Chapter Two

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Audgrim didn’t say anything until we were back on the road. He was driving slower now, on quieter streets, not so much trying to get somewhere as just driving for something to do while we talked. The equivalent of walking while you’re on the phone. “So,” he said eventually. “Interpretation?”

I took a moment to sort my thoughts out, looking out the window at the trees. We were going slow enough that I could keep my eyes open without the visual input becoming unpleasant, and the breeze was still nice, and today really had shaped up better than I’d expected. “Well, it’s a bit limited. Not a lot of concrete information to work with. And a lot of what I do have is supposition, so keep that in mind.”

“Noted.”

“Cool. So, first off, you’re probably looking at some kind of information motive. If it were an isolated event, I’d assume it had something to do with one of the corpses, but that doesn’t really track with a pattern that’s hit other kinds of business. Can’t rule it out entirely, and I’d definitely say you should look into who’s in there currently, just in case. But they were in his office looking at his books, and combined with the pattern at the other places, that feels like they were after information.”

“Agreed. I’ll look for a connection, and even if they weren’t there about the bodies, there might be something useful there. But yeah, that’s about what I figured. You think he was lying?” It wasn’t really a question. Audgrim could read me well enough for that.

“Mmm, yes and no? I don’t think he was lying, exactly. And I’m almost sure he didn’t know that someone had been in his desk. But something about it felt weird. It felt like he didn’t want us to look at the actual, I dunno, cadaver area? Not sure what the word is. But he was real quick to say there was nothing there and no need to look at it. It’s why I recommended that angle.”

He grunted. “Yeah, that tracks. We do have monitoring in there, and I’m pretty sure nobody was in that room last night. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing important there.”

“Pretty much my thoughts. And then the office itself was also odd. He struck me as the type to do his accounting on a computer, so why are there actual account books in his desk, and why’d he flinch when he realized the attacker saw them? Just weird all around. That might be me being a distrustful bitch and projecting, though.” I shrugged.

“Possible, but still worth looking into.” Audgrim sounded thoughtful. He didn’t contest my characterization of myself. That was one of the things I liked about Audgrim, about dvergar in general, really. They didn’t tend to deny reality, to sugarcoat things. He wasn’t judging me, but the simple reality was that I had issues with trust, and sometimes they affected my reaction to things. “Anything else about the attacker?”

“A little, but again, supposition. They’re definitely mostly human. There’s some other influence I didn’t recognize, but there are way too many things it could be for me to narrow it down past that. They knew that trick for masking their presence, and that’s interesting, because not many people do. There’s rarely a reason to bother. Even for me, they wouldn’t have left much of a track outside of the area they were actually working in. Not enough to do much more than realize someone had been present, and the acetone kinda gives that one away on its own.”

“Does seem a bit weird,” he agreed. “We already knew that someone was doing this, just not how or why. And the smell would have been enough to lead you to the office, anyway. So why bother with this?”

“Yeah. So maybe it’s something else, some detail in the signature obvious enough to catch in even a faint trace. Maybe they’re just the kind of paranoiac who hides their trail when no one’s even looking. Can’t really assess motive, but it’s a weird choice, and it’s a pretty specific skill to have learned. To me that suggests they have experience. On which note, the trace I did find was a bit…” I trailed off, uncertain.

“A bit what?” Audgrim prompted.

“I got a fairly strong emotional echo,” I said. “Nothing too clear or specific, but strong. There was a very stark feeling of satisfaction, glee almost. And I’m almost sure this was left on the way into the building, not back out, so it’s not that they found what they wanted in the office. Pretty sure they were getting off on what they’d done to your security guard, and I’m not sure that’s as metaphorical as I’d like.”

I hadn’t forgotten how he’d described the injuries, and the necrosis from a brown recluse bite was seriously nasty. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what kind of person got that kind of satisfaction from making someone’s body start rotting while they were still alive. Apparently Audgrim didn’t like the idea any more than I did, because he was silent for a moment, and he didn’t seem happy.

“Anyway,” I said after a brief but uncomfortable pause. “That’s about all I’ve got. I can take a look at the other locations if you want, but if it’s the same person, I can pretty much promise I won’t find anything useful. This impression wouldn’t have lasted more than another day, so I highly doubt there’s still anything at the others.”

He nodded. “Still. Gives me a few angles to look into. If I find something, do you mind if I call you?”

I could have said no. I’d done what he asked, after all. But the favor he’d offered was commensurate, and so far I hadn’t provided him with all that much. Audgrim was also someone I’d worked with before, and an acquaintance. Almost a friend, and I didn’t have many of those.

And besides. I was bored.

“Sure, feel free. It might be fun.”

---

Audgrim drove me home without me having to ask. It was just a given. He knew that I was perfectly capable of getting back on my own, but he also knew that I was very much not fond of public transportation, and rideshare services were a hassle. So he drove me home, dropped me at the door with another promise that he’d call when he knew something, and left.

People tended to find it surprising that I had my own house. Oh, it wasn’t extravagant or anything. It was an older building halfway up one of Pittsburgh’s rather absurd hills, over in Southside. It wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either, a bit narrow but three stories tall to make up for it. More to the point, though, people tended to find it surprising that I owned a house at all, given what I did for a living, or more accurately what I didn’t.

Usually, when they asked how I could afford it, I just smiled and acted mysterious. I figured that whatever explanation they came up with based on that was generally going to be both less boring and less creepy than the reality.

It was far more space than I needed, really. It was just me living there. I barely even used the ground floor, and the second floor was mostly a functional space. Kitchen, a small studio or workshop, two guest bedrooms as though I had guests. My personal space was on the third floor; thankfully, I didn’t mind stairs. I kicked my shoes off just inside the front door, locked it thoroughly, and then went upstairs, yawning a bit.

Much like having a house, people often didn’t seem to expect me to have a computer. I really couldn’t understand why that would be a surprise. Sure, a lot of supernatural creatures predate electric lighting. But I wasn’t remotely one of them, and even they often understood the power of modern tools. They hadn’t lived that long by being incapable of adapting to changing circumstances. Other people, who knew me, were sometimes startled to see it from me specifically, because I tend to produce a lot of static discharge when I’m excited or agitated. But I, too, am capable of adapting, and that’s a solvable issue. A good antistatic mat and strap, a passable Faraday cage on the computer, and backup peripherals made it trivial.

The bottom line was that I was a child of the modern era. I grew up in the early days of the Internet, my father had the right mix of money and apathy to leave me with a personal computer and nothing else to do as a kid, and I had a degree in computer science. I could figure out how to use one. It baffled me that this surprised people. I turned mine on when I got home, and went to water my houseplants.

I had a lot of them. Plants thrived in my care, always had, and I had no idea why. It didn’t seem to matter what I did; the most basic tending was enough to keep them healthy and growing. I was grateful for that. They were the only company I had a lot of days, so keeping them healthy was fairly important to me.

In my personal space, it was mostly flowers, selected for their scent. Lilies and violets, calendula and Siberian iris, lavender and hibiscus…there were enough that the whole top floor of my house smelled like flowers. There was also a sort of small, enclosed sunroom on that floor, where I kept the carnivores.

Other groups were more functional in nature, including a number that I wasn’t legally allowed to have. The small loft above my computer had a collection of psychoactives, for example, that would lead to a very interesting conversation if the wrong person saw them. The second floor had a bunch of edibles next to the kitchen, a mix of herbs and edible flowers.

Also on the second floor, in a separate room, I had a collection of, ah, non-edibles. I had some classics in there, wolfsbane and foxglove, belladonna, both hemlock and water hemlock. Others were more obscure, things like autumn crocus, Japanese skimmia, yellow jessamine and blue lobelia. It was an extensive collection, and all told I had enough poison in that room to kill at least a dozen or two people. I was, of course, of such fine and upstanding moral character that no one would even imagine I would do such a thing, but I could.

I was pretty safe myself. I had a strong resistance to toxins, and especially more natural ones like these. Still, I wore gloves and a mask in that room, and I didn’t use that space for any other purpose, because I wasn’t an idiot.

Upstairs, the computer was powered up and I had a ton of unread messages. To be expected, really. Also to be expected, most of them I could put off for later without issue. There were several people wanting art commissions, and while it was bad praxis for a freelance artist to put off responding to those, I didn’t care. As people around me often noted, a freelance artist rarely had her own house, and I was doing it as a hobby. I only took payment at all to avoid encouraging the assholes who think artists should work for free because it’ll be good exposure. Just because I don’t need the money doesn’t mean other people don’t. Of far more interest, though, was a message from Pepper.

Friendships were in many ways easier for me to maintain online than in person. It was…tidier that way. I only had four people I’d actually call a friend in this city, but I knew a lot of people online, and Pepper was the closest of them. I’d never seen her face or heard her voice. She’d never heard mine, and the only images she’d seen of me were ones that she was pretty much guaranteed not to realize depicted a real person. But we were friends in a way I couldn’t often find in person. I responded to her message right away.

EmeraldKeychain: Hey. What’s up? I used a fairly random username, mostly because I used the same one everywhere, and this one was almost always available. That it also had several layers of in-joke only I would understand made it even better.

She responded almost immediately. blackpeppermint: howldy. not much. tired. you? She did not use a consistent username, though it always had Pepper in it. She also did not use consistent punctuation or grammar, and expecting consistent sanity from any of my friends was wishful thinking at best. Conversations with Pepper could be…interesting as a result.

EmeraldKeychain: Eh.Weird morning. Not exactly bad, but definitely weird.

blackpeppermint: every morning is weird when you’re a weirdo honey

I had to laugh at that. EmeraldKeychain: Okay, yeah, you got me there. Weirder than usual, then.

blackpeppermint: well shit. how far should i be running do you think?

EmeraldKeychain: Okay, for one thing I’m not *that* bad. For another, you’re already on the other side of the continent.

blackpeppermint: key. you are literally a hermetic madwoman who is secretly the heiresss to a larege fortune of suspicious provenance and you draw tentacle monsters while in a mantic visionary fugue. when a person of this descrip;tion says “hi today was weird enough to tip the scale even for me” it i s the opening scene of either a horror flick or a disaster movie and if its the latter i would like to start packing now.

EmeraldKeychain: 1) Congratulations on using hermetic, provenance, and mantic all in one sentence, I am in awe. 2) Also you can use those in a sentence but you can’t spell large? 3) Given you’re the one who asked me to draw tentacle monsters I’m not sure you can throw stones. And 4) It’s solidly a horror flick so far, so I think you’re safe.

blackpeppermint: 1) thank you, i got a word of the day calendar. 2) screw you, it was a long day at work. 3) see previoius 4) welp, good luck, hopefully you’re getting cast as the final girl

I was laughing pretty hard by this point. EmeraldKeychain: Yeah, here’s hoping. Work worse than usual today? She was several timezones earlier than I was, but I was most of the way to nocturnal and she had to get up at hell o’clock for her job at a bakery. So she was still often done with work by the time I woke up.

blackpeppermint: girl you don’t even know. i spent seven hours on a wedding cake. seven. hours. then the guy showed up and threw a tantrum because he spelled his wife’s name wrong on the order and didn’t leave enough time before the reception for me to fix it without it looking terrible. freaking humans.

I appreciated that about Pepper. She had absolutely no involvement with the supernatural that I was aware of. She was still very conscientious about distinguishing between “humans” and “people”, because she felt that many animals had consciousness and should be included under the heading of people. It was an interesting attitude. Given that she ate them quite enthusiastically it might also be a somewhat concerning one, but it was definitely interesting.

EmeraldKeychain: Okay yeah that does sound like a nightmare. I’ve never understood the wedding cake thing, honestly. Cake at weddings, sure, makes as much sense as anything else about weddings. But wedding cakes seem like a lot of hassle for no reason.

blackpeppermint: hard agree. they don’t even taste good, and I would know. highly overrated. also blech, apparently dad’s getting off work early today so i gtg soon.

I winced. I didn’t know a whole bunch about Pepper’s living circumstances. But I knew she was living with her parents for financial reasons, and from the specific stories she’d shared, I knew that was deeply unfortunate. EmeraldKeychain: woof. Luck with the relatives. I didn’t refer to her parents as family. That word was meant for better people than them.

blackpeppermint: woof back you lunatic. luck with the slasher or w/e.

I was smiling after that conversation, even if it did end on a bit of a down note. Pepper tended to have that effect on me. It was a strange and probably somewhat dysfunctional friendship, but I found it to be a rewarding one. She was an interesting person. She lived in Los Angeles, quite literally the other side of the continent, and we would most likely never interact in person. But she was one of my closest friends, and I spent more time interacting with her than probably anyone else.

Then I remembered I had been checking messages. The request for help with a music video was easy enough to reply to. The boilerplate email from a tattoo artist about availability and the song recommendations from an acquaintance with delusions of poesy I didn’t need to respond to right now. But then I got to an email from Caleb, about some stained glass workshop, and the smile went away pretty fast.

Caleb was in many ways a sort of inverse or foil to Pepper. He was also an old friend, and for a long time he’d been a close one. But lately I was having to pull away from him, and soon I’d have to cut ties entirely. It wasn’t that he was a bad person, nothing like that at all.

It was just that when we’d met, we’d both been undergraduate students. He was twenty, I looked nineteen and at the time that was almost accurate. He was working towards a law degree, I was doing computer science and trying to figure out what to do with my life. We’d bonded over some shared interests, stuck around in each other’s lives.

Now he was a practicing attorney. He expected to make partner soon with a local criminal defense firm. Meanwhile, I still looked nineteen. I could cover that to a degree with cosmetics, but I knew he was starting to wonder why I hadn’t aged a day in fifteen years. I knew I had to cut ties soon. I understood that, but it didn’t mean I had to like it.

Caleb was why I stopped looking for local human friends. Most people who had any real involvement with the supernatural did eventually. It was generally felt that it was cruel for one of us to draw a vanilla human into our life. This wasn’t, as newcomers sometimes assumed, because they’d get dragged into something terrible, or you’d have to kill them to protect some secret. Those things happened, sure. There were horror stories about it. But they were rare.

Far more commonly, things were like this. Tension built as they noticed more and more things that were strange. Many supernatural beings, even those like me who were partially human, didn’t age normally, and eventually that became obvious. Inexplicable things happened—why exactly did I go through so many cell phones as one after another got fried by static? My senses were far sharper than most, and that I had to worry about things like smelling an emotional resonance I shouldn’t know about was unusual. But even modest awareness of things humans weren’t aware of became apparent over time. Questions would be asked that you had no answer for. You couldn’t keep the secret forever, and if you did tell them, all you’d accomplished was to leave them questioning their own sanity for the rest of their life. They would in some ways be as set apart from their world as you were, at that point.

It was cruel. It was almost always tragic. Like most people, I’d thought I would be the exception until I experienced this collapse myself. Other relationships had been even more unstable, but even with Caleb, who was both sheltered and kind enough to give the benefit of a great deal of doubt, it was collapsing now. On the internet it was much easier; I had no real worry that Pepper would pose the same challenge. I could control what information was apparent to her much more easily. But in person, vanilla humans were a terrible idea.

I ignored Caleb’s message too. I didn’t have it in me to deal with that right now.

By the time I’d gotten through all of that, it was late enough in the day that I should eat something. I didn’t feel up to cooking, and ended up just throwing something frozen in the microwave. I wasn’t hungry anyway, and was only eating because I knew I needed calories. As I waited on that, I glanced at my phone and realized I’d gotten a text from Maddie a few minutes ago.

It was very simple. I have an interesting story, want to get coffee and hear about it?

Maddie was a friend, and an easier one to interact with. She was a supernatural oddity herself, so there was none of the baggage of secrecy that tainted things with Caleb, or to a lesser extent with Pepper. But there also wasn’t the element of debt and obligation that colored things with Audgrim. I’d worked with him a few times, and I enjoyed his company. We occasionally spent time together outside of that professional context. But ultimately, he was someone I knew because we were useful to each other.

Maddie was just a friend. Just someone I had interests in common with. There was less in the way of baggage and awkward history with her than anyone else I could think of. She was also one of the most straightforward people I knew. If she said it was an interesting story, it wasn’t a euphemism, didn’t imply a deeper meaning. It was just an interesting story.

I told her I’d meet her in an hour.

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