Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (27 page)

I hesitated, then said it. After all, she was my friend, and I knew that if Prudence got pissed about anything, she wasn’t going to stop and ask questions before she started killing perceived ringleaders. “Lilah, I noticed what Cole said about the Ad-hene, and don’t think that I also didn’t notice you pushing that to a back burner.”

She frowned at me. “You have to understand about Cole and the Ad-hene, Fort. His mother was a changeling, one of Shoney’s. When she was old enough to have a baby, Shoney was the father, and that’s how Cole was born. And Cole was the best three-quarters that they’d ever produced—his glamours are the strongest, and he holds the glamours on almost forty of the Neighbors who are too weak to set their own. So Shoney wanted to re-create Cole—even after Cole’s mother miscarried three times and had two stillbirths, he wouldn’t give up. Finally Cole’s mother told Shoney that she wouldn’t do it anymore—no more pregnancies. And Shoney killed her—took her into the forest and just ripped her apart. Because to him she was just a changeling who was no longer useful, so she might as well give him the entertainment of her death.”

We looked at each other grimly. The truth was that I wouldn’t cry a tear if the Ad-hene were all killed the next day—they’d left too much of a trail of destruction behind them. And even though I still didn’t like Cole, this made me understand him a little more, almost against my will. But understanding didn’t change the truth that there was trouble brewing right now with the Neighbors—a lot of it.

As soon as the door had closed behind Lilah, I began muttering curses, circling around the room in much the same way that Lilah had done just a few minutes before. The last thing I needed was getting my sister involved—her answer would be to just start killing people and using that as a way to discourage future problems. Calling Chivalry was similarly problematic—given his fixation on following my mother’s last directive, there was no way that he’d agree to keep this hidden from my sister, and that led right back to the first problem at worst, and at the very best, just yet another sibling deadlock that would result in all of us standing around arguing while Cole took out Ambrose.

I pulled my phone out of its charger in the bedroom and called Suzume, but she didn’t pick up—it was entirely possible that she was out running around the woods behind her grandmother’s house on four legs, hunting bunnies and mice, or knocking over her neighbor’s trash cans for the umpteenth time. I cursed, checked the time, and cursed again. As I scrolled through my contacts, I hoped to hell that Valentine Sassoon was a night owl.

He wasn’t. Valentine Sassoon might be the would-be Norma Rae of the witches, but he was also a doctor with a thriving practice in sports medicine and orthopedic surgery, which apparently meant that he followed the practice of early to bed and early to rise. After he’d woken up sufficiently to realize that this was important, and that it really couldn’t wait until morning, he asked if it was possible to meet to discuss it. I ground my teeth at the thought of having to actually drag myself out somewhere, but the truth was that this was probably something that merited a full face-to-face conversation. There was a twenty-four-hour diner that I knew on the edge of the College Hill neighborhood that had decent parking and wouldn’t be far for him to get to, so I asked if he could go there. He agreed, and we both hung up.

I looked out the window—an inch of powder, snow still coming down, and other than the tire tracks from other cars, it was clear that the plows weren’t going to bother getting to work for another few hours. I cursed loudly and changed my sweatpants for jeans, and pulled a sweatshirt over my usual pajama top. The diner had undoubtedly seen worse. Yanking on my shoes, I went back into the kitchen and gnawed my way quickly through the Popsicle—it was probably a dumb thing to do before heading out into the cold, but damn it, this night was not going my way.

As I trudged down the apartment building steps, I passed Jaison coming up. I waved at him in passing, and grinned. “Hey, Jaison. Dan get lonely?”

Jaison gave me a lazy smile and gestured to himself. “Hey, who could blame a man for not being able to resist this?”

I laughed and continued to head down. “Did Suze booty-call you too?” Jaison called to me, pausing in his own trek up the stairs.

“I wish,” I grumbled. “No, I just have to meet up with someone, then come back. Family shit.”

Jaison reached into his pocket and withdrew his keys. “If you’re coming right back, then take my truck,” he advised. “Those tires that you have on the Scirocco are crap, even in baby snow like this.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate it,” I said, catching the keys as he tossed them down to me.

“No problem. Just remember—I want the same number of dents in my bumper tomorrow as there are right now.”

“Forty-eight, gotcha,” I said. “Thanks, and have fun.”

“You know it,” he said, heading up the stairs again with a definite jauntiness in his steps.

*   *   *

There’s a certain point of the night when a twenty-four-hour diner becomes a very weird intersection of humanity. People on dates who like each other enough to keep talking to each other, but aren’t ready to go back to someone’s house and possibly end up in bed. People who are in the middle of breakups. People who work weird work shifts, and are actually having their dinner, or possibly breakfast. People who you are almost entirely certain are prostitutes. People who are probably homeless, nursing cups of coffee as an excuse to sit somewhere nice and warm rather than being outside in the cold. People who have nowhere else in the world to go, and just look like the universe really needs to cut them a break for once.

But when it comes down to it, twenty-four-hour diners are wonderful, because where else can you walk in and get French toast at any hour of the day? If nuclear fallout ever ended up happening, my plan was to hole up in a twenty-four-hour diner and just eat French toast.

Since I was hoping to get out of this meeting as soon as possible and actually get some sleep, I avoided the siren song of French toast and just ordered a cup of hot chocolate—and given the level that my night was sucking, I felt entirely justified when I asked for extra whipped cream on top. Perhaps my waitress picked up on something with that sixth sense for sadness that all good service personnel are able to develop (I, for the record, had never developed this), or was just incredibly bored, because when she brought it to me, it was also jazzed up with a whole bunch of sprinkles.

This improved my night right up until the moment that Valentine Sassoon, looking more put together than any man apart from my brother had any right to at this hour of the night, sat down across from me, catching me midslurp of my delicious, whipped-cream-and-sprinkle-covered hot cocoa. He didn’t say anything, but there was no doubt that the subtle arch of his eyebrow was providing commentary on my choices.

It was of small comfort to me that I’d had much more embarrassing moments.

The waitress looped around again, long enough to take Valentine’s order of a small bowl of chowder and pretty much fall in love with him. Right there in the middle of a shift in the absolute dead of night, there had appeared a man who not only didn’t reek of alcohol or despair, but looked like he could be a model. Plus, he smiled extremely politely at her and even repeated her name after she’d introduced herself. I had a feeling that someone was going to get some extra crackers with his chowder.

That actually wasn’t a euphemism.

Once the waitress had managed to pry herself away from our table, I filled Valentine in on what Lilah had told me that evening. He listened without interrupting, his fingers carefully steepled as he gave me his full attention, his handsome face intent, but not giving any hints about how he was reacting to what I was telling him.

After I’d finished, Valentine placed his hands down flat on the table, the faded beige of the plastic top contrasting the dark skin of the long and elegant fingers that would make piano teachers and surgical instructors alike swoon.

“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ve been worried for a while that the other shoe was waiting to drop on Ambrose, but I’ve got to say that I wasn’t expecting it to come from this direction. Honestly I didn’t think that the elves even gave a crap.”

“The Neighbors aren’t like the Ad-hene, at least not this group,” I reminded him, “and they are not happy with what happened.” I took another sip of my cocoa, which was really very good. “Frankly, a lot of people should be unhappy.”

At my tone, Valentine’s eyebrows arched again. “I’m not arguing with you, Fort. Ambrose got very used to just doing what Lavinia asked him to, with no questions asked. But this is about a bigger issue, the problem of—”

“It’s one in the morning, and you would not even believe how many plates I’m already keeping in the air. Can we please, just this once, only focus on the issue of what’s happening right now?” I begged.

The witch sighed heavily. “Fine, we’ll do it your way. Treat the symptom, not the malady. But hey, what would I know about that? I just have a medical degree.”

“Ha-ha.” I rubbed my hand across my eyes, which were doing that overly moist almost-teary thing that happened when I was really tired. “Ambrose needs to get out of town, and given what’s going on with the Neighbors right now, I don’t think he should plan on coming back. So how do we relocate him?”

“It’s not just him. Ambrose has a wife who is also a witch, and their youngest child is still at home. You’re looking at relocating a family of three.”

“Shit,” I said. “Okay, do they have family that they can stay with?”

“You’re forgetting the system, Fort,” he said, at least doing me the favor of not gloating as I walked right into his hands about the bigger issue topic. “Witches need Scott permission to relocate anywhere in the territory—if a witch wants to move one town over, she has to put in a request. Plus, your family doesn’t want witches grouping in an area—there’s a quota system in place for how many witches can be in one place. If Ambrose and his family goes to stay with another set of witches, then they’re risking someone dropping a tip to the Scotts. Best-case scenario, a hell of a fine. Worst-case, Prudence shows up on their doorstep.”

I shoved my hands hard through my hair, frustrated. “I get your point, you know, Valentine. Yes, this system is deeply flawed. Yes, it really needs to be overhauled. None of which helps us keep Ambrose safe right now and prevent a huge interspecies incident. He needs to make a transfer request to somewhere that has room in its quota for more witches. Okay, how long does that kind of request usually take?”

Valentine took a spoonful of chowder and swallowed it slowly. “Last time I checked, eleven months was the average.”

“What?”
I shrieked, making every head in the diner turn in my direction, even those of the couples who were in the midst of painful breakups. Our waitress gave me a quelling glare, and I made one of those little apologetic hand waves and lowered my voice. “It takes
that
long?” I hissed to Valentine.

“Yes, it really does,” he replied, his expression grim. “There were witch families that lost their houses during the last recession, and they had to stay in hotels for months before they could get permission to go anywhere else, even though they had families that they could’ve stayed with, or sometimes could’ve rented cheap apartments in different areas of the city rather than pay out the nose with money they couldn’t afford to spend. But there’s no appeal process, no way to prioritize emergency requests over those that could wait, or fast-track requests from people who need to move to accept new jobs, and don’t get me started on what a headache college applications are to kids who don’t know if they’ll even be allowed to live in the area where their college is. Most witch children end up taking gap years just to give the paperwork time to go through.”

“Shit.” Something else that needed nothing more than immediate attention and overhaul, with a thoughtful implementation of better rules, and was instead going to get stuck into committee hell courtesy of the Scott siblings. I scrubbed my hand over my forehead, wishing that by friction alone I could force out some idea on how to get Prudence and Chivalry to agree with me when I finally brought this particular issue to the table. “Okay, I need you to tell Ambrose that he needs to be on the lookout for pissed-off elflings, and I’m going to have to go down tomorrow and make something work.”

Valentine stared at me, caught somewhere between the extreme hope of his idealism and the extreme cynicism that was no doubt the by-product of a life spent subject to the Scott rules dictating witch behavior. “Do you think you can?”

“I don’t have many options, do I?” I said, irritated.

“You could do nothing, you know,” Valentine pointed out. “It’s what plenty of people might do in your situation.”

“For Christ’s sake,” I grumbled, pulling out my wallet and thumbing through the contents of a billfold so meager that I was half surprised that a moth didn’t fly out. “Let’s not give me a medal for just deciding not to act like a complete dick and ignore problems. I mean, I haven’t gotten a damn thing done yet, Valentine. I don’t think that ‘good intentions’ counts as an accomplishment.”

Valentine reached over and pushed my wallet back, stopping me from pulling anything out. “I make good money, Fort. Let me get this one.” He gave me a searching look. “You’re angry at Ambrose. You think that he deserves some kind of punishment on this. But you’re working pretty hard to keep him alive here. Can I ask why that is?”

I was broke enough at this point that I wasn’t going to make a fuss about being treated to a cup of hot chocolate, so I got up from the booth and started yanking on my jacket. “Something needs to be done, Valentine, but the last time I checked, vigilante lynching squads are very rarely the answer to anything.” I pulled on my hat. “Call me if anything happens.”

I could feel Valentine’s eyes on me as I left the diner, but I didn’t look back. I couldn’t handle knowing that the hopes of yet another group were pinned on me.

It was just too depressing to think about.