My siblings and I found ourselves politely showed to the door, our ears filled with Patricia’s particular blend of reassurance about my mother’s condition (“just a nap is all she needs to perk her up”) and almost knee-jerk guilting (“it’s so important not to overly burden her, though of course I understand how difficult it might be to respect one’s own mother. After all, I can tell you things about my Levi that would break your heart”).
Prudence headed down the hallway in the direction of her own suite, looking—from the completely neutral expression on her face down to her professional low pumps, like any Providence businesswoman heading to work. She didn’t even glance at either me or Chivalry. I didn’t often feel like chatting with my sister, but after what we’d all just seen, I couldn’t help feeling that at least a little postmortem was in order. “Prudence—”
She glanced over her shoulder, her mouth tight and her eyes flinty. “Later, little brother. All things can be discussed at length later.” Then she turned a corner and was gone.
Chivalry rested a hand on the back of my shoulder and subtly nudged me to accompany him in the other direction than our sister, away from the family suites and toward the main staircase that would take us downstairs. Of course there were several other staircases in the house, but given that Chivalry had grown up in an age where those had been strictly for servants’ use, I didn’t think it ever would’ve even occurred to him that occasionally they offered more direct paths around the various levels of the house. “Give her a moment, Fort. This has been a shocking morning for us all.” A muscle twitched hard for a second in my brother’s chiseled jaw.
“But what does it mean, Chivalry? What Mother said—”
“You know, Fort. You already knew.” Nothing about my brother’s tone was harsh. It was gentle, and his own sadness was readily apparent. But at the same time it brooked no argument, gave me no way to wiggle around what had been stated outright in that frothily decorated room. Nothing, not even the life of a vampire, lasted forever.
I didn’t want to have to think about that, or wonder what life would be like without my terrifying, and terrifyingly loving, mother sitting in the corner, manipulating the lives of her children on puppet strings. So I thought about something else, something that I hoped would push us far away from the rawness of this topic and the way that it was making me think about my mother as transitory rather than permanent, and perhaps even have to decide once and for all whether I loved or hated her. I knew that I was acting out a cliché even as I did it, but clichés come from the truth, so I got mad at my brother.
“Chivalry, why couldn’t you just have sided with me on the succubi? I was the one who was actually sitting and talking to them.”
“Fort, it’s critical that you begin to start finding common ground with Prudence.” He let me change the topic, even as I felt his dark eyes assess me.
I pushed him, welcoming the feeling of justified irritation. The plight of the succubi was real and concrete, and with my brother’s vote I could’ve done real good for their lives. “Mother said that it was our decision—a two-to-one vote would’ve ended the conversation.”
“Fort, you’re asking me to side with you just because of your delightful personality. That’s not enough for this. I don’t disagree with you about the succubi, but I also don’t disagree with Prudence’s assessment either.”
Just hearing him reexpress that was nearly enough to make my head explode. My sister’s votes against me were incredibly frustrating, but at least they’d come from a particular set of deeply felt views, even if those views were far too Randian for me to ever sign on to or even respect. “But—”
“Fortitude.” We were on the main staircase by then, and Chivalry stopped and grabbed my lower arm hard, his fingers digging in with just enough force to remind me how strong he was, and how easy he would find it to snap my bone like kindling. His dark brown eyes were intense, and the irises were just slightly bigger than they should’ve been, a reminder to me not to push his temper. We were on the upper part of the staircase, and as I stepped back slightly I could feel the cool marble of the staircase balustrade against my waist. I resolutely kept my eyes on my brother, long practice allowing me to ignore the staircase carvings behind him. My mother’s home decorating whimsy combined with a great deal of discretionary income had resulted in a marble staircase with a nautical mermaid theme. The sculptor had apparently started the project innocently enough, but by the middle of the staircase had started feeling enough artistic license to drop the mermaids’ tops, and by the top of the stairs the carvings were frankly pornographic.
My brother leaned close, his voice low. “Mother said it outright today. She won’t be with us much longer. When she is gone, the territory falls to Prudence. If you wish to have your voice heard in the way that the territory operates, then you need to be working with her, not just trying to outvote her. Believe me, it won’t be about votes once Mother is gone.”
“Mother didn’t say that Prudence would inherit,” I pointed out. Then, emotions running high, I broached the topic that we almost never spoke of. “And she did something different with you and me than Prudence. Made us different.” Madeline had killed my sister’s host parents the day that she was born, and Prudence had gone through transition as she moved through puberty. But later, with my brother, Madeline had left his host mother alive until he was twenty, and learned that her life had held his transition back. With me she’d gone even further, and somehow this seemed to have changed us, made us different than our Prudence.
A disbelieving, incredulous smile pulled across my brother’s face. “Don’t fool yourself, little brother. Whatever Mother was doing with our conception and rearing, for whatever reason, it won’t change the facts. I’m a century away from mature power. You’re barely more than an infant. Despite what Mother might wish for, Prudence is the only candidate, and she knows it.” His hand tightened painfully on my arm, and I knew that I’d carry a bruise tomorrow. “And much as you two might be different, don’t forget that she is our sister, and that she knows her responsibilities.” He released my arm, and continued walking down the steps. After a second’s hesitation, I followed. We walked through the labyrinthine hallways of the house until we reached my brother’s office, tucked well away from the public rooms of the house where guests (both human, supernatural, and politicians) were entertained. It was decorated in dark wood, with luxuriously deep carpeting and almost stereotypical paintings of dogs and horses on the walls. I’d become a regular user of this office in the last few months, enough so that my brother had even floated the idea of getting a second desk brought in for me to use. But I’d said that I was comfortable enough making use of one of the long study tables in the corner when I needed workspace, and my brother was usually generous about sharing his computer, though he’d thrown something of a fit when I installed Minecraft on it. Truthfully I felt more than sufficiently involved in the family business, and, like the fictional Michael Corleone before me, preferred a bit of distance, however symbolic.
Other than us, the office was empty. The family employed two accountants to process tithes and print up the bills (yes, we actually did mail out tithing statements, which looked suspiciously similar to Rhode Island property tax bills) as well as determine what everyone should be paying. They were both human, and occupied a tidy little office in what had previously been the music room. Loren Noka also had a desk in that room, though she was just as likely to be found in this room, researching pieces of information in the extensive files that we still maintained in print. The file cabinets Chivalry owned were modern and top-of-the-line, but it wasn’t uncommon to open up a manila folder and find that the documents within it had been written on vellum centuries ago.
“Ah, excellent,” Chivalry said with forced heartiness as we came into the empty room. “Given how early Loren showed up this morning, I asked her to take the rest of the morning off and go have a nice brunch on us. Now”—he eyed me cautiously—“since I have you to myself for a moment, there are some line items in Ms. Hollis’s reimbursement sheets that I’d like to discuss with you.”
I immediately dropped into one of the comfortable leather armchairs in front of Chivalry’s desk and settled in for the long haul. Suzume was paid well by my family to accompany me around the territory and assist in the investigation of any issues or the enforcement of the Scotts’ rules, but she was not above submitting reimbursement sheets for any expenses that she felt that she had in some way incurred while on Scott time. After I’d gotten mud from my shoes on the inside of her Audi, I got an earful from Chivalry about receiving the bill for her car’s detailing. And the argument over whether or not she could send dry-cleaning bills to the family was a long and ongoing one—probably not assisted by my comment at the time about how she only seemed to wear clothing on fifty percent of our excursions anyway. That had resulted in several faxed documents breaking down standard dog grooming costs, and suggesting that a similarly priced scale be applied to her own cleaning and upkeep. My brother had been less than amused on that day.
I was waiting for something like that, so I was very surprised when Chivalry looked at me extremely seriously and asked, “Fort, are you in any trouble?”
I blinked at him, confused. “No—not more than usual.”
“I wish you’d be honest with me,” Chivalry said sadly. “Surely the last few months have shown you that the family is willing to support your actions and interests, or at least have a reasonable discussion about them.” He reached onto his desk and slid a file out of his stack, which he tapped with one finger but didn’t open. He stared at me, clearly waiting for a confession. When none was forthcoming, because of the sheer level of flummox that I was feeling, he gave a heavy sigh and flipped the folder open, then handed it to me. “You’re having the kitsune stay on duty four nights out of seven for bodyguarding duties. There’s clearly something going on.”
Horror filled me. I desperately tried to convince myself that it wasn’t the case, that she wouldn’t go that far, but there it was in black-and-white itemized charges. “. . . she’s charging for overnights?” And double for the weekends. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, with the air shoved outward and leaving me gasping and lost. I’d been a job for Suzume when we first met—the helpless baby vampire that she was hired to keep an eye on. But that had been a long time ago, and things had changed—or I’d thought they had. A nasty thought intruded into my head—was I still a job to her?
I mentally shook myself hard. That couldn’t be the case, and it wasn’t.
But that’s the horrible, insidious thing about doubt. Doubt lingers, undermines. Doubt is like the salt that was put down on all the New England roads every winter. It kept our cars from sliding on the ice, but it was corrosive. It devoured the metal of our cars, spreading rust through them like cancer. It weakened the roads, creating fissures in the asphalt. It washed off the roads and into the rivers, poisoning our waterways.
“Yes—” Chivalry was confirming.
“I’ll handle this,” I snapped. That airless feeling was going away, but I could feel my neck and cheeks getting hot as the shock faded and was replaced by anger. In what alternative universe, even a kitsune universe, was putting together an invoice for the time we spent together socially okay? My body felt numb, and I had a brief moment of gratitude that I had already been sitting down before my brother had unwittingly sprung this emotional can of snakes on me.
“But—”
“It’s a miscommunication, Chivalry, and I’ll handle it.”
Chivalry’s jaw firmed, and I saw a familiar, and wholly inconvenient, stubbornness as he refused to heed what I could only hope was a truly gimlet look in my eyes. “I know that you’ve done things on your own before, Fort, but given everything that’s currently going on here, I really don’t want you to be—”
I couldn’t take it anymore, and I blurted out, much louder than I’d intended, “I’m dating her.”
There was a long pause, and I could see the wheels turn in my brother’s head. “Oh. Oh.” He looked hideously embarrassed, which seemed only fair given the level of personal humiliation I was currently experiencing in realizing that my girlfriend had been logging her overnights as a business expense. The file was yanked out of my hands and shoved under his blotter, as if by immediately excising it from our sight we could pretend that the conversation had never even come up. “Well, then . . . yes, good chat.” He smoothed out his already immaculately pressed sweater, then made a show of checking his watch. “I’m going to see if Simone needs anything. Like . . . lunch.”
I turned to stare out the window. Just looking at him felt like too much right now—a million times worse than if I’d just found the numbers myself. It was like a mirror reflecting light, exacerbating the whole wretched moment. “Yes. Super. Do that.”
Chivalry made a hasty exit out the door, ostensibly off to go see my newest sister-in-law. I sat in the chair for a long minute, the blinding feeling of my wholly justifiable pissed-ness rolling over me in a wave, letting my fingers clench into the leather of the armchair until my knuckles ached.
I knew she cared about me, I reminded myself. She’d risked her life for me (even though she’d later put a dollar amount and an invoice on that too, if memory served me). She’d comforted me when the truth about vampire feeding almost broke me apart and turned me to desperate actions. She’d teased me, taunted me, slept beside me.
An image of her from that morning forced itself into my head—not of her smiling face or the sight of her bare skin in the morning light, but a furry ball on my pillow, white tail tip tucked over her nose.
She’d never stayed in her human shape all night with me. She always became a fox again. That had been bothering me for weeks, scraping at the back of my mind. Was that significant? Had that refusal actually been her true feelings coming through?
I tried to pull myself back. I needed to be reasonable, to try to force myself to look at this from her point of view, see things through her eyes.
At least she hadn’t included condoms on her last list of reimbursement charges.
That I knew of.
Shit. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and sent Suze what I felt was a rather remarkably restrained text mentioning that we had something that we needed to talk about when we saw each other tonight.
My phone immediately rang, filling the room with the Imperial March, her customized ringtone.
“Oh no,” I muttered to myself as I hit the ignore button. “I’m too clever for that.” This was not a discussion that we were going to have over the phone.
Not that it really gave me something to look forward to later, of course. And, just my luck, she’d already mentioned that she and her cousins would be swinging over to my workplace later. Fantastic.
If I’d been at home, there would’ve been no solution to my situation except to break out The Lord of the Rings, extended cuts, and mainline nine hours. Lacking that, I gave serious consideration to going over to the mansion’s home gym and exhausting myself with one of the punching bags. But instead, I spent the next few hours in my brother’s office, poking through the older immigration records in the hopes of finding a useful parallel to the current situation of the succubi. At least, I reminded myself, the succubi were actually sincere in their need for me. I was hoping that the records would hold something that I could use to help strengthen my current case—and while I had no real hopes of convincing Prudence, a little bit of precedent seemed like a useful way to leverage my brother out of his current state of Swiss neutrality. Loren came in when I’d been at it for about forty minutes, and after a quick assessment helped me out by checking the reference catalogue for me. While my family did follow trends in such areas as plumbing and fashion, in other ways they could remain frustratingly old-fashioned, such as my brother’s dislike of the Boolean method of searching. So far he had refused to allow Loren to make our records searchable with an online system, and instead we were stuck with a neatly typed and maintained card catalogue. I’d attended college at Brown, and was no stranger to researching my way through the periodical stacks, thanks to a number of my professors who were fanatical about the value of primary sources when putting together research papers, so going through the old family records at least brought back a few moderately pleasant associations to offset the flavor of dust and old paper. Chivalry had even undertaken the practice of using bound books for record-keeping, which were numbered and ordered, so once I had Loren working the card catalogue, the process went fairly smoothly.
The problem wasn’t in the methodology—it was in the result. Over the next few hours, a clear picture emerged about the Scott approach to supernaturals hoping to reside in the territory and benefit from staying in my mother’s long shadow. Most who were allowed to enter were large and established groups who could promise quick prosperity and had notable cash incentives that they were willing to offer, like the ghouls or the bears. Others were small, such as when Atsuko Hollis had entered the territory after the end of World War II—but she had offered the potential for a powerful future ally. The witches who came in were the best parallel to the succubi—a troublesome possibility of exposure, and they had never petitioned for entry in groups any larger than individuals or immediate family units, but their offers of crippling fees and painfully high tithes had been balanced with the fact that most witches worked as some kind of doctor or medical professional, and their earning potentials were almost universally high. The succubi had no cash reserves to smooth their passage, and frankly, my sister’s dislike of the witches was strong enough that even mentioning them in conjunction with this current situation would only hurt the succubi by mere association. Prudence had done her best to shut down any witch immigration completely, and had made no secret that her preference would’ve been to kick all the other witches out of the territory completely. Her hatred for the witches was as pure a passion as any I’d ever seen her exhibit, yet one that no one in my family had ever explained the history of, making me wonder if she had experienced some strange inversion of love at first sight. It was probably as good an explanation as I’d ever get—my family excelled at keeping secrets.
By three in the afternoon, I had a solid coating of dust from pulling down and looking into records that hadn’t been touched in decades and a splitting headache from deciphering the handwriting of generations of Chivalry’s secretaries, which ranged from perfect copperplate to downright cramped. I vowed that if I ever ended up the boss of Chivalry for a day, my first decree would be that we hire a fleet of temp workers and have all the records transcribed to digital files. I was nursing a very new but passionate appreciation for standard font styles.
What I didn’t have, unfortunately, was anything that would help the succubi.
At least I’d been able to give Loren the ability to carry out the grocery directive. Given my new knowledge of her firsthand experience with the feeding and maintenance of teenagers, I’d put the entire task in her capable hands. My own lunch had been provided by Madeline’s cook and served to me, unrequested, on a tray. The remnants of an excellent grilled cheese sandwich with an accompanying bowl of applesauce and a slice of pecan pie rested on a side table. While I’d lived on my own since college, and had never regretted it for even a single moment, I had to admit that there were huge perks to having a dedicated kitchen staff who not only knew all of my favorite foods, but were more than willing to make it almost magically appear along with a dessert. It was kind of like having Potter-esque house elves.
Another check at my watch, though, had me heading for the door. I could make a check-in call to Saskia during my break, but it was time to head to work. In my current financial situation, quitting this job was not exactly an option, however tempted I might be to deliver my resignation over the phone and continue scraping through the Scott archives in the hope that a scrap of paper could solve all of the succubi’s problems.
The drive from my mother’s mansion in Newport to my apartment in Providence generally took anywhere from forty minutes to an hour, depending on the season, the traffic patterns, and whether I had the misfortune to become trapped behind an elderly driver on one of the one-lane roads. Today, with the bitter cold keeping the tourists and the pleasure drivers safely tucked in their houses, and an overcast gray sky that, while not overtly threatening snow, was certainly keeping it a possibility, I was able to make the drive quickly. After tucking the Scirocco safely in the parking lot, with its solitary windshield wiper lifted up just in case a few inches came down before I got home, I made a brief stop upstairs to change into my work clothes. Knowing that a possible relationship-shattering fight in my future added a strange dimension to getting dressed. I put on my third-favorite set of jeans. If a pair of pants had to forever be sullied as the pants I was wearing when Suzume and I broke up, then it was better that it be a pair that I could throw away without regrets.
The hours of research into historical records, and lunch, and the drive back might’ve given me some welcome distance from my anger at Suzume, but I was under no illusions that it had smoothed things out. That anger was still there, and the mere thought of “billable hours” was more than enough to bring it surging back to the forefront of my brain.
There were a lot of things I didn’t enjoy about my current job, but at least the uniform wasn’t one of them. It was a fairly minimal dress code—just a company T-shirt and a small waist apron to stash crucial items like my order pad and a few dozen extra pens. I also appreciated that my workplace was in my own neighborhood of College Hill, just a quick bus ride away from the apartment. In better weather, it would even be within a possible walking distance if I wanted to save on the bus fare—not that I really expected to still be working there by the time summer rolled around again.
Waiting tables at a karaoke bar was not something I particularly wanted to make a long-term career choice.
I’d been to good karaoke bars before—the ones that did karaoke in the Japanese style, with fancy private rooms and sake cocktails, with incredible decor. Redbones was not a good karaoke bar. The owner, Orlando Bouchard, made no secret of the fact that transforming Redbones from a local dive bar into a local dive bar that centered on karaoke had stemmed entirely on his desire to find a way to get more people through the door without having to do any kind of major upscaling of the bar, which would probably have necessitated getting a real kitchen going. I personally felt that he’d also realized that if he could find something to appeal to the female college student population, the local male population would invariably follow. In that, Orlando wasn’t exactly wrong.
My employment at Redbones was actually even flakier than my usual fly-by-night minimum-wage drudgery. The waitstaff position that I currently occupied was one that had been vacated by Orlando’s niece when she went on maternity leave (an event that Orlando cursed daily), and it had been made extremely clear to me that as soon as the niece felt ready to come back to work, I was out on my ass. Not that I was making any arguments. I’d done more than my share of waitstaff jobs before, and nothing at Redbones was particularly difficult. There was no kitchen, and the only food that could be ordered was table baskets of popcorn, pretzels, cookies, and things like that, which were the simple matter of going into the back room, dumping the requested foodstuff into the basket, and carrying out again. The fanciest anything got was when people ordered off of the “celebration specials” page, which involved cupcakes. That meant that I went into the back room, took down the requisite number of cupcakes, put them on a plate, and stuck in the appropriate party toppers. Those came in birthday, bachelorette party (Orlando had tried stocking bachelor party, but no one had ever ordered those), and breakup. Breakup had sad kittens.
Ninety percent of the menu focused on what we did best—alcohol. Orlando was the man behind the bar, both literally and figuratively, and I had to admit that he was pretty good at mixing drinks. Another big part of my job was that whenever he was busy mixing particularly fancy drinks, I was empowered to fill up basic beer requests or simple drinks myself. That kept the system moving, continued to lubricate the customers, and saved Orlando from having to hire a second barman on busy nights. Not that I worked the busy nights. The bar was open five nights a week, Wednesdays to Sundays, and I was invariably awarded shifts on the slower nights (generally Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays), when Orlando could get away with just having one waiter on duty. Working at a bar was one of those rare jobs where people fought for the weekend shifts, which usually brought much higher tips. I was okay getting the unwanted weeknights, as it was actually better for my schedule. But Thursday night at a karaoke bar could be a very grim vista.
Which of course brought me to the major crux of the issue—it was a karaoke bar. Most people attended in groups, usually after they’d started the evening with dinner at a restaurant. Sometimes people came in groups from particularly friendly workplaces as a way to have a fun night out, but not usually. We had about two dozen small tables, which could be reserved in advance but almost never were except with bachelorette parties. I met groups at the door, escorted them to a free table (and with the nights I worked, there was always a free table), and handed them menus and a laminated songbook. When I swung over to take their drink or snack orders, I also collected their song requests, which they wrote on pads of paper that were kept at each table. I would then deliver those song requests to the karaoke DJ, who put together the song list. There were two large screens on the walls of the bar—one that displayed the lyrics of the song currently being sung, and one that had the arranged song order on it so that people could know if their song was coming up. Redbones had almost four thousand songs in the karaoke catalogue. But most nights it seemed like all people wanted to sing was Journey or Bon Jovi.
Work began as it usually did. We opened at four, but not even the most committed karaoke buff showed up that early, so we spent the first hour prepping. I turned on the popcorn machine in the back room (Orlando had gotten it when the movie theater down the street closed down) and made sure that there were plenty of cookies. We had a deal with a local bakery that I strongly suspected involved taking the cookies that normally would’ve been disposed at the end of their workday and giving them a few more hours of shelf life. I also pushed a broom around the floor—not that that really was going to help the situation, but it at least removed the visual issues. Sometimes I had to push really hard at stuff that was slightly adhered in a gummy mixture of ancient spilled drinks, dirt from shoes, and crumbled food, with just a slight veneer of vomit. What the floor really needed was an exorcism, or at least a few buckets of bleach, but my broom helped cover up its sins for another evening.
At the bar, Orlando furrowed his brow and began the first of several hundred rubdowns with a soft rag. Before the bar was Redbones, it had been various other liquor-dispensing establishments all the way back and through Prohibition, and the bar was as original as the bricks that made up the walls. Unfortunately, like the bricks, the bar really needed some serious rehab. While Orlando argued history as his reason for avoiding an upgrade, I suspected penny-pinching. Pratibha Vhora was the DJ, and she played with her sound checks, cross-examined her equipment, and when all else was done, she just popped on a preset song list and did a few crossword puzzles.
“Hey, Fort,” Pratibha said as I passed her. “‘Actor Guinness.’ Four letters, third one e.”
“Alec,” I answered.
She nodded, looking pleased. “Nice.” Once she’d realized my level of film trivia, Pratibha warmed up to me significantly. Supposedly Orlando’s niece had only been able to help out with gardening questions, which didn’t come up as often. Pratibha glanced up from her puzzle, and frowned. “Hey, are you okay tonight?”
Apparently my poker face was not as perfectly in place as I’d thought. “I’ve been better,” I hedged. A lot better, actually, this morning when I had a snuggly, sexy, happy girlfriend who I hadn’t been aware wasn’t punching out on the clock until she walked out my door.
“Stop distracting the talent, Fort!” Orlando bellowed from the bar. I sighed and kept sweeping as Pratibha gave me a sympathetic grin, put up her feet, and winked at me. Orlando was in his late fifties, built like a keg of beer, and seemed to feel emotionally bereft if he didn’t have something to complain about. Given that Pratibha had, presumably, more career options than I did (though she’d come to this job after fifteen years of DJing weddings, proms, and bar mitzvahs left her completely burned out on all formal-wear occasions), that often left me as the eternal target of Orlando’s grousing.
He eyed me when my sweeping brought me closer. While Orlando’s days of tight jeans were several decades in his rearview mirror, even a quick glance at the musculature in his dark brown arms generally was enough to disperse even the most assy of drunks. Orlando was also a possessor of a set of crazy eyes that would’ve made Christopher Lloyd jealous. He wasn’t the worst boss I’d ever had, and he’d mellowed after the first month made it clear that I wasn’t a slacker on the job, but even though I had some confidence that Orlando’s bark was rarely followed by an actual bite, he wasn’t exactly my favorite conversational companion.
“Is that girlfriend of yours coming by tonight?” he snapped out.
I answered in the affirmative, and was immediately rewarded with a string of expletives, which for once I at least partially agreed with. “She said that she’s bringing some of her cousins too,” I added, which triggered another explosion of curse words. Orlando had spent a few years in the navy, and it showed.
“You remind those jackals that only your girlfriend gets to drink for free,” Orlando snapped, scrubbing aggressively with his rag cloth. “And you tell them that if they try that polygamy story on me again, I’m watering every drink I hand them.”
Orlando’s relationship with the kitsune was fraught. On the one hand, he’d tended bar long enough to have a well-defined radar for trouble, and the kitsune were capable of so much mayhem that they probably should’ve been banned under international accords. On the other hand, the revelation that I was dating Suzume seemed to have garnered me a certain reluctant respect, if only in the sense that he admired my complete disregard for basic survival instinct. He also was a reasonable enough man to let Suze drink for free, since he knew that she’d probably wrangle free drinks out of me anyway, so it was for the best to just streamline the process. And as a business owner, he did acknowledge that having attractive single women in a bar was never a bad thing, and the kitsune certainly tended toward the attractive. Even the ones who weren’t hot had charisma to spare, which was usually pretty much the same thing in person. The male population of College Hill was essentially subsidizing the drink orders of the Hollis women, and was apparently grateful for the privilege.
Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that Suze and her cousins loved my new job. Suze had even told me that it had practically been my Christmas present to her. They tried to push people into poor song choices—awkward and painfully too-soon expressions of devotion or encouraging angry breakup songs. Those too drunk to know better often found themselves onstage trapped at the halfway point through “Bohemian Rhapsody” with no way out and nothing but a group of high-fiving women in the audience to explain their predicament. The kitsune also had an ongoing game where each picked an individual song, then tried to convince as many different people as possible to sing it over the course of an evening. Each time one of them got someone to sing her song, she won a point. High score won. Sometimes, to add an extra challenge, they’d all choose songs by the same artist.
I still had horrible flashbacks to Kelly Clarkson night.
A slow trickle of customers began just after five, and I was able to put the ineffective broom to one side and get to work taking drink orders and ferrying around baskets of snacks. I even tried to cheer up Orlando by reminding everyone that singing a song by Redbone would get them a free beer. An hour and a half in, one of the frat guys managed to give a halfway decent rendition of “Come and Get Your Love,” making Orlando’s perpetual scowl lighten.
The kitsune hit the bar at just past eight, strolling in like predators assessing a herd of sheep. Suze was in the lead, of course, but at this point I could recognize all of her six companions. The roster of kitsune had fluctuated wildly in my first few weeks of employment, but at this point it had settled into a more regular group. Suze’s younger cousin Takara aimed herself directly at the bar, right where the concentration of potential mayhem was the thickest. I’d seen the blue-haired and freckled kitsune dressed for work the first time I met her, but Takara dressed for fun was always a terrifying prospect. Tonight she’d pulled out all the stops with a tiny flared skirt, corset top, and, worst of all, a faux fox-ear headband. One of the favored Hollis games was the over-under on how many different guys would try to pick her up if she sat alone at the bar with a gin and tonic. I’d lost money at this game.
Despite hours spent thinking of exactly how I would begin the conversation with Suzume (screaming “J’accuse” at her across the room seemed too extreme, but kind of captured where I was at the moment), I was still without a plan and was therefore grateful when my attention was co-opted by the occupants of table five, who were protesting that they hadn’t been given any pens to write their song selections down with. I lifted up one of their discarded menus, revealing half a dozen pens. My excellent waitership was rewarded with sulky looks that suggested that I’d somehow deliberately hidden their pens to make them feel foolish.
My particular vocation of the moment preventing me from approaching Suzume immediately, I moved on to the next table, which was occupied by a post-breakup solidarity group that had already put in several requests for Fiona Apple songs, which I was not looking forward to. I cleared away a few of the empty cosmo glasses and tried not to take any of their irritated glares to heart. After all, from the snippets that I’d overheard, he did sound like a jerk.
As I carried the glasses back to the plastic box that I’d stashed just outside the back room, I felt a sharp tap on my arm. I looked over to see Suze’s cousin Hoshi keeping pace with me. The Asian lines of her cheekbones and jaw were a strange contrast to a nose that would’ve done any Hassidic woman proud, and exuberantly curled hair that was acutely sensitive to the slightest humidity in the air. Hoshi was one of those women who, going by facial symmetry alone, should have been unattractive, even discounting an impressive knife scar that ran halfway across her throat and then shot abruptly up her chin. Yet, like the rest of the kitsune, she presented herself with such an air of “I’m doing you a favor by letting you buy me a drink” that the average brain simply accepted that she had to be hot. Plus, her usual cover story for her scar was that she was a CIA agent, and frankly, it was no surprise that men fell before her in droves.
“Heya,” Hoshi said, giving me an affectionate nudge with her elbow. “Any potential targets identified?”
“Hoshi, I’m really not sure that I’m comfortable with getting involved in this, and frankly, I am not in even remotely the right headspace right now to even be contemplating your particular subset of needs.” Hoshi was apparently the latest of the White Fox’s granddaughters to feel a desire to hear the pitter-patting sounds of little kit paws in her home. The traditional reproductive approach in the kitsune was to find an appropriate man, get laid as many times as necessary until she was pregnant, then cut all ties with him and raise the resultant kits within the family. I didn’t particularly argue with the merits of this approach, particularly given the havoc Suze’s twin sister, Keiko, was currently creating by trying to have a relationship on the down-low, but I did object to Hoshi’s belief that I should help in the screening process of potential baby daddies. Also, given my current bone to pick with her cousin, my interest level in Hoshi’s family planning was in the negative zone.
“You’ve been awarded a partial vote, Fort. That is an honor that has never before been extended beyond the family, and you need to take this seriously.”
“How much is this vote worth?”
“One-eighth of a fox vote,” she said solemnly.
I dumped the glasses into the bin. “Well, I definitely feel honored now.”
Hoshi completely ignored the edge in my voice, and smiled happily. “Suzu-san said that you’d say that.” Her expression shifted, and playtime was clearly over. “Now, prospects?”
I knew from previous evenings that if I didn’t throw one of my fellow men under the reproductive bus, Hoshi would continue to pester me all night with my opinions on various men and the traits that they might or might not have to offer to her future offspring, with all the tenacity of a small terrier with a rawhide bone. And the only thing worse than the conversation I was about to have with Suzume was to have it in front of one of her cousins. “You’re into blonds, right? The tall blond at table seven has been bugging Pratibha for the last hour, so I think he’s single. And judging by the chatter when I’ve been taking drinks, I think he’s in a STEM field. He’s got kind of a honking laugh, but I don’t think that that’s genetic.”
Her eyes shot over to acquire the target, and she brightened. “Excellent start.” Never glancing away from her unsuspecting victim, who continued drinking blissfully, with no awareness of the one-woman mobile unit of Ancestry.com that was about to swoop down upon him, Hoshi slipped a folded dollar into the front of my apron. “Buy yourself something pretty.”
Normally I would’ve let her go at that, but I stopped her as she started moving in on the blond. “Hey, where’s Suze?”
She frowned and gave the room a quick glance. “Um . . . not sure.” Then a diabolical grin spread across her face, and she leaned toward me and whispered loudly, “Tonight’s theme is Cher.”
“Well, isn’t that just the cherry on top of the shit sundae that my day has become.” At the tables, people were signaling me, in dire need of snacks, drinks, or the need to complain uselessly about particular songs that were not included in our catalogue. “Hey, I’ve got to get back to my tables, but tell Suze to follow me into the kitchen next time I go back.”
“Hell yeah, I will,” Hoshi said, lasciviousness dripping from her voice.
I glared. “No, I need to talk to her.”
Hoshi’s expression didn’t change. “Suuure you do. In the kitchen.” Her eyebrows were doing an impression of Groucho Marx. One hand whipped out and delivered a sharp slap across my ass, which, as I gritted my teeth and reminded myself, was probably some kind of attempt at affection. “Talking.”
“Hoshi, do you mind?” Suzume’s cousins seemed determined to give me excellent anecdotes to share whenever my female colleagues began chatting about on-the-job sexual harassment.
“Nope!” Hoshi assured me with a chipper lilt, then sauntered off in the direction of the blond.
Thirty minutes later, with the tables momentarily appeased with orders taken and drinks delivered, I ducked into the kitchen to fill up more popcorn baskets and avoid a particularly strangled take on “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Apparently the kitsune Cher plan was already being executed.
A quick movement next to me revealed Suze, hopping up with vulpine ease to sit on the counter beside where I was working. Her dark eyes were gleaming with amusement, and she swung her legs casually. “Hey, did Hoshi tell you that tonight’s theme is Cher? I already got a guy to request ‘Half-Breed.’” She bumped me lightly with her knee. “Oh, and she also said that you had plans to slip me the salami, but I gotta say, I have concerns about the cleanliness of the surfaces in this kitchen already. Can you get a yeast infection from common food mold? Anyway, you’ll understand why I would prefer to be on top for this endeavor.”
I ignored her comment and, still lacking any plan on how to raise the subject, just spit it out. “Suze, you’re charging my family for the nights you stay over?”
She blinked. “Of course.”
This was not the response that I had expected, and my carefully planned response to what I had thought she would say was lost in my own incoherent sputtering.
Suze looked completely surprised. “You are exponentially safer with me around,” she said firmly.
“Suze—”
“Remember last week when I killed a mouse? I probably saved you from Lyme disease!”
“Suze—”
“And when I told you on Tuesday that the milk had gone sour?”
“Suze.”
“And how about when I warned you about the broken glass on the floor?”
“You broke that bowl!”
“And warned you about it!”
Our shouts fortunately coincided with a particularly up-tempo moment in the current song roster, but we spent a long moment glaring at each other as we reassessed our positions.
I took a deep breath. “Suze, this was a big fucking betrayal of trust, so I need you to actually take this seriously for one goddamn moment.”
For one second, she looked completely stunned. Then her upper lip curled just a fraction. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she bit out, “but every cent I’m paid comes from your mother, and not you. And given how often I’ve listened to you explain and justify your reasons for trying to keep yourself as far from that dragon’s horde of questionably acquired cash as possible, does it strike you as slightly hypocritical at this stage for you to suddenly clutch your pearls at the thought that I’m exploiting a few loopholes and stretching some justification to get my hands on a bit more of that wealth that—and, again, do correct me if I’m wrong—you want absolutely nothing to do with?”
“This isn’t about money and it’s not about family,” I snapped. “Our personal time is personal—you and me, without you glancing at the clock and thinking about rounding up the damn quarter hour!”
“Nothing about you can ever be just personal, Fortitude Scott.” Suzume’s voice had dropped, and she wasn’t loud, but low and almost snarling out the words. “Your mother holds the life of every person in her territory in her hands, and you think you can pretend that you’re just another guy? Yes, I skimmed the top. No, I’m not even the least bit sorry. But if you think that me writing out those invoices had anything to do with what I feel about you, that it was nothing except the bottom line, then you are the biggest goddamn idiot I’ve ever met.”
We broke apart at the same time, pacing away, as if too much had been said in those heated moments and we’d been shoved apart by magnetic forces. My chest was heaving as if I had run a mile, and I could actually feel a bead of sweat trickling between my shoulder blades. I turned and pressed my hands hard against the metal countertop, the cold shocking against my skin. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Suze pacing, stalking from one wall to another, and I could see the moment that she visibly restrained herself from giving a kick to my mop bucket, and instead nudged it aside with almost exquisite control.
I turned my head, just enough to see her fully, and said, softly, but with no softness, “No more charging for personal time.”
Suzume’s eyes were slits of discontent as she spun on her heel and marched away. She paused just at the doorway and, without turning, said, “My cousins and I considered making this a Bieber night, Fort. I can still make that happen.” No mobster could’ve delivered a threat with such tightly leashed menace.
“I’m going to be checking your reimbursement requests in the future, and your overtime requests. Not Loren Noka, not my brother. Me.”
At my words, she turned completely to face me, and had she been in fox form, there was no doubt that her ears would’ve been tightly pinned against her head. While her body language in human form was hobbled slightly by the lack of a luxurious tail and mobile ears, there was no mistaking that she was deeply and profoundly pissed off. Without breaking eye contact she swiped out one hand to snag a cookie from one of the snack baskets, and brought it up to take a rather vicious bite out of it. Chewing with deliberate slowness, she let the silence hang between us while she masticated, then swallowed. I glared right back at her, refusing to give an inch. After a long minute of assessment, she snarled, “Prepare for retribution. Shock and awe.” She shoved herself away from the counter and was through the kitchen door with kitsune swiftness.
Fourteen renditions of “Baby” later, Orlando snagged my elbow while I was filling up a beer order.
“What did you do to piss those women off this badly?” he bellowed into my ear. The shouting was completely unnecessary, but I’m sure that it made him feel better. Frankly, I would’ve welcomed some temporary deafness, so I wasn’t even going to complain about his manner of delivery.
“Suzume and I are negotiating relationship boundaries,” I gritted out. The architect of my current misery and the still-churning outrage in my gut was perched on a bar stool five feet away, nursing her way through a Dogfish Head and refusing to meet my eyes, though every time my back was turned I could feel her glare of death burning into me.
Orlando shook his head. “Best work on your negotiation skills, boy.”
It was a long night.
Last call came at a quarter to one. The bar had slowed down long before, with only a few people remaining. Pratibha was playing dance music, which Suze’s cousins were enthusiastically hurling themselves around to. Unexpected Bieber frenzy aside, it had been a fairly normal Thursday night, and I’d been able to get a lot of the tables cleaned up as most people filtered out. Suzume was still at the bar, her back to Orlando, ostensibly watching her cousins.
I handed the last of the drink orders to Orlando, then snagged a bottle of Sapporo from the small below-bar fridge where we kept the good stuff and poured it into a glass. My boss lifted an eyebrow—apparently this was taking things slightly too far. I fished my tip money out of my apron, counted off the dollars, and handed it over. He gave a satisfied nod and returned to constructing the last set of drinks.
I walked over to stand next to Suze, and silently passed her the drink. She took one long sip, then tilted her head to give me a look that was half banked anger, half begrudging sheepishness.
“You know, I wasn’t dating you because of the money,” she said, her voice low and reluctant.
I didn’t say anything, just accepted the glass when she handed it to me and drank. It had been hours since we sliced each other with words as sharp as glass, long enough for exhaustion to balance out the anger. Long enough for me to acknowledge that, as angry as we’d been (and still were) with each other, it meant something that she’d stayed. She could’ve walked right out the front door, but instead she’d stayed. Fumed, but stayed.
Even quieter, she said, “I didn’t know it would hurt you. It was mostly a joke—I could do it, so I did.”
I swallowed a second time, then passed it back to her. I could hear the honesty in her voice, and I recognized that ultimate truth about her nature in what she’d said. She could do it, so she did. Nogitsune, her grandmother had once said to me about Suzume. Forest fox. Trickster.
It should’ve made it hurt less, but it didn’t.
She was watching me, those dark clever eyes flicking over my face, picking up on who knows how much. After another long silence, she nodded to where her cousins were still dancing. “You gave a good tip to Hoshi. She moved the blond into the Reconnaissance stage.”
“That’s fantastic,” I lied. What I had rather unwillingly learned was that this meant that Hoshi hadn’t found anything to remove him from the genetic running tonight, and so the kitsune were going to now research him online, snoop into his financial records, and probably also break into his house at least once. It was also likely that they’d be obtaining some kind of genetic sample to send to those companies that offer a full DNA workup and print up a report about any dodgy genes or predispositions. If all that worked out, then she’d probably call him up for a date. The whole thing sounded pretty exhausting to me, and I had my moments when I wondered whether it was just another example of the kitsune’s propensity to make a game out of everything.
Suzume finished off the beer, then handed the empty back to me. “I should probably move the herd home.” There was the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth for a second, but it faded as she looked at me. “I’m the designated driver.”
I nodded. I was glad that the night was at least over.
“Fort,” she said, and there was just the slightest furrow in her forehead, the hint of worry in her eyes. “We’re okay, aren’t we?”
That worry loosened something in me, along with the question. Of anything I might ever have doubted about Suze, I could never doubt her intrinsic predator’s hatred of expressing vulnerability. I could feel my shoulders unkink just slightly, and I moved my left hand over, sliding it along her shoulder, around the back of her neck to stroke that soft place just below her hairline. I felt her relax into my touch, saw that furrow smooth and disappear from her forehead. “We’re okay for tonight,” I said, unable to truthfully say anything beyond that, but feeling my own intense gratitude for the words.
Surprise flitted briefly across her face, replaced almost immediately by careful assessment. She hadn’t expected my response to be conditional. But, then again, she hadn’t expected me to be hurt.
Suze gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “Well, then don’t forget to make sure you’ve got a clean shirt for tomorrow.”
I blinked at her.
She stared at me for a second, and then a smile tugged at her lips. “You forgot, didn’t you?”
“Forgot about wha— Oh, fuck that shit.” I mentally kicked myself. Tomorrow was the karhu crowning ceremony for the metsän kunigas. It had been on the calendar for over a month, and I’d been tapped to go to represent the family as a fairly obvious punishment for my actions regarding the elevation of the newest karhu. With the recent kerfuffle over the succubi, I’d honestly forgotten. “When does this thing start again?”
Her smile widened. “Sunrise. Seven thirteen a.m. Didn’t you read the e-vite?”
I cursed inventively.
A burble of a laugh escaped her, and she leaned over and into me, her right hand squeezing my knee as from shoulder to hip we fit against each other in that way that was still so new for us, yet was now so wonderfully familiar and natural. “For the bear-only part of the ceremony, Fort. We show up for the rest of it at nine.” She slid off the stool with that easy vulpine grace of a creature who always knew where her body was in space, and tugged on her jacket. “Formal dress.” She looked at me with fathomless dark eyes as she slowly fastened all her buttons. “I’ll be at your place at eight thirty.”
I nodded, acknowledging. But then she slid forward, her hips easing smoothly between my knees, her hands sliding up until her wrists were dangling loosely down my back, and she pressed one soft cheek against mine so that the smell of her hair filled my nose. “Do you see how much I like you, Fort?” she breathed into my ear. “I could’ve let you think that you had to attend the sunrise portion. And that part, BTW, is in fur. I think they’re doing a formal investiture of shitting in the woods.”
I knew there was no way that she could see the way that my mouth involuntarily curled into a smile, but I knew that she could feel the beat of my heart, and the way that my hands almost unconsciously wound around to rest at her waist. We stayed like that for a long moment, and all my anger from before couldn’t hide just how good it felt.
When she finally moved out of the embrace, it was slow, her cheek dragging against mine just enough to rasp the beginnings of my one a.m. stubble. Every cell in my body knew exactly how many micrometers her mouth was from mine, but she didn’t push for a kiss and I wasn’t ready yet to turn and take one. But I didn’t hurry to take my hands from her, letting them slide down from her waist and rest on her hips, my fingers pressing just harder than gentle into her flesh before I finally let them drop.
Whatever she read in my face, that signature strut was back in Suze’s step as she walked out the door, the rest of her cousins falling in behind her as if by some unspoken signal.
“Bunch of jackals,” Orlando muttered loudly behind me.
“Right genus, wrong species,” I replied.