Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (2 page)

We were loaded into my mother’s Rolls-Royce, along with her driver, and there was no conversation as the car backed cautiously out of the Common Burying Ground, onto the aptly named Farewell Street, and turned toward my mother’s mansion on Ocean Drive. In my lifetime, she’d never come to any of these visits to Chivalry’s mausoleum. It wasn’t from (or, rather, not
entirely
from) lack of interest—while I walked under the sun at any time of day, Chivalry required a Panama hat, dark glasses, and preferably some kind of awning during the hours around high noon. Prudence was finding sunlight steadily more problematic, coming outside only when the sun was at its weakest or on cloudy days. But our mother dated back to medieval times, and she lived her days in a suite of rooms that had been built without windows. It had probably been a century or more since she had been capable of even a short stroll on an overcast winter day.

In the summer, downtown Newport is stuffed with cars and meandering tourists. Just getting from the Claiborne Pell Bridge to my mother’s doorstep can take thirty minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. But as the daylight shortens, the temperatures drop, and the winter storms that roll through the Atlantic brush up against Newport and allow its inhabitants to experience the delight of near-sideways rainstorms, the summer visitors flee and the population plummets. The boutiques either switch to their winter hours or close their doors completely until May, the parking meters are covered over, lines shorten, and service gets better. Best of all, the drive to my mother’s mansion becomes less than ten minutes.

After shedding our coats in the main foyer, we filed into the dining room, where my mother was already seated, dressed in a neat black pants suit, its inherent frumpiness adding to her little-old-lady veneer—an illusion usually only broken when my mother smiled and revealed a pair of gleaming incisors that would not look out of place on a tiger. As we each took our seats, my
mother extended one thin, deceptively fragile hand to Chivalry.

“My poor boy,” she said. “I know how very fond you were of Bhumika.”

Madeline’s tone would’ve been perfectly appropriate—if Bhumika had been a hamster.

Chivalry thanked Madeline in a low voice, and with a satisfied nod, she reached down and rang the small silver bell that sat next to her wineglass. A moment later the room was filled with people as Madeline’s scrupulously trained staff descended on us with dinner. I glanced down at my plate and stifled a sigh. Maple-glazed ham, smelling delicious. I aimed my fork toward the potatoes and hoped that between that and my side of asparagus I would be able to fill up. My family’s approach to my vegetarianism had been to assume that if offered enough succulent temptations, I would eventually buckle under.

Across from me, Prudence ate one careful spoonful of the delicate soup in front of her, then put her cutlery down decisively.

“Mother,” she started, but her eyes were fixed on Chivalry, who was stirring his spoon through his own bowl of stew and eyeing my portion of gleaming ham steak with a very uncharacteristic interest that was making me feel uncomfortable. “I was thinking it might cheer us all up if I invited a few people from work down for dinner tomorrow.”

I managed to tear my eyes away from my brother long enough to look over at Madeline, but she was also watching Chivalry closely, even as she answered Prudence. “Oh, what a lovely idea, darling. I do so enjoy meeting bright young things.”

I choked on a sip of water, but not from my mother’s comment, though that was weird enough. My mother had very regular visitors and dinner parties, but her interests were entirely political, while my sister’s guests, if they
were indeed only her coworkers, would just be a group of stockbrokers and money managers. What shocked me was the sight of my brother’s fork snaking toward the ham on my plate. I glanced over—Chivalry’s eyes were fixed and gleaming. Awkwardly, I nudged my plate closer to him, but my movement seemed to bring him out of his reverie with a jolt. He cleared his throat loudly, took a large spoonful of his stew, and then said with complete aplomb, “If you want to, Prudence, go right ahead. Though I’m not sure how fifteen conversations about how the Brazilian real is stacking up against the dollar will particularly perk things up.”

That at least sounded like my brother, and though I watched him closely, his behavior remained normal for the rest of the meal. I wondered if ham steak–coveting was a normal stage of his grieving process—when Linda, his spouse before Bhumika, had died, I was in college and had left immediately after the memorial service.

Chivalry excused himself immediately after dinner, but he leaned down and gave my shoulder a fraternal squeeze on his way out—his way, I knew, of apologizing for whatever the attempted ham snatching had been about. When he left the room, I looked across the table at Madeline, hoping for an explanation, but she simply fussed with her wineglass. I slanted an inquiring look at Prudence, who was patting her mouth with a napkin.

“What was that about?” I asked.

Prudence arched her eyebrows. “I can’t have people over?”

“You know what I mean,” I said, irritated. “The ham.”

She sniffed, radiating disapproval. “Yes, irritating, isn’t it? I told you that Chivalry won’t feed until he finds a new wife.” She waved her napkin at me, a weird white counterpoint to her black ensemble. “Now you’re starting to see why that behavior is so utterly ridiculous.”

“Not feeding makes you want ham?”

I was treated to a very evocative eye roll. “Sometimes there’s just no talking with you, Fort. But on that note, when was the last time
you
fed?”

I glanced over at my mother, still swirling the last of her wine in its glass. Until my transition was completed, my blood needs were met by my mother. For years I’d fed every few months, as far apart as I could push it, but I’d given in to the requirements of my changing physiology, and now I usually fed every other week. And while I wasn’t a big fan of taking my sister’s advice, Chivalry’s weird dinner behavior had unsettled me. “Mother?” I asked. “I actually am a bit, you know . . . due.”

Madeline looked up from her glass, and I was struck by how very tired she looked. She’d always looked ancient (even for a vampire, six hundred plus years don’t rest lightly), but tonight the skin of her face seemed to hang from her bones. The blue eyes that were the model for Prudence’s were bloodshot. For a moment she looked confused, and I could see her eyes narrow as she mentally counted back the days to when she had last fed me. The answer she found clearly surprised her, and her feathery white eyebrows shot up. “Oh, my darling, how careless of me,” she said. Then she paused, and asked, almost tentatively, “I’m a bit under the weather tonight, precious. Would it be very difficult for you to wait a day or two?”

My jaw didn’t quite drop, but it definitely wanted to. In my life, my mother had nagged and enticed me to feed, and often despaired over my avoidance of it, but she had never once asked me to wait. “Uh, sure. Sure, it’s no problem.” My mouth moved through the social protocol, but I couldn’t help darting a look toward my sister, but Prudence wouldn’t look at me. She was staring at our mother, and despite the studied blankness of her expression, there was a look in her eyes that on anyone less sociopathic I would’ve called . . .
worried
.

My mother blinked owlishly behind the oversize
glasses that she didn’t need for her eyesight but liked to wear for effect. “Unless you’re very hungry, darling?”

“No, no I’m fine,” I assured her, feeling slightly better. “I’m not even noticing it.” Which was the truth—I’d gotten into the habit of feeding every second week, but I didn’t feel that uncomfortable sense of hunger that I remembered from the times when I’d avoided feeding for months longer than I should’ve. Madeline looked relieved, but when I glanced back to Prudence, she was now fiddling with her bracelet and maintaining a look of polite social boredom.

“I was just going to check in with the secretary and then head out,” I told my mother, pushing my chair back.

Madeline smiled then, widely enough to display her long fangs, and her eyes brightened. “Ah, what a good little worker. Your brother is lucky indeed that he has you to carry the dull minutiae of business while he is indisposed.” She eyed my sister and added pointedly, “Someone who can be trusted to follow directions.”

Ah, doublespeak, hidden messages, and awkward- ness—Mother was clearly a little tired, but otherwise in fine form. Before Prudence could respond, I babbled my good-byes and fled the dining room.

Vampires were an Old World
import to the Americas. My mother was the first to make the trip, crossing from England in 1662 and establishing a wide territory that included all of New England, most of New York state, a slice of New Jersey, and a healthy helping of eastern Canada. She’d been a vampire in her prime back then and had carved out her lands with almost traditional colonial zeal—anyone or anything that objected to her preeminent status had been very messily slaughtered. After almost a century of these activities, she had exterminated, driven out, or made treaties with all the occupants, and settled down to start a family.

The supernatural species hid among the human populations—humans outnumbered us by a thousand to one, and technology plus an unbeatable superiority of numbers was not a fight that any sane individual wanted to get into. There were plenty of the less sane among us, but even they were strong-armed to toe the party line on this one. There were species that had tried to withdraw completely beyond human communities; that was not only difficult, but it also meant withdrawing from some of the basic necessities of life—like high-speed Internet access. Most of us could pass for human, and plenty of species had developed symbiotic or outright parasitic relationships with humans.

Despite the passage of centuries and the establishment
of an American constitution, my mother’s method of rule remained entirely feudal. Nonhumans who wanted to either visit or live in my mother’s territory had to petition for entry and then negotiate the terms that they would live by. Madeline was a very big fan of tithing—almost all of the groups in our territory paid a percentage of their earnings to my mother. They also had to avoid conflicts with other nonhuman species in the area and cover any of their supernatural tracks that might otherwise bring unwelcome attention.

As she’d gotten older, Madeline had passed the business of keeping her territory running smoothly to her children. My sister was a natural-born enforcer, striking terror into the hearts of generations of my mother’s subjects, but the tasks that involved more subtlety than “kill and terrorize” fell to Chivalry. And as with all thoughtful men of business, that meant that he delegated as much of the mountain of paperwork as possible to his staff.

My brother’s office was on the first floor, but tucked toward the back of the house, far away from the glamorous public areas. It was large, and decorated in an almost stereotypically turn-of-the-century gentleman’s style. Cluttered bookshelves marched to the ceiling, paintings of yachts, dogs, and horses decorated all available open space on the wood-paneled walls, massive brocade curtains festooned the windows, and a massive oiled mahogany desk dominated the room. But for all the show, it was a functional office—those books were the old bound tithing records. The filing cabinets might have been wood-veneered, but any accounting actuary opening the drawer would see the rows of regimented files and feel right at home. My brother’s desk was old and big enough to merit its own zip code, but the computer on it was upgraded every other year. The next room (apparently the old music room) had been carved up several years ago to make a support office that had the desks, phones, and equipment for his secretary and two accountants—all human.
The accountants spent their days balancing the books, sending the tithing bills, and making sure that not a single penny that the Scotts could claim slid through the cracks. It was slightly shady work, but nothing that any good mobster accountant wouldn’t be used to. The secretary, on the other hand, had a very different job.

Loren Noka was working at my brother’s desk when I walked into the room. A statuesque woman in her late forties whose Native American heritage was clearly advertised in her high cheekbones and dark hair, she greeted me with a sober nod. Loren had taken the job of Chivalry’s secretary when her father, Irving, retired after almost fifty years of service. Now she spent her day answering calls and organizing e-mails that came in from the inhabitants of my mother’s territory, as well as scanning newspapers and local blogs for any hints of misbehavior or possible supernatural exposure.

“Hello, Ms. Noka. You’re working very late tonight.” Chivalry referred to her as “Loren,” but since he’d known her since she was in diapers, I suppose he had the right. To me, Ms. Noka had always had a very kind of Alfred from
Batman
demeanor. She knew a lot of secrets, would never tell a single one, was capable of a look of single icy superiority that would make a transgressor feel like an ant, and I was fairly certain that if I asked her, she would be able to construct a fully functional Batmobile.

“Just making one last check of the news sites before I call it an evening,” she said with a polite smile. With Chivalry in mourning, her workload had doubled overnight, but she somehow never indicated that she was stressed. The only thing about her that looked even slightly stressed was her royal purple pants suit as she stood up, but the fabric that was fighting to contain her curved and zaftig figure was probably held together by Loren Noka’s sheer strength of will—or she’d found some sort of experimental military superfabric with enhanced tensile strength.

“Is that for me?” I asked, nodding at the single file still sitting in the in-box on Chivalry’s desk, a stark contrast to the orderly but impressive pile organized in the adjoining out-box.

“Yes.” She reached over and handed it to me. “I would’ve called, but Mrs. Scott told me that you were coming back for dinner.”

The file’s weight was substantial, and I didn’t try to conceal my surprise. “Feels problematic.”

“No, nothing like that. I just got a message that the rusalka needs a meeting, and since I don’t think you’d ever met her before, I pulled the entire file for you to look over.”

After twenty-six years of ignoring anything supernatural (including myself), I’d been playing a desperate game of catch-up, particularly in the past month, where I’d suddenly found myself my mother’s official delegate and Ms. Noka’s boss. There had been quite a lot to learn, and I flipped open the file to its first page in the hope of refreshing my memory on this one—then immediately slapped it shut again. “Chivalry mentioned her once. How exactly does that one place a phone call to you?”

“One of her neighbors placed it at her request. Will you go up soon?”

“Might as well go tomorrow,” I said, unable to muster much enthusiasm. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. “It’s only up in Massachusetts.”

Ms. Noka gave me her Mona Lisa smile. “Remember to pick up the bait. There’s a note in there, but Mr. Scott always found duck gizzard the most effective. Especially in this weather, when you don’t have to wait a while.”

“I
do
read the whole file,” I noted, slightly defensively. At least, I did now. On my first fully commissioned task for the family, my friend and designated partner, Suzume, and I had driven up to Maine to deal with a group of selkies who were purportedly running a local protection scheme and sinking the boats of fishermen who
wouldn’t pay in. It had actually been a bit more complicated than that, and I’d made the classic rookie mistake of not reading all of Ms. Noka’s carefully collected background information before we’d headed up. While it had turned out well in the end, there had been an uncomfortable incident where I’d been pushed off a dock by a toddler and Suze had punched a seal in the face. A teenager had filmed the whole thing on his phone, and there had been an awkward period where we’d thought that the video would not only go viral, but that Suze would be formally charged with endangering the local wildlife.

With the file tucked under my arm for later examination, we exchanged good-byes. I left the house without seeing any of my family again, but the knowledge that always pulsed in the back of my brain put them all on the second floor, probably in their individual rooms.

My battered Ford Fiesta sat beside my family’s row of gleaming cars like a squat mushroom invading a cultured garden. It took two tries for the engine to turn over, and I rubbed my hands briskly together to encourage the circulation as I waited for the sluggish heating system to warm up. I could see my breath in the air as I pulled out my phone and punched Suzume’s phone number in from memory and listened to it ring. We’d been in a strange holding pattern for the last month since I’d confessed my feelings to her. On the one hand, our friendship had continued unabated, and she was my regular partner on all my official trips and investigations around the territory. But at the same time, the question of what her answer was going to be was hanging between us.

Suze didn’t pick up, and I left a message outlining the basics of tomorrow’s task. When I’d agreed to work officially for my family, Chivalry and I had negotiated a basic salary. It had been a hotly contested discussion, with Chivalry arguing high and me arguing very low. I’d supported myself on minimum-wage jobs since I had graduated college, and while I was not a particular fan of the
lifestyle that it had necessitated, I was also very wary about the possibility of my family buying my loyalties. We’d finally settled on an hourly wage for all tasks that was just a bit higher than what I would normally be earning in the open market of crappy jobs. Suzume had had no such ethical quibbles, and for her involvement with me, she was charging a very comfortable retaining fee.

I finished the message and ended the call, wondering what she was up to. With Suzume, there was always a long list of possibilities—anything from beating up problem clients for her family’s escort service to scampering around the woods in her natural fox form, with any number of activities in between. Since our visit to the selkies, most of our tasks had been relatively simple—investigations of why some tithes were low (the economic downturn was equally hard on supernatural-run businesses, as it turned out), a few territory disputes, some snooping into suspicious deaths that had uniformly turned out to have entirely human causes. Yet even though our job didn’t always have much interest to it, she’d remained committed.

Of course, she was still a kitsune, and was entirely capable of creating her own fun. I’d flipped down the sun visor on my drive down this morning and had discovered that some unnamed prankster (definitely Suze) had glued two small craft-baskety googly eyes to it, so now it appeared that the visor had eyes and was watching me.

It was lucky that there wasn’t any traffic on the road back to my apartment in Providence, since the Fiesta’s heater never managed to dispel any air that I would’ve characterized as warmer than “somewhat cool.” Since the Fiesta had spent the entire summer with inoperable air-conditioning, I couldn’t help but feel moderately annoyed that it was apparently capable of disgorging cool air, but only in the completely wrong season. By the time I got home, I hustled quickly to get into the apartment, sighing in relief when I got into the stairway with its comparatively warmer temperatures. I’d bought my funeral suit
and formal jacket new for the occasion—since my transition had begun, I’d put on enough muscle to go up four suit sizes, which had necessitated a shopping trip. After much hunting, I’d managed to find clothing that wouldn’t shatter my budget or sear my brother’s eyeballs on such a sad day. My suit had started its life in a very exclusive store window, until the store owners apparently realized that not many men were willing to strut their stuff in lime green. It had made its way down to the discount warehouse, where I’d bought it, and then I spent a rather interesting afternoon with Suzume figuring out how to dye it black in my apartment’s bathtub. The suit actually had a decent lining to it, but at a certain point in Rhode Island, typically around Halloween, it becomes preferable to just never leave the house if you aren’t wearing a heavy-knit sweater and the downiest of down parkas.

I climbed the three flights of stairs that led from the ground-floor boutique lingerie store, past Mrs. Bandyopadyay’s, and ended at the two-bedroom apartment that I shared at the top with my latest roommate, Dan Tabak. We’d only lived together for a month, though so far he’d managed to pay his half of the rent on time and not make any particular messes. But with any shared living situation, there would always be compromises—as I scrabbled in my pocket for the keys, I could hear the melodious (and now far-too-familiar) tones of Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice.

Inside was a typical Sunday tableau—Dan was sitting on the sofa, a wide assortment of thick law textbooks spread out on the battered coffee table in front of him, along with half a dozen completely stuffed notebooks, and his dreaded flash-card-making supplies. Dan was a second-year law student at Johnson and Wales University, and if I’d ever had even the slightest shred of interest in getting a law degree, seeing Dan in action would’ve crushed it. In the rare moments when Dan wasn’t in class, or in a study group, or studying on his own, he was
making flash cards as a study aid. It seemed like a horrible and endless process to me, but then again, I’d called higher education a success after getting a bachelor’s degree in film theory—an accomplishment that had involved not a single flash card, and a number of actually good films.

I collapsed into our armchair and looked over at the TV screen. A hellacious storm was whipping through the palm trees on a tropical island while Benedict Cumberbatch gave a stately narration. Dan liked to run epic BBC nature documentaries as background when he was making flash cards or organizing the day’s class notes. He claimed that documentaries like
Wild Pacific
had narrators whose voices were very soothing. I’d seen his DVDs of
Sherlock
, though, and had suspicions that Dan simply had a crush on Benedict Cumberbatch, but it seemed a little hypocritical to throw stones. After all, I’d seen a lot of shitty movies simply because Amy Adams was starring in them.

“Hey,” Dan greeted me, not looking up from his text. I glanced at the title,
Corporations
, and shuddered. “How’d it all go?”

“How do these things ever go? Mostly it just went, and at least now it’s over.” I reached down and pulled off my shoes, sighing in relief. Dress shoes were not made with all-day comfort in mind.