Chapter Twenty-Nine

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I do not like hospitals.

I am aware that this is not exactly a shocking, novel opinion. Nobody really likes hospitals. They aren’t a place anyone goes for fun. They’re a place of death deferred, of fear and pain and sickness. The patients go because they’re seriously sick or badly injured. The families arrive full of anxiety, sick with worry that something will go wrong, that they’ll be leaving in mourning. The staff mostly go there while tired, stressed, and badly overworked, hoping that nothing goes too terribly wrong today, that they won’t be the one who has to deliver bad news, all while their empathy is being steadily ablated away by the sheer volume of tragedy they’re immersed in. Virtually no one goes there because they like it.

And that emotional resonance sinks in. It makes the structure feel like fear and pain and grief. There are exceptions, sure. There are individual departments and wings that have a very different mood. They are a place of healing as well, and sometimes that shows through more clearly. But by and large, hospitals ache with the negative emotions that have passed through them. I really did not like that feeling.

On another level, particularly in departments where the patients have more injuries and more severe illness, I have a different kind of uncomfortable feeling. When I walk past the wounded, I smell blood. It’s such a distinctive odor that all the disinfectant and isopropanol and air freshener in the world can’t fully cover it up. I smell that, and I feel hungry. I see the elderly and the seriously ill, and a little part of me in the back of my head notes that they would be easy prey.

I’m not a werewolf, but I have enough of the wolf in me to have a seriously prey drive. Usually, I can manage that; it was just one more component of my experience that I selectively tuned out, and I was much better at that than I used to be.

But it was harder here, surrounded by vulnerable people like this. It was harder when I was already stressed. If one of the patients tried to run from me right now, it would be a struggle not to chase them. Being here was a reminder of how deeply rooted that prey drive was, and I didn’t like to be reminded of that. There were far too many dark thoughts there. Too many memories of what had happened before I learned to manage that prey drive.

I don’t like hospitals. This was something I already knew. The fact that I was in this one because I was, myself, seriously injured didn’t improve the experience one bit.

A surprising number of people had made it out of that canyon alive. Not all, not even close to all. I’d been extremely correct that Andrew was dead, for example, and I’d done Audgrim in myself. One of the werewolves had been burned too badly to survive. But the rest of us were alive. After the fight was over, I’d dragged myself out of the ritual site, and found the escorts we’d brought along.

I suspected they were not thrilled, and not just because the victory had come at such a cost. Audgrim was dead, and the way he died really didn’t look like it happened during the fight itself. I could see that the three remaining people from his group of employees had noticed this, and they weren’t happy about it.

But they were outnumbered by the wolves, and the wolves weren’t happy about how much Andrew didn’t look like it was mages that finished him off, either. Rebecca, the inhuman woman who smelled like a glacier and moved through the forest like a predator, was also standing right behind them. They didn’t cause a fuss. And while the evacuation process was tiring, painful, and challenging, it didn’t take that long. We got everyone out fast enough to get them to medical care.

The tree had a hole in it where Thorn had been, obvious even at a glance. And I was carrying a sword I hadn’t had when I went in there. Nobody said a word about that, either.

The losses and injuries were significant, though, enough that it was somewhat chilling to think about how close we’d come to catastrophic failure. The werewolves took the worst of it, on the whole. Andrew was dead, as were five others. There was one who had been burned to death in the canyon, one I saw die from a silver bullet in the neck, two who had been with the rear guard, and I later learned that the other wolf I’d seen get shot, two silver bullets in the chest, had died from her injuries. Pretty much all the survivors were wounded, many of them badly so. Cassie had serious damage to both shoulders; there were multiple tendons that had snapped, and that was the kind of thing that even a werewolf had to take seriously. It would be a while before she was fully recovered. Derek had broken a forelimb and got clawed open all down his flank. The other wolf in the canyon with us, who turned out to be Robert, the same guy who had gone out scouting earlier, had taken a blast of kinetic force that caused extensive internal bleeding. He was lucky to be alive.

For the Tribe, the damage had been lighter. Jack was so overdrawn that between that and the head trauma he picked up when Audgrim decked him, he’d been in a coma for the past week. He was starting to wake up today, but he was still seriously out of it. The expectation was that he’d make a full recovery, though, so I thought he’d still gotten pretty damn lucky. Richard had survived his injuries. Alice, the wizard who specialized in enchanting objects and defensive wards, was almost as drained as Jack, and the damage to her left leg was severe enough that she was going to have a limp for the rest of her life. But they’d all survived.

Audgrim was dead, obviously, though I doubted the dvergar would consider that much of a loss. Hell, I was guessing they’d feel like they owed me for it, all things considered. Not to mention that with how their laws worked, the debt Audgrim had taken on in trade for my help was on them now. He’d been acting as their agent at the time, and they were responsible for his actions and debts while he was in that role. And I had put myself through hell in the process of helping him with this hunt, a hunt which was successful largely because of my actions. The dwarves fucking owed me at this point.

The rest of us came out of it…more or less intact. Rebecca was unscathed. Melissa was going to be fine, or as close to it as she was getting; the preexisting damage to her mind was still there, obviously, but the fresh injuries were healed within a week. She was hardy. Capinera was pretty much fine as well; she had some burns, a couple bruises, and a sprained ankle, but the attack that actually took her out of the fight just knocked her out, no serious harm done. But Saori and I…were less fine.

I’d been correct about the broken ribs. I had four of them, and several others were cracked. My left elbow was slightly dislocated, the wrist was badly sprained, and one of the bones in my forearm was fractured; I’d made all of these worse trying to use that arm towards the end. I’d hit my head pretty hard, and probably a lot of the confused, unreal feeling I had towards the end of the fight had been the product of a moderately severe concussion. I healed very well, and far faster than a normal human, but even for me, that was a lot of damage, and I’d need a while to recover.

Saori, meanwhile, had basically shattered the right half of her body when she hit the wall of the canyon. I didn’t know how else to think of it. She had fractures in her collarbone, lower arm, and thigh, a dislocated hip, and three broken bones in her hand; enough ribs were broken to make counting pointless. She looked like she’d been in a car wreck, and not a gentle one. It would be weeks to months before she was able to walk normally. Kitsune apparently healed relatively well, but not nearly as fast as I did. She was confident she would eventually recover completely, but it would take a while.

A week after the battle, we were both still in the hospital. We’d ended up sharing the same room; I wasn’t sure who had pulled strings to arrange that, but I was grateful for it. Her company made it…more tolerable. It was after midnight, now, and I was trying to sleep; it wasn’t working at all, but I felt I should make the effort. Saori was in a stupor on the other side of the room. They had the kitsune on a hell of a lot of painkillers, and she was out cold.

The door opened, and Cassie slipped inside. The room was very dark, but I knew it was her. She moved in a distinctive way, and smelled like werewolf. I was quite sure we were outside of normal visiting hours, but she clearly didn’t care. This was the first time I’d seen her since that night out in the woods. Derek, Capinera, and Melissa had each visited at least once, and I’d heard about Cassie’s injuries from Derek, but she hadn’t been here herself yet.

Her arms moved strangely as she closed the door. It wasn’t healthy, but the damage would heal given time. Werewolves were even better than I was at recovering from injury.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “Good to see you.”

“Likewise.” The werewolf’s voice was quiet enough that if I were a human I couldn’t have heard her. “I’m glad you’re…relatively okay. Things got pretty bad there at the end. I wasn’t sure you’d survive that hit.”

“Me either,” I sighed. I’d gotten ridiculously lucky. Saori’s injuries were enough to convince me of that. When she took the same kind of hit, she’d broken most of the bones on one half of her body, and she’d been wearing armor. I was sure at this point that as bad as that impact was for me, the mage hadn’t even been trying. It had been a quick, reflexive spell without time to put much power into it.

“I saw what happened,” she said, and her voice was still quiet, but there was a lot of emotion in it. Anger, sorrow, gratitude, and guilt. Her voice was distant, and I was willing to bet that if I could see her eyes clearly, they would be distant too, and haunted. It was a moment in which her age showed, and I was willing to bet she was a pretty damn old werewolf based on that tone.

“Yeah. I kinda figured.” She hadn’t been unconscious, after all, just debilitated. She might be the only one who had actually seen what I did at the end. Jack saw the initial betrayal, but Audgrim had knocked him out almost immediately.

“I haven’t told anyone. It seemed better to ask you first.” There were a lot of layers in that, a lot of kinds of implicit meaning.

I sighed again. “As fucked as it is, I think it might be better if it does go down as a hunting accident. Audgrim’s behavior was appalling, but I don’t know what good it would do to have that be public knowledge. It’s kinda…as it is, I think this can be a good thing for the city.”

She tilted her head to the side curiously, an extremely canine posture. “How so?”

I tried to shrug, remembered it hurt like hell right now, and gestured vaguely with my good hand instead. “It’s sort of the inverse of what they were trying to do. The mages, I mean. They tried pretty hard to drive wedges between us, to damage relations so much that it sparked a war. They wanted that to happen so that we’d all be focused on killing each other rather than stopping them.”

“Ah.” The werewolf nodded a little. “I see. You think this will draw our different factions together more. Establish an alliance of sorts.”

“I think it’s possible, yeah. I mean, I’m not a diplomat. And I don’t expect it would be a terribly close alliance. But as it stands, it’s a bit…” I trailed off, but this time I remembered that shrugging was a bad idea. “There were a lot of people working together on this,” I said after a moment. “A lot of different skillsets, and having that breadth was important. And it worked. Everyone saw that cooperating like that was effective, it let us find those bastards and kill them. And they were very easy to hate.”

“Yeah, I follow. It establishes incentives for cooperation. But if Audgrim were known to be a traitor, that trust would evaporate.”

“Yup. Sure, he wasn’t really acting on behalf of the dvergar at that point. I’m sure they’d disclaim his actions, possibly outright disown him posthumously. But people won’t care. It’ll be seen as a polite fiction, a way to avoid responsibility by distancing themselves from him after his failure.”

“And thus drive people apart again. Yes.” Cassie was quiet for a moment. “Do you think they’d be wrong in that distrust?” she asked eventually, her voice still so hushed it was barely audible even to me. “The dvergar do have some degree of responsibility. They kept him in a position of authority, unsupervised, even though they knew he was desperate and had just shown a serious lack of competence.”

I sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know any of the actual dvergar well enough to even guess. It’s possible they set him up in that position intentionally to try and get the sword without taking blame, for all I know. But I’m also not sure it matters. It will establish good relations between the major local powers. Even if it’s built on a lie, I like that idea a lot more than the thought of my city turning into a warzone.”

She laughed a bit at that, soft as falling snow. “I can understand that. I’m not entirely sure I agree, but it’s your decision. So, a hunting accident it is. I’ll have to tell a couple of the others for safety’s sake, but I know who to talk to. They won’t spread the word further. And I’ll tell Jack about your wishes as well. I expect he’ll go along with them.”

“Thank you. For a lot of things, really.”

“It’s nothing. Don’t trouble yourself over it.” Cassie was quiet for a long moment, just sitting in the chair in the dark. Saori was snoring. It was a strangely amusing scene, and I had to fight not to giggle.

“It was my first time. I guess technically not quite, since there was that one rampage the first time the raiju traits manifested overtly. But I don’t even really remember doing that. It didn’t feel like this, didn’t feel real.” I wasn’t sure why I was saying it, not really. I mean, she already knew; I’d said as much at the time. I guess I just needed to talk about it, and this was the right moment for that. There are some things you can say in a darkened room to a near-stranger that you could never tell a friend in the light of day.

“First times are always hard.” Cassie sounded almost meditative. “First time doing anything. And killing is a harder thing than most.”

“Yeah.” I was quiet for a moment, then said, “It’s kind of funny. I’m not sorry I killed him, not really. It was the only way any of us were getting out of there alive. And it was quicker than what would have happened to him if he’d survived and gone home. I’m not sorry I did it. But I feel like something in me changed when I did, and that part I do feel bad about.”

“That’s always how it goes.” The werewolf was smiling, but it was a sad smile. Her tone was the soft, gentle voice a mother uses when explaining to her daughter that every flame, however pretty, will burn. “I think of it as a sort of revelation. Before you kill someone, you can tell yourself that you wouldn’t, that you couldn’t bring yourself to do it. But once you’ve made that choice, that illusion is gone. You know that you do have that in yourself, and you can no longer believe otherwise. And you might have known, before this, that you were capable of it, but that was an impulse during an overpowering fugue state. It doesn’t have much to do with who you are as a person, outside of that context. This was a choice.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that sounds exactly like what I’m feeling.” I was glad it was dark, in that moment. I didn’t want to see Cassie’s face during this conversation.

“It’s always hard. The first time doing anything. Audgrim would have had a similar experience, had he survived. He would have known that when push came to shove, he was willing to betray a trust and murder his allies.” Cassie sighed, long and soft and slow. “The first cut is the deepest. I would like to say that killing never gets easier, but that would be a lie. Everything grows easier with practice. Anything can become normal.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I imagine so. And it’s a bit…I mean, I’d like to say it was a one-off. That it will never happen again. But…if I’m being honest, I think that’s probably an unrealistic hope. I don’t really believe that I’ll be able to avoid it.”

The room was quiet after that, except for a kitsune snoring. She was a heavier sleeper than I’d realized, to have not stirred through this whole conversation. There seemed to be little to add to what I’d said. It would be nice to think that I would never kill someone again, but logic didn’t support that conclusion. I seemed likely to end up in positions where it was them or me that died, and I now knew that when it came down to it, in that situation I was probably going to choose them. It was ultimately that simple.

“You kept the sword,” the werewolf said eventually.

“Didn’t have a choice. It turns out that when the story said Gram picked Sigmund and was a gift for his hand specifically, they were kind of understating it. The sword isn’t going to leave me.” I’d tested that already, and confirmed my suspicions. When I had given it to Melissa and then to Derek, Thorn hadn’t stayed away long. Within less than twelve hours, both times, the sword had just…appeared in the hospital room while I wasn’t looking. I had no idea how it had gotten there, but I had a very strong feeling that it would always get back to me. The tie between us was not one that could be broken. I wasn’t sure how it worked, but I suspected there were not many barriers that could prevent Thorn from finding me.

Currently, it was under the sheet with me in the hospital bed. It seemed easier to just keep it on hand in a way that was relatively concealed rather than risk it returning in an awkward way. I really didn’t want to have to explain Thorn’s presence to the nurse.

Cassie nodded. “I imagine not. It seems to be how such things work. And it was what was needed. But taking it will have consequences for you.”

I sighed. I’d thought about that already, and came to the same conclusion. Thorn was a brand-new relic with serious, intense magic woven into it. People would notice that it was out in the world now, and there were people who would care. It was inevitable.

“There are always consequences,” I said, and I sounded almost as tired in that moment as Audgrim had in the moments just before his death.

“Yes.” The werewolf’s voice was calm, and simple, not varnishing the truth at all. “There are. But not all of them negative, I think. A blessing in one hand, and a curse in the other. It is the way of things.”

Her speech patterns, I noted idly, were not nearly as modern as when I’d spoken to her before. When I’d first met Cassie, she’d seemed very much like a product of the modern age. She exclusively used a casual nickname, wore modern clothing, used contemporary slang. But in this more intense, private moment, she sounded nothing like modern.

“I’ll let you get some rest,” she said, standing up like her back hurt. Even for a werewolf, she’d taken a beating. “Don’t be a stranger.”

I looked over at Saori, still out cold, and I smiled a little bit. It was completely sincere. Despite all the pain and the looming threat and the emotional turmoil, I could feel an odd kind of happiness as well. I could also feel an emotional resonance in the back of my mind, another kind of happiness, an amused one. “I’m always strange,” I said. “But I’ll be in touch.”

---

Life went on. That was, perhaps, both the greatest gift and the deepest curse of the world. No matter what happened to you, no matter what changed in your own life, the world still turned. People still had their own lives to take care of, and were not particularly affected by your tragedies or triumphs. Life went on.

My life changed after that. It couldn’t not. I didn’t, couldn’t, go back to obscurity, not really. That attack on the grove was a big deal, locally, and I went down as an essential part of it, perhaps the most essential part. I suppose that made sense, in a way. I hadn’t done all that much to the mages, but my use of that flashbang had been what set up the last mage’s death. And even without knowing about Audgrim’s betrayal, I looked a lot more important than I really was. I was the only one still standing at the end of the fight. I was the one who walked out with Thorn in one hand and the sickle in the other.

The sickle itself went back to Cerdinen.I was already going to be keeping one more magic blade than I wanted, and I really didn’t feel the need for another. I was already so strongly themed around plants that it was kind of upsetting. And pretty much none of it had been my idea, either. Even the tattoos, including the very obvious scarlet hibiscus blossom on my right hand, hadn’t been my idea. Those had been done in a traditional Japanese style where the artist chose the images, and they’d been done before any of the raiju traits or talking to plants manifested.

I had prominent tattoos of flowers, wolves, and clouds. I was now the owner of a sword named Thorn, and I didn’t have the heart to rename it; that felt wrong, somehow. The sword itself had wolves and flowers depicted on it, as did its sheath. I turned into something lupine with lightning wrapped around me. Plants would always thrive in my care, and I talked to them. Even my surname referenced cedars. On the whole, it looked very much like I had an unhealthy obsession with wolves, flowers, and storms, and I kind of resented how ubiquitous these things had become without my having any say in the matter.

And having a lord of the Midnight Court in my debt was worth far more, anyway. Of course I gave it back to him.

I couldn’t go back to obscurity after that. But I also found that I didn’t want to, that the idea of returning to a life spent trying to find busywork to fill empty days sounded awful instead of restful.

So things changed, over the next few weeks. I started going to Softened Dreams more often, and I actually talked to people there rather than sit in the corner watching them. There were several pieces of my art on display there, vivid and surreal and not quite like what anyone else would have made. I went to the Blackbird Cabaret occasionally, and I’d contributed samples of music for Capinera to use there; I couldn’t perform on stage, for obvious reasons, but I was still involved. I spent time hanging out with werewolves, and learned more about magical theory and practice from various members of the Tribe.

I went on a date with Saori, as predicted, and as predicted, it was romantic. Granted, she also put hallucinogens in my dinner—ones she’d gotten from my own collection, even—which made it a bit more exciting. Having seen something of the sort coming, I’d preemptively arranged to get her back with habaneros, and a stimulant mixed into her soda. She did, in fact, start a bar fight, despite the fact that she was still on crutches. At least it didn’t escalate past fists. But it was romantic, and I couldn’t deny that I’d enjoyed the night.

In short, I started to actually live, rather than just survive.

I would always be strange. My art was vivid and surreal, and my perception of the world was not what anyone else would see. Life would always be difficult. My activities would always be restricted, and I couldn’t do them in quite the ways I’d like. I was now welded to Thorn so tightly that I knew it would always be there.

All of these things were true. They would remain true. It was still the case that nothing I did was likely to change them. If anything, I’d added more limitations. I no longer had the option of anonymity and obscurity.

But it was time—well past time, really—that I accepted that and moved on. Crying about these truths hadn’t changed them either. And I could see, now, that I’d been letting the impossibility of finding “perfect” get in the way of having “good”. It was time for me to accept that this was just my nature, the inherent nature of my existence.

In the end, we can all be only what we are.

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