Chapter 20

The Baltimore Kennel-Owners Association

ichaela had been waiting for The Call, since Ana had been confirmed dead.

She wasn’t waiting by her phone though; there was plenty of work to be done, cleaning up after a hunter’s death, and Michaela was currently going through Ana Heeren’s storage unit, because even someone like Ana still practised ‘keep all your Hunting stuff out of your house’. It was boring work, going through and destroying papers and evidence that monsters existed, so Michaela was multi-tasking, giving Amber a ring and telling her Aix’s stuff needed to come to Baltimore, though she wasn’t sure where they were going to put it yet. Amber was concerned—she and Aix had hit it off immediately, and she’d apparently picked up a kitten on her way through Texas that she was planning on giving to Aix as a housewarming gift.

‘He’s not homeless again, is he, Mike?’

‘No, no, he’s had a windfall and is just still looking for a place. I’ll tell you more when you get here. I know he’s meeting with a realtor soon, and he’s currently a very honoured guest of a colleague of mine.’

Amber knew what ‘colleague’ meant, from Michaela. It meant the kind of thing you definitely couldn’t talk about over the phone.

‘Well you take care of him. He’s a good kid and if he needs a job I’ll put him through driving school.’

Michaela smiled. ‘Don’t worry, the problem is that there are lots of people who want him around.’

‘Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving kid.’

Michaela smiled. ‘Yeah, I’m with you on that. He got to town and just waded hip-deep into solving problems, so now they’ve convinced him to stay, but that means he’s gotta look for digs where he can set up shop.’

‘Ah, gotcha. Well a ten-by-ten storage unit will fit all his stuff, I’ll spot the rent for a month. Don’t tell him about the cat, I wanna surprise him.’

‘He doesn’t like surprises, Amber; but he’ll love the cat.’

After hanging up with Amber, Michaela cracked her neck and continued going through Ana’s storage unit. She wished Heather hadn’t immediately fucked off upon reaching the coastal city, but what could you do? Fae were fae, and Michaela would never begrudge a selkie the freedom to get the fuck off land after being landlocked for a week. Even Aix had been a little single-minded about seeing the bay as soon as they’d reached Baltimore.

Over the next hour, the sun set, and Michaela had finished collecting or destroying all the incriminating stuff from the storage unit; she paid the clerk to forget her face, and she was just finishing up a letter to her fathers when there was a call from René’s club.

‘Speak.’

‘This is George at Nepenthé Downstairs.’

Here it was. ‘So he finally called?’

‘Sir informed him and he awaits you reaching a secure line.’

Michaela steeled herself. ‘I’ll be right there, give me ten minutes; I was just cleaning up after the Heeren.’

She appended the letter briefly with this news, folded it up, and put it in the security envelope—the mail was the only secure communication left, other than the landlines that required constant supervision and checking to make sure they were not being tapped or found. Immortals were good at keeping on top of their correspondence, though most of them bitched about how slow it was these days (only getting delivered six times a week was unacceptable to immortal people who were accustomed to the mail getting delivered six times a day). Michaela only stopped to drop the letter in a post box, before heading back to the secure parking spot at one of the BUR terminals. The nightmare maze of narrow, one-way streets in downtown Baltimore was not something she wanted to deal with in a compact car, let alone the Moonbus, which had, in its previous life, been a full-sized school bus. She took her old duffel bag of essentials, shouldered Matilda, and got on the train to Whorefang Road.

As usual, nobody even looked at her—which wasn’t so different from most public transit, really. Except this wasn’t normal public transit, this was the public transit of the Otherfolk. But Michaela was The Van Helsing, and even though she’d proven more than ten times over that she wasn’t trigger-happy, she was in Baltimore, which had been crushed under the heel of Hunters since Ana’s mentor had come to town in the seventies. She was, also, armed. So she moved slowly, and calmly, and did not make eye-contact with anyone, and did not look at anyone vulnerable.

When she arrived at Nepenthé, it was closed (it was always closed on Wednesdays), but the wolves had arrived from the suburbs, from the spotless SUVs parked all up and down the street, and when Michaela got into the club’s closed but unlocked door, she heard and saw that they were acting exactly how you’d expect white suburbanites in an exclusive private white suburbanite secret society to act, and they were menacing Aix, who was in a wheelchair.

Michaela saw red. She fired off a warning shot at the one nearest Aix, Elcox, who happened to be the shittiest Big Dad Wolf she’d ever had the displeasure of meeting (he hated the term BDW, which was the widely accepted term, and insisted he was an “Alpha”—which just proved Michaela’s point). The bolt wasn’t silver, but Matilda’s draw-weight was enough that the bolt hitting his shoulder knocked him back with the force, and it broke the momentum of his pack.

And then Aix screamed, loud enough to rattle windows. It was a loud scream—he had a loud voice and knew how to project—but there was something a touch magical about it, something that echoed beyond reality, made the shadows get a little… tentacley.

And there was a hooded figure standing over him, in the next moment, wings of skin and bone spread protectively, eyes flickering in and out of existence on them, the outline difficult to keep hold of, like a perpetually-shifting octopus, or some kind of AI-generated image that kept refreshing.

‘Everyone shut. Up,’ Aix said, and Michaela was proud of him for standing up to them.

‘You shot me!’ Elcox shouted at Michaela, more offended than hurt. Michaela just locked gaze with him, like she always did with wolves.

‘The witch says shut up, you shut the fuck up, Elcox,’ Michaela said, with razor smile that promised more crossbow bolts. She saluted the tall, Lovecraftian figure crouched over Aix. ‘Cthulhu, I presume? Hope I’m pronouncing that right.’ She said that mostly to let the wolves know exactly what they were dealing with; hopefully it’d put the fear of Aix into them.

‘All of you get out,’ Aix said. ‘You wolves,’ he clarified.

‘We have a right—’

‘You lost your right to access me the minute you were violent!’ Aix interrupted, with a voice like thunder. Cthulhu seemed to get bigger. Some of the lower-ranking wolves were wise enough to slink out, tails between their legs and a whine in their throat; but not Elcox. Where the hell was René? Michaela thought. It was full dark, was he still waking up? Likely, unfortunately—it was early enough that he might be having breakfast, and vampires couldn’t be easily interrupted from meals. Which was probably why the wolves had shown up with this timing, the bullies—trying to get Aix alone and undefended.

They hadn’t counted on The Van Helsing, though, Michaela thought with a grim satisfaction.

There was a furious beeping, like the angriest, tiniest goose in existence, and a rock, of all things, pelted from somewhere in the rafters toward Elcox, twanging off the crossbow bolt sticking out of his arm. He yelped, eyes flashing gold as he searched the direction it had been thrown in.

Another rock flew at him, and this one beaned him in the face.

Go ‘way or I call Mommy eat you up!

Elcox finally flinched, at that horrible eldritch voice in his head, and slunk out—still glaring at them, blood trailing from a cut on his cheek where the second rock had hit him.

‘It wasn’t even silver-tipped, ya fuckin’ hounddog,’ Michaela scolded him as his eyes met hers. ‘G’wan now, git!’ she said, exactly the same she’d shoo off a particularly vexing bear or raccoon from her trashcans.

When he’d left, she locked the door and wedged a chair under the handle for good measure. When she turned back, Aix was shaking, and also wrapped in mostly purple tentacles; but he was leaning into the strange embrace, and Michaela knew he was being comforted, even if she couldn’t hear it. She sat down nearby, but not too near.

‘Hey,’ she said, softly.

‘Hey,’ Aix said, sounding less shaky than they looked. ‘You’re probably wondering where René is, and who let them in. It was. It was me. They didn’t open with barking at me, and I didn’t notice how many there were before they were pushing past me. And I.’ Aix covered their face in shame, hands still trembling. ‘I’ve only ever met nice wolves.’

‘I know the feeling,’ Michaela said, after what was probably too long a silence; but she wasn’t like Victoria, she wasn’t too good at this emotional stuff. ‘You gotta think of this pack as more like a bunch of rich people’s dogs. Like… Georgette, from Oliver and Company.’

That got a weak laugh. ‘Felt more like Roscoe and DeSoto.’ He straightened, shaking himself and holding his head up. ‘Still,’ he said, determined to pick the best out of the situation, as he always did. ‘Did you hear me? I can’t normally be that articulate when I’m unprepared.’ He was rather proud of himself, for that.

Pippin slid down one of the brass poles on the stage, and bounded across the floor and up into Aix’s lap, babbling concerned-sounding noises that mimicked human speech but absolutely did not arrange themselves into any kind of recognisable words. Her tail was swishing in agitation, even after she settled in Aix’s skirted lap.

‘Hey, looks like you saved me again, huh?’ Aix said, as Pippin purred and rubbed against every part of Aix she could reach, her Flash starting to glow again, blue and white.

The mass of increasingly amorphous tentacles pulled back into a tall humanoid shape, extremely slender and shrouded in a tattered black robe with a deep hood, long tendrils the only visible feature emerging from the darkness of the hood, and long, bony purple hands from the sleeves. The shape looked… familiar, somehow, but Michaela couldn’t pinpoint where she’d seen its like, before.

Aix smiled as Cthulhu reached a hand out to Pippin, who all but ignored him, focussed on Aix.

‘You all did,’ Aix continued, looking at Michaela, and then up at Cthulhu, before pausing at the new appearance of the latter, and then wrinkling their nose in a mischievous smile. ‘Cthulhu,’ he said, in a low voice trembling with laughter un-pealed. ‘Why are you making yourself look like an illithid.’

Victoria has some very interesting art.

Aix snorted, laughing—and it went a little hysterical, but Michaela just went and got an ice chip from behind the bar, pressing it into Aix’s hands gently. Pippin was very curious about the ice chip, but Michaela had gotten extras and handed her a smaller one to play with. Aix held the ice tightly, and slowly calmed down on his own.

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘for not slapping me, or something.’

‘God, no,’ Michaela said, horrified. ‘What is this, a farce?’

‘What the hell is going on out—oh my god what happened.’

And there was Jasper, the usual barkeep, a lovely Sikh silver bear (not literally a bear—though he was, like many of Baltimore’s werebears, a man of colour) who was currently dressed to his usual nines, brown and gold brocaded silk sherwani and saffron turban setting off his brown skin, making it rather luminous, particularly because he’d put a little bit of golden shimmer powder on for decoration.¹

‘The Baltimore Kennel-Owners Association is what happened,’ Aix’s voice was a little watery, but sarcastic and biting as he got during the—so far—brief flashes of drag queen he’d shown. ‘Oh, Jasper, this is my boyfriend, Cthulhu. Cthulhu, this is Jasper, he’s one of René’s boyfriend-vampires.’ Aix wasn’t sure if that was the right term, but to him the word ‘boyfriend’ was a very Legitimate Relationship word, and he wanted to grant all of them that kind of respect.

Cthulhu bowed politely.

‘I came up here to see if you were having trouble finding a snack for Pippin….’

‘I never got there,’ Aix said dryly, finally reaching for his wheels and moving toward the end of the bar, where the counter opened to let in the barkeep. ‘Michaela showed up just in time, and—Pippin, where did you get rocks from?’

My room… trailed off, with the knowledge that Throwing Rocks was Naughtybad.

‘Okay, well, sometimes it is okay to break the rules, like when someone is being violent. That is okay and you did a good Pippin thing to do.’ Aix hugged her, and looked up at Cthulhu. ‘And I’m glad you came, too. That helped enormously.’ He sighed, trying to gather his thoughts, which were jangling around like spoons in a glass. ‘…Thanks for shooting that asshole, Mike.’

‘Just doin’ my job, yer honour,’ Michaela said, with a little salute, and Aix giggled. He and Michaela had talked about how it was hard to be polite in a southern and non-gendered way, and Michaela had been rotating through various honorifics for Aix.

‘You shot one of them?’ Jasper said faintly, even as he filled a glass with water and brought it over to Aix.

‘Calm your magnificent tits, Jas, it wasn’t silver,’ Michaela said. ‘I was too far away to shove him. Things were escalating. The whole pack shoved in here to gang up on the local witch, and they sent them running after I bought them a second to breathe.’

‘I made a mistake, and Michaela, Pippin, and Cthulhu helped me deal with it,’ Aix added, in a blunt voice that was clearly full of inwardly-focussed rage. ‘I was so high on the joy of everything that’s been happening lately that I forgot, for a moment, that straight people existed.’

‘Happens to the best of us,’ Michaela said, knowing the first mistake always hit people hard. ‘You did good sticking to your principles. I admire that.’

‘Ye!’ Pippin agreed. She held the half-melted ice chip out to the world generally, her Mask distressed, and the usual blue-black of it pulled away from her little hands to show how red the ice had made her skin. Jasper took the ice chip from her and tossed it int the sink behind the bar counter, as Aix dug through his purse and pulled out part of his discarded hijab’s fabric, wiping her little hands dry and holding them in his.

Hurt!

I know baby, when your hands get that cold it hurts to warm them back up; but we gotta warm them back up, okay? I know it hurts. It will go away sooner if you wiggle your fingers, can you do that for me?

She stopped squirming, flexing her hands, her tail perking back up when she learned it did help the pain go away, until it was just buzzy and almost tickly, and then went away.

‘Does… Does Cthulhu talk, Aix?’ Jasper asked, and Aix looked up, then up at Cthulhu, then back at Jasper.

‘Has he… not been?’ he asked, confused.

Ah, no. Humans have quite variable brains, it means every new individual has to be bonded with slightly differently.

Made of plastic, it’s fantastic, Aix’s mind sang, with a bit of humour. ‘Um, okay so, apparently that was private thought-speech. Let’s go downstairs, though.’

‘Yes, we should,’ Jasper agreed, ‘The King awaits.’

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