Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (20 page)

“Do you think you’d have so many pictures of a guy you were planning on killing?” I asked Suze, who was following behind me with a bottle of Glade air freshener that she’d found under the kitchen sink. She gave a few squirts into the air in general to cover up our presence.

“Sure, if I wanted to avoid looking like a suspect,” she said. “These people are Finns. They can probably hold these kinds of grudges for years without letting on.”

“I am not even remotely familiar with that cultural stereotype, Suze, and I think you just made it up.”

The last bedroom was Dahlia’s. It was a fairly standard master bedroom, though she hadn’t bothered to make her queen-size bed this morning, and there were some clothes piled up on a chair in the corner. There was only one picture, this one of Dahlia and her daughters at the beach, framed and set next to the computer on her desk.

“Hey, who’s the father of Dahlia’s kids?” I asked.

“Beats me. I don’t follow bear gossip. She probably just did what the
reasonable
kitsune do and shacked up.” Suze sounded approving of that plan. Apparently the conversation with Keiko last night was still rankling.

“There was a wedding photo of Gil, though,” I noted. “So the
metsän kunigas
do get married.”

“Who knows, Fort. Maybe she and the dad broke up.” Suze gave another squirt of the Glade, this one aimed just close enough to my face to give me the hint that Suze apparently thought that we’d gotten about all the information available, and it was time to make an exit. I conceded the point.

We let ourselves out the back slider, with Suze fiddling with her picks to pop the lock back into place. Then it was over the fence again, to the car, and then cruising out of Lincoln and back toward home.

“Okay, well that was a pretty productive morning.” I
looked at the Ziploc bag now riding in the foot of the passenger side next to the still-spinning blood compass. “Hey, now that we’re away from the diapers, can you sniff anything off that?”

Suze leaned down and opened the bag, being careful to only touch the knife with the washcloth as she pulled it out. She stayed leaning down, keeping the knife well below the line of the windows. Apparently giant knives covered in blood were something to be cautious about flashing when surrounded by cars on Route 146. She gave it a careful sniff, then shook her head. “Blood on the blade, but I’m not smelling anything from the handle.”

“Is that normal?”

“On a murder weapon? Well, usually there’s at least a little sweating when you knife someone seventeen times, so maybe the killer wore gloves.” After that disturbing little insight into her own familiarity with murder weapons, she gave a shrug. “Know anyone who can check it for prints?”

“I was kind of hoping that you could.”

She laughed. “Fort, I might be awesome, but even I have limits. And none of the kitsune decided to go into forensics, so you’re shit out of luck on that. But I’ll let my cousin Rina know that she totally let you down by going to cosmetology school instead.”

“Okay, back in the bag,” I said, disappointed. I had a strong moment of missing Matt McMahon, and wishing that there was some way that I could show up on his doorstep with a bloody knife and get him to figure out whether there were fingerprints on it, and if there were, what on earth to do with those prints. Of course, the odds of that situation were right up there with me buying the
Star Wars
prequels. I forced myself to stop thinking about Matt and focus on the problem at hand. “Maybe my family has some kind of person on payroll who does that. I can ask Loren Noka.” It wouldn’t surprise me if Loren Noka answered my query by revealing that
fingerprint analysis was her personal hobby. She had that kind of air about her. I considered the idea, reminding myself that this time I was doing a sanctioned investigation, and that I supposedly had resources available to me. “Actually, I should probably talk to my brother about this one. Chivalry knows both Ilona and Dahlia—maybe he’ll know which of them is a more likely murderer.” I looked over at Suze, who was fiddling with the Fiesta’s radio. “Ready for lunch?” My stomach had been letting me know for a while that it was
very
ready for lunch.

“It’s eleven oh five in the morning,” Suzume said flatly. “Start eating meat.”

“My nutrition is fine!” I snapped defensively. I paused and forced myself to take a calming breath. Suze was a fox—a natural carnivore. She’d given me a weird look when I’d bought a side order of salad and another of asparagus for last night’s doomed dinner party. She couldn’t help her cultural predispositions. I changed the subject. “Do you want to swing down to Newport with me?”

“Doesn’t sound like much fun. Just drop me off at my car, and you can call me later and fill me in if you learn anything helpful.”

I couldn’t quite blame her for skipping a visit to my mother’s mansion, since it was almost an hour’s drive each way and would probably eat up most of the day in between, though I couldn’t help but feel a bit annoyed, given that I’d been forced to sit through
her
family’s dysfunction just last night. It seemed like a bit of a double-standard for her to immediately pass on a helping of my familial crap.

I drove back to my apartment, dropped Suze off at her car, and then immediately hit the road for Newport. I stopped just outside of Providence to fill the Fiesta with gas, discovering as I did that at some recent point Suze had glued a pair of googly eyes to the inside of my gas tank flap. I shook my head, then went inside. This was my preferred gas stop on the way to Newport—not only because gas was usually at least a nickel cheaper than in
the borders of Providence, but they also had a cooler filled with prepared lunches from a local deli, along with a lineup of meals that managed to have a vegetarian option that was a bit better than the usual gas station go-to of a bag of pretzels. I snagged a macaroni salad, a container of yogurt, and on my way to the register succumbed to temptation and tossed on a Little Debbie apple pie.

Since the inside of the Fiesta would not be markedly improved if a spill happened, I inhaled the macaroni salad and the yogurt while parked, tossing the containers in the outdoor trash and gnawing contentedly on the apple pie as I got back on the road and aimed myself toward Newport. I hit a little bit of congestion as all the drivers on their lunch break filled the road, but my time down remained fairly good. It was as I was crossing the Pell Bridge, my window cracked just enough for me to enjoy the smell of salt air and the sounds of shrieking seagulls without freezing, that I realized that I was hungry again. Not just hungry, but ravenous, as if the food at the gas station had been from last night rather than less than an hour ago.

I cursed as I felt my stomach actually rumble, and wondered whether I could’ve somehow contracted extra hunger cravings from being next to Keiko last night. I didn’t usually come in contact with pregnant women, after all, and my resistance to whatever weird pheromones they emitted might be low. I snickered a little, wondering how quickly she would throat-punch me if I ever mentioned that theory to her, and reluctantly considered whether Suze was actually partially correct on her nutrition theory. I’d become a vegetarian two years ago, when I’d first started dating my now ex-girlfriend Beth and she informed me about her policy of not kissing any mouth that consumed meat (which I still couldn’t entirely hold against her—after all, I had no plans to ever date a smoker), and I’d never actually sat down with a vitamin
and nutrition chart to check my diet. Firstly, I was a vampire, and I had a strong feeling that feeding on my mother’s blood was helping with my iron and protein intake. Secondly, I’d survived several years of college where my primary food groups had consisted of pizza and ramen noodles, and I had managed to avoid developing scurvy. But I’d turned twenty-seven in June, and for the first time I’d had a friend complain to me about acid reflux, so maybe this was some weird by-product of getting older.

Or maybe another weird quirk of my transition into becoming a full vampire meant that my stomach was returning to how it had functioned when I was a teenager—a bottomless pit that required at least five solid feeds a day. I definitely hoped it wasn’t that—I had little desire to fund a return to my teenage eating requirements.

But regardless of why I was hungry, the result was impossible to ignore, and I pulled into the Bellevue Gardens Shopping Center and headed straight into my favorite greasy-spoon diner, the Newport Creamery. As another sign that the tourist season was well and truly behind us, I got a cheery wave and a “Be right with you, honey” when I stepped up to the take-out counter, rather than a snapped “All ice cream orders have to go to the outdoor window!” I snagged a menu and flipped to the sandwiches, wondering what exactly I needed to finally appease my belly.

I ate at the Newport Creamery often enough that I could’ve listed their vegetarian options from memory, but today I found myself fixated by the picture of the turkey sandwich. Vegetarianism had never been a particularly easy lifestyle for me—from an environmental standpoint, I certainly agreed that it made sense for people to reduce their meat consumption, and I was a supporter of people trying to at least have a meat-free day in their weekly menu, but I didn’t object on a
fundamental level to the consumption of meat itself. I’d gone meat free for Beth, but I had stayed meat free because it had helped me suppress my vampire instincts—at least, until my transition had begun at the beginning of the summer. I still ate eggs and dairy, so while I’d missed a few dishes (namely bacon), I hadn’t felt terribly deprived before. There had been a few real moments of temptation, and I was certainly no stranger to the occasional backslide, but I’d never felt quite so fixated as I did at this moment, staring at the picture of the turkey sandwich, feeling my mouth fill with saliva, and picturing just how good that turkey would taste.

“Sir?” The waitress, a woman in her fifties with chemically assisted blond hair, was giving me a look that suggested that she was seriously considering calling over her manager. I blinked, and suddenly realized that my eyes felt weirdly itchy, and my vision was sharper than it should’ve been. My upper jaw was aching just a little, and there was a bubble of something cold and dark rising up in my chest. A shudder went down my spine as I realized that some instincts had been easing their way to my forefront while I’d been staring at the sandwich.

“Sorry, sorry. I missed breakfast this morning,” I lied, forcing as much contrition into my voice as I could, and snapped the menu closed. That explanation seemed to relax the server, who gave me a commiserating smile, and we slipped into a comfortable server-patron patter about the harsh penalties of skipping breakfast.

While they were processing my order, I hurried into the bathroom and stared into the mirror. My pupils were huge, not quite enough to completely obscure the brown of my irises, but enough to make me look seriously drugged-up and creepy. My hands were shaking as I splashed water on my face, running my tongue anxiously over my upper teeth as I checked my canines for any changes. I rubbed my face hard with a handful of paper
towels, then checked the mirror again. My pupils weren’t normal yet, but they looked better than a minute ago. I panted with relief, balled up the paper towels, and threw them into the trash with a lot more force than necessary.

I definitely needed to talk with my brother. Since transition had begun, my vampire instincts had edged out during a few times of high stress, but unless getting a turkey craving was somehow my new stress threshold, this was neither normal nor okay.

I went back to the take-out counter and picked up my order, tipping the waitress as generously as my wallet would allow to try to make amends for inadvertently being That Creepy Dude. I didn’t even wait until I was back in the Fiesta before I fished my veggie quesadilla out of the take-out bag and started to gobble it down. I ate it as fast as I could—not out of any desire to relieve my hunger or even any interest in the quesadilla itself, but just out of desperate hope that it would take the edge off whatever was bringing out my instincts.

My stomach felt uncomfortably tight when I swallowed the last of it, and gurgled slightly in protest at the speed of my consumption. I sat anxiously behind the wheel for a second, then tugged the rearview mirror down to check my eyes. Relief shuddered through me when all I could see was a completely normal-looking guy with melted cheese on his chin and shirt.

I cleaned off my face and dabbed at the shirt stain with a napkin, calming down slowly. That had been weird and freaky, but it was over now. I took a long sip of my chocolate Awful Awful and felt another bit of stress drain away. There was nothing about this situation that a great milk shake couldn’t fix, I coaxed myself.

I put the Fiesta in gear and drove slowly down the street to my mother’s mansion. My car had been built back when cup holders in cars were considered a luxury item for the rich, and I was holding my chocolate Awful
Awful in one hand while holding the strawberry Awful Awful I’d snagged for Chivalry between my legs. I was finally calm enough to start noticing my surroundings again, and I reflected that driving in November in a car with no heating while having a thirty-two-ounce milk shake concoction resting snuggly against my testicles was not precisely ideal.

Inside the mansion, I paused in the entry hall and reached inside me for my internal sense of my family. As always, my mother was the strongest beacon, and I could tell that she was upstairs in her room. Prudence was somewhere on the ground floor, but I tugged on the mental string that tied me to my brother and followed it up the grand main staircase and down the hall to the suite of rooms that he’d shared with Bhumika.

He’d felt me coming, of course, and my knock on his door was perfunctory as I walked into the main room of his suite. There were several bare spots on the walls where artwork that had been Bhumika’s taste rather than his had been removed, and one sofa as well as a few decorative tables had also disappeared, probably to molder in my mother’s extensive attics. The biggest change was botanical—Bhumika’s passion had been breeding and showing roses, and it had not only resulted in the replanning of my mother’s gardens, and in the construction of a conservatory greenhouse on one side of the mansion, but had also spilled over in a very big way into the rooms that Chivalry and Bhumika had shared. At the time of her death, their sitting room had been a near jungle of potted miniature roses, the smaller ones resting on tables while the larger ones sat on the floor and snagged your clothing if you passed too closely to them. Today, however, the room was nearly stripped of the pots, except for a cluster of them gathered in the center of the room, which Chivalry was currently studying.