Iron Night (31 page)

I believed her. And when I closed my eyes again, I fell back into a dreamless sleep.

I woke up the
next morning when someone began knocking on the door. For a second I was confused, mainly about why I had such a terrible crink in my neck. Then I realized that it was because a black fox was snuggled into a ball on my pillow and had nudged my head out of the way. Her tail was tickling my mouth, and as I pushed it away and rolled to my feet to head for the door, I ran a hand over my tongue to dislodge some of the hairs coating it.

I checked the peephole, then pulled the door open to reveal Lilah, looking scrubbed and fresh and carrying an armful of take-out bags that wafted smells of breakfast.

I'd texted her the hotel information the night before, but my surprise at seeing her must've shown on my face, because she immediately flushed. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just figured I'd bring over—” and then the light pink of her cheeks suddenly flamed red, and I looked behind me, wondering what had set her off and figuring that it had to be Suze. Instead I realized what she'd noticed—there were two beds in the room but one was still perfectly made, with all the pillows still in order. The other, the one I'd had both a skinwalker-induced terror dream and a championship-level pillow fight in, was completely wrecked. It didn't take a rocket scientist to draw conclusions from those two pieces of data.

I knew that my own face was flaming as I began sputtering some attempt to explain the situation, and Lilah began backing up, both of us clearly wishing that the earth would just open up and swallow us whole so we could escape the conversation, when there was a sharp yip at our feet that made both of us shut up and look down.

Smelling a breakfast she hadn't had to pay for, Suze had scampered over, still on four fox feet. She was now balanced on her back paws and was stretching her muzzle as high as possible toward the bags of food in Lilah's arms. It was the kind of scenario that had viral YouTube video written all over it.

“Oh, that's Suze?” Lilah said, sounding startled, and I remembered that she'd never seen the kitsune in her true form.

“Yeah,” I said, grateful that Suze's antics had apparently broken the cycle of awkward that Lilah and I had just been trapped in. Then suspicion kicked in. With Suze's almost pathological delight in pranking me, the very fact that she
hadn't
shifted to human form and let Lilah spot her lolling naked in hotel sheets was weird.

I eyed Suze, who was playing adorable fox and resolutely ignoring my attempt to catch her gaze. My mind began sorting through possible motives. Was this part of some elaborate long-con prank? Was she pranking me by
not
pranking me? Was she taking the situation seriously enough that— Wait, no. I dropped that one as unrealistic before I even finished it.

“So, the extra bed . . . ?” Lilah asked, comfortable or curious enough now to walk inside the room. Eyes glued to the food, Suze tracked her.

“Apparently all she needs as a fox is a pillow. And she liked mine.” I reached out and began helping Lilah set up the breakfast. As my hands fell back to years of ingrained wait-staffing, I wondered—between her painfully obvious “bathroom break” at Dreamcatching yesterday and the decision not to go full false-appearance romantic comedy just now, was Suze trying to set me up with Lilah?

Was Suze trying to find me a roommate
and
a girlfriend? The sane mind shuddered at the thought of such a situation.

I snuck a look at Lilah, who was lining up tiny containers of orange juice with a precision that hinted at either a past in the engineering sciences or a smattering of OCD. Did I
want
to date her? I certainly got along with her, God knows I was attracted to her, and she had been sending off hints of possibly being into me (which I liked in a woman). I looked at Suze—who, still in fox form, had stuffed her entire head into one of the empty breakfast bags and was now attempting, skunk style, to back out of it. Not much guidance there.

This was not a thought process that could be conducted on an empty, uncaffeinated stomach, and I reached for the coffee (bless her soul, and true daughter of New England that she was, Lilah had hit up a Dunkin' Donuts) and mentally put a pin in the issue.

We talked as we ate—or, rather, the two of us talked. Suze stayed fox for the entire meal, comfortably curled in an armchair and simply pointing her dark muzzle at whatever food she wanted to sample next. If either of us didn't respond quickly enough to her demands, she also demonstrated that she was extremely willing to appropriate food we'd already put onto our own plates, so Lilah and I became very quick to respond whenever that imperious black nose pointed toward another egg muffin.

Between bites and feeding the kitsune, Lilah explained that she hadn't been able to pick up any new information the night before. Since Dreamcatching didn't open until eleven, she'd decided to swing by and see if we'd come up with any new theories ourselves, leading to the morning's perilously awkward encounter. I told her about the nightmare Soli had apparently sent me, and Lilah was suitably horrified.

“You need to talk to someone about that,” she said. “Someone who has dealt with skinwalkers before. Have you called your sister?”

“Not since it happened,” I admitted. “But she was pretty clear earlier that it's just dream projections.” Though I would privately admit to a few qualms myself about the word
just
in that sentence.

Lilah apparently was in agreement. “That still sounds creepy. How long can she keep doing that? Can you even stop it?” She turned to Suzume. “Do you think Fort should talk to a witch? They might be able to cook him up some kind of magic Ambien.”

We both looked over at the fox, currently licking egg off of her whiskers. She paused, considered, then gave a small yip.

“Is that a yes or a no?” I demanded, and she moved her shoulders in what I assumed was an attempt at a shrug. “Suze, I'm trying to have a conversation with you here. Can you please change?” Suze's golden fox eyes narrowed, and she very deliberately turned around in her armchair and began grooming her tail.

“This is kind of awkward,” Lilah noted, and I nodded. The sounds of Suze's licking filled the room. The subject of the skinwalker's ability to mess with my REM cycle apparently shelved, Lilah and I returned to the issue of how to track down either Lulu or Tomas. With no new information, the conversation very quickly just became a verbal chasing of tails.

This was different from a literal chasing of tails, which Suze decided to do under the table while we had our conversation. It was somewhat distracting.

When my phone rang I lunged for it, certain that Prudence had finally closed in on her quarry, but it was Matt instead.

“Fort, I'm at Iron Needle,” Matt said, his voice low and tense, not bothering with any preamble. “There's a guy walking out the front door, and he has bandages on both wrists. He's got a shirt on and I can't see the shoulders, but this could be a possible victim—he's in the right age range.”

Adrenaline immediately shot through my veins. “Is he alone?” I asked.

“No, he's with a woman. I just took a picture, let me send it to you.”

When my cheap flip-phone had been destroyed a few months ago, Chivalry had taken the opportunity under the guise of a birthday present to upgrade me to the sleekest and smartest of phones that he could find, and had delivered it with every bell, whistle, and shiny new app that could be installed. So I was able to check Matt's photo without even hanging up on him, which turned out to not be a great thing because as soon as the photo filled my phone's screen, both Lilah and I responded with extremely loud and knee-jerk curses.

The photo was a distance shot, done as surreptitiously as possible with a small camera phone. But what we were looking at was unmistakable—that was Soli, walking in Beth's skin, and the young man beside her with bandages on his wrists and an almost sleepwalking expression was the changeling stock boy from Dreamcatching, Felix.

Suze bounced onto the table with agile grace, glanced down at the screen, and immediately jumped off and ran into the bathroom.

“Fort? What? What is it? Do you recognize them?” Matt's voice over the phone sounded very far away.

Lilah's eyes were huge, and she'd wrapped her hands over her mouth, clearly afraid to say anything that would be overheard. I cleared my throat awkwardly and stuttered, “Um, yeah, Lilah's with me, and she recognizes the kid. He's, um, one of the members of the cult.” Matt was quiet, and I pushed forward quickly. “Matt, can you follow them?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I'll tail them.”

“Don't lose them,” I said, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. “But don't . . . don't try to talk with them or anything. Don't let them see you.”

“I know how to tail, Fort,” he snapped, then, “Listen, I've got to get off the phone. I'll talk to you when I can.”

He hung up. As soon as she saw me end the call, Lilah took her hands off her mouth and her words tumbled out. “That's Felix. Why would they be using Felix? He's a changeling, not a recessive. Why would that woman be with him?”

“They've just changed the pattern,” I said grimly. “Or we were wrong about the pattern to start with. Maybe we missed a bunch of murders. Lilah, have changelings been going missing?”

“I don't know,” she said. Her hands were shaking, and she shoved them through her hair. She closed her eyes, thought a moment, then shook her head. “I don't think anyone went missing, but I can't be sure. They're on the fringes of the community. I know only a few, and there are at least a hundred, probably more, that are under thirty and were taken from their parents.”

The bathroom door slammed as Suze emerged. She was in human form again and had clearly dressed in a hurry. Pants and shirt were on but she was barefoot, and even though it was completely inappropriate under the circumstances, my brain couldn't help noting that she hadn't bothered with a bra. And that the room was a bit on the chilly side.

“Time to drop the speculation,” she said, pulling her hair back into a quick ponytail. “Soli is with the sacrifice this time, and they know that we're looking for them. I don't think they'll be worrying about laying a false trail. Your sister hasn't found any of them yet. It's up to your detective now.”

As if she'd summoned him, the phone rang. Matt was calling, and I immediately answered it. “Matt?”

“Lost them,” he said, his voice clipped. “The girl was driving and they ran a red light. I was two cars behind—there was no way I could follow them.”

“Shit.” With that lead down the toilet, there wasn't anything left except to try to move Matt out of the line of fire. “Can you go back to the tattoo place? Just watch it.”

“With a possible victim out there, you want me to get back on the stakeout?” Suspicion was heavy in Matt's voice. “What does your friend know?” Then, even more ominously, “Fort, I'm looking at this photo again and I've got to say, this girl is a dead damn ringer for that vegan ex of yours. What the fuck is going on here?”

My stomach dropped—Matt had met Beth only a few times in passing, but apparently it had been too much to hope for that he wouldn't recognize her if he stared at a picture of her skin long enough. I couldn't think of any way to smooth this over, and the fact was that we needed to put together some kind of plan quickly. I gave up and went for the most cliché way to escape this conversation. “What? Matt? I can't hear you! My reception sucks!” And I hit the End button.

Suzume gave me a slow shake of her head. “Really smooth, Fort. Not suspicious at all.”

“I'll worry about that later,” I told her. “Right now we need to figure out something to do. Lilah?”

Lilah was currently sitting on the edge of Suzume's bed, her face pressed into her hands, not exactly inspiring confidence. She didn't look up. “I don't know,” she moaned. “Felix is one of us. I hired him. Tomas gives him rides home after work sometimes. We all chipped in to get him a birthday cake when he turned seventeen. How could they even think of using him?”

“You can have your crisis of faith later, Keebler,” Suze said, derision glittering in her eyes when she looked at Lilah. “Right now your boss is planning on murdering the stock boy, and you going to pieces is
not
helping.”

I tossed a glare at Suze and dropped down onto my knees in front of the shaken half-blood, putting my hands around hers and gently tugging them down to reveal her paper-pale face. Whatever she'd thought the Neighbors capable of, it clearly hadn't been the murder of one of their own. “Lilah,” I said, as soothingly as I could, rubbing her cold hands. “If we can't stop it, Felix is going to die really horribly.” She flinched visibly, and I squeezed her hands hard. “You need to help us, Lilah,” I urged. “Is there any way you know to get either Tomas or Lulu's locations? Anything you haven't tried yet?”

She looked at me blankly; then understanding slowly filled her golden-brown eyes. There was something just a little harder about her gaze; one last illusion, one last, toughest belief she'd had about her extended family had just been stripped away. She nodded once. “I can get Dr. Leamaro,” she said, her voice low and rough.

“Meaning?” Behind me, Suze crossed her arms, and looked distinctly disbelieving.

“I can get Dr. Leamaro to come to my apartment,” Lilah said, her voice getting stronger, more grimly certain with each word.

I stared. “Why didn't you do that before?”

Lilah gently dropped my hands and stood up, pacing across the room. “Because I'll need to lie to a friend well enough that she believes me and calls Lavinia.”

Suze shook her head. “You and Fort are so alike,” she said in a tone that definitely was not implying a compliment, and reached down and pulled on a pair of socks. “This is definitely not the time to get panties in a twist over honesty. Do it now; apologize later.”