[Indigo]

Moss parked her battered jeep at one end of Bristlecone's main street and walked the rest of the way. Easier to get the lay of the land on foot, so to speak; and her car was recognizable enough that it seemed smarter to keep it out of view. If Roman was avoiding her, or planning to, she wasn't going to make it any easier.

Funny little town. Its shape, a sort of bowl in the middle of an uneven ring of hills, didn't seem quite natural, not to mention that perpetual drizzle. Even in places with habitually rainy climates, normally you got some sun. Only one or two days a year, maybe, but something. It didn't worry her, because there didn't seem to be anything actually wrong, and anyway this place had proven itself to be adequately defended already. But it struck her as odd. She briefly wished Elisheva had come along, in case there was something here she could have sensed.

The cafe, when Moss reached it, turned out to be an unassuming affair, gray brick with big plate glass windows in the front revealing yellow flowers on tables and a theoretically tantalizing glimpse of a bookshelf. From what she could tell it was actually organized, which meant Roman wasn't running this place by himself. Fascinating. The reports she'd read had given more attention to the spectacle of monsters battling in the sky than the bookstore employee who'd broken the flood spell, but she'd made some assumptions: most ordinary people would have skipped town after an experience like that. Or at minimum quit working with someone so closely connected to the events.

The sign said Cafe du Livre. Moss chuckled to herself. Roman, for a monster hunter, was terribly unimaginative.

It wasn't too busy at this time of day, which meant fewer people to stare at her, although maybe the green hair and the arm scars didn't draw so much attention here after recent events; and honestly, if she'd been that worried about it, she could have worn a shirt with sleeves. There was no one at the counter, but near the stove a tall white woman with the slit-pupiled eyes of a lizard stirred a cup of coffee and whistled to herself. When she turned around and saw Moss she gasped and dropped the spoon.

"It's you!" she said, bending to pick up the errant utensil, and it was so rare for someone to say this upon seeing Moss that she couldn't summon up a response. "Sorry," the woman continued, coming over to the counter. Her ears were slowly turning red. "I've seen pictures of you, but you're...kind of more in person. I'm Jules."

[Indigo]

"Moss," Moss said, "but I'm gonna guess you already knew that. You're the one who stopped the flood, right?" Normally she'd have liked to skip right to the point, in the early stages of a job. But this wasn't an ordinary job, and the whole situation was pretty weird, and, gods, what had Roman told this kid about her? She wouldn't pretend that she wasn't—call it striking to be polite, with the height and the muscles and the nose and the scars, in the flesh, but there was something else in this girl's face that unsettled her, that couldn't be explained just by her appearance. Not flirtation, although that was there too and she was ignoring it; something almost awestruck. Moss didn't like that.

"Among other things," Jules said. "But I prefer to think of it as a team effort. You're not really here about that, though, are you? I don't know where Barker went, or what happened to him exactly, we tried looking into it and I have a friend keeping an eye out but there's nothing conclusive. It's like he just disappeared."

"That more or less matches what I heard," Moss said. She wasn't worried about Barker, at least not yet. From the reports it looked like he'd invested way too much of his power in whatever the hell he was trying to do here. Nobody was likely to hear from him any time soon. Lucky, because she and her friends were about to be very preoccupied, especially if this went the way she wanted it to. Which was not guaranteed.

"You're looking for Roman, then." It wasn't a question.

"Hey, I could just be here for a brownie."

"Then you picked a bad day for it, I don't make them on Fridays." Jules folded her arms. "Come on. Give me some credit. There isn't much going on around here that would be interesting to monster hunters, so it's either Roman or Sauvage, right? Probably Roman. I know he never answered your email."

"You know a lot of things." Good to see Roman making friends, she supposed, but it was a strange thought. People she'd never met knowing things about her. It was making her inappropriately combative.

Jules shrugged. "Recently I tend to feel like I don't know anything, so thanks, I guess? Anyway, he's not here. You'll find him in the yellow house at the top of the hill, out that way. Let me make you a drink before you go, he makes the worst coffee."

"Thanks." Moss watched Jules work, at a speed that was wasted in a place as slow as this, and before she left she said, "I might come back to talk to you later. I have some questions." Because after all there was something unusual about the kid, a tenacity, and that was worth discussing even if she did make Moss feel like an outsider in her own life.

[Indigo]

If you'd asked her, Moss couldn't have said what kind of house she'd expect Roman to live in; for most of the time she'd known him they'd both been in dorms, or drifting from place to place following their work. Honestly, she was a little surprised to learn he didn't live in the bookstore. But whatever she might have imagined, this wouldn't have been it.

For one thing it was, as Jules had noted, yellow, a color he'd never really been enthusiastic about, and there was a carefully tended garden wrapping around the side. Roman was not a plant person. Moss didn't think she knew anyone she'd describe as a plant person, jokes about her name aside. There was also a red car parked around the other side of the house, which looked as though someone had bought it brand new, kept it in pristine condition all the way back to Bristlecone, and then sloshed a big bucket of mud over it as some kind of disguise. She didn't know for sure whether Roman had a driver's license, but she suspected the answer was no.

There were a few possible reasons for these discrepancies. If not for the garden, she would have been pretty sure about one of them, but, well. Ten years was a long time. Almost eleven, now.

She knocked on the door.

A voice called, "Come in!" It was not Roman's voice. It was in fact a voice that Roman had once, while extraordinarily drunk, described to her as "deepest, darkest velvet" and then immediately sworn her to secrecy, presumably because even in an advanced state of inebriation he'd realized how ridiculous it sounded. She didn't know why she even remembered it, except possibly to make fun of him about at some later date, if she'd ever had the opportunity.

What really mattered was that, if Roman could indeed be found here, they must have finally fucking talked about it, and she could relax.

She opened the door, and now that she knew who lived here in full, she wasn't surprised at all. The furniture in this house had clearly been assembled by someone who didn't quite understand his own taste because he was only just getting used to the idea that taste was something he could have, and so he'd just picked out a whole lot of individual things he liked and thrown them all together without considering the whole. It...sort of worked, if she was honest. She wondered where he'd gotten the paintings from.

Roman's rifle was mounted on the wall above the couch. Looking at it made her feel old, somehow, so she stopped doing that and went into the kitchen, from which she could hear assorted clattering.

[Indigo]

Sauvage stood at the kitchen sink, his back to her, washing dishes and looking out the window. He didn't react to her presence, though he must have known she was there. She said, "Hail, fell beast."

"I hope you're not here to kill me," he said. "I am rather preoccupied at the moment."

"I probably wouldn't have bothered to knock if I were."

"One never knows." He switched the faucet off and turned around, and she shouldn't be surprised that he looked exactly the same as he had ten years ago—she knew what he was, and her mental image of him certainly hadn't changed—but there was something jarring about it all the same. Maybe because she'd seen a picture of Roman in one of the reports, low-quality but decent enough to show how he'd changed, and so she'd imagined everything would be different.

Maybe she'd just hoped that the wariness behind his eyes would have gone. He didn't say anything else, but leaned back against the sink and watched her as if she might bite. The silence stretched out uncomfortably between them and, because Moss had always been one for getting to the point and because she was beginning to realize she hadn't been adequately prepared for this part, she said what she was thinking, which was, "It's really good to see you again."

"It..." He blinked. "I think I must have misheard you."

"I doubt it," she said. "Stop looking at me like that, will you? I always wondered where you went, after...you know, everything that happened. If you were still alive." Despite her best efforts, she'd never been able to shake the memory of that last awful fight, his relentless attempts to throw himself on whatever sword was within reach. "I'm glad to see you in one piece."

"Oh," he said. "Thank you." He examined his fingernails, which, given the nature of his abilities, was a completely transparent avoidance tactic. "Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"You knew the whole time, didn't you?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she lied, and he laughed.

"Moss—" When he looked up at her again the tension had gone out of his face, usurped by humor. "Well, I suppose I can't complain now. If you're here to speak to Roman—"

"Why does everyone keep assuming that?"

"Am I wrong?"

"...no."

"Well," Sauvage said, and stepped around her, leading the way into the living room. "He went into the city for some sort of meeting, something to do with rare books—I was listening when he told me about it, I swear, but much of it was business terms that I didn't understand. So I'm afraid you're stuck with me for a while. Unless, of course, you choose to wait somewhere else, which I couldn't blame you for." He sprawled across one end of the couch and met her eyes as if issuing a challenge.

Moss selected a chair and set her to-go cup on the end table beside it. "I don't have anywhere else to be," she said, settling into her seat. It was remarkably comfortable. "And...I mean, I wasn't expecting to see you here, but I'm not going to turn down a chance to catch up with an old friend."

"Is that what I am?" He made it sound more like a joke than a genuine question, and if she didn't know him better she might have believed it. Same old Sauvage.

"Yes." No room for argument or they'd go in circles all day, and Roman might have the patience for that, but Moss decidedly did not.

"Ah," he said. "That is...also unexpected. But not unwelcome."