Chapter Four

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Things with Alice hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected, and it was still relatively early when I walked into Softened Dreams. I’d thought about going somewhere else first, but even if I could have thought of anything useful to do, I probably wouldn’t have. The coffeehouse had a number of good qualities, but right now the one I was most interested in was that it was pretty damn safe. Nobody in their right mind, and few people who are out of it, will start shit in that building. The consequences of ignoring Hope’s policy of neutral ground and peaceful conduct are just too immediate and scary.

Normally, that only really mattered to me in that I liked the quiet. It was a very low-stress, lowkey kind of environment, and I appreciated that about it.

Today, though? I mean…someone tried to kill me last night. Granted she hadn’t done a great job of it, but as the ache in my left shoulder was happy to remind me, I’d gotten pretty damn lucky. And worse, I still had no idea whatsoever who she was, why she wanted me dead, or whether she had friends who felt similarly.

So yeah. I was fine with spending some time at Softened Dreams on my own before Derek or Saori got there. Right about now, I was very okay with that idea.

It was fairly busy at the moment. Just before lunchtime was always a popular time at a coffeehouse, I’d found. There were quite a few people in there, and several that I knew or recognized. There were a pair of identical twin sisters in the corner who had a slightly eerie tendency to finish each other’s sentences, meals, and romantic affairs, and who had once paid me an exorbitant amount of money to help arrange the latter. At present, they were playing chess against each other, and losing. The guy in the corner who wasn’t even pretending to mix coffee in with his whiskey was named Ralph, and he was always very respectful towards me ever since he saw Saori drunk one time. I think after that he was just impressed that I spent time around her voluntarily and hadn’t yet died as a result. One of the employees currently present, whose name was Ezekiel and who quite reasonably went by Sparrow instead, always found excuses to visit my table so he could pet Raincloud. Others I recognized and might have spoken with a time or two, but I didn’t really know them.

On impulse, once I’d gotten my tea and some sort of raspberry-based pastry, I took them over to a table by the back wall. As busy as it was, there was still a noticeable space left open around that table, where people didn’t want to get too close. Naturally, I walked right up and said, “Heya. Is it alright if I sit with you?”

Lacuna looked up at me and smiled. It was a reserved expression, one that showed no teeth, but it was friendly, and they nodded. I smiled back and sat down, setting my cup and plate on the table. “Haven’t talked in a while,” I said. I used to avoid that kind of phrasing with them, but I’d figured out years ago that Lacuna genuinely didn’t care. “How have things been?”

Their answer was a shrug, and a balancing gesture with one hand. They didn’t say anything. Lacuna never said anything; in all the years I’d been coming here, I had never once heard any vocalization from them at all beyond a rare, breathy laugh. But they were very expressive, and it wasn’t hard to take their meaning. Not too bad, not too great.

“Yeah,” I said, sipping tea. “Some months are like that. Oh, I don’t remember whether I’ve introduced you, this is Raincloud.” I was probably not allowed to bring her in here, given that this was a dining establishment to some extent, but the staff never gave me shit about it.

Lacuna smiled, and held out a hand for her to smell. They waited for her to indicate it was welcome before petting her ears and neck. It wasn’t exactly a surprise that Lacuna, of all people, would know to wait for consent before touch even if that consent wasn’t vocal.

Raincloud liked them, I could tell. The quietly contented feeling I was picking up from her did have a thread of curiosity, though. I suspected she’d already noticed one of the odd things about Lacuna, namely that they had no scent. It was one of a number of ways that they just…weren’t there. They didn’t talk. They were ghostly pale, with silver hair and eyes that were a blue only barely distinguishable from white, white clothes, never any color. They had no scent at all. At first I’d thought they had no magical aura or signature, either, which had creeped me out.

Then I’d figured out that they had one. It was just that their signature was defined by a feeling of nothingness, of void. The power in them was actually quite intense, but it felt like the intense absence of any energy at all. They left no emotional echo behind, and even the background energy flows of their environment faded out around them. And that had creeped me out even more.

“Been a bit of a long month for me,” I said after a few moments of companionable silence. “Not bad, exactly, but tiring. Kinda stressed lately too.”

Lacuna reached out and gently patted my wrist. A lot of people who went to Softened Dreams would have probably flinched away from that touch. They’d seen what could happen to people Lacuna touched. But I was well aware that Lacuna’s role as the coffeehouse’s peacekeeper was just that, a role. It didn’t have a lot to do with who they were as a person outside of that function. This was just a comforting gesture.

I liked Lacuna. We got along well. That made sense, I supposed; we’d both had plenty of experiences of being set apart from the people around us by a different mode of existence. I wasn’t sure whether they were actually unable to talk or just strongly preferred not to, and in many ways it didn’t really matter. I’d had enough intervals of being unable to talk myself to know how hard it made things. I didn’t need to know why they behaved this way in order to accommodate it.

“Thanks. I guess I’m kinda worried. Some girl jumped me with a sword last night. And I’ll be fine, but it’s got me nervous.”

Lacuna’s concern at that was so clear it might as well have been words. Are you sure you’re okay?

“Eh, yeah, I’ll be fine. I got cut but it’ll heal pretty quickly I think. She was really sloppy. But that’s kinda what worries me, you know?” My vague gesture towards the world at large was not nearly as expressive. It could have been; I was reasonably good with American sign language, same as Lacuna was perfectly capable of writing. If they wanted to use words right now, they could.

They didn’t feel the need. A nod, a tired smile, and petting Raincloud some more were sufficient. They understood.

“And I don’t know who it was, either,” I continued. It was probably a stupid idea to say all this in public, but I thought it was fine in this case. I wasn’t being loud, and people left Lacuna a lot of personal space. “It was over so fast. I don’t know who she was or why she was doing it. And so it’s kinda…she got pretty close with a very basic attempt. Literally just one person waiting in an alley with a sword, about as simple as it gets. What am I going to do if, surprise, she has friends and they’re actually good at this?”

Raincloud, though she was dozing and semiconscious at best, twitched a little at that. She could feel my anxiety, even if she wasn’t awake enough to know why. I paused, reaching down to pet her neck in a way I knew she found soothing. She made a soft, happy sound and curled down further towards sleep.

It would have been so nice if it were that easy to soothe myself. But the anxiety wasn’t baseless this time, and I didn’t really know what to do at this point.

Lacuna was nodding, and they looked sad. I was guessing I knew why, too. They could protect me. I had no doubt of that. But they wouldn’t, because they wouldn’t leave this building. I didn’t know whether there was some supernatural restriction involved, or their dedication to Hope was just that intense. The end result was the same. They might want to keep me safe, but once I left Softened Dreams, it wouldn’t happen.

This time I was the one who reached over and patted their wrist, and then smiled a bit when I realized how much it was the same thing I’d done with Raincloud. “I know,” I said. “I’ll try not to die, promise.”

They smiled back at me, and they seemed genuinely grateful. That was touching to me, that my survival was that meaningful to them. Maybe I had been less of a pariah than I’d thought, even when I was living like a hermit most of the time. Sure as hell seemed to be more people concerned about my sudden peril than I would have guessed.

On which note, glancing at the door I saw that Derek had just come in. “I have to go,” I said to Lacuna, nudging Raincloud and standing. She grumbled about being woken up, but did get up after a moment. Lacuna waved goodbye, and I walked over to where the werewolf was looking for an open table. It was starting to thin out a bit in there, so he didn’t have much difficulty.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s things?”

“Apparently less exciting for me than for you,” he said. His tone was very dry. “Oh, and the body was taken care of, no problem.” A lot of people would have been shocked to hear him casually discussing covering up murder in public. But that really didn’t matter at Softened Dreams. Most of the people who came here didn’t care much about human laws, if they even understood what they were. And violence was…a much more common thing among the circles we moved in. Much less shocking than in modern society.

I sighed with relief and sat down. Raincloud promptly curled around my feet again. She didn’t actually go back to sleep, but she was definitely relaxed. She liked how Derek smelled, something about a comparison to spearmint from what she’d said before. I wasn’t sure where she was getting that, since he smelled very little like mint of any kind to me, but I was willing to admit the wolf-and-flowers smell that werewolf magic had to me might be getting in the way.

“Thanks. Seriously. You sure I can’t pay you back?”

Derek shrugged dismissively. “It’s nothing. He didn’t even charge much. Very easy job as I understand it.”

I stared. “Easy? The blood would have stuck out like crazy on that much snow. Kinda garish, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” the werewolf said patiently. “And that also means that pretty much all the blood would have been in that snow. It’s easier to get a snowplow than clean that much blood out of the sidewalk. And she had no ID on her at all, so very little chance of a meaningful missing person report happening I’m guessing. Nah, this was an easy job even on short notice. It’s fine.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t entirely sure whether to feel unsettled that he knew this much about making murder evidence disappear, or grateful that he was willing to use that knowledge on my behalf. I ended up settling on both.

From Raincloud, I got another verbal question, a more ambiguous one this time. How’d you know?

You mean how’d I know that he would know a fixer? She indicated agreement, and I responded with a mental shrug. I wasn’t sure about him specifically. But werewolves tend to have criminal connections. Not all of them, but enough that any given wolf can probably access them one way or another.

Because they need to have things like this done? Huh. That was a more complex thought than I’d heard her express so clearly to date. Raincloud was picking up verbal reasoning so fast it was kinda spooky.

Sometimes. They often lead violent lives. But either way they need connections. They aren’t humans and don’t age, but they live in human society. So they will often need things like false identification, money laundering, and similar aids to avoid trouble.

“So what’s going on?” Derek asked me as that side exchange was wrapping up. As it turned out, telepathy was a very fast means of communication, enough so that it was easy to have mental conversations in parallel with normal ones. “Why do you have people trying to kill you?”

“In this specific case, no clue,” I sighed. “I don’t know who she was. In the general case, I’m nine kinds of fucked and I have no idea how to deal with it. Starting to seem like this is going to be a regular occasion now, people trying to kill me I mean.”

“You realize that explains nothing while still making me even more worried, right?”

“I am aware, yes,” I said dryly. “But I really don’t like explaining things multiple times and Saori hasn’t gotten here yet. With most people I’d blame road conditions, but considering who we’re talking about, ‘distracted by something flammable’ is probably more realistic.”

“Hey now, give her some credit,” Derek told me. “She’s more versatile than that. It might have been someone flammable.”

I snorted. “Okay, yeah, you got me there. Probably won’t be more than a few minutes, though. So at risk of repetition, how’s things?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. Not terrible. The pack’s been picking itself up again. We lost a few people in September, but pretty much back to full strength already. Couple people had friends who came in, and there were a couple of wolves who weren’t doing well where they were and decided to move here. One girl got turned last month and just did her first full moon, handling it well so far.”

I’d never really been sure how the werewolves determined the optimal number of wolves per city. There wasn’t some kind of formula for how many a population could support. Nor, in most cities, was there a specific leader who made that kind of decision; it was a consensus thing. It was a delicate balancing act in many ways. If there weren’t enough of them, they’d get overrun by some other group. Too many, and their social system became increasingly unstable. The end result seemed to usually be a dynamic equilibrium, with rates of “birth”, death, and migration all being high.

And I knew all that. But still, being reminded of the losses they suffered a few months ago hurt, and it made me feel irrationally guilty. I felt like I should somehow have managed to prevent them from happening, though logically I knew I had very little ability to do so.

“That’s the pack,” I said after a moment, right as the silence was starting to get awkward. “What about you?”

He shrugged. “I’m honestly not sure. It’s been a really long year. Mostly a good one, but…long. I guess I feel lonely lately. Lost a lot of friends this year.” He paused. “Amanda got killed about six weeks ago. I don’t think you probably heard. She was visiting a friend in West Virginia and got mixed up in some turf war between a vampire and some kind of demon or something.”

I winced. I hadn’t heard. Six weeks ago put it in October, and I’d been pretty occupied with Raincloud at the time. I hadn’t known Amanda well, only met her once that I could remember. But I knew she and Derek had been in some kind of semi-romantic relationship. That would also have been right after the whole clusterfuck in September, and in my experience that always made things like this cut deeper. Someone dying a week or two after a disaster, right when you were starting to process what had happened, was like a gut punch at the end of an exhalation.

Suddenly Derek’s concern for me had a very different tone to it. My teasing about giving him a nonanswer that only made him more worried didn’t feel very funny anymore.

“Shit,” I said after a moment. “I don’t know what to say. That’s…shit. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged again. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.” He was terrible at poker, and it showed here. Derek always looked vaguely puppyish to me somehow, and right now it was not a happy puppy look. “Anyway. I guess I’ve just been kinda out of it lately. Lonely. A bit sad. It’s been a long year.”

I sighed. “Yeah. Sounds like it. Wish I knew how to help.” I paused. “I mean, I guess to a degree I can help with the lonely part. If you want to spend more time together just let me know. I know it doesn’t make up for the people who aren’t there, but having any company sometimes helps me keep from fixating on loss. So, uh, if it’ll help I’m available. Don’t know what else to do though.”

“I appreciate that,” Derek said, and he sounded like he really meant it. Puppies were pretty good at earnest. “I might take you up on it. Though some of the loneliness is, ah, euphemistic.” He was very nearly blushing as he said that last part, which was kind of adorable. You’d think he’d know better by now, too. He’d been around me enough to have some idea of how shameless I generally was about sexuality.

“If you mean you need to get laid, I have time. Might need to wait for my shoulder to heal, though. So probably not until Tuesday or so.” I was not blushing. I was, in fact, smirking at him.

Derek was definitely blushing now. “What about Saori?” he said after a moment, clearly attempting to maintain his composure and just as clearly failing.

I frowned. “I mean, you can try,” I said dubiously. “She’s not usually into guys, but I guess it’s possible she’ll make an exception for you. She does like werewolves, so if nothing else you can probably get some cuddling.”

“Not what I meant,” the werewolf in question said. “Aren’t you two dating or something?”

“We’re definitely something. What’s that have to do with anything, though?” I was staring at him, and it genuinely took a few seconds for me to figure out what he meant and laugh. “Oh, uh, not really relevant. We’re not doing the monogamy thing. It’s been discussed.”

Derek looked like he felt incredibly awkward by this point. Which was really entertaining, but all things considered I felt I should probably be nice rather than push it further for the sake of amusement. I excused myself for a moment and went to get more tea, mostly just to give the poor boy a chance to compose himself. Raincloud stayed where she was and pretended to sleep, though I could tell she was laughing internally.

I’d thought about trying to censor the sexuality around her. It seemed like I should, given that she was in some sense a child. But I’d given up on it after a few weeks. For one thing, it was practically impossible in any realistic way. Not without a much cleaner mind than mine. I was at least self-aware enough for that.

And then on another level, while I compared her to a child at times, I was aware that Raincloud fundamentally was not a human of any kind. She wasn’t exactly a dog, and certainly she didn’t think in anything like the same ways as an ordinary dog. But there were ways in which she was much closer to one than to a human. Siberian huskies matured quickly, and were generally physically almost completely grown by the time they were a year old. They could and routinely did mate and have puppies of their own by around the same time. By their second birthday they were fully adult by any reasonable standard. If they lived to be eighteen they were very, very lucky.

With how insanely quickly Raincloud was picking up language and abstract reasoning, I was pretty sure that was still going to be the case for her, that she was maturing both physically and mentally far more quickly than a human. Trying to impose human standards on inhuman beings was almost never a good idea.

By the time I’d gotten my tea and made it back to the table, Derek was mostly composed again, and Saori had arrived. I didn’t say much until she’d gotten her own drink, which smelled like some unholy mix of coffee, chocolate, mint, oranges, and brandy, and arranged herself at the table.

“How do you even drink that?” For once it wasn’t me asking that. Derek had a comparably acute sense of smell, and he was watching the kitsune with a sort of horrified fascination. It wasn’t an unusual expression around Saori.

She just grinned at him and drank some more, then lounged back with about half her weight in my lap rather than on her own chair. “Generally with my mouth, but there are options.”

Derek made the conscious decision not to ask. I was good at recognizing the pause when someone did that, at this point. This, too, was a pretty common reaction in Saori’s presence.

She recognized it, too, and snickered as she leaned further into me. I was deeply unsure how she wasn’t falling out of her chair at this point. “So what’s up? Someone tried to shank you?”

I frowned. “I don’t think so? Pretty sure shank implies stabbing someone with an improvised knife. She tried to cut my head off with a sword, which I think is a different verb.”

“Okay, sure, but that verb probably isn’t as much fun to say.”

“I don’t think that’s how language works,” I said dryly. “But the salient part is that yes someone jumped out of an alley and attempted to kill me.”

“Oh, well if it was a surprise attack from an alley we can say she ambuscaded you. That works. How’d it go?”

“Eh.” I remembered the injury to my shoulder before trying to shrug, which I was oddly proud of. “She got a pretty decent hit in, but I’ll be okay before long. She…won’t. So, not terrible I guess?”

“I’ll take it, yeah.” Saori grinned at me. “I’d rather you not die without asking me for permission.”

Was there any hesitation in her at all when I said that I’d killed someone? Not that I could tell, not even a tiny bit. Not even enough to have dismissed any questions about it, and I doubted she’d even asked any. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, rather than mention any of that. “But if there’s a really good opportunity, I might not have time to call and check first. It’s like a flash sale, you have to jump on it while the offer’s there.”

She laughed. I grinned. Derek didn’t. “To get back on topic,” the werewolf said, “why the fuck are people trying to kill you?”

My grin faded away instantly. “Um,” I said. “I don’t know why she, personally, tried to kill me. But in the general sense things are kinda…not looking so great. That sword I picked up a few months ago is, uh, stronger than I realized. Enough so that some pretty scary people are likely going to want it. And given that it’s apparently impossible to steal it while I’m alive, I have a strong suspicion that they’re going to be trying to make me otherwise.”

“When you say it’s stronger than you realized,” Saori said, “how scary are we talking, on a scale from ‘bananas Foster’ to ‘cluster bomb’?”

“I have no idea how to use that scale,” I told her. “And the fact that you apparently do is a bit unsettling. But pretty up there, I think. It’s indestructible, unstoppable, casually does things that aren’t supposed to be possible, cuts magic, and it might also kill people a little bit to be around it or something.”

“Spicy. But still just a sword. You think they’ll want it that badly?”

I shrugged. “Not sure, but yeah, I think so. Honestly, it’s a bit…even leaving aside the question of whether it’s that powerful, it seems pretty easy. Like, most of the time if you want a weapon like this you have to take it from someone much scarier than I am. I have a strong suspicion that people will look at this, look at me, and see an opportunity.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Derek said quietly. “There are plenty of stories about people picking up something they aren’t ready for and getting screwed as a result.”

I sighed. “Yeah. And I don’t really know what to do about it. I couldn’t get rid of the thing if I tried, I’m pretty sure. So it’s kinda just…looking like this might be an ongoing issue.”

Saori nodded and curled into me a bit more closely. “Yeah. Welcome back to the violent lunatic club, then.” She managed to make this sound at least slightly like condolence, though both the rest of her tone and all of the affection seemed excited.

I had to laugh at that. “Thanks, I guess.” Raincloud twitched a little, still not nearly as asleep as she looked, and I reached down to pet her ears some more. She might not understand the full context, but she was picking up on enough to be nervous. “I needed it at the time. And I knew there would be consequences. I just…don’t really know what to do about them.”

“Well, you know there’s a threat,” Saori told me, now sounding like she was trying to be very patient while walking me through remedial education and only mostly succeeding. “And you probably want to get ready for it. Set up some home defenses, maybe do some training so you don’t fumble that badly with a random ambuscader. Seriously, this is embarrassing. You did so much better the last time someone tried to shank you on your way home.”

“Hate to say it, but she’s probably right,” Derek said. “Maybe not the nicest thing to think about, but pretending it’s not there won’t change things. Si vis pacem, para bellum.”

It took me a second to remember what that meant, but I got there. If you want peace, prepare for war. I had no idea why I knew that sentence in Latin, or when I’d learned it, but the information was there.

“Okay, so first off,” I said, “I’m not sure why you two think this would be a foreign concept to me. Just because I haven’t gotten things in place yet doesn’t mean I haven’t figured out I need to. Second, since when do you speak Latin?”

Derek shrugged and grinned. “I don’t. But it’s a famous phrase, and my cousin is a huge gun nerd. The number of times he’s told me why the nine-millimeter Parabellum round is called that would astonish you.”

Aaaand that would be why I knew it, even if I’d forgotten since. “I see. Well. In this case it does seem to be good advice.” I sighed. I didn’t like this, didn’t like being in this position. It wasn’t even that I had some kind of ethical issue with the idea. I just…didn’t want to need to think about things like this. Sure, I had weapons on hand and did basic home security, but that was a far cry from this kind of focused, extensive planning.

But it didn’t matter. Like Derek had just said, pretending this wasn’t happening wouldn’t change the fact that it was. Someone had tried to kill me, and all available evidence said there would be more, probably soon. I did not like the idea of dying, particularly not now, when my life was actually going right for once. It was that simple, really. Whether I liked that reality or not was immaterial.

“Okay. So in terms of concrete ideas, any suggestions? I’m not sure where to start.”

“Your house is a really soft target,” Saori said promptly. It was a good thing that everyone at the table had preternaturally good hearing, because with how the kitsune had mumbled that into my ribcage there was no way a human would have heard it. “That’s probably the big one. You’re going to want to move somewhere easier to work with, get real defenses set up, or both.”

“Neither of which I can do today,” I sighed. “Ugh. I guess I can at least start looking into it. You mean, like, warding spells?”

“Uh, yeah. A security camera is nice and all, but let’s be real here.” Saori shrugged. “Not my area of expertise, but I can probably find someone for you to talk to about it if you want.”

“That would be nice. I don’t really have any connections like that,” I said, stroking her hair absently. I was, I thought, going to have to fix that too. “And I guess I probably shouldn’t go home until I can start getting that set up. Even if they don’t know my exact address, people clearly have a general idea of where I live.”

“Sounds like you get to have your vagabond period,” Saori said. “I’ll try to make it quick, but not sure how long it will take to find people who are good at this. It’s been a while since I talked to any of them.”

I nodded. “Still faster than if I tried to do it myself, though. Thanks.” I glanced over at Derek.

The werewolf just shrugged. “I don’t have much experience here. I can give you the number of the guy I called last night. He’s good at what he does, and decent to work with. And you can crash on my couch if you want while your place is getting, uh, renovated. But I don’t know how much I can help beyond that.”

I sighed and nodded again. “Still helps. Thanks, seriously. I’m kind of out of my depth here. I really appreciate the help, or even just, like, having someone to talk to. I’m feeling…pretty overwhelmed. I know it was necessary, but I’m really starting to regret grabbing this thing.”

“You know,” Saori said, “I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but I think you’ve been so focused on how much of a problem the sword is that you’ve overlooked something.”

I started to get a sinking feeling. She sounded excited, and Saori being excited could mean a lot of things, but the angle of her grin said I wasn’t going to like this one. “What’s that?”

“Well, you keep saying you’re fucked because you own Thorn now,” she said. “And I think you’re overlooking a much bigger way you’re fucked. See, okay, so that sword is a lot like Gram out of that one saga or whatever, right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The Völsung Cycle.”

“Right, that one. And in that story, some guy crashed a wedding and stuck a magic sword in a tree, which incidentally we should do that sometime. It sounds like a hilarious prank. Anyway, only the one dude could pull the sword out and he kept it and war ensues. So yeah probably bad that you have it. Thing is, though, do you remember who crashed the wedding in the first place?”

I saw where she was going now, and I had been correct. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this at all. “It’s not stated directly, but it’s pretty obvious it was Odin.”

“Yeah.” Saori’s grin was wider now, and sharper. “Which tracks, it’s his style. So I think you should also be asking who stuck Thorn in that tree to begin with, because they’re probably way scarier than the people who want the sword now.”

“I am so fucked,” I said. My voice was the kind of hushed whisper that sounds almost reverent, spoken in the moment of revelation. She was right. I hadn’t even considered that yet. I suddenly felt like kind of an idiot for having not moved faster on this kind of stuff.

“Yep!” the kitsune agreed brightly, nuzzling my shoulder. “You are fucked beyond belief. But hey, at least you won’t die bored!”

“I am glad that my disaster of a life and likely upcoming gruesome death are entertaining for you,” I said dryly. I wasn’t even being sarcastic, as such. If it was going to happen anyway, it was weirdly comforting to think that she’d get some excitement out of things.

“In fairness, they aren’t the only things about you that entertain me.” Saori was smirking; I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear it in her voice. “You want an itemized list?”

Derek cleared his throat. “I’m, uh, just gonna head out now. Let me know if you need anything. And try not to get killed.”

I grinned at him, and pretended I didn’t see Thorn lying on the floor under the table, quietly menacing even with its magic contained by the sheath. “I’ll be in touch,” I said. “And I’ll probably take you up on the couch.” Apparently I’d gotten the tone right for the innuendo there, because he blushed, and I snickered as he walked away.

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