Chapter Five

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Saori left a few minutes later. The innuendos and public display of affection hadn’t exactly been a joke; I knew from experience that she wasn’t bluffing. If I’d expressed interest, she’d have been absolutely fine with ignoring an urgent situation in favor of hedonistic indulgence. Caution and prudence were not on the list of words anyone sane would apply to Saori, except perhaps to use her as a bad example. Safety wasn’t first for her, and was generally lucky to come in a distant third.

But it was, ultimately, a relatively urgent situation. I wasn’t sure when the next attack might come, or from what. I didn’t know how much said attacker would know about me, but my address was hardly a secret. I wasn’t going back there until this was done, and while that didn’t fuck with me like it would some people, it was inconvenient as hell.

So I wasn’t terribly interested in delays. And Saori was reckless, not stupid. She knew this needed done. She only lingered a few more minutes, and then she was off to start reaching out to her contacts. I’d offered to come with, but she said it would be likely to cause more issues than it solved. Her contacts were not fond of strangers, and given that she seemed to be expecting strain on those relationships already, I was forced to agree it was smarter not to bring me along.

She left, and it was just me and Raincloud still in the coffeehouse. She was dozing on my feet, and had actually slipped into sleep now rather than just faking it. I let her doze for a few minutes while I sipped tea and tried not to think about what I had gotten myself into. I wasn’t very successful; this situation was deeply uncomfortable, and it didn’t seem likely to get better anytime soon. If anything, it seemed likely to get worse. I was guessing that even if Saori could find someone to install some defenses, it would only be a temporary solution. Eventually, I’d need to come up with a better idea. As the past day had illustrated, it was probably best to assume “eventually” would happen sooner than I liked.

I sat and drank tea for a few minutes. Then I sighed, woke Raincloud, and reluctantly left Softened Dreams to go be productive. I took Thorn along; it wouldn’t get stolen if I left it there, but I didn’t want to freak anyone out when they saw it under the table.

---

I hadn’t been prepared for the logistics of hiding a body. But I had been preparing. That part just hadn’t occurred to me, that I would need to deal with evidence of murder. I wasn’t sure why, really, beyond a generalized lack of experience. Logically it was pretty obvious, given that I’d been pretty sure there would be violence in my life soon. I just hadn’t thought about it.

But I had thought of other things, some of which were now paying off. In particular, I had a keen appreciation for the value of information. Understanding what you were dealing with was a massive force multiplier when shit hit the fan. And my information was…unfortunately limited. While over a decade spent intentionally isolating myself from reality had arguably been good for my mental health, it hadn’t done wonders for my knowledge of current events.

Nor had my education before that really been all that complete. I knew the basics of how magic worked, and I could find and recognize energy signatures far better than most people. But practical application, detailed examination of spellcraft, and its mechanisms of action were all much less familiar to me. I’d been starting to take steps to remedy that, but at the moment I did not have nearly as much knowledge as I’d like.

What I did have, at least temporarily, was a reputation. The way things had played out in September had left me looking both more important and a lot more badass than was really accurate. People were aware of me now. And given that the coven of mages I’d helped take out had been intentionally going out of their way to make people hate them as much as possible, that awareness was of a positive kind. It wouldn’t last, but for the moment I had goodwill, and I’d leveraged it to make some useful friends.

It would be a while before my next meeting, which was scheduled for just past sundown. I had some hours to kill first. I didn’t particularly want to wait at Softened Dreams for that duration, though. However nervous I felt about the possibility of further attacks, it was obviously a risk I was going to have to take. It wasn’t like I was going to stay in this building for the rest of my life. That…honestly sounded quite a bit worse than a sword in the neck, even assuming the protection it offered was that complete, which I didn’t. Lacuna was scary, but they weren’t invincible.

So I sucked it up and left, and found a ride to the right general part of town well in advance. I didn’t really have a whole lot to do right now, and one of the reasons I’d suggested this as a meeting place was that I had no association with it. It was just some random park out by the zoo, and I genuinely wasn’t sure I’d ever been there before in my life. It was as far from a known location as I could get in this city.

Raincloud was quiet on the ride, though I could tell she was thinking about something. It just wasn’t in words, which was understandable, really. Hell, sometimes I couldn’t put my thoughts into words, and that was with the benefit of decades of practice. And aimless, meandering walking, movement without destination, was one of the more consistently useful things I knew, for working through ideas like that. So maybe wandering around the park would be helpful for both of us.

It was a nice park. Raincloud was full of energy now, bounding through the snow. It felt…good, watching that. Between the rapid development of her species, the enormously accelerated cognitive development from various supernatural factors, and the experiences she’d had because she shared my life and my life was insane, Raincloud was growing up very quickly.

It was good to see her get to just play for a little bit like this. She deserved that opportunity. Even the tree spirit who shared her head (and had firmly declined a name of his own for some reason) was glad for it. I didn’t get any words from him either at the moment, but I could feel a satisfaction distinct from the exuberance in Raincloud herself.

I’d initially worried, when we were planning this arrangement, that he would get too intense or aggressive mentally and cause problems for the dog hosting him. That had been rapidly shown to be a nonissue; he was deeply protective of Raincloud, and at the moment he shared my satisfaction that she was able to have this more innocent moment of play. He knew how much we’d impacted Raincloud’s existence, knew that she would never have the kind of life a husky normally would. He was glad she at least got moments like this sometimes.

Raincloud deserved better than this world. I thought that about a lot of people, and as with the others, I couldn’t do much half as much for Raincloud as I’d like. It was good to see this, that she was getting at least a little bit of innocence and joy. I already knew that she wouldn’t get enough of those things in this life.

It wasn’t a hard prediction to make. If there was someone who did get enough of those things in this world, I hadn’t yet met them.

I sighed, pushed the darker thoughts away, and found a bench to sit on. I was not possessed of a puppy’s seemingly boundless energy, and I hadn’t gotten much sleep. I wasn’t up to frolicking just now. But I sat on a small wooden bench, and I watched her play, and I did a surprisingly good job of stilling my anxiety for a time. I let the thoughts pass without words, paying enough attention to my surroundings for safety but otherwise letting myself drift. Those formless thoughts weren’t all that joyous, and innocence was a lost cause, but they felt clean.

It couldn’t last forever, though. Raincloud was in some ways still a puppy, after all, and as such tended to have seemingly boundless energy that suddenly ran out all at once. I watched her play in the snow for a while, but eventually the giddy feeling I was getting from her faded out into fatigue. She walked over, hopped up onto the bench, and sprawled across my lap.

Physical contact always made the impressions I got from her clearer. As she sprawled there and I gently petted her neck, I could feel the joy and excitement more clearly. It was, I thought, mostly the product of getting to run around in the snow. She wasn’t stupid—the absurd speed with which she was picking up language made that pretty clear—but she was more immediate in her focus, more able to enjoy the moment rather than worry about the larger situation. I envied her for that a little bit.

But there was something else stirring under that excitement, something thoughtful. And after a few minutes of this, Raincloud sent me another clearly formed thought. There was a mental impression of Saori, of the kitsune’s face and voice and scent. It had a question attached, clearly mapped into language. Do you love her?

I burst out laughing, which was probably not the best response and would have gotten me some odd looks from bystanders if any were in the area. I couldn’t help it, though. It was something about the simplicity of the question, the way Raincloud didn’t bother with any of the niceties and elaborate social rituals humans tended to have around topics like this. Just a single raw, simple question.

“You don’t go for the easy questions, huh?” I said once I’d gotten that initial giggling fit under control. “Couldn’t start with something simple like ‘what is the nature of the divine’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’, I take it?” Again, I said the response out loud. It would make me look like a crazy person, but nobody was around, and honestly at the moment it was kind of a perk anyway. I wanted to be unremarkable, and nobody wants to look closely at a crazy woman ranting at her dog in the park. And it did seem to be helpful for Raincloud’s language development to have the auditory and mental information linked this way.

She felt smug. I laughed a bit more, and then the laughter died away into a sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t really know how to tell,” I said. “I mean, I like her. I enjoy her company a lot. But I’m not sure I know what love feels like. It’s…not something I’ve had a lot of opportunity to experience. I like her, and I want to do well by her, and I want to be around her, but I don’t know whether that’s what ‘love’ means or not.” I wouldn’t usually have been that honest, and probably I’d have deflected the question in one way or another, but Raincloud deserved a better answer than that. She was, after all, trying to learn what love meant herself.

Raincloud took a moment to consider that, and then the mental image shifted to one of herself. The question remained intact.

I hugged her a bit closer. “I definitely love you, yes,” I said. “That’s easier in a lot of ways. I know you better, which is probably the biggest one. I’ve only known Saori slightly longer, and we don’t spend as much time together as I spend with you. Between that and how long she was alive before meeting me, there’s a lot of her life I don’t know much about. Some of what I do know is kind of troubling, too. So even if I do love her, it’s with some reservation. You, on the other hand, are very easy to love.”

She curled closer around me when I said that, and I could feel a surge of happiness and affection well up in her. I smiled and scritched her ears a bit. Raincloud might still be working on figuring out what love meant (and who wasn’t, really), but she was already very capable of feeling it.

“Okay, we’ve looked the place over,” I said. That had been largely the point of coming here early; the issue with choosing a meeting place I had no prior association with was that I had no prior knowledge of it, either. I wanted to get the lay of the land before my meeting. “We should probably go get something to eat.”

Raincloud practically jumped out of my lap at that, to the point that I had to giggle again. It was, I thought, another way in which she was good for me. I routinely skipped meals because I just forgot to eat. With Raincloud around, that happened less, because like most dogs she was quite happy to remind me of mealtimes.

---

Finding food wasn’t as simple as it seemed. Having Raincloud complicated things in that regard. I flatly refused to give her kibble; between smelling it and knowing what went into making it, I wasn’t willing to feed that shit to anything sapient, much less my own dog. Most of the time, she primarily ate meat, most of it plain and raw. She liked it just fine that way, and it was simple for everyone involved. At the moment, that would be a bit…awkward, though.

She could eat food which was meant for human consumption, and she often did. But it was delicate, because she wasn’t human or anything like it, and there were some significant dietary restrictions to be observed. Chocolate was an overstated concern; theobromine was toxic to dogs, but it was easy enough to avoid, and it took a lot of it for a lethal dose. Even at her current size, she was reasonably safe given she knew better than to do anything stupid. Macadamia nuts weren’t a huge issue either; they were poison for her, but also easy to avoid.

The tricky part was actually onions, and related plants like shallots or garlic. They were pretty seriously toxic for dogs, and they were also ubiquitous. Garlic was in everything, once you started having to be attentive to it. Finding somewhere that I could be absolutely certain would avoid it upon request was harder than it felt like it should be. Between that, finding something each of us liked, and preferably being able to have her at the table, things were just…tricky. I knew a few restaurants that worked well for this, but as I’d noted, this wasn’t a neighborhood I was familiar with. It was challenging.

This time it ended up being sandwiches, and we took them back to the same park. It was already almost sundown by that point, between it having taken so long to get food and sunset coming early in December. I was still early, but not absurdly so. I managed to eat most of a sandwich; Raincloud devoured hers with impressive speed and made as much of a mess as one would expect from someone with no hands. How she ate that much when she was that small was beyond me, but I was used to accommodating needs I didn’t understand, and I’d thought to get some white chocolate to give her afterwards.

She promptly flopped on my lap afterwards. I petted her ears, and waited to meet my own friend in low places.

---

Tobias Morgenstern was not a visually remarkable person. He was so nondescript that despite having met him multiple times before, I still didn’t know he had arrived at the park until he was actually walking up to the picnic table I’d claimed. He had hair a shade of brown somewhere between sandy and muddy, brown eyes, and facial features that were hard to remember even while I was looking at them. He was on the tall side of short and the dark side of pale, wore a hoodie and jeans, and had a perpetually harried look so stark that I suspected he practiced it. There was no way the stubble on his face was that consistent by accident.

“Hullo, Key,” he said, dropping onto the bench across from me. Toby definitely knew my actual name and could probably say it, but the nickname was how I’d introduced myself initially and it was the only thing he called me. His smile was friendly, and I imagined a dentist would be astounded at how average his dental health was. He had a slight accent, but not one that could be pinned down to anywhere in particular.

I’d seen this shtick before. Looking average and unremarkable is something a lot of people see value in, and Toby was hardly the first person I’d seen who cultivated that. But I had to admit he did a hell of a good job at it. You’d never guess from looking at him that he was an information broker, fence, and probably involved in other shady things that I didn’t know about.

“Hi, Toby. Thanks for coming out here, I know it’s a bit of a trip.”

“No problem,” he told me. It was hard to guess whether he meant it. “Though I am curious why you asked me to.”

I shrugged. “You don’t go to Softened Dreams. I don’t go to the Labyrinth. Mark’s is somewhere I’d rather not be seen just at the moment. Rules out the first three places that come to mind, and a park was the best I could do as a substitute on short notice.”

He nodded. “Parks are good for meetings,” he agreed. “Too public to try anything dumb, can still have a private conversation. Why not Mark’s?”

I sighed. “That…has to do with why I wanted to chat. My life has become interesting lately. I don’t know as much about why as I’d like to.”

His focus sharpened at that, though it barely showed up externally. I mostly noted it in his aura. Toby had a fairly ordinary human signature, shimmering and strong enough that he had some degree of power, not enough to suggest the power was a big deal. It felt sharper as I said that, and there was a momentary flicker of something else. It felt like a fish’s scales gleaming in the sun for just a moment before it dove back beneath the surface. “I do have a fondness for interesting things,” he said.

I chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Standard terms for negotiation?”

He nodded. “Yeah, agreed. What’s up?”

I relaxed slightly. He and I had a set of agreements we’d established the first time I did business with him, and it was easier to cite that than list them every time. The important parts were mutual nonaggression, and a degree of confidentiality. He might share the broad strokes of what we discussed here, if someone asked; he wouldn’t pass along details about my plans or requests, or anything that would represent a clear security risk for me. In Toby’s line of work, reputation was everything, and I was certain he wouldn’t risk his by breaking that agreement.

“Somebody tried to kill me last night,” I said simply. Raincloud twitched in her sleep; she had her head on my lap, and the skin contact made things clearer, enough that even sleeping she noticed the thread of anxiety I felt. I gave her some absent-minded ear scritches to make up for it. “Near Mark’s, it’s a known location for me. It felt weird, in a few ways. Method is probably the biggest one; it felt almost clumsy, she just stepped out of an alley with a sword.”

He whistled. “Damn, Key, you are good at interesting life events. Are you trying to track her down?”

I shrugged. “Not exactly? She’s dead and gone. But it felt weird, and I’m concerned she might have friends. Ideally, I’d like to know who she was, why she was there, and whether I’m right about the friends.”

He nodded. “Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Hm. I can’t really think of anything relevant off the top of my head. I don’t think she was local, if only because there aren’t all that many people in town who use swords.”

I snorted at that. “Yeah, coulda fooled me. Ah, well, it was worth a shot.”

I started to stand up, but Toby interrupted me. “What are you talking about?” he said, sounding almost offended. It might have been the most actual emotion I’d seen from him, though admittedly this was only the fourth time we’d talked. “I said I don’t know off the top of my head. That’s not the same as being unable to find out. I can ask around some, see what I find. If it’s a group, they might have local operations, people they’ve talked to. No promises, but I can check.”

“That would be appreciated,” I said. “How much do I owe you for that?”

“Wait and see if I can find anything,” he told me. “I’m not going to charge you if I can’t. We can talk payment when I know how much you’d be paying for.”

“Aren’t you worried that I might decline then and make it a waste of your time?” I asked. I felt vaguely curious. He and I were…not strangers, and technically I’d made a couple of deals with him already, but they had been very small things. Almost more an excuse to make introductions than a transaction, really. I wouldn’t have expected him to be that trusting given his profession.

He just laughed. “No. You’re not stupid enough to be bullshitting me about it happening, and I don’t like it when I don’t know who’s operating in town. I’d want to know anyway. I’ll be in touch.” He smiled at me as he stood up, seemingly genuinely, and he was whistling while he walked away. He wasn’t very good at whistling.

“Well, that went better than expected,” I said to Raincloud after Toby left. I’d woken her up when I started to stand earlier, and she hadn’t fallen back asleep. “Come on, we should get moving. Been here too long, and I’d like to get over to Derek’s before it gets much later.” I caught the impression of a question, not quite formed into words this time, and rolled my eyes at her. “Yes, you can play dice with him when we get there.”

Saori, I thought, was clearly rubbing off on her. It wasn’t even just that Raincloud had learned how to play liar’s dice already. She’d also figured out that Derek was as terrible at it as he was at poker, and took a sort of impish, slightly malicious pleasure in fleecing him. I was pretty sure Saori had also started to teach her to cheat at the game, and I wasn’t sure how that was even possible.

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