[Indigo]

It rained, almost always, in Bristlecone. It was not one of the things that had drawn Jules here—she wasn't naturally inclined to have strong feelings about any weather, but she'd definitely begun with a mild preference for dryness—but a year and a half into her new life it comforted her in a way. Sometimes she would go into the city to run errands or have a sniping argument with her parents, and all the unpredictability or, as the case may be, the painful predictability would wear her down, and when she came back Bristlecone would be damp and dreary and the same as always, welcoming her back into its chilly gray arms.

Today it was raining a lot harder, though. Wind rattled the shutters. She frowned into the mug she was cleaning and wondered if she ought to close up early.

The Cafe du Livre sat not quite in the center of Bristlecone, and at this stage it was split about evenly between bookstore and cafe. When Jules had first taken this job it had leaned heavily in favor of the bookstore, courtesy of the owner's predilection for hoarding weird old science books and burning eggs. Jules was not a professional chef by any means, except she guessed by the means that she was now paid to cook things, but she could handle breakfast food okay and she was an excellent baker, and now half the shop was populated by matching tables and chairs and neat little vases of flowers, and she watched with an eagle eye to make sure nobody was taking rare books near the food without paying for them first.

Business was usually slow in the middle of the week. Bristlecone was technically a village, though not quite small enough for Jules to think of it as one, because, as she would herself admit, she had no sense of scale, but in any case most of her customers were regulars and there weren't enough of those to fill up her day even on a regular Wednesday afternoon. On this particular day, the weather being what it was, the shop was completely empty except for her, the light oddly stark and white against the thunderclouds outside the windows, the silence and stillness making the place feel almost timeless.

Roman, the owner, had disappeared into a back room probably an hour ago, and Jules hadn't heard a peep out of him since. Maybe he'd slipped out the back and gone home early in case the storm got worse. She was not actually sure where he lived, and it was plausibly far enough to warrant such a thing, although she didn't think he had a car so it couldn't be that far. But surely he would have said something to her in that case, and probably told her to go home early too. He insisted on worrying about her for reasons beyond her comprehension.

The mug squeaked under her sponge as she battled a stubborn coffee stain, thunder boomed, windows shook, and, improbably, the bell rang to indicate a customer entering the store.

[Indigo]

The customer was a man a good five inches shorter than Jules, hunched in a dark blue raincoat that sheared water onto the floor in a solid sheet. He made an embarrassed face as he picked his way through his own puddle to drip more acceptably onto the doormat. There was something weird about his eyes, aside of course from the fact of their being bright red, but Jules had pretty weird-looking eyes herself, having never gotten the hang of making them look human along with the rest of her, so she wasn't really in a position to judge. He put his hands in his pockets and looked around the shop with an impression of barely repressed panic. The hood of his coat was down, but his thick black hair appeared, from this distance at least, to be completely dry.

"Hi there!" Jules called, and watched him almost jump out of his skin. That was weird, too, because she wasn't exactly inconspicuous, given the considerable height and the glittering green reptile eyes and, also, the fact that she was standing in the first place most people would look upon entering a cafe, directly behind the front counter. She smiled in an attempt to put him at ease, because that was her job after all.

He smiled back, ever so briefly, shook the last of the water off and sidled up to the counter. An air of guilt lingered about his face and shoulders without ever quite forming into a visible expression.

"Don't worry about the floor," she said, guessing. "It'll give me something to do while I wait for closing time."

"Ha," he said. His voice was much deeper than she'd expected, and for some reason that unsettled her. "I hope closing time is soon. The weather's not going to get any better."

"You never know."

"Hmm. Right. Do you run this place by yourself? I know this isn't exactly the big city, but it seems like a lot for one person to handle."

"No," she said slowly, "but as you can see there's not much to handle right now." He was just making customer small talk, she understood that kind of thing, but usually people saved that for after they'd placed an order or at least looked at the menu for a while, and usually they didn't make small talk while looking directly into her eyes with intense, obvious curiosity.

"That's true." He looked around again as if only now noticing the emptiness. "I'm sorry, I think I may have started this conversation in the wrong place. I just moved into—you know that little house on the hill above the town? I think it has a name, but I wasn't paying attention when the realtor told me what it was. I'm sure someone will correct me sooner or later."

That house had been empty since before she'd even arrived in Bristlecone, and people whispered about it occasionally. "I think people mostly call it the Check House, after the family that owned it before, but it's not any kind of official name, just one that saves time." Jules had a strange sense that she was getting out of her depth. Now he wasn't looking at her at all.

"That's it. Anyway, I have to go back into the city for more boxes, but I thought I'd stop in here and see if the coffee was good enough to become my new regular stop. And then, you know. I got distracted. This place reminds me of...well, it doesn't matter. Could I just have a small black coffee?"

"Of course, Mr..."

"Sauvage," he said, and smiled again, this time with teeth. They were sharp. It didn't actually feel like a threat, but it was definitely supposed to mean something, and she had no idea what.

[Indigo]

It was not a complicated order, and Sauvage had given the impression of being in a hurry, but once the coffee was made he lingered, asking questions about the shop and the town and glancing periodically out the windows as if keeping an eye on the weather. The storm neither worsened nor improved while he was there, only flickered ominously in the sky, like it was waiting for something.

Only a short time had passed when Jules heard a door open and shut on the bookstore side.

She had known Roman for about as long as she'd lived here, and she wouldn't say they were close, because he had a great skill for deflecting personal questions, but she felt that she knew him well enough. He was often distant and distracted but also warm and friendly, and she'd always had the sense he was watching her back despite her insistence that it didn't need watching. He was not very tall or very thin and his hair was mostly gray, and small blunt antlers protruded from his head like little hands but somehow only further softened his appearance with their size. Usually he wore a faint smile, and occasionally reading glasses. He had never been other than calm or, at most, mildly concerned in her presence.

When he said, "Sauvage," it was all ice and steel, and Jules did not at first recognize his voice.

Sauvage went absolutely still and silent in the middle of a sentence, as if he'd been unplugged. His eyes moved, slowly, to look past Jules, and she turned to follow his gaze. Roman was standing with an enormous book tucked under one arm, his other hand on the doorknob, his face absolutely devoid of expression in a way that made Jules's shoulders tense before it even fully registered.

"Roman!" Sauvage said, in a terrible approximation of lightheartedness. "I didn't expect to—"

"What are you doing here?"

"I was only sampling your fine c—"

"No," Roman said. His voice had warmed up to a recognizable form, which made him sound like a stern teacher pushed to the end of his patience, but at least Jules could relax a little now. A little. "What are you doing here, in Bristlecone?"

"I...I live here," Sauvage said, as if confessing to a crime. "As of this morning. What are you doing here?"

"This is my shop."

"Oh." A long pause. "I didn't know—this doesn't really seem like your kind of place. The shop, maybe, but not the town."

"I wouldn't have thought it was your kind of place, either, but I suppose there is no limit to what you will corrupt and despoil. I suppose you'll stop at nothing to spread your chaos and evil to every corner of the world, everything that's good." Roman spoke more quietly the longer he went on, a strange soft rage suffusing him as if he were trying to avoid embarrassing anyone.

Sauvage made a choked sound. "Will I? You haven't cared in the last decade, and you knew where to find me. Why should my corruption and chaos matter to you now? Because I dared to darken your field of view? I assure you, I would have avoided it if I'd known to." He picked up his coffee and zipped his raincoat in a single quick motion, and gave her a brief nod. "Sorry about this, Jules. Nice meeting you." And he whirled away from the counter and stepped out into the storm, and disappeared.

"I should have known he'd turn up eventually," Roman said, with something that was not quite a laugh. "I would ask why now, but I can't think of any time that would be good. Just one more thing to worry about."

"Roman," Jules said, "what the fuck?"

[Indigo]

Roman flinched, as if he'd forgotten she was there, and then he turned to her with an expression that seemed like it was trying to be a smile but tipped a little too far into a grimace. "Ah...well. It's nothing that would interest you, really, just some very old personal business which I didn't expect to—"

Jules sighed, which made him trail off. She didn't feel good about this, exactly, because while she'd always wondered what Roman was avoiding when he dodged her questions she had also tried to respect his privacy, and she did like him. But to pretend that whatever she had just witnessed was an ordinary disagreement went a little beyond the pale. "It's not about interest," she said, because what on earth did he think of her? "It's just that I did hear all of that and it was very...overwrought, I think might be the word. And a little concerning."

That got his hackles up, she could tell—he very firmly considered it his job to be concerned about her, and not the other way around. "It doesn't have anything to do with you," he said. He sounded more resigned than angry at her probing, which tracked with everything she'd thought about him before he'd pulled out that terrible cold voice, which made her feel a little better but not as much as she would have liked.

"It does now," she said, "unless Sauvage decides to leave Bristlecone entirely, right after buying a house here. I don't know him, so I can't say how likely it is, but if he does stay here then I'll probably run into him again."

Roman shut his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose and took one long, deep breath. "No, you're right. He will be back. And...this may have an impact on you, sooner or later. I wasn't certain at first if you would be staying here, so it seemed unnecessary, but even if Sauvage hadn't turned up I would have told you about this shortly, unless you moved back to the city."

"I'm not about to do that."

"Precisely." He looked out the window for a moment. The clouds were darkening now, gathering close against the rooftops as if preparing to reach out and grab the town and pull it into the sky. "We ought to close up for the night. I very much doubt anybody else will be in. It'll be too slippery out there for your bike—let me finish up a couple of things in the back, and I'll walk you home and tell you on the way. I have an umbrella, somewhere."

Jules was reasonably confident in her ability to ride her bike in a storm, and for that matter to walk it in one, but it was true that she hadn't brought her own umbrella when she'd arrived this morning and she wanted an explanation more than she wanted to have a pointless disagreement about how to get home. And he did worry about her, and she appreciated that even if it was unnecessary, because it was a genuine kind of worry and not the we-hate-your-life-choices kind her parents offered.

[Indigo]

Neither of them had brought a raincoat, because when it rained a little every day you just sort of got used to it, but Roman's umbrella was wide enough to shield both of them, although it didn't quite protect all of Jules's bike. Well, it had been sitting outside anyway; if it rusted it would be her own fault. The road that led to her house was mostly uphill, Bristlecone largely consisting of a series of uneven hills slowly rising around the wide depression that held what passed for downtown, and between the rain and the early dark it was admittedly a little tricky going, and Jules reluctantly was thankful to have an arm to grab onto when she slipped in an invisible pile of wet leaves.

"Have you ever heard of the Byron family? Not the poet." It was the first thing Roman had said since they left the shop, and it came two blocks up the road. "No. That's fine, it would just have sped the explanation along. I think they're probably the most well-known of the group, or perhaps I should call it an organization. Sorry, sorry, don't look at me like that, I'll get to the point. Before I moved to Bristlecone I was a monster hunter."

"A monster hunter," Jules repeated, feeling ridiculous. It wasn't that it seemed wholly implausible—there were plenty of weird things in the world—but it was the sort of thing that would only exist far away from her, that she would hear about on the news and think about how wild and varied the world was and then move on with her life. Then again, he didn't say he was currently a monster hunter, nor would she have believed it if he had, so it was still pretty far off.

"Yes. There's a sort of loose organization of us—them—and they have been known to differ on what should be considered a monster, but the usual definition is magical beings that wreak havoc on the world either mindlessly or out of personal greed. Often they are also very large, although it's not a requirement and we never did agree on why it was so common while I was with them."

"That's a very flowery definition."

"Is it? I suppose it's a profession that lends itself to that sort of thing. Before I retired I fought a number of monsters in what you might consider the classical sense, dragons and strange beasts that mixed a lot of different animals together, and things you might call demons—Catriona Byron always did, anyway—but also some people with very powerful magic who were using it in horrifying ways. What about Reeves, have you heard that name?"

"No." Jules made little effort to hide her annoyance at the question. "I think you should just assume I don't know anything about any of this, because I don't know why I would."

"Of course. Examples just make this easier. You don't want to know about Reeves if you can help it, anyway, but in any case, you have these people who I might describe as evil, although you will laugh, who are too powerful to be contained or stopped by more traditional forces like law enforcement. That's when monster hunters step in. We didn't precisely have formal training, but we were all highly magically skilled, some of us actual magical beings, and Catriona had this enchanted sword...sometimes it took a group of us, but we're able to match these people and creatures when it becomes necessary."

She studied Roman while he spoke, half-visible in the stark intermittent light of lampposts. There was of course little reason for her to pay any real attention to his, well, she wouldn't call it a physique, but anyway if she ever had considered it before now she would never have imagined that he used to fight anything. She'd known that he had some sort of pre-Bristlecone past, but for all she could tell from the look of him, Roman had been born in that bookstore and probably just coagulated out of the dust there.

"What does this have to do with Sauvage?" was all she said.

"Ah, yes. Sauvage. He is one of the monsters I fought. A dragon, to be more specific."

[Indigo]

"I've known dragons," Jules said carefully.

"Not like this."

She wasn't sure whether to press for more details, or how. "I don't mean to disparage your monster-fighting skills, I'm sure they were very good, but Sauvage does seem to still be alive..."

Roman laughed, in sharp contrast to the soft voice he spoke in, and unlike the earlier sound it was a real laugh, so that was progress. "Yes, he is. Sauvage is the youngest of a family of very old, very powerful dragons, and while I'm certain I could kill him with enough time and with the right tools, it would take extraordinary means. Someone equally powerful could do it more easily, but I'm not that. And there have always been mitigating factors."

"Such as?"

"He knows when to cut and run. And he has been..." Roman sighed, and turned to look out across the hills, and almost slipped in his own pile of leaves. "Ugh! Well, Sauvage's havoc is not usually completely intentional. There is something about what he is, or the amount of raw magical energy in him, I'm not sure, but he distorts reality without meaning to. And then, because he is perverse and delights in chaos, he distorts it further. Sometimes I think he sees the world as a kind of toy, one that he should be careful with but without understanding why."

Jules frowned her way through these descriptions, though she was pretty sure Roman didn't notice. His tone of voice went back and forth, never quite wavering or becoming louder but passing through shades of anger and academic elaboration and a familiarity that was almost...fond, for a fraction of a second. She did not consider herself particularly good at reading people, but she had spoken to Roman almost daily for a year and a half now, and she didn't think she'd imagined that note of warmth. "You sound like you know him awfully well, for a monster you hunted."

"I came up against him quite frequently for a time. He was more reasonable than some, some of the time, and there was more than one occasion when I was able to simply talk him down instead of driving him away by force. We came to know each other...yes, fairly well, I suppose. Not as well as I once thought."

"What in the world does that mean?" If he was going to drift off into cryptic allusions to his past life she was going to make a scene. It wouldn't be much of a scene, halfway up a dark hillside at five p.m. in a storm when nobody was outside if they didn't have to be, but it would at least be a valiant effort.

Roman looked her in the eye for the first time since the incident with Sauvage, and she blinked in surprise. There was unexpected force in that look, force she didn't fully understand, but that felt familiar to her. She'd seen that look in the mirror, after getting off the phone with her father. What that meant in the context of Roman, however, she couldn't even begin to imagine.

"I mentioned, before, that what passed for an organization among us included a handful of magical creatures—beings, I should say. There have been times when the monsters we have fought have seen the error of their ways, and even taken up the cause, though that's not where all such members have come from. Once Sauvage led me to believe that he would like to be one of these. He was in some bad company, an array of terrible monsters that required almost all of us to oppose, and he offered his help against them. We had a plan. It was detailed, and it would have worked. But at the last minute he...I don't know. We had a disagreement. He changed his mind."

There was a lot of space in that pause. Another side effect of her many conversations with Roman was that she had become very accustomed to how he spoke when he dodged a question, or when he was strategically leaving things out. But it was enough, for now, to get the gist.

[Indigo]

It seemed prudent to steer the topic at least slightly away, and there was another thing that had been gnawing at Jules as they'd walked. "You said you would have told me about the monster hunting anyway once you were sure I was going to stay in Bristlecone. Why is that? That is—I appreciate that you might not want to go spilling every detail of your life to somebody you barely know, I don't think anyone does, but you said it might have an impact on me. How?"

Another pause, this time one of reorientation and thought-gathering; Roman, she suspected, had been braced for her to probe into old wounds, which was a little insulting, but no matter just now. "Sauvage is not the only monster I've fought who could not be killed by mortal means. Far from it," he said. "Since we by definition fight things that most are ill-equipped to, it stands to reason that many of those things would be too powerful even for us to completely destroy."

This logic did not feel entirely watertight, but since all of the information surrounding it was presumably true, Jules nodded.

"I am retired from the profession now, and my enemies are no doubt aware of that. It's been ten years since I've done anything like monster hunting." Roman spoke slowly, cautiously, tiptoeing around something. "But some of them are the kind to hold grudges. It has always been possible that one of them might come to Bristlecone, looking for me. If you're going to live here, and even more so if you intend to continue working at the cafe, you should be forewarned, because you may encounter some of these monsters."

Wasn't that a cheerful thought. She could understand why he hadn't brought it up sooner: it wasn't the sort of thing that would encourage a prospective employee, even one who he hadn't sought out, and if she was only passing through then she was hardly likely to need to know. Understanding didn't mean she was happy about it.

They were almost to her house now, cobbles clicking underfoot differently from the paved roads they'd come up on, and Roman was watching her face with a close cousin of his usual concern for her welfare. It took her a moment to realize he was wondering what she would do. She could still decide to leave Bristlecone, after all, even if she wasn't moving back to the city, and he'd given her quite possibly the greatest incentive imaginable to do so. Jules was equipped to deal with a lot of things, but tangling with powerful monsters wasn't one of them.

Well. This afternoon notwithstanding.

"Do you think that's why Sauvage is here?" she said, sidestepping the question of her reaction entirely. She would feel how she felt about it, but she'd already made her mind up to stay, and there was no point in letting anyone think otherwise.

"I doubt it," Roman said. There was a touch of relief in his voice. "We may be enemies, but I do know him well enough, as you pointed out. His shock at my presence here was genuine. I don't know what he does intend by coming here, but he is not a threat to you. Not on purpose, and not yet, in any case."

"You think that will change?"

"I don't know. I've heard very little about him since I retired. One does tend to follow the exploits of one's old friends, even after moving on, and they were only called in to deal with him twice, and those both fairly easy jobs. I don't know what that means. I don't know what he wants in Bristlecone." He sounded frustrated. "I do know that unless he has learned a great deal of control in the last decade, he will have a corrupting influence over the village whether he likes it or not, and there is a considerable chance that once that happens he will decide to fuel it further for the fun of it. If he hasn't already come with that purpose in mind."

"And I'm guessing the odds he's learned that control are pretty slim."

"He's never shown any interest in it before, that I saw."

Jules nodded. They were outside her house now, standing awkwardly under Roman's umbrella, and her bike handlebars were digging into her side. Neither of them seemed able to come up with anything else to say.

Thunder cracked suddenly, right over their heads, and they both jumped, and laughed.

"Well," Jules said, "I'll see you at work. Try not to drown on your way home." And she watched Roman walk back down the hill, and wondered what he wasn't saying.

[Indigo]

The Cafe du Livre closed on Thursdays and Fridays, leaving Jules to sleep in, and then to lie staring at the gray light on the ceiling and wondering if she'd just simultaneously had the most mundane and least understandable dream of all time. But no. She never dreamed about people she got along with. Unfortunate, but useful in this moment.

Last night's storm had passed, to be replaced by a drizzle so light it was almost unnoticeable. She puttered around the house for a little while, checking on her efforts to rehabilitate the sad excuse for a garden that the previous tenant had left behind, poking disconsolately at the pile of unopened mostly-junk mail on her kitchen table. The fridge was dominated by a large covered baking pan full of what Roman would call her "famous" blondies and probably mean it. She portioned out several of these into a smaller container and tucked it into the basket on the front of her bike. Then she donned a light jacket, just in case the rain got worse, and pedaled up the hill to what had once been known as the Check House.

It was smaller than her place and painted a pleasant shade of yellow, perched above Bristlecone like a puppy playing watchdog. There was a red car parked around the side. As a result of yesterday's weather it was sunk three inches into the mud. It also didn't look remotely big enough to move in if you owned more than a handful of things, but then Sauvage had mentioned needing to go back for more boxes. She wondered why he didn't just rent a trailer. Or warp reality so his things were already at the house, but she didn't actually know how that worked, so maybe he couldn't.

She propped her bike against the porch railing and knocked.

"Come in!"

Probably not the wisest decision if you were a monster accustomed to being hunted, even if you couldn't be killed by mortal means, but Jules would open the door to just about anyone if it was raining hard enough so who was she to judge?

The house was much warmer inside than she'd expected and mostly full of boxes, which didn't seem to be arranged in any particular order. A green couch sat in the middle of the chaos. Nails dotted the dark red wall above it, but nothing had yet been hung up. She could just see past a stack of boxes to the kitchen, where Sauvage, in a swirling red silk bathrobe, was bent over the sink, whistling. He glanced over his shoulder as she shut the front door.

"Jules! Roman didn't tell you about me."

"He did," she said.

"But you're here. You didn't believe him?" He didn't sound especially pleased about it, just confused.

"I..." She paused, negotiating her way between two poorly-angled towers of boxes. "Roman is my friend, and I trust him, but I get the impression his judgment is a little clouded when it comes to his past."

"Of course. So is mine, and so is yours. That's what the past is for. What do you have there?"

"Housewarming present." She offered the box of blondies, which he accepted with the tips of his fingers, as if he thought it might be dangerous. "You are new in town, after all, and you didn't stay long enough to eat yesterday."

"Ah, so it is also an enticement to return to your establishment. The coffee was very good, by the way. Why don't you sit down? I'll be with you shortly. I don't think I'll be getting this drain unclogged any time soon."

[Indigo]

It was a very comfortable couch, much nicer than Jules's, if she was being honest. As promised, Sauvage took only a moment to sweep in from the kitchen, dodging boxes with barely a glance, except when one wobbled slightly in his wake and he reached out to stop it without quite touching it. Was he always so casual with his power, or just showing off? Neither seemed entirely believable. She couldn't imagine a near-immortal dragon feeling the need to show off to her.

He sat down at the other end of the couch and pulled up his feet, and though he wasn't the right shape for it she had a sense of his being coiled somehow. Under the bathrobe he was fully dressed, which made her wonder what the point of the robe was. When he'd come into the cafe she hadn't retained much about his appearance—she reserved such attention to detail for regulars and pretty girls—but now she found herself studying him, framing him in opposition to Roman as if this would give her answers. They were about the same height, if you ignored Roman's antlers. Sauvage's features were much sharper, his skin a few shades lighter, and of course there were the red eyes to Roman's brown, and something about his presence that seemed to fill space, while Roman had a tendency to fade back. None of it meant anything, probably, but she couldn't be sure, especially with how cagey everyone seemed to feel the need to be about everything.

"Why are you looking at me that way?" he said, with a bemused half smile. "If you're trying to see the dragon, you already are. There's no true form for you to find. They're all equally me."

"I hadn't really thought about it," she said, which was true. All that stuff about warping reality had been much more concerning to her, on the whole.

"Hmm. You know, I believe that." He pried up the edge of the container that held the blondies and extracted one without looking. "What is it, then? Is this a social call? Get to know the new neighbors, make sure they're not about to bring fire and death down upon you? These are delicious."

"Thank you! Yes and no, I guess. I can't be sure whether I would have come up here to meet you anyway, but I'm not so concerned about the fire and death. From what Roman said, it didn't sound like that was really your style, although he's sure you have some kind of ulterior motive for being here."

"I'm sure he is," Sauvage said. "Roman hates me, and I can't say it is entirely unfair that he does." He said it so lightly, so casually, as if it were simple and obvious and not unexpected at all, and the very ease with which he said it pinged to Jules as wrong. She might well be projecting—she suspected a powerful monster had more opportunities to get used to being hated than she had—but it didn't fit with what Roman had told her, either, about the almost-was switching of sides.

It was hard, too, for Jules to imagine soft-spoken, overly considerate Roman hating anyone, but she still hadn't forgotten the way he'd said Sauvage's name, before. She said, "Does that mean you're here for, let's say, sinister reasons? Because you're not doing a great job of it so far. Complimenting my baking isn't very evil of you."

[Indigo]

"Evil is...one word. Overly black-and-white morality may be Roman's fatal flaw." He slid one of the blondies into his mouth whole, which did not significantly impede his speech. "I think I would say careless, instead, but probably it isn't different enough to matter. I've hurt people without trying to. It wasn't a good way to be."

Wasn't, Jules noted, and then wondered why she'd noted it. Anyone, after all, could say anything they liked about who they were or had been, and Sauvage knew that all she knew was technically about the past. He could use that against her, if he wanted. The trouble was that she didn't know why he would. But then, she also didn't know why he'd let her into his house, why he was talking to her at all, why, in fact, he had apologized for his clash with Roman before leaving yesterday. He managed to be inscrutable by his openness. She didn't know how she felt about that. On some level she couldn't help admiring it, having only ever managed to be one or the other at any given time.

He'd told Roman the truth about living here. That had to mean something. Anyway, it was all she had to go on that she could be certain wasn't filtered through someone else.

"How do you know Roman?" he said suddenly, after a long minute of uninterrupted chewing. "You're not a hunter, and you're not from around here—" This had come up yesterday, when he'd been asking all those questions about Bristlecone, but that casual conversation seemed so far away from this one that for a second she thought he'd divined it somehow. "—and he's not, uh, social? Unless he's changed a lot in the last ten years. But he doesn't seem to have."

"I wouldn't know."

Sauvage raised his eyebrows at her; he knew a dodge when he heard one, too.

Jules sighed. "It's not a very interesting story," she said. Which was true, but she had never felt self-conscious about it before, because it was just her life, just a day that separated a "before" from an "after" and that meant something to her because of that but didn't need to mean anything to anyone else. Yesterday evening had been a very long evening, and a lot of things had become part of her life very quickly without actually being part of it at all, and now the memory felt...different. Shabby.

He was looking at her with that strange intensity again, as he had in the cafe, and of course, even with all the things she knew now that she hadn't then, she still had no idea why he was doing that. Anything else would probably be too easy.

"Tell you what," he said. "You want to know why I moved to Bristlecone. We don't know each other, and it's a bit of a personal question, but under the circumstances I can't really fault you for it. And you have thoroughly bribed me, whether or not you meant to." He tapped the side of the box. "Why don't I tell you why I'm here, and you tell me how you ended up working for Roman? Even trade."

"It's not an even trade if I've already bribed you." She couldn't entirely suppress a smile.

"Oh, no, it isn't. You're right. Hmm." He appeared to be genuinely considering solutions, as if the story of one short episode in her life were worth negotiating over. "All right, forget the trade, then. I will accept your prodigious baking skill as payment for my explanation—it's a long story, but there are at least two layers in here of whatever these things are, if they're all the same size. That seems about fair. You can decide afterward if you want to tell me about yourself or not. I'd like to know, but I don't really have any right to it. Sound better?"

"I can't argue with it," Jules said. She seriously doubted that whatever Sauvage had to say would make her feel any more like telling a story that would almost certainly be boring by comparison, but at least she'd get some answers. Probably. Maybe he'd get distracted and forget to ask again.

[Indigo]

He withdrew yet another blondie from the box; Jules had never seen anyone eat so fast and still carry on a conversation. This time he offered it to her before devouring it. "Let's see. I first met the monster hunters fifteen years ago—"

"You have to start fifteen years ago to explain why you're here now?"

"Yes," he said. "I told you it was a long story. If you didn't want answers you shouldn't have asked questions. It's too late to change your mind now."

There had been six of them the first time—Roman, Catriona, Moss, and others whose names Sauvage couldn't remember anymore, though it hadn't been that long ago in the grand scheme of things. He'd been living out in the middle of the forest then, not realizing or, once he did realize, caring very much that there was a town nearby, throwing magic around as he liked until his neighbors got tired of it and appealed to outside forces.

He'd been challenged before, when he spilled into people's lives and territories, but never like this. He had never faced such a skilled, well-armed group of people, or one that worked as such a cohesive unit. No battle had ever been so close, or so much fun. He had never lost before. The hunters couldn't kill him, but they could do lasting damage, and they could scare him and fascinate him at once. He reshaped himself into something fast and nonthreatening, and fled.

And before he could run another thing happened. Roman spoke to him, like he was a person, and that was entirely new too.

"Yes, well, the people living on the borders of your wild magic probably had bigger things than conversation to worry about," Jules said.

The ghost of a smile crossed Sauvage's lips. "Oh, I know. I don't blame them at all."

Roman told him to wait, and asked his name, and most curiously of all he asked Sauvage why: why he had tied reality in knots and remade his surroundings into something that wasn't even especially comfortable for him, much less the people living nearby. Sauvage had not been able to answer this question. On being told this the hunters had exchanged worried looks, and he had escaped while they talked it over.

After that they only came two at a time when they fought him, which happened with increasing regularity, and tried talking to him almost every time, especially when Roman was there. And after a while of that Roman was always one of the two, and most incidents they talked without fighting at all.

Sauvage had broken the world to his will many times and for many different reasons, accidentally and for his own enjoyment, and because he had never understood any of it, or himself, as real. Things that were not real could not affect things that were, and he knew what he was doing upset people, but he didn't exactly know why, because surely none of it mattered anyway. He was never sure how much of this the hunters figured out, but by words and by example they made the world real to him, and he discovered that there was a lot of it and that he liked most of it much more than he'd expected.

"I know what you're going to say," he said, preempting her as soon as she opened her mouth. "Of course I knew things other than me existed. It would have been hard to miss, in over 200 years. I just didn't see any reason to care about it."

"Actually," Jules said, "I understood that just fine. I was going to ask what this has to do with—"

"With why I'm here." He looked embarrassed. "I may have gotten a little carried away. It's been...a long time since I've spoken to anyone about anything, except for yesterday, of course."

"It's an interesting story," she said, feeling more than a little guilty. She had been enjoying it, and there was hope that it would fill in some of the blanks in Roman's explanation, and that had made her wary, because after all she still only had Sauvage's word that she could trust him, and not even really that; was a box of baked goods adequate price for the truth?

But she found herself liking Sauvage. Both in the cafe and now he seemed not completely sure how to be, which she guessed fit well enough with not having talked to anyone in a while, and there was something about it she recognized, and trusted.

It reminded her, in fact, of Roman in the earliest days of her employment. She wondered what he'd think of that.

She said, "I didn't mean to cut you off, I just wanted to be sure you were going somewhere with all this."

"Oh, I am," he said, and offered another of those sharp-toothed smiles she still couldn't read. "I can promise you that."

In the five years that he knew the monster hunters, the pattern of their meetings changed. For the most part Sauvage wasn't breaking things on purpose anymore, although he slipped up occasionally, got carried away with something that was already happening anyway—but that, really, was the problem. His presence weighed on the fabric of reality, twisted it, and it was so hard to resist the urge to twist it a little more. Encounters with the hunters became collaborative, attempts to fix what was going wrong, and sometimes the answer was to fight—he didn't mind it, and neither did Asher and Argent, how could he have forgotten their names before?—or for him to leave, but every so often Sauvage could fix whatever he'd done. It was a question of motivation: the closer he became to them, the more it seemed to matter. The fuller his life was, the more he wanted to maintain it. The more he talked with Roman—

Well, anyway, it didn't last.

[Indigo]

"Wait," Jules said. "What?"

"What do you mean, what? It's fairly straightforward, I should think."

"I mean, the more you talked with Roman, what?" She didn't let frustration creep into her voice, because she didn't want him to stop talking altogether and because it felt unfair, but the theatricality of breaking off in the middle of a sentence like that got on her nerves.

"It's not important." Through his whole story Sauvage had spoken with an edge of dramatic flair, as if relating a grand adventure, possibly that had happened to someone else, but now his voice dropped back down to earth, just a person talking to another person. For a fraction of a second he sounded very tired.

"I can't help thinking that your relationship with Roman is at least a little important."

He froze, one hand suspended above the box, and stared at her. "Relationship?"

"Yes." Now she was annoyed. "Did you think I wasn't paying attention?"

"You misunderstand me." He looked down at the blondie in his hand, as if it knew something he didn't. "We were never involved. I may have...wished otherwise, but I...even if he had known that, nothing would have come of it. I never told him, and neither did Moss when she figured it out—you remind me of her, you know—and it would be best for everyone to keep it that way."

He still hadn't put that storytelling voice back on, and it was plausible enough—Roman had a knack for picking up when she was upset about something but otherwise had an approach to emotional insight most generously described as clumsy—but Jules couldn't forget that slight, buried affection when Roman had told her about Sauvage, and so she wondered. "How do I know that's true?" Which felt rotten to say even as she was saying it, and what would be the point of lying? But she was rather out of her depth here. These matters of monsters and magic were beyond her.

Sauvage set the blondie back in the box, and raised his head, but he wouldn't quite meet her eyes. "I assure you, Jules, that if I had ever been worthy of a...a relationship with Roman, I'd make sure everyone knew about it." He sighed. "Do you want to hear the rest, or not?"

"I do," she said. "I'm sorry."

"It was a fair question. I should have chosen my words more carefully." He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again it was in the storytelling mode, if a little more subdued. "The hunters had made me aware of their history of recruiting from their enemies. It's not very common, but it's been known to happen, and one of them made a comparison to what they were doing with me. Elsie, maybe? You'd think I would be better with names. I wanted to be one of them. They were all very close with each other, they had this ease together that I had never experienced, and I liked them. And, well, you know. But I didn't have a way to cross the line from whatever I had become to a real ally. I was still wandering around the countryside making messes of things without trying, and they had no evidence that I could turn my power to their advantage, or that I'd want to. Eventually, though, I found..." His mouth twisted sideways. "It seems so crass, and callous, to call it an opportunity, but I did think of it that way at the time. It was a matter of social responsibility, something I like to think I would have done even if I hadn't wanted to earn my way into their good graces, but I can't in good conscience separate the two motivations, because they weren't separate when it happened."

"Roman mentioned this, I think," Jules said. "Or alluded to it anyway. He didn't go into detail, just left me to imagine some kind of unified monster community banding together to rain destruction on the rest of society, as a counterpart to the hunters."

This earned her a surprised laugh, which made her feel slightly better about her earlier prying, even if there didn't appear to be any hard feelings about it. Sauvage was strange and probably dangerous but he was still a person, and on those grounds she considered him to be owed a degree of privacy as much as anyone else. She hadn't spotted the line where story became something else, something sharper and closer to the heart, and she regretted it on principle as well as from a wary goodwill toward Sauvage in particular.

[Indigo]

"I am not traditionally on speaking terms with my cousins," Sauvage said, "but on this occasion I wasn't able to avoid their advances. Several of them were planning a coordinated, hmm, an infestation, I'd call it, in a cluster of human settlements near where I'd been living. They invited me to join them, and I told them I would, and when things got going I waited near the gates of the outermost town for the hunters. All six of them came—that is, there are more than six monster hunters in the world, but the ones I knew were the largest group in that part of the country and they worked well together, so—anyway, they sent the largest force available to deal with such a high concentration of powerful foes. And when they reached the gates, I offered them my help. I don't like my cousins, but I know them well enough to be useful.

"We put together a plan, a good one, worthy of being my ticket into the hunters' confidence. I don't remember all the details now, and I think they would bore you, but the general idea was to attack my cousins on multiple fronts in ways catered to their weaknesses and, if Argent could pull off the spellwork, any attempt to counter one of those attacks would make the others stronger. It was tremendously complicated. It wouldn't have worked without me." He had stopped eating when Jules had asked about Roman, but dropping that subject had apparently renewed his appetite, and he paused now to chew, although she was pretty sure he didn't actually need to. "And then, the day before we were set to deploy, I learned that it wouldn't work at all.

"I don't know if one of my cousins picked up on some of the magical groundwork that was being laid, or if it was a coincidental change of plans, or if it was part of what they'd intended all along. I tried to play along when I wasn't with the hunters, but they must have seen through me to some degree, if only because they expected me to fall short in some way." The emotion that tinged these words was not quite bitterness, or maybe it was that bitterness was only a part of it, the outermost layer of some older, deeper story no one but Sauvage would ever know. "Whatever it was, one of them—I'd tell you his name, but it would just be noise to you—informed me that the following day we would be changing the nature of our presence to a more actively destructive one. We'd been keeping things relatively subtle so far, but now they wanted to tear apart towns and turn people into...things, and all manner of other chaos. To corrupt, and despoil, you might say. The plan I'd helped the hunters make relied on the way things had gone so far, and if we carried it out now the results would be unpredictable, dangerous. So I went to Roman." He paused, and stared blankly ahead, and slid another blondie into his mouth.

"Roman said you had a disagreement," Jules said. "You argued over how to change your plan?"

"Not exactly," Sauvage said. "I tried to explain the problem, and why we needed to reevaluate, but he reacted poorly to the suggestion. He became suspicious, I think, that I wasn't really on the hunters' side, that this was some sort of trick. You have to understand, Roman didn't trust me. I am not a person who can be trusted. He trusted the plan, and so when I said the plan had to change, the consequences were predictable. I couldn't convince him. There was some shouting involved on both sides, it was a desperate moment, and I should have gone to one of the others but Roman was the de facto leader then and, truth be told, I couldn't handle him being angry at me." The storyteller's voice dropped away again for a moment. "We'd fought, physically, but he'd never said anything to me like what he said then. And I knew he wouldn't listen and I knew it would all go wrong and I couldn't bear to watch, so I just...left. I ran away."

[Indigo]

Another lull, filled by chewing on Sauvage's part. There seemed to be a space that words should fill, but what exactly the words would be remained opaque, and as someone who hadn't been there and didn't really know Sauvage, Jules was uniquely unqualified to judge what ought to be said or whether she should be the one to say it.

In the end what she said was, "What happened to the hunters? It can't have been too horrific or Roman would have mentioned it when he was warning me about you."

"Well, 'too horrific' is very subjective." He sounded now more or less as he had when she'd come in, before he'd begun his tale, but he was looking past her, leaning against the back of the couch; she resisted the urge to turn and check if there was a window over there. It seemed rude. "They carried out what they could of the original plan without me," he said, "and it went poorly. They lost, and my cousins are not gentle. Nobody died, for which I am grateful, but Roman and Moss were both seriously injured and I think that's probably why Roman retired. I never saw him again—until yesterday, of course—and when I next met the rest of them they didn't know his reasons, or wouldn't tell me.

"I laid low for a while. I felt...well, it doesn't matter. After some time had passed and I hadn't heard anything, I baited them out a couple of times, to try to find out what had happened, and because I thought they deserved a chance to give me whatever comeuppance they thought suitable. The second time none of them would hit me, no matter what I did, and I don't know why. Moss took me aside and gave me this little card with a phone number on it." He shook his head. "I don't know what that was for, either, and I never called it. But after that I decided it was time to make a change."

"So you moved to Bristlecone."

"You're skipping ahead," he said, "and it's a bit late for that now. At that point I hadn't even considered settling anywhere. I only knew I had to get myself under control somehow—it is, I think, impossible to do so completely, just because of what I am, but my family has techniques for minimizing their involuntary disruptions. They wouldn't teach me, of course, or none of this would have happened to begin with, but they are the sort of techniques you can teach yourself if you have the power to need them in the first place. That's what I was doing for most of the last decade. Mostly out to sea where there wasn't anyone to notice."

Jules nodded, though she remained somewhat puzzled. The two sides of this story she'd received fit into each other reasonably well, considering that both were warped by time and emotion, but there was still Roman's assertion that Sauvage was unlikely to have any desire to learn that kind of control, and Roman must know most of what she'd just learned. Either Sauvage was lying, or Roman had misjudged, and at this point she sincerely had no idea which she thought more probable.

She'd just have to wait and see.

"And so," Sauvage said, "the reason I came to Bristlecone. I don't know much about the village other than what you've told me. There isn't anything specific here I have designs on, unless you consider my buying this house to be somehow—sinister, I think you said? As I said, I didn't originally set out to do something like this. But after a while I found that I missed being a person. I missed restaurants and books and weather and buildings and all the thousand thousand little meetings between people every day. I'd had a taste of some of that when I knew the hunters, when we met to talk instead of fight. And I have a decent amount of self-control now. Maybe enough to build myself a life, a real one, no more destruction and chaos." He turned the last blondie over in his fingers, contemplatively. "I'll have to see how it goes."

[Indigo]

"You don't think there's much of a risk you'll destroy the town by accident, then?" This came out sharper than Jules had intended, because she lived here, after all, and felt a certain amount of protectiveness for the place, and would like to know if it was about to disintegrate.

Sauvage smiled, joylessly. "I don't think so. But I can't be sure. I am selfish, Jules, and I am not a good person, even if I'm not an evil one. I worked with the hunters out of selfishness, I abandoned them out of selfishness, I learned control out of selfishness and I moved here for the same reason. I can say to you that I will leave if things seem to be getting out of hand. I don't break promises. But that doesn't mean you should trust me."

"That's not a very reassuring answer."

"No. But it is an honest one." Sauvage sighed, and looked her in the eye again. "You should go home, Jules."

"You wanted to know how I met Roman," she said slowly.

"Yes," he said, "but you didn't want to tell me. Good instinct, I think. I like you, and I would like to know you better—oh, what is that face?"

"I just—you're not trying to flirt with me, are you?"

"Respectfully," he said, "I would never."

She considered the way he'd talked about Roman, and mused that she could trust that, if nothing else. "Good. Neither would I."

"Ha! It's important to get these things straightened out, I suppose. Or not straightened out. I'm sorry, that's an awful joke, I'm trying to lighten the mood but I don't think it's working." This smile was smaller, and more convincing. "As I was saying. I like you, and I don't know...anyone, really, or at least not anyone who's happy about it, and I would prefer not to live my new life in complete isolation. I'm good at being alone, but I don't enjoy it. But you've heard a lot of things about me, I don't know what all of them are, and I've told you myself I'm selfish and potentially dangerous. It wouldn't be fair for me to ask to know you, under the circumstances."

What a strange way of putting it. But she appreciated being given a free choice, even if she wasn't totally sure what to do with it. His story had been interesting, in many senses of the word, had contained many details that she would have to think on further to piece together their meaning, and had left her even more confused about why he would bother to tell it to her in the first place. Wanting company was well and good, but she'd expect him to prefer it from someone with at least a basic understanding of where he was coming from, and probably someone who would be gentle with his ego. Maybe he didn't know enough about her to worry about that last part.

"I'll tell you," she said. His reactions would tell her something, and it wasn't a secret or especially sensitive, and, anyway, she found herself wanting to explain. To take up some space with her own story.