Chapter Fourteen

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“So did you have any other secret plans to spring on me?” Saori asked once that was done.

“Eh, not really.” I paused. “Have I eaten recently?”

The kitsune glanced sidelong at me, which was nice, because sidelong was a fun word and I rarely had a reason to use it. “Do you not know?”

“I tend to lose track,” I admitted.

She rolled her eyes. “Let’s go with no, then. Wanna?”

“Probably a good idea, yeah.” I didn’t feel very hungry, but I really did tend to lose track and forget to eat. Even if I wasn’t hungry, I needed calories.

Calories in this case came from a sketchy 24/7 diner, the kind of place where the graveyard shift has seen so much bizarre shit in the middle of the night that practically nothing fazes them anymore. It was decent, though the cook went a little heavy on the pepper for my taste. I paid again, without asking, and left a generous tip, because people who work at that kind of place never get paid enough for the insanity they have to deal with.

“So how much money do you have, anyway?” Saori asked as we were leaving. She sounded more “curious about oddity” than “interested in value”, which suggested some things about her own perception of wealth.

I shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. Like I said, VNC manages the trust, and I have very little involvement with the actual funds. I have an account with enough in it to cover ordinary expenses, and my understanding is that the rest is mostly invested. They have good accountants, and the interest is enough that I’m unlikely to run out. If I want to access more of it for something, I have to call them to arrange that.”

“Sounds nice,” the kitsune said after a moment. “But also kinda creepy. Like…that’s not an organization I’d love having in that position.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And it’s also a bit…where did my mother get that much money? You know? Granted she was a raiju, and nonhumans sometimes do just have that kind of wealth on hand, but…why was she one of them? And why didn’t she tell me or my father about it before she died?”

I’d asked those questions so many times, over the past fourteen years. I never found an answer that I liked. The extremely unsettling nature of her death and the fact that she already had arrangements in place for that fund, set up so that I wouldn’t even know it existed until I was twenty-one, were just icing on an already disturbing cake.

“Your family sounds about as healthy as mine,” Saori said as we were getting back to her car. “And that is not a good thing.”

I laughed. “My condolences. So what do you want to do today?”

“What would you normally do?”

“Go home and dissociate,” I said dryly. “Maybe draw something. Not really an option right now.”

Saori laughed. “Right, point taken. Let me rephrase. Is there somewhere that you would generally recommend that someone new in town visit?”

I considered for a moment, then said, “How do you feel about coffeehouses?”

“You mean, like, coffee shops?”

“No, coffeehouses. The owner is very particular about that. No clue why, but she is.”

“And just like that you have my attention,” Saori said. “Which way?”

---

Softened Dreams was busier this time. It was morning, and even among my crowd, morning meant an elevated desire for coffee. A lot of the tables had people sitting at them alone or in small groups, conversing quietly, working on computers, writing in notebooks, generally doing the things one expects in a coffee establishment by any name.

Maddie wasn’t there, which was hardly surprising. She was at least as nocturnal as I was. I saw other people I recognized, though, among both the staff and the patrons. A few were acquaintances of one kind or another. At least one would be thrilled to put a knife in my neck if he got the chance, but he wouldn’t try, not here. Starting a fight in public was foolish. Starting a fight here, surrounded by dangerous people who valued this place’s peace and quiet, with Lacuna in the room watching you? That was outright suicidal.

I found an open table and sat down. Saori was looking around with obvious interest. “This is an interesting space,” she said. “I like the layout, lot of art up. Nice tables, too.”

“The owner, woman named Hope Robbins, uses it as an art gallery. In theory, at least; she doesn’t sell pieces very often, more of a collector than anything, I think. She’s actually here right now.” I gestured slightly towards a table at the far side of the room, away from the door, where Hope was sitting and reading a paperback novel.

“Huh,” Saori said. “Who’s the person standing next to her?”

I paused, trying to think of how to explain. “That’s Lacuna,” I said after a moment. “I…don’t know what Lacuna’s deal is. They’re always here, literally always I mean, this place is open twenty-four seven and they’re always here. They’re clearly very devoted to Hope, but beyond that I don’t know why they do this. They never talk, but they’re actually quite nice if you engage with them. But it’s a bit…Lacuna is why nobody starts fights here—which, incidentally, do not start a fight here.”

“Noted. What do they…do to people that try?” Saori was clearly deeply intrigued by this.

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “I don’t really know. Like I said, I don’t know what their deal is; they’re definitely not human, but I have no idea what they are, and I’m not asking. I think they kill people, but it’s hard to be sure. It’s definitely magic, it’s definitely very scary magic. I’ve never seen Lacuna have difficulty dealing with someone who causes problems. You start trouble, they show up, they give you one warning, and if you don’t listen they just…I think people are dead afterwards. But I don’t understand what happens to them well enough to be sure, and I don’t even know how to describe it.”

There was a pause while Saori absorbed this. “Okay,” the kitsune said after a moment, “I’ve got to ask. Is everything in this city just absolutely bizarre? Because I can work with that, but it’d be good to know.”

I chuckled at that. “Sometimes it fucking feels like it. Anyway, this is my main social venue. It’s quieter than other local hangouts, more relaxed.”

“Feels like it, yeah. Tranquil. I think I like it. Is the coffee any good?”

I shrugged. “Dunno, don’t drink coffee. They have good tea, though.”

“Cool, I’ll let you know.” Saori started to stand up.

“Oh, hey,” I said, as a thought occurred to me. “Do you want to meet anyone while you’re here?”

“Is there anyone here you’re friends with?”

I looked around the room, considering the question. There were certainly people in the crowd I recognized. Some I knew from seeing each other here, some I’d actually interacted with a bit; we were acquaintances, but I wasn’t sure I’d call any of them friends as such.

And then I spotted someone. It was not surprising that I hadn’t noticed her on my first glance around the coffeehouse; she was sitting alone at the smallest table in the room, tucked into a dark corner in the back. I grinned when I spotted her. “Yes, actually,” I said. “But it’d be better for me to check first. Melissa is…very skittish in some ways. If she does feel up to it, keep that in mind, she startles easily. And don’t try to touch her, not even a little bit.”

Saori nodded. “I can do that. I’ll go get coffee, then, and you can ask her.” She didn’t contest my suggestions at all, which was good; it meant there was a chance in hell they’d like each other. I always wanted my friends to get along well, but the simple reality was that sometimes people didn’t mesh well, and Saori’s usual behavior would…not be fun for Melissa.

I stood up and walked over to the corner where she was sitting. I made sure to approach slowly, and give her plenty of time to see me coming. “Hey there, honeybee,” I said once I was close enough to speak softly and still be heard. I made a point of using that endearment with her occasionally. Not long after we’d met I told her that was where the name Melissa came from, and she’d found it very touching. “Is it alright if I sit with you?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, because sometimes the answer was no. Melissa was in some ways my closest friend, and definitely the most emotionally intimate. But much like how I had to compensate for my neuroses, sometimes she simply wasn’t in a state to be social with anyone. There was a reason why even though she was very close, I spent less time talking with her than with Pepper.

We all had scars in this world. I knew a lot about Melissa’s. Her life had for years been hell on earth in ways that I didn’t like to even contemplate. I was there for the very end of that time, and even just that brief glimpse was enough to still feature in my nightmares occasionally, almost a decade later. I was very conscientious about Melissa’s issues.

Not today, though. When she saw me she smiled, and she nodded at my question. “That sounds nice,” she said. Both voice and smile were bright, cheerful, and showed no particular sign of any underlying distress.

I sat in the other chair at the table. “It’s been a little while,” I said, keeping my voice softer than I often did, softer than hers by a fair margin. “How have you been doing?”

She considered for a moment, then shrugged. “I think pretty well. How are you?”

“I’ve had an…interesting week,” I said. “Very eventful. I actually made a new friend who might enjoy meeting you, if you’d like.”

Melissa considered that for a moment as well, and then asked, “Do you think I’ll like them?”

“I don’t really know,” I said honestly. “I think it’s possible, though. She’s nice.”

“Okay then, sounds like fun.”

“Great,” I said, smiling. It was a small smile, subdued. I tried to keep most emotional displays pretty subdued around Melissa. “Let me go get her.”

Saori was loitering around the bar, holding a large cup of coffee. I could smell that it had some kind of alcohol in it, but it wasn’t overpowering. “So?” she asked as I got closer.

“She’s chill with it,” I said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

I wasn’t sure what Saori was expecting from my description. It probably wasn’t what she saw, though. Melissa was a very ordinary-looking girl, with skin the sort of bronze that could belong to any number of ethnicities, from various Mediterranean regions to American Indian to indigenous Hawaiian. She was casually dressed, black hoodie and jeans, and she had an easy, relaxed smile. The only odd thing about her appearance was a reddish shade to her eyes. I could pick up enough of her signature to get other details, a sound like desert winds, a taste in the back of my throat that burned like chilis and venom. But her physical appearance was totally ordinary.

“Melissa, this is the friend I mentioned,” I said softly as I pulled another chair over to the table. “Her name is Saori.”

Melissa smiled. “Hi,” she said, in a bright, coppery sort of voice, cheerful and casual, louder than mine by a fair margin. She did not look nor sound skittish in the slightest. “Nice to meet you.”

Saori glanced at me. I could practically see her asking what the hell I’d been warning her about. I didn’t say anything. Either she’d listen or she wouldn’t, and this was in some ways an important barometer. If she couldn’t act based on what I’d told her rather than the emotions Melissa was displaying, it was very unlikely that they would mesh well.

Ultimately, the kitsune rolled with it. “Nice to meet you, too,” she said, mimicking my softer tone, sitting down slowly. That was good; sudden movements could be pretty bad for Melissa, much like loud voices or touch. “Kyoko said that you’re a good friend, and I’m glad I could meet you today.”

Melissa smiled, laughed. “Kyoko is silly, but thank you. I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”

“Nope. I just moved to Pittsburgh recently, and I haven’t had the chance to meet many people yet.”

“And you already took the time to meet me? I’m flattered.”

“What can I say,” Saori said with a slight smile. “I have a weakness for charming girls who make my friends happy. A terrible character flaw, I know.”

Melissa laughed again. Saori sipped her spiked coffee and smiled. I relaxed a little. Yeah, these two were going to get along just fine.

---

We spent almost two hours hanging out with Melissa. Saori did an excellent job of keeping what I’d said in mind; she only started to raise her voice twice, and both times she caught it almost immediately. There were no sudden movements, no attempts to touch Melissa, though I could tell that the kitsune was only getting more perplexed as time went by and there continued to be no signs of anxiety or stress in the other girl.

Eventually, though, I noticed the indications of social anxiety and fatigue starting to show up in Melissa’s body language. It was nothing overt, no facial expressions or shift in her tone; just a slight tension in her spine, a slight shift in how she held her shoulders, the taste of venom in her aura sharpening a tiny bit. I only spotted it because I knew to look. Most people, definitely including Melissa herself, would never have guessed.

I stretched, slowly, and yawned. I really had not gotten enough sleep last night. “Alright, honeybee, think we need to get going,” I said. “Got some other errands to run. It was great to talk to you again, though.”

“Yeah, really glad I ran into you,” Melissa said. “Sorry it’s been so long. Rough month.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “Glad you’re feeling a bit better.”

“Mhmm! And great to meet you, Saori. Feel free to let me know if you want to chat again, Kyoko can give you my number.”

The kitsune finished her coffee and stood up, still moving pretty slowly. It wasn’t the first cup, and more than one had been alcoholic, but she didn’t show any indications of impairment from it that I could tell. “I’ll be sure and do that,” she said. “Thanks again for chatting with us, this was fun.”

I had to give Saori credit. She waited until we were out of the coffeehouse entirely and a short distance away before she, inevitably, asked, “Okay, so uh. What’s…going on there? ’Cause that is not someone I would describe as skittish.”

I considered for a moment how to answer. Normally, I would consider it rude to talk about someone else’s personal life and history like this. But Melissa and I had discussed the topic before, and she was fine with it. The comment about giving Saori her number, as well, was fairly clear in its implications. So it was more just a matter of how to convey a messy and complex story succinctly than anything.

“Melissa’s a scion,” I said eventually. It was a catchall term for pretty much anyone who was mostly human, but had a trace of some heritage that was strong enough to matter. “She’s about ten or twelve generations removed from Serket. Egyptian scorpion goddess, not sure whether you’re familiar.”

“I know the basics. Nothing too detailed. She’s not a lightweight, though, as I recall.”

“No. She’s a major deity, enough that even twelve generations removed, Melissa’s got some noticeable power in her. When she was about sixteen, before she’d ever displayed anything overtly, some witch did notice it, and decided he wanted to know what made a Serket scion tick.”

“Oh, shit.” Saori did not sound anything like happy now. Even if she didn’t know any context at all, I expected the venom in my tone would have said plenty about how this had gone.

“Yeah. She has power, but it hadn’t developed yet and she certainly did not know how to use it. It was trivial for him to kidnap her. He was a powerful human mage who specialized in mental effects, particularly the manipulation of emotion. He kept Melissa captive for the next four years.”

Saori looked like she felt a little ill. I really didn’t blame her for that. I’d seen some pretty fucked up things in my life. But that had been…special. There was a unique sort of violation in being forced to feel things that you didn’t want, that didn’t belong in the context you were in. It was bad enough when it was being done with something like psychotropic drugs.

With magic, though, it could get so much worse. Oh, it was possible to do emotional magic gently; I actually knew of a few therapists who used low-intensity workings routinely to help people. But applied maliciously? It afforded an enormous amount of control over someone, over the fine details of how they felt. And it let you push things well past the range of normal human emotions, into extremes that were not generally possible without supernatural influence. I’d felt that kind of thing a handful of times in my life, and found it to be one of the most profound violations I could imagine, an experience that was so disturbing it was hard to even begin to capture it in words.

Melissa had felt it every day for almost four years, while being kept as a sort of cross between a trophy and a laboratory rat, with all that each implied. I didn’t like to think about the things that happened to Melissa. I didn’t like to remember that I lived in a world where things like that even could happen to people.

“Please tell me you killed him,” Saori said after a moment.

“I didn’t personally kill him, no. But I watched while Audgrim did so. He is very much dead. My understanding is that Audgrim literally had the ashes mixed with salt and holy water before dumping them in the sewer.”

“Good.” Saori fit an impressive amount of contempt into that syllable.

“Agreed. It was…death is sincerely too good for some people. Anyway. I stuck around in her life afterwards. She…found it comforting. And I do genuinely enjoy her company, we’re pretty good friends now. She’s gotten a lot better over the past eight years. But you can’t go through that kind of thing without lasting consequences.”

“No. No, I don’t imagine you can. This is why you were saying to be cautious, I assume?”

I nodded. “Yeah. It’s…the thing is that Melissa spent years being subjected to extremes of emotion, completely unnatural feelings at extreme intensities. One of the consequences of that is a sort of severe alexithymia. She can’t recognize her own emotions much at all. They don’t register in a way that she can identify, not really; they don’t feel like what she learned emotions were. But they still affect her.”

“Ah,” Saori said. “Yeah. That explains some things. She doesn’t realize that she feels scared until it hits an extreme enough point that it resembles that supernatural emotion.”

“Exactly. And she’s had to deal with a lot of really intense cognitive dissonance, with externally imposed incongruent and inappropriate affect. So she has to actively work to remember what emotion a situation reasonably should prompt, she can barely recognize what it is triggering, and she doesn’t notice she’s being triggered and escalating until it goes supercritical, at which point you’ve got a scion with appreciable power suddenly going into a meltdown. Usually by that point the flashbacks are strong enough to resemble a psychotic episode, so she might also not know where she is or who she’s with.”

“Fuck. Poor girl. But also I only understood, like, half the words you just used.”

I laughed. “Sorry. One of my degrees was in cognitive neuroscience. I lapse into jargon sometimes. Honestly, one of the best indications that I’m upset about something is that I start using more formal language and technical terminology.”

Saori glanced at me. I recognize the look she was giving me; it was one I’d received a lot, both literally and metaphorically through the medium of the internet. People who knew me as an artist or as a supernatural oddity tended to have a very particular vibe when they were suddenly having to adjust that understanding to include “also she has a degree in cognitive neuroscience and another in computational biology”.

Most people did not then proceed to say, “Not gonna lie, kinda hot. You want to go spend time that could be used productively on irresponsible sexual hijinks?” But Saori was, as I’d very much figured out by now, not most people.

I was laughing pretty hard by this point. “When you put it like that, how can I refuse?” I said when I had enough breath back for it. “You good to drive?”

“Yeah, I process alcohol pretty quick. Also, are you really going to complain about danger when you’ve already seen how I drive sober?”

“No, but I like to at least know when I’m risking my life for dumb reasons.”

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