Iron Night (11 page)

“I have no doubts,” Suzume said. She tossed a lazy right hook at me, which I blocked easily. “See? Last spring we'd be trying to get your nose to stop bleeding right now.”

I dropped my guard just long enough to make an extremely rude gesture, which she laughed at. She then gave a little shrug to her shoulders and threw a quick set of three punches at me, all of which I blocked. She lifted an eyebrow at me, looking moderately impressed, and made another few hits, all of which I also blocked. We were still circling, and her smile was gone, replaced with a slight frown, as if she was working out a small, confounding puzzle. My self-confidence took a distinct step upward, and I felt good about myself, finally seeing some very real payout from my summer of physical misery.

I made a sharp left jab, but she quickly sidestepped the blow. Her frown was now much more pronounced.

“See?” I said, not fighting my own desire to smile.

“Yes,” she agreed, “very instructive.”

Five seconds later I was on my back with her arm pressed into my throat and her left knee digging into my kidney.

“What the hell has your brother been doing?” she demanded, looking profoundly irritated.

“Guh?” I choked out with the small amount of air I was somehow dragging into my lungs. Suze noticed my distress and took the weight off of my throat, at which point I gasped in air desperately.

“Seriously, what is wrong with Chivalry?” Suze continued, undeterred. “You've been blocking every punch I threw at you instead of trying to move out of the way, you are doing nothing with your legs except for shuffling, and you were completely unprepared for the most basic sweep I could come up with. What have the two of you been doing all these months?”

I scooted out from under that kidney-jabbing knee before I answered, wary about exactly what would happen if Suze put all of her weight onto it. “This is how Chivalry fights, Suze.”

She gave a derisive snort. “Your brother has all the vampire bennies going on, Fort. Inhuman speed, strength, and accelerated healing. Remind me what you have again?”

I sighed. “A degree in film theory and a can-do attitude?”

Suzume's expression spoke volumes. “You've got at least a century before you catch up with Chivalry and can fight like a Victorian gentleman defending the honor of queen and country. Let's do our best to keep you alive until then.”

As she gave me a hand up, I had a very sinking feeling in my stomach about the direction that this morning was going in.

“Right.” Suze pulled her hands up again, and there was a distinct gleam in her eyes that boded poorly for me. “Now, this is the kind of gutter fighting that you'll actually be up against.”

What followed was a forty-minute demonstration of all the things that Chivalry had decided didn't apply to the way real men fought. It was extremely illuminating and rather painful, given that Suze seemed to direct an inordinate amount of her strikes to my throat, kidneys, or knees.

“I'm leaving out most of the groin hits for today,” she said cheerfully at one point, circling me at a safe distance. “But you need to start working on making your height work in your favor.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I'd finally managed to block her latest attack toward my legs and was feeling a bit better about myself. A second later I made nose-first contact into my rug as Suze slipped behind me, gave me an extremely painful kick in the back of my right knee, and rode me to the floor with one arm wrapped around my neck in the perfect position for a good throttling.

“Well,” Suze said, as I gagged, “I'm shorter than almost anyone I get into a fight with, excluding my own family. This means that if I want to hit someone, I usually have to get inside their strike zone. I use a lot of what I learned from my mother and aunts, but I also took some Krav Maga classes because I like that the whole point of that style is to end a fight fast instead of being showy. So you'll notice”—she tightened her arm slightly for emphasis—“that most of what I aim for are the most vulnerable parts of the body. Your face, neck, groin, knee, eyes, and joints are all good spots for me. You”—and after one last, almost affectionate, choking she let go and let me wheeze—“have been aiming punches at the center of my body only.”

“Point taken,” I said as I pushed myself upright again. “Dirty fighting.”

“Not dirty—effective,” Suze corrected. She bounced lightly on the balls of her feet, looking obnoxiously fresh and pleased with herself, in a bizarre reflection of how Chivalry always looked at this point in our lessons. “Also, knock it off with your two-point contact system.”

“Huh?”

“This,” she made two quick jabs at me, each of which I blocked. “You're using just your fists. Have you heard about muay Thai?”

“Does it come with a little umbrella?”

She grinned. “Not quite. It's a fighting system that relies on eight points of contact—punches, kicks, elbows, and knee strikes. With your freakish height it actually might be a good fit.”

“Let me put that on my to-do list.”

“Good, and while we're on that—” And with another of those incredible bursts of speed, Suze had dropped to one knee in front of me and I felt a sharp prick just under my rib cage. I froze, then looked down very carefully. An open switchblade was in Suze's right hand, pressed against my skin with just enough pressure that a single drop of blood had welled up and was slowly staining the fabric of my T-shirt. The heel of her left hand was resting casually against the handle of her knife, innocently placed yet clearly prepared to add an extra boost of muscle to send the blade slicing into some fairly critical organs.

Suzume lifted one eyebrow slowly. “Questions?” she asked.

“One,” I managed, being very careful not to move. “Exactly where did you get that from?”

She gave me a slow, feral smile. “I always try to keep one stashed. You can always try to pat me down and figure out where I had it.”

“I'll take a rain check on that.” I moved backward carefully, keeping an eye on her. “So I assume that your lesson here was that I should be prepared for anything?”

“It's pretty hard to be prepared for anything,” she scoffed. “The lesson here is much simpler: always bring a knife to a fistfight.”

“And in a knife fight?”

Suzume gave me that bright, brilliant smile that made me catch my breath for a second. I told myself sternly that it was just all of the injuries my body had suffered, possibly combined with some head trauma.

•   •   •

As easy as Suzume had made wiping the floor with me look, we'd both needed showers before being fit for the company of the outside world. While Suze was taking hers, I pressed a bag of frozen peas against my abused kidney region and called my brother. Chivalry hadn't called that morning, which was unusual—lately he'd made a daily check-in whenever I wasn't meeting up with him at some point in the day, apparently to make sure I was doing lots of push-ups on our off days. My call went straight to voice mail, so I hung up and tried the mansion. This time I was connected—but to my mother.

“I'm sorry, darling,” Madeline explained, “but Chivalry is very occupied with his wife at the moment. It's horribly inconvenient.” I winced. My mother was not known for her empathy.

“Is Bhumika okay?”

“She's doing exactly as we can expect, so do try to give your brother a bit of consideration. It's very thoughtless of him to forget to call you, but this part of the process has always been difficult for him.” She paused, then scolded, “Oh, Fortitude, I can actually hear you biting your tongue.” My mother was right, and I was barely withholding several comments about her blasé attitude toward Bhumika's failing health. “But he did tell me that you had your own bit of excitement with that renter of yours managing to get himself murdered. Bad luck, my turtledove, but, really, what do you expect when you rent in Providence? The city has been going downhill since the Irish arrived.”

“
Mother!
You can't say that!”

“Really?” She sounded surprised. “Goodness, you should've heard the things we said just a century ago,” she mused. “Things do change, don't they?”

I gritted my teeth. “I have to go now, Mother.”

“Have a lovely day, my precious. I'll let your brother know that you called.”

Sadly, that was a better-than-normal phone conversation with my mother.

•   •   •

It was just after lunch that Suze and I stood in a lane at my usual gun range. Given that it was Sunday, we were surrounded by off-duty cops, guys with their acne-ridden teenage sons who were more interested in texting than shooting, and one very badass-looking nun who was definitely adding some of the Holy Spirit to her paper target.

Suzume freely admitted that she far preferred knives to guns, so she stood next to me (looking unnaturally adorable in her oversized ear protectors and safety glasses) and watched with interest as I made my way through three clips in my Colt. I'd spent many Saturday mornings in a gun range with my foster father as a child, but he'd always specifically trained me to aim for only one spot on my paper targets: the midway point between the shoulder and the neck, where one shot would usually break the collarbone and cause an excruciating but completely non-life-threatening injury. Several months before I'd discovered at a very inopportune moment that this might've been a great stopping shot for the average home burglar, but it did not exactly have similar effectiveness on a nonhuman opponent. Since then I'd begun working on training my aim into kill shots: head and heart.

Once I'd finished the clips I'd brought with the Colt, I hit the retrieval button and examined my target. In the black silhouette of a man I could see the holes where my bullets had gone through. The majority were right in the areas where I'd intended them. Not bad for twenty-five yards.

Suzume leaned over my shoulder and poked a finger at the one hole that was off in the far upper left of the target, in the white area that meant I'd missed entirely. “Bet that would've scared the crap out of some low-flying birds,” she said.

“It's generally considered bad form to poke people in the ribs while they're target shooting, Suze,” I said between gritted teeth.

She snorted, loudly enough that I heard her even above the shots being fired on either side of us. “Yeah, the next time you're in a life-or-death situation, we'll all make sure not to break your concentration or surprise you while you're trying to make a shot. Besides”—she gestured to the rest of the shots—“you ended up doing fine. By the end of it I was seriously considering making things a challenge and giving you a wedgie.”

“Don't even think about doing that on the next round,” I warned her as I reached into my duffel bag and pulled out my most recent financial investment, an Ithaca 37 pump-action shotgun that I'd sawed down according to the instructions I'd found on a rather disturbing Web site.

“Oh yes,” Suzume purred. “This is exactly what you should bring to a knife fight.”

“Just hang a new target for me,” I said as I checked it carefully, then loaded in four 20-gauge shells. I'd owned the Ithaca for just over a month, and it had taken suspending my Netflix, seriously scaling back my cable package, and then five straight weeks of eating nothing but ramen noodles and scraps from the restaurant to afford it.

Suzume put up my target, and I sent it out to fifty yards. The main attraction of the Ithaca was its ability to blow an impressive hole in something at a price range that was not completely unattainable for me. Other than one very interesting day during a father-son gun-safety course where we'd received an excellent visual demonstration on exactly how much damage could be inflicted on a human stand-in (in that case, some very ill-fated cabbages), I'd never used a shotgun before my purchase of the Ithaca. I'd been taking a lot of time getting used to controlling the kickback from it, and also trying to increase my speed of reloading, given that it held only two shells.

I spent thirty minutes on it, working my way down to a 12-gauge shell, the largest type of ammunition that the shotgun would accommodate. When I was finished my arms and shoulder were aching, my target was demolished, and Suzume was looking profoundly bored.

“Paper targets will tremble in fear as you approach,” she assured me as we drove home. Apparently I'd impressed her at some point in the day, however, either in my ability to be thrown around my living room or in my very masculine display of firearm prowess, because she not only chipped in for our delivery order of Chinese food that evening, but she even agreed to watch
Avatar
with me. She lasted halfway through the movie (admittedly only that long because of the presence of both Sigourney Weaver and the badass female helicopter pilot) before changing into her fox form and spending the remainder of the film playing with a balled-up piece of paper.

The next morning arrived without incident, despite Suzume again remaining on furry guard, and over breakfast we both agreed that whatever had killed Gage wasn't coming back, and that unfortunately neither of us had any more ideas for how to pick up its trail.

“I really appreciate your sticking around this weekend, Suze,” I told her.

Chewing a mouthful of tofu bacon, Suzume gave me a very serious look. “What else are friends for?”

We looked at each other in silence for a moment, then she cleared her throat and we both occupied ourselves again with mastication.

The movers arrived just after ten to collect Gage's boxes, followed quickly by the cargo truck that would be taking Gage's car down to his parents in Florida. After it was done, I stood in what had been Gage's room and looked around. Once again it was just an empty room with a bed frame, bare mattress, and wood floors that were a decade overdue for sanding and refinishing. There was nothing left to hint about who had lived there and been my friend.