Chapter 9

I woke up the next morning when someone began knocking on the door. For a second I was confused, mainly about why I had such a terrible crink in my neck. Then I realized that it was because a black fox was snuggled into a ball on my pillow and had nudged my head out of the way. Her tail was tickling my mouth, and as I pushed it away and rolled to my feet to head for the door, I ran a hand over my tongue to dislodge some of the hairs coating it.

I checked the peephole, then pulled the door open to reveal Lilah, looking scrubbed and fresh and carrying an armful of take-out bags that wafted smells of breakfast.

I’d texted her the hotel information the night before, but my surprise at seeing her must’ve shown on my face, because she immediately flushed. “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just figured I’d bring over—” and then the light pink of her cheeks suddenly flamed red, and I looked behind me, wondering what had set her off and figuring that it had to be Suze. Instead I realized what she’d noticed—there were two beds in the room but one was still perfectly made, with all the pillows still in order. The other, the one I’d had both a skinwalker-induced terror dream and a championship-level pillow fight in, was completely wrecked. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to draw conclusions from those two pieces of data.

I knew that my own face was flaming as I began sputtering some attempt to explain the situation, and Lilah began backing up, both of us clearly wishing that the earth would just open up and swallow us whole so we could escape the conversation, when there was a sharp yip at our feet that made both of us shut up and look down.

Smelling a breakfast she hadn’t had to pay for, Suze had scampered over, still on four fox feet. She was now balanced on her back paws and was stretching her muzzle as high as possible toward the bags of food in Lilah’s arms. It was the kind of scenario that had viral YouTube video written all over it.

“Oh, that’s Suze?” Lilah said, sounding startled, and I remembered that she’d never seen the kitsune in her true form.

“Yeah,” I said, grateful that Suze’s antics had apparently broken the cycle of awkward that Lilah and I had just been trapped in. Then suspicion kicked in. With Suze’s almost pathological delight in pranking me, the very fact that she hadn’t shifted to human form and let Lilah spot her lolling naked in hotel sheets was weird.

I eyed Suze, who was playing adorable fox and resolutely ignoring my attempt to catch her gaze. My mind began sorting through possible motives. Was this part of some elaborate long-con prank? Was she pranking me by not pranking me? Was she taking the situation seriously enough that— Wait, no. I dropped that one as unrealistic before I even finished it.

“So, the extra bed . . . ?” Lilah asked, comfortable or curious enough now to walk inside the room. Eyes glued to the food, Suze tracked her.

“Apparently all she needs as a fox is a pillow. And she liked mine.” I reached out and began helping Lilah set up the breakfast. As my hands fell back to years of ingrained wait-staffing, I wondered—between her painfully obvious “bathroom break” at Dreamcatching yesterday and the decision not to go full false-appearance romantic comedy just now, was Suze trying to set me up with Lilah?

Was Suze trying to find me a roommate and a girlfriend? The sane mind shuddered at the thought of such a situation.

I snuck a look at Lilah, who was lining up tiny containers of orange juice with a precision that hinted at either a past in the engineering sciences or a smattering of OCD. Did I want to date her? I certainly got along with her, God knows I was attracted to her, and she had been sending off hints of possibly being into me (which I liked in a woman). I looked at Suze—who, still in fox form, had stuffed her entire head into one of the empty breakfast bags and was now attempting, skunk style, to back out of it. Not much guidance there.

This was not a thought process that could be conducted on an empty, uncaffeinated stomach, and I reached for the coffee (bless her soul, and true daughter of New England that she was, Lilah had hit up a Dunkin’ Donuts) and mentally put a pin in the issue.

We talked as we ate—or, rather, the two of us talked. Suze stayed fox for the entire meal, comfortably curled in an armchair and simply pointing her dark muzzle at whatever food she wanted to sample next. If either of us didn’t respond quickly enough to her demands, she also demonstrated that she was extremely willing to appropriate food we’d already put onto our own plates, so Lilah and I became very quick to respond whenever that imperious black nose pointed toward another egg muffin.

Between bites and feeding the kitsune, Lilah explained that she hadn’t been able to pick up any new information the night before. Since Dreamcatching didn’t open until eleven, she’d decided to swing by and see if we’d come up with any new theories ourselves, leading to the morning’s perilously awkward encounter. I told her about the nightmare Soli had apparently sent me, and Lilah was suitably horrified.

“You need to talk to someone about that,” she said. “Someone who has dealt with skinwalkers before. Have you called your sister?”

“Not since it happened,” I admitted. “But she was pretty clear earlier that it’s just dream projections.” Though I would privately admit to a few qualms myself about the word just in that sentence.

Lilah apparently was in agreement. “That still sounds creepy. How long can she keep doing that? Can you even stop it?” She turned to Suzume. “Do you think Fort should talk to a witch? They might be able to cook him up some kind of magic Ambien.”

We both looked over at the fox, currently licking egg off of her whiskers. She paused, considered, then gave a small yip.

“Is that a yes or a no?” I demanded, and she moved her shoulders in what I assumed was an attempt at a shrug. “Suze, I’m trying to have a conversation with you here. Can you please change?” Suze’s golden fox eyes narrowed, and she very deliberately turned around in her armchair and began grooming her tail.

“This is kind of awkward,” Lilah noted, and I nodded. The sounds of Suze’s licking filled the room. The subject of the skinwalker’s ability to mess with my REM cycle apparently shelved, Lilah and I returned to the issue of how to track down either Lulu or Tomas. With no new information, the conversation very quickly just became a verbal chasing of tails.

This was different from a literal chasing of tails, which Suze decided to do under the table while we had our conversation. It was somewhat distracting.

When my phone rang I lunged for it, certain that Prudence had finally closed in on her quarry, but it was Matt instead.

“Fort, I’m at Iron Needle,” Matt said, his voice low and tense, not bothering with any preamble. “There’s a guy walking out the front door, and he has bandages on both wrists. He’s got a shirt on and I can’t see the shoulders, but this could be a possible victim—he’s in the right age range.”

Adrenaline immediately shot through my veins. “Is he alone?” I asked.

“No, he’s with a woman. I just took a picture, let me send it to you.”

When my cheap flip-phone had been destroyed a few months ago, Chivalry had taken the opportunity under the guise of a birthday present to upgrade me to the sleekest and smartest of phones that he could find, and had delivered it with every bell, whistle, and shiny new app that could be installed. So I was able to check Matt’s photo without even hanging up on him, which turned out to not be a great thing because as soon as the photo filled my phone’s screen, both Lilah and I responded with extremely loud and knee-jerk curses.

The photo was a distance shot, done as surreptitiously as possible with a small camera phone. But what we were looking at was unmistakable—that was Soli, walking in Beth’s skin, and the young man beside her with bandages on his wrists and an almost sleepwalking expression was the changeling stock boy from Dreamcatching, Felix.

Suze bounced onto the table with agile grace, glanced down at the screen, and immediately jumped off and ran into the bathroom.

“Fort? What? What is it? Do you recognize them?” Matt’s voice over the phone sounded very far away.

Lilah’s eyes were huge, and she’d wrapped her hands over her mouth, clearly afraid to say anything that would be overheard. I cleared my throat awkwardly and stuttered, “Um, yeah, Lilah’s with me, and she recognizes the kid. He’s, um, one of the members of the cult.” Matt was quiet, and I pushed forward quickly. “Matt, can you follow them?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I’ll tail them.”

“Don’t lose them,” I said, unable to keep the urgency out of my voice. “But don’t . . . don’t try to talk with them or anything. Don’t let them see you.”

“I know how to tail, Fort,” he snapped, then, “Listen, I’ve got to get off the phone. I’ll talk to you when I can.”

He hung up. As soon as she saw me end the call, Lilah took her hands off her mouth and her words tumbled out. “That’s Felix. Why would they be using Felix? He’s a changeling, not a recessive. Why would that woman be with him?”

“They’ve just changed the pattern,” I said grimly. “Or we were wrong about the pattern to start with. Maybe we missed a bunch of murders. Lilah, have changelings been going missing?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her hands were shaking, and she shoved them through her hair. She closed her eyes, thought a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t think anyone went missing, but I can’t be sure. They’re on the fringes of the community. I know only a few, and there are at least a hundred, probably more, that are under thirty and were taken from their parents.”

The bathroom door slammed as Suze emerged. She was in human form again and had clearly dressed in a hurry. Pants and shirt were on but she was barefoot, and even though it was completely inappropriate under the circumstances, my brain couldn’t help noting that she hadn’t bothered with a bra. And that the room was a bit on the chilly side.

“Time to drop the speculation,” she said, pulling her hair back into a quick ponytail. “Soli is with the sacrifice this time, and they know that we’re looking for them. I don’t think they’ll be worrying about laying a false trail. Your sister hasn’t found any of them yet. It’s up to your detective now.”

As if she’d summoned him, the phone rang. Matt was calling, and I immediately answered it. “Matt?”

“Lost them,” he said, his voice clipped. “The girl was driving and they ran a red light. I was two cars behind—there was no way I could follow them.”

“Shit.” With that lead down the toilet, there wasn’t anything left except to try to move Matt out of the line of fire. “Can you go back to the tattoo place? Just watch it.”

“With a possible victim out there, you want me to get back on the stakeout?” Suspicion was heavy in Matt’s voice. “What does your friend know?” Then, even more ominously, “Fort, I’m looking at this photo again and I’ve got to say, this girl is a dead damn ringer for that vegan ex of yours. What the fuck is going on here?”

My stomach dropped—Matt had met Beth only a few times in passing, but apparently it had been too much to hope for that he wouldn’t recognize her if he stared at a picture of her skin long enough. I couldn’t think of any way to smooth this over, and the fact was that we needed to put together some kind of plan quickly. I gave up and went for the most cliché way to escape this conversation. “What? Matt? I can’t hear you! My reception sucks!” And I hit the End button.

Suzume gave me a slow shake of her head. “Really smooth, Fort. Not suspicious at all.”

“I’ll worry about that later,” I told her. “Right now we need to figure out something to do. Lilah?”

Lilah was currently sitting on the edge of Suzume’s bed, her face pressed into her hands, not exactly inspiring confidence. She didn’t look up. “I don’t know,” she moaned. “Felix is one of us. I hired him. Tomas gives him rides home after work sometimes. We all chipped in to get him a birthday cake when he turned seventeen. How could they even think of using him?”

“You can have your crisis of faith later, Keebler,” Suze said, derision glittering in her eyes when she looked at Lilah. “Right now your boss is planning on murdering the stock boy, and you going to pieces is not helping.”

I tossed a glare at Suze and dropped down onto my knees in front of the shaken half-blood, putting my hands around hers and gently tugging them down to reveal her paper-pale face. Whatever she’d thought the Neighbors capable of, it clearly hadn’t been the murder of one of their own. “Lilah,” I said, as soothingly as I could, rubbing her cold hands. “If we can’t stop it, Felix is going to die really horribly.” She flinched visibly, and I squeezed her hands hard. “You need to help us, Lilah,” I urged. “Is there any way you know to get either Tomas or Lulu’s locations? Anything you haven’t tried yet?”

She looked at me blankly; then understanding slowly filled her golden-brown eyes. There was something just a little harder about her gaze; one last illusion, one last, toughest belief she’d had about her extended family had just been stripped away. She nodded once. “I can get Dr. Leamaro,” she said, her voice low and rough.

“Meaning?” Behind me, Suze crossed her arms, and looked distinctly disbelieving.

“I can get Dr. Leamaro to come to my apartment,” Lilah said, her voice getting stronger, more grimly certain with each word.

I stared. “Why didn’t you do that before?”

Lilah gently dropped my hands and stood up, pacing across the room. “Because I’ll need to lie to a friend well enough that she believes me and calls Lavinia.”

Suze shook her head. “You and Fort are so alike,” she said in a tone that definitely was not implying a compliment, and reached down and pulled on a pair of socks. “This is definitely not the time to get panties in a twist over honesty. Do it now; apologize later.”

I didn’t like the tone of her voice, and I wouldn’t have phrased it that way myself, but at this point I was in agreement with Suze. But I kept as much of that off my face as possible as I said to Lilah, “Let’s head to your apartment, then.”

•   •   •

“So, how are you going to flush out Lulu?” I asked as we drove to Lilah’s apartment. She’d taken a cab to the hotel, and now we were all one rather awkward group in the Fiesta, with Suze choosing to stake out the backseat with the bags. I would’ve felt more confident in this plan if Prudence was on her way as well, but by the time the brainstorm had happened it was already ten a.m., and on a perfect blue-sky day like today my sister was already holed up in her hotel room.

“I’ll tell her I might be miscarrying,” Lilah said.

I nearly rear-ended the car in front of us, and the Fiesta’s brakes squealed and threw all of us forward against our seat belts.

“Fort, when this is all over, we are playing some fucking poker,” Suze griped behind me. “Recognize a goddamn lie.”

“Yeah, definitely not pregnant.” Lilah eyed me.

I could feel an impending question about her waistline, and I cut it off. “Why would Lulu care if you’re pregnant?” I asked. “People are squirting out seven-eighths babies now—why worry about a halfsie’s baby?”

Lilah shook her head. “You aren’t understanding the mentality. This generation is what might make us a sustainable breeding population. Any of us who get pregnant, as long as it isn’t with a human, is valuable to them. Besides, I’m going to bait the hook with something good, something I know she won’t be able to resist.”

“If she’s hanging out with the Ad-hene, she probably won’t buy a story about her favorite kind of incest,” Suze noted dryly.

Lilah made a face. “Not that. But I’ve been getting the hard sell on one of the three-quarter boys lately. Cole’s a jackass, but I went out with him a few months ago, just to shut everyone up for a while. He showed up wasted, ended up sleeping on my couch for the night. If I say now that I actually had sex with him, the person I’m calling will believe me.”

“Who are you calling?” I asked. “You obviously don’t have Lulu’s direct number or you would’ve already handed that over.”

“Peggie,” she answered. “She’s a half-blood like me, and we’ve been friends since we were toddlers. But when I left after high school, she stayed. She’s not quite a true believer, but if I call her with this and say that I don’t know whether I wanted to keep the baby or not, I know she’ll act for the community and call Dr. Leamaro.”

All these crosses and hybrids were sloshing together in my head. “What would a halfsie and a three-quarter produce again?”

“A five-eighths,” she said readily, unintentionally highlighting exactly how creepy this whole situation was. “Not as good as a three-quarter but definitely better than a half-blood. Dr. Leamaro won’t risk one being lost.”

“Punch the gas, Fort,” Suze said. “I have officially topped out on the amount of fractions and pregnancy talk that I can handle for the damn day. I’m really ready to start kicking ass instead.”

“Fair enough,” I muttered, inching the speedometer upward.

•   •   •

Lilah lived on her own in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, furnished with the best in space-saving Swedish interior design. She’d placed the call as soon as we’d arrived, and since then Suze and I had been crouched uncomfortably in Lilah’s coat closet, waiting to spring into action.

“How long has it been?” Suze hissed loudly, managing to elbow me in the kidney as she shifted position.

“Two hours,” I snapped, checking my watch in the sliver of light from the cracked door. “Shut up.” I kept shifting my weight, trying to stave off pins and needles.

“This isn’t going to work.” Suze had gone very much on record as a doubter of this plan.

I had a lot of her doubts, but it had become clear that this was our best shot at this point, and I poked her with my own elbow and made a shushing sound.

“Guys, a car just pulled up.” Lilah had been positioned at her front window since she placed the call, and I could hear the jumble of fear and adrenaline in her voice. “Door is opening . . . Yeah, it’s Lavinia, and she’s alone. She’s got her medical bag. She’s coming up the walk.”

My heart thudded in my chest, and I could feel Suze tense beside me. Both of us were positioned so that we could peer out of the partially opened door. Lilah had drawn back from the window—we’d all agreed that it would look less suspicious if she wasn’t waiting right at the door, especially since she wasn’t supposed to know that her friend had called in the doctor. When Lulu’s loud, impatient knocking filled the small apartment and Lilah moved to answer it, I carefully thumbed off the safety on my Colt.

Lilah pulled open the door, revealing Dr. Lavinia Leamaro, and exclaimed loudly in fake surprise. I winced at the sound—the theater had not lost any true daughter in Lilah, and the lie was written clearly across her face. But Lulu wasn’t looking at Lilah’s face—those brilliant green eyes that were such a surprise against her dark skin were fixed on Lilah’s stomach, and for the first time I truly understood what Lilah had told me so many times.

When I had met Lulu, she had seemed normal enough—professional, if a little light on medical ethics. But now I saw the raw avarice on her face when she looked at Lilah’s belly, and whatever mask she’d worn had dropped, revealing a base fanaticism that was fundamentally repellent to me.

“You should’ve told me earlier, Lilah! It took that Peggie forever to get a message to me.” Lulu stretched out her free hand toward Lilah, grasping and feeling at her flat stomach, not even aware of the way that Lilah flinched at her touch. Her voice was thick with satisfaction. “It’s Cole’s, she said. You good girl. Your mother always said that you’d come around eventually. Now I’ll just check you out—” And, not releasing either her medical bag or her grip on Lilah, Lulu walked farther into the house and pushed the door closed with her foot.

That’s what Suze and I had been waiting for—the final confirmation that no one else was coming inside, and that Soli hadn’t been lurking somewhere. Lilah threw herself backward at the same moment that Suze and I burst out of the closet, managing to avoid tripping over each other. I held the gun on Lulu, and she froze in the middle of the room.

“So glad you could make it,” I told her. Would I find the tool that she’d used to slice Gage apart in that innocuous medical bag? Anger bubbled up in me, and my voice was as cold as any of my siblings could boast. “I have a lot to ask you,” I promised her.

Comprehension dawned on Lulu’s face, followed immediately by a contorting rage. Ignoring the fact that I was aiming a gun right at her head, she turned and made a lunge for Lilah, a wordless shriek of anger ripping out of her throat. Lilah barely pulled back enough to avoid Lulu’s grasping hands, and Suzume tackled the older half-blood to the floor. Lulu was fighting hard, driven by an anger that seemed to have almost pushed her past the point of sanity, struggling not to escape but to get at Lilah, and doing it with so much energy that Suze was clearly hard-pressed to subdue her. I turned the safety back on and shoved the Colt into Lilah’s hands, hoping that she wouldn’t drop it, and waded in to help Suze. It took both of us to wrestle her onto the ground, and after several breathless minutes when Lulu still wouldn’t stop fighting, Suze was eventually left with no other option than to throttle her into unconsciousness.

From her own overnight bag, Suze produced a bag of wire ties, bungee cords, and thin but strong cord. I did my best not to overthink her possession of that particular bag of tricks. Lilah had a nice wooden office chair in her bedroom, and the three of us (mostly Suze, with me attempting to reproduce her best knots and Lilah showing a complete Girl Scouts epic fail) tied Lulu to the chair. Clearly uncomfortable with her role as Judas, Lilah retreated from the bedroom, while Suze and I sat down to wait.

We didn’t have to wait long. In a few minutes Lulu woke up and immediately began screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Try all you want,” Suze said lazily. “Lilah’s neighbors are only going to notice that her TV is on very loudly today.” Once again, Suze’s fox tricks had proven extremely useful. Lulu stopped screaming and stared at them, her whole body quivering with rage. I couldn’t help but be amazed at her reaction, even as I kept my face stony—my reaction to waking up tied to a chair would definitely have been pants-wetting terror, not foaming anger.

“That little bitch,” Lulu snapped. “Oh, she will pay for this. I always warned that her parents were too soft, too—”

I cut in. “That’s not what we’re talking about today.” I ticked the items off on my fingers. “Fertility magic. Hiring a skinwalker. Murdering at least four men in the past year. Those are the topics I’m interested in. You can start wherever you’d like.”

Focusing her green eyes on me, Lulu hissed. “We pay the tithes on our businesses. Nothing else is of concern to the Scotts.”

“Everything in this territory is my mother’s business. Now start talking. Start by telling me where the skinwalker is and who hired her.”

Lulu snapped her mouth shut and glared at me, sullen and mute.

I waited, then tried again. “Felix Ortiz was tattooed this morning at the Iron Needle. Where is he now?”

Lulu said nothing.

“Where do you kill the men?”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Lulu said, her voice low and stubborn.

I had one card left to play. “You can talk to me or you can talk with my sister.” The first hint of real fear flickered through Lulu’s eyes, gone almost as soon as it appeared, but I noted it and pushed hard. “I don’t think you’d enjoy Prudence’s”—and I paused, saying the word almost as if I savored it—“methods.”

Defiance and fanaticism flared. “It doesn’t matter what you do. I will never betray the Ad-hene.” And looking at her face and the complete absence of concern for her own safety, I had to conclude that Lulu really meant it. I met Suze’s eyes and jerked my head toward the other room. She slid off the bed where she’d been sitting and followed me out of the room.

I closed the bedroom door carefully behind us and looked around. Lilah apparently dealt with anxiety by cleaning, because she was busily attacking her already spotless furniture with a dusting cloth. I asked Suze quietly to sit with the prisoner; given the extent to which we’d tied her down, I couldn’t imagine Lulu extricating herself, but I’d seen enough James Bond movies to be leery about leaving someone tied to a chair and unattended for long.

I bypassed Lilah’s cleaning frenzy and walked to the far corner of the kitchen—it was too small of an apartment for real privacy, but I wanted at least the illusion of it for this conversation. After a deep breath, I called my sister.

She was ensconced in her hotel room and answered my call on the first ring. After a quick exchange of greetings, I filled her in on everything that had happened. She listened without interrupting.

When I had finished, she said, “Well done, little brother,” in such an approving tone of voice that I seriously wondered for a moment whether I was speaking to an impersonator.

“Uh, thanks,” I said, still uncertain how to respond to this new, more supportive Prudence. “Listen. When can you get over here and question her? Apparently zealots are kind of tough to interrogate.”

“The worst; that is true,” she said sympathetically. Then, with an odd brightness, “I will head out as soon as this accursed sun goes down enough. Given what I’ve seen of the hourly forecast, about three, perhaps three and a half hours.”

“That long?” I asked, horrified. My sister’s tolerance for sunlight was definitely going down.

“Patience, brother. It will be all right. Make sure that the half-blood is secured and then leave her alone to stew. The wait will soften her up.” I began to protest, and she made soothing noises. “I will get the information as quickly as possible, brother, I assure you. Now, listen to me, because this is very important.”

“Yes?” I asked, reaching for a nearby pad of paper just in case I needed to take notes.

“Don’t be nice to her. No food, no drinks, and definitely no bathroom.”

“Um . . . ?” That last part made me very nervous. Lilah’s apartment was carpeted.

“Urinating oneself can be an important part of being broken down,” Prudence assured me.

I gulped. This newer, friendlier Prudence was definitely still my sister. “You’re the expert,” I managed, reminding myself that with a life on the line, I was probably going to be making a few 24-esque decisions.

My reply apparently delighted Prudence, because she burbled happily, “Ah, Fortitude. The things I can teach you.”

Even as my mouth made the appropriate good-byes, an icy chill went up my spine and I wondered whether I was really prepared for my sister’s version of sibling bonding exercises.

It was a long, tense afternoon while we waited for my sister to arrive and begin torturing Lulu. With nothing else to do, I joined Lilah in the distraction of cleaning. Suze remained impervious to the atmosphere, shifted to her fox form, and took a long nap on the sofa (all four furry paws in the air) while Lilah and I defrosted her freezer and cleaned out her fridge. I tried calling Matt three times, but he didn’t pick up, and I ended up leaving voice mails. I winced at what that might mean, but comforted myself with the knowledge that I hadn’t told him what hotel Suze and I had stayed at, so there wasn’t any chance that he had tailed us again.

When my sister arrived at a quarter to five, the first hints of orange were gathering in the clouds, heralding the start of a spectacular sunset. Being relieved at Prudence’s arrival was definitely a personal first for me, but the feeling flooded through me as I pulled open the front door at her imperious knock to reveal her, her lacy white parasol adding an almost steampunk accent to her usual Stepford-wifish attire. Her blue eyes were gleaming and there was an eager spring in her step as I directed her to the bedroom. Clearly Prudence enjoyed her work.

“Wait here, brother,” she told me at the entrance, and then entered alone, closing the door behind her.

The next two hours inched horribly by, with Lulu’s screams echoing through the apartment. I sat on the sofa, tensing at every sound that emerged from the closed bedroom until the muscles of my body actually felt sore. Lilah tried covering her ears at first, but eventually just gave up and pressed against my side, burying her face in my shoulder. I stroked her bright hair with one hand, but there was nothing to say. For all the crimes that Lulu had committed, it was impossible to hear the sounds of her agony and not cringe.

I’d made the decision and the call that had led to the torture, I reminded myself over and over—I needed to accept the consequences and not try to hide from Lulu’s screams. But as the sun set and the shadows deepened, I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and I turned to Suze and begged, “Can’t you hide those sounds?” I loathed my own weakness as I asked, but I just didn’t want to listen to the surround sound of Lulu’s torture for another minute.

Suzume had returned to her human shape shortly after Prudence had arrived and had positioned herself at the window, about as far away from where Lilah and I were sitting as she could get, staring out into the darkness. She didn’t look at me as she answered quietly. “I can hide the sounds from the neighbors by replacing them with sounds that they would normally expect to hear—that’s no real effort. But to hide the sounds from you, when you know the truth of what is happening in that room, would be much more difficult. I don’t know where this night is going to lead us, and I can’t spare the energy, Fort.” She looked over her shoulder at me very quickly, turning away again almost immediately, some undefined emotion flickering across her face. “Not even for your feelings.”

And time crept forward.

The clock had just ticked past seven when Prudence reappeared at the bedroom door and beckoned me over. A lazy, contented smile was spread across her face, and she was wiping one hand fastidiously with a monogrammed linen handkerchief that was already streaked in dark red stains.

“Come, Fortitude. I’m ready for you now,” she said.

Carefully extricating myself from Lilah, I took a deep breath and walked over to my sister, reminding myself again of why this had to be done. “What’s taking so long? Why isn’t she talking?” I asked.

Prudence gave a low, amused chuckle and wagged one newly clean finger at me. “Ah, brother. You think it’s easy to break a fanatic? You watch too much television. It would take me months, with every piece of agony just making her cling harder to her devotion, or result in nothing but a string of lies. No, I’ve just softened her a bit.” She dropped one deceptively delicate hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly, ignoring my barely hidden flinch as she touched me. “Tell me, Fortitude, have you learned much about the Neighbors during your investigation?”

“A bit,” I admitted cautiously.

She nodded, then urged me in a tone that was weirdly reminiscent of my teachers when they had been trying to lead the class to a concept. “Think hard on what this wretch values.”

I considered it, then said slowly, “She doesn’t value her own life.”

Prudence nodded again, pleased. “Precisely. True fanatics do not. So come in, Fortitude, and force her to talk by threatening what she does hold dear.”

I followed Prudence into the bedroom, unable to keep myself from looking back once over my shoulder. Suze had turned away from the window to watch the exchange, and she gave me one short nod. Lilah was still sitting on the sofa, her large eyes red from crying. She crossed her hands over her mouth and glanced away from me. From the depths of my soul I wished that I could do the same.

Inside the bedroom, Lulu was still tied to the chair, just as we’d left her. But there were small trails of dried blood at the corners of her mouth, and a towel from the bathroom was pressed against her stomach, blotted with bloodstains. Remembering the way Prudence had threatened Ambrose the witch at Lulu’s office, I couldn’t prevent myself from being grateful that Prudence had covered up her handiwork, even though it made me both hypocritical and cowardly, as I carried an equal stake in her actions. There was a weird smell in the room, almost a combination of a poorly maintained men’s bathroom and the back room of a butcher shop (another of my worse, short-term bits of employment). Seeing me, Lulu tried to spit but couldn’t put any force behind it, which just resulted in a pinkish liquid dribbling down her chin.

If I ran away or threw up, I’d lose this opportunity. I forced myself to remember what Gage’s body had looked like on the floor of his bedroom: cold, ruined, and tossed aside like garbage. I reminded myself that this woman was also responsible, at least in part, for the presence of Soli, and therefore shared in the guilt of Beth’s death. That stirred up enough anger in me to push back my guilt and regret for her pain, and I forced confidence in my voice as I said, “I think you’re ready to answer my questions now, Doctor.”

Lulu gave a high, shrill laugh that made her gasp as it jarred some broken place inside her. “And why would you say that, when your sister has had no luck at all?” she taunted, glaring at me with no hint of fear. “You can go ahead and kill me now. I’ll never talk to you.”

I glanced at my sister behind me, but Prudence just gave me an encouraging nod. “I’m surprised you’d say that,” I began, feeling her out, trying to remember everything I’d learned or had heard about the way that she viewed the world. “After all, what will your community do without their own pet doctor to churn changelings out of desperate women?”

At that Lulu’s expression wavered for a second and a shiver ran through her, but then she shook her head. “Others can continue that work. Maybe not on the same scale, but it will continue. And it doesn’t truly matter, because the time of the changeling is coming to an end.”

A thrill of excitement ran through me. Just like that, she’d handed me the key to force her confession. I would’ve liked myself better if I’d hesitated or if I’d said what I did with the fates of the living in mind, but it was the thought of Gage and Beth that pushed me immediately forward. “Perhaps you think that,” I said, leaning in and placing a hand on her shoulder. The bone moved, and I realized that it was broken. My stomach clenched, but I didn’t move my hand. “But if you don’t start talking right now, my sister is going to start hunting. For every minute you stay silent, she’ll kill one of your half-bloods.” Lulu gaped, horror suffusing her face, but I pushed forward brutally. “For every lie you tell me, she’ll slaughter one of those three-quarter hybrids you’ve worked so hard on.” A high, frightened sound emerged from Lulu’s throat, and now she was shaking visibly.

“No, you wouldn’t, you couldn’t—” Lulu’s wide green eyes darted between me and my sister.

“Look at my sister, Doctor,” I said heartlessly. “Do you think she’ll hesitate if I tell her to go and kill someone?” I didn’t look behind me, but there was a soft rustling of fabric, and whatever move Prudence made caused Lulu to flinch hard.

Weakness and despair made the wrinkles in Lulu’s face deepen, suddenly making her look her age for the first time I’d known her. She was beaten and she knew it. “What do you want from me?” she asked, voice shaking.

“I know that some of the Neighbors have been using a ritual to enable the conception of a seven-eighths hybrid. You’ve been using recessive men, tattooing and killing them. You brought a skinwalker in to help.” I leaned even closer to her. “Now tell me the rest.”

She wet her lips with her tongue, and when she spoke it was very slow and halting, each word sounding ripped from her throat. “It was Tomas who found it. We were all looking, all of us who are trusted, who are the inner circle, but he found it. He found an old witch up in Maine, one who had a collection of potion books. But she wouldn’t let him look at them, and that made us think that she was hiding something. We couldn’t risk the witch naming the Neighbors or the Ad-hene in a complaint to Madeline Scott, so that’s when we hired Soli, the skinwalker. She killed the witch, brought the books back.”

“What is Soli getting out of all of this?” I asked.

Lulu’s mouth twisted in brief, cynical amusement before quickly going slack again. “Money. She didn’t care what we did, as long as she was paid. And in one of the books we found a ritual, one where the only thing we needed from the witches was the spelled ink to make the tattoo. The sacrifice had to be special, not just any man off the street, so we used ones whose fathers were Ad-hene, the ones who had never bloomed.”

“The coroner’s report says that there were medical tools used in the amputations.”

She nodded, and these words came easier to her, as if she were talking about something of no great consequence or importance. “Yes, that was me. Hands, genitals, and tongue needed to be removed without killing the sacrifice. We’d hang him above the couple; then the seed had to be planted before the sacrifice’s blood stopped pumping.”

I stared at her for a second, my mind unable to wrap around what she’d just said. “What do you mean?”

“I’d make an incision in the sacrifice’s neck, then intercourse needed to be completed before the sacrifice bled out completely.” She spoke briskly, for the first time seeming to regain that air of medical superiority.

I couldn’t reply, and Prudence strolled forward next to me, looking completely unruffled, nodding and smoothly picking up the questioning that I’d dropped. “The purpose of those roofie potions that your witch cooked up, I believe. Hard to get most girls, even Neighbor girls, to participate.” She gave a small, fastidious sniff of disapproval. “I’m sure nothing was needed for the elves to perform.”

My brain was numb from the information I was still struggling with, and I stared at Lulu, moved beyond horror. “All those men. You delivered them when they were babies. And you’re just . . . so calm talking about what you did to them.” I couldn’t understand it.

Lulu stared at me, icy and unmoved. “They were useless to us. All that promise, all that effort, and all we got were mewling human babies. They should’ve been grateful that they could finally be of use to their fathers.” The fanatical gleam returned to her eyes, and her voice became triumphant. “And they were. The first baby was born yesterday, and there are three others twitching in their mothers’ wombs. This is the way back to what our kind was meant to be.”

Lilah’s voice cut in, and I looked behind me to see her standing in the doorway. She must’ve been listening to everything. Her eyes were fixed on Lulu, there was a dark flush in her cheeks, and something about the way she was holding herself hinted at barely restrained violence, as if her heritage was barely contained beneath her skin. “But Felix isn’t a recessive, Lavinia. He’s one of us, one of the Neighbors. Why would the skinwalker have taken him to Jacoby? Why would he be wearing those tattoos now?” Her voice rose with each question.

Lulu’s lip curled. “As if a changeling is truly one of us,” she said.

Apparently undistracted by the exchange, Prudence was tapping one finger contemplatively against her lips. Something occurred to her and she asked Lulu, “You’re wondering how much stronger a hybrid you can create, aren’t you? Whether a finer sacrifice will bring you closer to a true elf?”

There was a weirdly desperate tone in Lulu’s voice as she answered Prudence, something that bordered almost on gratitude that someone in the room apparently understood their way of thinking. “Yes. You see. This is about the survival of our race.”

Lilah laughed, high and hysterical. “Have you ever considered, Lavinia, that maybe we shouldn’t be trying quite so hard to be like Themselves? That maybe they’ve died out for a reason?”

Lulu’s head snapped back, as if Lilah had just said the most untenable heresy—which I supposed she had. But I broke in before the conversation could be sidetracked again. “Felix was with Soli this morning. If you aren’t trying to cover your tracks from us anymore, then nothing would be holding you back from making the sacrifice quickly. Has it already happened?” The half-blood woman chewed anxiously at her bottom lip and didn’t respond, which was enough of an answer in itself. I nodded. “It hasn’t happened, then. Tell me where and when.”

Lulu turned her face away from all of us, clearly struggling between her aversion to giving us the information we needed to stop the sacrifice and her fear of the consequences if she didn’t answer. My sister moved forward, easing down beside Lulu and stroking the sweaty curls back from the tortured woman’s forehead. When she spoke her voice was soft and almost loving, a horrible counterpoint to the content of the words themselves. “I will rip apart every hybrid girl I can find, Lulu,” Prudence promised. “And I will leave you alive to watch while I destroy every hope your race has left.”

No one doubted the truth of Prudence’s promise, and it was the last torture for Lulu, who broke fully at last. Her eyes were shattered when she whispered, “It’s tonight, just at moonrise. In the fairy circle outside the entrance to Underhill. They’ll all be there, waiting for me to arrive.”

I looked at Lilah, still standing at the doorway. “Do you know the spot?”

She nodded. “Yes,” but something was clearly on her mind, and she asked Lulu, “Who are they using?”

Those brilliant emerald eyes glittered with malice. “You should know.”

Betrayal covered Lilah’s face. “No, no, not Iris. My parents would never agree to that.” And I remembered then that Lilah’s nineteen-year-old sister was one of the three-quarter hybrid girls.

“They are loyal,” Lulu sneered, her voice like a knife. “They didn’t question us, just agreed to give the girl the brew and have her ready for Tomas to pick up.”

Lilah moved forward then, her hands reaching for the older woman, but I grabbed and held her before she could get close. She struggled for a moment, then gave up. “What time is moonrise tonight?” I asked her, hoping that she would somehow know offhand or that her finding the answer would manage to focus her attention.

Suzume stepped into the room at my question and held up my own phone, which I’d left in the other room. Apparently while we’d been embroiled in personal drama she’d made good use of my data plan. “Moonrise is at eight-oh-nine. We’ve got forty minutes.”

“We need to get moving,” I said urgently.

Prudence was still kneeling beside Lulu, stroking her dark curls with their periodic glints of silver. She looked over at me and asked, “You’re point, brother. What shall we do with the good doctor?”

After the past few minutes’ revelations there couldn’t be much doubt, but I still hesitated for a second, looking at the woman tied to the chair who had participated in so much misery and death. But when I said, “Kill her,” I was surprised at how hard and sure my own voice sounded, like a stranger’s.

Prudence’s hands moved in a blur, a crack filled the room, and Lulu’s head slumped on a broken neck. I felt inside myself but couldn’t even find a flicker of remorse. My sister stood up, and there was a gleam of approval in her blue eyes when she looked at me. “Very good, Fortitude,” she said.

I looked away from my sister, her praise bothering me exponentially more than the body did. “Everyone in the cars,” I said roughly. “Grab what you need for a fight.”

•   •   •

The Irish entrance to Underhill was closed in 1845, locking the elves inside to hopefully murder each other out of existence. The magic that closed the gate had a high cost—the Potato Famine was just one of them. But despite the best efforts of the ones who worked that magic, one elf and several half-bloods weren’t caught in the trap. They fled to America, ending up in my mother’s territory, where they negotiated the terms for their residency. It took sixty-three years for them to craft the Rhode Island opening to Underhill, and after they’d managed it, my mother used her political influence to push the creation of a state park around the gate to ensure its security. That was the start of the Lincoln Woods State Park—627 acres open year-round, including hills, a freshwater lake, and equestrian trails, and all lay only eight miles from the heart of Providence and didn’t even include an entrance fee.

Every stoplight was torturous as we drove, but I didn’t dare risk running any of them, not when we couldn’t afford the delay of a traffic stop. With Prudence following in her own car, Lilah gave me directions from the passenger’s seat. As I drove, I tossed my phone back to Suze and asked her to put one last call in to Matt, to figure out where he was and keep him somewhere safe. She tried, but passed it back to me a minute later. It had gone to voice mail again. I cursed, then focused on getting through a yellow light a minute before it went to red.

The park was officially open only from sunrise to sunset, but to avoid trapping lingering hikers the entrance gates were never closed. As Lilah directed us to a small parking area, I noticed that there were several cars already there. The clock ticked over to seven forty-eight p.m. just as I turned off the engine.

Suze had grabbed our duffels on the way out of the apartment, and I removed my Colt and the Ithaca 37, checking each quickly to make sure they were fully loaded. Because the Ithaca could carry only two shells at a time, I pushed more into the pockets of my shirt and jeans. The Colt went into its own holster that I strapped around my waist, but there was no way around carrying the Ithaca openly, and I hoped desperately that if we ran across any innocent night hikers, Suze could trick them into thinking that the Ithaca was just an oddly shaped hoagie.

Suze herself was carrying her long knife in her right hand. On the drive over, Lilah had been persuaded to carry the unregistered .38 that Suze routinely kept in her duffel bag, but from the way she was holding it, it seemed unlikely that she’d be able to hit the broad side of a barn. The plan we’d worked out on the way over was one where hopefully the combined authority of me and Prudence would be enough to stop the planned sacrifice, but if that failed, then Lilah’s job would be to try to get her sister and Felix to safety while the rest of us cleared a path for her and kept most of the potential harm away. Lilah had a very fixed and determined expression on her face that made me think that she’d be willing to pull the trigger tonight. Whatever internal qualms she’d had about her part in Lulu’s fate had evaporated once she’d learned that her sister was in danger, and as I looked at her under the fluorescence of the lone parking-lot light, I was struck by how very brave and yet how wholly unprepared she was for where this situation could end up heading.

My sister, meanwhile, had waited with barely concealed impatience while we’d done our best to arm ourselves. When I glanced at her with a question on my lips, it died as she flexed her bare hands in anticipation of the almost certain conflict ahead of us. Prudence clearly had no intention of using any weapons beyond the ones that nature had already endowed her with.

My phone read seven fifty-one when I tossed it onto the seat of my car for safekeeping (it was too new and shiny to risk getting crunched in a fight) and locked the doors, and we all fell into a line behind Lilah and followed her down a dirt path. As we passed the tree line and the leaves rustled eerily above us in the creepy way of the woods in the night, I noticed again that I was seeing better than I should’ve as all artificial lights disappeared behind us. It was another sign of my transition, but I couldn’t regret it at that moment—with whatever lay before us, I knew that I would certainly need every advantage my heritage could offer.