Page 30 of Tusks And Conditions

I turn on my stool.

Sabine Lin stands at the bottom of the iron staircase.

She is wearing her work clothes, but they are completely soaked. The cream blazer clings to her shoulders. The pressed slacks are dark with rain. The sensible beige shoes that are scuffed on the left toe from the morning we met at the DMI are leaving small puddles on the floor. Her hair is pulled back in the severe bun she wears to the accounting firm, plastered flat by the storm, with a single wet strand that curls against her temple and drives me to distraction. She is carrying her structured leather work bag over one shoulder, the one with the organized interior compartments and the small emergency kit in the side pocket.

She is five-foot-three. She weighs maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds. She is standing in a basement full of dangerous supernatural mercenaries in the city, every one of whom is now staring at her with expressions ranging from bewilderment to predatory assessment, and she looks absolutely, magnificently, terrifyingly furious.

"Jagger Ironjaw. You left a note."

Gutspill, the Troll who once ripped the arms off a Minotaur in a contract dispute, quietly picks up his drink and moves two seats farther away from me.

Every muscle in my body locks. The tankard is halfway to my mouth, suspended in the dead air between the bar and my face, and I cannot complete the motion because my arm has apparently seceded from the union of my body and declared itself an independent state governed entirely by the sight of her standing at the foot of those stairs.

She shouldn't be here. That is the first coherent thought that surfaces through the static. She should not be in this bar, in this neighborhood, on this side of the city. The Thornwall District after dark is not a place for cream blazers and structured leather work bags. The alley outside has three separate territorial markers scratched into the brickwork by competing supernatural gang affiliates, and the staircase she just descended has a step missing near the middle that I navigate by muscle memory but that could snap the ankle of someone who weighs a hundred and fifteen pounds and wears low heels with a modest one-inch lift. She could have fallen. She could have been mugged. She could have walked past the Ghoul den on Seventh Street, the one that operates behind the facade of a nail salon and whose proprietors have a documented preference for solitary human women walking alone after sunset.

The fear hits me so hard it tastes metallic, flooding the back of my throat like I've bitten through my own tongue, and the runes along my forearms ignite with a dull amber glow that I can see even through the leather of my bracers. Picks notices. She takes a measured step back from the bar and moves the shotgun from beneath the counter to the shelf behind her, which is either a gesture of de-escalation or an acknowledgment that a shotgun will not be sufficient for whatever is about to happen.

Sabine starts walking toward me. The bar patrons part for her, not because she is intimidating in any physical sense but because every hunter in this room has spent years developing the instinct to recognize when something dangerous is moving with purpose, and Sabine Lin is moving with the kind of purpose that suggests she has prepared a detailed, multi-point argument and will not be leaving until every point has been delivered, received, and acknowledged in writing. The Elven twins exchange a glance. The scarred Dwarf in the corner sets down his whetbrick to observe with undisguised interest, the way one might observe a nature documentary about a very small, very determined animal confronting a predator fifty times its size.

She stops three feet from my stool. Up close, I can see details that the dim bar lighting initially obscured. Her eyes are red-rimmed. Not from crying, or at least not recently, but from the specific raw exhaustion of someone who has been awake for too many hours doing something strenuous, like searching an entire city for one specific Orc who turned his phone off and removed the battery like a coward hiding behind the pretense of discipline. There is a smudge of something on her left cuff that might be ink or might be the residue of the alley wall she must have brushed against navigating the narrow passage to the service door. Her jaw is set so hard I can see the fine muscles working beneath the skin, and her chin is lifted at the angle I have come to recognize as her combat stance, the one she deploys against uncooperative tax codes and condescending senior partners and, apparently, six-and-a-half-foot Orcish bounty hunters who leave in the night like craven, lovesick idiots.

I set the tankard down slowly, because if I am going to have this conversation, I need both hands free. Not for violence. For surrender.

"Sabine."

"Don't you Sabine me." She reaches into her work bag and produces a folded piece of paper, which she holds up between us like an exhibit in a trial where I am both the defendant and the evidence. I recognize it immediately. My handwriting, blocky and cramped because Orcish hands were not designed for human-sized pens, on her monogrammed stationery that I pulled from the desk in her living room at four in the morning while she slept with her face pressed against the pillow I had been using, her fingers curled loosely around the sheet where my body had been. "You left. A note. On my kitchen island."

"It was a clear and well-reasoned note."

"It was three sentences!"

"Brevity is a professional skill."

She unfolds the note and reads it aloud, and the sound of my own words coming back at me in her precise, clipped accounting-firm diction is somehow more devastating than any physical blow I have absorbed in fifteen years of bounty hunting. "'Sabine. I am leaving to keep you safe. Do not look for me.' That's what you wrote. That's what you left on my kitchen island next to the fruit bowl I organized by color and the coaster set you actually started using without being reminded."

Behind me, Picks makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh or might be a cough, and I do not turn around to determine which because I cannot look away from Sabine's face. The anger is real, blazing and righteous, but beneath it there is something else.

"How did you find me?"

She lifts one eyebrow. Just one. The left. She does this when she is about to reveal that she has been three steps ahead of the situation for some time and has simply been waiting for the appropriate moment to disclose this fact. "You filed a change-of-address form with the DMI when you moved into my apartment. The original address on file is this neighborhood. I cross-referenced it with the property tax records for commercial spaces with residential use permits, narrowed it down to four buildings, and then asked the noodle vendor on the corner if he'd seen a very large, very stupid Orc walk past in the last twenty-four hours. He was extremely helpful. He says you owe him fourteen dollars for unpaid dumplings."

Gutspill, who has been inching his stool progressively farther away from the blast radius, lets out a low whistle of genuine admiration. One of the Elven twins whispers something to the other in Sindarin that I'm fairly certain translates to she tracked him faster than we tracked the Fae Duchess.

The black-bordered Skinwalker contract is on the bar between us like an accusation, and Sabine's eyes drop to it, and scans the header, the threat classification, the red-stamped casualty probability assessment in the upper right corner. Her face changes. The anger doesn't disappear, but it shifts, compresses, becomes something denser and more complicated, the way a star collapses inward before it either stabilizes or explodes.

"What is this?" She asks the question calmly, but her hand is shaking. The one holding the note, my stupid, insufficient, three-sentence note. The tremor is barely visible, a vibration in her fingertips that someone less attuned to the precise geography of her body would never notice, but I catalogued every detail of her hands last night while she slept, the specific pattern of her knuckles, the faint callus on her right middle finger from years of gripping pens, and I know those hands do not shake. Not during tax audits, not during DMI inspections, not during warehouse confrontations with magical crime lords. Those hands are steady because she is steady, because steadiness is the foundation of her entire identity, and the fact that they are shaking now is information that lands in the center of my sternum like a crossbow bolt.

"A contract. Standard bounty work."

"Extreme threat classification." She reads from the contract without touching it, her eyes flickering across the text with the speed and precision of someone who processes complex documents for a living. "Rogue Skinwalker. Three confirmed fatalities. Estimated survival probability for lone hunter engagement..." She pauses. "Forty-two percent."

"Those are conservative estimates. I'd put my personal odds higher."

"Your personal odds." She repeats the phrase as if I have just handed her a tax return with the numbers written in crayon. "You left my apartment in the night after... after everything... to come here and take a job with a fifty-eight percent chance of killing you."

"Forty-two percent chance of killing me. Fifty-eight percent survival odds. The numbers are in my favor."

"That is not how risk assessment works, and you know it, because I explained compound probability to you over those spreadsheets and you understood it perfectly because you are not stupid, Jagger, you are just infuriating."