Tag: chapter

Chapter Two

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.…

Chapter One

Attending a show at the Blackbird Cabaret was always a fascinating experience.

The building itself contributed a lot to that. Capinera actively refused to add permanent furniture, so you either stood, or you brought a chair or blanket to sit on if there was room at the event in question. The ceiling was open to show ducting and rafters from when the building was a warehouse, and the floor was open concrete except for a single, simple stage. The overall impression was an odd, surreal minimalism. It lent the Blackbird a sort of raw feeling, unfiltered and without any pretense.

Then you had the audience, which was its own kind of bizarre. Capinera didn’t exactly bar normal humans from it (though some of the individual performers did), but the crowd was always mostly or entirely drawn from the supernatural community. That never made up a large portion of the total population, but Pittsburgh had enough people to still maintain a decent crowd of us, and the Blackbird had enough of a reputation by now to draw people from further afield as well. I’d seen a lot of very strange people there, many of whom were barely even pretending to be mortals.

And, finally, there was the performance itself. Capinera was easily the most gifted a capella vocalist I’d ever heard, and those nights were so intense in their sound and emotion that I could barely tolerate being in the room for them. But most nights, she wasn’t performing herself, just providing the space for someone else. Those performers could be very, very strange, and unfortunately their quality was…not often on par with hers.…

Prelude

If I have a wish   it is to find you   where I find poetry

Do you ever   close your eyes in full sunlight   Here close your eyes

You are everything   that has not yet been lost

-Joanna Klink, excerpted from “Aerial”, Raptus, 2010…

Melissa

I wake up early. I didn’t especially mean to, just woke up an hour before my alarm. I hate it when that happens. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so trying to get any more sleep will take long enough that I might as well just get up now. So I do, stretching. Shoulder feels stiff. That’s annoying. It’s been three days since I helped Shawn carry furniture around. I don’t like that my arm is still complaining about it.

I dress myself with barely-conscious movements. It’s a familiar routine, and I wake up sluggish, so it runs on autopilot. It’s just a t-shirt and jeans anyway. Hoodie today, because it’s cold out. Normal.

Check my bag, it’s fine. I don’t really have much else to do before school. I sit and try to play video games to distract myself, but I’m already too distracted for it to help. Can’t focus through the intrusive thoughts. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I don’t know why I’m having intrusive thoughts about poison, about fire. It’s not something I remember thinking much about until recently.

There are a lot of things I don’t remember happening until recently.…

Caleb Moorhead

People lie to me a lot.

It’s inherent in my line of work. It’s inevitable. Attorneys hear a lot of lies. Cops lie about their intentions, about their evidence, about all kinds of things, really. Witnesses lie about what they’ve seen. Sometimes my clients lie to me as well, which is always frustrating. It’s very hard to defend someone when you’re working with inaccurate information.

I would much rather work with someone who was open with me about being guilty than try to represent a client who pretended to be innocent when they were very clearly not. It isn’t as though I would rat them out if they told me; it would be wildly against my personal and professional ethical codes to do so. At most, I might decline or drop their case, and even then I wouldn’t tell the police or prosecutors a word about what they’d said, because that confidentiality is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I feel strongly about maintaining it as an absolute. A client has to be able to trust that what they tell their attorney will be kept strictly, entirely confidential.…

Epilogue

Three weeks later, I was standing in a small apartment in a bad part of town waiting for someone to make a choice.

I still wasn’t entirely sure this would work. I’d worked through the theory extensively. I’d consulted with a ton of people about it. Alice, the wizard from the Tribe, had helped a lot with the underlying theory and principles involved. I’d been introduced to a guy named Nate who mixed magic with graffiti and was more shamanic in his focus, less tied to concrete and rational thought than a wizard. The categorization tools for mages would always be inadequate, but it was informative in this case. Wizards, as the most common categorization system defined them, were characterized by linear reasoning, structured and abstract thought, and rational logic. Alice fit that description perfectly, which was great for my education. But for this I also needed to draw on that more intuitive thought process.

So, I met Nate and we talked for a while. He introduced me to a girl named Opari who had personal experience of what I was doing here. Derek, Cassie, and Robert all had some amount of insight because of werewolf things. They also had a veterinarian that they worked with in town, which I found fascinating when they told me about her. Werewolves rarely needed medical care at all, but apparently there were some very specific things that sometimes came up that a vet was helpful with. So there was a vet in Pittsburgh who knew what they were, and I talked with her for a while. Hell, I even went back to my old cognitive neuroscience connections and asked them some questions.…