Tainted Blood: A Generation V Novel

by M. L. Brennan

  I was on my last assignment of the day, jogging a matched set of brick red Pharaoh Hounds named Fawkes and Codex, when my phone rang. I checked the caller ID, then slowed down to answer when I saw that it was Loren Noka. The dogs whined pitifully, hauling against the leashes and looking back at me with wide eyes that begged me to ruuuuuun, but I ignored them and listened to Ms. Noka’s clipped delivery.

  “I just got a call on the emergency line. The karhu of the metsän kunigas has been murdered. His niece discovered the body in his house, and they have requested an investigation.”

  I was turning the dogs around before Loren Noka was halfway through. “Text me the details, please,” I said quickly, then disconnected as soon as we had exchanged good-byes. I tapped Suze’s number in and was relieved when she picked up on the second ring.

  Halfway through whatever clever joke she was saying as a greeting, I broke in with, “The head bear was just found murdered. Chivalry’s still on bereavement, so this is all on me.”

  One of the things that a lot of people didn’t realize about Suzume (probably because they had already fled in the other direction) was that when things got serious, she didn’t play around. Without a pause, she immediately dropped all the fun joking and said, “I’m working downtown today. Pick me up.” Then she rattled off the address and hung up. I shoved my phone back in my jacket pocket and pulled on the dogs’ leashes—Fawkes and Codex, sensing that their precious run was going to be cut short, were doing their best to tug me in the direction that lay away from home—and once I had snouts facing correctly, I broke into a full sprint.

  While I dodged around pedestrians and avoided being run over at cross streets, my brain scrambled to get a handle on the hot mess that I’d just been deputized to deal with. Reported murders were very rare in the territory—in the months that I’d been officially a part of my family’s policing structure, I’d dealt with a few complaints and some minor disputes. Most things had been like my visit to the rusalka—fairly easy to look into and resolve. The most serious call to the emergency line that I’d been aware of was when I was still doing ride-alongs with Chivalry over the summer, and a member of the territory had tipped us off that some kobolds had gone from eating stray animals to snatching people’s pets.

  Murder was much different, and this one was serious. I’d done my best to learn about all the major species that my mother ruled over, but I still hadn’t met a lot of them. Unfortunately that included the metsän kunigas, and I tried to go over what I knew about them in my head as I returned two very disappointed dogs to their home and headed directly to my car.

  The metsän kunigas were bears. Or, rather, they were humans who could turn into bears. Unlike the kitsune or the Ad-hene, which had specific and very localized points of species origin (Japan and Ireland, respectively), werebears, like both of their natural cousins, had developed in a lot of different places. The two communities (the larger in Providence, and a smaller one in Maine) that were in my mother’s territory were Finnish immigrants who had come over in the early eighteen hundreds, but apparently there was also a variety of werebear that was indigenous to the United States, and lived in a few areas out West. They used different terminology, but the logistics were essentially the same. The Providence group typically didn’t cause trouble for the vampires, operating within the rules that had been negotiated when they settled, and they delivered very healthy tithes, since the ruling family operated a thriving local insurance company that employed many members of the group. Their leader was called the karhu, and basically served as the group’s monarch for life. The current karhu had been, until a few minutes ago, Matias Kivela. That, unfortunately, capped off most of what I knew about them.

  One thing that Chivalry had been very clear on was that they universally hated the term werebear. Naturally, that was the first word out of Suzume’s mouth as she hopped into my car.

  “You smell worse than the werebears, Fort. Did you really have to let every single dog mark you?”

  I’d pulled the car away from the curb the moment she pulled her door shut, and was already merging into the brewing excitement of Providence traffic at four thirty on a Tuesday. We were both dressed in work clothes—my apparently dog-funked jeans, a long-sleeved black shirt now decorated with a few sweaty spots thanks to my active day, and a zip-up gray hoodie with bleach stains. In contrast, Suzume was poured into a knee-length black pencil skirt, a dark green silk blouse, heels, and a black wool coat. We were definitely about to present an aesthetically mixed picture, but I was hoping that punctuality would be valued over presentation.

  “I’m pretty sure that metsän kunigas is the preferred term, Suze. How would you feel if people called you a fox?”

  “I would praise them on their accurate assessment of my place on the hotness-slash-awesomeness scale.”

  “And if they called you a werefox?”

  “I would make them eat their own kidneys.”

  “Consider my point made.” I turned onto Route 123 and glanced at Suze, who was glaring at me, the gears in her brain clearly working.

  “You don’t understand,” she complained at last. “I’m a fox that turns into a human, which is awesome. They are humans who turn into bears, which is lame. It’s completely different.”

  “I’m sure that the nuances of that are really important,” I said soothingly, then did my best to shift the conversation.

  The town of Lincoln, where most of the metsän kunigas lived, had a number of nice things going for it. It was a mere twelve miles from the heart of Providence, Money magazine had named it the sixty-third Best Place to Live, and it contained the Lincoln Woods State Park, which covered 627 acres of protected forest. Route 123 curved right along the edge of the state park, which was where a number of the metsän kunigas, including their dead leader, had bought property and built their homes.

  The house was a tidy little beige 1920s bungalow with a tall wooden privacy fence that hid all views of the backyard from anyone driving down the street. There were at least five cars wedged into the driveway, and more parked on the lawn. I pulled the Fiesta up to the curb, and we both got out.

  “Someone’s watching us,” I said quietly as we started up the front walkway. I could see the blinds in the front windows twitching.

  “A whole lot of people are watching us,” Suze corrected.

  The door opened the moment my foot hit the steps. The man in his late thirties who opened it filled the doorway—he had one of those solid, square builds that can hide a lot of potpie dinners, but his was solid muscle, with no trace of fat. His dark hair was cut short, and the rich natural brown of his face suggested that one of the immigrant Finns had found love south of the border. He was scowling, and the expression brought to my mind so many bad grumpy bear jokes that my hand shot out without conscious thought to give Suze’s wrist a cautionary squeeze. Her quiet little “Hrmph” confirmed my instinct.

  “So Chivalry Scott actually sent baby brother rather than stirring himself.” Even though he was half a head shorter than I was, the man at the door was capable of a very impressive rumbling bass.

  “You asked for vampire help, and that’s what just arrived,” I said, feeling my temper spike. It’s not that I wasn’t used to being referred to as the baby of the family, but most people at least tried to phrase it more politely. And after a month of my handling my brother’s workload, fewer of the territory inhabitants were surprised to see me. “If you want the Scotts involved, then that means that you’re dealing with me.”

  The man was suddenly and effectively hip-checked to the side by a woman whose age and facial features matched his too well to be anything other than a close sibling. Her chin-length haircut might’ve suggested Busy Professional Mother, but her expression clearly read Irritated Big Sister.

  “Calm down, Gil.” Her dark eyes were carefully shuttered and her face scrubbed clean of expression when she looked at me. As she nudged her brother out of the doorway, she gestured for both of us to come in. “I’m
sorry, we’re just a little surprised. We knew that Chivalry probably wouldn’t be able to come, so we were expecting Prudence,” she explained as we stepped inside and she closed the door behind us. Inside, the bungalow’s old floors gleamed with wood polish, and the decorating scheme seemed to revolve around the repeated theme of beige and beige—from what I could see of it. People packed the front hallway and spilled over into the adjoining dining room, all of them completely quiet and staring unabashedly at us.

  Our apparent hostess offered me a handshake as professional as the navy blue pants suit she was wearing. “We haven’t met before. I’m Dahlia, and this is my brother, Gil. The karhu was our uncle.”

  I returned the handshake. “I’m Fortitude Scott.”

  Suze caught her hand next. “Suzume Hollis.”

  Surprise flickered across Dahlia’s face, the first emotion I’d seen from her. “Oh, I already called the kitsune.”

  “I’m not part of the cleanup crew,” Suze said, giving a quick smile that flashed all her white teeth and didn’t suggest anything friendly. “I’m with the vampire.”

  “Why don’t you fill us in with what you know,” I suggested.

  “Of course,” Dahlia agreed immediately, her expression quickly shuttering again. “Please, follow me.”

  We were led into the living room, where the beige decor had received a splash of color, literally. The karhu had been a tall man in his sixties, still trim and fit, but whose blond hair was streaked with gray. Unlike his niece and nephew, he would’ve looked perfectly at home on the Finnish ski team—except for his ravaged chest and the large pool of dried blood that he was lying in.

  I looked down, feeling very much out of my depth. I’d seen bodies before, and I’d hunted for murderers, but most of it had been on my own time, with my family looking at my actions practically as teenage rebellion. Now I was standing next to a corpse with at least twenty of the metsän kunigas watching to see what I would do. Worse, they were right to, since I was very suddenly in charge.

  “How about I check the body while you get the background,” Suzume suggested beside me. I realized that she’d picked up on my discomfort and stepped in to cover for me. Gratitude filled me, and steadied me at the same time, allowing me to summon an inner Joe Friday as I looked at Dahlia and, in my best “Just the facts, ma’am” voice, ask, “What can you tell me?”

  Her brother still a scowling mass beside her, Dahlia began, “He was alive last night when Carmen left the house—”

  “Carmen?” I asked.

  “His daughter,” Gil said roughly, his tone and face clearly stating that this was something I should’ve known already.

  “Carmen is twenty-one,” said Dahlia, her cool voice cutting in. “She’s in the kitchen, but she’s having a hard time with this. If we can leave her alone for a few minutes, that might be best.”

  “Her father was just murdered,” I conceded. “I can talk with her after you and I finish.”

  Dahlia nodded. “She says that she left around nine last night to go to a party. She spent the night with a boy she met there, so she never came home. When she woke up, she had to go straight to work, so Uncle Matias would’ve been alone all night.” There was just the slightest waver in Dahlia’s eyes as she glanced away from me for the first time in the discussion. Her eyes went over at where her uncle’s body lay in a pool of blood and, from the smell that even open windows in November couldn’t completely disperse, waste. I wondered what this very contained woman was thinking, but then she controlled even that tiny deviation and looked back to me. “Uncle Matias didn’t come to work this morning.”

  “The family owns an insurance business,” Gil said. “Most of us work at it.”

  “I did know that, but thank you,” I said as politely as possible.

  “Oh, I should’ve guessed,” Gil replied. “The business generates tithes, so that would be important to know. Not like whether or not my uncle had a daughter.”

  I reminded myself that Gil’s uncle was lying dead five feet from us at the foot of his La-Z-Boy, and that misplaced anger and its corollary, misplaced dickishness, were a noted part of the grieving process. I therefore ignored Gil’s comment completely and continued looking at Dahlia, who elbowed her brother in the stomach with enough force to make him grunt slightly and take the cue to shut up.

  “I assumed at first that Uncle Matias might not be feeling well,” Dahlia continued, “but he didn’t call, and when I tried getting through to him, there was no answer on either the house phone or his cell.”

  “Was that unusual?” I wished that I had a pad of paper to take notes. It would’ve given me something official-looking to do. Beside the body, Suze had finished looking over the wounds on the front, and she now rolled it over with a soft thump that all of us pretended not to have heard.

  “For him not to pick up the cell, not really. None of us carry cell phones when we’re roaming in our other forms. But it was strange for him not to let me know that he wouldn’t be coming into work. He’d had appointments and calls scheduled, which I had to cover. So when I left the office to go home, I swung by the house. I have a key, and I let myself in. That was when I found him, and I called everyone in.”

  “It was just you?” I asked. Suzume was now giving the dead karhu a thorough sniffing—and since she was remaining in human form, that meant getting pretty close to the body. Fortunately no one seemed to be bothered by that—a benefit of dealing with people who spent a good amount of their time in natural fur coats.

  “Yes,” Dahlia confirmed. “Gil was in the field all day, looking into a flooded-basement claim. My mother was watching my daughters, and I knew they were planning on spending the day in the woods, so I didn’t even try calling them.”

  Suze rejoined us, her sniffing apparently concluded. Her clothing was now looking much worse for wear after crawling around the body—but since she didn’t seem to even notice the bloodstains now decorating the bottom of her skirt and her panty hose, I assumed that she had a plan for dealing with it. Since she was giving her hands a brisk wiping on her skirt, I wondered if that plan was dry cleaning or a Dumpster. “Too bad you didn’t stay on your own. I don’t smell anything on the body but bear, but since you’ve had half the metsän kunigas in the state kicking their heels in here, that’s not surprising. When the cleanup crew you hired gets here, we’ll give it a more thorough going-over, but did you notice anything when it was just you?”

  Dahlia shook her head, her brown eyes giving nothing away. “Whoever did it was long gone. I couldn’t smell anyone who shouldn’t have been here. I just started making calls.”

  Gil cut in again—and unlike Dahlia’s poker face, it was clear that Gil was angry at even the implication that his sister should’ve handled the body discovery differently. “Uncle Matias was in his sixties, but he was strong. What killed him could’ve killed Dahlia, so she was right to call the rest of us.” He pointed at the small but visible blood droplets that led from the body to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. “When I got here, the two of us followed the blood trail. It goes to the deck, but ends in the outdoor shower. There are some containers out there with spare clothes—sweatpants, big T-shirts, just enough to cover anyone who wanted to walk over wearing their fur. Carmen looked through it, and she doesn’t think that anything is missing.”

  “The killer would’ve needed a shower,” Suze agreed. “The karhu has a lot of stab wounds in his chest, and judging by what I’m looking at, it wasn’t much of a fight. The main blood pool is all in that one spot, with no drag marks. Everything beyond that is either spatter or what dripped off the killer on its way out the back door. Have you called in the ghouls?”

  “I did. They’ll send the hearse after the kitsune shroud the scene and the police are dealt with.” Compared with her brother’s impression of a simmering pot, Dahlia was an icicle.

  “They’ll do an autopsy for us, then, and see what they can pick up.” Suze’s tone was bland, but I could see her eyei
ng Gil, and specifically the vein currently throbbing in his forehead, as she waited for the outburst.

  She didn’t have long to wait. “Well, we all know what caused this!” Gil bellowed, making my ears ring. “Something that could’ve caught my uncle by surprise and killed him before he could shift forms? Something that could hide their scent even from a kitsune? Something that would want to kill Matias? This is obviously the Ad-hene!”

  A low murmur went through the general crowd, and I got the impression that Gil’s suspicion was a popular one, and that only my mother’s rules were preventing this group from heading over to the Underhill entrance with some torches and farm implements. I’d seen enough of the elves at work recently not to find that a very concerning prospect, but so far, nothing about this looked like the bodies I’d seen them leave behind before. “Why would the Ad-hene want your uncle dead?” I asked.

  “Maybe they’re tired of their usual prey. We share the Lincoln Woods with them, and my sister and I have both seen what they do to the deer that they hunt. They’re dangerous, and now that they aren’t allowed to slaughter their own children anymore, who knows what they’ll be up to next? Maybe they thought Matias would be interesting prey. Or worse, what if the next Ad-hene population pipe dream involves metsän kunigas blood? How long before the Scotts bother to look into it, since according to our treaty, we can’t even ask them ourselves?”