“That little bitch,” Lulu snapped. “Oh, she will pay for this. I always warned that her parents were too soft, too—”
I cut in. “That’s not what we’re talking about today.” I ticked the items off on my fingers. “Fertility magic. Hiring a skinwalker. Murdering at least four men in the past year. Those are the topics I’m interested in. You can start wherever you’d like.”
Focusing her green eyes on me, Lulu hissed. “We pay the tithes on our businesses. Nothing else is of concern to the Scotts.”
“Everything in this territory is my mother’s business. Now start talking. Start by telling me where the skinwalker is and who hired her.”
Lulu snapped her mouth shut and glared at me, sullen and mute.
I waited, then tried again. “Felix Ortiz was tattooed this morning at the Iron Needle. Where is he now?”
Lulu said nothing.
“Where do you kill the men?”
“I have nothing to say to you,” Lulu said, her voice low and stubborn.
I had one card left to play. “You can talk to me or you can talk with my sister.” The first hint of real fear flickered through Lulu’s eyes, gone almost as soon as it appeared, but I noted it and pushed hard. “I don’t think you’d enjoy Prudence’s”—and I paused, saying the word almost as if I savored it—“methods.”
Defiance and fanaticism flared. “It doesn’t matter what you do. I will never betray the Ad-hene.” And looking at her face and the complete absence of concern for her own safety, I had to conclude that Lulu really meant it. I met Suze’s eyes and jerked my head toward the other room. She slid off the bed where she’d been sitting and followed me out of the room.
I closed the bedroom door carefully behind us and looked around. Lilah apparently dealt with anxiety by cleaning, because she was busily attacking her already spotless furniture with a dusting cloth. I asked Suze quietly to sit with the prisoner; given the extent to which we’d tied her down, I couldn’t imagine Lulu extricating herself, but I’d seen enough James Bond movies to be leery about leaving someone tied to a chair and unattended for long.
I bypassed Lilah’s cleaning frenzy and walked to the far corner of the kitchen—it was too small of an apartment for real privacy, but I wanted at least the illusion of it for this conversation. After a deep breath, I called my sister.
She was ensconced in her hotel room and answered my call on the first ring. After a quick exchange of greetings, I filled her in on everything that had happened. She listened without interrupting.
When I had finished, she said, “Well done, little brother,” in such an approving tone of voice that I seriously wondered for a moment whether I was speaking to an impersonator.
“Uh, thanks,” I said, still uncertain how to respond to this new, more supportive Prudence. “Listen. When can you get over here and question her? Apparently zealots are kind of tough to interrogate.”
“The worst; that is true,” she said sympathetically. Then, with an odd brightness, “I will head out as soon as this accursed sun goes down enough. Given what I’ve seen of the hourly forecast, about three, perhaps three and a half hours.”
“That long?” I asked, horrified. My sister’s tolerance for sunlight was definitely going down.
“Patience, brother. It will be all right. Make sure that the half-blood is secured and then leave her alone to stew. The wait will soften her up.” I began to protest, and she made soothing noises. “I will get the information as quickly as possible, brother, I assure you. Now, listen to me, because this is very important.”
“Yes?” I asked, reaching for a nearby pad of paper just in case I needed to take notes.
“Don’t be nice to her. No food, no drinks, and definitely no bathroom.”
“Um . . . ?” That last part made me very nervous. Lilah’s apartment was carpeted.
“Urinating oneself can be an important part of being broken down,” Prudence assured me.
I gulped. This newer, friendlier Prudence was definitely still my sister. “You’re the expert,” I managed, reminding myself that with a life on the line, I was probably going to be making a few 24-esque decisions.
My reply apparently delighted Prudence, because she burbled happily, “Ah, Fortitude. The things I can teach you.”
Even as my mouth made the appropriate good-byes, an icy chill went up my spine and I wondered whether I was really prepared for my sister’s version of sibling bonding exercises.
It was a long, tense afternoon while we waited for my sister to arrive and begin torturing Lulu. With nothing else to do, I joined Lilah in the distraction of cleaning. Suze remained impervious to the atmosphere, shifted to her fox form, and took a long nap on the sofa (all four furry paws in the air) while Lilah and I defrosted her freezer and cleaned out her fridge. I tried calling Matt three times, but he didn’t pick up, and I ended up leaving voice mails. I winced at what that might mean, but comforted myself with the knowledge that I hadn’t told him what hotel Suze and I had stayed at, so there wasn’t any chance that he had tailed us again.
When my sister arrived at a quarter to five, the first hints of orange were gathering in the clouds, heralding the start of a spectacular sunset. Being relieved at Prudence’s arrival was definitely a personal first for me, but the feeling flooded through me as I pulled open the front door at her imperious knock to reveal her, her lacy white parasol adding an almost steampunk accent to her usual Stepford-wifish attire. Her blue eyes were gleaming and there was an eager spring in her step as I directed her to the bedroom. Clearly Prudence enjoyed her work.
“Wait here, brother,” she told me at the entrance, and then entered alone, closing the door behind her.
The next two hours inched horribly by, with Lulu’s screams echoing through the apartment. I sat on the sofa, tensing at every sound that emerged from the closed bedroom until the muscles of my body actually felt sore. Lilah tried covering her ears at first, but eventually just gave up and pressed against my side, burying her face in my shoulder. I stroked her bright hair with one hand, but there was nothing to say. For all the crimes that Lulu had committed, it was impossible to hear the sounds of her agony and not cringe.
I’d made the decision and the call that had led to the torture, I reminded myself over and over—I needed to accept the consequences and not try to hide from Lulu’s screams. But as the sun set and the shadows deepened, I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and I turned to Suze and begged, “Can’t you hide those sounds?” I loathed my own weakness as I asked, but I just didn’t want to listen to the surround sound of Lulu’s torture for another minute.
Suzume had returned to her human shape shortly after Prudence had arrived and had positioned herself at the window, about as far away from where Lilah and I were sitting as she could get, staring out into the darkness. She didn’t look at me as she answered quietly. “I can hide the sounds from the neighbors by replacing them with sounds that they would normally expect to hear—that’s no real effort. But to hide the sounds from you, when you know the truth of what is happening in that room, would be much more difficult. I don’t know where this night is going to lead us, and I can’t spare the energy, Fort.” She looked over her shoulder at me very quickly, turning away again almost immediately, some undefined emotion flickering across her face. “Not even for your feelings.”
And time crept forward.
The clock had just ticked past seven when Prudence reappeared at the bedroom door and beckoned me over. A lazy, contented smile was spread across her face, and she was wiping one hand fastidiously with a monogrammed linen handkerchief that was already streaked in dark red stains.
“Come, Fortitude. I’m ready for you now,” she said.
Carefully extricating myself from Lilah, I took a deep breath and walked over to my sister, reminding myself again of why this had to be done. “What’s taking so long? Why isn’t she talking?” I asked.
Prudence gave a low, amused chuckle and wagged one newly clean finger at me. “Ah, brother. You think it’s easy to break a fanatic? You watch too much television. It would take me months, with every piece of agony just making her cling harder to her devotion, or result in nothing but a string of lies. No, I’ve just softened her a bit.” She dropped one deceptively delicate hand on my shoulder and squeezed lightly, ignoring my barely hidden flinch as she touched me. “Tell me, Fortitude, have you learned much about the Neighbors during your investigation?”
“A bit,” I admitted cautiously.
She nodded, then urged me in a tone that was weirdly reminiscent of my teachers when they had been trying to lead the class to a concept. “Think hard on what this wretch values.”
I considered it, then said slowly, “She doesn’t value her own life.”
Prudence nodded again, pleased. “Precisely. True fanatics do not. So come in, Fortitude, and force her to talk by threatening what she does hold dear.”
I followed Prudence into the bedroom, unable to keep myself from looking back once over my shoulder. Suze had turned away from the window to watch the exchange, and she gave me one short nod. Lilah was still sitting on the sofa, her large eyes red from crying. She crossed her hands over her mouth and glanced away from me. From the depths of my soul I wished that I could do the same.
Inside the bedroom, Lulu was still tied to the chair, just as we’d left her. But there were small trails of dried blood at the corners of her mouth, and a towel from the bathroom was pressed against her stomach, blotted with bloodstains. Remembering the way Prudence had threatened Ambrose the witch at Lulu’s office, I couldn’t prevent myself from being grateful that Prudence had covered up her handiwork, even though it made me both hypocritical and cowardly, as I carried an equal stake in her actions. There was a weird smell in the room, almost a combination of a poorly maintained men’s bathroom and the back room of a butcher shop (another of my worse, short-term bits of employment). Seeing me, Lulu tried to spit but couldn’t put any force behind it, which just resulted in a pinkish liquid dribbling down her chin.
If I ran away or threw up, I’d lose this opportunity. I forced myself to remember what Gage’s body had looked like on the floor of his bedroom: cold, ruined, and tossed aside like garbage. I reminded myself that this woman was also responsible, at least in part, for the presence of Soli, and therefore shared in the guilt of Beth’s death. That stirred up enough anger in me to push back my guilt and regret for her pain, and I forced confidence in my voice as I said, “I think you’re ready to answer my questions now, Doctor.”
Lulu gave a high, shrill laugh that made her gasp as it jarred some broken place inside her. “And why would you say that, when your sister has had no luck at all?” she taunted, glaring at me with no hint of fear. “You can go ahead and kill me now. I’ll never talk to you.”
I glanced at my sister behind me, but Prudence just gave me an encouraging nod. “I’m surprised you’d say that,” I began, feeling her out, trying to remember everything I’d learned or had heard about the way that she viewed the world. “After all, what will your community do without their own pet doctor to churn changelings out of desperate women?”
At that Lulu’s expression wavered for a second and a shiver ran through her, but then she shook her head. “Others can continue that work. Maybe not on the same scale, but it will continue. And it doesn’t truly matter, because the time of the changeling is coming to an end.”
A thrill of excitement ran through me. Just like that, she’d handed me the key to force her confession. I would’ve liked myself better if I’d hesitated or if I’d said what I did with the fates of the living in mind, but it was the thought of Gage and Beth that pushed me immediately forward. “Perhaps you think that,” I said, leaning in and placing a hand on her shoulder. The bone moved, and I realized that it was broken. My stomach clenched, but I didn’t move my hand. “But if you don’t start talking right now, my sister is going to start hunting. For every minute you stay silent, she’ll kill one of your half-bloods.” Lulu gaped, horror suffusing her face, but I pushed forward brutally. “For every lie you tell me, she’ll slaughter one of those three-quarter hybrids you’ve worked so hard on.” A high, frightened sound emerged from Lulu’s throat, and now she was shaking visibly.
“No, you wouldn’t, you couldn’t—” Lulu’s wide green eyes darted between me and my sister.
“Look at my sister, Doctor,” I said heartlessly. “Do you think she’ll hesitate if I tell her to go and kill someone?” I didn’t look behind me, but there was a soft rustling of fabric, and whatever move Prudence made caused Lulu to flinch hard.
Weakness and despair made the wrinkles in Lulu’s face deepen, suddenly making her look her age for the first time I’d known her. She was beaten and she knew it. “What do you want from me?” she asked, voice shaking.
“I know that some of the Neighbors have been using a ritual to enable the conception of a seven-eighths hybrid. You’ve been using recessive men, tattooing and killing them. You brought a skinwalker in to help.” I leaned even closer to her. “Now tell me the rest.”
She wet her lips with her tongue, and when she spoke it was very slow and halting, each word sounding ripped from her throat. “It was Tomas who found it. We were all looking, all of us who are trusted, who are the inner circle, but he found it. He found an old witch up in Maine, one who had a collection of potion books. But she wouldn’t let him look at them, and that made us think that she was hiding something. We couldn’t risk the witch naming the Neighbors or the Ad-hene in a complaint to Madeline Scott, so that’s when we hired Soli, the skinwalker. She killed the witch, brought the books back.”
“What is Soli getting out of all of this?” I asked.
Lulu’s mouth twisted in brief, cynical amusement before quickly going slack again. “Money. She didn’t care what we did, as long as she was paid. And in one of the books we found a ritual, one where the only thing we needed from the witches was the spelled ink to make the tattoo. The sacrifice had to be special, not just any man off the street, so we used ones whose fathers were Ad-hene, the ones who had never bloomed.”
“The coroner’s report says that there were medical tools used in the amputations.”
She nodded, and these words came easier to her, as if she were talking about something of no great consequence or importance. “Yes, that was me. Hands, genitals, and tongue needed to be removed without killing the sacrifice. We’d hang him above the couple; then the seed had to be planted before the sacrifice’s blood stopped pumping.”
I stared at her for a second, my mind unable to wrap around what she’d just said. “What do you mean?”
“I’d make an incision in the sacrifice’s neck, then intercourse needed to be completed before the sacrifice bled out completely.” She spoke briskly, for the first time seeming to regain that air of medical superiority.
I couldn’t reply, and Prudence strolled forward next to me, looking completely unruffled, nodding and smoothly picking up the questioning that I’d dropped. “The purpose of those roofie potions that your witch cooked up, I believe. Hard to get most girls, even Neighbor girls, to participate.” She gave a small, fastidious sniff of disapproval. “I’m sure nothing was needed for the elves to perform.”
My brain was numb from the information I was still struggling with, and I stared at Lulu, moved beyond horror. “All those men. You delivered them when they were babies. And you’re just . . . so calm talking about what you did to them.” I couldn’t understand it.
Lulu stared at me, icy and unmoved. “They were useless to us. All that promise, all that effort, and all we got were mewling human babies. They should’ve been grateful that they could finally be of use to their fathers.” The fanatical gleam returned to her eyes, and her voice became triumphant. “And they were. The first baby was born yesterday, and there are three others twitc
hing in their mothers’ wombs. This is the way back to what our kind was meant to be.”
Lilah’s voice cut in, and I looked behind me to see her standing in the doorway. She must’ve been listening to everything. Her eyes were fixed on Lulu, there was a dark flush in her cheeks, and something about the way she was holding herself hinted at barely restrained violence, as if her heritage was barely contained beneath her skin. “But Felix isn’t a recessive, Lavinia. He’s one of us, one of the Neighbors. Why would the skinwalker have taken him to Jacoby? Why would he be wearing those tattoos now?” Her voice rose with each question.
Lulu’s lip curled. “As if a changeling is truly one of us,” she said.
Apparently undistracted by the exchange, Prudence was tapping one finger contemplatively against her lips. Something occurred to her and she asked Lulu, “You’re wondering how much stronger a hybrid you can create, aren’t you? Whether a finer sacrifice will bring you closer to a true elf?”
There was a weirdly desperate tone in Lulu’s voice as she answered Prudence, something that bordered almost on gratitude that someone in the room apparently understood their way of thinking. “Yes. You see. This is about the survival of our race.”
Lilah laughed, high and hysterical. “Have you ever considered, Lavinia, that maybe we shouldn’t be trying quite so hard to be like Themselves? That maybe they’ve died out for a reason?”
Lulu’s head snapped back, as if Lilah had just said the most untenable heresy—which I supposed she had. But I broke in before the conversation could be sidetracked again. “Felix was with Soli this morning. If you aren’t trying to cover your tracks from us anymore, then nothing would be holding you back from making the sacrifice quickly. Has it already happened?” The half-blood woman chewed anxiously at her bottom lip and didn’t respond, which was enough of an answer in itself. I nodded. “It hasn’t happened, then. Tell me where and when.”
Iron Night Page 29