20 
DECISIONS, DERISION, DIVISIONS
That burnt-down priest’s house on Mount Fuji got us somewhere. Parth says the onmyouji’s name is Akihiko Watanabe. Or at least, that’s one of his names,” Choo informed us. He was in the bakery’s cellar, mixing and thickening homemade dyes that Sarah had made from various herbs and berries into paints—spell ingredients turned into pigments. Sarah had decided that the best way to keep Kevin safe was to stay on the move, and she was helping Choo turn his van into a warded fortress on wheels. “Maybe he pretended to be some kind of Shinto priest for a while, but he got kicked out of the order. Then he did feng shui and fortune-telling for rich people, but the government came after him. They thought he was using information from his sessions to blackmail people. Then he did some stuff for the yakuza, but he pissed somebody off there too. He disappeared about ten years ago, and most people think he’s dead.”
“That would all fit what we know about him,” Sarah mused. “Sociopaths and narcissists tend to leave a trail of burnt bridges behind them wherever they go.”
Sarah and Sig and I were all standing around, half leaning against various tables or walls. Jerry had finally fallen asleep after three days standing, and I’m still not sure Sarah didn’t find some way to slip him something despite Jerry’s refusal to eat anything but food he randomly selected from her counter.
“I checked into that sperm clinic,” Sig said. “Last month, it had a serious fire and lost its supply of… um.…”
“Frozen pops?” I suggested, and got the same dour glance from three different people.
“Akihiko probably broke in, stole Kevin’s donations, and set the place on fire to cover his tracks,” Sarah speculated.
“Probably,” Sig said glumly. “Do we have a picture of the onmyouji yet?”
“No,” Choo said.
“Well, we’ve got a concrete lead as to his whereabouts.” I was munching on a slice from a vegetarian pizza that was bigger than a manhole lid and smaller than a tablecloth. “Akihiko is apparently running some kind of underground fighting tournament for supernatural beings in New York City.”
From Sig and Choo’s blank expressions, I might as well have said that Akihiko had begun marketing edible fire hydrants.
“Why?” Sig asked.
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” I said. “A lot of supernatural beings stay hidden by repressing seriously predatory instincts. A venue that allows them to let off some steam might draw a lot of them out of hiding.”
“I understand that,” Sig said a little impatiently. “But what does Akihiko get out of it?”
“We’ve been wondering how he’s been summoning all of these different exotic creatures,” I pointed out.
Sig’s troubled expression cleared. “You think he’s using this tournament to recruit supernatural muscle from a lot of different cultures?”
“Not just that,” Sarah interjected. She held up the feather we’d taken from Alyssa. “I think those scales you found on the chiang-shih were given to him by the onmyouji as a form of payment. Akihiko paid Alyssa off too. He got this feather from a siren, and it would be useful for all kinds of powerful love charms.”
“So, we… Wait, sirens have feathers?” Sig asked. She was probably thinking of all those weird mermaid tangents that had sprung out and deviated from the original siren stories.
“Just the bottom half,” I assured her.
“Think of all the monster bits and pieces Akihiko must be collecting just from cleaning up after the fights,” Sarah said. “Blood… scales… feathers… teeth and skin and glands and organs. Exotic, hard-to-get items. You could use that to cast a lot of spells or make a lot of charms and potions.”
Choo whistled. “Is there gambling involved too?”
“Sarah’s source said there is,” I said.
“So, he gets money from that end of it,” Choo speculated. “He makes contacts with the kind of monsters who like to kill. And he gets hard-to-find spell ingredients. That’s slick.”
“Let’s cut to the part where you want to fight in this underground tournament,” Sig said.
It was my turn to stare at somebody.
“We all know that’s where you’re going with this,” she explained. “You do realize that I’m going to fight too, right?”
“Hold on,” I protested. “I can’t be mind-read or psychically spied on. I’m the logical person to go undercover.”
“Sarah can provide me with wards against mind reading, and we’re looking for information.” Sig was making a point of speaking reasonably. “I can speak to ghosts.”
“I’ll need to focus. I’ll be distracted if you’re there.” I knew that was the wrong tactic to take the moment I heard the words coming out of my mouth.
“Then I’ll fight, and you can sit around waiting to find out if I’m coming back or not.” Now Sig’s tone was becoming a little grim. “It can’t be that big a deal. That’s what you want me to do, right?”
And then we were off.
Guess who won that argument?
Life is full of strange pivots and twists and weird compromises. Two years earlier, I would have stolen a car and made for New York City the moment I found out that the onmyouji was there. Every moment wasted was another moment where Akihiko might get fed up and kill or kidnap somebody close to the Kichidas, and I felt that urgency pressing on me. But now that I was part of a group, you know what I was doing eight hours after I got my first real lead?
I was making cupcakes.
Let me just say that again: I was making cupcakes.
Cupcakes.
I understand the individual steps that led to it. If Sig and I were going to both go undercover among creatures with enhanced senses, pretending not to know each other, we couldn’t just take off; we had to eradicate all scent trails. We had to go to separate locations and get medieval on our skin and hair, get new clothes, acquire new and separate transportation, and avoid physical contact with each other or anything we’d touched. That was step one.
Step two was that Sarah wasn’t ready to leave yet, and she still wanted either Sig or Cahill or me around in case Akihiko somehow located Kevin despite Sarah’s attempts to ward him. Again, I could see the sense in this. So, Sig and I had flipped a coin, and Sig had left to make preparations to leave first.
And Sarah wasn’t used to leaving her bakery in the hands of her employees for an unidentified amount of time. She was almost as fretful about that as she was to any threats on her life. That’s a factor. And I’ve had a lot of jobs in diners and bars and construction sites and fishing boats and lumber camps and farms over the decades, the kind of knock-around jobs that a nomad can get without inviting too much scrutiny. And while I’ve never worked in a bakery, I’ve made a lot of pizzas and biscuits and pancakes and pies and cakes in my day, and Sarah must have had some weird enhanced senses of her own, because it was as if she could smell it on me. So…
Put all that together and somehow I wound up helping Kevin make cupcakes. Another one of Sarah’s employees, Courtney Stewart, was coming in and out of the kitchen to check on some cheesecakes, but she was barely talking to us. I had met Courtney once before, briefly, the first time I came to Sarah, but she had mostly been out of it at the time, and Sarah had woven some spells to help Courtney… well, not forget, exactly, but remember those events fuzzily, as if her mind’s eye was peering through cheesecloth. Courtney had said hello to me uneasily and then proceeded to pretend that I didn’t exist, which was fine.
“Sarah says I should talk to you,” Kevin said.
“About what?” My voice was neutral, not because I meant to be unfriendly so much as I was ready to start hunting the man who had been hunting us, and I was used to having more alone time to plan and analyze and turn things over and around in my head.
“She says you know what it’s like to…” Kevin visibly struggled for words or the strength to say them. “Grow up being blamed for who you are naturally.”
“That’s true,” I acknowledged. “But so does Molly, I think. And she’s a much better person to talk to than I am.”
I was breaking eggs into the sifted cake and pastry flour while Kevin measured out tablespoons of sugar and baking powder and salt. I say measured, but he wasn’t bothering to check the instructions Sarah had laid out, or carefully leveling out the spoons. When I’d asked him if he knew what he was doing, he’d said no, but the cupcakes did. Seriously. At any rate, he didn’t argue my point about Molly. “Molly’s not back yet. And you might be dead soon.”
I didn’t take that personally. “Also true.”
“This underground fight tournament thing… Are there really that many supernatural creatures around?” Kevin asked.
“Can’t you see that for yourself?” I was genuinely curious, not trying to put him on the defensive. “You have the sight.”
“I was homeschooled in a small town.” There was a little bitterness in this observation. “I still saw some strange stuff, but Mom kept me away from places with a huge population. And now I’m in a small private school. So, I don’t really know. Are there that many?”
“Well, you’d have to define many,” I said. “There are a lot more of us than there were before the Fae created the Pax Arcana eight centuries ago, but the fertility rate is low for most supernaturals, and the mortality rate is high.”
“Because of people like you?” It was an incautious question asked carefully.
“Partly. And a lot of noobs like you get killed by other supernatural beings because they don’t understand the rules or the players,” I added.
“Is there a handbook or something?” Kevin asked.
“I’m working on that,” I said. We paused a while to add in the wet ingredients: the milk and softened butter and teaspoons of sweet-smelling vanilla. “Speaking of supernatural beings who don’t know what they’re doing, you realize there’s a good chance that any kids you have will have the sight, right? And if you’re just an anonymous sperm donor from some catalog, you won’t be there to help them deal with it.”
It was the first time I’d brought up the whole sperm donor thing, and Kevin didn’t take it well. Anger spilled out of him like lava. “There might be babies out there right now who came from me, being raised by my own grandfather so that he can kill them! I don’t need you to tell me I fucked up, okay?”
“I’m not judging,” I said, not entirely truthfully. I was pretty sure they didn’t have a BIG HONKING PSYCHIC box to check on one of those sperm donor cards, but it seemed like something prospective parents ought to know. “I’m just trying to figure it out. I don’t know you well, but it seems like you would have thought about your kids having the sight.”
“I was tired of feeling like a freak!” Kevin shot back, then got a little calmer. “A lot of people experiment with different types of drugs trying to do the kind of stuff I can do naturally.”
“That’s true,” I said. “So what?”
“I…” Kevin struggled internally. “I thought maybe I’d be helping seed the universe with people who could see past the usual walls. Like maybe there wouldn’t be so much violence if people could see past the surface stuff. And I figured most of the women who’d go to those clinics would be kind of liberal, wide-open types. Not like…”
Not like his parents? How angry a phase had this stage of Kevin’s been? It would have been his freshman year, his first year away from an apparently regimented life, not too long after his mother had died from cancer. People can react to the death of a loved one in all kinds of unpredictable ways that don’t seem to make sense on any kind of surface level. But I didn’t go there. Instead, I said, “I imagine lots of different kinds of people go to sperm clinics. And I’m pretty sure they all have a right to know that their kid might be able to see ghosts and alternate futures and stuff.”
“That mortality rate you were talking about…” Kevin faltered. “Would my kids be… I mean.… Do a lot of people like me get killed? I mean, my situation is weird even for weirdos, right?”
“True psychics have it rough,” I said bluntly. “A lot of sensitives get medicated into a coma or locked away somewhere until they shut up and pretend to be normal. A lot of them figure out a way to commit suicide too. Are you telling me that you’ve never thought about it? You and all those things you can’t stop seeing?”
His silence was answer enough.
“You need to tell your father that,” I said.
“You never had a father,” Kevin muttered. I couldn’t tell if he was saying that like I had it easy or if he was telling me to go fuck myself.
“No,” I admitted. “But I’ve had people I was trying to work with do screwed-up, sneaky things that almost got me killed. I don’t want your dad to join that club.”
“What do you mean?” he asked warily.
“I don’t want your dad biding his time until he can hunt my friends because he thinks we’re seducing you to the dark side,” I elaborated. “If he tries to betray us at a critical moment, I’ll kill him.”
“Maybe he’ll kill you first.” Kevin’s face became closed off and stubborn. “Or I will.”
I didn’t respond directly. We had to stop talking while I used an electric mixer to turn the floury mixture into batter. Maybe Kevin could have gently coaxed the cupcakeness out of the sticky mess, but I just beat it into submission. When I was done, I gave Kevin the batter so that he could pour it into muffin tins.
“Is that what you want?” I inquired mildly. “Do you want your father to hurt my friends or them to hurt him? Do you want to kill me or for me to kill you?”
“What do you want from me?” he blurted out. “My father won’t listen to me.”
“You’d be surprised at what people can handle if they really love each other,” I said. “And I really think he loves you, even if you don’t fit into his worldview.”
“I need time,” he said.
“Then tell Sarah thank you but get lost,” I said. “Just leave. I don’t think she’ll try to stop you.”
“I can’t.” Kevin’s voice was wistful. He loved all of this: Sarah and the pseudo-maternal thing she had going on around him, dream worlds, valkyries, bakeries full of wards and charms—he loved it. He was young and male and stupid and at least one of those adjectives was probably redundant.
“Then tell your father you love him, but if he does something messed-up to keep you from making your own decisions, you can’t be in his life anymore,” I said, still neutral.
“I can’t,” he said quietly.
Neither of us said anything for a time. “Look, Kevin,” I said finally. “I’ve fucked up a lot. I’ve gone into denial and fought who I am and run from things longer than most people have been alive. I don’t think I’m better than you. I’m asking you to be better than me.”
Eventually, Kevin drew in a deep breath, held it in his chest before releasing it again. “All right.”
“Why do you care about any of this?” Kevin asked.
Because someone ought to. Because not many could help him, and I could. Because at the end of the day, the evils that happen to someone else and seem like they can safely be ignored are more insidious than the threats that occur on an apocalyptic scale. But what I said was: “Well, saving virgins is kind of a family tradition.”
“Shut up.” Kevin’s face was a bright red.
“Just talk to your dad,” I advised.
And he did talk to Jerry too. Molly told me later that Kevin and his father got into a huge fight, a real one, and that by the end of it, Jerry wasn’t agreeing to anything but he wasn’t trying to leave and he was treating everyone like real people, not species traitors or monsters who looked human. I didn’t see any of that, though. Like I said, a sense of urgency was pressing on me, and by the time Jerry was awake, I was gone.