Interlude 10.a: Alexis Hamilton

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I took a deep breath, settled my backpack on my shoulders, and knocked on the door.

 

It came out feeble. Old ladies who had to lean on a walker to stay standing knocked louder than that. There was no way anyone inside the house could have heard it.

 

I started to knock again, but my hand stalled five inches from the door. I couldn’t make myself touch it. My heart was hammering in my chest, and I heard a crackle from the doorbell as the ambient electricity fried its circuits beyond any repair. I hadn’t even meant to do that.

 

It was ridiculous. I was a grown woman, with a six-figure savings account, excellent if forged academic credentials, and an incredible job waiting for me just as soon as I worked up the courage to take it. There was no reason I should be afraid to knock on this door, to see my family again.

 

This time I went too far the other direction, pounding on the door like I meant to wake the neighbors. I winced a little as the noise shattered the quiet on the predawn street—not the first impression I’d been hoping for—but at least it was done.

 

I stood on the doorstep for what felt like hours, running through all the ways this could go in my head. Anxiety cast a shadow over the hypothetical conversations, turning every turn of phrase into something barbed and toxic.

 

And then I heard the quiet click of a deadbolt being turned, and the door pulled open. The boy on the other side was tall, almost as tall as I was, but gangly, a puppy that hadn’t grown into his new frame yet. He was wearing glasses, which combined with his neatly-cut hair and button-up shirt to give him an almost somber appearance.

 

I barely recognized him. But then, I hadn’t seen him for…had it really been almost five years? He would be in high school now. Almost done with high school, in fact.

 

“Who are you?” he asked, looking at me suspiciously.

 

“Don’t you recognize me?” I asked, trying to keep my smile steady. I’d been expecting this, but it still hurt. “I’m your sister, Tyler.”

 

He stared at me for a moment, then stepped back into the house. “Alexis? Mom, dad! Alexis is back!”

 

I forced a smile, and followed him in.


 

For a while, I was overlooked. It didn’t matter that the prodigal daughter had returned; Tyler still had school, and dad still had to go to work. Rebecca had either dropped or failed out of college, to the surprise of no one, but apparently she’d managed to get a job at a fast food restaurant, and she had to be there on time as well.

 

In all the bustle, it was easy for me to slip upstairs, almost unnoticed. That was why I’d timed this when I did.

 

I’d thought that they might rent my room out, or else use it for storage, but it turned out that they’d left it almost untouched since I’d left. The bookshelves were still filled with old, worn paperbacks, mostly horror and suspense with a dash of carefully concealed romance novels. Knickknacks and magazines were scattered around on shelves or lying on the floor, all covered in a thin layer of dust.

 

I dropped my bag on the neatly-made bed and looked around. It felt odd, being in my room again after so long. I still recognized it, and I remembered the meaning the various keepsakes and posters held, but it felt like I was looking at it from one remove. Like their meaning belonged to someone else, not me.

 

“Alexis?” my mother said from the door. “Darling, what’s going on?”

 

I plastered a smile across my face again and turned to face her. “I thought I’d come back and say hello,” I said. “Maybe move back in for a while. I’ve got plenty of money, I can pay rent.”

 

“Oh, don’t worry about money,” she said, with a smile as fake as my own. “But what’s up? Why are you coming back now, when….”

 

She trailed off, as though unsure what to say. It didn’t matter, since I could fill the rest in for myself. When I’d been gone for years? When I hadn’t even bothered to call since I left? When our last conversation had ended with tears on both sides, and a screaming match that had left Tyler cowering in the corner with the cat?

 

“I guess I just need to be at home right now,” I said, not answering the question.

 

She seemed to accept it, nodding. “Do you have any luggage you need to bring in?”

 

“No. Just the one bag.”

 

“Okay. We’ll go out tomorrow and get you some decent clothes, anyway.”

 

Mom stood there for a moment longer, looking like she wanted to say something but she wasn’t sure what. Then she walked out, leaving me to unpack my bag.


 

Over the next few days, things around the house returned to their routine. Dad was still working seventy-hour weeks at the advertising firm. Mom was very much the socialite, although her social circles had changed slightly since I’d left. Tyler spent most of his time either at school or on the Internet. Rebecca had two different part-time jobs, one at a fast food restaurant and the other at a temp agency. In her spare time she liked to hang out with people who thought they were a tough crowd, which made me laugh a little.

 

She was also a junkie, addicted to a prescription narcotic of some sort. I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the family knew, although it seemed likely that they had some idea. I didn’t really care; Rebecca and I had been close once, when I was making the same dumb mistakes she was making now, but I liked to think that I’d grown up a little since then.

 

I had to wonder whether it had always been so petty, or it only seemed that way in retrospect. They lived their lives, and by and large it was pointless. A little more money, a nicer car, nicer clothes, but what did any of it matter? I had power, and while it might not have been much in the grand scheme of things, it was enough to do something real, something that mattered. In comparison, this was…hollow, I supposed was the way to describe it.

 

I was starting to remember why I’d left home in the first place. I’d come back here with the hope of remembering, reconnecting with the person I’d been before….just before.

 

The problem was that the old Alexis had been sort of a bitch. She’d been the shallow, petty, selfish sort of person who could look at this life and think that it mattered. When I’d left home, it hadn’t been because I didn’t want to live like this. It had been because I wanted to do it on my own terms.

 

And even after I’d left, nothing had been really different. I might not have agreed with it when my friends started to escalate things, moving from burglary to mugging, from mugging to murder, but I hadn’t really argued, either. I hadn’t even realized what that meant about me.

 

Not until the skinwalker gave me a knife and a choice had I realized who I was, deep down. I hated him for that. More than the pain, the deaths, the endless string of cruelties, I hated him for giving me the choice.


 

As time went by, I took to spending less and less time at home. I went to Seattle, to talk to Moray about life working for the Conclave, and how to use magic in a fight. He didn’t really teach me much about magic; what he taught me was more a state of mind, an attitude. I also spent a fair amount of time back in Transylvania, working in the laboratory. If I was going to be a Guard, I would need to be equipped for it.

 

Weeks rolled by like that, and the gulf between me and my family grew and grew. I lost track of how many topics I was trying to avoid; sometimes it seemed like there were no safe ones topics at all. Mom asked for my cell phone number, and I couldn’t give it to her because I didn’t have a cell phone; the electronics tended to fry when I got excited during a conversation, and it had become more work than it was worth to constantly be replacing them. They asked what I was doing for money, and of course that couldn’t be explained.

 

They asked what my plans were. Mom thought I should get a job, while dad tried to steer me towards college. I thought about being honest and telling them that I wanted to join the special forces of a secret organization that protected the world from supernatural threats, but there was no way that would end well.

 

So by and large I drifted along, trying to convince myself that I had something in common with them and failing more badly with each passing day. I’d just come to the conclusion that the whole endeavor had been a pointless waste of everyone’s time when everything changed.

 

Oddly enough, it was my mom that called me downstairs to watch the broadcast. Apparently it had taken over the channel with no real explanation.

 

Or, as I later learned, every channel. Every television station, every radio, was temporarily replaced with a different sort of programming. He left the Internet alone, probably because he knew they would start spreading the news on their own within seconds.

 

I hadn’t met Loki, not that I knew of, but I recognized him from Winter’s stories. And Winter’s reaction; there weren’t many things that could get that kind of response out of my cousin. At first it was funny, and I was almost grateful to Loki for stepping in. It wasn’t right that Winter was going to prison for something he’d tried his hardest to stop.

 

And then he started talking about how the rules had changed, and my smile slipped. “Shit,” I said. “This changes things.”

 

My mom looked at me oddly. “It’s just a hacker or something,” she said. “Probably a prank.”

 

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “You don’t get it. This changes everything. Shit. Can I use your phone? I need to talk to someone.”

 

She continued to give me that odd look, but she handed me her cell phone. I walked away from the couch, dialing a number from memory. “Moray,” I said, the instant he answered. “What in God’s name is going on out there?”

 

“This is in a different name, I think,” he said dryly. “Yes, this is for real, and no, we didn’t have anything to do with it. Although considering that I already got called to a meeting with Watcher, apparently someone knew about it.”

 

“This is crazy,” I said. “What do I do?”

 

“I’d suggest you lay low for a few days,” he said. “Things are going to get worse before they get better.” A moment later, the call ended.

 

I took a deep breath, tried to keep calm until I could hand the phone back to mom, and then lost it, muttering curses to myself as I sat on the couch with my head in my hands. I listened as Loki finished his speech and the screen went black momentarily before returning to the soap opera mom had been watching.

 

“Alexis?” She reached out to touch my shoulder, flinching back a little from the spark of static electricity that jumped to her. “Alexis, what’s wrong?”

 

“Everything,” I whispered. I felt almost numb, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what just happened. “Could you call dad, and see if he can get off early? I’d feel a lot better if everyone were home tonight.” Not that it was a great defense, since this building wasn’t warded or anything, but there were plenty of nasties that would rather attack people on the street than go to the effort of assaulting a house. Especially with me there.

 

“Darling, I think you’re overreacting a little. This is just a prank or something.”

 

“Please. It would make me feel better.”

 

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll call and ask him.”

 

For the next few days, I thought that I might actually be overreacting. Oh, it wasn’t good—there were riots in a few different cities, and plenty of reports of bizarre accidents and monster sightings. But it wasn’t anything like as bad as I’d been afraid of, either.

 

Then Tyler, who had staunchly refused to stay home from school until things blew over, didn’t come home one day.


 

Aiko listened to me patiently, which was as close as she was likely to come to telling me that she gave a damn about me. The kitsune was not a patient soul.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said when I’d finished. “He’s asleep.”

 

“What?”

 

“Winter’s asleep,” she repeated with that same artificial patience. “Has been for almost two days. I don’t know what they did to him in there—I don’t think he really knows—but it was bad.”

 

“Could you wake him up, then?”

 

“Alexis,” she said, “think about it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him in this rough of shape, and that’s saying something. If I wake him up right now, he’ll feel like he has to go out there and help you, and if he tries that in the condition he’s in, I don’t know what’ll happen, but it won’t be good.”

 

“What about you, then?” I said desperately. “Could you come out and help?”

 

I could almost hear her shaking her head. “Things are bad,” she said gently. “And chances are someone’s going to blame Winter for it. He’s not fit to defend himself right now, and we haven’t finished repairing the defenses on the castle. I need to be here in case someone attacks.” She paused. “And honestly, I doubt I could do much to help you anyway. Finding missing people is…not exactly my specialty, you know?”

 

“Right,” I said dully. “Thanks anyway.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she said again, before hanging up.

 

I stared at the payphone for a moment, then fed it a few more coins and dialed another number. “It’s Alexis,” I said as soon as Moray picked up on the other end. “My brother’s missing. I need your help.”

 

There was a long, ugly pause. “Shit,” he said, finally. “Look, Alexis, things are pretty crazy here. I don’t know—”

 

“I’ll owe you one,” I said, interrupting him. “It’s my brother, Moray.”

 

“Dammit,” he sighed. “Fine. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”


 

I met the Watcher in a parking lot less than an hour later. I was wearing my heavy, Kevlar-lined leather coat, and carrying my staff, in addition to various other weapons. He was wearing a three-piece suit and the only thing that was obviously a focus of some sort was the wand in his belt, but I was confident he was well enough armed to take on a small army and come out on top.

 

“I don’t have much time,” he said by way of greeting. “Do you have something I can use to track him? Hair, clothing, something like that?”

 

Wordlessly, I reached into my car and pulled out a grocery bag. In it was the shirt he’d been wearing the day before, along with a zipped bag containing a few hairs I’d found in his hairbrush. I didn’t have any blood, unfortunately, but hopefully this would do.

 

Moray grinned and snatched the bag out of my hand, walking around to the other side of the car. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll get the tracking spell going as we drive.”

 

It was slow driving, since Moray’s spell gave him little more than a direction and a vague sense of distance. That didn’t necessarily translate to a location, and it certainly didn’t translate to a street map. After a while it became clear that we were going to the river, though, which made it considerably easier.

 

And then I pulled over and parked, looking at a small garage not far from the docks. “You’re sure this is the place?” I asked.

 

“Yep,” he said, getting out of the car. “Based on the neighborhood, I’d say it’s probably a chop shop. Looks like your brother was taken by a gang, maybe for ransom, maybe for tribute.”

 

“Tribute?”

 

He shrugged. “Lots of things like kids. Could be they’re in debt to one of them, and they took your brother for payment.” He started to continue, but was interrupted when his phone rang. He answered it, his expression rapidly becoming grim, and hung up without saying anything.

 

“What is it?” I asked.

 

“Someone knew I left,” he spat. “They’re making moves in Seattle. I need to get back there, now.” He turned and started walking towards the river.

 

“Wait,” I said, hurrying after him. “I need your help.”

 

“If I don’t get back there in the next few minutes,” he said, “a lot more people than just your brother will die. Besides, you don’t need help.”

 

“Yes, I do,” I protested.

 

“Really?” he said, stopping by the edge of the water. “Tell me why you called me, then. It wasn’t because you couldn’t find him; you had the stuff, you could have done a basic tracking spell. Or even if you can’t, you could have called a werewolf. There’s a pack in town, and I know you’ve got some high-level contacts with them. They’d have been able to follow the trail here, no problem.”

 

I didn’t say anything, because I knew he was right.

 

“I know you know how to fight,” he said, lifting his hands. Power gathered around them, greens and blues that were a touch too vibrant for the world to hold, because they were intended to tear a hole in the world’s surface. “You’re not that experienced, but you’ve got a skillset that lends itself very well to violence. A couple of thugs aren’t much threat to you.”

 

I continued to say nothing as a roughly circular patch of air transformed into nothingness, because he was still right.

 

“I don’t know why you don’t want to fight,” he said, glancing at me. “Why you’re scared of it. But I recommend you think carefully about whether it’s more important to you than your brother’s life.” Then he stepped through the portal, which faded away a moment later.

 

I thought about it for longer than I’d like to admit.

 

Then I took a deep breath and walked over to the garage.


 

It took a few minutes of pounding on the door before someone answered. When they did I was surprised to see a woman, short and a little stocky, but in a way that suggested too many hours in the gym rather than a lot of food. “What do you want?” she said suspiciously.

 

“Hi,” I said, with a forced smile. “I’m here to talk about my brother.”

 

She eyed me for a moment longer, then took a step back, raised a pistol, and pulled the trigger.

 

I hadn’t been expecting that, and I hadn’t had a barrier up. It hit me in the abdomen and knocked the wind out of me, and I didn’t think it had penetrated the Kevlar but it still hurt, and it knocked me down, and she was pointing the gun at my head now and smiling and in that moment it was easy, it was oh-so-easy to lash out at her. Lightning was more natural, but force was quicker, and so it was force that I used, a blast of energy that hit her with the force of a small car.

 

It tore the door off its hinges and cracked the bricks of the wall, and it threw the woman to the ground before she could get another shot off. I wanted to stand, but I knew there were more important things to be done, so instead I reached, snatching the current out from the wires and spinning it around myself until my eyes ached and the air around me hummed with potential and I saw the world through the glare of blue electric fire.

 

The woman was getting up, so I let just a piece, just the tiniest piece of the lightning blazing in the air around me go, let it jump to her gun and then run up her arm and down her body to ground. She convulsed once as her muscles all jerked with the electricity running through them. Just once, and then she fell again.

 

Electricity is a funny thing. There isn’t much room between enough of it to incapacitate someone, and enough of it to kill them.

 

I’d used a little too much this time. She wasn’t going to be getting up. Normally I would have felt guilt about that, but with the electricity humming in the air and the anger running through my veins, there was no room for guilt.

 

I pushed myself to my feet, leaning on my staff, and walked inside. There were half a dozen people standing around, hard looking people dressed in black with the pale grey aura of human magic around them.

 

And there was also Tyler, tied to a chair.

 

One of them raised a gun, and I called force and storm and hit him hard enough that he hit the wall and slid down it, twitching a little. “Let my brother go,” I said, walking forward. One of them sneered, and all of them raised their weapons. I called up more force, a heavy barrier around me, and another around Tyler, to protect him from ricochets.

 

The guns roared for a long moment, and then went quiet, although my ears were ringing such that it wasn’t easy for me to notice.

 

Then it was my turn.

 

It’s a good time to be alive, for people like me, people who see beauty and life in the spark of static, who look at a battery and marvel at the potential it holds. There’s a wire in every wall, running underground and through the air, and at any given moment the current is pouring through them, so much of it that it’s easy to get lost, to follow the path they trace through the world, to forget that you’re more than just another charge, another tiny piece of the vast, interconnected web linking the world together.

 

It’s not a question of if there’s current to be had, in this day, but of how much, and even that has more to do with what you can handle than what’s available.

 

I called on that electricity, that whirling storm, and it came to my call, the lightbulbs shattering, the wires that fed their lights and their tools and their luxuries all bursting at my touch, spewing more and more power forth into the air, and I was grinning a wide death’s-head grin against the strain of holding it steady when it wanted, as it always wanted, to escape and go to ground, the intensity of that strain something almost physical, pressing against the inside of my skull.

 

And then I opened a hole, a tiny, well-defined hole, and it leapt from my grasp with joyous fury, pouring down the channel I had made for it.

 

What looked like a tiny bolt of lightning jumped from me to one of the gunmen, then to each of the others in turn. For a moment they all stood there, backs arched, trying to scream but unable to control their muscles, and, God help me, I saw the beauty there. Then it ended, and they dropped to the ground, guns clattering away from nerveless fingers.

 

I walked over slowly, leaning more heavily on my staff now. I hadn’t felt the exertion while I was working the magic, as usual, but once I’d let it go it hit me all at once, and it was a struggle to stand.

 

Tyler was staring at me, pale, eyes wide. It was hard to say whether he was more frightened of me or of the people who had kidnapped him.

 

I reached the gunmen and stared down at them. A memory came to mind, not quite a flashback, but almost as intense.

 

The skinwalker had an almost infinite variety of ways to cause suffering, to torment his victims. I’d seen more of them, far more, than I wanted to. But with me, he’d favored subtler tortures, mind games and psychological trauma. His favorite game, once it became clear to him just how much I hated it, was to give me a choice.

 

I could kill one person, or he could kill three.

 

The first time I’d been revolted at the idea of murdering someone in cold blood. I’d never intentionally hurt anyone, let alone killed them, and the mere notion of doing so was horrifying.

 

He’d suffocated one, thrown the second off a building, and lit the third on fire. And then he went about his day, like nothing of note had happened, because for him, nothing had.

 

The second time, I’d still held out hope that things might get better, that the world couldn’t really be this bad, that God wouldn’t, couldn’t, be cruel enough to allow such things to happen.

 

That time he’d taken children. He’d made it slow, and horrible, and he’d made me watch the whole time. I still had nightmares about that, and if I hadn’t been a vegetarian before I certainly would have been one after.

 

The third time, I’d taken the knife.

 

Now, looking down at the gangsters, i realized that I had the same choice in a different guise. I could be merciful, let them go, do the right thing. And if I did, the next kid they took might not have a sister with magic to rescue him.

 

Or I could take the metaphorical knife, and take one more step to the dark side.

 

There were times it was very easy to see what made Winter the way he was.

 

I bent down, and picked up one of the guns.


 

I brought Tyler home, and went upstairs without saying a word to my family. Tyler hadn’t spoken to me on the way back; it was hard to say whether he was more scared of the people who had taken him, or the one who was bringing him back.

 

In the shower, I threw up, scrubbed myself raw, and then threw up again. I ended up sitting there, shaking, until the water was cold. Then I got dressed, my fingers more steady than I felt they deserved to be, and packed my bag again. I didn’t say anything as I left the house, and nobody said anything to me.

 

I sent my application to the Guards the next day. It had become clear that there would be no redemption in my life, no peace, no return to a life with a family and a desk job and sleep without nightmares. There are wounds too deep for healing.

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Clean Slate 10.2

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The roads were bad.

 

It was strange, the extent to which that idea had simply never occurred to me. In this country, you expected that the road system would work. The traffic might be heavy, there might be blockages or wrecks, or maybe even washouts, but in the end things would be fixed. There would be a way to get from A to B.

 

But now? That wasn’t so much the case. Cars were abandoned on the side or in the middle of the road, their erstwhile owners nowhere in sight. Some of them looked to have been shredded by something with large claws, and others were burned-out husks, but plenty of the vehicles seemed intact. They were just…left, nobody having the time or inclination to deal with them.

 

In other places, the damage was more obvious. The support for a bridge had been turned to mud, leaving the whole thing to collapse; we had to drive three blocks to find a way around it, and even then it involved off-road driving and a liberal interpretation of traffic laws. Other than that, a number of traffic lights weren’t working properly, and several roads were barricaded off for no apparent reason.

 

I wondered how much of it was intentional action, screwing things up for amusement or to serve a greater purpose, and how much of it was simply the consequence of the broader environment. With people scared, communications disrupted, and most governmental bodies in disarray, it was easy to see how things would begin to deteriorate. Minor problems, that normally wouldn’t really be problems, started to accumulate. When a light malfunctioned, there was no crew to fix it. When a car wrecked, there was no one to tow it. The garbage trucks weren’t making their rounds, and as a result it just started to pile up.

 

It was almost surreal, how rapidly things had started to fall apart. There were a thousand little tasks that had to be done on a regular basis to keep a city running, and with nobody to do them, it didn’t take long to notice the cracks appearing in the facade.

 

Whatever the reason for the problems, we didn’t see many people on the roads, and I couldn’t blame them. We were driving a heavy armored truck, just one step short of a tank, and it was a good thing because not much else could have managed it.

 

Finally, after around three times longer than it should have taken, we made it downtown. Here, at least, things looked a little better. The streets were clear, and the buildings were intact. We passed people both walking and driving, and if they seemed scared and hurried, at least they weren’t actually injured.

 

“Where to now?” Aiko asked, turning up the stereo. It was currently blasting what appeared to be a theremin version of Beethoven’s Ninth at a volume more commonly associated with gangsta rap.

 

“Look for police, I guess,” I said, shrugging. It seemed like an inefficient way to find somebody, but Frishberg wasn’t answering her phone, and under the circumstances I wasn’t sure what else to do.

 

It took maybe five minutes for us to find a pair of them, sitting in a cruiser out front of an apartment building. Aiko pulled over next to them and I got out, walked over to their car, and knocked on the driver’s window.

 

I stood there for a couple seconds before he rolled the window down. “What do you want?” he asked suspiciously. His partner had her hand on her gun.

 

Not that I could blame them. I mean, even at the best of times, if a guy in armor gets out of a heavily armored truck and walks up to you, a certain amount of caution is pretty reasonable.

 

“I was hoping you could give me directions,” I said, smiling. They wouldn’t see it behind the helmet, but I was hoping that they would hear it in my voice. “We’re looking for Sergeant Kendra Frishberg. Do you know where she is?”

 

The driver looked at his partner, then shrugged. “Couple blocks that way,” he said. “Look for the barricades.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, going back to the truck. I could hear them muttering behind me as I got in. “Go a few blocks east and look for barricades,” I said.

 

“Barricades? Oh, this should be good.” Aiko was smiling, but I knew her well enough to see through it. She was concerned, even worried, although I didn’t think it had anything to do with the barricades. It had more to do with how the police had responded to me, the suspicion there, the hostility.

 

I had to admit there was a fair point there. I’d never actually been found innocent of blowing up large chunks of the city, after all, and even if I had been I wasn’t naive enough to think that would matter. Between that and the fact that the current insanity had kicked off during my court hearing, there was almost certainly some lingering animosity there.

 

Those two had been suspicious just looking at me, the armor and my attitude tipping them off that I wasn’t just another scared civilian. What would happen if they actually figured out who I was? Hell, even Frishberg might not be willing to play along with me at this point.

 

I didn’t want to think too much about what would happen then. I wasn’t going back in a cage.

 

It had to be dealt with at some point, though, so we kept driving.

 

After another two or three minutes, we found what they’d been talking about. A section of street had been cordoned off with caution tape and parked vehicles. There were a handful of cops standing around, making sure nobody crossed it.

 

Their posture was anxious. They weren’t scared, exactly—this wasn’t the same as what the civilians were showing. No, this attitude gave the impression of being a response to a specific event, rather than the general climate of the city. There was something going on here, and while the cops might be doing something about, I didn’t get the impression that they were confident it was working.

 

“Hi,” I said, getting out and walking up to the cordon, Snowflake pacing along beside me. Aiko was locking the truck up behind us. “Can you give me directions to Sergeant Frishberg?”

 

“She’s busy,” one of the cops said. “We have a situation here.”

 

I rolled my eyes. “Obviously,” I said, ladling on the sarcasm pretty thickly. “Why did you think we were here? Look, she’s going to want to talk to me. How about you tell me where I can find her?”

 

He frowned, and I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he wasn’t willing to call me on it, either. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to her.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, smiling. We followed him to a small building on the corner. The ground floor was a cafe of some kind, while the second floor seemed to be apartments. A sizable group of cops were hanging out around the building, watching it like hawks. I saw a couple of SWAT vehicles, and from the weapons on display they weren’t just for show.

 

I could smell blood from the building. That wasn’t good; even with my senses, there would have to be a fair amount of blood to smell it from this far away.

 

Frishberg was standing a short distance from the group, talking on a cell phone. “Hi,” I said, waving at her.

 

She turned, saw me, stared for a moment, and then hung up, cutting the guy on the other end off mid-tirade. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”

 

“Don’t ask me,” Aiko said. “I just drove him here.”

 

“I was hoping to talk with you,” I said, grinning. “Maybe catch up on how things have been. I haven’t seen you for a while, after all.”

 

She stared for a couple seconds longer, then turned to the cop who’d escorted me there. “Get back to your position,” she told him. “And forget you ever saw this.”

 

He frowned. But he went.

 

“Okay,” Frishberg said, rounding on me. “First off, I had no idea they were planning that. They wouldn’t even let me stop by after you were arrested, or I would have. Second, what the flying fuck made you think it was a good idea to come here? Are you out of your mind?”

 

“Probably,” I said, shrugging. “But I was telling the truth earlier. I was hoping to talk, get an idea of what’s going on. I’m sure you have info I don’t right now.”

 

She sighed, running her hand through her hair. It looked like a nervous gesture, but I was fairly confident it was an affectation. Frishberg was too good at lying to have a tell that obvious. “Look,” she said. “As much as I’d like to, I don’t have the time right now. Shit is going crazy right now, and since I’m the only one who’s been dealing with this stuff for years, I’m having to keep an eye on everything myself.”

 

“So let me clear your schedule a little,” I said. “What’s the crisis here?”

 

“Hostage situation,” she said. “Some freak walked into the cafe, took most of the staff hostage. They’re upstairs now, and he’s threatening to kill them if we go inside. I was hoping to get a negotiator down here, but apparently that isn’t going to happen.” She glared at the cell phone.

 

“Cool,” I said. “I’m fairly sure the hostages are already dead, but I can take care of the guy that did it. Give me ten minutes or so.”


 

The front door was locked, a problem I dealt with easily enough. It was a wooden door, not intended to stand up to an assault, and I kicked it in without much difficulty.

 

Inside, things were not pretty. There were splatters of blood on the floor and the furniture, although not enough to account for what I’d been smelling, and several overturned chairs. The cooking equipment must have been turned off, because there was no smoke and nothing was on fire, but the air still smelled like burned food. I was hungry, but not even I would call it an appetizing aroma.

 

“Naughty, naughty,” a voice called from above. “Coming in without an invitation, are we? You know what that means, don’t you?” A moment later a woman screamed. It wasn’t the sort of canned scream that you get in horror movies, or even a terrified running-away sort of scream. This was the kind of scream you hear from someone in too much pain to keep it all inside.

 

I was a little more familiar with that kind of thing than I wanted to be.

 

I glanced outside, afraid that the cops would come running when they heard the scream, but nobody did. Good; they were doing what they’d said, at least for the moment.

 

“I’m not with the police,” I said, dragging one of the tables next to another. Aiko caught on instantly and grabbed a third table, pushing it into position.

 

“Oh no?” he said, laughing. “Then who are you with?”

 

“At the moment it’s just me and some friends,” I said, climbing up onto the tables. Aiko passed up a chair, which I positioned in the center of the improvised platform. “You can call me Shrike, by the way.” I didn’t exactly want to use my real name, not when there were a dozen or so cops within earshot. I was sure some of them knew who I was, but there’s a huge difference between knowing something and being unable to provide plausible deniability about knowing it.

 

“Hello, Shrike,” he said. “You can call me Keith. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”

 

“Hello, Keith,” I said. Something about the name was familiar, but I couldn’t bring it to mind. “It sounds like you’ve been making things hard for the police recently.” I stood on the chair and reached up experimentally. The ceiling was, just barely, within reach.

 

“But you’ve already said you aren’t with the police,” he said, in a tone of exaggerated confusion. “So how should it be your business?”

 

“You’re causing trouble in my town,” I said, calling Tyrfing. I cut a roughly square hole in the ceiling with a couple of strokes, pushing it aside when it fell, and then climbed through. “And that’s always my business,” I concluded, helping Aiko through. Snowflake vaulted up on her own, disdaining the platform I’d assembled.

 

We were standing in a small kitchen, with puke-green appliances that didn’t look to have been updated since the seventies. The smell of blood was stronger here, and I could smell magic as well, a fae magic of moonless nights and the silence between heartbeats.

 

A moment later a figure stepped through the doorway, and the smell of magic intensified. He was male, but I hesitated to call him a man; his frame was too warped, his limbs too long, his skin too grey. He was the sort of fae that could pass for human with a light illusion or a heavy coat, but when you looked at him squarely the resemblance was slight. He moved with perfect confidence, though there was a heavy bandage wrapped around his eyes.

I stared at that bandage. It seemed significant, though I wasn’t sure why. It was grey in color, almost the same grey as his skin, but something about the color suggested that it was the result of wear, rather than manufacturing.

 

“Come now, Shrike,” he said, grinning. His teeth were just a shade too sharp, too long. “This apartment is accessible by exterior stairs, not through the business on the lower floor.”

 

“That’s why I came in the way I did,” I said, watching him warily. He gave the impression of being someone who would know if I looked away, and capitalize on it. “Or are you going to tell me those stairs aren’t trapped?”

 

His grin grew even wider, and he started to pace slowly around us. It felt strangely unnerving, frightening in a way I couldn’t quite define, but that made me tense and start looking for the exits. It made me think of a rabbit hiding in the brush while the wolf circles ever closer. The rabbit knows that the safest thing is to stay put, but it wants so very much to run….

 

“Why should I tell you a thing like that, Shrike, even if it were true? But come, let us not forget our manners. These are your friends, I shall presume? And how are they called?” Keith’s voice was light, casual, totally at odds with his predatory attitude.

 

“You can call me Cupcake,” Aiko said, turning to keep Keith within her field of view. “And the dog goes by Spike.”

 

“How intriguing,” he murmured. “I thank you, Shrike, for making this day amusing. I had almost feared that I would be bored, but you have brought fresh interest to my work here.”

 

I couldn’t say why, but right then was when I realized why his name was familiar. “Keith,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to be Blind Keith, would you?”

 

He stopped pacing and turned to face me, his smile gone. “And where would you have heard that name, Shrike?”

 

I had to swallow twice before I could speak, that same irrational fear making my throat tight and dry. “Erin mentioned you. She said that you were one of the best mercenaries in the Courts.”

 

“Mercenary,” he said distastefully. “I mislike that word, Shrike, for I am no mercenary, whose loyalties are bought and sold as cheaply as any other commodity.”

 

“Perhaps not,” I said. “But I think you have something in common with them, don’t you? Even if it is just a certain set of shared acquaintances.”

 

“Indeed,” he murmured, resuming his slow stalk around us. “And yet I question your wisdom in pushing this topic. You are, I hope, aware that I can snuff out the lives of these human hostages with nothing more than a snap of my fingers?”

 

I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could, hoping that I wasn’t condemning some poor cafe employee to death. “I’m aware,” I said. “I just don’t see how it’s relevant to this conversation. This is about you and us, not them.”

 

He regarded me for a moment, then raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Instantly, there was another scream of agony from elsewhere in the apartment, one that ended in a sort of gurgling moan.

 

Aiko looked like she was about to go running off, looking for the person that was screaming, so I caught her arm. “Nice try,” I said to Keith. “But your hostages are either dead or silenced, or else they would have started begging for help the moment they heard us talking out here.” I supposed it was also possible that they couldn’t hear what was going on, but I doubted it. Blind Keith struck me as the kind of guy who would want his victims to hear what was going on out here.

 

“What do you call that, then?” he asked, obviously referring to the ongoing moaning sounds.

 

“A hunting adaptation,” I replied immediately. “It’s the scream in the night that makes you leave your shelter, it’s the crying baby that draws you out of your safe place. It’s a will-o’-the-wisp, something to lure you out into the dark until you’re lost and alone and far from home.”

 

He nodded slowly. “Someone,” he murmured, “has been reading his faerie tales.”

 

“Yes,” I said. “I have. And one of the first things you learn about the fae is that they have rules. There are always rules, and I think I’ve figured out some of yours.”

 

“Oh? Do tell.”

 

“You’re a hunter, Blind Keith,” I said, turning so that I could watch him as he continued to pace around us. “A predator. You want us to run, so that you can chase us. You frighten us so that we will flee, you make us hear things so that we will go to check on them. How many sounds could you mimic? A great many, I suspect. You’ve been pushing us pretty hard, trying to scare us, but I notice you haven’t done a single thing to us. Why not?”

 

The fear crescendoed, rising to a fever pitch. My legs quivered, my hands shook, and a low whine of fear escaped my throat. Snowflake was whining as well, while Aiko had gone pale as snow and started trembling in my grip. I thought I was about to piss myself or throw up or both, but luckily my body was too confused to manage either.

 

And then the fear began to subside, first fading and then vanishing entirely, and Blind Keith was laughing softly. “You’ve got spine,” he said. “And to answer your question, it’s more to do with choice than necessity. I respect those with the courage to stand against me.”

 

“And yet,” I said, “you’re trespassing. I told the truth when I said that this was my city.”

 

He smiled indulgently. “Don’t think you can threaten me. You may know Erin, but you aren’t on her level. You’re barely more than a puppy, and I’m an old hunter indeed.”

 

“I might be a puppy,” I said, holding up Tyrfing, “but that doesn’t make me a weakling. I was raised in the Khan’s own pack, because no lesser wolf could tame me. I have seen the gods go to war. And my sword is called Tyrfing, and it has claimed the lives of creatures as old and mighty as you. That’s three ways you owe me respect, Blind Keith, and none of them are small.”

 

“Ah,” he sighed, stretching the sound out, making it last longer than it should have, longer than human lungs could have managed. “So you’re that wolf cub. I thought you’d be taller. No disrespect was intended, child; I was curious to see how the world is changing, and it seemed natural to come to the place where that change began.”

 

“Understood,” I said. “But you’re still causing trouble for me, at a time when I have more than enough to deal with. I’d appreciate it if you would stop.”

 

“I will leave,” he agreed. “And I will converse with you, before I return to the territory you have claimed for your own. Give my regards to your grandfather, Shrike.”


 

“What a mess,” Frishberg said, watching them carry out the bodies on stretchers. Only one of the hostages had been killed, apparently, and that had happened well before I got there, which was why I’d been smelling blood. But the others were traumatized, emotionally more than physically, and not remotely ready to handle a trip down a ladder on their own.

 

“Isn’t it just,” I said, also watching. “Everywhere, it sounds like.”

 

“That’s the funny thing,” she said, glancing at me. “From what I hear, it isn’t everywhere. In fact, it sounds like this is very much a localized thing.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Yeah. Some places aren’t doing so bad at all. Seattle, Phoenix, Chicago, San Francisco, the list goes on. Then you’ve got places like Portland, where they’re literally snatching people off the streets. You know why that is?”

 

I shrugged. “Not most of them. But in Seattle, it’s probably because there’s somebody there that nobody wants to cross. It’s easier and safer to go cause trouble somewhere else than to piss him off.”

 

“Right,” she said. “Someone like you, maybe?”

 

I snorted. “Thanks for the compliment, but Moray could eat me alive any time he wanted to.” I hadn’t forgotten what it was like to watch him fight. Water magic wasn’t something that I’d thought of as having a whole lot of combat applications, but he made it work.

 

“Don’t sell yourself short. We were trying to resolve that situation for almost three hours. You walk in, and five minutes later, bam, problem solved.”

 

“Maybe,” I said uncomfortably. “That’s just a matter of knowing how to talk to him, though. It’s nothing anybody else couldn’t have done.” I had an idea of where she was going with this, and I didn’t like it, not even a little.

 

Nor was I disappointed. “Winter,” she said, the first time she’d used my name today. “You owe me a favor.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’m calling it in. Make this be one of the good places. Make sure this city gets through this okay.”

 

“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” I said, sounding almost as exhausted as I felt.

 

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I’m asking.”

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Clean Slate 10.1

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Walking up to the building, I was surprised at how much activity there was inside. There were maybe twenty people in the main room, and their voices blended into a low buzz, making it hard to follow the line of any one conversation. People moved from one group to another, carrying papers or tablets, distributing food. Everyone was working at a feverish pace, and from the exhausted postures I guessed that many hadn’t taken a moment to rest for days.

 

All that stopped when I opened the door and walked in. People stopped what they were doing and turned to face the door, hands going to weapons.

 

I expected them to relax when they saw who it was, and in a sense they did. But almost half of those present saluted me, in one way or another, and several of the others followed suit a moment later.

 

Huh. That was new. I’d been the boss for quite a while, but that sort of open display of deference was unusual in the extreme. I wasn’t quite sure what to attribute it to, either. Was it the result of the general climate making people uneasy, eager for leadership? Or was there something more personal going on?

 

Regardless, it wasn’t even on the first page of my priorities, so I ignored them entirely as we walked across the room to the throne. The buzz of conversation resumed as people went back to their work.

 

Normally, on the rare occasions she even came, Aiko sat in her own throne next to mine. Today it wasn’t there, a problem she solved by sitting in my lap and smirking at me almost before I’d sat down.

 

Usually I would have been concerned about my image. Today…well, even if that weren’t way down my list of priorities and everyone else’s, you’d have to be insane to think we looked cute and cuddly. There was way too much weaponry on display for that, especially once Snowflake curled up around my feet.

 

“Jarl,” Selene said, appearing next to me about two seconds after I sat down. “I trust you’re feeling well?”

 

“Yeah, sure,” I lied absently, looking at the room. “What’s with all of this?”

 

“Telephone service has been patchy the last few days, and other means of communication are, well.” She shrugged. “Unreliable, I suppose would be the best way to phrase it. We’ve been coordinating everything through here, but it still involves a lot of people running back and forth.”

 

“Damn,” I said, watching the people running from one table to the next. The whole thing looked like barely-controlled madness, almost like watching an engine running a little faster than it could safely handle. “How much do we know about what’s going on?”

 

“Our information is decent. Not great, but decent. I’ve been having people prioritize information gathering and scouting activities.”

 

I grinned. It was good to know something had gone right recently. “Good. Give me the rundown.”

 

Selene nodded and then waved to one of the runners, a skinny kid who looked like he couldn’t be more than sixteen. “Get me Kyi, Tindr, and Brick. Then bring a table, a pitcher of tea, and a very large sandwich.” She glanced at me critically and said, “Make that two sandwiches.”

 

“Hey,” I objected as the kid ran off. “I don’t look that bad.”

 

“Winter,” Selene said dryly, “I have literally seen people in concentration camps that looked better than you.”

 

“How…you know what, I don’t think I want to know.” I shook my head. “Okay, moving on. What’s with the kid?”

 

She shrugged. “You’ve been attracting followers recently. This was the lowest-risk job I could find right now.”

 

“Fair enough,” I admitted reluctantly. I didn’t like the idea of bringing a relative innocent into things, but I supposed that with how things were right now, working in a building full of violent lunatics was probably one of the safer places to be. At least here if someone attacked there was a full-time staff of people ready to deal with things.

 

And besides. Nobody was really an innocent anymore. I wasn’t sure how things would shake out, but I was pretty confident that the supernatural wasn’t going back into the closet.

 

Kyi appeared out of nowhere a moment later. Probably she’d been in the crowd somewhere, but if so I hadn’t seen her. That was Kyi, generally. “Jarl,” she said, nodding deeply to me. “Welcome home.”

 

“Thanks. What’s the situation?”

 

“Poor,” she said bluntly. “I’ve been coordinating with our scouts, but information is sketchy. Let me set the maps out and I can bring you up to speed.”

 

In short order, a large folding table was set up in front of the throne. On it was a topographic map of the city, which had been abused to such an extent that it was hard to imagine it ever being used for its intended purpose again. Large swaths of the city had been shaded in various colors, and the map bristled with pins. Notes had been scrawled in the margins or across sections of the map in at least three alphabets, and even the English parts were hard to read, between rushed handwriting, half-finished thoughts and crossed out words, and the occasional coffee stain.

 

Kyi, though, seemed perfectly confident as she pointed to a small green area near the southern edge of the map. “This is the zone we have under control,” she said. “I’ve been scouting it regularly, but we haven’t had an incursion in two days.” She moved her finger slightly, indicating the larger area it was contained within. “We’ve been keeping the peace in this zone. But once you get farther from this building, things aren’t as safe. We can’t patrol the whole area, so sometimes we haven’t been able to respond to an incident until several hours later.”

 

I looked at it with some dismay. Even the larger area was…not that large, in comparison to the rest of the map. Less than ten percent of the city.

 

Considerably less.

 

“This,” she said, indicating a fairly large semicircle to the west, “is Kikuchi’s territory. He hasn’t actually laid claim to it, but nobody’s eager to upset him, either, so the intruders have mostly been staying well away from his mountain. There are still problems with looting and such, but it’s not as bad as most places.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “I can work with that. What next?”

 

A smaller, pinkish area in the middle of town was next, apparently. It was irregularly shaped, closer to an inkblot than a geometric figure. “This is where most of the independents have holed up,” Kyi said. “Nobody too powerful, but there are quite a few of them and they know what’s going on. Generally people have been going for easier targets, so they’ve been left alone. Outside of our immediate vicinity, it’s probably the safest place in the city.”

 

I stared at it, comparing it to my image of the city. It was hard, since I generally work from memory rather than a map, but I was fairly confident. “This is centered around Pryce’s,” I said. “Almost perfectly.”

 

She nodded. “They’ve been using it as a home base, apparently. Coordinating their efforts, the same way we’re doing here.”

 

“I’m guessing Pryce is staying neutral?”

 

“Extremely.”

 

I took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded again. “Okay. That might be a problem.”

 

Kyi nodded, then pointed to the blue circle covering most of the downtown area. “This,” she said, “is where the police have been concentrating their efforts. They’ve more or less imposed martial law, but they’re keeping the peace. There isn’t much looting or rioting going on in that area.”

 

“How are they doing at keeping the monsters out?”

 

She shrugged. “Not so bad. Not so good, either.”

 

“Fair enough. Next?”

 

Her finger drifted south and east, coming to rest on a large, vaguely rectangular area at the edge of the map that was shaded dark green. “Military,” she said. “And they have outposts here, here, here.” She indicated more green areas, some large, most not.

 

“That would be Fort Carson,” I said, pointing to the rectangular area. “Cheyenne Mountain over here, then Peterson Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy up here. I’m not sure what the others are.”

 

“Neither are we,” Kyi said, shrugging. “I haven’t made a priority of scouting their turf, and we don’t have any real contacts with them. As far as we’ve been able to figure out, they basically pulled all of their people into their territory, sent the civilians away, and locked everything down as tight as they could.”

 

“That’s fine,” I said. “Honestly, if they can just keep to themselves and make sure their space is safe, I’ll be thrilled.”

 

“Yes, jarl,” she said. “So those are all the friendly zones—”

 

“—more or less friendly,” Aiko interrupted. “I don’t know about you, but I’m actually not on great terms with the police.” She paused. “Oh wait, I do know about you.”

 

“More or less friendly,” Kyi agreed, ignoring everything else. “There’s also a large area on the north side that seems to be controlled by Katrin.”

 

Said area was shaded a dark red, and took up most of the northern part of the city. “Nobody’s moving in on her during the daytime?” I asked, trailing my fingers over the map. That was a lot of territory.

 

“A couple people tried. The vampires tracked them down the next night.” She shrugged. “Nobody’s been in a hurry to try again.”

 

I snorted. “Yeah, I bet. Are the people there safe?”

 

“As safe as cows,” Kyi said with barely controlled disgust. “And for exactly the same reasons.”

 

Right. More or less friendly, and Katrin didn’t even count as that.

 

I couldn’t afford to forget that. Especially not now.

 

I looked over the map one more time, noting the marked areas and especially the places between them. It sounded impressive when Kyi tallied all the zones that were under the control of one faction or another, but it was still less than half the area of the city. There were large chunks in between that were apparently unclaimed.

 

I didn’t have to ask what was going on there. It was the same thing that was going on in every no man’s land right now. Chaos.

 

“Okay,” I said. “I think I’ve got a decent handle on the geography. Brick? What’s your news?”

 

“I’ve got the best contact with the outside world right now,” he said, stepping up from where he’d been waiting beside the table. “Although I’m guessing you already know most of what I have to say. What’s happening here is about the same as what’s going on around the world. There are a handful of places nobody’s had the balls to attack yet, but by and large everywhere’s seen at least a little action. And it’s going to get worse.”

 

“Why?” I asked. I’d already reached that conclusion, but I wanted to hear his reasoning for it.

 

“Because people will start taking it seriously,” he said, shrugging. “What we’re seeing now, it’s the equivalent of joyriders. They see an opportunity to screw people over for kicks, so they’re jumping on it. But here in a few days, a couple of weeks at the most, the big organizations are going to get in on the deal. And when they do, they’ll be playing for keeps, not for laughs.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “That was my thought, too. What are the Watchers doing about it?”

 

“Scrambling trying to keep up,” he said dryly. “We knew something like this was in the pipeline—and by we I mean the higher-ups, not me personally—but we didn’t expect it to be this soon, or this fast. Right now it’s all about keeping things from going absolutely crazy and being ready for the next shoe to drop.” He smiled thinly. “Which is why, as of yesterday, I’ve been officially assigned to you as a liaison.”

 

“A liaison,” I repeated. “Um…why do I need a liaison?”

 

Brick shrugged. “Ask the boss. If I had to guess, they know that you’re a big name in this city, and they know a lot of people are going to see you as the cause for the insanity right now. So they want somebody on site to make sure you make things better instead of worse.”

 

“Or take me out, if I don’t.” It wasn’t a question. After intelligence gathering, that sort of covert removal was the main task of the Watchers.

 

“Or that,” Brick agreed. “But I doubt it will come to that.”

 

“Okay,” I said, sighing. “Let me know if there are any new developments. In the meantime…Tindr? What’s the financial status?”

 

“Not good,” the jotun said, stepping forward and setting a binder on top of the map. He flipped it open to reveal line after line of meticulous, densely packed handwriting. He leafed through it until he found the page he wanted, then spun it to face me. “The financial system is as uncertain as everything else right now.”

 

“Uncertain? Or in collapse?”

 

“Uncertain,” he repeated firmly. “Nothing’s really moving right now, good or bad. Now, after you were arrested, I liquidated some of your assets and transferred others into more stable investments. As a result, most of your wealth should survive the transition. Some of the companies you were invested in will probably go bankrupt, as will some of the shell corporations and laundering fronts. On the whole, though, I think it will be fine.”

 

“But?” I asked. “I’m sensing a ‘but,’ here.”

 

He sighed and nodded. “But,” he said, “many of the accounts are currently inaccessible. Trying to get a major international payment through the system right now is impossible. Between that and the fact that so much of your wealth is tied up in long-term assets and investments that would be difficult to offload right now, there’s relatively little actual money available.”

 

“How much?”

 

“At a guess?” He shrugged. “Less than a million immediately accessible. Given two or three days, between two and five million, probably closer to five.”

 

Okay. So I had a city on the verge of implosion, my information was shoddy as hell, and I was supposed to somehow make it all better. And I had barely more than normal operating expenses to do so with.

 

Oh yeah, and if I didn’t get it done in a couple of days, I probably wouldn’t get it done at all. And if that happened, a whole lot of people would die, I would most definitely be on even more hit lists than I already was, and my allies would probably be a lot less interested in covering my ass than they were right now.

 

I might not have objected so much, if it hadn’t felt so normal.

 

Maybe five minutes later, I was writing out a list while the frenetic work around me continued nonstop. Selene had gone back to coordinating their efforts and compiling the information that flowed in, while Tindr was working on liquidating assets and Kyi had taken a team out to do some reconnaissance.

 

“Whatcha writing?” Aiko asked. She was currently curled up against me, and seemed fairly happy. It struck me as slightly unfair that, apparently, even a person wearing armor was more comfortable to sit on than my throne.

 

“List of people I could ask for favors,” I said. “I’m hoping I can think of someone who might be helpful without being too risky to deal with.”

 

She snorted and shoved the last of her sandwich into her mouth. “Too risky?” she said, her voice slightly muffled. “For you?” I’d long since finished my own sandwich, and downed most of the pitcher of iced tea. It hadn’t done much to dull my hunger.

 

I looked at my list for a minute, then circled one of the names. “There,” I said. “What do you think of her?”

 

Aiko looked at it, then nodded. “Not bad. She’s on the ground and she’s not totally dumb, so she’ll know something. And she isn’t too bad to deal with.”

 

“You want to come with me, then?”

 

She shrugged. “Sure. Driving through town today might be interesting.”

 

“With my luck?” I said gloomily. “No might about it.”

 

She laughed and stood, and then we went to have a chat with Sergeant Frishberg.

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Unclean Hands Epilogue 9

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It was oddly peaceful on the ramparts of our castle. The night air was cool, and I could feel the creatures of the forest going about their business, making preparations for the coming winter. Down in the castle Aiko and Alexis were doing something similar, laying in supplies and shoring up the defenses. I had been helping earlier, but I’d mostly just been getting in the way, so I’d wandered up here instead.

 

It’s funny, Snowflake said, echoing my own thoughts. You can’t tell that anything’s wrong from here.

 

I know, I replied, reaching down and scratching her ears. She hadn’t been more than a couple feet from me in the four days since I’d left police custody.

 

Not that I could blame her. I hadn’t exactly been trying to get away from her, either.

 

Looking south, I almost fancied that I could see a lightness to the sky, a redness. It was probably my imagination, but not necessarily. News was hard to come by at the moment, but from what I’d heard Bucharest was burning.

 

A lot of the world was burning.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d expected to happen after Loki’s little speech, but it hadn’t been remotely as bad as what actually did. An awful lot of people had been awfully repressed for the last thousand years or so, and now that the rules had been lifted they were making up for lost time with a vengeance. Packs of werewolves roamed the streets, vampires stalked the night, and faeries kidnapped children from their homes in broad daylight. The Guards were trying to maintain sanity, as were the Watchers and various local powers, but they couldn’t be everywhere. Where there were gaps in the coverage, the fires spread.

 

Everything I’d heard suggested that things were bad out there, and getting worse.

 

The odd thing was that many of the problems could have been avoided. There were plenty of people out there who knew the rules, the logic by which these things worked. They could have told the uninformed to carry iron to ward off the fae, that werewolves weren’t so bad as long as you stayed out of the way, that they should never invite a stranger—or even a familiar face, really—into their home. Simple rules, tips and tricks that could negate a lot of the minor threats people were confronted by. That, in turn, would leave the greater powers with more time to handle the major problems.

 

Humanity already had the advantage of numbers, and modern weapons, and they had quite a few allies in the supernatural world. With just a little bit of knowledge and organization, they could have kept things together.

 

But most people had been caught wholly by surprise, unprepared to deal with things they’d been taught were fictional. They were confused, they were scared, and the government wasn’t doing all that great a job of making them less confused and scared. A lot of people didn’t know the old stories, and even those who did couldn’t really say which parts were accurate. There were places where people had held together and maintained order, but by and large they hadn’t. Unrest encouraged unrest, and in cities around the world there was rioting and chaos as a result.

 

But here, in one of the more inaccessible reaches of the Transylvanian mountains?

 

Things were peaceful here. Quiet. Calm. Outside, the creatures of the forest followed the same routines they’d followed for thousands of generations. Barring extreme changes in how the world worked, they would keep following those routines for thousands more.

 

It was, in an odd way, both reassuring and intimidating. To know that life would go on, that the current chaos was fundamentally transient, that was comforting. No matter how bad things got, something would be left to pick up and carry on.

 

But at the same time, there was something deeply unsettling about it. This was huge, probably the single biggest thing I’d ever seen, let alone had a part in. To know that it was, in the grand scheme of things, not terribly important or significant—that was terrifying. It was a reminder of just how small I was.

 

I sighed and went back inside. Soon, I knew, this illusion of peace would be shattered. Alexis was leaving in the morning, going back to live with her family in Oregon. Her membership in the Guards was all but certain by now, but she still needed a certain amount of combat training, and I wasn’t equipped to give it to her. She was going to be taking lessons from Moray.

 

For my part…well, I still had a city to govern. And now, more than ever, I had to actually do the job I’d laid claim to. If I wasn’t there to keep the peace in such troubled times, I might as well give up any pretense of being a jarl. And if someone wasn’t there to maintain order, things might get very bad before they got better.

 

Inside, the work was almost finished. I did a bit of heavy lifting, moving various blocks and beams into position, and then we called it a night. Alexis went to her room to finish packing. Aiko and I went upstairs, where she kissed me with an intensity that spoke of desperation more than passion.

 

Neither of us had mentioned what she’d been about to say, when we were interrupted. It had taken days for me to return to a more-or-less normal state of mind, and once I did it had become clear what the state of the world was going to be. Talking about emotions, our relationship, the future—it all seemed ridiculous in the face of such upheaval, such uncertainty about what tomorrow would bring.

 

But for the moment, I could be satisfied with tonight.

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Interlude 9.z: Loki Laufeyjarson

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I left the courthouse and went to my private domain to watch the consequences unfold. Like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pool, they would begin in obvious places and then slowly spread. Similarly, the interactions between multiple waves, between those waves and the pool itself, they were complex, difficult to model.

 

Interesting. Especially after so long without throwing any stones at all.

 

It started small. In Seoul, a kumiho walked the streets, enflaming the lust of all who saw her, taking the lives of any foolish enough to act on it. In Paris, a vampire stalked the night, killing with a freedom he hadn’t felt since the sixteenth century. In western Russia, one of the few true necromancers to survive the Watchers’ purges went into a mass grave, and left with power and an army.

 

And, naturally, sometimes it swung the other way. The necromancer and his horde were carpet bombed by the Russian military. A faerie who tried to assassinate the British Prime Minister for her own amusement was met with a hail of steel-jacketed bullets. A careless vampire left a trail of blood to his lair, and was staked at high noon by a group of vigilantes.

 

As I watched, the chaos spread. Ordinary humans, who had seen my broadcast or been told of it, began to worry. As news reports of the violence, the chaos, the insanity that was rampant in the world began to trickle in, that worry turned to panic or rage. There was rioting in the streets of almost every major city in the world. Police forces, unable to cope with what was going on, abandoned their mandate. Governments were paralyzed, unable to respond to something so far beyond their experience. Citizens turned to looting, to violence.

 

I smiled. A thousand years of rationalism and skepticism, overturned in a matter of days. Here, a suspected witch was stoned to death; there, a Wiccan was burned alive. The true mages began to retaliate, and now it was the mobs that screamed in agony as they were broken by immense forces, as they were skinned alive by summoned monsters, as their minds were crushed by overwhelming emotions.

 

It was exciting. Invigorating. Thrilling, even. The concepts of chaos, of entropy, and of madness were among those which I had chosen to define myself with. To see them writ large across the world, to watch the rapid collapse of so many social institutions….it gave me power, in a very real sense.

 

I floated in the dark and watched, not intervening at this time, but simply observing as the chaos unfolded and began to coalesce into new patterns. It was fascinating to watch, like observing evolution in real time, or a firestorm in slow motion. To know that nothing would be the same afterwards…it was intoxicating.

 

A new world, to usher in the birth of a new god.

 

And then, finally, the messenger I had been expecting arrived. It was a simple thing, ectoplasm shaped into a roughly humanoid form, but lacking many of the features of the human. I didn’t know who had sent it, and it really didn’t matter. Only one of us could have sent a construct into my private sanctum, and I knew what it meant.

 

I went elsewhere.


 

Standing in a darkened room—or, more accurately, a vaguely defined space which didn’t bother with the concept of light—I was surrounded by my peers. I took note of those who were manifest, and particularly of those who were not. Brahma hadn’t come, nor had Danu, nor Atum. No surprise, since none of them had left their sanctums in centuries. Coyote wasn’t there either, which was unfortunate; I could have used another ally. Likely he was too busy amusing himself in the chaos of the mortal world, a child playing in puddles.

 

Loki, Odin signified. He was manifest in the form of a hanged man, putrid, head flopping on a broken neck. You have overstepped.

 

I signified amusement. The agreement was made. The experiment was to be concluded; all meaningful data had been gathered. A new experiment was to begin.

 

Nyx, who had chosen to manifest as a formless mass of shadow, signified hesitant agreement. The agreement was made. But the suddenness with which you acted was not appropriate, nor was the magnitude of your declaration. The Allfather is correct; you have overstepped. You introduced unnecessary chaos into the situation.

 

Shiva, manifest as a serpent, signified disagreement. Chaos is the nature of change. To examine chaos, to observe the reaction of the mortals to this shift in their world, is the very purpose of our agreement. Loki is not to be criticized for doing so.

 

Enough, I signified. We all know what I have done, and we know why. My actions have brought about the greatest change, providing the opportunity for observation and learning. If you would condemn me for that, if you would sanction me, let it be done now.

 

There was a brief moment for reflection, and then the gathered deities let their will be known. Odin, Nyx, Vishnu, and Izanagi were in favor of imposing sanctions on me, for various reasons ranging from the deeply personal to the entirely practical. Shiva, Gaea, Quetzalcoatl, Iblis, and Enlil were not. Xmucane and Xpiacoc remained neutral, as usual.

 

I could see that Odin wanted to continue, to punish me in some way, but there was nothing he could do without offending the others. Go, then, he signified, and remember this.

 

I smiled, showing it in my manifestation as a burst of flame, and left that place. To the extent that such a thing could be described as place, which wasn’t much; like us, it was within space and time, but not truly of them.


 

Back in my sanctum, I examined the course of events once again, and then I began to change them. I was careful, subtle, delicate. A tiny nudge here, and the flame which should have snuffed out a man’s life splashes harmlessly against stone instead. A push there, and a bullet swerves ever so slightly in its course, penetrating the skull rather than deflecting off. A whisper is sufficient to sway a witch to the path of wisdom and weakness rather than power and death.

 

Nothing obvious, nothing that could be noticed or traced back to me, not even by my fellow gods. And if by some chance they did, they wouldn’t, couldn’t know why, couldn’t see the goal I was aiming towards. Which was good, because if they knew what I knew I would be faced with something considerably worse than criticism or sanctions.

 

Fortunately, none of them could see what was obvious to me. Likely none of them had thought to look; if they had, they lacked the understanding to recognize what they saw. For much the same reason, they didn’t understand that my goals in producing this chaos were farther reaching than my own amusement. I had an aim, and none of them had the capacity to grasp how I was working to achieve it.

 

We tend to specialize. To focus our efforts on certain tasks, certain skills, certain lore.

 

That Odin is the king of death, that he is the master of liminal states and the in-between places, that he is the lord of all transitions—these things are known. His is the knowledge of dark and terrible things, of magics that feed on sanity and blossom into power, of the strange and unknowable things which lurk beyond the limits of our worlds. None can match him in these fields.

 

Nyx is the mistress of shame and secrets. She knows everything that you’d rather she didn’t, every guilty thought, every transgression, every moment of weakness. She is the subtle one, the quiet one, the schemer, who works in the dark and never shows her hand. The weaver of webs and tangled threads, she is the finest of all the gods when it comes to the long game, the scheme that unfolds slowly over the course of eons.

 

In much the same way, I am undeniably the master of entropy. To look at a thing and see its ending, to see the weak points in every defense, the path by which all things can be brought to ruin—these are my gift.

 

And my curse.

 

To understand entropy is to understand that all things must end. All things, great and small, the clearly transient and seemingly eternal, each is on its own road to ruin. The end cannot be prevented, only postponed.

 

But to be alive, and I think the term applies to gods, is to fight the inevitable. And thus, despite knowing that the end is near, I act to delay it. A man dies who might have lived, or lives who might have died, and the waves ripple out, a million tiny interactions that individually do little, but combine to shift the course of history into another path.

 

A butterfly flaps its wings, and half a world away the air spins into a hurricane.

 

It is, in an odd way, still an application of my specialty. To follow the path of a thousand random events, to predict the ultimate consequence of unpredictable events—these things are very much in line with my expertise. Not prophecy, exactly, since prophecy is essentially impossible. No, this was simply a matter of understanding chaos. Turning that understanding inside out, applying an intimate awareness of destruction to preserve.

 

The irony of it all amused me.

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Unclean Hands 9.20

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An expensive black sedan parked on the street around two blocks away. There was a cat around the corner, a rat under the storm grate fifty feet in the other direction, and four pigeons overlooking the scene from various angles. As such, I had a surround view as a man opened the driver’s door and got out.

 

After a few seconds of processing, I recognized it as Alan, my lawyer. A visit from him was worth paying attention to, and today he was wearing an even nicer suit than usual, so I thought I might take a closer look.

 

Scent and sound weren’t so informative at the moment as vision, so I focused on one of the pigeons. A couple of blinks, mental more than physical, brought the scene into focus, and I watched as he walked briskly down the street. It was hard to read his expression through a pigeon’s eyes—they’d never been my favorite animal to work with, although I’d been forced to practice with them quite a bit recently. But I thought he looked grim. Determined, although not necessarily in a good way.

 

After he’d walked around a block, there was a crow within sight, and I shifted to her mind with a feeling of gratitude. A quick glance was enough to confirm that I had been correct. His expression definitely had a stoniness to it that suggested today was more than just another status update.

 

He moved inside the building and I floated with him, moving into a rat this time. It was nested down in a supply closet that hadn’t been opened since I took up residence here, and which was predictably trashed. I couldn’t see, but I could hear him walk into the former police station.

 

“Good morning,” one of the guards said. He was one of the friendlier ones, I thought. It had gotten hard to tell them apart. You’d think that spending so much time in their company would make them seem more like unique individuals, but strangely, the opposite was true. The turned into just cogs in the machine. “Big day, huh?”

 

“Very much so,” Alan agreed. He sounded much like he’d looked—determined, but not hopeful.

 

Big day. It took me a second to figure out what that meant.

 

Once I did, the excitement was enough to break my concentration completely, and I slipped back into my own body. Big day. There were only so many reasons why Alan would be here for a special day.

 

Presumably, it was finally time for my hearing.

 

I wanted to stand up and pace, restless and jittery now that I was so close to getting out of this hellhole. I forced myself to remain on my mattress instead. I’d taken to spending most of my time there, over the past weeks, and it would be odd if I got up for no reason just when my lawyer arrived.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure why I bothered, given that whoever watched the camera feeds had certainly seen enough to figure out that I was a little off. If nothing else, the fit I’d thrown during the full moon was surely an indicator. The silver in those damned bracelets had prevented me from actually changing, but the resultant agony had left me writhing on the ground and moaning most of the night. They’d actually checked whether I was okay the next morning, and the doctor had been baffled when I appeared entirely healthy.

 

As disjointed as my sense of time had become recently, it wasn’t surprising that the next few minutes seemed to take longer than entire days of waiting. It felt like hours passed before I heard footsteps coming down the hall, and figured I could stand up and go to the bars without arousing suspicion. Hell, it would probably seem weird if I weren’t anxious, under the circumstances.

 

As expected, a pair of guards approached. For the first time, though, Alan had come with them rather than waiting for me upstairs. “Good morning, Winter,” he said, nodding to me.

 

“Good morning, Alan. What’s the occasion?”

 

“It’s your hearing date,” he said. “It’s scheduled to start in about two hours.”

 

“Two hours,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me a little sooner than that?”

 

He looked at me almost pityingly. “I did,” he said gently. “Yesterday. And the day before. And the week before that.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yes.”

 

I blinked. Had I really missed that? Had I been so out of touch with my surroundings that I’d completely failed to notice him telling me something that crucial?

 

Thinking back on it, I found it disturbingly plausible. Even now, I had to resist the urge to let myself go. My body ached, I was still coughing from that cold I’d come down with weeks earlier, and recently when I bothered to eat I couldn’t keep my hands steady. In comparison to that, spending time in almost anyone’s body sounded pretty good.

 

I had to get this silver off. I had to.

 

“You’re going to be traveling there separately,” he was saying. I forced myself to pay attention; this might be important. “I’ll meet you at the courthouse, and we’ll go over some last-minute details. Please try not to do anything stupid until then.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Alan. I appreciate this.”

 

“The money is how you thank me,” he said dryly, and walked away, leaving me to the gentle mercies of my guards.

 

They let me out of the cell, and then one of them stood at a safe distance while the other put cuffs on my wrists and ankles. My hands were in front of me, at least; if they were behind me, considering how poor my coordination was at the moment, I wasn’t sure whether I’d have been able to walk.

 

They marched me out the building in silence, at a pace that was just a bit faster than I could comfortably manage with my feet chained together. We were met at the door by another three guards, who fell into position around me for the ten steps it took to get to the street.

 

Unsurprisingly, they weren’t transporting me with anyone else, so I got to sit in the back of one of the secure vans they used all by myself. Oh, there were four armed guards there with me, but I’d stopped really seeing them as people quite a while ago. They were more like furniture, or security cameras. Part of the background.

 

As usual, they weren’t interested in making conversation, and I certainly had nothing to say to them. So I leaned back and let myself drift some more, passing the time without quite cognizing it. I noticed, somewhat distantly, that there weren’t many animals out and about, and those that were weren’t happy about it. Focusing a little more clearly, I realized that the weather had gone from somewhat ominous to seriously inclement.

 

The next thing I was aware of, someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes, blinking a couple of times to get used to seeing the world through only one set, and then looked at the guard. From the expression on his face, it wasn’t the first time he’d shaken me. “Hey,” I said, slurring a little. I wasn’t sure whether it was from confusion regarding how my mouth was supposed to work or just fatigue. “What’s up?”

 

“We’re there,” he snapped. “Get out of the van.”

 

I did so, scooting to the edge and then hopping out. I landed awkwardly, and I recovered even more awkwardly, so that I ended up tripping over my own feet. I would have fallen on my face, had a particularly strong gust not hit me at just the right angle to push me back on balance.

 

One of the guards caught me by the elbow before I could overbalance again, steadying me against the wind. “This is crazy,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over the howling wind. His voice was still all but drowned out. “The forecast was clear for today!”

 

Looking around, I had to admit he had a point. I generally enjoyed the wind, but even would have to acknowledge it was vicious today, blowing people off their feet and turning dust and grit into a sandblaster. The clouds were so thick and dark it looked like dusk rather than midmorning. Lightning split the sky every second or two, providing more illumination than the sun, and the growl and rumble of thunder was incessant.

 

I found myself thinking of Scáthach talking about a storm on the horizon. Of Arbiter saying much the same thing.

 

Sure, it was probably metaphorical. But it was still a little unnerving.

 

I shivered a little as the guards escorted me into the building.

 

We walked in through the service entrance, and they seemed to know exactly where they were going as they marched me down several hallways and up a flight of stairs. We ended up in a small room which resembled the interrogation room back at the police station a little more closely than I would have liked. Two guards took up positions by the door, while I joined Alan at the table.

 

“You made it,” he said. “Good. I was starting to get worried.”

 

“Bad weather,” I said, looking out the window. It was small, and high on the wall, but still quite a bit better than I’d had in way too long. The storm didn’t look like it was lightening up at all.

 

“Quite. Strange; the forecast said it should be nice today.” He looked down at the stack of papers he was holding, then back up at me. “So, Winter, how much do you remember about what we’re trying to do today?”

 

“Not much,” I admitted. “I don’t think I’ve really been present for a lot of our conversations, mentally.”

 

“I noticed. Fortunately, you seem more lucid today. We’re planning to challenge many of the charges they’ve brought against you on the basis of inadequate evidence and poor procedure. There are a handful that I don’t think we can get dismissed on that basis; we’re planning an insanity defense for those. Ideally I think we’ll be able to dismiss many of the charges, and then take a plea bargain on the rest.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “And what are we bargaining for?”

 

“Life incarceration,” he said immediately. “Realistically, that’s the best you can hope for at this point. But with the plea deal, we can probably ensure that the sentence is to an asylum, or possibly a low-security prison.”

 

“Okay,” I said again. “And there’s nothing you can do that won’t end with me in a cage?”

 

He shrugged. “It’s conceivably possible that you’d be found innocent in a jury trial. But I wouldn’t bet on it, personally. The evidence for some of the charges is rather overwhelming, and you frankly aren’t photogenic enough to pull it off anyway. Speaking of which, I was wondering whether you’d be willing to take some steps on that.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

He opened his mouth, then closed it and reached into his briefcase instead. A moment later, he handed me a small mirror, giving me my first really decent look at myself since I’d been arrested.

 

I looked like shit.

 

Always on the thin side, I looked emaciated. My cheeks were gaunt, and my prison jumpsuit hung off me like I was a scarecrow. My skin was too pale from not seeing the sun in almost a month. My eyes were sunken, and unsettlingly bright as a result. My hair was tangled and matted, and it was long enough to meld into a scraggly beard.

 

I could see what Alan meant. I looked like a dead man walking, if that man also happened to be strung out on crack.

 

“Shit,” I said, setting the mirror back on the table. “Do you have a knife?” I gestured vaguely at my face, making it clear that I was talking about grooming rather than violence.

 

“Better,” he said, smiling. He reached into his briefcase again and came up with a pair of scissors, a safety razor, and a can of shaving cream. “I’m no stylist, but I should be able to get you at least somewhat presentable.”

 

“You do this often, then?”

 

“You’d be surprised,” he said seriously. “Most people let their grooming go a little in prison.” He paused. “Granted, this is a bit of an exceptional case.”


 

Heads were going to roll.

 

I’d just spent the last three hours forcing myself to remain alert, focused, and responsive, while Alan, the prosecuting attorney, and the judge debated fine points of legalese. I’d been patient and polite while being repeatedly asked the same questions over and over again. I’d tolerated the whispers and murmurs of the crowd gathered, which was larger than I’d expected for a preliminary hearing.

 

And now that said hearing was over, there were a few thoughts going through my mind.

 

The first was that Alan had been right. Based on the attitudes of everyone involved, from the lawyers to the peanut gallery, my chance of going free was basically nonexistent. I was almost certainly looking at a life sentence in one institution or another.

 

The second was that the judge had refused to set bail, meaning that I was going straight back to that tiny cell under the police station.

 

The third was that the ache from the silver hadn’t let up in the slightest. If anything, now that I was more conscious of what was going on, more tied to my body, it was worse. Over the past hours it had risen to a crescendo, and I almost couldn’t hear myself think through the pain.

 

The fourth was that the storm outside had only intensified. Even in the bowels of the courthouse I could occasionally hear the wind howling outside, and the more intense rounds of thunder shook the building to its foundations.

 

All of which just lead back to my initial conclusion. Heads rolling.

 

“Winter,” my lawyer said when I didn’t get up. “Winter, it’s time to go.”

 

I turned to him. “Alan,” I said, “thank you. You’ve been very pleasant and tolerant, even though I’m sure I haven’t been the easiest client. You’ve done a lot for me, and I want to apologize.”

 

“For what?”

 

I could have given any number of answers, but one of the things I’d figured out over the years was that the universe couldn’t resist the opportunity for perfect timing. Or, at least, Loki couldn’t, and at the moment that was good enough.

 

So rather than anything elaborate, I just said, “This.”

 

A moment later, perfectly on cue, the massive double doors of the courtroom slammed open hard enough to hit the walls and bounce. I watched as the entire crowd turned, seemingly as a single unit, to watch what was happening.

 

There were no friendly faces in that crowd. I’d hoped that Aiko might at least come, but I supposed the hearing wasn’t open to the general public.

 

Around three seconds after the door was open—just long enough that everyone had turned to look, but nobody had quite figure out what to do—Loki walked through. He was mostly human in appearance today, but well over six feet tall. He was grinning, and it was exactly the warped, twisted grin I associated with him.

 

“Lights are good,” he said cheerfully, swaggering down the middle of the room like he owned the place. “And action’s on its way. But we could use a few cameras, if anyone’s carrying.”

 

Several people in the crowd pulled out their phones, either on cue or because what they were seeing was too crazy not to get on video. Loki nodded approvingly and kept walking. “Very nice,” he said. “You folks just earned some brownie points.” He casually vaulted the barrier between the crowd and the people who were actually involved in the proceedings, and bowed to the judge. “Hello, Your Honor,” he said. “I’d like to address the court.”

 

“Bailiff,” the judge said instantly. That appeared to be all the instruction necessary, as the bailiff immediately moved forward and grabbed Loki by the shoulder.

 

“I’m going to give you one warning,” the deity said pleasantly. “Let go right now, or I will stop you.”

 

“Come on, buddy,” the bailiff sighed. “Let’s get you out of here.”

 

Loki’s smile slipped, just a little, and in that moment I realized something important about him.

 

I’d always treated Loki with respect. I’d mouthed off to him occasionally, sure, and I’d made a point of not behaving like a sycophant around him. But I’d done so specifically because I knew that he’d be bored if I didn’t, and I couldn’t afford for him to be bored with me. Even before I’d realized who he was, I’d had some idea of the power he wielded, and I’d always regarded him with respect and a healthy amount of fear as a result.

 

The bailiff, though? He genuinely thought Loki was just a random crazy person who’d wandered into the hearing somehow, and he was treating him appropriately.

 

And Loki was pissed.

 

There was no sign of pain, in what happened next. The bailiff didn’t scream, or writhe in agony as he fell to the ground. He just….

 

Stopped. Completely, and very fatally.

 

The judge didn’t have time to say anything before several guards lifted their weapons and started shooting. I ducked under the table I was sitting at, and several people in the audience screamed. Loki didn’t react at all, though. The bullets didn’t affect him. It was hard to say exactly what was going on; they weren’t ricocheting off him, and they weren’t making holes in him. It was more like they hit him and just vanished.

 

The guards stopped shooting and lowered their weapons, looking scared and confused. “Thank you for your courtesy,” Loki said sarcastically. “The next person to try something like that gets turned into something.”

 

One guard, braver or dumber than the rest, lifted his pistol again. Loki gestured slightly, and he hit the ground with a sort of squishing sound. At a glance it looked like parts of him had been turned inside out, exposing muscle and bone to the air. He flopped a couple of times and then went still.

 

“Excellent,” Loki said. “Perhaps now we can continue without further interruption. Oh, and don’t bother trying to call for help. I’ve taken the liberty of co-opting all outgoing communication for the time being. What happens here will be seen and heard by most of the world, so do try to remember that what you do now will be recorded for posterity.”

 

I wasn’t totally sure that last bit was directed at me, but I went ahead and got out from under the table anyway.

 

“What are you doing?” the judge asked. To her credit, she sounded completely composed, despite what had just happened.

 

“I’m making a public service announcement,” Loki said, grinning. “Many of you know who I am,” he continued, turning to face the cameras. “For the rest, just rest assured that I do have the authority to say what I’m saying. And what I’m saying is this. The experiment is over. The grand masquerade which has been the rule of the game for the past several centuries has run its course. Anything your various superiors have ever told you about preserving the innocence of the poor, ignorant little mortals is null and void. If they tell you otherwise, tell them to take it up with me.”

 

“I don’t understand,” the judge said.

 

“Don’t worry, dear. This message isn’t meant for the likes of you. Now, where was I?” He grinned. “Ah, yes. As I was saying, the age of the dull and mundane is ended. The time of rationalism is passed. The gods have spoken, and we tell our children to let fall the reins, take off the muzzles, and let it all out.”

 

“That’s fine,” I said. “But what about me?”

 

He turned and smiled at me. “I just told you that many of the rules no longer apply,” he said. “So I recommend that you be yourself. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a cage.” Then he turned and walked back out of the room, vaulting the barrier again on his way. He was whistling while he did, something catchy that I couldn’t place.

 

“Fine,” I sighed, standing. “Be that way.”

 

A moment’s concentration brought Tyrfing to my hand. A flick of my wrist sent the sheath spinning off under the prosecutor’s table; another and the chain between my hands was broken. I went ahead and cut the ankle cuffs as well, then carefully slid the blade under the tracking bracelet.

 

“Winter?” Alan asked, his voice the careful, gentle tone you use around people on ledges. “What are you doing?”

 

“I’m not going back to a cage,” I said absently, working the sword under the bracelet. I nicked myself, but it wasn’t a big deal. One more scar wouldn’t stand out on my left hand. Tyrfing slid through the bracelet like it was made of butter, and I switched to the other side, separating the bracelet into two semicircles.

 

Then I switched hands, and looked down with some dismay. I’d never been good left-handed, and between the scarring and the silver, I was even clumsier now. The idea of trying to cut the other bracelet off like that was…unsettling.

 

Then, unexpectedly, Alan spoke up. “Here,” he said. “Let me hold that for you.”

 

I eyed him for a moment, then shrugged and handed over the sword. I was half-expecting him to try and stab me with it, but he held it rock steady for me as I cut the other bracelet off.

 

“Thanks,” I said, taking the sword back. “I really am sorry about all this.”

 

“Don’t be,” he said. “Honestly, I was expecting something of the sort.” He smiled wryly. “Although not this extreme, I admit. In any case, I know that this likely wasn’t your fault. It’s been a pleasure working with you.”

 

“The pleasure is all mine,” I assured him. “And I’ll see that you get a nice bonus, as well.”

 

“In that case, it’s been a very great pleasure working with you.”

 

I grinned, then walked out into the storm. Nobody tried to stop me.

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Unclean Hands 9.19

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The next several days passed in a blur. My routine was very simple. I woke up at dawn every morning, more out of habit than anything; with no windows I couldn’t see the sun, and the lights in my cell never went off. I exercised for about an hour, at which point it was time for breakfast. “Breakfast,” it turned out, was a sort of imitation egg that appeared to have been made from a powdered mix, served with white bread. To say that it tasted like shit would be an insult to shit.

 

After breakfast, I spent some time looking through the eyes of various animals, keeping myself abreast of what was going on in the area. At first I was limited to the streets around the police station, but it didn’t take long for me to fix that. They had the place closed down to keep me in isolation, after all, and while there were always some guards on site, that still left large sections of the building basically empty. With a little bit of guidance from me, those areas were soon occupied by a pair of raccoons, an adolescent fox, and quite a number of rats. They left to get food on a regular basis—apparently prison food was too bad even for their standards—but they came back for the promise of easy shelter.

 

Checking up on conditions inside and outside the building kept me busy until lunch, which was a sandwich of the driest meat I’d ever seen pressed between more white bread, mushy peas, and powdered milk that had been reconstituted with considerably too much water. Once I’d choked that down, I didn’t have much to do with myself, so I mostly paced until dinnertime.

 

Dinner, somehow, managed to be even less pleasant than the other meals. Apparently it consisted of whatever happened to be left over from the previous day mashed together, scraped into a pan, and baked until it had the approximate consistency of shoe leather. Vile did not begin to describe the result.

 

Once that was done with, I laid down on the mattress and tossed and turned until exhaustion was sufficient to overcome the effects of nausea and those goddamn lights which never turned off. I wouldn’t have expected that to bother me nearly as much as it did. Finally I managed to drift off to a restless, fitful sleep.

 

Around six hours later, the cycle began again.

 

I kept meticulous track of the days, mostly just to keep myself grounded in the passage of time. Thus, I knew that it had been five days since Alan’s visit when a pair of guards approached the cell again. Aside from the silent man who brought my meals three times a day and then returned later to take the tray, they were the first people I’d seen since that visit.

 

“Hi,” I said, looking at them closely. I didn’t think I’d seen either of them before, although I recognized both from my routine surveillance of the area. “What’s up?”

 

“You have a visitor,” one of them said. Her voice was rough, and even by comparison to the other guards she seemed unfriendly. “Let’s go.”

 

Which was suspicious and weird as hell, but by this point, I was so glad to get out of that damn cell that I didn’t care. I felt almost cheerful as I followed them back to the same interrogation room as before. This time they handcuffed my wrists to the table before leaving. I had enough room to lean back comfortably, but lifting my arms more than a few inches from the table was impossible.

 

Maybe five minutes later, just when a person might be wondering if they were being left there to rot, the door opened again and a youngish man walked in. Luckily one of my rats had been close enough to overhear most of the conversation between him and the chief of police outside, so I really wasn’t concerned about the wait.

 

“Good morning, Mr. Wolf,” he said, smiling. It was a charming smile, but there was something almost plastic about it. It very much gave the impression that he was smiling not out of any real feeling, but because he knew it was a charming smile and he wanted me to be charmed.

 

“Good morning,” I said. “And please, call me Winter.”

 

“All right, Winter,” he said, sitting down opposite me. “My name’s Mike.”

 

“So what did you want to talk about?” I asked, smiling. My smile was probably less charming than his. I’m not really very good at charming smiles.

 

“I thought we could chat, maybe get to know you a little.”

 

“Ah,” I said. “So…you’re not with my lawyer or you’d have said so off the bat, you’re not hostile enough to be with the cops, you aren’t smooth enough to be a real interrogator. I’d be inclined to guess district attorney or something like that…but no, they would have a more aggressive opening too. The first thing you mention is wanting to know more about me, which suggests your job is to provide information. So…I’m guessing you’re a psychologist?”

 

He didn’t say anything, but his smile slipped a little. I grinned. “Hey, I got it right,” I said cheerfully.

 

There were times when it was really nice to hear conversations you aren’t present for. The rat hadn’t been able to hear every word they said, but it had been enough for me to make some educated guesses—which, in turn, let me do a really great Sherlock impression. Which might not be useful, but the expression on his face was priceless.

 

“Why would you think that I’m a psychologist?” he asked, trying to regain his composure.

 

I shrugged, the motion made somewhat awkward by the cuffs. “It makes sense if my lawyer’s considering an insanity plea,” I said. “Which might not be a bad idea, really.”

 

“Why would that be a good idea?”

 

I snorted. “Have you read my file, doc?”

 

“Yes,” he admitted. “It looks like you were diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia, and paranoid personality disorder. The psychologist at the time also made a note regarding the possibility of antisocial personality disorder, but since you were underage, it wasn’t diagnosed.”

 

“See?” I said, shrugging again. “If you’ve got a history like that, and you’ve got a list of charges like mine, ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ starts to sound pretty tempting. Sure, it’s a long shot, but what isn’t?”

 

“Do you feel that you’re insane, then?”

 

“I don’t know. Define insanity.”

 

“To be legally insane, you would have to either not know what you were doing, or not realize that what you were doing was wrong.”

 

“Ah,” I said. “And…how would I go about proving those?”

 

“We aren’t talking about proof right now,” he said. “I just want to know what you think.”

 

“Okay,” I said, grinning. “Starting with the first one, you right away run into problems with definitions again. Do I have to not know what I’m doing, or can I know what I’m doing but be wrong? Like, if I based my decision on information that seemed legit at the time, but turned out to be wildly inaccurate?”

 

“That would qualify,” he said. “But only if the reason you thought that information was accurate had to do with your mental illness.”

 

I thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “In that case, I guess I do qualify. There have definitely been times when I thought someone was out to get me, but it turned out to be baseless. That’s pretty typical for paranoids, right?”

 

“That’s a common symptom,” he agreed. “Would you mind giving me some examples?”

 

I hesitated. “It depends. This is all confidential, right? Off the record?”

 

“That’s right,” he confirmed. “Let’s take a look at the first crime you’re charged with, since your lawyer told me you aren’t planning to fight that one. Apparently you murdered your girlfriend?”

 

“I told him,” I said irritably. “I didn’t kill her, I just knew that it was happening.”

 

“It’s okay,” he said soothingly. “I’m not asking you to confess to anything. I just want to know whether, in your opinion, that was one of the situations we’re talking about.” I was a little surprised, but his voice actually did calm me down a little bit. Guy was good at his job, I had to give him that.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, that’s one of them. I thought she was out to get me—which she was, in a way, but in hindsight I don’t think she could have done anything about it.”

 

“I see,” he said. “And is that why you killed her?”

 

“I didn’t kill her,” I repeated. “And if you think repeating the question is going to change my answer, you’re wrong.” I paused and took a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway, yes, that’s part of why I let it happen. She’d also upset a pretty major organization, and I knew that if I tried to protect her they’d just come after me, too. So I don’t really think of it as letting her die, so much as choosing not to die with her.”

 

“I see,” he repeated. “And this organization, can you tell me a little more about them? Do you think they’re still out to get you?”

 

“No,” I said. “No, we’re on pretty good terms. I think we are, anyway; they might be a little upset that I got myself arrested. They frown on that.”

 

He considered me for a moment. “I hate to ask this,” he said at last, and I got the impression that he might actually be telling the truth. “But are you tailoring your answers to fit the diagnosis?”

 

“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “I mean, I know I’d probably say that either way, but I’m really not. Honestly, I just don’t care enough to bother.”

 

“Why not?”

 

I shrugged. “If they find me guilty, they’ll put me in a prison for the rest of my life. If they say I’m insane, they’ll put me in an asylum for the rest of my life. It doesn’t really make much of a difference. Either way, it’s a cage. I don’t like cages.”

 

“But in an asylum, you could get treatment.”

 

I snorted. “In my experience, psychiatry is a massive waste of time for everyone involved. No offense.”

 

“I see,” he said. “Would that also be why you stopped taking your medications several years ago?”

 

“Oh. Heh. I actually forgot about those. Yeah, I actually stopped quite a while before I dropped the prescription. It must have been almost twenty years now? Yeah.”

 

“May I ask why?”

 

“Sure,” I said. “They weren’t doing any good. The antidepressants made me feel worse, and the antipsychotics just made me feel ill.”

 

“I see,” he said again. “Would you consider trying them again if I wrote a prescription for you? They’ve made great strides in the drug development world since you last tried them. I think you’ll find that your experiences this time are much more positive than before.”

 

I shrugged. “Sure, if you want. I wouldn’t count on it.”

 

“Okay,” he said, standing. “I’ll clear it with the police and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks for your time, Winter.”

 

“No problem,” I said. “Oh, and Dr. Buckley?” He paused and turned back towards me. I grinned. “I just wanted to apologize,” I said. “In case this whole thing reflects poorly on you, afterward.”

 

I could see it when he realized that he’d never told me his last name. He shivered, just a little, and then turned and left, closing the door behind himself more forcefully than was strictly necessary.

 

I grinned and leaned back in my chair, waiting for the guards to come back and collect me. It can be very nice to overhear conversations without being present.

 

With that in mind, I relaxed and let myself drift. The rat I’d been using previously had moved on, but the fox was napping in the room upstairs. It’s ears were plenty sharp enough to catch the conversation going on below it.

 

“He’s definitely crazy,” the psychologist was saying. “But it’s a really odd sort of crazy. Like, he’s very polite, friendly, pleasant—and still makes it clear he could kill you as easily as look at you.”

 

“Aren’t you people supposed to have fancy words for that sort of thing?” the police chief replied, sounding amused.

 

“Would you understand them if I did?” There was a brief pause. “Anyway, I’m going to have some antipsychotics sent in. Try putting them in his food or something, we’ll see if they seem to help.”

 

“Did he consent to that?”

 

“Yeah. But I don’t know if he’d actually take them, if you just give him the pills.”

 

I smiled, and didn’t argue when the guards came in to escort me back to my cell.


 

Days passed, first at a crawl and then in a blur. I took to spending more and more time outside my body, drifting between other minds at will. Sometimes I spent hours as a passive observer in a single cat’s mind, following the slow stalk of a rodent. Other times I flitted from one animal to the next, barely taking in a single glimpse before moving on, or else diffused myself across multiple animals, parsing the sensations and feelings I got from them into a single gestalt.

 

I continued to exercise on a regular basis, although I did so more or less on autopilot. I couldn’t do very much, in any case; everything from the elbows down ached by now from the silver. I was strangely fatigued all the time, and my immune system was suppressed to such an extent that I caught a cold for the first time since I became a werewolf. On the whole, leaving my body was a welcome escape.

 

Sometimes I ate the food they gave me, but more often I didn’t bother. Already terrible, it tasted even worse when compared to the flavors I was getting from other bodies. I tried to remember to eat at least once daily, but I often forgot to. At some point they started giving me better food, but by then it was too little, too late; they could have been serving my favorite meals fresh from a four-star restaurant and I probably wouldn’t have eaten them with any more regularity.

 

Occasionally I had visitors. The lawyer—Alan, his name was—dropped by every few days to check on me. I managed to carry on a conversation, but I knew that I was coming across as listless and distractible. I managed to pay just enough attention to learn that he had indeed begun an insanity defense, and the first hearing date had been set.

 

Probably because of that, more psychologists and psychiatrists visited, as well. I wasn’t sure whether the first one returned or not. I paid less attention in those conversations, letting myself drift more completely. Sometimes I replied when they asked me questions. Sometimes I didn’t.

 

Occasionally, although not as often as I’d have guessed, people tried to interrogate me. On those occasions, I said nothing at all, and left just enough of my awareness in my body that I could tell what was going on. Sometimes they played the good cop. Sometimes they tried screaming in my face, or walking around behind me while someone else talked. None of them got a reaction.

 

On three occasions a cop hit me, twice in the abdomen and once in the face. Another time someone tried to waterboard me during my weekly shower. I didn’t react to those, either; in comparison to some of what I’d been through, they just didn’t make an impression. I didn’t see any of those cops again, and from overheard conversations I gathered that they’d been harshly disciplined.

 

The strangest thing was that the hard part, for me, wasn’t the bad food, the isolation, the occasional interrogation. It wasn’t even the confinement.

 

No, the hard part was knowing that I could make it stop. Knowing that, at any given moment, I could say a word and it would all go away. Hell, I could probably think Loki’s name hard enough and he would come.

 

But I didn’t. I knew what the consequences would be. I knew what the price would be. If I made that choice, heads would roll.

 

I could handle it, I told myself. Normal people went through this all the time. I could handle it until my hearing.

 

Because, somewhere in that blur of time, I’d made a decision. I could wait until the hearing. I could do that. I could see how that went, what happened.

 

And after that? If they tried to put me back in a cage?

 

Heads were going to roll.

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Unclean Hands 9.18

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Maybe half an hour later, a pair of guards came in. I was pretty sure one was the same guy who’d searched me; the other was new. Both of them were armed, although they had pistols and Tasers rather than military-grade hardware.

 

“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

 

“Your lawyer got here,” the one I recognized said. “We’re taking you to meet with him.”

 

“Cool,” I said, standing and walking over to the door. They let me out and then escorted me down the hallway, up the stairs, and through a heavy steel door. They made it clear that any sudden movements on my part would not be appreciated, and I was very much aware of their presence flanking me. At least they didn’t feel a need to handcuff me for the walk.

 

Inside, I found myself in a small, sparse room. The only really notable features were a metal table bolted to the floor, a pair of battered wooden chairs at that table, and extremely obvious security cameras in the upper corners of the room. I’d expected there to be a mirror, with more cops watching from the other side, but apparently that had been phased out in favor of the cameras.

 

I sat in one of the chairs and the guards took up positions by the doors. Maybe a minute later, the door opened again and a guy in a suit walked in. He was maybe in his sixties, with a confident demeanor and steely gaze that suggested it would be wise not to underestimate him.

 

“Good morning,” he said. “I apologize for not getting here sooner. I didn’t hear about your arrest until this morning.” From his tone, and the way he looked at the two guards while he said it, I gathered he was rather offended by that.

 

“No worries,” I said easily. “I guess you wanted to talk to me?”

 

“Yes,” he said, looking at the guards. “Gentlemen, this is a confidential discussion with my client. I would appreciate it if you waited outside.”

 

The talkative guy frowned. “This man is dangerous,” he said. “He’s supposed to be under armed guard.”

 

“There’s only one exit from this room. You can wait at the end of the hall.”

 

“That would put you in danger,” the cop insisted stubbornly.

 

“I’ll take my chances. Oh, and turn off the cameras, too.”

 

They complied, albeit reluctantly, and the guy in the suit sat down across from me and set a paper bag on the table. From the smell of it, the bag had some kind of meat in it, which reminded me rather intensely that I hadn’t eaten since last night.

 

“Good morning, Mr. Wolf,” he said. “I brought you some breakfast, if you’d like.”

 

“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the bag without waiting to be told twice. “And call me Winter.”

 

He smiled. “You’re quite welcome. My name is Alan, by the way.”

 

“You aren’t quite how I pictured a public defender,” I said, my mouth already full of sandwich. It was pretty bad, a cheap steak sandwich from a fast food restaurant, and at that moment it tasted like heaven.

 

He pulled a clipboard out of his briefcase and set it on the table before replying, “Oh, I’m not a public defender. I work for a criminal defense firm here in the city.”

 

I paused. “Who hired you?” I found it a little hard to believe that an actual lawyer would have taken this case willingly.

 

“A pleasant young woman named Selene,” he said. “I was actually planning to retire at the end of the month, but this was simply too interesting to pass up on.” He smiled. “And also she paid cash.”

 

“Ah,” I said, relaxing a little. That explained it. Money could work wonders when it came to making people cooperative, not to mention that Selene was one of the more persuasive people I’d met. “That’s good, then.”

 

“That you have a personal lawyer, rather than a public defender?”

 

“And also that you’re about to retire. I can’t imagine representing me is the sort of thing that would be good for your career.”

 

He sighed. “I take it you aren’t optimistic about your chances, then.”

 

I snorted. “With what I’m accused of? No, not really.”

 

“Well, I suppose that’s our cue to move on to business,” he said dryly. “Did they tell you what you’re charged with?”

 

I shrugged. “Maybe. I might have been asleep for that part of the conversation.”

 

“All right,” he said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of his briefcase. “I’m going to just run down their list of charges, then. I want you to comment on whether they’re accurate. Don’t worry about whether they can prove it or not just yet; I just want your gut impression on whether the charges are true or not.”

 

I glanced at the cameras. “You sure that’s a good idea?” I asked. “They might be listening.”

 

He smiled. “I doubt it. They’re smart enough not to try and use evidence from a confidential discussion with your attorney.”

 

“Okay,” I said, shrugging. “You’re the expert.”

 

“Thank you. First up, premeditated murder of Catherine Lynch. Yes, no, maybe?”

 

I frowned. That was…something I hadn’t thought about in quite a while, actually. It was almost funny; for a long time I’d felt incredibly guilty about it, but now there was just a sort of quiet regret.

 

I supposed I had worse things on my conscience, now.

 

Alan was expecting an answer, though, so I nodded. “Sort of,” I said. “I didn’t kill her, but I knew it was happening.”

 

“Right,” he said, making a note on the paper. “If we can show that someone else did it, we might be able to talk that one down to a conspiracy charge. The evidence is fairly thorough, so I don’t know that we could get it dismissed entirely. Moving on, it looks like a charge of assault against a Jason Hoover.”

 

“I don’t know him.”

 

The lawyer looked at the paper. “He’s an inmate at a correctional facility,” he said. “Looks like he filed a report shortly before his arrest claiming that you threatened to, and I quote, ‘cut off his nose and feed it to a dog,’ end quote.”

 

“Oh,” I said. “That guy. Yeah, that one’s accurate. Does that count as assault? I thought you had to hit someone for that.”

 

“You’re thinking of battery,” he said absently, writing another note in his file. “Assault can cover any plausible threat of violence. Okay, I think that one we can probably get dismissed. It’s your word against his, and considering that he was convicted of hate crimes and complicity in numerous murder cases, his word isn’t so strong. Next up, voluntary manslaughter of Preston Balstad.”

 

“Who’s that?”

 

“Apparently he tried to rob a restaurant you were eating in. You threw a rock at him and killed him. They’re claiming it was unnecessary force that you knew to be in excess of what was needed to defend yourself.”

 

“Right, I remember that now. Yeah, that one’s accurate too.”

 

He nodded. “Again, I think that one can probably be dismissed. There are multiple witnesses agreeing that he stated his intent to kill people based on their membership in a social group, which means we can spin it as a hate crime. Under the circumstances we can probably get them to dismiss that as reasonable force for self-defense purposes. Next, we have the false imprisonment and premeditated murder of Olivia Robbins.”

 

“Guilty.” There wasn’t much more to say on that topic.

 

Alan seemed to agree with me, since he just nodded and made another note before flipping the page. “Continuing, we have…twenty-three counts of second degree murder, a few days later.”

 

I tried to figure out what he was talking about, and realized it must be when I took down Jon. He’d had a lot of human mercenaries with him, and while I’d tried not to kill them, I hadn’t had that much choice.

 

“Guilty,” I said. “For some of them. Not sure how many. How do they even know about this?”

 

He looked at the paper. “It looks like they have testimony from an undercover police officer,” he said. “Someone named Enrico Rossi? Frankly, I doubt they’ll even bother prosecuting this. All they have is testimony from one person who can’t appear as a witness. No actual evidence.”

 

I didn’t care. This was…well, further evidence that the man I’d been friends with really was just there to take me down. Not very pleasant to hear.

 

“Next, we have one count of arson on the same day.”

 

“Yeah,” I said.

 

“Again, they don’t have much evidence linking you to it. Next, the premeditated murder of the same officer, Enrico Rossi.”

 

“That was a suicide,” I said, unable to keep some of the anger from entering my voice. “I wouldn’t have killed him.”

 

 

“All right. It does look suspicious, however, in light of comments he made to his supervisors. Moving on, there’s an obstruction of justice charge a short time later. Something about falsely reporting a hostage situation?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Did it, didn’t think anything would come of it.” I frowned. “I didn’t make the call, though. How do they know I had anything to do with that?”

 

He scanned the paper. “It doesn’t specify,” he said. “We can press them on that, if it comes to it. They’ll probably drop the charge. Next, tampering with evidence in a murder trial.”

 

“Yeah. I took it from storage. It was…yeah.”

 

He nodded. “All right. Next, premeditated murder with extreme brutality of Erica Reilly.”

 

“Didn’t do it,” I said.

 

“That might be difficult to demonstrate,” Alan said mildly. “Considering that there are multiple reports suggesting that you claimed otherwise at the time.”

 

I winced. In hindsight, getting on Pellegrini’s good side seemed…less than worth it.

 

“Continuing,” he said briskly. “We have twelve counts of second degree murder. The bodies were found in a house in northern Colorado Springs, dead from a wide variety of causes.”

 

It took a moment to figure out what he was talking about. The only thing I could think of was the house full of rakshasas and their slaves, which de Sousa had wiped out. For once, I hadn’t had anything to do with it. “I didn’t do that one,” I said.

 

Alan looked at me doubtfully. “This is the only one where they have DNA evidence to support it,” he said gently. “The chances of you getting out of it are…very slim.”

 

I shrugged. “That’s fine. I’m just saying, I didn’t do it. I honestly have no idea why my DNA would have been there.”

 

He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Moving on, it looks like…thirty-six counts of extortion, over a period ranging from shortly after those murders up until the present.”

 

“A protection racket,” I explained, feeling almost grateful to hear one that I could clearly place. “Although I should point out that all of them volunteered.”

 

“Right,” he said, making another note. “And…it looks like that brings us up to the big one. Three counts of domestic terrorism, two around a year and a half ago and one last week.”

 

I blinked. “That’s all?” I asked. “I was expecting they’d hit me with, like, a thousand murder charges for that or something.”

 

Alan sighed. “Mr. Wolf—Winter—I don’t think you entirely grasp the magnitude of what you’re dealing with. The minimum sentence for even one conviction of premeditated murder is life in prison. That’s the minimum sentence. Considering the number of charges against you, I think there’s a very real possibility of capital punishment. I would strongly recommend you take this seriously.”

 

“Oh, I am,” I assured him. “I just think it’s funny. Did they just get tired of writing out murder charges or something? Oh,” I added as an afterthought, “and also I didn’t do that. The terrorism bit, I mean.”

 

“I believe you. But considering the amount of evidence they have, and the fact that you’ve avoided arrest for so long, it’s questionable whether anyone else will.” He looked over the papers again, then folded them and put them back in his briefcase. “It looks like that’s everything,” he said. “Now, as your attorney, may I offer you some advice?”

 

I shrugged. “You’re the expert. Why hire an expert you aren’t going to listen to?”

 

He smiled. “You’d be surprised how many people do. Anyway, Winter, I would advise you to seriously consider plea bargaining. I’m confident that I can get you off of many of these charges, but the ones I might not be able to are among the more serious. If you take the plea bargain, you can probably get your sentence reduced to life imprisonment without parole. If it goes to a jury trial, there’s a very good chance that you’ll get the death penalty.”

 

“No offense, but that sounds considerably more pleasant than life in prison.”

 

“If you’re sure,” he said. “It’s your choice. Anyway, I’m going to consult with some of the partners at my firm and see if we can come up with another option. In the meantime, I strongly recommend you think about what I said.”


 

Maybe half an hour later, I was lying on the mattress in my cell. There was still nobody around, although any illusion of privacy was ruined by the cameras. There was the constant feeling of being watched, as though there were someone looking over my shoulder.

 

Still, there was something different right then. I still felt like being watched, but all of a sudden there was also the feeling of presence, like I wasn’t alone anymore.

 

It was a vague feeling, but I hadn’t lived this long by ignoring vague feelings. I immediately froze and looked around the room, trying to find any slight anomalies.

 

It only took a couple seconds to figure out what it was. There was a presence in the air, something I couldn’t see or hear, but which smelled like magic in the gentle tones of a morning breeze passing through the forest.

 

“Hello,” I said, looking its general direction. I was tensed now, ready to move. Air spirits were generally harmless, but I’d rather not take chances under the circumstances. “Do you have something to tell me?”

 

The spirit’s mind brushed gently against mine, conveying meaning and ideas without really shaping it into words. I got an image of Aiko—not a visual image, per se, more a summary description of who she was, her shape, her scent, the way her magic felt as it brushed against the air spirit. I felt frustration, regret, disgust. I got an impression of freedom, and then a sense of offering, of question.

 

I thought for a moment and then returned the idea of negation, rejection, refusal. I added feelings of caution, patience, and confidence, then topped it off with another sense of question, of request. This last was directed to the air spirit specifically, requesting that it return my reply to Aiko.

 

It hovered there for a moment longer, then vanished. It was hard to be sure whether it would do what I’d asked—air spirits are flighty, and almost mindless—but I suspected it would. Air spirits tend to do what Aiko asks them to.

 

If I got lucky, she might not decide to break me out anyway. At the moment, that seemed like a bad idea.

 

If I got even luckier, I wouldn’t regret asking her not to.

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Interlude 7.b: Axel Schneider

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I was a little nervous as I knocked on the door. Okay, I was more than just a little nervous, and I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t. An apartment building was a hell of an odd place for an interview, and it wasn’t the only odd thing about this, either. Everything about it stank.

 

But what could you do? I’d been looking for weeks, and there was no other work to be had as a psychologist. There was no other work to be had, period. I’d gotten by on savings, odd jobs, and little bit of help from friends, but that couldn’t last forever. It was already November, and it was shaping up to be a cold winter. I couldn’t lose my apartment now.

 

And, whatever my misgivings, they were offering good money. Too good money, that was part of the problem; when a job pays that kind of money, there’s a reason for it. But beggars can’t be choosers, so I’d put aside my doubts and applied.

 

And now I was knocking on the door, and trying not to feel like I’d made the wrong choice.

 

“Come in,” a woman said after a moment. I complied, and found myself in a small, dimly lit room. The only person there was a woman sitting on an old stool who stared at me as I walked in the door, and for a moment I thought I must have gotten the wrong apartment.

 

Then I noticed how she was staring. It wasn’t a look of surprise, or confusion, but rather appraisal, as though I were a horse she was considering purchasing. “So you are Dr. Schneider,” she said in German. “You seem young for a man of your credentials.”

 

“Yes ma’am,” I replied. “I graduated from university this year.”

 

“I am aware. I trust you will not argue if this interview is conducted in German, rather than English?”

 

“No ma’am,” I said, trying to hide my relief. One of the few things I knew about this job was that they wanted someone fluent in English, and I wouldn’t have even applied if I weren’t. But I was just as grateful that I could do the interview in my native language.

 

From her shrewd smile, I didn’t think my gratitude had gone unnoticed. “Good,” she said. “Looking over your record, it shows that you did your time in the military.”

 

“I served my nation and the Party, ma’am,” I said, somewhat stiffly. Better to be thought stiff than indifferent, on that particular topic.

 

“Yes, yes,” she said, in a tone of barely veiled boredom. I was somewhat taken aback by that. I didn’t feel terribly strongly about national loyalty, but it wasn’t wise to do anything that could be construed as unpatriotic. No one smart wanted to be labeled a dissident.

 

“Continuing,” she said, before I could decide how or even if I should respond. “Were you injured during your service?” The last word had a touch of bite to it, almost of mockery. She was pushing the boundary of what could be said safely, and it made me nervous. You never knew who might be listening.

 

But I still really needed this job, so I bit back my first reply. “I broke my shoulder, ma’am,” I said instead, struggling to keep my composure. Something about this woman, her confident demeanor, was deeply off-putting.

 

“Residual injury? Something that would impair you physically?”

 

“No ma’am. Nothing like that.”

 

“Good,” she said, making a small note in her file. “And it doesn’t look like you have any dependents?”

 

“No ma’am.”

 

“Good,” she said again, making another note. “We would require you to travel frequently. Very frequently, both in and out of the country.”

 

“I don’t have an exit visa.” Leaving the country, even briefly, wasn’t an easy thing to arrange. They were scared you wouldn’t come back.

 

She waved one hand dismissively. “That isn’t a concern. Is the travel a problem otherwise?”

 

“No ma’am,” I said, thinking furiously. There was a very limited list of people who could disregard the absence of a visa that casually. Very limited. And even then, most of them wouldn’t invest that much in someone they hadn’t even hired yet.

 

She was Stasi, she had to be. Who else would do something like that? And it would explain why she wasn’t concerned about being reported for sedition, too. Why worry about someone listening in on you when you were the one who did the listening?

 

I tried not to think about what the Stasi would want a psychologist for. It wasn’t easy. Some of those images were…not the sort of thing you could just forget.

 

“Good,” she said with wintry smile. “Assuming you work out, I can have the visa next week. Now, I’m guessing you want to know a little more about what kind of work you’re going to be doing?”

 

I hesitated. On the one hand, I couldn’t really do the job without knowing, and that was obvious enough that I couldn’t pretend otherwise without seeming an idiot. On the other, if I did admit it, I was as good as asking for state secrets.

 

“Yes ma’am,” I said at last. Better to admit it, and she seemed the sort to appreciate bluntness.

 

“Good,” she said, still smiling. “I recently took over as the head of a certain group. My predecessors have traditionally been reluctant to hire outside help, but I’m something of a progressive. I think my people will keep their heads a little better with advice from an expert. Therapy, consultations, that sort of thing.”

 

I let my breath out and nodded. Not as bad as I’d thought, if she was telling the truth. “This organization,” I said. “Would it be affiliated with the government?”

 

The smile faded from her face. “Let’s just say,” she said, slowly and carefully, “that there isn’t an official relationship between us and the government. And let’s leave it at that. Yes?”

 

I nodded again. “Yes ma’am. I don’t think I have any other questions.”

 

She smiled again. “Excellent. So what do you say?”

 

It still stank, but I still needed the money, and there were worse things I could be doing. So I took a deep breath and said, “I’ll take the job.”

 

“Good. Someone will be by within the week to deliver the documents and introduce you to some people.”

 

“Thank you, ma’am.”

 

She smiled at me. “Call me Watcher,” she said, walking out the door.


 

Watcher was as good as her word. Within a few days I had an exit visa—or, more properly, several, in a variety of names. I had the passports to go with them. And, maybe most importantly, I’d met the people I was working for. There were five of them who I’d been told outranked me. If they gave me orders, I was to obey them unless they contradicted something Watcher had told me.

 

Much like Watcher herself, they seemed to have an aversion to actual names, preferring to go by odd monikers. Loophole was a tall, wiry man who spoke very good English, and apparently no German at all. Snake was shorter, more aggressive, and spoke both English and German with a thick Russian accent. Beast was muscular and apparently French, although her demeanor was much more pleasant than the name would suggest. Fox assured me that he was native Japanese, although his English was flawless. He was charming, in a gloomy sort of way, and I noticed that everyone seemed to like him.

 

And then there was Nobody. By far the most enigmatic of the group, he was an average-looking guy who always seemed to be wearing the same ill-fitting suit. I thought I’d heard him speak a total of ten words in the two days I spent with him. When I asked Beast about it later, she laughed and said that was typical of Nobody.

 

Everyone else was my equal as far as Watcher was concerned. Or rather, they weren’t—Beast and Loophole both made it very clear that I was the newest guy in the organization, and I’d be wise to remember that—but I wasn’t required to obey them. That was somewhat surprising to me. Considering that I wasn’t even a spy, I’d expected to be mocked and ridiculed, but instead everyone seemed to be treating me with a great deal of respect.

 

Over the next months, I eased into my new job. I soon learned that Watcher’s description of the travel involved was an understatement. I was in a new city almost every week, and not just in Germany, or even in Europe. No, I was expected to be in New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, Cape Town…the list went on, and that was in just a few months. Apparently I was supposed to meet with each person on their home ground, although even at the time I thought it odd that a German intelligence agency would be so very far-flung.

 

It was a pleasure working for them, though. It seemed that anything and everything I could want was easily obtained. I stayed in hotels when I traveled, and every expense was paid before I even checked in. I tentatively inquired about talking to some prominent psychologists who were developing novel methods of therapy, and a meeting was arranged within days.

 

All of which was very nice, but couldn’t quite distract me from the work itself. It wasn’t going well, to put it mildly. I’d met with about thirty of Watcher’s people by then, and I hadn’t been able to do a thing for any of them.

 

I almost wanted to write it off as inexperience, but I could see that the problem ran deeper than that. Almost everything they said was hesitant, and they regularly trailed off without finishing what they were saying. Every single one of them was talking around something, and that was making my job damn near impossible.

 

Granted, I’d expected that there would be things they wouldn’t want to say. I’d been hired to work as a shrink for a bunch of secret agents; it was a given that there would be secrets. But it’s one thing when there are topics you can’t discuss, and another when almost every sentence has a hole in it. You can’t even carry on a conversation like that, let alone build the kind of relationship a psychologist needed to have with his patients.

 

I wrestled with it for a week or two after I realized that it wasn’t getting better. It was risky to ask for more information—that was the kind of thing that made you look very much like a spy, and I had a strong suspicion that if they thought I was trying to spy on them I’d wind up in a ditch. But in the end I decided it was even riskier if they thought I was leeching on their generosity without doing my job, so I wrote a short letter asking for a meeting with Watcher. I thought this request might go over better in person.

 

Not that I knew where to send it. I hadn’t even seen Watcher since that first interview. So the next time Beast came to check up on me, after we’d gone over my instructions for the next week, I gave her the note and asked her to deliver it for me.

 

She took the letter, but didn’t leave. “You sure you want to do this?” she asked.

 

I hesitated. “Is it a bad idea?”

 

She shrugged and sighed. “It’s an idea. Good, bad, in between. We’ll see how it goes.” She reached out and patted me on the shoulder compassionately. “Don’t worry, Axel. I’m sure it will go over fine.”

 

I was less sanguine, especially after her initial reaction, but I still thought I was right about what was the smarter move. I tried to put it out of my mind. I went out and ate a nice dinner—paying out of pocket, although it had been made clear that this could also be written off as a business expense—before returning to my hotel room.

 

When I opened the door, I saw Watcher sitting in my room. The left half of her face was covered in claw marks, and her left eye was missing entirely. There was a cane leaning against her chair, as well, which she hadn’t brought to our last meeting.

 

“Good evening, Dr. Schneider,” she said.

 

“Good evening,” I replied, somewhat dumbfoundedly. I hadn’t expected a reply so soon, and I definitely hadn’t expected…this. “What happened to your face?”

 

Almost instantly, I wanted to kick myself. How idiotic did you have to be to ask that?

 

Watcher didn’t seem to care, though. “A dispute regarding leadership,” she said with a pleasant smile. “Which I won. What did you want to discuss?”

 

I took a deep breath and said, “Your people aren’t talking to me. I mean, they are, but there’s something they don’t want to talk about.”

 

“I’m aware,” she said mildly. “I gave very specific instructions on the topic.”

 

Watcher was clearly telling me to back off, but I’d come this far. “It isn’t working,” I said stubbornly. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can’t do my job if the patient won’t talk to me.”

 

She regarded me for a long, long moment. The tension in the room was so thick you could cut it with an axe, never mind a knife.

 

Then she smiled. “You’re the expert,” she said. “But you should know that once you learn this, there’s no backing out. Not now, not ever. Not even if you quit working for me. Understood?”

 

I nodded, letting out a sigh of relief. “Understood.”

 

“Good. So let’s start small, then. Tell me, Dr. Schneider, do you believe in magic?”


 

The bus came to a stop and I jolted awake, sitting up straight. I joined the crowd filing off the bus, trying not to yawn. For once I wasn’t on business, but I still wanted to be at least somewhat alert.

 

I’d barely gotten out of the crowd when Beast fell in beside me. “Hey, Axel,” she said. “How’s it going?”

 

“It’s going,” I said, rubbing my eyes. Too little sleep recently. “How about you?”

 

Beast was silent for a moment, and I knew it was bad news. “Lost another one,” she said at last. “Shapeshifter, turned into a cat. They realized he was listening in, and….” She shrugged and dragged one finger across her throat.

 

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I didn’t have to ask to know that they’d been friends. There weren’t many shapeshifters among the Watchers, and Beast was the best there was. Of course she’d known him.

 

It still seemed strange that I’d only known about this for half a year. It seemed like it should have taken longer than that to come to grips with the idea of magic. Oddly enough, though, being a scientist had made the transition considerably easier. I’d been trained to believe in induction and empirical evidence, and they’d presented plenty of that. Sure, it had seemed bizarre, but so was gravity when you thought about it. The universe wasn’t obligated to make sense.

 

“Enough about that,” Beast said with forced cheer. “Today’s supposed to be happy.” She grinned and slapped me on the back. “Happy birthday.”

 

I smiled and kept walking. The bar was only a block or so away, and we reached it pretty soon. Inside, there was already a fairly sizable group waiting for us. Loophole and Fox had both made time to come, as had maybe a dozen of the other Watchers.

 

Watcher herself wasn’t there, of course. I hadn’t seen her again, but from what I’d heard she had her hands full and then some trying to keep order. She’d made some unpopular decisions since taking over, being more restrictive and less willing to play politics, and the mage clans hadn’t liked it.

 

It was a good night, food and laughter and embarrassing stories for years to come. It was in a sense my induction into the Watchers, one of the guys despite not having any magic to call my own, and the festivities were appropriately grand. And later, when the party was breaking up and the bar was closing and Beast suddenly leaned over and kissed me, I was just drunk enough to return it.

 

It was a good night.


 

It didn’t take long after that for me to start breaking the Watchers problems down into two basic groups. The first was pretty normal. They were battered, worn down by a life of stress, violence, and paranoia, but they were still fairly normal. I worked on them with cognitive techniques, and in quite a few cases prescribed drugs, mostly antidepressants and sleeping aids. Quite a few of them were addicts, relying on alcohol or narcotics to quiet the memories of what they’d seen and done, and I ended up starting a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous group. It wasn’t perfect, but they were essentially normal psychiatric patients, and I did a passable job of helping them.

 

The other problems, though…they were a little different. Because they weren’t problems, not really. I wasn’t supposed to cure their paranoia, violent tendencies, and borderline psychopathy. Because too often, those were the only things that kept them alive.

 

For those, all I could really do was listen. Some of the Watchers were reluctant to discuss topics like that, and I didn’t push them. Most, though, seemed to actually find relief in telling me stories. It became something of a contest to shock me with them. This man had poisoned a teenage girl once; he’d tried to poison her father but she ate the soup that was meant for him. That one had roasted a suspect alive during an interrogation. A woman admitted that she’d allowed a vampire free reign over the slums of New Orleans in exchange for information.

 

After another several months of this, when I’d done all of the actual therapy that I felt I could, I wrote another letter to Watcher. Loophole passed this one along, since Watcher moved around so much that it might be weeks before she checked in at any of the addresses I had for her.

 

I hadn’t seen Beast for weeks, although we were still together. Shapeshifters were one of the most versatile tools in Watcher’s arsenal, capable of both spying and holding their own in a fight, and as a result Beast was always busy overseeing operations or taking to the field herself. Between that and how much time I spent traveling, our relationship was very much one of days or hours snatched where we could find them.

 

It was almost a week, this time, before Watcher found time to talk to me. She approached me in a restaurant while I was getting lunch on the way to my next flight.

 

“Dr. Schneider,” she said, and I could only admire her ability to remain polite under such intense stress. “What is it?”

 

“You don’t need a psychologist,” I said bluntly. Neither of us had time to waste on idle chatter. “Not for half these people, anyway. You need a priest. Half these people just want to confess things.”

 

She sighed. “That was my first idea,” she agreed. “But there’s something you’re overlooking.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Yes,” she said, sounding very weary. “In this profession, you do a lot of things you’d rather not share with God. A lot of things. It’s easier to admit to a psychologist.” It didn’t sound like she was speaking in hypotheticals.

 

I nodded slowly, and fled the restaurant as quickly as I could.


 

I closed my eyes, grimaced, opened them again. My head hurt. My back hurt. I’d spent hours in this chair, and it wasn’t a comfortable chair, either. Not to mention that I had another job coming up, something that I hadn’t done before.

 

Hard to believe three years had happened so quickly. But that was the way of time, I supposed.

 

Hours later I was sitting in my hotel room. It was a familiar room; I’d been to this cheap hotel more times than I wanted to remember. London wasn’t my favorite city, but it was one of the Watchers’, and that meant I visited often.

 

It was late and I knew I should be sleeping, but I could also tell that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. I spent my time looking over the dossier for the man I was going to meet in the morning instead. If I couldn’t sleep, I could at least use the time productively.

 

His name was Michael Sheridan, age sixteen, American. He’d fallen in with a bad crowd and gotten involved with vaguely specified criminal activities. Eventually one of his buddies went too far and killed someone, and Sheridan had decided to report it to the Watchers. How he knew to contact the Watchers wasn’t specified. It wasn’t important.

 

What was important was what happened next. They’d gone in to shut the gang down, only to find that it was being sponsored by someone else. I didn’t know who that someone was, only that they were highly placed within the mage clans. As a result, the gang had far more knowledge and equipment than had been expected.

 

Snake had been leading the team personally, which was probably the only reason things hadn’t turned into an absolute disaster. As it was there were three Watchers in the hospital, and most of the kids had been killed in the fight. Sheridan claimed that he hadn’t known anything about what they were planning.

 

I would have been suspicious of that, but apparently Loophole had examined him and it was true. I wasn’t going to argue with that. Loophole was old—older, now—but he was still one of the best telepaths the Watchers had. If he said the kid was telling the truth, the kid was telling the truth.

 

Which made it problematic that he wanted to join the Watchers. It was suspicious, and even if he hadn’t set us up he might have been damaged by his association with the gang. At the same time, though, the Watchers couldn’t afford to turn anyone down right now.

 

I knew that as well as anyone. An awful lot of the people I was accustomed to talking with had stopped showing up to their sessions recently. Even Beast had been found in an alley in Shanghai last week, riddled with bullets. It hadn’t been enough to kill a shapeshifter of her caliber, thank God, but it would be a while before she was up and walking again.

 

And Watcher wanted me to screen Sheridan before they let him join. A potentially valuable, potentially disastrous kid wanted to sign up to help fight the bad guys, and I was the one who was supposed to make the call.

 

Good God. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

 

The next morning I walked into the restaurant five minutes early. He was already there, which surprised me a little. I wasn’t accustomed to young people showing up early. Hell, I certainly hadn’t when I was his age.

 

“Good morning,” I said, sliding into the booth opposite him. The photo in the dossier had been generally accurate, although he was wearing a dress shirt and slacks rather than jeans and leather. “You’re Michael, correct?”

 

“Mike,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously. “And you are?”

 

“My name is Axel Schneider,” I said, smiling. “You can call me Axel or Dr. Schneider, whichever you prefer. Would you like some food?”

 

He hesitated, then nodded. I waved a waitress over and he ordered a full English breakfast.

 

I was sticking to coffee. My stomach was still in knots over what had happened to Beast, never mind my own work.

 

“Okay, Mike,” I said. “I’m guessing you know why I’m here.”

 

“Yeah. You’re the one who decides if I get in, right?”

 

“Essentially, although I should stress that I’m just one opinion. Now, could you tell me a little about why you want to join the Watchers?”

 

He shrugged. “I fucked up,” he said simply. “I mean, big time. I got people killed. This seems like a good way to try and make up for that, you know?”

 

“Right,” I said. “You feel it’s your fault that people died, then?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding uncomfortable. “I mean, I didn’t do it, so I guess not? But it feels like it was. Like I should have been, I don’t know. Better.”

 

“You regret joining that gang, then.”

 

“Yeah,” he said, then a moment later, “no. I don’t know. It was the right decision at the time, I guess. But I regret the way it ended.”

 

“How was it the right decision?”

 

“Well, I’ve got this power, right? And I figured the only real options are to spend the rest of my life wondering whether I’m crazy, or learn something about it. Figure out what it is, how it works.”

 

I nodded. “So you joined them because it was a place you could fit in? Come to terms with your power and what it could do?”

 

“Yeah. You could say that.” He grinned weakly. “They actually made a lot of fun of me about it. They’re throwing fireballs and stopping bullets, and all I can do is move water around. But I guess I learned quite a bit, really.”

 

“Right,” I said. “So tell me the truth. Do you really want to join the Watchers to help people? Or is it because we’re the best source you have for learning how to control your magic?”

 

He squirmed under my gaze, looking at the floor. “A little of both,” he admitted.

 

I’d been planning on recommending against letting him in, but that line changed my mind. I’d seen plenty of Watchers who’d signed up to help people. By and large they had pretty serious problems—depression, guilt, stress disorders. They wanted to do good and it hit them hard when they realized that most of what the Watchers did wasn’t very good at all.

 

Somebody who wanted power, on the other hand?

 

That was worth considering.


 

I was a little surprised when Loophole sent me a message asking me to meet him in New York. I hadn’t seen him in years; Watcher had long since recognized that I didn’t need babysat. I mostly set my own schedule anymore.

 

I was more surprised when I found the designated meeting place, and Watcher was there too.

 

“Dr. Schneider,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

 

I wondered whether that was supposed to be a joke. Her other eye had been destroyed a few months earlier, when she was caught in a sorcerer’s fire spell. My understanding was that she’d come very, very close to being killed.

 

“Watcher,” I said. “What’s going on?”

 

She sighed, and gestured me to follow her. Loophole walked beside us, although I wasn’t sure why he was here if Watcher wanted something. “We need you to do something,” she said. “Something a little…unusual.”

 

“Unusual how?” I asked warily.

 

“A few days ago one of our teams was attacked by a group of rogue mages,” Loophole explained. “Very dangerous people. They’re wanted for quite a few crimes. They managed to get away, but we caught one.”

 

“So track them down.”

 

He grimaced. “We can’t. I was trying to get information out of her for hours yesterday. Got nowhere. She’s got unusually strong mental discipline.”

 

“And you want me to get her to talk?” I asked, incredulous. “That’s…really not my specialty.”

 

“You’re the best we have,” Watcher said. “At this point you’re probably the closest thing there is to a psychologist specialized in mages. If you could analyze her, come up with anything useful, it would be more than we have now.”

 

I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

 

They were keeping her in a disused section of the subway—or, rather, their own addition to that disused section. It had been carved out of bedrock and reinforced with magic, and you’d need a high-yield bomb to get through.

 

Before I could go inside, the two attendants made me put on a protective suit of some kind. It was fully enclosed, with panels of Kevlar on the chest and back. It was awkward, uncomfortable, and hard to move in. It was also probably a good idea.

 

I stepped inside the containment area and found myself in a surprisingly large room, maybe ten meters to a side. A chain-link fence divided the small strip I was standing in from the rest of the room, which contained a bed, toilet, and not a whole lot else.

 

Except, of course, for the prisoner.

 

Even forewarned by Loophole, I was a little taken aback by her appearance. She was hunched over, her arms too long for her body, her fingers too long for her arms and tipped with claws. The result resembled an ape more than a human.

 

“Good morning,” I said, loudly enough to be sure she heard me from across the room. “Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

 

She crossed the room faster than I would have thought possible, pressing up against the fence. “Talk,” she snarled. “Talk about what?”

 

“I’m here to see if I can convince you to cooperate with us,” I said mildly.

 

She stayed where she was for a moment, then frowned and backed away from the fence slightly. “You aren’t scared,” she said. “Most people get scared when I do that.”

 

“My wife is a shapeshifter,” I said. “And I routinely work with people who’ve undergone extreme body modifications. I promise that you aren’t the strangest-looking person I’ve known.”

 

She snorted. “Yeah, I’ll bet. So why should I cooperate?”

 

“Well, obviously there’s the possibility of more pleasant accommodations. I don’t know whether you could be released entirely, but I’m certainly willing to try. Other than that, you’d have to tell me what you want.”

 

“Do you know why I look like this?” she asked, changing mental gears with a rapidity that suggested those gears might be a little stripped.

 

“My understanding is that the leader of your group alters new recruits,” I said. “Making them physically stronger as well as changing their appearance.”

 

“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “You know any way to fix that?”

 

I sighed. “No. But as I said, there are stranger-looking people out there. I think it’s very possible that you could come to terms with your appearance and find some measure of acceptance.”

 

She stared at me, then snorted. “You’re trying to shrink me.”

 

“That’s my job,” I agreed.

 

She sighed. “Look, even if I wanted to help you I couldn’t. I don’t know where they are or what they’re doing now.”

 

“Could you tell me anything about why?” I asked. “Even a little might help.”

 

“Maybe it’s because they’re fucking crazy,” she said dryly. “You’re a shrink, right? You ever wonder why they needed to hire you so much?”

 

“It’s an extremely stressful profession.”

 

“Yeah, but there’s something else,” she said, grinning. It was an intimidating grin. “Something everybody knows but nobody ever talks about. See, magic makes you crazy. You know what my power, my gift is?”

 

“No.”

 

“I feel emotions,” she said. “I feel them, I recognize them, and I change them.” She paused. “Most people are afraid when they hear that,” she commented.

 

“I’ve seen scarier things,” I said. “Honestly, that sounds quite useful. It would make my job much easier.”

 

“Yeah, I bet. It wouldn’t make your life easier, though. See, I know what everyone’s feeling, all the time. You know how hard that makes it to have a conversation? You know how hard it is to make friends when everyone knows you can make them feel however you want?”

 

“No,” I said. “Honestly, I can’t begin to imagine. But I can say that if what you want is a place to belong, my organization is probably the best you could do.”

 

“Fine,” she whispered. “Send your people in. I’ll help if I can.”


 

Later, lying in bed, I found myself thinking back on that conversation. Beast was long since asleep, snoring loudly beside me, but I couldn’t get it out of my head.

 

Magic makes you crazy.

 

It made a certain amount of sense. The power, the sensations, the experiences it allowed you to have…the human mind wasn’t really equipped to cope with that. I could see it doing some damage.

 

I looked at my wife and wondered whether that applied to her. And, if so, how. The prisoner had been emotional, prone to mood swings and obsessed with the idea of companionship, but I’d also seen mages who were megalomaniacal, emotionally dead, or completely withdrawn from the world. Clearly there were a number of ways it could affect a person.

 

Even after years of marriage, I still called her Beast. That was probably a bit of a hint that she was, if not insane, certainly not a normal human being.

 

But hell. Even crazy people need friends.

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Unclean Hands 9.17

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Okay. So things were…not good, on a variety of levels. Assuming they were here for me, specifically, and considering how they’d gone about it so far I thought that was a safe assumption, I had a very limited amount of time to think. They wouldn’t wait long before jumping right to the excessive force stage of handling an uncooperative criminal.

 

I put my hands in the air, mostly just to keep them happy while I ran through the options in my head. Fighting was a bad idea. Even if I wanted to fight the cops, which I sorta didn’t, it was a bad move. They’d had time to move people into position, and I believed them when they said I was surrounded. I was wearing armor, sure, but not a helmet, and I was guessing they’d brought the big guns. Anti-materiel rifles with armor-piercing rounds would probably do the job. Or, hell, they might have rocket launchers.

 

Running wasn’t a whole lot better. If I tried to bolt, I was guessing the snipers would start shooting, and I didn’t want to trust my luck against that. Not to mention the whole rocket launcher thing. It wouldn’t matter if I was invisible if they had those.

 

Which, I supposed, only left…actually playing along and letting them arrest me.

 

I briefly reconsidered getting exploded instead, then sighed. “Run,” I said to Aiko, keeping my hands in the air.

 

She opened her mouth, and I could tell she wasn’t about to agree, so I cut her off. “Run,” I said again, more forcefully. “We can’t win this, and it’ll be a lot easier if they only find one of us.”

 

She obviously wasn’t happy, but she was at least as capable of figuring out what this situation called for as I was. She bolted, veiling herself with magic as she went. It wasn’t quite perfect invisibility, but in the dark, against normal humans, it should be more than enough.

 

I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see whether that would bring violent retaliation, but nothing happened. Good; I’d been pretty sure they were only really concerned with me, but there are times when pretty sure isn’t nearly as comforting as you’d like it to be.

 

I stood there, keeping my hands high enough that nobody would be likely to think I was disobeying that instruction, and waited for them to figure out what to do. After maybe a minute of that, a group approached from the direction of the armored personnel carrier. They were wearing bulky body armor with SWAT printed on it, and carrying an awful lot of guns.

 

Funny. It had never occurred to me that Colorado Springs would have a SWAT team. It made sense—the city was large enough, after all—I’d just…never thought about it.

 

“What happened to the girl?” one of them asked brusquely. Their body language made it clear that he was in charge of the group, although he seemed ridiculously young to have such a position.

 

And how crazy was that? Seriously, since when did I start thinking people looked young? Hell, most of the people I interacted with looked young, including the ones who’d seen a few millennia.

 

He was clearly expecting an answer, though, so I smiled. “What girl?” I asked innocently. “You must have been seeing things, officer. It’s just me here.”

 

He frowned. One of the others, an older guy with a spectacular mustache, piped up, “Sir, we could send a team after her.”

 

“Think this one through,” I said. I was pretty freaked out by this point, but I managed to keep my tone fairly casual. “You really want to risk letting me get away so that you can chase some girl you may or may not even have seen, at a distance, at night? Through a residential neighborhood? When you’ve got no real reason to think this hypothetical girl is guilty of anything at all?”

 

The leader’s frown deepened, and he took a second to think before he responded. “Let her go,” he said. “And somebody get cuffs on this guy.”

 

Smart choice. He’d get flak for it later from the higher-ups, I was guessing, but it was the right decision. Between that and the obvious respect the others had for him, I was pretty sure he had some real leadership potential. He might not have been an Alpha, if he were a werewolf—he lacked the presence they had, the ability to walk into a room and have everyone turn to look without quite knowing why—but he would definitely be someone the rest of the pack looked up to.

 

They were surprisingly gentle about cuffing me. I’d been expecting them to rough me up at least a little in the process, but they just handcuffed my hands behind my back and herded me into an armored car. It almost made me wonder whether they were filming the whole thing, and they wanted it to look as good as possible for the news.

 

I got into the back of the car and then zoned out. Presumably someone was reading me my rights, or else whispering vague threats in my ear or something, but I wasn’t all that interested.

 

I was much more interested in where we were going, which is why I focused most of my attention on my magic. There were no owls in the area, unfortunately, but plenty of foxes, cats, and raccoons out prowling the nighttime streets. Each one only got a fragmentary glimpse of my little procession, but by jumping from one to the next I was able to put together a pretty good image of what was going on.

 

The car I was in was just one out of an entire convoy of armored vehicles, moving in a formation that put my car slightly to one side of the center. Presumably that was so that anyone trying to break me out wouldn’t be able to tell where I was without checking every vehicle.

 

Although you’d have to be insane to try something like that. There were probably thirty armed guards with the convoy, and a lot of them were carrying what looked suspiciously like military weapons. And that wasn’t even counting the snipers. I noticed a few of them through the animals, mostly by scent or sound, but I was sure there were others.

 

I had to admit, I was almost flattered by the extremes they were going to. I could hardly even imagine the expenses involved with something like this—a dozen armored cars, including at least one that I was sure was military issue, thirty armed guards, snipers along the route…it was mind-boggling. And that wasn’t taking into account the road closures which must have taken place.

 

After maybe twenty minutes of driving at a snail’s pace through empty streets, the cars stopped outside of a police station. I returned my awareness to my own body just in time for one of the guards to open the door and nudge me.

 

I opened my eyes, blinked a couple of times, and looked around blearily. Pretending to have been asleep would be a convenient explanation for why I didn’t seem to have been paying attention.

 

And besides. I just couldn’t resist messing with their heads. They were just guys doing a job, sure, but that job was a hell of an inconvenient one for me. I wasn’t going to kill them for it, but I wasn’t above screwing with them a little. I figured making them think I was so relaxed and confident I could take a nap under those conditions was a decent way to start.

 

“Are we there?” I asked, yawning.

 

He frowned at me. “Yes. Get out of the car, please.”

 

I did so, and we started moving towards the police station. Having my hands cuffed behind my back threw my balance off more than I would have expected; I almost fell on my face a couple of times before the guard grabbed my elbow to steady me.

 

Inside the station, they led me downstairs to a small, windowless concrete room. Two guys with shotguns stood by the door, and a third walked into the room; the others either waited outside or left. I was guessing the latter. They might think I was scary, but they were looking at it from a human perspective, and even the scariest human is going to have a hard time doing much when they’re handcuffed and have two guys pointing shotguns at them from ten feet away.

 

The third policeman said, “Hands,” in a tone that was so blandly noncommittal you just knew he was hiding something. I turned around so that he could get at the handcuffs. He unlocked them and pulled them off, then said, “Strip.”

 

I complied, moving slowly enough that nobody could take it as a threat. I pulled my cloak off, making sure to keep it in the shape of a trench coat, and folded it neatly before setting it on the floor.

 

“Jesus,” he said, interrupting me. “Is that armor?”

 

“Yeah. And?”

 

He shook his head, looking somewhat bemused. “Who the hell wears armor to a restaurant?”

 

“I have reason,” I said dryly. “Or are you going to tell me you didn’t have orders to shoot me if I so much as talked back? Even though I’ve never been convicted or even formally accused of anything?”

 

A muscle in his jaw twitched, but he kept his composure pretty well. “You didn’t even know we were going to be there.”

 

I sighed, feeling very tired. “If you think the police are the only people who want to shoot me, you’re wrong.” I started undoing the various straps and buckles on the armor, making sure to keep my movements slow and steady. The guys with guns might not have been interested in participating in the conversation, but I was still very much aware of their presence.

 

The search that followed was predictable and thorough. I paid just enough attention to follow instructions, and left the rest of my mind in a cat outside. I was afraid that if I paid any more attention than that I’d do lose my patience and do something I would regret later.

 

The cat’s mind helped with that. It was soothing to use my magic, calming. It reminded me that I wasn’t helpless here. Plus there was a storm rolling in, and I’ve always loved the feeling of the wind in my fur. Even vicariously, it felt good enough to help offset the indignity of being strip searched in a tiny windowless room in the basement of a police station.

 

After what felt like an inordinate amount of time but was probably just a couple minutes, the guy doing the search finished, threw away the last pair of latex gloves, and left the room. That left me standing in the room with just the two guards, who’d exhibited no reaction the entire time. I almost wanted to make a smart comment just to see if I could get a rise out of them, but I resisted the impulse. It was a stupid one.

 

After a minute or two the third guy came back in, carrying a T-shirt and a pair of sweats. The shirt was a little too small and the pants comically overlarge, but they beat nothing and I couldn’t deny a certain feeling of gratitude. I’d been imprisoned a few times before, with varying degrees of legitimacy, but this was the first time I’d been given clothing.

 

“Will I get my belongings back when I’m released?” I asked as I pulled the clothes on.

 

The talkative officer gave me an almost pitying look, but all he said was, “Yeah. I’ll bag them and they’ll be set aside. Follow me, please.”

 

Out the door and down a hallway, we reached the cells. There weren’t very many of them, and all of them were empty. I was very aware, as we walked, of the guys with shotguns following behind. They still hadn’t said a word, either of them.

 

I had to wonder what the third guy had done to get this job. He was walking close enough to me that I could conceivably take him hostage, and he was in the line of fire of the other two. If I decided to start something, there wasn’t a chance that he’d get out unscathed. He probably wouldn’t get out at all.

 

We walked to the end of the hall, where the talkative guy stopped and unlocked the door of the last cell on the left. “In you go,” he said, and I complied without argument. He closed the door, locked it, and checked to make sure that it wouldn’t open. “Sit tight,” he said. “It’s after business hours right now, but we’ll get you a lawyer in the morning.”

 

I watched the three of them go. Most of the lights turned off after they left, leaving just the security lights in my cell and the hallway. It was more dim than really dark, but it was also definitely more dim than bright. Looking out through the bars—and it seemed almost charmingly quaint, that they’d put me in a cell with literal bars rather than just a room with a locked door—the hallways was gloomy, full of ominous shadows. This place wasn’t a prison, per se, but it was still a place of confinement, and a place where bad things had happened. That history had seeped into the stones, tainting the energy of the area with a disturbing aura.

 

I did my best to ignore it, and laid down on the mattress instead. It had been a long day, and an eventful day, and somehow I didn’t think tomorrow was going to be a whole lot better. I’d rather get some sleep before I had to deal with it.


 

I woke up early, but didn’t move. I’d seen at least two cameras watching this cell, and there were likely more I didn’t know about. Considering how seriously they were taking this, I had to assume they had people watching the feeds around the clock. That meant that as soon as I moved they would know I was conscious, and I’d rather take a few minutes to think before then.

 

The first thing I did was survey the area using my magic. It was just after dawn, early enough that the city hadn’t really woken up yet, but even by those standards the neighborhood was quiet. Not empty, which meant it hadn’t been evacuated or anything; just quiet, a little subdued. A handful of people walking dogs gave me a good opportunity to look around, familiarizing myself with the locale. Not terribly useful right now, but it might be later.

 

That done, I turned my thoughts to what I should do. Escape was possible, but difficult. I still had access to Tyrfing, which meant that I could probably just cut myself an exit through the wall given a little time, or I could simply open a portal to the Otherside. Either of those would take time, though, and there were drawbacks. If a sword magically appeared and I started cutting a hole in the wall, I could pretty much count on there being guys with guns on the other side when I finished. If I tried to escape through the Otherside, I’d be taking a risk; prisons hadn’t been high on my list of places to visit, so I didn’t know any destination points that were thematically close to this one. A failed portal wasn’t something I wanted to take a chance on.

 

Of course, I could also call Loki.

 

I quashed that thought immediately, lest he notice me thinking about him. It wasn’t a good idea. It was very much a not good idea, in fact. Loki might seem friendly, but I hadn’t let that blind me to the fact that he was Loki. He was the sort of god that other gods were scared of, and there were reasons for that. There would be a price if I got him involved, and I didn’t think it would be as simple as trading in one of the answers I was owed. Not when he knew he had me over a barrel.

 

No, I decided. Escape wasn’t really a viable option. It was possible, but every way I could see to do it entailed one kind of risk or another. I was better off to stay where I was and see how things unfolded. They’d mentioned a lawyer the other night, after all, and while I didn’t think that would do me much good at this point, it was at least worth taking the time to check. They’d gotten obviously guilty people off in the past, after all.

 

Having made my decision, I sat up, yawning and trying to make it look like I’d just woken up. I wasn’t sure how well I did at that—I’ve never been a great actor—but I didn’t really care that much. Then I settled in to wait for things to happen.

 

It was, I had to admit, a singularly boring wait. My cell was small enough that I couldn’t even really pace, and the only furniture was a badly rusted toilet and sink. The bed was just a mattress thrown on the floor, no sheets, no pillow, one threadbare blanket.

 

I had to wonder whether they’d stripped the room specifically for me. The lighting was crap, but I could see the other cells a little, and it looked like they had actual beds in them. Maybe this was some kind of psychological thing, trying to push me over the edge.

 

If so, it was more effective than I wanted to admit. I mean, I’m not suited to captivity in the first place. I don’t do well with cages. But this…hell, even when I’d gone nuts and Conn had stuck me in the safe room for a few months, even then I’d at least had a window. This was the sort of thing that could drive a person out of their skull pretty quickly.

 

I ended up leaving half my attention there, just to make sure I wasn’t caught by surprise if and when something did happen, and letting the rest drift. It was a bit of a risk—it would make me slower to react, and if someone was watching then sitting there staring into space wasn’t exactly making me look saner—but less of one than anything else I could think of.

 

It felt like much longer, but from the sun I was pretty sure it was only half an hour before I heard the door open and then close. Still early, by business hours standards.

 

I returned my consciousness fully to my body and sat up straighter, waiting. A moment later a guy walked into view. He was tallish, heavyset but not really overweight. He was wearing a police uniform, and he smelled rather strongly of coffee and onions. His face was almost familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

 

“Good morning, Mr. Wolf,” he said.

 

“Morning. Hey, do I know you from somewhere? You seem familiar.”

 

He seemed a little taken aback by the question, but he nodded. “I suppose you wouldn’t remember,” he said. “Just one more person you screwed over. I’m Albert Jackson, Colorado Springs Chief of Police.”

 

“Oh,” I said, nodding. I’d spoken with him once before, a few years earlier. Not surprising that I hadn’t recognized him. “I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about, though. When did I screw you over?”

 

“The last time we talked, I took your deal,” he said. “I took the werewolves seriously, I treated them with respect. Which was fine at the time, but once they told everyone it was a ‘hoax,’ and the public went back to thinking they were a myth?” He smiled. It wasn’t a very pleasant smile. “It’s not so good for your reputation, having everyone know that you fell for a hoax. I damn near lost my position.”

 

I nodded again. “Fair enough,” I said. “I honestly didn’t have anything to do with that, though. Believe me, I was as surprised as you when they took it back. I wouldn’t even have guessed that was possible.”

 

“Maybe,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he’d believed me or not. “Anyway, that isn’t really significant to why you’re here.”

 

“Right,” I agreed. “Speaking of, why here? I mean, sticking me in solitary in the basement of some random police station…it isn’t quite what I was expecting, I guess.”

 

“The entire building’s been locked down. As of today, the only business being conducted here is keeping you where you are.”

 

I blinked. “Seriously? Why?”

 

“Officially? It’s for your own safety. It was felt that placing you with other prisoners would possibly escalate to violence.”

 

“And unofficially?”

 

He smiled, a wry, crooked sort of smile. “Unofficially, a lot of people had to work very hard to catch you, and they very much don’t want to have to do so again. It was felt that a controlled environment like this would make that easier.” He shrugged. “And also the first reason. With what you’re accused of, there’s a very real chance that even other criminals wouldn’t be willing to tolerate you. Nobody wants to go to all this work and then have you die before trial.”

 

“What I’m accused of,” I said, ignoring the bit about other criminals. “What might that be, exactly?”

 

“Blowing up a decent chunk of the city,” he said promptly. “We put you in like normal, maybe your cellmate knew somebody that died in the blast. He gets upset, you get killed, we have to answer some awkward questions. This is better for everyone.” He paused a beat, then casually asked, “So, did you do it?”

 

I hesitated, then sighed. “No,” I said. “I didn’t do it.”

 

“You hesitated. Why’s that?”

 

“I didn’t do it,” I repeated. “But I knew some people that I think might have been involved with that whole mess. I guess I feel like I should have seen it coming, turned them in to the police or something.”

 

“Interesting,” he said, smiling again. This one was a more natural smile, although I was guessing it was still an act. “Where might these people be?”

 

I shrugged. “I dunno. Haven’t heard from them since then. That’s part of why I think they might have been involved.”

 

He looked at me for a moment, then sighed. “I want to believe you,” he said, and I almost thought he might be telling the truth. “But I can’t just take your word for it. Put your hands through the bars, please.”

 

“Going to handcuff me to the bars?” I asked, not moving. “That sounds a bit excessive, Chief. Can’t lie down, can’t go to the bathroom. I think that might even qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.”

 

As answer, he produced what looked like a pair of bracelets. They were large and heavy, more like manacles than modern handcuffs, except that they weren’t connected by a chain.

 

I looked at them for a moment, perplexed. Then I caught a familiar scent, and involuntarily snarled a little. The feeling was muted, so I was guessing it wasn’t on the surface, but there was silver in those things. Quite a bit of it, for me to notice it that quickly at a distance.

 

“These are tracking bracelets,” he said quietly. “They’ll make sure we don’t lose you.”

 

I regarded him for a moment, and when I replied my voice was equally soft. “I think,” I said, “that we both know that’s not what those are for. Lie to the guards if you want, but I think I deserve to know the truth.”

 

He sighed. “Rossi told us something about what you’re capable of,” he said, sounding very old and very tired. “”No details, but enough to get the point across. And he designed these as a countermeasure, before you killed him.”

 

Wait.

 

Enrico had designed these things? For me, personally?

 

I’d known that he hadn’t been entirely honest with me. I’d know that he’d seen me as a threat, that our friendship had largely been an excuse to keep an eye on me. But this…to design something like that, knowing firsthand how painful silver was to werewolves, knowing what long-term exposure could do, that was something else. This went beyond just lying to me. It was a betrayal, in so many ways.

 

Apparently Loki was telling the truth, way back when. I really couldn’t trust Enrico.

 

Pity I hadn’t believed that when he was still alive, and it might have done some good.

 

I slumped against the cell door, and stuck my arms through the bars.

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