Chapter Thirteen

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“Tell me you’ve got something.” I was trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. I wasn’t sure how well it was working.

“You’re in luck.” Toby, for his part, sounded smug. “I’ve got quite a bit, I think. There’s something…odd happening, and I’m pretty sure it’s related to your target.”

“Great, hit me.”

“We’re not playing blackjack,” he told me. “But if you want to lose, we can later. Kinda busy with something else at the moment.”

I sighed, and wondered why everyone I met not only had to be a smartass, they also apparently all learned how from the same style guide. “What did you get, then?”

“There’s a group operating in town,” Toby said, and the joking tone had faded, too quickly and completely to have been fully sincere in the first place. “Not totally sure who or what they are, not sure what they want. But the word is that they’ve been throwing money around, not an absurd amount, but there’s a decent amount of cash and…other resources…moving, and it doesn’t seem to be coming from any of the local players.”

I grunted. “What are they buying, do you know?”

“Equipment, muscle, and local transportation.”

“Anything like plastic explosives?”

“Not that I’ve heard about,” he said. It sounded like he was probably shrugging. “It’s possible, not like I’m prying into every transaction. But I haven’t heard about anything close to that. Guns, rented vans, food, more that kind of thing. They want local enforcers, but the one guy I know who signed up said they’re so awful to work for that he doubts anyone will. Aggressive, erratic—he quit after two days, and this guy isn’t prone to that.”

I nodded. That made them Ekaterina’s people, almost without a doubt. I’d been expecting that, really; the other attacker seemed too skilled to make this kind of noise, but the maenad’s crew? Yeah, they were loud in every sense of the word. “Great. Anything else?”

“Actually, yes. See, they aren’t local, I’m sure of that, but their local operations are too extensive not to have some kind of headquarters. And I’m pretty sure I’ve got a rough location on it. Narrowed it down to a neighborhood, but I think I might be able to get more specific than that within a few days.”

I blinked. That one I had not been expecting, and I was legitimately impressed that Toby had managed it. I wasn’t sure how he’d pulled it off, either. The maenads might not be great at subtlety, but they looked human to most people, and they weren’t causing chaos everywhere they went. Ultimately, figuring out where a group of things that looked like humans were in a city full of humans just wasn’t easy to do. The werewolves couldn’t have pulled it off without a scent trail, and there hadn’t been one of those to work from.

And while Toby’s contacts had been willing to share some information, there were limits to that. They might push those limits for the right inducement, especially when Ekaterina’s crew wasn’t local and wasn’t doing much to make friends here. But his contacts relied heavily on their reputation, it was inevitable in their field, and nobody wants to deal with someone when they’re known for selling out clients. Toby must have done something clever for this.

Then I paused as something else occurred to me. “How much would that information cost me, then?” I asked, not expecting to like the answer.

I was correct, though not in the way I had expected. “Well,” the information broker drawled, “seeing as we’re such good friends, I was thinking I’d tell you for free.”

That was too good to be true, and that usually means it isn’t. It put my hackles up instantly. “Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge to sell you, too. The real answer, please.”

“Hey now,” Toby said, in a distinctly wounded tone. “That’s rude. Am I not allowed to show generosity to a friend? Is it impossible that I would act purely out of the goodness of my heart?”

“My life has left me a bitter and cynical woman, with little trust in the benevolence of others, but I suppose that it’s possible, yes,” I allowed. “Are you?”

“Well, no,” he admitted, “but I might have been. And I am being serious. See, as noted, they’ve been buying some goods locally. They got real aggressive with one of my suppliers in the process, and that pisses me off. Not enough to go kick their door down or whatever, but seeing as you already have a vendetta against them? Yeah, I’d be happy to toss that detail in gratis. Charge you for the general information, but that’s all.”

“That makes much more sense,” I said, relaxing again. Benevolence I had a hard time believing, but petty, vindictive spite? Yeah, that was very plausible from what I’d seen of humanity. And, when I thought about it, there was probably also some enlightened self-interest happening. Toby not only got some free muscle to throw at an irritant, he did so in a way that was very unlikely to cause problems for him, might even be good for his reputation if he spun it right.

Plus, he got on my good side. Which was of dubious value given my life expectancy, but still. I was local, and that mattered, because local was the scale Toby worked on. There was a strong possibility I’d want to do business with him again, and a good first impression now would put him on much better footing then. There might be some of that in his motive, I thought, and if so I had to admit it was working.

“Figured you’d get it. Okay, I have to go. I’ll send you what I’ve got for address and equipment. Talk later.” He hung up without another word. Not one for long goodbyes, it would seem. Although I supposed it was possible he just had somewhere else to be in a hurry. Toby struck me as the kind of guy who kept a lot of balls in the air at any given time, and the fact that he hadn’t even stopped to discuss payment for the pieces of this report he was charging me for was suggestive.

I was just as glad for that. I wasn’t sure I was ready to find out what this would cost me, even with a vindictiveness discount to soften it. I’d have to have that conversation soon, but for now I was just savoring the novelty of something exceeding my expectations for the better.

---

Raincloud felt thoughtful.

She had for most of the day. It was the clearest impression I had of the day, really. Time had been slipping past in a blur, though at least it wasn’t the kind of fugue I’d been having lately. The past few days I’d been slipping into a haze of anxiety and uncertainty, too stressed and tired to fully engage with my world.

This wasn’t that. I had a lot more things to do, today, and that made it…easier. I didn’t like the free time I’d been having. It had too much room in it for thinking. Planning felt better, even if the plans ere bad ones.

I’d need to talk to Saori before I could really feel confident in some of the details of my scheming, but she’d told me it was better to wait for tomorrow. Her contact was getting here then, and she had plans tonight with an old friend. Dinner and explosions, she said; apparently the two of them hadn’t blown up a building together in years. The date had been selected weeks ago, and she couldn’t readily reschedule it.

I wondered whether it was true. It was plausible, but it felt off to me somehow. The timing felt suspicious, as did the lack of details. Normally, I’d expect her to include some strange or concerning addendum to bait out questions. And a standing plan of meeting up with an old friend just a few days after she’d gone out looking for such people was a bit of a stretch.

I could believe she was blowing up a building tonight. I could even believe that she was doing it with someone she hadn’t seen lately, and that they’d been planning this for a while. But I had a sneaking suspicion it was less “dinner date” and more “payment for services rendered”.

I didn’t mention it. If I was right, she wouldn’t appreciate me commenting on it so directly, pointing out that she’d taken on a debt to help me. We didn’t really do that kind of thing, for a lot of reasons that ultimately all boiled down to dysfunction. If I was wrong, well, then I’d be asking questions about one of Saori’s escapades, and like most people, I hadn’t taken long to learn that was a terrible idea.

So, I just agreed. I could wait on that part without issue anyway, really. I had other things to do. I spent an appalling amount of time on hold with various companies. I contacted a few of the easier people from my list, and confirmed that yes Cassie would be willing to teach me to track, yes there was a local machinist happy to make a dummy sword of Thorn’s shape and size to practice with, and yes there was a hunting store where I could buy, among other things, steel-jawed bear traps. I also confirmed that I still hated phone calls, but that was the cost of doing business.

I did that. There was food; I learned, not to my surprise, that Capinera was vegetarian. Though she did at least seem to enjoy it, so it wasn’t some form of punishing herself via asceticism. She, too, had seemed thoughtful today, but I noted that she did seem less subdued than I had generally seen her. She smiled more, with teeth sharp as needles.

The day passed in a blur of varied activity, and throughout all of it, Raincloud was at my side with a thoughtful feeling in the back of my mind.

And then, just like that, it was evening. I’d helped Capinera set up for the show, but I wasn’t in the audience; I really wasn’t in the mood for sand painting right now. I waited in her living space instead, sitting on the bed with Raincloud wrapped flopped across my legs. I noticed absently that the sheets were satin, something I’d observed before but not really thought about. Capinera really wasn’t living like an ascetic in a lot of ways. It didn’t seem like something that came that naturally to her, and that made me wonder again whether this lifestyle was healthy.

I probably shouldn’t have been so invested in that. I knew I couldn’t take on responsibility for Capinera’s life choices or happiness. Still, she was a friend. I didn’t have enough of those that I could lightly dismiss that concern.

I also couldn’t lightly dismiss how thoughtful Raincloud had been feeling. So far, I’d been giving her space to work through it. We practically lived in each other’s heads, sure, but she still needed privacy, and I didn’t want her to feel like I was intruding on it.

But I also didn’t want her to feel like she couldn’t talk to me about things. So eventually, I nudged her shoulder. “Hey,” I said, out loud. In theory it would risk being overheard, but I didn’t really care if I had a reputation for talking to myself, and it was loud enough out there that it was pretty unlikely anyway. That…was a large part of why I was in here, really. “Something on your mind?”

The response was quick and fluid. There was a mental impression, a memory of my conversations first with Saito yesterday and then with Silas before dawn this morning. And there was a question, simply phrased but undeniably phrased. Raincloud’s thoughts didn’t just feel as clear as words this time; they were words, a fully verbalized and concrete question. Why didn’t you want to talk to them?

I laughed a bit. “You really have a knack for asking hard questions, huh?” She nuzzled at my hip with a distinct feeling of pride. I shook my head slowly. “Okay, well, I can explain, but I’ll warn you in advance it might take a while. The reasons are different for the two of them, and some of them are kinda complicated.”

She curled in around me tighter, and looked at me with her ice-blue eyes wide open and bright. Didn’t need any supernatural link to understand the message there. She had plenty of time and nowhere better to be.

I laughed again. “Alright, well, start with Silas because he’s simpler. I’m nervous about him because he’s a largely unknown quantity for me. I’ve only interacted with him once before, a long time ago and under unusual conditions. With only that and his general reputation to go off of, I don’t have enough of a sense of who he is to make good guesses. And that, combined with the power he has, makes him a dangerous person to call on.”

But he owes you. Raincloud didn’t sound—or feel, really; however clearly phrased this was, it wasn’t being spoken—like she was disagreeing with me. More just…commenting on the situation.

“He does,” I agreed. “But in a way, for someone to owe you a debt can be at least as dangerous as for you to owe them. From a purely practical standpoint, if they owe you something, it might be advantageous for them to let you die. That way, you can’t collect the debt.”

I got a distinct mental image of Audgrim, in the moment before he tried to kill me. Raincloud hadn’t been there for that. But the cypress spirit that shared her mind was the only reason Audgrim failed, and the memory was perfectly clear.

I sighed. “Yeah. Exactly. And granted, there are a lot of people, especially in my social circles, who do not feel that way. They think in terms of personal honor. What I know of Silas suggests he’s one of those, not transactional about it, but I’m not as sure of that as I’d like to be.”

I see. And that’s why you never called it in before? The risk?

Clear language, verbal reasoning, working with abstract concepts smoothly. Raincloud was learning so fast it was a little eerie, even to me. I genuinely did love her, but I still had to repress a momentary shiver. It wasn’t just that she was learning these things when her species normally couldn’t. She was learning and maturing so much faster than human benchmarks it was comical. I tried to keep it from showing, though, and I was pretty sure I succeeded. It helped that the affectionate laughter I did show was sincere.

“Yes, more or less. Though what I told him was also true. I’ve sat on this favor because I’ve never had a situation come up where the potential reward worth the risk and worth the expense.” I shrugged. “I’m prone to stockpiling things in case I need them in the future. Favors are one of the things I like to keep on hand, so to speak.”

A moment of thought, and then I got a distinct sense of agreement. Okay, I understand. But Saito is different?

“Yeah, with him it’s…complicated.” I sighed, scritched Raincloud’s ears absently while I tried to find words for a relationship that was…complicated was an understatement. Saito and I had a long, complicated history together, almost half my life ago. He had been a lot of things to me. I wasn’t sure what some of them even were, but there had been a lot, and my feelings on him were…tangled.

I eventually went with, “I knew him very well when I lived in Japan. I’d even say he was something like a surrogate father for me for a while. But it’s complex, because that relationship meant a lot of different things, he had a lot of roles and qualities. And some of those things, I’ve tried to get away from in the time since. He’s also very tied up in how I left Japan, and that makes everything just…messy.”

Why did you leave?

I paused. “Have I not told you about that?” That was surprising to me, really. I didn’t talk about it often, but I’d somehow assumed that the topic would have come up by now.

No. You’ve mentioned something bad happening, but you haven’t told me what it was. She nuzzled at my hand, and I realized that in my surprise I had stopped petting her. I rolled my eyes a little, but I did correct that error.

Huh. Well, that’s another long story. Though it would, I supposed, not be as long as usual. This part I was not talking out loud for, and mental communication was faster than speech by far. I probably could have spoken. The chances of this being overheard were slim, and with the nature of the Blackbird Cabaret it was unlikely that anyone would care much anyway. But it just…felt wrong.

So, I know I’ve told you about how I used to spend a lot of time with an organized crime group. Saito was involved in that, deeply. But the thing is, a lot of the time people who are partly human and partly something else don’t show it at first. They seem like they’re just vanilla humans.

I could feel a spike of curiosity at that. Why doesn’t it show earlier? she asked. Always the question that most clearly caught her attention. Why?

I shrugged. I don’t know. And it doesn’t always work that way, but it’s common. Typically late adolescence is when it first shows through. For me, there were indications before that. My perceptions were always strange, very strange at times, for as long as I remember. But that was ascribed to mental illness and neurological conditions. My mother died before this, without telling me or my father anything about her nature.

I could feel that Raincloud was displeased by this, perhaps even irate, and I grinned. There was just something too absurd about it not to. My dog was telepathically communicating protective anger because of a failure in communication by my wholly-inhuman mother decades before Raincloud had been born. Sometimes it wasn’t hard to see why I, and everyone else, had thought I was just utterly insane for a while.

The grin faded quickly, though. Anyway. Long story short, I went insane as a kid. And not the fun kind. I’d always had weird perceptions and seizures, but they both got much worse after she died. Nightmares got worse, and I started having manic episodes where I couldn’t sleep at all. I’d always been prone to dissociation, but that got worse, more confusing. Between that and the mania I started hallucinating. Not often, but enough.

Raincloud wasn’t grinning, either, physically or mentally. That sounds…frightening.

It was, I confirmed. I didn’t remember that time interval very well, and didn’t really trust much of what I remembered to be real. That was…kind of the point, really. But I remembered the anxiety quite well, a sort of creeping dread as I slipped progressively further away from reality.

Raincloud whined softly, pressing into me again. I thought it was to offer comfort this time more than anything, and I appreciated it. Hell, she probably knew very well what my experience had been like. Given the mode of communication, she could probably feel the echos of my memory directly.

The hallucinations eventually got bad enough that my father couldn’t ignore it anymore. Spent my tenth birthday in a psych ward. I, uh. Spent kind of a lot of time in a psych ward, actually. Maybe eight months, spread over the next five years. At first because of hallucinations, then behavior problems. Anger management issues, mostly.

I got a distinct feeling of doubt from Raincloud. Anger management issues. That…doesn’t make much sense.

I laughed, and scritched her neck. Thanks, but you didn’t know me back then. I’ve had twenty years to work on those issues. I promise that at the time, they were…anger was much more a part of who I was and what I did. I lashed out at people a lot. And I was stronger than a normal human. Put another kid in the hospital once without meaning to. Anyway, all of this is just context, it happened before I met Saito. I figured out how to filter my perceptions when I was about twelve, I don’t know which psych ward I was in at the time. By fifteen, I thought everything was under control but the anger, and I didn’t care about that part. So I stopped going to psych wards and started going to gang bars.

Don’t blame you. That’s how you met Saito, then?

I shrugged. Eventually. I was stronger than a normal human, and I had some martial arts training already. My father thought it would help me learn discipline or something. Started out talking to pawns, but I met the players soon enough. I hesitated for a moment, mostly because this was…well. There were reasons I didn’t tell this story. It wasn’t an easy one to tell.

Eventually, I resumed. I’d been getting increasingly…strange, starting late that year. Impulses and emotions that I didn’t understand, suddenly feeling like a stranger in my own body. Electronics started having really weird problems around me. It became increasingly difficult to tell where reality stopped and my perceptual oddities began. I was having more intense awareness of things like emotional resonances and energy patterns. I had a hard time identifying what was real at any given time, and what only existed in my head.

Raincloud was nuzzling me again. She didn’t actually tell me that this part sounded frightening. She really didn’t need to, though. We both knew it. Of course I had been scared. I thought I was slipping back into complete madness.

This started when I was around sixteen. Kept building for a while. There was another episode of talking during a seizure. I’d by this point managed to convince myself that my memories of the first time had to be childish confusion, so that freaked me out hard. My behavior was getting pretty erratic, and there were times I started interacting with things that nobody else could see. When I was eighteen, things finally came to a head. I sighed, stroking her fur gently. She felt soft, and I needed some softness in my world right at the moment.

What happened?

It was supposed to be a normal day. We were going out to collect payment from a mechanic who paid us protection money. I was smiling, though it was a melancholic sort of smile. There were just…so many things wrong with that sentiment. For one, nothing good ever starts with “it was supposed to be a normal day”. For another, when a shakedown on behalf of an organized crime family is a normal day for you, that kinda says things in itself. There was a whole group of us. Me, Saito, six other people. Simple enough.

So what went wrong? Do I need to eat someone for you? Raincloud felt almost enthused at the prospect.

I laughed. No, this is one of the times violence actually isn’t the answer. I shrugged and kept petting her. We walked in on a rival family trying to move in on the business. Sheer bad luck that we were both there at the same time, and it got messy, fast. Eight on my side counting myself, they had nine, and there were five civilians there. The mechanic, his family, and one woman who was there to pick up her car when everything blew up. Really terrible timing on her part, honestly.

I could feel a sort of nod of agreement at that. Eight on nine by surprise in an awkward location. Not a great way to start a fight.

No. And it escalated fast. I don’t know who went for a gun first, but suddenly everyone was. I got shot, which was a first. I paused for a moment, because the first time is always hard. The first cut, as Cassie put it, is always the deepest. It changes a person, and they can’t always go back, can’t forget. I’d been in fights before this, some fairly serious. But I’d never actually gotten shot, and I’d never been in nearly so much danger. I was in an awkward spot, very little cover. Someone tagged me in the arm, I was terrified, and things…happened.

That is very clear and specific and I have no further questions. Well, damn. First Capinera got snarky with me, now Raincloud. Clearly, I was a bad influence on these people.

Go bite your tail. But also I can’t be very specific. I don’t remember things after I got shot clearly. There was blood, it hurt, and I was afraid. After that, everything is a blur. I only have a few clear memories, and I can’t put them in order.

Raincloud absorbed that quietly for a moment. But you do know what happened, she said eventually. It was hard not to think of it that way. Raincloud could construct sentences with abstract ideas. She’d already gotten language use down so well that she was able to use it conversationally, and her thoughts felt like speech.

I sighed, soft and slow. My understanding is that I killed almost everyone who was there. Saito got out, as did one person from the other family; I’m not sure how. Everyone else, both whole gangs and all of the civilians, died. I barely remember doing it, just a couple snapshots. Next time I was clearly aware of the world, I was waking up soaked in blood in a pile of bodies an hour later. I tore them apart, in many cases literally. Nineteen total. I remember this part. There was…a lot of blood.

Raincloud was quiet for a moment again. When her mental voice did return, she felt…I wasn’t sure what. Impressed, maybe, though in what sense of the word I wasn’t sure. Damn.

I laughed. Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction when I woke up. In a few ways, really. If the casual aggression, association with career criminals, and generalized lashing out at society hadn’t been enough to secure me a place in Hell, I was pretty sure slaughtering nineteen people, many of them innocents or allies, had done the trick.

Why did you kill them?

I sighed and shrugged. Because they were there. I don’t know beyond that. From what Saito told me after and what I do remember, my more bestial, inhuman side manifested for the first time. You’ve seen what I look like when that happens. Most humans aren’t prepared for it. I killed most of the other gang while they were still in shock, because I was angry and scared. Someone ran, because they were scared, and I got hit with a massive spike of prey drive I wasn’t ready for, and I chased them. It just…snowballed from there. No reason beyond that. They were there.

Raincloud was quiet for a moment, then there was an impression of laughter. Wow, you really weren’t kidding when you said you had a gift for finding trouble, huh?

I had to laugh at that myself. As though my current situation hadn’t illustrated that? But I supposed this did confirm for her that no really, I’d always been like this. Yeah. I was in a lot of it after that. I mean, other factors aside, I’d just killed almost twenty people, including members of two different Yakuza families. In front of witnesses from both who survived, and in a very overtly supernatural way. I was in, uh, kind of an awkward position.

No shit. Did Saito get you out of it?

Verbal reasoning, sentence structures, using sarcasm and metaphor, and now she was even including both expletives and profanity. I’d been ready for Raincloud to develop quickly but this was still kinda spooky.

She’d asked a question, though, and I answered it. Yeah. I’m not sure what all it involved. My understanding is that I never officially stopped working for the Yakuza, just got sent on an indefinitely long unsupervised assignment overseas. It was a way for everyone involved to save face, and honestly I needed to leave anyway after that. It was never openly acknowledged that I had been the one responsible. Saito recommended a small town not too far from here as a place to pause and reflect. I’ve barely talked to him since.

I think I see what you mean now. Not exactly a threat but…messy. Raincloud yawned and cuddled against me. I got an impression of gratitude and also of sleepiness, and smiled. I was proud of her language skills, but there was something very sweet about those raw, unfiltered emotional impressions.

“Get some rest,” I told her. “Tomorrow’s looking like an exciting day.”

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