Chapter Seven

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

 

Saori’s car was a disaster, to a degree I had to somewhat admire. It wasn’t exactly that it was messy. There was none of the fast food detritus that often showed up in someone’s vehicle if they weren’t fastidious. There was very little trash of any kind, in fact. But it was cluttered with a bewildering array of random objects. The medical kit and emergency blanket, I could understand. Four decks of playing cards and a sack of dice made a degree of sense. Even the two coils of climbing rope, sledgehammer, electric drill, and spray paint, while maybe a little suspect, I could see why someone would have in their car.

But I had to move an acetylene cutting torch off the passenger seat to sit down. And when I reached to put it in the back seat, I ended up setting it in a box with a collection of about twenty jump ropes of different size and style. She had a small, portable ice cream machine in there. She had a set of chisels. There was a plastic tub of LEGOs in the passenger footwell. There was a large canvas bag with hundreds of brightly colored pens in it. There was another plastic box with eight or nine stuffed bats, in the taxidermy sense.

Saori’s car had an assortment of random shit in it that was confusing, unsettling, and fascinating in roughly equal proportion. And from her grin as I was making space, I just knew that no explanations would be forthcoming as to why any of it was in there. I didn’t bother even asking.

I managed to sit down and get most of the way through putting on the seat belt before the car was moving. Once I did, I had my eyes closed almost immediately. We hadn’t even made it out of the parking lot, and I was guessing the kitsune was already going faster than this sedan’s intended highway speed.

“So where are we going?” Saori asked me.

“Southside Slope. You know the way?”

“Yeah.” She took a sharp right and sped up. I could feel the acceleration; she was very obviously not a defensive driver, and I was pretty sure she was weaving through traffic at a pace most people would find concerning if not outright alarming. She drove for about a minute before commenting, “You have your eyes closed.”

“Yup.”

“Mind if I ask why?” Saori’s tone was interesting. It wasn’t presumptive, like I would usually expect. She was genuinely asking whether I objected to the question, not actually asking it yet.

Normally, the answer would have been some form of “that’s personal”. But I liked her, and I was in a decent mood now. And if she drove like this and I spent any amount of time with her, the topic was one that would have to be addressed eventually. Better to get it out of the way up front.

“You know much about epilepsy? Human neurological condition, causes seizures?”

“Barely,” she said. “Not much more than that sentence.”

I nodded. “Yeah, figured. I got enough human from my father that I expect more of their medicine applies to me. I’m honestly not sure whether I’m epileptic. Probably, but diagnostic criteria don’t have a lot of room for ‘also part of it’s magic’, and the tests come back really weird. But for all practical intents and purposes, the term applies.”

“Makes sense so far.” I heard someone honking. It was hard to tell whether it was Saori or someone irate about how she was weaving through traffic, possibly while on a bridge.

“It’s photosensitive, or at least it’s got that in it. I get overstimulated easily, and like, usually it’s not a huge risk, it mostly only turns into a seizure with specific kinds of input. But even if I can manage it, it tends to make me headachy and nauseous. In a car there’s a hell of a lot of visual information happening, very quickly.” I shrugged. “So I generally don’t watch. You said you know the way, so I don’t really need to.”

Saori listened, and when I was finished she was quiet for a few moments. “Would you rather I slowed down?”

I shrugged again. “Eh. Not especially. I’m pretty used to it. Maybe another time if you want an active participant, and there are other things I can do to mitigate it as well. But this is easiest, and I trust you to know what you’re doing.”

She swerved again. There was more honking. Idly, I wondered how many people she pissed off doing this on a daily basis. I thought probably quite a few.

“That’s kinda stupid of you,” she said after a few moments. “You literally haven’t seen my driving. How do you know whether I’m any good at it?”

“Aside from the fact that we haven’t crashed yet?” I asked dryly. “Mostly from the, mm, the feeling of the car. It doesn’t feel anxious, it doesn’t feel like disregard.” I shrugged. “You don’t drive like this with no anxiety unless you’re skilled, insane, or both. And I’m not ruling out both, but it’s too confident to be just the insane part.”

Saori laughed. She put on music, and predictably, it was bizarre. It sounded like some kind of unholy hybrid of death metal, electric violin, and Tuvan throat singing. The stereo system was better than Audgrim’s. “Both,” she said. She had to practically shout to be heard over the music. “Definitely both. You can feel that much from it?”

“Yeah. It’s…like I said, part of the overstimulation is magic. I can pick up auras and lingering traces of energy really, really well. Enough detail to pick out emotional history sometimes. You use this car a lot. The vibe it has is heavily influenced by that.”

The kitsune made an interested noise, one mostly lost in a particularly intense section of the song. “That’s really interesting. I was wondering how you could smell a kitsune, cause I’m pretty sure we smell mostly human when we’re in this shape.”

I laughed. “Yeah, got me. It’s why I was the one they sent over to check you out. I got a good look at what happened to Chris—which you don’t want to, by the way, trust me—so the guy I’m working for at the moment figured I’d know if it was you. Obviously not, like I said, no similarity at all. You smell a lot better than that.”

“Flatterer,” Saori said. But I could hear the smile in it, before the music switched to something electronic with a pounding beat, and she turned it up far enough to make speech impractical.

---

Saori had to park a couple blocks out. It was just inevitable. Southside Slope is a neighborhood built on a massive hill, full of tangled, narrow streets. There are places where it’s too steep for cars, and the “street” is just a rickety old staircase with a street sign. Parking in that area was awful, and people could rarely get a spot anywhere actually close to my place.

She stopped the car. I opened my eyes. For a few moments, neither of us said anything.

Weirdly, I felt more awkward now than I had at any point prior. It was funny, in a way. All the weird or dangerous stuff—cold open conversations with a potentially hostile supernatural creature, breaking the news of a friend’s death, riding blind in a car with said supernatural creature, who drove like a maniac—hadn’t really bothered me. I at least felt like I understood those things.

But an ordinary social interaction with someone I wanted to like me? I felt lost, uncertain of myself. It had been over a decade since I was as young as I looked, but I felt like I was still that girl, a teenager who was perfectly fine with casual criminal behavior and not terribly concerned about her own safety, but got nervous and shy when she was into someone.

We sat there in silence for long enough to get a little uncomfortable before I eventually managed, “You’re welcome to come in if you’d like.”

It was some consolation that Saori also seemed nervous, which I could already tell was an unusual state for her. “That sounds nice,” the kitsune said after a moment. She sounded…uncertain, maybe, but not reluctant. I thought that was probably a good sign.

She seemed mostly balanced again by the time we got to my house, though, back to a casual grin. I unlocked the door, went in, locked it again behind us. Saori took off her shoes at the door, which I appreciated. It was one of the few Japanese traditions I hadn’t ditched, largely because it kept the floor cleaner.

“Make yourself at home,” I said vaguely in her direction while I finished locking the door. Then something occurred to me, and I added, “Don’t open the closed door on the second floor, though.”

“What, is that where you keep the incriminating evidence?”

I snorted. “No. It’s just full of poison, and I don’t know how most of it would affect you.”

She looked back at me, apparently to see if I was kidding. Seeing no particular evidence of humor, she said, “Okay, sliding over towards the actually-a-serial-killer kind of awkward now.” She did not sound particularly worried.

“I did promise to give you variety,” I said dryly, and that got a laugh.

“Touché,” Saori said, grinning. “Alright, I’ll be good for now. Anything else?”

“Nah, not really. I should check some messages, make sure nobody’s somehow found an emergency that needs my attention in the past hour. Should just be a few minutes.”

“Cool.” The kitsune started wandering around. I went up to the third floor and turned on the computer. I’d already watered the plants for today, at least, so that was taken care of.

As expected, I had a surly email from Audgrim asking what the hell I was thinking. I replied with a polite reminder that I was doing him a pretty significant favor helping with this situation at all, a brief explanation of how far Saori was from anything that I’d registered on the body, and a note that she’d like to be present when we murdered whoever was responsible. After a moment, I remembered to dig my backup phone out of the insulated closet where I kept the spare electronics, and added the number to the message.

Saori was still looking around. I wasn’t really sure what people did with guests, I very rarely had any here, but I thought probably I wasn’t supposed to ignore her. So after making sure there was nothing else that required immediate attention, I went looking for her.

I found her on the second floor. She had, it appeared, not gone into the room with my poisonous plant collection. But she was in the workshop next to it, looking around at various half-finished art projects. “This is a nice place,” she said. “I’m kind of impressed.”

“Thanks. I try to keep it niceish. It’s just me here, so it’s kinda,” I waved one hand vaguely, “a little more than I really need, but I try to at least keep everything tidy.”

She nodded. “You’ve got a lot of tools in here,” she noted, looking around at the various supplies. There were three worktables in the room, and a lot of shelves and plastic organizers. And, yes, a lot of tools, for everything from woodworking to stained glass to jewelry making to perfumery. Many of them hadn’t been used in a long while.

“Yeah,” I said. “I kinda…I dunno. I try to stay busy. I…don’t really get out much most of the time.”

“Why not?” Saori sounded genuinely curious. “You don’t seem like the shut-in type.”

I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be, if I had easy options. It’s a bit…well, to start with, it’s hard to have a social life like this. You know? Travel sucks ass most of the time, and if I go to the wrong party and there’s too much going on, I end up convulsing on the floor.”

Saori winced. “Oh. Yeah. I can see where that would be…challenging.”

“Heh. Yeah. And those are the parties I’d rather be at, usually, that’s the crowd I like. I don’t make friends easily to begin with, either. Most people don’t take it as well as you when I tell them what emotions their car smells like, or accidentally eavesdrop on a conversation I’m not supposed to know about.” I laughed a bit, though it sounded pretty bitter. “So, yeah, I don’t get out much. I try to keep myself busy.”

“Wow. That sounds hellish.”

I looked at her, and she didn’t look like she was being insincere at all. She really thought that living like this would be hellish. So rather than cracking a joke and changing the subject, I said, “My mother left me enough of an inheritance I don’t need to worry about trying to hold down a job, at least.” I smiled. It probably didn’t look very happy. “I can spend my time doing whatever I want. I just can’t do any of it how I want to.”

“Fuck,” Saori said. “I am so sorry. Didn’t mean to shove that in your face.”

I shrugged again. “It’s life. It’s not a terrible life, either. Do you want something to drink?”

She knew the casual attitude was a lie, I was quite sure. But she also knew how to follow a topic change. “That’d be nice, thank you.”

“Awesome.” I left the workshop and wandered over towards the kitchen. “I’ve got a couple kinds of soda, a bunch of energy drinks, tea, or I could make lemonade if you want.”

“Energy drink sounds great.”

“Awesome. Fridge on the left.” I had two, one set up for produce and the other for things that weren’t too picky about how cold they got. It was ridiculously excessive, but I more or less figured it didn’t matter. I had plenty of space in this house I did not actually need, and enough money to do ridiculous things. I might as well use it. I was far more trust fund kid than starving artist in that way.

“Sweet,” Saori said. And then a moment later, “You have four full cases of energy drinks in here?”

“I like caffeine and I don’t like shopping,” I said, wandering back out into the largely-disused sitting room. “So I get enough to last a while when I do go to the store.”

“Girl,” she said, following me with a can of something cloyingly saccharine that pretended to taste like fruit. I preferred energy drinks over coffee, but I didn’t drink them primarily for the taste. “When even I’m telling you that you might want to step it down a bit on these, you know you have a problem.”

I laughed. “It’s kind of you to pretend it’s singular. But yeah, probably right. Um. I don’t really know what to do at this point. I don’t have many guests.”

“Yeah,” Saori said. “I can relate to that.” She drank half the can and smiled, but it was a little hollow. “Chris was actually the only person I knew in this city. Haven’t been here long.”

“That sucks ass. Like, I think this is where I would have some flirtatious line about knowing another now, but losing your only connection like that is just…I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, wandered around the room a bit. “It happens. I mean, I met him when a mutual acquaintance from elsewhere recommended me as an assistant in a smuggling run. It’s a risky profession, and he had risky hobbies. People like that tend to live fast and die young.”

“What were they? The hobbies, I mean.”

“Street racing, mostly,” she said. She was looking at the art on the walls, various prints and paintings. There were no photographs, as I was sure she noticed. No humans, either. Just nature scenes and abstract, surreal images, many not clearly an image of anything at all. “He did a lot of work as a mechanic, too. I needed some aftermarket upgrades done. That’s why we became friends after, that and rollercoasters.”

I shuddered. “That is one thing I’ll just. Leave to you. Very not my thing.”

Saori laughed a little. “Yeah, I can imagine. Talk about sensory overload, doesn’t get a lot more intense than a good coaster. Anyway, that’s why I was hanging around with him, after we finished the job.”

“What was it?” I asked idly. “The job, I mean. Like, was it something that people would kill him for?”

“Not in the slightest, far as I know.” She shrugged. “Like I said, only been here a short time. About two months now, and I’d never seen the place before that. So it’s possible it was important, but as far as I know it was completely ordinary for him. He’d worked for the client before and he wasn’t moving anything special.”

“Huh. This whole mess has been so fucking weird.” I sat down on one of the couches. It was nice. I should use it more often. “I got into it as a favor for an acquaintance of mine. The dvergar have a pretty big security company of some kind locally, not sure if you’re familiar.”

“Nope, not familiar with any of the local players. I’ve been meaning to fix that, but it’s just been…” Saori trailed off. “A challenging month,” she said eventually.

I didn’t ask about that, nor about why she’d moved to a completely unfamiliar city. She’d said it wasn’t her idea to live in Fox Chapel, which suggested someone else was involved, and I didn’t ask about that either. I didn’t ask why I felt a layer of smoke and heat mixed into the feeling of kitsune. I was curious about all of those things, but I knew better than to pry.

“Well. They do, and the main local supervisor is this half-dvergr I’ve worked with a couple times before. My skills are…not useful all that often, but they’re not common, you know? So a few days ago he calls me and asks me to take a look at some really bizarre vandalism.”

“What’d it look like?” she asked idly.

“Nasty.” I shuddered a little. After the clearer exposure, I was very confident in my read on that one. Whoever attacked that guard, they enjoyed it way too much for comfort. “But kinda random. Bunch of places associated with the dvergar have been broken into for no apparent reason. This one was a funeral home, and it was the first time one of his employees was seriously injured, so I guess that escalated the response some. But it felt really random and weird, and I have no clue what they were doing there.”

“Huh.” Saori sounded thoughtful now. “And then Chris was…?”

“Killed the same way Audgrim’s guy was injured,” I confirmed. “Don’t really know why that happened either, it sounds like he didn’t have any serious enemies. But it felt planned, so it wasn’t that he just walked in on something or whatever. It’s all just…very strange.”

“Sounds like, yeah.” She was quiet for a few moments. “So what are they doing? Like, in terms of investigation or whatever.”

I shrugged. “Hell if I know. I’m not an investigator, and I’m really not that involved in the local scene. I know a few people, sure, but sorting through who would be motivated to do this? Not something I can help with.”

She made a thoughtful noise. “Who else is there, locally? Like, who are the major players?”

“Beats me,” I said cheerfully. “There are a bunch of werewolves. I’m told that all the forest makes it more appealing for them than most cities. I occasionally hang out with one of them, he’s terrible at poker but hosts good barbecues, and I’ve at least met a couple others through that. I know a couple of minor mages and oddities. There’s a girl who’s about twelve generations removed from an Egyptian goddess who’s fond of me. But I try to avoid major players as a topic; I only know Audgrim because someone recommended my services to him at one point and he stayed in touch afterwards.”

Saori nodded. “Yeah. I can understand that. You think they’ll find anything?”

I shrugged. “Dunno. They’ve got a strong human mage, guy who visits town occasionally and was associated with Chris. They’ve got a security company for manpower. I gave them some raw data to work with. I haven’t really tried to evaluate how likely it is they’ll get somewhere with those resources. Honestly, this conversation is more meaningful to me than that whole topic.”

“What, I’m more important than an ongoing crime spree with at least one murder involved?” Her voice was light, joking.

“Yes,” I said simply. My voice was not, and I was guessing she could hear the simple truth in that word, the sincerity, because for a moment her dark eyes had a very different emotion in them, one I couldn’t name.

“Why? You just met me.”

I shrugged. “Saori, it’s…you have no idea how rare this is for me. Like, that I meet someone and it goes well. Even the friends I do have, there’s usually tension, there’s stress, things feel awkward or sad. Hanging out with you has been fun. I don’t get fun very often.”

She was still looking at me with that odd emotion visible. I couldn’t at all tell what it was. And then a few moments later, it was gone. In its place was a sort of reckless, casual disregard that I could already tell was much more her default state.

“Well then,” Saori said. “We’ll just have to fix that.” She grinned. “So. When you said earlier that thoughts about me being cute and you needing to get laid crossed your mind, how serious were you?”

I found myself smiling back. It was funny, really. We’d been talking about some pretty heavy topics just now. Normally, I would expect the sudden transition back to lighthearted flirtation to feel forced. But it didn’t. Saori just had a sort of infectious excitement that was hard to resist, particularly when I didn’t really want to.

“The bedroom is upstairs,” I said by way of answer. Saori’s grin was sharp, now, and her laughter tasted like fire in the back of my throat.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter