Iron Night (33 page)

“Wait here, brother,” she told me at the entrance, and then entered alone, closing the door behind her.

The next two hours inched horribly by, with Lulu's screams echoing through the apartment. I sat on the sofa, tensing at every sound that emerged from the closed bedroom until the muscles of my body actually felt sore. Lilah tried covering her ears at first, but eventually just gave up and pressed against my side, burying her face in my shoulder. I stroked her bright hair with one hand, but there was nothing to say. For all the crimes that Lulu had committed, it was impossible to hear the sounds of her agony and not cringe.

I'd made the decision and the call that had led to the torture, I reminded myself over and over—I needed to accept the consequences and not try to hide from Lulu's screams. But as the sun set and the shadows deepened, I finally couldn't take it anymore, and I turned to Suze and begged, “Can't you hide those sounds?” I loathed my own weakness as I asked, but I just didn't want to listen to the surround sound of Lulu's torture for another minute.

Suzume had returned to her human shape shortly after Prudence had arrived and had positioned herself at the window, about as far away from where Lilah and I were sitting as she could get, staring out into the darkness. She didn't look at me as she answered quietly. “I can hide the sounds from the neighbors by replacing them with sounds that they would normally expect to hear—that's no real effort. But to hide the sounds from you, when you know the truth of what is happening in that room, would be much more difficult. I don't know where this night is going to lead us, and I can't spare the energy, Fort.” She looked over her shoulder at me very quickly, turning away again almost immediately, some undefined emotion flickering across her face. “Not even for your feelings.”

And time crept forward.

The clock had just ticked past seven when Prudence reappeared at the bedroom door and beckoned me over. A lazy, contented smile was spread across her face, and she was wiping one hand fastidiously with a monogrammed linen handkerchief that was already streaked in dark red stains.

“Come, Fortitude. I'm ready for you now,” she said.

Carefully extricating myself from Lilah, I took a deep breath and walked over to my sister, reminding myself again of why this had to be done. “What's taking so long? Why isn't she talking?” I asked.

Prudence gave a low, amused chuckle and wagged one newly clean finger at me. “Ah, brother. You think it's easy to break a fanatic? You watch too much television. It would take me months, with every piece of agony just making her cling harder to her devotion, or result in nothing but a string of lies. No, I've just softened her a bit.” She dropped one deceptively delicate hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly, ignoring my barely hidden flinch as she touched me. “Tell me, Fortitude, have you learned much about the Neighbors during your investigation?”

“A bit,” I admitted cautiously.

She nodded, then urged me in a tone that was weirdly reminiscent of my teachers when they had been trying to lead the class to a concept. “Think hard on what this wretch values.”

I considered it, then said slowly, “She doesn't value her own life.”

Prudence nodded again, pleased. “Precisely. True fanatics do not. So come in, Fortitude, and force her to talk by threatening what she does hold dear.”

I followed Prudence into the bedroom, unable to keep myself from looking back once over my shoulder. Suze had turned away from the window to watch the exchange, and she gave me one short nod. Lilah was still sitting on the sofa, her large eyes red from crying. She crossed her hands over her mouth and glanced away from me. From the depths of my soul I wished that I could do the same.

Inside the bedroom, Lulu was still tied to the chair, just as we'd left her. But there were small trails of dried blood at the corners of her mouth, and a towel from the bathroom was pressed against her stomach, blotted with bloodstains. Remembering the way Prudence had threatened Ambrose the witch at Lulu's office, I couldn't prevent myself from being grateful that Prudence had covered up her handiwork, even though it made me both hypocritical and cowardly, as I carried an equal stake in her actions. There was a weird smell in the room, almost a combination of a poorly maintained men's bathroom and the back room of a butcher shop (another of my worse, short-term bits of employment). Seeing me, Lulu tried to spit but couldn't put any force behind it, which just resulted in a pinkish liquid dribbling down her chin.

If I ran away or threw up, I'd lose this opportunity. I forced myself to remember what Gage's body had looked like on the floor of his bedroom: cold, ruined, and tossed aside like garbage. I reminded myself that this woman was also responsible, at least in part, for the presence of Soli, and therefore shared in the guilt of Beth's death. That stirred up enough anger in me to push back my guilt and regret for her pain, and I forced confidence in my voice as I said, “I think you're ready to answer my questions now, Doctor.”

Lulu gave a high, shrill laugh that made her gasp as it jarred some broken place inside her. “And why would you say that, when your sister has had no luck at all?” she taunted, glaring at me with no hint of fear. “You can go ahead and kill me now. I'll never talk to you.”

I glanced at my sister behind me, but Prudence just gave me an encouraging nod. “I'm surprised you'd say that,” I began, feeling her out, trying to remember everything I'd learned or had heard about the way that she viewed the world. “After all, what will your community do without their own pet doctor to churn changelings out of desperate women?”

At that Lulu's expression wavered for a second and a shiver ran through her, but then she shook her head. “Others can continue that work. Maybe not on the same scale, but it will continue. And it doesn't truly matter, because the time of the changeling is coming to an end.”

A thrill of excitement ran through me. Just like that, she'd handed me the key to force her confession. I would've liked myself better if I'd hesitated or if I'd said what I did with the fates of the living in mind, but it was the thought of Gage and Beth that pushed me immediately forward. “Perhaps you think that,” I said, leaning in and placing a hand on her shoulder. The bone moved, and I realized that it was broken. My stomach clenched, but I didn't move my hand. “But if you don't start talking right now, my sister is going to start hunting. For every minute you stay silent, she'll kill one of your half-bloods.” Lulu gaped, horror suffusing her face, but I pushed forward brutally. “For every lie you tell me, she'll slaughter one of those three-quarter hybrids you've worked so hard on.” A high, frightened sound emerged from Lulu's throat, and now she was shaking visibly.

“No, you wouldn't, you couldn't—” Lulu's wide green eyes darted between me and my sister.

“Look at my sister, Doctor,” I said heartlessly. “Do you think she'll hesitate if I tell her to go and kill someone?” I didn't look behind me, but there was a soft rustling of fabric, and whatever move Prudence made caused Lulu to flinch hard.

Weakness and despair made the wrinkles in Lulu's face deepen, suddenly making her look her age for the first time I'd known her. She was beaten and she knew it. “What do you want from me?” she asked, voice shaking.

“I know that some of the Neighbors have been using a ritual to enable the conception of a seven-eighths hybrid. You've been using recessive men, tattooing and killing them. You brought a skinwalker in to help.” I leaned even closer to her. “Now tell me the rest.”

She wet her lips with her tongue, and when she spoke it was very slow and halting, each word sounding ripped from her throat. “It was Tomas who found it. We were all looking, all of us who are trusted, who are the inner circle, but he found it. He found an old witch up in Maine, one who had a collection of potion books. But she wouldn't let him look at them, and that made us think that she was hiding something. We couldn't risk the witch naming the Neighbors or the Ad-hene in a complaint to Madeline Scott, so that's when we hired Soli, the skinwalker. She killed the witch, brought the books back.”

“What is Soli getting out of all of this?” I asked.

Lulu's mouth twisted in brief, cynical amusement before quickly going slack again. “Money. She didn't care what we did, as long as she was paid. And in one of the books we found a ritual, one where the only thing we needed from the witches was the spelled ink to make the tattoo. The sacrifice had to be special, not just any man off the street, so we used ones whose fathers were Ad-hene, the ones who had never bloomed.”

“The coroner's report says that there were medical tools used in the amputations.”

She nodded, and these words came easier to her, as if she were talking about something of no great consequence or importance. “Yes, that was me. Hands, genitals, and tongue needed to be removed without killing the sacrifice. We'd hang him above the couple; then the seed had to be planted before the sacrifice's blood stopped pumping.”

I stared at her for a second, my mind unable to wrap around what she'd just said. “What do you mean?”

“I'd make an incision in the sacrifice's neck, then intercourse needed to be completed before the sacrifice bled out completely.” She spoke briskly, for the first time seeming to regain that air of medical superiority.

I couldn't reply, and Prudence strolled forward next to me, looking completely unruffled, nodding and smoothly picking up the questioning that I'd dropped. “The purpose of those roofie potions that your witch cooked up, I believe. Hard to get most girls, even Neighbor girls, to participate.” She gave a small, fastidious sniff of disapproval. “I'm sure nothing was needed for the elves to perform.”

My brain was numb from the information I was still struggling with, and I stared at Lulu, moved beyond horror. “All those men. You delivered them when they were babies. And you're just . . . so calm talking about what you did to them.” I couldn't understand it.

Lulu stared at me, icy and unmoved. “They were useless to us. All that promise, all that effort, and all we got were mewling human babies. They should've been grateful that they could finally be of use to their fathers.” The fanatical gleam returned to her eyes, and her voice became triumphant. “And they were. The first baby was born yesterday, and there are three others twitching in their mothers' wombs. This is the way back to what our kind was meant to be.”

Lilah's voice cut in, and I looked behind me to see her standing in the doorway. She must've been listening to everything. Her eyes were fixed on Lulu, there was a dark flush in her cheeks, and something about the way she was holding herself hinted at barely restrained violence, as if her heritage was barely contained beneath her skin. “But Felix isn't a recessive, Lavinia. He's one of us, one of the Neighbors. Why would the skinwalker have taken him to Jacoby? Why would he be wearing those tattoos now?” Her voice rose with each question.

Lulu's lip curled. “As if a changeling is truly one of us,” she said.

Apparently undistracted by the exchange, Prudence was tapping one finger contemplatively against her lips. Something occurred to her and she asked Lulu, “You're wondering how much stronger a hybrid you can create, aren't you? Whether a finer sacrifice will bring you closer to a true elf?”

There was a weirdly desperate tone in Lulu's voice as she answered Prudence, something that bordered almost on gratitude that someone in the room apparently understood their way of thinking. “Yes. You see. This is about the survival of our race.”

Lilah laughed, high and hysterical. “Have you ever considered, Lavinia, that maybe we shouldn't be trying quite so hard to be like Themselves? That maybe they've died out for a reason?”

Lulu's head snapped back, as if Lilah had just said the most untenable heresy—which I supposed she had. But I broke in before the conversation could be sidetracked again. “Felix was with Soli this morning. If you aren't trying to cover your tracks from us anymore, then nothing would be holding you back from making the sacrifice quickly. Has it already happened?” The half-blood woman chewed anxiously at her bottom lip and didn't respond, which was enough of an answer in itself. I nodded. “It hasn't happened, then. Tell me where and when.”

Lulu turned her face away from all of us, clearly struggling between her aversion to giving us the information we needed to stop the sacrifice and her fear of the consequences if she didn't answer. My sister moved forward, easing down beside Lulu and stroking the sweaty curls back from the tortured woman's forehead. When she spoke her voice was soft and almost loving, a horrible counterpoint to the content of the words themselves. “I will rip apart every hybrid girl I can find, Lulu,” Prudence promised. “And I will leave you alive to watch while I destroy every hope your race has left.”

No one doubted the truth of Prudence's promise, and it was the last torture for Lulu, who broke fully at last. Her eyes were shattered when she whispered, “It's tonight, just at moonrise. In the fairy circle outside the entrance to Underhill. They'll all be there, waiting for me to arrive.”

I looked at Lilah, still standing at the doorway. “Do you know the spot?”

She nodded. “Yes,” but something was clearly on her mind, and she asked Lulu, “Who are they using?”

Those brilliant emerald eyes glittered with malice. “You should know.”

Betrayal covered Lilah's face. “No, no, not Iris. My parents would never agree to that.” And I remembered then that Lilah's nineteen-year-old sister was one of the three-quarter hybrid girls.

“They are loyal,” Lulu sneered, her voice like a knife. “They didn't question us, just agreed to give the girl the brew and have her ready for Tomas to pick up.”

Lilah moved forward then, her hands reaching for the older woman, but I grabbed and held her before she could get close. She struggled for a moment, then gave up. “What time is moonrise tonight?” I asked her, hoping that she would somehow know offhand or that her finding the answer would manage to focus her attention.