Despite the late night, I was up and dressed early the next morning, and as soon as the clock ticked over to eight a.m. and it was socially acceptable, I started making phone calls. The first was to Chivalry’s witch, Rosamund. No one picked up, and I was shuttled to her voice mail. It was the standard “Leave a message” blah-blah, but then it was repeated in Spanish, and then in a third language that I couldn’t even identify beyond its being definitely of Asian origin. I left a brief variation on “I’m Chivalry Scott’s brother. Call me.”
The next call I placed was to Lilah, and it yielded better results. She picked up on the fifth ring with a sleepy, “Fort?”
“I’m sorry, Lilah. Did I wake you?” She had that tone of a person whose brain was still coming online.
“Little bit,” she admitted. “What’s up?”
“There’s a bit of a situation, and I need to talk with you.”
“If you’re free tonight, we can grab dinner.”
That sounded very nice, and friendly-casual, but unfortunately the situation was anything but that. “I’m sorry, but it’s pretty important. Family business.” God, I felt like a mobster as I said that, and I corrected myself. “What I mean is that it’s about the Ad-hene. Can you do any earlier?”
“Oh.” Her voice flattened, and became almost resigned. “Well, I guess it was a matter of time.”
Alone in my kitchen, I raised my eyebrows and wondered what that implied. Maybe the Ad-hene really had found a way to hide their scent from kitsune noses. Well, I couldn’t pretend to feel sorry about the possibility of Prudence killing another of them. Frankly, they had it coming. Meanwhile, Lilah continued talking. “Yeah, just give me an hour or so to shower and swing over to my apartment. You remember where it is, right?”
I’d spent a few hours hiding in her closet and seen my sister break a woman’s neck in Lilah’s bedroom. Her address was well and truly seared into my brain, and I assured her that I’d be fine getting there. We exchanged good-byes; then I dialed Suzume to fill her in on the morning’s planned activities.
“No, you should head over alone,” she said to my surprise. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”
I wished she were in front of me. Glaring at a phone was very unsatisfying. “If you’re the victor, then I’m the spoils. Any plans to, you know, despoil me?” I knew that I sounded grumpy, but the day was still very young and now I was going to be heading into a potentially awkward situation with a very nice woman whose pass at me I’d had to turn down because of my feelings for Suze, and at this point, though it was rather churlish to note it, it had been a really long time since I’d had sex.
“You’re being awfully backtalky for spoils,” Suzume said, but there was an underlying sassiness in her voice that clearly said that she was enjoying this situation far more than she should’ve. “Go find out what Keebler knows, and call me when you’ve gotten the info we need to go kick some elfish ass.” Typical Suze, she sounded positively peppy at the thought of impending violence.
“Hey.”
“Hrm?”
“If you think that seeing Lilah again is going to change my mind, you’re wrong,” I said seriously.
There was a pause on her end, and if we’d been playing Battleship, she would’ve had to acknowledge a direct hit.
“Maybe I’m not sure if I want a boyfriend who would call me on my shit,” she said.
I snorted. If Suze had wanted a toady for a boyfriend, she could’ve had a dozen of them. Simultaneously. I’d seen guys get so distracted by her as she walked down the street that they’d bumped into walls. “Nice try. I’ll call you later, and I’ll still be single.” I hung up before she could respond.
Dressing was trickier than usual. On the one hand, Lilah had kissed me once, and there was an element of masculine pride in not wanting to show up looking like a hobo and making her regret her past attraction. On the other hand, if I put too much effort into this, I might accidentally give her the wrong impression, and that would be a jerk move. However, I was going over there in a fairly official capacity, which suggested that jeans were not the order of the day. But then again, Lilah and I were kind of friends, and I didn’t want to seem like I was showing off. Looking at it a different way, though, it was entirely possible that Lilah wasn’t the only person I’d be talking to about this today, which pushed me back into the direction of dressing carefully. But if at some point the day erupted into violence, I really didn’t want a pair of business dress slacks destroyed.
There were too many branches on this particular decision tree, so I gave up and went with a clean pair of khakis and a striped button-down shirt. True, once dressed, I looked like I was ready to go volunteer at a Christian ministry program, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad look. I pulled on a hat and parka and headed out, knowing that in the cold morning air it would take at least four tries for the Fiesta’s engine to catch.
Lilah lived in a ground-floor unit of a squat brick apartment building. There were four side-by-side units, with one shared slanted roof, and it was one of those places that real estate moguls had pooped out by the dozens in the 1950s during the clamor for cheap housing. When it was first built, there had probably been open green space behind each of the small units, maybe a garden for each, since there was one window in Lilah’s living room that was weirdly placed, as if its spot had once held a back door, but that area had long ago been paved over and turned into an almost identical building that faced the opposite road, with only a small strip of pavement just barely wide enough for the Dumpsters in between. In front, there was a narrow band of grass between the building and carefully marked resident parking. At least the uniform bushes along the front were pruned back, though their bare branches certainly weren’t winning any beauty contests.
The temperature had dropped from yesterday, and I could see my breath in the air as I picked my way up the walkway, listening to the quiet crunch of the frost-covered cement under my shoes. Lilah pulled the door open before I could even lift my hand to ring the bell. She was simply dressed in jeans and a sweater, and her bright coppery gold hair was still damp from the shower. As she ushered me inside, I noticed that she hadn’t put on her glamour yet, and the delicately curved and furred tip of her left ear was poking through the wet strands of her hair.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“It’s no problem. I still haven’t found another job yet, so it’s not like I have to head to work.” When I’d met her, Lilah had been the store manager at a New Age store. Unfortunately it had turned out that her boss was a murdering fanatic, and after he’d been killed, the store, which had never turned much of a profit to begin with, had closed.
“I’m really sorry.” I never knew quite what to say after those kinds of disclosures. I’d spent plenty of time myself in that between-jobs twilight, and knew from experience that there wasn’t really anything you wanted to hear except news of a job opening.
She gave a loose shrug. “Yeah, everyone is telling me that retail is tough right now if you want a manager’s spot. But I’ve got five more months of unemployment before I have to give up and take a cashiering position, and I’ve done a little under-the-table housecleaning to make ends meet.” Lilah looked at me, and I saw that there was more gold than brown in her eyes, a clear sign that she wasn’t quite as calm as she’d like me to believe. “But a few things have come up lately, and having a free schedule has actually come in handy.”
I was about to ask her what she meant, but then the door to her bedroom opened, and Iris, her younger sister, walked out. The last time I’d seen the nineteen-year-old, she’d been drugged, naked, and sitting in an inflatable kiddie pool with a very grim immediate future ahead of her.
Unlike Lilah, who was half human, three-quarters of Iris’s heritage was Ad-hene. Apparently morning in the Dwyer household was a break from the glamours that they would have to make and maintain for the rest of the day, because Iris was also walking in her natural state, and unlike Lilah, there was no way that she could’ve just covered up her ears and gone without.
Iris’s straight hair gleamed like polished copper piping, a shade that no human had been born with and no dye could’ve achieved, and the face that her shoulder-length bob framed had more in common with a Komodo dragon than with any primate. I’d seen a three-quarter elf hybrid before, but never one without a glamour, and it was a sight that forced me to repress the urge to look away. The Ad-hene themselves had even more severe features, but they’d also had an eerie and dangerous beauty to them that this scion lacked—she looked like one of those weird crossbred Chihuahuas and Chinese Crested that always seemed to win the annual World’s Ugliest Dog Competition—which I was sad to say I watched religiously every year.
There was a blankness to that bizarre face as Iris looked at me, everything that might be going on in her head tucked in so well that nothing showed on the surface. She was probably amazing at poker. “So, what are the vampires interested in talking to my sister about?” she asked with an undercurrent of hostility. I felt a tug of relief—not from her words, which put me in an awkward spot, but because I could at least pick up a bit of emotion from her voice.
Lilah answered her sister before I could think of anything to say. “Iris, this is Fortitude Scott, the one who helped us.”
There was something flat about her eyes when Iris looked at me. “Oh.” The hostility was gone now, leaving her voice expressionless, almost like a computer reader. I missed the hostility—it had felt more human. She moved a little closer to me and stepped in the sunbeam coming in from the window. As the light hit her face, those flat eyes adjusted, and I realized that the pupil wasn’t formed like a human’s. Instead of being round, it was vertical, like a lizard’s. The colored area around it was also disturbing—it lacked the softening brown that Lilah’s eyes had, leaving just a bright, buttery gold. “Didn’t see much that night,” Iris said. She took one more slow, precise step closer to me, then tilted her head carefully. “Heard you shot Nokke in the knee.”
I nodded, wondering where this was leading. Nokke, after all, was Lilah and Iris’s grandfather. And also Iris’s father, but that wasn’t something that was generally discussed. Incest wasn’t exactly the most genteel of conversation topics, and the Ad-hene had engaged in it regularly, resulting in some very weird biological relationships among the Neighbors. “Yes, I did.”
Iris’s mouth twisted in some private amusement, the first emotion to cross that blank face. “Too bad you didn’t shoot higher.”
Lilah saved me from that particular conversational anvil. “Iris, you should put your glamour on and head to school. You don’t want to miss class.”
That glimmer of emotion vanished like smoke, and Iris gave a small one-shouldered shrug. “Failing half of them.”
Lilah’s voice was firm. “Then there are still half of them that you can pass.”
That impressive display of big-sistering broke through even Iris’s near-lobotomized lack of involvement, and she snorted. Then she paused, and for a brief second I almost thought she looked concerned as those eerie yellow eyes flicked from her sister, to me, and back again. “You’ll be okay?” she asked Lilah.
Lilah walked over to Iris and put her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and leaned in to kiss Iris’s cheek. “Now get going.”
Iris blinked slowly, which did not help alleviate her resemblance to an iguana; then as I watched, her face changed, the glamour filling things out and making her look like one of those crazy-cheekboned high-fashion models that look more creepy than attractive—which was still a definite improvement. The metallic gleam of her hair dulled slightly, enough that while it still drew the eye, it no longer looked unnatural, the furred tips of her ears disappeared, and her pupils softened and rounded. It wasn’t like the kitsune’s fox tricks, because unlike with the foxes, my knowledge of the truth made her glamour weaker. When I looked at it, there was a haziness to her false face, and if I stared hard, I could get glimpses of the reality that lay beneath it.
Lilah handed Iris her backpack and ushered her out the door, giving her emotionless sister one last kiss on the cheek before she left. She gave a cheery wave, probably as her sister drove off, then dropped her hand and closed the door slowly. When she turned to face me again, I could see a weariness in her that she’d hidden from her little sister.
There was a brief silence, and then I asked, “So how long has she been staying with you?”
“Since that night. My parents gave her those drugs and handed her over to Tomas and the others. They say that they didn’t know what they had planned for her, but that was because they never even thought to ask.” Lilah rubbed her hands hard on her arm, and I could see that the last month hadn’t made a dent in her anger toward her parents. “Iris can’t go back to them, not now. There’d be bodies on the ground if she did.” The look on Lilah’s face suggested that she was trying hard to convince herself that that would be a bad thing. Then she visibly shook off the thoughts of her parents and shifted the topic. “So someone tipped you off about what’s been going on. I guess I should be glad I’m talking to you and not Prudence.” She sat down on her sofa and looked at me bleakly. “What are you going to do?”
I felt a sharp sting of betrayal—not because the elves were the killers, but because Lilah had known, and she hadn’t called me. She at least wasn’t trying to hide it now that I knew, but it was hard for me to push down my irritation at her and force my tone to be strictly professional. “Tell me which of the Ad-hene killed the karhu, and if anyone helped him. Then we can decide—”
“Wait, what?” Lilah cut me off, confused. “The karhu? Someone killed a bear? You think an Ad-hene killed a bear?”
Lilah’s poker face had never been great, and we stared at each other for a second, both of us realizing that we’d been talking about completely different subjects. I clarified. “Sometime either Monday night or early on Tuesday, Matias Kivela was stabbed to death. Are you saying you didn’t know that?” It was a relief that she hadn’t been sitting on a murderer, but on the other hand, I had a very bad feeling that this situation had suddenly gotten a lot more complicated.
“Why would I know that, Fort?” she asked testily. “The metsän kunigas have a right to use the Lincoln Woods, but we don’t do much socializing. If either group has a problem, our treaties say that we have to take it straight to the Scotts. I’m not sure I’ve even seen any of the bears in their human forms, much less talked to one. I definitely don’t get e-mail blasts about dead karhus.”
“Okay, you didn’t know,” I conceded, though that didn’t mean the elves were off the hook. “Do you know whether any of the Ad-hene killed him?”
Lilah was shaking her head immediately. “Fort, the Ad-hene haven’t left Underhill since your sister killed Shoney. As for stabbing . . .” She paused, and suddenly looked uncomfortable. “Fort, don’t you know the punishment your mother levied on Themselves?”
“Just that there was one.” Frankly, for the first week Suzume and I had been chasing selkies in Maine, and once home, I’d still had my hands full figuring out Chivalry’s job. “Why, what happened?”
Lilah cleared her throat awkwardly, then muttered, “Chivalry cut off the hands of each of the remaining Ad-hene.”
“What?” My brother was not the enforcer for the territory. That job lay with—and abruptly I realized why it had been my brother. Prudence had been suffering her own punishment.
Lilah began speaking quickly, apparently deciding now that she’d rather just get the revelations over with. “That was for being involved in the murders. Nokke and Amadon fought against you and your sister, though, so Chivalry cut off their tongues and . . . well, you know.”
I dropped onto the sofa next to her. “Whoa.” I’d known that my brother was willing to get his hands dirty for our mother, but apparently I hadn’t realized how dirty. And while a part of me felt a very nasty sense of justice done with the Ad-hene having to experience some of the suffering that they’d forced onto my friend Gage and several other young men, I recoiled at the thought of my brother inflicting it.
“It’ll all grow back, of course. I mean, it’ll take a while. They can heal a lot of wounds pretty fast, but amputations are apparently more complicated.” For a moment I thought that Lilah was trying to cover her discomfort with babble, but a moment later I realized that I’d underestimated her, and that unlike me, she’d kept her mind on the topic at hand when she said, “But believe me, none of them could’ve held a knife.”
That definitely shot a hole in Gil’s suspicions. Hands were definitely needed to stab someone to death. Of course, the last time the elves had been involved in murders, other hands had held the weapons. “What about their fanatics? It was the Neighbors who did most of their dirty work during the sacrifices.”
Lilah had seemed to calm down, but now her eyes got rabbity again, and there was a long pause. I narrowed my eyes and looked at her. “Do you want a drink?” she asked suddenly. “I need a drink right now.”
I followed her into the kitchen and watched as she opened the fridge and removed a half-empty bottle of vodka and a pitcher of orange juice. “It’s nine thirty, Lilah,” I reminded her.
“I’m unemployed, Fort,” she snapped. “You can drink in the morning when you’re unemployed.” She pulled a mug out of a cabinet and mixed a quick screwdriver, then took a swig. She blinked her too-bright eyes, then took another sip, and I noticed that the color began fading back to her usual, human-looking golden brown. She cleared her throat, removed a second mug from the cabinet, and filled it with straight orange juice. Then she slid the mug toward me wordlessly.
I took it, watching her carefully, and took a drink. High pulp. I waited another moment, then asked, “Lilah? What don’t you want to tell me?”
She toyed with her mug, which, like mine, had a comic from the Oatmeal printed incongruously on its side. “When you said that you needed to come over, I thought that meant you’d found out somehow.” She took a deep breath, and, not meeting my eyes, said, “Whoever killed your bear, Fort, it wasn’t the Ad-hene’s pet fanatics. It couldn’t have been, since they’re all dead.”
The words hung there between us for a long moment while I tried to wrap my head around them. “What?”
“Really dead,” Lilah clarified, and took another drink of her screwdriver. “All of them.”
I stared at Lilah, putting the pieces of what I was seeing together. The Ad-hene were what one could term murder-enthusiasts, and I’d seen them kill one of their most loyal followers with less concern than I showed when throwing out fruit that had gone squishy. If frustrated and maimed, or even if they were having a cranky day, I could certainly see the elves going on a killing spree of their followers. But I had a bad feeling that that wasn’t going to be the explanation here. “Lilah,” I said slowly, “if the Ad-hene were the ones who killed them, you wouldn’t be drinking right now. Tell me what happened.”
She still didn’t look at me, but she did nod, once. “People were killed, Fort.” Her voice was very soft. “If we hadn’t arrived when we did, Felix would’ve been killed. Four women were raped—it doesn’t matter if they were given drugs that made them willing, or that made them forget afterward. It was rape. More was planned.” She looked up at me, and her expression was grim. “You put me in charge, Fort, and I made sure that every single person in the community heard the truth of what happened. I had to do it, to make sure that we couldn’t gloss it over or look the other way—that we had to face the hard truth of what the Ad-hene were willing to do, and what those of our own were willing to do in their names.”
My voice was just as soft as hers. “What happened?”
She laughed suddenly, but with no humor whatsoever. With quick movements she tossed the remainder of her screwdriver into the sink, and turned on the tap to send it all down the drain. “Well, for one thing, they got pretty pissed.” She looked pensively at the water. “It wasn’t my parents’ generation—they were shocked, yeah, but they wouldn’t have done anything. But Dr. Leamaro and the others did their work well—the largest numbers of the Neighbors are my age and younger.” She shrugged and turned the tap off. “So we acted.”
“This was your idea?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.
“We lack the equipment for any kind of long-term imprisonment,” she said defensively, but then she looked over and met my eyes, and seemed to calm down. “I argued that we could try some sort of house-arrest situation, and there were a lot who agreed with me. But there were those who wanted blood—and they started grouping around Cole, one of the older three-quarters.” She grabbed a sponge and started wiping down her counter as she spoke, and I remembered that she was a stress-cleaner. “It would’ve happened with or without my permission. By agreeing to it, I was at least able to get Cole to agree that all the names had to be voted on before anyone was executed. It’s a very Star Chamber–style of justice, but at least it’s better than a vengeful mob.” Lilah found a spot on her counter and scrubbed it with more vigor than necessary. “We killed the last of them more than a week ago, so I’m sorry to say that whoever murdered the bear wasn’t one of them.”
This lead was drying up before my eyes, and I had an uncomfortable flashback to my mother’s directive to either find the murderer or locate a scapegoat. “So the Ad-hene couldn’t. There are none of their flunkies left who would’ve—Lilah, do you know any of the Neighbors at all who might’ve wanted to hurt one of the metsän kunigas?”
“I’m sorry, Fort, but I can’t think of a single one.” Her scrubbing slowed, and she looked over at me uncertainly. “What do you have that’s leading you to the Neighbors? Was there a glamour on something? Did Suzume smell a Neighbor?”
“Neither,” I admitted. “But the karhu’s family thinks that the Ad-hene were involved.”
Now she snorted, and some of her anxiety momentarily receded, replaced by the protectiveness that I’d seen her display toward many of the Neighbors her own age and younger. “Well, I’m sorry, Fort, but I think they’re looking for honey in the wrong tree. Believe me when I say that we have more than enough internal issues keeping everyone busy.”
I paused, considered, but I had to ask it. “How were the fanatics killed?”
“We let the women do it, the ones who were their victims.” Now she looked me straight in the eyes, almost daring me to question her. “They wanted to, and it was pretty hard to argue that they didn’t have a right.”
“Did Iris participate?”
She nodded silently, her face pale enough that her scattering of freckles showed against her face in sharp relief, but she didn’t back down.
There was another long pause while I tried to weigh what to say next. “Lilah, murders are supposed to be reported to the Scotts. Why haven’t we been told about these?”
Lilah shook her head with enough force that small drops of water flicked off her damp hair. “We don’t have to report murders, Fort. We just have to report a death if we want it investigated.” Her mouth twisted. “I was in charge, and I didn’t need anything investigated. All of those who died were Neighbors, so we weren’t poaching any of Madeline Scott’s humans. We destroyed the bodies in Dr. Leamaro’s old incinerator and no one is going to call the police, so there’s nothing that the Scotts would worry about.”
“You were glad it was me instead of Prudence, Lilah.” I pointed out. “You knew that my family wouldn’t be thrilled to hear about this.”
“Madeline Scott wants stable communities, Fort. Solid vassals who pay their tithes and don’t cause trouble.” She laughed a little, with a harsh cynicism that she hadn’t shown when I’d met her a month ago, before she had known what some of the Neighbors were capable of. “We’re keeping the tithes flowing, but we are really far from stable right now.” Lilah was pensive as she looked at me. “It was a good thing it was you, Fort,” she agreed.
“Are you going to be okay, Lilah?” I’d made her the Scott liaison to the Ad-hene to keep her safe from their retribution, and I’d encouraged her to try to reorganize the power structure because I’d known that she had a desire to protect Neighbors who had been abused under the old status quo, but I had the very stark realization that she was in a potentially very dangerous position now—largely thanks to me.
Lilah didn’t bother to pretend not to understand what I meant, but she shook her head. “Don’t worry about me, Fort. I’m riding the tiger right now, but they know that they need me.” At my questioning look, she smiled just a little, an expression that reminded me that she might’ve looked more human than her sister, but half her DNA belonged to a species that had driven itself right to the edge of extinction because its members had thought killing one another was fun. “They all know that I helped you when you were trying to find out who killed Gage, and you were the one who made me the Scott liaison to the Ad-hene. So no one is going to do anything to me, since they’ll want me to be the one to contact you later on.”
“Later on?”
“There’s been talk. The treaty with Madeline was negotiated by the Ad-hene, with their interests in mind. There are a lot of people who want to negotiate a new treaty, one that’s with the Neighbors instead.” The nervousness and guilt were completely wiped from her face, and now she leaned forward, looking every bit the political operative that usually graced my mother’s dinner parties.
“I’m not sure that my mother—”
“Not with Madeline, Fort. With you.”
And looking into her eyes, I realized that the Neighbors knew that my mother was dying.
Her voice dropped, and I recognized my friend again. “Those who were truly loyal and devoted are dead, and the Ad-hene themselves are safely in Underhill. Nothing will happen until your mother is . . . gone, and there’s a new opportunity for change, and for the things we want. We’re all waiting, Fort, and I can’t think of a single Neighbor who would jeopardize the situation by killing one of the bears.”
“Tell me what the Neighbors want,” I said.
“You’re my friend, Fort. I’m trusting you not to tell this to your family. You know what would happen if they learned what was going on.” There was a stubbornness on her face, but I tried one last time.
“The metsän kunigas are what my mother told me to look into, and that’s all I’m looking into for her. But tell me what the rest of the Neighbors want.”
She shook her head firmly. “No, Fort. I told you what you needed to know—that you have to look somewhere else for your killer—and I trusted you with a lot. But we’re still in discussions about the other thing, and I won’t talk to you about it until we’re decided.”
I watched her closely. I knew that she meant everything she said, and I knew that she’d told me a few things that would’ve had my sister arguing for her death. But I also knew that Lilah had never had a poker face. “This thing,” I said quietly. “You agree with it, don’t you.”
It hadn’t really been a question, but her face gave me my answer anyway. She picked up a small dish towel and wiped her hands, then folded it precisely and set it back down. “Tell Suze that I said hello,” she said, and I knew the conversation was over.
* * *
Back in my car, I checked my phone, which I’d turned off when I’d gone to talk with Lilah. There were two missed calls, both from numbers that I didn’t recognize. I returned the first, and found myself speaking to the extremely polite Catherine Celik, at the Celik Funeral Home, and being told what the ghouls had found when they had examined the body closely.
“The blow to the back of the head was the first strike,” Catherine informed me. “It had enough force behind it to fracture the skull, and without quick medical attention, the bleeding into his brain would probably have been fatal on its own. It also knocked him unconscious.”
“There were a lot of stab wounds in his chest,” I noted. “It looked like there must’ve been a fight.”
“No defensive wounds on his hands or arms to suggest that,” Catherine said. “The state medical examiner is one of ours, and she was kind enough to come in last night after her shift was over and perform a full examination, so this is the same level of information that the police would be given.”
It was clear that she’d felt insulted, and I hurried to smooth it over. “I didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t know what you were looking at,” I said, even though I suppose I had been, a bit. “I guess I was just confused about why so many wounds.”
“Seventeen,” she said, her voice sounding slightly less frosty as she apparently accepted the apology. “All in the chest. Even disregarding the head trauma, he would’ve been long dead halfway through.”
“This is sounding a bit personal,” I noted. “Was the examiner able to find anything new about the attacker?”
There was the rustling of papers. “Ah—well, from the angle of the wounds, the attacker was probably straddling the body when the stabbing began, so no ideas about the height. She was able to determine that the weapon was steel, straight edged and ground along both sides, and eight inches long.”
I rubbed my face. “So, probably the missing kitchen knife?”
“It does sound a bit like my best vegetable chopping knife,” she conceded. She might’ve said vegetables, but given what I’d observed of Dan’s dietary requirements, I was betting that her chopping knife was used on a lot of meat as well. I shuddered a little. I’d made the mistake only once of talking to Dan while he was cooking—and there had been no disguising the organ meat he used.
Catherine Celik’s calm and precise voice, clearly honed from years of being a funeral director, cut into my thoughts. “Mr. Scott, will you have any further need of the body? The Kivela family would like to know if they can schedule the funeral.”
I hesitated, then asked, “When will the funeral be held?”
“Not for at least two days, possibly more. I know they’ll need to schedule a long wake to accommodate the out-of-town metsän kunigas who need to travel.”
“Okay, tell them they can schedule it. But, please, Ms. Celik, could you put off doing anything to the body for as long as possible? Just in case I need something else from it.” I was fumbling in the dark here, and I wished heartily that someone was with me who could help out. Unwillingly, my thoughts turned to Matt McMahon, former cop, private eye, and the man who had been my surrogate uncle and the last remaining link to my foster parents until a month ago when he’d received a very sudden initiation into the world that most humans lived their entire lives blissfully unaware of. We hadn’t spoken since, and I pushed the thought of him away.
“Of course, sir. I will inform the family that the body will not be ready until the day of the funeral, and that we will instead set up a closed and empty casket for use during the wake.”
“That might not make them too happy,” I observed, imagining Gil Kivela’s reaction, “but I appreciate it, Ms. Celik.”
“It is a pleasure to assist the Scotts in this delicate matter, sir,” she said smoothly, and we exchanged good-byes.
The second call was a bit stranger. It was from the witch’s assistant, explaining that Rosamund was on vacation and out of the country. Apparently Rosamund had designated a substitute for any calls from the Scott family, but at that point in the conversation the assistant started sounding weaselly.
“Rosamund said to pass you along to Esmé Adams, who lives in Vermont, but . . . well, I heard that you were investigating this yourself. . . .”
The subtextual hinting was pretty heavy. “Yes . . . ?” I prompted cautiously.
“Well, I have another number. . . . Valentine Sassoon lives in-state, and . . .” If the witch on the phone had been in front of me, I would’ve had to suppress the urge to strangle her during all of these charged pauses. “He’s really interested in meeting you,” the assistant finally concluded.
Given the way that my morning with Lilah had started, I really didn’t want to deal with any more undercurrents in conversations, but I sighed and gave in, saying, “Why don’t you give me both numbers, then?”
The assistant was almost overcome with her eagerness to read Valentine Sassoon’s number out to me, but then she started verbally backtracking, apparently finally realizing that she hadn’t exactly been subtle. I agreed three times not to mention the private recommendation to Rosamund, assuming I ever met her, and finally got off the phone.
I pondered the situation for a moment, then called Suze. I gave her an edited version of my conversation with Lilah—I wasn’t sure exactly how much of the inner workings of the Neighbors’ problems she would be okay with me telling Suze (and, by extension, telling the kitsune in general), so I kept that part as bare bones as possible, saying only that the Ad-hene weren’t exactly equipped to carry knives right now, and mostly focusing on filling her in on what the ghouls’ autopsy had shown and my sudden surfeit of witch phone numbers.
“Call the one the assistant recommended,” she said immediately.
“Why, do you know him?” I asked.
“Never even heard of him, but I’m curious. Usually assistants who change a boss’s recommendation have a good reason.”
“Fine, I’ll call.”
“Come pick me up,” she insisted. “I’m missing all the fun.”
“And whose fault is that?” I asked. She made a very rude noise and hung up, which I took as an acknowledgment of my point.
I turned the Fiesta on and headed over to Suze’s, dialing as I went. Fortunately Rhode Island didn’t require hands-free sets yet, and since I was over the magical age of eighteen, the state assumed that I could multitask maturely. I slowed down anyway. There might not be laws against it, but the police took fairly dim views toward people driving while talking on their phones, and they had been known to hand out speeding tickets to people going thirty in a twenty-five miles per hour zone just to make their feelings about phone use known.
Another assistant answered the call, and I was immediately assured that Dr. Sassoon had left clear instructions, and that I was to come over at any time I wanted. I pulled a pen out of the glove compartment and, probably pushing multitasking just a bit too far, held the phone with my shoulder while I wrote the address the assistant rattled off to me down on my hand. Once I had it, I ended the call, stuck the pen back in its holder, tossed my phone into the passenger seat, and shifted gears. In New England, the speed limit is for when you’re doing something you shouldn’t be or when it’s snowing. At all other times the flow of traffic demands at least fifteen mph faster than the posted signs.
* * *
“Sorry, I really don’t have any plans to accept Jesus as my personal savior.” Suzume stood in her doorway and gave me an extremely amused look.
“Ha, ha,” I deadpanned as I hung up my jacket. Normally I would’ve just had her run out to the car and hit the road, but the cereal I’d eaten for breakfast this morning was already long gone, and I needed a pit stop.
While I made a beeline for Suzume’s fridge and the Hot Pockets that I knew she kept stashed, her focus never left my attire. “Am I expected to dress to match, Fort?” she asked. “I’m not sure my wardrobe is equipped for that level of blah.”
I pulled open her freezer. Jackpot—four-cheese pizza in microwavable sandwich form. She had two packages, and I pulled them both out for myself, then snagged one of the Philly steak ones for her.
“It’s barely eleven, Fort,” Suze noted.
“Then if you get hungry in the middle of interviewing this witch, don’t blame me.”
She considered that, then conceded the point. “Fine, cook them up. Better throw in a few more, though.” There was the distinctive clicking sound of claws against tile, and I looked over to see two small, inquisitive fox kit faces peeping out of the cracked bathroom door—one gray and one red. Apparently Yui and Riko were visiting. Suze didn’t look at the fox kits, but she did raise her voice very pointedly. “But if anyone violates their time-out, they’re going to see me feed their lunch to the crows.” There was a flurry of scampering noises and the kits disappeared back into the bathroom.
“They’re not coming with us to Sassoon’s office, Suze,” I said flatly. My mind filled with images of how much destruction kits could wreck in a doctor’s office. Frankly, just bringing Suze along was risking menace to property.
“Since you have not kit-proofed the Fiesta, I would say not.” She gave a snort that clearly outlined her feelings about that.
“Suze, I’ve got to go talk with this witch. If you’re babysitting, I’ve got to go on my own.”
“What, without me?” Suzume sounded hurt, and she gave me a full dose of big sad eyes. I wished that I were less vulnerable to big sad eyes. “I’m just watching the kits for half an hour. Tomomi woke up with an earache, and Yuzumi had to take her to the pediatrician. It’s not going to take long, and then she’ll be back for the others and we can head out.”
I pulled open a Hot Pocket package with unnecessary force, feeling irritated. Somehow it felt less than professional to have the murder investigation sidelined by babysitting. “Doesn’t your grandmother usually watch them?”
“Wednesdays she’s got her senior swim group down at the Y.” She raised her eyebrows at my expression. “What? It’s important for the elderly to stay active. Besides, Sassoon’s receptionist told you that you could come over whenever. Let’s test that theory a little.”
“Fine,” I groused, though I knew that I’d been beaten even before I’d shown up, “but this had better not take long.” I put the first plate of Hot Pockets into the microwave and hit the reheat button. “By the way, I’m still single, not that you asked.” The smell of melted cheese filled the apartment, and I pulled my plate out as soon as the microwave gave its little dinging noise. Plate in hand, I turned, and was suddenly brought up short by Suzume, who had come right up behind me, well inside my personal space, and had waited patiently for me. I froze automatically as she placed her hands very deliberately on my shoulders, leaned in close, and took a deep sniff of my face and chest.
She quirked an eyebrow at me, her expression unreadable. “Not even a hug from Lilah? Interesting.” Then she stepped back and busied herself by pulling out more freezer food for the kits.
If I hadn’t had anything else on my schedule, watching the kits wouldn’t have been a half-bad way to spend time. Once Suze released them from their time-out in the bathroom, they were energetic little bundles of fur and teeth. My willingness to continually throw a small, spit-soaked rubber ball down the hallway for them apparently endeared me greatly to their foxy hearts, and then I was given the very important job of distributing tummy rubs, and finally the kits collapsed on the end of the sofa for their naps.
My clothing was a bit worse for wear (Riko really liked nibbling at my shirttail), and I was wiping kit saliva off my shoes with a paper towel when Suze asked, in completely conversational tones, “So, what did Lilah tell you that you aren’t telling me?”
“What?”
“Seriously, Fort. I might not have caught a scent of anything but bear at the scene, but one conversation with Lilah and you’re basically crossing the elves off the suspect list. Spill the beans.”
I paused and considered her. I thought back over my conversation with Lilah, and how much she’d emphasized that a lot of the information she’d told me was potentially dangerous to her if it got back to my mother. “How much of what you see when we’re working do you report to your grandmother?” I asked. Atsuko Hollis, after all, was Madeline’s closest ally.
Suze’s dark eyes narrowed, and she didn’t say anything.
I nodded, my point confirmed. “Exactly, Suze.”
“Madeline might’ve given the Ad-hene a slap on the wrist—”
I gave a snort so loud that it made the kits twitch across the room. “Oh, you did not just make that pun.”
Suze ignored me and kept going. “But I’ve heard rumors that there are Ad-hene down in Underhill that no one has ever seen. Did your buddy mention those?”
I weighed her point. “Lilah told me about them when we were trying to find the skinwalker. She said that there are Ad-hene who are basically imprisoned in Underhill so that the ones that we see have someone to torture every day.” The elves were such a delightful species. Really, it was hard to imagine what could have inspired some of the Irish to try to trap all of them in Underhill for good.
“And whatever she told you that you’re not telling me, did that alibi out these mystery elves?”
“No,” I acknowledged, “but I’m not sure that I’d be in a hurry to go run errands and kill bears for the sociopath who would normally be torturing me if they hadn’t gotten their hands chopped off.”
“Me neither, but let’s just keep them in mind before we write the elves completely off.”
The conversation concluded just as Riko stirred from her nap, kit batteries apparently fully recharged, and then it was back to throwing the ball. Unfortunately I really did have other things that I should’ve been doing (namely, interviewing a witch), and as the promised “half an hour” morphed into “three and a half hours,” my patience started running short. The only reason I didn’t finally throw in the towel and head out on my own was that Suze was equally annoyed and began sending pissy text messages to the kits’ mother.
When Yuzumi finally showed up, she was revealed to be in her mid-twenties, looking exhausted and about as much in need of a shot of whiskey as I’d ever seen a woman. So, basically she was the universal embodiment of all mothers of three-year-old triplets.
“Ear infection,” was her grim opening statement, completely foregoing any regular greeting. Riko and Yui capered around her legs, and she petted their heads absently as she continued talking to Suzume, whose expression was clearly indicating that she was not pleased at the inaccuracy of Yuzumi’s babysitting estimate. “You would not believe the line at the doctor’s, and then the pharmacy took forever to fill one round of amoxicillin.”
“Tomomi in the car?” Suze asked, beginning to look a bit more forgiving.
“Yeah, she’s completely conked out. Thanks for watching the girls.” For the first time she looked over at me. She looked a lot like her sister, Takara, with incongruous blue eyes and freckles contrasting with her dark hair and Asian facial structure. “Is this the vampire?” she asked, a hint of curiosity making its way through her exhaustion.
“Sure is,” I said, giving a forcefully cheery wave.
She looked at me as if I were the dog that had just talked, then turned back to her cousin. “Thought he’d be better looking.”
“That does seem to be the consensus,” I noted wryly. Suzume just looked amused.
“Sorry, I know you probably have places to be,” Yuzumi said, and then rattled off some quick Japanese. I had no idea what she’d said, but both kits suddenly made similar hacking coughs, shuddered from the tips of their noses to the last hair on their tails, and then shifted into a pair of redheaded little girls whose only hint of their Japanese heritage was the shape of their eyes. They weren’t identical, but they were very naked, which immediately resulted in a crash course in how surprisingly difficult it is to get a pair of three-year-olds dressed for winter temperatures. Suze and Yuzumi turned practiced hands to the basics, but I ended up helping Riko into her shoes and mittens.
By the time Yuzumi and her brood were fully loaded into her station wagon and Suze and I were in the Fiesta and heading to the doctor’s address, it was just past three o’clock.
“You realize that if I can’t talk to this guy today, we have to call up the one in Vermont? I really don’t want to drive up to Vermont today, Suze.”
She just gave me her best foxy smile. “Much as I love maple syrup candy and eco-friendly co-ops, Fort, I don’t think we’re going to be hitting Vermont today.”
There was something altogether too smug and knowing in her voice. “Do you know anything about this guy?” I demanded.
Suze lifted her hands up with a laugh. “I don’t, really and truly. Just observing the situation, that’s all.”
I peered at her closely as we sat at a traffic light, but I could tell from her expression that she wasn’t lying on this one. I shook my head, the light turned green, and I concentrated on shifting the Fiesta smoothly through its gears.
* * *
The office of Dr. Valentine Sassoon, doctor of sports medicine and orthopedic surgery (as we were informed by the sign beside his door) was, by doctor standards, lushly opulent. Located in one of the more upper-tax-bracket neighborhoods of Providence, it was a beautifully maintained Victorian house that at some point had been retrofitted to suit the needs of a medical practice rather than a private residence, yet at the same time it retained all the beauty of hardwood floors, original crown molding, and two incredibly elaborate stained-glass windows.
As we walked into the waiting room that in some prior age had probably been a front parlor, the first thing I noticed was that every available inch of wall space was packed with a very interesting style of artwork. While most doctors’ offices featured framed prints that were mainly picked with all the daring interior decorating instincts of the average hotel chain, each frame on these walls contained the same set of items—one newspaper clipping detailing an athlete’s near-career-ending injury, a second clipping extolling the athlete’s incredible comeback, and a picture of the athlete in question with an arm wrapped around the shoulders of one smiling man in a white doctor’s coat.
“Typical witch,” Suze noted quietly as I eyed one of these little collages in the place of pride above the old fireplace. I was no sports aficionado, but I would’ve had to be a hermit living under a rock not to be able to recognize Curt Schilling. Just to make sure that no one was missing the implications, this one even included a close-up picture of the famous bloody sock.
“Not a fan of subtlety,” I agreed. Not that witches could really afford to be. The first time I’d visited the late Dr. Lavinia Leamaro, who employed a witch, I’d noticed a similar decoration style. Since she’d specialized in women’s infertility, she’d covered the walls with pictures of the children that her practice had produced—and Suzume had explained to me at the time that intense emotions fed into a witch’s magic and made it stronger. I wasn’t exactly clear on how that worked. I knew a bit about what witch magic could do, which was manipulate the body and coax it to do things that it normally wouldn’t, like allowing an infertile woman to conceive, or, judging by Dr. Sassoon’s wall of triumph, enable a man with a torn tendon sheath on his ankle to pitch a successful Game Six of the ALCS. That put magic firmly in the category of things like my iPhone; I was completely unclear on how it worked, but I could identify its results.
The receptionist immediately recognized my name, and did something I’d never seen before in a doctor’s office, which was get out of her chair herself to lead us out of the waiting room and down a hallway. She knocked on a closed door softly, and when she heard “Come in,” she ushered Suzume and me into a completely occupied examination room.
There was a young woman in her late teens sitting on the examination table with her left pants leg rolled up to her thigh, revealing a long, muscled leg. Her knee was sporting a number of long pink surgical scars and a line of black sutures that looked disturbingly fresh. Sitting beside her on one of those stools with rolling wheels was the man who’d been sporting a doctor’s coat in all of the collages in the waiting room. It was always hard to judge height when someone was sitting, but it was easy to judge clothing, and his shirt and slacks would’ve earned a nod of approval from Chivalry and probably paid for half my month’s rent. He was African American, with his hair trimmed very closely to his head, and he had the type of features that made him look like a TV actor playing a doctor—namely, he looked like the kind of guy who could’ve been strutting catwalks rather than sweating through medical school. I couldn’t help but resent him a little on sight—he was all too reminiscent of the football quarterback in my high school who had also been at the top of all the AP classes. Seeing someone attractive, popular, and intelligent had always made me feel like they’d just gotten a few too many of life’s gifts.
Fortunately my resentment was offset by the incredible awkwardness of walking in on someone else’s medical appointment. “I’m sorry, we’re interrupting. We can wait—”
“Not at all,” Dr. Sassoon said in a rich baritone that made me immediately think, Of course. Was it too much to wish that this Nubian god would end up sounding like Gilbert Gottfried? “I left instructions that you be brought in. Please, do sit down.” He gestured to the wall, which had two chairs, one of them occupied by an older man with a luxuriant white mustache and a slight similarity to a walrus. Valentine’s eyes noted Suze, and I was interested to see that he suddenly looked more cautious. The expression quickly vanished when he realized that I was watching him. “I’m sorry, I hadn’t expected you to bring company. Bill?” The walrus man looked up, and Dr. Sassoon smiled politely. “You won’t mind waiting in the front, will you?” It was phrased like a question, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was clearly a command. The walrus cleared his throat and stood up.
Now I definitely felt like we were crossing a line, and I held up a hand to Bill and spoke to the girl on the table. “No, no, we aren’t going to kick out your dad.”
The girl never glanced away from her knee, and responded flatly, “He’s my coach.”
“Well, then we don’t mind kicking him out at all,” Suze said, and gave the man a dismissive nod. “Bill.” He cleared his throat and slipped around us with a muttered apology, closing the door behind him without even a glance at the young woman he was leaving behind. Suze and I exchanged glances, then sat down in the vacated chairs.
Dr. Sassoon gave us another of those polite smiles, but his eyes were clearly sizing us up. “If you’ll just give me a moment.” He turned his swivel chair around and returned to his examination of the girl’s knee.
I looked over at Suze, who gave a small shrug and then turned her full attention to the doctor. We watched as he probed the girl’s damaged knee, carefully running his hands over it, and at one point he straightened the leg entirely. The girl didn’t make a sound, but her face whitened and sweat showed at her forehead while her hands gripped the side of the table hard. But despite her obvious pain, she didn’t protest or even flinch back from what Dr. Sassoon was doing. I was amazed at her control, since in her position I would’ve at least been bitching up a storm, if not shrieking in pain.
After a long minute, the doctor carefully let the leg return to its original position. “Thank you very much,” he told the girl, then looked back over his shoulder and addressed his next words to us. “I’m not sure if you recognize her, but Crystal here is the fourth-best gymnast in the United States, according to the last round of Nationals.” He glanced back at the girl inquisitively. “And you probably would’ve placed higher if it hadn’t been for the knee troubles, correct?”
Crystal nodded, and I was struck by the intensity on her face as she continued to stare down at the sutures covering her knee.
“Well, Bill is out of the room, so we have a chance for a bit of an honest chat,” Dr. Sassoon said to her. “According to what your trainer told me when he scheduled this appointment, you’ve been a gymnast since you were five, and training seven days a week since you were eight. You missed the age requirement for the last Olympics by one month last time, and now if you want to compete, you have to stay at the top of the sport for another two years. How am I doing so far?”
“You’re right,” Crystal replied.
“Now, you suffered a stress fracture in the knee a year ago and had surgery to repair it. You continued training and competing on it, and the knee got worse. Another round of surgery, more training, and competition. You got out of surgery three days ago, and the surgeon informed your coach that your career is over.”
The young woman was absolutely stone-faced during this recital of facts. “Yes,” she responded bluntly.
“Well,” Dr. Sassoon said, giving her an odd smile, “do you want your career to be over?”
She blinked, and looked completely thrown. “What?”
“Let’s put a pin in that question,” he said, that smile still firmly fixed on his face. “Why don’t you explain to me what your plan is for the next two years—assuming I could make that knee last for you?”
Crystal started talking, and it was a terse, focused monologue of training plans and competition schedules. She would graduate from high school next year, then take a gap year before college in order to train full-time in order to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team, then head out with the team and win gold. Everything was detailed and thought out—this had clearly been the plan she’d gone over in her head for years, and she had a focus and intensity that honestly made me a little uncomfortable. At one point I glanced away from her, and I noticed something that I hadn’t before. In the corner of the examination room was a large ceramic pot that housed a jasmine plant. I’d caught the scent upon entering, but the thought of growing plants in an examination room was so far outside my own experience that I had subconsciously attributed the scent to an overenthusiasm with an air freshener. As Crystal continued to detail exactly how she intended to bring home an Olympic gold medal, I realized that the delicate white flowers were shifting and taking on a strange tinge—while a moment ago they’d been milky white, now they gleamed a sickly and disturbing green, tinged with a putrescent yellow and a bruising red. Then I blinked, and the colors were gone. But I thought that there were more blooms on the plant than there had been a moment ago, blooms that struck me as growing with an almost eerie vigor. I glanced over at Suzume, but her eyes had never wavered from Dr. Sassoon, and from where her chair was located, I wasn’t sure she could see the pot of flowers.
Crystal’s chronology of intended glory had wrapped up, and now Dr. Sassoon was speaking again. “Sounds like quite a plan. Now, I can fix your leg.” Her poker face shattered, and Crystal flushed with excitement. But just as her mouth started opening, Sassoon held up one cautionary finger. “Ah. Let me clarify what I mean, because you have a choice in what I do. In one treatment, I will help the surgery that you just underwent. It will turn out to be much more successful than the surgeon originally thought, and your knee will heal. You’ll have some stiffness to it, and some loss of flexibility, but it will function well enough that you will be able to get through a perfectly normal life for the next sixty years. But your gymnastic career will indeed be over.”
Crystal’s face fell. Clearly that was not the kind of fixing that she’d thought he meant. “And the other treatment?” she muttered.
“You will have full function back.” He put one hand on her knee, and while there wasn’t anything remotely sexual about the gesture, there was something about it that made me uncomfortable watching it. It was the way that he looked at her knee, as if his eyes could see through the skin, down to the tendons and the bone, and he was pondering all the things there that he could reshape. “Full flexibility, strength, all those things that you haven’t had for the last year, and honestly probably a bit longer before that, given the state of your tendons. This knee will make it to the Olympics, and you will compete on it with no fears that it will crumple and betray you.”
Crystal was beaming. “Y—”
Sassoon cut her off again, firmly. “Not yet, Crystal. This path has a cost.” He lifted his hand and raised her knee one precise inch. It clearly didn’t hurt her, but it focused her attention on the joint in question almost as if it were separate from the rest of her body. His voice shifted, and this time when he spoke again, there was almost a brutality to it. “Your knee will be ruined. The cartilage will wear too quickly, your bones will grind, tendons will snap like old rubber bands, and the knee will fracture like poorly fired china. Before you’re a year past the Olympics, you’ll be walking like an old woman, and you will need total-knee-replacement surgery by the time you are twenty-five.” He was completely focused on her, and his incredible voice was deadly serious. “This is not an estimate, Crystal. This is a promise.”
“But . . .” I knew just from the look on her face which path she had already picked, and my heart sank in my chest. “But I’ll get to the Olympics, right?” Valentine nodded, and then there was nothing on her face except raw drive and ambition. “Then that’s what I want. Fix the knee, make it work. I need to be back in the gym as soon as possible.”
There was a complete lack of surprise on Sassoon’s face when he heard this, and he wheeled the small padded stool he was sitting on over to the pot of jasmine flowers. Reaching one hand down, he selected one bloom, and broke it off. With a smooth motion, he lifted it to his mouth and ate it, chewing with a slow deliberation as he then moved to the storage area set beside the pot. He opened a low drawer and removed a plain earthenware jar, about the size of one of my old girlfriend’s makeup containers, and then wheeled himself back to his former spot in front of Crystal. He swallowed the flower in his mouth, then opened the jar and took Crystal’s knee firmly in his left hand, dipping the first two fingers of his right hand into the jar and emerging with a dollop of cream. The cream at first glance looked no different from a blob of sunscreen, but as his hand moved, I noticed a weird opalescent shimmer to the cream that encompassed a rainbow of colors.
He began rubbing the cream firmly into the knee, and the moment the substance touched her skin, Crystal gave a full-body flinch that was so extreme, she might’ve tumbled right off the table if Sassoon’s grip on her knee hadn’t been so tight. Sweat was steaming down her forehead, and her hands locked onto the table in a death grip. She wasn’t trying to get her knee away from Sassoon, but small, strangled noises of pain began emerging from her throat.
“It burns, it burns, it burns!” Her voice was suddenly very high and very young.
I tensed at the sound, but Dr. Sassoon looked completely unperturbed. “It will do that, Crystal. Now,” he rubbed one last dollop of the stuff into her line of stitches, which resulted in a full-throated scream that left me flinching. He remained unaffected, and simply gave a small nod as he removed his hands from her leg. “You’re going to stay still for the next hour and give that a chance to soak in. Then I’ll be back, and I’ll put another layer on.” I’d thought Crystal was pale before, but now she went stark white at the knowledge that she was going to have to sit through a second round of that, but Sassoon wasn’t even done yet. “You’ll be back in here every morning for the next two weeks for another two layers. Keep the knee lightly wrapped between treatments, stay out of the gym, and, Crystal, this one is very important, don’t shower. Don’t even wash your hands. Do all of this, and when two weeks are over, you can go straight back into a full training and competition schedule, and the knee will do everything you need it to.”
Crystal blinked at him owlishly, the combination of the pain in her leg and the strange barrage of directions apparently overwhelming her. Sassoon put the top back on the jar, slipped the jar into his shirt pocket, and stood up, turning his attention to me and Suze just long enough to indicate that we were all heading out together. He gave Crystal one last, thin smile. “I’ll send Bill back in, and you can bring him up to speed on the plan.”
We followed behind Sassoon as he led us up the stairs to the second floor of the restored house, and into an office that had probably begun life as one of the bedrooms. The decoration style was more of the same from his waiting room, though I noticed one of the collages sitting unhung, propped on the wall behind his desk. This one featured Lance Armstrong, and, given recent events, I had a strong feeling that it used to hang in a point of pride downstairs.
“So what was all of that, Sassoon?” I snapped as we all settled into chairs. These, I couldn’t help but note despite my irritation, were much comfier than the ones in the examination room.
“Please, Fortitude, call me Valentine.” He steepled his fingers, and I again felt the full weight of his attention fix on me. “You don’t like the choice I offered Crystal.” He didn’t bother to phrase it as a question, just as a statement.
“No, I don’t,” I replied flatly. “I don’t think a seventeen-year-old has the perspective to make the decision to trade a lifetime’s use of her joint in exchange for a short-term goal.”
“Interesting,” the doctor said, and meant it. He leaned forward, his brown eyes intent. “And who should’ve made that decision instead? Her coach has a very strong financial incentive for getting that young woman on an Olympic podium, and very little concern about whether she’ll be capable of walking without a cane at thirty. Her parents stood back and watched while she ignored every doctor’s order and competed on a severely compromised joint. Maybe they’ll wring their hands later, but if they’d had worries about her future health, they would’ve pulled her from her current trainer months ago.”
“You could’ve made the decision,” I said, my voice icy. “Told her that gymnastics were over and sent her on to the rest of her life with a functioning left leg.”
“And assumed that I knew better than Crystal herself about what she needed to be happy in life. Seems a bit paternalistic, I think.” For the first time since we entered the room, Sassoon looked over at Suzume, who’d been watching this exchange with interest. “I wasn’t expecting you to bring company, but given what I’ve heard about your activities, Fortitude Scott, I should have. I presume that you are one of the White Fox’s granddaughters?”
“That’s right,” Suzume said coolly. “I notice that you don’t seem interested in my thoughts about the gymnast.”
“I’m not, actually, though of course it’s somewhat rude of me to admit,” Sassoon was definitely going for bluntness here. “Do you agree with your companion, however?”
Suze gave a sharp smile that showed off her teeth. “It was her body to ruin. Why fuss?” She leaned forward, and all joking was gone as she focused on the doctor. “The gymnast isn’t important, of course. You knew very well what she was going to choose before you even brought the subject up. What you were interested in was how Fort was going to react. Why don’t you tell us why that is?”
Sassoon registered Suze’s demand, but when he answered, he spoke directly to me again. “I believe you are acquainted with one of my colleagues, Ambrose?”
“The witch who used to work for Lavinia Leamaro? Yes, we met a few times.” I didn’t try to pretend to be anything other than grim when I spoke about him. At the behest of his fanatical employer, Ambrose had cooked up the roofie potions that had been fed to the Neighbor girls who had found themselves unwillingly involved in the Ad-hene’s murderous plan to breed themselves back to power. Ambrose hadn’t known what his potions had been used to do—but he also hadn’t asked why his boss wanted a potion that would render its drinker compliant and without memories of certain events. I’d prevented my sister from killing him, but I hadn’t been sorry when she left him with several long gouges in his stomach.
“I spoke with him recently, and he told me that you had stopped your sister from gutting him like a fish. I find that extremely interesting.”
A few pieces were beginning to come together for me. “Interesting enough that you convinced Rosamund’s assistant to give me your contact information,” I noted.
Sassoon nodded. “Yes. I wanted very much to meet you.” He spread his hands gracefully, and a thoroughly charming smile spread across his face. Clearly salesmanship was among his many talents, and some used-car lot had missed out big when Valentine Sassoon had applied to medical school. “And, whatever you were contacting Rosamund about, I’m confident enough to say that I can do just as well. A bit better, possibly. Certainly better than poor old Esmé would’ve.”
I eyed him carefully. That too-charming smile did nothing but inspire suspicion in me, and my feelings about the doctor at the moment were pretty far from signing up for his fan club, but there was clearly something that Sassoon wanted from me. I weighed my options, then decided to go ahead. “All right. Here’s the situation.”
Sassoon was attentive while I explained, taking notes and occasionally stopping me to ask a clarifying question, but otherwise quiet. I finally finished, and looked at him expectantly, curious to hear his response.
Suzume had been unusually silent during this exchange, watching Sassoon with all the close attention of a cat that has spotted a mouse. Now she gave a slow, taunting smile, and said, “Go ahead, Valentine. Here’s that chance you’ve wanted so badly to impress the youngest of the Scotts.”
Sassoon allowed only the briefest flicker of a look toward Suze, but it was a revealing one, and I realized during that moment that she’d hit on something important, and something very true. Then the witch’s expression smoothed again, resetting to pleasantly professional, and he focused on me when he spoke. “When I was very young, my grandmother told me that she had once been able to make a corpse’s body bleed fresh in the presence of its killer. But that magic would work only when the body still carried an imprint of the killer, and that would’ve been gone by the time rigor mortis set in.”
“That’s very helpful of you, telling us what you can’t do.” There was a lot of sarcasm from Suzume’s corner, but this time Sassoon must’ve been ready for her, and he didn’t acknowledge her comment except for just the slightest twitching around his left eye.
I’d already lost a lot of time today, and while a full list of what witches could do with a murder victim’s body was academically interesting, I needed something a bit more focused now. “Why don’t you just tell me what can be done?”
Sassoon smiled thinly at me. “You are tracking down a killer, so I understand a certain amount of disinterest in background. Very well. You tell me that the murder weapon is missing, and I’m sure that to find it would be helpful. Well, then. Blood calls to blood, Fortitude. If your killer was clever and tossed the weapon in a bucket of bleach, there will be nothing that any witch could do for you. But if even a trace of that blood remains on the blade, I can help you find it. Stabbings are very intimate—a lot of blood, and a lot of direct emotion. It’s not an easy thing to do, and I’ll need to call some of my colleagues to assist me, but I can give you an object, a compass of sorts, that will lead you straight to that knife as long as even a speck of blood remains on it.”
That was definitely something useful, no doubt about it. I readied myself for the weight of the other shoe dropping. “And what will this assistance cost me?” Not that my mother was hurting for money, but that would probably determine the price tag. I’d worked briefly in landscaping, and I’d seen my boss throw more than a few rich-bastard tax line-items on a job estimate.
Sassoon smiled, his perfect teeth gleaming. “On the house. I am, of course, quite happy to assist the Scott family.”
“Shenanigans,” I said bluntly. “Either you come clean now, or I hit the road for Vermont and see if Rosamund’s substitute can do this.”
His mouth pursed, and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. “She wouldn’t, that I can tell you.”
I didn’t bother to respond, just watched him. He stared back at me for a long minute, but then he broke and glanced over to Suzume. Answering his unspoken question, she said, “Your song and dance in the exam room was to find out if Ambrose was telling the truth about Fort. You got your answer, but in case you’re still wondering, I’ll confirm. Yes, Fort will absolutely go out to the car and leave you in his dust for a principle.” Sassoon looked at me, just a bit nervously this time, and I did my best to stay calm and cool as I stared at him. I wasn’t sure whether Suze was completely right on her last statement—I’d made plenty of compromises in the past when other people had been in danger—but I trusted that Suze was figuring out a way to get the witch to spill about his ulterior motive in getting involved.
It worked. Sassoon dropped the act and sat back heavily in his chair, annoyance now showing clearly on his expression. “Plain dealings seem odd when speaking to a vampire, but very well.” Something about him relaxed just slightly, the overt and almost annoying effort to charm being dialed back. “How much do you know about the witches, Fortitude? About our history in your mother’s territory?”
“You want to tell me something about that history, so why don’t you go ahead and do it?” I suggested.
Sassoon’s smile seemed more natural now. “You don’t like me very much. But you didn’t like Ambrose, or what he’d done, but you wouldn’t let your sister kill him. Let me talk about witches, then.” He dropped his hands onto the arms of his chair and leaned backward, clearly settling in for a long session. “Most witches earn a livelihood in medicine. Some of us went to medical school, but others find ways to work around that. Magic works with the body—some of us will lay our hands on our patients and change their bodies, but most of us choose to use the intermediary of potions and salves. The results are the same, but it is easier for our patients to assume that the cure came from a concoction rather than magic. Safer as well, of course. Witches, after all, have always had trouble hiding from the eye of humanity.”
“I believe Salem has a tourist trade based solely on that fact,” Suze noted.
“Salem gets all the attention, but Connecticut was the first colony to execute a suspected witch,” Sassoon said. “And there are a few countries today that still maintain official legislation against sorcery, though only in Saudi Arabia will the state still perform an execution. But to be what we are isn’t a choice—unless a witch regularly uses their power, siphoning it out and into humans, we sicken. And when we begin to sicken, the power will force its way out, oozing out and seeking humans. Without control and direction, our power will twist human bodies. Cancer rates will skyrocket, and there will be sudden increases in birth defects or miscarriages. Today that will result in a visit from the CDC and investigation of local chemical plants, but in past years that led to a witch hunt.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, and I meant it, since that was a fact that I had been previously unaware of, “but what does this have to do with me?”
“Witches don’t live in close communities beyond the immediate family structure. Large numbers meant a greater risk of detection, and for a very long time, doctors and healers whose patients showed a high instance of surviving as a result of attention were more suspect than those whose patients died by the cartload. So when witches came to your mother’s territory, we didn’t do so as one group, like the metsän kunigas or the ghouls, and we didn’t have a strong position to bargain with. And your mother had a strong desire to keep us from getting attention. We aren’t allowed to live close to one another outside the immediate nuclear family, or work together, and we’re strongly discouraged from any large gatherings. Children have to leave the family home at eighteen and settle elsewhere, regardless of whether or not they have the means to support themselves.” The smooth charm from before was completely gone now, and Sassoon’s voice was getting charged and excited. There was an expression of barely leashed outrage on his face, and for the first time I recognized who Valentine Sassoon really was—he was a believer and an activist, just like those people I’d known at Brown who had gone into the Peace Corps or taken gap years to work for Habitat for Humanity. It was a strange thing, this recognition, because suddenly he seemed much more like a person to me, and I very unwillingly found myself associating him with a dozen old friends who I’d listened to late into the night in bars, and I liked him better for it. And because he was being truly honest with us, he didn’t even notice and capitalize on that change of heart I was experiencing, instead rolling forward, his voice getting louder and more worked up as he went. “And things have tightened. It’s been fifty years since any new witch was given permission to settle inside Madeline Scott’s borders. Your sister Prudence was open about the fact that she was behind that. She also began harassing witch couples who had large families. Twenty years ago she murdered two witches and their six children, giving the justification that the family was too large and would’ve drawn attention—not was drawing attention, but would have. Since then, any couple who has more than three children lives in fear that Prudence Scott will show up at the door, because once she does, that family has twenty-four hours to be out of Scott territory, or Prudence comes hunting.”
He paused for a second, breathing deeply and clearly trying to pull himself back on track. I watched but didn’t say anything—my sister’s dislike of witches was something that she certainly had never hidden from me, but I hadn’t known the extent of what she’d done. I didn’t doubt what Sassoon was telling me—I knew Prudence, and I’d seen her murder my foster parents in front of me in the name of how they could have been a risk to our secrecy. It wasn’t hard to picture her killing a family of eight, and then using that to terrorize and control something as fundamental as family size.
Sassoon picked up his narrative again, and as much as he tried to control it, I could hear the thrumming excitement in his voice. After all, I remembered it from a dozen phone calls from Brown alumni telling me about how they’d quit their jobs to join Occupy Wall Street and be part of the movement that changed America. “But things are changing. Science has caught up with a lot of what magic does. The illness that our magic cures is often the same one that would be cleared up with antibiotics. We can make a tumor smaller, and over time even eliminate it. Chemotherapy can do the same thing. We can allow an infertile woman to carry a child to term—just like countless clinics. And better yet, when I do something with magic that goes beyond the boundaries of medicine, my patients simply regard it as a scientific marvel. Even if a scientist saw under a microscope that something I had done would not be possible, she would bend over backward and simply credit it as being beyond current scientific knowledge rather than even suggesting for a moment that magic could possibly exist.” Yeah, I definitely recognized that look on his face as he described what could be. “There are places that are still dangerous for us to live, but the cities in America are bastions for weirdness. Wiccans set up shop in Salem, and I see flyers for spiritual healing and crystal healing and alternative medicine covering public bulletin boards. This part of the world is safer for us now, safe enough that many of the old rules aren’t necessary anymore.”
“And you think I’ll be more open to changing these rules than my sister?” I asked.
Sassoon nodded eagerly. “Yes, but not just changing the rules. Allowing us to build a community, and to negotiate with your family as a group rather than as many individuals.”
Suze’s jaw dropped. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—you’re trying to unionize the witches?”
“Is that accurate?” I asked. “Because that actually sounds a bit accurate.”
He nodded. “It is.”
The kitsune whistled, long and low, and I saw that she was, despite herself, impressed. “Well, look at this. Sisters doing for themselves.” She’d always had an interesting way of showing that she was impressed. Then she became deadly serious. “You know that Prudence will never go for this, and neither will Chivalry.”
“But would Fortitude?” And he looked at me, both fiercely determined and painfully vulnerable.
I held up my hands. “Listen, Valentine, you’re making some good arguments here—I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But this is something that I’d have to look into a lot more, and I’m certainly not going to just agree with you based on a five-minute spiel.”
To my surprise, what I said actually seemed to rev him up more. “But you’re not immediately saying no, Fortitude, which is what is important.” With a clear effort, he forced the enthusiasm down and got serious again. “A succession is coming. We all know it, and we’re all bracing for it. If Prudence rules when Madeline is gone, then things for the witches are definitely going to stay bad and probably get a lot worse. But you stopped your sister from killing a witch, even one who had done some pretty morally gray things. So I want you to see more of us, Fortitude, and be aware of us and what we can do and how we could live. Because you could be a voice for where we could go, and for changes in the way things have been done.” That was definitely enough to make me uncomfortable, and I opened my mouth to explain that whatever hopes he was pinning on my ability to convince my sister to do something she didn’t want to, he was so barking up the wrong tree, but he held up a hand to stop me and my jaw snapped shut again. He just looked so very painfully earnest. “That’s all I wanted to say for today. Now, about your murderer problem. Just get me at least a cup of Matias Kivela’s blood, and a few hours for everyone I need to drive down. Let’s say, my house a bit after eleven tonight?” He wrote down an address on the back of one of his business cards and slid it across the desk to me. I glanced down at it, noticing that unlike most doctors, Sassoon had very legible handwriting.
I considered, then accepted that I really did need this compass thing. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on Sassoon. “All right.” I paused, then had to ask. “You’re not going to tell me not to tell my family about your big plans?”
All of his activist fervor from before was back under control, and Sassoon gave that cool smile that made me remember my earlier vestigial high-school desire to punch him. “You know very well that if you tell them, Prudence will see me dead as soon as possible.”
That was certainly unfortunately true, but still. “You’re pretty confident about my ability and desire to keep my mouth shut.”
“I’m a gambler. Besides, you protected Ambrose, who had done far more than me to deserve death,” the witch said dryly, then turned to look at Suzume.
“You aren’t so sure about the odds of my keeping this to myself, are you, Sabrina?” Suzume’s voice was amused, and she was clearly feeling peppy enough to start assigning nicknames. From the expression on Sassoon’s face, he not only caught the reference, but was highly offended by it. Again, Suzume’s instincts for antagonization were proving flawless. “Well, don’t fret. You’re being so nice and useful for us today—it would be a shame if Prudence ripped your arms off.”
That seemed like a solid exit line if I’d ever heard one, and so Suze and I showed ourselves out of the office and back to the Fiesta.
“Okay, so that was a bit more complicated than I expected,” I said to the world in general. Then I looked over at Suze, who was fiddling with her seat belt. “Think he’s worth working with, or should we see if the Vermonter can cook up that compass he was talking about?”
“Fort, your sister has the kind of attitude and outlook that I’m going to very politely refer to as unionbusting. Valentine stuck his neck out pretty far to try to recruit you, which to me suggests that he’s desperate because not many witches have been willing to sign up for his cause. They might agree with him on every line-item issue, but they’re not going to risk death by vampire.” She shrugged, not looking overly concerned at this assessment. “He needs you a lot right now, because he thinks that you can save the movement he’s trying to put together. If he promised to make you a compass, he’s probably going to just about kill himself to make sure that this is the best damn compass that any witch could give you. I don’t see the Vermont subwitch having that kind of motivation. Use him as long as he’s useful, and if he starts becoming a problem, just report him to your sister and she’ll take care of him.”
“Yeah, that’s nice,” I said sarcastically. I wished fervently that I could decide whether I liked Valentine Sassoon or thought he was a jackass, since I was sure that would help sort out my feelings about the likelihood that at some point my sister was going to show up on his doorstep in a killing mood. “Seriously, Suze, is what he’s saying about the witches right?”
“Fort, if you’ll listen to me for once, you won’t even go there.” There was a clear warning in Suzume’s voice.
“Suze.”
“Fine, yes,” she snapped, sounding pissed. “The witches have a bit of the short end of the stick.”
“If things are so bad here for them, why wouldn’t they leave? And why would others actually be trying to get in?” I tried to think through what Sassoon had told me again.
“Madeline Scott isn’t exactly benevolent, but she’s not bad,” Suze noted. “She at least prevents most interspecies warfare or predation, which is pretty different from a lot of other areas, where it’s just a question of which gang controls your area, and whether they want to kill you or recruit you. Some places are even worse—Des Moines is basically Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, with each individual looking out for their own skin, and your neighbor can go fuck themselves.”
The knowledge that putting one foot outside the boundaries of my mother’s territory would require the escort services of Chivalry had been enough to keep me solidly inside New England for my whole life, but I’d always assumed that it was just because I was a young vampire. Now I rethought my view of the wider world, and realized that things were even more complicated than I’d previously known.
“So Valentine is pinning his hopes for a brighter tomorrow on me.” That was enough to induce an instant headache, and I rubbed the heels of my hands hard against my eyes. The witches were so, so screwed. “Suze, everyone seems really interested in me all of a sudden.”
“That’s natural, Fort,” she said soothingly. “After all, your milk shake brings all the boys to the yard.”
I gave a deep sigh. “I value these chats we have. But, seriously. First with Lilah, now with Valentine, I’ve got people thinking that I can somehow protect them or change things after my mother is gone.” I blinked my eyes open again and turned to face Suze, staring at her beautiful, opaque black eyes, and I felt a small but insistent flutter of suspicion. “Do the kitsune think that as well?” I asked, feeling like the familiar assumptions of my life had suddenly been replaced by a set of fun house mirrors.
Suze looked amused rather than offended, and the blunt honesty in her voice steadied me. “My grandmother sees the value in having a foot in both camps, Fort, but if you think that’s my sole reason for hanging out with you, think again. The kitsune have the closest ties to the vampires. We’ve seen enough to know that your influence on Prudence is about as substantial as an ant’s on a hippopotamus.”
Wasn’t that the damn truth. I perked up slightly at the other implications in that small speech. “So you’re hanging out with me primarily because of my rugged male allure?”
“Maybe because of your scrappy puppy-struggling-out-of-a-cardboard-box appeal.”
“I’ll take that,” I said. That cleared up, I put the key into the ignition and started the Fiesta. It died. I started it again . . . and it died. Third time, and this time it caught. I shot a triumphant look to Suze, who returned it with a withering expression of Get a new car. I ignored that. “Now, let’s go see a ghoul about a cup of blood.”