Hermes blinked.
Grumbling, I got up and dressed. Anne was already in the kitchen when I got there, cooking something on the stove. “Morning,” she said. “Hi, Hermes.”
“’Scuse a sec,” I said. Anne moved out of the way and I opened a cupboard, rooting through the cans. “You didn’t see how he got in, did you?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Goddamn it.” I pulled out a can of cat food. “I have gate wards specifically to stop stuff like this.”
“Um, I don’t think he wants the cat food,” Anne said. “He’d rather have some of the bacon.”
“How do you know?”
There was a soft thump. I turned around to see Hermes sitting up on the kitchen counter, tail curled around his feet. He was ignoring me and looking at Anne. “Just a guess,” Anne said.
“We don’t have any bacon.”
“I bought some this morning.”
I glared at the fox. “Why exactly did you wake me up again?”
“Maybe he just thinks you sleep in too much.”
“I got stabbed!”
“Actually, you’re completely recovered.”
“You know, that lifesight of yours really takes the fun out of acting injured.”
“You seem to get injured often enough anyway.”
“I didn’t use to!”
Anne fed Hermes while I (reluctantly) got in touch with Caldera. I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, so I put the story in an e-mail in the slim hope that that way I wouldn’t have to tell her face to face. With that done, we settled down to breakfast.
I suppose if you’re not used to how my life works, the way I was acting probably seems pretty weird. I’d just had someone try to kill me and my response had been to call my friends over for dinner. If this had been some episode of a TV series, we’d have spent the night racing around interrogating people, having dramatic adventures, and trying to find the suspect in forty-five minutes plus commercial breaks.
There were two reasons I wasn’t doing that. First, on a strategic level, that’s not how conflicts between mages work. If you’re trying to catch a mage, the rule of thumb is that once he breaks contact, you’ve got one to five minutes to find him. After that, he’s gone. He’ll have gated away, and you’re not going to track him down without serious effort. Realistically, there wasn’t anything I, Anne, Luna, or Vari could have done to find my would-be assassin, and given what had happened last time, finding him probably wasn’t even that smart an idea in the first place. Caldera was the one with the resources to track him, and since that wasn’t going to happen quickly, it made more sense to get a good night’s sleep before calling her in.
The second reason was much simpler: I’d needed to recover. Having someone come that close to killing you is traumatic, especially when you hadn’t had time to prepare. I’d been in a state of mild shock last night, and all of the others had known it. That was why Luna and Vari had dropped everything to come over, and why Anne had stayed the night. I’ve been in this kind of situation enough times to know that when something like this happens to you, the best thing to do is hole up somewhere safe, try to relax, and spend your time doing safe, everyday things, like arguing about what to feed a blink fox. Soon Caldera would arrive and everything would start moving, and before long I’d probably be in danger again. But for now, we could rest.
“How’s the healing business going?” I asked Anne.
“It still feels weird thinking of it like that,” Anne said. “It’s okay, I think. I’m making enough money. Actually more than enough. But it still feels awkward charging people.”
“I thought you were only charging the ones who could afford it.”
“I am . . . well, I guess I’m not really the entrepreneur type. Though they do seem to treat me better than when I did it for free.”
“I noticed that too,” I said. “Back when I first took over the shop, I tried giving stuff away. Never seemed to turn out that well. I think people value something more if they pay for it.” I paused. “Are you still seeing Dr. Shirland?”
Anne nodded. Dr. Shirland’s an independent mind mage. She’d offered to treat Anne a year and a half back but had been turned down. After last spring, Anne had reconsidered.
“Going okay?”
“It’s not easy, but it helps. I’m glad you and Luna pushed me into it.”
“Have you been talking about . . . ?”
“About her?”
I didn’t need to ask who the “her” was, and Anne didn’t need to say it. Anne has her own problems, and there’s a side of her she doesn’t get on well with. “She calls her my shadow,” Anne said. “Other things too, but . . . She thinks I can work something out, but it’ll take a long time.”
“I guess now’s as good a time as any to start.”
Anne smiled slightly. “Let’s hope so.”
My phone rang, and I put it to my ear with an inward sigh. So much for quiet. “Hi, Caldera.”
“Are you at home?” Caldera said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m on my way. Don’t go anywhere.” She hung up.
I lowered the phone. “Well, it was nice while it lasted.”
Anne rose to her feet. “I guess that’s my cue to go.”
I looked at her in surprise. “You don’t have to.”
“I think it might be easier.”
I started to answer, then stopped and looked down. The bell was about to ring. Already?
I went downstairs and opened the door to see Caldera, dressed in her work clothes. “Hey.”
Caldera gave me an up-and-down look. “You all right?”
“I got better.”
Caldera pushed past me. “Then how about you explain,” she said over her shoulder, “how the hell you managed to nearly get yourself killed on the bloody DLR?”
I closed the door and followed Caldera upstairs. “Nice to see you too.”
“One job. You had one job. All you had do was investigate.”
“You were the one who sent me there. Shouldn’t I be the one blaming you?”
“I should have known it was a bad idea to send you on your own. I could—”
Caldera walked into the living room and stopped. I followed her in to see that Caldera had come face to face with Anne. Anne was in the middle of packing up her bag with her medical gear. She looked up at Caldera. There was a pause.
“You could what?” I asked when Caldera didn’t go on.
“In a sec,” Caldera said. She didn’t take her eyes off Anne.
“It’s okay,” Anne said. “I was just going.” She did up the straps on her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Give me a call if you need anything.”
“You don’t have to,” I said with a frown.
“I should probably be getting back.” Anne walked to the door. Caldera let her pass, moving noticeably farther out of Anne’s way than she really needed to, and I saw her eyes track Anne as she went by. Anne disappeared down the stairs, and a moment later I heard the sound of the front door opening and closing.
I turned to Caldera. “Was that really necessary?”
“She’s not a Keeper or an auxiliary,” Caldera said. “She’s not cleared for this information.”
“She just patched a giant bloody hole in my side. You don’t think that earns at least a thank-you?”
“A thank-you, yeah,” Caldera said. “Just leave it at that next time. You know there are Keeper-sanctioned healers.”
“Anne’s saved my life at least twice.”
“She’s also—” Caldera checked what she’d been about to say, shook her head. “Never mind. All right, I want you to go through exactly what happened last night. Don’t leave anything out.”
I still felt annoyed, but suppressed it. I sat down at the table with Caldera and started the debriefing. It took the best part of an hour, and by the time we were done I felt strung out.