Iron Night (20 page)

“Help me get him in the car. We'll drive him over to the—”

“Fort.” Suze cut me off. Looking at her, I was struck by how torn she looked. Her voice gentled. “You know we can't do that.”

“I won't let him die, Suze,” I warned her, praying that she wouldn't push me. I didn't want to know what choices I might have to make.

We stared at each other, neither moving. Then she glanced away fast, took a deep breath, and said, “Put him in the backseat of his car. I'll take him over to my house and get someone to look at him.”

“I'm not putting this on you,” I argued. “If anyone is going to risk pissing off my mother, it's going to be me.” After all, she wouldn't kill me.

“Oh, believe me, it's
going
to be you,” she said darkly as she reached down and grabbed Matt's legs. “Keebler, make yourself useful for five seconds and pat him down for his keys. Fort, grab the torso.” While Lilah checked his pockets, Suze leaned closer to me, her voice dropped, and I knew that this was as good an offer as she was going to make me. “I'll haul him home and get him checked out, but he's under lock and key until he wakes up and you talk with him. If we're lucky, that hit to the head rattled his brains enough that he won't start babbling about monsters and we won't have to go to our fallback position.”

“And if we do?” I asked.

Suze started to answer, then stopped herself and took a deep breath. “We'll talk about it then.”

I nodded slowly. “I'll follow you in the Fiesta.”

“Better make a phone call while you're at it.”

We lifted Matt together, both initially stumbling and barely holding him. “Fuck,” I muttered, suddenly remembering our other crisis. “The skinwalker.” There was a short list of creatures that my mother had banned from entering her territory. The skinwalkers were right at the top. I'd never seen one before tonight, but some of Chivalry's stories were trickling back to me. None of them were reassuring.

If I hadn't met Soli tonight and seen how easily she'd been mopping the floor with me and Suze, I would've risked hiding her presence from my family. With Matt's involvement, the thought of deliberately inviting the interest of the people who would be the first to try to eliminate the threat he posed was insane. But the fact was that Suze and I were completely outmatched. I needed my brother.

We maneuvered Matt into his backseat, with Lilah doing her best to sweep off an open area for him, then helped pull him in as gently as possible. He groaned once but didn't make any other sounds. There was a blanket crumpled up on the floor of the passenger's seat that I knew Matt kept stashed for long stakeouts, and Lilah pulled it out and tucked it over him. She tugged up the paper towels around his head to check on his cut, and I looked away quickly, shame choking me. Matt had gotten hurt, and my first instinct had been to capitalize on it, not help him.

Lilah climbed out of the car. “Looks like it stopped bleeding,” she said. I felt her fumble around and pat my shoulder, then squeeze it quickly and drop her hand. I looked up. She was focused on me, and there was sympathy on her face. She hadn't seen what I'd tried to do, I realized, and she thought I was just unable to see Matt hurt.

Suze was frowning at Lilah, but when the half-blood looked away from me the expression wiped from her face. There was no hiding the annoyance in her voice, though, as she said to Lilah, “So, awesome night. We should do this again probably never. Gimme the keys. One of us can get you somewhere where you can wait for a cab.”

The dismissal was clear, but Lilah shook her head with surprising firmness. “No, I'll help you get him to your house.”

“What?” Suze was genuinely surprised. Frankly, I was as well—after the fiasco at the tattoo parlor, I wouldn't have blamed Lilah for taking the opportunity to bail.

Lilah pointed at Suzume's chest, where the long cuts Soli had inflicted were sluggishly oozing blood each time she moved, like a badly cut knee on a long walk home. “You've got to be hurting really badly. While I'm driving you can actually wrap those up or something. Unless you were really looking forward to passing out from blood loss at the first stop sign.” She lifted her eyebrows, and even after everything that had happened that night, I felt the shadow of a smile play at my mouth. I knew from hard experience that this was the only way into Suze's good graces and away from the land of bad nicknames was by slinging sass and showing backbone.

“I'm fine,” Suze grumped, but I noticed that she shifted slightly to make her cuts less visible. “Besides, like you can actually drive stick.”

“Actually I can,” Lilah said, then pointed. “Get in the car.”

Suzume looked over at me, and I raised my hands and stepped back. “Don't involve me,” I said. “I'll follow in the Fiesta.”

We pulled out, with the Buick in front. Lilah might have been comfortable driving stick (as clearly evidenced by the fact that she managed to start it up without stalling), but my guess was that she wasn't a usual driver of older American cars that had been built along lines similar in size to humpback whales, and she drove very slowly.

I'd left my phone in the Fiesta's glove compartment before we'd headed to the Iron Needle, and I pulled it out now and dialed Chivalry's number.

It was ten thirty, and when Chivalry picked up he answered just above a whisper. Left to his own devices, Chivalry tended to keep the kind of hours that Ben Franklin would admire, getting up with the sun and consigning anything that aired on TV after nine p.m. to his DVR.

I cut straight to the chase. “Suzume and I found what dumped Gage's body.”

“Oh?” he said. He was surprised, but then his voice warmed with pleasure and older-brother pride. “That's excellent, Fortitude. Do you need assistance?” Only Chivalry could find such a very polite way to ask if I needed help killing something.

Every spot where Soli's fists had connected felt tender to the point where a tub filled with ice had nearly erotic appeal, and, given its current special level of throbbing, I was seriously concerned that the spot on my cheekbone where Soli had punched and Suzume had backhanded me might've been at least fractured. As much as she'd done to hide it, I knew that Suze was in substantial pain from her cuts, though given how much better her healing ability was than mine, I knew why she'd downplayed them. And this was a situation where we'd outnumbered and startled Soli. The cavalry were definitely needed. I snorted and said, “I should say so. It's a skinwalker.”

“Are you certain?” All of the relaxed congratulation was gone, and Chivalry's voice was tense.

“Really sure. We got a peek at the center of the Tootsie Pop.”

“How badly are you hurt?” That Chivalry asked
how badly
rather than
are you
was a direct confirmation of the seriousness of the situation.

“Banged up, but we're both okay.”

“Where is the skinwalker now?”

“Gone. Listen, Chivalry, there's some weird shit going on up here. The skinwalker is working with the elves on something.”

Chivalry sucked in a breath. “You need to tell all of this to Mother. Get down here right now.”

“No, Chivalry, I can't—”

“That's not a request, Fortitude,” Chivalry snapped. “I want you to get in your car right now and come straight to the mansion. No detours, nothing. This supercedes everything. If you aren't in front of the mansion one hour from now, I'm coming and getting you.” He hung up. Another sign that convinced me how serious this was—Chivalry wrote regular letters to the editor of the local newspaper complaining about the decline in phone etiquette.

“Oh, not good,” I muttered as I immediately called Suze. When she picked up I explained the necessary change in plans, and she assured me that she and Lilah would be able to handle Matt. Hoping that was the case but unable to do anything about it, I made a quick, illegal U-turn and headed for the highway.

•   •   •

As I drove, most of my mind was on trying to sort through what had just happened. Skinwalkers were, unlike kitsune or the elves, native to North America, but my mother hadn't had any contact with them until western expansion had progressed well into areas like Texas and Arizona. They had been banned from my mother's territory more than sixty years ago, and the ones that didn't willingly relocate had been hunted down and killed by Prudence and Chivalry, and while my brother hadn't gone into the details, apparently they had made those executions grisly enough that no skinwalker had been sighted in the territory since, though Chivalry had once mentioned that the largest concentration of them was now in Miami, where they liked the heat, the city life, and the convenience of the everglades for dumping bodies.

That was the one thing Chivalry had emphasized: skinwalkers meant bodies. They were humanoid in shape but not in appearance. He hadn't gone into detail (and I had not pursued it), but I'd just gotten a small window into what a skinwalker looked like in its natural form. It was apparently a rare sight—true to their name, they stripped the skin from their victims and were able to wear it to blend in to the population. No one knew how long they could wear one skin for; Chivalry had known individuals who kept skins for months or even years, but like snails with shells, there was a large amount of “trading up,” which occurred whenever a skinwalker caught sight of a face or body that it liked better than the one it was currently wearing. They were rapacious, violent, and deadly.

And I'd just pissed one off very personally. I pressed my foot harder onto the gas pedal. Suddenly seeing my family held an enticing appeal. Kind of like in the Three Billy Goats Gruff—Soli might've handed me my ass, but I was willing to bet that things would be very different with my big brother.

I tried not to think about what had happened with Matt. I didn't want to think about what I'd almost done to him, or its potential implications. There had been times in the past where blood had excited me and I'd felt cold, predatory instincts stir in me, but those had been only during the days when I'd been trying to avoid my vampire heritage as much as possible and had avoided coming home to feed from my mother. I'd never come so close to sampling human blood, and I'd never before lost all recognition of those around me. What frightened me was that I'd been drinking my mother's blood more regularly over the past few months than I had at any point since my late teens, and between that and my vegetarian diet what had happened shouldn't have been possible.

That I knew of. The information my family had provided me about what I could expect now that my transition had started had been about as helpful as Queen Victoria's premarital advice to her daughters. The idea that this might be my new normal made my hands shake on the wheel, and I forced the topic from my brain. Suddenly a skinwalker who seemed personally pissed at me seemed like a much better issue to ponder.

It was a weeknight and late, so roads were clear and I was able to make excellent time to Newport, pulling my car into the driveway at just past eleven. The house was completely lit up, twinkling like a jewel in the dark. I could feel the presence of my entire family in the house as I walked toward it. Prudence had avoided me for the past few months, pouting over my failure to get myself killed, and there was something intoxicating about feeling the certainty of all of them, a drumming knowledge in the back of my brain that tugged at the part of me that had come roaring out earlier that evening and was still crouched far too close to the surface.

No one was waiting for me, but I followed the pull of their presence unerringly to the small parlor to the left of the grand staircase that was reserved for family use and not quite as overwhelmingly decorated as the more public areas of the mansion.

Despite the season, a fire had been lit in the granite fireplace, and my mother sat on the rose-colored sofa tucked closest to it. She was wearing her typical set of innocuous camouflage, wide-legged light green grandma pants that accented her flowery pastel shirt, all topped off with her clunky eighties glasses and her best Barbara Bush hairdo. Chivalry sat to her left, much more dressed down than usual in a button-down shirt and jeans, with a hollow and exhausted look around his eyes. Prudence wasn't sitting, but instead paced around the room. She must've been out on the town when she'd been called home, because she was dressed for the opera in a long black gown that sparkled when she moved, the full skirt swishing dangerously in her wake, contrasting the gleam of white shoulders and very generously displayed décolletage in the thinly strapped top. Her bright red hair was pinned up instead of hanging in its usual sleek bob, and the heads of the pins sparkled like the diamonds that I suspected they actually were.

Everyone was already looking at the doorway when I walked in, having undoubtedly felt my approach ever since I pulled into the driveway, if not even before that. Prudence gave me one sweeping look and continued her pacing, but Chivalry immediately got up and hurried over to me, concern filling his face when he reached out to touch my bruised cheek.

“What else, Fort?” he asked urgently, patting my arms to check for broken bones and eyeing the rest of me that was concealed by my clothing. Chivalry was able to hide his mother-hen streak most of the time, but when I was younger he'd always been the first to come running with a bottle of iodine whenever I came home after a bike ride with a freshly scraped knee.

I flinched away from his hand, as even his delicate probing had sent a blast of pain through my skull, but I gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Just bruises. I'm okay.” He looked completely unconvinced, still scanning me anxiously for injuries, and I tried to make my voice more reassuring as I repeated, “Really, I'm fine. Suze actually looks worse than I do right now.”

From her position on the sofa, Madeline frowned. “The kitsune was there? Atsuko was involved in your search?”