Generation V (26 page)

My hands were shaking a little as I dried them. Finding Phillip yesterday had been a shock, and the violence that had followed had been completely unexpected. Now I knew that I might be facing blood and bodily injury, and that Suzume was capable of tracking Luca to his lair. I wished that the thought of those two things didn’t scare me, but they did. Maybe my sense of self-preservation was stronger than my desire to engage in heroics. I rested my hands on the edge of the sink and squeezed the cool porcelain for a minute. Okay, I clearly wasn’t Batman, or even Antman, but I was all that Amy had. And wasn’t that just a shame?

Clearly I needed to work on my personal pep talks.

I combed some gel into my hair and tried to crunch some of the dark brown tangle into spikes. The result was semisuccessful, but it did look marginally more badass, and that helped cheer me up. Now all I needed was black leather pants, combat boots, and a black T-shirt to look like an extra from
Underworld
. It turned out that I actually could laugh in the face of danger, so I called that a win and left the bathroom.

I went out into the living room, where Suzume was seated on the futon, flipping channels on the television. She’d put her hair up in a ponytail, and on impulse I reached out to tug at the silky black rope. She tilted her head slightly, but didn’t object, as I kept my hand around it, stroking it a little with my thumb, before letting it go again. It made me feel better, and when I rested my hand on the arm of the futon, it finally wasn’t shaking anymore.

“Are you still going to try to find Amy?” she asked, her voice so quiet that I barely heard her over the droning of the television.

“Yes.” There was something in her voice that worried me, but I answered quickly, a little annoyed with her. She should’ve known this.

Suzume flipped channels faster, hitting the buttons on the remote with restless, aggressive motions. “And what are you planning to do once we find her?”

“I’ll ask Luca to give her to me.”

Suzume didn’t look at me. “And when he doesn’t?”

The question hung between us. I breathed in deeply, and let it out again. If this came down to a fight between me and Luca, I was beyond screwed, and she knew it. I had hopes for the best and no defense against the worst, but it was all that I had.

“Suze,” I said, desperation in my voice. “I have to find her.”

She kept flipping channels.

“We can make this happen,” I insisted. “I can lie to him, tell him that Madeline got pissed about the publicity, tell him that she sent me to get Amy.”

“And if he calls your mother to verify that?”

“Chivalry will lie for me if he answers the phone.” That wasn’t the answer she was looking for, but I reached out and squeezed her shoulder, willing to her to believe in this, to trust that this could happen. “He will.” I knew that repeating it was the wrong decision, but I needed the reassurance as well.

She turned off the television and set the remote down on the arm of the futon with exquisite care. Then she turned to look at me, and I could finally see how angry she was.

“Fort,” she said. “You aren’t responsible for any of this.”

“I know.”

“Not for Maria.” Her voice was rising as she continued. “Not for Mr. and Mrs. Grann. Not for Jessica. Not for Amy.
None
of it.” She was shouting in my face now, but I didn’t object, or try to stop her or quiet her down.

She pressed a hand to either side of my face and pulled us close, until all I could see were her dark, beautiful, angry eyes. Her voice dropped, became soft and gentle. “You are not going to be able to save Amy.”

“I can,” I said. “
We
can.”

“Those are lottery odds, Fort.” Her voice was like a warm blanket, urging me to roll up in it, to just accept that truth. “Everything has to go right. You don’t have a fallback, you don’t have some ace in the hole to pull out if it goes bad. And even if you try, it still won’t bring any of them back. Do you understand me, Fort? None of them.”

I’d never told her about Brian and Jill, but I realized in that moment that Suzume knew about them, and had known about them this whole time.

“I have to find her,” I told her, needing her to understand. “It’s not about guilt or wanting to be some kind of hero.” I reached up to press my hands over hers, to feel the warmth of those long fingers that seemed so capable of trickery and violence. She was the reason that Phillip was dead, the whip that had driven me to go to Prudence’s house when I thought that nothing could ever have made me go there. I knew all too well how much I needed her to understand why this was so important, and why I needed her so badly. I thought about Amy from the newspaper photo, in the baseball uniform, with blond ponytail, freckles, and coaxed smile. “She’s only
nine, Suze,” I said, trying to put it into words. “I was nine when Prudence killed my parents…it was like she’d destroyed my whole world. And that’s what is happening to Amy right now. I can’t just turn my back on her. Not when I can try to do something. If I don’t do anything, then it’s like I helped kill her. Do you understand?”

I pressed harder at her hands, knowing it was too tight, but pushing anyway. I wanted to leave her handprints on my face. Her eyes were so beautiful, dark and perfect, and looking into them I finally said what had been gnawing at me. “What if I hadn’t let go of Maria?” I asked. Suzume’s face immediately turned stormy, and she tried to free her hands, but I held on, pushing it. “What if I’d just held on to her arm? What if I hadn’t given up on her?”

“Nothing would’ve changed, Fort,” Suzume said fiercely. “It all would’ve ended the same damn way.”

“But you don’t know that.
I
don’t know that. If I’d forced it, pushed it, thrown a goddamn tantrum like a two-year-old,
maybe
he would’ve given in. Maybe she’d be alive. You can’t say that it was impossible. I could’ve tried harder. I could’ve saved her.”

Suzume pushed harder, forcing down my hands. I could feel the loss the moment her palms no longer touched my face. She pulled back, away from me. I reached out, tried to touch her, but she got up too quickly, and was out of my reach.

“Suze,” I said. “I need you. Please. I need your help.”

There was a small moment of hesitation, but I knew when she’d made her decision, because her face hardened, became certain. She reached down behind the futon and picked up her duffel, which she must’ve put
behind there when I was in the bathroom. It was full again, stuffed nearly to overflowing. She’d packed up.

“Please, Suzume.” I got off the couch, following her as she walked to the door. My voice raised, and I yelled at her as her hand touched the doorknob, “Goddamnit, Suze, don’t leave me!”

She paused again, then turned to look at me, and her face was a stranger’s. I’d already extended a hand to grab her shoulder, but now I pulled back, not touching her. “Despite what my cultural heritage might suggest,” she said coldly, “I’m not a fan of kamikaze missions. Do what you think you have to, Fort, but you’ll do it alone.”

I felt a sharp pain in my chest. A loss, a betrayal.

She walked out, and I watched from the doorway. When she’d reached the end of the hallway and had taken the first step down the stairs, I called to her, “What does
nogitsune
mean, Suzume? What did your grandmother try to warn me about?”

I could see that my last barb had hit by the way her spine stiffened, and the sudden tension in her shoulders and arms. She froze for a second, then replied without turning around. Her voice was flat, but I could hear her suppressed anger. “It means field fox, Fort. It means to be without kindness, to just be a trickster, a nuisance, a danger. It means not caring about consequences. It means to have to live outside the human cities.” She paused, and I could see her take a deep breath. “But it also means to value your own survival. And Amy Grann is not worth risking my life for.”

I watched her walk down the stairs. Then I went back into the apartment and looked out the window.

Suzume exited through the front of the building.
There was a cab already waiting at the curb, and she got into the backseat. That made it hurt even more—that she’d known even before she started talking to me that she was leaving, that she’d already called her cab. She’d been that sure that nothing I said could possibly have changed her mind, that there was no reason in the world worth staying with me. I watched as the cab pulled away, merging into traffic and disappearing around the corner.

She never looked back. Not once.

I still waited. I waited for five minutes, for ten minutes. I waited because I still hoped that this was a joke, a prank. That she would slink her way in through the door and laugh in my face, mock me for my lack of faith in her. And so I clung to my belief that she would be back.

Ten minutes turned to fifteen, and the truth began to sink in. At half an hour, I accepted it. She wasn’t going to be coming back.

I was on my own.

Suzume was gone.

I was on my own.

Those two thoughts chased each other around in my head. I sat on the futon, still reeling at the realization that Suzume had really left me, that it had really just happened. She’d just packed her bag and walked out. I had to reconsider everything that had happened today after I realized that Amy was alive. All those moments that I thought had been Suzume beginning to respect me more, to treat me more as an equal and less like the village idiot—those long quiet drives, her insistence that I talk to Prudence—they’d really been about her cutting her ties to me, deciding that the money Madeline was paying her wasn’t worth the bother and risk of sticking around with me.

I’d only met her two nights ago. She’d barely been in my life forty-eight hours. She’d been so annoying that on many occasions I’d wished I’d had more money so that I could pay her to leave me alone. But seeing her ride away in that cab had hurt more than when I’d walked in on Beth having sex with Larry.

I pressed my hands over my eyes and told myself that
I had to get a grip. She was a fox and a trickster who delighted in screwing with other people—all the moments I’d thought that we were starting to form a weird little friendship had been just as fake as the times when she’d come onto me just to play with my head. The money she’d taken was the only reason she’d been staying with me. Her own poor attention span was the only reason that she’d been helping me hunt down the Grann sisters at all. But when entertainment and money hadn’t been enough to offset risk, I’d been dropped. Her own grandmother had warned me, but I hadn’t listened. I’d believed that no one who’d seen Jessica Grann’s body lying on the ground could walk away.

More than that, I’d trusted Suzume. And she’d walked.

She’d been the one who’d found Phillip, the one who’d finally killed him. I’d been relying on her to find Luca for me. I didn’t have a fox’s nose; I couldn’t hunt him down by a smell.

I’d been scared before of what it meant to challenge Luca when Suzume was with me. Now I was beyond scared at what that meant. Now what I really wanted to do was hide under my bed. Or drive down to the mansion and hide under
Chivalry’s
bed.

I forced myself to get up off the futon, then walk back into my bedroom. There was a piece of paper sitting on my laptop, and I picked it up. It was filled with looping, girlish handwriting dotted with little hearts, and I knew immediately that it had to be Suzume’s. I might’ve considered not reading it, just crumpling it up manfully and throwing it away, but I was already reading it before I realized that I should’ve done something else.

It took me a second to realize what it was. It was a list
of all the passwords that Suzume had changed. Facebook, bank account, e-mail log-ins, everything. They were all there. It hurt again, because this meant that she was even done with tormenting me, but I gritted my teeth, pushed that down, and dropped the password sheet back onto my desk. I briefly thought better of that and tucked it into the bottom of my underwear drawer, but that, I promised myself, would be the last time I’d think about Suzume. Unless she’d done something like short-sheet my bed on her way out, which seemed like a distinct possibility.

But that was for a later discovery, and I almost forcibly restrained myself from checking the sheets. I opened my closet and started digging though it. I’m not the stereotypical single-guy pig in terms of cleanliness, but I also don’t do too much to keep my bedroom in order. I keep dirty clothes and random stuff off the floor, but I mostly manage that by tossing items like that onto my closet floor, where they’re less visible to unexpected female company, but still available in a nice little heap whenever laundry day has passed me by again and I need a shirt that only needs to pass a very lax sniff test.

Now I dug through that pile, and the piles behind it that consisted of old school textbooks, a few DVDs that I preferred not to display out in the living room (not because of salacious content, but more because I felt slightly embarrassed to own copies of
Clue
and
The Princess Bride
), a box of stuff from my last apartment that I had still never gotten around to unpacking, and finally reached my goal.

It was a plain metal footlocker, about the size of a normal shoe box, with a combination lock. It had sat in
the back of the closet since the day I’d moved in, and hadn’t been opened for years before that. I used a sock from my dirty laundry pile to wipe away the dust that had accumulated on it.

The combination was simple, and I spun it from memory. Brian had believed that if he hadn’t told me the combination, one day the mystery would be too much for me and I’d take loppers to it. That thought probably spoke more of Brian’s childhood antics than mine, but I can still remember sitting at our kitchen table while Brian spun the dial and told me the combination. Twenty-four, seven, twelve. His day of birth, Jill’s day of birth, then my day of birth.

The box opened, releasing a whiff of stale air. I reached in slowly, and withdrew Brian’s 1911 Colt .45 automatic. He’d bought it about two months before he and Jill were murdered, for reasons that I never knew. He’d kept it locked in a back closet, out of sight. His .38 had been his police-issued sidearm, and the gun he’d taught me to shoot on, but this one had been different. I’d never shot the .45, and he’d never taken it with us when we went to the range, even for him to fire. He’d promised to teach me how to use it eventually, but he’d told me that even with his help, it was too big for a nine-year-old to fire.