Chapter Ten

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Saori insisted on driving me home. She didn’t exactly insist on staying there with me, but she offered to stay, and make sure I got some rest.

I thought about saying that I didn’t need a nursemaid. Then I thought about Saori’s home, in a part of the city that was an obvious bad joke, and not a joke she chose. I thought about how she was alone in a city she did not know, one where her only local friend was recently murdered. I thought about incense and ashes and blood, and the loneliness of a stranger in a strange land. And I thought, also, about the hollow feeling of one person rattling around in a house meant for four, talking to her houseplants because sometimes you have to talk to someone and they were the only companions she had.

I said I’d love that. She grinned with obvious enthusiasm, and I found once again that her cheer was infectious. And, if I was being honest, I did look like shit. I looked exhausted in the car’s mirror, like I’d been awake for three days straight. My hands had a twitchiness in them that reminded me of someone strung out on harsh stimulants. The echoes of Steven’s death still hadn’t fully faded from my perceptions, and I was flinching from nothing occasionally when a random shadow or breeze became too threatening. So it was, on the whole, probably just as well.

I did actually rest, though, if only because I was too tired and anxious for anything strenuous. Lunch was followed by cuddling. I watered the plants, and I could swear the lavender in the bedroom felt happy for me and the sundew a room over was expressing the equivalent of a congratulatory smirk. Optimistically, I wrote this off as the product of stress and a lot of overexposure in the past few days. I was really hoping the plants weren’t starting to reply when I talked to them. But even beyond that, I was not okay with the thought that they were starting by congratulating me on developing a sex life. There were just…so many implications there that I did not care to contemplate.

Probably just stress. Sure. I believed that.

In any case. We ate. There was cuddling. I had no real idea when one of these clowns would next decide they urgently needed my assistance with something, so I didn’t want to start anything too involved. After I dozed off on the couch and started drooling on her, Saori decided I should go to bed, and I had to admit it was probably a good idea.

When I finished brushing my teeth, I found her standing in my bedroom with a very odd expression. I wasn’t sure how to parse it; if I’d been in a clearer headspace I might have been able to put a name to it, but as it was, all I really had was the mental image of a fox who has just discovered turtles for the first time.

“Something up?” I asked.

Saori didn’t say anything for long enough that I wasn’t sure she was going to. When she did respond, the kitsune’s voice was similarly odd, carefully controlled but laced with an emotion I couldn’t put a label on. “You have a lot of stuffed animals in here,” she said. She was looking around like she hadn’t seen the room before. I supposed that was fair; she might have been here last night, but she wasn’t exactly paying attention to the decor.

I wasn’t sure how that was relevant, and it wasn’t a question. But it seemed to invite a response, so I shrugged, grabbing one and tossing it over towards the bed. “I guess? I sorta have a habit of sleeping with one.”

“Why?”

I was feeling increasingly perplexed at this point. “I don’t usually sleep very well,” I said. “And they’re comforting sometimes when I have a nightmare. Saori, is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” the kitsune said, still looking at a plush rabbit with that odd expression. “I’m not sure how to tell.”

“It’s alright if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Saori shook her head. “No, it’s nothing like that. More just…” She trailed off for a moment. “This isn’t something I’m used to. Most people I’ve known wouldn’t do it. I don’t know how to explain.”

I considered it for a few moments. “What would you expect to see instead?”

“It would depend on context, I guess. Just…not this.”

I thought about it some more. What about this would she be so unaccustomed to? Not, I thought, the objects themselves. They might be a particular focus for the emotion, but not the cause of it. That seemed to be more about the underlying motivation or reason I had them.

And then it clicked. “Most of those people wouldn’t admit they needed it, would they?”

Saori shook her head. “No. They wouldn’t.”

I was familiar with that attitude, that philosophy. I thought about the vulnerability inherent in needing comforted, and the kind of person who would see it as weakness. I thought about Saori, and the reckless, devil-may-care attitude she presented most of the time. I thought about how she woke up, not exactly abrupt, but very quick, and alert before she’d even opened her eyes. I thought about a home she hadn’t picked, in a city not her own. I thought about smoke and ashes, and all the things they meant.

I didn’t know the details. I mean, I’d just met her. And I was aware that while Saori looked human most of the time, she fundamentally was not, not even to the limited extent that I was. I did not know at all how that impacted things, either in terms of her nature and identity or the things she had experienced. Much of her life hadn’t even happened in this world.

But I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one in the room who had nightmares.

Gently, and with much the same care I would use when handling a baby bird, I asked, “Would you like one?”

“That would be nice,” she said, with that same tone. I still couldn’t have described it, but I understood it a bit now. It had a lot in common with how she’d looked last night, when she realized I was serious about talking with her mattering more to me than people being murdered.

I got the impression that people had not often tried to comfort Saori. I thought I might want to change that.

I grabbed a different plush, a leopard older and more battered than most of them. “Alright. This one I’d like to keep but you’re welcome to take any of the others.”

I didn’t see which she took, or if she took one at all. It didn’t really matter, in some ways. As she’d observed, I had a lot of the things, and while they had a certain amount of meaning, for most the comfort they provided was more tactile than emotional. And I knew she could get one herself if she wanted, anyway. It was the offer that mattered.

Saori stayed the night with me, unsurprisingly. I laid awake in the dark for a long time, holding the kitsune while she slept, lost in thoughts I couldn’t put words to, couldn’t make into language. When I finally did find sleep, my dreams were troubled, full of blood and storms and rotting flowers.

---

I was—of course—woken by a phone call. Saori jerked awake when my phone rang, with a momentary flicker of anxiety visible in her eyes. I couldn’t blame her, given I probably looked pretty much the same.

I grabbed my phone, and answered it on the second attempt. “Audgrim,” I said, “you’d better have a very good reason for calling me at four-thirty in the morning.”

“I have something to show you,” he said, sounding somehow even more dour than his default. “Urgently.”

I took a slow, deep breath. “You remember that favor you promised me when this started?” I said. “It’s going to be a very fucking big one.”

“Yeah,” he said, and that grim tone had been joined by a bone-deep fatigue. “Yeah, I think it will be.”

---

Audgrim sent one of his employees to get us rather than come himself. In some ways, that was as ominous as all of the other signals he was giving off of inexplicable urgency. He knew how I was with cars, with strangers, really with every component of this experience. And dvergr culture, in classic Scandinavian fashion, very much emphasized a lead-from-the-front management style. A jarl had to be as scary as any of his vikings or housekarls, back in the old days, or he would not be a jarl much longer. Audgrim always came himself when he wanted something from me, to the point that I had only interacted with his employees at all a handful of times.

But this guy definitely did work for him. I checked fairly thoroughly, and still wasn’t happy with it. He insisted on riding in the same car with us, saying that Audgrim had ordered him not to let me out of his sight. I insisted on Saori driving, which he didn’t like much, but he acknowledged it was reasonable of me to find getting in a car driven by someone I didn’t know…unpleasant. Saori was a spectacularly reckless driver, and she didn’t know the car she was driving, and I still trusted her more than him.

She was spectacularly reckless, too. The devil-may-care attitude was firmly in place again this morning, and she was all grins and laughter and cynical mockery. I didn’t think it was a lie, exactly, or even a mask as such. This attitude, this careless mischief and random insanity, was a genuine and important part of her. It was just also the part she wanted to present to the world, while concealing anything else behind it. It was very thorough; I suspected that in the past few days I’d seen more of what was behind that shell than Saori normally showed in a year.

In any case, she took directions from Audgrim’s employee, but the way she followed them had him sounding like he was seriously questioning his career choices. I considered this my token revenge for being woken up so early. And, fortunately for him, the drive was a short one.

I wasn’t sure where I’d expected us to be going. But it definitely was not up the same hill I lived on, and to a particularly inaccessible part of it. There were a lot of old houses like mine on Southside Slope, with a maze of narrow, twisting roads between them. But there were also areas that were too steep, too rocky, and just generally too much of a pain in the ass for anyone to have developed them. He had us go to one of those, along an access road that basically no one used. It was private property, but teenagers used to have a habit of sneaking in to sit around a bonfire, to laugh and tell ghost stories and have disappointing first kisses, and generally be dumb kids like teenagers do. I wasn’t sure whether they still did that here.

But there wasn’t anyone there currently. I was glaring at Audgrim’s employee by now, though he may not have noticed through the relief at being back on solid ground. “The hell are we doing here?” I asked.

“It’s a little ways off into the trees, miss,” he said.

I continued glaring at him. “You realize how insanely suspicious this is, right?”

He looked at the ground. “Yes, miss. Apologies. Mr. Eyvindson said that he didn’t want to leave the site unattended.”

I heard Audgrim’s last name so rarely that it actually took me a few seconds to recognize it. It wasn’t really even his name; Eyvindr had been his father’s name. I took a deep breath, and slowly let it out. “Fine,” I said. My voice sounded very even, very precise. People who did not know me often made the mistake of thinking this meant I was calm. “Which way?”

He swallowed, hard. I realized that Saori was right next to me, also glaring at him, and she did not appear calm at all. I hadn’t noticed she was even carrying that knife until it caught the moonlight, which was impressive given its size. “Um. This way, miss, apologies again.” He started off through the trees, further into the grove. We followed. I had to feel bad for him, really. He was not getting paid enough for this. I didn’t even have to know his salary to know that.

It was not a long walk. And somewhat to my surprise, we actually did find Audgrim rather than, say, a dozen people with guns. He did still have some people around, and probably they had guns, but they weren’t pointed at us, so it was fine.

He was, himself, standing in a small clearing in the trees. I started to move out into it, but paused as I saw something, and knelt down to look at it first. There was a length of silver wire in the grass that had caught my attention when the light hit it right.

But once I saw it, I could see that it was just one piece of many. I saw silver, copper, steel, gold, all laid out on the ground. There were bits of stone, bits of glass, all kinds of stuff, all set out in an intricate design that sprawled across the whole clearing. It looked like a mix of elaborate geometric patterns and vaguely runic symbols, and everything about it felt indefinably wrong to me.

I stopped when I saw that, and Saori did as well, perhaps just taking the cue from me. I so very much did not want to step out into that clearing. “Audgrim?” I called from the edge of the trees. “What the hell is this?”

He looked over at me, and his posture actually looked relieved when he saw me. “That’s what I was hoping to ask you,” he said, loudly enough for me to hear clearly. “We found this thing, and I don’t know what the hell it is. Been trying not to mess with it, but I don’t know what to do beyond that.” He walked over towards us, which was good, because having a conversation at that distance was annoying and I really didn’t want to walk towards him right now.

“How did you even find it?” I asked as he approached.

“We’ve actually been making a bit of progress,” he said. “In particular, I was able to track down their missing wolf at least slightly.”

“How?” I asked, more out of idle curiosity than anything.

Audgrim shrugged. “That street only gets so many cars on it. The intersections on either end have traffic cameras, which was pretty lucky for us. I grabbed license plates for every car that went through there in the right time window, then started cross-referencing them to find anomalies. Once I had it narrowed down to three vehicles, I started looking for where they went after they left. Two were totally mundane, a food delivery and some guy who was visiting his sister.”

I stared. Saori, after a moment, said, “You can do that?”

Audgrim just smiled. I had to work not to shiver. I knew that the dvergar had a lot of influence, locally. They’d maintained an interest in this city since it was founded, and on an intellectual level, I’d sort of known that he could probably get a lot of things done that he didn’t really have the legal authority to do. But it was one thing to know that, and another to see it being used so casually. It had only even taken him a few hours.

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “So you got that. What’s that have to do with this place?”

His smile faded almost instantly. “Directly? Almost nothing. It was a rented car, we couldn’t really get much past that. They drove to a parking garage and then switched cars, and that we couldn’t follow. The wolves confirmed Mike’s scent was in the garage but that’s about it. But since it suggested that they didn’t bother hiding from mundane authorities, I also grabbed pretty much every local police report from the past two days to look at.”

Because clearly having access to creepy amounts of surveillance data wasn’t unsettling enough. “What’d you get?”

“Not too much so far,” he said. “It’s a lot of information to sift through, and we don’t really know what to look for very well. It’s really only a few of the strangest incidents that I’ve been able to look into. This one, in particular, was…odd. There were a ton of complaints about noise and activity here over the past three to five days, and then two nights ago a whole bunch of calls all at once a little before midnight, then nothing.”

“Got written off as a bunch of high schoolers having a party?” I guessed.

“Yeah. But the timing and some of the details were odd, like how rather than music, the noises being reported were loud sounds that resembled fireworks, creepy laughter, stuff like that. Also a weird time of year for it, the school year just started again.” He shrugged. “Seemed odd, so I asked Cassie to go see if it smelled like anything.”

“And she found this?”

He nodded. “Apparently the whole area, from here to the access road, smells all kinds of wrong. She described it as being like a bunch of scents distorted and blended into each other. I don’t know how their scent tracking works well enough to guess at what that means. She really did not like it, though, so she backed off and called me. Came in and found this whole setup.”

I sighed. “And you wanted me to come look at it, see what was going on?”

“Maybe?” He shrugged. “I’m genuinely not sure what this is, what to do with it, I don’t even know if it’s related. This is pretty far outside my area of expertise.”

I nodded. “Alright. Well. If I’m here already, fine.” I knelt down to look at the bit of metal closest to me again, brushing my fingers over it. The impression was immediate, strong, and unpleasant, without me even having to open myself up more than my default state. Grease and rot and something sick and putrid and alien. I shuddered and stood back up. “’Kay, that was easy. Definitely them, and there’s a lot less human in this relative to that sponsor. Seems to have involved several people, and it was spread out in time. Very strong, very inhuman. Some form of ritual magic but I doubt I’ll be able to tell you more than that. This isn’t my area of expertise, either, and beyond telling you who was here, I don’t think I’ve got anything for you on this one.”

He nodded. He looked like he’d expected that, and like he was expecting something worse next. I got the strong impression that I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.

I was not disappointed. “I’d like for you to call the firm,” he said, quiet and unsure of himself.

To anyone else in that clearing, my reaction to this sentence probably seemed completely disproportionate. I turned and stared at him in silence for a long moment. My expression was blank, and when I did speak, my voice had gone back to that very level, calm tone that never meant anything good when it came from me.

“You want me to…is this your idea of a practical joke or something?”

“No,” he said quietly. “No, I’m serious.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” I asked.

He glanced around, and then started walking back out into the clearing. This time I followed, and Saori did as well, looking increasingly confused. I knew what he had in mind, though. It was as close to private as we were getting, and some conversations you did not want to have in front of a dozen of your employees.

“None of my people have the right skillset to analyze this,” he said quietly, once were out into the clearing. “And even if I wanted the Tribe looking at this, it’s not their kind of magic.”

“Sure,” I said. “But you have to know this will be…an incredibly bad idea.” I shook my head. “Audgrim, it’s…why? Like, seriously, why? Nothing about this situation merits the kinds of resources you’ve been throwing at it. Calling me because of some vandalism is one thing, it’s odd but I can understand it. Talking to Jack Tar was another thing entirely, but he was wanting to help you anyway, sure, reasonable enough. But calling the firm is…what the hell is so important about this that you’d pull them in on it?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Audgrim said. Shouted, really, and I must have flinched, because he closed his eyes and visibly forced himself to calm down again. “Kyoko, it’s…look. Everything I know says you’re right. It’s vandalism and two dead people, that’s nothing, it doesn’t matter. But the family is leaning on me hard. I’ve got my mother breathing down my neck, even my uncle took the time to tell me in person not to fuck this up. I haven’t seen him in years, and he cares enough to come and tell me this, and I do not know why. But I have never seen them get this intense about something before. And that scares me, especially when, like you said, nothing about it seems like it should even register on their scale.”

“Um,” Saori said, sounding very much not happy to be interrupting. “Sorry, but. What the hell are you talking about?”

Audgrim clearly needed a moment to cool down anyway, so I was the one who answered her. “There’s this consulting firm called Varkalnen, Nilsen, Casimir, and Associates. Though ‛consulting firm’ doesn’t really capture it. VNC has a reputation for being…they can put you in contact with a consultant or specialist on any topic you want. I’m not being particularly hyperbolic, they really do have almost literally anything. But prices…can be considerable.”

“Ah,” she said. “I think I’m beginning to see what you mean.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling very tired. “I have…a limited amount of contact with them. Mostly because my mother had more. They’re the ones who administer the trust fund she set up for me, as well as having been responsible for much of my education. They’re the ones who gave Audgrim my number, a long while ago, when he wanted someone to look at a very unusual computer system. But that was a simple thing to ask for. Getting an expert on ritual magic to come look at this on short notice is…not.”

“The first taste is always free,” Saori said, her eyes distant. “Always.”

I smiled a little. “Yeah.” I looked over to Audgrim, who had apparently been content to let me explain this without comment. “You know this won’t end well.”

“Maybe not,” he said quietly. “But the cost will be on my head. All I need you to do is make the initial call.”

I sighed. The first taste was always, always free. And he really should have known better, but I wasn’t here to protect him from his own choices.

“Give me a few minutes and I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

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