Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (6 page)

“Why don’t you fill us in with what you know,” I suggested.

“Of course,” Dahlia agreed immediately, her expression quickly shuttering again. “Please, follow me.”

We were led into the living room, where the beige decor had received a splash of color, literally. The
karhu
had been a tall man in his sixties, still trim and fit, but whose blond hair was streaked with gray. Unlike his niece and nephew, he would’ve looked perfectly at home
on the Finnish ski team—except for his ravaged chest and the large pool of dried blood that he was lying in.

I looked down, feeling very much out of my depth. I’d seen bodies before, and I’d hunted for murderers, but most of it had been on my own time, with my family looking at my actions practically as teenage rebellion. Now I was standing next to a corpse with at least twenty of the
metsän kunigas
watching to see what I would do. Worse, they were right to, since I was very suddenly in charge.

“How about I check the body while you get the background,” Suzume suggested beside me. I realized that she’d picked up on my discomfort and stepped in to cover for me. Gratitude filled me, and steadied me at the same time, allowing me to summon an inner Joe Friday as I looked at Dahlia and, in my best “Just the facts, ma’am” voice, ask, “What can you tell me?”

Her brother still a scowling mass beside her, Dahlia began, “He was alive last night when Carmen left the house—”

“Carmen?” I asked.

“His daughter,” Gil said roughly, his tone and face clearly stating that this was something I should’ve known already.

“Carmen is twenty-one,” said Dahlia, her cool voice cutting in. “She’s in the kitchen, but she’s having a hard time with this. If we can leave her alone for a few minutes, that might be best.”

“Her father was just murdered,” I conceded. “I can talk with her after you and I finish.”

Dahlia nodded. “She says that she left around nine last night to go to a party. She spent the night with a boy she met there, so she never came home. When she woke up, she had to go straight to work, so Uncle Matias would’ve been alone all night.” There was just the slightest waver in Dahlia’s eyes as she glanced away from me for the first time in the discussion. Her eyes went over at where her uncle’s body lay in a pool of blood and, from
the smell that even open windows in November couldn’t completely disperse, waste. I wondered what this very contained woman was thinking, but then she controlled even that tiny deviation and looked back to me. “Uncle Matias didn’t come to work this morning.”

“The family owns an insurance business,” Gil said. “Most of us work at it.”

“I did know that, but thank you,” I said as politely as possible.

“Oh, I should’ve guessed,” Gil replied. “The business generates tithes, so that would be important to know. Not like whether or not my uncle had a daughter.”

I reminded myself that Gil’s uncle was lying dead five feet from us at the foot of his La-Z-Boy, and that misplaced anger and its corollary, misplaced dickishness, were a noted part of the grieving process. I therefore ignored Gil’s comment completely and continued looking at Dahlia, who elbowed her brother in the stomach with enough force to make him grunt slightly and take the cue to shut up.

“I assumed at first that Uncle Matias might not be feeling well,” Dahlia continued, “but he didn’t call, and when I tried getting through to him, there was no answer on either the house phone or his cell.”

“Was that unusual?” I wished that I had a pad of paper to take notes. It would’ve given me something official-looking to do. Beside the body, Suze had finished looking over the wounds on the front, and she now rolled it over with a soft thump that all of us pretended not to have heard.

“For him not to pick up the cell, not really. None of us carry cell phones when we’re roaming in our other forms. But it was strange for him not to let me know that he wouldn’t be coming into work. He’d had appointments and calls scheduled, which I had to cover. So when I left the office to go home, I swung by the house. I have a key,
and I let myself in. That was when I found him, and I called everyone in.”

“It was just you?” I asked. Suzume was now giving the dead
karhu
a thorough sniffing—and since she was remaining in human form, that meant getting pretty close to the body. Fortunately no one seemed to be bothered by that—a benefit of dealing with people who spent a good amount of their time in natural fur coats.

“Yes,” Dahlia confirmed. “Gil was in the field all day, looking into a flooded-basement claim. My mother was watching my daughters, and I knew they were planning on spending the day in the woods, so I didn’t even try calling them.”

Suze rejoined us, her sniffing apparently concluded. Her clothing was now looking much worse for wear after crawling around the body—but since she didn’t seem to even notice the bloodstains now decorating the bottom of her skirt and her panty hose, I assumed that she had a plan for dealing with it. Since she was giving her hands a brisk wiping on her skirt, I wondered if that plan was dry cleaning or a Dumpster. “Too bad you didn’t stay on your own. I don’t smell anything on the body but bear, but since you’ve had half the
metsän kunigas
in the state kicking their heels in here, that’s not surprising. When the cleanup crew you hired gets here, we’ll give it a more thorough going-over, but did you notice anything when it was just you?”

Dahlia shook her head, her brown eyes giving nothing away. “Whoever did it was long gone. I couldn’t smell anyone who shouldn’t have been here. I just started making calls.”

Gil cut in again—and unlike Dahlia’s poker face, it was clear that Gil was angry at even the implication that his sister should’ve handled the body discovery differently. “Uncle Matias was in his sixties, but he was strong. What killed him could’ve killed Dahlia, so she was right
to call the rest of us.” He pointed at the small but visible blood droplets that led from the body to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. “When I got here, the two of us followed the blood trail. It goes to the deck, but ends in the outdoor shower. There are some containers out there with spare clothes—sweatpants, big T-shirts, just enough to cover anyone who wanted to walk over wearing their fur. Carmen looked through it, and she doesn’t think that anything is missing.”

“The killer would’ve needed a shower,” Suze agreed. “The
karhu
has a lot of stab wounds in his chest, and judging by what I’m looking at, it wasn’t much of a fight. The main blood pool is all in that one spot, with no drag marks. Everything beyond that is either spatter or what dripped off the killer on its way out the back door. Have you called in the ghouls?”

“I did. They’ll send the hearse after the kitsune shroud the scene and the police are dealt with.” Compared with her brother’s impression of a simmering pot, Dahlia was an icicle.

“They’ll do an autopsy for us, then, and see what they can pick up.” Suze’s tone was bland, but I could see her eyeing Gil, and specifically the vein currently throbbing in his forehead, as she waited for the outburst.

She didn’t have long to wait. “Well, we all know what caused this!” Gil bellowed, making my ears ring. “Something that could’ve caught my uncle by surprise and killed him before he could shift forms? Something that could hide their scent even from a kitsune? Something that would
want
to kill Matias? This is obviously the Ad-hene!”

A low murmur went through the general crowd, and I got the impression that Gil’s suspicion was a popular one, and that only my mother’s rules were preventing this group from heading over to the Underhill entrance with some torches and farm implements. I’d seen enough of the elves at work recently not to find that a very
concerning prospect, but so far, nothing about this looked like the bodies I’d seen them leave behind before. “Why would the Ad-hene want your uncle dead?” I asked.

“Maybe they’re tired of their usual prey. We share the Lincoln Woods with them, and my sister and I have both seen what they do to the deer that they hunt. They’re dangerous, and now that they aren’t allowed to slaughter their own children anymore, who knows what they’ll be up to next? Maybe they thought Matias would be interesting prey. Or worse, what if the next Ad-hene population pipe dream involves
metsän kunigas
blood? How long before the Scotts bother to look into it, since according to our treaty, we can’t even ask them ourselves?”

Gil was definitely not a member of the Scott family fan club, that was for sure. I pushed him. “My mother just punished the Ad-hene for breaking our rules. Do you think they’d defy her again in less than a month?”

“There’s no reasoning with madmen,” Gil countered. “And they didn’t start breaking those rules overnight. From what I heard, the murders were happening for close to a year before the Scotts bothered to look into them—and only after a corpse got dumped on your doorstep! We use those woods—my nieces
play
in those woods. Our
karhu
is dead, and to me the most obvious culprit is sitting right in Underhill.”

Through her brother’s passionate tirade, Dahlia had been noticeably silent, and I shifted my attention to her. “You’re very quiet. What do you think about this theory?”

Her eyes narrowed, flicked to her brother, and I could see her weighing the possibilities before cautiously nodding. “The Ad-hene like to kill, and they’ve broken the rules before.” She asked Suzume, “Could an Ad-hene hide his scent from you with a glamour?”

Suze’s expression was reluctant and very unhappy, so I knew her answer before she even spoke. Nothing irritated her more than having to admit that her kitsune
abilities had limitations. “I’m not sure. If we were talking just about the Neighbors, I’d say no—the nose is harder to fool than the eye, and most of them can barely hold a visual glamour. But I can’t say for sure about the Ad-hene, and I don’t think anyone in my family has had enough contact with them to know either.”

A blond girl with a kind of Swiss Miss prettiness who looked just out of her teens walked up to us, the first of any of the bears to break away from the observing throng. Her face was red and blotchy from very recent crying. “Dahlia, the kitsune just arrived,” she said, her voice low.

“Good.” Dahlia looked at me. “Mr. Scott, this is Carmen, my cousin.”

So this was the dead bear’s daughter. I felt horribly awkward being introduced to her with such icy politeness when her father’s body was still sprawled in the middle of the room. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I managed, getting a small nod in return. Then the moment was broken by the entrance of the kitsune.

There were three of them, a terrifying thought in itself, and they walked in a small phalanx to us, forcing several of the bears to stumble out of their way or be trampled. In the front was the smallest, an older woman whose dark hair was heavily streaked with gray but who bore a strong resemblance to Suzume. Flanking her were two kitsune in their early twenties who bore the clear signs of more localized parentage. All three were dressed in formal business wear, but it ranged from the older woman’s sedate gray slacks-and-sweater combo to the youngest woman’s brilliant canary yellow skirt paired with a black silk blouse.

“Suzu-chan, I should’ve known I’d find you here,” the older woman said, with that touch of exasperation that seemed to affect most people Suzume knew.

My partner gave a broad grin. “Right where I’d be most useful, right, Oba-chan?” As the woman gave a very definitive snort that expressed her feelings on the
subject, Suze nudged me with a friendly elbow. “Fort, meet my Aunt Chiyo.”

Horrors, more introductions. “It’s a pleasure,” I said politely.

There was clear interest in the way Chiyo looked at me, but also a subtle wariness. “Hmm. The young almost-vampire my mother seemed so interested in. You’re taller than the White Fox described.” Her mouth pursed. “These are two of my daughters. Midori is my oldest.” Midori towered over the other kitsune by several inches. Her features and eyes were as Asian as her mother’s, but her skin was a very dark brown that had clearly come from her father, along with gorgeous curly hair that was not quite the true, deep black that Suze and her aunt had. She shook hands with me, her cinnamon-colored eyes solemn.

“And one of my younger daughters, Takara,” Chiyo continued. The yang to her sister’s yin, Takara had Irish-pale skin, and each of her cheekbones was covered in a series of freckles. I could only speculate what her natural hair color was since it was barely two inches long and dyed a bright blue that matched her eyes. Clearly Suzume’s aunt had not had a set “type” when she’d dated as a young woman.

Compared to her mother and older sister’s very dignified bearing, Takara was practically vibrating with energy as she looked me up and down with a keenness that made me feel just slightly objectified. Even worse was the very visible disappointment on her face as she said to Suzume, “I thought he’d be better looking,
anego
.”

Suzume was clearly amused by both my discomfort and her cousin’s pout. “Next time I’ll provide visual supplements, Taka. That way you won’t be let down.”

Now Midori joined in. “I don’t know; given how Keiko talks about him, he could be worse. At least the vampire smell isn’t too obvious. Of course, it could be covered up by all those dogs that apparently humped him.”

Chiyo cut the conversation short with a sudden barrage
of Japanese that I somehow knew (just
knew
) had not been particularly complimentary to my personal aroma. “We can all chat later,” she concluded in English, then nodded to Dahlia. “After all, the
metsän kunigas
have hired us to perform a job.”

“We appreciate your time, Ms. Hollis,” Dahlia said formally. All three of the bears were watching the kitsune very carefully.

“Oh, I imagine that you do.” And then Chiyo gave a very foxy and predatory grin that was definitely not nice at all, and that I had seen several times before on Suzume’s face. “Forgive my lack of delicacy, but you are familiar with the price tag on what we’re about to do, yes?”

Gil was gritting his teeth. “We don’t have many options, do we?”