Chapter Eight

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Later. Much later. I’d fallen asleep at some point, tangled in a pile of limbs with Saori. She hadn’t woken up yet. Probably not surprising; I hadn’t actually had a nightmare, but I could hardly ever sleep deeply. I didn’t sleep very long most of the time, either; I usually woke up in the afternoon, but that was because I went to bed after sunrise often as not. I wasn’t sure I could extricate myself from the tangle without waking her, and didn’t try. I was quite content to stay where I was, though I did free one arm enough that I could stroke her hair while she slept.

The kitsune seemed smaller, asleep, when she wasn’t in motion. She was, I noted absently, attractive. I hadn’t really seen that yesterday, or rather I had seen it but not in a way that provided any clarity about her physical appearance. Too hard to tell where objective reality stopped and my less concrete senses began.

Now, I could see that she was attractive. I was guessing people would call her hot more often than beautiful, but they would call her that. Her hair was cut short and unevenly, but artistically so, and the deep crimson streaks in it were real, barely visible against the black. Being this close and familiar, I could pick up scents of fox and spice even through my filters, but nothing past that. Thus, I could tell that some of that scent of incense had just been a floral perfume.

It felt…nice, having her cuddled up against me. Very nice. I was happy to stay there until she woke up. It didn’t take long, anyway. I’d been tired enough, in enough ways, to go to sleep earlier than my norm, and it was still morning when she started stirring.

Saori woke up in an interesting way. It wasn’t exactly abrupt. It was languid, even, with a few moments of stretching and happy noises before she opened her eyes. But it felt like she was mentally alert as soon as she started stirring at all. There was no drowsiness, no momentary uncertainty as to why she was in an unfamiliar bed, nothing. She stretched and pressed against me, then opened her eyes with a smug grin.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Hi. How’d you sleep?”

“Eh. Had worse. You want breakfast?”

“Sure. Do we have to get up for that?”

“Sadly, yes.”

---

Breakfast happened. I was a tolerable cook, not great, but I could do it. The reasons I so often ate frozen food and snacks instead had more to do with motivation than skill. That was easier to find than usual, this morning, and I put something reasonably edible together.

Saori, as she’d implied the previous day, didn’t often have room to criticize someone about caffeine use. We’d gone through two energy drinks each by the time the last of the sausages was gone. Caffeine was always interesting in how it affected me. I still got most of the stimulant effect, but I had much the same resistance to the unpleasant effects of overuse that I did to other toxins. Between that and my poor sleep quality, it wasn’t hard to see why I bought these things in such bulk. I could have just gotten caffeine supplements, but I dislike pills more than sucralose.

“So we didn’t really cover this last night,” Saori said once I was done cleaning up the kitchen. “But what do you see this being? Like, in terms of relationship things.”

“I dunno. What do you want it to be?” I went over and joined her on the couch. “I’m not being flippant, to be clear. I’m just pretty open. Like I said yesterday, you seem like an interesting person to talk with, not a random hookup. So I’d like to continue spending time with you, and if you’re interested I’d enjoy it including sex. But in terms of things like exclusivity, or a formal label to the relationship, I don’t really have strong preferences.”

“That’s an unexpectedly thorough answer.”

My lips twitched a little. “Relationship goals are a topic I’ve had plenty of time to think about.”

“Heh. Fair enough.” Saori was quiet for a moment, seeming lost in thought. I let her take her time considering the topic. Eventually, she said, “I’ve tried the monogamy thing, a few times. Hasn’t ended well. So if you don’t have a preference I don’t feel a need to impose it. And then formality and labels are both terrible, so pass on that, thanks. That said, though, definitely interested.”

Saori was smirking and moving closer. I wasn’t entirely sure what she was planning to do, but I was looking forward to finding out.

And then someone rang the doorbell downstairs.

Saori paused at the interruption. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reminding myself that murder is not an appropriate response to all of life’s annoyances. While I was doing this, they rang the bell again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should go get that.”

“Yeah, they don’t seem likely to leave on their own.” She disentangled herself from me.

I went downstairs and checked who it was. Unfortunately, I knew him, so murder was probably not a great solution in this case.

I opened the door all of six inches and glared at the guy on the front step. “The hell are you doing at my house, Derek?”

Derek smiled. It was probably supposed to look sheepish. Given that he was the werewolf friend I’d mentioned to Saori, and I’d personally seen him ripping deer apart with his teeth, he probably wasn’t going to make it any closer than “very dangerous puppy,” but the effort was there. And in fairness, reaching very dangerous puppy eyes was still pretty impressive for a werewolf. “Sorry. I tried calling, but you didn’t answer.”

“Broke my phone. I’ll send you the new number later.” I tried to close the door, tried being the operative word. He had his foot in the way.

“I kinda need your help,” he said.

“Why do people keep telling me that?” I asked, not directing the question at anyone in particular. “Did someone start spreading malicious rumors about how I’m deeply benevolent and a great person to ask for help with things?”

“Someone’s gone missing,” he said, not acknowledging my attempt at humor.

I stared at him. “You guys are, like, a hundred times better equipped to work a missing persons case than I am.”

“We can’t,” he snarled. The smile was gone, and there was real, violent anger in its place. I must have flinched a bit, because he closed his eyes and took a couple deep breaths before continuing in a calmer tone. “We’ve been trying, but it’s not going well. It’s not normal, and we can’t get a scent to follow.”

I paused for a moment at that. Werewolves’ skill at tracking was legendary. You mix a sense of smell at least as acute as a bloodhound’s with human intelligence, coordination, and in some cases a lot of experience, that tends to happen. Put that together with some other things, and….

“Did they,” I asked slowly, “use acetone as a scent mask, by chance?”

He blinked, startled. “How do you know that?”

Of course it was. And while I really, really wanted to tell him to screw off, it would be a terrible idea. If nothing else, I hadn’t forgotten that Saori had significant personal interest in this whole mess. Ignoring the chance to follow up on this in favor of resuming our earlier conversation would likely leave the kitsune rather…unimpressed.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, probably sounding exasperated. “Uh, no offense.”

“None taken. So….”

“Ugh,” I sighed. “Yeah, I’ll look at it. Wait here, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

---

Saori insisted on coming along. I insisted on riding in her car rather than his. Derek didn’t like this very much, but he knew better than to push me on it when I clearly didn’t want to be doing this to begin with. Honestly, he almost certainly knew exactly what was going on there. Even in skin, his sense of smell was at least as sharp as mine, and we hadn’t really had time to shower. Hell, Saori was even wearing one of my shirts. It was a little large on her, but adequate, and hers was…going to need washed.

Derek knew better than to mention this, too. Though in this case that wasn’t so much to avoid pissing me off as because I was shameless, Saori was smirking at him, and he knew he’d likely hear far more than he wanted to about it if he brought it up.

He drove more slowly than Saori probably wanted to, but fast enough I wasn’t paying much attention to the route. Northwest, I thought, which meant not especially close to any of the previous locations I’d seen. Details beyond that were lost in a haze of wind, some unholy hybrid of swing and bagpipes, and Saori’s golden-fire laughter.

It was a longer drive this time. I was pretty fine with that.

Eventually, though, it had to end. Derek pulled into the driveway of some house. Not rural, but far enough into suburbia that having a back yard large enough to play football in was not terribly extravagant. I didn’t recognize it. There were two cars in the driveway already, and it really wasn’t large enough for four, so Saori parked hers on the street. Having one tire on the neighbor’s otherwise immaculate lawn was probably not strictly required, but such is life.

“Alright,” I said to Derek as we approached the house. “Walk me through what happened.”

“Mike lives here with Samantha, that’s his wife. He’s one of us, she’s human but knows about it. He went missing yesterday evening. And we really don’t know how. There’s no indication of violence at all. Sam was here at the time, and she doesn’t know either. She says Mike got up and went to answer the door. She didn’t hear anything being said. Next thing she remembers, she was waking up on the floor two hours later and he was gone.”

I didn’t bother asking whether she was a reliable source. They’d have checked that long before they were reduced to asking me for help. Derek was acquainted with me, and I’d met a couple of the other local wolves, but this was something they’d much rather handle in-house. Getting an outsider involved, and not even a particularly trusted one? They were desperate. It hadn’t taken them as long to reach that point as it had for Audgrim, but then, this was both more personal and more urgent than his situation.

“And when you got here, you found the place untouched, but reeking of acetone?”

“Yeah.” He sounded…displeased. “They practically soaked the driveway in the stuff. We can just barely follow Mike’s trail from the front door out to the street, and only because we know him. Can’t pick out anything else through the noise.”

“And once they got to the street, they’d be gone.” Saori sounded intrigued, though it wasn’t a question.

Derek answered it anyway. “Yeah. Got in a car, but….”

“But there are dozens of those passing through here on any given day.” I nodded. “Yeah. Anyone else here right now?”

“Samantha is. And then Cassie and Andrew, they’re both ours.”

I nodded again. “Cool. Let’s go say hi.”

---

It was not hard to tell which of the people in the house was Samantha. She looked to be early middle-aged, for one thing, and werewolves are as ageless as I am. For another, she’d been crying. The other two people in the room looked comparably upset, but in a way that was less tear-stricken and more quietly furious.

I very carefully did not carry myself in a confrontational way as we entered the house. Even Saori seemed to know better. Werewolves…had a reputation for both overprotectiveness and anger management problems. I really didn’t want to deal with that right now. Neither of them looked particularly dangerous, but then, neither did I. And the smell of wolf and lavender in that room was overpowering. I was very careful not to seem hostile walking in there.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Kyoko, and this is Saori. Any chance we could chat with you?”

Cassie looked at me, then at Derek. “You didn’t say she’d bring someone else.”

“I know,” I sighed, before he could answer. “But my friend here has a bit of an axe to grind with someone who might be related to this, and it would have been really awkward to ask her to stay home.”

“I’m definitely setting them on fire when we find them,” Saori said helpfully. “Acid and needles also under consideration.”

Cassie smiled a little at that. Andrew didn’t, but he didn’t object, either. “Let’s chat, then,” Cassie said. Her glance took in Samantha, and I shook my head a tiny bit. No need to involve her in this, at least not yet. She almost certainly didn’t know anything useful, and she didn’t need to have strangers talking about her missing husband in front of her. She’d had a hard enough day already.

We went back outside. I wandered into the yard and sat down under a tree. It emphasized the whole nonconfrontational look, and also supplied shade, because for once it wasn’t cloudy and the sun was extremely confrontational about it. “Okay,” I said. “Is it alright if I ask a couple questions?”

“Go ahead.” Andrew sounded slightly less on-edge than Cassie did, though it might just have been better masked. None of the wolves sat down. Saori did, but that may have just been so she could cuddle up next to me.

“Cool. So you know someone was present and took Mike. Anything about them?”

“Him,” Andrew said. “Pretty sure. There are a couple fragmentary footprints, and the stride length and weight distribution look male. Fairly average height and build, wearing boots, casual walking pace. Nothing else.”

Werewolves are scary good at tracking people.

“Alright. Not a lot, but I guess it’s something. Acetone from the street to the door. Any in the house?”

“Little bit just inside the door,” Cassie said. “Little on Sam too, but that might just be nail polish remover.”

I nodded. So he hadn’t needed to go inside. And Sam wasn’t injured, either. Between that and the gap in her memory, this sounded a lot like the other break-ins Audgrim had mentioned, and very little like the attack on Chris, or like what happened to Audgrim’s worker at the funeral home. I hadn’t smelled any acetone on Chris, either, and even if he’d been moved, the smell would have lingered on his clothing. The implications were potentially interesting.

“Is it okay if I look around a little bit?”

The two of them glanced at each other. Glanced at Derek, who shrugged. Andrew nodded. “Sure.”

“Thanks.” I stood up and walked back over to the house, braced myself, and then let the world flood in.

It wasn’t as easy as the funeral home, was much more overwhelming. Open environment, and there had been a bunch of werewolves through here. Saori too, for that matter, and her signature remained fascinating, that thread of smoke in her scent captivating now that it felt so clear. But it was nowhere remotely close to as unpleasant as looking at Chris and Jack had been, and my swaying was solidly from the “wow, this is so vivid and wonderful” kind of high. It took me a few tries to get my bearings and start actually examining things.

The driveway was a lost cause, and I barely even glanced at it. Environments like this one—outdoors, open to the air, few physical objects for energy to saturate—didn’t hold traces well to begin with. If he’d also soaked it in charged acetone thoroughly enough to keep the wolves from catching anything, and then said wolves spent almost a full day trying, I wasn’t going to be picking up anything out there.

I went to the doorway, instead. From the sounds of it, that was probably where he’d done whatever magic was involved in this. It was also where he’d have most wanted to hide his trail, but he’d probably been hiding mostly from the werewolves, and that meant a very different focus than hiding from me.

Still, he’d been very thorough. I looked around the door frame, the small section of tile flooring just inside the door, the door itself, and got a whole lot of nothing. There might have been a residue on Sam, but realistically even if there were, it would have faded into her own aura by now. I didn’t try to examine her beyond a glance; it would have been both rude and pointless.

But there was something, a tiny lingering trace of energy left in the coat closet. And it felt…interesting. It was very, very similar to what I’d been seeing so far. It had the shimmering feeling of human power, and it had the dark, vile admixture within that power. Rather than rancid meat, though, I got the cloying sweetness of rotting flowers. It felt slick, but rather than cold grease, it felt like oiled silk slipping between my fingers, or like grasping for the details of a dream when they were already fading from my memory. And perhaps most telling of all, there was none of the sadistic glee I’d felt both times before. This was calm, and very relaxed. Almost soothing, if anything.

I glanced down. Unless Mike wore women’s shoes, his were missing. I smiled, very slightly, and then closed myself down again, leaning against the wall to stay standing through that moment of disoriented loss. It always felt bad to put those filters back in place, even when what they were showing me felt terrible.

But I’d gotten what I needed, I thought, and I went back outside, closing the door behind me. There were things starting to fall into place. It was still mostly conjecture, but I was grinning as I walked over to the others, and it wasn’t entirely the product of the high.

“Hi,” I said. “So, I’ve got something. Not a lot. Something, though. I’ll be happy to explain but I have a question first. Are there any other werewolves you haven’t heard from lately? Not necessarily missing as such, might be a perfectly reasonable absence. Just someone you haven’t heard from in, oh, let’s say five or six days.” That would put it a day or two before Audgrim had first called me.

The three of them glanced at each other. After a few moments, Cassie said, “Steven’s been on a business trip for the past week. I haven’t heard from him, not sure if anyone else has.”

“Awesome. You mind giving him a call for me?”

She called him. There was no answer. She tried again, and still, nothing. The three of them asked around, and it did not take long to establish that none of the werewolves had heard from Steven in at least six days.

They were starting to freak out when they told me this. I couldn’t blame them. This was a bit of a spooky thing to have guessed. I felt a little bad for them, because I strongly suspected it wasn’t about to get better.

“Thanks,” I said. “You mind waiting a little longer? There’s someone I think you’ll want to meet, and I’d rather not explain twice.”

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