Chapter Fifteen

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“Yes,” I said, eyeing the large man standing behind me warily. “I do mind, but I have a feeling you’re going to do it anyway, so let’s cut to the chase.”

“Great.” His voice sounded distinctly wrong as he said that, an inflection pattern that just didn’t quite work.

He did indeed proceed to sit down, taking the chair Kadir had recently vacated. His movements as he sat were a little off, too, not quite how human bodies moved. Between those and the really unusual size, I would have known he wasn’t human at a glance. I could also feel it, his aura completely lacking the shimmering feeling of humanity and instead consisting of an unpleasantly musky smell and the sound of drunken laughter. But this wasn’t even a convincing enough guise to fool most humans on more than a cursory level.

“So given you’re now sitting down,” I said, as Saori slid her chair over slightly towards me, putting the table between her and the new arrival. “What the fuck do you people want, anyway?”

“Have we been unclear?” He was still smiling, and he didn’t pretend not to understand the question. That made me dislike him a tiny bit less, which wasn’t saying much.

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” I snapped. “Obviously you’re trying to kill me, but that’s a proximate cause at most. There’s some value in me dying or you wouldn’t bother. So again, what do you want?”

“Personally,” he said, “I mostly just want to get on the boss’s good side. And she wants you dead pretty bad, so I figure this is a great way to do that.”

I stared at him. “You know,” I commented idly to nobody in particular, “this might be a first. Usually, when I talk to dumb muscle, they’re at least smart enough to get their boss’s orders a little more specifically than that.”

Saori started laughing. A flicker of rage passed over the man’s face, and the smell of musk got a little thicker. Between that and the likely association with Ekaterina, I was guessing he was a satyr. They seemed to have pretty close ties with maenads in the folklore, and goat would explain the smell. I wasn’t sure, because trying to estimate anything based on my perception of an unfamiliar signature was dicey. But it seemed like a decent guess.

“Funny. Most of the people I’ve killed were at least smart enough not to make things worse for themselves in the process.” He wasn’t even pretending to smile now.

“Dude,” I sighed. “If you think this is the first time I’ve made things worse for myself by saying something foolish, hate to break it to you but it’s not even on the first page of the list.” I yawned, apparently not yet fully recovered from the abrupt awakening and trip over here. I was pretty sure yawning was going to piss him off even more, but hey, I did just tell him this was a known issue for me.

“This isn’t even on the first page out of times I’ve watched,” Saori chimed in helpfully while I did. “Depending on the font, I guess.”

“So you might as well piss off,” I concluded after that interruption.

This whole time, the probably-satyr just kept looking more and more enraged. Honestly, I was pretty sure the only reason we got through that whole exchange without him interrupting was that he was too furious to find words. When he did, his voice still sounded more like a growl than speech. “You dare? You dare to speak to me that way?”

“Yup, looks like it,” I confirmed. “Look, you’ve already said you have no useful information and neither the authority nor inclination to negotiate. I am not interested in making conversation with you, and I’m trying to eat this pastry in peace, which you’re definitely interfering with. So, yeah, unless you have something useful to say, leave.”

He was snarling as he stood up, and he didn’t walk away. He just loomed closer, menacingly, and took a step closer, to our side of the table. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t really need to. The aggression was clear enough that Raincloud was already on her feet with hackles visibly raised, and Saori was pushing her chair away from the table.

I didn’t move. I didn’t feel a need. But then, I was the only person at the table who knew what was about to happen.

I genuinely hadn’t been trying to provoke him to this. I was a smartass with everyone, and had fully expected him to just leave. I had, apparently too charitably, been assuming that he had at least that much brain. No one in their right mind, and few who are out of it, will start any kind of physical violence at Softened Dreams.

Still snarling, he kicked at Raincloud, which was maybe the single worst choice he could have made in that moment. He barely even touched her; she was smart enough to see it coming, and quick enough to already be slipping out of the way of the attack. It didn’t hurt her at all, I could tell.

But it was enough. And if it had been anyone else he went for, I might at least have tried to step in here. But he tried to kick my dog, and there weren’t many things that would have catapulted him to the top of my bad list faster than that.

He hadn’t quite gotten his balance back when Lacuna was at the table. I hadn’t really seen them approaching. I didn’t think it was anything spooky; they were just very fast, and very quiet. But regardless, they were very fast, because Saori was quicker both in reflexes and movement speed than any natural human, and she still hadn’t quite made it around the corner of the table when they got there.

Lacuna didn’t say anything, of course. They never said anything. But they rapped their knuckles against the table, once, sharp enough that most of the room could hear. The entire room turned to watch, and nobody was standing up or reaching for weapons.

That really should have been enough warning in itself. In a room full of magic and monsters, where most of those present had seen enough violence not to freeze up when a fight broke out and a fair portion were pretty damn vigilant, nobody felt the need to stand up or make preparations when he picked a fight. That is never a good sign.

The satyr, like everyone else, turned to look at the sound. Lacuna pointed towards the sign over the bar, heavy block lettering reading “NO VIOLENCE. NO HARASSMENT. NO EXCEPTIONS.” It was one of several, arranged so that at least one was visible from anywhere in the room. Lacuna then pointed at the door. The meaning was completely apparent, straightforward enough that words weren’t needed at all. The rules here were simple. People got exactly one warning that they were breaking one.

Ekaterina herself would have known better, I was sure of that. Even if she didn’t know about Lacuna, about this place specifically, she would have known better than this. Places like this, neutral social spaces catering to the supernatural crowd, always had measures in place to enforce that neutrality. She would have realized that this warning was one she should listen to. But this guy was the dumbest kind of muscle, and he just finished drawing his knife.

Lacuna reached out, and rested one hand on his other wrist. It looked almost comical, if you didn’t know better. Lacuna couldn’t weigh more than half of what he did, and had no apparent weapons. Just a pale, silent figure in white clothes who had no color at all, and all they did was touch him. It wasn’t even a particularly firm grip. It didn’t need to be.

Personally, I’d suspected for years they didn’t need to touch someone at all, and the reason they always did was to keep the other patrons from freaking out any more than necessary. If they always touched someone before doing this, then people only had to be irrationally nervous about skin contact, rather than even being in the same room with Lacuna. That thought process would be characteristic for them.

I was probably the only person who could perceive what happened next. It was very fast, and very subtle. Even with how overtuned my senses were for this kind of thing, even knowing what to expect, it was still almost too fast to notice.

Lacuna’s power felt like absence. They had a signature of nothingness, of void; energy flows faded around them, and they left no trace of their presence behind. Except now, suddenly, that changed. They radiated energy now, magic that felt almost exactly like that of the satyr they were touching. As I watched, that dialed in even closer, until their power felt like a perfect match for his. Just, you know, stronger. A lot stronger.

The instant that it did, the exact moment that Lacuna matched him perfectly, there was a strange, disorienting sort of twisting feeling. It wasn’t just me that could perceive this part, either. I’d asked a few other people who had seen this, and they all said they felt something when it happened, though nobody quite knew how to describe it. Twisting, pressure, a force tugging at something they couldn’t name. A particularly unusual woman called Opari had described it as feeling like nails dragging down a chalkboard ontologically orthogonal to Real.

That might count as knowing how to describe it. It wasn’t like it made enough sense to me to say; it might have been a perfectly clear description, if I could figure out what the hell she meant by it. Opari…was at least as hard to understand as Lacuna, in very different ways.

Regardless, it only lasted a moment. Never mind blinks, it felt like the actual change happened so fast it cut between two thoughts. One instant, that twisting feeling was there, and then it was gone. The aura around Lacuna was gone, and they were back to feeling like an absence.

The satyr was also gone, and that wasn’t a euphemism. He wasn’t dead, or at least not in a way that I understood. He just wasn’t there anymore. His clothes were, and my focus was quick enough to actually watch them falling to the ground in a heap, along with the knife and a few pieces of jewelry. But the satyr himself was gone, like he’d never been there at all. No body, not even dust. Just…gone.

The whole thing, from start to finish, took about two seconds. Maybe less. Lacuna was that fast. I didn’t know what they were and had no idea what that trick actually was, but they were really fucking good at it.

Lacuna bent over, and started pulling the various belongings together into a tidy pile. The rest of the room went back to what they were doing. Saori and Raincloud, after a moment, settled back down, realizing that it was already over.

“Thanks,” I said to Lacuna. “And sorry about that. I really wasn’t expecting this. These people are just…ugh. Didn’t mean to cause trouble here.”

They just shrugged, and smiled at me as they finished gathering things together. No teeth, but it was a friendly expression, and they gestured vaguely with the satyr’s knife as they stood back up. The implication was pretty clear. It hadn’t been me that tried to hit someone, hadn’t been me that drew a weapon.

I was guessing it would have been different, if I actually had been baiting him to provoke this response. There was a good chance that Lacuna would have known, by one means or another, and a very good chance that they wouldn’t appreciate it. They liked me, but they also took their role as peacekeeper here very seriously. But given that I really was just a smartass and great at talking myself into trouble, and hadn’t been intending this to happen, they weren’t going to give me any difficulty about it.

They nodded politely to Saori, smiled at Raincloud, and took the satyr’s belongings with them back to where they’d been sitting at the edge of the room. My understanding was that usually most of it got donated to some kind of shelter in town.

“Well,” I said. “That was bracing.” I ate a bit more of the pastry. It was excellent.

“Yeah, just a bit,” Saori said. “You, uh. You weren’t kidding, huh?”

“Nope.” Raincloud stretched, and then walked over and sat next to me, leaning against my legs. She did not, I noted, feel particularly scared. There was some edge of stress, but it could have been excitement as easily as fear. I wasn’t quite sure what that suggested.

“Is that what they do every time?” Saori, meanwhile, sounded fascinated. But that one wasn’t hard to explain at all.

“Pretty much, yeah.” I shrugged. “I’ve never seen someone shrug it off. Sometimes someone tries to hit them first, but I’ve never seen that do much either. You get one warning, and if you don’t take that chance Lacuna deletes you, end of story.”

“I can see what you mean about not starting fights here, yeah,” she agreed, watching Lacuna sit down from across the room with an interest that hadn’t been there before. “And not knowing how to describe it. I’ve seen a lot of things, but I don’t think I’ve seen that stunt before.”

“Same. Never seen anything like it.” I shrugged. “People sometimes think it’s creepy.”

“But not you.”

“Nope.” I finished the pastry, sipped some tea. “Lacuna’s a sweet person, as long as you can…I dunno, meet them where they are? Like, yeah, they can be spooky, and I think that particularly with them not talking and never leaving this place people get weird about it. But the rules here are simple, and the enforcement is very fair. They always give people a warning. The fact that I don’t understand the mechanisms they use afterwards doesn’t really matter much.”

Saori nodded. “Yeah. I suppose I can understand that. No worse than what I was about to do to him, really.”

“Probably!” I agreed cheerfully. “Hard to say, since I don’t know what they actually do to people, but it seems likely. And, I mean, same. Though in my case it would probably have involved fewer cantaloupes.”

She sighed. “You’re just never going to let that one go, huh?”

“I’m just saying. I liked that painting.”

Saori flipped me off. Raincloud snickered. I drank the last of my tea.

“So what now?” Saori asked me after a few moments. “Any more bad ideas for me to aid and abet?”

“Not really.” I shrugged. “Kadir needs time, Silas’s person won’t be here for a few days, and everything else is pretty much ready to go. Not a lot to do this weekend.”

“Sweet, that means it’s my turn. You wanna go back to my place? I have a lot of getting laid to catch up on, especially with all the explosions recently.”

I sighed. She grinned. I was pretty damn shameless, but sometimes even for me Saori was just…so very much who she was.

But also, and more to the point, there were practical considerations. “That seems like a terrible idea,” I said, “especially with all the explosions recently.”

She scoffed. “If it weren’t a terrible idea, how would you know it was mine? But, also, they only pulled that off because I left the car unattended for so long. Not making that mistake again.”

“Sure,” I said. “But that doesn’t rule out all kinds of other things. If these assholes know that’s a good place to target me…they don’t exactly seem to have many limits. At all.”

“Most of those attacks would take prep time,” she said, shrugging. “Not a ton, but some. And the ones that don’t generally damage the property pretty extensively. Ekaterina’s gang is too clownshoes to find the place, and the other is too competent to risk that.”

I raised an eyebrow. “They were willing to risk blowing up a few buildings before.”

“Not what I mean.” Saori paused. “I…expect that if they know where I live, they also know more or less how I got there. And they aren’t stupid enough to get involved in it.”

“You think your benefactor cares that much?” I said, and even I could hear the disbelief in my tone. Every impression she’d given me about the whole situation was…much less benign than that.

“About me? Not in the slightest. They wouldn’t cross the street to piss on me if I were on fire. But the building itself was part of a deal they made with me. And you do not want to put these people into anything resembling a breach of contract.” Saori grinned. “And, as noted, terrible ideas, kinda my specialty anyway.”

Interesting. It made a degree of sense. If you didn’t know the terms of that deal exactly, I could see where it would make sense to err on the side of caution. It was much like what Capinera had described, and it was a similarly flimsy aegis. Eventually, the attacker would get tired of waiting. Though my concerns about Saori’s mysterious benefactor, and my morbid curiosity as to who they were and why she didn’t talk about it, were only growing with time. I noticed, as well, that she’d just referred to them in the plural, which was…interesting.

“Fuck it, why not,” I said after a few moments. “I’m pretty good at terrible ideas too.”

She laughed, in her usual golden-fire sort of way, and stood up. “I know,” she said. “Your ideas might actually be worse than mine, sometimes.”

But she was grinning, and she said it like a compliment.

---

Later. Not as much later as either of us would prefer, but later. I was dozing in bed, wrapped in scents of fox and spice and flowers. It was, I noted absently, probably just as well that my sensory everything was unusual. Most people didn’t like the way foxes smell, to put it mildly. It was a heavy, musky smell, not far off from skunk. It was just as well that I was unusually fond of it, all things considered.

I’d have to go soon. Given that what little safety I had here was reliant on the enemy not having their feet under them, lingering would be kinda stupid. I certainly wasn’t staying the night.

But for the moment, I was dozing. Saori was wrapped around me with her head pillowed on my shoulder. She still hadn’t moved into this house much, and it still felt anonymous, virtually sterile. But it smelled like her, and I was drifting in quiet, wordless thoughts, and I felt peaceful.

Peaceful was never the easiest feeling for me to find, and lately I’d had none at all. It felt…nice.

Saori stirred, after what might have been five minutes or five hours. The kitsune yawned, nestling in against me closer, and traced her fingertips over the cut on my shoulder. As expected, it was almost totally healed already. There was no pain, just an angry red line. By tomorrow, even that would be gone.

“This is kinda sad,” she said. She sounded relaxed, verging on sleepy.

“How’s that?”

“I like your tattoos,” the kitsune said, nuzzling at one that looked like a viper. “It’s a shame to mess them up with scars.”

I stroked her hair with one hand. “Oh. You, uh, don’t have to worry about that.”

“How’s that?” I wasn’t sure whether she was echoing me deliberately, but my lips twitched into a smile either way.

“Well, a lot of them are old, from back when I was running with the Yakuza,” I said. “It’s this whole cultural thing in Japan, that association between tattoos and crime I mean. Not as much as it used to be. For a long time, tattoos were so tightly linked with organized crime they were illegal.”

“Wait, seriously?” Saori sounded distinctly incredulous.

“Yup. It was a weird ritual thing, and then also stuff related to the Ainu got mixed in and it just had a very odd role in society. Then the government started using it as a punishment thing to mark criminals.”

She snorted. “Lemme guess, that backfired and the marks started to be a badge of honor.”

I laughed. “Got it in one.” I really couldn’t fathom how those officials had done something that stupid. Saori could tell it was a bad idea in under five seconds. Saori.

“And then they tried to fix that part by criminalizing it entirely,” she continued. “Because banning something which has appeal because it’s linked with illicit activity is great at discouraging people.”

I grinned. “Yeah, pretty much exactly how it went. Whole thing was one bad decision after another. Anyway, tattoos were illegal for almost a hundred years. It’s legal now, but still in a weird place socially. There aren’t a ton of tattoo artists in Japan, and most of them are tourist bait.”

“But not this one.” It wasn’t a question. She could tell where this was going.

“No. Someone Saito knew, who had history working with the Yakuza. He was a traditional horishi, living in the mountains outside the city. He didn’t advertise, virtually never had foreign clients. Exclusively worked in the traditional irezumi style, which incidentally is really obnoxious. He did it by hand rather than use a machine.”

Saori winced. “Ow.”

I laughed. “Yeah. Very ow. And very slow. I was going out there weekly for almost three fucking years. He didn’t do all of my ink, but he did most of it. And it’s…strange.”

“Strange how?”

“They’re very colorful, don’t you think?”

Saori made a sound that verged on purring. “Yes. They are.”

“Colorful tattoos fade,” I said quietly. “They age, they get sun-faded. You need to get them touched up now and again. These…don’t. They were done almost twenty years ago, and they’re so bright I could have just gotten them yesterday.”

She was still purring, but it had a different tone to it, less relaxed, more intrigued. “That’s really interesting. And it doesn’t seem likely to just be different pigments.”

“No. But it gets even weirder. I’ve gotten injured a fair number of times since then, right? And I heal so well that usually there’s barely a scar after, but. I’ve had cuts deep enough I’d expect them to disrupt the tattoo. People need to get them touched up after that, too.”

“But not you.” She traced the line of a scar on my forearm with her nail, and I shivered.

“Nope. It heals back. Like, the skin that forms after the injury matches the tattoo perfectly. Every time.”

“Like it was yesterday,” she echoed. “That’s fascinating.”

“Right? And it’s not some property about me, either. I’ve had tattoos done by other people, and those fade. His work is…a different kind of permanent.”

Saori was quiet for a moment. “I notice,” she said eventually, “that Saito was the one who recommended this guy.”

“Yes. He was.” It was something I’d thought about more than once.

“Wasn’t he the same guy who ‛recommended’ that you move to a town which just happened to be run by a werewolf?”

“Yeah. Same guy sent me to this, I don’t know, mystical tattooist.”

“That’s impressive. Also makes them hotter, if you were curious.” She yawned and went back to cuddling rather than talking, though I noted she was tracing the lines of various tattoos in the process.

It was…something, alright. I didn’t think Saori had thought through some of the implications yet. There really wasn’t much reason why they’d occur to her right away. But I’d thought about this a lot of times over the years.

She gently stroked one of the wolves I carried on me. There were several in those tattoos. Wolves, clouds, and flowers all featured prominently. They weren’t the only elements; there were a few snakes, a length of chain, and various other things. I even had a fox on me, something Saori teased me about mercilessly sometimes. But those three were the most prevalent, visible elements. There was a hibiscus blossom on the back of my right hand, a wolf’s head on my left.

I’d specifically asked him to do my hands, which wasn’t common. Most people in Japan make sure that if they’re wearing a business suit, no ink can be seen. I’d wanted to intentionally make that impossible for myself, as a symbolic gesture. I wasn’t interested in rejoining polite society. I wasn’t wanted there, and the feeling was mutual.

I’d asked for the location on those, but none of the imagery had been my idea. The horishi had picked these motifs. It was how traditional irezumi generally worked. I had a say in the matter; I could have refused something. But almost all the creative decisions were made by the artist.

I hadn’t objected at the time. I’d always been fond of wolves, and clouds were a common background element, forgettable. The flowers had been a little more marginal, but I had ultimately decided that they were acceptable, for a few reasons. There was an interesting dissonance in that softer imagery, as contrasted against both the rest of the ink and the rest of, well, me. The designs were beautiful when he sketched them out. And, I recalled, I’d liked the symbolism of some of them.

That, and I had seen that he used such vivid inks that the flowers looked slightly off-putting, and I enjoyed that. That and the dissonance both were funny to me. I hadn’t objected.

After he’d already done all this, I’d learned that my mother was a raiju. That I looked lupine when I was drawing on that power, and I had lightning in my veins. I realized that plants grew unnaturally well under my care, and then most recently I’d realized that I had some sort of very limited telepathy with them.

And suddenly, things were a lot less funny.

Wolves, clouds, and flowers were the three most prominent, visible tattoos on me. You couldn’t miss them when I had one on either hand and plenty of others up my arms, on my back, and covering portions of my chest and legs. They weren’t unusual imagery, but the notion that he’d picked all three primary motifs that on the nose by chance was comical.

Wolves and storm and flowers inked into my skin, all of them permanent in a way that natural tattoos couldn’t be. A mystical tattoo artist who had apparently known my nature before I did, and had found real, serious power in the old traditions he followed. A mentor who had sent me there, who had suggested Ashland as a good place to go for reflection. Saito was also one of the two people who survived my rampage the first time I shifted into fur, and I didn’t know how.

Taken as a whole, the implications were uncomfortable at best.

I sighed, and stroked Saori’s hair some more. Soon, I’d have to leave. But I could spend a few more minutes here, dozing and drifting. I could smell her, and it felt soothing, peaceful. That feeling of peace was a lie, of course, but it was one I needed.

I’d have to leave that false refuge soon. But not quite yet.

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