“So make him pay it.”
I stared. She made it sound so simple, as if I’d just been letting it slide this whole time. “How would you suggest I do that?” I asked.
“Threats of violence have always worked very well for me,” Suzume said, completely serious.
I sighed. “And if threats don’t work?”
“Then use violence.” Suzume gave a smothered little laugh. “Jeez, Fort, you seem to like making things more complicated than they really are.”
After breakfast in bed, it was hard to get moving. Showering and then falling straight into bed might’ve been what I wanted to do last night, but apparently it hadn’t been the best thing for my bruised body. Everything was stiff, and even lifting my arms up enough to get a T-shirt over my head turned out to be a really bad idea. I eventually had to suck it up and ask Suzume for a hand.
She looked at me critically after I lay panting on the bed following my return to a toddler-era style of dressing.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“Fuck, Suze, can you pretend for a minute that you care about my ego?”
She ignored me. “Your mother will dock my pay if she sees you like this. And my family will never let me live it down if they know I let someone wipe the floor with you when it was my job to keep you safe.”
“I’m so sorry. I never stopped to think about how my pain was going to inconvenience you.”
“I understand, Fort, and you’re forgiven.”
I sighed as she rattled on. There were some areas of sarcasm that went right over her head.
“But I refuse to let you be a stain on my record. Get in the car.”
“What?” I blinked at her. “I thought you said that we were going to have a casual day. Not move any further than the couch? Let me cuddle up to some ice packs?” I was definitely harboring some carnal thoughts about a few bags of frozen vegetables. Plus…“What about Star Wars? You said you’d watch the original, undigitally fucked-over Star Wars with me!”
“No, this is way too serious. We’re going straight to a doctor’s office.”
Straight to a doctor’s office didn’t exactly happen. Suzume’s standards of hygiene were a bit higher than mine this morning, and while she indulged in the kind of thirty-minute shower that would knock out our ancient water heater for the rest of the day, I hobbled over to my computer to check the news. A bakery worker had found Jessica’s body in the early hours of the morning, just as Suzume had predicted. The hunt for Amy Grann was headline news, and I felt a sharp pang as I wondered how long it would be before they finally found her body, and where it had been dumped. I scrolled through the article, not reading the text too closely. The press had gotten more photos since yesterday, and in addition to the Grann family portrait, there were now several that were just of Amy. I saw her playing with the family dog, posed in her Sunday best, and giving a gap-toothed smile in her softball uniform.
I spent the most time looking at that picture. A few of her teammates were standing around her, and it was clear that she was the short one on the team. I’d played on Little League teams at around the same age. Because I’d been about five inches shorter than all the other boys, I was front and center in every team photo.
My foster father had coached my Little League team. I was incredibly bad at sports, and would’ve been a lot happier spending my Saturdays sitting at home watching TV, but Jill and Brian had been determined to give me the perfect childhood, over my own objections if necessary. So I’d spent hours of time in left field, the place where I had the least opportunity for missed plays and throwing errors. There were a lot of hot afternoons when I’d stared at the sky and counted clouds while mosquitoes feasted on my exposed flesh and I waited impatiently for the innings to just be over already so that I could return to an air-conditioned environment. I wondered if Amy’s dad had coached her team. I wondered if her mom had been in the stands for every game, like Jill had always been for me.
My maudlin mood was broken when Suzume came out of the bathroom. She’d changed clothes, and was now dressed in what were apparently her standard bodyguarding clothes—black boots, close-fitting black pants, and a thin body-hugging T-shirt. Today the T-shirt was fire-engine red. She’d clipped her hair up so that half of it was in some kind of sleek twist, and the other half was falling around her face in little feathery strands. She practically glowed with vitality and good health.
By contrast I was wearing a much-laundered and half-faded Dalek shirt (exterminate!) with a few holes in the shoulders and the same cotton pajama bottoms that I’d worn to bed. Bending was really not agreeing with me right now, and so I’d chosen to turn down Suzume’s extremely generous offer to help me change pants (having suffered through more than enough commentary on my physique when she helped me with my shirt) and hope that no one noticed my sartorial sins. Since my face looked like I’d just gotten into a fight with a city bus and lost, I was betting that my pants were going to be the least of my problems today.
We then spent a few minutes taping a plastic grocery bag over the shattered window in the Fiesta. My karma had finally decided to stop shitting on me full-time, and it hadn’t rained last night. Of course, the trade-off of that was that the bloody shirt I’d stuffed under my seat last night had spent the morning baking in the sun, much to the apparent delight of the neighborhood’s entire fly population, which had found a nice access point through the open window.
I hauled out the shirt, along with my ruined floor mat, but Suzume stopped me just before I would’ve tossed them in the trash.
“Trash collectors seem to take dim views on finding blood-soaked clothing. I’ll bag them and put them in the trunk. Then we can throw them into the medical waste trash at the doctor’s office.”
While that was an admittedly good solution to the bloody evidence issue, there was one small matter that I’d now spent half the morning trying to explain to the very image-conscious kitsune.
“Suzume, seriously. I don’t have health insurance and I have no cash. How the hell am I supposed to afford a doctor’s visit?”
“A human doctor?” Suzume sputtered with outrage. “You think I’m taking you to a human doctor? Why would I bother? So they can write the words ‘Icy-Hot’ on a prescription pad? I’d slap a case of concealer on you before I wasted my time with a human doctor.”
I leaned against the hood of my car and sighed as Suzume continued her rant. When she began winding down, I asked, “So, what is the alternative to a human doctor? A vet?” I really hoped it wasn’t a vet. I could totally see Suzume taking me to see a vet. She’d probably ask if there were any weekly specials on castration.
Suzume shook her head sadly. “You have no faith in me at all. Get in the car and I’ll give you another ice pack for the trip.”
Since that was probably the best offer I was likely to get, I took her up on it.
Twenty minutes later we were driving through the rarified air of Barrington, one of the wealthiest of the Providence suburbs. While a town like Newport consists of an interesting mix of the superwealthy who live in gated mansions and the ordinary and everyday people who filled out the rest of the population, Barrington was very much exclusively the golf and country-club set. The average income was in the hundred-thousand-dollar range, and a few years ago Money magazine had ranked it as the sixth-best town to live in in the United States. Subdivisions filled with McMansions lined the roads, and every time we had to sit at a stoplight I could see people in the cars around us looking utterly appalled at the sight of the Fiesta, which, like me, was not at its aesthetic best just now.
“One of these people is going to call the police on us,” I predicted dourly.
“What for?”
“Driving while poor.” I glared at a woman in an Audi next to us who apparently spent my yearly income on tanning beds. She sneered, but I noticed that she turned down a side street pretty quickly.
“Don’t be such a crab,” Suzume said. She pulled into one of the small plazas filled with professi
onal buildings of the medical variety—dentists, eye doctors, that sort of thing. “Look, we’re here.”
There were apparently a lot of doctors clustered in each building, so I scanned the posted sign for any likely candidates, then looked again.
“Okay, I give up,” I said. “The dermatologist or the urologist?” After all, I had pissed a little blood this morning, which at the time Suzume had assured me was a perfectly normal by-product of being punched in the kidneys.
Suzume pointed. I stared, then looked at her wide grin, then read it again.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
Five minutes later we were sitting in the peach-toned waiting room of Lavinia Leamaro, doctor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive endocrinology. The sofas were upholstered in brightly flowered fabrics, and the little side tables were covered with copies of women’s parenting or pregnancy magazines. There was an enormous framed sepia-toned photo of a woman breast-feeding an infant dominating one wall, which I had very deliberately chosen to sit beneath so that I wouldn’t have to struggle to avoid looking at it. On the wall I was facing there were at least a hundred individually framed four-by-six photos of infants, each labeled with name, birth date, and apparently critical information about their weight and length. At the top of the wall the words OUR SUCCESS STORIES! were painted in elaborate teal calligraphy. There were three women also sitting in the waiting room, all in their mid-thirties to early forties and very visibly not pregnant, and when they weren’t shooting me confused and somewhat hostile glances, they were staring fixedly at that wall of infant photos with an almost rabid hunger.
I was feeling a bit out of place.
Suzume was conducting a very spirited conversation with the registering nurse, but pitched just low enough that it didn’t carry. Since I had a feeling that whatever story Suzume was pitching was unlikely to present me in a flattering light, I was extremely grateful for that. Conversation completed, Suzume strolled back and dropped down onto the sofa next to me. The three women all started shooting covert glances over at us as Suzume grabbed a magazine and flipped through it.
“Now, look at that,” Suzume said, stopping at one page. Since I somehow doubted that there was anything in a magazine entitled Modern Pregnancy that was going to interest me, I very studiously avoided looking. “Now, that is not all baby weight,” Suzume continued. I tried, but I couldn’t help myself and I glanced over, and immediately regretted it. “No, wait,” she said. “She’s pregnant with triplets.” She tilted her head. “Bold of her to get photographed in just underpants, though.”
“She’s wearing underpants?” I asked, wishing that I could scrub that image from my brain. That looked less miracle of life and more Alien.
“They’re mostly hidden by the belly. But that’s still a bit big if you ask me. When my cousin Yuzuki was pregnant with triplets, she didn’t look anywhere near that big.”
“Your cousin had triplets?”
“Yeah, you met them at my grandmother’s house. Riko, Yui, and Tomomi. My grandmother’s first, and so far only, set of great-grandchildren. Yuzuki was always a suck-up.” Suzume tilted her head the other way, considering. “Of course, Yuzuki did stay fox for pretty much the whole pregnancy, so that probably had an effect. The human body is really built for singles rather than litters.”
“So your cousin had triplets and you and your sister are twins? Jeez, multiples really run in your family.”
“We’re foxes, Fort,” Suzume said, how many times do I have to spell this out? not really even bothering to stay subtextual. “Litters are more natural to us than single births. If we stick to our natural form for most of the pregnancy, we get a couple kits in one go. Stay in human shape, though, and the body has to protect itself by reducing. Are you getting this, or do I need to break out hand puppets?”
“Okay, okay. This is really fascinating, Suze, but”—mindful of our audience of women, who seemed uncertain of whether to shoot Suzume glares of death for being a decade younger than they were or feel sorry for her because she was presumably having fertility issues but were definitely trying their best to subtly scoot close enough to overhear our conversation, I dropped my voice to a whisper—“why the fuck are we here?”
She looked surprised. “Because you can’t dodge a punch and you heal like an immuno-compromised grandma.”
I was saved the indignity of trying to respond to that when the nurse called, “Suzume Hollis? Dr. Leamaro will see you now.”
We got up and followed her in. Behind us, the three women who had been waiting before we arrived finally decided what the correct response was, and their nasty glares bored holes in our backs.
Instead of leading us into one of the examination rooms for the standard medical practice of a second round of waiting, the nurse escorted us to an office, where a statuesquely attractive middle-aged woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair that was thoroughly restrained in an elaborate French braid, save for one corkscrew curl escaping at her temple, rich dark skin, and a white doctor’s jacket sat behind a mahogany desk that would’ve been a lot more imposing had it not been completely overflowing with file folders, charts, loose paper, and at least three partially consumed coffees.
Her eyes were a shocking contrast to her skin and hair, an almost acid green that made me wonder if she used colored contact lenses. She fixed those eyes on Suzume and gave her a very chilly glare that made me certain that they’d met before—only someone who’d already been subjected to Suzume’s presence would have that level of animosity.
I couldn’t help saying it as I limped in. “Dr. Lavinia Leamaro, I presume?”
Now the good doctor offered me a little of that glare.
Suzume sprawled bonelessly in one of the chairs parked in front of the desk. “Don’t be so formal, Fort. She’ll respond to Lulu.”
“Dr. Leamaro is fine,” she bit out in sepulcher tones. I decided to attempt a little discretion, and I stood just behind Suzume’s chair. The fact that the chairs were really low and I was still aching from getting up from the sofa in the waiting room had absolutely nothing to do with my decision, of course.
“Why am I being subjected to your presence?” Dr. Leamaro asked Suzume. Oh yeah, she’d definitely spent some time with the fox before.
“Well, it’s very personal, but”—Suzume leaned over the desk, and dropped her voice—“I just have this…longing to be a mother, but Fort’s sperm don’t swim! Help me, Lulu. You’re my only hope!” Then there was some loud fake sobbing as Suzume threw herself face-first into the mound of papers.
Dr. Leamaro stared down at Suzume. “I really hate you,” she said.
“Don’t lie, Lulu, you looove me.” Suzume popped back up, sunny smile in place.
There was a loud sigh and Dr. Leamaro made a show of checking her watch. “My appointments are backing up as we speak, so can you please tell me what you want so that I can just give it to you and you’ll leave?”
“My tagalong got himself broken”—Suzume pointed at me—“and he’s not old enough to wear big-boy pants yet, so no vampire healing.” At my horrified gasp, she waved a hand casually. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Fort. Lulu’s no more human than you are. She’s an elf. C’mon.” Her voice turned coaxing as she looked back to the doctor. “Flash him an ear. Do it. Do it.”
“Absolutely not.” Dr. Leamaro curled her lip in distaste.
“You’re an elf?” I asked, unable to help myself. Keeping myself away from Madeline’s business and as far into the human world as possible meant that I didn’t have much contact with the supernaturals outside my immediate family, and I’d never seen an elf outside of storybook illustrations and The Lord of the Rings movies. “Really? I thought elves were…” I stopped myself just in time.
“Were what?” Dr. Leamaro’s voice was as toasty as Antarctica during a cold snap. Apparently I hadn’t stopped myself soon enough.
“…Irish,” I finished lamely. The doctor didn’t look remotely appeased.
Suzume
snickered. “She’s a halfsie, Fort. I meant it when I said that she’s about as human as you are right now. You’re more likely to meet an A-cup Playboy bunny than a full-blooded elf. But her daddy was running around the Emerald Isles before Saint Patrick, so you’re half right. And your mom is from Chicago, right, Lulu?”
“I have no desire to chat genealogy with you,” the doctor snapped. “Your vampire lacks a visible vagina”—I suppose I partially deserved that one—“so I have no idea what you expect me to do.”
“Well, certainly not what you usually do to your patients, that’s for sure.” Suzume snorted. “I want to borrow your witch.”
Dr. Leamaro suddenly stopped being pissed and started looking cagey. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said primly.
Suzume gave a full belly laugh. “You expect me to buy that you’re actually practicing medicine here? An elf? Next you’ll be offering me a great deal on a bridge in Brooklyn. Get the damn witch in here.”
I couldn’t keep thinking of her as Dr. Leamaro, and Lulu definitely didn’t like what Suzume was saying. “I graduated from Harvard,” she bit out. The battle cry of a thousand Ivy Leaguers with their credibility questioned.
“Yeah, yeah, I saw the diploma, Lulu. I’m sure you rocked the MCATs. Witch, please.”
“Infertility medicine is a science. I don’t need any magic to do my job.”
“And it’s a good thing, because elf magic blows. You had to hire a witch for the magic part. Because the science of medicine never has a hundred percent results. We checked your stats a few months ago after you got that big write-up in the med journal. Every woman who walks through your door is knocked up within a year.”
Lulu’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes widened.
“Kind of sloppy, actually,” Suzume continued. “Did you have to be perfect because your ego demanded you be the most awesome doctor in the state, or because your odds of real success are so low? My bet is both.”
Lulu slumped back in her seat, all the fight out of her, and looked ready to vomit. “What are you going to do?”
Generation V Page 17