“This is fucked up,” I said, louder than I needed to, but wanting to hear my own voice again, to force myself back into normal, back to the real me, not the tracking-a-drop-of-blood version of myself. “Is this what it’s going to be now? We just walked a block because of a dot of blood. Someone probably just slipped on the ice and skinned their knee. God help me if Jaison nicks himself shaving, or if Mrs. Bandyopadyay pokes herself with a needle while she’s quilting.”
“Hold off on the emo for a second there,” Suze said, then got down on her hands and knees. She pressed herself right down to the cement itself, brushing her face against the ground.
“I know what just happened here, Suze,” I snapped. “Someone lost a few drops of blood and I went haywire.”
She sat up fast, and with fox speed she smacked me in the shoulder, hard. “You dope,” she said affectionately, even as my shoulder throbbed. “You don’t even know what you’re smelling.” Suze hopped agilely to her feet, then extended a hand. “Come on, I’ve got the scent now, so we can move a little faster.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, linking my arm with hers as we resumed walking, though at a much different pace. We weren’t jogging, but we were at the speed just below that. Anyone looking at us would think that we were late for something.
“You humanoids have no idea how your own noses work,” Suze said as we sped along. “Even the werebears are barely better than our kits. You aren’t following blood because it’s blood. You’re following it because of what was going in it when it came out.”
“That made zero sense.”
She grinned at me, and the shape of Suze’s face in the darkness was suddenly longer, more vulpine. She could still pass for human, barely, but there was no hiding the gleam in eyes that seemed subtly different. “You’re a predator, Fort,” she reminded me. “Whoever the owner of that blood is, they were scared when they bled. And not just startled, but terrified. There was extra adrenaline flowing, the heart rate was kicked up to the max, and”—she sniffed again, harder, as we walked, then nodded, more to herself than to me—“her body was terrified.”
I frowned. “I didn’t respond to the blood on its own—I responded to its circumstance?”
“A predator responding to weak prey.” She nodded, then lifted an eyebrow. “And guess what smell I just picked up on?”
“Another predator?” I guessed.
She grinned. “I’m smelling kobold. Multiple kobolds, in fact. And they’re right”—Suze sped us up, then turned a quick corner down an alley—“here.”
The smell of the blood was thick here, but it was actually easier to ignore because of everything else that demanded my attention. An old woman wrapped in layers of old coats, loose shirts, and part of what looked like a quilt tied around her waist was huddling against the wall of the alley. Her eyes were huge in the darkness, and her hands, covered in old grime and dirt, were pressed over her mouth. She was trying to stay quiet, to make herself as small as possible, but little whimpers of raw terror kept creeping out. There was blood on her wrists, and I could see a little on her ankles as well.
Surrounding her were three kobolds, and as we watched, one darted forward and nipped her hand, just hard enough to break the skin and make a few droplets of blood bead on the surface of her skin. “It doesn’t make a sound,” one of the others crooned in that high, child’s voice that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “It wants to live to see the dawn, so it doesn’t cry out.”
Imagine the body of a hyena, with that sloped back and hunched shoulders, the thick torso and the awkwardly long legs. But instead of a hyena’s head there’s a human face, long and sallow, the skin almost gray in a way that blends into the shadows. The jaw struggles to contain a mouth full of animal teeth, jagged and yellow, built for ripping flesh and gnawing at bones, and they poke out and rest against lips that are black like a hyena’s, not like a person’s. Each of the front two legs ends not in a paw, but in a human hand, the backs still bristling with fur all the way down to the fingers, where each digit ends in a blunt claw. The fur on the body is charcoal gray, with lighter spots that should make them stick out, but actually just add to their camouflage. These were the kobolds, who could never pass for human, but whose minds were too keen to ever be mistaken for an animal.
They were city dwellers, scavengers who hung at the edges. They lived in abandoned buildings, darkened alleys, and of course the sewers. Anyone who had ever feared alligators in the sewers had no idea what they really needed to be afraid of. In my mother’s territory they were permitted to eat the wildlife of the city—stray dogs and cats who would never have owners looking for them, pigeons and rats, and whatever treasures they found in Dumpsters. Months ago Chivalry and I had had to discipline a small group that had gotten tired of the lean denizens of the street and had started snatching plump pets from out of yards and off leashes. But this was something else altogether.
They were too focused on their prey and didn’t realize that we’d entered the alley. A second kobold darted forward to nip the woman again, but I was already moving, and moving faster than a human could’ve.
I got a hand on the back of the moving kobold’s neck, right at the scruff, and hauled it backward and away from its target. It snarled in surprise, but the forearms on a kobold were built like a hyena’s, not a person’s, and it didn’t have the joints or movement to bend its forearms up or around to get at me. It threw its heavy weight around desperately, but I dug my hand in harder and refused to let go. Months of working out, plus the onset of my transition, had given me enough arm muscles that it couldn’t break my grip and get away.
The kobold beside it gave a guttural cry that was somewhere on that midpoint between human and animal, and it charged me. I punted it hard in the chest with my foot, and it slammed backward and into the wall with a yelp of surprise and indignation. I looked around to see whether the third kobold was coming up behind me, but I didn’t need to worry. It was flat to the ground, with Suze’s knee keeping it pressed firmly in the position she wanted it, and it wasn’t making so much as a sound, given that she had her best switchblade fully extended and the point positioned less than an inch from one of the kobold’s large eyes.
“Not a cry, not a whimper,” Suze said to the kobold in a deliberate echo to what they had said to their victim. “Or you truly will never see another dawn.”
“Ma’am?” I called to the woman, who was still frozen in place against the wall. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”
She stared at me, her mouth an o of surprise, and her rheumy old eyes still blank with fear. Beside her I could see one of those sleeping bags that’s made from sewing layers of old blankets together, the kind that I had seen other homeless people on the streets of Providence wrap around themselves and sleep in. She didn’t say anything to me, and I wondered if she’d really heard me, or if she was even able to respond.
“Ma’am,” I said again, making my voice as gentle as I could. “Ma’am, it’s going to be very cold tonight. Is there a shelter that you can go to tonight? I promise you, ma’am, that these things aren’t real.” And I ground my fingers farther into the neck of the kobold I was holding, and gave it a shake that even I knew was vicious. “These things aren’t real,” I repeated, “but even if they were, you’d never have to worry about them again, because I won’t let them harm you.”
She nodded slowly, to what part of my statement I wasn’t sure, and then, holding my gaze, reached down with shaking hands to collect her sleeping bag and a grimy backpack. She pulled those things to her and stood up, then hurried away on shuffling feet, whispering to herself, “Not real, not real,” even as she stepped over the gray tail of the one that Suze kept pinned to the ground. We all listened as her footsteps in the snow moved farther away and finally were gone in the night.
The kobold that I had kicked kept its distance, but its gleaming dark eyes watched me. “Young prince,” it said,
and its voice was a little girl’s, hurt and betrayed. “Why does the prince attack us?”
“You live in Madeline Scott’s territory,” I ground out, my temper spiking as the kobold tried to pretend innocence. “You live by Madeline Scott’s rules. And those rules are clear—you don’t hunt the humans.”
The kobold snickered, its black lips parting. “Just amusement,” it said. “Just a game with one whose mind is already lost. If we hunted in earnest, you would know.” The black lips widened farther, showing every sharp tooth.
“Or would he?” interjected the kobold that I still held by its scruff. It had gone limp when the first kobold spoke, and now it hung from my hand with every appearance of relaxation. Its voice was a young boy’s, the kind you’d hear from a five-year-old, and then it laughed, a high titter that raked against the ear. “So many secrets are known only to the queen. And when she fades to nothing, who is left to speak the secrets?”
A chill ran up my spine that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. As hard as it was to imagine when you looked at them, the kobolds were where the myth of the sphinx had developed. They spoke in riddles and confusion, and there were those who believed that they also spoke prophesy.
The third kobold spoke then, another little girl, but this one was sly and gleeful, though still eyeing Suzume’s knife warily. “Perhaps then a value would be placed on those who give tongue to the dead.”
Suze’s lip curled. “Well, that’s an insight into the kobold dating scene that I didn’t need.”
The first kobold by the wall hissed in rage at Suze’s words, and the fur along the ridge of its back lifted. “The little fox laughs, but soon she’ll be in tears,” it snarled, that little girl voice raging. “The offspring of the White Fox harbor their own poison.” Then she turned coy, turning her head to one side and watching both of us from the corner of her eye. “Or don’t you wish to know what the future holds?”
Suze gave her own snarl, and in one quick movement had turned the knife in her hand away from the kobold’s eye to slice down against its leg, one fast cut into the flesh that for a second exposed the whiteness of bone before the blood began to flow. The sound the kobold made wasn’t an animal yelp, but a disturbing child’s scream of pain, and then Suze was off its back and had hurled it, one-handed, to where the first kobold stood. They went down in a pile of yelps, but when they came up neither made a move against her, just pressed backward. The wounded kobold leaned down to lick its leg, but the one that had spoken smiled tauntingly, proud that it had clearly struck a nerve.
I cut in, dropping the kobold that I’d been holding after one last brutal shake. “Save it for the tourists, guys. There’s no prophecy, just good background and guesses. Now keep your attention on stray animals, because you remember what happens when you break the rules, don’t you? My brother and I left your kind bleeding into the gutters last summer.” I looked at all of them, not hiding just how much I wanted to make them feel just a hint of the terror that they’d inflicted on that homeless woman, so breakable in her obvious madness.
“The prince denies prophesy, but we are the speakers of truth, the seers of hearts,” was the sibilant response hissed from the shadows. “And your own heart is so obvious, so soft.” A high laugh. “You hunger to break our bones, wreak your vengeance, though you might dress it up in the clothing of justice. But you fear to be like your sister, fear to glory in violence as she does, so you will let us go with no harm.”
I hated how right they were, but I looked at those too-intelligent, mocking eyes, and refused to be taunted into an action I’d already decided against. “You like talking about my sister’s violence,” I said coldly. “That’s good, because I’m going to be talking with my sister about what I saw tonight. She’ll probably want to have a chat with you guys. You remember Prudence’s chats, don’t you? The kind that end with her ripping out organs. She’s not like me—she won’t stick to the things that grow back.” I might disagree with almost everything that Prudence stood for and believed in, but when it came to the kobolds I had no problem with using her as the bogeyman to prevent the kind of behavior that I’d seen tonight.
The kobolds made shows of sneering and flicking their tails to show disdain, but the one that Suze had cut faded quickly away, followed by the second. The third also began to slink off, but stopped at the entrance of the alley to get one last taunt in. “And what will happen when the hand that holds the dog’s leash is gone, and the master’s voice is silenced?” it asked, with that lisp on its consonants that so many little children possess as they shape their soft palates around words made for adult mouths. “The dog will bite then, and no one can tell it not to.” Then it was gone in the night.
“I hate those creepy little bastards,” Suze bit out grimly. She hunkered down to wipe the blade of her knife clean on the snow, and shot me a sideways look. “We could’ve just killed all three, you know.”
I knew, of course. I was a Scott vampire, and no one liked the kobolds, even other kobolds. It was because I’d wanted to kill them so badly that I hadn’t. “I’ll talk with my mother about this. They were right—they hadn’t engaged in a real hunt, not the way they or my family would see it.”
“So, nothing?” Suze asked, her eyebrows shooting up in surprise.
“Definitely not nothing. I don’t think that was the first time they tormented someone like that—they were too quick with their defense, too sure that the woman was mentally ill.” My hands clenched again as the memory of the woman’s vulnerability flashed through my mind, overlaid with my own shame at the part of myself that had assessed and been fascinated by it. For the millionth time, I wished that I could’ve been born something other than what I was. I forced my mind to focus on an active solution to what was going on. “I’m going to call my brother tomorrow morning. Prudence is sitting on top of some major aggravation right now—if she agrees that they’re too far over the line of behavior, then I’m sure she’d love to make a trip to the city to reinforce some manners.”
“And if she agrees with the kobolds, or just doesn’t give a shit about the homeless?” Suze put her knife away and, linking her arm in mine, began the walk back to the car.
“Then tomorrow night you and I will go around and have some chats with kobold groups,” I said, deadly serious. I could avoid feeding my own violent urges when it was possible, but I wasn’t the guy I’d been a year ago. I couldn’t look away entirely from something when I had the means to correct it, even though that correction meant embracing the part of myself that terrified me.
We walked in silence for another few steps, our feet landing on a mixture of bare sidewalk, rock-salt-covered ice, and old snow. I felt Suze’s arm slide through mine, feeling utterly right and comfortable. “So,” she asked, watching me from the corner of her eye, “am I go for an overnight?”
I couldn’t help the smile that stretched across my face at her bluntness. No delicate hanging around in the living room for her, ticking down the hours until one could believably claim to be too tired to drive home. I snuggled our linked arms tighter and slipped my bare hand from my coat pocket to hers. There was a lot left unresolved, and as our first major fight in the relationship, it was still as open and delicate as the dog bite on my hand.
But the kobolds were liars and charlatans, and there was no such thing as fate.
“I’d like that,” I said, and even in a night so cold that the skin of my face was aching, the sight of her smile made me warm.
I’m not sure which of us started walking faster, or maybe we both did, but soon we were back in the car and making our way to my apartment at a good pace. After all, there was something to look forward to now.
“Succubi refugees, werebear attachés, and now kobold corralling,” Suze noted. “You have a few plates in the air, don’t you?”
“Yeah. And if they’d ever seen me wait tables, they’d know that I’m the last person in the world
who should be trusted with delicate china.”
Chapter Five
I woke up to a jabbing in my side. The room was dark, illuminated slightly by the light from the streetlight seeping through my cheap curtains. I could feel the cold of the room on my face, but the rest of my body, tucked beneath flannel sheets, heavy comforter, and augmented by the toasty heat of the woman snuggled next to me, was warm. I was aware that my skin was damp with sweat, not just on what was beneath the covers, but also my face and head. My heart was racing so hard that I could almost imagine that I could feel it thudding against the inside of my chest. That, apart from the jabbing, was my first hint.
The jabbing, courtesy of a surprisingly bony kitsune elbow, stopped, and I felt her snuggle closer. “You were having a nightmare, Fort.”
I ran my hand over the back of my head, feeling that my hair was actually wet from the sweat. There was an almost metallic taste in my mouth. The cobwebby feeling finally left my brain, and I remembered my dream. It was an old one, mostly.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up. Was I making noise?”
“A little. Mostly you kept tensing up, though. And when I tried to wake you up at first, you flinched so hard that you almost fell out of bed.” She paused, and then I felt her hand lightly touch my face. “Do you want to talk about it?” Suze was tentative, uncertain. It was oddly comforting to know that she trusted me enough to show that vulnerability—that she didn’t have all the answers, or all the know-how. Apparently even ass-kicking kitsune could be flummoxed about the protocol of dealing with the nightmares of a significant other.
“Not really,” I said honestly. And I didn’t. It was the old dream, more of a memory, really, of the day that my foster parents, Brian and Jill, had been murdered. My sister had painted the floors and walls with their blood because I’d told them the truth about what we were, and they’d believed me. They’d loved me, they’d believed me, and they’d died for it.
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