Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (34 page)

Between one breath and the next, the woman was gone, leaving a wounded fox that leaped away as the skinwalker hesitated for just an instant, thrown off by sudden air beneath claws that just a second before had been trying to tear flesh from bone. I threw my whole body forward, knocking the skinwalker onto its knees, and screamed when I felt those mandibles rip into my shoulder and chest, grabbing and slicing as if they were knife-tipped fingers searching for the softest, most vulnerable areas, even as its free arm now found its way right to my side, his fist slamming into me hard enough that I could feel my ribs crack. I shoved my left hand up, catching the bottom of its chin and trying to force that mouth away from me—whatever was happening at my side, there was no mistaking that the true danger was his mouth. I could feel the edge of Suze’s knife beneath my knee, but it might as well have been on the moon for all the good that it could do me in that moment.

I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye as a black fox, her fur wet with blood in a dozen places, jumped with pinpoint accuracy, landing just so on the shoulders of the skinwalker, her delicate clawed feet fighting madly to find purchase in the smooth surface, and the white of her teeth flashed as she brought them down into the skinwalker’s right eye. Its scream filled the room as the surface of the eye was pierced, a yellow viscous fluid exploding outward, and Suze was thrown off the shoulders, but she snapped her jaws tight and swung, her teeth embedded in what was left of the eye. The skinwalker abandoned me completely, desperately bringing its free arm up to try to get Suze off it, and that gave me the opening I needed to drop the poker and dive down for Suze’s knife. I brought it up with all the strength that I had into the main body section of the skinwalker, and I could feel the tip scrape against that carapace until it finally found a seam, a tiny joint between plates, and I shoved Suze’s knife in all the way until its hilt was the only thing emerging.

The skinwalker fell backward, its limbs spasming uncontrollably, and the black fox rode it all the way down, growling like a creature possessed. Half-hidden beneath the remains of a coffee table, I saw a familiar handle, and I moved without hesitation, grabbing the Colt, straddling the skinwalker, pressing the muzzle of the Colt into its mouth (uncaring about the way that the mandibles sliced my hand), and I squeezed off all the remaining five shots.

One final shudder ran through the skinwalker after the majority of the back of its head exploded from the inside out, and it went limp, well and truly dead. For one long second I stared at it, still processing what had happened, and then every injury on my body seemed to register itself with my brain in the same instant, and I gave a guttural yell that was practically a scream, then started crawling, because standing up was not even an option at this point, toward the black fox whose jaws were still lodged in the remainder of the skinwalker’s eye.

“Suze?” I asked hoarsely, reaching out my bleeding hands to touch her, shuddering at how deep the slices on her body were as they bled freely. “Suze?”

She opened her mouth almost delicately, her pink tongue liberally coated with the yellow ichor from the eyeball, and turned to look at me. Her back arched suddenly, and she made a deep, whole-body hack, like a cat about to expel a hairball, and several chunks of strangely colored eyeball emerged, along with a whole lot of sputum. She focused on me again, still covered with blood, and flipped her tail back and forth as if to say,
A-okay
.

*   *   *

I dragged us both to the downstairs bathroom, Suze tucked under my arm and clearly grateful for the ride. I was just glad that in this form she weighed less than twenty pounds. There was a fully stocked first aid kit under the sink, and I broke it open and hauled out the three full rolls of gauze. Suze’s slices were so deep that on one of them I could actually see the white of bone, but all she let me do was wrap up her torso with gauze, trying to put enough pressure on things to slow the bleeding, before she gave a small growl and used her nose to nudge one of the rolls in my direction. Then she lay down on the bath mat and watched me through partially lidded eyes.

My left shoulder and upper chest were a mass of blood, but the flow was already slowing as I fished out a few bags of those heavy gauze pads that were meant to be cut down to size to go over skinned knees or burns, and just slapped them onto the area and secured them with half a roll of medical tape. The mandibles had been sharp and terrible, but fortunately they hadn’t been able to slice too deeply, though the web of tiny, precise cuts hurt even worse than my ribs, which burned with every breath that I took. My right hand was also bleeding from a lot of cuts around my fingers and wrist, and along the back of the palm, from where I’d basically shoved it into the skinwalker’s mouth while I was shooting him, and I wrapped it as best I could, given the awkwardness of using my left hand.

I looked over again at Suze, who had clearly taken much more damage than I had. “What do I do, Suze?” I asked. “Should I take you to a vet?”

She whuffled a little, amused, and shook her head. Then she lifted her face imperiously and gestured at the door.

“You need me to get something for you?” Shaking.

“I need to look for something?” Nodding.

“Something you need?” Shaking.

I paused, and considered. “Oh,” I realized. In the fight for our lives and making sure that we weren’t going to completely bleed out, I’d almost managed to forget what we’d seen. “I need to check to see if there are any survivors,” I said bleakly, and she nodded.

There weren’t.

He must’ve arrived early in the morning, before the succubi had woken up, because it was upstairs, in the bedrooms, where I found most of the bodies. From the looks of it, he’d killed the adults first, taking them out quickly. It was with the children that he’d taken his time, and the sight of those tiny, tormented bodies was something I knew that I’d never be able to forget, however many centuries I lived.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I simply laid each small body out and then covered it with a sheet. Saskia and Nicholas had both died in the master bedroom, in front of a large walk-in closet. There were tiny footprints in their blood, making me wonder if they’d realized that the skinwalker was in the house, and had tried to hide some of the children. I arranged them beside each other, with the remains of their daughter between them.

For Miro, I carried him downstairs, ignoring the screaming protest of my cracked ribs and the slices on my torso. By process of elimination, I’d realized that it was his son, Kirby, that the skinwalker had been eating when we came in. He’d been the youngest of the children, and he was the smallest of the corpses. I put him down in the living room, beside what was left of Kirby, and covered both of them with a throw rug from the sofa.

I heard footsteps, and turned to see Suze limping into the room. She’d returned to human form, and while I’d been covering the bodies, she must’ve been wrapping up the worst of her slices. She’d put a few butterfly bandages on the cut that had run across her muzzle as a fox—as a human it sliced across her cheek, barely missing her right eye. She was covered in blood, and gave a small groan as she reached down to snag her shirt off the floor where it had fallen when she changed into a fox.

“How are you even walking?” I asked.

“‘Kill me fast or start running like hell’ is practically our motto,” she said, wincing as she eased herself down onto the sofa. “I heal faster than you, vampire boy, or at least faster than you will for another few decades, so after you helped keep me from bleeding out, it was just a matter of waiting for the worst of things to knit together enough that I could grit my way through it.” She started to tug her shirt on, but even with excessive care she almost immediately made a wrong movement and made a half-smothered scream of pain. She paused, panted, then said, “Though I might be taking it easy for a few days. Slacking back, eating ice cream, watching reality TV. Doing some laurel resting while this heals up.”

I looked down at the bodies at my feet. “What are we going to do about this, Suze?”

She ignored what I’d really meant. “I can’t disguise this many bodies, even if I hadn’t been devoting so much energy to healing.” She dropped her shirt onto her lap. “Fuck that, I’m just going to ride home fox. You can throw some towels down on the seats.” She gestured broadly at the house. “We’ll disable all the fire alarms and burn the place to the ground. If we siphon some gas from the tanks of their cars, we can get things cranking and make sure that there’s almost nothing left for anyone to examine. We’ll throw the cars in the garage, let the fire take them as well. I can set enough of a fox trick that everyone who comes to investigate this will agree that the fire started naturally—probably an electrical fire, and that it started when whoever was in the house was asleep. Enough smoke inhalation, fire spreading too fast, and no one got out.” She nodded grimly. “That’s what we’ll have to do.”

“Suze, that’s not—” The sudden sound of a phone ringing cut me off. It was loud—definitely coming from this room, but it wasn’t my phone or Suze’s. I looked around, then recoiled in disgust. It was coming from the remains of the skinwalker’s human flesh—the phone had been in his pants pocket, and had ended up among that twisted wreckage of nasty rotting meat. Suze’s discarded socks were lying near it, and I tugged one of those over my hand and poked cautiously among the pile until I pulled out the phone.

“What are you doing?” Suze watched me from the sofa.

“Have you wondered,” I asked slowly, scrolling down through the list of recent calls received, “how the skinwalker knew how to come here? The succubi changed the plates on their van more than a dozen times, and were using nothing but cash so that they wouldn’t leave a trail. So how did the skinwalker find them? How did it enter Scott territory and go to the one house where its quarry was?” I saw the number on the skinwalker’s phone, and my heart sank. I looked up at Suze. “He was invited, and told exactly where to go.”

She stared at me, comprehension dawning, but I had to say the words myself. “I wasn’t the only one who was frustrated with the stagnation of things that had to be dealt with,” I said. “Prudence was angry. And she moved faster than I did—she got this skinwalker’s phone number—who even knows how—and she called him so that he would come here and kill all the succubi and remove a point of discussion from our list.” For a moment I felt light-headed and wondered if I was going to pass out, whether from blood and injuries or just the sheer weight of this knowledge, crumpling down like a Southern debutante in an old movie, but it passed, leaving me still standing with what I knew. I opened my eyes again and focused on Suze. “All these people . . . This can’t happen again, Suze. I can’t let this happen again.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, very softly.

“Something,” I said. “I’m going to do something.” I looked down at the throw blanket that I’d put over the bodies, at the way that it was slowly wicking up blood and forming stains. “Something big.”

*   *   *

I arrived at the mansion the next morning, ten minutes after the beginning of our scheduled meeting. One of the staff members was refreshing the floral arrangement beside the base of the stairs, and I asked her to go get my siblings and to please bring them here, to the main entryway. Her surprise was clear, but she was well trained and did what I asked without question. After all, I was a Scott.

Prudence and Chivalry walked in together, and stopped dead at what they saw. Because I was standing there, of course, but arrayed behind me were Atsuko and all her living daughters and granddaughters, in human and fox forms. And Gil and Dahlia Kivela were there, with a dozen of the
metsän kunigas
. The ghoul elders were there, along with their strongest members, the ones most ready for a fight. Lilah and Cole stood off to the side with several of the Neighbors, their glamours dropped and their hair gleaming like metal threads, and finally there was Valentine Sassoon and over fifty adult witches.

The kitsune had hidden them all as they came in. Because the kitsune worked at their strongest within expectation, and who would ever have expected to see these groups together, arrayed as one body, filling the whole of the massive entryway of Madeline Scott’s mansion?

My brother recovered first. “Fort,” he asked carefully, “what is this?”

“This is called a coup,” I said, and I looked directly at my sister. “We’re not going to keep doing it the old way anymore.”

Prudence was absolutely cold, rigid and controlled. “And how do you suggest we do it?” She scanned her eyes over everyone in the room, her expression promising death. “What promises have you made, baby brother?” she hissed.

“Everyone has a seat at the table now.” I nodded behind me, indicating those who stood there. “We all live in this territory, and we all have a stake in it. Every group will have a representative, and every representative will have a vote.”

Chivalry’s expression was despairing. “You think it’s that simple, Fortitude?”

“No, I know it isn’t. But that’s where we’re starting. We’ll work it out, all of us.” I stared at my family, and the heat of my anger and rage was just as strong as it had been the previous day, when I saw Prudence’s number on the skinwalker’s phone. “We live in America, and it’s time for a motherfucking democracy.”

My sister stepped forward, and she wasn’t cold now—her eyes were glowing, and an unholy rage was almost rolling off her. “This country won its democracy through blood, brother. I remember—I was there to see it. How much will your little group sacrifice for this? How much blood will they shed?” Her fangs slid out, white and sharp.

Everyone around me tensed, but no one ran as she moved closer to us. I drew my sawed-off Ithaca and sighted down on my sister, bracing myself to pull the trigger and shoot her.

For a long minute, I don’t think anyone in the room breathed, as everything hung by a thread.

It was Chivalry who suddenly reached out and caught Prudence’s arm, keeping her from taking that one final step that would’ve sent violence exploding throughout the room.