Chapter Thirty
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I did not wake up from the nightmare in a good state of mind. That was an understatement of almost criminal proportion, really. I managed to dislodge Saori from my chest and roll out of bed before I started throwing up, but that was about it.
I spent a while like that, shaking and retching on Capinera’s floor. I thought I might be crying also, but it was a little hard to tell. It was hard to tell how long it dragged on, too; time got weird when I felt like this, in ways I’d never quite been able to define.
Saori hadn’t woken up. That spoke volumes about just how tired she’d been. She was a heavier sleeper than I was, but I was putting off a fair amount of electricity, and had just rolled her off my chest before throwing up right next to her. This…would ordinarily be more than enough to wake her up.
Capinera was sitting there watching me with Raincloud next to her; I had made enough of a commotion to wake Raincloud, and she felt as worried in the back of my mind as Capinera looked. The latter didn’t say anything, but she had her rapier within easy reach, and it didn’t look as casual as usual.
Eventually I managed to bring myself back under control, and spent a few moments longer lying there curled into a ball before pushing myself to my feet and stumbling out to the bathroom to rinse my mouth out and splash cold water on my face. I was trying to shake myself out of the nightmare, and it kinda worked, but not as well as it usually would. Even for me, that was a pretty fucked up dream.
After a few minutes I gave up and admitted I’d gotten as much benefit as I was going to, and went back to join the others. It was crowded in such a small space, but none of us objected to that. I still felt shaky, but at least I could maintain a steady gait now.
“Bad dreams, I take it.” Capinera was quiet, clearly trying not to wake Saori, which got a shaky laugh out of me. If I hadn’t managed to wake her just now, I was guessing the kitsune was out cold enough that Capinera would have a hard time screaming loud enough to wake her if she tried.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice a little hoarse but otherwise mostly steady. “I hate nightmares so fucking much.”
“You have a lot of them.”
I sighed, slumping down on the floor next to her and resting my head against her leg. “Yeah. Not usually this bad, but…yeah.”
“At times like this, I think I’m glad I don’t need to sleep often,” Capinera said. She stroked my hair gently, and Raincloud flopped down with her head in my lap with a concerned feeling. I petted her neck, and laughed softly at the recursion.
“Yeah. I…think I envy you for that. Sleep and I have never been great friends.”
“It doesn’t seem so.” She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “I think I’d have nightmares too.”
I sighed. “After the life you’ve lived? Almost certainly. Though mine are…worse than many, and this was a really bad one. In the lifetime top twenty for me, and considering the competition, that’s a lot more meaningful than it sounds.” I paused. “Oh, right. Sorry about your floor.”
“It’s concrete. Very easy to clean.” Capinera didn’t sound too concerned, and I realized suddenly that I had taken so long trying to shake the nightmare off that she’d already cleaned the worst of it up. She’d probably go back and actually scrub it later, but for now she just stayed where she was and stroked my hair.
I appreciated that. It was helping, really the whole experience was. It felt very normalizing, sitting there and listening to Saori snoring, feeling Raincloud’s contentment now that my distress wasn’t worrying her.
I’d only known any of these people for a few months. It was hard to remember that, sometimes. And in some ways it didn’t matter. This was already easily the healthiest, most closely-woven social network I’d ever had. That being a really low bar didn’t diminish the value this held for me. I rested my head against Capinera’s thigh for a little while, and drifted in thoughts of lost homes and sanctuaries and prices paid, memories of falling leaves and the sound of some bird whose name I didn’t know and whose song I hadn’t heard in fifteen years, in scents of blackberries and foxes and blood that smelled like love.
It wasn’t sleep. It wasn’t dreaming, not really. But it was better than my dreams ever really got, and that was worth a lot.
There was basically no chance that I was going to be doing anything about Ekaterina and Cormac tonight. It was already almost sunset, and Saori still hadn’t woken up. I was having a hard time focusing on much of anything, and my experiences felt distant, disjointed. I was, I thought, in part remembering the vividness of the Otherside and trying to find it here, and failing.
It troubled me that it had taken so little time for that to become a normal experience, that it threw me off balance to come back home. Though this had probably been an outlier, an extreme case. I was guessing not many people came back from their first time at a festival of the Sidhe Courts’ high nobility unchanged, no matter what world they were from.
For example, Saori was still out cold, though she’d woken up long enough to eat something and cuddle for a few minutes before falling asleep again. I wasn’t too worried about her. Really, she’d had at least as long a day as I did. That conversation about Shadowed Flame was clearly one that she’d been dreading for a while. She was drained as hell. I was exhausted and off-balance. I had to act soon, but it simply wasn’t possible right now.
Nothing happened to interrupt that recovery. No attacks, no explosions, no weather nymphs showing up to express Nephele’s displeasure. Nothing. I could almost convince myself that it wasn’t going to. I almost thought that maybe Kali hadn’t screwed me over as badly as I’d expected, and the brief imprisonment was the only immediate-future consequence. I didn’t actually believe those things, but as the hours ticked past, I could almost convince myself.
I tried to stay busy through the afternoon. I reviewed the notes I’d taken, brushed Raincloud, helped Capinera tidy up, looked at the estimated blueprint that Lily had put together. I thought I should probably feel nervous with what I was currently planning out, but the actual emotion wasn’t there. If anything, I felt eager.
Mostly just a giddy lunatic who gets off on the adrenaline rush, Gwydion had said. I wasn’t sure I liked the implications that held about where my life was headed. And I didn’t at all like that mostly. I had to admit, at least to myself, that some of the eagerness I was feeling wasn’t just a desire to be done with this, and it wasn’t just looking forward to the adrenaline. There was a significant portion that was darker, a desire for bloody vengeance.
I didn’t like waiting. It left me with too much time for thinking. I tried to stay busy through the afternoon, even spent a while helping Capinera with cleaning, but there was only so much to do. And then, as the afternoon was winding down towards evening, there was a sudden disruption in that busywork.
It was nothing dramatic. Just someone knocking on the front door. They weren’t even knocking in a particularly forceful or aggressive way. Just four calm, evenly spaced knocks, at a polite volume. Nothing dramatic at all, and certainly not enough to explain the sudden, intense trepidation when I heard them.
I glanced at Capinera, and she shook her head slightly. She didn’t know who this was, either. And I didn’t like that one bit, but I somehow doubted that this person was going to leave if we ignored them. It was better to get it over with.
So I walked over, opened the door, and damn near had a heart attack.
Our visitor did not look remarkable, not really. She was a Japanese girl, roughly average height, just thin enough it wasn’t clear whether she was slender or outright malnourished. She was slouching, and wearing jeans and a light hoodie that didn’t seem like enough for the weather. Her hands, and what I could see of her wrists and forearms, had bright, colorful tattoos.
I’d been expecting to recognize the person who was knocking. And in a sense I did. I ought to; I saw her every time I looked in the mirror. This person was mimicking me perfectly, to the point that I wasn’t sure even I could have picked out which was really me—with a single, glaring exception. Where my eyes were a leaf-green so vivid it was barely within human range, hers were far outside that range. They were mirrors, solid silver orbs casting a reflection as clear and distorted as the trick mirror in a carnival sideshow.
“Um,” I said, trying not to stare and failing. “Hi?”
She tilted her head to the side slightly. It was eerie, really; the gesture was very familiar to me, but only from the inside. I did that exact thing very often when I was curious or interested in something, but it didn’t seem like something most people did. Seeing it like this, seeing my appearance and mannerisms replicated so closely, was…surreal and unsettling.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice, at least, wasn’t quite identical. It was close; it had the same basic sound, the pitch and resonance. But at least to me, it also had a sort of overtone of breaking glass, much the same as Kali’s voice had held mad, frenzied laughter. “Kyoko, right?”
“Something like that.” I hadn’t stepped out from behind the wards. They wouldn’t do me any good, of course, not against someone who had a reserved seat in the VIP section of that party. Not against someone who sounded like Kali. But they were what I had.
“Would you be alright with going for a walk with me? I’d like to have a chat.” She didn’t sound threatening at all, sounded almost friendly. I had no idea whether that meant anything, though.
“Maybe,” I said. “It would depend what kind of chat you mean.”
“Just getting to know you, I suppose. You were in my chair. I’m curious why.”
I’d already been pretty much certain that was who I was talking to, but it was kind of her to remove any lingering hope that I was wrong. “You seem to have the advantage in that already, given you know who I am.”
“Oh, right. I didn’t introduce myself, did I, apologies. Nemesis, pleased to meet you, et cetera.”
My heart had already been sunk well into my abdomen, but now it felt like it was trying to tunnel into the floor. “I don’t suppose you mean nemesis with a lowercase ‛n’,” I said, not sounding hopeful in the slightest. “Or maybe just, like, my nemesis or something.”
“Afraid not.” She sounded genuinely apologetic about that, which was simultaneously weirdly sweet and extremely disturbing.
Nemesis. The Greek goddess of vengeance, of divine retribution, implacable and relentless. I was talking to the literal patron deity of revenge, and given she was explicitly not the goddess of justice, there was no guarantee that revenge was of the proportionate variety.
And I’d personally insulted her in front of both Courts of the Sidhe.
Apparently I’d been right earlier. Kali hadn’t fucked me over as badly as I’d expected. She’d done much worse than my expectations could possibly have extended to.
“Let me get my coat,” I said.
I didn’t bring any weapons. There didn’t seem to be much point. Nemesis was in much the same position, in that way, as Kali herself. If she decided to end me, I wouldn’t even have input on how she went about it, never mind trying to fight back. I was a featherweight. Nemesis was the kind of goddess who made other gods flinch when she said “Boo.” It was that simple.
In a way, it was very freeing. I couldn’t fuck this up for myself any more than I already had, really. There was an odd kind of peace in that.
But as we started walking, I still didn’t detect any particular hostility—and if she were also mimicking my nonverbal cues, which seemed likely, I definitely would have. She just seemed…curious.
“Gotta say, I was expecting this to be a lot messier,” I said, after we’d walked about a block and a half with no sound other than snow under two sets of the same footsteps. She matched my stride so closely I couldn’t confidently tell the sounds apart, and those sounds came at exactly the same time.
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “I dunno, just thought I’d be bleeding or something by now. I’m not complaining, just really confused by my life at this point.”
“You were expecting me to kill you?” Nemesis sounded curious again.
“Eh, hadn’t really thought it through that specifically. But in the past two days I’ve gotten myself in debt to Kali, made a deal with Gwydion, broke out of Nephele’s dungeon, and now I’m talking to you.” I shrugged again. “I’ve gotten enough bad life choices in lately that I was guessing one of them would have caught up to me.”
“I suppose that’s a fair assessment,” Nemesis said. We walked for a while in silence again before she added, “I’m not, by the way. No particular expectation that I’ll kill you today.”
“That’s a bit of a relief,” I said. I hadn’t missed how limited that statement was, but it beat the hell out of nothing.
“It would seem to be a bit premature as a reaction. You caused me no harm.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I think that a lot of deities, if insulted by someone as trivial as me, would kill them whether there was actual harm or not.”
She shrugged. It was exactly the way I shrugged—loose shoulders, a small movement, hands tucked into the front pocket of her hoodie. This reflection was perfect to the point of being eerie, and not getting less so. “I’m not a lot of deities.”
“Getting that impression,” I said quietly. “Sorry about my initial reaction, was just a little spooked.”
“And you’re apologizing for that?”
“When I think about it, I was assessing you based on reputation rather than how you actually behaved. That seems unfair to me, upon review.”
“Interesting. Well, apology accepted, then. And that’s a good policy, in general, by the way. Much of the time, the reputation of powerful beings has been intentionally constructed, and it can be deceptive.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. I’ll keep it in mind.”
“A good plan,” Nemesis said. We fell silent again, and two sets of the same footsteps were the only noise. We didn’t seem to be walking to anywhere in particular, just wandering around the warehouses and alleys that made up this neighborhood, all of them empty today. I did pay attention to that, though; I’d learned that lesson rather clearly last night, even if the consequence might not be quite as terrifying as it had initially seemed.
“I didn’t mean to, by the way,” I said, as that occurred to me. “Take your seat, I mean. I didn’t even know that’s what was going on; Kali led me to the table and I didn’t realize where I was.”
I could hear a sort of fond, exasperated smile in Nemesis’s voice now. Weirdly, I was starting to be grateful for her mimicry. I knew that tone enough from my own voice when discussing Saori’s antics to recognize it clearly, even through the breaking-glass tones that hid behind her words. “That sounds like her.”
“She plays tricks on people often?”
Nemesis was quiet for long enough that I wasn’t sure she would reply. “Not tricks,” she said eventually, her tone thoughtful now. “Kali’s not prone to those at all. Lessons, maybe, is the word I would use. She cultivates people. She can occasionally be mischievous, but only occasionally, and her actions always have purpose.”
“Huh.” I thought about that, and I had the feeling I was going to continue thinking about it for a while. There was…a lot to unpack in that comment.
She gave me time to process it. It felt weirdly peaceful. I was walking around with the patron deity of bloody vengeance, who hadn’t even fully committed to not killing me today, and it felt tranquil somehow.
“Mind if I ask a question?” I said after a a while in silence.
She shrugged. “I might not answer, but you may ask.”
“Why do people keep acting like I’m important? People keep treating me like I’m somehow significant. You and Kali taking the time to talk to me, Gwydion acting like knowing how I think is valuable, Lord Cerdinen and Silas Fleischmann both going out of their way to offer me gratitude for minor things. I don’t understand it. I don’t feel like I’m significant enough to matter to people like you.”
Nemesis sighed, and I knew that sigh, too. It was the one I made when I felt sad, exhausted, and some kind of poignancy I recognized but couldn’t name, all at once. “I don’t entirely know, to be honest. I didn’t even know about you until last night. And some of what I do know I can’t share.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Kinda figured it’d be something like that.”
“It does seem to be the way of things,” she agreed. “And I can at least tell you that those great powers probably aren’t concerned with who you are, so much as with who you might become. You have…unusual potential for growth.”
I blinked. “What?”
She shrugged. “Just that. I don’t have any details I can give you.”
This was starting to actively freak me out, though I tried not to let it show. Gwydion had said almost the same thing, that my relationship to plants was out of bounds, against the rules to tell me about. What the fuck kind of rules were there about me that would restrict even beings like them? And why?
Potential for growth. I was going to have even more questions to follow up than I already did, and my to-do list was getting uncomfortably long.
“I have to go, sadly,” Nemesis said, and she did sound genuinely sad about that, at least a little bit, at least when heard in my own voice. “I have things to do. Just wanted to meet you first. Have a nice day.”
Before I could respond, she was gone. It was almost the same stunt Kali had pulled the first time we talked, though Nemesis was at least less jarring about it. Where Kali had simply been gone with no sense of transition at all, Nemesis walked around a corner and vanished. The footprints stopped mid-stride, and I couldn’t smell any magic from her departure, couldn’t see any trace of her. I hadn’t, I realized, been getting any of her emotional tones tinting energy flows.
I hadn’t noticed her aura, either. I had a suspicion this was because she had been mirroring that too, and I was so accustomed to my own aura I tuned it out completely.
The reflective element felt…interesting. It didn’t seem specific to me. I got the impression Nemesis did this habitually, particularly given that eyes like mirrors seemed to be kinda her thing. Something felt significant about that, though I couldn’t fit it into words at all.
I sighed, and started walking back to the Blackbird.
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