Chapter Three

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I didn’t have to ask where Maddie meant to get coffee. It was a given. There was only one place she could plausibly be thinking of.

In any city worth the name, there will be a place that acts as a social venue for the local supernatural community. In most cities of any real size, there will be several, catering to slightly different crowds. The exact form varies widely, but they all have a few qualities in common. They’re usually neutral ground, not particularly affiliated with any major group or faction. They generally have measures in place to enforce that neutrality and prevent fights. They are usually businesses of some kind that allows for easy socialization. Some actually prevent normal people from going there, but even if they don’t, ordinary humans rarely come in and rarely linger when they do. I wasn’t sure if this was because of some subconscious awareness of the magic in the place, or just a more ordinary feeling of wrongness, of a subculture that does not welcome them.

I knew of four in Pittsburgh. I actually lived just a few blocks from one, a bar in Southside. It was on a stretch of Carson with a very particular culture, one I liked. In the space of a few blocks, you could find a dozen bars, a mix of dive bars, biker bars that had signs up saying club colors were banned and fights were discouraged, and a couple of places that were very Irish. There were a like number of tattoo and piercing shops, and assorted shops selling odd and very specific merchandise. It had a counterculture feeling to it that I liked.

Mark’s was one of the places that did discourage ordinary humans, at least a bit. It had no advertising, not even a sign on the door, and no windows, having been built in the basement of an otherwise empty building. Not a place you would end up by accident, and vanilla humans rarely if ever did. Once inside, it was pretty much the same as any of its neighbors, at least on the surface.

It was in easy walking distance, but I rarely went there. Bars were usually too overstimulating for me. My primary social scene, then, was a coffeehouse and art gallery called Softened Dreams, a fair distance northeast. The rideshare was expensive, like always. I ignored it, like I mostly ignored the driver on the way. These things just…weren’t part of my world anymore, really. My funds were not unlimited or anything, I didn’t live an extravagant lifestyle. But my needs were provided for, as they had been for most of my adult life, and as I expected they would be for the remainder of that life barring seriously unforeseen circumstances. It left me out of touch, and I knew it, but what was I going to do, opt out?

The driver even tried to engage with me a couple times. I didn’t know how to respond, didn’t know how to interact with normal society anymore. There were so many topics, so many aspects of human life I couldn’t relate to. I was quiet, and he gave up, and it left me feeling if anything lonelier than before. It drove home how much I just…didn’t belong in the world around me.

It was a relief to arrive. That kind of loneliness was worse than spending days at home with no company except plants and a computer. There’s a sort of clean feeling about being lonely because I was alone. It hurt far more to be lonely in a crowd.

---

Maddie was early. She was always early, compulsively so. I showed up early to events of practical importance, because I knew otherwise I’d be running late, those were my options. Maddie was just…always early. She’d told me she tended to have panic attacks otherwise.

I didn’t ask why. She didn’t ask why I always used rideshares or taxis or just walked for miles if I had to rather than ride a bus. Someone learned pretty quickly, in our world, that there are some questions it’s better not to ask. We all knew that most of us had scars. It was a sort of unwritten rule of etiquette within this community that you didn’t dig into them. They didn’t want to talk about those scars, you probably didn’t want to know about them, and so you didn’t ask. Once you’d picked up a few of your own you were grateful when people returned the favor. Maybe if you’re close to someone, but even then, it’s best done…tactfully.

So I didn’t ask why, and she didn’t either. I just never showed up more than a couple minutes early to something involving her, and she offered to give me a ride if she knew it would be awkward for me otherwise. It was a courtesy of sorts.

As expected, she was there when I walked in. Maddie looked very average, very ordinary. She was a pale girl, average height and build, auburn hair, freckles, forgettable facial features. The only thing that made her easy to spot was the jewelry. She always wore a lot, silver with crystals that looked almost exactly like rubies. It all shimmered with magic, and she made it all herself.

I got tea first. The tangerine-infused sencha was better than most in this city, and I felt nostalgic. It was quiet right now, not a very busy time of day, and there were just a handful of people sitting at the various scattered tables. Three more sitting at the bar, a large construction of glass and steel which was as much an art piece as any of the paintings on the walls, putting back various kinds of alcohol with a sort of grim determination. The only employees in sight were two baristas, neither of whom I knew, and Lacuna.

Gathering places like this usually had measures to enforce neutrality and prevent fights from breaking out between people who might, ordinarily, want to kill each other on sight. At Softened Dreams, the measure in question was Lacuna. I did not understand Lacuna; they scared me a little, and I was far from alone. I liked them, considered them somewhat of a friend even, but I did not understand what they did when someone broke the rules of the coffeehouse, and that was unsettling to me.

Maddie saw me as soon as I walked in, of course. Even if she were not hypervigilant by nature, there weren’t that many people there and I was distinctive. She didn’t pause what she was doing, though, just kept sorting cards on the table. She didn’t look up when I sat down, either, though she was well aware of my presence. Maddie tended to be…very focused.

“Hey, how’s things?” I asked, looking for a place to set my tea. There weren’t many; she had most of the table covered. It looked like she was going through a full box of packs, from the latest Magic: the Gathering release.

“Not bad, been worse.” She finished sifting the current stack, opened another pack. “Trip up to New Jersey last week, the weather up there is horrible. You?”

“Not bad, been better,” I said. “Nothing special recently really.”

Was this a lie? I wasn’t entirely sure. Audgrim’s situation was certainly unusual, but to call it special seemed like a stretch. I had no stake in it, no emotional investment in the matter. My only interest was idle curiosity and a favor owed. It was odd, it was inexplicable, but I didn’t think it really counted as special, and regardless, it would have been rude to share his personal business with others.

Maddie nodded. “Yeah, I get that.” She probably did, too. She wasn’t new, she could recognize an evasive nonanswer, and guess at the reason.

But she didn’t push, and this time there was a very good chance it wasn’t politeness. She just didn’t care. Maddie had exceptionally clear boundaries between her personal and professional lives. She wasn’t here to investigate anything, and I was guessing the idea never even occurred to her. She just looked at the cards, sighed, and started sorting them. “Son of a bitch. I’ve had the worst luck with this set.”

I snickered. I played the game, but not nearly as seriously as Maddie. She…kinda did everything seriously, or rather, intensely. “What are you fishing for?”

“Sacrifice deck, currently. But we’ll see how things go this season.”

I nodded, and sipped tea. She sorted cards, and sipped coffee. We spent a while like that without saying anything. I knew that trying to interrupt her would just make her annoyed. And besides, it felt…good. It was a companionable kind of quiet. Her characteristic smell of blood went well with the tea, and the tuneless humming was a pleasant shade of dark crimson. Most of that probably wasn’t real as such; it was my brain weaving things into a synesthetic tangle. But my experience of it was real, and pleasant, so what did it really matter?

Eventually, she was done. Neatly stacked cards were sorted into separate bags, and went back into the box. A great many wrappers were collected and placed neatly in the trash. Maddie did most things neatly. Task finished, she finally looked at me directly. “So, you wanna hear something really weird?”

“Sure, hit me.”

“If you want, but I’ll tell you first.” She grinned. “Okay, so I get most of my tools from this wholesale supplier over in West End, right?”

“Right.” I vaguely knew of the place, some jeweler’s supply. Didn’t sell any actual jewelry, and rarely dealt with the public.

“I went there last week to get some stuff,” she said. “Brushes and sandpaper, a new engraving tool, stuff like that. Thing is, they didn’t have any. Someone came in and bought out their entire stock of most of it. Almost all the supplies for polishing and buffing, cleaning, engraving, anything like that.”

That one got me to blink. “The fuck does anyone need with that much?”

“I know, right? Nobody needs that many brushes,” Maddie said. “But it gets weirder. Yesterday, I went to a craft store up in Lawrenceville, ’cause I still needed things. And someone bought most of their stuff too. Engraving tools, wire, chain, pliers, semiprecious stones, all kinds of stuff. Bought their entire stock of almost everything except fabrics and beads.”

“That’s absurd,” I said. “You think it’s the same person?”

“Gotta be, right? I mean, how many people run around throwing that kind of money away on this stuff? But then, get this, I know the worker there. He’s the one who made the sale. Apparently this guy just came in and started grabbing whole spools of wire, handfuls of tools, didn’t even look at them. My friend figures it’s gotta be a prank or something, goes over to stop him. And the guy just stared at him, apparently pretty creepy, and then apologized and started pulling out cash. Lots and lots of cash.”

I stared at her for a few moments. I was trying to figure out how much that would cost. I wasn’t terribly familiar with these stores, but I could loosely guess at the cost. Buying both out of stock on this many things was…tens of thousands at least, an amount of money that even I could recognize as outlandish.

“He paid cash for it?”

“Yeah,” Maddie confirmed. “For the entire purchase. Nonsequential twenties, and they aren’t forged, they seem legit. Barely seemed to notice. Grabbed more stuff, added more cash, until eventually he had everything he wanted I guess. And the whole time he was apparently just…really weird about it. Didn’t really look at what he was grabbing, didn’t ask questions, you’d say something to him and there was always this pause while he just stared at you before responding. My friend said this guy seemed like the fucking Terminator, and he was pretty sure he was going to get shot or something, but nope. Paid cash, didn’t argue about the price, walked out.”

I just continued to stare for a while. I could see why she’d called this interesting, now. It wasn’t exactly worrisome, as such. The guy was creepy, but apparently hadn’t done anything actually threatening at all. The supplies were vastly excessive for any purpose I could readily imagine, but it wasn’t stuff that was readily harmful, either. But it was just…something you didn’t see very often.

Maddie just grinned at me and gave me a few moments to process this. She was clearly enjoying my reaction. I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the arcane by any stretch, but I’d been around the block enough to be a bit jaded. It wasn’t every day something got me all the way to baffled, but this managed it, and she was smug about that.

“Okay,” I said eventually. “You got me, this is interesting. Any idea what he’d do with that set of things?”

“Kinda? Not really though.” Maddie shrugged. “Most of it’s pretty general stuff. Anything involving cleaning or polishing metal could use some of the brushes and such. Anything related to engraving or carving. Honestly, the mix has so much random shit and redundancy, even without the volume, that I think he might genuinely not have been paying attention and just got the entire section.”

I shook my head. “Bizarre.”

She continued to grin at me as she stood up. “Right? Anyway, gotta go, picking up a package.”

“Thanks for sharing. See you around.” It was a bit abrupt, but that was par for the course with her.

“No problem. Oh, hey, one other thing,” she said, pausing. “You happen to know anything about arcane augmentation of horticulture?”

I stared at her blankly. “Eh?”

“Using magic to get plants to grow better,” she clarified.

“Oh,” I said. Right, she knew about that. “No, not as such. I don’t really…do anything for that. It just kinda happens. I don’t really know why.”

“Pity,” she said, scooping up her box. “Friend of mine has been asking, thought you might be able to help. Alright, well, see you around.”

She left after that. I sat, and finished my tea, and thought about blood and jewels and flowers. When I did leave, I felt a little less lonely than earlier this afternoon, and a lot more perplexed.

---

When I left Softened Dreams, I didn’t immediately go home. I spent a while wandering around, listening to minimalist music and thinking. The earbuds were starting to lose sound quality, I noticed. They never lasted long with me.

It was, I thought, possible that this weirdness wasn’t connected with Audgrim’s thing. I thought it was a pretty remote chance, though. Oh, they weren’t necessarily related in any deep way. I wasn’t one of those people who said they didn’t believe in coincidence. That kind of paranoia wasn’t my thing. Coincidences happened all the time. It was more just…

In any complex, highly interwoven system, even small changes have cascade effects. They really can’t not. Things don’t exist in isolation. There might be a few steps in between, but if you look hard enough some connection will exist, especially in a system this small. It’s pretty basic network theory, really, even if I didn’t cheat and cite a connection based on the fact that I knew about both.

So the question really wasn’t, was this connected in some way? It was much more, was the connection significant enough that I should tell Audgrim about it? And I wasn’t sure about that. The timing was certainly suggestive, but ultimately the events had nothing obvious in common beyond being weird. I didn’t know enough about the significance of either one to say whether this oddity mattered.

I hated not knowing things. Hated that feeling of confusion, of being lost and unable to tell what was going on around me. It grated on me to a degree that I was well aware was at best irrational and most likely outright pathological. It was why it was so easy to get my attention with bait like a phone call about bizarre criminal mischief, or an unexplained text message about something interesting. I knew that my fixation was irrational, knew that it had caused me to take some pretty stupid risks in the past, knew most of the causes for that reaction in fair detail. And yet, I still found myself falling for that bait every time.

I wandered aimlessly for a while like that. The weather was still nice, the sunlight wasn’t quite so glaringly bright now, and the lingering taste of the tea was pleasant. A soft voice crooned about prices paid for survival, and what will remain when the wolves take everything. I walked until the movement and the music calmed me down, and then went home.

I kept my earbuds in on the return trip, and switched the music to a much less minimalist EDM playlist. If the driver tried to engage me in conversation, I didn’t notice.

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