Chapter 8

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?”

Looking equally relieved at having a neutral topic, she shrugged. “Oh, that’s just the spot where the Ad-hene paternity is listed. If Gage had been a changeling, they would’ve wanted to know.”

“So Gage was actually your uncle. That’s kind of weird to think about.”

Lilah gave an amused smile—apparently my reaction to the crazy family trees she dealt with every day was borderline cute. “Yeah. But so are a lot of people. The changeling who is our stock boy, Felix, is also my uncle.” She shrugged. “It kind of stops having much meaning to you. Your family is who was raised in the same house as you, not who happens to share a few extra strands of genome.”

“Except for dating purposes.” I noted, teasingly reminding her of the prom-date fiasco.

She laughed. “True. Then it starts mattering again.” Then she looked over at me, and her smile had an extra layer of nuance. “Speaking of dating, remember to try to look the part tonight.”

Well, that seemed almost certainly flirtatious, and I did my best to reciprocate. “I will launder my finest T-shirt for the occasion,” I said grandly, and she gave a very ego-reinforcing laugh as a toilet flushed loudly nearby and Suze returned, giving us a very measuring expression.

Back in the car, I confronted her about it. “Suze, are you trying to set me up with Lilah?” I asked straight out, studying her face carefully.

She had on her best poker face. “She’s nice. Cute if you like redheads who hail from West Virginia levels of inbreeding.”

I pushed. “So, you think I should go out with her?”

With her keen instincts at driving me completely insane, Suze just gave a noncommittal shrug and smoothly changed the subject. “I think you should come up with better plans than undercover speed-dating. Bad cologne and desperation. You’re lucky I have flexible hours, Fort. When I blow off work, it’s for important shit. Like three-dollar martini night.”

I let the topic change stand, returning us to more comfortable conversational waters. “I value your sacrifices, Suze. But if a guy shows up with those tattoos, we can keep him from becoming a blood sacrifice for crazy incest hounds. I’d call that a worthwhile evening.”

“And while we’re covering that end, who’s going to be watching the tattoo parlor?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, surprised at how serious she’d suddenly become.

“If someone gets the tat of death, they’re walking out of that shop. Someone needs to keep an eye on it, and I happen to know a person who is used to spending long hours watching front doors.”

I knew who she was talking about, and felt my temper start boiling. “Are you nuts, Suze? Matt is chasing nice, safe, ivory-tower leads today. I’d rather not reinvolve him in the real shit.”

“Your buddy isn’t stupid, Fort. Eventually he’s going to realize that there’s nothing there and then he’ll want back in. Instead of waiting for that to happen, why not give him a job now? Sitting in a coffee shop for hours at a time is pretty safe, and might actually be useful if he can spot a potential victim before we’re able to shut down the whole operation.” Suze’s voice was cool. When she wanted to, she could play logic like an upright bass, and I ground my teeth together and tried to ignore it, focusing on the other cars in our lane as if our commute was the only thing worthy of my attention. Maybe she’d let it go.

“You know I’m right,” she said, clearly having no intention of letting it go.

I hated it when she was right.

•   •   •

Suze and I had disagreements all the time, and about most subjects, but usually we let most conflicts die after a few sarcastic quips and a general agreement to disagree. This time it was different, and we sniped back and forth at each other for the entire drive back to my apartment and even up the stairs. I knew why she wasn’t letting the subject go: everything about the plan made sense, and my only defense was that I wasn’t comfortable with it. Calling Matt and pulling him back toward the real investigation scared the crap out of me.

Of course, once I’d admitted that that was my sole objection, I didn’t have many options left. So after we’d cautiously made our way up the stairs and into my apartment (the caution being twofold—firstly that we’d been arguing for twenty minutes and were trying to give each other some space, but secondly that a skinwalker knew my address and we were keeping an eye out for a potential, if unlikely, ambush), I stood in my bedroom and called Matt.

It was a quick conversation, which, given how Judas-y I was feeling at the moment, was a relief. Just as Suze and I had known, there had been no activity or club link to be found at the colleges, and Matt welcomed the partial truths that I fed him and claimed were Lilah’s discoveries from questioning fellow cult members, and agreed to stake out the Iron Needle and keep an eye on any customers who fit the profile.

I called my sister while I pulled on my work clothing, which was definitely overdue for a trip through the wash. I did my best with my handy bottle of Febreze while I filled Prudence in on everything we’d learned and passed along Tomas’s home address, emphasizing that everyone except Soli was on a capture-alive-and-with-minimal-damage basis. She was happy to get a clear starting point, and promised that when she headed out she’d go straight there.

Once dressed, I also quickly packed up two duffel bags. The thought that Soli knew where I lived and had already climbed my fire escape once was enough to make my skin crawl, and I was planning on camping out at Suze’s until everything was finally wrapped up. Into one bag went the basics of living—three days’ worth of clothing, deodorant, and my Firefly DVDs—and into the other I packed the basics of staying alive: my Colt and the Ithaca 37, along with every round of ammo I’d accumulated.

For once, Suze had respected my privacy and stayed in the main room while I changed and packed. I’d been relieved by the decision, feeling that both of us needed a chance to decompress. As I walked out of my bedroom, carrying both duffel bags (one noticeably heavier than the other), I saw her sitting with very unusual meekness at the table. In front of her was a freshly made sandwich, and when I walked over to her, she nudged the plate forward, toward me, in an unmistakable gesture.

I paused, surprised. Suze didn’t apologize often. Equally rare was her willingness to make food, and that she’d made food that was solely for me? This was blue-lobster levels of rare.

“I’m still right,” she said, looking up at me. “But I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to protect him because you care about him.” I’d never seen Suze look that uncomfortable before—it was a foreign expression on someone who seemed to walk through life with the confidence and self-assurance of a small army. I felt both touched that she’d show me that face and also a little regretful that it was there.

“Thank you,” I said, picking up the sandwich and biting in. Grilled cheese. So this was what apology tasted like. I swallowed. “Suze, I—”

She cut me off quickly. “Let’s not get psychological about this. Just eat the sandwich and let’s forget about it.”

I looked at her until she met my eyes. “Okay,” I said, and took another bite.

Her face brightened, her shoulders straightened, and I could almost feel the force of her confidence reasserting itself, like the gravity well of a gas giant. “Okay,” she said, relaxing. “Now let’s talk about this weasel-fuck speed-dating thing.”

There wasn’t enough time after I’d eaten to drive Suze back to her place and still get to work on time, so we worked out a plan that she would drop me off at Peláez and drive the Fiesta the rest of the day until she came back to get me for the speed-dating.

“Do not wreck my car,” I warned her as the car idled behind the kitchen entrance of the restaurant.

“Of course not,” she promised as she shimmied bonelessly into the driver’s seat.

“Or alter it in any way.”

“Well, now you’re just being unreasonable.” She gave me a wholly untrustworthy smile and pulled away before I could say anything else. I watched her merge into traffic, wondering bleakly if I’d ever see the Fiesta again.

Daria was extremely displeased when I told her that I’d have to leave early that night, and spent ten minutes emphasizing to me exactly how thin the ice was beneath the feet of my continued employment. But apparently never having missed a night of work before this was enough to prevent her from openly firing me, though the look in her eyes suggested that if someone had been standing beside me with a resume in hand at that moment I would’ve found myself out on my ass. I swore over and over that it would never happen again—and, with my current level of expenses, I was pretty sure that I couldn’t afford for it to happen again.

I gave my best hustle that afternoon, assisted by the fact that Chef Jerome was still refining the bombe fruit flowers’ alcohol mix in a corner and was less interested than usual in harassing me. When five thirty rolled around I ignored Daria’s death glare and slipped out the back door, where, true to her word, Suze was waiting for me in the Fiesta, which, thankfully, looked to be in the same state of disrepair that it had been six hours ago, with no new additions.

Suze hopped out of the driver’s seat and tossed me the keys, which I caught only because of my increasing vampire reflexes, as the vast majority of my brain was taking in her appearance. Apparently Suze had decided to embrace our activity that night, and had gone full shock and awe in her clothing choice. High heels and a short yet swishy gold dress were definitely a change from what I usually saw her in.

“Planning on breaking hearts and crushing dreams tonight?” I finally managed to force out of my dry throat.

“You know it,” she said with a sassy smile. “If this wraps up early, we can go salsa dancing.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said, watching as she strutted over to the other side of the car and poured herself into the passenger’s seat. I shook my head and got in myself, slamming the door hard to make it stick. “I called Prudence half an hour ago from the bathroom. She went to the address Lilah gave us. It’s definitely Tomas’s house, but no one was there. Once we finish with this, we should probably swing around and help her hunt.”

“No worries,” Suze said, and flipped up the skirt of her dress, revealing not only a long, perfectly toned thigh, but also a very familiar knife strapped to that thigh. Apparently Arlene was along for the ride tonight.

“That is a textbook definition of a mixed message,” I noted. Forcing my eyes away, I turned to start backing the car up, then froze again. “Suze,” I said, impressed at how controlled my voice sounded. “Why is there a plushy Cthulhu doll staring at me from the back window?” From tentacles to wings to fuzzy green fur, never had the Elder God looked that cuddly.

She smiled at me, eyes glittering in the light from the setting sun. “I was going to give him to you for Christmas, but I didn’t have much time to work with.”

I shook my head and reached back to snag it, pulling it down from my back windshield and into the backseat. It was very soft, almost asking to be squeezed. I looked around the interior of the car but couldn’t see anything else out of place. The wide grin on Suze’s face gave me no hints—either I was missing whatever else she’d done to my poor Fiesta or it really had just been the Cthulhu, and now she was just seeing if she could trick me into thinking that she’d pulled another prank. Those were always her favorite types of jokes anyway—no work on her part, yet months of potential dividends.

I didn’t have time to examine the entire car, so I just shook my head and concentrated on the drive to the bookstore, reminding myself sternly not to try to overanalyze Suze’s wicked little snicker. I discovered halfway through the drive that she had also changed all of my radio presets to synth-pop stations, and apparently figured out a new way to save the settings so that I couldn’t reprogram them.

•   •   •

A few of Providence’s independent bookstores had survived the massive Barnes & Noble influx of the nineties, and the ones that had lasted were managing to hold on as the big-box Goliaths closed one by one, victims of their own business model. The site of tonight’s speed-dating was in my own neighborhood of College Hill, holding on through that most reliable of clientele: college students, college professors, and intellectual hangers-on. As we walked into Books on the Hill, the intensely evocative aroma of brand-new books hit me, and I sighed deeply, my eyes immediately gravitating to at least three titles that I knew I had to own. On months like this I usually avoided Books on the Hill like the plague, because it could always be relied on to ravage my budget with the virulence of Ebola-Zaire.

“Suze, can I bum a twenty?” I whispered as we passed the new arrivals table.

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” Suze said piously, speeding past me. We’d discussed the importance of not looking like we were together, but I glared at her back as she took complete advantage of the circumstances.

Books on the Hill had a small back room where author readings and signings usually took place, and tonight it had been stuffed with about two dozen small folding tables, each just large enough to accommodate a pair of chairs tucked under it. Lilah stood at a long side table covered with the tools of her trade—shiny geodes, scented candles, and the egg timer that would be dictating our romantic lives for the next two hours. Her hair was down and secured in place with another wide fabric headband that very conveniently covered the upper half of her ears. It matched her lilac-colored sweater and sensible khaki slacks—this was the most conservatively that I’d ever seen her dress, and I wondered if there was some unspoken rule about the speed-date moderator making sure not to outshine any of the participants.

“Your hair looks nice like that,” I complimented her as she checked me off of the list and handed me a pen and a gridded sheet of paper that I would apparently be using to grade all of my five-minute dates.

Lilah blushed a little and smiled at me, unable to resist reaching up with one hand to self-consciously pat at her headband to make sure that her ears were tucked away. “You think so?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. I was no expert on women, but I’d learned enough from the dating world to know that hairstyle changes should always be responded to with a compliment. “It’s very fluffy.” Not that I had a particularly deep reserve of compliments, of course, but Lilah’s smile widened appreciatively, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back.

Her smile dimmed for a second, and she nodded to where Suze had staked out a table already. Somehow she’d managed to get her hands on a copy of the Kama Sutra, which she’d plunked down right in front of her. Her arms were now crossed just behind it and there was a very definite Go on . . . ask me about it, chump look on her face. I felt a distinct twinge of sympathy for every other guy in the room, most of whom were looking at her like weekend backpackers put down in the base camp of K2. They really, really wanted a summit, but were also slightly concerned that they might die in the attempt.

“Suzume looks very pretty,” Lilah said. There was a distinct undertone in her voice.

“She likes causing riots,” I said. But seeing the way that Lilah’s smile kept drooping like a wilting daisy, I noted brightly, “But you look really nice too. In an undercover CIA-agent kind of way.” I wondered briefly if that was going to read as well as it had sounded in my head. Thank God she was apparently willing to go with me on it, because she laughed.

I appreciated that she had politely avoided commenting on my own appearance. There hadn’t been time to change, so I’d just taken off my bow tie, unbuttoned the top button on my white shirt, and done my best to turn my shellacked hair into something that looked effortless and spiky, but was more spray-glued clumpy. Suze had tried to remove a few of the worst stains on my shirt with a napkin and a bottle of water, but without much success, so I now looked like a stained and slightly dripped-on waiter on his smoke break.

I reminded myself that this was an undercover-surveillance mission to try to save lives, and that any rejection I suffered during it therefore did not count toward my life total.

The event started. At its core it was pretty simple, based on the idea that you would know within five minutes whether you had any interest at all in the person sitting in front of you. We sat at the little tables and made five-minutes of polite chitchat; then the timer would go off, we would thank each other, and the guys would get up and have to move to the next table, during this process trying to mark up our little spreadsheets without being obvious about whether rejection was actually happening.

On top of everything else, I also had to do my best to check out my five-minute dates’ wrists for any new tattoos. There hadn’t been any female victims yet, but it seemed better to be thorough, though I was extremely glad that it was Suze’s job to check the men. Whenever I was near her table, I was able to admire her technique of using very flirtatious hand-holding as a method of sliding cuffs up wrists.

The weather had been mild enough today that most of the women were in short sleeves or no sleeves, giving me an easy way to check them, but a few were wearing sensible cardigans, and those proved very difficult. Sleeve nudging within fifteen seconds of an introduction apparently came off as creepy and sleazy when I tried it, as opposed to salacious and irresistible like when Suze did it. Several times I just gave in and pretended that “So, do you have any tattoos?” was an acceptable conversation starter.

What I had also failed to realize was just how exhausting it was to meet a new person every five minutes and attempt to sparkle as a potential mate. As the time ground along, I noticed that the women stopped being as polite to me—once they’d decided that they were not going to put a check next to my name, several dropped even the pretense of a conversation and began either scoping out the room for more likely prospects, eyeing guys that they’d liked better than me, or (in several cases) shooting looks of death over to the table where Suzume was holding court. I decided that I would never get desperate enough to do this for actual dating purposes.

Or if I did, I would choose a much better wingman than Suze. My wingman would definitely be a guy. And preferably with the kind of Quasimodo face and Hulk-like manners that would make me shine in comparison.

We were down to the last three dates, and I was desperately clinging to the light at the end of the tunnel when I sat at the next table and found myself face-to-face with my ex-girlfriend, Beth.

Or, at least, face-to-face with her skin.

That was Beth’s face, with her olive skin and the one small chicken-pox scar under her left eye. Those were her rich black curls tumbling down to her shoulders. But Beth’s dark brown eyes had never looked at me with that kind of icy malice and barely contained violence that froze me in place as I stared. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening—my brain was stuck on repeat, like a trapped bee battering itself against glass. I couldn’t be sitting here staring at that thing that was looking back at me from Beth’s eyes.

“Soli,” I managed to whisper between numb lips. I was carved out of ice, disbelieving, the shock rattling through me with the force of a storm.

A nasty smile spread across that familiar face, its features emphasized with more makeup than Beth had ever even owned. “I told you that you’d be paying for my new suit,” she said, and even her voice was Beth’s but with a different phrasing, a different accent. It was throbbingly familiar—the voice that used to whisper activist pillow-talk to me in the dark—but it was a stranger moving her mouth, forcing words up her throat, over her tongue and lips.

I’d only ever seen Beth in baggy peasant blouses, long beaded skirts, and the occasional maxi dress on more formal occasions. Now I saw what she would’ve looked like in a sleek black top and a pair of leather pants. I wanted to vomit—it was treating Beth’s body, her flesh, as its own dress-up mannequin.

“What did you do?” I couldn’t wrap my brain around it; I couldn’t accept it. Beth, with her bright mind, her resolute idealism, her cheerfully cheating ways, couldn’t be dead.

“Went shopping, dear.” And that thing grinned so widely that I could see that there were teeth in the back of its mouth that were much too sharp to be molars. “You should be more careful with the privacy settings on your Facebook.” She stretched out her hands, examining Beth’s long artist’s fingers with a connoisseur’s eye.

This was worse than just Beth’s death. This was a horror, a perversion, a desecration to see her move Beth’s fingers.

Somewhere under that smooth surface was that hard black thing that I’d seen last night—crouching there and pulling the strings to Beth’s body.

I wanted to tear it out with my bare hands.

My hands shook from the effort it took not to wrap themselves around the skinwalker’s neck and squeeze. But she’d done this on purpose—we were surrounded by the banal chitchat of two dozen humans, none of them remotely aware that they were like blissful beachgoers in the opening scenes of a Jaws movie, completely unaware that death was gliding in their midst.

Soli continued smugly. “They might find the skin’s meat. I wrapped it in a plastic bag and threw it down her building’s garbage shaft.” She giggled. “Those things are so convenient.”

Somehow that horrible image of Beth’s tortured remains cut through just enough of the urge to kill. My mind raced, trying to determine some foothold on the creature in front of me, some way to coax information out of it that would trip it up. Something that would expose enough of a vulnerability that I could slice it out of Beth like an excised tumor. I grasped the last thing she’d said. “So, convenience is important to you? Then why haul Gage’s body up our fire escape and leave it in his own bedroom?”

She giggled again, and the sound was like a knife scraping down a chalkboard. “I figured that the vampires would have plenty of practice making bodies disappear, especially ones with no blood left in them.” Then the pleasure leached out of her face and she pouted, Beth’s full lower lip overly emphasized in dark red lipstick. “Staging an accident is boring, and the incinerator at the doctor’s office is so slow that you have to wait half the night for it to finish. It’s annoying. I wanted to have some fun. Hit a club.” The pout was replaced by a frown, and in a mercurial change of mood, that malicious anger was back. “You weren’t supposed to get that curious about a dead human. So this”—she tapped one long finger against the side of Beth’s face—“is a warning. You and the fox can stay out of my business.”

Part of me knew I should try to signal Suzume, or, hell, even try to text Prudence under the table, but I couldn’t pull enough of my brain away from the rising bubble of rage that was keeping me fixated on the skinwalker, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling like a frozen deer but like a rabid dog pulling against the end of its leash.

I leaned forward, across the table, and very deliberately said, “I’m going to kill you.” My eyes felt strangely warm, but for once I didn’t feel panic as I wondered whether the pupils were expanding past where a human’s would. I didn’t care if I looked like a vampire at this moment—in fact, I hoped that I did.

Whatever was happening, Soli didn’t look impressed. Instead she gave a slow smile. “You’re going to try,” she corrected me.

The egg timer went off, indicating that our five-minute date was up. As soon as the sound registered through the room, Soli was out of her chair and moving fast for the back door of the store. I jumped up quickly enough that my chair fell backward and chased her. She was faster than me, and I had to dodge around all of the other men who had just gotten up to change tables, so she beat me out the door, but not by much.

The back door led to a small gravel customer parking lot that was lit only by a weak security light on the back of the building. As the door slammed behind me, I saw Soli running toward a car parked in the fire zone with its four-ways on. I raced after her and caught up enough that I was able to snag a handful of her dark, curling hair in my hand. It felt familiar—I’d run my hand a thousand times through Beth’s hair. Now I wrapped my fist in it and yanked backward with all my weight, snapping her head back and arresting her forward movement. She stumbled hard but didn’t go down, instead pivoting toward me, and then we were grappling tightly. I briefly got a hand around her throat, but she was still a lot stronger than me, and I was thrown hard to the ground, which knocked the wind out of me.

Instead of following up her strike, I heard the sound of running feet on the gravel and knew that she was heading for the car. I managed to roll to my side, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch her in time. As I started to pull myself up, the sound of spinning tires on gravel filled the air, and I suddenly saw a set of headlights coming straight toward me. Then there was a hand at the back of my shirt and another on my arm, grabbing and yanking me out of the way just in time, and I could feel the rush of the displaced air as the car barely missed running me down.

I heard the panting breath in my ear, and I knew even without looking that it was Suze who had pulled me out of the way. We both watched as the car screeched out of the lot and disappeared.

“It was her, the skinwalker,” I panted to Suze.

She nodded, then whispered to me, “There were too many people and smells in the room—I didn’t know what was going on until I saw how you were looking at her.”

“She has Beth’s skin. Why didn’t I notice her from the beginning?”

Suze’s voice was grim. “I don’t think she was there from the start.” She yanked at me, tugging me back toward the store. When we reached the back door I could hear Lilah’s voice, talking to people still in the shop, making up a story about a participant who had to leave early and how she’d forgotten her phone at the table, which her date had run off to try to return to her. I could hear the cooing murmur of the speed-daters as they accepted the story, talking helpfully about possible ways to locate the phone’s owner.

The evening’s events broke up soon after that, with the speed-daters all shooed back to the front of the store, where the bookstore workers clearly hoped that they’d top the night off with a book purchase. Suze ducked her horde of admirers and slipped out the back door again. I made a show of helping Lilah pack up her table as everyone else moved out. Not that I helped much. I couldn’t get the image of Beth’s marionette body out of my mind, and my hands shook uncontrollably. A polished geode slipped out of my grip and fell onto the table with a loud crack. I winced, and Lilah shot me a sympathetic look and started to open her mouth to say something, but I shook my head quickly, cutting her off, and took a deep breath and shoved down what had happened just far enough to fake functional for a little while longer. Ah, compartmentalization—my old friend.

Most of the daters had left when Suzume slid back in ten minutes later, shuffling up to where Lilah and I were putting candles into boxes.

“There’s a dead woman behind the Dumpster in the back parking lot,” she said quietly. “That’s the person whose table Soli took over to talk with Fort.”

A fat vanilla candle dropped out of Lilah’s hand. “She killed someone? Just to do that?”

I thought back grimly to Chivalry’s descriptions of the skinwalkers. “My brother told me that skinwalkers leave trails of bodies. I think we’re getting a good idea of how they like to operate.”

“What do we do about the body?” Lilah whispered, her eyes darting over to the front checkout desk, where blissfully ignorant literary commerce was taking place as everyone got in their last purchases before closing time, then back to us, pinballing between me and Suzume for a moment before locking onto the kitsune as the one most likely to have a plan. She was right—I was using everything I had right now to look passably normal even as Beth’s death rattled through me. Constructing an actual response to this situation was far beyond me.

Fortunately, Suzume was more than willing to take command. “Soli grabbed her purse, might have taken her jewelry. Right now it looks like a mugging gone wrong—like it happened when she was walking to her car. I put a small illusion down to hide her for now, but I’ll drop it when we leave. Someone will find her.” I’d seen Suzume put a fox illusion on a dead body before, and knew how well she could hide something from unsuspecting minds. People walking to their cars could walk through the poor woman’s blood and not even know it.

“Why did she do this? Just to taunt me?” I couldn’t understand why Soli had taken the trouble to come tonight but then just run out.

Suze narrowed her eyes, considering. “She’s working for the elves, and right now we’re closing in on them. Maybe she was working on getting our attention focused on her and off her employers.”

“Why? That won’t help them in the long run,” I noted.

Lilah suddenly lit up. “But it would in the short run,” she said in a eureka tone of voice. She glanced around, confirming that we were still alone at the back of the store, and whispered, “Allegra’s son was born this afternoon. A lot of people were excited. Even Themselves were excited.”

I frowned, not following. “But Allegra’s a three-quarter. That’s still rare, right?”

Lilah nodded. “Yes, but it was more than that. There have been three-quarter-to-three-quarter babies born before—that generation is just coming of age, but it turned out that they’re a lot like the half-bloods. They can have children with each other easily; they don’t even need a witch potion. It’s like the human part of our heritage stabilizes us, lets us breed. So they shouldn’t have been that excited, but they are.”

“Breakthrough-level excited?” Suze asked slowly, and Lilah nodded.

“I talked to a friend. His brother is a three-quarter and when he was talking about the baby, he was saying that this was important for the whole community.”

The pieces were starting to come together for me. “Allegra had a baby today. So when would that baby have been conceived?”

Suzume shrugged. “Nine-month gestation. February-ish, right?” She looked at Lilah for confirmation, and Lilah paused to do a little mental arithmetic, then nodded in agreement.

I remembered standing in Matt’s office, listening as he listed off the names and dates of the missing men. “Rian Orbon went missing in February. He was the first one with the tattoos.”

Suze hissed slowly under her breath. “Death-sacrifice tattoos,” she muttered, realizing what I was saying. She looked over at Lilah, whose eyes had popped wide at the implications. “February death, February conception. The speed-dates started being held away from Dreamcatching after New Year’s—so January. And what have the elves been trying for that would make them excited?”

“A seven-eighths cross,” she murmured despairingly. Then a thought clearly crossed her mind, and she looked almost physically ill. “There are more than forty women who are three-quarter crosses and are the right age to have a baby.”

“And they’d apparently need to kill one guy for each,” I agreed. “That’s forty deaths.”

Suze added on, “And who says that the women could only have one baby each? Lulu’s practice has been producing recessive changelings for thirty years. That’s a big pool of resources to draw from if your goal is to produce a whole breeding generation of seven-eighths crosses.”

“All those speed-dates scheduled just for next month,” Lilah said, still looking ready to puke at the scale of what was going one. “I think we can assume they’re already working on that goal.”

The implications were horrific, and I felt a surge of adrenaline as I realized how many people were at risk. “We need Tomas or Lulu—someone who can lead us right to the heart of this so that we can stop the whole thing.” To Lilah, I said, “My sister checked the address you gave us; it’s empty. If they knew my family was looking into this, where would they hide?”

She shook her head, her coppery hair glinting in the light. “I don’t know. I’ve never been involved with them that far. They’ve never told me these things.”

I rubbed the back of my hand hard against my forehead as some of the bookstore staff members came in to start cleaning up the tables and chairs from the speed-dating. “We need to head out of here. Lilah, can you talk to anyone who might know more about this?”

With clear effort, Lilah pulled herself together. “I’ll try.” She sounded exhausted. “A few of the Neighbors are having informal parties tonight—I’ll hit a few and see if I can hear any gossip.”

“Okay. Call me if you find anything out.” Awkwardly I patted her shoulder, wishing there were a Hallmark card for I’m sorry you had to learn that people you are related to are murdering psychopaths, and that to prevent even more killings you have to betray even more people you’ve known since before you were potty trained. And wouldn’t that look cute in a kitten’s thought bubble? Lilah gave me a small nod, and I knew that a little of that had translated.

Suze and I made our way to the car, both feeling very jumpy as we went. Once there, I called my sister—Prudence was still hunting for Lulu and not getting results, but after hearing about our encounter with Soli and that she was now wearing my ex-girlfriend, Prudence told me in no uncertain terms that unless I had special information or Suze had the ability to track a car by scent, the best thing we could do was find a safe place to set up for the night and to be ready to head out and join her if she was able to find someone involved in the murders.

“They have kept the details of their operation very close to the chest, apparently,” my sister said, and in the background I heard a muffled scream that I decided not to think about very closely. “But I am confident my inquiries will eventually bear fruit.”

“That’s great, Prudence,” I said. “Just remember that you need my permission to kill someone.” There was another, less muffled scream, and I immediately amended that to, “Or maim.”

“Very well, but you are limiting my options somewhat,” she said, but there was amusement rather than irritation in her voice. Violence apparently put a little pep in her step.

Maybe it was knowing she was mellower than usual, or maybe I would’ve asked anyway. “Listen, Prudence, about the skinwalker—”

“Yes?”

I turned away from Suze, not wanting to look at her when I asked this. “The humans they kill to . . . use. It’s just their body, right? There are no other . . . effects?”

“What do you mean, effects?”

“You know—mannerisms, memories. They don’t get those things . . . do they?” I was dancing around it, not wanting to say the word soul. On one hand I felt almost silly and superstitious—nothing in my experience had ever suggested that we even had souls. But at the same time it felt deadly important, and saying it out loud would make my fear too real, too possible.

“Oh, that. No, none of that transfers.” Prudence’s voice was almost, well, on someone else I would’ve assumed that she was trying to reassure me. With it coming from my sister, I just felt confused. “No need to worry about the creature knowing phone numbers or whatever odd little pillow talk you might’ve shared with the meat. Don’t let the creature try to fool you either—they are very accomplished manipulators and usually pick up plenty of information from the home of the skin.”

Prudence’s easy use of the words meat and skin ripped through me, but was no less than I could’ve expected. Her easy dismissal of Beth—I’d known better than to expect otherwise, but it didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt, and I wanted to end the phone call. “Thanks, that’s—”

“Although . . .”

“Yes?” The skin on the back of my neck prickled.

“Well, I’ve never seen it happen to a vampire before, but just as a bit of trivia, the skinwalker can use the skin as a talisman for dreamwalking.”

“What?” I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded bad.

“Yes,” Prudence practically chirped, as if she were sharing a delightful anecdote over coffee. “They can use it to torment the relatives and loved ones of the skin. No actual gain of information, just projection. Silly and useless, really.” Her voice warmed and became that almost-reassuring tone again that set me on edge. “I’ve never even heard of a vampire succumbing—and a skinwalker once paraded around in my favorite bridge partner for weeks. I can’t even tell you how enraged I was. Another one actually wore Chivalry’s wife.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

“Well, she was quite tiresome—incredibly gauche and whiny thing; don’t even get me started on her bad taste in clothing—but of course Chivalry was quite worked up. Not a single dream, though, and you know how much he utterly dotes on those wives of his, so I wouldn’t be worried about any of that nonsense. Now, remember that this creature apparently likes to run Internet searches on you. Get a hotel room tonight.”

I didn’t like my sister or her methods, but in this situation it was hard to disagree with excellent advice. Forty minutes later Suze and I were carrying our bags into the cheapest room we could find that still offered two beds. We took turns in the bathroom, changing into jeans and long-sleeve shirts, the kind of clothing that could be napped in but would be appropriate if Prudence got a location and we had to run off into the night to god only knew where.

When it was my turn in the bathroom I took a quick shower, having learned from hard experience that sleeping with work levels of product in my hair resulted in very weird, almost sculpturally bad hair the next day. I rushed through the shower, not wanting to deal with my thoughts or the horrible ball of grief that I knew was waiting for me when I actually sat down and thought about Beth. What had happened to her and how her death was so utterly and inescapably because she’d known me. I was rubbing my hair dry with a towel when I came back into the room and found Suzume sitting cross-legged on her bed, a half-sausage/half-veggie-lover’s pizza beside her, and a six-pack of beer on the floor.

I stared. My wallet was still in my pants pocket.

“Did you buy dinner?” I asked, shocked.

Suze gave me a measured look. “Don’t get used to this,” she warned.

We demolished the pizza. Afterward, sitting on the floor with my back leaning against my bed, carefully disassembling and checking each part of the Colt and the Ithaca before putting them back together while my phone remained frustratingly silent, I said into the comfortable silence that had fallen between us, “When this whole thing is over, I never want to talk about elf genealogy again. The last few days have been like some nightmare biology lesson. Like Attack of Mendel’s Beans set in the Appalachian mountains, crossed with a PBS special on Egyptian pharaohs.”

Lying on her belly, watching me from half-lidded eyes, Suze agreed. “Amen to that. All this whinging and sacrifice magic fuckery is making me even gladder than usual that I’m a kitsune.”

I tilted my head. “Why? How do you guys manage it?”

Suze shrugged lazily. “You meet a guy in a bar, you get laid, a few months later you have a litter of kits. Easy-peasy, and you even get a few free drinks in the deal.”

I thought about it for a long minute. “So, you don’t even tell the guy that he’s a father?”

There was a very serious look in Suzume’s eyes. “It’s safer for everyone that way.”

She hadn’t said it to accuse me, I knew. She was stating a fact of life, a piece of the kitsune culture. But I swallowed hard, and the silence that fell wasn’t comfortable at all. The guns were all checked, and I pushed them under my bed. Out of sight if someone glanced around the room, but right where I could get to them quickly. I climbed into the bed and rolled to face the wall, pulling the cheap hotel comforter over my shoulders. “I’m going to sleep,” I said, my voice rough.

I was tired. Last night I’d gotten barely four hours of sleep, and the past few days had been brutal on many different levels. I felt battered—not physically, because the blood I’d drunk from my mother still crackled through my veins, healing my bruises and abrasions faster than they ever should’ve healed. But it was a mental exhaustion that made me feel like I wanted to just pull the comforter over my head and not get out of bed for a week. Too much had happened. Too many innocent people were dead because of grudges and agendas that they’d never even known existed.

It had been hoping too much that Suze wouldn’t say anything, but when she did, her voice was very careful, and she picked her words as cautiously as a barefoot girl picked her way down a rocky beach. “Fort, do you want to talk about what happened to Beth?”

I shook my head, not looking away from the wall in front of me. “No, Suze, I can’t. Not now. Not until Soli is dead and I never have to look at her again when she’s . . .” I paused, not able to talk around the tightness in my chest, the confusion and the pain that I was pressing down as hard as I could to keep functioning for however longer I needed to finish this. I could start trying to deal with it then, but I knew that if I touched it now, I’d just be a shivering and rocking ball. And that’s not what Beth or Gage or all those other people needed right now. “I just can’t talk about it.”

Suzume paused, then said gently, “Okay.” And I heard the rustle of fabric as she reached over and clicked off the light.

The darkness felt comforting. I didn’t have to try to control what was showing on my face anymore. I heard her shift around on her own bed; then everything was quiet except for the sound of both of us breathing and the distant whoosh of traffic on the street. A long time passed as I tried my best to think about nothing at all, but finally I couldn’t stop it anymore, and I whispered, almost under my breath, “Suze?”

She heard me, of course. Even when she was human, her ears were sharper than mine. “Yes?”

I pushed the words out. “If, for whatever reason, I’m hurt or—”

She was moving before I could finish, and I heard the springs shifting in her bed as she rolled off and knelt on the floor next to my bed, wrapping one arm around me and pressing her forehead against the back of my neck. Neither of us said anything for a long minute, just breathing as she held me. For all the time we spent together, it was rare for her to touch my skin, but there wasn’t anything sexual about this—despite the darkness, and tenderness of her touch, and the feel of her breath. It was comforting, as if she were wrapping me in all her wiry strength, both of body and will.

When she spoke, it was a whisper, but there was steel in it and a promise that I knew that she meant and would never break. “I’ll rip the skin off that bitch’s back,” she said right against my ear. “Whatever happens, she won’t get to keep what she stole.”

It soothed me to hear that, relaxed the part of me that I didn’t like and that needed blood and vengeance, but that I couldn’t ignore tonight. I reached out with one hand, wrapping it around her elbow, letting my forearm rest against hers. Neither of us moved, and it was in that position that I was finally able to close my eyes and let sleep take me.

•   •   •

I knew I was dreaming, but it wasn’t my dream. I was walking down a hallway, but at the same time it wasn’t me who was walking.

It was like being at an art-house theater and watching a bad shaky-cam, low-budget movie. The perspective seemed off, and the color balance was somehow wrong in a way I couldn’t quite define but that gave me a distant feeling of nausea. But I recognized the hallway I was walking down and apartment door I knocked on.

Beth opened the door—the Beth I’d known, with an open expression and a ready smile. What she saw erased her smile—she looked down at something on my chest and opened her mouth to scream. I was only able to see, not hear, but a hand that was mine but not mine slapped out to cover her mouth, and when I saw that hand, with its caramel skin and perfect manicure such a contrast to the long black talons that punched out through it, I knew whose dream this was.

But knowing didn’t wake me up, and I was looking through Soli’s eyes, feeling the movement of her limbs as if they were my own, as she shoved her way into the apartment, slammed the door shut behind her, and shoved Beth down to the ground. Those were her hands, yet my hands, that slapped a piece of duct tape across Beth’s mouth to keep her quiet, then flipped her over and pressed one knee hard into the middle of her back to keep Beth exactly where she was. I could feel Beth struggling, trying to push up and get away, but Soli was too strong and held her down.

I felt an echo of irritation inside me. This wasn’t my emotion; it was Soli’s. She was irritated—irritated that she had to replace a skin she’d been fond of. Irritated that this skin wouldn’t be as pretty. Irritated that this had to be done here, where the meat would have to be kept quiet.

And then all that irritation ebbed away, replaced by the pleasure Soli felt, and I was forced to feel as she placed one long black talon at the back of Beth’s neck, just at her hairline, and began to peel the skin off of her. I knew how much Soli enjoyed it as Beth writhed, because it wasn’t just Soli feeling it; it was me—

I woke up when Suze slapped me across the face, and I knew from the blooming heat in both cheeks that she must’ve been hitting me for a while now. Someone was yelling, and it took me a second to register that my throat was sore because the person yelling was me.

The light wasn’t on, but neither of us had closed the heavy drapes and moonlight poured through the window, illuminating Suze as she straddled my chest, one hand still drawn back to deliver another smack if it proved necessary. Her hair hung down around her face, obscuring it in a wave of black, but all of her attention was on me. I stopped yelling, and we both paused.

“Fort?” she said harshly. “That’s the kind of night terror that needs a psychiatrist.”

“It wasn’t my dream,” I said with surprising difficulty. For someone who looked so tiny and dainty, Suze was a little more weight than I liked on my chest. I nudged her leg with my hand, and she took the hint and dismounted me. Instead of returning to her own bed, however, she plopped herself next to me on the bed, her back resting against the headboard as she looked down at me intently.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I saw Soli kill Beth,” I said. “Or start to, anyway. You woke me up before she finished.”

There was a long pause. “I’m going to go on record that I hate this fucking skinwalker,” Suze said. “And at the risk of sounding species-ist, I’m going to say that I don’t ever want to meet another one.”

“Noted and agreed.” I struggled to keep my voice from reflecting the icy horror that was filling my chest. “So, apparently I don’t have enough vampire-ness, and it can get into my head.” Maybe it was because I wasn’t through the transition. Or maybe it was something more. After all, my mother had made me differently than my siblings—she’d told me that but nothing else.

Suze’s voice cut through my thoughts. “According to your sister, it’s just the dreams.”

My jaw dropped. “You’re going to call this just? What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

There was a short pause; then Suze asked, “Have you ever studied the fine art of occlumency?”

I didn’t hesitate, but smacked her as hard as I could with my pillow. It was one of those hotels that set up at least four half-size pillows on each bed, so Suze was immediately able to similarly arm herself, and for a few minutes the only sounds in the room were of pillows making contact and muffled curses as we engaged in a brief but very serious pillow fight. “This is not the time for a goddamn Harry Potter reference!” I finally yelled, and the pillow fight ended just as quickly as it had started. I dropped back onto the bed, breathing hard. “Seriously, Suze. What the hell am I going to do here?”

Suzume was also panting from the intensity of our pillow brawl, something that even under these circumstances made me feel a little better about myself. She wiggled back into her previous position of sitting up against the headboard, but now reached down and ran one cool hand over my forehead, wiping away the sweat that was only partially from our recent battle. Against my will, I felt myself relax at the soothing motion. “Go back to sleep,” she said.

I pushed her hand away, deeply irritated. “Did you not just notice the crazy dream invasion?”

Suze resumed her stroking. “Yes,” she said, finally sounding serious. “And this time I’ll be watching for it. If it happens again, I’ll wake you up even faster.”

I paused, considering what she’d just said. But then I shook my head. “I’m never falling asleep again.”

She tsked her tongue. “Of course you will. I’ll even tell you a story.” Her voice changed, no longer conversational, and took on the rhythm and cadence of repeating something she’d heard many, many times. “This is the story my mother told me, and her mother told her, and her mother told her, all the way back to when it happened, because this is a true story of our people.”

“I don’t think I’m included in that our,” I noted sarcastically.

Suze’s hand stopped stroking just long enough to smack me hard. “Shush,” she scolded me. “This is the way the story is told.” She cleared her throat and resumed the head petting, as if nothing had happened. And once she started talking again, I began to forget about being irritated with her and became absorbed in her story. “There was once a fox who went wandering far from her mother and her sisters and the den where she had been born. She traveled up and down the whole length of Japan, and she saw many strange things. One night, far from any dens she knew or caches of food she had left, she caught the smell of an oni. An oni is a vicious thing, strong and fast, and she had no sisters and cousins to help her, and most foxes would’ve hurried in the other direction. But this fox was a curious thing, and she followed the trail of the oni where it led her, being careful to move more silently than the wind. Eventually she found herself at a small house, where the oni was crouched beside the door, waiting to kill the man who lived there when he came outside in the morning. And this fox did an amazing thing, for not even knowing who lived inside that house, she crept all around, up onto the roof, and above where the oni was waiting. If she’d put one paw wrong and made a single sound, the oni would’ve heard and ripped her apart, but she didn’t, and when she was above him, she jumped down and broke his neck with one bite. And the god Inari saw what she had done, and for her bravery he marked her as his own by making the tip of her red tail white. Well, the fox was very proud, but she was still a curious fox, and so she waited beside the door to see what kind of human she had saved. When the rooster crowed in the morning and the first light appeared, the man came outside. And when the fox saw him, she fell in love with him, which shows you what a foolish little fox she was.”

That struck me as weird, and I interrupted her. “Wait. One second ago she was honored by gods. Now she’s foolish?”

“No comments from the peanut gallery,” Suze said in her normal voice. I grumbled under my breath but obeyed, and she resumed the story. “So she ran to the edge of the forest and changed into a beautiful woman, dressed in the finest garments. The man saw her when he went walking that night and he fell in love with her, and took her back to his house and made her his wife. She bore him a son soon after, and all seemed well, except that each morning the man’s dog would bark at her, because the dog knew that she was a fox and not a woman. The fox begged her husband to kill the dog, but he refused, and one day the dog was able to get into the house and attack her. And the attack was so vicious that she had no choice but to turn back from a woman into a fox and run out the door and over the fence and across the fields, leaving her husband and baby behind.” There was a long pause, and I wished that Suze hadn’t let her long hair fall forward to shadow her face. I wondered what she was thinking about. Then she picked up the thread again. “And that is why foxes do not belong in the houses of men. But this is a true story. And the fox had loved and married an honorable man. Because when he saw his wife change into a fox and run away, he called after her and said, ‘You may be a fox, but you are the mother of my son and I love you. Come back when you please, and you will always be welcome.’ And so every night after that the fox would slip out from the forest, across the fields, under the fence, into the house, and sleep in the arms of her husband. But she understood then that they were different, and when she gave birth after that, it was to daughters who ran with her on four feet and lived in a den.”

I waited, but Suze didn’t say anything else, and clearly the story was over.

“So, the white in your tail?” I remembered when it had appeared. It has been after she’d risked her life to save mine.

“It’s kind of spiritual. Supposedly it’s a gift from Inari.” Something in her tone told me that we weren’t going to be talking about the circumstances that she’d gotten her white under—not now, maybe not ever.

“Who’s Inari?” I asked, acknowledging the message and leading the conversation away.

“The god of rice.”

“Um, rice?” It seemed like an odd fit. I would’ve expected a much more badass god for the kitsune.

“Yeah, rice,” Suzume snapped. “It was a primary foodstuff, jackass. Every culture dependent on one item so heavily has a god like that. We had Inari, the Mayans had a corn god, and the Irish have their potato saint.”

I paused. “Suze, there isn’t an Irish potato saint.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Very.”

“Fine, whiskey fairy. Whatever.”

In the darkness I winced. “You are not exactly culturally sensitive, Suze.”

“Fuck that noise,” she snorted.

The conversation had definitely traveled a bit, but one element from her story was still bothering me. Very carefully, I asked, “I thought kitsune only had daughters?”

Suze shook her head. All of the playfulness from the potato conversation was gone now, and very quietly she answered, “No, that part is true, but only daughters are kitsune. A son would only be human. When a kitsune changes from fox to woman, and woman to fox when she is pregnant with daughters, the daughters change with her, because they are what she is. But a son is human, and if his mother becomes a fox when she carries him, the fetus will die.”

I thought about what I’d learned and a connection formed in my mind that I hadn’t considered before. “When you were arguing with your sister, it was about her boyfriend. And that she wasn’t changing her form.”

“Yes.” I knew from her voice that Suze didn’t want me to follow this any further, but I asked anyway.

“Keiko is pregnant, isn’t she?”

I wondered at first if she’d just refuse to answer me, but after a tense moment Suze said, “She learned the wrong lesson from the story. Loving a human will only lead to grief.” She stopped stroking and gave my head a little pat. I wasn’t sure which of us was meant to be comforted by the gesture. “But she’s only four months along. She has time to come to her senses. And in all the stories my grandmother has told me about the lives of kitsune in Japan, she only ever met one fox who gave birth to a son.”

I had one last question. “Are you hiding all of this from your grandmother?”

But I’d reached the end of Suze’s willingness to talk about her family, and she just patted my head again. “Go to sleep, Fort. I’ll make sure that you don’t dream.”

I believed her. And when I closed my eyes again, I fell back into a dreamless sleep.