Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (18 page)

I yawned and began the process of starting up the Fiesta. I could see a thin layer of frost on the hood, and I knew that this was probably going to take at least four attempts. Cold weather was not a friend to an ancient engine. “We’re hunting a killer, Suze,” I pointed out.

“With a compass that only works if they haven’t cleaned the murder weapon yet. Our killer either cleaned it already and we’re going to be shit out of luck, or they haven’t cleaned it yet, in which case they probably aren’t planning to do it. So I’m getting up when I’m getting up.”

I conceded to her logic. In my current brain-fogged state, it seemed like more than enough justification for a few extra hours of sleep. “Sounds like good reasoning to me.” I glanced at the dashboard clock as the engine caught and perked up. “Hey, Wendy’s has late drive-through hours. Let’s get some fries on the way back.”

By the time I’d driven Suze completely across town to her place in Silver Lake, then back to my apartment in College Hill, it was a quarter past two. Deciding that dental hygiene could wait a few hours, and enjoying the feeling of French-fry fullness in my belly, I toed off my shoes, chucked my pants and button-up shirt, and was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

*   *   *

When I woke up, the sun was shining through my windows, and I had that weird knowledge that someone was watching me. Sure enough, it was Suzume. Dressed in an eye-searingly bright red turtleneck and blue jeans,
she was straddling my hips in a somewhat concerning manner and staring down at me.

“Um, hi,” I said cautiously. My tongue felt completely furred, and with regret I remembered last night’s decision to forego toothbrushing.

“Hey.” Her black eyes were unblinking. There was a short pause. “I brought over a carton of eggs.”

I blinked, my sleep-muddled brain attempting to process both the non sequitur and her presence in my bedroom. “You drove yourself over . . . with eggs?” I rubbed my eyes and tried to gather more facts to clear this up. “What time is it?”

“Almost nine. C’mon.” She poked my belly. “Time for eggs.”

I dropped my hand and stared up at her again, comprehension sinking in. “You want me to make these eggs, don’t you?” I wondered if this was some kind of bizarre relationship signal, or if Suze had woken up in her own bed and decided that the easiest way to obtain her breakfast was actually to drive over to my apartment and demand that I cook it for her.

“Well, I mean, I’m certainly not going to instruct you on the proper rules of hosting, but it
is
usually considered good manners to provide food for your guests.” She smiled at me helpfully.

I sat up, scooting my hips back toward the headboard and out from under her, grateful that my winter bedding included a thick comforter and an old quilt. Suzume’s presence had sent all of my partially remembered dreams completely out of my head, but it had definitely been enough to confuse the lower half of my body. I shifted myself carefully. “Last night you were all about a late start,” I noted.

“Technically that was this morning.”

She’d dodged the question. I eyed her suspiciously. “Normally a late start means I call you at around tenish.”

Suze gave a lazy shrug. “So today it didn’t.” I noticed
the way her eyes darted around the room, scanning everything.

Looking
for something. Abruptly I recognized the expression on her face and realized what was going on. Curiosity wasn’t just the killer of cats—it also applied to foxes. “Under the bed, in the shoe box.”

She immediately combat-rolled off the mattress and, after a moment of rustling, emerged with the magical jelly jar. We both stared at it. The liquid this morning was now an even swirl of red and gray, and the toothpick was no longer spinning, instead pointing in the direction of my framed poster of the original
Dune
movie. Suze moved the jar around a little, first in one direction, then the other, and each time the toothpick adjusted itself to continue indicating the same spot. “Huh.” She raised her eyebrows. “Guess Sassoon wasn’t useless after all.” She set the jar down carefully on my bedside table, then looked back at me. “Now. Eggs?”

I kicked Suze out of my room long enough to pull on clothing for the day—I wasn’t sure where the magical blood compass was going to lead us, but I decided that I probably couldn’t go wrong with jeans and a sweater. My own stomach was indicating that eggs actually
were
a fantastic idea, so I headed straight to the stove, where Suze had helpfully positioned the open container. Suze was occupying herself by reading the newspaper (actually, I had strong suspicions that she was reading
Mrs. Bandyopadyay’s
newspaper, and I made a quick mental note to drop it off in front of her door on our way out) and I gave her clothing a quick scan for any visible googly-eye attachment paraphernalia, but there were just too many places for her to stash them, and I gave up.

I tossed a few pats of butter in the pan and cracked six eggs into the mixing bowl. I paused for a second, considered, then tossed in another two. I had no idea how long it would take to track down a murder weapon with a blood compass, and I definitely wanted a full belly. While
I whisked the eggs, I remembered my days-old promise to my mother, winced, and called my sister. At least if I was cooking, I’d have a built-in excuse to escape the conversation quickly.

Prudence listened with surprising mildness to my update about the rusalka situation.

“That sounds fairly straightforward,” she noted when I was done. “I’ll ask Loren to look into whether any lakes in the territory have restrictions on Jet Skis. If that doesn’t work, I’m sure there are some lonely places in Canada where we can stash her.” There was a pause. Then she said, knowingly, “You could’ve done that yourself. Mother wanted you to call me, didn’t she?”

“Um, yeah.” I poured the mixed eggs into the pan, then started poking them with a spatula to scramble them.

“That’s fairly typical of her.” Prudence sounded mellower than usual today, though. I wondered if she was still distracted by Chivalry’s dating life. “How are things going with the Kivela murder? Have you located an appropriate suspect yet?”

I winced at Prudence’s clear acknowledgment that all she wanted was a scapegoat rather than the actual killer. “Some good progress on that, actually,” I said. And with my conversation with Sassoon from yesterday about Prudence’s attitude toward the witches still fresh in my mind, I noted, “I actually got a nice bit of assistance from a witch,” and then filled her in about the blood compass.

“Really?” Prudence sounded impressed. “I didn’t think old Rosamund had it in her.”

“Oh, actually she was on vacation. This was the recommended substitute.” And that was all technically true, I congratulated myself. Valentine Sassoon
had
been recommended . . . just not by Rosamund.

“Well, even vermin can be useful sometimes, I suppose. Broken clocks and all that nonsense.” Prudence’s interest was clearly exhausted.

I winced at her phrasing. Apparently warming Prudence up on the witches was going to take a longer campaign. The eggs were ready, and I said a hasty good-bye to my sister.

Suze shook her head at me as I brought the plates to the table. “Fort, this is like watching someone fall in love with a twenty-year-old cat that limps. Follow my advice and stay out of this. Your sister has had more than two centuries to build up this dislike of the witches—you aren’t going to be able to do anything about it. Save yourself the trouble and don’t even try.”

“I was only telling her the truth, which was that Sassoon
was
useful.” She gave me a patently disbelieving look, and I shoveled a huge forkful of eggs into my mouth in response.

Eight scrambled eggs disappeared from our plates with surprising speed, with Suze making a playful show of defending her share from me. I was still a little hungry even after we’d eaten all of them, and I regarded the last four eggs in the carton speculatively. Suzume followed my line of sight and snorted. “Jeez, Fort, you’re a bottomless pit lately. I told you that the vegetarianism would do this—I bet your poor body is protein deficient.”

“It’s not that,” I said, irritated. “My activity level is just a little up with all the dog walking.” I checked my watch. “Come on, I’ll grab a bagel for the road, and we’ll see if we can figure out how to use a magical jelly jar blood compass.”

Bundled up for the weather, and with my Colt .45 and Ithaca .37 stashed in a handy duffel bag, just in case the compass led us to the murderer along with the weapon, we settled ourselves into the Fiesta and pondered the compass.

“Hey,” Suze suggested. “I’m figuring that unless the compass starts doing something wacky, we should just drive over to Matias Kivela’s house and follow it from
there. After all, the killer left out of the back sliding door—there’s a shot that they just dumped the knife somewhere in the woods behind the house.”

I nodded. “Sounds like a good plan,” I agreed, and backed the Fiesta out of its spot.

“Oh,
now
you’re listening to my plans?” Beneath her fleecy bobble hat, her expression of irritation should’ve looked comedic. It didn’t, probably because I knew that she had at least one knife on her, and that since I couldn’t see them, she was using fox tricks to hide them from me.

“Suze, I was not going to tell Mrs. Bandyopadyay that I saw local hooligans steal her newspaper, pursued them, fought with them, and liberated it.” I merged into traffic.

“No, you told her the truth, and now I’m going to get geriatric stink-eye every time I walk by her door.”

“If it makes you feel any better, Suze, I’m not sure she liked you that much even before she knew you’d snatched her newspaper.”

“
To check the weather
, Fort,” she protested loudly. “And with almost every intention of returning it.”

“It’s a dying industry. Just pay seventy-five cents and get your own damn copy. Look at it like throwing a few quarters in the Salvation Army bucket.”

It was a weekday, but late enough into the morning that the majority of commuters were already at work, and the drive over to Lincoln went smoothly. We were, quite quickly, cruising in front of the beige craftsman that used to house the late
karhu
, and I reflected that this kind of commute was probably why the bears had settled in this area. I pulled the car up to the curb and peered out the window.

“The house looks empty.”

“Should be,” Suze said. “I made a quick call to the Celik ghouls this morning—the Kivelas have a two-day wake planned, and it started this morning. They’re expecting just about every bear for the duration—they
rented the biggest room the Celiks had, plus two side rooms for spillover. No one is going to be at this house.”

We both looked at the compass. The green cellophane of the toothpick was now pointing down the street and a little to the side.

“Think we should park and hit the woods?” I asked.

“Cruise forward a little. If it swings all the way over toward the woods, then we’ll get out. But the state park is a big place—I’d rather not do any extra walking if I can help it.”

I could definitely get behind that reason. “Hey,” I said. “Pull off your hat and sit up a little higher.”

“What?”

“I’m going like ten miles per hour through a residential zone. I want to make sure that people see that there’s also a woman in the car.”

“Why?”

“So they don’t panic and think I’m a pedophile,” I grumbled.

Suze snickered and did as I asked, keeping her eyes on the compass. We inched down the street, past more little houses, and the occasional big one. I shook my head a little. My foster mother, Jill, had always found it incredibly annoying when new developers overbuilt on tiny lots, and I supposed that I had fully inherited that particular prejudice.

“Hey, the compass is swinging.”

I pulled the Fiesta over to the curb and looked over. Sure enough, the cellophane was now pointing fully away from the street, and toward another of the houses that was on the state-park side of the road. It was one of those long one-level ranch styles, with light yellow siding and a brick foundation.

“We’re only about ten houses down from Matias’s house,” I noted. “Think the knife is in the woods behind the ranch?”

“Or in that house,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor war got out of hand?”

“Neighbors like the elves or like a Robert Frost poem gone wrong?” I drove down a few more houses before finding a parking spot for the Fiesta. If the killer lived in that house, I had no desire to park right the hell in front of it.

“Either could work.” Suze patted her leg, and for just a second her fox trick lifted and I saw her long twelve-inch knife (fondly referred to as “Arlene”) strapped to her calf, where the hem of her parka wouldn’t interfere with her ability to draw it. I reached into the backseat and felt around in my duffel for my Colt, which I tucked securely in the shoulder holster that I’d put on before we’d left the apartment. Winter wasn’t my favorite season (mostly due to the Fiesta’s lack of a functional heating system), but I had to admit that it made carrying concealed weapons quite a bit easier than in the summer.

There were no cars parked in the driveway of the ranch house, but I took a quick peek in the window of its one-car garage as we walked up to the property. Empty. A long privacy fence surrounded the property, just like at Matias Kivela’s. I raised my eyebrows at Suze, who was sniffing furiously.

“Metsän kunigas,”
she said. “Either living here or visiting often enough that the scent is thick on the property.”

The fence was not a little one—six feet high. We poked around cautiously, but there wasn’t a gate, so the only way through was the house—or a hop. Suze crouched down on the ground, enough to give me a quick foothold to boost myself up with. As I scrabbled over the fence, I had the awful vision of a busybody neighbor looking out their window and then rushing to call the cops about a break-in. “You’re masking us, right?” I muttered to Suzume.

“Don’t worry, Fort. No one is seeing you huff and puff your way over that except me.”