Chapter Three

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The laceration in my shoulder was, as I’d expected, fairly minor. It was noticeable, sure, but it wasn’t a serious impairment. And while I didn’t heal as quickly as a werewolf, I was still significantly better than human baseline. I was guessing it would only be a few days before it was completely healed, at most. I didn’t even bother bandaging it, just washed it in the shower and put a clean shirt over it. Infection wasn’t a huge risk for me. Like poisons, infectious diseases seemed to have little effect on me for some reason. I did not get colds, hadn’t had one since I was a teenager.

It took time, though, and energy. By the time I was done, I was feeling tired. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep yet, though, and ended up at my computer instead. Raincloud came and curled around my feet almost immediately, and she was absolutely capable of sleeping. I could feel her dreams flickering in the back of my head, half-formed presences much more pleasant than mine usually were. Even the tree spirit cohabiting with her seemed to be asleep, or something like it. I wasn’t entirely clear on how that worked, but he did seem to go dormant most of the time when she was asleep, and that was definitely the case now.

I spent a while working on a logo design I’d agreed to do for some Australian guy who owned a ranching supply store. He’d had a hard time finding someone to do that work, and now that I was halfway through the project, I could understand why. I wasn’t making much progress, but I was too worked up to sleep still, and too distracted and tired to do much of anything well. It was something to do with my hands while I calmed myself down more than anything.

Eventually, I gave up and closed out of the program. It hadn’t helped much; I still felt antsy, on edge. I looked for something else to distract myself with, and saw that Pepper was online. Talking with her was probably a better distraction anyway. She was usually…very good at drawing my attention.

EmeraldKeychain: You’re up early.

The response was immediate. thepeppermintcondition: couldn’t sleep. you’e up late

EmeraldKeychain: Ditto. Been a really long day. Tired. I like the name, by the way, you’re getting better at them.

thepeppermintcondition: thankts, i was feeling existential. and yeah ai can relate to that

I thought about what I’d just done to leave me feeling so drained and anxious, and had to fight to keep the giggling from waking Raincloud. EmeraldKeychain: For your sake, I really and truly hope you can’t.

thepeppermintcondition: you know key sometimes you say these theings and i can’t quite tell whpether you’re baeing a drama queen oryou really are this liek. spooky serial killer cannibal girl just hannibaling it up on here. alo;s either way i assure you i can relate because i have been awake since thurestday morning and i am tired beyond words.

I winced. It was Saturday, or, well, tipping over into Sunday by now. She was sitting at around seventy-two hours without sleep. I knew from experience how brutal that was. EmeraldKeychain: I have to maintain the air of mystery somehow. And that explains the typos. Why haven’t you slept?

thepeppermintcondition: a few things. got the usual, you know hos;w it is. insomnia, back hurts like hell, etc. but also parents hasdfve been worsae then usual; laately.they uasually only treat *me* like shit, so it’s kinda fun to hearwe them screaming ateach other too. notg reaat for my sleep schasduel though.

I winced again. Pepper’s parents were…a special kind of terrible. I really didn’t even know how to capture the extent of it in words. My understanding was that her mother once threatened to kill her for not falling asleep quickly enough. She’d needed medical care more than once because of her father’s tendency to lose his temper while drunk. Her relatives made mine look good by comparison, and that was not something I had cause to say often.

EmeraldKeychain: I hate those people. Like. When they die, I’m having a party on your behalf. There will be cake. Just so you know.

thepeppermintcondition: thank you but also pie > cake you we;irdo. on which note i had to call off today, really no t functional enosugh for a kitchen, so i’ve got time. chess?

I hesitated. I thought I should probably try to sleep some. I mean, I had at least two people to meet today, and given that someone had literally tried to kill me a few hours ago, it would probably be smart for me to rest. I did not want to be dull from lack of sleep right now.

But Pepper clearly needed some support at the moment. And she was a friend. She deserved so much better than the life she had, and while I couldn’t do much for her, having someone to talk to when her life was this awful was…better than nothing.

Fuck it. I had practice at functioning without sleep, and an ungodly amount of caffeine on hand. EmeraldKeychain: Sure, sounds like fun.

---

I sucked at chess. Oh, I knew how to play, the rules and the basics of strategy. But I didn’t play very well at the best of times. The kinds of spatial mapping, prediction, and alertness the game required were not easy for me. I did a little better in person, because I could get a better sense of my opponent’s headspace and plans, and I could play without relying so much on logical analysis. That kind of intuitive play still didn’t do great, but it was at least erratic, swinging between extremes of unexpected insight and profoundly dumb choices. Online my play was consistent, but it was consistently mediocre.

Pepper, on the other hand, was quite good at chess. Ordinarily she kicked my ass any day, and we played with the understanding that she was taking it easy on me to be sporting and it was still mostly a thing we did because my flailing was funny to watch.

Currently, though, she was running on fumes after spending three days awake. That entire time had been spent at either a job she hated, or in a house which she desperately wanted to leave but didn’t have a way to escape from. So while I was fairly sure she couldn’t relate to the specific event that had left me feeling so drained, she was absolutely exhausted, and extremely stressed. As a result the matches were actually relatively even this time, a comedy of errors that was kind of spectacular.

peppercorndog: you do realize you just left your rook opean, right?

EmeraldKeychain: Probably! Also and incidentally, remember what I said about you getting better at coming up with handles? Yeah I take that back so much.

peppercorndog: lov3ey you too key. how’s the acid fuzzbath doing?

I wasn’t entirely sure why Pepper had started using nicknames related to acid for Raincloud. It was something about how she behaved like she was high, and then concatenating her name with acid rain. It didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I’d checked with Raincloud and she thought it was hilarious, so I just kinda rolled with it.

EmeraldKeychain: Currently asleep on my feet. I think she’s dreaming about playing fetch, she keeps pawing the air occasionally. I could also feel the rough shape of the dreams directly through that mental bond, but I was hardly going to mention that part.

peppercorndog: lucky bitch. why can’t i ever get dre ams about playing fetch? that’d be great. but noooo, my subnconscious just deicide s to give me sureealist nightmares about squid instead.

I made the very conscious decision not to ask. I had enough nightmares of my own without adding Pepper’s, and honestly, I did not want to know what her subconscious came up with on the theme of squid. For once, I was smart enough not to ask anyway.

EmeraldKeychain: Yeah kinda same vibe here. Last night mine was something about being strangled by an eel. No clue why. The hell do you think you’re doing with that knight?

peppercorndog: key if you think that i’m thinking abi;ut what i’m doingt right now, you have fundamnentally failed to undersand the situation. god i’m tired. they’re supposed to be leaving in a few hours, hopefully i can sleep some then.

EmeraldKeychain: Here’s hoping. Did something set them off, or are they just being themselves?

peppercorndog: holidays. holidays are always worshe. and then also his cousin got laid off, so now he’s freaking out worrie d that he will be too, so he takes it out on everyone else. c’est la vie.

EmeraldKeychain: What the hell does that have to do with anything? They don’t even work in the same field, right?

peppercorndog: girl i stopped trying to make these people mak esense years aog. you can’t find rational thinking where it do;jesn’t exist, and it’s not worht the headache to try.

I sighed. Yeah, she was probably right about that. EmeraldKeychain: Yeah, I know. I guess I still have this impulse to try and understand people like them. Like if I can just figure out what’s going on in their head I can get through to them. You’d think I’d know better by now, but c’est la vie.

peppercorndog: so it goes. when logic tries to argue with neuroticism, it’s usually the sane part that breaki;s first. brians do be weird that way. mate in five.

EmeraldKeychain: Pepper. You just moved your queen right in front of a bishop. Also, I *do* still have a degree in neuroscience, I have a pretty good idea how weird brains are.

peppercorndog: …welp. not my brightest move. also i always forget about that for some reason. i guess you don’t really writet he way i expec;t academicsfd to, aside from the bit where you proofread and grammar check in causual chats.

I smiled a little bit at that at that comment. EmeraldKeychain: Like I said, I have to maintain the mystique. A proper mysterious demeanor doesn’t just develop itself, you know. And anyway I wouldn’t call myself an academic. It’s been quite some time since I was involved in that world.

peppercorndog: you do a great jobn on it 10/10 would be perplexed by again. how old are you, anyway? i’ve never gotten clea ron that.

EmeraldKeychain: Old enough I could have died. Young enough I haven’t yet.

peppercorndog: see key that’s another of those things where i don’t know whether you’re being melodramatic or i should actually be really unsettled by what you just siad. well played, very impressed by the mystiqzue. god i feel twitchy thpis morning.

EmeraldKeychain: You’re at about the point where most people start hallucinating from sleep deprivation. Not terribly surprised. How long until you can lie down?

peppercorndog: honey i think we both know that neihter of us needs help from sleep dep to hallucinate. and about two hours i htink. they’re supposed to leave about then and i’m guessing there wil;l be anothe rscreaming match when they do, so not worth trying yets.

I winced. EmeraldKeychain: Ugh. Yeah probably not. Looks like I’m probably skipping sleep for tonight, and I don’t have anything actually planned until late morning. So I can keep you company for a while longer. Another game?

peppercorndog: sure, sounds good. and thanks. like, seriously, thank you. i am not sure you understand how much this means to me. i mean, i think probably sitting and playing chess with someone online isn’t something that most people would see as a big deal. but things are really bad for me right now. and this is helping a lot.

I smiled a little bit when I read that, though I was guessing it mostly looked sad. Raincloud twitched and made a soft sound in her sleep, and I took a moment to pet her before responding. EmeraldKeychain: Sometimes it’s the smallest things. I remember back in high school, when my life was really hellish, some employee at a convenience store asked if I was okay. I almost broke down crying because I’d been really fucked up for a while, to the point I was considering suicide pretty seriously, and it felt like this total stranger was the only person who’d noticed anything wrong. I still remember that guy. So yeah I get what you mean.

peppercorndog: yeah. guess you might. i can’t really talk about this stuff with anyone else. not and have them understand at all. so, yeah, thank you. also did you seriously just do that with your rook wtf girl sometimes i worry about you be;ause that is the ;ikind of play i would expect someone to make after a traumatic brain injury.

I laughed. Raincloud stirred again at the noise, just enough to nestle in against me more closely. EmeraldKeychain: The health of my brain is extremely suspect, but I don’t think it’s gotten worse. The concussion was rough, but not acute brain damage rough. So I’m probably fine.

peppercorndog: that’ss good. how’s foxface doing?

EmeraldKeychain: Pretty decent. She’s most of the way to recovered now, enough that she’s out bullying the local street gangs. The wreck did not do much to discourage her. I’d presented the injuries Saori and I had picked up a few months ago as the product of a car wreck. I didn’t love that, but I hadn’t wanted to keep my injuries a secret from Pepper either. And the kinds of damage that we’d had was all consistent with that narrative; blunt force trauma was much the same, whether the momentum slamming you into a wall was coming from a vehicle or a spell.

Pepper also didn’t know Saori’s name, and certainly didn’t know she was a kitsune. But I’d presented her as having a fox-themed nickname, and Pepper had just taken it from there on her own. It was…simpler that way. It meant that if I slipped and referred to something related to that, it would be easy to pass it off as a joke or a bit of poor phrasing. I didn’t love having to think that way, either, but it was so much better than the alternative.

peppercorndog: good. and good she’s in shape for, ah, extracurricular activities. cause girl you realtly needed that.

EmeraldKeychain: Preaching to the choir. She’s planning to come over again tomorrow. Today. Whatever, you know what I mean.

peppercorndog: as oppposed to what, coming under?

I sighed. If those two ever actually talked to each other, they’d get along great, though I was a bit nervous about the prospect of actually introducing them. I was quite sure they’d get on like a house on fire, but with Saori involved there was a very real chance that wouldn’t be just an idiom. EmeraldKeychain: Yes, well done, you’re very clever.

peppercorndog: thank you, thank you. also;p thank fuck because i can finally hear them getting ready to leave.

EmeraldKeychain: Isn’t it still, like, four in the morning there?

peppercorndog: just after five, so close enough. they’re taking a road trip to visit her family, which in a true chrissmas miracle meands i get the house ;to myself for a week. idk why they deiceides to leave this early something about traffice but i’m so much not complaining. i’m going to go get ready for bed again. seriously, thank s. also good luck with that terrible exhaustion which mustn’t be related upon.

EmeraldKeychain: Anytime. Though preferably not this time specifically if you can help it, because mornings are awful. I should try to rest for at least a couple hours I guess.

peppercorndog: good lurk. give the acid bath a hug for me. gnight.

I smiled a little, and thought for a moment before grabbing my phone. I wrote out two quick texts, one to Saori to let her know that I’d been attacked, was okay, and would be at Softened Dreams tomorrow; and one to Alice asking whether I could drop by tomorrow and have her look at something.

That done, I scooped Raincloud up, gave her a hug, and went to lie down. My sleep, if you could even call it that, was fitful, restless, and full of bloody laughter. There was, perhaps inevitably, a squid involved.

---

Alice was free for a while, she’d said, starting a little before noon. That was kind of awkward timing for me, not allowing a lot of time to rest and likely to run over into when I’d said I’d meet Derek. I wasn’t complaining, though. For her to have availability at all on such short notice was quite generous on her part. More to the point, she was a very useful person to know, and I hardly wanted to get on her bad side.

It wasn’t snowing today, but it was if anything colder than last night. I was just as glad for that. It meant I could wear a longer coat without it looking odd, and that meant I could conceal weapons much more readily. Sure, I had access to Thorn regardless, and that helped a lot. But…there were reasons swords were no longer the favored weapon of the mortal world. I had pepper spray and a few useful little trinkets on hand, today. I’d also managed to fit my shotgun under that coat, which was probably illegal, but given the shotgun itself was definitely illegal it didn’t really matter much.

Even with everything bundled under the coat, I was nervous. I didn’t usually carry weapons, for a variety of reasons, and I felt irrationally afraid that at any moment someone would call me out on it.

But no one did. People on the street walked past without noticing me much at all. The rideshare driver balked at Raincloud, but a few twenties were enough to persuade him. He didn’t comment on anything else. As it started to sink in that I was getting away with this, the anxiety faded out into an odd sense of power. I had so many ways to kill these people, and none of them even knew it. There was a strange, almost elated feeling in that.

Alice lived in a very ordinary house in Homewood. Or, well, an ordinary house for the area. It was a bad part of town, deeply impoverished after generations of societal neglect. There were a lot of buildings that were abandoned around there, boarded up or falling in on themselves, many with notices up saying the building had been condemned. As a result, the fact that Alice’s windows had bars and were boarded over anyway didn’t make the building stand out much. The front yard was barren dirt under the snow. She…wasn’t really big on aesthetics in general. At a glance, her house looked as abandoned as its neighbors.

But walking up to it, I could feel the power in the building. Alice maintained some pretty serious wards on her house. They weren’t, like, world class or anything, but she’d discussed their theory and design with me a bit, and they were plenty scary enough. My understanding was that while the first layer just reflected kinetic energy back at the source when someone tried to break through, if you tried too hard it started setting off landmines. Not literally, but close enough.

I was always very courteous when I was in the wizard’s home. I didn’t expect her to do anything to me; we’d been on fairly good terms since we met a few months ago. But being in her house, where she’d had plenty of time to prepare things and I was surrounded by those wards, felt a little bit like sitting in a room knowing the person chatting with you had a loaded gun. You might be friends. You might not expect them to shoot you. But you’re very aware that they could.

On which note, I dropped my own just inside the door, after she’d lowered the wards and waved me in. Carrying a weapon into someone’s home was…kind of the exact opposite of courteous, really.

“So what’s up?” Alice asked, leading me into the building. She was moving slowly; my understanding was that her left hip and knee had been badly enough damaged in September that she was expecting to have a limp for the rest of her life. She looked like a normal human otherwise, a woman a little bit too young for the iron-grey streaks in her hair, dressed in a simple T-shirt and sweatpants. I could feel the magic hanging around her like a shimmering cloud, though, and it was strong enough to give the lie to that impression of normalcy immediately.

“Mm. Lot of things, but in particular I was hoping you could look at something for me,” I said. “A sword. It’s extremely magic, but I am…not qualified to say much more than that. And I’d like to know.”

She glanced back at me, and her eyes were dark and knowing for the split second before I looked away. “This is the sword from that tree.”

“Yeah. It is.” I didn’t see much point in trying to hide that.

“You haven’t asked me before this. Why now?”

I shrugged. “The last few times we talked, I was mostly working out how to get Raincloud to happen. She’s doing well, by the way.” At the moment, she was curled up next to my shotgun by the door for a nap. She had very little interest in this conversation. Raincloud had a surprising degree of interest in magical theory, and routinely sat in on my remedial lessons lately, but this specific topic didn’t seem to catch her interest. “That seemed more of an immediate need. And then I still need to get enough groundwork that jumping straight to this seemed…premature.”

“But now you want to know?” Alice pulled open a trapdoor, an actual trapdoor, and started down the ladder to her lab. I felt kind of bad for her; managing that with her leg had to be hell.

“Yeah, kinda need to now. I…had to draw it again. And I have questions.” I didn’t say why I’d needed to use Thorn, and she didn’t ask. There…really weren’t many plausible answers.

I wasn’t exactly being dishonest. Raincloud’s odd symbiotic relationship with the tree spirit had taken a fair amount of work to set up. And the rest of my study time had been decidedly of the remedial nature. I was moderately well-informed about the supernatural world, and I could perceive and identify magical signatures and lingering energies better than just about anybody. But I’d never learned much about the theory or practice of magic, how it actually worked and how it was used. The parts I did know a lot about were esoteric, scattered between topics more or less at random.

There was another element to it, though. I was scared to learn what Thorn actually was, what it could do, what I’d done when I pulled it out of that tree. I’d been putting off asking questions like this as a result.

“I see. Did you bring it with you?”

“Not on me. But it seems to kinda…show up on its own, especially if I want it. I don’t know how, that’s one of the things I wanted to ask about.”

“Well then. I have an hour or so. Let’s take a look.”

I sighed, and started down the ladder after her.

I’d never been in a wizard’s laboratory or workshop space before meeting Alice. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from it, either. It just wasn’t something I’d ever really considered much. But it definitely wasn’t what I’d gotten.

Her lab was a disaster area. It was pretty large, but every inch of it was cluttered with various supplies, tools, and half-finished projects. She had some really strange stuff in there, too. I’d gotten in the habit of leaving most of it very carefully alone. There were stories about what happened to people who wandered around a wizard’s workshop carelessly. And granted those wizards had been quite a bit stronger than Alice, but it still just seemed…unwise to risk it. I didn’t even look too closely at most of what she had in there, let alone touch it.

She went to a relatively open workbench, moved a Bunsen burner and a vice out of the way, and turned towards me expectantly.

With some reluctance, I closed my eyes and focused. This part I had experimented with a little, since it didn’t require actually drawing the sword. Thorn was generally content to be left on its own for anywhere from eight to twelve hours. After that point it was liable to randomly, inexplicably show up wherever I was. It didn’t seem to matter in the slightest how far away I was, or where I’d left the sword. It could find its way out of a locked safe and show up on Saori’s dashboard three hundred miles away, as we’d learned in a particularly awkward way when we went to a concert in Philadelphia last month.

I couldn’t really keep it away. But there was a certain kind of want, of focused and intentional desire, that seemed to bring it to me immediately. I couldn’t have really described the feeling; it wasn’t quite the same as asking for it, or thinking about it, or even just wanting it to show up. It was a much more focused feeling than that, more intentional.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw Thorn on the floor under one of the workbenches. I picked it up and handed it to Alice without a word.

She drew it from the sheath, slowly, and set it on the table. Then she grabbed one of the stools and sat down to look at it.

It took a while. It took long enough that the feeling of Thorn’s magic, blood and flowers and shadowed flame, shivers down my spine and giddy laughter just above the threshold of hearing, was starting to make my eyes ache. I sat down after a few minutes and started looking at pictures on my phone while she examined the sword. Occasionally she muttered to herself; I didn’t try to make out the words.

Finally, Alice put down the loupe and slid Thorn back into its sheath, looking a little strained. I let out a sigh of relief as that overwhelming aura of power faded away. She turned towards me and said, quite simply, “God damn.”

I put my phone away. “That bad, huh?”

She shrugged. “That something. Okay. To preface this, I am not remotely competent to actually analyze this thing. I’m pretty good at this, but I know my limits, and that sword is well outside of them. So keep that in mind.”

“Noted. So it’s better than what you make?”

Alice just stared at me. “It’s better than anything I’ve ever seen. By at least two orders of magnitude, maybe more. I can’t even tell how many workings it’s imbued with; I can identify at least six, and make guesses at what they do, but there are probably others. The structure is very, very intricate; the same piece of geometry might be a part of three different workings, with a different function in each. I can’t make many confident statements, and you aren’t going to like the ones I can.”

I winced. “Oh. Well. Might as well get started then.”

The wizard nodded. “So to get the obvious out of the way, there are at least two enchantments making it structurally stronger. They’re both fairly standard, but far more powerful than I would normally expect. I would be shocked if you found a way to break that sword. It will never dull, and it will never stain. Its structure is preserved too well for that.”

I nodded. “Yeah, kinda figured. It seems to cut through steel without any real issue, so…yeah.”

“Right. Those are the obvious ones. The next is different, much more abstract, and if you’d asked me an hour ago I would have said it was impossible. You said it keeps showing up near you? I’m guessing it’s actually teleporting.”

I waited for Alice to continue. She didn’t, just looked at me like what she’d said was deeply significant. After a few moments of that, I prompted, “And that’s important?”

“Yeah, it uh. It definitely is. Look, true teleportation is…virtually impossible.” Alice was looking at Thorn now, in much the same way she might look at a venomous snake, or possibly an armed landmine. “There are tons of ways to fake it. Tricks with Otherside portals, manipulations of space, arbitrarily fast movement…but actual teleportation, directly moving from one point to another, is almost impossible. There are only a handful of beings that can do it, and essentially all of them are gods. At a human power level…there are standing prizes and awards for anyone that can figure it out.”

I was staring at the sword too, now. “But Thorn does it all the time.”

“Of course it has a name,” Alice sighed. “And yes. It does. I think that structure is also contributing to its sharpness. When it cuts something, it’s also manipulating space in some way to make it do more damage. Which is also impossible, by the way. I guess nobody told it that.”

“I didn’t pick the name,” I said, in a distinctly sour tone. “Great. So that’s three, right?”

“Yeah. Fourth is some emotional thing. That’s far outside my skillset, so I can’t really tell what it does beyond that. Fifth is another that’s hard to explain. Short version, it cuts magic too. Not sure how it works exactly, but I can definitely feel it pulling minor workings apart, and fast. With how powerful this thing is, it’d probably take a hell of a strong piece of magic to stop it.”

I was starting to see why people would start wars over a sword like this. “So it’s basically indestructible. It can’t be lost, stolen, or disarmed. And it’ll cut through pretty much anything, up to and including magic.”

“Yeah. And there’s at least one more structure that I can just barely spot. I can’t quite tell what it does, it’s very abstract and I don’t know how it works. My best guess is that it’s to do with healing. It might cause health problems just to be around it, for all I know.”

There was a long silence after that. Finally, I said, “Well then. You ever get the feeling that you’re in hot water so far over your head that you’re about to pass the eggs someone’s boiling?”

“I do not,” Alice said. “That’s a great analogy, though, and I’m definitely stealing it in case I need it later.”

“Thanks, that means a lot to me. Okay. I should probably get going. Thanks again, sorry about the short notice. How much do I owe you?” I pulled out a scrap of paper to write it down.

“Thirteen ounces of pigeon blood collected at night. A bottle of moonlight collected without light pollution. I’ll give you containers for those. Oh, and four ounces of cypress needles from within city limits.”

I nodded. This was another reason I hadn’t brought Thorn for her to look at before this. Alice seemed to like me, and she seemed to think she owed me from September for some reason. But there’s very little in this world that’s free, and an education was high on the list of things that wasn’t. She didn’t take payment in cash, either; she always asked for this kind of bizarre shopping list. She claimed it was to use these as reagents in her lab, or workshop or whatever this space was. Personally I was guessing more than half the time she was just fucking with me. For someone who specialized in analytical thought and careful works of magic, Alice was surprisingly mischievous.

“Great. Thanks for bringing the sword in, by the way. I’m glad I got the chance to examine it. Please don’t ever bring it back.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I sighed. “But I think we both know it’s not going to be that easy.”

I took the containers she gave me, and climbed back up the ladder to collect Raincloud, wincing a bit at the strain it put on my shoulder. I really needed to get better at dodging. I tucked the shotgun under my coat again, but I left Thorn in a bush right outside Alice’s door. It could find me, and it would be tricky to conceal it.

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