Generation V

by M. L. Brennan

  “So I have to walk back to the car shirtless?” I asked.

  “While that would be lots of fun, no.” Suzume turned the shirt right side out again, and held it out to me. The inside was covered in blood, and only the fact that it had started the night as navy blue kept it looking even semipassable on the outside.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Very often, but not this time.”

  “It’s wet.”

  “On.” I knew that implacable look on her face. While it usually involved a demand that it was a mealtime, I knew that it again meant that I was going to have to give in.

  In a night of increasingly gross occurrences, putting on that bloody shirt was right near the top. Patches of it stuck to my skin, and I shuddered as I buttoned it up. There was also some relief that I’d fed from Madeline so recently. Three nights ago, there would’ve been no way for me to feel anything but hunger when presented with this much blood. I hated to feed, but I had to acknowledge in this moment that putting it off the way I had been doing was more than a little stupid.

  Then again, maybe it hadn’t been entirely clever life decisions that led me to stand in an alleyway at night, accompanied only by a fox and a pair of bodies.

  “Are we done?” I asked.

  “Not quite,” Suzume said. She crouched down again next to the body, and rested her right hand over Phillip’s staring eye. She took a deep breath in, and for a moment it was if my entire body was filled with that pins-and-needles feeling that comes when your foot is just on the edge of falling asleep. Then Suzume breathed out again slowly, and the feeling passed.

  She got up slowly, brushing off her knees. Her face was completely colorless, and she shook. “Okay, now we can go.”

  “What do you mean? How is that going to keep them from finding Phillip?”

  “Phillip where?”

  “Right there!” I pointed at where we’d dumped the twisted and ruined body, then stared. Phillip wasn’t there anymore. Instead it was an old man, dressed in rags with a little hat sculpted out of tinfoil. He was curled up on his side, eyes closed peacefully. Flies were converging around him, and the smell of him made me reel backward. I knew without question that the old man must have died here days ago, probably when his heart gave out.

  I looked over at Suzume, who had braced herself against the wall. She was still shaking slightly, and her head almost drooped with exhaustion, but there was that familiar smirk on her face.

  “What did you do? How could—” I looked back again. The old man still lay there. “You changed him!”

  “No,” Suzume said. “I just changed the way you see him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Suzume slid a little, and when I reached out a hand she took it gratefully, using it to pull herself back up. “Everyone who looks at him will see an old homeless man who died a few days ago, and everyone will agree that his heart must’ve given out. The coroner is going to see the same thing, even if he opens up the chest. The morticians who keep him in storage while they try to find his family will all see an old man, not Phillip. The people who bury him weeks from now will still see an old man. Every camera will record the old man. People will walk in his blood and never realize it. Someone can stick their hand inside his chest and never realize that there isn’t a heart left.”

  “My God,” I whispered.

  “Not quite, but I am pretty awesome,” Suzume said. She started to slide again, and this time I wrapped my arm around her waist. “It’s hard to do,” she said, resting her head against my shoulder. “It has to trick a lot of people for a long time. It has to trick machines too.”

  “Are you going to put one on Jessica too?”

  “I only had enough in me for one.” Her voice was soft, almost thin.

  “Why him?”

  Apparently she wasn’t tired enough for sarcasm, because she rolled her eyes at me. “We have two bodies. One is a vampire spawn whose body isn’t quite normal anymore, who both of us have bled on and who has my saliva all over him. The other is a murdered little girl who every police officer in this city is looking for. Which one would you rather have CSI technicians crawling all over?”

  “Valid point,” I muttered.

  I looked back once as we left. Jessica was shadowed by the Dumpster beside her, but her blond hair and pale skin were bright in the moonlight. I hoped someone would find her soon, and that they would put a blanket over her. She looked so small and vulnerable, lying there in her daisy pajamas.

  We made slow progress back to the car. Suzume was so tired she was practically sleepwalking, and I was still bruised and sore from the fight, with one knee that ached sharply with every step. I dumped the trash bags down a storm drain a few blocks away from the alley, and by that time I was practically carrying Suzume.

  This should’ve been my opportunity for a display of masculine studliness as I swept the gorgeous woman off her feet and carried her to safety, but unfortunately—

  “Christ, you’re heavy,” I bitched to Suzume. We’d finally given up all hope that she could walk back to the car, and now I was carrying her piggyback style. Her head lolled on my shoulder, hair falling down to tickle my nose, and I heard her quiet snicker in my ear.

  My rest breaks were getting longer and longer by the time we finally reentered the neighborhood we’d parked in. It was almost midnight now, and there were lines out the door in front of most of the clubs. People were dressed to impress, with short skirts and shiny shirts.

  “Oh, come on,” I moaned, staring at the hordes from the shadow of a closed building’s awning. “This was completely deserted a few hours ago.”

  “Thursday is ladies’ night,” Suzume muttered in my ear. “Just get to the car.”

  “Yeah, fantastic idea. You’re wearing a T-shirt and look like I’ve just roofied your drink. I’m going to get arrested, and then they might start wondering why my shirt is soaked in blood.”

  “Idiot,” Suzume whispered. “They’ll see a drunk girl being carried home by her boyfriend. No one will worry, and no one will care.”

  I cranked back and looked at her. Her eyes were barely slitted open, and she looked even paler than before. “I thought you didn’t have the energy for any more illusions,” I said.

  “I’m showing dumb, mostly intoxicated and hormone-driven twits exactly what they expect to see at this time of night. This is barely a scrap of an illusion that only has to hold up at a distance. But unless you’d like to test your own bloody date-rape concept, I’d suggest getting us to the car before I lose even this.”

  I shut up and hauled us down the street to where I was parked. A few people laughed at us, and one guy yelled some advice about making sure she vomited before I put her in the car, but no one seemed worried, and no one came any closer to investigate. I hurried as fast as I could anyway, the back of my neck creeping at the thought of what we’d look like without Suzume’s illusion. That meant that we were moving at a pace just faster than a crippled giraffe.

  The Fiesta had not fared well in our absence. The rear driver’s-side window had been smashed, and my radio had now joined the free market economy. I was too exhausted to even feel pissed, and I practically poured Suzume into the passenger seat. I had just enough awareness to put the gun into the trunk, where Suzume’s duffel bag and my CD collection had managed to survive unscathed. I opened up Suzume’s duffel and after some rooting around managed to unearth a pair of shorts for her. I might’ve been half-dead from exhaustion and pounded to a pulp, but I still knew that I’d feel calmer if she was wearing more clothing.

  I shouldn’t have bothered. A black fox was sound asleep on the seat when I got into the car, her head and neck still threaded through the appropriate holes in my T-shirt. She woke up enough to give a few halfhearted grumbles when I pulled it off her, but then her head dropped back down and she was out again. I stripped off my flannel shirt, stuffing it under my seat and shuddering at the way the saturated fabric squished, and pulled the T-shirt over my
head.

  The drive back to my apartment was awful. My brain felt like it was mired in molasses, and at one point I forgot and tried to turn on the radio to keep myself awake. My already cut knuckles scratched against a few of the ripped-off wires, which did manage to wake me up a little. Night wind howled in from the broken window, and I hoped that it wasn’t supposed to rain. There was no way I was going to tape plastic over that tonight.

  At least Suzume was a lot easier to carry as a fox. She hung limply in my arms as I hauled myself up the stairs to my apartment and tucked her onto my bed. I thought about just collapsing, but there was a more urgent concern.

  The pipes in my building are old, and they make a banging sound whenever someone takes a shower, but for once I didn’t give a crap about being a polite neighbor or roommate. Under the bright fluorescent lights I looked like I’d been playing in a slaughterhouse. My chest was caked in dried blood, along with a number of black fox hairs from Suzume’s brief period in my shirt. Under good light, I could now see all the smears of blood and dirt on my jeans as well, and I dumped them straight into the trash. The water running into the drain was pink as I scrubbed myself down with soap, and the hot water ran out long before I’d finished. I shivered as I scrubbed, feeling the sting as soap entered into the dozens of cuts that I found on my face, arms, back, and knees.

  Finally I felt marginally cleaner and turned off the water. My teeth were chattering as I dried off and dry-swallowed a pair of Tylenol. I turned the light off without looking in the mirror, figuring that I’d have to see my bruises again in the morning anyway. I shuffled into my room like an old man, wincing with every step. On the bed, Suzume opened those bright button eyes and looked at me for a long minute, then scooted over an inch and gave a soft yip of welcome.

  I pulled on a pair of old brown cotton pajama bottoms that were worn smooth and thin from a thousand runs through the laundry, dropped the wet towel onto the floor, and crawled into the bed. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

  I woke up at one point in the night, confused. There was a furry body snuggled against my chest, and my body was one throbbing ball of hurt. Then I remembered what had happened, and I remembered the way Jessica Grann had looked the last time I saw her.

  I lay awake in the dark, thinking about what had been done to her, and remembering the way her blue eyes had stared up at me. Maria’s eyes had been a deep chocolate brown, but I wondered if they had looked the same way to whoever had found her—empty, yet somehow accusatory. I felt moisture on my face and scrubbed hard at my eyes with my hand. That wouldn’t bring Jessica or Maria back, or take away the image of their broken bodies. It was a long time until finally exhaustion and the soft whuffling of Suzume’s breathing pulled me back down into sleep.

  Chapter 8

  I woke up slowly, a lazy drift into consciousness. There wasn’t any confusion about where I was—I was in my bed. I had had the shit beaten out of me. I’d helped kill Phillip last night. Jessica and Amy Grann were dead. I had failed.

  And judging by the furry weight on my chest, either I had a kitsune on top of me or feral cats had invaded the building.

  I opened my eyes and looked directly into Suzume’s black button eyes. She whimpered happily and wagged her fluffy tail back and forth. I sighed deeply, feeling the soreness in my chest as I inhaled.

  The sunlight was very bright in the room. An awful suspicion filled me, and I looked over at my bedside clock, then back at Suzume.

  “I was supposed to be at work three hours ago,” I whispered.

  Her fluffy head nodded vigorously, tail still wagging. I looked back at the clock. Sometime last night it had acquired small tooth marks around the alarm button.

  “You turned off my alarm?”

  Suzume’s tongue lolled out of her mouth; then she gave two sharp yips. She looked really proud.

  “You’re trying to get me fired,” I said, the horror fully sinking in.

  The fox snorted loudly, then hopped off my chest (that didn’t do my bruises any favors) and dropped down over the side of the bed with a soft thump. A minute went by; then Suzume’s head and shoulders popped up, fully human. The height of the bed cut off my view of anything really exciting, but it was very obvious that she was naked. What was also both sad and obvious was that the sight of her bare shoulders was much more erotic to me than it should’ve been. I focused on how she was trying to ruin my life. It shouldn’t matter how good she looked while she did it.

  “Idiot,” Suzume said with another snort. She folded her arms on the bed and laid her head down to look at me sideways. “If I wanted to get you fired, I would’ve come up with something a lot more creative than just making you sleep in.”

  “Oh yes, I never meant to impugn the artistry of your trickery,” I said sarcastically. “But after the way I cut out of work yesterday, how is missing the entire first half of my shift going to somehow convince Jeanine that I’m employee of the month?”

  “I called in earlier and said that you’d had a family emergency and couldn’t make it in today.” She looked curious. “Do you actually want to go into work today?”

  “No,” I admitted. If it had just been how badly I felt, and just how insane the bruises that I’d acquired last night probably looked right now, I would’ve dragged in no matter what. But failing the Grann girls so badly, and with the memory of Jessica’s body so fresh in my mind…no, I definitely didn’t want to go anywhere near the banality of Busy Beans. Of course, there were other concerns. “But I really can’t skip work.”

  “Because you’re broke,” she said.

  “How do you know that?” Given the way that Suzume had treated me as her source of free food since she’d met me, I was pretty surprised that she’d known.

  “A few subtle clues were evident.” Suzume mimed inhaling on a pipe, then began ticking them off on her fingers. “First, there was your car. It’s rusty, old, doesn’t like to start in the morning, and the bumper drags enough that I’m sure that one more speed bump is going to rip it right off. Second, there were your clothes. They suck. Third was your unspeakable cheapness in not buying me a beer last night to go with the pizza. I mean, pizza and beer. They just go together. You don’t mess with nature. But probably the most striking clue was when I accessed your online bank statement and looked at your balance.”

  My jaw hung open, and I wasn’t able to force anything other than strangled sounds out of my throat.

  “Really, it was elementary, my dear Watson.” Suzume mimed tucking away her pipe. When I continued to stare at her and blither, she sniffed, irked that I wasn’t praising her skills of detection. “Honestly, Fort, you shouldn’t use the same password for everything. Don’t worry. I changed it for you.”

  I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the pillow. There was a short silence while I could feel her looking at me, then the soft crinkling sound of a paper bag being opened, and the ambrosial smell of a toasted bagel filled the room.

  I cracked open one eye. Suzume had a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts in one hand and a fresh bagel in the other.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “You went out and bought bagels?” Clearly the shocks were just going to keep coming this morning.

  “Of course not.” She looked offended. “I stole them from Larry.”

  I paused and considered. Then, “I’m okay with that,” and I snagged the bagel she offered and began to eat it. As soon as the first bit went down, my stomach remembered that in addition to being extremely traumatized, it was also extremely empty. I pretty much inhaled the entire bagel. Without even being asked, Suzume handed me another bagel, along with a container of cream cheese. Bliss.

  While I was eating, Suzume ducked down behind the bed for a minute, then reemerged wearing my old Brown T-shirt and a pair of my shorts. They completely dwarfed her, but instead of making her look ridiculous, they just made her look more adorably pixieish than usual.

  Too adorable, actually. For a woman who last night
had been sporting enough facial contusions to have earned a free ride to a battered women’s shelter, plus a deep head cut that bled profusely and a few cracked ribs, she was now completely unmarked, without even the slightest suggestion of a bruise or discomfort.

  “Suzume, are you messing with me again?”

  Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. I gestured to her face. “Are you keeping me from seeing your bruises?”

  “Oh.” She grinned. “Nope. We heal faster in our natural states.”

  I frowned. “But you went fox when we got back to the car. Did you change back after I went to sleep?”

  The grin wiped off her face, and she leaned closer to me, menace suddenly seething in her dark eyes. I pulled back in surprise, the quick change from warm amusement to this icy anger startling me.

  “Keep one thing in mind, Fortitude,” she hissed, low and dangerous. “I’m not some were-critter. I’m not a woman who can turn into a fox when she feels like it. I’m a fox who can become a woman. Try to remember that.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. She glared at me for another minute, then pulled back and scooted to the far side of the bed, pulling another bagel out of the bag and giving it a vicious bite. We ate in silence. After a few minutes she slowly seemed to thaw, even offering me the last bagel in the bag.

  We were almost finished when she asked, almost normally, “So, why have you been paying all the rent for the last few months?”

  I didn’t like talking about this, but I could see that this was Suzume’s version of an olive branch after how she’d lashed out, so I answered.

  “About six months ago Larry said that he was having money trouble, and he only gave me a partial payment. The next month he gave me even less, and since then I haven’t gotten anything at all.”

  Suzume chewed thoughtfully. “Are you friends with him?”

  “No.” Definitely not. I hadn’t been too fond of him even before he’d slept with Beth.