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“So —” he started.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just —”
“Pike.”
“The wolf stopped pacing,” Pike said. Carefully not making anything of it. “I noticed. In the office, before we left. I wasn’t going to say anything, obviously.”
“And yet here we are.”
“Here we are,” Pike agreed. He went quiet. Not the kind where he was loading up on the next thing. “She’s good, Tor. The way she handled this morning. The way she talked to you.”
“Assessed me, you mean?”
“Called you out for standing against the wall looking authoritative.” A grin. “Nobody does that.”
Tor kept his focus on the square. “It landed differently than intended.”
“I know. That’s why I’m mentioning it.”
The square was busy with the ordinary morning traffic of a coastal town going about its business. The vendor stalls. A woman with a stroller. No dark-haired man anywhere in the flow of it. Tor tracked the sight lines from where the man had stood. Direct line to the café window. Direct line to Mirelle’s table. If he had been there from the start, he would have witnessed the whole surge.
The cold anger was back. This time, he did not pretend it wasn’t the wolf. He stopped walking. “I need everything on what’s feeding this: where it’s coming from, how far back it goes. And foot traffic for this square, the last month.”
“Already pulling it,” Pike said, phone out.
“And —”
“Her address history against the ward spikes. All of it.” Pike glanced up. “I started when you were still staring at the wall in the office.” They walked. The ocean was loud this morning, louder than the weather explained. It marked the edge of the ward boundary, so Tor always tracked it, and he’d been noting the change for two weeks without finding a cause. The offshore anchor, centuries older than the ward grid and missing its original records, was responding to something he couldn’t name.
Tor was beginning to suspect that some of what he’d blamed on the Rift wasn’t the Rift at all.
He turned the problem over. “She needs training. That’s too much for an untrained person. If she spikes again without grounding —”
“You’re going to volunteer to train her.”
“It’s the correct response.”
“It is,” Pike said, agreeably. “That’s definitely what it is.”
“If she loses control of the power —”
“Significant. Completely. One hundred percent the reason.”
Tor stopped walking. “Are you going to be like this the entire investigation?”
Pike tilted his head, weighing the question with a solemnity it did not deserve. “Probably,” he said. “But I’ll try to be useful about it.”
Tor resumed walking. He had a working theory about the man in the square. None of it was good. He had a ward system showing strain and an awakening on course to get worse before it got better. He also had a problem the ward system could not touch, one that began and ended with a woman who met his eyes and asked whether he planned to be useful.
Tor was excellent at managing problems; he was not going to be able to manage this one.
THREE
MIRELLE
The next morning, the raccoon was still on the espresso machine. Mirelle stood in the doorway of the Cauldron and Cup. The raccoon met her gaze, composed, as if it had been there a while and gotten plenty done. The specialty tea display lay on the floor, unbroken. Relocated, because the raccoon had feelings about spatial organization. “It arrived,” Valene said without turning around, “a few minutes after you texted. I’ve stopped trying to figure out how. It knocked over my teas.”
