Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel (3 page)

“Is it true that you guys go through this every five years?” Dan looked up from his book and raised his dark eyebrows inquisitively.

I shrugged awkwardly. We were really just still in the figuring-each-other-out phase of rooming. But unlike all of my previous roommates, Dan wasn’t human. I was still getting used to living with someone who not only knew about vampires and the supernatural, but who actually heard regular gossip about my family. “Usually a little longer than that, but sometimes less,” I replied, trying to be polite but really not wanting to keep talking about the subject.

Dan let it drop. “Did you eat? I made too much, so there are still some leftovers in the pot.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “Was it one of
those
meals?” Dan was a ghoul, which meant that a certain amount of his intake had to be human organs in order for him to maintain his health. The ghouls in my mother’s territory had all originated in Turkey and had acclimated well to America, most of them finding an easy source for their dietary needs by opening funeral homes or working in hospital sanitation. It had made me extremely cautious around Dan’s cooking, though, and we’d had to have a few pretty serious conversations about dish cleanup, prompt post-preparation trash disposal, and the labeling of leftovers.

“Just the shepherd’s pie. The sweet potatoes are safe.” Dan snorted. “I can’t believe that you’re so squeamish about these things. It’s not like I interrogate you about every beverage you store in the fridge.”

“Really? What the hell was that soda discussion last week about, then?”

“You know my feelings about high-fructose corn syrup.” Dan narrowed his eyes, and a very stubborn and lawyery look crossed his handsome face.

I shook my head, unwilling to reengage on this particular issue, even if it meant that I had to abide by Dan’s new list of sodas that were banned in the apartment. I was also not entirely full after my partial dinner at my mother’s, so I got up to investigate the sweet potatoes. There was still a full serving in the pot, looking extremely inviting, so I spooned it into a small dish. I carefully avoided looking at the partially empty casserole dish. Since Dan had moved in, I’d learned to my horror about how many sins dishes like shepherd’s pie and meat loaf could conceal. I put the now-empty pot in the sink and turned on the faucet, automatically stepping back to avoid the incipient spreading puddle that had been this sink’s hallmark for many months. To my surprise,
everything remained dry, and the faucet even managed to avoid its usual cantankerous sputter. For a moment, I wondered whether my landlord had finally, for the first time in all the years I’d lived there, responded to a repair request. But that seemed like the kind of out-of-character behavior usually only present in body snatching and encroaching brain tumors, and the last time I’d seen Mr. Jennings, he’d seemed completely normal.

“Dan,” I called over my shoulder, “did Jaison fix the sink?” Despite my extreme dislike of Dan’s meat products and my unwelcome exposure to so many viewings of nature documentaries, he had come with one very big mark in his favor—his boyfriend, Jaison, who was a general contractor. Since Dan had moved in, Jaison had fixed the broken window in his room, adjusted the iffy thermostat on the living room radiator, and even figured out why the pipes in the bathroom made such a racket whenever anyone showered. (He hadn’t been able to fix that pipe problem, since it would’ve involved completely opening up the walls, but it was nice to have a diagnosis.)

“He swung by with the parts early this afternoon. Said that it was driving him nuts,” Dan said, not looking up.

I was distinctly impressed. “He came by on a Sunday and fixed our sink, without you even asking? You can never break up with this man.” And clearly, short of Dan setting fire to the curtains, I could never ditch him as a roommate.

“Yeah, I’ll pass that one along,” Dan replied dryly. “I’ve got your half of the materials costs written down on a Post-it somewhere.” Then he tilted his head backward over the back of the couch to look at me. “Hey, can you put the last of the shepherd’s pie in the microwave for me? I think I’ll finish it off.”

“I’m not touching that thing, even with a spatula.” I put my bowl of sweet potatoes in the microwave and nuked it as Dan laughed incredulously at my statement and turned his attention back to the screen, where
Benedict Cumberbatch was now discussing the coconut thief crab. My phone gave its incoming-text buzz, and I pulled it out. Suze was up for the trip to Massachusetts tomorrow. I smiled, texted back an acknowledgment, and then polished off the sweet potatoes in short order. A comfortable silence fell between me and Dan, though I found myself glancing over at him several times, wanting to ask a question that I had a strong feeling would be crossing a boundary. I wished I could ask him how he could date Jaison, who was a human with no knowledge of the supernatural world at all, and feel comfortable not only keeping such an enormous secret from him, but also eat three dinners a week that were made from humans. I wanted to know whether it was as easy as he made it look, or whether it was actually much, much harder, and he was just really good at keeping up a facade. I wondered what Dan thought of my brother’s relationships with his wives. Did he think Chivalry’s approach was sensible, or was he actually as appalled by it as I was by his shepherd’s pie?

I opened my mouth to ask the last one, then shut it quickly. I shouldn’t ask questions when I might not be ready for the answers, I reminded myself. And even though my half of the rent was paid up for another four months, and between the family work and some part-time floater work I’d picked up, I was more financially solvent than I’d been in the last five years, it was a good idea to maintain roommate harmony by not poking at sleeping dogs. I’d spent far too many months too recently with a sum net worth of less than fifty dollars to not be pleasantly enjoying being able to buy a new DVD or replace a worn-out piece of clothing without worrying about paying my bills. I was even managing to accrue a tidy sum that I hoped would help overhaul some of the Fiesta’s more-pressing issues—it would be nice, for instance, to experience a winter that didn’t require mittens while driving.

Leaving Dan to his Sisyphean flash-card construction, I headed to bed.

I found two very tiny googly eyes glued to the back of my toothbrush, and one single googly eye affixed to the cap of my toothpaste. I laughed at the sight, but then felt a low feeling of unease as I considered where Suze might be going with this one. I checked my room carefully for any more eyes before finally pulling up my heavy winter comforter and slowly falling asleep, the precise murmur of Benedict Cumberbatch’s narration still drifting through my bedroom wall.

*   *   *

Armed with a bag of assorted Munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts and a coffee for each of us, I picked Suzume up from her house at ten the next morning. She was scampering out of her front door the moment I pulled into her driveway. The grin covering her face was nearly as brilliant as her neon green North Face parka. Suzume was very familiar with the Fiesta’s winter performance at this point, so she was wearing a heavy pair of blue corduroy pants, and her silky black hair was arranged in two jaunty pigtails that just showed under the bobble-topped fleece hat that matched her parka.

“
Fuck
is it cold in here!” she noted as she pitched her duffel bag into the backseat with a heavy metallic clunk that indicated that she was prepared for whatever we might encounter. “Fort, I’m not telling you that you should buy a new car—”

“I’m sure you aren’t, but somehow I think that is going to be the takeaway on this comment,” I noted.

She continued blithely over me. “No, I’d never question your automotive decisions. I’m just going to note how glad I am at this particular juncture that my reproductive organs naturally reside inside my body and don’t have to try to make the inward crawl that yours probably are attempting at this moment.”

I snorted, handing her coffee over as she pulled on a
pair of gloves that she had apparently set aside just for the car ride. “Do you have all of that out of your system now, or am I going to hear variations on this theme for the whole drive?”

“I can make no promises,” Suze said, her beautiful almond-shaped eyes crinkling in humor.

Getting from Providence to the small town just outside Lowell, Massachusetts, where the rusalka lived required a cautious snaking around the edge of Boston. Even at ten o’clock on a Monday morning, the roads leading into Boston were stuffed with commuters, and we made our way carefully around and then up, neither of us having any intention of turning an hour-and-a-half drive into a three-hour Masshole-infested nightmare of bad driving and Red Sox bumper stickers.

Resting just below the border into New Hampshire, Lowell is one of the classic New England cities. Farming roots made way to an industrial boom, followed by the slow and painful collapse of the mill and textile industries. Despite a growing student population thanks to the Lowell branch of the University of Massachusetts, and a slow but helpful influx of several high-tech and biomedical companies, driving through downtown Lowell was still a stark and sad presentation of the bones of the town’s mighty past. Though some of the old factories had been turned into museums or apartment buildings, many still sat vacant.

We drove through Lowell, across the river, and then we were in the small adjoining town of Dracut. After a circuitous path through a labyrinth of tiny interconnecting roads, we finally pulled up to our destination—the small public boat launch to Long Pond. Possibly one of the least inventively named lakes in New England, it was sizable, its upper third quadrant crossing the line into New Hampshire. It was ringed on all sides by tiny capes and slouched houses that probably all dated back to the 1940s or earlier, all cheek by jowl on minuscule lots, the
primary appeal of which was a tiny strip of sand and a wooden boat dock that someone’s grandfather had probably built over a few weekends back in the days when building permits were optional and a six-pack of beer was required. A few places stuck out—new construction where someone had bought up one of the old properties, razed it to the ground, and proceeded to shoehorn in a hideous McMansion that overwhelmed the tiny property and completely missed the point of lakeside living.

I parked the car and then grabbed the small deli bag that I’d picked up this morning. The parking area, which in the summer was probably stuffed to the point where cars parked on the grass, was completely vacant now, and the moment Suze and I got out of the car, an icy breeze whipping across the water gave us a clear reminder of why that was. Suze managed to restrain herself to a very speaking glance, and hauled a small blanket out of her duffel bag. It was wool, with a bright argyle pattern, the kind of thing that the elderly tuck around their knees during end-of-season games at Fenway Park.

The dock that we walked down was bleached from years in the sun, but we both sat down cautiously on the spread blanket, well aware that generations of splinters probably remained to attack the unwary. While Suze wrangled the deli container, I pulled a long coil of fishing line out of my pocket, then took up the surprisingly difficult task of tying one end firmly to a raw duck gizzard. Neither the smell nor the temperature was helping, and I was well aware that the easiest route, a hook, would be a very bad idea. I finally succeeded, despite Suzume’s ongoing color commentary of the ordeal, and dropped the gizzard down into the lake. The water was clear enough that we could peer down and see our bait hanging there a few inches below the surface, suspended by my line and already the subject of intense scrutiny by some minnows and one fat sunfish.

We stared in complete silence for five minutes,
watching the fish, until Suze finally pronounced grimly, “This is going to take all damn day.” She sent a dark-eyed glare my way, as if somehow this were my fault. “She needs to get a freaking cell phone like everyone else.”

“Pretty sure that phones don’t work that well underwater,” I noted.

“She could stash it in a beaver lodge when she wasn’t using it.”

“Beaver lodges now come with electrical plugs for charging purposes?”

Suze reached down and tugged the line, making the duck gizzard wobble in the water. “How exactly is this supposed to work?”

I’d read the entire file last night, but I was a little hazy on this myself. “I think she somehow smells it?” Suze looked unconvinced, and I defended the theory. “Hey, sharks can smell stuff underwater.”

Looking down critically to the gizzard, currently being nibbled at by fish, Suze said, “It’s a really big lake. Does she usually hang around this dock?”

“Um, I don’t think she has a preferred area.” I passed the deli container over to her. There were a half-dozen other pinkish-grayish blobs of meat still in it, with a matching (and extremely odorous) liquid collecting at the bottom. “Here, pour the gizzard juice out into the water. Maybe that will help.”

The day dragged on while we sat and waited, replacing the gizzard each time the little circling fish managed to completely nibble the bait off the line. For a short time the sun came out and we were warm enough to pull off our hats and gloves, but then the gray clouds rolled back in and the temperature dropped again. We talked while we waited, but they were intermittent conversations at best, since we were both actively scanning the water around us, looking for signs that the rusalka was approaching.

Two and a half hours into our vigil, a ripple in the
water a hundred yards out caught my attention, and I nudged Suze with my elbow. We both eyed it carefully—between the lake’s beaver population and one slightly out-of-season loon, we’d had a lot of false alarms. But then the ripple appeared again, closer this time, and my heart began beating faster as I realized that there was a large mass moving under the water.

She broke the surface of the lake about ten feet from us, and her natural camouflage was good enough that if I hadn’t been specifically looking for her, I doubted that I would’ve spotted her. The rusalka was cautious, and the only thing visible was her face from forehead to cheekbone. Her skin was a dull and mottled collection of grays and dark blues that matched the surface of the water almost exactly, and her one visible eye was a hazy white. Then there was a blink, and I realized that what I’d seen was an outer eyelid. The eye now visible was a brilliant blue-green, like a freshly polished aquamarine, but it was a solid color, without a visible pupil or any white.