Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (33 page)

I closed my eyes as all those things that I’d felt in the butcher shop came rushing back, despite all my efforts to forget them in the confusion and rush of feeding from a human victim for the first time. “This can’t keep going, Dan. I mean, we can’t possibly stay in a situation where people have to
thank me
for not massacring them.” I opened my eyes, and Dan was looking back at me solemnly.

“Then what’s the alternative, Fort? Really?”

We stared at each other for a long second, and then Dan gave a small shrug of his shoulders. “You did a good thing today. Come on—let’s bro-hug this one.”

A small laugh escaped me, and I accepted the manly hug, with its requisite slaps on the back and nods at the end. There was another pause, and then Dan said, “Okay, now go gargle a bottle of mouthwash, because that is some
Guinness
-level bad breath.”

I laughed again, because I knew that was what he’d intended, because for Dan there was no way out, and no other options beyond leaving the Scott territory entirely, which, as I’d learned with the succubi, carried its own risks. So he was trying to distract me, to give me something else to focus on, even if that something was my own utterly fetid breath.

*   *   *

When the illuminated numbers of my clock turned over to five a.m., I was awake and watching them. I’d been awake for most of the night, thinking. I was thinking about everything that had happened since my mother’s death, and quite a few of the things that had come before it. But mostly I was thinking about how incredibly angry I’d felt that the ghouls had thanked me so sincerely. The sly gamesmanship of Atsuko Hollis, the rage of Cole, and even the careful maneuvering of Valentine Sassoon had all felt somehow easier to handle than that relieved gratitude from the ghouls. But when I put all those things together, I felt one overwhelming certainty—this couldn’t go on.

Lying there in my bed, watching the darkness in my room lighten infinitely slowly, until finally the sun begrudgingly began to emerge, I finally believed that enough to do something about it. I also accepted the truth—because of what I’d done on behalf of the ghouls yesterday, Chivalry and Prudence were going to be pissed off at me.

And the thought emerged—if they were going to be pissed off at me anyway, why not really earn that, and do some real good while I was at it?

As soon as I weighed that thought, I realized the rightness of it. I rolled out of bed and dressed in a hurry, yanking on clothing without caring whether it came from the dirty or the clean piles, and rushing through my business in the bathroom without even glancing at my appearance in the mirror. I ran a quick hand through my hair, then stuffed a knitted hat over whatever nightmare was currently occupying my scalp and took the steps two at a time as I hurried down to my car.

*   *   *

Suze’s voice was still warm and mushy with sleep when she answered her phone, her greeting so mashed together that it was only from its context that I knew that she was saying my name.

“I’m on your doorstep,” I said. “Come let me in.”

There was a pause while she wrapped her sleep-foggy mind around that, and her answer was searingly filthy even by her standards, but she padded her way to the door anyway and opened it. She must’ve been sleeping in fox form, because she had wrapped herself in one of the snowflake-patterned flannel sheets from her bed, and was giving me a distinctly unhappy glare that suggested that if I didn’t have a particularly good reason for waking her up in this way, I was quickly going to find myself mauled.

I walked straight into her living room, hearing the sound of the door shutting behind me, and immediately started talking. “I’m going down and getting the succubi,” I told her, pacing the floor, unable to stand still. “Chivalry and Prudence can go screw themselves, because I’m not letting them spend one more day in limbo. I’m going to hand them the paperwork, bring them up to Connecticut, and find them a hotel or something to stay in while they settle in. My sister might blow a gasket, but once I have them in this territory, Chivalry won’t be willing to go against signed agreements, and Prudence won’t be able to kick them out or kill them. Because the succubi are going to belong here, damn it, and get all the protections that we can give them.” I spun around to look at her. “And I’m here to ask if you’ll go down with me, Suze.”

She blinked twice at me, her mussed dark hair half covering one eye. “This is going to require some coffee,” she said slowly, and began walking toward the kitchen.

I stopped her when she would’ve passed me, wrapping one arm around her waist, feeling the soft flannel that draped over her, and the heat and curves of her body. “No, I need your answer,” I said, never taking my eyes away from her face. “Because I’m getting in that car and I’m doing this, with or without you, but—”

She reached out one hand and smacked my cheek, hard enough that I stopped talking. Then she clicked her tongue and said, “You idiot. Of course I’m coming with you. But it’s an ass-long drive to New Jersey, and I’m going to need some coffee.” I stared at her, and she smiled. “You’re my buddy to the end, Fort, and if you’ve come up with this insane idea, then I’m with you until the wheels come off. But I expect a cup of coffee first.”

There was nothing I could say in answer to a statement like that, so I leaned down and kissed her, trying to put all my gratitude and respect and love in one gesture that felt both utterly inadequate and at the same time wholly right.

*   *   *

Our first stop was Dunkin’ Donuts, because their coffee was a lot better than anything that Suze was capable of brewing, given that I was fairly certain that new iPhones were produced more regularly than she changed her filters. The next stop was at my mother’s mansion, where at six thirty Suze kept the car idling in the driveway while I slipped inside and made my way into the office. I knew from the bond between us that my brother was upstairs in his suite of rooms, probably snuggled next to Simone, and that Prudence wasn’t present at all—she was almost certainly at home at her town house.

The succubi file, with all of its requisite paperwork for immigration and tithing, was in the increasingly overstuffed drawer marked
PENDING DECISION
, and I slid it out in its fat entirety and flipped through it. With Loren Noka’s trademark efficiency, and also what I couldn’t help perceiving as a certain relentless optimism, the elaborately worded documents were already completely ready, awaiting only the signatures of the succubi spokesman and a member of the Scott family. An oversight, of course, and one that I was sure would be immediately corrected when I came home and shoved the document into my siblings’ faces—surely future documents would require all three of our signatures, but here was that shining loophole, and if I was only going to get to exploit it once, then I was going to make it count in people’s lives.

I made it back out to the driveway without being detected, though I could already hear the sounds of the house starting to come alive, with the staff coming in from their own tucked-away parking area and starting their days of cleaning, or cooking, or data crunching. As I got back into the car, Suze took off the parking brake and moved the clutch to its slipping point, allowing my manual transmission car to ghost down the driveway, the light layer of snow on the gravel muffling the normal sounds.

“You know, you could turn the car on all the way,” I said. “It’s not going to attract any attention, since they’d probably just think that it was the woman who delivers the newspapers.”

“I’m in a spy film right now, Fort. Don’t ruin this.”

An hour later I called Loren Noka from the road and told her that I’d handled all of the ghoul issue, but that I wanted to have today’s meeting canceled, because I had things to handle, and that she could inform my siblings that I’d discuss everything fully with them tomorrow. She paused, and I knew that she’d picked something up in the way that I’d phrased that, but then she calmly assented and assured me that she’d pass the messages on.

“They’ll probably enjoy a day off anyway,” I said to Suze as I hung up the phone.

“I sure hope so,” she replied around a mouthful of chocolate munchkins—after all, what was a stop at Dunkin’ Donuts without also getting some pastry—“since after they find out what the hell you’ve been up to for a day and a half, they’ll probably never let you go anywhere on your own again.”

At just after ten in the morning, the Scirocco pulled into the driveway of the wheat-colored Colonial that the succubi had been staying in. Their repurposed church youth group van was still in the driveway, with a new set of New Jersey plates. Beside it was a new car, a plain Honda Civic with a Nevada license plate.

“Did another of the succubi end up making it out?” Suze asked as we got out of the car.

“Saskia didn’t mention it the last time we talked,” I answered, “but I know that she hadn’t given up hope, especially for her brother. Maybe we’ll each have some good news to share.” But I reached my hand reflexively into my pocket to touch the Colt, just to make certain that it was there.

There was no movement at the windows as we came up the walkway, but as we got closer we both saw at the same time that the front door was ajar. It wasn’t anything that was unexplainable in a house containing that many small children, but the silence in the air suddenly felt much less like the New Jersey suburban dream, and much more threatening. Suze put her finger to her lips and slipped in front of me, glancing inside quickly, then nudging the door all the way open with her shoulder, both of her hands now wrapped around the handle of her longest knife, the one that was nearly a machete.

We both went in silently.

What was left of Milo, the adult succubi who had held so tightly to his young son, was halfway down the staircase. His left arm was separate from the rest of his body, resting two steps above a single toddler’s flip-flop. I froze at the sight of the tableau, realizing with a deep, crushing knowledge that I’d acted too late, and they’d paid the price.

A sound broke the silence—a low mewling, followed by a crunching. I could feel Suze’s hand on my shoulder, urging me back, but I was already moving, and I was no longer even thinking at all, except that whatever had done this was still in the house, and I wasn’t going to let it walk out again.

A tall man with light brown hair and good looks was in the living room, crouched over a bloody, mangled pile of something that I knew had been a child only by the size of it, and realized was still alive only from that tiny, lost, empty mewl, the last sound possible from a throat that had already screamed itself out when the skinwalker started to feed. Because that was what it was doing—leaning over what had been a child’s stomach, his mouth impossibly wide, pushing back the skin of the dead man that he was wearing so that long black mandibles could emerge, slice flesh off its prey, and pull it back inside.

I’d aimed the Colt at his head and squeezed off three rounds as soon as I registered what I was looking at, but even that had been too slow, as it either sensed my movement or caught sight of me, and it was moving before the bullets could reach it. It moved even faster than Soli, the last skinwalker I’d faced, had moved, so fast that even my vampire eyes had trouble tracking it. The first shot took off a chunk of his cheek and jaw, and he screamed as he ran, a high, painful sound that raked down my brain at a decibel level that I wasn’t even sure I was fully hearing. His victim’s skin tore, but what came out wasn’t blood, it was a foamy white substance, and the puncturing of the skin released a smell that was worse than maggoty garbage in the summer, a putrescence that filled the room.

My second two shots had missed, but I was already moving, trying to get another shot, when it slammed into my side, throwing me across the room and into a wall, missing the stone fireplace by mere inches, the Colt knocked out of my hands. He would’ve come after me, but then he had Suze to deal with, the long knife in her hands whipping with deadly accuracy and kitsune speed, but each time she slashed out he was already gone, dodging with terrifying ease, and she’d learned from her last fight with a skinwalker to keep her cuts shallow, to never overextend herself.

I rolled to my feet. The Colt was gone, so I grabbed at the cast-iron fireplace tools that were beside me, tossing aside the brush and the short shovel and rake, coming back with the long, heavy poker. This time, when the skinwalker dodged to avoid Suze’s knife, he found himself bashed with the metal poker that I brought down with all the strength I had onto whatever I could hit, which in this case was his left shoulder. There was an explosion of more of that foamy white fluid, and I could feel the reverberation and sting up my hands and arms from what I’d just connected with—it was if I’d just slammed the poker broadside against a cement wall, but there was no doubt that the skinwalker was affected, because the scream was even louder this time, and there was a sudden ripping sound, like what a wet grocery bag would make as the gallon of milk finally makes its escape, and an explosion of the smell was so extreme that it made me double over, gagging, my eyeballs burning and tears running down my cheeks, the inside of my nostrils and throat feeling like sandpaper was being scrubbed against it, as if this wasn’t just a smell, but mustard gas from World War I.

Suze, her nose so much sharper than mine, was affected even worse, falling to her knees, barely able to hold on to the handle of her knife as she vomited helplessly. And in front of us the skinwalker shed its stolen mask, shreds of rotting human flesh falling around it as the hardened black carapace of the true skinwalker emerged, shoving its way out of the dead man’s skin to reveal a full height that had its head brushing against the ceiling of the room, an insectoid face with steadily working mandibles and shining refracted black eyes that reflected my own face a hundred times.

It knew that Suze was the greater threat, because it moved for her first, even faster now that it had fully shed its facade, the inch-long, curving black claws that were serrated like shark’s teeth slicing down with deadly intent. I forced my arm to raise the poker again, but too slowly, because it had already reached Suze, and those claws sliced through skin, searching for vital organs. I slammed the poker down onto the left arm, and as it slid over that glossy hard carapace I was able to twist it, pulling and engaging one arm long enough to get those claws away from Suze and give her just an instant of an opening.