“You heard what I did—you saw what I saw. Don’t you want to help the succubi?” It was that terrible, reluctant hope that had been on their faces when I gave them the money and the pizzas that hurt the most. They hadn’t had that when we first showed up. I’d given them a sliver of hope, and now it was resting on me. If I failed, and betrayed that hope, then it would be worse than if I’d just kicked them out of the Supplicant House as soon as I saw them.
Suze made a rude sound. “I’m going to tell you about something very important that I learned about from watching lots of TV shows about spies—it’s called compartmentalization. Bad things happen, Fort, and people get hurt. But you need to limit your efforts to the people who are most important to you, or you’ll just get burned out or rubbed out.”
I glanced over at her. It was past six thirty, and fully dark. I could see only a little of her expression in the lights from the highway and the passing cars.
“Besides,” she continued, “if you keep asking me to front money for pizzas and children’s clothing, it’s going to be like that time that I sent ten bucks to the Humane Society. Fifteen years later and I still get annoying mail from them.”
I sighed. “Listen, I’ll write you a check when we get back to the apartment. Just . . . don’t cash it for about a week.”
She poked me in the ribs then, and there was a softness on her face, a smile. “I don’t want you to change, Fort,” she said suddenly, surprising me. “I’m not trying to nag you into not caring. I like who you are right now, and I’m not going to suddenly try to remake you just because I’ve lifted tail for you. I just don’t want you to end up like a marshmallow Peep in the microwave of the world.”
I couldn’t help laughing at her analogy, and the tension in the car eased. She slid her left hand comfortably onto my leg, letting it rest there as we drove along, and when I didn’t need to shift gears I let my own hand drop down onto hers, holding it loosely. There was a long silence, broken only by passing trucks howling down the highway.
I finally spoke. “Okay, now I really want some Peeps.” Why had she chosen an analogy that involved a seasonal snack that wouldn’t be on shelves for another three months?
“Oh my God, me too!” Suze immediately responded.
* * *
We pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building just after eight. Parking the Scirocco was a delicate endeavor because of the building manager’s approach to snow removal, which could charitably be referred to as problematic. Mr. Jennings was not a fan of paying the plow service, and any snow accumulation below four inches was judged by him as insufficient to justify calling the plow guy. Unfortunately for those of us who actually lived in the building, it wasn’t unusual during the winter to wake up to an inch one morning, then a few days later another three inches, then another two. Things started getting problematic when the temperature never got warm enough for there to be a melt between snowfalls, and suddenly the parking lot started having some serious snow accumulation, all of which Mr. Jennings insisted was not his problem.
This had resulted in a lot of shoveling on the part of me and my roommate, Dan, given that we were the only able-bodied residents of the building. The ground floor was an upscale women’s lingerie boutique that had never had access to the parking lot to begin with, and the second-floor apartment was occupied by Mrs. Bandyopadyay, who was in her eighties and, while still impressively spry and mobile, was not exactly in shoveling shape. So a parking lot that had previously been, if not exactly roomy, but at least comfortably able to handle our two cars plus Mrs. Bandyopadyay’s ancient Buick Roadmaster (used only when Mrs. Bandyopadyay had to go to a funeral), plus the cars of our significant others from time to time, had suddenly become exceedingly claustrophobic as walls of snow began to accumulate. Right now we’d been keeping our fingers crossed for a bit of a thaw to bring the snow back down again; otherwise we were going to have to seriously consider spending an afternoon moving one of our snow piles over.
I glanced over at Suze as we pulled into the parking lot. We’d stopped for dinner at a branch of the Newport Creamery on our way back into the city, so both of us were comfortably sated with greasy diner food and excellent milk shakes. It was entirely possible that she would decide to saunter over to her Audi Coupe and head back to her own house in the Silver Lake neighborhood for the night. We hadn’t been dating long enough for there to be an automatic assumption of an overnight, and frankly we were still working on navigating the particular ins and outs of this relationship.
One thing I valued about Suze, however, was her appreciation of the straightforward approach. Unlike my previous girlfriends, where getting them into my apartment for some sex and an overnight visit had involved carefully considered bait and the emotional equivalent of defusing a nuclear bomb with five minutes on the clock, Suze didn’t mind if I just asked her if she wanted to sleep over. Bless her.
“So,” I said. “I believe you brought up the subject of sexy underpants earlier?”
“Hell yeah. I’m on that offer like maggots on roadkill.”
“That . . . is not exactly keeping up with the mood I was hoping for.”
She grinned. “Put on those underpants I got you and you’ll see how fast I can get in the mood.”
We got out of the car, the icy night air enough to take my breath away. I shoved my right hand in my pocket, and grabbed my duffel bag with my left—the duffel was where I kept all the particular tools of my trade stashed—a Colt .45, an Ithaca 37 shotgun with the barrel sawed down, and a spare pair of pants (which I learned the hard way was an essential tool of the trade during a never-to-be-repeated incident in Maine). Suze stopped over at her Audi long enough to fish a small backpack out of her trunk—one that I knew from experience contained her toiletries, fresh underpants, and a spare shirt.
“Not that I’m complaining about the result they get,” I said, linking our arms together as we walked across the slick parking lot (Mr. Jennings was a skinflint about rock salt too), “and I’m definitely not suggesting that you get more creative, but I’m still not sure how a pair of trunk underpants from Jockey count as sexy underwear. Even if they are red.”
Suze gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fort, you’re the king of the Fruit of the Loom boxer brief multipack. Clearly you’re not going to get this one.”
“I’m just saying that it’s kind of annoying that the ‘sexy’ underpants don’t have a fly. It’s kind of inconvenient.”
She snorted, very loudly, as we walked into the apartment stairwell and began climbing the three flights of stairs to my floor. “Yes, you have to drop trou to pee. How unspeakably difficult for you. I’ll cry you a river of sympathy after you spend one day in a thong, panty hose, pencil skirt, and heels, with only a public restroom to pee in.”
I dodged the suggestion. “Let me just point out that I very happily wear the sexy clothing you got me, whereas I have yet to see you in what I bought you for Christmas.”
“And you won’t,” she growled dangerously, “because I burned it in effigy and salted the earth where the ashes fell.”
For some reason she hadn’t appreciated getting a T-shirt with WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY? emblazoned across the chest, although her expression when she’d first seen it was priceless. While Suze normally enjoyed depictions of foxes in the media (and in fact still owned the Disney Fox and the Hound nightgown that she’d worn as a little girl), she had developed a particular loathing for the viral video that had spawned the catchphrase.
Entering the apartment, we greeted my roommate, Dan, and his boyfriend, Jaison, who were comfortably ensconced on the couch and watching a movie. I could tell at a glance that it was Dan’s pick of film—for one thing, Jaison looked mind-numbingly bored. For another, Benedict Cumberbatch (Dan’s not-so-secret star crush) was on the screen. And the movie wasn’t Star Trek: Into Darkness—that rare moment when Dan and Jaison’s interests had overlapped into a perfec
t Venn diagram.
“Taking a break from studying?” I asked Dan as I hung my jacket on the ancient coatrack that had mysteriously appeared in my apartment after Chivalry’s first visit several years ago, along with a set of matching dish towels (though the dish towels had long ago been stolen by one of my earlier, former, immensely shittier roommates).
“I’ll get another hour in after this is over,” Dan said. He was a second-year law student at Johnson & Wales University, and studied more than I had ever even dreamed possible. Of course, my highest academic accomplishment had been a bachelor’s degree in film studies, where apart from a few pretty decent film theory textbooks (most of which I’d actually even kept after graduation—one currently helped keep my desk level), most of my homework had involved watching movies—a high percentage of which had actually even been good. Being around Dan was a daily reinforcement of the many reasons why I wasn’t interested in getting a graduate degree.
Jaison gave a theatrically heavy sigh and stretched one long arm around Dan’s shoulders, a comical look of amusement stretching across his dark-skinned face. He was a general contractor, and while he managed to put more physical work into an eight-hour period than most people attempted in a week, he considered work done when he left the job site. He even held off on returning calls about bidding for jobs or client questions until he was back in his truck and heading to the site the next morning.
The two of them contrasted more than in just their work philosophies and film tastes (Dan tended toward moody dramas of the English variety, while Jaison had quickly become my go-to partner for dragging our respective dates to every geeky film there was—we’d managed to hit Guardians of the Galaxy twice before Suze and Dan brokered a rare mutual peace agreement for the sake of boycotting future viewings). Jaison was well over six feet tall and favored broken-in jeans, tees, and sweatshirts, while Dan was barely five-five and spent most of his life looking like he’d just wandered off the pages of Esquire. And, of course, there was the small detail that of the four people in the apartment at the moment, Jaison was the only human. And, coincidentally, the only one who was completely unaware that the supernatural actually existed.
Dan was a ghoul—and while he didn’t exactly feast on the flesh of humans, he did dine on human organs several nights out of the week. He didn’t kill people, of course—none of the ghouls who lived in the Providence community did that. Why go through all the fuss and possible exposure of killing people when people died every day? Ghouls owned local funeral homes and worked in medical pathology, just the kinds of places where they would have plenty of access to fresh human bodies that had no more need of any of their delicious, vitamin-heavy organs. Those were harvested and distributed to the rest of the ghouls—though apparently there were also at least two ghoul-owned butcher shops in the Providence area. If I’d still been eating meat, I admit that that would’ve given me pause.
Jaison craned his head back to look at me. “Hey, Fort. Did you see Ninja Kitty anywhere when you came in?”
Beside him, I could see Dan suppressing a sigh. When Suzume and I had started dating, I hadn’t quite realized how much time she’d be spending at the apartment in fox form. We’d been good friends for months, so she’d long been a regular fixture around the apartment, and she and Jaison got along well (Suze and Dan . . . that was a different story), but in the past she’d primarily kept to human form, particularly when we weren’t the only ones in the apartment. That had changed, slowly at first, then in a big way over the last two to three weeks. Dan and I had actually been worried enough to try to have a serious conversation together about how exactly we were going to explain to Jaison why there was a fox scampering around the apartment.
Our big mistake, of course, had been in asking Suze if she could try to avoid taking fox form when there was a chance that Jaison could spot her. Naturally the very next time the two of them had been in the apartment together, Suze excused herself on the pretext of being really tired, and a black fox had sauntered into the living room and jumped up on the sofa next to Jaison, tail wagging delightedly, ready for a belly rub. It was a good thing that Dan and I had healthy cholesterol levels, because the moment had nearly given both of us heart attacks.
Of course, with Suze’s ability to mess with perception, she’d had the situation completely under control. Jaison had been startled at the sudden appearance of a friendly black cat, but certainly not shocked the way he would’ve been by a fox. We watched as Jaison rubbed her long foxy face and called her a nice kitty, and that was our only hint about what he was seeing. Suze had deliberately not influenced the way that Dan and I were seeing her, which she later admitted to me had been partially because Dan and I both had at least some expectation of seeing a fox in the apartment, and it would’ve therefore been harder to trick our minds. But mostly because Suze had gotten substantial thrills out of fucking with the two of us.
Thus had been born the fiction of Ninja Kitty, the stray cat who was mysteriously able to enter and exit our apartment at will. And, in the classic tradition of Superman and Clark Kent, the possibility that Suzume and Ninja Kitty could be one and the same was so unbelievably far-fetched that it never even crossed Jaison’s mind. Not even Ninja Kitty’s noted habit of “accidentally” knocking over Dan’s stacks of study flash cards and how often she seemed to find herself sitting on his open textbooks tipped Jaison off. Of course, Dan knew that she was doing it deliberately—but couldn’t even hint about it when Jaison was around, marveling at Ninja Kitty’s consistency.
“No, haven’t spotted her tonight,” I answered Jaison.
“I hope she’s okay,” he worried. “The temperature is supposed to drop below zero tonight.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine.” Poor Jaison. He was a devoted cat lover, but couldn’t have one himself because he lived with his grandmother, who was allergic. The more often Jaison spent time with Suze’s alter ego, the more I could see the wheels turning in his head as he tried to figure out a way to convince Dan to adopt Ninja Kitty full-time for him.
“She knows how to get in, Jaison,” Suze said, with a blandness utterly at odds with the glee in her eyes. “I’m sure if it’s too cold for her outside, she’ll show up.”
“Given her level of socialization, I bet that she has her own home,” Dan said, giving Suze an icy look. “Maybe she’s spending more time there.”
Before Dan and Suze could fully engage, I plopped down on the sofa and redirected things. “What are we watching?”
“Parade’s End,” Jaison said. “The British World War One masterpiece about a man who never gets laid. Portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch.”
“Jeez, Fort. Before I broke your dry spell, that could’ve been the story of your life.” Suze grinned and settled herself down in the armchair. It was a recent addition to the living room, obtained after Dan and I agreed that a three-person sofa was not quite up to handling the seating demands of two couples. A few days spent cruising Craigslist, and the assistance of Jaison’s truck, and we had a new armchair, tastefully upholstered in acid green corduroy. We were even moderately confident that no one had died in it (the seller had sworn that the tenant whose apartment he was emptying had died in the bedroom, not the living room).
“You people have no appreciation of film,” Dan said. “Fort, support me.”
“The British cinematic tradition of people staring intently at each other in lieu of actually addressing story elements is a long and noble one, particularly in Masterpiece Theater,” I noted.
“Thank you.”
“Also, Dan is gay for Cumberbatch.”
That earned me a couch cushion thrown at my head by Dan while Jaison and Suzume hooted with laughter.
* * *
I woke up the next morning with a substantial crick in my neck, thanks to the black fox that was ensconced in the middle of my pillow. I rolled over to the side and began rubbing my abused neck, grumbling. I didn’t
deny that my single-size mattress had been making for some tight quarters when Suze spent the night, and I had in fact been considering making the upgrade to a double or even a queen (plans that had now been firmly put on the back burner thanks to my financial support of the succubi), but we did have two pillows. It wasn’t exactly necessary for her to take hostile possession of my pillow every time she stayed over.
Also, the truth of the matter was that I’d gone to bed with a naked woman, and waking up next to a fluffy fox was not exactly how I liked to start the morning.
I said her name loudly. Then, with no response, I nudged her slightly. I was rewarded by the lazy opening of one amber eye.
“Suze, I’d like to do some early-morning postcoital cuddling,” I said.
Her luxuriously long tail wagged happily, and she rolled over so that she was regarding me upside down, her jaw open and her tongue lolling partially out.
“Rubbing your belly is not exactly what I had in mind.” My voice sounded about as dry as the Sahara.
She made a little disappointed sound in her throat; then with a huff she transformed. Between one breath and the next the winter-coated black fox on my pillow was replaced with a naked woman draped over the top of my bed.
Suze quirked an eyebrow. “Spoilsport.”
I hooked an arm around her hips and tugged her around and down. “Don’t worry,” I promised her with a grin. “You’ll still get plenty of rubbing.”
* * *
An hour later I was whistling while I put together a dual breakfast of English muffins, cereal, and orange juice. The stiffness in my neck was still present, but it now seemed like a decent tradeoff for the relaxation of every other part of me. Suze was in the shower, which thanks to our crummy pipes produced a rattling sound that was almost impossible to ignore, but I was determined to hold on to this good mood as long as possible, and I just whistled louder.
Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel Page 5