Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (5 page)

“Yes,” Saskia whispered. Looking down, I could see that the children, who had seemed so still, had been slowly shifting and creeping, and now they were pressed as closely against where the adults were sitting as possible. Those pale faces were sneaking glances at me—me, the person who had the right to just tell them all to leave the house, leave the state, and live or die somewhere where I didn’t have to see it or be responsible for it.

I’d spent years running from this kind of responsibility. In honesty, a large part of me wanted nothing more than to tear out the front door—but the last months had shown me the costs of trusting that someone else would come along and handle situations like this one.

They
would
get handled. In a way that resulted in bodies in shallow graves.

“I’ll get you an answer,” I promised. I wanted to promise more, but I couldn’t. If I could be careful, do this right, I could help make things safe for this group—but it meant playing by the rules and doing my best for them. “I’ll be meeting with my family tomorrow morning, and I will tell you now that I’ll be pushing for us to take you in.” I’d run fast calculations in my head—all I had to do to schedule the meeting was to ask Loren to put it on the family calendar (we did e-mail notifications—it was charmingly corporate of us) and we would gather. I could’ve asked her to push it for that evening, but I wasn’t sure whether Chivalry would be back from New Hampshire yet—I knew him well enough to know that if he spotted any antique stores or adorable co-ops or (heaven help us) some hole-in-the-wall art gallery along the road, it would add hours to his ETA. And when I made this proposal to my mother, I wanted to make sure that Chivalry was there as a potential vote in my corner—because I already knew what my sister’s response would be.

I wasn’t used to having jobs where people relied on me for something important. If I wasn’t able to get someone a latte fast enough, or if I was slow bagging groceries, or if I was a terrible telemarketer, no one ever got hurt, because nothing was ever really at risk. That wasn’t the case anymore. And the look of desperate hope in their eyes at what I’d said, hope that rested in
me
, was enough to redouble that urge to run for the hills. I devoutly hoped that nothing on my face was indicating to the succubi how much I was longing to go back to my apartment and create a pillow fort to stand between me and the world I’d found myself in.

“We’re going to leave several of these financial forms with you,” I said, gesturing to Loren’s satchel. “I know that you’re going to have to leave a lot of blanks, but I want you to fill them out as honestly as you can. We have to run a credit score and a few other things, but Loren and I know that at this point you’re almost certainly victims of identity fraud, so don’t worry about that. You’ll have probably about forty minutes to do that before we get back.”

“Get back?” Nicholas looked confused.

“I’m echoing what he said.” Suze lifted an eyebrow. “Where are we going that we’re heading back?”

“We’re going to pick up some pizzas for everyone.”

As I’d hoped, it turned out that eerily quiet, horribly traumatized children with feeding prongs in multiple parts of their bodies could still perk up at the word
pizza
.

*   *   *

I’d broken my phone recently, and the one I’d replaced it with was talk and text and nothing else. Suze lived an active lifestyle that was similarly hard on phones, and her phone was barely better than that. Fortunately for both of us, Loren was in possession of the smartest and shiniest of smartphones, and was able to direct us to a local pizza place, where I ordered half a dozen large cheese pies. I’d taken a quick look in the Supplicant House kitchen before I left—there were a few cans of tomato soup, an assortment of cereal boxes, and a bag of rice, things that wouldn’t go bad and that could cover one or two meals, but that was it. Pizza was an easy answer for one night, and if they had leftovers, then they’d also have lunch for the next day.

As we stood inside the pizza place, enjoying the heat from the ovens, Loren was her usual quiet, diplomatic self. And Suzume was also herself.

“Fort, what have I told you over and over again about things like this?” She was keeping her voice low enough that the people behind the counter couldn’t hear what we were talking about, but it was pretty obvious that this was the early stage of a couple disagreement. “No money, no allies, nothing to offer. We might as well boot them out of the territory now, tell them to run for the Canadian border, and hope for their sakes that the skinwalkers either lose interest or don’t like cold weather.”

“Nothing is certain.” I looked out the front windows. There was a bank across the street—the same kind of bank I had an account at, actually.

“I think that I could place a very reliable bet on how Prudence is going to react when you want to give this group asylum at a cut-rate price.” Suze was grim.

“My mother is in charge, not Prudence, and she’s surprised us all before.” A few times. Personally I was hoping that an argument of asylum now, hugely crippling tithes later was going to appeal to her. “Listen, Suze, do me a favor and pay for the pizzas while I run across the street.”

“Wait, you want me to—” Suze saw what I was looking at and groaned loudly. “Oh no. Fort, you are the softest touch I’ve ever met.”

“I’ll pay you back next week,” I promised as I darted out the door. There was almost no traffic to speak of in this tiny little main street, so I walked across the street, balancing awkwardly on the piles of skuzzy snow left behind by the plows.

I didn’t want to do what I was about to do. Just walking into the bank branch made me grit my teeth, and picking up one of the blank withdrawal forms was almost physically painful. It wasn’t as if I was the kind of guy who could toss away a few hundred dollars and not feel the sting of it. But I reminded myself that, thanks to my brother, my half of the rent was paid up for three more months. And while the Scirocco had had a number of expenses when I first purchased it—notably the alternator, the timing belt, the interior fuel pump (that had actually been a tricky one, because unbeknownst to me, the Scirocco had been built like a Klingon and had
two
pumps, one internal and one high-pressure one on the outside), plus a leaking exhaust manifold, it was at a point where it ran pretty reliably now. There were some rust issues, but I could keep buying myself time on those by just slapping primer paint over them.

There wasn’t a line in front of the teller, which I was grateful for. Too much time and I might’ve talked myself out of this. Working for my family plus picking up a bit of extra with a part-time job had been good for me, and I’d built up six hundred dollars in my checking account that didn’t have to go to any bill. It had been a very long time since I had that much in my account
plus
a working vehicle.

I withdrew it all. Payday was this week, I reminded myself. I could live on the twenty-three dollars that was in my wallet. The six hundreds went into my back pocket.

Returning to the pizza parlor, where Suze stared at me disapprovingly through the window, I wondered how much it cost to get seasonal clothing for seven kids and three adults, plus fill up the van (which had to be a gas guzzler), plus put food on the table for however long it would take me to convince my mother to let them into the territory permanently. Suddenly the six hundred didn’t seem like much at all.

Both women were waiting for me. “Ms. Hollis thinks that you’re planning on giving the succubi some money. Is this true?” Loren looked curious.

“Just what I had in my account. It’s not that much.” I hesitated, then asked, “Loren, I’ll make sure that you’re reimbursed from petty cash—could you give me whatever money you have on you?”

Something flickered across her face. She was surprised—and like a good butler, Loren almost never showed it when she was surprised. “Did that bank have an ATM?”

“In the front.” Relief filled me. “Just whatever you can spare right now, and I promise that you’ll get it back.”

She left. Unlike me, she went to the corner before crossing. It was hard to imagine Loren Noka crunching her way over a snow wall, though even if that was her secret vice, it wasn’t as if I could expect her to do it in pumps. As it was, my formal shoes now had a solid coating of road salt that I’d probably have to scrub off tonight. Beside me, Suze just shook her head in disgust.

Loren came back and handed me a folded wad of twenties. “Here’s two hundred,” she said, then held up a hand. “Don’t say anything, Fortitude. I’ve worked for your family all my life, and I respect them terribly, but . . . they wouldn’t have done this, or thought of this. Not even Mr. Scott. So don’t say anything.” She cleared her throat loudly.

We both looked at Suze. She looked back at us.

A long minute passed.

“Fuck you,” she snapped, then zipped her parka up to her nose and pulled on her gloves. She stomped across the street, hopping the snow walls with the perfect balance and grace of a gymnast, and disappeared into the bank. A minute later she was heading back, and then she was shoving the door to the pizza restaurant open with bad temper and pushing two crumpled hundreds into my hands. “I’ll be adding a service fee to my bill for this,” she warned.

“Thank you, Suze,” I said.

“I’m expecting big things in return for this,” she said darkly. “
Sexy underpants
things.”

I pretended not to have heard her because Loren was standing right there, along with several very curious locals, but I heard and received the message. After all, the car radio hadn’t been the only thing she got me for Christmas.

We stopped back at the Supplicant House just long enough to deliver the pizzas and the money to the succubi. The looks on their faces—the creeping expression of a hope that they were terrified to accept lest it prove just another terrible trick, were painful to see. By unspoken consent, the three of us hurried out again as soon as we were able and then we were back on Route 80 and heading for home. None of us spoke much—there didn’t seem to be anything that felt right to say. Too much was resting on us.

Even Suze felt it, because we drove for forty minutes in silence before she leaned forward and cued her iPod up for Babymetal.

Loren lived two towns
over from Newport, on the mainland—like a lot of the people who worked in Newport, she had chosen to save money by buying a home outside the tourist hot spots and accepting the offset of a longer commute and the cost of daily bridge tolls on her way to and from work.

“I’ll schedule the meeting as soon as I go inside,” Loren promised as she heaved herself out of my low-slung car while I stood beside the door like a particularly attentive date or well-trained chauffeur. Given the current state of my bank account, however, fixing the lock pin had just plummeted down my list of possible expenditures. “Ten a.m.?”

I nodded my agreement—Loren knew what she was doing. I’d originally been in favor of hauling everyone together as early as possible tomorrow to start talking about what the succubi needed, but Loren had advised me against that approach, noting that my brother was driving back home late this evening and would probably be tired, my sister was not exactly known to be a morning person, and my mother liked to watch the morning news shows and got slightly put out when she couldn’t. We wanted people in good, pleasantly receptive moods. Ten was late enough in the morning that everyone would’ve been able to have a leisurely breakfast and gotten a few morning tasks out of the way.

Loren’s house was an older Victorian, gorgeously painted and maintained but wedged in on its sides by her neighbors, and she had no garage on the property, just a largish storage shed at the end of her skinny driveway. When I’d picked her up that morning, her compact Honda was parked in front of the shed, and I had wondered how many times during our trip to and from New Jersey she’d regretted not suggesting that she drive us in her car, however economy-sized. Now, though, the Scirocco’s headlights illuminated a second car parked behind the Honda—this one was a Volvo SUV. Loren headed up her walkway, taking her keys out of her purse as she went, and I practically leaped back into the heated interior of the Scirocco, grumbling quietly to Suze, “Now, why the hell weren’t we driving
that
to Hardwick?” I appreciated the Scirocco’s fuel efficiency, but there was something to say for basic comfort, and it had not been a vehicle intended to transport multiple people.

Suze was climbing agilely from the backseat to the front. “That’s her wife’s car. She needs it to ferry their kids to soccer practice and oboe lessons.”

I stared at her. “How do you know that? You just met Loren this morning—how could you know things about her personal life that I don’t after working with her since summer?”

“Maybe I’m more approachable,” Suze said, stretching out in the passenger seat.

“Really?” In honesty, I hadn’t thought much about Loren’s personal life before now, for the same reason that I never really spent much time thinking about Alfred’s personal life when I watched Batman movies. I’d intellectually known that she didn’t just hang herself up in the closet at the end of the evening, and the days of servants sleeping in the attics and having no personal lives were (much to my mother’s regret) long over. There were still a handful of my mother’s staff who lived on-site and were provided rooms, but Loren wasn’t one of them.

Suze laughed at my expression. “No, not really. I tailed her for a few days.”

I stalled the Scirocco out in the process of backing out of Loren’s driveway. “You
what
?”

“Spied on her, Fort. Don’t look so shocked. I pulled her financials while I was at it. Her oldest kid got into an Ivy League school. I hope for her bank account’s sake that the younger two go state. Plus, her wife works at a nonprofit, and I have to say, the pay really matches the name.”

I blew out a heavy breath and resumed driving, even as my temper spiked. “Is there any particular reason that you decided to violate Loren’s privacy, Suze?”

There was a long silence, and when I finally glanced over while we sat at a red light, I saw that she was giving me a long, level stare. After I’d finally made eye contact, she raised her eyebrows a little. Her voice was utterly flat and serious. “Don’t be naïve. Loren Noka is loyal to your mother, and to your brother. She’s worked for them since she was fifteen, and probably did odd jobs or helped out her dad even earlier than that. But you’ve only worked with her for a few months—don’t think that loyalty automatically transfers. I wanted to check her out.”

“You’re thinking about a succession,” I said quietly. “About what happens when my mother dies.”

Her eyebrows arched even higher. “Aren’t you?”

I was, of course. That is, I was thinking about my mother’s death. Despite popular myths, vampires weren’t immortal. We were born, we aged, and we died—though we did have centuries more on the clock than any human. I had always thought of my mother as basically immortal—I was probably like any other child in that respect. It was maybe a little more excusable on my part—my mother had been born before the fall of Constantinople. But she’d been weakening recently, and now it was an open topic throughout the territory—when would Madeline Scott die, and what would that mean for those who lived within her borders?

But I was thinking very little about the territory. I was thinking about my mother. My terrifying, murderous, ancient, powerful mother. Who loved me. My feelings for her were too complicated to just be called love. And it wasn’t just her death and its loss—I was standing on the threshold of my transition into full vampire adulthood, but for the moment I was still reliant on my mother for my blood needs. I fed on her, and because of that, I didn’t have to feed on humans the way my siblings did. And I really, really didn’t want to have to start preying on humans.

And at the moment, I certainly didn’t want to have a conversation about any of that. So, without even an attempt at grace, I changed the subject. “You seemed awfully quiet in today’s meeting with the succubi.”

“Really?” Suze gave a crooked grin. “You’re going to go there after that diplomacy crack?”

“You know what I mean. I was the one doing most of the talking. Even Loren asked more questions than you did.”

Suze snorted. “Well, talking was your job, wasn’t it? Besides, I was doing my job and watching your back. While you were engaging in active listening and figuring out what questions to ask, I was making sure that I was ready to slice anyone who suddenly came after you.”

“You talk more when it’s you and me out together. Like when we were figuring out the selkie shakedown in the fall. You talked plenty then.”

“That’s different,” she noted. “That’s us being our own buddy-cop movie, and it’s awesome. I mean, jeez, I got to punch a seal in the face. That was basically a lifetime achievement unlocked right there. When we’re hunting shit down and policing the territory, there are always good opportunities for violence. With this, though . . . Fort, I hate to say it, but freaking diplomacy and taxes are not exactly my areas of primary interest or, dare I even say it, expertise.”

I turned the Scirocco onto the entrance ramp for the highway, settled into the middle lane, and just let habit steer us home. “Yeah, but your grandmother—”

She snickered. “Fort, I’m going to stop you right there. My grandmother figured out my strengths years ago. I definitely got to focus on tussling and being a general badass. Keiko was the one who got stuck with reading stuff like Miyamoto Musashi’s
A Book of Five Rings
.” Suze’s grandmother, Atsuko Hollis, was the matriarch of the kitsune in Providence, and Suze’s twin sister was her designated heir. Though Keiko had been up to a few things lately that the White Fox would not have been pleased with.

“But the succubi—”

“You’re just setting yourself up for heartbreak, and I wish you wouldn’t.” For all the harshness of her words, they were almost gently spoken. “You want to help them, but coming to the Scott territory was their Hail Mary move. Your mother hasn’t allowed any succubi in before—why would she change her mind now? Because she feels bad for them? That doesn’t exactly sound like usual behavior from Madeline Scott.”

“You heard what I did—you saw what I saw. Don’t you want to help the succubi?” It was that terrible, reluctant hope that had been on their faces when I gave them the money and the pizzas that hurt the most. They hadn’t had that when we first showed up. I’d given them a sliver of hope, and now it was resting on me. If I failed, and betrayed that hope, then it would be worse than if I’d just kicked them out of the Supplicant House as soon as I saw them.

Suze made a rude sound. “I’m going to tell you about something very important that I learned about from watching lots of TV shows about spies—it’s called compartmentalization. Bad things happen, Fort, and people get hurt. But you need to limit your efforts to the people who are most important to you, or you’ll just get burned out or rubbed out.”

I glanced over at her. It was past six thirty, and fully dark. I could see only a little of her expression in the lights from the highway and the passing cars.

“Besides,” she continued, “if you keep asking me to front money for pizzas and children’s clothing, it’s going to be like that time that I sent ten bucks to the Humane Society. Fifteen years later and I still get annoying mail from them.”

I sighed. “Listen, I’ll write you a check when we get back to the apartment. Just . . . don’t cash it for about a week.”

She poked me in the ribs then, and there was a softness on her face, a smile. “I don’t want you to change, Fort,” she said suddenly, surprising me. “I’m not trying to nag you into not caring. I like who you are right now, and I’m not going to suddenly try to remake you just because I’ve lifted tail for you. I just don’t want you to end up like a marshmallow Peep in the microwave of the world.”

I couldn’t help laughing at her analogy, and the tension in the car eased. She slid her left hand comfortably onto my leg, letting it rest there as we drove along, and when I didn’t need to shift gears I let my own hand drop down onto hers, holding it loosely. There was a long silence, broken only by passing trucks howling down the highway.

I finally spoke. “Okay, now I really want some Peeps.” Why had she chosen an analogy that involved a seasonal snack that wouldn’t be on shelves for another three months?

“Oh my God, me too!” Suze immediately responded.

*   *   *

We pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building just after eight. Parking the Scirocco was a delicate endeavor because of the building manager’s approach to snow removal, which could charitably be referred to as problematic. Mr. Jennings was not a fan of paying the plow service, and any snow accumulation below four inches was judged by him as insufficient to justify calling the plow guy. Unfortunately for those of us who actually lived in the building, it wasn’t unusual during the winter to wake up to an inch one morning, then a few days later another three inches, then another two. Things started getting problematic when the temperature never got warm enough for there to be a melt between snowfalls, and suddenly the parking lot started having some serious snow accumulation, all of which Mr. Jennings insisted was not his problem.

This had resulted in a lot of shoveling on the part of me and my roommate, Dan, given that we were the only able-bodied residents of the building. The ground floor was an upscale women’s lingerie boutique that had never had access to the parking lot to begin with, and the second-floor apartment was occupied by Mrs. Bandyopadyay, who was in her eighties and, while still impressively spry and mobile, was not exactly in shoveling shape. So a parking lot that had previously been, if not exactly roomy, but at least comfortably able to handle our two cars plus Mrs. Bandyopadyay’s ancient Buick Roadmaster (used only when Mrs. Bandyopadyay had to go to a funeral), plus the cars of our significant others from time to time, had suddenly become exceedingly claustrophobic as walls of snow began to accumulate. Right now we’d been keeping our fingers crossed for a bit of a thaw to bring the snow back down again; otherwise we were going to have to seriously consider spending an afternoon moving one of our snow piles over.

I glanced over at Suze as we pulled into the parking lot. We’d stopped for dinner at a branch of the Newport Creamery on our way back into the city, so both of us were comfortably sated with greasy diner food and excellent milk shakes. It was entirely possible that she would decide to saunter over to her Audi Coupe and head back to her own house in the Silver Lake neighborhood for the night. We hadn’t been dating long enough for there to be an automatic assumption of an overnight, and frankly we were still working on navigating the particular ins and outs of this relationship.

One thing I valued about Suze, however, was her appreciation of the straightforward approach. Unlike my previous girlfriends, where getting them into my apartment for some sex and an overnight visit had involved carefully considered bait and the emotional equivalent of defusing a nuclear bomb with five minutes on the clock, Suze didn’t mind if I just asked her if she wanted to sleep over. Bless her.

“So,” I said. “I believe you brought up the subject of sexy underpants earlier?”

“Hell yeah. I’m on that offer like maggots on roadkill.”

“That . . . is not exactly keeping up with the mood I was hoping for.”

She grinned. “Put on those underpants I got you and you’ll see how fast I can get in the mood.”

We got out of the car, the icy night air enough to take my breath away. I shoved my right hand in my pocket, and grabbed my duffel bag with my left—the duffel was where I kept all the particular tools of my trade stashed—a Colt .45, an Ithaca 37 shotgun with the barrel sawed down, and a spare pair of pants (which I learned the hard way was an essential tool of the trade during a never-to-be-repeated incident in Maine). Suze stopped over at her Audi long enough to fish a small backpack out of her trunk—one that I knew from experience contained her toiletries, fresh underpants, and a spare shirt.

“Not that I’m complaining about the result they get,” I said, linking our arms together as we walked across the slick parking lot (Mr. Jennings was a skinflint about rock salt too), “and I’m definitely not suggesting that you get more creative, but I’m still not sure how a pair of trunk underpants from Jockey count as sexy underwear. Even if they
are
red.”