Chapter Twelve

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It was a nice time for a walk. It was morning, technically, and by the time we were done at the ritual site, the sun was starting to consider showing its face. But it hadn’t committed to the idea yet, and the predawn stillness hadn’t yet given way to the bustle of the early-morning commuter rush. We passed a few people, but this neighborhood wasn’t all that busy in general, and mostly we had the street to ourselves.

It was a nice time for a walk. I had enjoyable company, and the past few days really hadn’t been enough time for that to stop feeling novel and pleasant. I really wasn’t sure what Saori was to me, and we’d already more or less established that we weren’t applying a simple label to the relationship anyway.

But regardless of how the relationship was characterized, this was more time than I had spent engaging socially with someone, in person, in weeks, maybe months. The sex was nice, but even just having someone to talk to did a lot to pull me out of that agitated headspace. By the time we were about halfway back to my house, I was grinning and laughing quite sincerely.

“So how’d it go with the incense, anyway?” I asked, reminded by some comment about the flammability of the average housecat.

“With the what?”

“The bit you mentioned earlier, about lacing some monastery’s incense with drugs. How’d it go?” I was assuming that she hadn’t been kidding about that.

Saori laughed. “Right, that! Kinda disappointing, honestly. It was a nice idea, but I think I used the wrong drug or something. All it really did was give a few monks headaches, which, you know, still funny but not really what I was going for.”

“I probably have something better at home,” I said. “And if not I can definitely get it.”

“Wait, seriously?” She looked over at me with a distinctly hopeful sort of smile.

I snickered. “Saori, I have a literal room in my house for growing my collection of poisonous plants. Did you really think I don’t have any psychoactive houseplants?” I paused. “Well, I mean, a lot of the poisonous ones are psychoactive. Belladonna is practically the reference drug for deliriants, for example. But I also have some that aren’t likely to kill someone.”

She was grinning now. “Damn, nice. I am so glad I met you, seriously.”

I started to respond to that, and then paused. I could hear footsteps behind us. And while that was not, in and of itself, notable, there was something…odd about them. I couldn’t tell what, something about the cadence, perhaps, or a slight feeling of thrumming anticipation.

Nothing big. But I was, as I had told Audgrim a few days ago, a distrustful bitch, and my general attitude was that if I did something bizarre and insane, I was already so far into the eccentric range that it wouldn’t stand out much. So I didn’t even take the time to say anything, just pivoted to face towards the person.

Some guy in a hoodie and jeans. Nobody special, but he noticed me noticing him, and he went from a fairly normal pace to a much faster one, not running, but very purposeful. It was one of the less steep portions of the hill, and the sidewalk was good enough footing to allow for that pace.

By the time he got close enough for me to see the knife in the twilight, I was already moving. He didn’t expect that. He also clearly didn’t expect me to step towards him as he got close. He seemed slow now, and clumsy, though I knew a lot of this was just that my perceptions sharpened when this kind of thing happened. I was moving quicker, processing quicker. It felt like I had all the time in the world to watch and respond while he tried to adjust and stab me.

Humans, as I understood it, had this feeling too. People felt like things slowed down when adrenaline was running high. I just…took that a little further than humans did.

He went for a thrust, which was fairly reasonable. Not normally the best option, you had to hit a vital target for someone to bleed out quick enough to matter. Slashing was usually better with a short blade like that. But he had momentum, moving slightly downhill like this, and it was a good weapon for thrusting, a stiletto or similar. Reasonable enough, under the circumstances.

I could feel myself snarling as I stepped towards him, getting slightly out of his line of movement in the process. He had too much momentum to adjust quickly, and the blade went past about four inches from my ribcage. I grabbed his arm as it did. It was a pretty standard balance break drawn from aikido. I could feel the anxiety in his posture, yellow-orange and startled.

People sometimes had a tendency to think my inhuman nature was funny. And, to be fair, in some ways it was. When Saori had to leave her phone in the other room to be sure I wouldn’t fry it in my sleep, and she commented that it felt like she was a kid who had to turn in her electronics when it was bedtime, that was pretty funny. When I needed an antistatic mat at the computer so I didn’t break it when I got excited about a video game, that was hilarious.

I produced enough electrostatic discharge to ruin electronics because my self-control slipped a little. It was funny. But people sometimes let that amusement blind them, didn’t think through the implications. I did that by accident, but that did not mean that it only happened by accident. And in the folklore, raiju were not benign or gentle creatures. Not even a little bit.

I was guessing this guy didn’t think it was very funny when I grabbed him and hit him with enough electricity to send most of his muscles into involuntary, spastic convulsions. He probably also did not think it was very funny when, as his leg jerked unexpectedly and his momentum carried him forward, my other hand caught him in the solar plexus. As with the balance break, it drew on principles from martial arts, in this case mostly boxing. As with the balance break, and really most human martial arts, it had significant differences when used by someone who was not human.

I was not a particularly large woman. But that doesn’t matter much once the supernatural becomes involved, and raiju were not gentle creatures. I was stronger than I looked. I was a lot stronger than I looked. And a hook to the solar plexus was a nasty punch to begin with.

His feet came off the ground. At this point, my grip on his wrist was really the only anchor his body had. I broke his fall enough that he didn’t crack his skull on the sidewalk, but it was still a hard fall onto concrete.

Saori had that knife out again. I wasn’t surprised; it was a pretty fast reaction time, but from her driving I had already known she was outside human range for that. She didn’t need to do anything with it, though. There didn’t seem to be any other attackers, and this guy was…pretty thoroughly out of the fight. She was mostly looking at me.

I knew what she was seeing. Raiju are also not particularly human creatures. Most of them, as I understood it, could mimic human bodies, and I was only half-raiju anyway. But when I was actively drawing on that heritage, I looked like a mix of a wolf and a storm cloud. I didn’t go fully lupine like a werewolf; I was still bipedal, and I was recognizably myself. Same body shape, same vivid green eyes; the fur was the same black as my hair, and the lightning crawling through that fur was the exact same shade as my eyes.

No one would be intimidated by my normal appearance. I was just a Japanese girl in her late teens or early twenties, nothing special. But this? People tended to find this pretty fucking scary.

Saori said, “You’re hot when you’re messy,” and grinned at me. She hadn’t put her knife away, but she didn’t seem anxious at all.

“Thanks,” I said. My voice was odd, the enunciation strange because of the fangs and laced with crackling electricity. “You have any zip ties?”

“Why would I be carrying zip ties?”

“Why are you carrying a bag of dice?”

“Okay, that’s fair,” the kitsune admitted. “But no, I don’t.”

“Ugh. It’s not far, at least. Give me a second.” I closed my eyes, focusing, and pushed the storm back down. It was, really, a lot like the filters I maintained to limit the constant flood of sensory information. And like those filters, forcing the storm in my blood into the background again was both harder and less pleasant than letting it out in the first place. At least the transition was essentially instant and painless for me; I didn’t even feel my body changing, not at all. The werewolves had it way worse.

I staggered a little as the world went back to moving at a more ordinary pace and the lightning stopped crawling over me. I hadn’t done this in quite a while, hadn’t called on the beast and the storm inside of me. I just didn’t need to very often. Not in recent years.

After I adjusted again, I picked the guy up. I was stronger than anyone my size had a right to be, and it was pretty effortless. I draped one of his arms over my shoulder, so that at a glance it would look like I was just helping a drunk friend stagger home. He was semiconscious, but not enough to struggle, or, I thought, even enough to talk; he wasn’t going to be shouting for help or anything. Saori scooped up his knife.

“Honestly, kind of impressed,” Saori said, following me. She had a kind of exuberance about her, practically skipping as we walked. It would certainly help to sell the “group of drunk friends going home after a night out” look, though I doubted that was why the kitsune was doing it. “You took him down pretty fast. But also that was rude, I didn’t even have a chance to play with him first.”

I grinned. “Guess you’ll have to be a little quicker next time, huh?” She pouted. I snickered.

It was not a long walk, and he wasn’t actually that much weight for me. But I was tired, once the adrenaline started fading. Not really because of the fight, as such. I just hadn’t gotten much sleep, and it now appeared unlikely I was getting more before I had to be active for the day. It left me in a bit of a bad mood, and I may have been less gentle than I could have been as I hauled him into my house.

Saori locked the door behind us while I carried my captive to a room on the ground floor I rarely used for anything. She joined me about when I had managed to find a pack of heavy zip ties in the closet. “Honestly, I feel kind of insulted,” I said as I rolled him onto his stomach and put him in a simple hogtie. “This is what they send to attack me? This jackass?”

“Disrespectful, really,” Saori agreed. “This knife is trash, by the way. It’s a show piece, and not even a good one. You should be ashamed of yourself.” This was clearly directed at the guy on the floor, who was starting to stir by now.

He started to struggle a bit, to pull against the ties. Then he looked up and saw Saori, standing there holding his knife and talking shit about its quality. He saw me digging through the closet, and remembered that I’d taken him out in a couple of seconds while unarmed. He might have seen the irritation in my posture, the boredom in the kitsune’s face. If he were particularly quick to get his bearings, he might even have gotten around to thinking about the implications of me having heavy zip ties on hand and knowing how to use them to restrain someone effectively.

He went still again. He went very still, and he didn’t say anything at all.

I found what I was looking for, which took a few moments. I had a lot of crap in that closet, and hadn’t had much need for some of this in a long time. “You mind watching him for a few minutes?” I asked. “Think I should go call our friend.” I did not use Audgrim’s name in front of the guy who was sent to kill me. There was a chance he was going to survive this experience, and it would have been rude to let that information slip in front of him when I didn’t have to.

Saori shrugged. “Sure.”

“Awesome.” I tossed her a roll of heavy duct tape, a bottle of isopropanol, a long-handled lighter of the kind you use to light a gas grill or campfire, and a box of small iron nails. “Have fun.” I didn’t expect she would actually torture him, but she was the kind of unpredictable that plausibly could. Given that he’d attempted, however clumsily, to kill me, I felt that scaring the shit out of him like this was a fairly proportionate form of revenge.

From the way Saori was grinning, I was pretty sure she agreed, and from the way his breathing sped up I was pretty sure it worked. I smiled sweetly at him and went upstairs.

---

Audgrim answered his phone with, “What’s up?” and a somewhat cautious tone.

“Some idiot tried to stab me just now,” I said. “Probably related to your thing, seems a bit implausible it was coincidental.”

“Were you injured?”

I chuckled. “No. No, I was not. He’s tied up on the floor of my house. Wasn’t sure if you’d want to interrogate him or something.”

“Awesome. I’ll have someone come by and pick him up.” He disconnected without saying goodbye.

I went back downstairs and found Saori playing with fire. As expected, she hadn’t actually done anything to him. But she had a lighter, and it hadn’t taken a genius to figure out that the kitsune liked fire by this point. It did not surprise me that she had something on fire. It did surprise me that she’d found some tea lights in the closet, set them out on the floor, and drawn a pentacle around the guy, while chanting in faux-Latin. But it was pretty funny, and it did have the poor bastard terrified.

It was less than two minutes later that someone rang the doorbell. I checked the door, and found one of Audgrim’s employees.

I corrected myself a moment later. It was the same employee, specifically, who had come to get me earlier. I paused when I realized this, then opened the door. “You got here very quickly,” I said. I didn’t sound happy about it, because I wasn’t.

“Yes, miss,” he said. “Mr. Eyvindson told me to keep an eye on you.”

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that this guy hadn’t done anything wrong, and it would be unfair to take my frustration out on him. “Come in and grab this idiot, then,” I said, and stepped out of the way. As soon as I’d closed the door behind him, I was calling Audgrim again.

“Yes?” he said.

“Audgrim,” I said slowly, “why did you have one of your employees watching me?”

“Because I thought you might need someone on hand,” he said. “It is a security company. This is something they do.”

“That implies you knew I would be attacked,” I said.

I could almost hear his shrug. “Knew? Not really. But there was a strong suspicion, yes.”

“And you didn’t tell me because…?”

“Because you’re shit at lying and I didn’t want it to be obvious you were expecting trouble.”

“Why not?” I could hear my voice taking on that worryingly blank, even tone again.

“Because we gained valuable intelligence this way,” Audgrim said. “It’s…look, who did they send?”

“Some random guy with a knife,” I said.

“Right. The thing is…okay, let me start at the beginning. It’s safe to say you’ve contributed a lot to this investigation, and I don’t think we’d have gotten nearly this far, this quickly, without you. But when you examine the cases so far, there’s an immediately apparent trend. The attacker is attempting to conceal information, and they’re doing so in ways that are tailored to the target. Yes?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Scent mask when they hit the werewolves, but not with the Tribe. Camera issues with your places, but not when they kidnapped the werewolf.”

“Right. But they don’t appear to have specifically done anything to hide from you. At no point have we found specific countermeasures of that kind, and that suggests strongly that you were not a known factor a priori.”

I started to object, but paused. The acetone wash, even if they had done it everywhere, wasn’t specific to me. Other people could find those traces if they wanted to badly enough. It was useful with the werewolves, too. They had other reasons for doing that. And acetone was practically free; charging it with enough energy to make it effective for this purpose was trivial for any competent mage.

Audgrim was still going, anyway. “So consider the situation. The attacker has been well-informed in other ways. They know which businesses have contracts with us. They knew where the werewolf lived. These attacks have been very precisely targeted. So, the question becomes how they are getting that information.”

I was starting to see where he was going with this. “And they knew to attack me, now.”

“Yes. That strongly suggests their intelligence is being updated. This is not just research they did beforehand.” He paused, as though trying to phrase something, then said, “Now, consider the nature of the attack on you. The first, obvious detail is that they didn’t commit serious resources to it. The fact that they thought a random guy with a knife would be enough to kill you strongly suggests that their information about you is still very limited.”

“Gosh thanks,” I said dryly. “This matters why?”

“Because I know the werewolves have seen you fight,” he said simply. “And my employees have either seen it or been briefed on it.”

I started to ask what he was talking about, but then remembered that there had been a pretty nasty brawl at one of Derek’s barbecues. Some very stupid faeries had been upset they didn’t get an invitation, as I recalled. And one of the favors I’d done Audgrim in the past had gotten pretty messy at the end, though that had been almost a decade ago.

“I see,” I said quietly, as realization dawned on me. “You’re looking for leaks.”

“Yes. It’s not the only way they might be getting fresh intelligence, but it’s a possible one,” he said. “If they had a source among either my people or the wolves, they’d have known better than to think this would be worth trying. So I sent my most trusted employee with you in case they tried something that would have worked. Next there’s the detail that they didn’t incorporate any magic at all into the attack.”

I frowned. That…was a good point. When they’d attacked Chris, or the security guard for that matter, they’d used some kind of supernatural necrotic thing on them. Steven, the dead werewolf in the funeral home, had smelled like magic. This guy had none at all, just the faint shimmer of vanilla human.

“What this suggests to me,” Audgrim said, “is that they know you would have a good chance of learning something important if you encountered their work directly. This time there was a specific countermeasure that took you into account. And it’s not one that my employees would know to use, they do not know how your abilities work at all. The wolves might have, and the Tribe certainly would. So we’ve gained a lot of useful information here, if only in that we know they’re getting fresh information, that they know where you live, and that there are specific details they do and do not have.”

“You used me as bait,” I said quietly. “Actively so. You encouraged me to go home, expecting they would know my address. You set this situation up intentionally, without telling me.”

“Yes.” There was no shame in Audgrim’s voice at all. No pride, but no guilt either, no apology, just a statement of fact.

“You know that favor you’re owing me after this?” I said, still in that very quiet, level tone. “You offered commensurate. I want you to think about what that means at this point.” I hung up on him without another word.

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