Chapter Twenty-Six

I was not prepared for what came next.

In some ways, I had been overconfident, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my opinion of myself had been lower than was warranted. It was true that I had been around violence a lot of times. It was true that there were periods of my life where it felt normal. It was even true that some of those fights had escalated far enough that I’d seen people getting killed.

But what I was discovering now was that those had been, well, fights. Many had been pretty much just brawls between vanilla humans. Some had involved other creatures—werewolves a few times, Audgrim and once another dvergr, mages—but they were still relatively small in scale. They had been solidly something you would call a fight.

What I discovered now was that this had not remotely prepared me for what I had to imagine counted as a small battle, or at the very least a skirmish.…

Chapter Twenty-Five

While I was talking with Cassie, the last few people had arrived. One was a woman on a motorcycle I recognized from Softened Dreams, but hadn’t ever spoken with. I wasn’t sure what she was; her magic smelled cold, like snow and wind and the polar night where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks and the only light is that of stars and aurora. Definitely not human, but no clue what she actually was.

The last to arrive was a bit more of a surprise. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting there, but it definitely wasn’t Melissa driving a beat-up old jeep. The fact that she had Capinera in the passenger seat was really just icing on the cake.

I walked over to where they were getting out and grabbing their stuff. “What are you doing out here?” I asked. I was legitimately confused by their presence; I just wouldn’t have expected to see either of them out here, wasn’t sure who would have even asked them.…

Chapter Twenty-Four

Martin. The guy who was so casual, so relaxed and unobtrusive that I had forgotten he was even present, the one time we met. He had felt peaceful, even. When I found him sitting next to Chris’s dead body, there wasn’t even a flicker of concern that he was a threat. And I’d basically forgotten him entirely since then.

But he was the one who had been pestering Maddie about magic and plants and how they intersected. He was the one who had known that Saori was in contact with Chris and where to find her, and why she had been briefly implicated in his murder. Now that I thought about it, he was also the person who had told Jack that Capinera was linked to the Midnight Court. Which wasn’t false, but it sure as hell was misleading.

It was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for. Someone who was loud and aggressive was usually someone who felt the need to prove something. They were insecure on some level. In my experience, really dangerous people tended not to make threats at all. They didn’t use fancy titles or dramatic pseudonyms. They didn’t get aggressive. It was just…understood by all parties what they could do to you if you gave them a reason to, without them needing to say a word.…

Drugs and Poisons

So, as is now apparent, drugs and poisons are something Kyoko is linked with. And I think that this provides a good opportunity to showcase some of how I approach character design and writing more generally. There are a lot of details in that character element that are worth examining.

Because most people know very little about these things. They might know some of the names, but even that’s limited, because people rarely use chemical names for things, rarely use generic names. Slang terms and trade names are often the only ones people know. You might have an idea what ecstasy is, in this context, but not have a clue that it’s called methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Similarly, plenty of people take an over-the-counter acid reducer called Zantac. They will mostly not know that Zantac is the trade name being applied to a drug called famotidine, much less know that in the past Zantac was the trade name applied to a different, related drug called ranitidine, nor that the change happened because ranitidine was recalled after it was found to decay into a carcinogenic compound when stored for a prolonged time.…

Chapter Twenty-Three

“Do you think you’re supposed to be bringing me?” Saori asked me, as we were getting close to the fae lord’s estate. I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant for something to be an estate, but this definitely seemed to count. We were well outside the urban area by now, on some narrow access road in the forest. “He pretty specifically invited you.”

“Beats me,” I said cheerfully. “But you helped, and it’s not like I could drive out here myself. So I think it’s pretty reasonable.”

“On the list of adjectives I would generally apply to the Sidhe,” she said dryly, “I don’t think ‛reasonable’ even makes the top fifty. But hey, maybe we’ll get lucky.”…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Saori had ditched the plastic tub of LEGOs and the ice cream machine she’d had in her car, apparently. They had been replaced by a box filled with dozens of hockey stick blades of various shapes, and a clown mask sitting on the dashboard. Which was….

I knew that it would only encourage her, and the answer would be neither informative nor reassuring. But I had to ask. “Is that mask…autographed?”

“Yup!” she said brightly.

“By whom?”

“The entirety of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.” Saori sounded smug. “The list sorted by instrument is in the glovebox.”…