Chapter Two

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Maddie didn’t take us all the way home, and I didn’t ask her to. She had offered to drive because she was making the trip anyway. She lived pretty close to the Blackbird Cabaret, in the same largely-abandoned post-industrial ghost town of a neighborhood. I was pretty sure she was there for similar reasons, too; it was quiet, and defensible, and there were no neighbors to cause a fuss. She had a meeting in the middle of the night tonight at Mark’s, the bar that was one of the other major local social spaces for our crowd.

So, she drove us there and then dropped us off outside the bar. Her need to be early for that appointment was obsessive enough that trying to get her to take us the rest of the way would have been a waste of effort. And it was only a few blocks from Mark’s to my house, anyway. Comfortable walking distance, and both Raincloud and I could handle the cold just fine.

The snow was coming down more thickly now. It was a very dense, wet snow; I always noticed that here. Other places I’d been, I’d sometimes seen light, crystalline powder snow, the sort that had more air in it than ice. In Pittsburgh, though, the snow was always wet. We got a lot of slush in the winter, a lot of ice. Honestly, between that and how steep the hill I lived on was, it was entirely possible that Maddie couldn’t have driven us the rest of the way if she’d tried. There were a lot of cars that floundered in my neighborhood in the winter. They would try to start up that street, lose traction, and slide right back down.

Snow always had a sort of hushed, soft feeling to it, and it made the world feel like a very different place to me. In the urban night, where the flakes were dancing past the streetlights and the snow on the ground glittered with reflected, artificial light, it felt almost unreal.

As we walked, I felt contemplation coming from Raincloud. It wasn’t as clear without skin contact, but I could tell she was thinking about something, and then I got another actual question. It came in the form of a memory of Capinera discussing atonement, and another simple phrase. Why does she do this? That was always the question that caught her curiosity most sharply, a trait I suspected she was picking up from me. Raincloud didn’t have half as many questions about “what” and “how” as she did about “why”.

I sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know either, really. It’s not something I would do. The fixation on atonement seems like an unhealthy attachment to the past. It’s not like feeling guilty about the people she’s killed makes them less dead. Personally I tend to think that what you do tomorrow matters more than yesterday.” I was impressed by Capinera’s dedication, sure, but there was at least as much confusion in it as respect. My grasp on morality was tenuous at the best of times, and her approach to the topic felt particularly strange.

But I was used to that. Not understanding other people’s moral reasoning was a familiar feeling for me.

It was a quiet walk after that. I was lost in thoughts that I couldn’t turn into words, listening to the snow crunching under my feet. Raincloud was continuing to frolic. We turned and started up the hill, and the footing got worse, forcing me to actually pay attention to walking.

There was very little warning. I didn’t see the woman coming at all. I wasn’t sure whether that was the result of magical concealment or she was just good at hiding and I wasn’t paying enough attention. Regardless, by the time I realized she was stepping out of the alley beside me, she was right next to me and the sword was already in motion.

I twisted aside, more by luck than skill, and rather than take my head off, she just sliced into my shoulder. Dodging like that had put me off balance, though, and the ground was icy. The world felt suddenly like it was moving very, very slowly as I started to fall.

Somewhat frantically, I reached out and grabbed the cloak she was wearing. Some idle part of me noted that this was very surreal. Who wears a cloak and uses a sword in this day and age? The rest of me, though, was much more busy tugging and twisting. The motion was instant, reflexive; it had been a while since my judo classes, but muscle memory stuck around, and I’d practiced this sacrifice throw a lot back then.

She was probably pretty strong. But I had leverage, I was making her support my full body weight, and the footing was very poor. The end result was that I still fell, but so did she, and she was the one who went flying downhill.

I scrambled to my feet. Raincloud was starting to react now, and thank fuck she was smart enough for that reaction to be shying away from the woman rather than trying to attack. At some point in the process of getting upright again, my hand came down on Thorn’s hilt without me quite noticing it.

The sword was clingy, and it had a habit of showing up randomly in my presence. In the past this had mostly been funny, and on occasion distinctly inconvenient. Right about now, though, I was grateful as all hell for it.

I hadn’t drawn Thorn since that first night in the woods, when I had deliberately chosen to kill someone for the first time. I framed it mentally as a respect thing, not to treat the sword casually. To a degree that was true; drawing a blade like Thorn was not a small action. If I was being honest, though, it was probably more that the sword scared the hell out of me.

Regardless, I had never drawn it from its sheath, only from the tree it was housed in before I claimed it. But its grip fit into my hand perfectly. Undoing the restraining strap felt natural, the snap holding it closed working smoothly. It was a very modern sort of fastener, but then, Thorn was not an old relic, just a strong one. Around the time I was fully upright, it slipped out of its sheath, and I could swear the sound it made as it was drawn was a song.

The world stood still for a moment, just as it had when I last drew Thorn. Everything seemed to pause and hold its breath for just a second before resuming. Now that it was free of the sheath its magic felt overpowering, the scent of flowers and blood thick in the air, dark flames forming a sort of overlay on my vision. The woman in front of me finished getting to her feet as well, and she had her sword in hand.

I noted that I had been a little hypocritical a moment earlier. I’d thought she was silly for having a sword, but here I was holding one myself. They even looked sort of similar. They were both relatively short, both curved forward. It was hard to tell for sure in the dark, but I thought hers was bronze, and the metal had a strong resemblance to the amber inlay on Thorn.

We started to close on each other, moving slowly with how bad the footing was. She’d clearly been hoping to kill me on that first attack, and now that it had failed, she was much more cautious. I was bleeding from the cut on my shoulder, but it was on my off arm, and I could barely feel it. The euphoria and bloodlust surging up into me from Thorn was enough to make that pain feel…trivial. I realized I was grinning and I didn’t know why.

She lunged once we got close; I was guessing she was hoping to take me by surprise. It didn’t work out so great for her. The world still felt like it was moving in slow motion, and I was able to sidestep without losing my balance this time. The sword didn’t miss by much, but it did miss, and as it went past I swiped at it with Thorn. The inner curve of the blade, the side that was easier to cut with, caught her weapon near the hilt.

Any competent swordsman would tell you that parrying with the edge of your sword is stupid. It’s a technique for movies, for choreographed fights that are meant to be flashy. It’s foolish, it risks breaking your own weapon, and it’ll certainly dull the edge of the blade. If you have to parry with your sword, and you’d rather not, you want to use the flat of the blade.

Anyone could tell you that, and would. With any other sword, they might be right. Thorn, though, was…not like other swords. I didn’t really know what enchantments were laid on the blade, didn’t know how it worked. But I knew that the sword was more durable, and its edge sharper, than anything else I’d ever seen. And so, I didn’t so much parry the other woman’s weapon as just slice it in half. Thorn cut through it so easily it felt more like I was cutting wood than bronze, and not even a sturdy wood, at that.

Suddenly losing that much weight from her sword threw the attacker off balance. She stumbled back a step, trying to adjust to having been suddenly disarmed. Without even thinking, moving on muscle memory and instinct, I followed, and turned the momentum as I descended the hill into a thrust.

Metal put up only a token resistance to Thorn’s edge. Flesh and bone didn’t manage even that much, and the claw-like profile of the blade was well-suited to an overhand thrust. Before she could adjust to what had already happened, the woman was left looking down at the sword that had pierced through her just beside her sternum. Her mouth formed a soft “oh”, more surprise than pain. And then she fell.

I let go of the grip, and Thorn fell with the body. She was already dead, and there was already enough blood in the snow to have me a bit freaked out. The sword’s power was still an intense, almost painful presence in the world, but the euphoria faded slightly once I let go of it, and the bloodlust settled out into a sort of calm, sated feeling, a satisfaction.

The moment the fight was over, Raincloud was running over to me. I could feel her anxiety, her worry about the cut I’d taken. Now that the adrenaline rush was starting to fade, and I could feel it, I was a bit worried too. It wasn’t actually dangerous, I was sure of that, but it had gotten into muscle and I would have a hard time using that arm for a little while. I healed unnaturally well and quickly, but still, it was troubling.

I tried not to let that show, though. Raincloud didn’t need to carry my stress, too. I just knelt down and hugged her. “Shh,” I said. “It’s alright. I’m alright. Pretty sure it was just her, and she can’t hurt us now.”

She calmed down quickly, and I stood up. I felt a lot more tired than I had a few minutes ago. “Come on,” I said, turning away from the body. “Let’s go home.”

I left Thorn behind in the body. I wasn’t worried about it being stolen. As I had been assured, and as it had demonstrated, it would always find its way back to me.

---

We got home without further incident. I knew it was a bit silly, but I still felt a lot more relaxed once we were inside and the door was firmly locked. That feeling was largely an illusion, given that my house was hardly a fortress, but it was an illusion I needed.

Now that I was calming down a bit and able to think more clearly, I realized that I had a pretty significant problem on my hands. I’d killed people before, on two occasions, but both times I’d had some degree of organizational backing. And while I’d known, on some level, that it was inevitably going to happen again now that I had Thorn in my keeping, I’d been hoping it would take more than a few months before things escalated that far. Now that they had, I realized I hadn’t really done much to prepare for the aftermath.

There was a dead body in the street. It was well past midnight, and no one sane wanted to be out traveling in this weather, so I doubted it had been seen yet. But that couldn’t last. There was a lot of blood out there and it would absolutely show in the snow. I hadn’t gotten a ton of it on me, but there was some, if only because I was bleeding, too. Would someone be able to follow it straight to my door? I wasn’t sure.

I tried to think of what to do, and ended up grabbing my phone. My hands were surprisingly steady. Derek answered on the second ring; he usually stayed up late, which was why I’d called him rather than one of the other werewolves.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s Kyoko. Listen, I uh, I kinda need a favor. Some girl just jumped me with a sword a few blocks from my house.”

“Are you okay?” The concern in Derek’s voice was instant, and sort of touching. It was nice to know he cared.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said. “But I don’t really know what to do about the body. I’d really rather not talk to the cops about this. I don’t know if you guys, like, know a fixer or something, but it seemed worth a try.”

The pause felt like it stretched out too long, but it was probably just me, because he sounded pretty chill when he did answer. “Yeah. I know a guy. Send me the address and I can get him out there pretty quick, I think. Should be fine.”

I felt a palpable wave of relief at that. It had seemed like a relatively safe bet; for a variety of reasons, werewolf packs tended to have some degree of criminal connections. But still, it was a relief. “Thanks. I can pay you back later.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said dismissively. “It’s what friends are for. I have to go call him, but would you be okay with meeting up tomorrow? Kinda worried about you.”

“That should be fine. Coffee around lunchtime work?”

“Yeah, sounds good. Have a good night.”

“Thanks. Bye.”

I hung up, and tried not to think about how many kinds of disturbed I felt right now. I was moderately successful. It was easier once Raincloud came over and leaned against my legs. Her presence was calming, in a few ways. I could tell she was still worried about me, but that was fading away quickly now that we were home and she was sure the injury really was as mild as I’d said. Raincloud had a very immediate focus in some ways, good at releasing thoughts about the past or the future, and she let go of that anxiety quickly once the threat was past. I wasn’t sure how much of that was personality, how much was age, and how much was just that even a sapient dog was still a dog. But regardless, it was calming, grounding.

I was a little calmer now. But I still got my sawed-off shotgun from the basement before going up to my living area on the third floor. Upstairs, I found Thorn leaning against my desk, back in its sheath. It felt satisfied. I looked at it for a moment, and then I looked away, and went to wash off the blood.

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