Vampires were an Old World import to the Americas. My mother was the first to make the trip, crossing from England in 1662 and establishing a wide territory that included all of New England, most of New York state, a slice of New Jersey, and a healthy helping of eastern Canada. She’d been a vampire in her prime back then and had carved out her lands with almost traditional colonial zeal—anyone or anything that objected to her preeminent status had been very messily slaughtered. After almost a century of these activities, she had exterminated, driven out, or made treaties with all the occupants, and settled down to start a family.
The supernatural species hid among the human populations—humans outnumbered us by a thousand to one, and technology plus an unbeatable superiority of numbers was not a fight that any sane individual wanted to get into. There were plenty of the less sane among us, but even they were strong-armed to toe the party line on this one. There were species that had tried to withdraw completely beyond human communities; that was not only difficult, but it also meant withdrawing from some of the basic necessities of life—like high-speed Internet access. Most of us could pass for human, and plenty of species had developed symbiotic or outright parasitic relationships with humans.
Despite the passage of centuries and the establishment of an American constitution, my mother’s method of rule remained entirely feudal. Nonhumans who wanted to either visit or live in my mother’s territory had to petition for entry and then negotiate the terms that they would live by. Madeline was a very big fan of tithing—almost all of the groups in our territory paid a percentage of their earnings to my mother. They also had to avoid conflicts with other nonhuman species in the area and cover any of their supernatural tracks that might otherwise bring unwelcome attention.
As she’d gotten older, Madeline had passed the business of keeping her territory running smoothly to her children. My sister was a natural-born enforcer, striking terror into the hearts of generations of my mother’s subjects, but the tasks that involved more subtlety than “kill and terrorize” fell to Chivalry. And as with all thoughtful men of business, that meant that he delegated as much of the mountain of paperwork as possible to his staff.
My brother’s office was on the first floor, but tucked toward the back of the house, far away from the glamorous public areas. It was large, and decorated in an almost stereotypically turn-of-the-century gentleman’s style. Cluttered bookshelves marched to the ceiling, paintings of yachts, dogs, and horses decorated all available open space on the wood-paneled walls, massive brocade curtains festooned the windows, and a massive oiled mahogany desk dominated the room. But for all the show, it was a functional office—those books were the old bound tithing records. The filing cabinets might have been wood-veneered, but any accounting actuary opening the drawer would see the rows of regimented files and feel right at home. My brother’s desk was old and big enough to merit its own zip code, but the computer on it was upgraded every other year. The next room (apparently the old music room) had been carved up several years ago to make a support office that had the desks, phones, and equipment for his secretary and two accountants—all human. The accountants spent their days balancing the books, sending the tithing bills, and making sure that not a single penny that the Scotts could claim slid through the cracks. It was slightly shady work, but nothing that any good mobster accountant wouldn’t be used to. The secretary, on the other hand, had a very different job.
Loren Noka was working at my brother’s desk when I walked into the room. A statuesque woman in her late forties whose Native American heritage was clearly advertised in her high cheekbones and dark hair, she greeted me with a sober nod. Loren had taken the job of Chivalry’s secretary when her father, Irving, retired after almost fifty years of service. Now she spent her day answering calls and organizing e-mails that came in from the inhabitants of my mother’s territory, as well as scanning newspapers and local blogs for any hints of misbehavior or possible supernatural exposure.
“Hello, Ms. Noka. You’re working very late tonight.” Chivalry referred to her as “Loren,” but since he’d known her since she was in diapers, I suppose he had the right. To me, Ms. Noka had always had a very kind of Alfred from Batman demeanor. She knew a lot of secrets, would never tell a single one, was capable of a look of single icy superiority that would make a transgressor feel like an ant, and I was fairly certain that if I asked her, she would be able to construct a fully functional Batmobile.
“Just making one last check of the news sites before I call it an evening,” she said with a polite smile. With Chivalry in mourning, her workload had doubled overnight, but she somehow never indicated that she was stressed. The only thing about her that looked even slightly stressed was her royal purple pants suit as she stood up, but the fabric that was fighting to contain her curved and zaftig figure was probably held together by Loren Noka’s sheer strength of will—or she’d found some sort of experimental military superfabric with enhanced tensile strength.
“Is that for me?” I asked, nodding at the single file still sitting in the in-box on Chivalry’s desk, a stark contrast to the orderly but impressive pile organized in the adjoining out-box.
“Yes.” She reached over and handed it to me. “I would’ve called, but Mrs. Scott told me that you were coming back for dinner.”
The file’s weight was substantial, and I didn’t try to conceal my surprise. “Feels problematic.”
“No, nothing like that. I just got a message that the rusalka needs a meeting, and since I don’t think you’d ever met her before, I pulled the entire file for you to look over.”
After twenty-six years of ignoring anything supernatural (including myself), I’d been playing a desperate game of catch-up, particularly in the past month, where I’d suddenly found myself my mother’s official delegate and Ms. Noka’s boss. There had been quite a lot to learn, and I flipped open the file to its first page in the hope of refreshing my memory on this one—then immediately slapped it shut again. “Chivalry mentioned her once. How exactly does that one place a phone call to you?”
“One of her neighbors placed it at her request. Will you go up soon?”
“Might as well go tomorrow,” I said, unable to muster much enthusiasm. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. “It’s only up in Massachusetts.”
Ms. Noka gave me her Mona Lisa smile. “Remember to pick up the bait. There’s a note in there, but Mr. Scott always found duck gizzard the most effective. Especially in this weather, when you don’t have to wait a while.”
“I do read the whole file,” I noted, slightly defensively. At least, I did now. On my first fully commissioned task for the family, my friend and designated partner, Suzume, and I had driven up to Maine to deal with a group of selkies who were purportedly running a local protection scheme and sinking the boats of fishermen who wouldn’t pay in. It had actually been a bit more complicated than that, and I’d made the classic rookie mistake of not reading all of Ms. Noka’s carefully collected background information before we’d headed up. While it had turned out well in the end, there had been an uncomfortable incident where I’d been pushed off a dock by a toddler and Suze had punched a seal in the face. A teenager had filmed the whole thing on his phone, and there had been an awkward period where we’d thought that the video would not only go viral, but that Suze would be formally charged with endangering the local wildlife.
With the file tucked under my arm for later examination, we exchanged good-byes. I left the house without seeing any of my family again, but the knowledge that always pulsed in the back of my brain put them all on the second floor, probably in their individual rooms.
My battered Ford Fiesta sat beside my family’s row of gleaming cars like a squat mushroom invading a cultured garden. It took two tries for the engine to turn over, and I rubbed my hands briskly together to encourage the circulation as I waited for the sluggish heating system to warm up. I could see my breath in the air as I pulled out my phone and punched Suzume’s phone number in from memory and listened to it ring. We’d been in a strange holding pattern for the last month since I’d confessed my feelings to her. On the one hand, our friendship had continued unabated, and she was my regular partner on all my official trips and investigations around the territory. But at the same time, the question of what her answer was going to be was hanging between us.
Suze didn’t pick up, and I left a message outlining the basics of tomorrow’s task. When I’d agreed to work officially for my family, Chivalry and I had negotiated a basic salary. It had been a hotly contested discussion, with Chivalry arguing high and me arguing very low. I’d supported myself on minimum-wage jobs since I had graduated college, and while I was not a particular fan of the lifestyle that it had necessitated, I was also very wary about the possibility of my family buying my loyalties. We’d finally settled on an hourly wage for all tasks that was just a bit higher than what I would normally be earning in the open market of crappy jobs. Suzume had had no such ethical quibbles, and for her involvement with me, she was charging a very comfortable retaining fee.
I finished the message and ended the call, wondering what she was up to. With Suzume, there was always a long list of possibilities—anything from beating up problem clients for her family’s escort service to scampering around the woods in her natural fox form, with any number of activities in between. Since our visit to the selkies, most of our tasks had been relatively simple—investigations of why some tithes were low (the economic downturn was equally hard on supernatural-run businesses, as it turned out), a few territory disputes, some snooping into suspicious deaths that had uniformly turned out to have entirely human causes. Yet even though our job didn’t always have much interest to it, she’d remained committed.
Of course, she was still a kitsune, and was entirely capable of creating her own fun. I’d flipped down the sun visor on my drive down this morning and had discovered that some unnamed prankster (definitely Suze) had glued two small craft-baskety googly eyes to it, so now it appeared that the visor had eyes and was watching me.
It was lucky that there wasn’t any traffic on the road back to my apartment in Providence, since the Fiesta’s heater never managed to dispel any air that I would’ve characterized as warmer than “somewhat cool.” Since the Fiesta had spent the entire summer with inoperable air-conditioning, I couldn’t help but feel moderately annoyed that it was apparently capable of disgorging cool air, but only in the completely wrong season. By the time I got home, I hustled quickly to get into the apartment, sighing in relief when I got into the stairway with its comparatively warmer temperatures. I’d bought my funeral suit and formal jacket new for the occasion—since my transition had begun, I’d put on enough muscle to go up four suit sizes, which had necessitated a shopping trip. After much hunting, I’d managed to find clothing that wouldn’t shatter my budget or sear my brother’s eyeballs on such a sad day. My suit had started its life in a very exclusive store window, until the store owners apparently realized that not many men were willing to strut their stuff in lime green. It had made its way down to the discount warehouse, where I’d bought it, and then I spent a rather interesting afternoon with Suzume figuring out how to dye it black in my apartment’s bathtub. The suit actually had a decent lining to it, but at a certain point in Rhode Island, typically around Halloween, it becomes preferable to just never leave the house if you aren’t wearing a heavy-knit sweater and the downiest of down parkas.
I climbed the three flights of stairs that led from the ground-floor boutique lingerie store, past Mrs. Bandyopadyay’s, and ended at the two-bedroom apartment that I shared at the top with my latest roommate, Dan Tabak. We’d only lived together for a month, though so far he’d managed to pay his half of the rent on time and not make any particular messes. But with any shared living situation, there would always be compromises—as I scrabbled in my pocket for the keys, I could hear the melodious (and now far-too-familiar) tones of Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice.
Inside was a typical Sunday tableau—Dan was sitting on the sofa, a wide assortment of thick law textbooks spread out on the battered coffee table in front of him, along with half a dozen completely stuffed notebooks, and his dreaded flash-card-making supplies. Dan was a second-year law student at Johnson and Wales University, and if I’d ever had even the slightest shred of interest in getting a law degree, seeing Dan in action would’ve crushed it. In the rare moments when Dan wasn’t in class, or in a study group, or studying on his own, he was making flash cards as a study aid. It seemed like a horrible and endless process to me, but then again, I’d called higher education a success after getting a bachelor’s degree in film theory—an accomplishment that had involved not a single flash card, and a number of actually good films.
I collapsed into our armchair and looked over at the TV screen. A hellacious storm was whipping through the palm trees on a tropical island while Benedict Cumberbatch gave a stately narration. Dan liked to run epic BBC nature documentaries as background when he was making flash cards or organizing the day’s class notes. He claimed that documentaries like Wild Pacific had narrators whose voices were very soothing. I’d seen his DVDs of Sherlock, though, and had suspicions that Dan simply had a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch, but it seemed a little hypocritical to throw stones. After all, I’d seen a lot of shitty movies simply because Amy Adams was starring in them.
“Hey,” Dan greeted me, not looking up from his text. I glanced at the title, Corporations, and shuddered. “How’d it all go?”
“How do these things ever go? Mostly it just went, and at least now it’s over.” I reached down and pulled off my shoes, sighing in relief. Dress shoes were not made with all-day comfort in mind.
“Is it true that you guys go through this every five years?” Dan looked up from his book and raised his dark eyebrows inquisitively.
I shrugged awkwardly. We were really just still in the figuring-each-other-out phase of rooming. But unlike all of my previous roommates, Dan wasn’t human. I was still getting used to living with someone who not only knew about vampires and the supernatural, but who actually heard regular gossip about my family. “Usually a little longer than that, but sometimes less,” I replied, trying to be polite but really not wanting to keep talking about the subject.
Dan let it drop. “Did you eat? I made too much, so there are still some leftovers in the pot.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “Was it one of those meals?” Dan was a ghoul, which meant that a certain amount of his intake had to be human organs in order for him to maintain his health. The ghouls in my mother’s territory had all originated in Turkey and had acclimated well to America, most of them finding an easy source for their dietary needs by opening funeral homes or working in hospital sanitation. It had made me extremely cautious around Dan’s cooking, though, and we’d had to have a few pretty serious conversations about dish cleanup, prompt post-preparation trash disposal, and the labeling of leftovers.
“Just the shepherd’s pie. The sweet potatoes are safe.” Dan snorted. “I can’t believe that you’re so squeamish about these things. It’s not like I interrogate you about every beverage you store in the fridge.”
“Really? What the hell was that soda discussion last week about, then?”
“You know my feelings about high-fructose corn syrup.” Dan narrowed his eyes, and a very stubborn and lawyery look crossed his handsome face.
I shook my head, unwilling to reengage on this particular issue, even if it meant that I had to abide by Dan’s new list of sodas that were banned in the apartment. I was also not entirely full after my partial dinner at my mother’s, so I got up to investigate the sweet potatoes. There was still a full serving in the pot, looking extremely inviting, so I spooned it into a small dish. I carefully avoided looking at the partially empty casserole dish. Since Dan had moved in, I’d learned to my horror about how many sins dishes like shepherd’s pie and meat loaf could conceal. I put the now-empty pot in the sink and turned on the faucet, automatically stepping back to avoid the incipient spreading puddle that had been this sink’s hallmark for many months. To my surprise, everything remained dry, and the faucet even managed to avoid its usual cantankerous sputter. For a moment, I wondered whether my landlord had finally, for the first time in all the years I’d lived there, responded to a repair request. But that seemed like the kind of out-of-character behavior usually only present in body snatching and encroaching brain tumors, and the last time I’d seen Mr. Jennings, he’d seemed completely normal.
“Dan,” I called over my shoulder, “did Jaison fix the sink?” Despite my extreme dislike of Dan’s meat products and my unwelcome exposure to so many viewings of nature documentaries, he had come with one very big mark in his favor—his boyfriend, Jaison, who was a general contractor. Since Dan had moved in, Jaison had fixed the broken window in his room, adjusted the iffy thermostat on the living room radiator, and even figured out why the pipes in the bathroom made such a racket whenever anyone showered. (He hadn’t been able to fix that pipe problem, since it would’ve involved completely opening up the walls, but it was nice to have a diagnosis.)
“He swung by with the parts early this afternoon. Said that it was driving him nuts,” Dan said, not looking up.
I was distinctly impressed. “He came by on a Sunday and fixed our sink, without you even asking? You can never break up with this man.” And clearly, short of Dan setting fire to the curtains, I could never ditch him as a roommate.
“Yeah, I’ll pass that one along,” Dan replied dryly. “I’ve got your half of the materials costs written down on a Post-it somewhere.” Then he tilted his head backward over the back of the couch to look at me. “Hey, can you put the last of the shepherd’s pie in the microwave for me? I think I’ll finish it off.”
“I’m not touching that thing, even with a spatula.” I put my bowl of sweet potatoes in the microwave and nuked it as Dan laughed incredulously at my statement and turned his attention back to the screen, where Benedict Cumberbatch was now discussing the coconut thief crab. My phone gave its incoming-text buzz, and I pulled it out. Suze was up for the trip to Massachusetts tomorrow. I smiled, texted back an acknowledgment, and then polished off the sweet potatoes in short order. A comfortable silence fell between me and Dan, though I found myself glancing over at him several times, wanting to ask a question that I had a strong feeling would be crossing a boundary. I wished I could ask him how he could date Jaison, who was a human with no knowledge of the supernatural world at all, and feel comfortable not only keeping such an enormous secret from him, but also eat three dinners a week that were made from humans. I wanted to know whether it was as easy as he made it look, or whether it was actually much, much harder, and he was just really good at keeping up a facade. I wondered what Dan thought of my brother’s relationships with his wives. Did he think Chivalry’s approach was sensible, or was he actually as appalled by it as I was by his shepherd’s pie?
I opened my mouth to ask the last one, then shut it quickly. I shouldn’t ask questions when I might not be ready for the answers, I reminded myself. And even though my half of the rent was paid up for another four months, and between the family work and some part-time floater work I’d picked up, I was more financially solvent than I’d been in the last five years, it was a good idea to maintain roommate harmony by not poking at sleeping dogs. I’d spent far too many months too recently with a sum net worth of less than fifty dollars to not be pleasantly enjoying being able to buy a new DVD or replace a worn-out piece of clothing without worrying about paying my bills. I was even managing to accrue a tidy sum that I hoped would help overhaul some of the Fiesta’s more-pressing issues—it would be nice, for instance, to experience a winter that didn’t require mittens while driving.
Leaving Dan to his Sisyphean flash-card construction, I headed to bed.
I found two very tiny googly eyes glued to the back of my toothbrush, and one single googly eye affixed to the cap of my toothpaste. I laughed at the sight, but then felt a low feeling of unease as I considered where Suze might be going with this one. I checked my room carefully for any more eyes before finally pulling up my heavy winter comforter and slowly falling asleep, the precise murmur of Benedict Cumberbatch’s narration still drifting through my bedroom wall.
* * *
Armed with a bag of assorted Munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts and a coffee for each of us, I picked Suzume up from her house at ten the next morning. She was scampering out of her front door the moment I pulled into her driveway. The grin covering her face was nearly as brilliant as her neon green North Face parka. Suzume was very familiar with the Fiesta’s winter performance at this point, so she was wearing a heavy pair of blue corduroy pants, and her silky black hair was arranged in two jaunty pigtails that just showed under the bobble-topped fleece hat that matched her parka.
“Fuck is it cold in here!” she noted as she pitched her duffel bag into the backseat with a heavy metallic clunk that indicated that she was prepared for whatever we might encounter. “Fort, I’m not telling you that you should buy a new car—”
“I’m sure you aren’t, but somehow I think that is going to be the takeaway on this comment,” I noted.
She continued blithely over me. “No, I’d never question your automotive decisions. I’m just going to note how glad I am at this particular juncture that my reproductive organs naturally reside inside my body and don’t have to try to make the inward crawl that yours probably are attempting at this moment.”
I snorted, handing her coffee over as she pulled on a pair of gloves that she had apparently set aside just for the car ride. “Do you have all of that out of your system now, or am I going to hear variations on this theme for the whole drive?”
“I can make no promises,” Suze said, her beautiful almond-shaped eyes crinkling in humor.
Getting from Providence to the small town just outside Lowell, Massachusetts, where the rusalka lived required a cautious snaking around the edge of Boston. Even at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, the roads leading into Boston were stuffed with commuters, and we made our way carefully around and then up, neither of us having any intention of turning an hour-and-a-half drive into a three-hour Masshole-infested nightmare of bad driving and Red Sox bumper stickers.
Resting just below the border into New Hampshire, Lowell is one of the classic New England cities. Farming roots made way to an industrial boom, followed by the slow and painful collapse of the mill and textile industries. Despite a growing student population thanks to the Lowell branch of the University of Massachusetts, and a slow but helpful influx of several high-tech and biomedical companies, driving through downtown Lowell was still a stark and sad presentation of the bones of the town’s mighty past. Though some of the old factories had been turned into museums or apartment buildings, many still sat vacant.
We drove through Lowell, across the river, and then we were in the small adjoining town of Dracut. After a circuitous path through a labyrinth of tiny interconnecting roads, we finally pulled up to our destination—the small public boat launch to Long Pond. Possibly one of the least inventively named lakes in New England, it was sizable, its upper third quadrant crossing the line into New Hampshire. It was ringed on all sides by tiny capes and slouched houses that probably all dated back to the 1940s or earlier, all cheek by jowl on minuscule lots, the primary appeal of which was a tiny strip of sand and a wooden boat dock that someone’s grandfather had probably built over a few weekends back in the days when building permits were optional and a six-pack of beer was required. A few places stuck out—new construction where someone had bought up one of the old properties, razed it to the ground, and proceeded to shoehorn in a hideous McMansion that overwhelmed the tiny property and completely missed the point of lakeside living.
I parked the car and then grabbed the small deli bag that I’d picked up this morning. The parking area, which in the summer was probably stuffed to the point where cars parked on the grass, was completely vacant now, and the moment Suze and I got out of the car, an icy breeze whipping across the water gave us a clear reminder of why that was. Suze managed to restrain herself to a very speaking glance, and hauled a small blanket out of her duffel bag. It was wool, with a bright argyle pattern, the kind of thing that the elderly tuck around their knees during end-of-season games at Fenway Park.
The dock that we walked down was bleached from years in the sun, but we both sat down cautiously on the spread blanket, well aware that generations of splinters probably remained to attack the unwary. While Suze wrangled the deli container, I pulled a long coil of fishing line out of my pocket, then took up the surprisingly difficult task of tying one end firmly to a raw duck gizzard. Neither the smell nor the temperature was helping, and I was well aware that the easiest route, a hook, would be a very bad idea. I finally succeeded, despite Suzume’s ongoing color commentary of the ordeal, and dropped the gizzard down into the lake. The water was clear enough that we could peer down and see our bait hanging there a few inches below the surface, suspended by my line and already the subject of intense scrutiny by some minnows and one fat sunfish.
We stared in complete silence for five minutes, watching the fish, until Suze finally pronounced grimly, “This is going to take all damn day.” She sent a dark-eyed glare my way, as if somehow this were my fault. “She needs to get a freaking cell phone like everyone else.”
“Pretty sure that phones don’t work that well underwater,” I noted.
“She could stash it in a beaver lodge when she wasn’t using it.”
“Beaver lodges now come with electrical plugs for charging purposes?”
Suze reached down and tugged the line, making the duck gizzard wobble in the water. “How exactly is this supposed to work?”
I’d read the entire file last night, but I was a little hazy on this myself. “I think she somehow smells it?” Suze looked unconvinced, and I defended the theory. “Hey, sharks can smell stuff underwater.”
Looking down critically to the gizzard, currently being nibbled at by fish, Suze said, “It’s a really big lake. Does she usually hang around this dock?”
“Um, I don’t think she has a preferred area.” I passed the deli container over to her. There were a half-dozen other pinkish-grayish blobs of meat still in it, with a matching (and extremely odorous) liquid collecting at the bottom. “Here, pour the gizzard juice out into the water. Maybe that will help.”
The day dragged on while we sat and waited, replacing the gizzard each time the little circling fish managed to completely nibble the bait off the line. For a short time the sun came out and we were warm enough to pull off our hats and gloves, but then the gray clouds rolled back in and the temperature dropped again. We talked while we waited, but they were intermittent conversations at best, since we were both actively scanning the water around us, looking for signs that the rusalka was approaching.
Two and a half hours into our vigil, a ripple in the water a hundred yards out caught my attention, and I nudged Suze with my elbow. We both eyed it carefully—between the lake’s beaver population and one slightly out-of-season loon, we’d had a lot of false alarms. But then the ripple appeared again, closer this time, and my heart began beating faster as I realized that there was a large mass moving under the water.
She broke the surface of the lake about ten feet from us, and her natural camouflage was good enough that if I hadn’t been specifically looking for her, I doubted that I would’ve spotted her. The rusalka was cautious, and the only thing visible was her face from forehead to cheekbone. Her skin was a dull and mottled collection of grays and dark blues that matched the surface of the water almost exactly, and her one visible eye was a hazy white. Then there was a blink, and I realized that what I’d seen was an outer eyelid. The eye now visible was a brilliant blue-green, like a freshly polished aquamarine, but it was a solid color, without a visible pupil or any white.
“You can come closer,” I called softly. “I’m Chivalry Scott’s brother, Fortitude, and I came to talk with you. I’ve brought my friend Suzume, a kitsune, so she can keep anyone from noticing you.”
I glanced quickly at Suze, who gave a small shrug. “Shouldn’t be hard,” she muttered. “It’s not like anyone would be expecting to see her.” All of the kitsune have a kind of magic that they refer to as fox tricks—they can hide things that are happening, or make people see only what they would expect to see, rather than what is actually there. I’d seen Suzume once hide a corpse in a way that would fool policemen, cameras, and even morticians—but that had been very difficult. She always told me that working within people’s expectations was the easiest to do.
The eye disappeared beneath the water with barely a ripple, but then a breath later, the rusalka fully surfaced right beside the dock, and it was all I could do to avoid a full jump-reaction. The file that Loren Noka had prepared for me had included a few drawings, but that was a very different thing from seeing the rusalka in all her glory.
From her waist upward, the rusalka looked superficially like a woman. Her skin was that chameleon-like gray and blue all over, but from a distance it did look like human flesh—though now that she was closer, I could see a slight overlapping pattern to it, like the hide on a shark. What at first looked like a long, coiling head of hair that stretched below her waist and was a mix of black, gray, and blue was actually something thicker, and it moved against the wind, constantly coiling and relaxing, like the strands on a sea anemone. Her eyes were that brilliant aquamarine blue, but set on the sides of her face like a fish’s. She had no nose, and her long mouth opened and shut as she seemed to adjust to the air. The rusalka was no mammal, so her torso was flat, with no unnecessary breast tissue, even in imitation. And down at the waist was what made my throat suddenly go dry. The lake surface began to slowly churn as the rusalka propelled herself higher out of the water, revealing the tangle of dozens of long, powerful tentacles that made up her lower body. She pushed upward until she could rest her arms on the edge of the dock, an oddly relaxed-looking pose that allowed her to fix one of those eyes on each of us.
There was also, it must be said, a distinctly fishy odor emanating from her.
She was a stunning example of the weird directions that nature and evolution can take. Farther off in the lake, two men in kayaks paddled leisurely into view, apparently confident enough in their craft that they didn’t expect to overturn into the icy waters. Suze’s fox trick did its work, though, and one gave us a small wave of recognition, not even registering the sight of an honest-to-god sea monster resting against the dock.
Very typically, Suze recovered first from the reveal, and, for all the world like a good hostess at a boring cocktail party, extended the deli container forward, with a drawled, “Canapé?”
The rusalka took a deep breath, drawing in the odor of the remaining duck gizzards. Then her mouth fell open into a wide semblance of a smile that revealed a set of teeth that reminded me of a porpoise’s, and with a brisk and oddly throaty, “Don’t mind if I do,” she accepted the container in one webbed hand and tipped the whole thing back like an oyster shooter. I somehow restrained a shudder—the smell of those duck gizzards, even on a cool November afternoon, had not been improved by a lack of refrigeration.
Looking about as pleased as possible with her noseless face and fish eyes (she bore, I couldn’t help but notice, a small but distinct resemblance to the film version of Lord Voldemort), she made a smacking sound with her mouth that I assumed was some kind of compliment to the cook, and set the now-empty container back on the dock.
“So,” I said, drawing on every iota of experience I’d gained during my time in the service industry to just roll with this and preferably get out as soon as possible. “What seems to be on your mind?” From the notes in the file, the rusalka wasn’t much into small talk, and honestly, what kind of social pleasantries were there with a sea monster? Ask how the algae level had been this summer?
“Jet Skiers,” she said, practically hissing the word, and the water became more agitated as her tentacles thrashed in temper.
“Um, I’m sorry?” Whatever issues I’d considered as being the cause of my visit today, that had definitely not been on the list.
But the rusalka was clearly eager to elaborate. “Those awful Jet Skiers. From the moment the lake unfreezes in the spring, through the entire summer, and practically right into winter, not a day goes by that I don’t have to hear them buzzing those horrid machines up and down the lake. This summer was the worst—it was constant. They drip gasoline, they swamp the canoeists so that I’ve nearly had people dumped right on top of me, and the blades on them are horrendous. Just look at that!” One long tentacle lifted out of the water for our perusal. I noticed that it was the same color as her skin on the top side, but on the bottom, suction-cuppy side, it was a bright, almost electric blue. It also had two long, barely healed slices in it.
Apparently it wasn’t just manatees that were in danger from Jet Skis. “That does seem problematic,” I said, feeling sympathetic. “And you would like my mother to . . . ?”
The rusalka dropped that hazy white lid down over her eyes in a way that in the female of a lot of other species I would’ve called coy. “Well, I can’t kill any of them without your mother’s permission,” she said slowly. “But perhaps if just a few unfortunate accidents started occurring . . . ? I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long before the town authorities stepped in to regulate things.”
Sympathy over injured tentacles only went so far. “We aren’t going to green-light the slaughter of Jet Skiers,” I told her flatly.
Suzume piped up, that familiar foxy glint in her eyes. “I don’t know, Fort,” she said, mock-thoughtfully. “They can be awfully assholish. And if she agrees to take out only the problematic ones—”
The look I gave her told her how very, very unamused I was.
“What?” Suze responded, the hurt tone of her voice completely at odds with the grin that she was fighting to suppress. “I’m sure it would make life a lot more pleasant.”
As if on cue, the loud buzzing of a Jet Ski filled the air, and from the north end of the lake a particularly douchey specimen roared into view, cutting across the path of the kayakers so that the wake of his machine nearly swamped them. He then turned and went skyrocketing back in the direction he’d come from, leaving the two men frantically trying to right their kayaks and ride out the rest of the waves. The darker-haired of the two, stabilizing himself faster, expressed his outrage in gestures more usually seen on the I-93 interchange into Boston than in the beauty of nature.
I could sort of see what Suzume meant, and it was always difficult to argue against the killing of humans when the ones in question insisted on acting like complete dicks, but still . . . “I’m sorry,” I said, making sure that my tone was firm, “but you are not going to be allowed to kill the Jet Skiers. No matter how much they might have it coming.”
There was no doubt about this one—the rusalka was pouting. “I was worried you’d say that.” She sighed heavily, and her tentacles slapped the surface of the water in a desultory fashion that I supposed was meant to convey disappointment. “Things are changing so much. I remember a time when Chivalry didn’t mind if I took a few bites out of drowning victims, as long as I hadn’t been the cause of it. Now I have to stay away from the bodies, even when they’re stuck somewhere for days and I don’t see how anyone would notice one little nibble gone.”
The nostalgia of the predatory species in the territory was always a little creepy to listen to. “I am sorry,” I repeated, “but you have to stick to the fish. Birds if you can take them at night when no one will see you hunt. We just can’t risk anyone figuring out that there’s a large predator in the lake, much less that it’s you.”
“It’s terribly crowded now, though. There used to be quiet areas of the lake, even in the summer.” The rusalka’s lower lip gave a small tremble, and she fixed that incredible eye on me again. “Are you very sure that you won’t let me kill just a few of the Jet Skiers?”
Clearly this had been on her mind for a while. If I hadn’t checked all of the clippings and printouts that Loren Noka had provided in the file and known for a fact that there hadn’t been any unexplained deaths or suspicious drownings in this lake for the last three years, I would’ve been getting worried. “Very sure.”
The rusalka’s tentacles slapped the water a few more times; then she sighed. “Then I think I’d like to ask your family to find me a new lake. Somewhere very quiet, with healthy fish. Maybe in the migratory path of some ducks.”
Despite my instinctual sympathy for any duck populations she found herself around, this was a plan that I could get on board with. Apart from the undeniably problematic Jet Skiers, it looked like the population density of this area was on the rise, which was not a good match with the rusalka. I wasn’t very worried about her ability to keep herself hidden—the background in the file I’d read made it clear that she spent most of her time in deep water, and since there hadn’t been any local rumors about a lake monster, she wasn’t a concern in that area. But there did tend to be higher suicide rates around the lakes where rusalka lived—whether it was a chemical or pheromone they dispersed naturally into the water or something else, it was a fact of their presence. Depression rates would be higher around a rusalka, and suicide clusters common. It made sense, really. The rusalka was native to Russia.
“That seems like a reasonable request,” I said. “Do you have any preferred destination?”
“North.” That eerie hair of hers curled tightly, wrapping around her head and shoulders. “The water temperature is getting just a bit too high in the summer. I noticed it the last few years.”
Somewhere, I thought, some Republican senator had sensed a disturbance in the Force and screamed out that global warming was a myth. “I’ll bring it up with my family and see what we can work out,” I assured her. North certainly wouldn’t be a problem—if we were looking for a relatively remote lake, we needed to get her farther away from the cities anyway.
She dipped lower into the water, her tentacles now completely hidden. “But no Jet Skiers,” the rusalka said darkly.
“You might have to compromise a little, but I promise that I’ll see what lakes have restrictions.” There had to be some privately owned lakes or lakes in protected areas where the authorities shared the rusalka’s distaste. “Is that sufficient?” I asked as she slid down even farther, until only her shoulders and head were visible. The rusalki were solitary creatures, not known for being great socializers, and I had a feeling that with our business concluded, she was ready to be on her way.
“Yes. My thanks,” she said. There was a sudden flurry in the water, a swatting of tentacles, and a moment later two fat sunfish were flopping on the argyle blanket between me and Suze, and the rusalka was gone.
We both stared at the flopping, gasping fish for a second. “Maybe that’s her version of a fruit basket?” I ventured.
“So tossing them back in is out of the question,” Suze agreed, and made a face. “Your Fiesta doesn’t smell good at the best of times, but this might be a tipping point.”
Almost three hours of sitting on a windy dock had left me with a desire to get somewhere with heating that was stronger than my inclination to defend the honor of my car, so we stuffed the fish into the deli container and headed back to the Fiesta. We dumped the now very dead fish four streets away, where we hoped they would make some stray cat extremely happy. By mutual decision, we then broke out the smartphones and made a beeline for the nearest pizza place. While the duck gizzards and the rusalka had not been very pleasant, we’d missed lunch and it was now almost four o’clock.
I couldn’t vouch for Suzume, but I hit up the Purell dispenser in the bathroom with more than usual vigor.
Once I’d decontaminated myself as much as possible, I settled back into the booth where Suze was already flipping through the menu. She’d taken off her parka for the first time that day and now looked much happier.
“If we ever have to do that again, I’m doing it on four paws. My winter coat is all grown in now, and I would’ve been much more comfortable.”
“Plus you could’ve eaten those fish she tossed us,” I noted. “Would’ve saved you the cost of dinner.”
She looked up from the menu, clearly affronted. “What, I sit on a dock all day with you to visit something that is probably going to give me tentacle-hentai nightmares, and you can’t even spring for half a pizza?”
When we’d first met, that would’ve had me lunging for my wallet. But I knew Suzume well enough to know how much of her indignation was just an act. “If this is a date, I’ll pay. But if it isn’t, we really should make sure to ask for a split check. You know, so everything’s clear.” I gave her my most agreeable smile, watching her eyes narrow.
“So your argument here is that I should date you to get some free food?”
“I’m just saying that there are some perks.” She made a grumbling sound, and I grinned. “In fact, as a show of good faith, I’ll even get you a beer.”
It was an old joke between us, and she couldn’t hold back her laugh. “Well, that’s the kind of big gesture that can get a woman’s attention,” she teased, deliberately flipping her pigtails.
“Pizza and beer, Suze,” I deadpanned. “I have it on excellent authority that they go together.”
Suze pushed her menu away as the waitress came up. “Large pizza, half vegetarian, half meat lover’s,” she rattled off our standard order as the poor woman, who had only expected to take the drinks, scrambled for her order pad. Suze paused for a moment and looked back at me, tilting her head in that very vulpine way of hers. Not looking away from me, she said, “Split the checks. But,” she amended emphatically, “the beer goes on his.” When the waitress left, she gave me a chiding look. “Don’t try to bribe me, Fort.”
“It’s not a bribe,” I said mildly. “Just an incentive.”
She snorted, but then changed the subject. I let her—we’d had these small snippets of conversation many times over the last month. If she’d ever told me flat out at any point that she didn’t want to be in a relationship with me, then I would’ve dropped it forever. But she hadn’t—and at times I could feel her dark eyes watching me when I wasn’t looking, considering and assessing, the same way I’d once seen her in her fox form, staring up at a bakery tin that I’d put on top of one of the high cabinets to keep away from her. She’d been weighing how much she’d really wanted it, and whether it was worth the effort.
As it had turned out, a fox is very capable of jumping straight to the top of a refrigerator, then hopping on top of the hanging cabinets, scampering over to the bakery tin, and gobbling a third of the contents before you can stop her. Since then I’d just had to accept that no food item in my apartment was safe from Suzume.
When I pulled out my wallet at the end of the meal, I discovered that it was now sporting a pair of glued-on googly eyes. I looked over at Suze, who was watching me with a look of sublime glee across her face. I shook my head and pulled out some cash, ignoring her delighted snickering.
We drove back to my apartment, where Suze plopped straight onto the couch and started channel surfing. I called the results of the trip in to my mother, who seemed pleased by the results.
“Talk this one over with your sister,” Madeline told me. “I’m sure the two of you can come up with a good plan of action.”
“Mother, I’m not sure that Prudence and I work that well together,” I said. “The last time didn’t work out too well.” In fact it had ended in my holding a gun to her head, and then her attempting to kill my host father, Henry. Not a particularly great track record.
“Nonsense, darling. You sorted out that wretched elf problem, and just had a few hiccups at the end.” I choked a little at her phrasing. “Besides,” she said, her tone sharpening, “you have many more years of sharing each other’s company. There’s no time like the present to figure out how to get along. Now, when will you be coming down again? She’s decided to continue visiting in her old room for another week or so, so you can see her whenever you want.” What a very genteel way my mother had with phrasing. Much better than mentioning that Prudence had had to temporarily move back into the mansion when Madeline began enacting her punishment plan. Apparently it was very hard to go to the bathroom with a broken thigh unless there was a helpful twenty-four-hour presence of staff willing to help out.
“In a few days,” I told her. “The rusalka won’t need to be moved until the springtime anyway, so there’s no rush.” We exchanged good-byes, and then I hung up.
Collaborating with Prudence again was right up there with a root canal as far as things I’d like to avoid. I put in a call to Loren Noka to check on whether any new messages or jobs had come in while I was out, pulling out and prepping a bag of microwavable popcorn as I went. Suze had given up on channel surfing and was now digging around at the DVD pile. Noka assured me that with the rusalka conversation out of the way, there was nothing that needed my attention.
With the knowledge that I wouldn’t be running errands for the family business, I called up my floater job. A few weeks ago, I’d seen a flyer on the side of a bus stop shelter, and after following up on it, I had begun my exciting employment as the substitute dog walker for a local entrepreneur who had managed to corner the market in the College Hill area. Hank was a semi-retired semi-professional marathon runner in his fifties, and years ago he’d hit on the realization that he could get his necessary daily miles clocked up while at the same time hauling along some pampered canines and get paid for it. Since then he’d become something of a dog walker kingpin, with hordes of underlings, a permanently affixed Bluetooth, and a daily e-mail blast of schedules and locations. Working with my family had left my schedule too erratic even for working as a waiter, and so far this had been an almost unqualified success. After all, there isn’t that much of a difference between cleaning up after people’s dinners and scooping dog poop into plastic bags.
Fortunately enough, one of Hank’s regulars was going to be out the next day, so he simply gave me her full schedule. It included a round of basic morning and afternoon poops, which were never more than a quick walk around the block, and also a long set of full exercise runs for a few people who preferred the dog exhausted and their furniture intact.
Suze made a loud noise of disgust when I hung up, but said nothing. She was not a fan of the dog walking—she claimed that all the dogs marking me was really annoying. She’d thrown a fit the few times I’d met up with her after walking the dogs without going through a full shower. I assumed it was some kind of weird canine thing, since the dogs certainly noticed whenever I’d been around Suze—even a dog that might’ve been practically crossing its legs to avoid an accident had to slow down and give me a complete sniffing before we could make our way to the nearest patch of grass.
The familiar opening instrumental strains of Wild Pacific floated through the apartment. “Don’t even think about it,” I snapped at Suze, who, having made her disapproval clear, gave a superior sniff and flopped back onto the sofa. I poured the popcorn into a container and handed it to her as a peace offering, then popped the DVD out and flipped the TV over to the classic movies channel. Luck was with me as the opening scene of Shadow of a Doubt filled the screen. Suze and I had very different tastes when it came to most films and shows, but Hitchcock was always a reliable compromise.
The murderous Uncle Charlie had just been triumphantly squished by a train when keys rattled in the door and Dan and his boyfriend, Jaison, came in, carrying take-out food bags. As a couple, they were a study in contrasts. Dan was five foot five, dressed in an elegant dark gray peacoat, slacks, and a wine-colored scarf that was tied around his neck with a casually perfect knot that I knew would’ve taken me hours to achieve. Jaison was well over six feet tall, his medium-length natural Afro mashed under a battered Red Sox ball cap and an unzipped parka thrown on over a tan sweatshirt, with the carpenter’s pants that he’d probably worn to work that day, judging by a blob of dried mortar still attaching the pants to the top of his steel-toed work boots. And, of course, the small fact that Jaison was entirely human, while Dan was very much not.
A round of polite hellos was exchanged. Both Suze and Jaison were in and out of the apartment regularly enough that everyone knew each other socially at this point.
“Hey, Jaison. Over for dinner?” Suzume asked. I shot a suspicious look at her. Despite how innocuous the question had been, I knew that tone in her voice too well.
“Dan and I grabbed Thai food,” Jaison responded.
Suzume made a tsking sound. “Really, Jaison, why doesn’t Dan ever make dinner for you? I hear he’s a very daring chef.”
I blanched, and from his position behind Jaison, Dan looked ready to strangle Suze, whose smile had just a bit too much trickster in it to be mistaken for friendly. I knew that my roommate was always extremely careful to cook only on nights when Jaison wouldn’t be staying over, and up until now I’d participated in the cover story that Dan wasn’t much of a cook.
I hurried into the conversation, “Suze, plenty of people like eating out when they can. And I’m sure that Dan’s glad to get a break from washing out the pots.” I aimed a small kick at her ankle, but Suze was no stranger to the social-norm protection kick, and she smoothly lifted up her legs and tucked them onto the sofa, never breaking that wide smile.
Jaison remained blessedly unaware of the undercurrents in the conversation, and his white teeth flashed against his dark skin in a wide, though slightly baffled smile. “I don’t mind doing a round of dishes in exchange for dinner,” he said, before turning one slightly confused look at his boyfriend. “But I thought you didn’t really know how to cook?”
Dan very deliberately ignored the question and shoved the line of discussion into a completely new direction with a surprising lack of subtlety for a man currently studying the legal system. “What I’d really like is if we could convince the landlord to put in a dishwasher.”
I did my best to help out, saying, “It would take a miracle, Dan. You wouldn’t believe the fuss Mrs. Bandyopadyay had to make when her stove had a gas leak.” Leaning in close, I whispered, “Be nice,” in Suze’s ear.
While Jaison began transferring the take-out food from Styrofoam containers to plates, Dan came over to the couch under the pretext of checking out our pile of DVDs. I was treated to an extremely icy glare.
“Turn that look ninety degrees to the right, Dan,” I warned. “I didn’t start this.”
“She’s your girlfriend, so she’s your responsibility,” Dan said in a muttering pitch that nonetheless fully expressed his irritation. “Get her to knock it off.”
“Sitting right here,” Suzume complained, “and resenting every implication and statement you just made.”
“Dan, even if she was my girlfriend, which, for the record, she isn’t, I would still do what I’m doing now, which is to take this chance in advance to fully disavow whatever action she eventually takes to get back at you for those comments.”
The expression on Suze’s face was definitely promising full retribution, and Dan was smart enough to look a bit concerned. Quitting while he was behind, he grabbed a disc at random and got up, grumbling, “I didn’t know living with you came with a fox involved. The kitsune are a menace.”
Suzume watched Dan retreat, the gleam in her dark eyes hinting at future destruction of property or the ruination of reputations. I scooted closer to her and said softly, “He’s just sensitive about Jaison, Suze. That really wasn’t nice to tease him about.”
She gave a very superior sniff. “If he wants to date dinner, then he should get used to it.” Then she fixed me with a sidelong look. “You’re both too sensitive about this.”
“And your poking at Dan has nothing to do with Keiko?” Suzume and her twin sister had been arguing for months over Keiko’s relationship with a very nice, and wholly human, doctor.
The glitter in Suze’s eyes warned me to back off from that topic. “I don’t know if you stuck up for me very well just now. That’s didn’t seem like very boyfriend-ish behavior.”
I took the hint and dropped the family topic, but I couldn’t hold back a laugh at her mock-affronted demeanor. “Suze, the last thing you would ever convince me that you want is blind validation.”
A very calculating expression filled her face, and Suzume made a surprisingly smooth slinking movement across the sofa that took the distance between us from comfortable and friendly to completely nonexistent, pressing us together from shoulder to hip in a way that made my breath catch. My body went on full alert, and I was uncomfortably reminded of just how long it had been since I’d had sex. Suze was clearly absolutely aware of every iota of her effect on me, and her voice became low and husky as she murmured in my ear. “If you know me so well, what do you have that I want?”
Completely ignorant of just how loaded a question had just been asked, Jaison cut through the banal sounds of take-out food being dished out, saying in gleeful surprise, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles? Dan, I thought you hated the Terminator series!”
Suze and I didn’t move. Behind us, I could almost hear Dan gritting his teeth as he very quickly reaped the reward of snagging a DVD at random from my pile. “Well, you and Fort both like it so much,” Dan covered. “Maybe I should give it another chance.”
Without breaking eye contact with me, Suzume called, “That means giving it a full chance this time, Dan. Letting the series build its momentum. No calling it quits three episodes in.” Even as the sexual tension meter remained set on high, I fought a smile—Suze was never one to let a good chance for immediate payback pass her by.
“Fort, are you up for watching the pilot tonight?” Jaison asked as he walked over to prep the evening’s entertainment. As he did, Suze leaned away from me, letting a natural-looking position adjustment break our physical contact.
“Robots, time travel, Summer Glau, and violence?” I asked. If my body was destined to remain woefully unsexed, maybe my brain could at least get the condolence prize of sci-fi-induced dopamine. “Do you even need to ask?”
Jaison grinned and offered me a fist bump of geek solidarity, which I was happy to accept. Then he looked over at Suze. “Even Dan’s giving it a chance,” he coaxed. “You might like it.”
“Violence, sure. Summer Glau, maybe. Robots and time travel? Never. I’ll call a cab.” She gave my knee a friendly pat as she stood up. “Have fun scooping poop tomorrow.”
“It’s just the career I dreamed about for four years at Brown,” I noted.