And why shouldn’t it? He was the single biggest connection I’d made outside my own dorm. Or the biggest one that had been made with me… it had been more his own initiative and Amaranth’s prompting that had put us together.

Maybe years of being isolated had made isolation a habit for me.

At the start of the school year I’d expected my heritage to disqualify me from friendship or even coexistence with anyone who knew about it. That hadn’t proven to be the case, but I still acted like it was. While Two and Shiel were meeting people based on shared interests despite the obstacles they seemed to face, I still mostly worked under the assumption that no one would share mine. When I thought about the people I’d started to get to know outside of class, or even noticed in class, the names I could match with faces were the people who annoyed me the most.

I felt a stab of impatience with myself and realized that I’d spaced off and lost myself in thought while Ian was watching me, waiting for me.

“Ian, hey,” I said, coming up to him. I had an impulse to give him a kiss on the cheek, but as I got nearer it turned into a desire to kiss him full on the lips.

It seemed like it had been a while since I’d felt so self-conscious about displays of affection with Amaranth, and I wasn’t exactly embarrassed… or that embarrassed… by what I was doing with Ian, but I was surprised by my actions. The feeling of connection, of belonging, that I felt to the crowd behind me meant I couldn’t have pretended that we were alone even if Winnie hadn’t been standing right there in the periphery of my vision.

As soon as I became aware of her standing there I felt another impulse, and lifted my leg up. My thought was to wrap it around Ian’s waist, but it turned out that I wasn’t that flexible, especially in my tight jeans. All I could manage was to sort of rub my leg against the side of Ian’s. He ground his approval against me. I was suddenly very conscious of the way my jeans bound to and squeezed my ass when I moved. That thought seemed to summon Ian’s hand, which showed me what squeezing really felt like.

Winnie cleared her throat beside us, and Ian reluctantly separated himself from me.

“What… uh, what brought that on?” Ian asked.

“Don’t know,” I said honestly. “Just felt like it.”

“I think I like your feelings,” he said.

“I feel I like your thinkings,” I said.

Winnie gave an obnoxiously high-pitched sputtering laugh that seemed to shatter my skull like glass, somehow driving each individual shard right into my brain.

“Oh my kosh, you guys are way too cute to be allowed,” Winnie said. “You should forget about dating anyone else and just get married and have a lot of babies.”

“Yeah, no, I’m never having babies,” I said.

“Never say never!” she said.

It wasn’t a joke, but it was the sort of thing that I just knew she would follow with another peal of painful laughter, and for a moment it really seemed like she would. Then, mercifully, she clamped her mouth shut, a slightly confused look on her face. She shook it off, then waved at someone she knew and headed off without another word.

“Do you mind if we… go off somewhere?” I asked Ian.

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” he said, looking at me with an expression on his face that made me feel both possessed and coveted at the same time. I blushed. It was a humbling look, both in the sense that it humbled me to realize that Ian could feel that strongly about wanting me, and humbling in the sense that it seemed to say, be humble… lower yourself before me.

Looking at him, I couldn’t really sort out how it said that. Had I always been that good at reading his looks? Probably I was just imagining things… it was far more likely that I was just seeing what I wanted, because I found I really did want to do that, to go down on my knees before him right there in the nexus…

I pushed that thought away. From the way Ian’s head cocked back, it seemed like he was fighting off a similar impulse. There were things that we had to discuss.

“I meant to talk,” I said. “First, I mean. We can also… though, I don’t really want… I mean, I kind of want to do some hanging out down here.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “We’ll just tell everyone we need to run upstairs for a minute.”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” I said. “Relying on the privacy and security of dorm rooms, I mean.”

“Okay then… um, I guess we could talk outside?” he suggested.

“Oh, right, because the problem with the dorm room is it has too much privacy and security,” I said. “As compared to the open air, in the dark.”

“We’re not going into the dark,” he said. “We’re just going to step outside.” He gestured towards the glass doors behind him, where there was a pretty broad paved expanse lit up. “See? We’ll be well inside the protective glow and in clear view of the public, of which there are a lot of members here, including a giantess with a big magic spear.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I admitted, and he opened the door to usher me out ahead o fhim.

I shrieked and jumped as soon as the blast of cold air hit me… I’d been so focused on the other reasons not to go outside that I hadn’t even been thinking about it. My wonderfully long, warm coat was upstairs.

“Oh, here,” Ian said, shrugging his jacket off and holding it out to me. I was too stunned by the cold to be expecting the gesture, to say nothing of being ready to react to it, and so its soft leather sleeve just brushed against my arm.

Suddenly I wanted to be wearing it, to be wrapped up in the smell and memory of the warmth of Ian’s body, even if such notional warmth would be no match for the actual cold outside.

“Thanks,” I said. I put it on and found that it was heavier and warmer than it had looked. I quickly worked my way through my protective spells.

Ian’s jacket didn’t make for quite as good a focus to hang them on as my own coat did, but they would be better than nothing. Fortified as best as I could be, I headed out into the cold air. If nothing else, I hoped that the frigidity would make it less likely that anybody would come out to see what we were up to, or linger outside if they were just getting back to the dorms.

The eyeless fish-beast was continuing its silent patrol of the sky over campus. Seeing it slither unsupported through the air was unnerving, but at least it didn’t seem to be paying us any special attention.

“Man, that thing is…” Ian said, then shook his head and shivered. “Makes me feel weird.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Vulnerable, you know?”

“Okay, I guess I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “It’s creepy looking but I doubt it’s going to just attack… it’s supposed to be an ambassador or emissary of some kind, I think.”

“Do we know what that job description entails in the under-realms?” Ian asked. “Anyway, I don’t mean vulnerable like that. More… naked. Unprotected.”

“I do see what you mean, then,” I said. “Pala seemed to think that it can read minds, even extraplanar ones.”

“So it could be hearing our thoughts right now?” Ian said.

“Well, at the point where she said it was doing that, it had actually stopped right above us and was pretty obviously paying attention to us,” I said. “Not just circling around the general area.”

“On that subject, it does seem to be sort of hanging out around here,” Ian said. “Didn’t Dee’s people move her out of Harlowe? Was that just her, or the whole underground contingent?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s getting a read on things while they think about moving back?”

“Could be,” Ian said. “Well, there are two disconcerting ideas right there.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chance that it can hear our thoughts,” he said, “and the somewhat larger chance that it can hear our voices.”

We were kind of looking up and talking at it.

“Do you want to go inside and find somewhere?” Ian asked.

“Let’s talk quietly,” I said. Somehow I didn’t think that the nagging feeling that it could be listening in would vanish just because it was out of sight. At least outdoors, I could tell it wasn’t perched in the air directly above me or anything.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just move a bit away from the building, all casual-like.”

I leaned into him, clinging to him and let him saunter-walk us over to a point nearer to the edge of the grass than the doors.

“So,” he said, “I think I know what you want to talk about… and I’ve got some things to say, too.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah… about the uh, whole ‘teeth’ thing,” he said. “If anybody else recognizes them, they’re obviously not willing to come forward… at this point, I think you’ve got to act. Morally.”

“I did,” I said.

“I mean you’ve got to tell someone,” he said.

“That’s what I meant, too,” I said. “Through Lee. I shouldn’t really be talking about the specifics, but I wanted you to know that I’d done something… that I made sure the authorities know what’s going on.”

As I said that, it occurred to me that I didn’t actually have any proof of what Mr. Embries had chosen to tell the Imperial investigators. He’d looked so pleased with himself at the press conference… was he playing his own game of some sort?

“Then you have to do it in a way that can’t be ignored or overlooked… and you’re not sure it hasn’t been, I can tell,” Ian said. “This round-about shit isn’t going to cut it, Mackenzie. I know you don’t want to stick out your neck, and believe me, the last thing I want is for you to take any more stupid risks this semester. But you’ve got to get the powers that be to pay attention to your information.”

“They did,” I said. I didn’t know much about the vice-chancellor, but he definitely qualified as a power that be. He definitely had some kind of power and he certainly was. “They are. They are doing so now.”

“They just got done announcing that it was a random monster attack,” Ian said.

“Did you watch the press conference?” I asked, figuring it would make it easier for him to understand why I was sure that something more was going on if he’d been caught in the vice-chancellor’s influence field or whatever. I knew he’d brushed up against it once before, when we’d gone to the administration building to talk to the investigators.

“No, I just heard people talking about it.”

“Well, the vice-chancellor’s got something up his sleeve,” I said. “Remember him?”

“The old guy?”

“Yeah, ‘the old guy’,” I said.

“He didn’t make much of an impression on me,” Ian said. “I only remember that we met him because Amaranth asked me about it a bit later. I guess he made a bigger impression on her… the ‘sexy grandpa’ thing doesn’t do much for me.”

“Ian, you were gasping at him like someone had sucked all the vital force out of the air,” I said. “Your exact response was something like, ‘What was that?’”

“My response was exactly something like that?” Ian said. “I guess I was just curious who he was, since he knew Jenkins.”

I could tell he was being utterly sincere, which was sort of disconcerting. He clearly remembered the incident, so it wasn’t like there was a hole in his memory that his mind was paving over, as Amaranth’s had done when my pitchfork messed with her mind. On the other hand, it was kind of reassuring to know that the effect Embries had on people could be so short-lived… especially if everybody who had been in a class at five got caught in it.

“Well, anyway… the official statement is not going to be the end of it,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I’m sure they’re not actually washing their hands of everything and walking away.”

“And you’re okay with being part of an imperial cover-up,” he said.

“That’s pretty melodramatic,” I said. “But if it is a cover-up, what happens to me if I go public with the information they obviously don’t want getting out?”

“But why don’t they?” Ian asked. “Who benefits by keeping it silent, except the killers?”

“All of them, maybe?” I said, waving my hand back at the nexus. “Us? Everyone who gets to enjoy a relatively peaceful campus instead of more fear and hatred?”

“Things look quiet now, but people aren’t satisfied,” Ian said. “They’re going to want real closure, and that means real action.”

“It’s not a perfect situation, but things are better than they could be,” I said.

“So that’s the moral,” he said. “It’s okay to protect killers if it keeps things nice and cozy for everyone who hasn’t been killed.”

“I’m not formulating a moral here, Ian.”

“Well, maybe you should be,” he said. “What’s the point of all this happening if we can’t learn something from it?”

“I think the possibility of a moral kind of goes away when you start involving actual murder and government machinations and anything more complicated than like a hen who wants a shiny rock, or something,” I said. “The bad things that happen to people aren’t fables, and they’re not cautionary tales.”

“Is it wrong to learn something from it, then?”

“We shouldn’t be treating it as something to be learned from,” I said. “That’s… creepy, and kind of gross.”

“There are a lot of things about this situation are creepy and kind of gross,” Ian said. “I’m not sure that this really qualifies.”

“You don’t want Leda’s death to be ‘in vain’?” I said. “Would using it to… to… provoke a riot make things better for her, somehow?”

“Would it be so bad?” he asked. He seemed to be very weirdly enthralled by the idea, once it was out of my mouth. “Everybody on campus has weapons… everybody’s got a little training. Would it be so terrible to put that into action, to get out there and do something?”

“Yes,” I said. “It would be a riot. It would be terrible for everyone involved, no matter how tangentially, on both sides, by definition.”

“Okay, granted, some people might get hurt in the process, but better to have injuries from a fight than more deaths from a killer whose existence is being hidden,” he said. “People want to do something… they want action. Before the announcement, there was at least the possibility of closure, but now people are thinking that the thing that killed Leda is still out there… and they’re right about that. You could give them some direction.”

“Direction? Riots aren’t exactly known for their ability to pinpoint targets with elven accuracy. And even if nobody gets hurt, they still will have gone through a riot,” I said with growing conviction. “What do you imagine that’s going to be like? It’s not a battle, it’s not warfare… whatever those things are like. It’s getting swept up in anger and bloodshed… and that’s not even getting into the violence they’d inflict.”

“On killers,” Ian said.

“On anyone they perceived to be killers, or anyone who seemed to be in league with killers in the heat of the moment, or anyone who was in their way, or in arm’s reach,” I said.

“How exactly are you such an expert on riots? Did you see a lot of them?”

“No,” I said. I was unprepared for the question, though I also sort of felt like I’d seen it coming. I was unprepared because I really didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know, Ian… it’s just stuff that’s sort of coming to me, you know? But it all makes sense to me. I mean, this campus has been literally torn apart before… it doesn’t seem too hard to imagine that it could happen again. And anyway, even historical riots where a mob was focused on a single actually convicted killer usually wound up having more victims.”

“So we’re back to doing nothing,” Ian said.

“We’re back to leaving it to people who are equipped to do something,” I said. “We’re not heroes, Ian… we’re first year students. We barely know what we’re doing with our own lives. We’re supposed to take responsibility for things that could affect the lives of everyone on campus?”

“You’re already making that sort of decision,” he said.

“I’m deciding to put my trust in people who are more capable,” I said. “The justice system, or at least the government… okay, yes, I admit that it’s already not going quite the way I’d envisioned it, but that’s all the more reason to let someone else handle it. Things are already out of control enough.”

“If you’re not going to act, you’re not going to act,” Ian said. “But believe me when I say that people want action, and there will be action. It’s just up in the air what kind, and who it’ll be against. You could maybe swing that around so it’s at least facing the right direction.”

“Where are you getting this from, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Ian said. “The mood on campus? I wasn’t really prepared to say all this before I came over, but it seems kind of obvious now that we’re talking about it.”

“Well, let’s not talk about it, then,” I said. “Because it seems like we’re just digging up more reasons to disagree… and…”

I blushed as the words that were meant to follow that conjunction caught in my throat. I was thinking of the look Ian had given me before.

“And?” Ian prompted.

“I don’t like to disagree with you,” I said.

“Yeah? You could have fooled me.”

“I have a… habit… of arguing,” I said. “But I don’t know that actually enjoy it, in the sense that it makes my life better or happier or anything… and anyway, that’s not really what I meant.”

“What did you mean, then?” he asked, but I had a feeling he’d caught onto my meaning.

“I don’t like to disagree with you,” I said. “Right now, I’d much rather be… agreeable. Really agreeable.”

“Mackenzie?”

“Yes?”

“Just how much do you trust in the privacy and security of your dorm room?” he asked.

“Enough,” I said.

“Then let’s go inside.”

Soon: Stuff!

Discuss this story on the Livejournal community.

I then had the thought that I could ask her if she minded walking faster. That wouldn’t be rude, would it? I had a legitimate reason to want to be out of the cold… it sapped my strength and caused discomfort that verged on pain. Also, it was cold. As soon as I thought of it in those terms, though, I felt like I’d be making an imposition… just because she was “guarding my body”, as she put it, didn’t mean she had to accommodate my weaknesses.

Except it wouldn’t cost her anything, and I would be asking her. Nicely. I could manage that, couldn’t I?

It was weird how the bare tree limbs seemed to get darker faster than anything else. As long as there was any light in the sky, you’d think they would show some of their color against it, but they were like skeletons of shadow grasping at the breeze.

How many students had lost their lives on campus the past weekend? The school year so far? Each school year? It was a dangerous world, and the only way to deal with it was really to not deal with it… but walking across the darkening grounds with the glow of the path giving Pala and me an elven complexion was eerie. It felt more like Veil than Veil had.

Yeah, under the circumstances, I thought I could manage “nice” if it meant getting indoors where it was warm and bright and full of people… many of whom had little to no interest in killing me, a little bit faster…

“Pala?” I said gently, trying to break into her thoughts gently.

“Do you think birds are… ticklish?” she said.

“I… what?”

“Birds,” she said. “Do you think they are ticklish?”

“I… can’t say the question has ever entered my mind,” I said. “But…”

“They are covered in feathers,” she said. “All over. My uncle Halbjorn, he used to tickle my feet with goose feathers.”

“They don’t have feathers on their feet,” I said.

“I think a goose at least would laugh himself silly if he were ticklish, at all, anywhere.”

“The part of the feather that tickles you is different from the part that’s connected to their skin,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I was thinking that maybe they were ticklish of scales.”

“What?”

“Scales,” she said. “If I am ticklish of feathers, then maybe a bird is ticklish of fish scales.”

“I… this is not the best topic for me to talk about right now,” I said, as birds and fish were putting unpleasant associations in my mind.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “The cold weather makes me think of geese, and goose down, which made me think of my uncle… what would you like to talk about, instead?”

“I’d actually just like to get back to Harlowe and get inside,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking.”

“Okay,” she said. “But, do you think it would be okay if I spent the night in the Harlowe Hall? Ian did not say for sure if he needed me to guard your body tomorrow, but it would make things easier.”

“Yeah, it should be fine… I mean, I don’t care and I think the actual rules about overnight guests are same-sex, no sleeping in the hallways or on the lounge furniture,” I said. “There might be a limit of nights in a row or something about needing roommates’ permission, I don’t know off the top of my head. Two probably wouldn’t mind, since you wouldn’t actually put her out.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t! I like Two. She knows so many things,” Pala said. “And many of the things she knows are about dessert.”

“You know Two?” I asked, surprised.

“Everybody knows Two,” she said.

“What I mean to ask is… how do you know Two?” I asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t hard,” Pala said. “I met her.”

“So… you’re friends?”

“According to her definition.”

“So you disagree?”

“No, I also think that we are friends,” Pala said. “But unlike her, I cannot prove it. So I mention her definition, because it is the stronger case. You see?”

“That’s… why would you need to prove you’re friends?” I asked. “Who’s going to doubt you?”

“You?”

She was getting kind of frustratingly good at that.

“Oh… sorry, I wasn’t trying to sound skeptical,” I said. “I was just curious about how well you know her.”

“How well?” Pala said. “Um… I think pretty well. I’m not good at knowing people, but I would know Two anywhere. She’s the one who has her name written on her forehead.”

“When did you become friends?”

“Oh, a day ago… maybe three? Veil was… when?”

“The dance was on Saturday,” I said.

“Yes, that was it,” Pala said. “So many things have happened since then.”

Tell me about it, I thought, but even I could see the response to that one coming.

“Well, anyway… I think it would be great if you stuck around,” I said. “There’s still the possibility for things to get very ugly, very quickly if someone takes the ‘monster attack’ report the wrong way.”

The more I thought about, the more I thought it was probably a good thing that the official school broadcast of the press conference had ended with the cameraman getting caught up in the vice-chancellor’s aura of… whateverness. Hopefully at least some of the people who caught the close-up would be sufficiently distracted for their knee-jerk reactions to pass before they could be acted on.

“You think monsters could attack Harlowe Hall?” Pala asked. “But I thought the dormitories were protected by the paths so that monsters can’t get in.”

“No, I mean some misguided human students could attack Harlowe Hall to get the ‘monsters’,” I said.

“Don’t they know that monsters can’t get in?”

I thought about saying “oh, never mind”, then I realized it was a matter of word choice. She didn’t understand monster as a pejorative… or that its traditional use included a lot of humanoid races, including hers and mine. I started to think about how best to explain to her that some people heard “monster” and thought “goblins and ogres and other types of people who live in Harlowe” rather than things like wild creatures and mindless undead, but then I realized that would be shading right up against explaining the sleight-of-word that had gone on at the press conference.

She hadn’t watched it, that I knew of, but I felt uneasy about the idea of putting the idea in her head all the same.

“Oh, never mind,” I said. “Look, the cold kind of bothers me… do you think we could pick up the pace just a little?”

“Okie dokie,” she said. “I did not want to leave you behind… my test assignment, I moved too quickly. You’d think short steps would be faster.”

“Why?”

“They don’t have as far to go.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that… nothing constructive, anyway… so we lapsed into silence. Silent Pala radiated a sort of spaciness that I really didn’t think was just my initial “brainless” prejudice. She was looking all around as we walked, but with a vacant smile on her face and a general air of pleasant blankness. As bodyguards went, I figured she had the imposing stature and the fighting skills, but I wasn’t sure she’d pass any sort of general alertness test.

Not that I was going to win any awards for most vigilant sentinel any time soon.

The perception that she wasn’t paying attention disappeared in a hurry when she suddenly crouched low and angled her face upwards. Her spear swung around like a gate to stop me. I jumped back from it… the last person I’d seen come into contact with the spear aside from Pala was Puddy, and she’d taken a pretty vicious smite-down for it.

“Stay where you are,” Pala said. “No, wait… move to the center of the path and turn sideways.”

“Um… okay,” I said, though I followed her logic. By turning perpendicular to the direction of the path, I would very slightly increase the distance between any part of my body and the unprotected ground outside. “What’s going on?”

“Something moving around,” she said. “Behind a building.”

“You can see behind buildings?”

“No, over.”

“You can see over buildings?” I asked. Pala was tall, but she wasn’t that tall.

“Yes, can’t you?” she said. “You just look at the front of the building and look up… that’s where it peeked out..”

“Something pretty big, then?” I said. I had a brief vision of one of Pala’s relatives coming to pay an unscheduled visit. I couldn’t think of any giant creatures known to live in the area. I was used to the occasional dragon watch back home, only one of which had ever escalated into a full-blown warning, but something about Prax seemed to make it unappealing to dragons… none of the local wyrms had ever extended their hunting territories northward into it, and neither had any of their kin in the other bordering provinces.

“No,” she said. “Something flying. No… big and flying.”

I turned in place to look at what she was seeing, just in time to catch a curving body flashing with scales as it crested behind an old three story class building. The thoughts of dragons resurged in my brain before the thing shot upwards, exposing an undulating form with tentacle-like whiskers protruding from its snout.

“It is hard to tell in this lighting,” Pala said, “but it appears to be some variety of blind sea monster.”

“Oh, the eyeless fish-beast,” I said. It was hard to tell, since it was moving and not close enough to anything to get a real comparison, but it seemed larger than the last time I had seen it. “It’s some kind of ambassador for the underground realms, I guess.”

“It is… looking for someone,” Pala said as it swam through the air with a back-and-forth motion. “Or patrolling?”

“It looks like it,” I said. Maybe the subterranean contingent had taken the “monster” story to heart.

“Stay still,” Pala said.

“Why?” I asked, more than a little annoyed. Every time I stopped moving outside, it seemed like the cold started finding new ways to slip past my increasingly-reflexive insulation spells. I pumped a little more energy into them and then tried to warm myself up with a little very low-key invocation of the heat aspect of fire.

“Because it seems powerful and we do not know for what it is searching,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

The thing passed directly over us. It was definitely bigger than it had been inside of Harlowe… bigger than a carriage. There was no way it could fit inside one of Harlowe’s hallways, much less squeeze through its doors. The power needed to effect that sort of size change was tremendous, but there was a good chance the fish-beast had other options. It gave off a very unworldly vibe that was probably nothing but accurate, and in some dimensions space was not as much of a fixed thing as it was in ours. It was possible for something from those planes to lack a true size or shape, which meant it could alter how it manifested upon our plane.

The thought of size-changing magic got me thinking, though. It took a tremendous amount of energy to make someone… or something… grow to giant size, or shrink from the size of a human to something you could slip into your pocket, but there were more subtle resizing magics. Disposable rings of protection got by with a cheat, using a flexible outer layer and an inner band that expanded or contracted to fit different sized fingers, but rings with more permanent enchantments often could make adjustments within a small range by actually shrinking or growing the ring band.

Making Pala small enough for her to fit into a human-sized world would take bigger magic than she could probably afford, but if she were even just a few feet shorter she’d have an easier time getting around and fitting in. It was probably worth mentioning to her… once the current situation was over.

I realized the fish-beast had circled around over us a few times and was now fluttering directly overhead. It was kind of discomfiting to see… it was one thing to watch it floating in the air without visible support, and another thing to see it do so right over your own head. That aside, there was just something… off… about the fish-beast, something that struck me as wrong and just got more so the longer I looked.

I felt a prickling feeling in the back of my head, just above my spine.

“Boobies!” Pala said.

“What?” I said, an image of Amaranth popping into my head. I turned and looked at her.

Overhead there was a sound like a long, wet gasp, and the fish-beast flew on. I wasn’t watching it do so, but I could tell that it had… it was a bit like when a cloud moves out from underneath the sun and it’s suddenly warmer and lighter, except that it was still just as cold and dark as before. But it felt like that.

“Why did you say ‘boobies’?” I asked her.

“Because you are a female p… lesbian,” she said. “And I thought it would distract you. I am meant to be guarding your body but I thought your brain is a part of your body, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean, it’s inside your skull and connected to you…”

“I understand that, but what do you mean… do you think looking at that thing was harmful?”

“Maybe? But it was getting inside of our heads,” she said. “I think it was looking at our thoughts?”

“My mind can’t be read,” I said, then I remembered that this was because of the extraplanar connection of my demon blood. That, and the demon side of my mind could be pretty vicious to intruders. But the eyeless fish-beast wasn’t exactly from around here, either, and I wasn’t about to place bets on my brain against its when it came to the subtle arts. “Usually.”

“Mine, either,” Pala said. “People get… lost. But I think that maybe the blind sea monster can find its own way.”

“Probably,” I said. “You know, Pala… I was thinking. Have you ever considered a size-changing enchantment?”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “I have looked into that quite often. But giants are not as well-affected by size-changing spells. They say that our size is more… inherited?”

“Inherent,” I said. “A giant’s size is more fundamental a characteristic… I didn’t realize that but I suppose it would be true. Still, it wouldn’t have to be a huge change… even just a foot would mean you wouldn’t have to duck your head as much.”

“Wouldn’t it mean I would have to duck my head more?” she said. “Or… am I not understanding what it means ‘to duck’?”

“I think so,” I said. “Lower your head so it doesn’t hit the ceiling… being shorter would mean you’d have to do that less.”

“Why would using magic to be taller make me shorter?”

“I wasn’t talking about being taller,” I said. “I’m talking about making you shorter.”

“Oh!” she said, the light of recognition dawning in her eyes. “That makes sense! Because I thought… wait, why would you do that?”

“What?”

“I am too short by half already!” she said. “Why would you have me shorter?”

“Well… the buildings aren’t exactly made for someone your size,” I said. Shit, I thought. She’d given me a big enough hint, no pun intended. Size was intrinsic to gianthood… even if her folks weren’t full-blooded giants, if they identified with their giant blood then it stood to reason that she wouldn’t be interested in shrinking. “If you had a belt or ring or something that you could put on and take off, you could get around more easily. Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything…”

“These belts,” she said. “They could make me bigger, too?”

“Well, yes… it would be a different enchantment, but similar,” I said. “I don’t know if anything like that’s on the market, and it would have less effect on you, proportional to your giant blood…”

“My blood would grow more than the rest of me?” she asked. “Or less?”

“The same,” I said. “I just mean… your natural resistance to size changing would lessen it, but it should do something.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I drank a potion of giant growth once and it did nothing.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have been permanent, anyway,” I said. That was one of the well-known weaknesses of metaphor magic: trying to give something like, say, the grace of a cat to a cat or the strength of a bull to a bull would accomplish nothing, and at exactly the same energy expenditure as if it had worked.

“They wouldn’t necessarily be cheap,” I said. “But… your family has some money or other resource, I’m guessing?”

The gold armor she wore in the ring hadn’t looked cheap, even without considering the enchantments it would need to be much more effective than a mail shirt made from aluminum foil. That, and the out-of-plane tuition rates were even higher than the out-of-province ones.

She nodded. She seemed happy with the idea, which made me glad I’d said anything, even though she didn’t seem to find my original idea at all appealing. Well, I had tried to help. In the interest of at least not doing any harm, I added, “You’d probably want something you could take off easily when you had to go inside.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I do not think I would need to wear it here, but when I go home… I can show everyone how much I grew!”

I was becoming glad that I’d given Pala a second chance… and that she had apparently decided to do the same thing for me, even after noticing how little I had thought of her. Some people spread joy like a torch sheds light, and when Pala smiled, she was one of them.

Soon: A short political round table, and Sooni cracks the case.

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I must have… I had to have heard him wrong. My grandmother was hundreds of miles away. She’d shown no inclination to follow me to MU when I first left. It seemed impossible that she should show up now, in the midst of everything that was going on.

“Martha Blaise,” Lee repeated. “Is she your grandmother?”

“What’s my grandmother doing here?” I asked.

“Sounds like she’s advocating for you… somewhat,” Lee said. “She’s in a conference with the lead finder on site. Closed door, but very loud. I figured she was a student’s parent or relative, but I asked one of the locals who she was when I realized she was talking about demonic traces, or rather their absence.”

“So you haven’t talked to her?” I asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Lee said. “She seems to be arguing with… it sounds like she thinks the case against you is stronger than it is. She’s trying to cut a deal on your behalf. You folks weren’t kidding about thin walls.”

“Her voice sort of carries,” I said, and in fact I could sort of hear her in the background of the reflection. “I don’t want any part of a deal she makes.”

“Mackenzie, you’re a competent adult,” Lee said. “I represent you, not her… she’s not in a position to make a deal for you and you’re not in so bad a position you’d need her to. I don’t know your whole family background, so I’m sorry if this is upsetting to you, but overall it’s a good thing. Her word isn’t going to be definitive, given her obvious bias, but if she knows what she’s talking about and can be assumed to be telling the truth…”

“I really can’t imagine her lying,” I said. “I think she’d probably burst into flame or something.”

“Yes, well, that’s a huge trump for us,” Lee said. “We can already establish that you were elsewhere. It’s going to be established that you weren’t here. My job is just going to be making sure these facts aren’t overlooked, and that neither are your rights.”

“Um, can I butt in?” Ian said, sliding around next to me and leaning into view of the small mirror. “Hi. Again, just going by the TV version here, but don’t you think this could actually look kind of bad? Her, um, lovers vouch for her whereabouts, her close relative volunteers her demon-scanning expertise to prove it wasn’t her…”

“Yes, there are some potential pitfalls there, but I’m not in the best place to discuss strategy,” he said. His voice dropped. “I’m about to interrupt the conversation… let both parties know that I represent Mackenzie and that you are ready to talk to Inspector Gregory whenever it’s convenient for him. I think we should be able to wrap up your part of this investigation this afternoon.”

“If we can do it without any interaction between my grandmother and me, I’d appreciate it,” I said.

Amaranth grabbed the mirror from me. Lee swore as the image in front of him undoubtedly spun like crazy.

“Lee, don’t worry… do whatever’s most certain to see Mack through safely,” she said. “We’ll sort out the family stuff later.”

“I wouldn’t do anything else,” he said. “And please… please don’t do that again.”

“Oh, sorry!” she said.

“I’m attracting stares now,” he said. “So I’m gonna get to work. You three sit tight.”

“Okay,” Amaranth said. “Good luck!”

“Uh, thank you.”

She snapped the mirror shut with a satisfied smile that wobbled a little when she saw my glare.

“I’m sorry for snatching him away like that, baby, but you shouldn’t let your feelings about your grandmother jeopardize your safety,” she said.

“Is that really what that was all about?” I asked. “Or are you just jumping on a chance to attempt some kind of reconciliation?”

“Baby… this would so not be the time for that,” Amaranth said. “Honestly, I wouldn’t want even a happy reunion to distract you before we know you’re out of the woods.”

“But otherwise… once I am out of the woods… you think it would be a happy reunion,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be difficult now, of all times,” Amaranth said. “I was being hypothetical.”

“Well, you’re hypothetically wrong,” I said.

“‘Hypothetical’ isn’t exactly a strong suit around here,” Ian said.

“I know you think that everyone should just love each other, and Dee can’t understand why I wouldn’t want a relationship with my maternal…”

“Excuse us,” a voice said, pleasant and musical. I thought it had come from nowhere, but it had actually come from one of the two cloaked elves, who had both come up upon us so suddenly they might have teleported. “We do not mean to be intrusive, but by ‘Dee’, are you referring to Delia Daella?”

“Well, yes, actually,” Amaranth said, “but this is sort of a private conversation. We’re actually waiting for our lawyer, so if you have any questions…”

“Oh, we wouldn’t dream of bothering your legal advocate,” the second one said.

“Then you probably shouldn’t be talking to us,” Ian said. “I’m pretty sure that’ll bug the crap out of him.”

“We would, however, appreciate a few words with friends of our willfull charge,” the elven woman continued as if she hadn’t even heard Ian’s snarky interjection.

“Yes, you may be able to help her a great deal by speaking to her as friends.”

“Oh!” Amaranth said. “Well, if there’s something we can do to help Dee, we’ll be happy to talk about it just as soon as our other friend gets back to advise us.”

“Please, it’s no matter of great legal complexity,” the hooded woman said. “We just wondered if you have had a chance to observe her condition. She seems so drained, so fatigued from her self-imposed vigil… but she won’t admit to the possibility that she may have fallen asleep at some point during it.”

“I don’t see…” Amaranth started to say.

“What, you think Steff did it?” I asked. “Or Viktor?”

“We venture no opinion on the question of who is responsible,” the second elf said. “Our duty is to see that our Delia Daella is shielded from blame. The light of doubt is already falling upon those with whom she has sequestered herself. It is not in her interest to offer them a defense.”

“But is Dee really going to be a suspect?” I asked. “And if she was, their defense is her defense. They were all there together, right?”

“That is what Delia Daella says. But she perhaps may not be in the best condition to positively assert that.”

“Steff is our friend, too,” I said. “And Dee’s. You’re not going to get any of us to sell her out.”

“That really is enough,” Amaranth said to me. “It was so nice meeting you,” she said to the elves, “but I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

“Please forgive the interruption, then,” one of the elves said, bowing and backing away.

“Perhaps we should speak to your advocate,” one of the elves said.

“I don’t think you’ll find him receptive to any proposals to lie,” Amaranth said. “Trying to frame someone else isn’t going to make anyone look good.”

“We would not ask anyone to lie,” the elf said. “We are not attempting to ‘frame’ anyone, just to… reframe the circumstances.”

“Again, we really don’t have anything to talk about,” Amaranth said. “Thank you.”

I wasn’t sure what she was thankful for, but it seemed like a polite attempt to end the conversation, and the elf didn’t have anything to say to it. She bowed and went back to her group. In addition to the gorgon and the mushroom person, there was now also a small rock-like humanoid huddled under the protective aegis of the shimmering fish-beast. The gorgon had stepped a few feet away and was chatting quietly with the harpy from the skirmish team and her human boyfriend.

Lee made a reappearance in the room shortly. He had a small cut on his forehead, right underneath a lump that seemed to swell visibly in the time from when he entered the big room and when he reached us.

“Your grandmother moves quickly for a woman her age, Mackenzie,” he said.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything,” he said.

“I’m still sorry,” I said.

“Expressing unearned guilt is a bad habit for a suspect to have,” Lee said. “Though I don’t think that label exactly fits. There’s a lot of interest in you… but you’re definitely not the only name on the short list, and I got the distinct impression that it’s not just your whereabouts and doings last night that they’re interested in.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

His voice dropped.

“The point man upstairs, Agent Nevis, told me they ‘mainly’ have questions about some of your acquaintances,” Lee said. “I think part of that emphasis was to make sure we’re not going in overly defensive. I guarantee you that they’re going to ask about your whereabouts and that they will check on what we tell them, just as they’ll double-check what Ms. Blaise told them about the scene.”

“Do they just let anybody’s grandma wander into crime scenes and start divining?” Ian asked.

“She has some credentials, apparently,” Lee said. “I don’t know who gave her access or what was going through their head.”

“She was an exorcist,” I said. “I don’t know if she was certified, or if it’s still valid.”

Lee looked at me in surprise.

“I don’t think it matters as much in small towns… where there aren’t boatloads of powerful clerics in the temple… if someone’s licensed or not,” I explained.

“Mackenzie, she’s a paladin,” Lee said.

“What?” I said.

“Dame Commander in the EWD Reserves.”

“What?” I repeated.

“She showed me her badge right after she threw the book at me,” Lee said. “Figuratively, I mean. Paladins are only empowered to act as peace officers in places where there’s no other active law enforcement.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I think there must be some kind of mistaken identity thing going on. You’ve been misinformed or you’ve mixed a couple people up. The woman who hit you, did her badge identify her by name?”

“Mackenzie, there’s no confusion… she introduced herself, and she said she was your grandmother,” Lee said. “Her shield is inscribed with her name.”

“My grandmother is a little old lady who chases away disembodied demons,” I said. “She’s not a paladin.”

“I’m pretty sure I read or heard that she was,” Ian said. “In the news or something.”

“If the woman I spoke with isn’t your grandmother, then she stole a badge from your grandmother who is still a paladin,” Lee said. “But this is all very far afield of the point.”

“Mack… you do know that your grandmother must have had a life before you were born, don’t you?” Amaranth asked.

“Yes, but… I can’t imagine her lying about something like this,” I said. “Or about anything. She hated lies more than just about anything. She said they were the beginning of all sins, and that they give other sins shelter.”

“Um… did she ever tell you she wasn’t in the White Dragons?” Ian asked.

“You know, Mack, if you picked up your outlook on lying from her, then it seems like she can’t have nearly as big a problem with lies of omission as other kinds,” Amaranth said. “And frankly, if it was part of her life that she’d left behind, I’m not sure I’d count it as a lie not to mention it, either.”

“If it makes things any clearer at all,” Lee said, “I should mention that she only produced her shield with great reluctance, after I raised questions about her right to be present and after I dismissed her family-related argument.”

“It doesn’t make anything clear,” I said. “Okay, yes, she’s always been sort of… militant, I guess… but in the old-lady-who-loves-Khersis kind of way, not the knight-in-holy-armor kind of way.”

“Mack… I don’t mean to keep harping on this point,” Amaranth said, “but you do know that people aren’t born as old ladies, right?”

“Of course I know that,” I said, though, of course I couldn’t really picture my grandmother as a young woman and I had never really tried.

When I did, though… when I tried to imagine what someone who was so pious, so stern, so uncompromising in her beliefs, and so powerful in her faith but who had never been a cleric…

“Holy fuck,” I said, as the image came into my head of my grandmother clad in mail and holding a blessed broadsword.

“I’m sure this must be an interesting revelation for you,” Lee said. “If you need a few minutes to digest it, take them… but let’s not get completely sidetracked. I spoke to Nevis and I told him that we’re eager to help, but that we’d prefer it if we can deal with Mike Gregory and if you can talk to him as a group. He’s having Gregory paged when he’s done at the admin building. Nevis couldn’t make any promises. I think that they may want to talk to you two ladies individually afterwards, or at least you, Mackenzie, but I will be there handling things for each of you if it comes to that.”

“Why would they want to talk to Amaranth alone?” I asked. Obviously they would if they were going to try to pick our story apart to somehow indict me, but Lee was acting like that seemed like a remote possibility. Besides that, Ian as the human and the one who’d probably be less strongly linked to me in the eyes of anybody else they talked to would seem to be the weaker link.

“You’re both Harlowe residents,” he said. “Truth be told, there are a lot of prospective suspects in here… a lot of members of predatory races, races with anthropophagic history.”

“Um, sort of on that subject, Lee,” Amaranth said, her mouth twisting in between her words. She looked like she had the urge to chew her lower lip off with worry. “I know I said that I supported you doing anything to keep Mack safe, but we want you to know that we’re not willing to say things to implicate other students, even though that might shift suspicion off Mack.”

“To be clear: are you saying you would withhold evidence from the investigators to shield your dormmates?” Lee asked.

“Oh, no, I’m not talking about withholding anything,” Amaranth said. “But say someone comes at us with a theory that implicates someone else, and they ask us in a leading sort of way if we ever noticed that person sneaking out at night, or something like that.”

“If you’re not comfortable with a line of questioning, look to me to intervene,” Lee said. “My first responsibility here is to you three, not to your friends or your neighbors, but I will not allow you to be compromised for the sake of a lazy investigator’s convenience.”

“Thank you,” Amaranth said.

“May I ask what prompted that?” Lee said.

“This is a discussion I would rather have somewhere away from prying ears,” Amaranth said.

Lee nodded, and his eyes flickered almost imperceptibly towards the underworld contingent… the only ears in the room that were likely to overhear a quiet conversation in a large room full of quiet conversations being elven was probably a dead giveaway.

“Let’s take a walk outside,” he said.

“Is that going to be okay?” I said. “If that Gregory guy gets here and we’ve vanished…”

“I told them to reflect me if they need anything from us,” Lee said.

With that settled, I had no objection to getting away from the pair of cloaked underelves who were willing to use us and throw Steff under the behemoth’s feet to make double sure that Dee wasn’t implicated. I wondered if there wasn’t some racial animosity involved there… if my job was to make sure that someone wasn’t tarnished by a murder investigation, suggesting that one of the people she spent the weekend in the company of might have been responsible wouldn’t be my opening gambit.

Though… they had said that suspicion was falling on Steff and Viktor anyway, so maybe it hadn’t been their choice of a first move, either. That thought kind of gave me chills. How much suspicion, exactly, would it take for “maybe I fell asleep and didn’t notice them going out and murdering someone” to sound like a better defense to her advocates than “no, I was with them the whole time and there was no murdering”?

Lee had told Ian that if I were under suspicion, he’d be suspect, too, for providing part of my alibi. The same would be true of Dee, with regard to Steff and Viktor. I trusted Dee to know whether or not she’d fallen asleep, and I certainly trusted her to tell the truth. I hadn’t given much thought to the blowup we witnessed earlier… with Dee and Viktor both taking her obligation to Steff’s health so deadly seriously, her actions seemed perfectly understandable as a reaction to being pulled away from Steff’s bedside.

It also fit in nicely with how I imagined she would react if it were suggested that she bend the truth to save her own skin at the expense of a friend… maybe with a little extra indignity thrown in at the idea that she might have fallen asleep on the job without immediately realizing it.

These were the thoughts that swirled around in my head as we headed out onto the patio and up the uneven stairs. We headed south away from the front of the building, towards a group of school buildings I’d never been in. Lee didn’t say anything until we were on the other side of one of them from Harlowe.

“What happened?” he asked, straight to the point.

Amaranth recounted the interruption from the eavesdropping elves.

“Hmm,” Lee said. “This ‘Dee’ is the Delia Daella who’s been in the news? The so-called ‘naked priestess’?”

“That’s her,” Amaranth said, nodding.

“They call her ‘the naked priestess’?” I asked.

“Do you never watch the news?” Ian asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“I don’t sit down and watch it very often, but… it’s on sometimes,” he said. “You pick things up.”

“There are more TVs in your dorm than in mine,” I reminded him. “We don’t even get the student newspaper.”

“Listen,” Lee said. “There may be a reason why the dark elves think that Dee’s friends would be under special scrutiny. That may be difficult if they’re your friends, too, but that can’t distract you. If charges are brought against them, I’m sure you’ll have chances to speak out on their behalf, offer testimony about their characters, what have you… but for now, if it comes up, the most you can honestly say is that you were gone all weekend and so you can’t really speak to anything that might have happened on campus. If the imperials ask you about them, I’ll say that. Don’t let them goad you into saying anything else.”

I kind of expected him to look at me after he said that last bit, but he kept his gaze on Amaranth. I suppose she had as little self-control as I did when it came to some things. He only knew her because of her protective impulses towards me.

“Thank you, Lee,” Amaranth said, nodding. “Really, truly… I know this is your job, but you’ve been so helpful, and I don’t know what we would do without you.”

“Remember, Amaranth, that technically the fact that you’re speaking to them at all is a courtesy,” Lee said. “You have divine privilege. They can’t arrest you. They can’t question you against your will. They can’t make you testify or go on record. For questions about Mackenzie’s whereabouts, you’ve got every reason to answer, but if they stray to other topics, you could tell them to go to hell and they couldn’t do anything. Don’t, incidentally.”

“Oh, I could never do that,” Amaranth said.

“The point is that you have a pretty big trump card if they get in your face,” Lee said. “I mention this because you seem somewhat… delicate, in some regards. If things get too stressful, tell me that you think you’re done and I’ll manage the damage control on that. It’s likely to be better for our side than if you snap.”

Amaranth nodded. She nibbled at her lip a little bit.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just realized… your head. I should have offered earlier. Would you like me to do something for it?”

“Is that going to limit my proximity to Mackenzie?” he asked. “They offered me healing, but I wanted to wait until we were finished for the day.”

“It shouldn’t make a difference,” she said. “It’ll only take a touch. As long as you don’t headbutt her or dance cheek-to-cheek, she shouldn’t even be able to feel it.”

“Shouldn’t or won’t?” Lee asked.

“Won’t,” I said. “She’s healed worse in front of me before. It can be… uncomfortable… to look at while it’s going on, but the aftereffects are pretty negligible.”

“Well, alright, then,” Lee said. “I suppose it’s probably best if I don’t have an untreated head injury when I’m representing.”

“What did she throw at you, exactly?” Ian asked.

“Her librum, I think,” Lee said. “I would imagine that’s what it was. It was very impressive-looking.”

“Ouch,” I said. My grandmother’s travel librum had metal brackety things protecting the corners of the dragonhide cover.

“Yes, exactly,” Lee said.

“Better take a step back and cover your eyes, baby,” Amaranth said, and I did step back, though I only shaded my eyes and lowered them slightly… after my experience at the club, I was curious how much I could really stand to be exposed to her healing energy.

The glow was far more intense, and I had to quickly drop my gaze to the ground, but the pain wasn’t that bad… it was intense, but it wasn’t bad.

Far worse was the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach when I heard my grandmother’s voice in my ear.

“Of course you avert your eyes from a display of her pure spirit, after spending all day lustfully ogling her corrupt flesh.”

Next: Brimstone.

“The investigators have set up shop here, on the first floor,” he said, frowning. “I wasn’t really expecting that.”

“Does that mean we should go somewhere else?” I asked hopefully.

“No, I don’t think so… they’ve asked students to stay in their own residence halls as much as possible,” Lee said. “Let’s head on in and get the lay of the land.”

We clambered out of the coach and headed down the slightly uneven concrete steps to the front patio. Lee entered the basement lounge ahead of us, holding open the door.

The room was fuller than I’d seen it any other time since the first weekend and its hall-wide meeting. It wasn’t just students, either. Some of the larger groups were sitting with humans, who I figured were their resident advisers, judging by their ages. The dean of non-human students, who probably hadn’t been back in Harlowe since the first weekend, was talking quietly to a couple of guys who were probably either somebody’s lawyers or plain clothes investigators.

The gorgon girl who lived in the room directly beneath me was standing with a couple of figures in all-encompassing black cloaks similar to the ones that Dee wore, and another person who looked like a humanoid mushroom standing about three and a half feet tall.

“It looks like there was an all-night Veil party,” Lee said.

It took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about… he was looking at Sooni, who was dressed in her latest Science Princess outfit. Maliko and Suzi were huddled around her. Sooni was bawling her eyes out, Maliko looked scared. Suzi looked oddly serene, as if she possibly didn’t understand what was happening.

Arrayed around them were men who looked like body guards… easterners, three who looked human and two who were canine yokai.

Interestingly, Kai was standing just outside the ring of bodyguards, looking sort of adorably stern in her baby clothes. She had a weapon belt strapped around her padded diaper, with a pair of long and short curved swords and wicked-pronged throwing blades.

“No, that’s actually just… Sunday morning,” I said.

“Ah, well… looks like Gregory’s not at the Crystal Palace any more but he hasn’t turned up here yet, either,” Lee said quietly, his eyes going back down to his tablet. “He might be at the admin building. Most of the agents and officers on premises are blanks to me… I don’t want any contact between them and you if he’s not in earshot of an uproar.”

“Is this one guy really going to make that much difference?” Ian asked. “I mean, if someone decides to play a little game of blackguard, paladin, with us don’t you think we can count on at least one honest cop hearing? Dorms aren’t known for efficient soundproofing.”

“Mike Gregory’s one of the ‘good guys’, no doubt about that,” Lee said. “But that’s not why I want him. I told you, I spent part of the morning studying him.”

“Um, no offense,” Ian said, “but I really hope you’re not staking everything on some hunch you gleaned from reading news clippings. I admit I don’t know much about these things except what I’ve seen on TV… but that sounds like something I’ve seen on TV.”

I nodded my own agreement. I trusted Lee… but I wasn’t sure what he could have learned in an hour or two that would make him seem so certain.

“Let’s just say that my firm’s information on Mr. Gregory is better than news clippings,” Lee said.

“What, do you have a psych profile or something?” Ian asked.

“I really can’t say anything about the specific nature of the information,” Lee said.

“Holy shit,” Ian said.

“Please do us all a favor and don’t go jumping to conclusions, or spreading them around,” Lee said. “Now, I’d rather not leave you completely alone but I’m kind of on my own here for the time being. Will the three of you be okay sitting tight here while I go up and have a chat with the people on-site here?”

Ian and Amaranth both looked at me. I knew they weren’t deferring to me. It looked more like they were sizing me up somehow… maybe wondering how well I’d handle myself if someone confronted us, or if I’d say or do something rash.

While that kind of concern had some basis ordinarily, I resented the idea that I couldn’t be counted on to control myself when it counted.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine,” I said, trying to force myself to be nonchalant. “Go on, have fun.” Okay, maybe I could stand being a little more chalant than that. “I mean, do what you have to.”

“Right,” Lee said. “If anyone official… imperial, provincial, school, or other… wants to talk to you, tell them your attorney is upstairs and will be with them shortly. Don’t listen to anyone who says you don’t need me. I’ll make this as quick as I can.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be polite but firm,” Amaranth said.

“Okay, but if someone presses you to the point that balancing those two things becomes tricky, make sure you remember which of them is optional,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”

He left us alone. We all looked at each other, but nobody said anything. Amaranth stirred as if she were about to speak and break the silence, but then she seemed to think better of it. It was like she shrank back inside herself.

The atmosphere inside the main lounge was somber. That didn’t seem too odd, considering that Leda was dead, but it was surprising that so many people would seem so deeply affected by her death. Sooni was the only one who was weeping so openly, but there were more tears throughout the room.

Harlowe was a place of insular cliques, in my experience… and indeed, the room was full of islands of people with no more than half a dozen students in each and many smaller than that. Leda had been standoffish… at the risk of speaking ill of the dead, she’d been more than a bit of a snob.

Then I became aware of an undercurrent to the scene: fear. I could feel it, I could smell it… and once I knew it was there I could see it on the faces of everyone in the room.

One of their own… our own… had died, been killed. Imperial suspicion was on someone from our building. Who wouldn’t be afraid? The fierce and feral-seeming had to worry about being accused and brought to trial for a crime they might not have done… or worse, accused and not brought to trial. The more conventionally vulnerable had to worry about becoming victims themselves.

I was probably creating a dichotomy that didn’t exist, I realized. I myself was proof that someone could look innocuous by human standards and still be both physically powerful and dangerous. The gnomish students would probably garner little suspicion, but everyone else would be fair game for the investigators.

Lee had kept my mind on my plight, my defense, to the extent that I hadn’t had much thought for the question of who might have done it. Now I found my mind turning to that subject.

The fact that Leda had been human-like and killed in water suggested one very strong possibility to me… or rather, one or two of them. If she bore bite marks and was torn apart to the point that resurrection didn’t seem to be in the cards for her royal personage, as it seemed was the case, then that made it even more likely.

Suspicion wasn’t proof… although it might turn out to be just as good for the imperials if it gave them a satisfactory resolution. Lee seemed like a good guy, and he definitely had my back… but that was the thing. He had my back. I was sure he’d want me to share my information about the mermaids if he thought it would help me out.

I couldn’t even say that he’d be wrong to do so. I hadn’t killed anyone. Feejee and Iona, by their own admission, had. Would it be such a terrible injustice if… say, Iona… were to take the blame for this one?

Of course it would, I realized. Someone had killed Leda. Trying to punish Iona for unrelated deaths without knowing for sure she was responsible for this one would only mean someone else might get away with murder.

And, of course, I’d had no interest in seeing Iona punished before doing so coincided with a chance to shield my own ass.

But maybe I was overthinking it… the investigators weren’t going to take the unsupported word of a demonblood murder suspect as damning evidence. They’d at least check Iona out because I had a lawyer who would use it against them if they ignored a tip that could clear me, and they’d either find proof of her involvement or…

…or the’d discover that under her smooth, red-tinged skin, she was hiding something a lot scarier looking than any demon and forget about finding evidence of anything else.

Also, I was thinking of this in terms of blaming Iona, but there was no way I could shield Feejee. While Feejee was hardly innocent… she seemed to be, in some ways, an innocent. She knew nothing but her people’s own peculiar system of morality. There was no connection in her mind between the idea of humans as people she could talk to and befriend and humans she could eat… or there was no conflict between the two.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it, either way. I had the feeling that if she ate me, she might miss me afterwards, but I didn’t expect any remorse.

If Leda hadn’t died in water, I would be pretty sure Feejee hadn’t been involved. That she had been killed in the fountain muddied the… metaphorical water. It might even have made it more likely to be her than Iona… I could see Feejee not giving a second thought to the victim’s identity or standing as long as she was in water.

On the other hand, I could also see Iona just not caring. Feejee could overwhelm me with fear when she shifted into her less human-looking states. Iona was just plain scary, no matter what face she wore.

“Holy shit!” Ian said.

“What?” I said, looking around.

Hovering over the underworld contingent was what could only be the observer Lee had described as “some sort of eyeless fish-beast”… it was at least five feet across, generally flat and maybe three feet tall at the center, with wavy fringed fins protruding a foot and a half farther on each side. The front of it seemed to be all mouth, except for a small knob over the center of it from which a pair of whisker-like undulating antennae protruded. Its coloration was… hard to describe.

Dark and glistening, but just when I thought I was getting a handle on exactly what dark and glistening color it was, my mind slipped off it.

“Did I miss that thing somehow, or did it just show up?” Ian asked just as the thing faded back out of sight. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s… interesting.”

“It probably exists simultaneously on multiple planes,” Amaranth said. “Physical, ethereal…”

“The ether doesn’t extend that deep below the surface,” I said. “Probably some place stranger than that… somewhere that’s farther removed from anywhere up here. That could be why it seems to have trouble manifesting.”

It shimmered back into view, slowly turning in the air as it did. I had a distinct sense of unease as I realized that it was “looking” towards us, its long, whippy appendages streaming out through the air. Something rolled over me… a feeling like being pounded by a cold, strangely dry surf, and then the thing reoriented itself back the way it had been.

“Oh, so that’s how you say ‘mind your own business’ in extraplanar fishese,” Ian said. “I’ve been wondering.”

“Actually, it was just saying hi,” Amaranth said. “Introducing itself.”

“What’s it doing now?” Ian asked.

The fish turned its attention towards the door at the back corner of the room, where the stairwell to the boys’ side was. A moment later, the door swung open so hard and fast that I thought perhaps its attention had caused it to move, but then Dee came flying through it in a dark-dark green robe… as far as I could tell, her feet were on the ground, but there was really no other word for it but flying. She used the unearthly smooth elven stride, but she crossed the room over to the group of her compatriots far too quickly to call it “gliding”.

Her appearance took them by surprise. I could imagine the substance of what Dee was saying had something to do with her obligations to Steff, though I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying, or even hear what the cloaked elves said to her in response. They were either sticking to telepathy or modulating their voices to a degree Dee wasn’t bothering to do. They seemed deeply concerned with her state of dress, though… one of them actually stripped off her cloak, revealing herself to have spiky black hair, and tried to throw it over Dee’s body. Dee batted it aside mentally, her voice getting slightly louder.

“Do you think we should go help her?” Amaranth asked.

“It looks like she’s doing okay to me,” Ian said.

“We probably shouldn’t be getting involved with anything right now,” I said. “Remember what Lee said?”

“I think we could support our friend without getting entangled with officialdom,” Amaranth said.

“Right, except we’d be supporting her to ambassadors or lawyers or oathspeakers or whoever those are,” I said.

“Looks like it doesn’t matter anyway,” Ian said, as Dee threw up her arms and then turned and zipped back towards the door.

The woman who’d taken off her cloak made a lunge for her, but the other one grabbed her arm and held her back. As soon as Dee was out of sight, the uncloaked one shook her head sadly, then let out an audible “oh!” and disappeared. The discarded cloak seemed to pick itself up and then settled itself into an elf-sized shape.

“Apparently they’re privacy advocates?” Ian said.

There was a loud scoffing sound from behind us. I turned to see Trina had just come in. All three of her eyes looked bleary and red.

“I can’t believe you’re joking at a time like this,” she said. “Or actually, I can. Come on, Gladys,” she said half over her shoulder, apparently not even realizing that her friend had fallen behind her at some point and wasn‘t even in sight. “Let’s go find Mariel.”

“…she sure told me?” Ian said as Trina headed for the stairs.

“Everybody deals with tragedy differently,” Amaranth said.

I thought that maybe Trina’s way of dealing with it differently was by dealing with it exactly the same way she dealt with everything else, but I didn’t say that. I looked around the room, looking for something else to say, something else to talk about… and I was again struck by the amount of fear there seemed to be. Some people even had the look on their face that I recognized as being a certain kind of “guilty”… the look that says you know you’re going to be punished and you at least halfway feel you deserve it, irrespective of anything you’ve actually done. It looks the same as being guilty to a lot of people… particularly people who think that the innocent don’t have any reason to fear punishment.

“I think the really sad thing is that no one’s really dealing with what happened yet,” I said. “I don’t know who’d be mourning Leda, but right now everybody’s worried about what happens next… everybody’s waiting for the hammer to fall.”

“We’re sort of lucky, in a way,” Amaranth said, nodding. “Or we will be, if Lee’s right and he can get them to move on from you fairly quickly. You know you’re under suspicion, and you can look forward to a quick resolution.”

“I can hope for one,” I said. “It’s not a guarantee. I think I’d rather not be under suspicion in the first place.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t choose that, any more than you were able to choose your birth,” Amaranth said. “And even the people who don’t share your circumstances are under a cloud… they just don’t know exactly how bad it is yet.”

“Amaranth… I know you’re trying to look on the bright side, but it sounds to me like you’re talking about ’having a big enough problem to notice it’ like it’s a good thing,” I said. “And yeah, Lee’s got confidence and I’ve got confidence in him, but he‘s always been pretty upfront about the fact that there are no guarantees. There are a lot of things that could go wrong… there’s no way of knowing for sure that I’ll be cleared of suspicion, much less that it‘ll happen quickly.”

“Um, your coat’s buzzing,” Ian said.

“Oh!” I said, and I pulled my mirror out of my coat pocket and flipped it open. “It’s Lee,” I said for the others’ benefit as I accepted the reflection. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mackenzie?” he said. “Yes, I think things either got a whole lot simpler or more complicated. They have a demon expert here insisting there was no infernal handiwork in the killing.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” Amaranth said, leaning over my shoulder. “Wouldn’t that make things simpler for Mack?”

“For a demonblood who’s under suspicion?” Lee said. “Very likely yes. For Mackenzie Blaise? That depends.”

“Depends on what?” I asked.

“On your relationship to a Martha Blaise.”

Next time: Do you really need a teaser?

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