Winter's Tale

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David hadn’t been exaggerating when he said that the “situation” was nearby. It was literally just a couple of blocks down the road, not even a mile away.

 

None of us had the armor—or clothing, or costumes, or whatever the hell I was supposed to call it—that we would end up using. For the moment, we were faking it with what we had on hand. Derek was wearing his riot gear, with the transparent shield pulled down over his face. Elyssa and Tony had black balaclavas pulled down over their faces. Tawny went with a more basic approach, but it worked surprisingly well; with her hair down, some heavy makeup, and a pair of sunglasses, she was almost unrecognizable.

 

David and I, naturally, didn’t have any trouble with it. I wasn’t wearing my usual helmet—the snarling wolf’s mask was simply too recognizable when I was trying to keep people from realizing who I was—but I’d brought another helmet from home. It was fairly simple, not much more than a metal bucket with eyeholes, but it covered my face. David, on the other hand, had his full kit on hand. The clothing looked something like a wingsuit, with an intricate, vaguely feathery pattern in blues and greys. The mask, similarly, was vaguely suggestive of a bird, feathery patterns and a beak.

 

I found it amusing that the people who least needed to care about concealing their identities were the most capable of doing so. I didn’t want people to connect “Jonathan Keyes” to Winter Wolf, but that was more a matter of convenience than anything. If someone did draw the connection, it wasn’t like it was a serious problem. I didn’t exactly have much of a civilian life for them to target me through. I mean, if somebody was dumb enough to kidnap Aiko, they deserved what happened to them.

 

Similarly, while I didn’t know much about David, I was guessing he didn’t care that much about it. He was a Guard back when that actually meant something, and you didn’t get to that kind of position without being fairly invested in that life.

 

Once we were as ready as we were likely to get, and we’d gotten through some mild hysterics on the part of the newbies, we packed into the back of a van and started in the direction of the situation. It seemed a little like overkill to me—there wasn’t a whole lot of need to get a van to go a couple of blocks—but I supposed that it could be excused. I was working with humans again, after all, and while none of them was markedly out of shape, they weren’t exactly star athletes either.

 

As I understood it, the situation was fairly simple. Three gunmen had burst into a local grocery store, ranting and raving incoherently. Most of the people had managed to get away, but they’d taken one of the shoppers hostage, and they were threatening to kill her if their demands weren’t met. Precisely what those demands were was less than clear, but effective communication skills weren’t something you really expected from lunatics that launched armed assaults on grocery stores. Apparently the police weren’t going to be able to get there for several minutes, and even once they showed up there was no guarantee that they could do anything useful. Thus, it fell to us to deal with things.

 

I had my doubts about the whole thing, but I didn’t voice them. It wasn’t important right now.

 

Instead, as David drove towards the scene, I pulled my phone out and sent a text message to Selene. Hostage situation downtown. Establish perimeter at 400 ft, remain hidden, do not engage.

 

The reply was almost immediate. Confirmed. Kyi is en route with enough people to set up the perimeter. You are dealing with it?

 

Yes, with reservations. Not expecting trouble, but have them ready to step in if needed.

 

“What are you doing?” Tawny asked, leaning in to look.

 

“Not really your business, is it?” I asked, turning off the phone.

 

“We’re here anyway,” David said, before things could escalate any further. “Everybody remembers the plan?”

 

There was a chorus of affirmatives as I got out of the van. I didn’t bother saying anything; he knew that I remembered what to do, and I knew he knew it. There wasn’t much point in talking about it.

 

I was on point going in, for obvious reasons. Even without my armor, I was an order of magnitude tougher than anyone present with the possible exception of David. If anyone was going to walk around the corner and run right into the enemy, there was no question that it should be me.

 

I felt an odd thrill as I opened the front door of the occupied building. It had been ages since I deliberately went into a fight without my armor; the notion of actually being threatened by punks with guns was one that I had become unaccustomed to. Not that I was unprotected—the clothing I was wearing was still moderately reinforced—but I felt almost naked. It was an odd experience, especially with a bunch of virtual strangers at my back.

 

The supermarket wasn’t one that I could remember having been in before, but it was fairly typical of the breed. About half the lights were out, casting many of the aisles into shadow. It was almost completely silent, an echoing, cavernous sort of silence. It was eerie, the way silence in a place that should have been bustling with activity almost always was. The only break in the silence was a quiet, intermittent conversation from the back of the store.

 

“This is crazy,” Tony said in a whisper. Quieter than he needed to be, really, but I could understand it. The silence in here seemed to demand a matching hush from us, and I was certain he was feeling nervous, terrified of being discovered. “We just finished sparring. We’re already tired.”

 

“Get used to it,” I said calmly, scanning the store for any hint of motion. “People aren’t usually nice enough to let you rest before they try to kill you.” I didn’t see anything moving, no hint of someone watching, so I started forward towards one of the darker aisles. “Sounds like they’re in the back,” I said.

 

“Yep,” David agreed quietly. “Shrike, you’re in the lead. The rest of you stay behind him, watch for anything he doesn’t seem to be noticing. I’ll be above you.” He leapt off the ground without waiting for a response, easily landing on one of the shelves and balancing there.

 

I almost whistled in appreciation. No wonder he was wearing a wingsuit if he could jump like that. Hell, odds were good he could actually fly.

 

I felt a spike of jealousy at that, but dismissed it easily enough. I couldn’t fly, but I was close enough. And besides, there was work to do.

 

Creeping down the aisle, I could clearly feel it when Elyssa started working on me. It was easy to feel, but hard to define or explain. It was like the feeling I’d had sometimes, where I was so focused on some stimulus that the rest of the world seemed to disappear. Except that right now I was focused on everything to that degree. Everything, from keeping track of where the shadows were that I could hide in all the way down to the slightly too-tight fit of my left boot, was in almost painfully clear focus. It should have been distracting, trying to keep track of that many things in that degree of detail, but it wasn’t. That was the whole point of her magic, after all.

 

We weren’t silent. Not even close. I was pretty damn quiet, and David was utterly silent overhead. Even Elyssa was impressively quiet, probably because her mind was augmented even beyond what she was doing for me. The other three, though…well, after a minute or so I gave up on wincing when they made noise, because it was happening too frequently to keep up with.

 

I made it to the end of the aisle and crouched there, wrapping myself in a web of air and shadow. It would make me nearly invisible so long as I stayed in the shadows, and muffle any noise I made as well.

 

It was surprisingly challenging to maintain my shroud without the cloak. I’d gotten spoiled, having my toys all the time. In a way, it was probably good for me to do without. Which didn’t mean that I didn’t resent it.

 

At this point, the plan called for me to sneak in and get the hostage out, since I was actually the most sneaky of the group. Again, it wasn’t something I’d had much need to do in recent years. Most of my work had been blatant and highly visible for a long time now, and when I did need something done stealthily I’d mostly sent Kyi to take care of it.

 

I hadn’t completely lost my touch, though, and it turned out that being hyperaware of everything around me was a pretty considerable help when it came to moving quietly. I managed to slip up to the meat department, where it seemed like the conversation had been coming from, without screwing anything up.

 

Behind the counter, I eased through the door into the area where the butchers worked. It smelled like blood and fresh meat, reminding me with an uncomfortable intensity that I hadn’t eaten since before the sparring session started. I tried to put it out of my mind, but now my heightened awareness worked against me, making it pretty freaking hard to ignore. It was distracting, and distracted was a very bad state of mind to be in for something like this.

 

In the end, I picked up a shrinkwrapped package of steak that had been knocked to the floor, tore it open, and stuffed a chunk into my mouth. It felt embarrassingly unprofessional, and it was actually pretty freaking worrying that I needed to stop for some raw meat in the middle of sneaking up on the enemy, but it was better than being unable to function as well as I was supposed to because I was distracted by hunger.

 

The conversation was coming from the left, but now that I was closer I could also hear noise from the right, a sort of muffled banging and shouting. I went for that one, since conversation was much more likely to be the attackers.

 

The butcher shop was a cramped, brightly-lit maze of counters and boxes, with lots of sharp bits of metal gleaming in the fluorescent lights. I crouched low, making sure that I wasn’t visible above the counters.

 

I managed to track the muffled noise down to a supply closet on the edge of the room. It wasn’t hard to figure out where I was going; they’d thrown the contents carelessly out on the floor, various cleaning supplies pooling on the vinyl flooring. It smelled harsh, ammonia and rubbing alcohol blending together into a noxious mix that almost overpowered the scent of blood.

 

Technically, I wasn’t supposed to know how to open locks. I hadn’t actually asked about it, but given that we were supposed to be some kind of force of law and order, it didn’t take a genius that picking locks was a skill I probably shouldn’t advertise.

 

But nobody was watching right now, so I went ahead and twisted the lock open with a bit of hardened air and a slight effort of will. I’d gotten pretty quick at that trick over the years.

 

I pulled the door open, and as expected I found the hostage inside the closet, tied to a chair and gagged with what looked like a couple of socks. She was young, maybe twenty, and reasonably attractive. She looked like she’d been crying, her makeup smeared, and her expression when I opened the door was one of near-terror.

 

I started to move forward, planning to untie her, then hesitated. There was something odd about this.

 

After a second, I realized what it was. She didn’t smell afraid. I mean, I couldn’t actually smell emotions, but people who were terrified that they were about to die tended to have certain physical reactions. They sweated, and more often than they wanted to admit they pissed themselves or threw up. She didn’t smell like any of those things.

 

I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t already been suspicious, or if I hadn’t had some lingering degree of magical assistance—my awareness had started going back to normal once I put some physical distance between myself and Elyssa, but it wasn’t an instant process.

 

Once I caught on to that, though, I noticed some other small details. She was tied up with rope, but she didn’t have any rope burns, no abrasions. If someone was really tied up and struggling, they usually rubbed their skin raw and bleeding trying to get loose; she hadn’t. Similarly, the gag wasn’t pulled nearly as tight as it would have to be to really be effective. She hadn’t struggled with it, trying to get loose so she could really scream.

 

I paused, then it clicked into place with the suspicions I’d already had. I almost laughed, but managed to restrain myself. This wasn’t about me, not really, and it would have been the height of rudeness to ruin it for everyone else.

 

I was grinning as I cut the ropes off her wrists and ankles, but it shouldn’t matter; nobody could see my face anyway. The placement of the ropes was, once I thought about it, another tipoff. She could have unlocked the door, maybe even managed to untie herself from the chair completely if she were flexible and motivated enough. The fact that she hadn’t even tried was rather telling.

 

“We’re going to get you out of here,” I said quietly, playing along. “But I need you to be quiet. Can you do that for me?”

 

She nodded frantically, eyes wide and teary, flexing her hands and rubbing her wrists where they’d been tied. I untied the gag and pulled it off, and while she worked her jaw, she didn’t actually say anything.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Follow me, and stay quiet.” I opened the door and started out without waiting for a response.

 

The emergency exit was closest, but it wasn’t a good idea. The power hadn’t been cut, so the alarm was probably still active, and triggering the alarm would kind of negate the purpose of sneaking in in the first place. Furthermore, now that I was getting a better idea of what was going on, I thought I knew what was expected of me. I was supposed to go back the same way I’d come in, leading the girl past the waiting Guards. I could play the role I was assigned.

 

She followed me almost exactly, even crouching down in the same way I was. She was shaking, breathing hard, and crying silently. It wasn’t the smoothest exit I’d ever seen, but in a way that was probably a good thing. Her obvious emotional reaction would make my casual stoicism stand out, giving it more impact.

 

As expected, nobody challenged us on the way out. Outside, I hurried her into the aisle, well away from the gunmen, then sat her down and told her to wait. She nodded, still crying a little. She clutched at my hand a little when I went to leave, but I tugged free and went back without waiting. I did snag a can of beans off the shelf on the way, though.

 

Unsurprisingly, the others had noticed me leaving, and they’d already left their own positions and started for the meat department. I fell in with them and quietly said, “Turn left inside. Didn’t see them, but I could hear them talking over there.”

 

“Got it,” David said back, just as quietly. “Let’s do this.”

 

Inside, we turned left and made straight for the sounds of conversation. It cut off as soon as we were inside—there were reasons I’d come in alone when I wanted to be sneaky, after all.

 

There were three of them, as we’d heard, two with pistols and one carrying a shotgun. They were standing around in a stockroom arguing about something, but when they heard us they came out into the main area of the butcher shop, looking around. They weren’t as good as she was; there was a stiffness to their movements, a hesitation, that gave the game right away.

 

Not that it probably mattered. The rest of these people did not give the impression of being comfortable with people pointing guns at them. They were probably so freaked out that they wouldn’t have noticed if the gunmen were wearing frilly tutus.

 

It took them a second to really key on us, probably because of Elyssa. I didn’t think she could screw with somebody’s head enough to really make us invisible, but she could slow their reaction down a little, buying us that crucial second to act.

 

Once again, I was the first to respond, the quickest trigger finger. I chucked the can I was holding at the guy with the shotgun. I threw it hard, and I put a tailwind behind it, propelling it a little faster and keeping it on track.

 

Left to my own devices, I’d have thrown it at his head. But I’d killed people like that before, and I hadn’t forgotten that killing was Not Allowed. So this time I aimed at his abdomen instead, just in case I was wrong. It would hurt like a son of a bitch if it hit him, and it might still rupture things inside him, but he’d live long enough to get to the hospital, and they could probably fix him there.

 

As expected, though, he didn’t really have to worry about it. The can swerved ever so slightly off course as it flew, and smashed into the wall next to him. I glanced at David, and while I couldn’t see his face, his posture was a little stiff, and he was looking in that direction a little bit too intently. Enough confirmation for me.

 

Tony was only a little slower on the draw than I was, hurling a stream of fire at the shotgun-wielder. It hit, and singed him, but there wasn’t enough power behind it to really burn. A second or so later, Tawny poured out another packet of salt around herself—not actually reaching for anything yet, but getting ready to.

 

The gunmen ran, bolting for the emergency exit I’d noticed earlier. Tony and Derek both started to follow, but I caught Tony at about the same time David grabbed Derek’s sleeve. “Let them go,” I said. “The hostage is still here. Getting her to safety is the priority here.”

 

“Yeah,” David said. “The police can take it from here.”

 

Tony didn’t seem too thrilled, but he didn’t argue.

 

I didn’t miss that David gave me an almost appraising look on the way out.

---

 

Afterwards, we had a celebration of sorts at the base, in the living quarters. There was music involved, and alcohol, although I was reasonably confident that at least a couple of the younger Guards weren’t legally allowed to drink. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t care that much.

 

Instead, I found an opportunity to talk to David alone. The senior Guard was back in his civvies, standing on the periphery and sipping the same beer he’d been sipping for the past hour.

 

“So where’d you find the girl?” I asked, quietly enough to be masked by the pounding of the beat. It wasn’t hard. They were blasting the music loud enough to get noise complaints if we’d been in a residential neighborhood.

 

He glanced at me. “Excuse me?”

 

“The girl,” I said again. “She’s fantastic. Is she local, or did you bring in your own talent from out of town?”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And she’s local. Works with a theatre troupe out of Denver.”

 

“Damn,” I said. “I need to go to the theatre more, apparently. She was excellent. Easily one of the best actors I’ve ever seen.”

 

“What gave it away, then?”

 

I shrugged. “Critical thinking, mostly. I mean, come on. You just happened to get a call, right as we were wrapping up the sparring, for something that just happened to be right down the street? And wasn’t a real threat to us, but could maybe feel like one if you didn’t know better?” I snorted. “You aren’t that lucky. Then the actual scene wasn’t quite real enough. She’s a great actor, but it was still just an act. Then there was the way all of the gunmen just happened to run, thus ensuring nobody was in real danger and everybody got away clean. They were your guys, I’m guessing?”

 

“Mercenaries who work with the Guards sometimes,” he confirmed. “We could have hired actors for that too, but I don’t like trusting civilians with weapons.”

 

“Fair point,” I said. “It was a good game, by the way. Very nicely arranged.”

 

“We do something similar for all our new recruits who don’t have combat experience,” he said. “You have to ease people into it, you know?”

 

I nodded. “I get the idea, yeah. It’s not how I do things, but I’m a bit of an asshole. And I mostly only work with people who already have at least some grounding, so I guess there are different needs there.”

 

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Although even most of the people who already have some experience don’t catch on that it’s a sham. You’re a bit paranoid, aren’t you?”

 

I snorted. “More than just a bit.” I paused and pulled my phone out as I got another text message. I read it over, then sighed. “I have to go,” I said

 

“Why?”

 

“Let me put it this way,” I said dryly. “When I get urgent messages, it actually is a crisis. Right now, for example, some of your people are apparently down at my place trying to kill me, and my associates are having a hard time dealing with it on their own.”

 

He sighed. “All right,” he said. “Let me get my stuff, and I’ll come with you.”

 

I paused. “Why?”

 

“You’re one of us now,” he said. “At least a little bit. That means something for me. If you’re having trouble with ‘my people,’ I can at least make an effort to help you out with it.”

 

“Why am I having a hard time believing your motives are really that pure of heart?”

 

He snorted. “Because you’re more than just a bit paranoid, maybe?”

 

I had to laugh at that. “You might have a point,” I said. “All right, I’ll wait a minute for you. My ride will be here around then anyway.”

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“Okay,” I said, sitting down across from Tawny. “So tell me about these demons.”

 

She grinned and set the book she was reading back on the table. At a glance, it seemed to be some sort of pop science book, less rigorous than an actual textbook but still much more inclined to educational than to entertaining. “Finally,” she said. “Thought you’d never ask.”

 

“Things have been busy,” I said, shrugging. “So what do you do? Are you actually summoning things from somewhere else, or is it more like a construct or something?”

 

“I don’t know the right terms,” she said, shrugging. “But it’s like…there’s always things wanting in, you know? Wherever you go there’s going to be something that wants to come through there. So it’s not like I have to bring them here or whatever. I just have to open the door for them.”

 

“Would you mind showing me?”

 

Tawny grinned again. “Of course not.” She stood and rolled back the rug under her chair, getting at the tile floor underneath. She pulled a couple of little packets of salt, like they had in some restaurants, out of her pocket and tore them open, pouring out a line in a rough circle on the floor around her. “I don’t actually need to draw a circle,” she told me. “It just makes things a lot easier.”

 

I didn’t bother telling her that was true for most kinds of magic, not just hers. I could already tell that I wasn’t going to be passing myself off as being as new as most of them, but I was supposed to be seeming at least a little clueless. If I let on how much I already knew they’d start asking how, and that was a topic that would pretty much inevitably lead into discussions I was definitely not supposed to have with them.

 

I felt her power pushing on the world as she started to do whatever it was that she did. It smelled sort of similar to opening a portal, but a little less focused, like the difference between a knife and a needle. It was also surprisingly strong. Not, like, ridiculously, but Tawny wasn’t a pushover in the sense of how much raw power she could throw around.

 

A couple of seconds passed without anything much happening, then the air in front of her sort of twisted. It was hard to say quite what I was seeing; it was almost like a heat haze, but there was also a sense of the image warping, something like I was looking through a pane of thick glass. For just an instant I got the impression of lines stretching off in directions that didn’t quite make sense, dimensions beyond just the usual four converging onto that point.

 

Then the moment passed, and things went back to normal. Except now, rather than air, there was a creature in front of Tawny. It was small, no larger than my head, and it looked like the stereotypical conception of an imp. It had red skin, black batlike wings, and a thin barbed tail. It opened its mouth and hissed at me, and its jaws seemed to open wide enough to swallow its own head. Its teeth were heavy and triangular, like a shark’s, but much smaller relative to its mouth, almost like it just had serrated jaws rather than actual teeth.

 

“Damn,” I said, staring at it. “I’m impressed.” I was, too. I hadn’t seen anything quite like this before, either the creature or the summoning of it. That wasn’t a magic to take lightly. I was guessing I could take the imp-thing, but I couldn’t help but think of all the scarier things she could have summoned instead.

 

She beamed. It only lasted a second before she covered it with the tough-girl facade again, but I saw it. “The little ones are harder to bring through,” she said, holding her hand out. The imp-thing flapped over and perched on her finger, glowering back at me. “They don’t push as hard to get in. But they’re easier to control once they get here. I like to use the smallest I can and still get things done.”

 

“You mean physically smaller?” I asked.

 

Tawny waggled her hand equivocally, causing the imp-thing to flutter its wings for balance and hiss again. “Sort of?” she said. “The size isn’t what matters, but it tends to line up with what does. This guy’s a great example. I don’t think he’s really intelligent, maybe not even as much as a dog. There’s no real thought there, just a whole bunch of emotion. I don’t even have to try to make him do what I want. The bigger ones tend to be smarter, and a lot harder to keep a grip on.”

 

“Huh,” I said. “So you mostly use the smaller ones, then?”

 

She shrugged. “When I can get away with it,” she said. “The bigger ones are stronger too, so sometimes I need more than one like that can do. But I try to stick with the smallest I can and still get things done.”

 

I nodded, mostly looking at the imp-thing. Something about the way she’d said that made me think she’d summoned a really big one once, and it hadn’t ended well for her. When she’d first started developing her magic, maybe, before she’d figured out the rules.

 

“That isn’t a demon, though,” I commented. “It looks a little demonic, but it isn’t a demon.”

 

Tawny looked at me curiously. “How do you know?”

 

“I’d recognize a demon,” I said. “I guess you conceptually could bind a weak enough demon, but this isn’t one.”

 

She looked at me for a moment longer. “You know, Jonny,” she said, “somehow I’m getting the impression I should be a little scared of you.”

 

“I feel the same about you,” I said dryly.

 

Tawny laughed at that. “Well, I’m glad we’re on the same page, then,” she said. “It’s about time for sparring, though. This should be fun.” She closed her hands around the imp-thing, and I felt another burst of magic as she sent it back to wherever it had come from.

---

 

Tawny and I were the first to show up for the sparring session, which gave me plenty of time to look around.

 

The training area was on the fifth floor, with the other work areas set aside for the Guards themselves. It wasn’t a huge room, but it wasn’t small. The room itself was roughly square, around thirty feet on each side. A circle was painted on the floor, almost touching the walls on each side; one of the corners this left had a few chairs in it, while the others held various targets and dummies.

 

The space felt comfortable and familiar, which was interesting, because I couldn’t remember having been in a similar room…pretty much ever, actually. But the intent of the room, the feeling of it, was one that I was very much familiar with.

 

Tawny didn’t seem interested in small talk, so I wandered around the room while she sat and went back to her book. I walked around, getting a feel for the texture of the tile floor and the amount of space I had to work with. If I had to participate in this little sparring exercise, I wanted to be able to do so at least somewhat competently.

 

The others trickled in over the next five minutes or so. Derek came first, wearing a set of police-style riot gear that he didn’t look at all comfortable in. I could smell the magic on the armor, reinforcing and strengthening, but it was somewhat simplistic. David followed a minute or so later, with Elyssa right behind him. Another five minutes passed before Tony finally walked in, yawning and scratching his ass.

 

“All right,” David said, once everyone was there. “Let’s get started. Jonathan is new here, so how about we let him start.”

 

I shrugged. “Fine with me. What do you want me to do?”

 

“We’ll start by having you spar with Tony,” David said, giving me a significant look. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to signify, but it was clearly supposed to be significant. “Remember, this is just practice. Don’t do anything that might really hurt your sparring partner, and if they or I say to stop, you stop, immediately.”

 

“Got it,” I said, stepping into the painted circle. “I’m ready whenever.”

 

Tony grinned, a brash and overconfident sort of grin, and walked to the other side of the circle from me. “Let’s do this, then,” he said.

 

“All right,” David said, stepping out into the spectator area with the others. “On my mark. Ready? Go!”

 

Tony started cautiously. He wasn’t sure what I was capable of, not really, and it showed in his behavior. He started gathering power, getting ready, but he didn’t do anything aggressive right away.

 

I did. The instant David said go, I took off, sprinting straight at Tony. I didn’t know any more about his capabilities than he knew about mine, but I knew enough to want it over fast. He’d said he was good with fire and electricity, and I knew from experience that hanging back and trading blows with someone who had that skillset was unlikely to end well for me. Instant and decisive aggression was the best tactic for me to take.

 

He managed to get an attack off, throwing a fistful of fire at my head, but he wasn’t used to being rushed and he hadn’t accounted for how quickly I could move. I didn’t even need to dodge to be perfectly safe as I kept moving in.

 

He started to get more fire together, but I was already on him. I threw him to the ground with more muscle than skill—they’d been told I was a werewolf, so they knew I was strong, but they didn’t know I was skilled and I had no intention of telling them if I didn’t need to. He hit the floor hard enough to knock the wind out of him, and he lost his grip on the power he’d been collecting.

 

Before he could get his bearings again, I was sitting on his chest, holding a knife against his throat. “We good?” I asked calmly.

 

He froze, and then very carefully nodded. I got off of him and stood up, folding the knife closed and tucking it back into my pocket. “That was embarrassing,” I said. “That was literally shameful. You guys are supposed to be fighting serious bad guys, and if that was a serious fight, you’d just have gotten murdered by a guy with a cheap knife.”

 

Tony flushed. “You caught me by surprise,” he said defensively. “That wouldn’t have worked if I’d been ready.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Prove it. I’m ready to go when you are.”

 

Tony hesitated, but he couldn’t say no without losing face, and it was already quite obvious that he wasn’t willing to do that. I wondered idly whether all fire mages had the brashness and the ego, or it was just the ones I knew. It seemed like too much of a common trait to be entirely coincidence.

 

“All right,” David said as we went back to our positions. He caught my eye and nodded a little. Approval? Maybe, but why?

 

Then I caught on, and almost laughed. Of course. He was a real Guard, one with serious power and experience. Odds were good that he was at least as experienced as I was, which meant that he knew how dangerously overconfident Tony was. He knew damned well that these kids weren’t remotely prepared for the kind of threats they were supposed to be dealing with. They were still riding the high of having magic, of being special, and they hadn’t yet processed that they were still very definitely not the top of the food chain.

 

And they needed to have that bubble burst. Of course they did. As long as they went in with their current attitudes, they were more liability than asset. They’d get slaughtered in their first serious fight.

 

But David couldn’t be the one to actually do it. He was supposed to be their leader, and that meant that they had to like him. This wasn’t like my relationship with my housecarls; David was obviously trying to set himself up as first among equals, rather than an absolute ruler. That was probably the best approach with these kids, since they weren’t accustomed to the more old-fashioned modes of government that most of the people I dealt with used. But at the same time, it meant that he wasn’t able to smack them around and call them morons.

 

No wonder he’d set me up to fight the most overconfident of the bunch first. He was using me as his bad cop. I was intended to convey the stuff they didn’t want to hear, so that David could go on being their buddy.

 

For a second, I almost didn’t want to perform, just to make a point. I didn’t like being used like this, especially when he hadn’t even had the decency to tell me first.

 

Then I had to laugh at myself. It was a good plan. It was scheming, manipulative, and underhanded, but it would work I could recognize that it needed to be done, and I wasn’t likely to be their friend regardless. I just didn’t have a lot in common with these kids. And, if I was being entirely honest with myself, I didn’t want to. I already knew that this line of work, this entire world, would suck any youthful innocence and optimism right out of them, leaving them as bitter, cynical, and psychotic as the rest of us. I’d seen it before. Knowing them better would just mean that I had to care.

 

So when David said, “Go!” the second time, I didn’t hesitate. I sidestepped the blast of fire that Tony instantly and predictably threw at me, drawing cold around myself to mitigate any heat that might have otherwise reached me. As I moved I pulled a flashbang out of my hip pocket, pulled the pin, and threw it in his general direction, turning my own head away as I did. The whole thing looked like a single smooth and practiced motion, mostly because it was. I usually preferred to keep the grenades in my cloak, but this wasn’t the only place I couldn’t wear it, and I’d practiced with a simple pair of pants as well.

 

Even with my head turned away and my eyes closed, ready for what was going to happen, the detonation of the flashbang was intense. It was deafening and disorienting, leaving me with little more than afterimages and ringing ears to work with.

 

Unlike the rest of them, though, I knew how to handle that situation. I knew generally where Tony was, and I knew the feel of the floor, the small irregularities that I had to be careful of. I could run at him almost as quickly blind as I could with full vision. I could track the motion of the air well enough to have a decent idea of his movements, and adjust appropriately.

 

Again, it was a matter of experience. Being blinded was a common, basic tactic, and one that anyone should be ready to deal with. A more practiced mage would have had some way to detect me without vision, or at least been ready to blast at random, hitting me by random chance or at least keeping me at bay.

 

Tony didn’t, and he wasn’t. When the flashbang went off he was disoriented and stunned, and he didn’t recover before I reached him, literally jumping on him and dragging him down to the floor.

 

Once I had my hands on him, it didn’t really matter that I couldn’t see. Working by feel, I quickly secured him in place and put one hand on his throat. I didn’t actually apply any real pressure, just made him very aware that I could.

 

I didn’t have a knife out this time—too likely to go badly when I couldn’t see where he was with any confidence. But I didn’t need one. Again, they knew I was a werewolf. It wasn’t a secret that I was stronger than a human. I could break him in half and everyone in the room knew it.

 

“We’re good,” he said, sounding just a little choked. It might have been a mental thing, or I supposed I might have put a little more pressure on his throat than I thought. I’d only meant it to be a threat, but I might have gone a little bit too far.

 

I wasn’t used to working with humans. They were so…fragile.

 

I took my hand away and got off him, sitting down to wait for my vision to recover. It wouldn’t take long. Those flashbangs were intended for instant but brief incapacitation, and I healed faster than a human on top of that.

 

“You cheated,” Tony said. “You threw a grenade at me.”

 

“What, and you think other people won’t?” I snorted. “Please. Those things are pretty standard. Human beings are dependent on sight, and everyone knows it. If you want to put a mage down without killing him, flashbangs are one of the first things you’re going to go for. So if I were you, I’d get used to it, because I won’t be the last one to use them against you.”

 

“I’m with Jonathan on this one,” David said. “It’s a valid tactic. The only rule for this match was that you couldn’t do permanent harm, which this shouldn’t, correct?”

 

“Nope,” I said. “It’s just a flashbang. You should all be fine in a few minutes. They use these things on civilians.”

 

“It’s a valid tactic,” David said again. “If you weren’t prepared to deal with it, that’s on you, not him. Now, I think you could both use a bit of a rest, so when everyone can see again we’ll have Elyssa and Derek go a round.”

---

 

I was expecting to think that the new Guards were rather pitiable and useless. And, in all honesty, I did think that, but I was actually fairly impressed with them, on the whole. They were new, and it showed, but they did have potential. They were even making strides to develop that potential, which was even better.

 

Tony was all offense, all the time. I couldn’t really blame him for that, though; when your gift is in fire and your only real backup is a little bit of a knack with electricity, you don’t have a lot to work with defensively. He was overconfident, but he seemed like he wanted to make that confidence justified. After I thrashed him, he was pretty quiet for a while, and he gave the impression that he was really pushing himself for the rest of the sparring session.

 

Derek was almost the opposite, as far as attitude went. He was shy, reserved, and desperate for approval. He practically glowed from any compliment, even halfhearted or mixed ones. In terms of talent, or what role he would play, I couldn’t get much of a fix on him. He was the only one aside from me who’d brought any equipment, which made sense if his primary ability was to make things, but he didn’t seem at all confident when it came to actually using that equipment. There was still a lot of potential there, but he had the furthest to go until he was really functional.

 

The two females were definitely more of wild cards. Elyssa could blur someone’s attention to a degree that was actually a little scary. She snuck up on me and almost had me beat before I took my own advice and just started swinging wildly. Eventually a gust of wind tripped her up and she lost her focus when she fell, and from there out it was my game. She took it well enough. She didn’t really seem to have much of an emotional reaction to anything, or what she did have was a little bit off. From what she’d said she routinely used her magic on herself, focusing her attention beyond what a human mind could do unaided or spreading it out so that she was aware of her surroundings to a preternatural degree. If that was the case, I wasn’t surprised that she seemed a little nuts. I of all people should know that prolonged use of magic to alter your own perceptions and thoughts could make you more than a little strange. I was glad to have her on my side, but at the same time, both her magic and her personality were a little bit creepy, even by my standards.

 

And then there was Tawny. In terms of magic, she was an almost total unknown. From what she’d said, I got the impression that what things were available to her to let in was dependent on a lot of different things—everything from location and time of day to what mood she was in and who was around. She wasn’t willing to summon up anything but the smallest of creatures for sparring, things so fragile and weak that even the other newbies had no trouble taking care of them. At the same time, though, we were all acutely aware that she could probably come up with something that none of us could easily handle if she were willing to face the consequences of doing so. As far as attitude went, she was willing to admit how inexperienced she was, and enthusiastic about changing that. She hadn’t even fully recovered her vision before she was asking me about where she could get some flashbangs of her own, how expensive they were, how they could be used, and so on.

 

David didn’t participate in the sparring at all. I still had very little idea of what his magic was, beyond a vague sense of movement. Nothing much of his personality showed through the generically pleasant and genial mask.

 

The sparring went on for several hours. I paired off with everyone other than David at least twice, and then started fighting them two at once when I kept winning. I made sure to be pleasant about it, not doing anything that would make them really hate me, but I didn’t throw any of the matches. That would have been bloody stupid, since I might be depending on these people to cover my ass in the future. I’d rather they not like me very much than that they think they were competent when they weren’t.

 

Finally, just when David was calling it good and the last fight was wrapping up, he got a call. The senior Guard answered his cell phone and listened for a few minute or so, then hung up with a grin. “Well,” he said. “Looks like we’ll be getting a little more exercise after all. There’s a real-life situation going down a couple of blocks away for us to use for practice dealing with real threats.”

 

I sighed. Of course there was.

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“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

 

David glanced at me. “Was I not clear earlier?”

 

I stared at the sign, reading it again. It still said PUBLIC RELATIONS. “I assumed you were kidding,” I said. “You seriously have a PR guy?”

 

“We have a whole team dedicated to it,” he said dryly. “This is just the guy that calls the shots.” His smile was rather chilly as he pushed the door open. “This is the last thing I have scheduled for you today,” he said. “You can stay here, go home, whatever. Tomorrow is the first practice session with the full group. Have fun.”

 

He turned and walked away, whistling a jaunty tune. I watched him go, and then sighed and stepped into the office.

 

The first impression I got was that it was a very constructed sort of place. Everything was arranged just so, everything precisely in its place. It was set up to look more chaotic, like it was the office of a busy man who couldn’t quite find the time to straighten it up, but the little details gave it away. The open books were a little too neatly spaced out, the disheveled stacks of paper were disheveled in precisely the same ways.

 

The office’s owner, currently sitting at the desk, was much the same. His coat was hung over the back of his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose. It was a very good act, a very good presentation of the harried office worker who was too busy with his work to pay attention to the little things. But I still got the feeling that it was artificial, that it was all very deliberately arranged. It was almost like talking to one of the Sidhe, except he wasn’t quite good enough to cover up the hints of artifice.

 

“Hi,” I said, walking up to him.

 

“You must be Jonathan Keyes,” he said. “I’m Frank Gosnell, head of the public relations department here. Pleased to meet you.”

 

“You do know that isn’t my real name, right?”

 

He regarded me for a moment. “In this office,” he said at last, “it is. You’re Jonathan Keyes, or failing that, Shrike. Whatever you might call yourself elsewhere, here those very much are your real names. Are we clear?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think so.”

 

“Good. Please, take a seat.”

 

I grabbed one of the chairs and spun it around, resting my arms on the back as I sat down. It was meant to annoy him, deliberately upsetting the carefully ordered layout of his office, and from the way his shoulders tensed I thought it was working.

 

His voice, though, was easy and relaxed. “You know,” he said, “I really have to hand it to you. I think your file is the most heavily redacted, classified one I’ve ever seen. There are whole pages blacked out in that thing.”

 

“Did you read them anyway?”

 

He held his hand in front of him and rocked it side to side. “Eh,” he said. “My clearance is high enough to read some of it, and I pieced together some of the rest from what I already knew.” He lowered his hand to the table again, looking at me seriously. “I won’t pretend to understand you,” he said. “We both know I don’t. But I’ve got enough of an idea who you are to know that we’ve got an uphill battle in front of us.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“I think it’s fair to say that you’re used to getting your own way,” he said. “You think you know best, and you’re accustomed to acting on that knowledge, without necessarily getting another opinion first.”

 

I frowned. “Pretty fair,” I admitted.

 

He nodded. “Yes, well, as of now that’s not how you do things. You’re a part of a team now, understand? And while I’m sure you’re good at what you do, this is a very different world you’re entering now. You’ve got to learn to play by different rules than you’re used to.”

 

“How so?”

 

“First off,” he said, “no killing. Just don’t. You use nonlethal measures unless you’ve got an explicit order to kill the enemy, and even then you check with me first if you can.”

 

“That’s ridiculous,” I protested. “That’ll just give us a reputation for being soft. Nobody will respect us if we aren’t willing to finish the job.”

 

He sighed. “Look, Jonathan,” he said. “From your file, I’m sure that you’ve had to worry about what impression you’re making in the past. But I’m guessing you’ve mostly been concerned about what people like you think, correct?”

 

I hesitated. “Broadly speaking, yeah,” I said. “I mean, not exactly like me, but people that move in somewhat similar circles.”

 

“I thought so. Well, your approach might work with them, but now we need to think about another demographic. We need to think about what regular people think. The general public, your average human being that knows nothing about how things work behind the scenes, that is the most important opinion for us right now.”

 

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think they might still prefer the lethal option.”

 

He regarded me for a moment, his hands folded on the desk in front of him. “Let’s make a deal, Jonathan,” he said. “I won’t tell you how to do what you do. When it comes to fighting you’ve got experience and skill, and I don’t. So if you tell me something about what the best way to fight someone is, I’ll just assume you know what you’re talking about rather than try to play armchair general. In return, you do me the same favor and trust that I know my job. Does that sound good?”

 

“Sure.”

 

“Excellent,” he said. “Then believe me when I say that killing people actually doesn’t endear you to society. I don’t care if it’s justified; if the first thing people learn about us is that we have a habit of killing suspects while trying to apprehend them, we’ll lose any chance we might have had to earn their trust. So for now, you’re using strictly nonlethal methods, are we clear?”

 

I frowned. “I suppose,” I said reluctantly. “But I’m really not much good at pulling my punches.”

 

“That’s what training is for,” he said pitilessly. “Most of the others will be working to build themselves up. You, on the other hand, need to learn to hold back. As a part of that, I don’t want to hear that you’ve won any sparring matches with your new teammates for at least a week.”

 

“What? Why?” I demanded.

 

“Several reasons,” he said. “First, it will show me that you’re capable of holding yourself back. Second, most of these people need a confidence boost; for you to walk in and thrash them all would be the worst thing you could do for team cohesion. Third, you need to get used to not being in the spotlight.”

 

I considered that for a moment, then sighed. “Okay,” I said reluctantly. “Fine. But I think we need to go back real quick. This isn’t a matter of me holding back. The things I do are inherently likely to kill people.”

 

“How so?”

 

I thought about it, then decided that words weren’t likely to get me anywhere with Gosnell.

 

I summoned Tyrfing instead, the sword appearing in my hand with a sudden, familiar weight. I flicked the clasp open and dropped the sheath, then thrust the sword straight down into the floor. As expected, it easily punched through the flooring and stood there, sticking straight up into the air.

 

“Explain how that’s supposed to not kill people,” I said, not looking away from him.

 

He pursed his lips. “Interesting. That’s the weapon you use?”

 

“Usually, yeah.”

 

He nodded. “You’ll have to use something else with us, of course,” he said. “That’s far too distinctive; you’d be recognized easily. We can get another sword for you. Derek can probably do something with it.”

 

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” I said, pulling Tyrfing back out of the floor and grabbing the sheath. “Me using another sword, I mean.”

 

It took me a couple of seconds to sheathe Tyrfing. I’d almost forgotten how hard it was to put the cursed sword away without using it first. It wasn’t something I’d needed to do all that much.

 

“That’s fine,” Gosnell said. “But that sword stays out of sight, on these premises and when you’re in the field. We can come up with some other weapons for you to use.”

 

I gritted my teeth. I wanted to argue, but he had some valid points. “Fine,” I said. “Any other restrictions you want to put me under?”

 

He smiled a little. “Not yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with some later,” he said. “That does bring up the next point, though. What’s your look going to be? There are a couple of things I’ve been specifically instructed to avoid—wolves and snowflakes, mostly—but otherwise it’s fairly open. Going by Shrike, I’m assuming you want some kind of a bird theme, right?”

 

I shrugged. “Sure.”

 

“Excellent,” he said. “Now, your features are fairly distinctive, so we’ll want your face fully covered. Probably a fully enclosed helmet, just in case. Do you have a preference for the rest, whether you want to show some skin or be mostly covered?”

 

“Covered,” I said decisively. “I’d rather not have any exposed skin, actually.”

 

He nodded and wrote a couple lines on the corner of one of the papers on his desk. “Okay,” he said. “Colors? Any preference?”

 

“Something fairly bright,” I said. “No black or white.” I paused. “Not dayglo bright or anything, though.”

 

“Bright without being ridiculous,” he said. “We can do that. I’ll get back to you with some choices for what colors you like after we settle out how we want to handle color selection for the team. We want to have some similarity between you, as far as appearance goes, but it looks like that’ll shape up all right without making you all wear the same color, so there’s more flexibility there.”

 

“How are we looking similar without color?”

 

He paused. “Let’s just say you aren’t the only one who’s going to have some feathers,” he said. “Now, this should be enough to get the design people started. We’ll want your measurements before we actually finalize the design, but that can wait.”

 

“I can handle this,” I said.

 

He eyed me. “Jonathan. We agreed that you wouldn’t argue with me about my side of things.”

 

“And that you wouldn’t interfere with mine,” I reminded him. “This isn’t just an aesthetic issue. I wear armor, and I rely on it to keep me from getting killed. And I know a guy who I trust to make a decent set more than your designers. You get the look however you want it, and I’ll take it to my supplier to get the actual armor made.”

 

“That’s reasonable,” he said. “You’ll have to cover the cost yourself if you get your equipment out of house, though.”

 

I snorted. “Not a problem.”

 

“That’s good.” He glanced at the paper he’d written on earlier, then nodded. “All right. You won’t start actually interacting with the public for probably at least a week, so you don’t need to have your public persona down yet. But you should start thinking about how you want to present yourself as Shrike. My understanding is that you’re supposed to be fairly reserved, rather than being in the spotlight, but beyond that you’ve got a lot of latitude in what you want the persona to be.”

 

“All right,” I said. “Is there anything else?”

 

“I don’t believe so, no,” he said. He smiled again, just as false and artificial as his other smiles. “Thank you for your time, Jonathan. Have a good day.”

---

 

Aiko listened to me gripe without saying anything, then burst out laughing once I was finished. “Goddamn,” she said. “They’ve really got you whipped, don’t they?”

 

I glowered. “They don’t own me,” I said.

 

“Nope,” she said happily. “They just sat you down with a PR guy and had him spend half an hour telling you what to do. And you listened.” She grinned. “Totally whipped.”

 

I sighed. “I’m still not thrilled at the idea of doing this at all,” I said. “But they had some valid points about why I should consider it, and it hasn’t been terrible so far. I just wish it wasn’t taking so much of my time. I didn’t have a lot of free time before signing up for this.”

 

“Not having much time just means you have to play harder when you can,” she said. Her sly smile as she glanced at me made it pretty obvious what she had in mind.

 

“I wish I could,” I said. “But I told Tindr I’d be by to go over the financial information tonight, and I’ve got new reports from Selene and Luna to look at.”

 

“How long’s it been since you slept?”

 

I shrugged. “A few days, I think. Why?”

 

“I know you’re a freak of nature and all, and that’s terrible. But that part, specifically, isn’t bad.” She sighed. “Okay, fine. You’ve got more work to do. I’m going home, and I expect you to come back there before this training tomorrow. I know you don’t need rest as much as you used to, but not even you can just keep working indefinitely.”

 

“I know,” I said. “I’ll be home as soon as I can manage it.” I hugged her. “Love you.”

 

“Love you too, you oaf,” she said, hugging me back. Then she walked away, gathering the magic for the portal around her.

---

 

The mansion was quiet as I walked up. It was only a little past sunset, though it felt much later. Between not sleeping much and traveling all the time, my sense of time was pretty disconnected from the clock anymore.

 

Inside, Snowflake was curled up next to the throne, her paws and muzzle stained a dull crimson with dry blood. She’d gone hunting again while I went to meet my new coworkers, apparently successfully. She twitched a little as I scratched her ears, sitting down next to her, and I could feel a sort of dim happiness from her, but she didn’t move or really wake up.

 

As usual, it was only a moment before Selene appeared next to me. “Good evening, boss,” she said, handing me a cup of tea and a sandwich. “How’d it go with the Guards?”

 

“Well,” I said, “the good news is that I still have a job. And the bad news is that I still have a job.”

 

She chuckled. “I understand. Well, for once I’ve got mostly good news. We’re finally making progress on talks with the vampires. They still haven’t formally acknowledged your claim on the city, but they’re willing to talk. I’m setting up a meeting for next week, around midnight in Rome. Do you think that will work with your schedule?”

 

“If necessary I can make it work. We’ve been trying to set this up for a couple of months now.” I frowned, tapping one finger on the arm of the throne. “Do you think they acknowledged us because Hrafn backed us up?”

 

She shrugged. “No clue. We still haven’t heard back from him. They did change their tune surprisingly quickly after we contacted him, though. He’s apparently doing all right, by the way. After Katrin died he went straight to northern Europe, and he’s apparently been there since, moving around frequently enough not to draw much attention. That’s why it took us so long to find him.”

 

I grunted. “Good. He was an all-right sort, for a vampire. I’m glad he’s doing all right.”

 

She nodded. “Other than that, news from the Pack is mixed. We just finished making a formal alliance with the Wolf Creek pack, which means we’re now officially on good terms with all of the publicly recognized werewolf packs in the state. But the Pack as a whole wants to have a long conversation with you about the skinwalker you killed. Apparently he was pretty highly placed in their ranks, and they aren’t thrilled to lose him right now.”

 

I groaned and stuffed the last of the sandwich into my mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, swallowing. “Somebody’s actually sorry to see that bastard go?”

 

“Apparently. Anyway, we’re working to set that up as well, but I don’t have a confident date set yet.”

 

“All right,” I sighed. “Is there anything else?”

 

“Nothing major,” she said. “Tentative overtures with some smaller groups, but nothing confident yet. We’ve had a few people contact us considering joining up, but none of them are that serious about it yet. Nothing that needs your attention.”

 

“All right,” I said. “Send in Tindr with the financial information, please. And another sandwich.”

 

She nodded. “You’ve got it, jarl.”

 

I watched her go, and tried to pretend that I didn’t feel like things were spiraling out of control.

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Somehow I’d always expected dying would hurt. I wasn’t quite sure why; it just seemed a logical connection. As much as we struggled against it, as much as every living thing tried to avoid death, I’d sort of assumed it would be painful. Despite having euthanized more animals than I was comfortable remembering, and seeing that it was a gentle thing, I’d assumed that the subjective experience must be agonizing, full of drama and fear.

 

The reality, for me, was a great deal less impressive. I failed to recognize how much danger a stranger posed, and turned down an offer without considering what the consequences of doing so might be. Then the world went black, and I had just enough time to feel like I was falling before my experience of the world turned off entirely.

 

That quick. That simple. There was no pain, and I didn’t have enough time to process what was happening and arrive at the conclusion of terror. Things just…ended, like someone walked away halfway through writing a sentence.

 

It was, in a perverse way, almost disappointing.

---

 

The next thing I knew, the world was completely different. My clinic, with its familiar shapes and sounds, was gone. In its place was a broad plain, jagged and harsh, cut by cliffs and canyons. There was no light above, no hint of a sun or moon in the sky. If it was sky; the blackness could just as easily have been a ceiling. Ten feet above my head or a thousand, it didn’t seem to matter.

 

The only thing that stayed the same was the person there with me. He was pale, the sort of nearly-albino pallor that suggested he seldom if ever saw the sun. That pallor stood in sharp contrast to the unrelieved black of his tailored suit, a suit that looked like it cost more than some cars. I might have been wildly off-target with that guess, but somehow I didn’t think so.

 

“What the hell just happened?” I demanded, looking around in a panic. I might not have felt afraid before, but it was catching up to me now.

 

“Good day, Doctor Swanson,” he said with a polite smile. “To answer your question, what just happened was that I woke you up. What happened before that was a heart attack.”

 

“I’m dead,” I said numbly. I felt like I should be arguing the point, like I should be in denial over it, but I wasn’t. The truth was that it wasn’t a surprise. That sudden blackness had felt like death; it had a sort of undeniable finality to it that I couldn’t put into words.

 

“For some meanings of the term, yes,” he said. “Your vital functions ceased. You were legally declared dead by a competent authority and cremated. In that sense, yes, you’re dead. But you, the thinking entity which calls itself Bailey Swanson, still exists. From that perspective, you are no more dead than you ever were.”

 

I took that in for a moment, looking around. In all directions things seemed the same, as far as I could see. It occurred to me to wonder why I could see him; I wasn’t sure, since things were otherwise dark.

 

“If I’m dead,” I said slowly, “then where is this? And who are you?”

 

“This world has never had a name,” he said. “Or rather it has had a great many, none of which can claim any real superiority over any other. The simplest way to describe it would be as the place behind the scenes where things go to be recycled once they no longer belong onstage. And I, Doctor Swanson, am the person who killed you, and who arranged for you to come here rather than proceed to oblivion as most of the dead do.”

 

“Oblivion,” I said, fixating on the one part of that explanation I might have understood. “So…there’s no afterlife, then? Things jut end?”

 

He smiled again, a slightly different smile than before. “An interesting question, and one which I am not equipped to answer. Perhaps there is an eternal life waiting for you after you pass beyond my reach; I have no more way of knowing than you do. But I, personally, would not bet on it.”

 

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I felt like my mind was working strangely, fixating on some things and letting others pass almost without noticing them. He’d dropped some bombshells there, said some things that were huge and important, but I focused on something else completely. “You arranged for me to come here,” I said. “Why?”

 

“Because I do regret your death,” he said. “I felt that it was the most expedient way to achieve my goals, but I feel no actual ill will towards you, and I do respect your professional integrity. This, then, is a compromise. Your old life is gone and you cannot get it back, but you may be able to survive here in some form.”

 

I opened my mouth to ask what he meant by that, but he cut me off before I could. “Pardon me, Doctor Swanson,” he said, “but my time here is limited, and there are things you need to know if you would have any chance of surviving in this environment.”

 

I wasn’t happy about essentially being told to sit down and shut up, but I did it. This person—or thing, or whatever—had killed me once for being too dumb to take him seriously. It was a pretty convincing argument for paying attention to what he said now.

 

“The primary thing to keep in mind is that this is a hostile environment,” he said. “It was designed with the explicit intent of wearing things down, including people. The residents may be genuinely helpful; it is unlikely, but possible. Everything else should be treated as a threat. Second, as I said earlier, this place was designed as a sort of cosmic recycling center. It breaks things down and builds them up again in a new form. You may find yourself changing into something other than what you have been, as this process is applied to you. If so, do not worry excessively; it is a natural part of life here. The more you can embrace and make use of these changes, the better you will do here.”

 

He smiled at me and tipped his hat, then turned and started to walk away.

 

“Wait,” I said.

 

He paused. “Keep it brief, please, Doctor Swanson. I do have an appointment to keep.”

 

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.

 

“That question cannot reasonably be answered without reference to purpose,” he replied calmly. “And I do not know what your purpose is. Do you?”

 

“I don’t even know what’s happening,” I said, a little desperately. “How am I supposed to know what to do?”

 

“Ah,” he replied. “If your goal is a greater understanding of your circumstances, you should stick to the left-hand path ahead. Beyond that, I am afraid you are on your own. Good day, Doctor Swanson.”

 

He walked away, and the darkness swallowed him within a few steps, leaving nothing behind.

 

It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized how much his presence had been insulating me from the full reality of this place. Once he was gone, it was easy for me to understand what he had meant about it being a hostile environment.

 

The first thing I noticed was the wind. It was a constant presence, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but never really stopping. That wind was an assault on every sense, a constant, unrelenting attack. It was bitterly cold, piercing my coat and chilling me to the core; my fingers started to feel numb after just a couple of seconds of exposure, and my teeth were chattering despite a coat that had been sufficient in even the cruelest of Maine’s winters. The sound was almost as bad, a howl, a roar, sometimes even a whistle, but never silent. The wind pelted me with dust, with sand and grit, like standing in a low-intensity sandblaster; it threatened to push me over, robbed me of any confidence in my balance.

 

In a way, the inconsistency of the wind was worse than if it had been stuck at the highest intensity. It made it hard to get used to it, hard to adjust. I couldn’t even brace against it, since it seemed to swirl around me, hitting me from a different direction every few seconds.

 

Looking around, I saw that it was pitch black, a darkness somewhere between a moonless night and being trapped in a dark closet. What little light there was was intermittent, inconsistent. Every few seconds the darkness overhead crawled with light, a little slower than lightning, giving me just enough time to look at my surroundings. I couldn’t quite take a second look at anything in those brief moments of illumination, leaving me with nothing but frightening, nightmarish afterimages dancing in my vision. It was like seeing a monster or a man with a knife while walking home, except that I couldn’t do a double take and realize that it was just a tree or an oddly shaped rock.

 

From what I could make out in these moments of half-light, I thought my initial impression had been correct. I was standing on a vast plain, stretching in all directions. Except that plain implied flat, even ground, and this was anything but. I could make out hills, enormous cliffs that towered overhead like the skyscrapers in Boston. They weren’t skyscrapers, they were obviously stone cliffs, but there was the same sense of being dwarfed, the same inconceivable scale. Here and there the ground dropped away just as steeply; I couldn’t see how far down these crevices and canyons went, but if the scale was comparable to the cliffs above me, the fall would be enough to kill me and then some. The result was a harsh, dangerous sort of terrain, where a wrong turn might mean hours of backtracking, a false step a lethal fall.

 

In keeping with that desolate atmosphere, the ground was rocky, dry, and barren. Here and there I saw a patch of scraggly grass, or a stunted bush, but in a way that only served to emphasize just how desolate things were. The fact that life could survive here, that it was possible for plants to grow, but in most places they didn’t. Like the sound of water dripping in a cave, they didn’t so much fill the emptiness as emphasize it.

 

For a moment I just stood there, thinking about what to do. I seriously considered just lying down and waiting for one of the less helpful residents to find me, at which point I would presumably be dead in every sense of the word rather than just some of them.

 

Then I shook my head. I might die, but I wouldn’t just lie down and take it. I had to at least try.

 

My fingers shook as I unzipped my coat. They felt clumsy, wooden, barely responding to my commands. I couldn’t bend them, not really. Too cold.

 

I pulled my scarf out from the inside pocket of the coat, then zipped it closed again with my shaking fingers. It hadn’t been cold enough to need a scarf before I’d come here, but I’d gotten in the habit of carrying one years ago. They were useful for so many different things.

 

Right now, it was useful as a facemask. I tied it around my face several times, then tied it off. The result was clumsy, and I was sure it was ugly as hell, but it did what it was supposed to. It put a layer of cloth between my face and the outside world, kept the dust and grit away from my skin. When I pulled my hood up and cinched it down tight around my face, the only exposed skin was a thin strip around my eyes. I drew my hands up into my sleeves, clenching and relaxing them in an effort to keep them at least marginally flexible, and it was almost bearable.

 

Almost.

 

I was standing on a narrow path, a strip of dirt about twenty feet wide. To the right was a cliff, jagged stone a hundred feet high. To the left the ground dropped away, sloping steeply down for around fifty feet before it plummeted. Both of those options left a lot to be desired.

 

That gave me, essentially, two choices: forward, or back. Or stay here, but I’d already decided against that.

 

I went with forward, the same direction he’d gone. I walked carefully, slowly, stepping only when there was light, testing the ground before I put my full weight on it. I hadn’t forgotten that warning about the environment here being hostile.

 

A few hundred feet further along, the path I was on forked. To the right, it turned down and looped around the edge of the cliff. To the left, it ascended the side of another mesa, a steep climb up, even with the many switchbacks worked into the narrow trail.

 

I stood there for a moment, then turned left and started climbing.

---

 

I went to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota once, when I was a kid. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but now I found myself remembering it with shocking intensity. The memories were vivid, somehow more real than my current surroundings.

 

As I walked, I found myself thinking about that with a sort of bitter amusement. If they thought those were bad, I thought, they should have seen this place.

 

As simply as that, I found my own name for this place. It was the Badlands. In a way, it seemed appropriate. Not only was the geography similar here, at least in the broad sense, but there was something about the term that seemed fitting. This was the Badlands, the bad place. It was a place where everything worked against you. It was offensive on every level, grinding you down.

---

 

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been walking. Time seemed not to have much meaning, here; there was only the next switchback, the next climb, the next step. When I tried to think of something beyond that, the Badlands were quick to punish me. A stone turned underfoot, or broke off in my grasp, threatening to drop me off the edge and into the abyss. I couldn’t see how far down it was. The light didn’t penetrate to the bottom.

 

It had been a while, though. Hours, at least, though I hadn’t made as much progress as I felt I should in that time. I was cold, and the footing was poor. It seemed like for every two steps I took, I slid one step backward. I was hungry, and thirsty, although both feelings were distant. I couldn’t take the time to think about them, couldn’t focus on them. The wind seemed to be waiting for me to be distracted before it spun around me again, trying to snatch me away from the cliff.

 

It was hard to tell, but I thought I was about halfway up when I caught a glimpse of motion. Something ahead, beside the path.

 

The light flicked off. I stood where I was and waited.

 

When the light came on again, it was gone. I waited through another cycle, but there was still no sign of whatever it was, and I couldn’t just stand there forever. My teeth were already clenched together, but I ground them a little tighter together and started forward again. I picked up a stone, about the right size to throw; it was a pitiful weapon, but better than nothing.

 

I saw it again halfway up that section of path, and again at the next switchback. It was a narrow figure, somewhere between a human and a lemur, all long limbs and corded muscles, without an ounce of fat on its frame. Each time, it vanished after I’d just barely glimpsed it.

 

The third time, I’d finally had enough. “Hello?” I said. My voice came out dry and weak, my throat so dry it hurt to talk. I swallowed twice, trying to moisten my throat, and then spoke again. “Hello?”

 

There was a pause, then a head poked up over the edge of the path. It was roughly human, but with huge white eyes, and no hair at all. When it spoke, I saw long narrow teeth and a long narrow tongue.

 

“Hello?” it said. It sounded hesitant, like it wasn’t quite sure whether that was the right thing to say.

 

“You’ve been following me,” I said. I had to almost shout to be heard over the wind.

 

“I’m hungry,” it replied, its voice a plaintive wail now.

 

The lights flickered out.

 

I wanted to panic, wanted to freak out and throw the stone I was holding and run away. But I couldn’t throw my only meager weapon at a target I couldn’t see, and there was nowhere to run. There was nothing to do but choke that terror back down and wait.

 

A few seconds later, the light came back. The creature was nowhere to be seen.

 

“You could have pulled me off,” I said. “You could have just grabbed my ankle and pulled me down.”

 

“Could have,” it agreed from behind me. I turned and saw its head poking up from the side of the path behind me.

 

How had it gotten behind me so fast?

 

“But?” I said, taking a half-step back before I could stop myself.

 

“Don’t want to,” it said. “There’s a hole in the path up ahead. That was me.”

 

I blinked, trying to follow this thing’s conversation. It should have been surreal, but somehow it wasn’t. I was too tired, and next to what had already happened to me, who was I to say that this was strange?

 

I remembered what the person who put me here had said about things changing, and thought I might be looking at what he meant. “You were a person, then?” I said, then quickly corrected myself, “A human, I mean.”

 

The head bobbed in a quick, almost rodent-like nod. “I was walking along, just like you are now. Then the path fell out from underneath me.”

 

I shivered at the thought—more than I was already shivering, even. I was acutely aware that the same thing could happen to me at any moment. Would I be quick enough to catch something before I fell? I didn’t think so. I was too cold; it was making me slow and clumsy.

 

“This is a bad path,” the creature added. It didn’t sound like a warning so much as a statement of fact. It made me think that every path was probably a bad path.

 

“It’s the path I need to walk,” I said.

 

It nodded like that made sense. “Do you mind if I walk with you? I haven’t talked with anyone in a long time.”

 

The light went out, leaving me blind again. I managed to keep from panicking this time, and my voice was even fairly steady as I said, “That would be good.”

 

When the light came back on, I got my first real glimpse of the thing I was talking to. It was perched on the cliff face beside me, clinging to the stone as casually as if it were just walking along.

 

My first impression had been more or less correct. It was human in its rough shape, but with very long limbs that ended in very long fingers and toes. It was naked, but I still couldn’t have placed its gender; there was no hint of genitals. Or, for that matter, many of the other features I would expect from a human body; there were no nipples, no belly button, no hair. Its skin was grey, with a gritty texture that reminded me of the dirt that had been pelting me since I arrived.

 

And it had a broad flaps of skin stretching from elbow down to knee, like the “wings” of a flying squirrel.

 

I tried not to flinch away the thing’s appearance, so far removed from humanity that I honestly would have sooner guessed it was some kind of freakish bat. I don’t think I did a very good job, but it didn’t seem to notice. It crawled headfirst along the cliff face as I walked, looking almost like a spider.

 

“Do you have a name?” I asked, heading up the path.

 

There was a pause. “Not anymore,” it said. “I lost it somewhere, I think. Now when I think about my name the words get mixed up with the wind.”

 

“Oh,” I said. “My name’s….” I paused.

 

“It’s okay if you don’t have one,” it said. “Lots of people don’t.”

 

“No,” I said. “I have a name. It’s Bailey.”

 

Why had it been so hard to think of that?

 

I lost it somewhere, I think.

 

I shivered again.

 

The light went out, and I stopped again. In the dark, its voice came from ahead of me. “How did you get here?”

 

“Someone brought me here and left me,” I said. “How did you get here?”

 

Again, there was a long, long pause. “I ran away,” it said at last, slowly, like it was having to struggle to bring the memories to mind. “It was cold, and I was scared, but he was hitting me and then he had a knife and I was…yeah. I had to run. And then I tried to sleep in an alley, and the wind was so cold, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go. The next day I kept walking, but things were different, and then I was here.”

 

“You slipped through the cracks,” I said. How old had he—or she, I supposed, but somehow I got the feeling of a he from it—been when that happened? Young, I thought. Probably not even to puberty. He seemed like he was still there, somehow, the mind of a child in the body of a monster.

 

“Maybe. Yeah.”

 

“How do you live here?”

 

“I stay by the cliff,” he said. “There’s things to eat. Not much, but some. I can’t go out too far, or the wind gets too strong and I can’t fly. But close to the cliffs it’s all right, mostly.”

 

That sounds awful, I thought.

 

I didn’t say it, but it must have shown in my expression or something, because he said, “It isn’t so bad here. You get used to the dark and the cold eventually. And…there’s something good about it. It’s like, you fell, but now there’s nowhere further to fall.”

 

“You don’t have to worry about what tomorrow’s bringing, because yesterday brought it,” I said. A friend of mine had said that after the doctors told her the cancer was terminal. At the time, I hadn’t quite understood.

 

“Yeah. That. And the things that were bad before, whatever made you come here, it can’t hurt you anymore. Watch out, that hole is just up here.”

 

With that warning, I slowed down, beyond my already glacial pace.

 

The gap in the path wasn’t too large. Five feet, maybe. Under normal circumstances I could have jumped it easily.

 

Now? In the dark, with my muscles numbed and weakened by the endless cold, in the Badlands? Maybe not.

 

“I don’t go much past this,” he said. “There’s things up higher, and this is where…yeah.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “I think I have to keep going.”

 

“Yeah,” he said again. “Good luck. If you want to come back and talk some more, that’d be cool.”

 

I swallowed hard, then took a couple long steps forward and jumped.

 

The light flickered out as I left the ground, and for a long moment I hung there in the dark, not knowing whether I would fall or not. The wind, for once, was quiet, just a soft whistling through the canyon.

 

Then my feet hit stone on the other side, and I let out the breath I’d been holding. I was, for the moment, safe.

 

Except not, because a moment later the ground started to crumble under my heels, where I’d landed too close to the edge. I windmilled my arms, grabbing at the cliff, but I was already leaning backwards and I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough, that I was going to fall.

 

Something hit me hard in the back, knocking me forward. I fell onto my hands and knees, listening to the rocks tumbling down the cliff.

 

When the light came on and I looked down, I saw him several hundred feet down, falling fast. His false wings snapped open, catching the air and spinning him out into a long, steep glide out of sight.

 

I watched him go with a vague feeling of jealousy and then kept climbing, panting with exertion and fear.

---

 

One of the maddening things about the Badlands, as I learned fairly quickly, is how inconsistent it is. There’s no login, no fairness in how it treats people. Five people might walk safely across a bridge, only for it to collapse on the sixth. The wind might hold one person up and smash another to the ground, with the two standing right beside each other. If there’s any logic to it, it’s a logic that human minds can’t begin to fathom.

 

In the Badlands, the only thing you can rely on is that nothing—nothing—can be trusted.

 

In some ways, that’s what wore me down the fastest. More than the pain, the cold, the constant danger, the hunger, more than any of it, it was tension. It was always having to look twice, having to test everything. There was only so much of the constant fear, the paranoia, that a person could take before things started breaking.

---

 

The top of the mesa was a city, of sorts. There were just a few shacks, cobbled together out of what looked like sheet metal and tarps, or cut into the stone. Back when I was alive, I’d have said that it was more pitiful than most of the tent cities I’d seen. Here, it was the only sign of civilization I’d seen, which automatically made it a haven of luxury.

 

I was very, very cautious as I approached it. I hadn’t been here long—no more than a day, I thought—but I was already getting a sense of what the Badlands were like. There was no safety here, no respite. That was the whole point. And you couldn’t survive here without, in some way, belonging here.

 

The kid who’d saved me was one thing. He was a scavenger, living on the outskirts, barely more a part of the Badlands than I was. But these people were different. They’d obviously been here a while, and they’d scraped out some kind of stable living there.

 

My instincts from my old life and my growing understanding of this new one both told me the same things. First, these people would be hard, mean sons of bitches; nobody else would have made it this far down here. Second, they would expect the same from me. They hadn’t managed to hold on to this by assuming the best of people.

 

Walking up to the settlement, I saw a handful of people moving around. Using that term loosely; most of them looked only a very little bit like what I was used to thinking of as people. At the very least, most of them had open wounds, most of which were obviously festering. Others were more dramatically warped, the way the child had been earlier. Here was one with a leg cobbled together out of bits of scrap metal and stones; there was a woman with three arms, one of which looked like a spider’s leg. I was too far away to make out many details, still, but even at a distance, even at a glance, they couldn’t have passed for human, by and large.

 

As I got closer, they started turning to face me, hands going to weapons. Those who weren’t already weapons in themselves; several had teeth and claws. They were chipped and broken, but I’d spent enough time working with animals to recognize the threat they posed.

 

I tried to seem nonthreatening as I walked into the city, and it seemed to work. They didn’t attack me, anyway. It probably helped that compared to them I was nonthreatening. I didn’t have a weapon, having dropped the rock I was carrying a ways back, and physically I’d never exactly been imposing.

 

I was almost to the center of the town when one of the residents grabbed me by the arm. She looked like a human teenager, emaciated to the point of being almost skeletal. But her fingers were too long, fading from flesh into something shiny and black, and a snake protruded from one of her eye sockets.

 

“Hey,” she said, a long forked tongue flickering out of her mouth. “You’re new, right?”

 

“Yeah,” I admitted.

 

She nodded, the gesture more in the shoulders than the neck. “Thought so. You’ve got the look. Listen, you should talk to the man. He can answer your questions.” She turned me to face one of the shacks and pushed me forward. “Go on now,” she said.

 

I stumbled forward to the shack indicated. It was one of the larger and better ones, cobbled together out of small stones mortared together with some sort of mud.

 

I stepped inside and found myself staring at a machete from about six inches away. “What are you doing here?” the man holding it demanded.

 

I held my hands out to the side and very carefully didn’t move. “I’m new here,” I said. “Some girl told me I should come to you with questions.”

 

There was a momentary pause before he lowered the machete. “All right,” he said. “Give me a moment.” He walked a few feet away and bent over, visible only dimly in the intermittent light coming in the door. After a few seconds of muttered cursing he got a lantern of some sort lit, giving me my first look at him.

 

He looked more human than most of the people here. His legs were too short and thick, his skin an unhealthy shade of greyish brown with necrotic sores on his face and solid black eyes, but nothing too extreme. He could pass for human with sunglasses and a long coat.

 

“It’s customary to provide some form of payment,” he said, sitting in a crude wooden chair at the table with the lantern. There wasn’t a second chair. “Whatever you can. So you know.”

 

“I’m a doctor,” I said. “Or I was. I could look at those sores on your face.”

 

He looked at me curiously. “Were you really?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. I hesitated. “I worked on animals, not people. But….”

 

“But I’m not a person anymore. Yes. Fair enough, then. Ask your questions.”

 

“How do I get out of this place?”

 

He smiled, showing blocky teeth like those of a horse. “Well, you’re direct,” he commented. “Most people beat around the bush a little first.”

 

“But they all want to know.”

 

He snorted, the sort of wet, heavy snort that requires either very specific circumstances or serious illness to pull off. “Of course they do,” he said dryly. “Who wouldn’t? But there isn’t much of an answer. The vast majority of those who end up here will never make it out.”

 

“I didn’t ask how not to leave,” I said.

 

He nodded slowly. “Of course. Do you know anything of what this place is?”

 

“I heard that it’s a sort of recycling center,” I said. “Somewhere that things go to be broken down and repurposed.”

 

“That’s as good an explanation as any,” he said. “Well, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it uses escape as an incentive. If you want out, you have to let it change you.”

 

“I don’t understand. How does that work?”

 

He sighed. “There are a few exits,” he said. “Not many. They aren’t accessible to you as you are now. You would need to be able to fly, or breathe underwater, or something else. Even after you reach the exit, there’s usually a guardian, a challenge, something to keep people in. If you want to survive past that, you have to be strong or smart or lucky. Most don’t make it. Even if you do, you won’t likely be back home. There are many, many worlds that touch on this one, and while leaving is almost certain to be a step up, you’ll probably still be in a strange place.”

 

Once again, I found myself casually disregarding profound revelations about the world to fixate on the immediately important information. He’d just mentioned multiple worlds, and I ignored it completely. “That doesn’t sound like a good plan. Too many variables.”

 

“True. The other alternative is to count on someone else for your escape. People don’t come here often, but occasionally someone wants a monster. This isn’t a great place to come for one—the residents tend to be unpredictable, at best—but if you want something strong enough and nasty enough to tip the scales, you could do worse.”

 

I considered that for a moment. “That would still require you to be strong, though,” I said. “You’d have to stand out enough to be worth their time.”

 

“Yes,” he agreed. “Of course, you can’t really get out with either of those ways. By the time you’ve changed that far, you’re only barely you.”

 

“But I don’t want to change,” I said plaintively. “I want to stay human.”

 

He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Have you looked at yourself recently?” he asked.

 

“No. I haven’t had the time.”

 

He nodded like he’d expected that, and went to the lumpy sack on a stone frame that apparently served as his bed. He picked something up from the floor nearby and carried it back to me with obvious care. “You break this, and I break you,” he said, handing it to me.

 

It genuinely took me a second to realize it was a mirror. I didn’t recognize my own reflection. Not at all. My face and hands were covered in blood from small cuts and abrasions. The skin was grey and gritty, the dust and dirt of the Badlands embedded into it. I tried to brush it away, and succeeded only in smearing blood and grime across the skin. The Badlands dirt seemed to be a part of my skin now.

 

“That’s after, what, a day?” he asked. “Less? Face it, girl, you’re already changing.”

 

“Bailey,” I said. “My name’s Bailey.”

 

“Good for you,” he said. “But it doesn’t change the facts. If you want to stay human, you might as well off yourself right now, because you’re as close to that as you’re ever going to be.”

 

I frowned and set the mirror on the table. The shack was silent for several seconds.

 

“Okay,” I said at last. “How do I go about changing?”

 

He shrugged. “It’s not really something you do,” he said. “This place will do it for you. You let it in and it’ll give you what you need to survive; keep that up long enough and you’ll be a monster before you know it. But if you want to speed the process up, you could get to know the place. Learn to feel its rhythms, understand what it is and how it works. Limbo always takes as much as it gives or more. The better you understand it, the more you’ll be able to do what it wants; the more you give it what it wants, the more power it’ll give you in return.”

 

“Limbo?” I said. “You mean the Badlands?”

 

He gave me an oddly evaluating look. “You already gave it a name? That’s a good sign for what you want. It suggests you’ve already got something of a connection.”

 

“You talk about it like its alive.”

 

“And I’m not convinced it isn’t,” he said. “But it doesn’t really matter. Whether the place is alive, or there’s a person in charge of it that makes decisions, or it’s just an automated process, the result is the same. Some behaviors are rewarded; others are punished.”

 

I nodded slowly. “Okay. I can buy that. I think I only have one question left, then.”

 

“That’s good,” he said dryly. “I was about to start charging you more.”

 

“What about you?” I said, ignoring his joke. “If you know all this, why haven’t you tried to leave? Hell, how do you know all this?”

 

“What makes you think I haven’t?” he said seriously. “I got close enough to see the exit, and I know this place well enough to have a good idea of what it was going to cost me to get through it. As to how I know…well, how did you think I knew what people are looking for when they come here for monsters? One of the easiest ways to wind up here is to summon something and have it drag you down with it.”

---

 

I was not sure how long it had been. More than weeks and less than years. A coherent perception of time had been one of the first things to go. I’d recognized that first day that looking beyond the moment was risky, that it left me vulnerable. Giving up the capacity to fully conceptualize time was a logical next step in that progression, one that bought me a vastly heightened degree of focus.

 

I slid forward to the edge of the mesa, slow and silent. The light still flickered, but I had very little appreciation of it. Light and darkness were much the same to my eyes. The right one still required light to function, but the left had been gouged out by a wind-carried stone a long time ago. The replacement, which had grown out of bone and dirt in the empty socket, saw better in the darkness than the light. Between the two, it didn’t matter to me much at all.

 

“I think I’m ready,” I said to my pet. Barely the size of my hand, it was a sort of lizard with scales like jewels. I didn’t know what it was, whether it had been a person, or a lizard, or some creature that I didn’t know. Maybe it was a creation of this place, born wholly of the Badlands. Regardless, it was a good listener and it didn’t eat much, which made it a good pet.

 

It was so hard to find food. I didn’t need to eat, I couldn’t starve; I’d learned that the hard way, back in the beginning. But food was power and power was what I needed, so I found food. I hunted and I scavenged, and while it had often been tight, somehow I scraped together enough for my pet as well.

 

It amused me that I’d kept a pet, after sacrificing so many things. It was something to talk to. The first boy I’d met in the Badlands hadn’t been exaggerating that. He’d done me a good turn, warning me like that. I tried to honor that by helping out other new people when I could, showing them the ropes or helping them out of a hard place. Sometimes I forgot and ate them instead, but I figured that couldn’t be helped. It was so hard to remember.

 

Even more than that, though, my pet helped me remember who I was. I’d cared for pets once. It had been important to me. I wasn’t entirely sure why, but that wasn’t surprising. I’d lost a lot of the mental functions I’d once had. I just had to assume that I’d had a reason for it back then, and continue to do so now.

 

I stepped up to the edge and gazed down into the abyss. With my Badlands eye, I could see exactly how deep it was, unlike the first time I’d looked down into the canyons. Three thousand, seven hundred and twelve feet. I was very good at gauging heights.

One thousand and four feet above the ground, a tunnel opened in the side of an otherwise blank wall. I’d started down that tunnel, and gone far enough to feel the shift in the Badlands around me. I’d seen the texture of the darkness lightening up, heard the wind quieting down, and I’d known what it meant.

 

Somewhere down that tunnel was an exit. A place where the Badlands ceased to be the Badlands. A way out of this hell.

 

Since then, I’d been getting ready. I’d been eating, stockpiling power, stockpiling weapons. This was the final exam. The Badlands had made me what I needed to be, given power and stripped away weakness. Now I just had to prove that I was capable of using it.

 

In theory, this was what I’d been searching for all this time. This was what I’d wanted, what I’d needed.

 

But now that I knew where to go, I’d spent a while putting it off. Maybe a week. Maybe more. And even now that I’d come back, with the intention of finally ending this torment one way or another, I was hesitating. And I knew why.

 

Deep down, I suspected I couldn’t.

 

Almost no one made it out on their own. I’d asked all sorts of people, everyone I could get to talk to me and who might know anything. The stories changed with every retelling, every person I asked had slightly different information, but that detail always stayed the same. Almost no one made it out.

 

I didn’t feel fear anymore. Not the way I used to. There was no visceral reaction, no piss-yourself-and-run-away terror. The Badlands had gotten rid of that a long time ago. But I could still experience fear on some level, could still recognize intellectually that I was afraid. And I was afraid that I was not one of the lucky or talented few who would get to leave.

 

I was afraid that if I went down that tunnel, there was nothing waiting for me but death.

 

“You know,” I said to my pet, stroking its neck and looking at my destination, “I used to think I wanted to die. I even tried to do the deed myself a couple of times. But now that I’m actually looking at the decision, I find I’d rather not.” I didn’t remember much from before…before, but I remembered that. I didn’t know why I’d attempted suicide, but I had.

 

It occurred to me, as I stood there, that that boy had warned me about this too. He’d said something about how you could get used to the Badlands, how it wasn’t so bad after a while. At the time I hadn’t been able to see how that was possible, but now I did. Things were bad here, but they were a bad that I understood. I knew the Badlands. I had food, had a decent life. Risking that, even for the chance at being out, was a scary thought.

 

Recognizing that was just what I needed to give me that final push. I tucked my pet away in my coat where I wouldn’t lose it and stretched my neck, getting ready for what was next.

 

That boy really had done me a huge favor, the one and only time we’d talked. I’d have to remember to thank him for it if I ever saw him again. What had his name been, anyway? I couldn’t quite bring it to mind.

 

Names could be slippery things, down here in the Badlands. Hard to hold onto. I’d lost mine somewhere along the way, I thought. I’d lost a lot of things.

 

I turned back to the mesa’s edge, and jumped out into the darkness.

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“That’s the place?” I asked, looking at our destination. It was a moderately-sized office building in the heart of downtown, all worn concrete and gleaming windows.

 

“That’s it,” my escort said. He’d introduced himself to me as David Brunner; I could smell the movement in his magic, quick and light, but beyond that I didn’t know much of anything about him. He was a Guard, apparently the person who was going to be in charge of their public branch in Colorado Springs.

 

“Nice digs,” Aiko said. “You own the whole building?”

 

“Yeah,” David said. “No offense, but you aren’t actually invited in. We’re planning to open areas of the building to the public once we have things up and running for real, but for the moment it’s still restricted to members of the Guards. Not to mention that having you around would make it a little too easy to figure out who Winter really is.”

 

“No problem,” she said easily. “I think we all knew that I wasn’t exactly going to be signing up with this crew. You don’t want to let me into your clubhouse, that’s fine.”

 

I eyed for a moment. “Please don’t break in,” I said. “We know you can. You don’t need to prove it.”

 

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You don’t seriously think I would do something like that, do you?”

 

“Yeah,” I said dryly. “Given that I’m pretty sure you were already considering it, yes, I do.”

 

She sniffed. “Fine. I’ll wait outside like a boring person.”

 

“Thank you.” I turned to David. “Okay, what do I need to know?”

 

“To start with, I’m the only other person on the local team who knows about the Conclave, the Guards as an organization beyond what’s being developed for the public, or pretty much anything about the political structures you’re used to dealing with. As far as everyone else is concerned, none of that exists, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

 

I blinked. “These people are that new?”

 

He smiled thinly. “You have no idea. Speaking of which, I’m also the only one who knows who you are. To the rest of the team, you’re Jonathan Keyes, using the alias Shrike. Here’s your paperwork for that, by the way.” He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and held it out to me.

 

I didn’t take it. “Shrike,” I said. “Seriously? That’s the name you guys came up with for me?”

 

“You’re the one who put it on the form. It’s not my problem if you changed your mind.”

 

I opened my mouth, then sighed and turned back to Aiko. “Shrike,” I said. “You filled out a form saying that I wanted to go by the name Shrike.”

 

“What?” she said, smirking. “I told you I wanted to have a pet name for you. It just took a little while to actually make it happen.”

 

“Okay,” I said, taking the envelope. “So apparently I’m going by Shrike now. Joy. You said my fake real name is Jonathan Keyes?”

 

“That’s right,” David said. “Now, the team does know that you’re a werewolf, as well as very basic information about your magic and your skills. So don’t worry about keeping any of that secret. But your real identity, your political affiliations, and your heritage are all very much secret.”

 

I snorted. “What do you even know about my heritage?”

 

“Enough to know that we don’t want them knowing much of anything about it. That means you also have to seem like a different person. So the wolf motif? That’s going to have to go.”

 

I stared at him for a moment. “You know,” I commented, “I was just thinking that there was not one single thing about this arrangement that I actually liked. Thanks for proving me wrong.”

 

“What?” David said. He shook his head a moment later. “No, never mind. Not important. Here’s your ID; that’ll get you through the security. Now come on, let’s introduce you to the rest of the team.” He started across the street without waiting for me to answer. I hugged Aiko and then followed.

 

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” I asked.

 

David glanced at me, then continued walking. “I think you’re dangerous,” he said. “You’re disruptive, destructive, and you have a history of doing stupid things. To be blunt, you’re exactly what we’re working against here. You just happen to be pointed at even worse things right now.”

 

I took a few more steps, then said, “You smell sort of bad. Like, whatever cologne you’re using? It’s starting to go rancid. Just so you know.”

 

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, reminding me very strongly of Guard. Apparently I had a gift for annoying all of his people, not just the boss.

 

He swiped his own identification card through the reader at the door. The reader beeped and then the door unlocked with a sharp click. He pulled it open and waved me inside.

 

I paused outside. “This building is warded?” I asked absently, most of my attention on the wards themselves. I sniffed, analyzing the scent of the magic, and felt around at the edges of the spells.

 

“Of course,” he said impatiently.

 

“These are, like, cookie-cutter wards,” I said. “They’re ridiculously generic. And the joints between the different wards are weak. A moron could take this apart.”

 

“And you think you could do better?” he asked.

 

“Of course not,” I snapped. “Defensive magic isn’t exactly my strong suit, as you’re well aware. That’s why I hired someone who is good at it, rather than try and cobble it together myself and end up with this kind of sloppy, standardized crap.”

 

He sighed. “I’ll pass on your recommendation to the higher-ups,” he said, sounding tired. “Now come on. The rest of the team is waiting to meet you.”

 

The building was in the middle of some fairly extensive renovations. There was a demolition crew gutting the ground floor, clearing out the walls to leave a large, open space, and David said that there was more work being done elsewhere. Apparently the elevators were down for the time being as a part of the renovations, which I was just as glad for. I’ve always much preferred stairs.

 

“The ground floor is going to be the public area,” David said, climbing the stairs as quickly and easily as I could. That was pretty impressive, for a human, enough to make me wonder whether he had some means of making it easier magically. “We’re going to have a gift shop, a cafe, that sort of thing.”

 

I blinked. “A gift shop? That’s…why?”

 

He shrugged. “We need cash,” he said simply. “To pull this arrangement off, we’re going to need a lot of money. We’re planning on getting support from the government once we’re up and running, and until then the funds from our donors should be plenty.” He glanced at me as he said that, a silent reminder that the precise nature of those donors was not public knowledge even here. “But we’ll want to be bringing in some cash on our own, and a gift shop isn’t a bad way of going about that.”

 

“Who in their right mind would be shopping at a gift shop here?” I demanded.

 

He snorted. “You might be surprised,” he said dryly. “Remember, this is going to be a high-profile, publicly known organization. People are going to be talking about us. Hell, I’ll be surprised if it takes more than a couple weeks for you to be a celebrity.”

 

I groaned. “Oh, no,” I said. “I’ve done the celebrity thing before. Vastly overrated.”

 

“When were you a celebrity?”

 

“First time the werewolves came out to the public,” I said. “I was one of the names on the list. I didn’t have it as bad as a lot of them, but it was still pretty ridiculous. People barging into my store and ranting about it, or trying to take pictures of me whenever I went outside.”

 

He laughed. “Well, at least you know what you’re in for.” He glanced at me curiously. “Maybe you can tell me something, though. Why did the werewolves pull that stunt? The whole thing seemed a little…random.”

 

“You know,” I said slowly, “at the time I agreed with you. Thought it was a terrible idea. But looking back on it, I’d wager the Khan knew that this was coming. The whole supernatural world going public, I mean. The first time was a sort of trial balloon, seeing what the reaction would be and who the most strongly-opposed people were. Then when they went back into the closet for a while, they could arrange for those people to have unfortunate accidents before we went public for real.”

 

“That’s pretty terrifying,” he said after a moment. “That kind of thinking, I mean. And the way you just talk about them having accidents like it’s nothing. You really think that’s right?”

 

“We’re talking about people who were lynching werewolves in the streets,” I said coldly. “Or just random people that maybe looked a little like a werewolf if you squinted hard enough. I don’t have a lot of pity for them.”

 

“I guess that’s fair,” David said, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. The tour. So the ground floor is open to the general public. Then the next couple floors are where we’re putting in the support staff and the bureaucracy. Fifth floor is our work area—lab space, workshops, and such.”

 

“I’m going to want to check that out,” I said. “Is it fully equipped?”

 

“I thought you might like that part,” he said. “And no, we’re still getting it set up. On the plus side, that does mean that you can put in any special requests. I’ll show you where after you meet your new coworkers. Speaking of, here we are.” He opened the heavy fire door at the next landing and waved me through. “Sixth floor,” he said. “This is our common area. Seventh is the top floor, and that’s where our personal quarters are.”

 

“Seems a little awkward for us to get to,” I commented. The door opened into a hallway, across from the elevators. To either side there were a handful of doors opening off the hall.

 

“It’s also hard for anyone else to get to,” he pointed out. “Kind of have to pick one, right?”

 

“Fair point.”

 

“Glad you think so. Well, here we are.” He grinned at me and opened one of the doors.

 

Looking in, the first thing that struck me was how cozy it was. The floor was covered in pale grey carpet, saved from looking institutional by the thick, plush shag. The walls were a warmer cream color, with several paintings, drawings, photos, and posters on them. There were several leather couches and armchairs scattered around the room, as well as a beanbag and some large cushions. Somebody had hung a green-and-black hammock in the corner, which looked like it was made of parachute fabric. There was a television, a stereo, some video games. The result should have been cluttered and chaotic, but somehow it all seemed to fit together into a harmonious whole.

 

There were four people in the room when I walked in. A man and a woman were curled up together in the beanbag, a skinny guy was sprawled in one of the armchairs, and a girl with an aggressively red mohawk was lying in the hammock.

 

“Hey, folks,” David said, following me in and closing the door behind us. “Last one of the team’s finally here. Meet Jonathan. He’s going to be our tank.”

 

“Nice to meet you,” the guy on the couch said, looking up at me and smiling awkwardly. Now that I looked at him again, I saw that he wasn’t much older than the girl in the hammock; he might be in his twenties, but not by much. “My name’s Derek. I’m mostly good at making things. Like armor and stuff, yeah?”

 

“That’s an useful ability,” I said.

 

His awkward smile blossomed into a broad, ecstatic grin. “Thanks,” he said.

 

“Yeah, yeah,” the girl in the hammock said impatiently. “I’m Tawny and I summon demons. Christ, this is like an AA meeting.”

 

I considered her for a moment. “I think you and I should have a conversation about that.”

 

“What, you want me to renounce my heretical ways and go back to being a good girl?”

 

“Nah,” I said. “Mostly I just want to know what kind of demon you’re summoning. Some are a lot better to work with than others.”

 

She looked directly at me for the first time, apparently trying to figure out whether I was serious, and then grinned almost as widely as Derek. She was missing some teeth. “I think I might like you, Jonny,” she said. “Tell you what, I’ll have that conversation with you. Who knows, I might even learn something.”

 

“I look forward to it,” I said.

 

“Well, not to rush you or anything, but we are on a schedule,” David said. “You already know me. I mostly focus on mobility and providing ranged support.”

 

“My name’s Anthony,” the guy in the beanbag said. His eyes were solidly closed. “But you can call me Tony. Everyone does. I’m good with fire, primarily, although I do a little work with electricity and light.”

 

“And I’m Elyssa,” the woman with him said. Despite their physical proximity, they seemed like polar opposites; her eyes were wide open and darted around in a way that made me think she was taking in everything that happened. “I mess with people’s perceptions, especially with attention. Now run along; you don’t want to keep the bossman waiting.”

 

“Hang on a second,” I said. “What’s the rush?”

 

“You have some paperwork to file,” David said. “Financial information and such. And then you have a meeting with the public relations team to talk about how your image is going to need to change now that you aren’t operating on your own.”

 

Tawny laughed. “Good luck with that, Jonny,” she said. “Play nice with the pencil-pushers.”

 

And on that less-than-comforting note, I was whisked right back out to arrange for the less dramatic aspects of a job that I was already deeply, deeply regretting having agreed to.

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Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

“Okay,” I said to Guard as the rest of the mages got up and started drifting towards the door. “If this is all about you offering me a deal, why did all of you need to be here?”

 

“You’re not the only one asking that,” the pale woman in the blue robe grumbled. Thinking back on it I was pretty sure it was the first thing she’d said. It took a moment for me to remember who she actually was, since I didn’t think I’d seen her except for a few minutes while they were trying to decide whether to charge me with murder or not. I was reasonably confident her title—or name, or whatever—was Walker. She’d voted not to kill me, as I recalled.

 

Come to think of it, Guide had been against me that day. That probably made it a little harder to say that it was a total accident that I’d killed her.

 

Guard glared at her, then turned back to me with a very badly faked smile. “Some actions can only formally taken by all members of the Conclave together. Technically, offering a complete and total outsider a major position with one of our organizations is one of those actions. I wonder why.”

 

Prophet looked from me to Guard and backed, then grinned maliciously. “Have fun,” he said, snapping his fingers. His haze of magic faded from around the walls, and he walked out the door.

 

I eyed Guard as the Conclave members finished leaving, then shrugged and sat down across from him. “Given that we’re already in a restaurant, you actually want to get some food? Because I’m thinking this conversation will be a lot more endurable if I’m stuffing my face during it.”

 

“Fine with me,” he said. “Watcher!”

 

Moray opened the door and poked his head inside. “Yes?”

 

“Send the wait staff in,” Guard said.

 

The next twenty minutes or so passed in total and uncomfortable silence. Literal silence; I wasn’t in the mood to be making casual conversation, and Guard was apparently content with awkwardly intense stares and a fake smile that got even less believable with each passing moment.

 

Finally, when I was seriously starting to consider actually talking about important things just to break the silence despite knowing how dumb that was, the waitress showed up. And then another half a dozen people following her.

 

They started laying out plates, and didn’t stop until most of the conference table was covered. Moray stood and watched the whole time, which seemed to be creeping the restaurant employees out more than a little bit. I could not in all honesty blame them for that. When you’re serving two people an amount of food suitable to a small army while a guy in a three-piece suit watches you work is the kind of thing that probably should leave you feeling a little weird.

 

They finished and filed out, with Moray following close behind them and closing the door. Guard looked at his one plate of enchiladas, then looked at the rest of the food on the table.

 

He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Is this really necessary?”

 

“I’m starving, and the food here is passable. If you don’t want to cover the bill, I can handle it.” I grabbed a platter of nachos and dragged it close. “Okay,” I said. “Details. What kind of work are you expecting me to do?”

 

“It would entail a mixture of direct action and politics,” he said. “To begin with, you would be expected to enforce minimum standards of law and order within your area of influence, particularly upon the supernatural residents. While you certainly can enforce the law, it isn’t a priority, particularly until the legal system catches up with the recent upheaval. We’re more concerned with maintaining basic standards of order and stability, and minimizing destruction and civilian casualties.”

 

I swallowed and then gave him a funny look. “You do realize these are things I already do, right?”

 

He smiled. It was wider and more mobile than the faked smiles earlier, his teeth startlingly white against the dark skin. The expression didn’t last more than a second, but it still conveyed more genuine emotion than I’d seen out of him during this whole meeting. “So now you’ll do it for us,” he said.

 

I snorted. “Okay. So that must bring us to the politics bit, I guess.”

 

“Yes,” Guard said in a tone of deep, profound distaste. “The worst part of the arrangement, as usual. The gist of it is that you would be building connections and establishing positive relations with other groups. You would have to represent us, both to other political entities and to the citizenry; we would expect you to represent us well to both. As we begin to integrate ourselves with existing political structures, you would also have to work with them. We expect to also begin drawing a great many new recruits; you would be involved with attracting, vetting, training, and coordinating them.”

 

I sat and processed that for a few moments as I polished off the nachos. “So let’s start at the beginning,” I said, once I’d thought it through. “You realize that I am the main political group in the area, right? I mean, my organization is probably the strongest one in the region, and most of the rest are either allied with or explicitly subordinate to mine. So you basically want me to establish relations with myself?”

 

“Well, that should make it easy, shouldn’t it? If you can’t manage that, I don’t know why my colleagues would be as impressed with you as they seem to be.” He sighed. “We wouldn’t be offering you this opportunity if you weren’t useful. Your political capital is one of the main reasons we’re doing so. While your observations on this topic are amusing in their own way, this isn’t either surprising or accidental.”

 

I nodded. “Fair enough. Okay, point two. You want me to represent you in a positive light? Are you nuts? Because I’m not exactly on the best terms with a lot of people. There are a lot of them that would probably tell you to screw off as soon as they hear that I’m involved.”

 

Guard considered me for a moment, then sighed again. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Consider whether maybe, just maybe, we aren’t total morons. We might even know more about politics than you do. I mean, I’d like to think that we didn’t get this position without some degree of qualification.”

 

I chuckled. “Again, fair point. So…what do I actually get out of this deal?”

 

“What, aside from the chance to completely shape the future of the world in a major way? I thought we already went over this.”

 

“Yeah, I’m just messing with you.” I grinned at him. “Quick question, though. I was under the impression that I couldn’t hold any kind of official position on account of the whole, you know, internationally wanted for blowing up a decent chunk of a city. Do you have any way around that little problem?”

 

Guard closed his eyes for a moment and I got the distinct impression he was counting to ten to keep from murdering me. “All of our people will be using aliases,” he said, opening his eyes and plastering on an even more obviously fake smile. “The general public should never become aware of who you are. The government will have your identity on file, of course, but we can provide falsified identification for you if you can’t manage it on your own.”

 

I blinked. “Really? Just use a false name? It’s that easy?”

 

He shrugged and took a sip of water. “Why shouldn’t it be? You already keep your face covered while you’re working, and I imagine most of the others will be as well. Many of those who will be involved in this project were raised on superheroes and the like; they’re likely to jump on the excuse to wear a costume and use a dramatic name, aside from the practical benefits.”

 

I winced. He laughed.

 

“Okay,” I said. “I think that’s the last question I had. Was there anything else you had to tell me?”

 

“Just one thing,” he said with a smile. “You won’t be in charge of operations within Colorado Springs. You’ll be starting at the bottom and working up, in fact. So to begin with you’ll be at the very bottom slot on the totem pole.”

 

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why? I’m not exactly a newbie at this stuff.”

 

“Several reasons,” he said, smiling. Clearly, Guard was enjoying this part of the interview. “First off, as you pointed out, you have an organization of your own to be running. Expecting you to manage ours on top of that would be unreasonable. Second, you’re far too high-profile. If you were the head of the local team, it would be extremely likely that someone would figure out who you are. It’s also likely that you’ll be required to meet with the Guards in your capacity as jarl, which would be one hell of a trick if you’re the head of both groups. And finally, in this sense you are a total newbie. You have no experience with how we operate, no familiarity with the system. There’s no way that you could act as a viable leader without even having worked with us in the past.”

 

I glowered at him for a second or two, then nodded. “Fine,” I said grudgingly. “But you realize what it would do to my reputation if I’m taking orders?”

 

“Just one more reason not to let anyone connect the two personas,” he said smiling. “So I think that’s everything we needed to cover. What do you think?”

 

“I’ll need to consider it,” I said, grabbing another plate. “I’m not sure whether I even have time to add this to what I’m already doing. But I’m not going to rule it out entirely.”

 

“Honestly that’s more than I was expecting,” Guard said, rolling up the sleeves of his robe and grabbing his fork. “You’ve got a few days to decide. I’ll get back to you.”

 

I grunted and stuffed another taco in my mouth. I’d already polished off enough food for a dozen people, but I was still profoundly hungry. I knew that there was no way just eating would make that hunger go away; it was deeper than that, a simplified experience of a more metaphysical need. But there was still a sort of satisfaction in eating.

 

Guard also started eating. His one plate looked a little ridiculous in comparison to the dozen or so others on the table, but he was fairly enthusiastic at first, stuffing his face with apparent satisfaction.

 

Then he started slowing down.

 

Then his face hit the table.

---

 

I sat in the hospital waiting room and, shockingly, waited. I’d taken the time to tell Snowflake, Aiko, and my thugs what was going on and not to expect me back soon, but other than that I’d just been sitting here for the past half-hour or so. It already looked bad enough; for me to then disappear from the scene would be a little bit suspicious.

 

Finally, Moray walked into the waiting room and sat next to me. “I hate hospitals,” he commented.

 

“Me too. They creep me out.” I glowered at the aquarium on the opposite wall. “And they smell bad. Like, I mean just awful.”

 

He snorted. “You would fixate on that.”

 

I chuckled. “Yeah, well. Is there any word?”

 

He nodded. “Definitely poison, but I don’t know enough to understand half of what they’re saying. It sounds like he’s probably out of it for a while, but the doctors don’t think he’s going to die.”

 

“Good,” I said.

 

“Is it?”

 

I nodded. “I don’t know if I like him and I don’t get the impression he likes me at all, but I don’t want him dead. Not to mention that I really don’t think it’d have gone well for me if he died.”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “It does look pretty fishy. Especially right after another of the Conclave members that voted against you died.”

 

“That would be why it’s a good thing that he isn’t dying,” I said dryly. “You have any idea who poisoned him? Or how?”

 

“Not yet. There was nothing in any of the other dishes, so it was pretty clearly targeted at Guard. He’s got more enemies than just about anyone alive, though, so that doesn’t narrow it down much.”

 

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “Have you looked into the restaurant staff at all? Maybe it was one of the waiters that put the poison in, or a cook?”

 

“There are people investigating them, but I haven’t heard what they’ve found,” he said. “Of course, there is another possibility.”

 

“What is that?”

 

“He did it himself.”

 

“That makes sense,” I said. “Oh wait, no it doesn’t. What the hell?”

 

“Think about it,” Moray said. “Pretty convenient that he got just enough of the poison in him to make him sick, but not enough to kill him. That’s a lucky coincidence, and I’m not a fan of coincidence.”

 

“Okay,” I said after a moment. “Even by my standards that’s impressively paranoid. Why would he be almost killing himself, again?”

 

“To make you do what he wants,” Moray said. “Think about it. He was making you an offer, right? I didn’t hear what you said, but I know how things were shaping up. Well, I think this is a bit of a high-pressure sales tactic, don’t you?”

 

I frowned. “Well, I can see how this would influence my decision, yeah. But I have a hard time seeing me being that important to him. This is a pretty huge risk for him to be taking for the sake of…what? Making it a little awkward for me to say no?”

 

“It’s the kind of tactic I could see him using,” he said seriously. “I’ve known Guard for a long time now. He isn’t the sort to shy away from a risk. If he wanted you to take the deal he was offering, I could see him pulling this kind of stunt.” He glanced at me over his sunglasses, his expression carefully blank. “Like I said, I’m not sure. But you should at least think about it.”

 

He looked at me for a moment longer in silence, then walked back into the hospital.

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“You know,” I commented, “I was expecting this to be in another conference center or something like that. Not the back room of a Mexican restaurant. Isn’t this going to be a little crowded?”

 

Moray glanced at me. “You’re thinking of a full assembly, like the one you were at before. This isn’t like that. It’s just the Conclave members today.”

 

“Huh,” I said. “You get a promotion I didn’t hear about, then?”

 

He snorted. “Not likely. There isn’t enough money in the whole world to convince me to take that job. No, I’m just here as security. Making sure that nobody gets in or spies on you guys. I don’t even know what they want to talk to you about, and I don’t want to know. Not my business.”

 

“Yeah. I don’t blame you.”

 

The restaurant was fairly busy. It was lunchtime, and there were people here from the nearby businesses. Office workers, for the most part, although there were a handful of others, laborers and tradesmen. I recognized half a dozen or so of those present as my employees, housecarls and human thugs. I hadn’t brought any mages, for obvious reasons. Presumably their side had a comparable number of people seeded in the crowd, but I couldn’t pick them out at a glance.

 

Moray led me through the restaurant to a door labeled RESERVED. It didn’t look like it was closed often. He stopped outside and gestured for me to go on, so I did. The doorknob sparked a little when I touched it, something just a little more than static.

 

I recognized almost all of the people in the room, to one degree or another. The only one I didn’t know at all was the man in the green robe. He was thin, with a pinched sort of face that made it look like he was scowling even when he wasn’t.

 

The other eight I recognized. All the members of the Conclave were here. Any one of them was probably powerful enough to turn this entire city into slag. All nine of them in one room, at close proximity, was enough magic to set my teeth on edge, a heavy stench in the air that was impossible to overlook or forget.

 

“A moment,” Prophet said. I felt him work a quick, subtle magic, not terribly powerful, but subtle and very smoothly executed. At first I wasn’t sure what he’d done; then I noticed a sort of shimmer around the edges of the room, a barely-visible curtain like a heat haze against the walls and the door.

 

“Locking me in?” I asked curiously. It wasn’t a threat, really. If these people wanted me dead I was dead. There wasn’t really any question on that front.

 

“You’re welcome to leave any time you like,” he replied calmly. “But I would prefer that the details of this conversation not leave this room.”

 

I nodded. “Fair enough.” Then I looked at the guy in the green robe. “I don’t know you.”

 

“No,” he agreed. “I’m new. Guide.”

 

“You must have a name. Something other than a job description.”

 

“Guide is my name now,” he said. “Any other name I might once have had I gave up when I put on this robe.”

 

I blinked. “Are you seriously saying you gave up your identity when you took that position?”

 

“Among other things.”

 

I shook my head. “Man. I so do not want one of these jobs.”

 

His lips twitched in a feeble smile, one that died almost instantly. “I don’t think we need to worry about that happening.”

 

“Enough,” Prophet said sharply. “Our time here is limited.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Your message said you wanted a conversation about the Conclave member I accidentally, and I feel I should stress the accidentally here, killed in Russia?”

 

“Among other things. We are here to extend you a warning, and an offer.”

 

“Start with the warning,” I said lightly. “Otherwise you’ll probably get shot right before you can tell me and I’ll be stuck sitting here wondering what you were trying to warn me about.”

 

He almost smiled. “As you wish. We do not intend to take any official action against you regarding Guide’s death. We are not unreasonable, and we can recognize that what happened was an accident. One which occurred only because you were taking risks to assist with our battle, no less.”

 

I snorted “Well, I’m glad someone isn’t unreasonable. Not seeing how this is a warning, though.”

 

He pursed his lips. “We are not taking any official action against you,” he repeated. “But she was the Guide of the Conclave. That means it was her task to oversee the less experienced and powerful mages. She matched those who were newly admitted with appropriate mentors, and ensured that their education met certain universal standards. She directed those who didn’t already have connections in a clan to one where they would fit, or recommended them to the Watchers or Guards if they were suited to it. Do you know what that means?”

 

“In the grand scheme of things, not really. But on a personal level, I think that if she was responsible for introducing that many people to the scene, odds are good that some of those interactions went further than just a nice letter. There will be plenty of people that view her as a personal mentor, or think that they owe her. And they probably aren’t exactly thrilled that she’s dead.”

 

Prophet regarded me for a moment. “You know,” he said conversationally, “for the longest time I didn’t understand what Watcher could see in you. I underestimated you. More recently I’ve come to see that you aren’t nearly as stupid as I thought. In your own idiosyncratic, probably brain-damaged way you’re really quite clever.”

 

“Um,” I said. “Thanks, I think?”

 

“That wasn’t a compliment. In any case, you do seem to have the basic concept I’m getting at. We aren’t planning an official retaliation, and I don’t think anyone in this room is planning an unofficial one. But I can almost guarantee that at least a few people are.”

 

I groaned. “Can’t you do something about this?” I asked. “Like, I don’t know, issue a public statement that it wasn’t my fault?”

 

“Certainly,” Prophet said, with a sly smile. “Would you like us to?”

 

“No, he wouldn’t,” Watcher said in her dry rasp of a voice, before I could reply. “Given that we couldn’t do so without explaining what did happen to her, and acknowledging that you did kill her would necessitate a response from us.”

 

“Why?” I asked, exasperated. “You just said that you know I’m not at fault.”

 

Keeper, in her saffron-yellow robe, nodded. “We do,” she said. “However, that does not mean that you are not guilty under our law. One of our core founding tenets is that anyone who kills a Conclave member, regardless of circumstance and reason, must be subject to reprisal. The only exception is lawful execution, which this was not. As such, if we were to acknowledge that you killed Guide, we would be required to seek that reprisal.”

 

“Whereas now everyone knows, but no one can prove anything.” I sighed and nodded. “Okay. I understand. Vengeful mages incoming and there isn’t anything you can do to stop them; got it. So I guess that’s the warning.”

 

“Yes,” Prophet said. “Which brings us to the offer. Guard?”

 

The man in the scarlet robe cleared his throat. “We are going public in the near future,” he said. “And based on the advice of certain people, I would like to extend you an offer to be a part of this publicity movement.”

 

“Wait a second,” I said. “The Conclave is going public? Are you serious?”

 

“No. The Conclave is going to remain hidden from mainstream society, as it has throughout history. The Guards are going public.”

 

I blinked. “Are you serious?” I repeated. “You’re coming out to the public halfway? How in hell is this a good idea?”

 

“What it comes down to is this,” Prophet said. “We need to have some public presence. That will let us coordinate our response to external threats. We’ll have an official standing with mundane governments and be able to coordinate with them as well, which we obviously need at this point. And, most importantly, a public presence will let us find and train new mages, and sort those who have the talent to join the clans from the minor talents and lesser lights.”

 

I thought about it for a second. “Okay,” I said. “I honestly hadn’t thought it through to that extent. You’re planning things out that far?”

 

“Someone has to,” he said dryly. “And as usual, it falls to me. In any case, the need for an organization to govern and regulate magic as it transitions into an everyday part of normal life is clear. You have, I think, seen firsthand the reasons for regulation and training, and the current state of affairs is a clear argument for why a certain degree of enforcement is necessary. But at the same time, many of the tasks we manage would be impossible if they were not a secret. You are familiar with the Watchers’ work, and I assure you that we do have other activities behind the scenes which are just as important.”

 

“Okay,” I said again. “So…let me get this straight. You’re introducing the Guards to the world as defenders, with training and regulation. I’m guessing you’d be working against outsiders, vampires and things from the Otherside and such, given that my understanding is that’s what the Guards do now and you mentioned external threats. And the whole time, you’d have the Watchers acting as a secret police force and the whole system would be secretly run by a small group of incredibly powerful people that the public never knows about?”

 

“Essentially, yes.”

 

I snorted. “Well, damn. You realize this is basically a conspiracy theory come to life, right? There’s no way in hell you could pull this off without magic.”

 

“Well,” Prophet said, “it’s a good thing we have magic, then, isn’t it? In any case, this is the plan, and it will happen. It’s going to start with just the rank and file of the Guards and a handful of clan mages, but we expect participation to increase rapidly, likely spreading beyond mages to werewolves and even vampires. We are offering you the chance to be a part of spearheading the initial group.”

 

“No.”

 

He raised one eyebrow. “Really? That simple.”

 

“Yeah, and you want to know why?” I stabbed one finger at him accusingly. “It’s been months since Loki’s broadcast. Months of chaos, and pointless destruction. Where was your organization through that, huh? Where were you when all of that was going on?”

 

“It takes time to arrange this sort of thing,” Prophet said.

 

“Bullshit. You could have had people on the ground two hours after he made his announcement, and we all know it. And we know why you didn’t, too. You said it yourself. The current state of affairs is a hell of a convincing argument for why normal humans need help with things. It’s a convincing argument for why the current governments need some kind of help to deal with the supernatural. And something tell me that they’ll be a lot more likely to accept you as that help, and accept the terms under which you offer your help. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Now, I’ve done some bad things, but letting all those people die, allowing the chaos and the destruction, for the sake of political expediency? I don’t think I can tolerate that.”

 

He regarded me for a moment, then said, “You immature, sniveling child. I have never had the highest opinion of you, but I thought you at least had the spine to do what was necessary. If you don’t enjoy it, that’s your prerogative; you can feel however you please. But if you’re going to claim power, you owe it to the people you claim to rule to acknowledge the responsibilities of your position. So stop coddling yourself, accept that you will have to do things you don’t like to get the job done, and grow the fuck up.”

 

I just stared at him. I opened my mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.

 

He made a noise of disgust and gestured at Watcher. “You know him,” Prophet said. “Get this through his skull.”

 

She sighed. “I understand your complaint, Winter,” she said, coughing. “And I won’t deny that line of thinking played a part in our decision. But you have to recognize that this is the best option we had available. A brief demonstration of why our assistance is necessary is far less damaging in the long run than a prolonged period of unrest as we made the transition.”

 

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I can go there. I can see your point. And, you know, I can see why you would use that line of reasoning. Your whole job is to do bad things for the greater good. And that’s why the answer is still no. You go too far, Watcher. You cross lines. As far as I’m concerned, you’re barely any better than the people you fight. And I can’t say I haven’t followed that road myself, but I at least acknowledge that what I’ve done is wrong. I won’t sit here and try to defend my choices as having been justified by some greater good.”

 

She coughed again, leaning on her cane a little. “You’d condemn humanity to the predation of monsters to satisfy your ego?”

 

“I’m one of the monsters, remember?” I smiled, and it was not a very pleasant smile. “I’ve stopped pretending that I’m human. There’s no point in it. So you’re not going to get very far with that appeal, I’m afraid. And to answer your question, nope. I’m not condemning anyone to anything. You want to help people, you want to maintain order, I won’t get in your way. I’ll even help you. But when it comes to actually joining you, my response is the same as every other time you’ve asked me to sign up for your team. You people are a kind of messed up that I don’t want to be.”

 

“So fix it,” Arbiter said abruptly, the first he’d spoken since I walked in.

 

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

 

“You’ll forgive me if I’m too blunt, I hope,” he said. “But this is something I’ve noticed from you several times. You’re very quick to blame the establishment, Winter, but you seldom seem to do much to fix that establishment. If things are ever going to get better, it will only be because people make them better. Well, this is your chance. You’ve got the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a major organization. If you feel that Watcher’s tactics cross too many boundaries, if you’re concerned that the new incarnation of the Guards will be similarly problematic, don’t you think you should at least attempt to influence it for the better?”

 

I frowned. I wanted to keep saying no, but…Arbiter had some valid points there. For most of my life I’d been complaining about the way things were, but I’d always sort of assumed that was just how it was. It was like the weather; sure, you griped about it when it rained on your parade, but you didn’t seriously think about changing the weather. It was something you just lived with.

 

Except now I really did have the chance to maybe make some changes. I could maybe fix some of the shit I’d been upset by all these years. And if that was the case, maybe I did owe it to myself to at least try.

 

What if I could make the new order better than the old one, at least a little bit?

 

I considered it for a moment, then sighed. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll hear you out, at least for now.”

 

“Excellent,” Guard said. “I’ll be happy to go over the details with you.”

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I met my guest in the foyer, although the room was far too large and grand to deserve such a basic name. The ceiling was high and vaulted, with sparks and glimmers of light dancing in the shadows; the floor was a delicate mosaic of colored tiles and gemstones. An abstract geometric pattern, although there were hints of stars in the pattern.

 

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, taking off her coat and boots. Invisible hands helped her, pulling the clothing off and whisking it away; more invisible servants took her hat and socks, provided a pair of comfortable slippers instead.

 

A wasteful extravagance, but I could afford it. This was my world, after all. Or one of them, at least. One of my favorites, even.

 

“Not to worry,” I said. I’d known when she was coming, of course. Little, if anything, could surprise me here.

 

“Thanks for inviting me,” she said, walking over and offering me her hand. Her skin was too pale, with strangely greenish veins showing through, and I could feel a hint of scales when I brushed my lips against her hand; her irises were a pale violet more suitable to gemstones than eyes, and faintly luminescent in the darkness of the foyer.

 

At least she looked human this time, broadly speaking. It always disturbed me a little when she started messing about with the basic structure of her body. People weren’t supposed to have wings and tails, let alone some of the really strange things she’d added in the past.

 

“How have you been?” I asked.

 

She shrugged. “Nothing particularly exciting. You?”

 

“Losing wars,” I said cheerfully. “As usual. Shall we?”

 

She nodded, and I walked through the foyer, leading her on by the hand. The foyer was vast, but a slight folding of space let us cross it in two steps. One step took us from the bottom of the grand staircase to the top, and another crossed the fifty feet to the other end of a long corridor. The elaborate mosaics and paintings, the gold and jewels passed us in a blur as we walked through the empty halls.

 

Had I been alone I could have brought myself to where I was going in a single step. But extravagant manipulations of space could have unfortunate effects on other people, and I wasn’t entirely sure how it would interact with whatever alterations she’d made to her physiology most recently. It couldn’t hurt her, of course, but it would have been impolite.

 

“I would have been here sooner,” she said. “But I’d forgotten that you made it so I could only open a portal here from a specific location on Earth. How did you even do that, anyway? That isn’t normal for the Otherside.”

 

“We aren’t on the Otherside,” I said, relaxing my hold on the fabric of space so that we could walk up the last set of stairs at a normal pace. “Not exactly. This domain is…think of it as occupying the unused space between their domains. I’m using their framework to maintain the basic structure, and it has a very slight connection to their system, but it isn’t actually a part of it.”

 

“You can do that?” She laughed. “Of course you can. Never mind.”

 

I smiled, and opened the door at the top of the stairs, letting her go through first. I followed her out onto the roof, closing the door behind myself. It didn’t make a sound.

 

The roof wasn’t stone, wasn’t even material in any meaningful sense, but it had been designed to resemble black marble. It extended around us for a mile in every direction, uniform and featureless. I hadn’t put much effort into it. The focus here was on the sky, and the field of stars I had arranged there.

 

I took her hand again and, with a few steps and a twisting of space, brought us to the edge of the roof. A small table and two chairs stood on nothing fifty feet further on, the sole and solitary feature that could be seen. I stepped off the edge of the roof and she followed me without hesitation, trusting that we wouldn’t fall though there was nothing there to hold us up.

 

The nothing held us up, exactly as the stone had. My world, my rules; if I said that physical objects didn’t necessarily have to impede light, that they didn’t have to interact with light at all, the world wasn’t going to argue with me.

 

We walked out to the table, and I pulled her chair out for her. “What a gentleman,” she said with an impish smile, sitting and letting me push the chair in again.

 

“I try,” I said seriously, sitting across from her. Then I reached out to the world, the fundamental rules that determined how the world functioned, and I gave them a twist.

 

The manor behind us, the building as big as a city, faded out of sight the same as the bridge leading out here. We were left floating in a field of stars, surrounded on all sides by the void of space. The stars blazed in every color of the rainbow, brighter than they ever could on Earth.

 

“Oh, my,” my companion murmured. “This is quite nice.” I noticed her eyes adjusting, the color and shape changing slightly to let her more fully appreciate the view. I imagined she would be giving herself a more panoramic vision, and the capacity to experience more of the spectrum.

 

“It’s the Horsehead Nebula,” I said. “Seen from the vicinity of Rigel. I took a trip out to look at it a few years back. Would you care for some wine?”

 

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” she said, leaning back until her chair was standing on two legs and her face was directed straight downward. A human neck couldn’t have bent so far, but she’d left that sort of limitation behind a long, long time ago.

 

I pulled a quick trick involving folded space and suddenly had a small wineglass in either hand. They were filled with a pale golden wine; like my companion’s eyes, the liquid was ever so slightly luminous, though I wouldn’t have known if I weren’t seeing it in the dark.

 

“Nice one,” she said, taking one of the glasses. “You could make a killing as a bartender.”

 

“I poured them earlier,” I admitted. “If you want a refill we’ll have to pour it like usual.” I took a sip, just enough to moisten my tongue, and the flavor exploded in my mouth, sweet and tart and utterly magnificent. “My last bottle from Atlantis,” I commented, setting the glass on the table. “I see the years haven’t hurt it.”

 

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re going all out, I see,” she said, taking a similarly minimal sip of the wine.

 

“It’s a special event,” I said. “I finished my first universe last week. Not reliant on their framework, not a part of their Otherside network at all. It’s a wholly independent, self-contained system, only accessible through this intermediary.”

 

She was silent for a moment. “That’s amazing,” she said at last. “It’s self-sustaining, I assume?”

 

“Absolutely. It won’t last forever without maintenance—entropy is still a concern—but it’s at least as stable as any of their domains.”

 

“Amazing,” she said again.

 

“I thought you might want to know,” I commented, taking another tiny sip. “Since in the past you’ve said your reasoning for not joining me was that we didn’t have anything to put in place after we won. With this development, we do.”

 

“I’ll have to think about it. And I’d want to see this universe of yours before I make any commitments. Not that I don’t trust you, but I’d have to see it with my own eyes.”

 

“Of course. Honestly, I was going to ask you to take a look at it. I think you might have some very valuable input for me. You are, after all, an expert.”

 

She smiled and nodded, acknowledging the compliment. “Have you told your mole about this?”

 

“I advise you not to call him that to his face,” I said mildly. “And no, nor will I. Given that the entire reason he agreed to help me was that he doesn’t think there’s going to be an ‘after,’ telling him I’m experimenting with creating independent universes doesn’t seem like the best move.”

 

“That’s a fair point,” she said, toying with her glass. After a moment of silence, she said, “Do you ever worry that we’re playing god?”

 

I blinked. “Now that’s a loaded question,” I said. “What brought this on?”

 

She shrugged, an extremely fluid gesture. “It seems a natural extension of the topic. And it’s a question I’ve been pondering quite a bit recently.”

 

I nodded. “I think I see. Tell me, how many times have you died now?”

 

“For real? Five.”

 

“Five,” I mused. “You know, most messiahs only claim one. Five seems a little extravagant.”

 

She shifted in her chair, a little uncomfortably. “It’s not a huge deal,” she said. “Lots of us have died a few times now.”

 

“Some of us haven’t died at all,” I reminded her. “You and Dreamer, Arbiter, Walker. The rest of us haven’t really died even once. Besides which, you’re missing my point. You’ve died five times and none of them has stuck yet. You’ve created new life forms. I control space and, to a lesser extent, time. I built an entirely new universe from scratch. At some point, don’t you think you’re answering your own question?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“You asked me whether we’re playing god. I don’t think so. At some point along the way, I’d have to say we stopped playing.”

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“Why is it,” I said to no one in particular, “why is it that these things only happen to me when I try to do the right thing? I mean, I can be a violent, self-serving asshole as much as I want and get away with it. But when I stick my neck out to help someone, this sort of nonsense happens.”

 

“I take it the news from the Conclave is not entirely pleasant,” Selene said dryly.

 

No shit, Snowflake said in the back of my head. Do they have any other kind?

 

“It isn’t sounding good,” I said. “Apparently I killed a Conclave member in Russia last year.”

 

Selene cleared her throat. “Ah. Do you mean a clan mage, or an actual Conclave member?”

 

“The latter.”

 

“Oh. That might be a problem. Um. If you don’t mind, how did you even manage that?”

 

I shrugged. “Beats me. I was kind of tripping on the Wild Hunt at the time. Don’t even remember doing it. Which, you know, you’d think that being out of your mind on that kind of magic while trying to save the world would get you some amnesty, but apparently now that they’ve finally managed to replace her they want to have a long conversation about the whole thing.”

 

Something tells me this is the sort of conversation that ends with at least one person bleeding.

 

“I’m hoping this isn’t going to get that ugly,” I said. “Won’t find out until next week. They actually gave me advance notice this time around.”

 

“You do have the meeting with the mayor in about an hour, though,” Selene reminded me.

 

“I know. I’m heading that direction now. I just felt a need to comment on this, because it’s so freaking ridiculous.” I shook my head and tossed the letter aside. As usual, it had just randomly appeared on my desk while I was out of the room. That trick had gotten old a long time ago. “You coming, Snowflake?”

 

A political meeting where even if it does turn into a fight it won’t be exciting at all? Pass. I think I’ll go hunting instead, maybe kill some squirrels.

 

Suit yourself, I sent back, standing and walking out of my office. She butted her head against my thigh as I walked past, but didn’t reply otherwise.

 

Downstairs, there was a quiet buzz of activity in the main room. I’d stopped thinking of it as the throne room a while ago; enough other stuff happened in that room to make the throne much less of the focus anymore. At the moment Tindr was sitting at a desk in the corner, on the phone with someone and looking at several notebooks and a laptop. Kyi was standing by the map table, updating the incident markers and territory boundaries to reflect the latest changes in the scene. A werewolf and a kitsune that I barely recognized were standing at the water cooler and discussing a television show.

 

All of them nodded respectfully as I walked briskly across the room. Outside, Kjaran already had the limo running. The paint had been redone again in the past couple of weeks since I saw it last; it was still black, with my coat of arms on one side and Aiko’s on the other, but now there was a very subtle pattern reminiscent of frost painted across it in blues and violets barely distinguishable from black. I found I liked the effect more than I would have expected to.

 

The car was heavily armored and had some of the best defenses money could buy, and in addition to Kjaran there was a human thug riding a very literal shotgun. It was purely for show, of course; nobody in this town was likely to be dumb enough to try and attack me now, and if they did I was perfectly able to defend myself. But as statements went, this one wasn’t bad. Particularly when he turned on “Ride of the Valkyries” on the very, very expensive stereo system we’d had installed.

---

 

I was reasonably confident that the mayor of the city had intended to put us on an equal footing by setting up the meeting in a hotel conference room. Where a meeting was could do a lot to set the tone of that meeting; putting it in a neutral location was a good sign for it being a neutral meeting. It was equally inconvenient for both of us, and it didn’t force me to either come to his space or tolerate him in mine.

 

Granted, the effect was a little spoiled by the fact that he’d randomly chosen a hotel that I owned. I was reasonably confident he didn’t know that, though. Tindr had arranged things through a series of shell corporations and money laundering fronts elaborate enough that I couldn’t even begin to follow it. I’d be very, very surprised if he had figured it out.

 

I showed up half an hour early and walked in alone. Bringing in thugs was nice for some kinds of meeting, but some didn’t do so well with that kind of message. Somehow I didn’t think that it would be the best approach to what was supposed to be a peaceful meeting with a guy I knew for a fact had no violence in his background whatsoever.

 

Besides, I could take him any time I wanted. John Cohen couldn’t be a threat to me on the best day he ever had and I knew it. In a way, having thugs with me to talk to someone like that would be bad for my image. Having minions made me look influential; needing them for something like this made me look like I was useless on my own.

 

To my surprise, he was already in the conference room when I showed up. As usual, the mayor looked very much the part of a beleaguered public servant, his ill-fitting suit rumpled and a little stained, reading something out of a file folder.

 

“Good morning, John,” I said, walking up to him. “You wanted to talk about something?”

 

“Winter,” he said, looking up from the folder. “Thanks for coming.” He juggled the folder and then shook my hand—a little gingerly, since I wasn’t about to take off my gauntlet for it, and those spikes weren’t just for show. “I was hoping we could talk about your position with the city.”

 

“I thought I didn’t have one,” I said, casually pulling out one of the chairs and lounging on it. I didn’t quite put my feet up on the conference table. “We settled this months ago. I don’t claim any kind of official capacity, and you don’t get in the way of my people. That setup’s been working pretty well for us so far.”

 

He sighed and sat down across from me. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to get away with that kind of unofficial arrangement,” he said. “Politics might be catching up with us.” He sounded vaguely disgusted about it.

 

“I’d have thought you’d be glad about that. I mean, you are a politician.”

 

He shrugged. “I won’t deny being grateful that the system is kicking back into gear. As much as I appreciate what you’ve been doing, I would rather see due process and a democratic government take hold in this country again. But in this case, I find the specific things that are being done to be more than a little disturbing. I’m guessing you know about the bill that’s being discussed in the House this week?”

 

“What, you mean the motion to officially list werewolves as not being human, not being citizens of the United States, and not having any of the rights allowed to either group?” I snorted. “Yeah,” I said dryly. “Somehow that one stuck out in my memory. Can’t imagine why.”

 

He chuckled a little, although it sounded more tired than amused. “Yes, I suppose it would,” he said. “You sound remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing, all things considered.”

 

I shrugged. “Hardly seems worth getting worked up over. It isn’t going to pass.”

 

“You’re confident of that?”

 

“Absolutely. Enough politicians either are werewolves or are owned by werewolves that it doesn’t have a chance. I’ll be surprised if it makes it out of committee.”

 

He heaved what seemed to be a genuine sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “It still sets an ugly precedent, but that’s much better than if it were actually to pass.”

 

“Why is it so important to you?” I asked curiously. The mayor seemed to be genuinely concerned at the thought of the bill making it into law, and I wasn’t quite sure why he would care.

 

“Aside from the fact that I’ve spoken with you, what, four times now and I have no reason to think you’re less of a person than I am?” He shrugged. “I guess I’m a little disturbed by anything that hints at making groups of people legally less than human. If we say that werewolves are subhuman, how long before we’re applying the same argument to blacks, or gays, or women? I mean, I know that slippery slope is a weak argument, but I think in this case there’s enough precedent to make it a legitimate concern.”

 

I considered him for a moment. I didn’t usually think of John as black; from my perspective, when I spent most of my time interacting with things that really weren’t human, dividing people up on the basis of race seemed a little bizarre. But now that I considered it in that light, I supposed that I could understand why he would be personally invested in this bill.

 

Although he probably would have been opposed to it regardless. I hadn’t interacted with the mayor that much, but from what I’d seen he was an all right sort. Not a saint, by any means, but I had a hard time picturing him condoning hate crimes against anyone, and it was hard to see this bill as anything other than open license to commit hate crimes against werewolves. But still, I liked being able to connect the intensity of his feelings on this one to a personal motivation. It made the cynical part of me happy.

 

“Okay,” I said. “And this is relevant to us…why, exactly?”

 

He raised one eyebrow. “Do you really not see this as being a relevant issue for you? Disregarding your confidence that it won’t be passed into law, don’t you think this would have some serious impacts on your life?”

 

“You do remember what kicked off the broadcast at the beginning of all this, I hope,” I said dryly. “I wasn’t willing to go to jail for something I didn’t do. I don’t exactly think my reaction would be better if the government were to literally pass a law saying that I’m not a person and any moron with a silver bullet could murder me in broad daylight without getting so much as a slap on the wrist. Realistically, I’d probably just walk away from the whole system at that point.”

 

“You think it would be that easy?”

 

I shrugged. “Sure. Why not? I’m really only answerable to your laws because I choose to be, John. You guys need me a lot more than I need you right now. If I were to get really pissed off tomorrow, I could leave and it would be, at worst, a mild inconvenience to me.”

 

“When you start talking like this,” he said after a moment, “I have the rather terrifying feeling that I’m living in a fairy tale. We’re protected by a powerful and inscrutable force. He operates by rules that we don’t understand, and if we break them or do something to annoy him we’re doomed and there’s not a thing we can do about it.” He shook his head. “The world has become a rather scary place in the last year.”

 

“Eh, it’s always been like this,” I said. “Only difference is now you know you’re a small fish in a big ocean. Anyway, you’re a busy guy and I’m sure you didn’t ask me here to talk philosophy. Why does this bill mean that we have to change my ‘position’ with the city?”

 

“Well, it isn’t the bill itself. It’s more that it indicates the bureaucracy has finally gotten its feet under itself again. That means that unofficial arrangements like we have are going to be coming under a great deal more scrutiny, and I don’t think we can really go without some kind of legitimate authority for you indefinitely.”

 

“Lots of other cities have people filling the same basic role I’ve been playing here,” I said. “I’ve talked to a lot of them. What are they doing about it?”

 

John shrugged. “Different places are taking different routes right now. Mostly they involve giving the person in question some kind of position within the police force. Or the military, in the places that are still under martial law. Regardless, there’s a clear legal authority in place.”

 

“So do that.”

 

He grimaced. “Well, that’s where it becomes a problem. See, the charges against you were never actually dismissed, so you’re still wanted for a laundry list of crimes. At this point you’re basically convicted if they could get you into the courtroom again. I can overlook it, but there’s no way I could actually appoint you to any kind of formal position.”

 

“Can’t you, I don’t know, pardon me or whatever?”

 

“For this?” He snorted. “That’s way above my pay grade. You’d have to deal with the federal government to get the charges of terrorism dismissed.” He paused. “You do realize that’s going to be a problem, right? Eventually someone will go over the head of local law enforcement and arrest you.”

 

I shrugged. “Of all the things in this world that scare me, that’s so far down the list that it doesn’t even register. Like I said, my status within your legal system is just not an important part of my life right now.”

 

“Right. Sorry, I’m just not used to people being quite so blatant about that attitude. Most of the criminals I talk to at least pretend to care. Although I guess they do have to care more than you do, so that’s probably fair enough.” He shook his head. “I’m rambling. Sorry; it’s been a long morning. Anyway, this isn’t an emergency or anything. Take some time and see if you can come up with a solution. I’ll get in touch if anything else comes up, or if things get more urgent.”

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Some people take a year to plan a wedding. There are logistical issues, details to be worked out, scheduling conflicts to be resolved.

 

This one was conceived, planned, and carried out in the space of a month.

 

There were a number of reasons that it could be done so quickly. The first was the nature of the participants. She could have been a patron saint of impulsive whimsy; he never quite got the hang of caring what the world thought of him. Between the two, it was perhaps unsurprising that prolonged planning and preparation were not in the cards.

 

The second reason was that they stood at the head of a sizable organization, commanding considerable numbers and resources. They did not have to carry out the logistical work, the numerous small tasks required to arrange such an event, on their own, packed in with their work. They didn’t have to scrounge for the cheapest available venue or catering. When a task needed to be done, they could set a dozen minions to it; when funding was needed, it could be procured. This simplified matters considerably.

 

The third reason was the timing of the wedding. Coming on the heels of a prolonged and intense period of stress, it was perfectly timed to provide a contrast. Much of the world was feeling the need for stress relief in some form or another. As such, those who were invited did not complain about the short notice. The inconvenience was outweighed by the chance to feel as though there was a spot of light in the darkness.

 

Whatever the reason, what can be said with certainty is this. Barely a month after the notion of marriage was first seriously considered by either of the participants, on a cold January afternoon, it was time to hold a wedding. The following is an abbreviated account of what happened directly leading up to and on that day.

---

 

Aiko Miyake

The problems started with location. The obvious answer was to do it in Colorado, since it was nearby and easy. But Edward was basically Winter’s dad, and apparently the deal he’d made to stay out of the state didn’t even allow exceptions for that sort of thing. Not even I was going to suggest that we do it there anyway, so that meant we had to start looking for other locations.

 

And naturally as soon as that happened my parents wanted it to be in Japan. I provided a succinct reply of “Fuck that,” followed by a less succinct and marginally more polite reminder that it was only after considerable persuasion on Winter’s part I had agreed to invite them at all. And I was quite open to being persuaded otherwise.

 

They seemed to get the message.

 

Even once I had that settled, though, there was still a lot of contention. Winter flat refused to have the ceremony on the Otherside, which was nice in that it saved me the trouble of doing it. But that still left an entire planet, and it seemed like anywhere we picked made someone get upset and complain about favoritism.

 

Finally, after most of a day of this, I said, “South Dakota.”

 

There was a quiet pause, after which Winter cautiously said, “There’s nothing there.”

 

“So build something,” I said. “You own a construction company somewhere out there, right? Have them throw some kind of stadium together. It’s inconvenient for everyone, so nobody can really complain about us being too nice to someone else.”

 

There was a moment where everyone considered, then Winter turned to Tindr. “Can we make it happen?” he asked.

 

The accountant shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “We’d need more than just the company we have there to get any real stadium done, especially in the time frame you’re working on. But we’ve got plenty of cash and some local talent to get the ball rolling.”

 

“Let’s do it, then.”

 

I grinned, and sat back in my chair to wait for the next issue.

---

 

“There is no way I’m wearing a dress.”

 

The tailor gave me a long-suffering look. “It’s rather traditional,” he said.

 

“I don’t care about tradition,” I said. “I don’t do dresses. It isn’t a thing that’s going to happen.”

 

“Be that as it may,” he said. “You asked me for something appropriate to a wedding. If you want to completely ignore tradition, there’s a limited amount that I can do for that.”

 

I groaned. “Okay, fine,” I said. “What other traditional clothing is there to choose from?”

 

“Tuxedo?” he said hopefully.

 

I shook my head. “I don’t really do suits either. Too formal.”

 

“Well, formal is sort of the point of the event,” he said dryly.

 

“Still. Next?”

 

“Dress uniform, maybe.”

 

I chewed on that for a few moments, then grinned. “Okay,” I said. “I think I can work with that.”

 

“It does make this rather a waste of time for me, though,” he pointed out. “Since you wouldn’t be buying anything from me if you go that route.”

 

“Oh, don’t feel bad,” I said, standing. “I was never going to buy anything from you. I’ve got other sources for that. The last two hours were really more me just…feeling things out, I guess.”

 

He watched me saunter out of the store with a vaguely disgusted expression.

---

 

“So my aunt wants a Catholic ceremony,” Winter said.

 

I stared. “You told her no, I hope.”

 

“Oh yeah. I’d be liable to stab someone if I stood through that.”

 

“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe I was hasty in my initial reaction.”

 

He snorted. “Too late. I already made my opinion pretty clear to her. Does raise the question, though. As far as gods go, about all I can offer is asking Loki for his blessing.”

 

I shuddered. “Oh, hell no. I’m sure there’s something stupider than that you could do, but I don’t know what it is.”

 

“My point exactly.”

 

“Huh,” I said. “Church of Satan, maybe?”

 

“I thought the point was to get something less stupid,” he said dryly. “Were the problems we’ve already had with Hell not enough for you?”

 

“LaVeyan Satanism is an atheistic religion,” I said defensively. “They’ve got less to do with Hell than the Christians do.”

 

“I’m aware. But I’d lay decent odds that if we had a Satanist priest doing our marriage ceremony, Iblis would show up at some just for kicks.”

 

“I’m not taking that bet.” I thought for a minute, then asked, “Pastafarian?’

 

“Still not a good idea,” he said. “Honestly, we’re probably better off sticking to strictly, explicitly nontheistic stuff.”

 

I sniffed. “Man. This is a lot more work than I was expecting. Why did I agree to this again?”

 

“Aiko. It was your idea.”

 

“Man. I have some stupid ideas when I’m drunk.”

 

He snorted. “I can’t argue that one. But you weren’t drunk. You were, at most, sleepy.”

 

“Same difference.”

 

Winter chuckled. “Fair enough.” He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Do you still want to go through with it?”

 

“Hell yes,” I said, without hesitating. “It’s worth it.”

---

 

Alexis Hamilton

It was surprisingly hard to get the day off. I was solidly in the high-intensity portion of Guard training, when they didn’t even want us leaving to get medical treatment. I tried to impress upon the instructors just how monumental of an event this was, but I got stonewalled at every turn.

 

I was actually wondering whether I’d have to go AWOL and deal with the consequences when I happened to mention the situation to one of the supervisors. We didn’t see him often; he didn’t have a hands-on role in our training. The supervisors only dropped in now and then to remind the instructors that there were people higher in the food chain than they were. We were all glad for those visits; the instructors always eased up on the psychotic drill sergeant throttle for a while after one.

 

I knew it was a ploy designed to make us like and trust the system. But damn if it wasn’t sort of working all the same. I still didn’t trust the Guards as a whole an inch, but I was actually getting somewhat fond of the supervisors. All things considered, that was a fairly significant achievement on their part. That wasn’t why I asked him, though, not really. It was more calculated than that. If they wanted to make us think that the distant authority figures were pleasant and reasonable, and it was only the most proximate of our superiors that were assholes, being able to say they’d made an exception for me was not a bad move for that agenda.

 

At first, though, he was no more responsive than the lower-ranking flunkies. He was nicer about it, all smiles and apologies, but still made it very clear that I wasn’t going to happen.

 

Then I happened to mention the name of the cousin whose wedding I wanted to go to. He went real quiet then, and then said he’d see what he could do. Less than an hour later, I had a paper giving me leave to go.

 

I grinned when I saw that. There are times when it’s very nice to have friends in high places.

---

 

I showed up almost a day early, having taken a portal in to Wyoming and then hitchhiked the rest of the way. The hitchhiking had been easier than I expected; I’d gotten accustomed to a pretty shredded road system, but apparently it wasn’t nearly as bad once you got outside of the city. There weren’t nearly as many things running around causing trouble in the countryside.

 

Granted, there weren’t nearly as many defenses on random highways in the countryside, either. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the vanilla human driving cross-country through the backwoods of South Dakota in the middle of the night. But given that I wasn’t a vanilla human, it wasn’t so much of a concern.

 

I did run into one trucker near the Wyoming border who had some inappropriate ideas of personal space. But there was always some chance of that when you were out hitching. Now that guys like that were zero threat to me, I was almost glad to see it. Dealing with sleazebags like that was a public service, and having a problem that I could solve at no risk was a nice change.

 

I made it into town at around midnight. It was late, but by some small miracle I was able to find a motel that was not only open but still had a room.

 

Six hours later, I shambled into the one restaurant in this backwater of a town. I was still fairly tired, but in a way that was a good thing. It meant my appalment at the poor food safety, sloppy cutting technique, and generally shoddy workmanship in the kitchen was more muted. And really, after several weeks of what was effectively boot camp, six hours of sleep felt pretty good. Decent food and all the coffee I wanted were just added luxuries on top.

 

The stadium was on the outskirts of town. It was smallish, more like a moderately sized amphitheater than a real stadium, and the raw, unfinished look wasn’t exactly concealed, but I thought that was probably deliberate. It gave the place a feeling of newness, a sense of new beginnings and the start of things. It was a good aesthetic for the event, I thought.

 

I got there with about five hours to go before anything was scheduled to happen. There were already people running around, setting things up and getting ready. I recognized some of them as Winter’s thugs; the rest looked like a mix of construction workers and professional specialists, caterers and the like.

 

I found someone who looked like she knew what she was doing and walked up. I recognized her vaguely as one of Winter’s lieutenants, a demon of some sort; I hadn’t spent much time with her, since by the time she was starting with him I was starting to drift away. But her appearance was memorable, and I thought I remembered her being competent.

 

“Hey,” I said, walking up to her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

 

“Yes,” she said, sounding grateful. “Go check on the sound system? Last I knew they were doing sound checks, but I don’t know how it turned out. It’s right over there.”

 

I hesitated. “You sure you want me near the electronics?” I asked. “I mean, things like that have a tendency to have…accidents when I’m around.”

 

“We’ve got measures in place around the things that matter,” she said. “Faraday cages and such. You won’t be frying them unless you really try. And if you take out a few people’s cell phones, that’s more a feature than a bug. We don’t want them taking pictures anyway.”

 

I grinned. “All right then,” I said. “I’ll go and check on that for you.”

---

 

Anna Rossi

I was pretty stunned when I got an invitation to Winter and Aiko’s wedding. Not that I got an invite, necessarily; Winter and I were still pretty close friends, and I’d have been surprised and hurt if I wasn’t invited. But the notion that they were getting married at all was somewhat bizarre. Not that they weren’t great for each other and all, but if you’d asked me an hour before I got the note I’d have sworn up one side and down the other that neither one would ever get married. They just weren’t the type that I’d have seen that coming from.

 

But then I opened the letter and saw the letter, and I was pretty glad I’d never actually placed a bet on the topic. There was no question that I was going; I’d have run there cross-country if I had to. Given that I’d been splitting time between Colorado and Wyoming for the last month and there were people heading out to the wedding from both locations, I pretty much had my choice of rides.

 

I ended up riding along with Edward, or running alongside the truck for a fair chunk of the distance. I was feeling too amped up to sit still the whole time, and there was some good terrain to run through. Edward was vaguely amused by the whole thing, but I wasn’t that bothered. I was still new enough to the whole werewolf thing to get off on running through the countryside in fur, or riding with my head out the car window. If he was amused by that, that was fine with me; I wasn’t shy. I’d spent long enough waiting for this that I wasn’t going to waste time holding myself back because proper society wanted me to now.

 

And besides, there was no proper society anymore. Oh, it wasn’t completely gone; I expected the influence of that much history was never really going to go away. But if I were to run into some asshole tomorrow and get into the usual arguments, I’d have as much claim to belong in the world as any of them.

 

I’m grinning into the wind as we drive through the night, the retrofitted stereo blasting Ode to Joy at a volume that has the woodland creatures fleeing in terror as we pass.

---

 

Conn Ferguson

 

One of the questions people ask me more often than almost any other is whether my long life has changed my outlook on the world.

 

Usually I ignore the question entirely, or else deflect it with some platitude. Because, of course, the answer is both obvious and inexpressible. Of course my perspective is different than that of some youth who is, from my perspective, little more than an infant. One does not live long enough to watch civilizations be born, rise to prominence, and crumble without having a different understanding of the world than someone who can count the decades they’ve seen on their fingers.

 

But how could I, how could anyone, hope to convey that perspective to someone for whom even a hundred years is an almost unimaginable gap of time? There’s no way. It isn’t simply a matter of quantitative difference. It’s an experience, a feeling, a state of mind. I know many, many words, in many languages, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a word that can fully encapsulate that feeling and pin it down, in any language I’ve ever heard.

 

And thus I don’t bother answering the question, because there’s no answer I could give that would make them really understand. There’s no way to grasp that feeling unless you’ve experienced it, and if you have then you don’t need anyone to explain it to you.

 

But if I wanted to convey the impression of that state of mind to someone, there were worse places to start than this. Watching one’s child being married—and Winter was for all intents and purposes my child, for all that I was no more closely related to him than to any random person on the street—was as close as a human could really get to that feeling.

 

So if the person who asked had had that experience, and if I cared enough, I might tell them to start there. Start with the surge of pride and joy at seeing one’s offspring make that step. Add in the sorrow you feel from seeing them take that great step away from being the child you remember them as, and the edge of guilt upon realizing that you’re sorry to see them being happy and independent. Mix in the bittersweet recognition that all things are transient, that nothing is perfect and nothing lasts forever. Then, as the final touch of shade in the pigment, incorporate the quiet, delicate awareness that the world has moved on without you.

 

“Take that feeling,” I might say, “and apply it to the whole world. That’s what it’s like to be me.”

 

The few occasions I’ve said that, the people I’m talking to usually get real quiet and then make an excuse to stay far away from me in the future. Honestly, I can’t blame them.

 

Most of the time, that part of me is kept hidden away, buried nice and deep under layers upon layers of masks. Most of the time I live so much in the present that even I can forget just how far back my life stretches.

 

Most of the time. The quiet, tragic happiness of this moment made it harder to hide.

 

I stood at the edge of the celebration, standing in the bright sun and thinking dark thoughts, and the crowd left a twenty-foot space around me without quite realizing why.

---

 

Edward Frodsham

 

After about a hundred years, I’d considered myself jaded. I saw enough in that time that not a lot could get a rise out of me. After around two hundred, there wasn’t a whole lot left to see that I hadn’t seen before. I could keep a reserved distance pretty much whatever came my way. In recent decades I’d made it something of a cornerstone of my public persona. Not showing any reaction, not seeming to really be impacted by anything, it was a key part of how I presented myself. Any Alpha needed to look strong, needed to seem like they could take on the world and walk away laughing. This was how I built that image, and even when something did get through to me I’d learned not to show it, to take it all casually and never admit that anything had made an impression.

 

When it came time for me to make a toast, I found that I was tearing up, my voice a little choked, and I couldn’t find it in myself to really care.

---

 

Jacques

 

I sauntered up next to Cupcake and said, “You didn’t invite me. I’m hurt.”

 

She turned to me, her mouth full of—what else— a chocolate cupcake. “You’re still here,” she said, swallowing and licking a bit of frosting off her finger.

 

I snorted, causing a werewolf fifteen feet away to grimace without knowing why. “Come on, Cupcake,” I said. “If I only went where I’m invited, I’d never leave my house.”

 

“Point,” she said. “So what are you doing here?”

 

“What, because I can’t just want to wish you well on the big day?” I snorted, grabbed a glass of champagne off a passing caterer’s tray and downed. “You wound me.”

 

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll take it back if you tell me that’s really the only reason you’re here.”

 

“You got me,” I admitted. “Dropping off a delivery. It’s over on the other table with the other gifts. I figured I’d stop and say hi while I was around. You got some more booze here?”

 

“‘Course,” she said. “So is this delivery, like, a bomb or poison gas or something?”

 

“Would I do that to you?” I asked. “After all we’ve been through?”

 

“Of course you would,” she said, without any hesitation.

 

“Well, no shit. But no, this isn’t a trap. Just a gift as far as I know. Seriously, a bottle?”

 

She sighed and flagged down one of the servers. “Bring me a jug of absinthe,” she said. He nodded and rushed off, and she turned back to me. “You really crashed this wedding just to deliver a gift? I know what the security was like here. You could have just waited until after the wedding.”

 

“It’s a wedding gift, not a fucking honeymoon gift. I’m supposed to deliver it during the wedding. This should be easy even for you to grasp, Cupcake.”

 

“Why are you calling me that?” she asked, sounding vaguely curious. “We all know you know who I am. Why keep up the act?”

 

“It’s courtesy,” I said. “You told me to call you Cupcake, so that’s what I’ll call you. You tell me you want to be called the Cat in the Hat, I’ll fucking call you that. It’s basic etiquette, you see? Speaking of, give my best to whatsisface.”

 

She rolled her eyes and pointed over my shoulder. “Your booze is on the way. See you around.”

---

 

Kimiko

 

“I wouldn’t have guessed that you were invited,” the werewolf commented, grabbing a sandwich off the table. Kara, I thought her name was. I wasn’t totally sure, since we’d only met the once and I’d had bigger things on my mind at the time. “Didn’t seem like you and Aiko got along that well.”

 

“Technically they didn’t invite me,” I said. “They sent an invitation to my boss, and he picked me to come as his representative. Without telling anyone in advance.”

 

She grinned. “That’s pretty choice.”

 

“Yeah, he’s actually got a pretty good sense of humor. It just doesn’t show that often.” I glanced at her. “So how’ve you been?”

 

The werewolf shrugged. “Not bad, not bad. Haven’t been in town much recently. I started school again, now that I don’t need to pretend I’m a human. It’s a lot of work, trying to balance that with the pack, but it won’t be that long before I graduate and start as an engineer. What about you?”

 

“Oh, I can’t complain. Ever since I helped the boss take care of some upstarts last month, I’ve been practically the second-in-command. Moving up in the world, you know?” I grinned. “Plus the expression on those tengu’s faces when they have to do what I tell them is priceless.”

 

“I can imagine,” she said, smiling back.

 

The conversation trailed off for a few minutes as we both ate until something caught my eye, and I just had to say something. “Is that a wolf walking around on two legs?” I asked.

 

She glanced in that direction. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That guy. He’s some kind of faerie or something. I’ve hunted with him a couple of times.”

 

“It looks like that werewolf is flirting with him,” I commented.

 

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Pretty clear there.”

 

“And…that doesn’t bother you?”

 

She shrugged. “Not really. Anna can make her own choices.” She pursed her lips. “Although it would have been more tasteful to at least wait until after the ceremony before wandering off behind a building.”

 

“It’s a wedding,” I said, also shrugging. “A certain amount of indiscretion is to be expected, I think. I’d be more concerned that she’s getting involved with one of the fae.”

 

“He seemed like an all right sort. And like I said, she can make her own decisions. I’m not responsible for the pack anymore.” She grinned. “That was the best choice I ever made, I can tell you that.”

 

“It’s not for everyone,” I agreed. Personally I didn’t think I could have given that position up once I’d gotten it, but I could see that she wasn’t the type to enjoy being in charge. Kyrie struck me as the sort that would much prefer a middle-management position of the sort I currently had—enough authority to set some rules, but with someone higher on the chain to kick problems up to when she didn’t want to deal with it.

 

The conversation trailed off into silence again. This silence was somehow even more awkward than earlier, and it wasn’t hard to see why. We’d just watched her friend drag some guy off for a quick roll in the metaphorical hay, and the last time we’d interacted had been to stage a scene involving the two of us making out in front of an audience. Her posture and expression made it fairly clear that these thoughts were at the forefront of her mind. Which, in turn, was awkward for me, for other reasons.

 

After a minute or so the tension got to the point that I felt a need to do something about it. From what I’d heard and my minimal personal experience, werewolves generally preferred straightforward means of resolving things, so I didn’t beat around the bush.

 

“You’re thinking about the last time we talked,” I said.

 

“Yeah.” Kari’s voice was matter-of-fact, without any hesitation or hint of shame.

 

“So I don’t know how to say this nicely,” I said, not looking directly at her. “But I really only staged that for shock value. I’m not actually interested in going anywhere with it. Sorry.”

 

“No problem,” she said easily. She seemed totally casual, not reacting at all. I wondered how much of that was an act. “You mind if I ask why?”

 

“I’m not actually into girls,” I said. “And I’m not into werewolves.”

 

“Valid points,” she said. She grabbed another sandwich off the table—her fifth, I was pretty sure, which was impressive even for a werewolf—and started to walk away. “I think the actual ceremony is starting soon,” she said. “I should get going.”

 

I watched her leave, and went off to make some more acquaintances on behalf of Kikuchi.

---

 

Kyra Walker

 

I still found it strange that Winter had asked me to be the best man. Or best person. Or whatever. Ryan had done the same thing, but I still didn’t have a way to phrase it that wasn’t clunky as hell.

 

“Are you serious?” I’d asked him, when he first proposed the idea. “Don’t you know somebody who’d be a better pick for this? I mean, having a god backing you up would look a hell of a lot better than me.”

 

“Screw that,” he’d said cheerfully. “Politics has taken over the rest of my life. I’m not going to let it have this too. You’re my best friend; ergo, you’re the one who should be there. I mean, if you don’t want it that’s one thing, but I’m not picking someone else for the sake of politics or appearances.”

 

And of course, after he’d said that I basically had to agree. Even though, if I was being entirely honest, I didn’t want it. The idea of being a central part of this whole thing was terrifying. Being on display in front of these people, with all of the scariest people I’d ever seen staring at me? That was a frightening thought. The idea of being supposed to keep those people in line through the utter clusterfuck that any wedding between these two would inevitably become? That was worse.

 

It helped a little when one of his minions took me aside afterward and let me know that most of the peacekeeping duties would be taken care of by the numerous thugs that either had permanent positions in his organization or had been hired specially for this. Between the intense security, the political suicide involved in messing up this event, and the cosmic horror entailed in crossing some of the things who were attending, it was unlikely there would be any serious disturbances for me to resolve.

 

No, I was just supposed to manage the groom. And also the bride, since it wasn’t like Aiko had someone to play my role on her side. Which was hideously uncomfortable on all sorts of levels, but I wasn’t going to say so. As far as I knew Winter still hadn’t caught on to all that, and at this point I’d rather spend several hours being cut with a silver knife before skinny dipping in a swimming pool full of lemonade than be the one to explain it to him.

 

Thus started a solid month of ridiculous bullshit. There were seven brawls, two assassination attempts, and three major fires, two of which were started by the pending couple. Their courtship had always involved plenty of pranks, and having observed it from the start I wasn’t exactly surprised when that continued to be the case.

 

Both of them were trying to top themselves for the special event, so naturally it fell to me to keep things from getting a little too real. I was the one who had to step in and tell Aiko that she should probably stick to augmenting Winter’s soup with chilies rather than monkshood, since even if he could shrug off the effects it was not a great idea to have poison out in a restaurant where normal people ate. When he went to get her back, I was the one who had to point out that slashing her tires was probably a more appropriate prank than cutting the brake lines.

 

I was the one who had to plan both the bachelor party and the bachelorette party. Then, when both sides independently decided to crash the other’s party, and asked me to make it happen, I was the one who at the last minute had to arrange a third party for them to simultaneously interrupt so that they could each think that they’d been the one to pull the clever scheme off. I had to arrange food and drink for a group that could eat an entire restaurant out of stock. I knew that, because I’d bought an entire restaurant’s stock, and I still had to make an emergency snack run halfway through the night.

 

I’d never seen Aiko drunk before; predictably, though, she was an unholy terror in that state. I’d set up the party at the most open-minded club I’d ever been to in the city, and provided both warnings and generous payment in advance. But when she really got going, I still had to rush to management with reassurances and another several thousand dollars to keep from getting thrown out. Even the stripper got fed up with it and walked out, thus removing the only pleasant aspect of the evening for me. She was good at her job and I was confident she’d seen some intense shit before, but not even an experienced stripper was able to handle Aiko when the kitsune really got on a roll.

 

Predictably enough, the next morning was not an easy one. Aiko was too hungover to stand unaided, and while Winter wasn’t hungover, that wasn’t exactly a good thing. It had never really occurred to me that there might be a reason the groom was customarily too wasted to see straight on the night before the wedding. Now that I had one who was effectively incapable of getting drunk, I found out the hard way that a sober groom was a groom who could express his last-minute cold feet, uncertainty, and fear of commitment. And the whole time I was listening to him and nodding sympathetically, I was mostly thinking that I hadn’t gotten any sleep and I’d been on my feet for the last twelve hours and I’d have gladly shanked someone for the chance to take a nap.

 

The club owner came in around dawn to herd us out so they could clean the place up. I’d never seen a woman that short and wearing that little look quite that pissed before. I couldn’t really blame her, either. Considering what the place looked like, I couldn’t blame her. I’d seen some wild parties going on here, but I’d never seen the club look quite this demolished. I’d slipped her another two grand of Winter’s money and started the process. With a mixture of shouting, shaking, and cold water, I managed to get the revelers up and moving, even if they had to lean on each other and half-carry each other out the door.

 

The portals were hellish, as usual, and it took me a solid fifteen minutes to recover once we got to South Dakota. I managed to get a solid two hours of sleep before the festivities started, and then went out to get some breakfast. It took half a gallon of coffee to even begin to clear my head—of all the consequences of becoming a werewolf, I hated the resistance to caffeine more than almost anything.

 

I was immensely grateful, as the massive celebration surrounding the wedding started, that I wasn’t responsible for keeping order. In the first few hours, before Winter and Aiko even got involved in things, I saw no less than seven major fights break out. Three of them escalated far enough that people got killed or worse than killed before someone managed to break things up. I got mixed up in two of them at least, although luckily I managed to get out of them without anything really serious happening.

 

I got shut down by Kimiko before that even got off the ground, and then spent a solid half hour freaking out trying to find the bride, since she’d went out for donuts on a whim. It was like ten minutes before she was supposed to be appearing in public and we were on the verge of sending out a search party when she came back, with frosting on her lips. I damn near strangled her on the spot, and I seriously doubt I was alone, and from the expression on Aiko’s face she damn well knew it.

 

I managed to throw on the tuxedo and scramble out in time to stand on the dais next to Winter when I was supposed to. My smile when the orchestra struck up O Fortuna and Aiko started down the aisle was sincere. If it owed as much to the prospect of getting back to my regular life as it did to joy at the happiness of my friends, I didn’t think I could be blamed for that.

 

All I had to do now was get through the ceremony itself, and the reception, and probably a couple of afterparties, and the trip back, and I’d be home free. With luck I’d be able to get through at least a semester before their unique brand of psycho took over my life again.

---

 

Miyake Kuzunoha

 

Of all the things I’d never dreamed to see, my daughter’s wedding was one of those I had wanted most. But it had become clear fairly early on that it was a scene that was unlikely to happen, and I had resigned myself to that knowledge. It was not what I would have preferred, but I could recognize that different people had different needs. I had spent long enough trying to force her into a different mold to drive her away. Now that there was finally some chance of her returning, at least in part, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. I hadn’t even mentioned the topic to her.

 

Then I got her message. It was possibly the greatest surprise I’d had since I received the message from her impostor. She’d been in contact with me to some extent since returning, but this news came as a complete surprise.

 

At first I had reacted somewhat impulsively, insisting that the wedding be held in Japan. Her reaction had been understandably poor. I managed to settle that unfortunate first response and approach the discussion more reasonably, and ended the conversation on a positive note.

 

Until the ceremony actually started, I wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t a prank. I loved Aiko, but she had always taken after her father in that way. Neither of them had always been able to restrict their jokes to within reasonable boundaries. Even if that had been the case, I’d have been glad. Since we started talking again, our relationship had been delicate and fragile. For her to start her practical jokes again would be a good sign.

 

But then the ceremony did start, and I felt even more pleased. True, it was not all that I might have asked. It was held in a stadium with a thousand guests in attendance, most of whom I didn’t approve of in the least. The vows were said in pig Latin, and most of them made practically no sense at all. Not that long ago I’d even have said that her choice of husband was inappropriate, but having met him and seen that he was truly dedicated to her, I was more ambivalent.

 

For all of that, though, it was still something I’d hoped to see and never expected. I was smiling widely as it happened.

---

 

Selene

 

Winter and Aiko finished the ceremony, which was conducted by a nontheistic priest who did an admirable job of not making any kind of reference to a deity or religion of any kind, and then they walked into the back room of the stadium.

 

I stood and watched, paying more attention to the crowd than to the couple. I was mostly concerned that somebody would do something stupid, like plan an assassination during the ceremony. That turned out to be a pretty reasonable concern, since some moron did. I spotted him pulling out a rifle and assembling it, and sent a handful of people to deal with it. A pair of hired thugs grabbed him and politely escorted him out of the stadium. Once outside, out of sight, they would keep him to be interrogated. It was conceivably possible that it had been just an honest mistake, or that he was worried someone else would try to start a fight and he wanted to be ready for it.

 

Possible. Unlikely, but possible. If that was the case, he’d be kept in custody until the celebration was over and then let go.

 

If not, he was going to have a very bad day that would probably end with him dying. Winter and Aiko had limited patience and itchy trigger fingers at the best of times, and if there was anything that would provoke a violent response from them it was this.

 

That was the only disturbance. By some miracle, they actually did get through the vows and the ceremony. Finally, when I was almost twitchy with the tension, they wrapped it up and went off the stage. Dais. Thing. Whatever it was that that part of the area was supposed to be called.

 

The plan called for them to be in back for a few minutes before coming back out for the reception. Now that the wedding was over the party would start and probably go for a solid twelve to fifteen hours. The entertainment would start with the orchestra playing “Ride of the Valkyries” as Winter and Aiko left. After that there were comedians, more music from the orchestra and a handful of other bands, a couple of dance troupes, fireworks—we’d really pulled out all the stops. It was, essentially, a display of power. It was the same reason the rich and powerful had always thrown massive, over-the-top parties. We did it because we could, as a way of announcing that we could afford it, that we had the wealth and power to pull it off. It was conspicuous consumption on a grand scale, the same as any other large wedding.

 

Or, at least, that was the plan. As usual, the plan didn’t survive long.

 

As the first song wrapped up, a figure appeared on the stage thing. She was tall and beautiful, and one glance was all it took for me to know what she was. It wasn’t just her looks, although those were undeniably useful to confirm what I would have known without them. Her posture, her expression, her clothing, all of them pointed to the same conclusion. We were in similar lines of work.

 

“You didn’t invite the wicked godmother,” she said, turning and looking at the crowd. “How foolish of you. Perhaps I should curse this union.”

 

Winter and Aiko still weren’t back, and nobody seemed to be in a great hurry to deal with the situation. So after a few seconds, I reluctantly stepped up out of my little office area. “If you feel that you should have been invited and weren’t, we can discuss reparations,” I called.

 

“I am a lady of the Midnight Court,” she said. “I do not discuss.”

 

“Oh, you’re with the Court,” I said, grinning. “We invited a bunch of you from the Midnight Court,” I continued, raising my voice so that they would be sure to hear me. “I saw that some of you arrived, but I’m sure not all of you that came signed in. So I’m going to just put this out there. Which of you is ranked highly enough to take care of this?”

 

After a second or two, my attention was drawn to a woman about halfway up the northern side of the seating. I wasn’t sure why, exactly. She wasn’t that remarkable in appearance, a small woman so completely shrouded in black cloth that I wasn’t sure how I even knew she was female. She hadn’t done anything either, not even stood up. There was just a sudden feeling of presence to her, her magic pressing heavy on the world. Judging by the way that about ninety-five percent of the people in the stadium turned to face her at the exact same time, I didn’t think I was alone.

 

The woman who’d appeared and started throwing around meaningless threats saw who everyone was looking at, and froze. Instants later she vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, and the strange gravity that had drawn every eye in the place was gone.

 

I grinned, briefly, and then went back to managing the party.

---

 

Serval

 

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, gentle as a dead leaf falling to the ground. I rolled the words across my tongue, tasting them. I seldom said them, or anything like them. Their feel was alien on my lips, the sentiment even more so behind them.

 

I stepped past the guard when his back was turned, slid under a table, wove a quick magic to fog another man’s mind at a critical moment, and slid past the camera on the door. The lock opened with a quick twist of magic and I stepped inside, closing the door behind myself before the guard turned back to look. Another quick bit of magic locked the door again as I left. It wasn’t necessary, but I prided myself on being neat.

 

I could hear them. I could hear their beating hearts, quick and excited. I could hear their breathing, the floor creaking beneath their feet. It made it easy to find my quarry, even though I’d never been here before.

 

I heard them laugh, and a smile danced across my face before it died. Good. It was good they were laughing. It was good they were happy. That eased the sting.

 

I followed the noise, my own steps silent in a way that very few people had ever managed. I found the room they were in without much trouble, and stood against the wall for a moment to watch them. They were laughing, joking, talking. Eating what smelled like a chocolate cake. They were touching each other to a degree that seemed unnecessary.

 

I realized that I was flipping a knife around in my hand, rolling it across my knuckles, and forced myself to stop. It was a nervous habit. It was unnecessary. I would not require a knife. I returned it to its sheath, where I could get at it quickly if my opinion of its necessity changed.

 

“I’m sorry,” I said, just loud enough for the two of them to hear, as I let myself fade back in to visibility.

---

 

Tindr the Exile

 

“How much did we spend on this again?” I asked, watching the festivities.

 

“Nineteen million,” the accountant replied. “Although much of that was covered by other parties. Add in the expected financial value of gifts, and the net loss was only around five million.”

 

I winced. She chuckled dryly.

 

“How long has it been since the ceremony finished?” I asked absently after a few minutes.

 

“Twenty-one minutes,” she replied instantly.

 

I frowned. “They should have been back by now,” I said absently.

 

“Should we contact Selene?”

 

I shook my head. “No. She’ll already know. In any case, there isn’t much to do. If something managed to get past all the security and beat the two of them, I don’t think there’s anything the likes of us can do about it.”

---

 

Winter

 

Aiko hit the accelerator, and the Lamborghini went from ninety to one-fifty in a few seconds.

 

“Watch it,” I said absently. “I almost spilled my tea.”

 

She took one hand off the wheel to punch me in the ribs without looking. “Deal with it,” she said. “I’ve got a wide-open highway and a Lamborghini. If you think I’m sticking to double digits, you’re deluding yourself.”

 

“That’s a fair point,” I acknowledged, leaning towards the window and squinting against the wind. I caught her hand and held it for a moment before letting go; I was reckless, not suicidal, and distracting the driver at this kind of speed was a great way to end up very, very dead. “I still can’t quite believe Serval came to apologize for overreacting back when you left.”

 

“It’s pretty in character for her,” Aiko said. “She was always…eh. She’s got even less of an idea how normal people work than I do. To Serval, that probably seemed like a reasonable way of delivering the message. The fact that she just about gave me a heart attack would just be a nice bonus.”

 

“You going to follow up on it?”

 

She shrugged, fiddling with the stereo. She didn’t answer until a Viking metal song was on, blasting loud enough to have royally pissed off any other drivers on the road, if there were any. “Maybe,” she said at last. “I’ll think about it. We were pretty good friends back then, and she was a better person than most of my friends from that time in my life. It’s worth considering, but I don’t really know if I want the reminder of who I was back then.”

 

“Fair enough. So when do you think they’ll figure out that we aren’t coming back for the party?”

 

“If they haven’t already figured it out, they’re probably too dim to understand if you told them to their faces,” Aiko said dryly. “But I figure they’ll deal. We already paid for the party. If they were expecting us to actually stay for it, that’s on them.”

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