Category: Pawn and Storm

Chapter Two

Maddie didn’t take us all the way home, and I didn’t ask her to. She had offered to drive because she was making the trip anyway. She lived pretty close to the Blackbird Cabaret, in the same largely-abandoned post-industrial ghost town of a neighborhood. I was pretty sure she was there for similar reasons, too; it was quiet, and defensible, and there were no neighbors to cause a fuss. She had a meeting in the middle of the night tonight at Mark’s, the bar that was one of the other major local social spaces for our crowd.

So, she drove us there and then dropped us off outside the bar. Her need to be early for that appointment was obsessive enough that trying to get her to take us the rest of the way would have been a waste of effort. And it was only a few blocks from Mark’s to my house, anyway. Comfortable walking distance, and both Raincloud and I could handle the cold just fine.…

Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…