Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (5 page)

“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.

I was not a
big fan of being awake at six in the morning, especially during the winter months when the sun wasn’t even up yet, but it was the unfortunate downside in a temporary career option that revolved around the bladder control of canines. At least today the coffeepot was already going. Still dressed in my usual winter pajamas of a set of old sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt, I propelled my zombielike self into the main room, where an already-dressed but still-rumpled-looking Jaison was pouring out the first coffee of the day. We exchanged the traditional pre-caffeine greeting of manly grumbles and commenced slurping.

Dan was parked on the sofa, feverishly flipping through a set of his flash cards, muttering things under his breath about alter ego liability and undercapitalization. Jaison and I shared a look of perfect understanding—no salary was worth that. The stressed-out ghoul broke off his prepping for a minute. “Fort, the dish-soap bottle has eyes. Is your girlfriend behind that?”

I shuffled over and checked beneath the sink. Sure enough, the Dawn container now had a jaunty pair of googly eyes. “She’s still not my girlfriend, Dan.”

“Whatever the hell she is, she’d better remember that whatever kind of grand finale she’s working up to had better not involve defiling common property.”

Silently, Jaison turned the handle of the coffeepot so that I could properly admire the eyes that were now affixed to it. By wordless agreement, neither of us mentioned it to Dan. I also decided that the addition I’d noticed on the ice cube trays the previous night could wait for a more opportune time.

*   *   *

The early morning passed in a quick series of doggy pee breaks. There weren’t that many of them—most dog owners, no matter how busy their work schedules, were able to run their dogs out for a fast poop before they had to head out for the day. But there were a few people who worked third shift and wouldn’t be home until almost noon, and one or two families had clearly gotten the dog as some sort of prop for their kid’s childhood and now attempted to farm out every inconvenient facet of the dog’s existence. Hank’s dog-walking kingdom was based on the very marketable importance of reliability—his clients might not always know
who
was going to be walking their dog, but they knew that
someone
would be showing up, and in a timely enough fashion that they wouldn’t be coming home to find a puddle of urine in the middle of their carpet. To make that possible, Hank required all of his clients to hang a combination-based keyholder on their doors, the same way that real estate agencies did. Hank changed all of the combinations himself every month, to cut down on theft concerns. Each walker was e-mailed their walking schedule, addresses, and the combination keys the night before their route started, and in all the houses where I’d shown up to collect a dog for Hank, I’d never been given the wrong combination code.

Once the morning sanitary checks were completed without a problem (though Venus, the elderly French bulldog, managed to take twenty minutes to locate her ideal spot before solemnly defecating on the front steps of a synagogue, while the very unamused rabbi watched
to make certain that I collected every single particle of poop), I moved on to the exercise runs. For most of the dogs, a half-hour jog at a good pace was enough to ensure that they were left panting and happily mellowed out. Others, like Hercule, the Great Pyrenees, or Mogsy, the Rhodesian Ridgeback, ended up with a full hour. At two o’clock, my schedule temporarily shifted back to poop maintenance, giving several desperately grateful dogs a well-needed bathroom break to tide them over until their owners got home in the evening, but everything ran mostly on track, with the only hiccup being when Pip, the long-haired dachshund, attempted to attack, for no discernible reason, a mailbox. He ended up settling for peeing on it, but looked balefully over his shoulder several times as we departed. Whatever issues lay between Pip and the mailbox, they were clearly far from over.

Despite the ignominy of scooping up dog feces and having my crotch ritualistically sniffed by fifteen different snouts, I enjoyed the work. Jogging around the College Hill area of Providence, even during November, was far less soul-crushing than any retail job I’d ever held, and the dogs were always happy to see me, which made them a cut above most of my former coworkers. Plus, spending the majority of the day jogging was good enough exercise that I didn’t have to maintain a gym membership. While there were the occasional moments of watching a dog urinate and pondering the usefulness of my Ivy League degree and periodic spots of weirdness like the day Ella (apparently an inveterate trash eater) pooped out two elastic bands, some chicken bones, and a condom, I’d so far been very happy at how the job was working out.

I was on my last assignment of the day, jogging a matched set of brick red Pharaoh Hounds named Fawkes and Codex, when my phone rang. I checked the caller ID, then slowed down to answer when I saw that it was Loren Noka. The dogs whined pitifully, hauling against the leashes and looking back at me with wide eyes that
begged me to
ruuuuuun
, but I ignored them and listened to Ms. Noka’s clipped delivery.

“I just got a call on the emergency line. The
karhu
of the
metsän kunigas
has been murdered. His niece discovered the body in his house, and they have requested an investigation.”

I was turning the dogs around before Loren Noka was halfway through. “Text me the details, please,” I said quickly, then disconnected as soon as we had exchanged good-byes. I tapped Suze’s number in and was relieved when she picked up on the second ring.

Halfway through whatever clever joke she was saying as a greeting, I broke in with, “The head bear was just found murdered. Chivalry’s still on bereavement, so this is all on me.”

One of the things that a lot of people didn’t realize about Suzume (probably because they had already fled in the other direction) was that when things got serious, she didn’t play around. Without a pause, she immediately dropped all the fun joking and said, “I’m working downtown today. Pick me up.” Then she rattled off the address and hung up. I shoved my phone back in my jacket pocket and pulled on the dogs’ leashes—Fawkes and Codex, sensing that their precious run was going to be cut short, were doing their best to tug me in the direction that lay
away
from home—and once I had snouts facing correctly, I broke into a full sprint.

While I dodged around pedestrians and avoided being run over at cross streets, my brain scrambled to get a handle on the hot mess that I’d just been deputized to deal with. Reported murders were very rare in the territory—in the months that I’d been officially a part of my family’s policing structure, I’d dealt with a few complaints and some minor disputes. Most things had been like my visit to the rusalka—fairly easy to look into and resolve. The most serious call to the emergency line that I’d been aware of was when I was still doing ride-alongs with
Chivalry over the summer, and a member of the territory had tipped us off that some kobolds had gone from eating stray animals to snatching people’s pets.

Murder was much different, and this one was serious. I’d done my best to learn about all the major species that my mother ruled over, but I still hadn’t met a lot of them. Unfortunately that included the
metsän kunigas
, and I tried to go over what I knew about them in my head as I returned two very disappointed dogs to their home and headed directly to my car.

The
metsän kunigas
were bears. Or, rather, they were humans who could turn into bears. Unlike the kitsune or the Ad-hene, which had specific and very localized points of species origin (Japan and Ireland, respectively), werebears, like both of their natural cousins, had developed in a lot of different places. The two communities (the larger in Providence, and a smaller one in Maine) that were in my mother’s territory were Finnish immigrants who had come over in the early eighteen hundreds, but apparently there was also a variety of werebear that was indigenous to the United States, and lived in a few areas out West. They used different terminology, but the logistics were essentially the same. The Providence group typically didn’t cause trouble for the vampires, operating within the rules that had been negotiated when they settled, and they delivered very healthy tithes, since the ruling family operated a thriving local insurance company that employed many members of the group. Their leader was called the
karhu
, and basically served as the group’s monarch for life. The current
karhu
had been, until a few minutes ago, Matias Kivela. That, unfortunately, capped off most of what I knew about them.

One thing that Chivalry had been very clear on was that they universally hated the term
werebear
. Naturally, that was the first word out of Suzume’s mouth as she hopped into my car.

“You smell worse than the werebears, Fort. Did you really have to let every single dog mark you?”

I’d pulled the car away from the curb the moment she pulled her door shut, and was already merging into the brewing excitement of Providence traffic at four thirty on a Tuesday. We were both dressed in work clothes—my apparently dog-funked jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt now decorated with a few sweaty spots thanks to my active day, and a zip-up gray hoodie with bleach stains. In contrast, Suzume was poured into a knee-length black pencil skirt, a dark green silk blouse, heels, and a black wool coat. We were definitely about to present an aesthetically mixed picture, but I was hoping that punctuality would be valued over presentation.

“I’m pretty sure that
metsän kunigas
is the preferred term, Suze. How would you feel if people called you a fox?”

“I would praise them on their accurate assessment of my place on the hotness-slash-awesomeness scale.”

“And if they called you a werefox?”

“I would make them eat their own kidneys.”

“Consider my point made.” I turned onto Route 123 and glanced at Suze, who was glaring at me, the gears in her brain clearly working.

“You don’t understand,” she complained at last. “
I’m
a fox that turns into a human, which is awesome.
They
are humans who turn into bears, which is lame. It’s completely different.”

“I’m sure that the nuances of that are really important,” I said soothingly, then did my best to shift the conversation.

The town of Lincoln, where most of the
metsän kunigas
lived, had a number of nice things going for it. It was a mere twelve miles from the heart of Providence,
Money
magazine had named it the sixty-third Best Place to Live, and it contained the Lincoln Woods State Park, which covered 627 acres of protected forest. Route 123 curved right along the edge of the state park, which was where a number of the
metsän kunigas
, including their dead leader, had bought property and built their homes.

The house was a tidy little beige 1920s bungalow with a tall wooden privacy fence that hid all views of the backyard from anyone driving down the street. There were at least five cars wedged into the driveway, and more parked on the lawn. I pulled the Fiesta up to the curb, and we both got out.

“Someone’s watching us,” I said quietly as we started up the front walkway. I could see the blinds in the front windows twitching.

“A whole lot of people are watching us,” Suze corrected.

The door opened the moment my foot hit the steps. The man in his late thirties who opened it filled the doorway—he had one of those solid, square builds that can hide a lot of potpie dinners, but his was solid muscle, with no trace of fat. His dark hair was cut short, and the rich natural brown of his face suggested that one of the immigrant Finns had found love south of the border. He was scowling, and the expression brought to my mind so many bad grumpy bear jokes that my hand shot out without conscious thought to give Suze’s wrist a cautionary squeeze. Her quiet little “Hrmph” confirmed my instinct.

“So Chivalry Scott actually sent baby brother rather than stirring himself.” Even though he was half a head shorter than I was, the man at the door was capable of a very impressive rumbling bass.

“You asked for vampire help, and that’s what just arrived,” I said, feeling my temper spike. It’s not that I wasn’t used to being referred to as the baby of the family, but most people at least tried to phrase it more politely. And after a month of my handling my brother’s workload, fewer of the territory inhabitants were surprised to see me. “If you want the Scotts involved, then that means that you’re dealing with me.”

The man was suddenly and effectively hip-checked to the side by a woman whose age and facial features matched his too well to be anything other than a close
sibling. Her chin-length haircut might’ve suggested Busy Professional Mother, but her expression clearly read Irritated Big Sister.

“Calm down, Gil.” Her dark eyes were carefully shuttered and her face scrubbed clean of expression when she looked at me. As she nudged her brother out of the doorway, she gestured for both of us to come in. “I’m sorry, we’re just a little surprised. We knew that Chivalry probably wouldn’t be able to come, so we were expecting Prudence,” she explained as we stepped inside and she closed the door behind us. Inside, the bungalow’s old floors gleamed with wood polish, and the decorating scheme seemed to revolve around the repeated theme of beige and beige—from what I could see of it. People packed the front hallway and spilled over into the adjoining dining room, all of them completely quiet and staring unabashedly at us.

Our apparent hostess offered me a handshake as professional as the navy blue pants suit she was wearing. “We haven’t met before. I’m Dahlia, and this is my brother, Gil. The
karhu
was our uncle.”

I returned the handshake. “I’m Fortitude Scott.”

Suze caught her hand next. “Suzume Hollis.”

Surprise flickered across Dahlia’s face, the first emotion I’d seen from her. “Oh, I already called the kitsune.”

“I’m not part of the cleanup crew,” Suze said, giving a quick smile that flashed all her white teeth and didn’t suggest anything friendly. “I’m with the vampire.”