Chapter Two

“You’re getting better, but you’re still dropping your guard.” To demonstrate her point, Cassie reached out and hit me on the shoulder where I’d let my hand drop down out of position.

She did not hit me full force. But Cassie was a werewolf, and not a pushover even by their standards. Punching me at full force would damage things. Partial force still hurt like hell and knocked me off balance. She did not, as I had learned, believe in going easy on people.

Not for the first time, I wondered whether I could have found someone else to practice my hand-to-hand with. Cassie was skilled, enough so to have thoroughly confirmed my suspicion that she was at least a few hundred years old. But I could have done without the bruises, much as I would have been fine with learning to track someone by scent without having to deal with scent masks quite this nasty. She’d used one involving bromine last month, and that was…I had literally had photosensitive seizures that were less of a sensory hell than trying to track someone through a bromine scent mask.…

Chapter One

“Sugiyama! It’s Saito, hello. Are you well?”

I would have known without him telling me. The old gangster’s voice, high for a guy but rough, was both distinctive and very familiar. Even when he’d just woken me out of a pleasant doze (how people kept doing this was beyond me), and I was appropriately both annoyed and surprised, I’d still have known who it was. Even if he weren’t also speaking Japanese. But it was kind of him to make sure I knew who to be annoyed at right away.

“The hell are you up at this hour for?” I asked, in a tone of voice that was only moderately surly, and in English rather than Japanese. So, polite for me, but not by most people’s standards.…

Prelude

love me like a freezing shot of vodka, like pure agave, love me
when you’re lonely, when we’re both too tired to speak, when you don’t believe
in anything, listen, there isn’t anything, it doesn’t matter; lie down
with me and close your eyes, the road curves here, I’m cranking up the radio
and we’re going, we won’t turn back as long as you love me,
as long as you keep on doing it exactly like that.
-Kim Addonizio, from “Like That”, Tell Me, 2000…

Saori

On the first day, I’m jolted awake out of a sound sleep. Literally jolted; they shove something like a cattle prod against my neck, and I wake up screaming in pain. I don’t immediately remember where I am or how I got there. I’m confused and everything feels very sludgy somehow, like it’s hard to even think.

Before I can adjust to anything at all, the instant I open my eyes, someone sprays what feels like pepper juice into them. It feels like my eyes are on fire, and the vision I hadn’t even begun to sort through is immediately obscured by tears. I scream again, and then again when the first lash lands on my back a few seconds later.

Someone grabs my hands, pulling them out to either side. I struggle, something that didn’t even occur to me until they grabbed me, but I’m weak and clumsy, and they have no difficulty pinning me like this. I feel very exposed, even before the cattle prod returns and starts on my breasts. That hurts so much that I can’t even scream, even before someone grabs my hair and then hits me in the face. He yells at me and I can sort of understand that he’s telling me to look at him.…

New Year’s Eve

Stories are universal. Everyone has at least one, and some have a great many, indeed. There have been stories for as long as there have been people to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. And wherever you go, whatever language you speak, some things stay the same. Every culture has its heroes, paragons of whatever they call virtue, legendary and awe-inspiring. Every culture has its tragedies. Every culture has its jokes.

But every culture has its villains, too. Anywhere you go, you will find them. There have been villains, been nightmares and horrors and evildoers, for as long as there have been heroes to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. There are countless kinds, in epics and tragedies and jokes alike.

And of all these stories, all the narratives people weave to make events into meaning, there are perhaps none that are held quite as deeply inside a person as the scary ones. There have always been stories to tell around the campfire, when the night presses in close around you and there are monsters in every shadow. There have always been monsters to tell those stories about, and not all of them were the people sitting beside you.…

Epilogue

I stood on the staircase and looked at the manor. This was, I had learned, what it was; it wasn’t just the mansion itself that I now owned, but also a sizable chunk of land around it, which was apparently the distinction.

I had not been expecting to live here. I had been fully expecting to pawn it off along with the rest of Cormac’s belongings. But it wouldn’t actually have brought much, with how far out into the ass end of nowhere it was. And it was, I had to admit, pretty much ideal for my needs in some ways. Out so far into a post-industrial wasteland that it was all the way into the forest, plenty of room to work with, a landed estate sufficiently large that neighbors were a complete nonissue even without it being all the way out in fucking Fairywood. The trip into town would be a pain in the ass, but not an unreasonable one.

I had still been resistant to the idea of living in anything that could be called a landed estate, or the manor house therein. But Saori liked the idea, surprising no one, and she’d decided to fight dirty and rope Raincloud in on the pleading. I could hold up under a vixen applying bedroom eyes or a puppy applying, well, puppy eyes. I did not think I could reasonably be blamed for caving under the pressure of both.…