Dark Ascension

Book 4: Generation V

by M.L. Brennan

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

As the “wickedly clever” (Publishers Weekly) series continues, reluctant, slacker vampire Fortitude Scott learns that nothing is more important than family—or more deadly....

After a lifetime of avoiding his family, Fort has discovered that working for them isn’t half bad—even if his mother, Madeline, is a terrifying, murderous vampire. His newfound career has given him a purpose and a paycheck and has even helped him get his partner, foxy kitsune Suzume, to agree to be his girlfriend. All in all, things are looking up.

Only, just as Fort is getting comfortable managing a supernatural empire that stretches from New Jersey to Ontario, Madeline’s health starts failing, throwing Fort into the middle of an uncomfortable and dangerous battle for succession. His older sister, Prudence, is determined to take over the territory. But Fort isn’t the only one wary of her sociopathic tendencies, and allies, old and new, are turning to him to keep Prudence from gaining power.

Now, as Fort fights against his impending transition into vampire adulthood, he must also battle to keep Prudence from destroying their mother’s kingdom—before she takes him down with it....

Release date: August 4, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 320

Sample

 

Chapter One

The highway sign indicating my entry into Hardwick Township appeared just as the digital clock display on my GPS clicked over to noon. I’d been driving for four and a half hours by then, enough time to take me from the heart of my mother’s territory in Providence, Rhode Island, to its very edge in northern New Jersey. There were a lot of people who would’ve been surprised to know that I-80 demarcated a line of ownership that had been established with blood hundreds of years ago. Those people would have been even more surprised to learn that the path of this particular interstate had been placed at the direction of a vampire.

Or not. New Jersey politics were rather notorious, after all.

My mother was the vampire in question, and also the reason that I was driving through New Jersey. Madeline Scott reigned supreme in a territory that stretched from New Jersey’s border with Pennsylvania up into southern Québec—and like any good leader, she had realized long ago the importance of delegating menial tasks. Today I was on my way to discuss terms and conditions with a group of hopeful immigrants to the territory. Not humans, of course—with few exceptions, humans moved through territories with blissful ignorance. Territory rules and boundaries applied to a much smaller, and more secret global population—the supernatural.

This was normally the kind of task that my older brother, Chivalry, was best at handling—with smooth good looks and the kind of diplomatic skills that would’ve made Madeleine Albright jealous, my brother was practically tailor-made for these kinds of missions. I was definitely the second string in this particular field, but I was at least an improvement over our oldest sibling, my sister, Prudence.

Her diplomatic skills mostly involved leaving bodies on the floor.

I’d been involved with only one immigration request before, and that was a fairly standard one of a werebear (sorry, metsän kunigas—the bears are picky about the terminology) family from Mexico coming in to join up with our local group. It had been back when I was still doing ride-alongs with Chivalry as part of my training. I’d spent most of my life trying to be like the humans around me, and pretending that things like vampires didn’t even exist—that had led me to a film studies degree from Brown and then a series of minimum-wage jobs. But last year things had changed, and now I was irrevocably part of the family system, and was even on the family payroll. At my own insistence, I’d kept the minimum wage, even though I knew that my family could pay me marriage-counselor-level hourly rates and never even notice. During one of the periods that the Scirocco had been in the shop, and I’d been relying on the Providence bus system and shanks’ mare for transportation, my roommate, Dan, had asked me outright why I didn’t just take more money from my family—they’d be happy to give it, and in fact could probably have just bought me a new car from the petty cash account and relied on their fleet of accountants to turn it into a tax write-off. It had been hard to put a lifetime’s coil of fear, stubbornness, and tiny private high ground into words, but the best that I’d been able to explain was that taking no more than I would otherwise have been earning on the open market of shitty jobs made me feel like I couldn’t be caught by my family’s money, or ever build up a style of living that required that money and therefore could put pressure on me to do things that I felt might be unethical. This way, after all, I could always tell them all to go pound sand and maintain my current lifestyle by pouring coffee and cleaning public toilets.

Dan had been so utterly disgusted by what he termed my “bullheaded and bullshit martyrdom” that he’d lent me his car until the Scirocco was fixed. While I hadn’t exactly followed his reasoning on that one, I supposed that at least we were both equally mystified by the other’s actions.

Today was going to be my first solo effort—and it probably wouldn’t even have been happening, except that Chivalry was on vacation with his new wife, Simone, in New Hampshire. The call requesting a hearing for immigration into the territory had come in yesterday, and had cited some emergency as the reason for the short notice. Chivalry had offered to come home early to handle it, but I’d promised to do it myself. Simone was a professional mountaineer, and she’d just finished guiding a group of winter hikers up Mount Washington, so it didn’t seem fair to make her cut short her downtime afterward at a fancy and expensive ski lodge. Plus, she and Chivalry had been married for only a month and a half, and most of that had been sucked up with the holiday season. With the new year only a week old, I figured that she deserved a little one-on-one with my brother. After all, it wasn’t like she had a lot of time to waste.

So that had all led to me here, in my gray Scirocco, cruising into a rural town (population 1,696) in New Jersey whose sole claim to fame was that the original Friday the 13th had been filmed there. Under normal circumstances, I might’ve been kind of excited. After all, despite the layer of snow on the ground that was old enough to have acquired a nasty grayish crust that removed all picturesque elements from it, the roads were dry, my car was running well, and my partner in crime and new girlfriend, Suzume, was reclining naked in the backseat.

Well, naked other than her natural fur coat. Suzume was a kitsune, and apparently the Scirocco had been built on a scale far too compact for her to willingly spend four and a half hours in her human skin. She had shifted into her other form, which had coal-black fur, amber eyes containing a world of mischief, and a snow-white tail tip. From the soft whuffling sounds emerging from my backseat, she’d been napping for at least the last two hours. Before that she’d been playing with a balled-up take-out bag from Dunkin’ Donuts—all that remained of our breakfast of champions.

Normal circumstances didn’t apply because the Scirocco’s passenger seat was currently occupied by the generously endowed figure of Loren Noka, the family’s business secretary and a woman whose air of complete and utter competency left me feeling more than a little intimidated. Her Native American heritage was clearly written across her face, and even though I knew that she was in her late forties, her dark hair showed not the slightest hint of gray. I had almost suffered a near-death experience from sheer shame this morning when she wordlessly lowered her cream linen pantsuit–clad body down onto a subcompact car seat that was not only older than I was, but had been liberally patched and repatched with duct tape in four different colors. And I also had a very bad suspicion that the entire interior of the car was currently coated with Suzume’s black fox hairs.

Loren was along on this trip to provide double duty as my chaperone in diplomacy, and also to handle most of the paperwork. Immigration into the territory had copious aspects, such as whether my mother was willing to let certain groups or species enter, but the biggest focus was a simple one: money. From the meagerest kobold right up to the elves, every supernatural who lived in my mother’s territory tithed heavily for the privilege. We even ran their credit scores.

In exchange, those who lived in my mother’s territory were under her protection. It was a very Mafia-style protection, with many regulations on behavior and activities, and the possibility of death-by-Prudence if they violated any of those rules, but it did prevent any group from preying on another. I’d never set one foot outside the boundaries of Scott territory, but given how desperate many people were to get in, what was out there couldn’t be a walk in the park.

Suzume was along in case ass needed to be kicked at some point. Which, though her current form looked like nothing more than an adorable plushy toy, she knew how to deliver.

Loren must’ve been following my train of thought, because she glanced over her shoulder and noted quietly, “We’ll be at the Supplicant House in less than ten minutes. Shouldn’t your companion assume a more appropriate form?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s a lot more diplomatic the way she is.”

A delicately angled black snout immediately inserted itself between the two front seats, and a long vulpine tongue gave my right ear and surrounding hair a thorough slobbering, ignoring my shout of protest. Apparently Suze hadn’t been as asleep as I’d thought. The snout withdrew again into the backseat, and Loren restrained herself to a single raised eyebrow as she wordlessly removed a tissue from her purse and handed it to me.

I mopped myself off as best I could, grumbling as I did. A moment later I yelped again as Suzume leaned forward between the seats again, now entirely human and just as entirely naked.

“I resent your comment,” she said. “I have excellent diplomacy skills. In fact, of the two of us, I am the resident champion of diplomacy.”

“Yes, Diplomacy. The lying, backstabbing board game that appeals to every innate skill you possess. I’m aware.” We’d played it a few times with Dan and his boyfriend. I’d been soundly beaten each time. “Now can you please put clothing on before you cause a multiple-car accident?” Suze’s casual attitude toward personal nudity was genuine, but she was also quite well aware that the rest of the planet’s population was significantly less casual in response to it. In the passenger seat, Loren Noka suddenly exhibited a new and powerful interest in the rural New Jersey scenery.

Suze smiled at me, the delicate corners of the eyes that were the clearest marker of her Japanese heritage crinkling. “Now, who would expect to see a smoking-hot woman in the backseat of a car this shitty?” With that bon mot, she began a leisurely reapplication of her bra. All of the kitsune had a kind of illusion magic that they referred to as fox tricks—it allowed them to fool all of a person’s senses (and sometimes even cameras and technical equipment) into seeing only what the kitsune wanted to be seen. I knew that fox tricks were the easiest when the kitsune worked within what the viewer would normally expect to see—for example, it probably would’ve been more difficult for her to convince someone that there was a naked woman in the back of my car than to convince them that of course the woman in that car was wearing clothing—even while she was still functionally undressed.

“Don’t think I won’t turn the heat off if you take too long,” I muttered. If the January chill was what it took to get her dressed, then I wasn’t above unrolling my window.

Of course, if I wanted to see Suzume undressed again in a more recreational setting, then I knew as well as she did that the odds of me actually following through on my threat were practically zero.

“Hey,” Suze said, her voice partially muffled by the turtleneck she was pulling over her head, “any chance we can turn on some actual music? If I have to sit through one more minute of NPR, I might have to punch the next person I see with an All Things Considered travel mug in the face.”

“You knew the terms when you agreed to come on the trip,” I warned her. Suze’s preference in music could be best described as “tunes to speed to,” and while I normally didn’t mind it too much (and in fact had begun to develop an unwilling appreciation for J-pop thrash metal), I’d felt the need to intercede for the sake of Loren Noka (who struck me as more of a smooth jazz connoisseur), and we’d spent the entire drive going from one NPR station to another.

“This is completely unfair. If it wasn’t for me, we would’ve spent the entire trip with nothing but Springsteen.”

“I know that it’s New Jersey, but they do occasionally play something other than The Boss,” Loren interjected.

“No, she’s talking about my car stereo,” I explained. “When I bought the Scirocco back in November, the radio was broken, and there was a Born to Run tape permanently fused into the player. It wasn’t exactly at the top of my priority list of repairs, so Suze got me a new system for Christmas.”

“And surprised him with it,” Suze said. Her voice still sounded a little weird, and when I checked the rearview this time, I saw that she was in the process of wiggling into her jeans. Winter clothing was rough for shape-shifting.

“Yes. She surprised me with it by hiring someone to break into my car, take it to a chop shop, install the new stereo, and bring it back.”

Suze leaned forward again and frowned at me. “You’re not sounding appropriately appreciative of the awesomeness of my gift presentation.”

“It was a great present,” I assured her, “and I really was happy to not have to have it installed. I just wish that the installer hadn’t permanently broken the passenger door while doing it, and stolen my tire iron, cell phone charger, and flashlight.”

“No one likes an ungrateful gift recipient,” Suze said.

“They broke the passenger door?” Loren interjected, looking concerned. After all, if the door in question suddenly failed catastrophically, she was on the front lines.

“Not too badly,” I assured her. “They just broke the lock pin, so you can’t unlock the passenger door without the key anymore.”

“So I can’t open my door from the inside?” Loren asked.

“No.”

“So you now essentially have a kidnapper-mobile?”

“Some people would regard that as an added feature,” Suze said helpfully.

“Yes, Suze. But those people would be kidnappers.” I’d been having this conversation with her since the holidays. A preliminary phone call to a repair garage had also revealed that fixing this particular issue could only be accomplished with a special thread die, so this was probably now going to be a semipermanent feature of the car from now on. That had definitely tempered my gratitude for relief from endless repeats of The Boss. Suzume’s helpful suggestion had been to simply leave the door eternally unlocked, but given my lack of interest in allowing the petty thieves of Providence to treat my car as a personal rummage sale, I’d simply gotten into the habit of manually relocking the car on every occasion that I had to let a passenger in or out.

Loren headed off the topic with a polite redirection to the kinds of minimum tithing amounts that we would be looking for in this meeting, and I let myself focus back on the road. The percentages and payoffs had already been thoroughly drilled into my head during a cram session spent with the documents that I’d been sent last night, and Loren had gone over them twice already on the trip. But apparently Loren’s back-to-business topic choice was enough to remind Suze about what was waiting for us in a few more miles.

“This is going to be awesome,” Suze interrupted, glee heavy in her voice. “It’ll be like the whole Victoria’s Secret catwalk show.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

Suze scoffed. “They’re succubi, Fort.”

“Oh. So they’re actually—” I looked over at Loren and raised my eyebrows inquisitively. I was living proof that superstition, literature, and Hollywood were not always accurate in presenting the supernatural, so I’d assumed that any particular cultural assumptions I might’ve had about succubi were likely to be hugely off base.

Loren wiggled a hand in a maybe-yes-maybe-no gesture. “We’ve never had them in the territory, and they seem to prefer warmer climates, so I couldn’t find much information in the files.” Irritation crossed her face for a brief moment. Nothing got under Loren’s skin like shoddy file-keeping. “Your mother categorized them years ago as completely nonthreatening, and with none in residence, that was rather it. It made for pretty brief reading.”

“The Northeast isn’t good thong weather. It makes sense that we wouldn’t see many of them,” Suze noted.

“They’re not all female,” I pointed out. How much of it was to prove that I’d actually done the reading, I couldn’t exactly say.

“Dudes can wear thongs too, Fort. Unlike you, I’m not making sexist assumptions.” Suze was using her most helpful tone, which she only used when she was having particular levels of fun.

I pushed onward. Loren’s mouth had made a suspicious twitch at Suze’s comment, and whether the secretary was struggling not to laugh or containing the urge to throttle the kitsune, I figured that a little more filler would give her the minute to find the strength. “It’s like foxes—we call females vixens, but they’re still foxes. All succubi are called succubi, but if you need the gendered term you can call the males incubi.”

“That’s very fascinating, Fort. I’m taking notes, I swear.” In the rearview I could see Suze push up her left sleeve to the elbow and solemnly start moving her index finger on the inside of her arm in a writing motion.

It was a sleepy, rural town, heavy on big farming fields covered in snow and a few derelict buildings that suggested that the area had been having trouble hanging on to businesses. It was close enough to wilderness vacationing areas that there were a few motels and one bed-and-breakfast, but that was about it. The GPS led us down several winding two-lane roads that boasted nothing but woods until, like magic, there suddenly appeared a tidy little subdivision. The neat and wholly forgettable and generic sign at the entrance to the subdivision read CEDAR HILLS, and a short road led to a rounded cul-de-sac with four identical houses set around it. They were all modest Colonials, the kind that could be found across the country. All of them were painted a tastefully bland wheat color; all of them were in good condition, with identical driveways and a basic amount of landscaping. And for fifty-one weeks out of the year, these houses were always completely empty.

This secluded little area, existing like a ghost in its community, was where petitioners from the south and west of the country came to wait for meetings with my family. There was a similar setup in Québec for more northern visitors, and I was fairly certain that the subdivision there was identical to what I was looking at now. Our eastern border was a whole ocean, so overseas petitioners essentially had to choose where they preferred flying into—Canada or New Jersey. These tiny wait stations were set just inside our border, positioned for easy expulsion of anyone who didn’t make a cut. There was no way for my family to fully police our borders against someone who just drove in—but anyone who did that was risking the death penalty that it carried if a member of the Scott family caught them. My sister had apparently made something of a name for herself over the years with how inventive she could be when it came to punishing trespassers. I’d been told that videos existed of her inventiveness.

There was a large van, the kind driven by church groups and college sports teams, parked in the driveway of the third house, and I pulled the Scirocco in behind it. Whenever a petition call came in, Madeline’s local agent would drive over to one of the houses and leave a key in the mailbox. The agent was also the one who was paid to make sure that the houses were always fully maintained, and was paid well for the privilege of asking no questions. One key per group, one house for their stay, and one interview with a member of the Scott family. Decisions were final.

We all sat for a moment in the car, looking at the house. There were blinds in the windows, but we could see them being rustled. At least one of the succubi was watching. I felt a tug in the pit of my stomach. Inside were the representatives of a group that desperately wanted to get away from wherever they came from and come to the presumed safety of my mother’s territory, and I was the person who represented my mother and held all that authority in my hands. Maybe it should’ve made me feel more excited, but mostly it just made me feel awfully depressed and a bit embarrassed.

Loren and Suze were both doing small, surreptitious checks on clothing and hair after the long drive, so I pulled my vanity mirror down as well. What I saw looking back at me was exactly what I’d expected—a guy in his late twenties who wouldn’t have turned a single head on the street, either positively or negatively, with dark hair that only with the greatest reluctance would yield to styling gels. I was wearing the khaki and collared button-down combination that Suze had said made me look like I was on my way to a Christian revival picnic, and I’d traded my aging winter parka for a more dignified black wool knockoff-of-a-knockoff jacket that came to midthigh, and that from a distance actually looked fairly nice. I’d spent my life trying to make sure that I didn’t become like the rest of my family, and while the surface still showed that, I was becoming more and more concerned about the rest of me.

Behind me, Suze made a rude noise and swatted me lightly. “I can actually hear your internal demotivating monologue,” she said. “The best cologne in the world is power, and right now you’re covered in it, so let’s head in.”

I deliberately didn’t look at Loren, and instead just opened the door. The blast of icy January air was immediate. In the car, with the heater cranked and the weak winter sun greenhousing through the windows, it had been easy to forget how lung-bitingly cold it was. After a quick walk around the car to unlock the passenger door and release the women, who were giving me what I felt to be unnecessarily grumpy looks about not having control of their own egress, I stuffed my hands into my pockets and shuddered. With the winter wind biting at us, we headed up the walk at double time, Loren’s sensibly low pumps clacking urgently against the slate panels. The door was pulled open as we neared it.

If I’d had any particular personal investment in having Suze’s expectations of six-foot-tall underwear models be realized, my day would’ve received a quick crushing. The figure standing in the doorway was male, average height, but lean in a way that reminded me of a marathon runner, with nothing but muscle, veins, and skin. His hair was black, but with a line of pure white at the roots, as if a recent dye job was growing out. His skin had that particular orange hue of someone who was a fan of spray tanning, with the lighter patches around his eyes and at the corners of his elbows that confirmed it. From his face I would’ve guessed his age at not more than early thirties, but that felt oddly wrong, though I couldn’t figure out why. His clothing was wildly out of season—sandals, shorts, and a thin T-shirt, and the house was definitely not heated to match.

As I stepped over the threshold and into the small foyer, I could see a woman standing a bit farther back. She was also showing the signs of spray-tanning, though hers looked a bit more evenly applied, and if I hadn’t caught a glance at the palm of her left hand, I might not have suspected it. Her hair was a midbrown, but had the same line of white rootiness showing at her hairline as the man. Both of them had dark brown eyes.

The man was standing within reach, so I began what I hoped to be a solid, honest handshake, but unfortunately the amount of stress sweat on the succubus’s part left the experience rather lacking in vigor—though it certainly made up for that in sheer sogginess. I concentrated on meeting his eyes and carefully resisted the urge to wipe my hand on my pants. “I’m Fortitude, Madeline Scott’s son. I’m here to negotiate.”

“I’m Nicholas,” he responded, and immediately tipped his head toward the woman beside him, “and this is my wife, Saskia.”

“Lovely to meet you,” I said, making another round of handshakes. Saskia’s hand was drier, though she was shaking hard enough that I felt like I was chasing a moving object. Clearly both were under pressure. My smile must’ve looked like a rictus by now, but I tried to normalize and continue with introductions. “My companions are—”

“Shenanigans.” Suze cut me off.

We all froze. I turned around, completely unsurprised at the sight of the long, carefully honed knife that had suddenly appeared in Suzume’s hands. I could feel my muscles tense immediately, and I looked around the room, moving sideways to put myself between Loren and the two succubi, who both looked ready to faint. “What’s wrong?” I asked, sliding my right hand into the pocket of my jacket. One of the things I’d liked about this coat was how well the pockets could conceal a .45. It wasn’t exactly a regulation holster, but with the safety engaged I wasn’t worried about it going off, and I hadn’t wanted to let anyone know that I was carrying. I’d gotten more distrustful over the last year.

“This isn’t just a representative pair. I smell multiple other recent scents.”

I took the gun out and stared at the succubi. “If there’s an explanation, I’d recommend that it starts fast.”

It was Saskia who started speaking—fast and terrified, never able to take her eyes away from Suze’s knife, even though I was holding a gun, and her words tumbled over one another and became incomprehensible.

Loren’s hand closed over my wrist. “Look,” she said softly, drawing my attention to the small figure that was just barely in view through the open archway that led into the living room. I froze at what I saw.

“Suze, put the knife away,” I whispered.

“What—”

“Look.”

They must’ve been told to hide away where we wouldn’t see them, but there were a lot of them, so it was understandable that one had managed to slip the leash. Peeking around the corner at us was a toddler.

*   *   *

We ended up in the living room. All of these houses were fully furnished, so there were sofas to sit on, along with end tables, knickknacks, and even books to fill the shelves, though it all came off looking just slightly too much like an IKEA showroom display. I sat on one long sofa, flanked on either side by Suze and Loren. Saskia and Nicholas were on the catty-corner love seat. And between them was their daughter, Julie.

It was hard to look away from Julie. Saskia and Nicholas looked just a little off, but nothing that would’ve looked particularly unnatural on the streets of a city like L.A., or Las Vegas, which was where they were from. But Julie stood out—she lacked the familiar level of baby chub that I’d always seen before on toddlers, and was a miniature version of the adults, built like Iggy Pop. Like her parents she had only clothing fit for an afternoon in Nevada, but they’d tried to compensate by swathing her in an adult-size hoodie that covered her from neck to knees, the kind sold at highway rest stops—this one had been bought in Illinois, judging by what was written across the front. But I could see her face and her lower legs—her skin was pale, so pale that it was translucent enough to see the blue and purple tracings of the major arteries in her legs and throat. Her lips were the color of old chalk dust. Her hair was pale, and not just the white-blond of some small children before it turns to brown, but pale like the fur on a polar bear, ranging from pure white to a dull cream. And her eyes had just barely enough pigment to be charitably called gray—it was uncomfortable to look at, which was probably why her parents were both wearing colored contacts.

She was the one I was focusing on, but I could’ve looked at any of the others. Six other children sat around us, from a fourteen-year-old boy down to a two-year-old who was so tightly swaddled in a blanket from one of the upstairs beds that if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have been able to guess gender. He was held by his father, the third of the adults, though Miro was clearly unable to do anything more at the moment than hold the baby and rock