A Storm of Blossoms

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.…

Chapter Nine

By some fortuitous quirk of timing, Audgrim called me less than five minutes later, before I’d actually managed to find his phone number again. “I found something,” he said.

“And good morning to you too. Does it have to do with the bodies at the funeral home?”

There was a brief pause. “Yes, actually,” he said a moment later.

“Awesome. I’m going to make a series of guesses, and then you can tell me how close I am, okay?” I was grinning wide enough to look a little unhinged. Saori was too, and she’d turned down the music so she could hear the conversation clearly.…

Chapter Eight

Later. Much later. I’d fallen asleep at some point, tangled in a pile of limbs with Saori. She hadn’t woken up yet. Probably not surprising; I hadn’t actually had a nightmare, but I could hardly ever sleep deeply. I didn’t sleep very long most of the time, either; I usually woke up in the afternoon, but that was because I went to bed after sunrise often as not. I wasn’t sure I could extricate myself from the tangle without waking her, and didn’t try. I was quite content to stay where I was, though I did free one arm enough that I could stroke her hair while she slept.…