Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (16 page)

“Good plan,” I complimented him, and meant it. I’d played the game before—Small World was what the result would be if Risk was put in a blender with Tolkien, and then a few adjustments made to avoid infringement lawsuits.

Suze and I cleared the plates and acted like good dinner guests by cleaning up while Farid began setting up the game on the coffee table in the living room. Keiko, feeling the pressure of her gestating offspring on her bladder, took what was easily her twentieth bathroom break of the evening. I was rinsing the dishes when Suze nudged me lightly with her shoulder and, as the sound of the running water prevented anyone from overhearing us, muttered to me, “Try not to get too attached, Fort.”

“To dirty dishes?” I asked, deliberately misunderstanding her. “Well, I admit that it does take me back to more than a few line items on my résumé.”

This time her nudge had significantly more force to it. I was reminded of those first-person accounts of shark attacks, where first the shark deliberately bumps into the person to see if he can fight back. “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, drying the dish that I’d handed her with extra vigor. “Nice dinners and board games aren’t going to make Keiko’s plan work. This is going to end badly, and Farid is going to be the one to pay the price.”

I pushed the faucet, increasing the amount of water coming out, then glared at Suze. “Don’t talk to me like I haven’t seen consequences,” I warned. “I’ve lost people because of the truth.”

“Then you should be on my side here,” she insisted. “Convince Keiko to pack her shit up and leave when Farid is at work. Denial of paternity, maybe slipping a few dollars to someone to fake a DNA test if he keeps pushing it, and Farid ends up with a broken heart and possibly some trust issues, but he gets away without physical damage.”

The anger that had been building up within me disappeared when I looked at Suze, really looked at her for a second, and realized what was going on. She’d been against Keiko’s plan from the beginning, but that had been because she’d been defending the rules her grandmother had laid down, and because she’d been trying to protect her sister.

“You’re starting to like him,” I said softly, and she turned her face away, a few strands of hair that had managed to work their way loose after a day of being tucked away in her braided bun flicking over her shoulder. And, because it was the truth, I said, “I like him too, Suze. I didn’t really want to, but I do.”

“Then help me convince Keiko.” Suze’s expression was deliberately blank, covering up what she was thinking.

I finished rinsing the last of the plates and handed it to her. As I wiped my hands with the spare dish towel, I turned around and leaned against the countertop. The small eat-in kitchen had been designed to feel less restrictive by cutting an overlarge entryway arch instead of a standard doorway, and through that opening I had a great view of the rest of the claustrophobically tight first floor. Farid had the game already set up, a small, pleased smile on his face as he made sure that the brightly colored board was perfectly arranged so that everyone had the best possible view of the action, and there were little piles of point tokens at each separate place. Keiko had emerged from the bathroom, and was sitting on the couch across from where he knelt on the floor, having taken the most awkward playing position without making any kind of fuss about it. She was smiling at him, listening as he spoke and pointed to various portions of the board, probably explaining the rules.

“She loves him,” I said softly to Suze. “You know that. And she loves him so much that she’s going to risk everything to try to be with him.”

“You’re usually a lot more conservative than I am about risk,” she noted, making a show of moistening a sponge and running it lightly over the counter. “At least, about nonpersonal risk.”

“But isn’t what she’s trying for worth it? She wants to be with him, to give her daughter a father. And if we help her, if she can make it work—”

“Fort.” Her simple, calm tone cut me off. Once she was sure that she had my full attention, she placed her hands on my shoulders and pushed herself up onto her toes, looking me as full in the eyes as she could. After a second she leaned in and brushed a kiss against my mouth, then pulled back, her expression unreadable. When she spoke, her voice sounded regretful—a rare emotion from her. “When this ends the way I know that it will, I’ll be sorry. But you’ll be hurt. And I’m sorry about that.” She relaxed back to the flats of her feet, then reached over and turned the faucet off decisively. With a quick roll of her shoulders she pivoted around and sauntered into the living room, her voice and demeanor changing smoothly, perfectly, to fit the persona she was presenting for Farid’s benefit: a friendly, bubbly sister of his girlfriend, with no dangerous undercurrents or hidden knowledge. “Now, how do I win this game?” she demanded.

*   *   *

The temperature was plummeting when we said our good-byes and left the town house. A light coating of frost was already covering the windows of the Scirocco, and I paused for a moment to look up at the sky. It was cold enough to make the exposed skin of my face hurt, but the sky was still clear of snow. I pulled my keys out of my pocket, the fabric of my gloves making my movements clumsy as I sorted to find the one I needed; then I suddenly paused. There was something in the silent night air, something that I wasn’t hearing or feeling . . . something that I was smelling.

“Hey, Fort, any plans on opening the car door before I die of hypothermia?” Suze groused, but I waved a hand at her to be quiet. I closed my eyes and inhaled as deeply as I could through my nose, trying to figure out what that was. It was like a wisp of perfume in the air, tugging at me, almost daring me to identify it.

“Fort, what’s going on?” Suze’s voice was softer, and I heard the rustle of her coat and the crunch of old snow beneath her boots as she came around to stand beside me. My eyes were still closed as I tried to tease out that smell, but I felt her press her elbow against my side—not in a jabbing or demanding way, but in a way that reminded me that she was there, and grounded me.

Acting on instinct, I opened my mouth and inhaled, as if I could taste the smell. And I could—it was there, again, flirting against my senses, playing over my tongue. I could hear Suze begin sniffing, applying her own kitsune senses to the task—though her nose on two legs was no comparison to what it was on four legs, she still had a better sense of smell than any human, or even any vampire. There was only one thing that I’d ever been able to smell better than her, and the knowledge pinged into my brain and finally identified that drifting, perfumed aroma.

“Blood,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at Suze. “I smell human blood.”

She gave a small shake of her own head. “It’s too faint for me.” She nudged me lightly. “Follow it. Let’s see if you can track.”

I gave a small, startled snort. “I can’t track, Suze. I’m—”

“Let’s find out,” she repeated. Her voice was low and rich. “Just close your eyes and focus on the smell. I’ll make sure that you don’t bump into anything.” Her arm wrapped around my waist, a warm, comforting band. “See what you can find,” she urged, and I looked at her again for a long second, then closed my eyes.

The scent was still there, waiting for me. Trusting in Suze to keep me from falling on my ass, I began walking. It took me a few false starts to figure out how to follow it—I had to keep sampling the air over my tongue and using that to orient myself. I was lucky that it was a still night, with almost no breeze. We were away from student areas, and it was late enough that even on a Friday night, most of the residents of these brick town houses and apartments were tucked away in their beds. Once or twice Suze’s arm tightened around my waist, forcing me to stop and wait while a car passed by, and other times she used her body to nudge me around obstacles, but she stayed quiet and let me focus on the smell.

The blood smell was like warm cinnamon rolls from a bakery, or a steak searing away in a bed of chopped onions. It was a pot of warm stew bubbling on the stove on a cold day, or a fresh-cut slice of watermelon in the summer. The farther I walked, the more it urged me forward, every instinct in my body switching on and adding to my desire to follow it.

We’d walked a block before Suze tugged me to a stop and spoke for the first time. “There it is,” she said quietly. I opened my eyes to see her pointing down at the sidewalk we were standing on. Slowly I crouched down, my eyes picking out what she was gesturing to far better than they should’ve in the darkness, even with the improvements my vision had undergone since my transition began.

It was a little splash of blood, smaller than a dime, fresh and unnaturally bright against the cement. It drew my eyes and the smell, more delightful than a pan of frying bacon, filled my head. I had to shove my hands into my pockets hard to resist the urge to reach down and touch that little spot with my finger, because I knew that touching it would never be enough. I’d want to put it against my tongue, rub it against my gums and the inside of my cheeks. I’d want to roll in it. I pressed my hands into my pockets harder, and felt a seam rip.

“This is fucked up,” I said, louder than I needed to, but wanting to hear my own voice again, to force myself back into normal, back to the real me, not the tracking-a-drop-of-blood version of myself. “Is this what it’s going to be now? We just walked a block because of a dot of blood. Someone probably just slipped on the ice and skinned their knee. God help me if Jaison nicks himself shaving, or if Mrs. Bandyopadyay pokes herself with a needle while she’s quilting.”

“Hold off on the emo for a second there,” Suze said, then got down on her hands and knees. She pressed herself right down to the cement itself, brushing her face against the ground.

“I know what just happened here, Suze,” I snapped. “Someone lost a few drops of blood and I went haywire.”

She sat up fast, and with fox speed she smacked me in the shoulder, hard. “You dope,” she said affectionately, even as my shoulder throbbed. “You don’t even know what you’re smelling.” Suze hopped agilely to her feet, then extended a hand. “Come on, I’ve got the scent now, so we can move a little faster.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, linking my arm with hers as we resumed walking, though at a much different pace. We weren’t jogging, but we were at the speed just below that. Anyone looking at us would think that we were late for something.

“You humanoids have no idea how your own noses work,” Suze said as we sped along. “Even the werebears are barely better than our kits. You aren’t following blood because it’s blood. You’re following it because of what was going in it when it came out.”

“That made zero sense.”

She grinned at me, and the shape of Suze’s face in the darkness was suddenly longer, more vulpine. She could still pass for human, barely, but there was no hiding the gleam in eyes that seemed subtly different. “You’re a predator, Fort,” she reminded me. “Whoever the owner of that blood is, they were scared when they bled. And not just startled, but terrified. There was extra adrenaline flowing, the heart rate was kicked up to the max, and”—she sniffed again, harder, as we walked, then nodded, more to herself than to me—“
her
body was terrified.”

I frowned. “I didn’t respond to the blood on its own—I responded to its circumstance?”

“A predator responding to weak prey.” She nodded, then lifted an eyebrow. “And guess what smell I just picked up on?”

“Another predator?” I guessed.

She grinned. “I’m smelling kobold. Multiple kobolds, in fact. And they’re right”—Suze sped us up, then turned a quick corner down an alley—“here.”

The smell of the blood was thick here, but it was actually easier to ignore because of everything else that demanded my attention. An old woman wrapped in layers of old coats, loose shirts, and part of what looked like a quilt tied around her waist was huddling against the wall of the alley. Her eyes were huge in the darkness, and her hands, covered in old grime and dirt, were pressed over her mouth. She was trying to stay quiet, to make herself as small as possible, but little whimpers of raw terror kept creeping out. There was blood on her wrists, and I could see a little on her ankles as well.

Surrounding her were three kobolds, and as we watched, one darted forward and nipped her hand, just hard enough to break the skin and make a few droplets of blood bead on the surface of her skin. “It doesn’t make a sound,” one of the others crooned in that high, child’s voice that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “It wants to live to see the dawn, so it doesn’t cry out.”

Imagine the body of a hyena, with that sloped back and hunched shoulders, the thick torso and the awkwardly long legs. But instead of a hyena’s head there’s a human face, long and sallow, the skin almost gray in a way that blends into the shadows. The jaw struggles to contain a mouth full of animal teeth, jagged and yellow, built for ripping flesh and gnawing at bones, and they poke out and rest against lips that are black like a hyena’s, not like a person’s. Each of the front two legs ends not in a paw, but in a human hand, the backs still bristling with fur all the way down to the fingers, where each digit ends in a blunt claw. The fur on the body is charcoal gray, with lighter spots that should make them stick out, but actually just add to their camouflage. These were the kobolds, who could never pass for human, but whose minds were too keen to ever be mistaken for an animal.

They were city dwellers, scavengers who hung at the edges. They lived in abandoned buildings, darkened alleys, and of course the sewers. Anyone who had ever feared alligators in the sewers had no idea what they really needed to be afraid of. In my mother’s territory they were permitted to eat the wildlife of the city—stray dogs and cats who would never have owners looking for them, pigeons and rats, and whatever treasures they found in Dumpsters. Months ago Chivalry and I had had to discipline a small group that had gotten tired of the lean denizens of the street and had started snatching plump pets from out of yards and off leashes. But this was something else altogether.