“Really?” Cole asked coldly, his disbelief clear. “Well, how pleasant that they’ve finally located some ethics. I do hope that they used both hands and a flashlight.”
Lilah got up and physically took me by the arm, towing me over to the door and leaving no question that this meeting was officially over. “That’s everything we agreed that we wanted to talk about, Cole, so that’s enough. I’m sure that Fort needs to get home.” As she flipped the lock on the door, she paused and looked at me with deep sincerity. “Fort, thank you. I mean it.”
I gave a small shrug. Lilah and I were the same in a lot of ways, given that we’d both run from our biology as long as we could. But when Lilah had seen bad things happening in her community, she didn’t only just buckle down and do something about it, even if it meant risking her life, but she stayed involved, doing her best to try to help the weaker members of the Neighbors, to protect them. I respected the hell out of her for it, and couldn’t say for certain that I would’ve been able to do the same thing in her position—at least not without trying to weasel my way out of it at first. “I should’ve checked in with you earlier, Lilah. I shouldn’t have let it become an emergency. But give me a call sometime later—we’ll do lunch, something that isn’t about business.”
She gave me a quick smile and a friendly peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I’ll talk with you later. And do give my best to Suzume when you see her.” A quick grin flashed across Lilah’s face, and a hint of her old spirit. “I heard you two are dating.”
I could feel a smile spread across my face, and I teased, “I thought there wasn’t much talking between the races.”
“Oh, there isn’t,” she assured me. “But this one was just too good for anyone to stay quiet about.”
With one last wave, she closed the door, and I headed back to my car. Snow had started falling when I was inside—the eventual payoff from the heavy gray clouds that had hung in the sky all day, making everything moody and grim. It wasn’t supposed to be a big storm, but I had to turn the car on to get the heat going, then pull my ice scraper out of the backseat and spend a few minutes brushing the fluffy accumulation off my windows, headlights, and brake lights, before I was finally able to get into the car and head home, mulling over all the issues that I would now have to present to my siblings and try to get some answers for.
* * *
In an effort to numb my brain to everything that was going on, I stayed up later than I had lately, and watched TV. Dan’s parents had gotten him a subscription to Hulu for Christmas, giving us a sudden access to television that we’d agreed was both incredible and that we’d probably have to completely disable when he was in exam time again, so we spent the evening watching an older season of Top Chef, with Dan periodically complaining about how more challenges needed to focus on the use of organ meat so that he could get new ideas for the kitchen.
Around midnight, Dan headed off to bed. I watched one last episode, mostly just to have something to look at while thoughts chased around in my head like aimless mice. I unwrapped a Popsicle, the last of the orange ones, and began gnawing at it contemplatively, bliss filling me as the persistent ache in my upper jaw was soothed away. A knock on the door surprised me, surprising me even more when I opened it to find Lilah standing in my hall, her hair mashed under a dark green wool hat that matched her heavy winter jacket.
“Uh . . .” I said eloquently, the only thing running through my head being that I was in my pajamas and flannel robe, with a half-eaten Popsicle in my hand.
“I’m really sorry, Fort,” she said in a rush. “I know that this is incredibly inconvenient.” It was true, but agreeing to it seemed somehow a little rude, so I just gave a noncommittal shrug and opened the door wider so that she could come inside.
“Did something happen after I left tonight?” I asked, wrapping what was left of my Popsicle in a paper towel and tucking it back into the freezer. Unexpected guest or no, I was planning to eat that thing.
“No, nothing like that.” Lilah pulled off her hat and coat, folding them carefully onto the side of the sofa. I suppressed a sigh. Apparently this wasn’t going to be a quick visit. “I wanted to talk with you about Cole.”
“Ah. Yeah, you’d mentioned him before as the one who pushed to kill the Neighbors who’d been working with the Ad-hene on the blood sacrifices.” I sat down. “Kind of a surprise to find him waiting to see me, though.”
“I’m sorry about that, but there was a big meeting going down, and he backed me into a corner in front of a lot of the rest of the Neighbors.” She ran her hands over her hair, patting the hair over her ears in an unconscious habit. Her glamour was back in place this evening. “But I’m sure that you’re going to see a lot of him in the future.”
“Oh? Lilah, don’t get me wrong, but that it not in any way improving my night.”
She gave me a quick smile, but it failed to make a dent in her overall anxiety. “Yeah, Cole can be kind of a dick, but he’s not a bad guy overall. He really does want to protect us, to help with our new direction.”
“But you don’t agree with him.”
“On some things, sure. Not on everything.” She paced the room, looking around. “Oh, you got a new armchair. It looks nice.”
“Lilah, seriously, it’s after midnight,” I begged. “I know there’s something you don’t want to say to me, but you came all the way over here to say it rather than texting me, so please just spit it out.”
“You’re right, okay.” She plunked herself down on the new armchair, arranged her hands carefully in her lap, then looked up at me and opened her mouth. Five seconds later she was up and pacing again, and I threw up my hands.
“Lilah—”
“No, fine.” She pressed her fist against her chin, then said, “You need to call the witches.”
“Yeah, we were just talking about that this evening—”
“No,” she snapped, then took a deep breath. “It’s about Ambrose, Fort, the witch who cooked up those roofie potions that were given to the girls.”
I sighed. “Listen, Lilah, I don’t like it either, and I don’t think that he’s a particularly good person, but he didn’t know what those potions were for. He should’ve asked, but he didn’t, and I believe that he didn’t know. If he was a doctor, I’d say to suspend his license or make him go before an ethics board, but he’s not—he’s a witch, and he was doing what Lavinia was paying him—”
“Don’t defend him, Fort,” Lilah said, her temper flaring enough that her eyes were significantly more gold than brown. “Iris was given that potion, and we both saw what it did to her. I know all the women who were given it, and I was the one who had to tell them what was done to them, because they still have no memories about what happened, but now they’re having to deal with what was done to them, and that someone was murdered right in front of them when they couldn’t do anything about it.” Her knuckles whitened, and I could see her visibly rein in her temper. Her voice lowered, but the intensity was still there as she looked at me. “I want to hurt Ambrose. I want him to bleed. But I can’t risk what would happen if a Neighbor killed a witch, and that’s why I’m telling you this, Fort. You need to get him out of the city, hide him somewhere.”
I looked at her and understood why she’d come here this late, and hadn’t called me. “This is about Cole,” I said. “He killed all the Neighbors who were involved, and now he’s looking at Ambrose as well.”
“He holds him responsible for what his actions contributed to,” Lilah said dully. “Can’t you understand that?”
“Yes, I can,” I agreed. I leaned over and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing lightly. “I know someone to call,” I assured her. “I’ll get Ambrose away before anything can happen.”
She hesitated a second, then nodded, reaching her right hand over to pat my hand, nodding a few times. I could see the strain in her face, the worry, and it made me terrifie
d to think about the things that she was still not telling me, and that frankly I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to know about.
I hesitated, then said it. After all, she was my friend, and I knew that if Prudence got pissed about anything, she wasn’t going to stop and ask questions before she started killing perceived ringleaders. “Lilah, I noticed what Cole said about the Ad-hene, and don’t think that I also didn’t notice you pushing that to a back burner.”
She frowned at me. “You have to understand about Cole and the Ad-hene, Fort. His mother was a changeling, one of Shoney’s. When she was old enough to have a baby, Shoney was the father, and that’s how Cole was born. And Cole was the best three-quarters that they’d ever produced—his glamours are the strongest, and he holds the glamours on almost forty of the Neighbors who are too weak to set their own. So Shoney wanted to re-create Cole—even after Cole’s mother miscarried three times and had two stillbirths, he wouldn’t give up. Finally Cole’s mother told Shoney that she wouldn’t do it anymore—no more pregnancies. And Shoney killed her—took her into the forest and just ripped her apart. Because to him she was just a changeling who was no longer useful, so she might as well give him the entertainment of her death.”
We looked at each other grimly. The truth was that I wouldn’t cry a tear if the Ad-hene were all killed the next day—they’d left too much of a trail of destruction behind them. And even though I still didn’t like Cole, this made me understand him a little more, almost against my will. But understanding didn’t change the truth that there was trouble brewing right now with the Neighbors—a lot of it.
As soon as the door had closed behind Lilah, I began muttering curses, circling around the room in much the same way that Lilah had done just a few minutes before. The last thing I needed was getting my sister involved—her answer would be to just start killing people and using that as a way to discourage future problems. Calling Chivalry was similarly problematic—given his fixation on following my mother’s last directive, there was no way that he’d agree to keep this hidden from my sister, and that led right back to the first problem at worst, and at the very best, just yet another sibling deadlock that would result in all of us standing around arguing while Cole took out Ambrose.
I pulled my phone out of its charger in the bedroom and called Suzume, but she didn’t pick up—it was entirely possible that she was out running around the woods behind her grandmother’s house on four legs, hunting bunnies and mice, or knocking over her neighbor’s trash cans for the umpteenth time. I cursed, checked the time, and cursed again. As I scrolled through my contacts, I hoped to hell that Valentine Sassoon was a night owl.
He wasn’t. Valentine Sassoon might be the would-be Norma Rae of the witches, but he was also a doctor with a thriving practice in sports medicine and orthopedic surgery, which apparently meant that he followed the practice of early to bed and early to rise. After he’d woken up sufficiently to realize that this was important, and that it really couldn’t wait until morning, he asked if it was possible to meet to discuss it. I ground my teeth at the thought of having to actually drag myself out somewhere, but the truth was that this was probably something that merited a full face-to-face conversation. There was a twenty-four-hour diner that I knew on the edge of the College Hill neighborhood that had decent parking and wouldn’t be far for him to get to, so I asked if he could go there. He agreed, and we both hung up.
I looked out the window—an inch of powder, snow still coming down, and other than the tire tracks from other cars, it was clear that the plows weren’t going to bother getting to work for another few hours. I cursed loudly and changed my sweatpants for jeans, and pulled a sweatshirt over my usual pajama top. The diner had undoubtedly seen worse. Yanking on my shoes, I went back into the kitchen and gnawed my way quickly through the Popsicle—it was probably a dumb thing to do before heading out into the cold, but damn it, this night was not going my way.
As I trudged down the apartment building steps, I passed Jaison coming up. I waved at him in passing, and grinned. “Hey, Jaison. Dan get lonely?”
Jaison gave me a lazy smile and gestured to himself. “Hey, who could blame a man for not being able to resist this?”
I laughed and continued to head down. “Did Suze booty-call you too?” Jaison called to me, pausing in his own trek up the stairs.
“I wish,” I grumbled. “No, I just have to meet up with someone, then come back. Family shit.”
Jaison reached into his pocket and withdrew his keys. “If you’re coming right back, then take my truck,” he advised. “Those tires that you have on the Scirocco are crap, even in baby snow like this.”
“Thanks, I really appreciate it,” I said, catching the keys as he tossed them down to me.
“No problem. Just remember—I want the same number of dents in my bumper tomorrow as there are right now.”
“Forty-eight, gotcha,” I said. “Thanks, and have fun.”
“You know it,” he said, heading up the stairs again with a definite jauntiness in his steps.
* * *
There’s a certain point of the night when a twenty-four-hour diner becomes a very weird intersection of humanity. People on dates who like each other enough to keep talking to each other, but aren’t ready to go back to someone’s house and possibly end up in bed. People who are in the middle of breakups. People who work weird work shifts, and are actually having their dinner, or possibly breakfast. People who you are almost entirely certain are prostitutes. People who are probably homeless, nursing cups of coffee as an excuse to sit somewhere nice and warm rather than being outside in the cold. People who have nowhere else in the world to go, and just look like the universe really needs to cut them a break for once.
But when it comes down to it, twenty-four-hour diners are wonderful, because where else can you walk in and get French toast at any hour of the day? If nuclear fallout ever ended up happening, my plan was to hole up in a twenty-four-hour diner and just eat French toast.
Since I was hoping to get out of this meeting as soon as possible and actually get some sleep, I avoided the siren song of French toast and just ordered a cup of hot chocolate—and given the level that my night was sucking, I felt entirely justified when I asked for extra whipped cream on top. Perhaps my waitress picked up on something with that sixth sense for sadness that all good service personnel are able to develop (I, for the record, had never developed this), or was just incredibly bored, because when she brought it to me, it was also jazzed up with a whole bunch of sprinkles.
This improved my night right up until the moment that Valentine Sassoon, looking more put together than any man apart from my brother had any right to at this hour of the night, sat down across from me, catching me midslurp of my delicious, whipped-cream-and-sprinkle-covered hot cocoa. He didn’t say anything, but there was no doubt that the subtle arch of his eyebrow was providing commentary on my choices.
It was of small comfort to me that I’d had much more embarrassing moments.
The waitress looped around again, long enough to take Valentine’s order of a small bowl of chowder and pretty much fall in love with him. Right there in the middle of a shift in the absolute dead of night, there had appeared a man who not only didn’t reek of alcohol or despair, but looked like he could be a model. Plus, he smiled extremely politely at her and even repeated her name after she’d introduced herself. I had a feeling that someone was going to get some extra crackers with his chowder.
That actually wasn’t a euphemism.
Once the waitress had managed to pry herself away from our table, I filled Valentine in on what Lilah had told me that evening. He listened without interrupting, his fingers carefully steepled as he gave me his full attention, his handsome face intent, but not giving any hints about how he was reacting to what I was telling him.
After I’d finished, Valentine placed his hands down flat on the table, the faded beige of the plastic
top contrasting the dark skin of the long and elegant fingers that would make piano teachers and surgical instructors alike swoon.
“You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I’ve been worried for a while that the other shoe was waiting to drop on Ambrose, but I’ve got to say that I wasn’t expecting it to come from this direction. Honestly I didn’t think that the elves even gave a crap.”
“The Neighbors aren’t like the Ad-hene, at least not this group,” I reminded him, “and they are not happy with what happened.” I took another sip of my cocoa, which was really very good. “Frankly, a lot of people should be unhappy.”
At my tone, Valentine’s eyebrows arched again. “I’m not arguing with you, Fort. Ambrose got very used to just doing what Lavinia asked him to, with no questions asked. But this is about a bigger issue, the problem of—”
“It’s one in the morning, and you would not even believe how many plates I’m already keeping in the air. Can we please, just this once, only focus on the issue of what’s happening right now?” I begged.
The witch sighed heavily. “Fine, we’ll do it your way. Treat the symptom, not the malady. But hey, what would I know about that? I just have a medical degree.”
“Ha-ha.” I rubbed my hand across my eyes, which were doing that overly moist almost-teary thing that happened when I was really tired. “Ambrose needs to get out of town, and given what’s going on with the Neighbors right now, I don’t think he should plan on coming back. So how do we relocate him?”
“It’s not just him. Ambrose has a wife who is also a witch, and their youngest child is still at home. You’re looking at relocating a family of three.”
Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel Page 24