Chapter Fifteen

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It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. Going back to my house at the moment was such an obviously stupid idea that even Saori couldn’t justify it. And that complicated things. I could have offered to pay for a hotel room, but my resources were not infinite. And the reality was that while Saori obviously did not care for her living arrangements, avoiding the topic was a temporary solution at best.

So I didn’t offer, and she didn’t ask. She was reluctant to invite me home, but she did. I agreed without comment. She put on some really surreal electronica on the way, a minimalist trance song with repetitive vocals discussing the value of checking one’s tie in the mirror.

I liked it. The sound was only okay, but the tactile synesthesia was fantastic, like having someone petting me while lightning was crawling through my fur. I was getting the impression that spending time with Saori was going to rapidly be increasing the strangeness of my music library.

We eventually arrived at a small house in Fox Chapel, in a quietly wealthy residential neighborhood, the kind of place where prosperity was a social weapon. The cars were mostly new and shiny; the lawns were ruthlessly well-maintained. It wasn’t about looking good, not here; it was about looking better-than, about outdoing the neighbors. This house looked no different than any of the rest. It also felt no different, no emotional resonance or energy signature to mark it as distinct from any other building. That part was more surprising to me.

But it was definitely her place. Saori unlocked the door and waved me in. “C’mon, the water’s fine,” she said.

I walked inside and found a building that was…the word “sterile” came forcefully to mind. It was anonymous, generic. This impression only became stronger as I wandered through the building. The floor was plain black carpet, the walls were almost violently white. The living room had one couch, which looked like it might be less comfortable to sit on than the floor next to it. The kitchen had one table with two black chairs, all in plain black metal, and a white tile floor.

There was no sign of identity here, no personality, no life. This was a house that had never been a home, and there was nothing about it that said anyone lived here at all. The walls were blank; the floor was empty. There was exactly enough furniture to get by, all of it lifeless. The place barely even smelled like her. Walking through it, I couldn’t recognize Saori in it at all.

“You weren’t kidding about having just gotten here, huh?” I said eventually.

Saori shrugged, looking a bit uncomfortable. “Yeah. It’s…I didn’t really have a lot with me when I came to the city. At all. It’s a long story.”

“You want to talk about it?”

The kitsune paused, and then said, “Not really. It’s…I was in a pretty bad situation, and didn’t have a lot of options. The people who got me out of it offered to set me up with a place afterwards. And, uh, I guess they have a pretty crap sense of humor.”

I was socially clumsy at times, but it wasn’t hard to read between those lines. Favors that significant were not generally freebies, especially when the person providing them knows you’re desperate. I rather doubted that her escape from whatever happened had come without a price.

I was curious, but I didn’t pry. Saori clearly didn’t want to talk about that, and pushing would be both invasive and unlikely to work. She’d tell me eventually if she wanted to. For the moment, I just grabbed her by the hand and dragged her into the bedroom. We drove thoughts of smoke and ashes far away for a time. Afterwards, she dozed in my embrace, and I laid awake, thinking about blood and storms and the prices we paid for sanctuary.

---

I was, in some ways, impressed. I got all the way to just past sunset before the next random phone call. I swallowed a bite of takeout spaghetti before answering. “What do you want?”

I was a bit surprised to hear Jack Tar responding. “You always answer the phone like that?” He sounded vaguely curious.

“Pretty much. Sometimes I’m less polite about it. How the hell do you even have this number?”

“Little bird told me,” he said. “Also told me you found a neat little piece of magic up on the hill, no?”

“Wasn’t me that found it,” I said, shrugging even though he couldn’t see it; like a lot of people, I had a tendency to gesture while talking on the phone. “But yes, I looked at it.”

“Right, whichever. The salient part is that the dvergr told me a bit about it. Fae work, no?”

“Sidhe, apparently, yeah. At least the structure is, hell if I know beyond that. Still about the same signature, so human caster with some backer. But using a Sidhe ritual design, yeah.”

“Yeah, that. Well, it’s kind of interesting to me,” he said. “’Cause there are next to no fae around here. You have some edge cases like the dvergar, but the ones that are affiliated with the Sidhe tend to leave the place alone. Too much iron here, and not just physically; they call this Steel City, for fuck’s sake. Metaphysical landscape’s not real friendly to that crowd.”

I hadn’t heard that, but it made sense. The dvergar might be…something like fae, but more in the sense of a political alliance based on common interests than a shared identity and nature. They shared few qualities beyond that. Dvergar were legendary blacksmiths and had some kind of power over metal. But the beings people thought of as faeries, in all their myriad types, hated iron the way werewolves hate silver, as something much worse than simple pain.

“Cool. Point being?”

I could almost hear Jack grinning. “Point being that it ain’t hard to narrow things down a bit, if they’re the ones doing this. There aren’t many at all who have holdings in the area and have enough power to back this kind of thing. I only know of four, in fact, and one I’m willing to vouch for as not the kind of asshole to be involved in this shit.”

I was starting to feel interested, despite myself. At some point, I realized, I’d started to actually care about this. I wasn’t sure when. It might have been when someone tried to stab me, but I thought it might also have happened before that, maybe when I’d felt the lingering terror and agony on Steven’s corpse. That, I thought, had been a moment not wholly dissimilar to the raid where I met Melissa. I had very little hero complex in me, but just…there are limits. Regardless of why, though, I didn’t feel dispassionate and uninvested anymore. I actually cared about this situation. I was not thrilled about this discovery.

“Okay, so you’ve got it down to three then,” I said. “Assuming, and it’s a big assumption, that the person we’re looking for is both Sidhe and local.”

“Well, that’s the part where it starts getting interesting,” Jack said. He was definitely grinning. “See, the fourth I know well enough that I went and asked her about it. She didn’t tell me much, but she did tell me not to get involved, in a way that says she knows about something. Said that people who fuck around with occasions such as this do not enjoy finding out.”

Saori snickered. I rolled my eyes a bit. “I doubt in that exact phrasing. But ‛occasions such as this’ is rather interesting, if that part was accurate.”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing. Implies both a known event and the significance of timing, and it screams that this is Sidhe business one way or another. So I asked around a bit more, and of those other three, one has entirely pulled out of the area, not sure if it’s temporary. Another is practically a hermit, barely ever leaves his home a little ways outside of town, and I don’t know much about him. And the last is presently refusing all visitors and messengers, which is not normal.”

“Huh.” I considered that. “No clue what that all suggests, but it’s certainly suggestive of some kind of significance.”

“Yeah, about where I’m at too.”

“Do you know what Court affiliations are involved?”

“Yeah,” Jack said, and now he sounded…less than thrilled. “The one who left is Sunlit, and the two who stayed are both fairly highly ranked nobles with Midnight.”

Saori and I both winced at that. The Midnight Court was currently the most common casual name applied to the Unseelie Court of the Sidhe. The Unseelie weren’t evil; ideas like “good” and “evil” were almost never a useful model with which to understand the Sidhe. I wasn’t even sure they were more dangerous than the Seelie. Either one was perfectly capable of things much worse than just killing you.

But the Unseelie were more predatory. They were more violent, more destructive, crueler on the whole. The names Midnight and Sunlit weren’t really descriptive of them in any fundamental way; they were metaphors, shorthand chosen because they were evocative and readily understood. But they were metaphors that had been chosen for a reason. Darkness wasn’t evil, and light wasn’t good; sometimes the shadows hid you from the monster, or the sunlight burned the flesh from your bones. But the night was secretive, threatening, and cold.

The Sunlit Sidhe had fled, and both of the Midnight had remained. I wasn’t thrilled about the implications, not even a little bit. It also did not escape me that the feelings I’d picked up about this sponsor—dark, decaying, quietly but unmistakably malicious—were things that mapped pretty well towards the Midnight Court.

“Okay. So what do you want me to do?”

“Nothing, actually. I don’t have anything really actionable yet. I just thought I’d keep you appraised of recent findings as a courtesy. Have a good night.”

I blinked at that, and before I could think of how to respond, the line went dead.

“As a courtesy,” I said. “Huh. Well then.”

“Is he not normally courteous?” Saori asked me.

“Sure isn’t that polite to Audgrim. Not sure beyond that.” I wasn’t sure what to make of Jack. He had a way of making me feel off-balance while talking to him, like I couldn’t quite get a grasp on him.

“You trust him?”

“Weirdly enough,” I said, “I think so? Kind of, at least. He’s got a decent reputation, and it’s…I got a good look at his magic a while ago. A clear impression of his signature. It felt very…vibrant, very alive. I’m sure he’s capable of turning me into mulch without real hesitation, you don’t get that kind of power by being gentle, but I don’t get much of a scheming, manipulative sort of vibe from him.” I shrugged. “Not really sure how to explain.”

“Eh, I think I get it,” Saori said. “I’ve known some people like that. Didn’t like some of them. Didn’t trust them an inch. But I understood them, maybe even respected them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, that seems pretty much accurate. I don’t trust Jack to be a good person, but I trust him to be the person he is.”

What did that say about me, I wondered? I had trusted Saori enough after maybe fifteen minutes of conversation to entrust my life to her driving skills and sincerity. I trusted Jack Tar in some ways on the basis of meeting him once and a brief phone call. I felt less trust for Audgrim, Derek, or Maddie than I did for either of these virtual strangers, and after Melissa and Caleb, they were the three closest friends I had in this city, a city I had lived in for the past fifteen years. I felt like that probably suggested things both about my relationship to trust and the people in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked what it said about either one.

I didn’t finish eating. I had no appetite after that call. We went to bed early, and while I fell asleep quickly, my dreams were nothing like soft.

---

The next morning came too early. The nightmares had been vague, formless things, darkness and fog and sourceless anxiety, terrible certainty that something awful was lurking just out of sight, disjointed images of knives and blood, laughter and screaming and howling wolves that sounded like thunder. I actually woke Saori up with it; I wasn’t thrashing too much, but it was enough, especially when there were also occasional bursts of electricity arcing off of me.

She looked concerned, when I woke up enough to process my surroundings. I was shaky. Not the worst nightmare I’d had, but that wasn’t saying much.

“You alright?” she asked me.

I wasn’t really up to language yet. I tended to get like that when stressed or overwhelmed; I still knew the words, still knew what I meant, but I couldn’t remember how to say them. Even pleasant emotions could do it, and sometimes it doesn’t take much, but nightmares were particularly reliable for shutting those functions down. I nodded, smiled a little, hugged her. She didn’t seem convinced, but she didn’t contradict me.

I went to the bathroom and ran cold water over my face until the lingering shreds of fog and dread had faded and I felt reasonably calm. When I got back out, Saori was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her phone. Apparently I had not managed to wreck it from the other side of the room. “Bad one?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Had worse. But yeah, not great.” My voice was still thin and hoarse, but at least I could talk now.

“Sucks. Anything I can do?”

“You want to go get something to eat? I could use some fresh air.”

“Sure,” she said. “Sounds good. Not like I have much here to cook with. Even if either of us were good at cooking.”

“Hey,” I protested. “I can cook.”

Saori just looked at me.

“Reasonably well,” I amended.

“Kyoko,” she said, not unkindly. “You routinely live on frozen burritos and energy drinks, and forget whether you’ve eaten in the past eight hours. I question your ability to assess this.”

I had to admit she had a point there.

---

Breakfast was good. Nothing of great significance was discussed over the meal, and by the time we finished I’d mostly shaken off the nightmare. We went to a park afterwards rather than back to her place, and having now been there, I could understand why. Even my house felt more lived in and more like a home than that, and I barely used half of it.

“So what do you figure we’re doing today?” Saori asked, sounding vaguely curious.

I shrugged, and watched someone walking a dog near the park bench we were sitting at. “Dunno. Seems pretty likely this is Sidhe business of one kind or another, and I’m not any kind of qualified to work with that. Never had much to do with them one way or the other. Seems like a dumb idea to go back to my place until this is resolved, and you already saw the only place I do social things, so not really sure what to suggest.”

“Fair.” She was quiet for a few moments. “I remember being much better at this. Company, I mean. It’s been a while.”

I laughed a bit. “Yeah, I feel that. But even if we wanted to go to my old kind of hangout, I don’t know the local gang bars enough to recommend one. And those I do know are all pretty close to my house, so…yeah.”

She nodded. “I’ll work on it. There’s got to be a good one in town, and I haven’t started a bar fight in ages.”

Because of course Saori started bar fights for fun. Hell, I was guessing she started riots for fun.

“Guess just killing time, then,” I said. “I’m kinda regretting not reading more mystery novels or something. Sitting and waiting for the actual investigators to find things for me to look at is kinda maddening.”

“Seriously. I hate waiting.”

“I’ve never been very good at it,” I agreed. “It’s…oddly tiring, I think. The unresolved anticipation becomes exhausting after a while. And it leaves me with too much free time to think about things. I start worrying, or worse, contemplating my life choices.”

Saori shuddered. “Ew, screw that noise. You want to set something on fire to pass time?”

“Are you actually an outright pyromaniac? I’m starting to wonder.”

“Probably!” the kitsune said cheerfully. “Also a kleptomaniac. And a nymphomaniac. Really, I’m just good at things that end in -maniac.”

“Okay, that’s fair. But not right now, I think. If nothing else I’d rather not commit arson where I live; it creates too many problems. We can take a road trip to Ohio for that.”

She looked at me oddly. “I can’t quite tell whether you’re serious.”

I just smiled. She tried for an expression of indignation for all of three seconds before it cracked and she broke down laughing.

---

This time, it was a text message rather than a call. I appreciated that, really. It was a pleasant change of pace, and I didn’t like phone calls much. A text was…tidier. This one came from the same number Jack had called me on. It read:

Investigation has found something about Steven. He has recently been a regular attendee at the Blackbird Cabaret. Circumstantial. The owner of the Cabaret has possible tie to MC. She will perform Adar Mân Y Mynydd tonight. Does not usually announce details of her performance in advance or sing in Welsh. Attend?

I read it. I read it again. It was…fascinating, in a way. Jack was an increasingly perplexing enigma to me. He was a powerful mage who could easily have wealth and privilege, but chose to live as a vagrant. He spoke in a very casual way with Audgrim, and he knew Audgrim’s mother’s name, used that name casually as well. But he was courteous to me, and spoke fluent Japanese for some reason. And now it turned out that by text he used full sentences, but in ways that were very terse, reminding me a bit of Andrew’s professionally detached tone yesterday. He knew Steven’s name off the top of his head, when he hadn’t even been there when we found the dead werewolf.

Saori was reading over my shoulder. “Okay,” she said. “I know it’s a small thing, but who the hell uses a circumflex in a text message?”

“Jack Tar, apparently,” I said. “For some reason. He’s…something.”

“No shit. What’s the Blackbird Cabaret?”

“Performing arts venue that opened not that long ago,” I said. “It’s the newest major social space for the supernatural in the city. Don’t know a ton about it. It has a reputation for hosting almost any kind of entertainment imaginable. Everything from concerts and dance performances to acrobats to stage magic. Also real magic, and at least once someone from a local piercing studio being suspended by hooks as part of some kind of neopagan ritual.”

Saori blinked at that. “Uh. ’Kay then. And the owner?”

I shrugged. “Again, don’t know much. Some girl who goes by Capinera and is apparently a very good singer. Consistent rumors saying she’s not fully human, but I don’t know anything confidently about her.”

“You’ve never heard her sing?”

“Nope. Never been to the Blackbird Cabaret at all.”

“Why not?” Saori sounded perplexed. “It seems like your kind of place.”

I sighed. “Looking like you’ll find out,” I said. I wondered if I actually sounded as tired as I thought, or it was just that I felt that way. Going back to the conversation with Jack, I typed out a quick I’ll be there. Time and address?

It was inconvenient that I’d started to actually care about this. They didn’t even have to persuade me to get me to be an idiot this time.
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