Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (10 page)

The party was still in full swing in the main hall, so I took a back staircase rather than the grand main one that swept downward in carved and gilded glory. Down a hallway where I passed staff members making their way back to the kitchen with trays of empty wineglasses and half-nibbled plates of food, I headed to the small butler’s pantry that concealed the entrance to one of the house’s nastier secrets.

A staff member was always stationed in the pantry, endlessly scrubbing and polishing the silver, and the one on duty tonight gave me a solemn nod as she unlocked the door partially hidden behind the woodwork pattern, revealing the basement staircase that, in sharp contrast to everything else in the house, was purely functional and industrial.

Until the murderous scene that my sister instigated a month ago when she tried to kill my host father and push me into full transition, the rooms at the bottom of the stairs and behind a steel door with a keypad lock had
belonged to Mr. Albert. He’d been my host parents’ guardian and keeper since I’d been a small child, and I took a short moment before keying in the code that would allow me entrance to gather myself together.

The door released, and I pulled it open, entering completely transformed rooms. The main room, with its full-length one-way mirror used to observe Henry at all times, had previously been decorated like an old, comfortable sitting room. But Mr. Albert’s scuffed shelves and ancient armchairs were gone, replaced by a set of Spartan, functional furniture, with the showpiece being a long metal desk, looking like it was straining under the massive computer setup on top of it, with three screens, two towers, and a total of three battery backups daisy-chained together. I had privately dubbed this collection “Skynet.”

Sitting with his back to me, and looking steadily out the glass and into Henry’s holding area was the new keeper, Conrad Miller. Mr. Alfred had been a former wrestler and a big man, but Conrad had the kind of build and muscle mass that should’ve been illegal under the Geneva Conventions. I was a tall guy, but next to Conrad’s six-foot-five frame and easily two-hundred fifty pounds (none of it fat), I felt like a wet kitten looking at a Saint Bernard. His dark hair was trimmed into a jarhead’s buzz, and I knew that the even brown of his skin was natural, since he hadn’t left these rooms once since my mother had employed him a month ago.

“Hey, Conrad,” I said. “Are you AFK?”

Conrad didn’t even glance over at me, but as I walked closer, I could see him smile. The computer screens were covered in the saturated colors of
World of Warcraft
, and his character was on the center screen, as much at rest as a night elf with purple skin and greenish blue hair could get. I wasn’t sure how exactly my mother found her employees, but Chivalry had shown me Conrad’s background information, and he was pretty much a perfect fit
for the job. After almost eight years in the Marines and three combat tours, Conrad had been honorably discharged. With his experience, he would’ve been great in the private security business—except for the post-traumatic stress disorder that was the remaining legacy of his service in war zones. Because of his PTSD, he couldn’t stand being in any location that he didn’t feel was secure. That included just about anywhere he would travel in private security, plus his local grocery store and most of the rooms of his own house. Madeline’s fortified bunker of a basement, with its restricted access and top-of-the-line installations, had suited him very well. A few pieces of exercise equipment and a reliable Internet connection to support his
WoW
habit, and he’d settled right in.

We were still in the getting-to-know-you phase, but he seemed nice enough, and despite how I sometimes teased him about multitasking with
WoW
, he was serious about the job.

“Do you mind waiting until Maire is out?” he asked, his eyes never wavering from the glass. “It’s safer to cover only one person at a time.”

“It’s okay. I just came down for a look, not a visit.”

I hadn’t talked to Henry since he’d killed Mr. Albert. I’d been told my entire life that my host parents were dangerous, and I’d accepted it on an intellectual level, but the sight of Henry tearing at Mr. Albert with his hands and teeth had finally forced me to realize exactly what he was capable of. That would’ve been easier if he was always the wild, vicious, ravening thing that he’d been when he attacked Mr. Albert, but the problem was that he wasn’t. The process that had made him capable of becoming a part of the vampire life cycle had twisted and warped his mind, but it hadn’t broken it. And in some horrible way, I knew that Henry loved me, which somehow made Mr. Albert’s death even worse.

But the events that had led to Mr. Albert’s death hadn’t left Henry unmarked. I looked through the
window and watched the other new addition to Madeline’s staff, Maire O’Riley. Small in stature and with curling strawberry blond hair that even her no-nonsense short cut couldn’t stop from looking angelic, Maire had been a combat medic until her left leg was blown off in an IED explosion. I’d seen her use a prosthetic that mimicked what her old leg had probably looked like a few times, but whenever she was inside Henry’s enclosure, she wore a carbon fiber blade attachment designed solely for function and quick motion rather than any aesthetic sensibilities. Both she and Conrad had, as part of the interview process, been shown photographs of all of Henry’s victims, including Mr. Albert.

Seeing Maire inside the enclosure made me nervous. “Why don’t you go in when she does, Conrad?”

Conrad’s smile widened. “She says I hover and get in her way.” He didn’t break his alert observation, but he tilted his head slightly toward me. “Don’t worry about Maire. She’s tough, and she knows what she’s doing.”

Henry didn’t look dangerous anymore. Inside his clear plastic cube prison (the outsides now heavily reinforced with steel following Prudence’s attack on the original), Maire was changing Henry’s feeding tube—never a pleasant sight. In her attempt to kill him, Prudence had done severe damage, which had never healed or even closed. In the process that made him a vampire host, my mother had replaced his entire blood supply with hers, a process that was extremely difficult for a vampire and nearly universally fatal for the prospective host. Henry had survived, and my mother’s blood had fundamentally changed him down to the DNA level; among other things, it had made him far tougher and stronger than a human. Yet at the same time, it made him vulnerable, because his body was unable to make new blood or heal itself without my mother’s assistance and donation of more of her own supply. All of Henry’s wounds from his fight were neatly sutured closed, but they continually seeped fluid
and required constant attention. Some of the damage to his upper body had necessitated the feeding tube, as well as a catheter, which required constant maintenance and attention from Maire. They also required Henry to remain still, which he’d been unwilling (or unable) to do, so now he spent his days and nights completely immobilized, strapped to a hospital bed. This enforced inactivity had caused the formation of bedsores, which also needed regular tending.

Until now, I’d thought that Madeline had made a deliberate decision not to make the blood transfers needed for Henry to heal. I’d assumed that she had been punishing him, much like her breaking and rebreaking of Prudence’s leg. Looking at his pitiful condition, however, and thinking about how my mother had interrupted my feeding, I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was highly possible that Madeline was currently
unable
to spare the blood that Henry would need to return to full, or even partial, health.

Inside the cube, Maire completed her work, gathered her tools, and left the cell, locking the newly reinforced door behind her. Conrad’s hand never wavered from his stun gun until she had entered the room where we were sitting. Then he returned the instrument to his belt and started up his game again.

I greeted Maire, who looked completely unsurprised at my presence.

“He knows you’re here. Do you want to talk to him?”

“No,” I said, too quickly. I paused and took a deeper breath. “No, just tell him . . . Tell him that I’m not ready yet.”

Maire gave a one-shoulder shrug and began unpacking her supply bag and pockets onto a small table. I’d seen this before—every time she left Henry’s cube, she always went through everything and checked it against a list to make sure that she’d brought back everything that she’d intended to, and that Henry hadn’t somehow been
able to steal an item from her. Considering that my host mother, Grace, had died after stabbing herself a dozen times in the chest with a toothbrush that she’d managed to pocket and then sharpen to a knife’s edge, Maire’s habit was one that was likely to help keep both her and Conrad safe.

“You know,” Maire said conversationally, “my grandma used to work at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.”

“I actually didn’t know that,” I replied, feeling a little confused at the non sequitur.

“She worked with the big cats. One day one of the feeding cage locks got stuck, and a leopard jumped on her and scratched her up pretty badly. She got out alive, but she had some really bad scarring on her neck and arm. When I was really little, I asked her one day if she’d been mad at the leopard that did it. She said no, that the leopard was just doing what its nature made it do, and that was no reason to be mad at an animal.” She glanced up when she was finished, fixing me with her Irish green eyes to make sure that I had figured out the meaning of this conversation.

“Thank you, Maire,” I said, giving her a quick glare.

It was about as effective as glaring at a moose. “Just saying,” she said, completely undaunted.

“I’ll see you both later. Have a good night.”

As I pulled the coded door shut behind me, I could hear Conrad say, “Sleeping dogs, Maire. Why can’t you ever let them lie?”

Having no desire to talk to either of my siblings again, I slipped around the party by going out the kitchen. That put me in the direct path of Madeline’s cook, who cornered me to ask if I’d had dinner yet. I had to admit that I hadn’t. I knew that she would’ve preferred to park me in the dining room and serve a three-course meal, but after I insisted that I had a lot to do tomorrow and needed to head back to Providence, she grumbled but settled for making me a sandwich for the road and
forcing me to accept a piece of cake from the party food. I finally made my escape, but got all the way to the parking lines of cars before I remembered that James had my keys, which meant turning around and going back into the house.

“When you’re just rushing around, you’ll waste more minutes than if you’d just taken your time in the first place,” James scolded me when I finally located him. It seemed my night for unsolicited advice, so I just nodded and waited for my car to be brought around from whatever hole they’d stashed it in.

I ate my sandwich on the drive home, my head full of everything that had happened today. There was plenty to brood over, and my mood was pretty low by the time I finally got into Providence. The apartment was dark when I entered, except for the weak light by the front door that Dan and I would leave on if the other person was out late, so I knew that my roommate had already gone to bed. I ate the piece of cake straight from the plastic container that it had been packed in, but I was still feeling fairly in the dumps by the time I had scraped the last forkful of frosting into my mouth. It was well after midnight, and while I had plenty of people to follow up with on Matias Kivela’s murder, they would all have to wait until a more reasonable hour.

I took a quick shower to finally get rid of the combination of dog rub and jogging sweat that I’d been carrying around since that afternoon, then brushed my teeth and took a quick stop at the toilet. I was pulling off a few sheets of toilet paper when I suddenly felt a weird bump in the roll, and I paused. A dark suspicion filled me, and I unrolled more paper quickly. There they were—two small googly eyes, glued to the toilet paper roll, staring at me.

It took me almost a full second to process what I was seeing, and then I laughed hard enough that I actually had to wipe my eyes when I was done. What was really
impressive was not only that Suzume had decided to do that, but that the eyes were at least halfway down into the toilet roll, meaning that she must’ve unrolled the paper, glued on the eyes, and then rerolled everything neatly enough that she hadn’t tipped off any of the people who regularly used the apartment’s toilet. I was also impressed that she’d put all that effort into a prank that might not have even gotten to me—after all, Dan, Jaison, and even Suzume herself regularly made stopovers here.

Still snickering, I pulled the roll down and tossed it into the trash, then dug a fresh toilet roll out from under the sink and set it up. I tugged the first sheet free from its little glue adhesive, then unrolled enough to complete my business.

I paused for a second, then eyed the roll.

I had to check.

I started pulling the toilet paper again, this time not yanking off a few squares, but unrolling the whole thing.

Halfway into it, there were the googly eyes staring up at me.

Despite the late night,
I was up and dressed early the next morning, and as soon as the clock ticked over to eight a.m. and it was socially acceptable, I started making phone calls. The first was to Chivalry’s witch, Rosamund. No one picked up, and I was shuttled to her voice mail. It was the standard “Leave a message” blah-blah, but then it was repeated in Spanish, and then in a third language that I couldn’t even identify beyond its being definitely of Asian origin. I left a brief variation on “I’m Chivalry Scott’s brother. Call me.”

The next call I placed was to Lilah, and it yielded better results. She picked up on the fifth ring with a sleepy, “Fort?”

“I’m sorry, Lilah. Did I wake you?” She had that tone of a person whose brain was still coming online.

“Little bit,” she admitted. “What’s up?”

“There’s a bit of a situation, and I need to talk with you.”

“If you’re free tonight, we can grab dinner.”

That sounded very nice, and friendly-casual, but unfortunately the situation was anything but that. “I’m sorry, but it’s pretty important. Family business.” God, I felt like a mobster as I said that, and I corrected myself. “What I mean is that it’s about the Ad-hene. Can you do any earlier?”

“Oh.” Her voice flattened, and became almost resigned. “Well, I guess it was a matter of time.”

Alone in my kitchen, I raised my eyebrows and wondered what that implied. Maybe the Ad-hene really
had
found a way to hide their scent from kitsune noses. Well, I couldn’t pretend to feel sorry about the possibility of Prudence killing another of them. Frankly, they had it coming. Meanwhile, Lilah continued talking. “Yeah, just give me an hour or so to shower and swing over to my apartment. You remember where it is, right?”

I’d spent a few hours hiding in her closet and seen my sister break a woman’s neck in Lilah’s bedroom. Her address was well and truly seared into my brain, and I assured her that I’d be fine getting there. We exchanged good-byes; then I dialed Suzume to fill her in on the morning’s planned activities.

“No, you should head over alone,” she said to my surprise. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”

I wished she were in front of me. Glaring at a phone was very unsatisfying. “If you’re the victor, then I’m the spoils. Any plans to, you know,
despoil
me?” I knew that I sounded grumpy, but the day was still very young and now I was going to be heading into a potentially awkward situation with a very nice woman whose pass at me I’d had to turn down because of my feelings for Suze, and at this point, though it was rather churlish to note it, it had been a
really
long time since I’d had sex.

“You’re being awfully backtalky for spoils,” Suzume said, but there was an underlying sassiness in her voice that clearly said that she was enjoying this situation far more than she should’ve. “Go find out what Keebler knows, and call me when you’ve gotten the info we need to go kick some elfish ass.” Typical Suze, she sounded positively peppy at the thought of impending violence.

“Hey.”

“Hrm?”

“If you think that seeing Lilah again is going to change my mind, you’re wrong,” I said seriously.

There was a pause on her end, and if we’d been playing
Battleship
, she would’ve had to acknowledge a direct hit.

“Maybe I’m not sure if I want a boyfriend who would call me on my shit,” she said.

I snorted. If Suze had wanted a toady for a boyfriend, she could’ve had a dozen of them. Simultaneously. I’d seen guys get so distracted by her as she walked down the street that they’d bumped into walls. “Nice try. I’ll call you later, and I’ll still be single.” I hung up before she could respond.

Dressing was trickier than usual. On the one hand, Lilah had kissed me once, and there was an element of masculine pride in not wanting to show up looking like a hobo and making her regret her past attraction. On the other hand, if I put too much effort into this, I might accidentally give her the wrong impression, and that would be a jerk move. However, I was going over there in a fairly official capacity, which suggested that jeans were not the order of the day. But then again, Lilah and I were kind of friends, and I didn’t want to seem like I was showing off. Looking at it a different way, though, it was entirely possible that Lilah wasn’t the only person I’d be talking to about this today, which pushed me back into the direction of dressing carefully. But if at some point the day erupted into violence, I really didn’t want a pair of business dress slacks destroyed.

There were too many branches on this particular decision tree, so I gave up and went with a clean pair of khakis and a striped button-down shirt. True, once dressed, I looked like I was ready to go volunteer at a Christian ministry program, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad look. I pulled on a hat and parka and headed out, knowing that in the cold morning air it would take at least four tries for the Fiesta’s engine to catch.

Lilah lived in a ground-floor unit of a squat brick apartment building. There were four side-by-side units, with one shared slanted roof, and it was one of those places that real estate moguls had pooped out by the dozens in the 1950s during the clamor for cheap housing. When it was first built, there had probably been open green space behind each of the small units, maybe a garden for each, since there was one window in Lilah’s living room that was weirdly placed, as if its spot had once held a back door, but that area had long ago been paved over and turned into an almost identical building that faced the opposite road, with only a small strip of pavement just barely wide enough for the Dumpsters in between. In front, there was a narrow band of grass between the building and carefully marked resident parking. At least the uniform bushes along the front were pruned back, though their bare branches certainly weren’t winning any beauty contests.

The temperature had dropped from yesterday, and I could see my breath in the air as I picked my way up the walkway, listening to the quiet crunch of the frost-covered cement under my shoes. Lilah pulled the door open before I could even lift my hand to ring the bell. She was simply dressed in jeans and a sweater, and her bright coppery gold hair was still damp from the shower. As she ushered me inside, I noticed that she hadn’t put on her glamour yet, and the delicately curved and furred tip of her left ear was poking through the wet strands of her hair.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.

“It’s no problem. I still haven’t found another job yet, so it’s not like I have to head to work.” When I’d met her, Lilah had been the store manager at a New Age store. Unfortunately it had turned out that her boss was a murdering fanatic, and after he’d been killed, the store, which had never turned much of a profit to begin with, had closed.

“I’m really sorry.” I never knew quite what to say after those kinds of disclosures. I’d spent plenty of time myself in that between-jobs twilight, and knew from experience that there wasn’t really anything you wanted to hear except news of a job opening.

She gave a loose shrug. “Yeah, everyone is telling me that retail is tough right now if you want a manager’s spot. But I’ve got five more months of unemployment before I have to give up and take a cashiering position, and I’ve done a little under-the-table housecleaning to make ends meet.” Lilah looked at me, and I saw that there was more gold than brown in her eyes, a clear sign that she wasn’t quite as calm as she’d like me to believe. “But a few things have come up lately, and having a free schedule has actually come in handy.”

I was about to ask her what she meant, but then the door to her bedroom opened, and Iris, her younger sister, walked out. The last time I’d seen the nineteen-year-old, she’d been drugged, naked, and sitting in an inflatable kiddie pool with a very grim immediate future ahead of her.

Unlike Lilah, who was half human, three-quarters of Iris’s heritage was Ad-hene. Apparently morning in the Dwyer household was a break from the glamours that they would have to make and maintain for the rest of the day, because Iris was also walking in her natural state, and unlike Lilah, there was no way that she could’ve just covered up her ears and gone without.

Iris’s straight hair gleamed like polished copper piping, a shade that no human had been born with and no dye could’ve achieved, and the face that her shoulder-length bob framed had more in common with a Komodo dragon than with any primate. I’d seen a three-quarter elf hybrid before, but never one without a glamour, and it was a sight that forced me to repress the urge to look away. The Ad-hene themselves had even more severe
features, but they’d also had an eerie and dangerous beauty to them that this scion lacked—she looked like one of those weird crossbred Chihuahuas and Chinese Crested that always seemed to win the annual World’s Ugliest Dog Competition—which I was sad to say I watched religiously every year.

There was a blankness to that bizarre face as Iris looked at me, everything that might be going on in her head tucked in so well that nothing showed on the surface. She was probably amazing at poker. “So, what are the vampires interested in talking to my sister about?” she asked with an undercurrent of hostility. I felt a tug of relief—not from her words, which put me in an awkward spot, but because I could at least pick up a bit of emotion from her voice.

Lilah answered her sister before I could think of anything to say. “Iris, this is Fortitude Scott, the one who helped us.”

There was something flat about her eyes when Iris looked at me. “Oh.” The hostility was gone now, leaving her voice expressionless, almost like a computer reader. I missed the hostility—it had felt more human. She moved a little closer to me and stepped in the sunbeam coming in from the window. As the light hit her face, those flat eyes adjusted, and I realized that the pupil wasn’t formed like a human’s. Instead of being round, it was vertical, like a lizard’s. The colored area around it was also disturbing—it lacked the softening brown that Lilah’s eyes had, leaving just a bright, buttery gold. “Didn’t see much that night,” Iris said. She took one more slow, precise step closer to me, then tilted her head carefully. “Heard you shot Nokke in the knee.”

I nodded, wondering where this was leading. Nokke, after all, was Lilah and Iris’s grandfather. And also Iris’s father, but that wasn’t something that was generally discussed. Incest wasn’t exactly the most genteel of
conversation topics, and the Ad-hene had engaged in it regularly, resulting in some very weird biological relationships among the Neighbors. “Yes, I did.”

Iris’s mouth twisted in some private amusement, the first emotion to cross that blank face. “Too bad you didn’t shoot higher.”

Lilah saved me from that particular conversational anvil. “Iris, you should put your glamour on and head to school. You don’t want to miss class.”

That glimmer of emotion vanished like smoke, and Iris gave a small one-shouldered shrug. “Failing half of them.”

Lilah’s voice was firm. “Then there are still half of them that you can pass.”

That impressive display of big-sistering broke through even Iris’s near-lobotomized lack of involvement, and she snorted. Then she paused, and for a brief second I almost thought she looked concerned as those eerie yellow eyes flicked from her sister, to me, and back again. “You’ll be okay?” she asked Lilah.

Lilah walked over to Iris and put her hands on the younger girl’s shoulders. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and leaned in to kiss Iris’s cheek. “Now get going.”

Iris blinked slowly, which did not help alleviate her resemblance to an iguana; then as I watched, her face changed, the glamour filling things out and making her look like one of those crazy-cheekboned high-fashion models that look more creepy than attractive—which was still a definite improvement. The metallic gleam of her hair dulled slightly, enough that while it still drew the eye, it no longer looked unnatural, the furred tips of her ears disappeared, and her pupils softened and rounded. It wasn’t like the kitsune’s fox tricks, because unlike with the foxes, my knowledge of the truth made her glamour weaker. When I looked at it, there was a haziness to her false face, and if I stared hard, I could get glimpses of the reality that lay beneath it.

Lilah handed Iris her backpack and ushered her out the door, giving her emotionless sister one last kiss on the cheek before she left. She gave a cheery wave, probably as her sister drove off, then dropped her hand and closed the door slowly. When she turned to face me again, I could see a weariness in her that she’d hidden from her little sister.

There was a brief silence, and then I asked, “So how long has she been staying with you?”

“Since that night. My parents gave her those drugs and handed her over to Tomas and the others. They say that they didn’t know what they had planned for her, but that was because they never even thought to ask.” Lilah rubbed her hands hard on her arm, and I could see that the last month hadn’t made a dent in her anger toward her parents. “Iris can’t go back to them, not now. There’d be bodies on the ground if she did.” The look on Lilah’s face suggested that she was trying hard to convince herself that that would be a bad thing. Then she visibly shook off the thoughts of her parents and shifted the topic. “So someone tipped you off about what’s been going on. I guess I should be glad I’m talking to you and not Prudence.” She sat down on her sofa and looked at me bleakly. “What are you going to do?”

I felt a sharp sting of betrayal—not because the elves were the killers, but because Lilah had known, and she hadn’t called me. She at least wasn’t trying to hide it now that I knew, but it was hard for me to push down my irritation at her and force my tone to be strictly professional. “Tell me which of the Ad-hene killed the
karhu
, and if anyone helped him. Then we can decide—”

“Wait, what?” Lilah cut me off, confused. “The
karhu
? Someone killed a bear? You think an Ad-hene killed a bear?”

Lilah’s poker face had never been great, and we stared at each other for a second, both of us realizing that we’d been talking about completely different subjects. I
clarified. “Sometime either Monday night or early on Tuesday, Matias Kivela was stabbed to death. Are you saying you didn’t know that?” It was a relief that she hadn’t been sitting on a murderer, but on the other hand, I had a very bad feeling that this situation had suddenly gotten a lot more complicated.