Chapter Nine

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Explosions are intrinsically loud.

This was not exactly a startling, original observation. It was also an understatement of comical proportion. Even the relatively small explosions involved in gunfire are spectacularly loud, far more so than most people would imagine. Something smaller like a twenty-two gauge rifle or nine millimeter pistol round might be in line with their imagination. Those are still noisy, but they’re not incredibly so. Larger firearms, though, are loud enough that the shotgun blast earlier had been physically painful and left my ears ringing.

I discovered now that this did not in any way prepare me for the experience of a car bomb. The noise alone was miserably painful, and between that and the pressure wave, I lost track of my surroundings for a few moments. The world went white, and I was falling. Or maybe flying through the air; I couldn’t tell which way was up, so it was kinda hard to tell. Everything hurt and I had no idea what was going on. I might have outright lost consciousness. It was hard to tell.

When I became aware of the world again, I was lying on the asphalt. Everything hurt, and my ears were ringing so much I might as well have been deaf. It took me a moment to work up the energy to look around.

Saori and Raincloud had apparently run faster, or maybe just gotten luckier. The former was sitting up watching me, and while she was leaning against the wall of the alley, she didn’t look to be in much pain. The latter, I could feel, was conscious, only mildly bruised, and feeling a very strong surge of relief.

Granted, that last bit didn’t exactly take a telepathic link to identify. When I managed to sit up, she was in my lap almost immediately, making happy canid sounds and nuzzling into me. That was a bit of a clue. But still, it was good to know she was okay.

“The fuck was that?” I asked, once my ears had recovered enough to at least hear myself.

“Car bomb,” Saori said promptly. “Not a huge one, but pretty good. We should get moving if you can, emergency services will be here…very soon.”

I laughed. “Yeah, this alley’s going to be crawling with cops in a minute or two. You have an exit in mind?”

“Yeah,” she told me, standing up and then giving me a hand up as well. “Back door of a restaurant over here. They evacuated already, I think, so we should be able to slip out. I can manage enough of a veil to get us through the cordon or whatever.”

“Cool. Let’s go.” I felt weirdly enthused about that. I’d never seen this kind of magic in use, and while Saori had implied that she could do it before, she hadn’t actually told me much about how.

The reality proved to be…a bit more boring than I might have hoped. She already had the door unlocked for us. I was entirely unsurprised to learn that Saori could pick locks, though to be fair, so could I, an artifact of my extremely misspent youth. We stepped through (I remembered to lock it behind us) and wandered out through the kitchen of what smelled like a decent Italian restaurant. Raincloud gave me a mental nudge on the way through, and I grabbed a steak out of the fridge for her. I rolled my eyes a bit, but honestly, relative to having just set a bomb off less than a block away, I figured petty theft wasn’t going to bother the staff much. And she had just saved our asses, so.

Saori’s veil was so subtle I didn’t even realize she was doing it at first. It smelled like fox and spice and smoke, but not much more so than her baseline aura. And from the inside, there was almost no change. Things looked a little bit darker, and there was a faint red tinge in my vision, like I was wearing tinted lenses. Nothing else to show that it was happening.

But she walked out the front door like it was just an average day. I followed her, not saying anything, and we just kinda…walked right through a police line. There were probably almost twenty cops there already, accompanied by a fire truck and two ambulances. All of those people, and we walked past them without interruption.

It felt eerie, really, the way they were looking straight at us and not responding. I could hear them talking to each other, and the terse, jargon-laced conversation happening over the radios. I could see them milling around. But they didn’t see me at all, not one of them reacting to us. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to push my luck, but I was absolutely fascinated at how easy this was. We ducked under the police tape that was already up around the scene and slipped out into the crowd of bystanders, without even a pretense of mundane stealth.

Once we were in the crowd, and safely lost as just two more faces among many, Saori dropped the veil. I could tell because things got brighter, but there was no more change in the energy patterns around me than when she put it up.

“So,” she said. “That was…bracing.” The kitsune was grinning. I wasn’t sure whether it was sincere. I could barely hear her through the ringing in my ears, which made it hard to gauge tone.

“That’s one word for it. You two are okay, right?”

“Yup! You definitely took the worst of it this time around. You passed out for almost a minute; I was starting to worry that I’d have to carry your ass out.”

“Yeah, not having a great time. I think my ears are…starting to recover, at least.” I winced as yet another police cruiser went by, siren blaring at an unholy volume. I was almost flattered by the intensity of the emergency services response. Though I suppose that we had just gotten into a minor gunfight, used an incendiary grenade, and then detonated a bomb, so it probably wasn’t all that surprising.

“That’s good. On which note, remind me later that I definitely owe ’Cloud a steak.”

“I already grabbed one,” I said dryly. “But I’ll try to remember. This was a pretty nice save, thank you.” That last comment was directed towards Raincloud directly, and I could feel her happiness and pride, mixed through with a thread of anxiety.

“Yeah. Catching the gunpowder was impressive. That definitely wasn’t the bomb itself, more likely the person who planted it had a lot of guns on them.” Saori grinned. “Lucky as hell, really. That was a close one.”

“No shit.” I didn’t sound nearly as excited as she did. “How did we trigger it, do you think? We didn’t touch anything, and I find it hard to believe it was a proximity sensor that sensitive without it having triggered before this.”

“Same.” Saori was quiet for a long moment. Eventually, in a much less cheerful tone, she said, “My guess is it was a proximity sensor, just not the kind you’re used to. It was probably rigged to detect a specific aura. Wouldn’t have gone off for a human.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and turned towards her. “You can…do that?”

“I mean, I can’t personally, but it can be done, yes.” Saori shrugged. “You aren’t the only one who can detect these things, you know.”

“Sure, but…how does that even work?” I still wasn’t moving. This was…a discovery that was several kinds of unsettling to me. It wasn’t just that it implied things about whoever was behind the bomb. It also felt strangely uncomfortable to learn that the signatures I was accustomed to using for identification myself could also be used for something like this. I wasn’t sure why.

“It’s delicate and I don’t know exactly how it works,” Saori hedged. “But the basic idea is that you have a spell already in place with a structure that’s not quite complete. People do that all the time; you set the spell up, and then when whatever trigger you built into it happens, it shifts the structure enough to complete the working. In this case, the spell was linked to a detonator.”

“I’m familiar with the concept, at least vaguely. But that’s one hell of a sensitive trigger. We didn’t even use any magic near it.” I started moving again, though it was slower now, and I could feel Raincloud picking up on how disturbed I was by this. She didn’t like the implications either once she sorted through them.

“Yup. That’s…kind of the hard part with this sort of thing.” Saori shrugged. “It has to be very, very sensitive for passive auras to set it off. And you get a few false positives, probably would have triggered on any kitsune rather than just me for example. It’s not common, but it’s a thing. Rigging it to a bomb was clever, though, very stylish.”

We walked quietly for a few moments. We were starting to get far enough away from the scene of the explosion that the sirens were quieter, which was a relief. My ears still hurt, and the bruises hadn’t helped the cut on my hip in the slightest. I hadn’t even had time to look at that yet.

“That sounds like a hell of a trick,” I said eventually. “I can’t imagine there are many people who could pull that off.”

“Nope!” Saori sounded chipper again. “It’s hard to put that kind of latent spell together, the trigger is very delicate work. And then they also apparently know how to use explosives pretty well. Guessing that was C-4, not totally sure but it seems likely. So, looks like you’ve got a high-class secret admirer.”

“I’m flattered.” I did not sound chipper. I sounded calm, in a way that was never a good thing with me. “I think this time it actually does make sense to apologize. That was a nice car.”

“Yeah, I’m pissed about that one. Explosions are fun and all, but this was just rude.” Saori paused. “And it wasn’t a whole lot like Ekaterina’s thing.”

“No, not especially.” It was a thought I’d already had, and I didn’t like it at all. That first attack had been impulsive, clumsy, and simple. The ambush by Ekaterina today hadn’t been a whole lot different, really; it was better-executed, but it wasn’t exactly a genius plan. It was just a bunch of people with weapons attacking us face-on. Simple, direct, and from what Saori had inferred about their targeting, probably not all that strongly grounded in the mortal world. She might be wrong, but it seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

This assassination attempt was nothing like that. This was smooth, professional, impersonal, and used mundane explosives to great effect. It was far scarier to me, too. Someone coming at me with a sword might not be something I was used to, but it was a problem I at least knew how to solve. This…wasn’t. We’d only survived that bomb by the thinnest of margins, and they hadn’t exposed themselves to any danger at all in the process. This felt like the work of an actual, highly skilled assassin, and if they kept trying things like this, it was only a matter of time before it worked.

“You really are fucked beyond belief,” Saori told me, grinning. “It’s fun. I barely even need to pick fights lately with how much excitement you’re providing.”

“You’re welcome, I guess. Also insane, but I’m glad someone is finding this fun.”

She laughed. Raincloud did, too. I sighed, and kept walking.

“So what are you doing next, do you think?” she asked me after another block of random side streets.

“Not totally sure,” I admitted. “I’m pretty seriously out of my depth at this point. I mean, already was, really, but at least with Ekaterina’s crew I have some idea of what I need to do. I’m just struggling to do it. This…I don’t even know where to start.”

Saori nodded quietly. There was an odd look in the kitsune’s eyes now, one I couldn’t name and wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “You could ask VNC,” she said.

I imagined what that would cost me, and shuddered. The consulting firm might be an ally of sorts, but they were not my friends, and this was just about the worst bargaining position I could be in. The idea of what I would have to pay if I went to them this desperate was not pleasant even to contemplate.

“Even if I could afford that,” I said after a moment, “I don’t think it would do much. They aren’t local enough for this kind of thing. I really wouldn’t expect them to have anyone on hand who could offer much insight about a local-scale threat with no notice and almost no information to work from.”

She nodded again. She still looked just…odd, her eyes fey and distant. “If you want,” she said after a moment, “I can contact the people who…got me out of the trouble I was in.”

It was my turn to be quiet for a few moments. I knew almost nothing about that whole topic. I did not know who that benefactor was, or what they had done. I didn’t know why she had needed it, and while I had the sense that the price of their help had been a heavy one, I didn’t know any details about that, either. She’d been so cagey about it that it was telling in and of itself.

“You think they’d be able to help here?” I asked after a few steps.

“Yes. They could.” Saori sounded entirely certain of that, a sort of bedrock confidence so complete that it was kind of spooky. It was like the possibility that they couldn’t help in some way didn’t even cross her mind, and all things considered, the implications of that were…unsettling.

“People who can do things like that,” I said delicately, “rarely do them for free.” I wasn’t sure how direct to be, right now. I didn’t want to come across as harsh, given that Saori herself had made this sort of bargain. I also didn’t want to outright mention the toll it had taken on her. Again, details were unclear to me, but her first few months in Pittsburgh had apparently been…pretty fucking rough. Bringing that up seemed rude, but I’d have to be an idiot not to be thinking about it, under the circumstances.

“No. They do not. You would hate it. You’d probably hate me for doing it. But if you want me to, I can call them.” There was almost a pleading note in her voice now, as though she were desperately hoping I would make the right choice. I wasn’t sure which one she wanted, though.

I sighed. “I’m not quite that desperate yet. But…thank you for the offer. That means a lot to me.”

Strangely, I wasn’t being sarcastic at all. In a weird way, this was genuinely touching. Saori clearly wasn’t comfortable with any part of that history, and I highly doubted she was thrilled about the thought of contacting them again. That she was willing to do so for me was, in its own dysfunctional way, a way of showing that she cared. I’d have to be insane to take that offer, but still, touching.

It did leave me in a rough position, though. I was lost before I added high explosives to the list of things I had to worry about. Now that the danger had escalated even further, I was starting to feel more than a little desperate. Not enough so to take Saori up on that idea, but…well. I was clearly going to have to do something I didn’t like, here. And there were milder options than hers.

“Let’s go somewhere I can make some calls,” I said quietly. I had some devils of my own, and deals to make.

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