Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (11 page)

Apparently my poker face was not as perfectly in place as I’d thought. “I’ve been better,” I hedged. A lot better, actually, this morning when I had a snuggly, sexy, happy girlfriend who I
hadn’t
been aware wasn’t punching out on the clock until she walked out my door.

“Stop distracting the talent, Fort!” Orlando bellowed from the bar. I sighed and kept sweeping as Pratibha gave me a sympathetic grin, put up her feet, and winked at me. Orlando was in his late fifties, built like a keg of beer, and seemed to feel emotionally bereft if he didn’t have something to complain about. Given that Pratibha had, presumably, more career options than I did (though she’d come to this job after fifteen years of DJing weddings, proms, and bar mitzvahs left her completely burned out on all formal-wear occasions), that often left me as the eternal target of Orlando’s grousing.

He eyed me when my sweeping brought me closer. While Orlando’s days of tight jeans were several decades in his rearview mirror, even a quick glance at the musculature in his dark brown arms generally was enough to disperse even the most assy of drunks. Orlando was also a possessor of a set of crazy eyes that would’ve made Christopher Lloyd jealous. He wasn’t the worst boss I’d ever had, and he’d mellowed after the first month made it clear that I wasn’t a slacker on the job, but even though I had some confidence that Orlando’s bark was rarely followed by an actual bite, he wasn’t exactly my favorite conversational companion.

“Is that girlfriend of yours coming by tonight?” he snapped out.

I answered in the affirmative, and was immediately rewarded with a string of expletives, which for once I at least partially agreed with. “She said that she’s bringing some of her cousins too,” I added, which triggered another explosion of curse words. Orlando had spent a few years in the navy, and it showed.

“You remind those jackals that only your girlfriend gets to drink for free,” Orlando snapped, scrubbing aggressively with his rag cloth. “And you tell them that if they try that polygamy story on me again, I’m watering every drink I hand them.”

Orlando’s relationship with the kitsune was fraught. On the one hand, he’d tended bar long enough to have a well-defined radar for trouble, and the kitsune were capable of so much mayhem that they probably should’ve been banned under international accords. On the other hand, the revelation that I was dating Suzume seemed to have garnered me a certain reluctant respect, if only in the sense that he admired my complete disregard for basic survival instinct. He also was a reasonable enough man to let Suze drink for free, since he knew that she’d probably wrangle free drinks out of me anyway, so it was for the best to just streamline the process. And as a business owner, he did acknowledge that having attractive single women in a bar was never a bad thing, and the kitsune certainly tended toward the attractive. Even the ones who weren’t hot had charisma to spare, which was usually pretty much the same thing in person. The male population of College Hill was essentially subsidizing the drink orders of the Hollis women, and was apparently grateful for the privilege.

Most of the problems stemmed from the fact that Suze and her cousins
loved
my new job. Suze had even told me that it had practically been my Christmas present to her. They tried to push people into poor song choices—awkward and painfully too-soon expressions of devotion or encouraging angry breakup songs. Those too drunk to know better often found themselves onstage trapped at the halfway point through “Bohemian Rhapsody” with no way out and nothing but a group of high-fiving women in the audience to explain their predicament. The kitsune also had an ongoing game where each picked an individual song, then tried to convince as many different people as possible to sing it over the course of an evening. Each time one of them got someone to sing her song, she won a point. High score won. Sometimes, to add an extra challenge, they’d all choose songs by the same artist.

I still had horrible flashbacks to Kelly Clarkson night.

A slow trickle of customers began just after five, and I was able to put the ineffective broom to one side and get to work taking drink orders and ferrying around baskets of snacks. I even tried to cheer up Orlando by reminding everyone that singing a song by Redbone would get them a free beer. An hour and a half in, one of the frat guys managed to give a halfway decent rendition of “Come and Get Your Love,” making Orlando’s perpetual scowl lighten.

The kitsune hit the bar at just past eight, strolling in like predators assessing a herd of sheep. Suze was in the lead, of course, but at this point I could recognize all of her six companions. The roster of kitsune had fluctuated wildly in my first few weeks of employment, but at this point it had settled into a more regular group. Suze’s younger cousin Takara aimed herself directly at the bar, right where the concentration of potential mayhem was the thickest. I’d seen the blue-haired and freckled kitsune dressed for work the first time I met her, but Takara dressed for fun was always a terrifying prospect. Tonight she’d pulled out all the stops with a tiny flared skirt, corset top, and, worst of all, a faux fox-ear headband. One of the favored Hollis games was the over-under on how many different guys would try to pick her up if she sat alone at the bar with a gin and tonic. I’d lost money at this game.

Despite hours spent thinking of exactly how I would begin the conversation with Suzume (screaming
“J’accuse”
at her across the room seemed too extreme, but kind of captured where I was at the moment), I was still without a plan and was therefore grateful when my attention was co-opted by the occupants of table five, who were protesting that they hadn’t been given any pens to write their song selections down with. I lifted up one of their discarded menus, revealing half a dozen pens. My excellent waitership was rewarded with sulky looks that suggested that I’d somehow deliberately hidden their pens to make them feel foolish.

My particular vocation of the moment preventing me from approaching Suzume immediately, I moved on to the next table, which was occupied by a post-breakup solidarity group that had already put in several requests for Fiona Apple songs, which I was not looking forward to. I cleared away a few of the empty cosmo glasses and tried not to take any of their irritated glares to heart. After all, from the snippets that I’d overheard, he
did
sound like a jerk.

As I carried the glasses back to the plastic box that I’d stashed just outside the back room, I felt a sharp tap on my arm. I looked over to see Suze’s cousin Hoshi keeping pace with me. The Asian lines of her cheekbones and jaw were a strange contrast to a nose that would’ve done any Hassidic woman proud, and exuberantly curled hair that was acutely sensitive to the slightest humidity in the air. Hoshi was one of those women who, going by facial symmetry alone, should have been unattractive, even discounting an impressive knife scar that ran halfway across her throat and then shot abruptly up her chin. Yet, like the rest of the kitsune, she presented herself with such an air of “I’m doing you a favor by letting you buy me a drink” that the average brain simply accepted that she had to be hot. Plus, her usual cover story for her scar was that she was a CIA agent, and frankly, it was no surprise that men fell before her in droves.

“Heya,” Hoshi said, giving me an affectionate nudge with her elbow. “Any potential targets identified?”

“Hoshi, I’m really not sure that I’m comfortable with getting involved in this, and frankly, I am not in even remotely the right headspace right now to even be contemplating your particular subset of needs.” Hoshi was apparently the latest of the White Fox’s granddaughters to feel a desire to hear the pitter-patting sounds of little kit paws in her home. The traditional reproductive approach in the kitsune was to find an appropriate man, get laid as many times as necessary until she was pregnant, then cut all ties with him and raise the resultant kits within the family. I didn’t particularly argue with the merits of this approach, particularly given the havoc Suze’s twin sister, Keiko, was currently creating by trying to have a relationship on the down-low, but I did object to Hoshi’s belief that I should help in the screening process of potential baby daddies. Also, given my current bone to pick with her cousin, my interest level in Hoshi’s family planning was in the negative zone.

“You’ve been awarded a partial vote, Fort. That is an honor that has never before been extended beyond the family, and you need to take this seriously.”

“How much is this vote worth?”

“One-eighth of a fox vote,” she said solemnly.

I dumped the glasses into the bin. “Well, I definitely feel honored now.”

Hoshi completely ignored the edge in my voice, and smiled happily. “Suzu-san said that you’d say that.” Her expression shifted, and playtime was clearly over. “Now, prospects?”

I knew from previous evenings that if I didn’t throw one of my fellow men under the reproductive bus, Hoshi would continue to pester me all night with my opinions on various men and the traits that they might or might not have to offer to her future offspring, with all the tenacity of a small terrier with a rawhide bone. And the only thing worse than the conversation I was about to have with Suzume was to have it in front of one of her cousins. “You’re into blonds, right? The tall blond at table seven has been bugging Pratibha for the last hour, so I think he’s single. And judging by the chatter when I’ve been taking drinks, I think he’s in a STEM field. He’s got kind of a honking laugh, but I don’t think that that’s genetic.”

Her eyes shot over to acquire the target, and she brightened. “Excellent start.” Never glancing away from her unsuspecting victim, who continued drinking blissfully, with no awareness of the one-woman mobile unit of Ancestry.com that was about to swoop down upon him, Hoshi slipped a folded dollar into the front of my apron. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

Normally I would’ve let her go at that, but I stopped her as she started moving in on the blond. “Hey, where’s Suze?”

She frowned and gave the room a quick glance. “Um . . . not sure.” Then a diabolical grin spread across her face, and she leaned toward me and whispered loudly, “Tonight’s theme is
Cher
.”

“Well, isn’t that just the cherry on top of the shit sundae that my day has become.” At the tables, people were signaling me, in dire need of snacks, drinks, or the need to complain uselessly about particular songs that were not included in our catalogue. “Hey, I’ve got to get back to my tables, but tell Suze to follow me into the kitchen next time I go back.”

“Hell yeah, I will,” Hoshi said, lasciviousness dripping from her voice.

I glared. “No, I need to talk to her.”

Hoshi’s expression didn’t change. “
Suuure
you do. In the
kitchen
.” Her eyebrows were doing an impression of Groucho Marx. One hand whipped out and delivered a sharp slap across my ass, which, as I gritted my teeth and reminded myself, was probably some kind of attempt at affection.
“Talking.”

“Hoshi, do you mind?” Suzume’s cousins seemed determined to give me excellent anecdotes to share whenever my female colleagues began chatting about on-the-job sexual harassment.

“Nope!” Hoshi assured me with a chipper lilt, then sauntered off in the direction of the blond.

Thirty minutes later, with the tables momentarily appeased with orders taken and drinks delivered, I ducked into the kitchen to fill up more popcorn baskets and avoid a particularly strangled take on “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Apparently the kitsune Cher plan was already being executed.

A quick movement next to me revealed Suze, hopping up with vulpine ease to sit on the counter beside where I was working. Her dark eyes were gleaming with amusement, and she swung her legs casually. “Hey, did Hoshi tell you that tonight’s theme is Cher? I already got a guy to request ‘Half-Breed.’” She bumped me lightly with her knee. “Oh, and she also said that you had plans to slip me the salami, but I gotta say, I have concerns about the cleanliness of the surfaces in this kitchen already. Can you get a yeast infection from common food mold? Anyway, you’ll understand why I would prefer to be on top for this endeavor.”

I ignored her comment and, still lacking any plan on how to raise the subject, just spit it out. “Suze, you’re charging my family for the nights you stay over?”

She blinked. “Of course.”

This was not the response that I had expected, and my carefully planned response to what I had
thought
she would say was lost in my own incoherent sputtering.

Suze looked completely surprised. “You are
exponentially
safer with me around,” she said firmly.

“Suze—”

“Remember last week when I killed a mouse? I probably saved you from Lyme disease!”

“Suze—”

“And when I told you on Tuesday that the milk had gone sour?”

“Suze.”

“And how about when I warned you about the broken glass on the floor?”

“
You
broke that bowl!”

“And
warned
you about it!”

Our shouts fortunately coincided with a particularly up-tempo moment in the current song roster, but we spent a long moment glaring at each other as we reassessed our positions.

I took a deep breath. “Suze, this was a big fucking betrayal of trust, so I need you to actually take this seriously for one goddamn moment.”

For one second, she looked completely stunned. Then her upper lip curled just a fraction. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she bit out, “but every cent I’m paid comes from your mother, and not you. And given how often I’ve listened to you explain and justify your reasons for trying to keep yourself as far from that dragon’s horde of questionably acquired cash as possible, does it strike you as slightly hypocritical at this stage for you to suddenly clutch your pearls at the thought that I’m exploiting a few loopholes and stretching some justification to get my hands on a bit more of that wealth that—and, again, do correct me if I’m wrong—
you want absolutely nothing to do with
?”

“This isn’t about money and it’s not about family,” I snapped. “Our personal time is
personal
—you and me, without you glancing at the clock and thinking about rounding up the damn quarter hour!”