Chapter Six

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Derek lived east of Pittsburgh proper, around the border between eastern Pitcairn and Monroeville. This, in and of itself, would be enough to make it an unexpected place for me to be. Pitcairn was an odd mix of abandoned and stuck-up, and Monroeville was worse, the kind of suburb you’d hold up as an example of why suburbia is a diseased phenomenon. I liked Derek enough to visit his place, but I sure as hell wasn’t prone to dropping in because I happened to be in the area.

But I could cope. I had the rideshare driver drop us off several blocks away outside a Chinese restaurant, just in case someone had both the ability and inclination to trace it, and we walked the rest of the way. It was significantly less pleasant than earlier. It was solidly night by now, and it was cold, and “walkable” was not an adjective I could apply to Monroeville with a straight face if I tried. By the time we got there, I was feeling drained as hell, and even Raincloud looked a bit bedraggled. I told her as much, and got a flicker of amusement from her at how specific the adjective was in its mood.

The amusement faded out rapidly into fatigue, though, and by the time we got to Derek’s place we were both pretty much wiped out. Maybe the werewolf could tell, because he just waved us inside without any witty commentary. Raincloud immediately curled up on the couch and went to sleep. I would have liked to have done the same, but as tired as I was, I was still too anxious to sleep yet.

I ended up sitting at the kitchen table with Derek. It was a nice table. I wasn’t entirely clear on what he did for work. It was something in or adjacent to the medical field as I recalled, but if I’d heard the details I’d forgotten them. It definitely paid pretty well, though. He could afford a house in the suburbs, a nice car, a cleaner when a friend killed someone…it was pretty clear he was doing alright for himself.

“You seem stressed,” he told me, sipping coffee. It was late for that, but I didn’t really have any room to talk there. I would have been consuming some caffeine too if I could stand the taste of coffee. As it was, given that was the only form of caffeine he had on hand, I was left to watch in envy.

I sighed. “Yeah. Long day. This situation is…much more draining than I would have guessed. It’s not like anything has even really happened, you know? I got cut one time and it’s already pretty much healed. I don’t know why it has me freaking out so much.”

He shrugged. “It makes sense to me. It’s not about the injury, it’s about the implications. You’ve got an unknown threat and you don’t know what to expect from it. You’re also not used to feeling like there’s someone actively trying to harm you. It seems pretty reasonable to freak out about that.”

“I guess so. And it’s not like I do great with uncertainty to begin with.” I sighed again, and shrugged. “But these are the circumstances I get, I guess.”

“We play the hand we’re dealt.” Derek sounded almost meditative. “It doesn’t matter whether we wanted to get it.”

I snorted. “Yeah, and in your case we lose regardless. You manage to lose to me at cards.”

The werewolf laughed. “Okay, fair point. But the metaphor still applies. And I kind of understand, I think. It’s…I didn’t opt into this.”

“Into the werewolf stuff?”

He nodded. “Yeah. You know how it goes. Mostly people choose it these days, in one way or another. It’s better for everyone involved that way.”

“Sure. More confident it will work, right? I know it’s not all that easy to get the new patterns to overwrite human ones.” It was always hard to change someone’s fundamental signature, and lycanthropy spread by overwriting the existing one almost entirely. I was pretty sure that was why humans were, as far as I knew at least, the only ones susceptible to it. Human signatures were weak as hell, and still too strong for that process to be easy.

“Yeah. You have to be in pretty rough shape physically. And a lot of people don’t handle the change well mentally if it does take. So it’s just overall better to take people who are more likely to tolerate it and get them ready ahead of time.”

Get them ready. It was a nice way of saying you wanted the prospective werewolf close to death, in a controlled way. If someone hadn’t made that choice beforehand…well. There was more than one way for a person to end up close to dead with a werewolf involved.

“But not you,” I said softly.

“No. Some moon-crazed bastard just jumped me while I was walking home and mauled the hell out of me.” He shrugged. “I don’t know whether he meant to leave me alive or just got bored. Doesn’t really matter. This is where I ended up.”

I winced. “Wow. Damn.”

He nodded. “I got lucky. Someone found me before anything got…messy. That wolf got put down, by the way. Too far gone to come back. Not the way I expected my life to go, but we play the hands we’re dealt.”

I smiled a little, though it mostly felt sad than anything. “Yeah. Suppose you do understand that. I don’t think I do, at least not in that way. My stuff was all inborn. Didn’t all manifest when I was a kid, but things were never normal for me. So I’ve never had quite that kind of sudden transition.”

Derek nodded. “Yeah. It’s…different, I think. I can’t really imagine the other. I had twenty years to build an understanding of the world first before anything supernatural happened in my life. I don’t really know whether that made it better or worse.”

“Not sure how you’d even guess that,” I said. I thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged. “I think at least in my case that would have been worse. The parts that were sudden for me got…really bad. I don’t think I would have handled it well if the perceptual strangeness and seizures had all set in at once too. I’m guessing they wouldn’t have let me out of the psych ward for a long time, if ever.” I paused. “Well, until the transformation started. Not sure what would have happened then.”

He nodded. “Yeah, hard to say. You were in the psych ward?”

Normally, I wouldn’t have answered that question. But he was a friend, and I was in the right mood to talk about it. So I sighed, long and thin, and said, “Yeah. A few times, as a kid. At first it was because of the sensory stuff getting labeled as hallucinations, panic attacks, that kind of thing. Later on behavioral issues as well. Spent about eight months in there, cumulative. I got diagnosed with a ton of things over the years, some of which were probably accurate. Things got…very messy for a while.”

“Damn. I don’t know how I’d have handled that one. Mental hospitals are a little spooky.”

I shrugged. “In my experience, nobody does. It’s…you know how there are some situations where you can’t quite predict how someone will respond to it? Even yourself; until it happens, you don’t entirely know how it will hit you. Things like a death in the family or sudden violence or whatever. Psych wards are kinda one of those.”

Derek nodded. “Yeah. That tracks. God, we’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”

I laughed, hard. “Kinda are, yeah. So many different kinds of trauma here. We should play bingo sometime.”

He grinned. “You know, that honestly sounds kind of funny. We could drag some other people in on it, Saori or Cassie maybe.”

I tried to imagine either the older werewolf or the kitsune being willing to participate in that, and what they would say if they did. I’d had the laughter mostly under control again, but that mental image was just so many different kinds of comical that I lost it again. It might have been a bit more than was quite justified, but I felt that a certain amount of hysteria on my part was forgivable at the moment.

It took a while for me to bring that back down. I even managed to wake Raincloud with the intensity of the echoed amusement, and once she caught the thread of what I was laughing at I could feel her cackling just as hard mentally. That set me off again, and by the time I got myself under control, Derek was giving me a very unimpressed look.

“Sorry,” I said, a little breathlessly. “Sorry, just. The mental image of what Saori would say in a game of trauma bingo. Wow. You’d probably get answers, but I guarantee you’d regret asking.”

“You would know.” His voice was dry, but the perpetual impression of puppy he gave me (despite, from what he’d said earlier, probably being at least as old as I was) made it hard for him to mask amusement. He was so bad at masking tells in general it was kind of impressive.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And you don’t want to. Promise.”

“Having met Saori, I am entirely capable of believing that.”

I snickered. “People have that reaction so much. It’s hilarious to watch.”

Derek sighed. “There’s definitely a reason you two get along well. Okay. I have to get some sleep pretty soon, work tomorrow. You’re welcome to crash on the couch for a while. I can get you the spare key so you don’t have to worry about that.”

“Thanks. This…makes things much easier.” I yawned. His mention of sleep had been enough to remind me of how little I’d gotten last night. “Alright. See you tomorrow.”

I wasn’t expecting to find sleep easily, even with how tired I was. It could be hard for me to get to sleep, especially somewhere I didn’t know well. But Derek’s couch was better than most, and I had a soft blanket to nuzzle into. I could smell him on it, wolves and lavender and something like spearmint echoed from Raincloud, who was a warm weight on my legs. Sleep was quick in coming, and it was a gentle one as such things went.

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The next morning was interesting. I slept much longer than I’d anticipated, for one thing, and by the time I woke up Derek was already gone. I’d thrashed in my sleep enough that the blanket was on the floor, but Raincloud was sprawled over me instead, which was more than sufficient for warmth. I scritched her ears, and she made happy noises in her sleep. I was smiling a little as I checked my phone.

I had several text messages waiting. Maybe the most unexpected was one from Toby, saying that he thought he had something, but would need more time to confirm details. Frankly, I was astonished I had even heard back from him already. That was…impressively quick turnaround time to have found anything at all.

Less unexpected, though predictably still quite strange, was the one from Saori. She’d at least found some of her old contacts, but it was slow going past that. The guy who had been the best with wards was eaten by lizards last year, apparently, and fallback options were taking their time about things. She was guessing she’d be back in town Wednesday, and as what might have been the strangest flirtatious gesture I’d ever seen, she included what looked like a photograph of a dullahan using his own severed head as a prop for a striptease routine.

I made the very conscious decision not to ask any questions whatsoever, and started getting ready for my day. Sometimes even I could tell that I did not want to know the context of something Saori said.

The rest of the day was an exercise in frustration. It was an unpleasant blend of anxiety and boredom, and it felt far too confining.

Oh, it wasn’t like I spent the whole time in Derek’s house. I really didn’t think there was a need to. The chance of someone spotting me seemed vanishingly low. Sure, I was visually distinctive. But the Pittsburgh metro area is a big place, and there was very little linking me to this corner of it. If someone were tracking down my known associates, that might eventually lead them here via Derek. But I was guessing that would take a while, and as long as I didn’t do anything stupid I was probably safe enough for the moment. I could go outside, take Raincloud for a walk, get food from a very suburbian chain restaurant. It wasn’t horribly boring.

But it was enough that I chafed at the inactivity. There was something very frustrating about it, about how limiting it felt. This wasn’t that far from my normal life, but the moment it stopped being a voluntary choice, it became unpleasantly restrictive, like being somewhere I wanted to be but knowing that all the doors out were locked. And, moreover, there was very little I could do about it that I hadn’t already done. Knowing that I’d already gotten things into motion that would help in the near future didn’t make waiting through today any less frustrating.

I didn’t like waiting. Waiting had far too much room in it for thinking, and with the most recent turns my life had taken, those thoughts weren’t exactly full of sunshine and roses. Raincloud helped, at least; the immediacy of her perspective, I thought, was a large part of it. She was just…so much more able to set things like the larger context of events and the long-term consequences they would lead to aside.

I expected that a lot of people would have thought of that as a sort of naïveté, a childlike innocence. I was also sure they would be wrong to do so. Raincloud was hardly unaware of these things. If nothing else, the frequency with which she asked me questions about why someone did something, why something was true, clearly showed that she both understood and had interest in broader contexts. This seemed more like a sort of mindfulness, an ability to set aside things she couldn’t act on, and focus on her immediate experience. There was probably a lesson in that.

It helped, but it was still a long, miserable day for me. Nothing particularly bad happened, but the anxiety was wearing on me quickly. And then there was another element that made it even worse, too. If I’d guessed correctly, and so far my guesses had seemed pretty accurate, this wasn’t going away. Things might get better with time; more understanding, defenses, experience, there were lots of potential mitigating factors.

But mitigation was probably all they were. To some degree this was my new normal. It might get better, but to some extent this vigilance and anticipation of attack was going to be my life for the foreseeable future. I’d always had some degree of tendency for paranoia, and anxiety seemed inevitable. Having a close family member die while one is a child in a way likely related to a terrorist attack was, I had found, not great for one’s long-term sense of safety in the world. This…was definitely going to make that worse, regardless of what I did or how I felt about it.

It was a long day. Derek wasn’t around to provide company or distraction, either. He worked in a hospital, I remembered that even if I didn’t remember what he did there exactly, and the hours were insane. He was already gone when I woke up, and it had to be almost sixteen hours later when he got back. It was past midnight by then, I was most of the way to asleep on the couch, and he was clearly exhausted. Werewolves have great endurance, but even for him spending sixteen hours at a mentally taxing job was…kind of a lot. He managed to eat something—he was still a werewolf, and there was a reason I’d heard dozens of jokes over the years about lycanthropic appetites. But that was about all he did before he was passing out.

That was Monday. Tuesday was not a whole hell of a lot better. I slept well again, at least, but there was no reprieve. No one had new information for me. Things were so quiet that I wasn’t even sure why I was so on edge, but the agitation hadn’t calmed down. There were no attacks, no signs of menace at all. I couldn’t explain why I was so certain that I was in immediate danger. My long-term risk assessment aside, everything had been entirely peaceful since that first attack.

And yet the anxiety just refused to stop. All through Tuesday I was so on edge I was practically vibrating. I was restless and fidgety; when I was outside I felt nervous about the crowds and the possibility of surveillance, but in the house I felt confined and claustrophobic. By late afternoon Raincloud was feeling agitated just from the echoes of that anxiety that she could feel coming from me; I tried to keep it from cascading to her, but it wasn’t working well. That bond was too visceral, and I wasn’t practiced at telepathy of any kind. Probably the only way I could have kept her from feeling how on edge I was would have been to block her out entirely, and I wasn’t willing to do that. It felt too isolating, like I’d be cutting her off from the world far too extensively for me to be comfortable with it. Echoed anxiety seemed better to me than that.

We weren’t in the best of moods when we went out to get something for lunch. Thorn decided to show up at a smoothie shop and very nearly got me in a whole lot of trouble, which I didn’t appreciate very much. It definitely didn’t do much to calm me down suddenly seeing the sword sitting on my table out of nowhere.

But no actual threat materialized. Tuesday afternoon slipped past in a dissociated haze. When Derek came back, it was slightly jarring, surprising even. It was like I’d forgotten where I was, that someone else was going to be here. That happened to me sometimes. Unfamiliar physical environments had a tendency to leave me a little disoriented. I could never quite describe the feeling to someone else. It was like my sensory perception got overloaded trying to process the unfamiliar surroundings and shut down entirely. And at that point, those surroundings barely existed for me.

He hadn’t been working as late today. But that really didn’t say much, all things considered. It was still past ten when he walked in, and he still looked pretty drained. I was at least awake enough to go sit with him while he ate dinner, though.

“They’re working you pretty hard,” I commented while he waited on the microwave. Leftover meatloaf, I was pretty sure. There were reasons Raincloud and I had mostly been eating elsewhere the past couple days.

He shrugged. “It’s pretty normal. Ten to twelve hour shifts are the norm. But people still rack up overtime pretty often.”

“What do you even do that has that schedule?” I was morbidly curious at this point.

“Imaging technician, mostly. It gets a little complicated because everywhere is so short-staffed. People get shuffled to other departments for a shift now and then to cover someone if they know how.” He shrugged again. “It’s how the medical field works. Nurses have it even worse. I have seen a nurse work for thirty consecutive hours, multiple times. Not legal, but the hospital tends to look the other way when it comes to that particular law.”

“Fuck’s sake.” I knew about how brutal schedules could get for nurses, but it was in an abstract way. I hadn’t really talked much with someone actually impacted by it. “It’s that hard to find techs?”

“Yup.” He went to get his meatloaf. It smelled bland as hell to me, ground beef and not a whole lot else. He seemed to enjoy it, but then, he was a werewolf. Some of them ate their meat raw half the time. “The specific position I’m in requires specialized training. As in, legally it requires some specific credentials, people usually go to community college as an associate’s degree or do vocational school.”

I frowned. “I didn’t think you were doing anything that complicated.”

“Nope,” he agreed cheerfully. “Most days someone could do my job with a high school education and a few weeks of on-the-job training. But it’s a legal requirement, and that limits the employment pool pretty hard. And anything related to the medical field has insane burnout rates, so yeah. We’re always short-staffed to some extent.”

I sighed. “God damn, man. I don’t know how or why you do that to yourself. This place is nice and all, but that sounds awful.”

Derek shrugged. “I like it, honestly. It’s tiring, but I like the work, and mostly I like the coworkers. There are worse gigs.”

“If you say so,” I said. I…really couldn’t imagine why he would live like this. Lycanthropy might be softening the physical fatigue for him, but it didn’t do a lot about mental or emotional exhaustion. I didn’t believe for a moment that he lacked options, either. Derek was an intelligent werewolf with good social skills and criminal connections. The chance that he couldn’t find another way to support this lifestyle was virtually nil. I didn’t understand this choice.

But I was used to not understanding people. And it didn’t really matter whether it made sense to me. Much like Lacuna’s muteness, I didn’t need to understand why he lived this way in order to adapt to it. He worked with a much nastier schedule than I’d quite realized, and it left him with little time and energy for things like building social networks. I expected that was a lot of why he was so lonely; when your work was that demanding, other things tended to slip. I made a mental note to work on helping him with that.

I didn’t know what else to say, and apparently he didn’t either. We sat there in comfortable silence while he finished his meatloaf, and then he went directly to bed. I went back to the couch, where Raincloud woke up just long enough to cuddle me to sleep.

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