Chapter Thirty-Three

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I still felt a little out of sorts the next day. The sunlight was too bright, the world felt simultaneously overstimulating and undersaturated, and I was an odd mixture of exhausted and restless that had more than a passing resemblance to mania. I’d gotten some sleep, and it hadn’t been troubled by nightmares for once, but I was still tired.

But I was, in several ways, out of time. It had to be tonight. So while I was feeling dissociated and strung out, I was still a little bit southeast of Homestead Cemetery.

I didn’t have an exact address; Toby had only been able to narrow it down to this neighborhood. I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. It would be, if I were planning a surgical strike or something. But for what I had in mind, it was plenty. I just went to the right general area and started wandering around.

Ekaterina’s crew was slipshod, but they weren’t idiots. I was sure they would find me. Because I wanted them to talk to me when they did rather than jump on me with swords (and because I couldn’t have talked them out of it and hadn’t tried), I wasn’t alone. With Saori on one side and Capinera on the other, I looked a hell of a lot less swordable than I would alone.

Especially today. We looked…well. Capinera’s armor was just a form-fitting suit of matte black metal, easy enough to wear without attracting notice. The rapier was less subtle, but she clearly had practice, and she managed to conceal it under a light coat well enough to work, especially here. This was not a neighborhood where people looked too closely at a group of strangers, especially a group that had this kind of attitude. You learn some lessons pretty quickly, living in a high-crime, low-income kind of neighborhood.

Saori’s armor was not subtle. But she was graceful enough to move without it being obvious, and she had a long coat thrown over it, so the only parts she couldn’t wear without being noticed were the helmet and gauntlets. She still looked dangerous, especially once you saw her eyes. They were dark, and full of fire, and I wasn’t sure whether anyone else could see the latter, but enough carried through into real perceptions to make her grin look particularly insane today.

The three of us were obvious. We were obviously ready for a fight, but not moving in a way that said we were looking for one. Raincloud was rather less threatening and had also insisted on coming, which I wasn’t as happy about, but this part of the day’s activities should be safe enough, and I couldn’t realistically protect her forever.

It took longer than I’d expected, almost half an hour. But eventually, they found us. There were at least eight visible, and I’d caught glimpses of another four, minimum, who weren’t part of the official greeting party.

Some might be human. If so, it was drowned out in a haze of other signatures, primarily the heavy musk I was pretty sure marked a satyr, and the thicker, wine-blood-amber laughter that I was entirely sure meant maenad.

One of the latter opened her mouth. I cut her off before she could actually say anything. “Hi!” I said brightly, grinning too wide. “I’m here to chat.”

She hesitated, clearly not having been ready for the conversation to open quite like this. “You want to talk?” she said after a moment. “Then talk.”

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “Not here to chat with you. I’m here to talk with Ekaterina, you mind showing us to her?”

She also hadn’t been expecting that. She had to know who I was, but this approach was just…odd enough that she wasn’t sure how to manage it. “Ekaterina isn’t taking visitors.”

My grin got a little wider, and it felt feral. “Oh, trust me,” I said. “She’ll want to talk to me.”

---

It took a few minutes. During that time, we stayed pretty much exactly where we were, surrounded by a ring of dangerous mythical creatures whose body language was uniformly and overtly hostile. None of us exhibited any particular anxiety about this fact.

Saori and Capinera were both accustomed to this kind of thing. I was less so, but honestly, after the week I’d had, it was hard to get worked up about it. Ekaterina herself would be lucky to make the top ten scariest people I’d talked with in that time. Her minions didn’t even register, and I was just too strung out to care that they still had a decided advantage in numbers and position if it came to a fight.

Eventually, the maenad who had greeted us came back. “Follow,” she said simply, in much the same tone as a woman who just bit into a lemon, or possibly a rotting onion. She turned and started walking without another word. We followed her, and the rest of her gang followed us.

Ekaterina was standing on the sidewalk less than two blocks away. She didn’t look thrilled about things, but she at least didn’t have the same open hostility as her minions. “Kyoko,” she said, watching me approach.

“Hi!” I said. “Truce while we chat? Call it duration of conversation and half an hour after?”

“Why not. I will initiate no violence against you and yours for that duration, nor instruct anyone else to do so, upon my honor.”

“Likewise sworn,” I said, as did Capinera and Saori, and a great deal of tension ran out of literally everyone present, all at once, which was kind of surreal to watch. We were still nothing like friends, but no one present was going to break that sworn agreement, and we all knew that with a confidence that left us practically tranquil by comparison.

“Come inside, and let’s chat,” Ekaterina said, and went into one of the abandoned buildings next to us. It looked like it had been a corner store once, but that was a long time ago.

Once we were inside, though, it was obvious that it wasn’t abandoned now. Signs of habitation were subtle enough not to be seen from the street, but people had been moving through here, and I could see a little fresh trash here and there. Ekaterina went to a door that looked like it led to a storeroom, and opened it to instead show a staircase leading down to a basement. It looked like a later addition to the building, perhaps having been installed after the store itself was already abandoned.

I didn’t like this. But Saori was already following Ekaterina down, and there was no way out but through. And, realistically speaking, this wasn’t a materially greater risk than we were already taking. We were surrounded, outnumbered, and on the maenads’ home ground. If they decided to attack us despite the parley agreement, we’d be dead in short order, regardless.

I went down the stairs, and emerged into a furnished basement larger and considerably nicer than the building above had been even when it was in active use. There were several rooms, couches, tables, the works. Hell, I was pretty sure I glimpsed a billiards table in one of the side rooms. Ekaterina went straight to another door, though, and showed us into what looked like some kind of office.

“So what are you doing here?” she asked as we went in. Ekaterina went to a chair on the far side of a wide desk, and two other people came in with her, the maenad who had spoken to us before and a tall, lean man whose magic I couldn’t get a clear sense of without a much closer examination than I was going to give it right now. One stood on either side of her, against the wall behind her.

“Well,” I said, claiming a simpler chair on our side of the desk. There were only two on this side, a problem Saori solved by sitting on my lap while Capinera closed the door. “I figure I’ll make a series of unexpectedly accurate guesses and then we’ll make a deal. Sound good?”

Ekaterina was amused. She didn’t show it very much; the surface level was still wary, dangerous, and unfriendly. But I could see the amusement in her posture, and the man behind her was actually smiling. “You’re welcome to try.”

“Cool!” I grinned. “So, point the first: You don’t actually care about me much. This mess isn’t about you being hostile to me at all. Point the second: Someone else in town has also been trying to kill me lately, and you do care about him. Point the third: You might want Thorn, but not half as much as you want Cormac Goldenblade dead. In fact, I’m willing to bet you’re only even after my blood right now because you really don’t want him getting the sword and the easiest way to keep that from happening is to take it yourself. All of which leads to offer the fourth: I will personally show you straight to his door and help you murder the bastard, and you’ll call off whatever vendetta you have against me. Sound good?”

Ekaterina looked at me for a few seconds. “You’re surprisingly well informed,” she said eventually.

I grinned a little wider. “I did tell you they would be unexpectedly accurate guesses,” I reminded her.

Ekaterina did smile now, thin and sharp, and inclined her head slightly, a fencer acknowledging a touch. Behind her, the other maenad was grinning, and the man on her other side was visibly restraining laughter. Saori wasn’t even trying, and I could feel her giggling on my lap. Raincloud was laughing even harder in my head, though externally she was curled around my feet with no evidence of attention to what was going on.

“Point,” Ekaterina said. “It does occur to me to ask why you’d be here, rather than making the same offer to him. Assuming your guesses are accurate, that is.”

I considered that for a moment. Eventually, I responded with, “Because you’ve been pretty honest with me, and pretty honorable in how you’ve gone about things. Cormac is a coward who doesn’t give a shit about killing a bunch of random civilians. And even without factoring in my opinion of that personally, it means I’d never actually trust him to keep his word. He’d follow the letter of the oath, but I’m certain he would find a way to weasel around it.” I shrugged. “I don’t have the power to confidently take on either one of you myself, never mind both. And if I have to play kingmaker between you two, I’ll take the person who’s honorable and has no direct stake in my death over the chickenshit asshole who wants power and doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process any day.”

Ekaterina’s smile was wider now, and sharper. Saori’s giggling was clearly audible at this point, and while Capinera was too reserved for that, I could tell she was deeply amused as well.

“Valid logic,” Ekaterina acknowledged. “And you have a very good understanding of Cormac for having never met the treacherous snake.” Her voice was practically dripping venom as she said this last, enough that I had to repress a shiver. Which was good, because that was absolutely the voice of someone who would make a point of dancing on Cormac’s grave for years after having killed him, and that meant this was probably going to work.

“Thanks. And, I mean, that’s admittedly also a factor.” I was grinning again. “I get the impression that Cormac Goldenblade is not the kind of guy who makes many friends. I mean, hell, even the name would be enough to make me want to punch him in the face. I have enough of a personal grievance to justify killing him, and I’m pretty sure that you aren’t the only person who will be glad I do.”

“Also true,” Ekaterina agreed. “And you said you know where he is?”

“Yup!” I agreed cheerfully. “Or, I mean, I know where the mansion is that his trigger man went after trying to kill me. And it’s wrapped in Sidhe warding spells, has multiple people using it. I’m reasonably confident that he’ll be there himself. He’s too much of a coward to come on the attack personally, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be at their headquarters, if only because he can’t trust his followers not to turn on him as soon as he’s not looking.”

“A very good understanding of him,” Ekaterina agreed. “And…hm. I think that’s a trade I can agree to. You help me kill me Cormac Goldenblade, and I’ll stop trying to kill you, and order my people to do the same.”

It was a very loosely worded agreement. I wasn’t too worried about that, though. I’d meant what I said about the two of them. Ekaterina wasn’t the type to weasel her way out of a promise. “Agreed,” I said.

“Are you ready to go now?” the maenad asked. The question didn’t surprise me. I’d seen enough of how this crew operated that I’d be an idiot to find “sudden, impulsive violence” a surprising decision.

And it wasn’t one I disagreed with, in this case. But I wasn’t ready. Not quite. “Tonight,” I said. “A little past sunset.”

My grin was not the widest or the most bloodthirsty in the room. But that spoke mostly to the quality of the competition.

---

The remainder of the day passed calmly enough. We spent a while with the maenads, who proved to be surprisingly good company now that they weren’t trying to kill me. And getting to see the looks on a group of satyrs’ faces when Raincloud robbed them blind in a game of liar’s dice really was priceless.

Ekaterina spent a while talking about mutual acquaintances with Saori. Capinera, to my surprise, ran the table at billiards as hard as Raincloud was dice, and seemed to enjoy it. I ended up having an animated conversation with a maenad, a human, and some guy I couldn’t identify about weapon maintenance, of all things. I wasn’t quite sure how that happened, but it was weirdly amusing to sit and swap tips for taking care of knives. I didn’t often meet people who were invested enough in that topic for a conversation to count as animated, but here we were.

It wasn’t exactly intentional, but it did occur to me at some point that we were doing a startlingly good job of networking here. I’d already been confident that Ekaterina and company weren’t going to cause us further problems, but it definitely didn’t hurt that all four of us managed to find some friends over the course of the day. And hell, it was fun.

I could tell that Ekaterina was getting more confused over the course of the day, though, as I did absolutely nothing that could be reasonably construed as preparation. I sharpened some knives, but nobody thought I needed them to be sharper, and we didn’t even leave their hideout. The maenad was clearly wondering why the hell I’d asked for this delay if I wasn’t going to do anything useful with it.

That just made the whole thing even funnier to me. I got to watch Ekaterina growing more and more perplexed as the hours ticked by without me doing anything materially useful at all. I enjoyed screwing with her like this, maybe more than I should. But given she recently managed a decent hit with a sword on me, I felt that a little mindfuckery on my part was fair play.

And then I got a text. I glanced at my phone, and grinned. “Finally,” I said. “Let’s go. I’ve got something to do on the way, but it won’t take long.”

I hadn’t really had much sense of time passing, given that we were in a basement. But as expected, it was just a tiny bit after the last traces of sunlight had faded when I got outside.

We were traveling separately, most of the way. This was in part because of trust, but mostly had to do with simple practicality. As funny as it would be to subject them to Saori’s driving, the car was cramped enough already. And besides, it was kind of nice. The four of us, enough caffeine to make most people sick, a surprisingly tender song in which the singer declared her willingness to kill for someone. Later Saori would probably put on something much louder and more aggressive, that was usually her routine before fights, but for the moment it was soft. Romantic, even. Of a dysfunctional kind, probably, but still, it was a nice evening, and my smile was entirely sincere.

---

I felt vulnerable and exposed walking into the cemetery, and not just because of the locale. Saori and Capinera were waiting a little ways away at the moment. It seemed polite; given that Silas had literally turned Lily in large part so she could act as a security consultant, I was fairly confident that she was on the hypervigilant side. Bringing someone else seemed like it might make her twitchy.

Instead, I got to almost jump out of my skin when the vampire just…appeared, right next to me. I wasn’t sure if she’d snuck up on me or was just that quick, but I hadn’t noticed her approaching, and looking over and seeing her was one hell of a jump scare.

Lily had the good grace not to comment on my reaction, though I got the distinct impression that she was amused. “Hello,” she said. “Bit of a dramatic meeting place, isn’t it?”

I shrugged and tried to get my breathing back under control. It was a work in progress. “It was nearby,” I said. “And I wanted to chat. ’Cause I’m going after the group I had you tail, a few nights ago. Got a fair number of people, and we’re on the way over to assault their headquarters. Given you’re the one who was actually there, I was hoping you would be willing to lead us to the building.”

Lily shrugged. “Don’t see why not. Do you want help with the actual attack?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. I did promise Silas I wouldn’t put you in any undue risk.”

She smiled, just a little. “I think the risk may be less than you think.” Her voice and smile both were still completely normal, and I wasn’t sure why she suddenly felt so carnivorous.

She was probably right. To some degree, I’d been thinking of her as relatively vulnerable. Maybe it was her age; her apparent age was that of a college student, and while I knew that was useless as a gauge, it might still be tripping me up mentally. And, I mean, from what she’d said she was about the same age I was, and relative to most supernatural figures of any real significance we might as well both be as young as we looked.

But she was still a vampire. And I didn’t know exactly what that meant, in terms of her combat capability. But odds were good that Lily was pretty scary when she wanted to be.

“We’ll see when we get there,” I said, rather than answer. “There are some other people involved who might have thoughts on the matter.”

Lily nodded, and followed me into the night.

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