Iron Night (16 page)

Irritated, I asked, “What, Suze? You're looking at me like I've got stuff on my face.”

“No, just thinking.” There were subtexts to her subtexts in that comment.

I sighed heavily. “Are you going to share it with me?”

“Just remembering that I still have my old boom box in a closet.”

“What?” It was a good thing that I'd just stopped at a red light, because the completely left-field nature of that comment gave my brain whiplash.

“You can borrow it.”

“I'm going to need more help on this non sequitur, Suze.”

There was a gleam in her eyes that I didn't know how to interpret, but I was pretty sure that it boded poorly for me. “You know, to hold up outside Lilah's window.”

“You're nuts,” I said flatly.

“I can already see you composing your mix tape. Don't forget to put ‘In Your Eyes' on it. Chicks dig that one,” she said, with a little twist of viciousness on the last part.

I shook my head. “I have to go to work and earn back some of that money I just spent bribing a junkie, so I'll drop you off at your place so that you can keep yourself company with the crazy.”

She made an affronted sniff, and we drove in silence for several long, uncomfortable minutes until finally she internally forgave me and made an innocuous and clearly peace-making joke about a particularly obnoxious billboard ad, which started a normal conversation. It allowed both of us to ignore the suddenly tense undertone that had emerged, and when I dropped her off we said good-bye with an unusual level of politeness.

As she started to walk to her door, I abruptly leaned out my window and said, “Listen, Suze, about the roommate thing—”

“Oh, don't worry, Fort.” And the expression on her face was definitely enough to make me concerned. “I am
all over
that.”

I shuddered and went to work.

I brooded through my work shift, wishing that carrying tiny plates of expensive food could occupy more of my thoughts and give me less time to try to puzzle through either why elves would want to kill Gage in such a confusingly convoluted manner or Suze's moodiness. I was able to come up with an equal number of theories for both.

As if in answer to my inner desire for distraction, it was a slow night on service and I had the misfortune to be tapped as the test server for Chef Jerome. Whenever he was working on new dishes, some unfortunate member of the waitstaff was picked to see how the dishes would work when introduced to the movement of a serving platter. Tonight that unfortunate person was me.

Most of the dishes that night were pretty usual. Delicate, ornate, yet surprisingly sturdy. Chef Jerome's experiment with halved coconut shells turned out to be not quite perfectly balanced yet, much to my dismay and Chef Jerome's invective-laden rage. And the final capper on the evening was working with Chef Jerome's newest creation, a strange variation on bombe Alaska that involved several pieces of fruit that had been exquisitely carved into flower shapes and then drenched in some mysterious combination of alcohol, and which Chef Jerome envisioned as being carried out while on fire. Unfortunately the mix on the alcohol was a little off, and sparks kept catching on my shirt and having to be beaten down by Chef Jerome's alert sous-chef, Melissa.

By the end of the ordeal Chef Jerome was busily working on adjusting the alcohol mix to retain flavor but burn slightly more manageably, and I was reflecting that my wish for distraction had come at the high price of my work shirt, which now had several burns.

I finished my shift at seven. Paying the fee at the parking garage made me wince and remember why I usually took the bus to work. There was a lot behind Peláez, but it was only for the customers to park in. Those of us who actually worked there and drove in had to fend for ourselves, which in this part of town generally meant dedicated parking lots. The Peláez managers were extremely ruthless in enforcing their parking preferences. One of the busboys earned extra money by going into the lot and cataloguing the parked cars every thirty minutes. If a car was parked in the lot for more than three hours, then steps were immediately taken to determine if it actually belonged to a customer. If it wasn't, then the tow truck was called.

I called Suzume while I worked on getting the Fiesta started. I waited impatiently while the phone rang, then was surprised to find myself in voice mail, which had somehow never happened before. Even more surprising was how professional Suze's voice mail message was.

“Hey, just wanted to remind you to head over to meet up with Lilah,” I said. I paused, racking my brain for something to say, then heard the incoming call beep. “Oh, good, that's you,” I said in relief. “Crap, I shouldn't have said that out loud. Shit, I— Okay, I'm just going to give up now. Delete this message.”

I had a bad feeling that that message would come back to torment me in some way. Deciding to deal with that hurdle when it came, I picked up Suze's call and repeated the less idiotic portion of my voice-mail message.

“Can't make it, Fort. Sorry.”

“What?” I was shocked, and felt a pang of hurt feelings. I had to ask, “Is this about before? In the car? Or later? I swear, I have at least seventy-eight percent faith that you are doing a good job trying to find me a nonhuman roommate.”

“Keep your skirt down, Louise; your slip is showing.” Her derisive snort and insult to my masculinity were so quintessentially Suze that I relaxed. “I'm not ditching you; I'm at work. My cousin Midori has been covering for me the past few days, but one guy asked for me by name, so I couldn't bail. I'll finish this as soon as I can and come over, but in the meantime I'm sure you can handle Lilah if she starts getting feisty.”

“Feisty in what way?” I asked suspiciously. Suze responded with a combination of cat meows and cracking whip noises, and I hung up on her.

After I put the phone away and wrestled the Fiesta into gear (the clutch was slowly dying and needed to be replaced—which was unfortunately what I'd been saving up for before I'd had to bribe Jacoby), I froze, weighing Suze's words. Was this a date? I pondered that for a second, then relaxed. No, this was a strategic meet-up to discuss serious territorial business.

Besides, if it was a date, I still had a half hour after I got home to change clothes before she showed up.

•   •   •

As it turned out, I did not have that time. When I reached the top of the third set of stairs, I found Lilah sitting in the hallway next to my door. She was still wearing the yellow dress from this morning, with the addition of a bright blue coat that fell into that category of coats that seem to straddle the line between heavy button-up sweater and dedicated outerwear. Her coppery hair was loose for the first time, falling down her back in a wavy mass that suggested a much higher wind outside than I had personally experienced. A stretchy white headband with a cheery fake sunflower attached to it was doing double duty of both keeping her hair out of her eyes and providing backup cover for her ears.

Seeing me, Lilah scrambled to her feet. I noticed that her ability to blush extended not just to her cheeks, but down her neck and presumably to lower reaches as well.

“Sorry I'm early,” she said, making a noble attempt to brush off her backside without being obvious about it. “It's a really bad habit of mine. Usually I bring a book and wait in my car until I'm only fifteen minutes early, but I took a cab tonight.”

Despite the circumstances that had led to this meeting and my own brooding over it, I smiled at the image of Lilah waiting outside parties until some invisible social acceptability clock counted down. “No problem, as long as you don't mind that I'm still dressed for work.” I gestured to my charred shirt and my pants, which had been on the receiving end of one overfilled serving of Chef Jerome's coconut soup. I'd tried some, and it was an extremely delicious dish, but balancing something that came served in a hollowed-out half of a coconut had been too much of a challenge for me.

Looking down, Lilah laughed. “Not at all,” she assured me. Then: “It's not like it's a date.”

From the look on her face, she knew her mistake the moment it came out of her mouth. I gave a very strained, very fake laugh as I agreed, “No, not a date at all.”

She faked an answering laugh. Then we both laughed together. It was horribly painful.

“Because it's not,” she said, still fake chortling heartily.

“Nope,” I answered.

There was a long pause as we stared at each other, caught in a social nightmare.

It was totally like a date.

“Would you like a drink?” I asked, desperate to do something to salvage the situation.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, yes.”

•   •   •

The last time Chivalry had asked me if I wanted something to drink, the result had been Macallan 1926, which was part of the impressive collection of alcohol that he had built up during Newport's days as a port for the booze runners during Prohibition. I'd learned later that the bottle he'd brought out with absolutely no show or ceremony would've run upward of sixty thousand dollars on the open market.

In stocking my own personal liquor cabinet, I'd had to take a more restrained approach. For one thing, there wasn't a lot of cabinet space in my apartment, and my liquor cabinet actually doubled as my cleaning-agent cabinet. So when I needed the social-lubricating benefits of hard alcohol, I pulled out my trusty bottle of Banker's Club—a brand of rum so cheap that it actually came in a plastic bottle. The taste matched the price, and as I mixed us each a rum and coke, I hoped that the comparatively high quality of the Coca-Cola would cover up the worst of my cost-cutting sins. Or that it would be so horrible that she'd overlook the fact that, lacking clean glasses, I'd poured our drinks into matching coffee mugs.

Lilah did make a notable face at her first sip, which she immediately tried to cover up by complimenting the apartment décor, but the answer to the foul taste was the same as with most alcohol: drink more. By our second glasses we'd both managed to move past the initial social awkwardness enough to be making eye contact again, and I was able to give Lilah a more detailed description of the situation to date, from Gage's death to Matt's discovery of the tattoo link to the missing persons' reports, finishing with the morning's visit to Iron Needle and the subsequent discoveries there.

Finally, with no more background information left, I asked her what she knew.

Lilah pondered the contents of her mug for a long moment before answering, and when she spoke it was very slowly and reluctantly. “Nothing more than you're telling me, Fort, but I'm worried about which members of Neighbors Jacoby said were involved. I wouldn't use his phrasing—”

“You mean
older, really snotty fucks, always brownnosing it up
isn't accurate?” I asked dryly.

That made her laugh. “Okay, maybe it's a little accurate,” she said with a hint of wry humor, but then she immediately sobered again. “We call ourselves the Neighbors because it was one of the politer terms used back in Ireland for the older race. We call the true ones who are left the Ad-hene, or Themselves if we're not being entirely polite, but there are a bunch of other names they'd respond to. Sidhe, the Gentry, Tuatha Dé Danann, elves—all are accurate terms, plus dozens of others.” She tossed back the last of her drink, then looked at me seriously. “The vampires live a long time. How old is your mother?”

“She was born the year that Edward II of England was deposed by his wife. Fourteenth century.”

Lilah nodded. “And your brother and sister?”

“Prudence was born during the American Revolution. Chivalry was born at the end of the Civil War.”

“And there aren't many other races that live half as long as vampires, right?”

“As far as I know.” I couldn't help feeling a small spasm of irritation. Lilah knew the answers to all of her questions, and the subject of exactly how many centuries of life I could reasonably expect to see always put me in a poor mood. “What's your point?”

“My grandfather was old when the Romans first stepped onto British soil. Old and in the middle of a war among the Ad-hene that had already lasted a thousand years and devastated the population, but they kept fighting and killing because that was what they
liked
to do. To them, having a child, raising it, training it—those were things that you did so that someday you'd have a worthy opponent to kill. They whittled themselves down from probably a million at their peak to less than a hundred before they actually started even trying to do something about it. When they finally stopped being able to kill each other, they turned to torture.” Lilah's face paled under her freckles at some memory, and she swallowed hard, taking a long moment before she continued. “You don't want to see the inside of Underhill, Fort. There are captive Ad-hene in there who will never die of old age, and who every morning are tortured and flayed, and every night are healed so that it can happen all over again.”

“I didn't know about that,” I said quietly. “My brother didn't tell me.” There were a lot of things Chivalry hadn't told me during the time we'd spent together during the summer, and I hadn't pushed him on any of them. In that moment I was shamefully aware that I hadn't pushed him because I hadn't really wanted to know—that, transition or not, I still desperately wished that I could've continued running away from who, and what, I was. And Chivalry had let me, and told me only about what I needed to know at the moment, or the things that wouldn't truly appall me, like goats for trolls or feral cat colonies for kobolds. Not a fifteen-percent surcharge squeezed from local supernatural businesses. Not the torturing practices of the elves.

Lilah continued. “Underhill's openings into Ireland were locked for a reason. The cost to do it was the potato famine, but they didn't catch all of the Ad-hene. My grandfather, Nokke, was the one who came to America, and he's the one who negotiated with your mother for a place in her territory where a gate to Underhill could be opened. One of the rules she made all of them swear to was that the only prey they could hunt or kill was themselves.” She set down her glass on the floor beside the sofa and scooted closer to me. It wasn't a romantic scoot, but almost as if being closer to me was necessary to underscore how seriously she needed me to take what she was saying. Her voice dropped, intensified, and as she spoke about her people, I wondered if she'd ever said these things out loud to any outsider before. “This is why I'm telling you this, Fort. There are a few people among the Neighbors who know everything I've just told you, and probably even more than that, and they
idolize
Themselves. All they think about is how they can somehow breed their way back to a race that is closer to what the Ad-hene were—more longevity, more power, more”—she paused, fumbling for a moment, then her jaw tightened and she said what had stuck in her throat—“more of the bloodlust. My boss, Tomas, is one of them. Most of the parents of the three-quarter crosses are, to some degree.”