Chapter Twenty-Four

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A day and a half was an awkward interval of time. It was brief enough that I wasn’t doing much of substance before the party. While Lily had located the headquarters of the more dangerous threat facing me, she’d also gotten enough other information to make me very nervous about assaulting that headquarters. I knew that there were multiple people involved, and that they had the building fortified, and very little about their actual capabilities.

So, a direct assault was risky at best. And, furthermore, even if I pulled it off, there was a good chance I’d be injured in the process. I was well aware that either going to this party while injured and vulnerable or failing to go at all was risking things much worse than simple death. Even Saori had agreed that attacking now rather than waiting until after the party would be idiotic, and when Saori told you that an idea was reckless to the point of stupidity, you knew you were in the realm of genuine insanity.

But I didn’t have a lot else to do, either. I was so completely out of my depth when it came to this party that I really didn’t even know where to start. Hell, I barely remembered how to manage human high society at this point. Add in the fact that the only interactions I’d knowingly had with the fae were either with Capinera or one conversation with Lord Cerdinen, and the sheer degree of spooky that my invitation now represented, and I was so far into the range of ominous dread that it wrapped around to the far side and became macabre comedy.

But business and busyness had always been what I resorted to, when I had too much time and the time had too much room for thinking. So I did what few things I could, over the course of the day on Friday. Saori was there for parts of it, but she had her own preparations to make as well. I was well aware that the kitsune was…not really all that much better equipped for this than I was. She might have been to some Sidhe events in the past, but they’d been about as far from high society as it was possible to get.

She did not tell me what she needed to do before tomorrow night. I didn’t ask.

For my part, I got something resembling a nice outfit assembled, ate, and spent a while thinking about what I might want to accomplish at the party. At this point, I was mainly going for fear of what might happen if I didn’t, but this was still a potentially priceless opportunity. It was also a profoundly dangerous one, but it was the only game in town.

So, I pulled up the running list I kept going of shit I needed to look into, and copied some of the more relevant entries onto paper, since I was assuming electronics wouldn’t work in Nephele’s realm. I thought it was probably a good idea to have a list written out ahead of time, much like a grocery list and for much the same reasons.

Around noon, I got a text from Toby. It was, startlingly enough, good news. Narrowed it down to a three block radius or so. You’re looking just southeast of Homestead cemetery. Best I’m getting. Good hunting.

I was increasingly impressed by his work. That was just…much more than I’d been expecting to get, and not only because I was on a budget. For him to have gone from virtually no information to locating a headquarters in the space of a week was remarkable. And, I mean, granted I wasn’t actually sure yet whether the people he had been tracking were the same as had been hunting me, but it seemed pretty likely.

Time slid past. Raincloud spent a while chasing squirrels while I worked on my list. We weren’t in an actual park, this time; I’d learned my lesson about those, and at least for the time being had no intention of spending time in one. We’d just hopped a fence into one of the random patches of forest that dotted Pittsburgh’s urban landscape instead. Tucked into the brush under the trees, it would be very hard to find me, and I wasn’t sure where a sniper even could go to have a clear line of sight on this spot. It meant my ass was cold from sitting in the snow, but that was the cost of doing business.

This event was sufficiently classy that I was actually going to wear jewelry, something I did so rarely that I had to actually go to a jeweler to get it. As a result, Raincloud now had a ruby dangling from her collar, and it did, in fact, look good against her fur, very striking. She felt happy, carefree even. She was still aware of the gravity of the situation, and she was smart enough to be nervous about it, but she was much better than I was at letting that anxiety go while she was doing other things.

While she chased squirrels, the cypress spirit that shared space in her mind was planning with me. His intelligence was…slightly alien even to me, but he was quite intelligent, and he contributed some useful insights. My connection with him was clearer than with her, for all that he rarely said much; particularly without direct skin contact, I got more detail from him. From Raincloud I was currently getting little more than that generalized emotional impression, but with him I had actual language, abstract thought and complex planning. It was surreal, in a way; all three of us had this intimate connection, but there were still these very different conversations happening in parallel.

Around sundown, I finally gave up and admitted that I wasn’t going to be making any more progress. I hadn’t been for a while, if I was being honest, but it was better than sitting around waiting. Wasn’t like I had a whole hell of a lot else to do, anyway.

Eventually, though, I had to call it a wrap. If nothing else, I was aware that I did need to get some rest tonight. Sleep and I had never been on the best of terms, but even I wasn’t dumb enough to think pulling an all-nighter right now was anything resembling a good idea. And so, eventually, I gave up, put my notebook away, and stood up. “C’mon,” I called to Raincloud, out loud because why not. “Let’s get moving.”

She was at my side within a couple of seconds, with a feeling of affection that made me smile. We started walking through the trees. It felt…peaceful, here. The snow was undisturbed except for our footprints, and there were enough conifers that it smelled like pine. That always felt peaceful to me, for reasons I wasn’t totally clear on but which probably had a lot to do with my synesthesia.

We were going a different direction than we’d come from. I didn’t really expect that anyone would have tailed us here and then stopped outside the tree cover to wait for us to come back out, but then again, I also hadn’t expected a car bomb. I had to admit that the Sidhe assassin was at least making me better at seeing possible angles of attack. Ekaterina wasn’t, not really; that gang’s operations had been so direct that I only called them assassination attempts for lack of a better name. But the Sidhe was creative, sneaky, and doing a great job of turning my resting-state hypervigilance into active analysis of possible threats.

So, we were leaving a different side of the forest than we’d come from. It was a large enough copse of trees that it was unlikely someone watching our entrance point would also have a line of sight towards where we were going. Saori already knew and was planning to pick us up as soon as we hopped the fence on the other side. Keep moving, keep changing up my patterns. In principle, I should only have to do this for a short time longer. Which was good, because maintaining this strange balance between putting myself in position to get killed and making myself seem like a hard enough target that attacking a fortified position made sense was strangely stressful.

It didn’t help matters when I got a phone call shortly before we made it out of the woods. I answered without looking. “The hell do you want?” I asked, in a more surly tone than I usually used when I answered the phone, which was saying something.

“Hello to you too. Are you okay?” Caleb didn’t sound too bothered by that tone. Then again, he knew how much I disliked phone calls.

“Eh, more or less. Why?”

“Because your house burned down and I haven’t heard from you since,” he said dryly.

“Oh, right.” I had somehow almost forgotten that little detail in the chaos of the past week. “Yeah, I’m fine, didn’t get hurt or anything. I’m staying with a friend.”

“I’m still kinda worried about you, Kyoko. Can we please have an actual conversation?”

It was a bad idea. It was a really, really bad idea. I knew that. I was well aware that I was past the point where I needed to cut ties with Caleb. I had been past that point before things started blowing up around me. It had been bad enough when the only hazard involved was my nature being…difficult to reconcile with vanilla human life. Now that there were also serious, obvious safety issues?

This was a terrible idea. I knew it. I’d been intentionally neglecting that relationship hoping he’d eventually get frustrated with me and leave. Caleb being Caleb, that clearly wasn’t going to happen, which meant I had to take more active measures. But he’d been a very good friend at a time when I’d really needed that, and I didn’t have it in me to tell him we were done over the phone.

I became aware that the pause had gone on too long, and sighed. “Fuck. Uh. Yeah, sure. Tomorrow morning?”

“By which I assume you mean afternoon. Yes, that should be fine.”

“Great,” I said, in a voice that did not remotely sound like this was great. “Uh. Can you meet me somewhere public?” Which was a request that would immediately sound suspicious, but I wasn’t sure how to get around that.

He didn’t sound surprised, and didn’t hesitate. “Sure. Does the dining hall at the college work?”

Easy. Effective, too. Public, visible, but with enough room to have a private conversation. The public setting clearly was not enough to really guarantee safety right now, but this wasn’t a known location where it would make sense to have a bomb in place, and it did not have easy sight lines and accessible sniper’s nests. Hell, it was also elegant in how it conveyed the details; even if someone was listening in on this call, they wouldn’t necessarily know what he meant. He and I had established when we were both going to undergrad that his school was the college and mine the university, so it would be easier to distinguish the two in speech. Without that personal context, there were enough colleges in this city that it would be challenging to guess which he meant.

This was a good enough suggestion, and a fluid enough one, that it was almost unsettling in itself. It was so obviously safe that I immediately felt nervous about it. Which, I mean, as Saori had recently pointed out, that kind of thinking was extremely characteristic of psychotic paranoia, which wasn’t a mode of thought known for accurately assessing safety.

On the other hand, almost immediately after she said this we had been ambushed and then nearly blown up, so this observation wasn’t as comforting as it might have been.

“Fine,” I sighed. “See you then.”

---

Oakland was an odd neighborhood. Pittsburgh, in general, had a lot of individual character in its neighborhoods. Some cities feel monotonous, like the whole city was more or less homogeneous. Others are a patchwork made up of individual neighborhoods, districts, boroughs, and cultural enclaves, where one part of town might feel completely different than another, like you aren’t even in the same city. Pittsburgh was solidly in the latter category.

Oakland, specifically, was a neighborhood defined by academia. I went to Carnegie-Mellon University, a school famous for its engineering and computer science departments. Caleb had gone to the University of Pittsburgh, which was more generalized in its focus. It also had a forty story Gothic cathedral as the centerpiece of the campus, which made it pretty damn hard to forget that the university was there. They had an affiliated teaching hospital, which had grown into a large network of hospitals and insurance departments that ran medicine in this city with the ruthlessness of a Mafia protection racket. Toss in Carlow University and a few smaller schools and R&D groups, and you got a neighborhood that was entirely defined by academics.

I didn’t spend much time in Oakland anymore. I didn’t feel any great desire to revisit those memories. They were…in many ways the last moments of another life. I’d already begun peeling away from mortal society by that point; I had known at least the broad strokes of my heritage, had known that I would never truly belong among vanilla humans. But it wasn’t until after I had graduated that I had truly withdrawn from that world.

It felt weird being back here. Much the same, in a way, as how I’d felt the last time I went back to the house I’d lived in for so long. This place had been familiar once. It had been home. But that was a long time ago, and I had been a different person. I felt awkward and alien here now, out of place, like I was trying to fit myself into a shape I no longer knew how to make.

You can’t step in the same river twice. No matter how many times I rediscovered that truth, it always felt strange to be reminded that I had changed and couldn’t go back.

Saori was loitering somewhere nearby, as was Raincloud. It would be pretty damn awkward to have them with me for this, but Saori had wanted to be in the vicinity in case this became a conversation of the explosive variety. She hadn’t tried to talk me out of it, though, somewhat to my surprise.

I guess maybe Saori knew a bit about goodbyes, and how it felt to walk away from a life you couldn’t go back to. And it wasn’t as though the kitsune was averse to bad ideas or explosive conversations, anyway. She hadn’t objected at all.

There were a number of dining halls on Pitt’s campus, but only one that we’d ever spent time in together. I had no idea what the name of the building was, and was a little surprised I still knew how to find it. I paused at the door long enough to check on various weapons; I wasn’t carrying the shotgun simply because wearing a trench coat would make me look way too obviously like I didn’t belong here, but I had a pistol in a shoulder holster that felt awkward to move with. Hopefully the baggy hoodie was enough to cover for that. Thorn was available whether I was carrying it or not, but I also had a couple of knives, a plastic-fiberglass composite dagger in case I needed something nonmetallic and a bowie knife in my hoodie pocket in case I needed to cut something but didn’t need to be using a sword comparable to freaking Excalibur to do it. The pepper spray was easier to explain, and a canister of tear gas was, well. Probably by the time anyone searched me and figured out what that was, I would have bigger problems than whether I was legally allowed to own lachrymatory agents that strong.

I wanted to delay longer, but it wouldn’t help, and I was aware that I was on a timer. I was supposed to be doing stupid, possibly suicidal things in another world at sunset, and the days weren’t that long in winter this far north. So I sighed, confirmed that Raincloud was close enough to get at least a vague emotional impression from me, and then went inside.

The dining hall was set up in a pretty basic way. There was a large seating area, separate from the actual kitchen, which worked like a buffet. You had to pay to get into the latter, but the seating wasn’t restricted, and it wasn’t a particularly busy time of day. It was primarily oriented at students, but they didn’t actually stop other people from going in, and I looked like a college student anyway with how much I didn’t age. And I was pretty good at looking like I belonged; in my experience, if you walked into a room with full confidence that you belonged there, people usually wouldn’t be willing to challenge you.

So I walked in, completely ignored the actual dining part, and wandered around the open space looking for Caleb.

It took a minute for me to spot him. He had a small table tucked into the corner, well away from anyone else in the room. It was definitely him, too; I knew him pretty well, even if we hadn’t spent much time together recently.

I sighed and walked over. He waved at me when I got close, further removing any lingering ambiguity, and while there were plenty of beings capable of mimicking someone’s appearance, he was too clearly human for that; his aura was a faint shimmer, lacking any powerful magic at all. This did, in fact, appear to be Caleb wanting to have a conversation rather than another assassination attempt.

I wasn’t sure which I would have preferred. But this was the one I got, and there was no way out but through. I walked over and sat in the one other chair at the table, which put my back to the wall. I appreciated that; I was feeling twitchy enough as it was.

“Hi,” I said. I felt awkward, clumsy.

Caleb didn’t look too comfortable himself. He looked…tired. And he looked old; even by human standards, he looked older than his years right now.

In a way, he looked like he belonged here as much as I did. But anyone watching would assume that he was a professor meeting with a much younger student, not that we were peers. He was even dressed for it, wearing business casual and dress shoes rather than my hoodie and jeans. I hadn’t bothered with the cosmetics I usually used around him to try and mask how ageless my appearance was. There seemed little point, today.

“Hi.” There was a noticeable delay before his response, but his voice was steady when he did, casual in a way I couldn’t muster. “You doing okay?”

I shrugged. “More or less.”

Caleb just looked at me for a moment. “Kyoko,” he said eventually, in a gentle tone. “You are a terrible liar. What’s wrong?”

What wasn’t? But that answer wouldn’t help anything. “Things are just stressful lately,” I said instead, somewhat lamely. “Long week.”

“I imagine so, given that your house burned down. To the ground, from what I hear.”

“Pretty much. Yeah.”

“You said you have somewhere to stay, though?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, for the moment at least. I’ll figure something else out soon.”

“That’s good.” He sipped at a glass of water. He hadn’t gotten any food, either.

“Yeah. But it kinda…” I trailed off into another awkward pause. I wasn’t sure how to broach the actual topic I was here for. Which didn’t usually slow me down, but my usual approach of careening between topics without much transition didn’t seem right for this.

Caleb seemed content to wait, and so the silence just settled in and became oppressive. Eventually, I managed, “I probably won’t be coming around much going forward. Or, well, at all.”

“Why is that?” He didn’t sound surprised. Though I suppose that to be fair, I had been actively avoiding him for months now.

“Because continuing to talk to you would be a bad idea,” I sighed. “For all parties involved.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because bad things will happen,” I said simply. “I…fuck, this was a mistake. Sorry. Don’t call.” I stood up and started walking away, fully expecting to never come back.

I was brought up short after two steps when Caleb said, in a gentle tone, “Kyoko, I know you aren’t a human.”

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