Tag: chapter

Chapter Six

Derek lived east of Pittsburgh proper, around the border between eastern Pitcairn and Monroeville. This, in and of itself, would be enough to make it an unexpected place for me to be. Pitcairn was an odd mix of abandoned and stuck-up, and Monroeville was worse, the kind of suburb you’d hold up as an example of why suburbia is a diseased phenomenon. I liked Derek enough to visit his place, but I sure as hell wasn’t prone to dropping in because I happened to be in the area.

But I could cope. I had the rideshare driver drop us off several blocks away outside a Chinese restaurant, just in case someone had both the ability and inclination to trace it, and we walked the rest of the way. It was significantly less pleasant than earlier. It was solidly night by now, and it was cold, and “walkable” was not an adjective I could apply to Monroeville with a straight face if I tried. By the time we got there, I was feeling drained as hell, and even Raincloud looked a bit bedraggled. I told her as much, and got a flicker of amusement from her at how specific the adjective was in its mood.…

Chapter Five

Saori left a few minutes later. The innuendos and public display of affection hadn’t exactly been a joke; I knew from experience that she wasn’t bluffing. If I’d expressed interest, she’d have been absolutely fine with ignoring an urgent situation in favor of hedonistic indulgence. Caution and prudence were not on the list of words anyone sane would apply to Saori, except perhaps to use her as a bad example. Safety wasn’t first for her, and was generally lucky to come in a distant third.

But it was, ultimately, a relatively urgent situation. I wasn’t sure when the next attack might come, or from what. I didn’t know how much said attacker would know about me, but my address was hardly a secret. I wasn’t going back there until this was done, and while that didn’t fuck with me like it would some people, it was inconvenient as hell.

So I wasn’t terribly interested in delays. And Saori was reckless, not stupid. She knew this needed done. She only lingered a few more minutes, and then she was off to start reaching out to her contacts. I’d offered to come with, but she said it would be likely to cause more issues than it solved. Her contacts were not fond of strangers, and given that she seemed to be expecting strain on those relationships already, I was forced to agree it was smarter not to bring me along.…

Chapter Four

Things with Alice hadn’t taken as long as I’d expected, and it was still relatively early when I walked into Softened Dreams. I’d thought about going somewhere else first, but even if I could have thought of anything useful to do, I probably wouldn’t have. The coffeehouse had a number of good qualities, but right now the one I was most interested in was that it was pretty damn safe. Nobody in their right mind, and few people who are out of it, will start shit in that building. The consequences of ignoring Hope’s policy of neutral ground and peaceful conduct are just too immediate and scary.

Normally, that only really mattered to me in that I liked the quiet. It was a very low-stress, lowkey kind of environment, and I appreciated that about it.

Today, though? I mean…someone tried to kill me last night. Granted she hadn’t done a great job of it, but as the ache in my left shoulder was happy to remind me, I’d gotten pretty damn lucky. And worse, I still had no idea whatsoever who she was, why she wanted me dead, or whether she had friends who felt similarly.…

Chapter Three

The laceration in my shoulder was, as I’d expected, fairly minor. It was noticeable, sure, but it wasn’t a serious impairment. And while I didn’t heal as quickly as a werewolf, I was still significantly better than human baseline. I was guessing it would only be a few days before it was completely healed, at most. I didn’t even bother bandaging it, just washed it in the shower and put a clean shirt over it. Infection wasn’t a huge risk for me. Like poisons, infectious diseases seemed to have little effect on me for some reason. I did not get colds, hadn’t had one since I was a teenager.

It took time, though, and energy. By the time I was done, I was feeling tired. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep yet, though, and ended up at my computer instead. Raincloud came and curled around my feet almost immediately, and she was absolutely capable of sleeping. I could feel her dreams flickering in the back of my head, half-formed presences much more pleasant than mine usually were. Even the tree spirit cohabiting with her seemed to be asleep, or something like it. I wasn’t entirely clear on how that worked, but he did seem to go dormant most of the time when she was asleep, and that was definitely the case now.

I spent a while working on a logo design I’d agreed to do for some Australian guy who owned a ranching supply store. He’d had a hard time finding someone to do that work, and now that I was halfway through the project, I could understand why. I wasn’t making much progress, but I was too worked up to sleep still, and too distracted and tired to do much of anything well. It was something to do with my hands while I calmed myself down more than anything.…

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.…