A Storm of Blossoms

Chapter Thirteen

We couldn’t really stay at my house at that point. Never mind getting more sleep, I wasn’t even going to be going home again for a while. I handed off the captive to Audgrim’s person, and followed him out the door.

Saori was quiet while we went out to her car. She’d heard the entire conversation, of course. Her hearing was, like mine, outside of human range. Finally, she said, “He’s kind of a dick, isn’t he?”

“Little bit,” I sighed. This was the first time he’d done something quite this intense, but he was always…very much a dvergr in some key ways. He was aptly named; Auðgrímr meant grim inheritance, and he’d certainly gotten his share of their infamous grim, coldly rational patterns of thought.…

Chapter Twelve

It was a nice time for a walk. It was morning, technically, and by the time we were done at the ritual site, the sun was starting to consider showing its face. But it hadn’t committed to the idea yet, and the predawn stillness hadn’t yet given way to the bustle of the early-morning commuter rush. We passed a few people, but this neighborhood wasn’t all that busy in general, and mostly we had the street to ourselves.…

Chapter Eleven

My point of contact with VNC was almost always the same person, some woman named Kelly Lamarcke who was apparently the firm’s primary agent in this region. VNC was at minimum a global organization, and quite possibly had interests in other worlds entirely, and they had a sprawling bureaucracy to support that. My understanding was that she was relatively low in that bureaucratic hierarchy.

I was just as glad to mostly deal with a relatively low-ranking member of the firm. I’d been around one of the name partners exactly once, and would be quite happy to never repeat the experience. Jack Tar was the most personally powerful human I’d ever been around. But that was a position he held only because while I did not know what Elaheh Nilsen was, and she might well have started out human, if so I was sure she left that behind a long, long time ago.…

Chapter Ten

Saori insisted on driving me home. She didn’t exactly insist on staying there with me, but she offered to stay, and make sure I got some rest.

I thought about saying that I didn’t need a nursemaid. Then I thought about Saori’s home, in a part of the city that was an obvious bad joke, and not a joke she chose. I thought about how she was alone in a city she did not know, one where her only local friend was recently murdered. I thought about incense and ashes and blood, and the loneliness of a stranger in a strange land. And I thought, also, about the hollow feeling of one person rattling around in a house meant for four, talking to her houseplants because sometimes you have to talk to someone and they were the only companions she had.

I said I’d love that. She grinned with obvious enthusiasm, and I found once again that her cheer was infectious. And, if I was being honest, I did look like shit. I looked exhausted in the car’s mirror, like I’d been awake for three days straight. My hands had a twitchiness in them that reminded me of someone strung out on harsh stimulants. The echoes of Steven’s death still hadn’t fully faded from my perceptions, and I was flinching from nothing occasionally when a random shadow or breeze became too threatening. So it was, on the whole, probably just as well.…