Iron Night (26 page)

Suze tapped the folders. “I convinced my new buddy to check Lulu's records. All the victims were conceived here. Got the files, so we can look through to see what made them special.”

Outside, the cloud cover had burned off, revealing a perfect blue-sky autumn day and a bright sun. Closing the office door behind her, Prudence winced and quickly replaced her hat and adjusted her sunglasses.

Noticing her discomfort, I started to ask, “Prudence, do you need to—”

She nodded, cutting me off. “Yes, it is time I returned to my hotel.”

Relief filled me, but my mind was also working, trying to determine how best to utilize my sister's undeniable talent at eliciting honest answers from shady individuals. “Okay. We'll look into the files. If it's sunny all day, when will you be comfortable coming outside again?”

“Four, perhaps four thirty.” She tilted her head forward, considering me briefly over the top of her sunglasses. “What would you like me to do, brother?”

“I want you to find Lulu. Soli knew who I was, so if Lulu's hiding, she's hiding from us. Can you find her?”

She gave me a small smile. “It will be a pleasure.” She tugged her black silk gloves over her hands, protecting the exposed skin from the sun, and made another minute adjustment to her hat. “I will make inquiries while I rest in my room, and this evening I will start my pursuit.”

The expression on her face made me deeply grateful that at this point the odds that Lulu was not neck-deep in this situation were minuscule. “Thank you,” I said politely.

Prudence paused, then said, “That was good work back there, Fortitude.” Then, with that staggeringly unusual statement still rattling in my head as I struggled to deal with the shock of being given yet another compliment from her in less than twenty-four hours, she turned quickly and was in her car and pulling out without waiting for a reply.

As we both watched Prudence's Lexus make a turn out of the complex and disappear into traffic, I said to Suze, “I assume you heard everything that happened in the back room.”

She shrugged. “Might have.”

“What do you—” the Tetris theme song erupted from my pants pocket, cutting off my question, and I reached down and pulled out my phone. I checked the screen, saw Lilah's name, and immediately flipped it open, raising my eyebrows at Suze. “Hello?”

Lilah was speaking quickly and excitedly. “Hey, Fort. I'm at Dreamcatching now. It's just me here, and I was looking around and I think I found something. Can you come over now?”

I glanced at the files under Suze's arm. “Yeah, Suze and I will be right over. We just found something too, and we can swap notes.”

After an exchange of good-byes, we both hung up.

While we headed over to Dreamcatching, Suze paged through the files, reading with an intensity that would've left me with a distinct case of car sickness. As I stopped at a red light, I flipped my phone out and dialed Matt, checking in to see what he was doing. The call was a quick one—Matt was at the first college on his list, trying to run down any clubs and activities that could've brought the victims into contact with one another. I felt relief knowing that he was running down a fake lead that would keep him well out of danger for the day, and when he asked what I was up to, I assured him that Suze and I were just waiting to see if he could turn anything up, as both of us had to work that day and couldn't go anywhere ourselves.

I actually did have to go to work that afternoon, and I hoped that no one would notice that I had not had either the time or the inclination to wash my uniform in almost a week.

I said good-bye to Matt, and hung up.

Without looking up from the file in front of her, Suze began, “I—”

“If it's about Matt, don't say it,” I said, cutting her off.

There was a long pause and then she glanced up at me, looking at me steadily. “If you want to keep that man alive, you need to separate from him. Soon.”

My temper sparked and caught like dry grass in the summer. “You think I haven't considered that? You think I
like
having him in danger?”

Suze stared at me, her dark eyes narrowing. “I think that you and my sister have a lot in common.”

The memory of Keiko watching her human boyfriend, and the almost visible subtext of their impending tragedy, filled my mind, and my anger guttered and died. Was my own attachment to Matt like that? But whenever I thought of giving him up, of dodging his calls or picking a fight and pretending that I didn't want to see him, or, worst of all, convincing him that the bond between us didn't matter and that I didn't care about him anymore, I just couldn't think about it. Matt was the last link back to my foster parents—he could tell me about anecdotes of Brian on the job, or reminisce about how he and Jill would argue politics over the table on the many nights he'd eaten dinner with us. I wasn't ready to lose that.

“Not now, Suze. Please not now.” She started to say something, and I shook my head. “Let's just focus on the elves.” I nodded at the file. “Anything useful?”

She didn't like it; it was clear, but she allowed me to change the subject. That didn't mean she had to be happy about it, and her tone was lethal. “It's a medical file, and I am not a doctor. Right now I've got fuck-all except a detailed description of some woman's vagina.”

“That's great. Keep on that,” I said, and returned my attention to driving, grateful for the reprieve, while she muttered darkly under her breath.

At Dreamcatching, Lilah was
watching for us, waiting anxiously just inside the door. She waved us in and closed the door behind us, flipping the little sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
.

“Aren't you worried about what your boss will think about your new definition of standard hours?” Suze asked, sounding almost unwillingly amused.

Lilah snorted. “I rang up a pack of incense as today's total sales. No one will notice, or if they do they'll celebrate our improving solvency.” She led us through the beaded curtain and into the back rooms. I was entertained to note that in contrast to the soothing turquoise walls and careful ambiance of the front of the store, the areas where customers were not welcome looked like any other place I'd worked at—cement floors, piles of brown boxes, and the occasional ancient office chair that any OSHA agent worth his salt would wrap in hazardous-materials tape.

“Allegra went into labor early this morning,” she said, leading us through the warren of boxes and into an old, dusty office with orange shag carpeting and a few motivational pictures framed on the walls—clearly the den of a manager. “Tomas is staying with her, and Felix works after he gets out of school, so I had a chance to search everything.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“Well, mostly that Tomas cheats on his taxes. And this.” She slid open the bottom drawer of the desk, pulled out the folders that hung in it, and gestured for me to look.

I peered in. On the bottom of the drawer, where it must've slipped out of a file and worked its way down, was one page that was a partial view of an illustration that had been photocopied out of a book. Someone had clearly enlarged the image when they were copying it—there were a few squiggles of handwritten words around the image, but they were mostly cut off, and even the ones that I could decipher were in a foreign language. It was an ink drawing of a very familiar band of intricate knots, and beside it an anonymous male figure hung upside down from a tree, with those bands drawn on his skin at bicep and wrist.

Suze leaned in over my shoulder for a look and gave a low whistle. “That drawing of the band is the same one that Jacoby has in his design book. Someone trimmed the image from this page to give to him.”

“It was the only thing in the whole office,” Lilah explained. “I wouldn't have found it at all, except I was pulling out the files so that I could keep them in exact order.”

“Tomas must've been originally keeping a file on this here but moved it later.” I looked closer at the text. “Lilah, can you read what's written here?”

“Sorry, I took French in high school,” she said apologetically.

I was surprised. “French? Not, you know . . . Gaelic?”

She gave me a very put-out look. “Not exactly an option in Providence high schools,” Lilah said witheringly.

Suze pulled out her phone and waggled it. “Good thing we've got technology. Here.” She'd brought in the files from Lulu's office and handed them to me in return for the photocopy.

While Suze started squinting at the page and tapping words into Google, Lilah pointed at the files. “What are those?”

“Actually, we were hoping you could help.” I handed them to her. “These are files on each of the victims from Dr. Leamaro's office.”

Lilah frowned. “What?” She flipped open the first in the stack and scanned through it quickly, flicking through most of the pages until she found what she was looking for. She nodded as she read it, but looked extremely confused. “He was a recessive,” she told me, then checked each file in turn. “They were all recessives. That doesn't make sense.”

“Why not? That means he was a changeling, just one without ears, right?”

Lilah corrected me. “No, a recessive is a human. The DNA that makes a changeling is completely dormant. Believe me, the Neighbors tried everything; there's nothing that can turn that DNA on. They gave up more than twenty years ago.” Still frowning, she looked over at the illustration that Suze was examining and the drawing of the man hanging upside down. “Unless . . . Maybe this is something new, that they're trying to make active changelings.”

“We talked to Lulu's witch. He said that that tattoo is for a blood sacrifice. That doesn't sound like something that leads to long-term health.”

Lilah grimaced. “No, that doesn't sound good at all.”

Suze snapped her fingers loudly at us, drawing our attention. “Hey, how does this help with the brainstorming?” She pointed to one of the few complete and legible words on the sheet,
sliochdmhorachd
, which I couldn't even imagine how to start trying to pronounce. “Apparently this is Scottish Gaelic for ‘fertility.'” She gave me a wry look. “Sound like the elf theme song to anyone else?”

I thought back to what Ambrose had told us about his fertility potions' limitations. “Lilah, are the Ad-hene trying to breed something more than a three-quarter cross?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Sure, they've been trying for years. But it hasn't happened. The three-quarters, like Allegra and my sister, Iris, are as close as they've been able to get, and even that took magic.”

“If a potion couldn't get them a cross between a full and a three-quarter, do you think that they'd be willing to try killing someone for it?”

Lilah gave me a pensive look. “Themselves never need much of a reason to kill humans. The only reason they don't do it more often is your mother set some pretty clear rules. If they thought it would get them the seven-eighths cross they wanted . . . yeah, they'd do that.”

Suze broke in, impatient. “We can sit here and speculate on the why until the cows come home, but why not just concentrate on the who? Lulu is probably involved; that sheet proves that your boss is
definitely
involved. All we have to do is grab one of them. We get them to lead us to the rest of the group so that we can eliminate all of them, and not only do the murders stop, but we can even ask them definitively what the fuck they were up to.”

I hesitated, but Suzume had a very good point there. “I guess.” I looked over at Lilah, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside me, a few coppery curls escaping from her braid. I stumbled a moment, knowing what I had to ask her to do but hating it at the same time. There wasn't much of a choice, though, and I pushed ahead. “Listen, I know he's your boss and part of the community, and probably related to you in a few ways as well, but—”

She knew what I was asking and gave me the kindness of not having to spell it out. “I know, Fort. It's okay,” she said, cutting me off. Her long skirt had pockets in it, and she pulled out a folded piece of paper and handed it to me. She'd known the moment she found the illustration in his desk drawer what I'd need from her. Her face was pale but resolute. “If he was doing this, then he has to be stopped. This is Tomas's address. With Allegra in labor, they won't be leaving the house today.”

I opened the paper to check. There was the address, in a looping script that stopped just short of substituting hearts for
o
's. “No hospital?”

“Not with Allegra. She'll want to drop her glamour to be more comfortable during the labor. Most of us were born at home because of that.”

That gave another interesting explanation to the doctor's absence from her office this morning. “That's probably where Lulu is as well.” Lilah nodded.

Suze put her phone away and tucked the photocopy in her back pocket. Standing up, she said grimly, “And since they know that the Scotts are looking into their business, there's probably a certain skinwalker present as well. And how and why that skinwalker got involved in this circle jerk is something to add to the list of interrogation questions.”

I winced at the reminder of the skinwalker. That definitely cut out any plan of going over to the house ourselves. “I'll give the address to Prudence to track down this evening when she can go out again. She knows a lot more about skinwalkers than either of us do—she can just nab either Lulu or Tomas if they leave the house on their own.” Given Prudence's tendency to create a body count,
grab a target
was a better direction than
eliminate
. That left hours today before Prudence would be able to leave her hotel comfortably, and I paused again, torn. “Do you think they could have anything planned for today? If all the people they're killing are recessive changelings, then that's a pretty substantial pool of potential victims.”

“More specific, Fort,” Suze noted. “Recessive changelings with the blood-sacrifice tattoo. We could always see if Jacoby tattooed anyone since we talked with him, or if he didn't give us all of the names in the first place.”

“Or you could go one better,” Lilah said suddenly, looking excited. “You said that everyone who was tattooed was sent to the speed-dating that the store hosted. Well, why not just go there and see if anyone has the tattoos?”

“There's another speed-dating?” I asked.

“Tonight!” She grabbed a stack of paper from on top of the desk, flipped through it, and withdrew a flier. “It's been scheduled for weeks.”

“Don't you have to sign up for those things? In advance?” Suze asked.

Lilah smiled smugly. “Not if you know the coordinator who checks off the list and collects tickets. And with Tomas busy with Allegra, I'm going to be the only one there tonight. Since you're a guy and a girl, I don't even have to worry about the gender ratio being off—I'll just set up an extra table.”

Suze looked over at me, her expression clearly demanding that I shoot down this plan. Apparently speed-dating was not her style. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this had potential. “This could actually really work,” I said, picking up on Lilah's excitement. “What time does it start?”

“Six o'clock. You'll love it—it's at this really cute independent bookstore. Meet some new people, browse some books—this has everything!” Clearly Lilah had been giving people the hard sell for too long and just couldn't stop herself from talking it up.

I looked at the flier. “That's something else I'm not following here,” I noted. “What the hell is up with these speed-dating things? Why didn't they just grab Gage when he got his tattoo in the first place? Or abduct him from the house?”

“House snatch involves the possibility of nosy neighbors or roommates,” Suze said with a disturbing air of experience. “And given that they were faking deaths and disappearances, I can see why getting the victims to a controlled secondary location was done.”

“Crap. I guess that explains the change,” said Lilah, her coppery eyebrows arched almost up to her hairline.

“Change?” I asked her.

“Yeah, the speed-dating is something that Tomas has done here and here for a few years, but they used to be held in the store to increase foot-traffic. Then right after New Year's he started joining up with other businesses, and we were doing them a lot more often.”

“More often?” I asked, worried at the implications. “How
much
more?”

Following my train of thought, Lilah looked at the flier and blanched. “It used to be once, maybe twice a year. Now, well, we're having two in as many weeks.”

“Are there more coming up?”

Her golden-brown eyes were grim. “Four more next month.”

“I hope you get paid extra for that shit,” Suze put in.

Lilah shook her head. “I'm salary.”

“Bummer.” The women exchanged looks, for once perfectly in tune.

Reality suddenly closed in again, and I realized that even if going to a bookstore and having to fight purchase temptation when my expenses this month were already dooming me to a steady diet of ramen wasn't bad enough, I was scheduled to work through dinner shift tonight. “Oh, shit. I'm going to have to cut out early from work.” I paused, reviewing it. “Crap, it's still a decent plan. Okay, I'll just tell them I've got to head out early.” That was sure to go over like a lead balloon. No wonder most vigilante crime fighters were independently wealthy: the others were busy at work.

“Is your boss not very flexible?” Lilah asked.

“He kind of hates me very specifically,” I said glumly. And as of the night before seemed to hold me personally responsible for the failure of the bombe fruit flowers.

Suze scoffed. “Don't make it harder than it is, Fort. Just lie your ass off and say you have to go to a wake. It's not like you bag out early all the time.”

“I'm not going to lie about a wake,” I said, hurt. “I'll just be honest and say it's a one-time thing.”

She shook her head. “When you're whining about being unemployed again, remember who gave you the good advice about being deceptive that you ignored.” Suze checked her phone. “Speaking of which, if you want to arrive on time to the job you're about to be fired from, maybe we should get going.” She glanced from me to Lilah, then got that sneaky look on her face that I had come to distrust. “I'll just powder my nose and let you two say good-bye.” As she headed over to the bathroom, I looked at Lilah uncomfortably, wondering whether Suze was trying to set us up or embarrass us, or actually liked me and was trying some kind of reverse-psychology thing. Knowing Suze, it could be any of those or none of those.

Lilah and I looked awkwardly at each other. Figuring out if a girl wanted to go out with me had never been my strong suit—though, in fairness, there also hadn't been a huge line of interested parties. Maybe Suze was trying to let me know that Lilah was into me, and that she herself was really not. I'd been the recipient of variations of that maneuver on a few scarring occasions in adolescence.

Clearing my throat, wishing that this entire situation could come with accompanying subtitles to explain undercurrents to me, I looked down at the file that Lilah still had open on her lap. This one was Gage's, and I noticed that the name Nokke was typed in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Desperately grateful for a distraction, I pointed to it. “Hey, isn't that your grandfather's name, Lilah? Why is he listed in Gage's file?”