Chapter One

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I really hate being woken up by phone calls. Not a huge fan of phone calls in general, but I don’t sleep well, and having it interrupted when I did manage to sleep was particularly obnoxious. The fact that this call had woken me out of a fairly nasty nightmare made me resent it less, but did not make me sound any happier when I answered.

“What do you want?” I didn’t see who was calling before I answered. They weren’t listed as a contact, but I replaced phones often enough that didn’t mean much.

“I’ve got a situation I’d like you to take a look at.” I placed the voice, a low and slightly rough baritone, after a moment. I didn’t talk to Audgrim terribly often, but his voice was memorable.

“Cool. And you woke me up because…?”

“It’s noon.” He was trying for chastising. It didn’t work very well.

“I am all too aware,” I groaned. “Your point being?”

“It’s family stuff. Some really weird vandalism or something at one of our businesses.”

I yawned. “Yeah, still not seeing why I care here.”

“I’ll owe you a favor,” he said. “Commensurate, with our standard restrictions.” Audgrim sounded like he’d just bitten into a lemon.

That did get me to pay attention, though it didn’t prevent another yawn. “That serious, huh?” Favors were, in the world Audgrim and I moved in, a rather big deal. Debt and obligation in general, really, but favors in particular had weight. We’d exchanged them before, hence the standing set of restrictions, but still not something to hand out lightly.

“Yeah. It’s…really strange, Kyoko. I’m kind of at a loss here.”

I sighed. “Ugh. Fine. I’ll be ready in twenty. You’re driving.” I hung up before he could respond, and reluctantly got out of bed. It wouldn’t take me that long to get dressed, given I was barely aiming as high as “presentable”, but a few minutes to clear out the lingering anxiety of the nightmare would be helpful.

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Audgrim had a nice car. I didn’t really know enough to identify it much beyond that, cars for me having always been something other people used. All I really knew was that it was a black SUV, it was comfortable, and it looked and smelled new. Money might not be worth all that much to either of us, but even a half-dwarf tended towards hoarding and luxury.

Audgrim didn’t look like what most people would imagine a dwarf as. And it wasn’t just because he was half-human, either. The dvergar were just…not much like what people tended to think of when they pictured a dwarf. Audgrim was tall, six feet and change, with broad shoulders, vaguely Scandinavian features, and a contagious grin. He was generally clean-shaven, because as he freely acknowledged, his face did not lend itself to beards. Visible stubble currently suggested both a stressful few days and the look of a mangy rodent.

“So what are we going to look at, anyway?” I asked as he pulled away from my house. I didn’t bother keeping track of where we were going, had in fact closed my eyes already. I had the window down, the fall air was pleasantly crisp, and the breeze felt nice on my face. Summer in Pittsburgh was generally unpleasantly warm by my standards, and I felt that the cooler weather today merited conscious attention.

“Some funeral home in North Shore. Smaller place, a bit older. Owner has a contract with us for security.”

I’d never entirely gotten clear on whether the local dvergar ran a security company or a protection racket. In most ways, I supposed, the difference was fairly trivial. I also wasn’t sure why a funeral home needed meaningful security, but I guess people got weird about corpses sometimes. “And you said it was vandalism?”

“I honestly have no fucking clue,” Audgrim said. We turned, and picked up speed. Down out of the tangle of tiny, steep streets around my house, then. “I don’t know what else to call it, but it’s bizarre. This is the eighth incident in just under two weeks. They’ve all been at either buildings we own, businesses we operate, or businesses we provide security to. Every time, it’s been some kind of break-in, and I have no idea why, because they haven’t been taking anything, literally nothing that we can tell. Haven’t been damaging anything really. Everything else has been kind of inconsistent, though.”

“No witnesses, I take it?”

“None,” he said, his voice sour now. “Sometimes the people on site don’t remember seeing anything, others they remember falling asleep and having really weird dreams. At least one didn’t remember anything, but there’s a window of around twenty minutes he doesn’t remember at all, including a conversation with his girlfriend that happened during. Cameras have been having weird malfunctions; we got a few images, but nothing recognizable or useful.”

“Huh.” Despite myself, I had to admit I was somewhat intrigued now. This was, in fact, strange. “So definitely targeting you, but not stealing anything. Anyone get hurt?”

“Yeah, this time was the first. Happened last night, around two in the morning. Security guard who was on shift at the time, human but competent and fairly informed. And the injuries are as bizarre as everything else, too. Severe frostbite for no apparent reason, and necrosis that resembles brown recluse bites. He’s in the hospital currently. He doesn’t remember much of it either, woke up on the floor like that after they were gone.”

I shuddered a bit at that. I was familiar with what brown recluse venom did to people. It…was not a pleasant thing, even just to look at. “Okay, yeah, starting to get an idea of why you’re freaked. No metaphysical trail either I assume?”

“Nope. Can’t even find traces to show that a working happened. I mean, it’s pretty clear at least some of this is magic, don’t really know how else to explain some of this shit. But no traces. You’ve got better senses for that than any of our staff, though.”

I had to laugh at that comment. Bit of an understatement, really. “Okay. Anyone else going to be there?”

“Yeah, the owner’s on site. He’s aware of the supernatural, but not in any detailed way. He knows I’m bringing a consultant, but I didn’t tell him anything else about you.”

“Awesome. I think that’s all my questions. How’s the stereo in this thing?”

Rather than answer, he just put on some music. Bach, it sounded like, one of the few areas of overlap in our tastes. I tended to like my music either much more or much less traditional than Audgrim prefers. Classic rock, in my opinion, was one of the greatest mistakes of the twentieth century.

Bach was good, though. I didn’t immediately recognize the composition, but it had a sort of silvery, tingling feeling about it. The stereo was passable. The breeze was crisp. Today was going better than I’d expected from how I’d woken up.

 

The trip wasn’t too long. Two or three songs before Audgrim parked and turned the music off. I opened my eyes, blinking a bit at the sunlight, and looked around.

We were in one of the nicer parts of North Shore. Not too far from a park, it looked like, and far enough from the sports stadiums not to have much traffic. I didn’t come to this neighborhood often enough to say more specifically than that.

The funeral home itself was a relatively small building, set aside from its neighbors a bit with its own parking lot. It was nice, could have passed for a restaurant, but I didn’t like the way it felt. It had a bitterness to it, not twisted or evil, but bitter. Death is like that, I suppose.

The front door had a sign up apologetically announcing they would be closed for the next few days, with no reason listed. Cheapish metal door, painted, no window to show what was behind it. There was a window next to it, but the blinds were closed. Very little to show what was inside, aside from the sign out front.

Audgrim had a key, unsurprisingly, and opened the door without knocking. Inside, we were in a lobby or something of the sort; architecture not being a topic I knew much about, I wasn’t sure what the specific word was. Bright fluorescent lights, cheap vinyl flooring, fairly cheap desk but the computer was pretty new and appeared to be of decent quality.

The guy sitting behind that desk was probably in his early thirties, slightly darker skin than Audgrim but that wasn’t saying much. Cheap suit, mostly black, of course; I imagined that he wore black more days than not, in his line of work. He looked nervous, and like he hadn’t slept much last night.

“Hey, Anthony. This is Kyoko Sugiyama, she’s the consultant I mentioned this morning. Kyoko, Anthony Hayes, he’s the owner here.”

I could practically see him evaluating me. I knew what he was thinking, too. I didn’t exactly look like a professional investigator or consultant, or a professional anything, really. I looked like a Japanese girl too young to buy alcohol with bright green eyes and extensive tattoos. The hibiscus blossom on my right hand and the wolf on the left were always visible, but I’d worn short sleeves today, so he could see that my arms were also covered in wolves and flowers, clouds and snakes. They were all very vivid, very colorful, and none of them made me look professional.

“Pleased to meet you, Kyoko,” he said, his pronunciation of my name fairly terrible. I was pretty used to that, on the whole. His voice was otherwise quite pleasant, a nice dark green feeling about it.

“Call me Key.” I could see Audgrim’s amusement at this, though I doubted Anthony noticed; Audgrim was fairly reserved, which seemed to be a common trait among the dvergar. He knew about this little joke, though. Adding that syllable—Kiyoko, rather than Kyoko—was the most common way for Americans to mispronounce my name. Using it as a nickname was a subtle bit of mockery, more or less saying that if they were going to get it wrong, they should just stop after that mistake. They rarely realized I was making fun of them.

Audgrim knew, of course. He was one of the few people I knew whose name was harder for the people here to pronounce than mine. He didn’t even try to get them to actually call him Auðgrímr, but even Audgrim was hard for most Americans. I supposed we’d bonded over that to a degree.

I looked around as we walked into the building further, took a deep breath, noticed something. “Hey, Anthony. Do you use acetone much?”

He blinked. “Um. What?”

“Acetone,” I said again. I was trying to sound patient; I wasn’t sure how well it was working. “Do you use it here?”

“Not really?”

“Cool. Didn’t think so, but I don’t really know how funeral homes work, so I figured I’d check. So this is the room where your guy was working, Audgrim?”

Audgrim was clearly just as lost, but he’d worked with me before. He knew enough to just roll with it. “Yeah. Usually behind the desk for overnights. No security camera in this room, though.”

“Awesome.” I walked over to the desk, squatted down to look more closely. “Okay, yup, stronger over here. Probably sprayed the whole room with the stuff.” I had no idea how they couldn’t smell it. But I’d gotten pretty used to that. Humans just had such mediocre senses, and dvergar were only mildly better in a lot of areas.

I stood up again, looked at the room again now that I was starting to get a better feel for it. “Okay. And this is the only door into the building, correct?”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “There’s an employee entrance towards the back, but it gets locked up overnight. That one does have a security camera, also, and it doesn’t seem like anyone was back there last night.”

“Yeah, that tracks. I’m guessing you don’t have any particularly important bodies here right now?”

“No. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, really. And it doesn’t look like anyone was in that area, either. Doors stayed locked overnight, and there’s a camera in there that didn’t catch anything.”

I nodded. About what I’d expected. “How about an office or records area, do you have anything like that?”

“Two offices, yes. One is mine, the other is shared by a few of the employees.”

“Makes sense. Mind showing me?”

Anthony clearly thought I was insane. But he trusted Audgrim, and I could see that he wasn’t entirely clueless, either. Most humans, when they saw how young I looked, tended to get dismissive. Anthony looked like he knew better, past that first moment of confusion. He thought I was crazy, but he didn’t think I was stupid, and he was smart enough to be wary. He showed us to the offices. I didn’t have to ask which was his. It was the one that reeked of acetone.

“Ugh. Yeah, they were definitely in here also. Not in the other, I don’t think. Cool if I look at your desk?”

“Um. Sure?”

“Awesome.” I walked over and sat down, trying to get a feel for the space. Ugly desk, but the chair was nice. Computer was also nice, but not special. There were few signs of personality, and those I did see felt impersonal—a fake plant, a small picture of a dog. Nothing that was specific to Anthony’s life. The desk was a style that had locks on most of the drawers. Carpet in this room, which had absorbed more of the acetone, leaving it even more noxious in there. Audgrim, I thought, could smell it now, based on his expression.

They hadn’t sprayed the desk down fully, though. It would have damaged the material, most likely, and that would have given them away. As I dragged my fingertips over it, I could get a faint read, not much more than a tingle, but it was there. It had a nasty, slightly greasy feeling to it. I found where that feeling was strongest, and pulled that drawer open.

From the look on Anthony’s face, it was supposed to be locked, and he hadn’t realized that it wasn’t until just now. He looked too abruptly tense for that. Looking inside, I saw what looked like some old-school accounting books. I didn’t look at them more closely, just closed the drawer.

“That’d be what they were here for, I’m guessing,” I said. “I don’t think they went anywhere else. Acetone seems like it was just here, the lobby, and the hallway. That’d be why your people didn’t get any traces, incidentally, Audgrim.”

He blinked at that. “What?”

I shrugged. “It’s not a perfect mask, but it would be plenty to remove faint traces. I haven’t seen this trick in a while, but acetone is a pretty good choice for it, and it’s distinctive.” I finished looking over the desk, didn’t find anything else, stood back up. They were both staring at me.

“You’re going to have to explain that one,” Audgrim said after a moment, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to without prompting.

“Oh, it’s pretty simple, really. A substance’s physical and metaphysical properties are often related to some degree. Not always, but often. Acetone is a really effective solvent, broad-spectrum and cheap. It’s polar, and ideally you’d mix it with something like toluene to get more of the nonpolar solutes. But it’s a great solvent, and in this case that maps across.”

They continued to stare. I walked back to the door of the office, and it took a moment for them to follow.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Audgrim was the one who said it, but it was clear it was a shared sentiment.

I rolled my eyes. “Some of us got passing grades in chemistry. Fine, I’ll dumb it down for you. Acetone dissolves all kinds of shit, and that means that it can be used to dissolve magic to a limited degree. Better than water, and it’s both cheap and accessible. Also, it has a really strong odor, which makes it useful as a more literal scent mask as well. You can mix in other solvents or additives, if you want to tailor it or get a stronger effect. But even just acetone if you add a magical charge will work. They probably put it in a spray bottle and doused the whole area they’d been through, it’d be more than enough to wipe this kind of transient signature.”

“Okay, see, that I can understand,” Audgrim said. “Did they wipe it well enough to work on you?”

I grinned. “Let’s find out.”

It would be inaccurate to describe what I did next as opening my senses to magical energies. Variations of that phrasing were how most practitioners I’d discussed the topic with described it. And for them, it was probably accurate. Mages generally had some passive awareness of energy fields, enough to recognize some nonhumans, detect an active working, or pick up on a strong impression that had been reinforced in a location repeatedly. But unless they made a conscious effort, they didn’t usually get details or subtle signatures; they were barely more sensitive, in a lot of cases, than ordinary humans. Even most of the nonhuman practitioners I had met had to work to get detail.

It wasn’t like that for me. I was always aware of those forces on some level. I’d smelled the death in this place as soon as I walked in the door; it was dry, more bones-and-dust than rotting meat, but you can’t have this many corpses passing through a building and not leave an impression on it. I’d felt it in my fingertips when I touched Anthony’s desk, greasy and distasteful. It was always there for me, always had been; I’d developed the ability by the time I was talking in sentences, and didn’t remember what life was like without it.

So I really didn’t have to open myself up at all. I’d learned to filter that information out really well, because otherwise it became overstimulating and unpleasant. I was used to masking it, softening it a bit so I could function, practiced enough that I didn’t really have to think about it. But it was an active effort to do so, and all it took to bring it into focus was relaxing a little. The filters went away, and that background perception flooded in at full intensity.

The world was so vivid, everything so much more intense. The colors were rich and oversaturated, the humming of the fluorescent lights felt like music, the texture of my shirt more like silk than mass-produced cotton. It felt great, like I was just so much more alive than I’d been ten seconds ago. It usually did, right up until it felt absolutely terrible.

This wasn’t bad, though. Controlled environment, not a lot of activity happening, nothing awful hitting my awareness, and it felt amazing. I was still grinning, but I could tell it was a more relaxed expression than it had been a moment prior, my jaw looser, my spine less rigid. People had told me the sudden euphoria looked quite a bit like I was high, complete with being fascinated by things no one else could see and occasionally giggling for no apparent reason.

The building’s background impression was stronger now. I could taste the bitterness of it, smell the dry, sterile death in the air. There was surprisingly little grief in it, though I supposed probably the grieving families didn’t spend much time back here or in the lobby. There would be meeting rooms that tasted like mourning, I was sure. But here, in the areas where this was just a business, it was detached, clinical, more formaldehyde in the scent than tears.

These things weren’t actually what I was perceiving, of course. This perception didn’t have much to do with anything as simple as the chemical signals people called scents. But the human brain—and mine was close enough to human for this purpose—doesn’t have a native way to understand magic, to interpret these energies. And comparing things to what we already knew was how people made sense of things far outside their realm of experience, how they made information into meaning. Most people interpreted energy fields primarily as visual metaphors. For me they were a cocktail of every kind of sensory information, mixed through each other and with more mundane synesthesia tying them together as well.

There was a reason that initial rush of perception made me look high. The sudden wave of all these sensations all at once, so vivid and oversaturated, was intense, and the euphoria was momentarily overpowering. It took a few moments for me to focus enough to actually look for traces.

Using energized solvents to wipe the faint, lingering impressions left by transient presence or momentary workings was similar to using something like bleach to wipe more ordinary biometric information. That is to say, it was possible, but you had to be really fucking thorough to be sure. Also like biometrics, the average person had no way to check whether it had worked. A mage would have to be in a trance, generally speaking, to perceive the local field closely enough to be sure. You usually didn’t have that kind of time when you were somewhere that you weren’t supposed to be.

So I went looking in case they missed a spot. From the outside, I was sure it looked bizarre, and it wasn’t making Anthony less convinced I was insane. I glanced around the office, but I wasn’t expecting anything, and I was correct. They’d been thorough in there. I barely glanced at it, just enough to confirm that they’d gotten everything, and then wandered out into the hallway. I was moving erratically, staring at walls with dilated eyes and sniffing the air. Physically examining things like that, trying to get more sensory information, had no direct influence on what I could feel. But doing so seemed to bring it into better focus somehow. Maybe just because it was what my brain knew to do to improve acuity, and so the action focused my attention.

The hallway was pretty well cleaned out, too. They must have used most of a bottle of acetone in here, and the smell was terrible. Anthony started to ask something, but Audgrim shushed him with a quiet voice that rippled gunmetal-grey. I kept looking.

And then I saw it. They’d missed a spot, in the hallway next to the door of the lobby. A patch of wall, near the floor, where there was an interruption in the background field of the building. People often weren’t as careful with walls as with the floor. It wasn’t a strong signal, probably only left any trace of the person’s presence because they’d just done whatever the hell they’d done to the security guard. But it was there.

“Got something,” I said, walking over to it and squatting down. From the outside, it looked like I was staring at a patch of wall no different than any other, the white paint comparably stained, nothing unusual at all about it.

From my perspective, there was a faint, shimmering overlay on it. It was iridescent, a bit like an oil slick, laid over a dark base. The shimmering feeling was common to human magic in my experience, but that base layer was unusual. When I reached out and touched it, the greasy feeling was stronger. When I focused on it, the background hum of fluorescent lights took on a slightly dissonant tone. I liked dissonance a lot of the time, but this sound was grating, unpleasant. I leaned in and licked the paint (Anthony was staring with such intensity it was satisfying even though I couldn’t see his expression), and it had a bitterness more noxious than that of the funeral home itself, foul, almost tainted. It felt gleeful, too, and that was kinda creepy, all things considered.

Enough. I closed my eyes, focused on my breathing, and reinstated those filters. It was always harder than taking them down in the first place. When I got them in place, I almost fell over, the sudden loss of sensation disorienting and unpleasant. It was like opting into blindness, and the knowledge that it was better than the alternative did not make the experience less jarring. It took me a moment to stand up.

Audgrim could recognize it. We’d worked together before, quite a few times, and from what I’d been told the disoriented feeling of closing myself off from the world was as visible as the high of opening that floodgate to begin with. By the time I’d finished standing up, he was standing next to me with a hand on my elbow to steady me. I’d have been annoyed by the gesture, had it not been helpful when I almost lost my balance. I considered being annoyed anyway, but it seemed a bit petty.

He waited until I was steady before saying anything. “You get anything from it?”

“A bit, yeah,” I said. “Feels mostly human, shimmers like human, but weird. There’s some admixture I don’t recognize, a nasty one. And it’s fairly strong. Hard to say how strong exactly, there’s not much to work with here, but not a lightweight.”

Audgrim looked unhappy. Anthony looked incredibly uncomfortable. We walked back out to the lobby with nothing else said.

“Okay. You have anything else to do here?” Audgrim glanced from me to the human in the room. There were several kinds of implicit meaning, there. Anthony might be at least slightly informed, but there were conversations you didn’t have in front of someone who was so relatively innocent.

“Nah, think that’s about all I’m getting here. They cleaned this place up pretty good.”

He nodded, unsurprised. My senses for this kind of thing were very, very sharp, but even for me, there were limits. “Okay. Thanks, Anthony, we’ll get out of your hair now. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”

“Sure,” he said. “Nice to meet you, uh, Key.”

“Likewise, Mr. Hayes. Have a nice day.” I grinned at him, wide enough to look a little bit uncanny, and walked out the door.

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