taste in clothing—but of course Chivalry was quite worked up. Not a single dream, though, and you know how much he utterly dotes on those wives of his, so I wouldn't be worried about any of that nonsense. Now, remember that this creature apparently likes to run Internet searches on you. Get a hotel room tonight.”

I didn't like my sister or her methods, but in this situation it was hard to disagree with excellent advice. Forty minutes later Suze and I were carrying our bags into the cheapest room we could find that still offered two beds. We took turns in the bathroom, changing into jeans and long-sleeve shirts, the kind of clothing that could be napped in but would be appropriate if Prudence got a location and we had to run off into the night to god only knew where.

When it was my turn in the bathroom I took a quick shower, having learned from hard experience that sleeping with work levels of product in my hair resulted in very weird, almost sculpturally bad hair the next day. I rushed through the shower, not wanting to deal with my thoughts or the horrible ball of grief that I knew was waiting for me when I actually sat down and thought about Beth. What had happened to her and how her death was so utterly and inescapably
because
she'd known me. I was rubbing my hair dry with a towel when I came back into the room and found Suzume sitting cross-legged on her bed, a half-sausage/half-veggie-lover's pizza beside her, and a six-pack of beer on the floor.

I stared. My wallet was still in my pants pocket.

“Did you buy dinner?” I asked, shocked.

Suze gave me a measured look. “Don't get used to this,” she warned.

We demolished the pizza. Afterward, sitting on the floor with my back leaning against my bed, carefully disassembling and checking each part of the Colt and the Ithaca before putting them back together while my phone remained frustratingly silent, I said into the comfortable silence that had fallen between us, “When this whole thing is over, I never want to talk about elf genealogy again. The last few days have been like some nightmare biology lesson. Like
Attack of Mendel's Beans
set in the Appalachian mountains, crossed with a PBS special on Egyptian pharaohs.”

Lying on her belly, watching me from half-lidded eyes, Suze agreed. “Amen to that. All this whinging and sacrifice magic fuckery is making me even gladder than usual that I'm a kitsune.”

I tilted my head. “Why? How do you guys manage it?”

Suze shrugged lazily. “You meet a guy in a bar, you get laid, a few months later you have a litter of kits. Easy-peasy, and you even get a few free drinks in the deal.”

I thought about it for a long minute. “So, you don't even tell the guy that he's a father?”

There was a very serious look in Suzume's eyes. “It's safer for everyone that way.”

She hadn't said it to accuse me, I knew. She was stating a fact of life, a piece of the kitsune culture. But I swallowed hard, and the silence that fell wasn't comfortable at all. The guns were all checked, and I pushed them under my bed. Out of sight if someone glanced around the room, but right where I could get to them quickly. I climbed into the bed and rolled to face the wall, pulling the cheap hotel comforter over my shoulders. “I'm going to sleep,” I said, my voice rough.

I was tired. Last night I'd gotten barely four hours of sleep, and the past few days had been brutal on many different levels. I felt battered—not physically, because the blood I'd drunk from my mother still crackled through my veins, healing my bruises and abrasions faster than they ever should've healed. But it was a mental exhaustion that made me feel like I wanted to just pull the comforter over my head and not get out of bed for a week. Too much had happened. Too many innocent people were dead because of grudges and agendas that they'd never even known existed.

It had been hoping too much that Suze wouldn't say anything, but when she did, her voice was very careful, and she picked her words as cautiously as a barefoot girl picked her way down a rocky beach. “Fort, do you want to talk about what happened to Beth?”

I shook my head, not looking away from the wall in front of me. “No, Suze, I can't. Not now. Not until Soli is dead and I never have to look at her again when she's . . .” I paused, not able to talk around the tightness in my chest, the confusion and the pain that I was pressing down as hard as I could to keep functioning for however longer I needed to finish this. I could start trying to deal with it then, but I knew that if I touched it now, I'd just be a shivering and rocking ball. And that's not what Beth or Gage or all those other people needed right now. “I just can't talk about it.”

Suzume paused, then said gently, “Okay.” And I heard the rustle of fabric as she reached over and clicked off the light.

The darkness felt comforting. I didn't have to try to control what was showing on my face anymore. I heard her shift around on her own bed; then everything was quiet except for the sound of both of us breathing and the distant
whoosh
of traffic on the street. A long time passed as I tried my best to think about nothing at all, but finally I couldn't stop it anymore, and I whispered, almost under my breath, “Suze?”