Chapter Eight

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I’d seen Saori use one of these grenades before. I hadn’t gotten a very clear look at it then, and I wasn’t watching at all right now, but I could make a pretty good guess at what was going on behind me. There would be an immediate blast of flame, and then waves of choking, disorienting black smoke. The flame wasn’t normal fire, though I wasn’t sure what the difference was, chemical or magical or both. Whatever the means, the result was terrifying, fire that clung to flesh, that refused to go out, accompanied by smoke that scrambled vision in a way smoke usually didn’t.

Within a second, I could hear screaming behind me. I could smell charring flesh, noxious and disgusting, and that spoke volumes about just how intense the fire was. Normally, flesh took time to burn, and in the process it smelled like roasting meat, appetizing regardless of my feelings on the source. This skipped cooked and went straight to charred, and it smelled vile.

And in that instant, as soon as I heard the screams, I was taking off at a run. Saori had said it would be messy behind us, and even if I hadn’t fully understood why, I’d trusted her judgment. I had been ready to bolt forward, through the group ahead of us. Between the advantage of surprise—what hunter expects the prey to sprint towards them?—and having known what was coming, I was quicker off the line than they were.

These people were, some distant part of my mind noted, quite disciplined. Fire is terrifying even when it isn’t that sort of hellish incendiary weapon, and almost everyone reacts to a sudden fire breaking out with alarm. It speaks to a part of the brain that doesn’t care about things like rational planning, that just wants out. For them to stand their ground spoke to a significant amount of discipline and training. I could respect them for that.

The rest of me was busy trying to survive it. The people behind us, I was guessing, were not going to be a problem. They might survive, I wasn’t sure, but they weren’t likely to recover and advance forward out of the smoke before we were gone. That left just the five in front of us. If we could get past them I was pretty sure we were safe; the fire would definitely be bringing in that emergency response now, and they were unlikely to chase us out onto the street while the cops were coming at speed.

One, towards the back, had a gun. It looked a lot like my own shotgun, and it was already aimed in our direction. But we were all pretty hard targets. Saori was quicker and more graceful than any normal human, Raincloud was a Siberian husky who was also both small and far more intelligent than any normal dog, and I was…well. The phrase “quick as lightning” didn’t exist without cause. I wasn’t remotely as agile as Saori was, but I was comparably fast, and the world around me seemed like it was all moving so slowly by comparison.

I had plenty of time to watch him aim, in those first few seconds after the grenade went off. He was trying to track my movement, but he just wasn’t prepared for how fast we were moving, and the shot wasn’t even close to hitting me. The sound of the shotgun was deafening in that small alleyway. Saori darted forward into the cluster of people, ducking under one sword and twisting past another so smoothly it looked like the fight was choreographed. She slashed at someone on the way past—I hadn’t seen her draw the knife, wasn’t sure where she’d been carrying it—and took her hand off at the wrist, then lunged forward and stabbed the gunman in the chest.

Two down and the flankers disabled left the numbers almost even, but I had no intention of staying and fighting. This was still an ambush, after all, and we had no way of knowing what else they had prepared. Not to mention that Ekaterina was still up, as was another woman who was nothing like human, and I wasn’t at all sure that I could take either of them in a fight. I ducked aside instead, hugging the wall and sprinting forward.

Chaos and speed were doing a lot of work for us. I almost made it through before they could react.

Almost. But as I was slipping past Ekaterina, she twisted, quick and flexible as a snake, and slashed at me. She was using the same style of bronze sword as the first attacker had, and she was both faster and stronger than the human woman had been. I tried to dodge, but there was very limited room to maneuver, and I could feel the blade bite in, just above my hip. I couldn’t feel the pain right away through the adrenaline, but that leg felt weaker, and I was dimly aware that I was bleeding.

Somewhat frantically, I lunged forward and twisted to the side, feeling the blade slide back out of my flesh. Ekaterina tried to keep up, but I was behind her at this point, and the ground was slick, and I was still pretty damn fast. Another step forward. There was only one of them in front of me now, and while he was huge, damn near seven feet tall if I had to guess, I was pretty sure he was mostly human. In this crowd, that was…problematic for him.

He slashed at me with what looked like a larger, heavier version of the same sword. It was a good strike, but his swing seemed so slow. I was short enough to duck under his attack easily, and step up inside his effective reach.

The shotgun would be useless in such close quarters, and I didn’t even try. I didn’t have a knife handy, and drawing Thorn would have taken too long. I just stepped forward instead, setting my shoulder against his hip, and pushed.

He was huge. Even with how much stronger I was than a human of my build could be, I doubted I could have lifted him on a good day, much less with a hip and a shoulder both injured. But this wasn’t a simple contest of strength, and I wasn’t trying to lift him off the ground. He was off-balance from his swing having missed like that, I was under his center of mass, and I was pushing with my whole body against a leg that wasn’t braced well. It was almost the same, in terms of body mechanics, as a classic floating hip throw from judo, and it was comparably effective. He overbalanced and started to fall. I slipped to the side and ducked past him as he did, and now his bulk was an advantage for me, keeping Ekaterina from following me readily.

Not that she was trying to. The whole group of them was falling back now, in response to some barked command from her. I didn’t recognize the language, didn’t wait around to see what they were doing. I just kept running, almost out to the street now. Saori was keeping pace next to me now, and after a momentary pang of anxiety I realized Raincloud was right behind me as well.

We got out to the street. Saori turned, and I followed her. Half a block forward, then we turned onto a different alley. I glanced back, half-expecting them to be pursuing us, but nope. Nobody was behind us, and I could already hear the sirens. We were probably in the clear.

I let myself slow down a bit, now. I was panting, more from adrenaline and reaction than exertion, and my leg hurt. I went from a run down to a jog, and then a walk, starting to calm down a bit.

“That went pretty well,” Saori said. She was not panting, from reaction or otherwise. She was just grinning at me.

“Not bad,” I agreed. “Looked like you probably killed at least one, too.”

“At least two,” she corrected me. “Pretty sure at least one of them died in the fire.”

I nodded. I wasn’t surprised by that. I hadn’t watched, but the smell of burning flesh was intense, and I had an idea of what those things did. If one of the humans had been in the direct splash zone, they were probably going to die.

Saori had just killed two people for me. Maybe more. And hadn’t even flinched at the thought of doing so. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Should I be uncomfortable that she took someone’s life that casually? Maybe, but…they’d been planning to do the same to me. Saori was probably a terrible person, but good for me, and she clearly cared about me far more than she did most people. I felt touched by that much more than actually disturbed.

“How much property damage was that, anyway?” I asked after a few moments. We were still walking, but it was a casual pace now, calm.

“Less than you’d expect. Those things are pretty controlled, the fire doesn’t really spread.” She shrugged. “Some, though. Sorry about that, I know you try not to do arson things in this city. Didn’t really have another way to deal with them available.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “They earned it. Sucks for the shop owners, but don’t know how that could have been avoided.”

“Pretty much, yeah. You didn’t go fuzzy.”

“I didn’t?” I blinked. That hadn’t really occurred to me. “I didn’t. Huh.”

She gave me a sidelong glance, which was an excellent gift, really; I didn’t get many opportunities to use that word. “You didn’t notice?”

I shrugged. “I keep the same body plan. And it’s a bit…I mean, I can do it on purpose. But a lot of the time, it just sort of happens when I get stressed enough. I don’t really notice it until after.”

“Huh.” She considered that. “That’s got to be hella awkward sometimes.”

“A bit,” I admitted. “It’s mostly the tail that I have to adjust for.”

“How do you manage that?” she asked. “I’ve never actually thought about it before.”

I shrugged. “I wear high-waisted jeans a lot of the time, and shirts long enough to overlap. Cut a slit in the right place, and a tail can fit through, but the shirt covers the gap.”

Saori took a moment to absorb this. “Are you telling me,” she said eventually, “that you’ve been wearing clothes with easy access to your ass this whole time, and I didn’t notice?”

I grinned at her. “Yup. Though it’s more tramp stamp area, tails attach further up on the spine than people often think. And to be fair, I don’t always wear those.”

“Still. I haven’t been this embarrassed in a while. And this works?”

“More or less. It’s mostly only happened during fights, which is manageable. Once by surprise during sex, though. That one was very awkward.”

She winced. “Yeah, I bet. What happened?”

I sighed. “It was with some guy, vanilla human and kind of a douche. At first it seemed…extremely awkward, but relatively harmless. But the breakup was messy, I had terrible taste in men back then, and he uh. Decided to post it as revenge porn online.”

Saori stopped in her tracks and turned to stare at me. Hell, I could tell that Raincloud had picked up enough of what I meant to be staring at me too. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Saori said, sounding almost dumbfounded.

I snickered. Saori was usually the person who caused that tone of voice, and I was strangely proud of getting her to use it. “I guess I’m on a roll today, huh? Oh, and no, he really did. Like I said. Terrible taste in men.”

“That might take understatement of the week,” she said dryly. “Fuck’s sake. What happened?”

I shrugged. “I talked to a friend. Werewolf in New York, I think I’ve mentioned him to you before? Yeah. I don’t entirely know what happened to that guy after that, but I’d be shocked if he survived it. Didn’t really cause me any issues. The video circulated a bit, but nobody took it all that seriously. You know how these things go, it got dismissed as special effects.”

“Still, though. That’s pretty shit. Sorry it happened to you.”

“You know,” I said, “weirdly enough, in hindsight, I think I’m glad it did.”

Saori started walking again. “Why’s that?” she asked, with an odd sort of curiosity. It was like she was trying to figure out what her emotional response to my answer might be.

“Because he was a complete asshole,” I said. “It’s a bit….” I trailed off for a moment, trying to find the right words. This wasn’t something I’d ever explained to someone before. “There are certain rules, right? Pieces of advice that people in my sort of situation, on the periphery of humanity, all tend to hear. I think for most people, there’s a temptation to think those rules don’t apply to you. That you’ll somehow be the exception.”

“Yeah,” Saori said. Her voice was soft, and her eyes were distant for a moment, almost haunted. “I can understand that.”

I chuckled, though it didn’t have much humor in it. “I know I thought so. I’d been told that entangling myself too closely with a vanilla human was a bad idea, but I didn’t care about that. I thought I could ignore those rules. I’m pretty sure it was inevitable that something awful was going to happen in the process of me learning otherwise.” It was something I’d thought about a lot of times, and that conclusion was inescapable. I was too stubborn to listen otherwise. I was self-aware enough to at least realize that.

“Ah,” Saori said, nodding. “And this way it happened to him.”

“Yup.” I shrugged. “He was enough of an asshole to post revenge porn and enough of an idiot to think using that clip for it was a good idea. I don’t feel terribly guilt-ridden about him dying as a result.”

“Yeah, good riddance. Anyway. Why do you think you didn’t get all furry this time? Seems like fights usually bring that out in you.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “And you’re right, it is a little weird. Violence usually does evoke that response. I’m not sure why it didn’t this time.”

“Something to think about, then,” she said, grinning. “I’m parked around the corner, by the way.”

“Cool.” I tried to think of what to do next. It was challenging; I hadn’t slept much, and right now that was very apparent to me. My head hurt, and it felt very much like I had gotten absolutely nowhere over the past several days. It was frustrating as hell, though I did at least have a name now. It was meaningless to me, but from how the rest had deferred to her, I was guessing Ekaterina, daughter of Coronis was a reasonably important person. Asking around, then, might turn something up. Today was, I reminded myself, not a total loss.

“So where are we going?” Saori asked me.

“Hm. Not sure where would be smart at this point.” I paused as something occurred to me. “How did they find us, anyway, you think? They didn’t manage any attempts over the past few days, and I kinda doubt it was because they needed time to set up.”

“They don’t seem like the type for that,” Saori agreed. “Too impulsive, and I would know. Hm. Known location, maybe?”

“From tracking you, you mean?” I frowned. “I mean, I guess it’s possible. But I’ve been staying with Derek, and that’s at least as much of one. Maybe more; I’ve got a longer history with him, and it’s a stationary target.”

“Sure, but he’s a werewolf,” Saori said.

“Why would that matter?”

The kitsune shrugged. “I mean, he’s very…local. Very rooted in this city, and I doubt he’s ever set foot outside this world.”

“Ah,” I said, realizing what she was getting at. “And you think these people were from the Otherside?”

“I’m guessing so,” she said. “They had a halfway decent veil up, so they’ve got magic to work with, probably enough for portals. And it would explain why they’d think to target my crossing point, but not a local’s house. It’s easier to find information about me in those circles than here, and for a werewolf it’s the inverse.”

“Right,” I said. The veil explained why I hadn’t noticed them, too. I’d never really been around that kind of magic, and Saori obviously had. It tracked that she would see through it more easily. “Ringleader didn’t smell human at all, either. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Um. Sorry about getting you targeted, I guess?”

Saori snorted. “Sorry? The hell for? That was exciting. I mean, I’m annoyed that my leg’s still a bit fucked up and I had to go easy because of it, but otherwise that was fun.”

I sighed. “Right. What am I thinking, I must have forgotten who I was talking to. Okay. So, the only people I really know with strong ties to the Otherside are you and Capinera. So it seems like it should be…relatively safe otherwise?”

Saori shrugged as we rounded the corner to the random back alley where she’d left her car. I wasn’t really sure why it was this far away from her transfer point, but then again, I had no experience with what she had been doing. “Relatively and temporarily, yes. But not every group active in the Otherside is as clueless about mortals as those clowns seem to be. Some of them know how to navigate human society and use tools within it.”

I nodded, and then paused. Something about what she’d just said was itching at me. It felt like I was missing something obvious.

It was actually Raincloud that noticed the discrepancy first, and I caught the echo of the realization from her mind. There were no words, she didn’t take the time to fit this into language. But there was sudden wariness, and there was a scent she didn’t recognize and didn’t like. I hadn’t noticed it myself; my sense of smell is good, but I’d been distracted, and it wasn’t usually the focus of my awareness. Raincloud was fundamentally a dog in many ways, with all that implied, and she was always aware of scents.

Once I parsed out that mental impression, I didn’t so much pause as freeze. Saori hadn’t noticed anything either, but when she saw me stop like that, she stopped too, and she was reaching for her gun. The kitsune had not survived this long with her lifestyle by being slow on the uptake. And when someone freezes up like that, it’s best to assume there’s a reason. Situations like this were…pretty much exactly why.

“Saori,” I said slowly. “Why does your car smell like a stranger?” I concentrated, trying to sift through the scent. It was hard; I was working through the perception secondhand, and while Raincloud and I had mentally shared enough experiences to be able to do that, it was still tricky. It took me a moment to figure out what felt wrong about that scent.

And then I went from frozen to backing away warily. “A stranger who smells like gunpowder,” I amended before Saori could answer. Raincloud didn’t know the smell well enough to recognize it, but it was distinctive enough that I did.

Saori didn’t answer the question. She didn’t back away, either. She turned and bolted back down the alley at maximum speed instead.

I hadn’t survived this long by being slow on the uptake, either. And one of the most important lessons I’d learned in life was that when someone who knew what they were doing is reacting with that kind of urgency, you don’t ask questions. When the bomb disposal technician starts running, you follow them without waiting to see why. When the head engineer goes pale and starts barking orders, you do what they say now and ask why you did those things later.

Similarly, when Saori started sprinting away, I didn’t hesitate a moment before I joined her. And while Raincloud hadn’t survived a particularly long time, she was an extremely quick learner, and she was right there with us.

None of us hesitated. We were all pretty damn fast, and we’d still been a relatively long way from the vehicle when we turned and ran. And so, between all these factors, we were pretty far back down the alley when the bomb went off.

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