Chapter Seventeen

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Waking up was slow. It was hard. Normally I woke up quickly, and neither a deep sleep nor a nightmare was enough to change that. This…was like trying to force my way through a thick fluid. It was hard, it was somehow painful. When I did snap back to awareness, I still felt dazed, my thoughts blunted by a thick fog.

I was in a bed, I thought. It was soft. The sheets felt like satin. I could smell something sweet and floral. It took a little bit to work my way up to opening my eyes, but when I did I found the lighting was soft as well, and there were some rugs breaking up the monotony of the concrete floor. I was in a twin-size bed, and the room also had a simple wooden chair, a small refrigerator, and a camp stove; not a lot else.

Capinera was sitting on the chair, across the room from me. Not a large room, but it meant there was enough space to not feel threatening. She was quietly reading a book. I wasn’t entirely sure how I recognized her immediately, given that I’d only seen her once, for a few seconds. Maybe just because those seconds had been so intensely burned into my brain. She looked calm, peaceful even, though there was a sheathed rapier leaning against the wall next to her.

I wasn’t terribly worried by that. It seemed more likely that she was keeping a vigil in case someone tried to attack me while I was unconscious than anything. The sense of total, nigh-omniscient understanding had been a transient thing, but I remembered enough to be confident Capinera was not a threat to me.

“Hi,” I said. It hurt a little; my throat was dry. I realized, abruptly, that it was not the only thing that hurt. My back was sore, and my right hand hurt where I’d hit my knuckles on the concrete. Felt like I’d bitten my lip, too. At least my head didn’t hurt; Saori must have reacted quickly enough to keep me from cracking my skull on the floor. That was good.

Capinera looked up, and then tucked a bookmark in the book and set it aside. “Hello. Kyoko, yes?” Her voice, I noticed absently, was lovely, not terribly surprising given the quality of her singing. It was also very soft, gentle almost.

That dispelled any lingering anxiety I might have had. She knew my name, which I really only saw a handful of ways she’d have learned that, and most of them were reassuring rather than the inverse. She said it right, too, even extending the first “o” to a second count. Most English native speakers I’d met didn’t even notice me doing that; the idea of extending syllables to change meaning just didn’t feature in that language. My friends picked it up with practice, and unsurprisingly Saori did not struggle at all, but it wasn’t common.

“Yeah. Do you have some water?”

“Yes, one moment.” She went to the fridge in the corner, and took out a bottle of water. She walked over and handed it to me rather than toss it, and I noted that the tamper-proof cap was intact. Might have been coincidence, and I didn’t really feel worried about her poisoning me anyway, but it was further reassurance all the same.

I sipped at it. It felt good. I was starting to feel less dazed, as well, which was even better. “Was I out long?”

“About six hours. It’s a little after three in the morning.” She walked back to her chair and sat down again.

I winced. Longer than usual. That, along with other things, was enough to give me a distinctly bad feeling about this seizure. “Did I go tonic-clonic?” Capinera looked blank, so I clarified, “Convulsions.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes. Fairly severe ones. I was concerned, but your friends seemed confident that this was a known thing and all you needed was rest.”

“Friends” seemed a bit of an overstatement, but I didn’t comment on it. “Did they leave?”

“Yes. They seemed to be in a great hurry. One, Saori I believe she said her name was, stuck around long enough to explain that much to me, but they all seemed…very urgent.”

That somehow did not surprise me. “Sorry for the disruption. Did they ask you to keep an eye on me while they were gone?”

Capinera nodded. “It’s fine. And yes. She seemed concerned that you would be attacked.”

This, too, did not surprise me. I was getting the impression that this was probably one of the safer places they could have left me, at the moment. But the fact that they had known that, along with the frantic hurry she was describing, meant I had to ask the question I’d been avoiding. “Did I…say anything? During the seizure, I mean.” I sounded like this wouldn’t surprise me either, but also, at least to myself, like I really, really wanted to be surprised.

“Yes. Though I don’t know what you said. Does this happen often?”

I laughed a little, though it didn’t sound very happy. “Seizures? More often than I’d like. Talking during? No, not often at all. This is the fourth time, and based on the last three, it’s….” What did I say there? Disturbing? Terrifying? Extremely ominous? Eventually, I settled on, “Concerning.”

Capinera nodded. “Do you think something bad has happened, then?”

“No. Going to happen.” I paused. “The first time this happened was four days before my mother died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want to talk about it?”

Ordinarily, the answer to that would have been a very curt “no.” But something about the current moment shifted that. Maybe it was the recent events making me feel a strange kind of intimacy with Capinera, or maybe I was just suddenly very anxious and needed to talk. Regardless, what I said was, “Actually, I think I might. Is that okay?”

“Of course.” She sounded like she meant it, too.

“I was born on the spring equinox,” I said. “Thirty-five years ago. I don’t expect you are familiar enough with recent Japanese history to know the significance.” Most people didn’t, I’d found. Even people who were old enough to have heard about it when it happened didn’t immediately put two and two together, for the most part.

“No, almost nothing. I was mostly raised in the Otherside.”

I nodded. That made sense. I was pretty sure Capinera was partly mortal, not wholly inhuman like Saori was. But just like there were half-bloods such as myself who were born and raised entirely on earth, I expected there were others who were…not. “Twenty-seven years ago,” I said, “also on the spring equinox, a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo carried out an attack in Tokyo using sarin.” She looked confused, and I realized she probably didn’t know much about modern human weapons, so I clarified, “Sarin is a chemical weapon, a particularly dangerous toxin.”

Capinera wasn’t an idiot. She could see where I was going with this. “Was your mother killed in the attack?” she asked. Her voice was soft by default, it seemed, but at the moment her tone was particularly gentle.

“I’ve never quite been sure,” I said. I shrugged. “Officially, no. Sarin is extremely dangerous, and Aum had a lot of the stuff. But they were kind of incompetent, and they didn’t have anything like an effective distribution mechanism. It made a lot of people sick, and a lot of people were permanently injured, but only about a dozen died in the immediate aftermath of the attack. She wasn’t one of them. But she was hit by a car and died the same day, and she was most likely on one of the trains that was targeted. And her travel plan didn’t even call for her to be anywhere near where she died, she was supposed to be boarding another train leaving the city.”

“So there was definitely something wrong, then.”

I sighed. “Yeah. Nerve agents can do some really strange things to people, and I don’t know how they affect raiju at all. My best guess is that she was sick and confused, possibly hallucinating, and wandered into traffic. But I don’t really know.”

Capinera nodded. “That makes sense. It sounds very difficult, the uncertainty I mean. I think it would leave me questioning a lot of things.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Yeah, I tend to agree. Anyway. I’d had a few seizures before this. But the one a few days before this happened was…different. The earlier ones were mostly during a fever, which is relatively normal in human children. I don’t remember them well, but they were normal. This was…well, there was no provoking circumstance, to start with; it just sort of happened. And some of the things I said were…disturbing. I don’t remember talking, but I heard a bit about it. Didn’t say much and it sounded like incoherent ranting. But some of the details, in hindsight, were…” I trailed off, trying to think of how to explain.

“Prophetic?” Capinera asked.

I shook my head. “No, not exactly. Prophecy as such is impossible as I understand it. Oracular, maybe, is the right word. With the context of what I know now, it seems like I might have been describing some things about the attack. I mean, the cult had been stockpiling this stuff, and they’d used similar chemicals to kill people before this on a smaller scale. I don’t think I saw the future, but it feels very much like I was describing things about the present.”

She nodded. “Right, that makes sense. The difference between precognition and prescience. One can infer a great deal about the future, with enough information, even if certainty and direct observation is impossible.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” I paused. “You can see why I’m nervous, I expect.”

“Yes. I can.” Capinera thought for a moment. “Though your friends did seem to be acting on whatever you told them. Perhaps they will be able to do something.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Actually, though, do you know who all was involved?”

“I only spoke with Saori,” she said. “But I believe it was her, a werewolf, a human sorcerer, a dwarf, and one of the Sidhe who all left in a great hurry.”

I let out a sigh of relief. They’d taken the Sidhe with them, then. I wasn’t sure at all what I’d said to get them to do so, but I remembered enough to be pretty sure that was important. “Good. Oh, also, question. I’m told you don’t often sing in Welsh, is that correct?”

A sort of darkness passed over Capinera’s features at this. She seemed…melancholic, bleak, regretful, and contemplative, all at once. “No. Not anymore. Mostly English and Italian, occasionally other languages.”

“Would you mind telling me why tonight was an exception?” It was a sincere question. This was…clearly not a topic she was entirely comfortable with.

“No, not at all. Someone had specifically requested that I perform this song tonight. A werewolf, I believe his name was…Stefan? Something like that.” Capinera shrugged. “I rarely use the language, but I sometimes take requests from people to help offset the cost of the building, and he seemed to think it was important.”

I was sure I looked at least a bit stricken. I was sure she noticed, too. But she didn’t say anything. A request for that very particular song. That explained so much. I wasn’t sure why Steven had been the one requesting it, but the rest of it tied together very neatly, and I supposed it made some sense.

As I had observed several times now, these attacks seemed almost to be going out of their way to make people hate the attacker as much as possible. And people would have found the connections eventually. A wolf abducted in a way that made the werewolves painfully aware of their inability to do anything about it, another tortured to death. A mage killed with magic and left in a very public place. They hadn’t killed any of the dvergar that I knew of, but given the nature of the dvergar what they did was almost worse; dwarves did not have a reputation for taking insults to their competence well, to put it mildly.

It hadn’t occurred to me to ask why. Now that I did, it felt somewhat obvious. Anger leads people to make rash choices, to act impulsively. It impairs critical thinking, disrupts communication.

I looked for my phone, found it, along with my other belongings, on a small table next to the bed. No messages, which in a way was a good thing. It suggested that nothing had gone so disastrously wrong that I was hearing about it. I sent Saori a text to say that I was okay, and drank some more water.

Capinera seemed lost in thought. “Do you need to get some sleep?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, not yet. I don’t sleep much.”

“Alright. Thank you.” What was I thanking her for, I wondered? I wasn’t quite sure. Letting me stay here? Sitting up watching to make sure nobody murdered me? Letting me talk about things? Probably all of the above, I thought, but it was sort of hard to tell.

Regardless, she smiled, and I only then realized that she hadn’t previously. Her teeth were sharp, significantly sharper than human normal. “It’s no trouble. You should rest. No one will attack you here.”

“How do you know?” I asked. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I was curious what she would say.

“Because if they try, I will kill them,” Capinera said simply. She didn’t say it like a threat; if anything, she sounded sad. I was pretty sure she’d be sad while she did it, too. “And I expect they know that.”

“You sound very confident.”

“I have killed many things,” she said, in the same soft tone, the same shadow in her eyes. Not a boast at all. “And this place is well-protected. There are certainly still people who could overcome me easily; I am not one of the great powers of the world by any stretch of the imagination. From what Saori said, it’s very possible that the people who want to hurt you would be capable of doing so. But from what she said, they would not do so easily or without cost. It would be a foolish waste of resources. I think they will wait for another time.”

I tended to agree. I could still feel the wards in the wall humming at my back. And the sad, quiet certainty in Capinera’s voice was…telling. That rapier was well-worn.

“Thank you,” I said again, and then laid back down and tried to sleep. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. My dreams were full of blackberries and echoing voices, singing about regret and loneliness and lost homes. Not sweet dreams, but they were soft ones in their way, and there was a comfort in that.

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