I didn’t mind working late-night hours, and in fact far preferred it to insanely early morning hours, but I wasn’t exactly at my most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I rolled out of bed the next morning after a mere five hours of sleep. A hot shower helped dispel some of the cobwebs from my brain and the steam removed wrinkles from my shirt. Typical for me, I had arrived home so tired from work that I’d completely forgotten Suze’s clothing advice, and wasn’t able to find any appropriately clean button-downs in my closet. After a quick pawing through several of the clothing piles that seemed to spring up around my room like mushrooms following a rainstorm, I finally managed to extract a nice white oxford that had only a minor sweat funk, easily cured by some strategic Febreze-ing. It did have a small tomato-sauce stain, but thankfully only where I was confident that my tie could cover it.
I spent extra time shellacking my hair down with extra-hold gel. I knew it made me look like I was trying to audition for a bit role in The Godfather, but my hair had two settings—gelled into submission or Rorschach test. The latter didn’t exactly seem suitable for today.
Dan was sitting at the table when I came into the main room, snacking on the leftover Redbones cookies that I’d brought home the previous night and quizzing himself with his ubiquitous stack of flash cards. He must’ve just gotten back from his morning jog, since he was dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt, and bless the man, he must’ve started the coffeepot before he left. He had a steaming mug in front of him, and there was just enough in the pot for a second cup.
“Hey, did Jaison stay over last night?” I asked, pondering the coffee.
“Nah, the rest is for you.”
Reassured, I poured out the rest, then dug around in the fridge for the creamer. During my leaner financial times, I’d gotten to the point of stuffing my pockets with extra nondairy creamers when I was at restaurants and just keeping them at home, and even with decent paychecks I’d kept the habit going. During our first week of living together, Dan had watched my preparation with silent horror. For his coffee he bought pint containers of heavy cream from the grocery store, and had finally broken and staged a coffee intervention on me. Jaison, who simply drank his coffee black, had watched the entire fracas with great amusement.
I sipped at my cup while I pondered my breakfast options. Already being dressed was leaving me leery about eating anything that could leave a stain, since with my luck this would be the day that I dropped breakfast all over myself. Wherever things had been left between me and Suzume, I knew for certain that I didn’t want to pick them up with a butter smear down my shirt. At last I dug out a half-petrified container of s’mores Pop-Tarts and set in on them.
“Big day today?” Dan asked as I settled myself and my breakfast at the table. He gestured at my suit, which was definitely not daily attire.
I nodded. “For the metsän kunigas, yeah. I have to go and be the Scott rep.” I tugged open one of the foil packets. “Hey, I look okay, right? Like, no holes in the back of my pants?” Suze was due over soon, but I’d learned the hard way that expecting her to point out holes in my pants was asking her to compromise her future hilarity at the expense of pointing out things that I should’ve caught myself, and that really wasn’t a fair position to put her into.
Yes, we’d had that conversation.
Dan shook his head. “I didn’t see any. But, Fort, the four-in-hand knot really doesn’t look good when you have a suit jacket on.” His expression was pained. Dan took personal presentation very seriously, and seemed eternally put upon that both Jaison and I completely failed to keep up.
“It’s the only one I know how to tie, Dan.” I knew that I sounded grumpy, but it matched how I felt.
Immediately Dan set down his flash cards and started tugging at my tie. “Gimme that.”
I let him, frankly somewhat relieved. I didn’t like showing up and knowing that people thought that I hadn’t made enough of a clothing effort, but at the same time I frankly just sucked at putting myself together and it was hard not to just feel irritated that we hadn’t reached the promised future of sci-fi fiction that consisted of easy-to-wear zip-up jumpsuits for every occasion. That, at least, I figured I could handle. I mean, assuming that the fabric also self-cleaned.
“Fort, your shirt has a stain.” From Dan’s expression I might as well have burned down an orphanage.
“The tie was covering it,” I defended.
He shuddered. This was why I preferred it when Jaison stayed over—yes, it put a strain on our tiny coffeemaker and required the drinker of the second cup to start a second batch, but at the same time it also gave me some backup whenever Dan gave me that look that suggested that I was practically a caveman, barely able to wrap animal skin around my nakedness as I gnawed at mastodon with my teeth.
“I’ll loan you a tie tack,” Dan offered. He quickly removed the last traces of my apparently substandard knot, then with a few quick passes around his own neck put together a frankly really impressive knot. He left it loose enough that he could take it off himself and hand it over to me. Maybe I should’ve had more pride to reject his mommy-bird-feeding-baby approach to formal wear, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue with results. I slid it over my own head, then tucked it under my collar and tightened it up. A quick look in the reflective surface of the microwave confirmed that it actually looked pretty damn good. Good enough that I had to restrain the urge to take a selfie and send it to Chivalry. The only thing that held me back was the knowledge that he would probably print it out and keep it in his wallet like a baby picture.
“That’s really cool, Dan. Where’d you learn how to do that one?”
“Ghouls are great at tying knots,” my roommate said. “It’s a cultural point of pride, since we spent so many years having to tie our human victims on spits to roast over the fire.”
I stared as he took another sanguine bite out of his chocolate-chip cookie.
Dan laughed. “You’re too easy, Fort. The knot is called a Euclid, and I learned it by watching a video on YouTube.”
“Oh, well, thanks.” I pondered the awesomeness of the tie for another minute, then asked, “Hey, do you know any of the bears?” I’d spent my early childhood living with my human foster parents, with no real contact with any of the supernatural elements beyond a monthly dinner with my mother and siblings. After my foster parents were murdered by my sister, I’d been brought down to live in the mansion, but even then I’d seen very few supernaturals beyond my family. Firstly, I’d tried as hard as I could to reject everything that wasn’t a strictly human life—as much as I could, of course, while at the same time living with three other vampires. But also there really weren’t that many to see, even had I wanted to.
There were two kinds of nonhumans who lived under my mother’s rule—the ones who could pass for human, and who spent much of their lives hiding right in plain sight, and the ones who would never be able to pass for human, and had to stay far away from humans. Newport was one of three towns on Aquidneck Island, which made up just under forty square miles in the mighty state of Rhode Island, and its entire supernatural population consisted of my family, plus a small colony of Norwegian-extract trolls that lived under the Claiborne Pell Bridge and did a better job of passing as boulders than as humans. So during my entire career in elementary, middle, and high school, I’d been the only nonhuman in the building. Which had not done my sense of isolation any great favors. When I left home for college, I’d played human with such an intent focus that I probably would’ve run in the other direction if I’d seen another nonhuman.
Dan was my first nonhuman roommate, and there was still a strangeness in being able to talk with him about all the things that I’d spent so many years never daring to talk about with anyone other than my family, who I’d been spending all my efforts to avoid seeing anyway. And despite my recent crash course in the running of the territory and the races who owed my mother fealty, it occurred to me suddenly that I actually didn’t know too much about how they functioned between their own separate groups. I mean, maybe they’d had their own Cub Scout troops.
“I went to high school with a few,” Dan said, giving a small shrug. “Never had much to do with them, of course.”
It was the “of course” that piqued my curiosity. Apparently that was a no to the Cub Scout question. “Why is that? I remember from when I was talking to Lilah Dwyer that she said that the Neighbors didn’t socialize with the bears, but I figured that that was a bear/elf thing. Is it actually normal?”
A cynical smile spread across Dan’s face and he shook his head slightly, as if my naïveté in this situation was something that he was trying to decide was infuriating or cute. “Fraternization isn’t exactly something your family encourages, Fort, so most of us keep to within our own kind.” He took a deep drink of his coffee. “I think one of my biggest teenage rebellion moments was when I was friends with a changeling kid for a while. Drove my father crazy, which was really half the reason I did it. I mean, Nate wasn’t a bad guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not sure I ever really liked him. Felt sorry for him, mostly. One minute he was living with a normal family in Connecticut, and the next minute his death gets faked and he gets told that he’s actually part elf. We still do Christmas cards, but we drifted after graduation. Poor guy got an arranged marriage with another changeling girl who is even more screwed up than he is, so now he’s got a wife with a drinking problem and four kids under the age of five. Talking with him is like dipping a toe in the Swamps of Sadness.”
“Huh.” I considered that for a second, adding it to the puzzle of what I’d already observed or been told. “But, depressing high school friends aside, I mean, even if my family isn’t big on different groups socializing, there’s no rule against it that I’ve seen. Besides, you outnumber us by a lot. Why not try to get some strength in numbers, use other groups to shore up your own weaknesses, or at least form some bonds and support?”
I said that last part while Dan was taking a swig of his coffee, and the ghoul laughed so hard that he ended up spitting liquid. Even then he continued to laugh until he was doubled over, tears coming out of his eyes, and he was slapping the top of the table with one open hand, as if his mirth was so great that mere laughter alone was insufficient to express it.
I tried not to feel insulted.
Finally, when he’d managed to calm himself sufficiently so that he was only making the occasional small snorting noise, Dan pulled himself together enough to answer, “Fort, if I didn’t know you by now, I’d wonder whether your family was using you to encourage every fringe wannabe Thomas Paine in this territory so that they could eventually just get them all in one place and kill them.”
There was a long pause between the two of us while I stared at him and tried to process what he’d just said. It took me a minute to realize that there had been nothing really amused about the way he’d laughed earlier, and that he was actually deadly serious in what he’d just said.
“Shit,” I said, stunned. “You actually thought that for a while, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did,” Dan replied honestly. “For, like, the first two weeks. But if that’s the plan, you sure as hell don’t know it. You’re the real deal, a vampire bleeding heart.”
“Ooh, blood joke for the vampire. Funny, Dan. Real funny.” I was grumping mostly because it was hard to fully respond to what he was saying while at the same time dealing with the dissonance of being handed an entirely new lens to view our first month of cohabitation through. No wonder he’d seemed so cranky and closemouthed at first.
“Okay, that one was a little bad,” Dan admitted. “But seriously. No one wants to be the one to stick their neck out. And if the elves go down, or the bears, or whoever, no group wants to get pulled down with them. So the ghouls worry about ghoul business, and everyone else can go get burned.”
“That can’t be what everyone thinks,” I insisted.
“But enough of them do.” He pulled the last cookie out of the bag and gestured at me with it. “That’s what you don’t get, Fort, and it’s why the Occupy movement fizzled. Most people are getting along okay with the status quo, and they aren’t going to rock the boat.”
I thought about what my mother had openly discussed the day before, and wondered how much longer that status quo was going to continue to exist. Prudence’s idea of a great territory, which I’d been subjected to at length during my mother’s New Year’s State of the Territory financial review, was one where instead of it being vampire-only on Aquidneck Island, it was vampire-only for the entirety of my mother’s territory. I couldn’t help wondering how well avoiding fraternization would reward the races in the territory at that point. “Yeah . . . but what happens if the water suddenly gets choppy and the boat flips over anyway?”
Dan’s dark eyes were serious. “I guess that’s the question that would come up if a rogue wave came along,” he said quietly, and I knew that, beyond our tortured metaphor, we were both thinking about the same thing, but that neither of us was going to say it.
A loud knocking on the door broke the moment, and Suzume strolled in. I’d never given her a key, yet she had somehow acquired one on her own. I’d decided that it was in my own best interest not to investigate her sources too closely, so I hadn’t commented on it. Dan had very seriously proposed having the locks changed, but I’d pointed out that that would simply make it a fun challenge for her, and we’d be completely out the cost of getting the locks switched the moment that she successfully acquired a new key.
Unlike me, Suze had the uncanny ability to look as good after five hours of sleep as most people could only dream to look after eight. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would’ve missed that slight hint of caution around her eyes, the forced brightness in the smile that she flashed as she said, “Looking good, Fort!” I wondered whether she was maintaining a facade to attempt to gaslight Dan, or whether she was testing the waters to see whether last night’s argument might’ve blown over like a midsummer squall. “Dan tied your tie, didn’t he?”
“I might’ve outsourced some aspects of my appearance, yes,” I acknowledged loftily, letting her set the tone for now. “But in an entirely managerial sense.”
“He made use of local artisanal talent,” Dan added.
I nodded. “This is an organic, farm-to-table tie knot.”
She laughed. “C’mon, we need to hit the road. We only got half an inch of powder last night, so the Scirocco will be fine.”
“You’ve got studded winter tires on your Audi, Suze. Why can’t we just take that?” I didn’t bother to hide how irked I felt. While it was my own financial choices that had resulted in the same all-season tires that had been on the Scirocco when I bought it, I wasn’t above coveting the awesome tires on Suze’s car. And as unreasonable as it might’ve been at the moment, I also wasn’t above taking some of the residual hurt over last night’s fight out onto exposing her Audi’s underbody to the rock salt undoubtedly coating the Providence roads.
Suze made a show of running a hand along her temple to carefully adjust any strands of hair that had escaped from her perfectly constructed braided bun—though of course there weren’t any. “My Audi is sitting where it belongs—in my garage. Taka gave me a ride over this morning so that the road scuz can go where it belongs—on your car.” There was a slight narrowing of her eyes, a hint of a warning that she might not be happy with where we were right now, but that I shouldn’t expect any undue favors.
“And on Taka’s car, apparently,” I said wryly, privately accepting the message.
“Taka leases, so she doesn’t give a shit about what happens to that car, short of it being hit by a meteor.” Suze paused to consider. “Okay, actually a meteor would probably be okay as well, since I think that counts with the insurance as an act of God. Plus, as long as she wasn’t in the car at the time, that would just be awesome.”
Dan shook his head and picked his stack of flash cards back up. “Have a great day, guys.”
My one good formal coat was not meant for Rhode Island in January, so I did what guys almost always do in the winter, which was to pull on my regular winter coat, a battered yet exceptionally toasty parka. Once we got to the venue, my plan was to leave my coat in the car and just run the gauntlet inside, trusting in my suit jacket to keep me from getting hypothermia on the way. Once inside, I knew, things would probably swing in my favor as the men walked around in comfort in suit jackets and the women shivered in their dresses and thin cardigans. Game, set, and match to the patriarchy.
As I pulled the door shut behind us, Suze looked up at me, the mask of normality that she’d put on in front of Dan dropping. There was worry there, and a lot of unhappiness—probably that I’d made her worry, but I didn’t think that that was all of it. Some of it, I thought, was for me.
“I’m sorry that it hurt you,” she said, so quickly that her words almost ran over one another. She spoke as if the words were an unpleasant medicine, and she twisted her face away for a moment, a hard frown pressing her dark eyebrows together, before focusing her eyes on me again.
I heard what she said, and I could feel what she hadn’t. “But you don’t understand why it hurt me,” I said, filling in the blank.
There was a pause, and her mouth twisted, real anxiety curling the sides of her mouth down, her eyes darting away from me. A long silence passed. “Can’t it be enough that I’m sorry?” she said finally, quietly, her shoulders slumping almost in despair.
I looked at her, weighing it—that brutally honest apology, with all its flaws and gaps, almost beautiful in its truthful insufficiency. She didn’t understand—and she was admitting that she couldn’t.
When I’d told her that I wanted to date her, she warned me that she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, change who she was. I’d told her that I’d known that, but still wanted her. For the first time I was really faced with those words—had I been honest? Had I meant it? Or had I meant it, but been wrong?
Everything felt balanced for a moment, and I don’t think either of us breathed. I considered those questions.
“I don’t know if it’ll always be enough,” I said, trying to give her the same painful honesty she’d offered me. “But it’s enough now. It’s enough for today, and for tomorrow.”
A small smile curled at her mouth, and her dark eyes brightened. And then she was leaning up and I was leaning down, and that kiss was a relief like a sip of water in the middle of a heat wave in July.
* * *
On the way down, we passed Mrs. Bandyopadyay, who was bundled up with the kinds of layers normally associated with treks in the Yukon. Her bichon frise, Buttons, was snapped into his own insulated Lands’ End doggie coat, with matching booties on all four paws and a rather jaunty hat. They were beginning a slow promenade down the stairs, and I immediately stopped. Mrs. Bandyopadyay was somewhere in her upper eighties and increasingly delicate, and even the sight of her navigating the hall steps during the winter was enough to make anyone cringe, and taking Buttons for walks seemed like an invitation for breaking a hip and dying of exposure. I knew for a fact that she’d promised her adult children that she’d have Buttons do his business on pee pads during the winter—mostly because at some point all three of them had cornered me in the hallway to beg me about trying to prevent their mother from walking Buttons when the weather was bad. And by bad, they really meant “before May.”
“Mrs. Bandyopadyay,” I said, and at the sound of my voice she gave me a guilty look—she hadn’t seen me earlier because of the size of her hat’s wool earflaps, which restricted any periphery vision, “if Buttons needs to be walked, you know that Dan or I are always happy to do it.”
“I know,” she replied, sounding fretful, “but I hate imposing. And I saw Daniel coming back from his run and considered asking, but you know how Buttons gives him trouble.”
I did, actually. For a ten-pound dog that seemed composed primarily of white and apricot fluff, Buttons had a very definite idea about who was in charge—and that was Buttons. Even now, dressed in his ridiculous getup, he was emitting a very seriously pissed-off growl at Suzume, who was responding by completely refusing to acknowledge his existence and exhibiting a demeanor of icy disdain. If Mrs. Bandyopadyay hadn’t been around, though, I wouldn’t have put it past Suze to change forms and throw down with Buttons to prove, once and for all, who was the top canid in this building. Buttons was probably the one area that Suze and Dan could agree on.
I knew for a fact that Suze had, in fox form, peed in every one of Buttons’s favorite spots, just to piss him off. It was kind of hard to figure out how I was supposed to respond to that one. Discussions of relationship boundaries, after all, so rarely involved actual urination boundaries.
“I don’t mind walking him,” I said. “And I used to walk dogs for a living—Buttons is no comparison to walking a Great Dane.”
That seemed to reassure her, and she handed over the leash and went back inside, presumably to start what had to be a half-hour process of delayering herself.
“No comparison, huh?” Suze asked as we continued downstairs, Buttons alternating between hauling on the leash so hard that he nearly choked himself and wheeling around to run at my ankles threateningly, mouth open to reveal his sharp little teeth.
“None at all,” I agreed. Paprika the Great Dane might’ve been a hundred and eighty pounds, but he’d been a dream to walk, with the only challenge coming when the fierce desire to be cuddled became too much for him, and he would attempt to rub his massive head against me, occasionally with enough enthusiasm to almost knock me over. “I would take ten Paprikas over one Buttons.”
Suze took the keys over to warm up the Scirocco and get the de-icing process going while I gave Buttons a quick morning constitutional. The little demon showed his gratitude for his successfully empty bladder by giving the leash a hard and unexpected yank just as we walked over a section of black ice, and I slipped and went down hard on my left knee. Then, while I was still cursing the heavens over that, Buttons took the opportunity to nip my right hand, hard enough to draw blood.
I used the first aid kit in the car to patch up my hand while Suze carried Buttons back to his owner by the scruff of his neck. When she arrived back at the car, I was examining the damage to my knee—I had a hell of a bruise and it was throbbing, but at least I’d somehow managed to avoid tearing my best pair of formal slacks—which was very lucky, since my second-best pair was my last pair, and those had a huge hole ripped in the right cuff that needed a tailor’s attention before they could be worn out in public again.
Suze shook her head at me. “Fort, why don’t you leave the good deeds to Jaison? He’s the only one apart from Mrs. Bandyopadyay who even likes that little shit of a dog.”
“That’s because Buttons likes him,” I muttered. It was typical—everyone liked Jaison, even Satan’s own bichon frise. “Besides, better me than Mrs. Bandyopadyay. Can you imagine that poor woman stepping on that ice? It would be like you and my best mixing bowl all over again. Nothing but wreckage.”
Suze snorted in amusement as I turned the engine over to start the car, patiently waiting through its initial sluggishness. Mechanically fuel-injected engines didn’t like the cold. “Mrs. Bandyopadyay apologizes for Buttons, by the way. She says that using the pee pads makes him cranky.”
“Breathing oxygen makes that dog cranky.”
She ignored me. “I told her about all the black ice, and said that maybe she should just try walking Buttons in the hallway.”
I paused in the act of merging into traffic and stared at her. “You what?”
“She was a little hesitant at first, but then I reminded her about what a dick your landlord was about fixing her stove that time she had a gas leak, and she seemed to warm up to the idea. She agreed that karma might need a little assistance in this situation.”
“Suze, I really don’t want to have to be walking through dog piss and shit every time I go home. Tell me that she’s not actually convinced.”
“Oh, stop worrying so much,” Suze said. “Besides, your landlord hasn’t cleaned that hallway any time this decade. I doubt you’ll even notice the dog piss, and Mrs. Bandyopadyay is pretty confident that she can use the pooper scooper to get his crap off the carpet without having to bend over too much. You know, ’cause of her back problems.”
“Suze, I say this from a place of deep and abiding affection: I’d rather think about the odds that the dog bite on my hand gets infected and gangrenous than about the ways that you’re trying to help out right now.”
Silence reigned for half the drive over to the metsän kunigas ceremony, at which point I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts to get her a salted caramel hot chocolate—a beverage that to me made my taste buds attempt ritualized suicide, yet always seemed to entirely satiate that portion of Suzume that was basically a hummingbird. It was apparently judged to be a worthy peace offering, and Suze was back to peppiness as we arrived at the East Providence Elks Lodge. I was almost entirely certain that the metsän kunigas had lied in some way on their rental application for today’s ceremony. Or this was a much looser fraternal order than I had previously been led to believe.
I mentioned this observation to Suze as I cruised through the overfull parking lot. She smiled beatifically in response. “The bears had a sixty-thousand-dollar bill to pay to my family for disguising the bodies of Matias Kivela and Peter Utrio from the police. Then we hit them with another thirty thousand to fake a suicide for their murdering psychopath of a cousin. My understanding is that Gil and Dahlia were practicing some austerity measures with this place.”
“That’s terrible, Suze. Why are you so happy about that?”
“Because, unlike you, I believe in the beauty of capitalism. I am proud to be an American, while you are showing suspiciously Canadian elements of socialistic inclination.”
I couldn’t restrain my laugh, and she gave a satisfied smile, then leaned over to give me a salt, caramel, and chocolate-flavored kiss, which managed to taste better than I would’ve expected. “Don’t get so worried, Fort. You have the financial paperwork on the Kivela family—their company is in great shape, and after we set up that suicide front for Carmen, Matias’s assets were able to get through probate and end up with his sister. They’re selling the house to another of the metsän kunigas, and once it goes through, they’ll be able to pay off those lines of home interest credit that both of them pulled to cover our bill.”
“Dan says that groups in this territory avoid fraternization. But you always seem to know plenty about what people outside the kitsune are up to. Why is that?”
Suze leaned over to tap the tip of my nose affectionately. But despite the playfulness of her gesture, her voice was completely serious. “Because this isn’t fraternization, Fort. It’s keeping a cautious eye on all the idiots around us who suffer under the weighty burden of not being foxes, and who therefore cannot be trusted to act in a rational manner.” She looked around the lot that we were currently taking a third circuit around—while I was sure that it was large enough to comfortably fit all of its fraternal member automobiles during the summer, it was suffering from the typical winter issue of snow removal. Their plow service had been pushing all the snow to the back third of the lot, which at this point had consolidated into an unmovable edifice of icy and very grimy snow, looking solid enough that I probably could’ve ascended it with an ice hammer and some pitons. It definitely wasn’t going anywhere until at least late spring, and in the meantime had severely reduced the parking options. And given that we’d arrived after all the metsän kunigas, there was simply nowhere for me to stick the Scirocco. Even the handicapped spots and the fire lane had already been filled with cars. Suze gave a decisive gesture. “Now I think it’s time to stop dillydallying here and abuse your power the way it was meant to be abused—park one of these fuckers in. Preferably by the door. It’s as cold as Frosty the Snowman’s scrotum out there.”
There was no other way around it, so I ended up parking in a trio of Saabs. The bears were of Finnish extract, and clearly had a preference for Nordic cars. “I’m pretty sure that Frosty the Snowman was never constructed for anatomical correctness, Suze.”
“He was when my cousins and I used to make him.”
* * *
My introduction to the metsän kunigas had begun under extremely poor circumstances, when Suze and I got called in to investigate the murder of the then-karhu, Matias. Today’s ceremony was to formalize the passing of the title to his nephew, Gil. Gil hadn’t been a popular choice in my family—he was a hot-blooded guy, intensely devoted to his family and the well-being of the bears in the territory, and wasn’t afraid to be critical of what he saw as flaws in the way that the Scotts controlled and ruled the metsän kunigas. But his older sister, Dahlia, who’d been my brother’s pick to inherit, had supported her brother over herself.
When they greeted me at the door, I was struck once again by what a contrast the siblings presented. Dahlia was all poised, smooth control, her bobbed hair sleek and carefully presented, and her expressions so tightly tamped down that Vegas card champions would’ve envied her poker face. Gil, however, was an inch shorter than his sister and built like a wrestler, all boxy muscle, with a face that showed every emotion that went through his head. When Gil was pissed at you, you knew it—usually because he was bellowing at you. And when he liked you, there was no guessing at it.
Since Suze and I had helped him save the lives of both his sister and his husband, in addition to supporting his bid for the title of karhu, we were apparently in his good books right now. And I learned that when he greeted me with a hug that strained the integrity of my rib cage and lifted me several inches off the ground. Since I hadn’t realized before this that we were on hugging terms (and the term “bear hug” had never been more appropriate), it was somewhat of a surprise. I was feeling distinctly rumpled when I was finally released from his embrace.
“I feel incredibly welcomed,” I said honestly. The wide smile across Gil’s face was infectious, and I couldn’t help returning it. Beside him, Dahlia settled for a more sedate handshake.
“Don’t even think about it, teddy bear,” Suze warned Gil as he turned to her.
“You don’t have to worry, Suzume,” Gil replied, leaning in to give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I don’t like you as much as Fortitude.”
“For which you have my eternal gratitude.”
I shook my head and greeted Gil’s husband, Kevin. The Kivela siblings had inherited their Mexican father’s coloration, and it was kind of funny how the blond, pale Kevin matched their mother’s Finnish looks so closely and in fact blended right into the majority of the group. There were two groups of werebears in my mother’s territory, the Providence group and another in northern Maine. Both traced their roots back to an original community of Finnish bears who had petitioned my mother for entry over a century ago.
Among the group of conservatively dressed people standing around the open area of the Elks Lodge interior, a blend of the werebears and several human spouses, which I found impossible to differentiate just from a glance, were two bear cubs, incongruously rolling around with each other in the pursuit of a bright green rubber ball. All the people standing around them, nursing cups of coffee and the occasional portion of bagel, simply ignored the spectacle of the two cubs, stepping aside when the two and their ball barreled past them, and at most giving them slightly amused glances.
“Anni and Linnea,” Gil supplied, following my glance. “My nieces.”
“I’d never seen them in their other forms before,” I said politely, hoping that the bears used similar terminology to the foxes.
“It’s not usual,” Dahlia said quickly, surprising me in her emphasis. After all, whenever I’d seen the younger kitsune, Yuzumi’s three-year-old triplets, they spent more time in fur than skin. I’d spent more than my fair share of time trying to discourage Riko from gnawing her sharp white canines into my shoes.
Gil must’ve seen something in my face, because he explained, “To become a bear is a gift that comes with our blood, but it is a learned skill. The part of the ceremony that is private is conducted as bears. As members of the bloodline of the ruling house, Anni and Linnea needed to be there, but changing is more difficult for them, and it will be a few more hours before they can return to their natural forms.”
“They look like they’re having a fantastic time,” I said, while beside me Suze gave a small, smug sniff. It never took much to reassert a kitsune’s belief in her inherent superiority to other species, and apparently this more than qualified.
The ceremony started soon after that, with everyone pitching in to set up an array of folding chairs. I quickly realized why this assignment had been characterized by my family as a punishment for my choice in supporting Gil as karhu—and it hadn’t been because of the early start time. The ceremony was a long series of blessings being read, then protracted periods of solemn reflection by all participants. Worse yet, the blessings were all in Finnish—which, unfortunately, none of the current crop of metsän kunigas actually spoke. Apparently the last person who had a working grasp of the language had been one elderly bear in his nineties who had recently passed away. Much of the ceremony was actually achieved thanks to the forethought of Gil and Dahlia’s grandfather, who had, at some point in the nineteen sixties, committed the ceremony text to a series of slide projections with accompanying audiotape. While I gave him points for the preservation of historical tradition, I also could’ve lived without three hours of staticky droning in a completely incomprehensible language, punctuated with barked orders of “Advance slide!” The slides themselves were simply the text of what he was reading, which was useful only in the sense that I could visually identify that I had no idea where each word began or ended.
As the visiting dignitary, I was seated in the front, beside the Kivela family, so there was no escape. Suzume was no help at all, since after the initial ten minutes she excused herself to take a bathroom break. She never returned from that break, which might have concerned me, except Anni and Linnea were suddenly joined in their ball-chasing fun by a black fox.
When the final tape of the recording was finally at its end, everyone roused themselves from their glazed-eyed stupor long enough to make polite golf claps. While I was shaking hands with Ilona and several of the other older bears, Suzume appeared at my side, again neatly put together in her navy wool dress and smiling politely, giving no indication at all that we’d all seen her pass the time during the ceremony by, at one point, stealing the ball from the little girls, jumping to the top of the stack of still-folded metal chairs, and taunting them into climbing for it, with entirely predictable results.
Gil made his way over to us. “I’m actually thinking that one of my first proposals will be to translate the ceremony into English.”
“That is so Vatican Two of you, Gil,” Suze said.
“Well, it’s either that or have the film converted to DVD, and I’m not sure that that’s something I can do in good conscience. After all, someday Anni or Linnea will become karhu. Having to sit through Grandpa’s presentation is not exactly the legacy I’d like to pass forward.”
“You’re a good uncle.” I hoped that my level of fervency wasn’t rude, but just the thought of anyone having to sit through that again was horrifying.
With perfect timing, lunch was announced. It was a huge potluck affair, and I was able to fill my plastic plate multiple times and I still hadn’t even managed to taste half of the dishes. The bears were apparently very serious about food. As I swallowed my third smoked salmon hors d’oeuvre, I noted to Suze that, as terrible as the ceremony had been, the food was almost good enough to make up for it.
She gave me a sly smile. “I see that you enjoy eating like a bear, then.” I frowned, then looked back at the tables of food and realized what she was referring to—every dish contained either fish or berries. I shushed her as she snickered.
Toward the end of the afternoon I was sitting off to the side of the group, making conversation with Kevin about his Web design business while Suze applied herself to working the room, probably collecting scraps of noteworthy information to bring back to her grandmother, the White Fox. Gil made his way over to me, accepting congratulations from a few other bears with polite nods, but homing in on me with all the subtlety of Bullet Bill in Super Mario Brothers.
“Let me guess,” I said when Gil parked himself in the chair next to me. “You’d like to have a chat about some territory issues.”
“I promise to at least keep it a friendly chat,” he said, with a little “what can you do?” shrug. Kevin gave a smothered laugh and headed back to the crowd. Suzume caught my eye from where she was chatting with a few other women in their early thirties, and lifted an inquiring eyebrow, clearly wanting to know whether I wanted her to come over. I gave a quick shake of my head, and she returned to her conversation.
“So this conversation is going to be fox free,” Gil noted. “I’m flattered.”
“Gil, you really should ask your sister for some pointers on diplomacy. And I’m not even someone who usually wants all the fluffy language and talking around a subject.”
“That’s why Dahlia runs the business and I just go out to check out claims,” Gil said. “We each have our strengths. And you know that I’ll never stop being grateful that you and Suzume helped me save Kevin and my sister, but I think that maybe it’s time for a little more plain dealing between the metsän kunigas and the Scotts.” He held up a hand when I initially began to respond, saying, “I’m not pushing today, Fort, I’m really not.”
“I notice that emphasis on ‘today,’” I replied. “But I have to tell you that my sister wasn’t happy when I supported you as karhu. None of my family was. So you need to be really careful, and really cautious. Please”—I dropped my voice almost to a mutter—“please don’t give them a reason to want you dead.”
Gil’s dark eyes were steady. “We both know that they already want me dead. Not actively, but enough that I’m certainly not going to let myself cross paths with Prudence Scott any time soon.” He shifted. “But you were on the front lines with what happened—you saw the way that Carmen planned to exploit Scott control to get what she wanted. If the bears had more self-governance—”
“Gil,” I cautioned.
He frowned, irritated. “Fine, okay, we’ll use different words. After what happened with Carmen, I think it would be in everyone’s best interest if the bears had more of an ability to handle and investigate more problems internally.”
“My sister is not happy that even the kitsune have those rights right now. I’m not sure that either she, or even my brother, will be overly enthused at the bears requesting them.” I sighed and rubbed my hand hard over my head, forgetting for a second how much gel I’d applied that morning. The result was a disturbing crunchiness under my palm, and a very real feeling that I probably didn’t want to know what I looked like right now. However, my hair was very much the least of my problems at the moment. After the issue with the succubi, the last thing I wanted was to have to get into another discussion with Prudence and Chivalry—yet from the increasingly stubborn look on Gil’s face, that was exactly what I was heading toward. And even worse, I agreed with Gil. Carmen had been relying on having a vampire roll in to investigate her father’s death who had no interest in finding anything other than a quick and easy target for blame, and had come closer to getting exactly that than any of us really wanted to think about right now, given that her plan would’ve resulted in Dahlia’s death, and quite probably Gil’s as well.
“Listen,” I said, “what about this—I go to my family and suggest that a specific member of the metsän kunigas is assigned to be an assistant or an attaché, or whatever, whenever the Scotts are dealing with bear affairs. That person not only advises us about what’s going on inside the community, and gives us feedback about what might work or not work, but also keeps you informed about what’s going on. Now, I can’t make any promises, because I have to sell this to my family. But this way you’re not in the dark on what we’re doing, and you know that at least you guys have a voice in the room, even if right now it’s just in an advisory capacity.”
It clearly wasn’t what Gil had been hoping for, but at the same time I could see that he was weighing that against his likelihood of getting anything better, and realizing that that was pretty much nil. Which obviously didn’t make him any happier about it, but with a small grimace he nodded. “Okay, that’s okay as a first step.”
I heard his emphasis on the last two words, and couldn’t help sighing internally. Standing between my family and Gil was like being in King’s Quest VI during the crushing ceiling trap scene. Two unyielding surfaces and one squishy person in the middle.
There was a brief pause, and then the unhappiness on Gil’s face was replaced by worry. I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I knew even before he started talking what Gil was going to ask about. “Fort, I’m sure you know that there are a lot of rumors right now. Rumors about your mother . . . and her health.”
He looked at me, and I could see, for just a second, just how terrified he was.
I paused. Maybe the smart thing was to keep quiet, to keep family business to the family, but we’d been through some stuff together. Maybe Gil would never be the kind of person who I could really feel comfortable around, or have a real friendship with, but I owed him something.
I leaned closer to Gil, and, very quietly, so quietly that even he would have to strain to hear, I whispered, “I don’t know what the rumors are, Gil, not for sure. But things are changing. I think things are going to change fast.”
Gil shuddered, just once, and his mouth pressed into a thin, pained line. He nodded quickly, then clapped me hard on the shoulder with one broad palm.
* * *
Back in the car, Suze immediately cranked up the heat to full, threw her heels into the backseat, and started wiggling out of her panty hose. Given that she was sitting in the passenger seat of a German compact car, that required near-contortion levels of wiggling.
“You know, we’re going to be at your sister’s place in less than twenty minutes,” I noted. “I’m sure they’d let you change in their bathroom.”
Completely ignoring all rules of safe driving, Suze threw her balled-up panty hose at my head. Since panty hose doesn’t exactly throw well, it mostly ended up draped around my shoulders. “Women’s formal wear should be classified as cruel and inhumane between the dates of November first and April thirtieth.” She pulled a pair of wool socks out of her purse and yanked them on, then took off her seat belt and started rummaging in the backseat for her bag of spare clothing.
After a quick glance to make sure that I wasn’t in danger of hitting any other cars if I took my eyes off the road, I glanced to my right to contemplate the sight of Suze’s rear draped over the center console, her wool dress still rucked up to her waist after the removal of the panty hose. Her dress must’ve been thick enough that she didn’t have panty-line concerns, because her underpants today were cotton hip-huggers, decorated liberally with daisies. I wondered whether she fully appreciated the extent to which the sight of her underpants consistently improved my day. Perhaps that effect would eventually begin to fade with familiarity, but I was willing to continue my exposure to her underpants to test that theory.
“You could always have worn dress slacks, you know,” I said mildly.
Her immediate response was both pithy, foul, and anatomically unlikely. She wiggled back into her seat, now in possession of her duffel bag, which she began rummaging through for clothing as she continued her retort to my suggestion. “Have you seen how good my legs look in this dress? Wearing slacks would’ve been a crime against humanity.”
I knew I was grinning like an idiot at her smug self-confidence, yet I couldn’t help it. “You do love your contradictions, Suze.”
“And don’t you forget it, man friend,” she said as she tugged on the fleece-lined pants that were apparently her reward for the thermal sacrifice her legs had made for the sake of the human race.
Twenty minutes later we were parked in the driveway of the compact town house that her twin sister, Keiko, shared with her boyfriend, Farid. Suze had completed her outfit change in the car and, now comfortably ensconced in pants and a sweater, began hassling me about the moments I was spending trying to attain a modicum of her own clothing comfort.
“Come on, Fort, get the lead out,” she grumbled.
Ignoring her, I continued loosening my tie gently, doing as little damage to the knot as possible, until there was enough slack for me to ease it over my head.
“Oh, you’re not serious.” Suze’s expression made it clear that she already knew the answer but felt the need to make the statement anyway.
“Completely,” I assured her. “I’m going to get as many uses out of this knot as I can.” Technically I supposed that I could track down the same YouTube video that Dan had learned it from, but despite all the aphorisms about teaching a man to fish, I had no intention of leaving the frozen fish aisle. “Also, I’m visiting your sister for the umpteenth Friday night in a row. I’d expect a little more buttering up.” I knew that I could’ve made an allusion to the complete lack of make-up sex that had occurred since our fight, but things felt too delicate to go there.
“I am buttering you up,” she insisted. “That’s why I’m not pointing out the stain on your shirt.”
“Shit.” I’d forgotten about what the tie had been covering up. I pondered it for a second, then shrugged. This would certainly not be the first time that I’d shown up somewhere in less than adequate attire. If I listened to Chivalry, that would basically be the story of my life.
With a long-suffering sigh, Suze dug again into her duffel, then fished out a rumpled wad of dark green cotton. I stared.
“Is that one of my sweaters?” I asked. She nodded, pleased. “Not that I’m not grateful, Suze, but . . . when did you stick my sweater into your duffel? You weren’t even in my bedroom today.”
Her dark eyes gleamed as she preened. “My ways are mysterious.”
I pulled off my stained button-down and exchanged it gratefully for the sweater, which was significantly warmer. As I tugged it all the way down, though, I gave Suze’s pleased expression a sidelong look. “You climbed the tree and broke into my room this morning, didn’t you?”
Her smile widened.
“You climbed a tree, broke into my room, kidnapped one of my sweaters . . . all to surprise me with—oh, shit, what else did you do?” I couldn’t help feeling impressed—some girlfriends would’ve responded to a fight like that by bringing over baked goods or suggesting kinkier-than-usual sex. Mine engaged in third-floor burglary.
“I hate to ruin a surprise.” She leaned closer to me. “But you hadn’t logged off of your computer, so I might’ve spent a little time doing some research. Your Amazon account might have some confusion about your preferences for a while.” A quick kiss, then that foxy grin. “Now let’s go in. Farid is sure to have the heat cranked.”
“At least he’s got that much going for him,” I muttered. Unlike my own apartment, with my landlord’s Professor Coldheart approach to interior heating, Farid took a very heavy hand on the thermostat whenever guests were coming over. Apparently his mother had emphasized hospitality pretty heavily when he was a kid, because the inside of that town house was never less than seventy-two degrees whenever we went over for dinner. It was pretty nice, actually, though when I’d mentioned it once to Suze she just gave a little sniff and said that, since they had natural gas heat rather than oil, it wasn’t a big sacrifice.
When Suze first addressed the idea of a weekly visit to her sister’s place, I’d been pretty surprised. Firstly, Keiko didn’t really like me. Secondly, Suze didn’t approve of Farid—the kitsune had pretty strict rules when it came to romantic relationships with humans. Casual dating was okay, but live-in relationships were completely forbidden. When it came to starting a family, the approved methodology was the one that led to Hoshi’s genetic screening process at Redbones. Keiko was her grandmother’s chosen heir to lead the kitsune someday down the line, yet she was in the midst of breaking some of the biggest rules by not just living with Farid, but also making him aware of her pregnancy with their baby.
For now, Suzume had been convinced, albeit very reluctantly, to stay quiet about Keiko’s master plan of keeping Farid in the dark about both his wife and daughter’s true natures indefinitely. Operating under the theory that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, she was keeping their grandmother out of the loop, planning only to make her big reveal once she had a few years of success to show for herself. The modern kitsune woman, Keiko was trying to have it all—and a big part of that meant lying to Farid.
Which was where these weekly visits came in. During one dinner party of the damned, I’d actually ended up on Keiko’s side in convincing Suzume that the best thing she could do, despite her very sizable reservations regarding her sister’s plan, was to help keep the situation stable. So, in Suzume’s eyes, this meant that the whole situation was my fault. Having a good sense of timing, Suzume had informed me about both my culpability and the proposed weekly visits during the first month that we were having sex, right after she’d dropped her pants. No surprise, I’d agreed to everything she proposed.
Also—still worth it.
The dinner visits were to give Farid the mistaken impression that he was seeing a lot of Keiko’s family. She’d met Farid’s parents and extended family, and was apparently a regular guest at Amini family events, so it was necessary for her to fool him into thinking that there was an equal exchange. Both sisters had heavily downplayed exactly how extensive and local their family group was, and by the institution of weekly double date nights with me and Suze, poor Farid probably never really got the chance to realize that he’d never met any member of Keiko’s family beyond her twin sister.
I also knew that Suze was considering the possibility of hiring paid actors to pose as extended family at big events in the baby’s life, when it would be necessary to have a presence beyond just a sister, and using their fox tricks to smooth over any rough edges. I’d thought that it was a terrible, terrible idea, but I’d acknowledged that it at least showed that Suze was committing more to helping out her sister.
My own sacrifice of two months of Friday evenings had, I felt, been somewhat undervalued by the Hollis women. In some ways it hadn’t been too bad—for the first month, we’d gotten into a regular habit of eating out and then going bowling. Why Suze and Keiko had decided that bowling was the key to establishing a working cover of family togetherness I’d never entirely figured out—Farid and I mostly found ourselves in the position of talking the twins out of hurling the bowling balls at each other. There had been a certain excitement to those evenings—as much as any evening in rented shoes can really be called exciting—but we’d had to scrap those outings after Keiko’s pregnancy advanced sufficiently that her center of gravity started shifting, leading to just a weekly dinner and board game evening.
There was a brief flurry of greetings, as well as the near-ritualized feeling of Keiko’s belly to see if the baby would grace us with a kick, as we entered into the town house, already smelling mouthwateringly like pork cooking in the oven. At six and a half months along, Keiko was definitely visibly pregnant now, though not quite at the waddling stage. As I put my right hand on her belly, wishing that this weird temporary time-out of usual personal space and boundary rules would feel somewhat less like I was just standing there with my hand on the protruding stomach of a woman who, frankly, I didn’t know particularly well, Farid noticed the Band-Aid on my hand. It was only partially covering the bite that Buttons had given me that morning, but I still wondered if his hawklike vision for injuries was a result of being a surgical resident, or some intrinsic sharpening of the skill in preparation for fatherhood.
Either way, no sooner had I said the words dog bite than I found myself dragged into the downstairs bathroom and subjected to a full antibacterial scrub.
“Honey, can you watch the ham?” he called out the door.
I was gritting my teeth against the distinct agony of having a hospital-grade sponge-brush covered in iodine ground enthusiastically against a raw wound. “You realize,” I gritted out as he scrubbed, “that they’re probably just standing there staring at the ham, right? I mean, neither of them really does much cooking.”
“You’ve got such a good sense of humor, Fort,” Farid said with a grin.
Keiko appeared in the doorway. From the expression of her face, she not only had heard my comment and correctly identified that it had not been meant as a joke, but was now pissed off because she’d been coming over to ask Farid about what exactly he meant by watching the ham. Unfortunately for me, her vengeance was close at hand. “Dog bites can get infected so easily,” she said, her voice making a good approximation of real sympathy as long as you ignored the gleam in her eyes. “I sure hope you’re being thorough, sweetie.”
“Absolutely,” Farid said enthusiastically. “I’ll do a second scrub, just to be sure.”
“That’s great. Absolutely fabulous.” I dug my free fist into my leg to try to distract myself from that second sponge-brush coming toward my hand. I knew that Farid was being careful about my health, and I couldn’t bear to try to brush him off—even though my odds of getting an infection were pretty low. Since the beginning of my transition, I’d healed faster than I ever had before, and for the first time in years had managed to remain unaffected by flu season.
Suze poked her head over her sister’s shoulder. “Farid, how much of the hospital has ended up in your medicine cabinet?”
“Just getting prepared for the baby,” he assured her. Then, looking over at what had probably started as a linen closet, and now consisted entirely of various bottles, ointments, bandage wrappings, and even a couple of bags of saline that had to have started their lives on the shelves of a supply closet in his workplace, he gave a sheepish grin. It was a grin that transformed looks that even I had to admit were damn attractive into the Middle Eastern version of Ryan Gosling. “Maybe a few things found their way home,” he admitted.
After he’d finally judged my wound to be fully sterilized, and had been talked out of putting in just one or two stitches to help things heal faster, Farid gave me a wrap with gauze and medical tape that did turn out to be a significant improvement on my Band-Aid approach. Not that it in any way was worth the throbbing in my much-abused hand, but I was trying to focus on silver linings. Particularly since the ham had ended up overcooking while Farid was distracted.
“The timer went off,” I muttered to Suze over dinner. “Why the hell didn’t you take the ham out?”
“That timer could’ve been indicating many things,” she replied with a sniff.
I just shook my head. “Hey, Farid, what game are we playing tonight?”
Across the table, where he’d been surreptitiously trying to sneak more kale onto Keiko’s plate, Farid perked up. “I actually have one that you guys haven’t played yet.”
“You mean we’re not going for a repeat of last week’s game of Settlers of Cataan?” I asked.
“Those dice had it coming,” Keiko said darkly, her eyes narrowing. “It flies in the face of basic probability for the number eleven to be rolled that often.”
Suze nodded and set her wineglass down decisively. “And nine didn’t come up at all. Keiko was completely justified.”
Farid rubbed his partner’s back soothingly. “Those were a lot of obscenities that ended up getting screamed at the dice,” he noted. “Maybe that was kind of a peek at how things are going to be in the delivery room, but one look was enough.” I nodded in agreement. The Cataan Incident, as I’d referred to it to Dan and Jaison, had definitely been interesting to witness, but wasn’t exactly something that I wanted to sign up for a second round of. Farid continued blithely. “So tonight’s competitive delight will be Small World.” Keiko began a query, and Farid, clearly anticipating her question, said, “Yes, you can attack each other. And no, the dice involvement is minimal.” Both sisters looked pleased.
“Good plan,” I complimented him, and meant it. I’d played the game before—Small World was what the result would be if Risk was put in a blender with Tolkien, and then a few adjustments made to avoid infringement lawsuits.
Suze and I cleared the plates and acted like good dinner guests by cleaning up while Farid began setting up the game on the coffee table in the living room. Keiko, feeling the pressure of her gestating offspring on her bladder, took what was easily her twentieth bathroom break of the evening. I was rinsing the dishes when Suze nudged me lightly with her shoulder and, as the sound of the running water prevented anyone from overhearing us, muttered to me, “Try not to get too attached, Fort.”
“To dirty dishes?” I asked, deliberately misunderstanding her. “Well, I admit that it does take me back to more than a few line items on my résumé.”
This time her nudge had significantly more force to it. I was reminded of those first-person accounts of shark attacks, where first the shark deliberately bumps into the person to see if he can fight back. “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, drying the dish that I’d handed her with extra vigor. “Nice dinners and board games aren’t going to make Keiko’s plan work. This is going to end badly, and Farid is going to be the one to pay the price.”
I pushed the faucet, increasing the amount of water coming out, then glared at Suze. “Don’t talk to me like I haven’t seen consequences,” I warned. “I’ve lost people because of the truth.”
“Then you should be on my side here,” she insisted. “Convince Keiko to pack her shit up and leave when Farid is at work. Denial of paternity, maybe slipping a few dollars to someone to fake a DNA test if he keeps pushing it, and Farid ends up with a broken heart and possibly some trust issues, but he gets away without physical damage.”
The anger that had been building up within me disappeared when I looked at Suze, really looked at her for a second, and realized what was going on. She’d been against Keiko’s plan from the beginning, but that had been because she’d been defending the rules her grandmother had laid down, and because she’d been trying to protect her sister.
“You’re starting to like him,” I said softly, and she turned her face away, a few strands of hair that had managed to work their way loose after a day of being tucked away in her braided bun flicking over her shoulder. And, because it was the truth, I said, “I like him too, Suze. I didn’t really want to, but I do.”
“Then help me convince Keiko.” Suze’s expression was deliberately blank, covering up what she was thinking.
I finished rinsing the last of the plates and handed it to her. As I wiped my hands with the spare dish towel, I turned around and leaned against the countertop. The small eat-in kitchen had been designed to feel less restrictive by cutting an overlarge entryway arch instead of a standard doorway, and through that opening I had a great view of the rest of the claustrophobically tight first floor. Farid had the game already set up, a small, pleased smile on his face as he made sure that the brightly colored board was perfectly arranged so that everyone had the best possible view of the action, and there were little piles of point tokens at each separate place. Keiko had emerged from the bathroom, and was sitting on the couch across from where he knelt on the floor, having taken the most awkward playing position without making any kind of fuss about it. She was smiling at him, listening as he spoke and pointed to various portions of the board, probably explaining the rules.
“She loves him,” I said softly to Suze. “You know that. And she loves him so much that she’s going to risk everything to try to be with him.”
“You’re usually a lot more conservative than I am about risk,” she noted, making a show of moistening a sponge and running it lightly over the counter. “At least, about nonpersonal risk.”
“But isn’t what she’s trying for worth it? She wants to be with him, to give her daughter a father. And if we help her, if she can make it work—”
“Fort.” Her simple, calm tone cut me off. Once she was sure that she had my full attention, she placed her hands on my shoulders and pushed herself up onto her toes, looking me as full in the eyes as she could. After a second she leaned in and brushed a kiss against my mouth, then pulled back, her expression unreadable. When she spoke, her voice sounded regretful—a rare emotion from her. “When this ends the way I know that it will, I’ll be sorry. But you’ll be hurt. And I’m sorry about that.” She relaxed back to the flats of her feet, then reached over and turned the faucet off decisively. With a quick roll of her shoulders she pivoted around and sauntered into the living room, her voice and demeanor changing smoothly, perfectly, to fit the persona she was presenting for Farid’s benefit: a friendly, bubbly sister of his girlfriend, with no dangerous undercurrents or hidden knowledge. “Now, how do I win this game?” she demanded.
* * *
The temperature was plummeting when we said our good-byes and left the town house. A light coating of frost was already covering the windows of the Scirocco, and I paused for a moment to look up at the sky. It was cold enough to make the exposed skin of my face hurt, but the sky was still clear of snow. I pulled my keys out of my pocket, the fabric of my gloves making my movements clumsy as I sorted to find the one I needed; then I suddenly paused. There was something in the silent night air, something that I wasn’t hearing or feeling . . . something that I was smelling.
“Hey, Fort, any plans on opening the car door before I die of hypothermia?” Suze groused, but I waved a hand at her to be quiet. I closed my eyes and inhaled as deeply as I could through my nose, trying to figure out what that was. It was like a wisp of perfume in the air, tugging at me, almost daring me to identify it.
“Fort, what’s going on?” Suze’s voice was softer, and I heard the rustle of her coat and the crunch of old snow beneath her boots as she came around to stand beside me. My eyes were still closed as I tried to tease out that smell, but I felt her press her elbow against my side—not in a jabbing or demanding way, but in a way that reminded me that she was there, and grounded me.
Acting on instinct, I opened my mouth and inhaled, as if I could taste the smell. And I could—it was there, again, flirting against my senses, playing over my tongue. I could hear Suze begin sniffing, applying her own kitsune senses to the task—though her nose on two legs was no comparison to what it was on four legs, she still had a better sense of smell than any human, or even any vampire. There was only one thing that I’d ever been able to smell better than her, and the knowledge pinged into my brain and finally identified that drifting, perfumed aroma.
“Blood,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at Suze. “I smell human blood.”
She gave a small shake of her own head. “It’s too faint for me.” She nudged me lightly. “Follow it. Let’s see if you can track.”
I gave a small, startled snort. “I can’t track, Suze. I’m—”
“Let’s find out,” she repeated. Her voice was low and rich. “Just close your eyes and focus on the smell. I’ll make sure that you don’t bump into anything.” Her arm wrapped around my waist, a warm, comforting band. “See what you can find,” she urged, and I looked at her again for a long second, then closed my eyes.
The scent was still there, waiting for me. Trusting in Suze to keep me from falling on my ass, I began walking. It took me a few false starts to figure out how to follow it—I had to keep sampling the air over my tongue and using that to orient myself. I was lucky that it was a still night, with almost no breeze. We were away from student areas, and it was late enough that even on a Friday night, most of the residents of these brick town houses and apartments were tucked away in their beds. Once or twice Suze’s arm tightened around my waist, forcing me to stop and wait while a car passed by, and other times she used her body to nudge me around obstacles, but she stayed quiet and let me focus on the smell.
The blood smell was like warm cinnamon rolls from a bakery, or a steak searing away in a bed of chopped onions. It was a pot of warm stew bubbling on the stove on a cold day, or a fresh-cut slice of watermelon in the summer. The farther I walked, the more it urged me forward, every instinct in my body switching on and adding to my desire to follow it.
We’d walked a block before Suze tugged me to a stop and spoke for the first time. “There it is,” she said quietly. I opened my eyes to see her pointing down at the sidewalk we were standing on. Slowly I crouched down, my eyes picking out what she was gesturing to far better than they should’ve in the darkness, even with the improvements my vision had undergone since my transition began.
It was a little splash of blood, smaller than a dime, fresh and unnaturally bright against the cement. It drew my eyes and the smell, more delightful than a pan of frying bacon, filled my head. I had to shove my hands into my pockets hard to resist the urge to reach down and touch that little spot with my finger, because I knew that touching it would never be enough. I’d want to put it against my tongue, rub it against my gums and the inside of my cheeks. I’d want to roll in it. I pressed my hands into my pockets harder, and felt a seam rip.
“This is fucked up,” I said, louder than I needed to, but wanting to hear my own voice again, to force myself back into normal, back to the real me, not the tracking-a-drop-of-blood version of myself. “Is this what it’s going to be now? We just walked a block because of a dot of blood. Someone probably just slipped on the ice and skinned their knee. God help me if Jaison nicks himself shaving, or if Mrs. Bandyopadyay pokes herself with a needle while she’s quilting.”
“Hold off on the emo for a second there,” Suze said, then got down on her hands and knees. She pressed herself right down to the cement itself, brushing her face against the ground.
“I know what just happened here, Suze,” I snapped. “Someone lost a few drops of blood and I went haywire.”
She sat up fast, and with fox speed she smacked me in the shoulder, hard. “You dope,” she said affectionately, even as my shoulder throbbed. “You don’t even know what you’re smelling.” Suze hopped agilely to her feet, then extended a hand. “Come on, I’ve got the scent now, so we can move a little faster.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, linking my arm with hers as we resumed walking, though at a much different pace. We weren’t jogging, but we were at the speed just below that. Anyone looking at us would think that we were late for something.
“You humanoids have no idea how your own noses work,” Suze said as we sped along. “Even the werebears are barely better than our kits. You aren’t following blood because it’s blood. You’re following it because of what was going in it when it came out.”
“That made zero sense.”
She grinned at me, and the shape of Suze’s face in the darkness was suddenly longer, more vulpine. She could still pass for human, barely, but there was no hiding the gleam in eyes that seemed subtly different. “You’re a predator, Fort,” she reminded me. “Whoever the owner of that blood is, they were scared when they bled. And not just startled, but terrified. There was extra adrenaline flowing, the heart rate was kicked up to the max, and”—she sniffed again, harder, as we walked, then nodded, more to herself than to me—“her body was terrified.”
I frowned. “I didn’t respond to the blood on its own—I responded to its circumstance?”
“A predator responding to weak prey.” She nodded, then lifted an eyebrow. “And guess what smell I just picked up on?”
“Another predator?” I guessed.
She grinned. “I’m smelling kobold. Multiple kobolds, in fact. And they’re right”—Suze sped us up, then turned a quick corner down an alley—“here.”
The smell of the blood was thick here, but it was actually easier to ignore because of everything else that demanded my attention. An old woman wrapped in layers of old coats, loose shirts, and part of what looked like a quilt tied around her waist was huddling against the wall of the alley. Her eyes were huge in the darkness, and her hands, covered in old grime and dirt, were pressed over her mouth. She was trying to stay quiet, to make herself as small as possible, but little whimpers of raw terror kept creeping out. There was blood on her wrists, and I could see a little on her ankles as well.
Surrounding her were three kobolds, and as we watched, one darted forward and nipped her hand, just hard enough to break the skin and make a few droplets of blood bead on the surface of her skin. “It doesn’t make a sound,” one of the others crooned in that high, child’s voice that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “It wants to live to see the dawn, so it doesn’t cry out.”
Imagine the body of a hyena, with that sloped back and hunched shoulders, the thick torso and the awkwardly long legs. But instead of a hyena’s head there’s a human face, long and sallow, the skin almost gray in a way that blends into the shadows. The jaw struggles to contain a mouth full of animal teeth, jagged and yellow, built for ripping flesh and gnawing at bones, and they poke out and rest against lips that are black like a hyena’s, not like a person’s. Each of the front two legs ends not in a paw, but in a human hand, the backs still bristling with fur all the way down to the fingers, where each digit ends in a blunt claw. The fur on the body is charcoal gray, with lighter spots that should make them stick out, but actually just add to their camouflage. These were the kobolds, who could never pass for human, but whose minds were too keen to ever be mistaken for an animal.
They were city dwellers, scavengers who hung at the edges. They lived in abandoned buildings, darkened alleys, and of course the sewers. Anyone who had ever feared alligators in the sewers had no idea what they really needed to be afraid of. In my mother’s territory they were permitted to eat the wildlife of the city—stray dogs and cats who would never have owners looking for them, pigeons and rats, and whatever treasures they found in Dumpsters. Months ago Chivalry and I had had to discipline a small group that had gotten tired of the lean denizens of the street and had started snatching plump pets from out of yards and off leashes. But this was something else altogether.
They were too focused on their prey and didn’t realize that we’d entered the alley. A second kobold darted forward to nip the woman again, but I was already moving, and moving faster than a human could’ve.
I got a hand on the back of the moving kobold’s neck, right at the scruff, and hauled it backward and away from its target. It snarled in surprise, but the forearms on a kobold were built like a hyena’s, not a person’s, and it didn’t have the joints or movement to bend its forearms up or around to get at me. It threw its heavy weight around desperately, but I dug my hand in harder and refused to let go. Months of working out, plus the onset of my transition, had given me enough arm muscles that it couldn’t break my grip and get away.
The kobold beside it gave a guttural cry that was somewhere on that midpoint between human and animal, and it charged me. I punted it hard in the chest with my foot, and it slammed backward and into the wall with a yelp of surprise and indignation. I looked around to see whether the third kobold was coming up behind me, but I didn’t need to worry. It was flat to the ground, with Suze’s knee keeping it pressed firmly in the position she wanted it, and it wasn’t making so much as a sound, given that she had her best switchblade fully extended and the point positioned less than an inch from one of the kobold’s large eyes.
“Not a cry, not a whimper,” Suze said to the kobold in a deliberate echo to what they had said to their victim. “Or you truly will never see another dawn.”
“Ma’am?” I called to the woman, who was still frozen in place against the wall. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”
She stared at me, her mouth an o of surprise, and her rheumy old eyes still blank with fear. Beside her I could see one of those sleeping bags that’s made from sewing layers of old blankets together, the kind that I had seen other homeless people on the streets of Providence wrap around themselves and sleep in. She didn’t say anything to me, and I wondered if she’d really heard me, or if she was even able to respond.
“Ma’am,” I said again, making my voice as gentle as I could. “Ma’am, it’s going to be very cold tonight. Is there a shelter that you can go to tonight? I promise you, ma’am, that these things aren’t real.” And I ground my fingers farther into the neck of the kobold I was holding, and gave it a shake that even I knew was vicious. “These things aren’t real,” I repeated, “but even if they were, you’d never have to worry about them again, because I won’t let them harm you.”
She nodded slowly, to what part of my statement I wasn’t sure, and then, holding my gaze, reached down with shaking hands to collect her sleeping bag and a grimy backpack. She pulled those things to her and stood up, then hurried away on shuffling feet, whispering to herself, “Not real, not real,” even as she stepped over the gray tail of the one that Suze kept pinned to the ground. We all listened as her footsteps in the snow moved farther away and finally were gone in the night.
The kobold that I had kicked kept its distance, but its gleaming dark eyes watched me. “Young prince,” it said, and its voice was a little girl’s, hurt and betrayed. “Why does the prince attack us?”
“You live in Madeline Scott’s territory,” I ground out, my temper spiking as the kobold tried to pretend innocence. “You live by Madeline Scott’s rules. And those rules are clear—you don’t hunt the humans.”
The kobold snickered, its black lips parting. “Just amusement,” it said. “Just a game with one whose mind is already lost. If we hunted in earnest, you would know.” The black lips widened farther, showing every sharp tooth.
“Or would he?” interjected the kobold that I still held by its scruff. It had gone limp when the first kobold spoke, and now it hung from my hand with every appearance of relaxation. Its voice was a young boy’s, the kind you’d hear from a five-year-old, and then it laughed, a high titter that raked against the ear. “So many secrets are known only to the queen. And when she fades to nothing, who is left to speak the secrets?”
A chill ran up my spine that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. As hard as it was to imagine when you looked at them, the kobolds were where the myth of the sphinx had developed. They spoke in riddles and confusion, and there were those who believed that they also spoke prophesy.
The third kobold spoke then, another little girl, but this one was sly and gleeful, though still eyeing Suzume’s knife warily. “Perhaps then a value would be placed on those who give tongue to the dead.”
Suze’s lip curled. “Well, that’s an insight into the kobold dating scene that I didn’t need.”
The first kobold by the wall hissed in rage at Suze’s words, and the fur along the ridge of its back lifted. “The little fox laughs, but soon she’ll be in tears,” it snarled, that little girl voice raging. “The offspring of the White Fox harbor their own poison.” Then she turned coy, turning her head to one side and watching both of us from the corner of her eye. “Or don’t you wish to know what the future holds?”
Suze gave her own snarl, and in one quick movement had turned the knife in her hand away from the kobold’s eye to slice down against its leg, one fast cut into the flesh that for a second exposed the whiteness of bone before the blood began to flow. The sound the kobold made wasn’t an animal yelp, but a disturbing child’s scream of pain, and then Suze was off its back and had hurled it, one-handed, to where the first kobold stood. They went down in a pile of yelps, but when they came up neither made a move against her, just pressed backward. The wounded kobold leaned down to lick its leg, but the one that had spoken smiled tauntingly, proud that it had clearly struck a nerve.
I cut in, dropping the kobold that I’d been holding after one last brutal shake. “Save it for the tourists, guys. There’s no prophecy, just good background and guesses. Now keep your attention on stray animals, because you remember what happens when you break the rules, don’t you? My brother and I left your kind bleeding into the gutters last summer.” I looked at all of them, not hiding just how much I wanted to make them feel just a hint of the terror that they’d inflicted on that homeless woman, so breakable in her obvious madness.
“The prince denies prophesy, but we are the speakers of truth, the seers of hearts,” was the sibilant response hissed from the shadows. “And your own heart is so obvious, so soft.” A high laugh. “You hunger to break our bones, wreak your vengeance, though you might dress it up in the clothing of justice. But you fear to be like your sister, fear to glory in violence as she does, so you will let us go with no harm.”
I hated how right they were, but I looked at those too-intelligent, mocking eyes, and refused to be taunted into an action I’d already decided against. “You like talking about my sister’s violence,” I said coldly. “That’s good, because I’m going to be talking with my sister about what I saw tonight. She’ll probably want to have a chat with you guys. You remember Prudence’s chats, don’t you? The kind that end with her ripping out organs. She’s not like me—she won’t stick to the things that grow back.” I might disagree with almost everything that Prudence stood for and believed in, but when it came to the kobolds I had no problem with using her as the bogeyman to prevent the kind of behavior that I’d seen tonight.
The kobolds made shows of sneering and flicking their tails to show disdain, but the one that Suze had cut faded quickly away, followed by the second. The third also began to slink off, but stopped at the entrance of the alley to get one last taunt in. “And what will happen when the hand that holds the dog’s leash is gone, and the master’s voice is silenced?” it asked, with that lisp on its consonants that so many little children possess as they shape their soft palates around words made for adult mouths. “The dog will bite then, and no one can tell it not to.” Then it was gone in the night.
“I hate those creepy little bastards,” Suze bit out grimly. She hunkered down to wipe the blade of her knife clean on the snow, and shot me a sideways look. “We could’ve just killed all three, you know.”
I knew, of course. I was a Scott vampire, and no one liked the kobolds, even other kobolds. It was because I’d wanted to kill them so badly that I hadn’t. “I’ll talk with my mother about this. They were right—they hadn’t engaged in a real hunt, not the way they or my family would see it.”
“So, nothing?” Suze asked, her eyebrows shooting up in surprise.
“Definitely not nothing. I don’t think that was the first time they tormented someone like that—they were too quick with their defense, too sure that the woman was mentally ill.” My hands clenched again as the memory of the woman’s vulnerability flashed through my mind, overlaid with my own shame at the part of myself that had assessed and been fascinated by it. For the millionth time, I wished that I could’ve been born something other than what I was. I forced my mind to focus on an active solution to what was going on. “I’m going to call my brother tomorrow morning. Prudence is sitting on top of some major aggravation right now—if she agrees that they’re too far over the line of behavior, then I’m sure she’d love to make a trip to the city to reinforce some manners.”
“And if she agrees with the kobolds, or just doesn’t give a shit about the homeless?” Suze put her knife away and, linking her arm in mine, began the walk back to the car.
“Then tomorrow night you and I will go around and have some chats with kobold groups,” I said, deadly serious. I could avoid feeding my own violent urges when it was possible, but I wasn’t the guy I’d been a year ago. I couldn’t look away entirely from something when I had the means to correct it, even though that correction meant embracing the part of myself that terrified me.
We walked in silence for another few steps, our feet landing on a mixture of bare sidewalk, rock-salt-covered ice, and old snow. I felt Suze’s arm slide through mine, feeling utterly right and comfortable. “So,” she asked, watching me from the corner of her eye, “am I go for an overnight?”
I couldn’t help the smile that stretched across my face at her bluntness. No delicate hanging around in the living room for her, ticking down the hours until one could believably claim to be too tired to drive home. I snuggled our linked arms tighter and slipped my bare hand from my coat pocket to hers. There was a lot left unresolved, and as our first major fight in the relationship, it was still as open and delicate as the dog bite on my hand.
But the kobolds were liars and charlatans, and there was no such thing as fate.
“I’d like that,” I said, and even in a night so cold that the skin of my face was aching, the sight of her smile made me warm.
I’m not sure which of us started walking faster, or maybe we both did, but soon we were back in the car and making our way to my apartment at a good pace. After all, there was something to look forward to now.
“Succubi refugees, werebear attachés, and now kobold corralling,” Suze noted. “You have a few plates in the air, don’t you?”
“Yeah. And if they’d ever seen me wait tables, they’d know that I’m the last person in the world who should be trusted with delicate china.”