Ch.16
Asia held my sleeve in the grocery store. Her fingers were hooked into the fabric at my elbow, not gripping hard, just maintaining contact, the way a kid holds on in a crowd except she was seventeen and the crowd was a Tuesday afternoon in a suburban supermarket with about eight other shoppers.
She'd started doing it the first time we went out. The streets between our house and the store were fine, familiar now after a week, but inside the store the aisles were tall and the layout was foreign and she'd lost me once near the frozen foods and I'd found her standing in the bread aisle looking at the ceiling like she was trying to navigate by the fluorescent lights.
So now she held my sleeve. I carried the basket.
"Do we need ginger?" she asked. She was studying a handwritten shopping list she'd made in a mix of Japanese and Italian, her lips moving as she translated between the two.
"Probably."
"Your mother uses it in everything."
"That's why we probably need it."
She nodded seriously and headed for the produce section. I followed, her fingers still hooked into my elbow, and we navigated the aisle together like a very small and very polite convoy.
Asia's cooking had taken over the household inside a week. The convent in Italy had apparently trained her as thoroughly in the kitchen as it had in theology, and my mom had been so delighted by the help that she'd handed over the morning meal rotation without a fight. Asia made breakfast now. Every morning. Miso, rice, tamagoyaki, pickled vegetables, all of it precise and consistent, the same focus she probably used to bring to prayers.
She stopped in front of a shelf of sauces and reached for a bottle on the upper level. Her arm stretched, her school uniform pulled up from her waist, and the gap between her skirt and her shirt showed a strip of skin at her lower back, the curve of her spine, pale and soft. She was on her toes and her fingers were about two inches from the bottle and she was going to knock over the three bottles in front of it if she kept reaching.
I stepped behind her and grabbed the bottle off the shelf. My chest pressed against her back for a second, my arm reaching over hers, and she went rigid. Just froze. Her hand was still up and her breathing stopped and when I stepped back and put the bottle in the basket she was facing the shelf with her ears crimson.
"Thank you, Issei-san."
"Mm."
Her ears stayed red for the rest of the shopping trip. She didn't let go of my sleeve.
An old woman at the checkout counter looked at us, at Asia's blonde hair and my dark one, at her fingers on my elbow, and smiled with the serene satisfaction of a grandmother who'd decided we were dating. We were not dating. I didn't correct her.
The ORC clubroom in the afternoon smelled like old wood and the green tea Akeno kept brewing. Kiba was in the yard with two demonic swords, running forms, and when I asked if he'd teach me some basics he looked at me with the polite surprise of a man who'd been asked whether water was wet.
"Of course," he said. "Grab a practice sword."
The practice sword was a wooden bokken from a rack by the door. I took a stance that felt natural and Kiba corrected it in four places. My feet were wrong, my elbows were off, my center of gravity was too high, and my grip was actually decent, which he said was probably from the gauntlet combat style.
We sparred. Kiba was a Knight, which meant his speed was inhuman, and he'd been trained since childhood by a Church project that had killed everyone else in the program. He was very, very good. I was very, very bad. But I was also faster and stronger than a human should be, and Kiba noticed. His eyes narrowed halfway through the first exchange when I blocked a strike that should have gotten past me.
"You've improved," he said. "Since last week."
"Training."
"Mm." He didn't push. He came at me with a combination I couldn't read and the bokken hit my ribs and I went sideways.
From the porch, Koneko was watching. She was sitting with her legs tucked under her, a bag of strawberry pocky in her lap, eating them one at a time with the mechanical precision of a metronome.
"You're bad at this," she said.
I picked myself up from the dirt. "Thank you, Koneko."
"…You're welcome."
Her mouth twitched. The corner of it, the left side, moving maybe two millimeters upward before resettling into deadpan. I would have missed it if I hadn't been looking. Koneko Toujou had almost smiled at me and the world continued to turn.
We went three more rounds. I lost every one. Kiba was patient, correcting my form between exchanges, and by the end my arms were sore and my shirt was dirty and the new baseline was there, the Mid-Class-Devil power humming under my skin, making every block a little faster and every strike a little harder than it should have been. I was still bad. I was less bad than I would have been a week ago.
The knock on the ORC clubroom door was precise. Two raps, evenly spaced, at the exact volume that communicated formality without being demanding. I'd heard Rias knock. Akeno knocked. Neither of them sounded like that.
Rias opened the door. Standing in the hallway was a girl with short black hair and violet eyes behind rectangular glasses. Kuoh Academy uniform, impeccable, with the Student Council armband on her left sleeve. Beside her, taller, with very long black hair and heterochromatic eyes behind blue-rimmed glasses, stood a woman whose posture suggested she'd been born standing at attention.
"Sona." Rias's voice was the composed one. The heiress greeting a peer.
"Rias." The girl's voice was cool, precise, every syllable exactly where it belonged. "I hope I'm not interrupting. I wanted to introduce myself to your... ally."
She looked past Rias. At me.
Sona Sitri. The Student Council President. Heiress to the House of Sitri. I knew her from the anime, four seasons of watching her operate in Rias's shadow, the chess master who'd broken her own engagement by beating her fiancé at the board. In person she was shorter than Rias and her eyes were sharper and she stood like every inch of her posture had been calibrated.
"Hyoudou Issei," I said.
"Sitri Sona. And this is my Queen, Shinra Tsubaki."
Tsubaki dipped her head. A millimeter. Her heterochromatic eyes, one violet, one brown, stayed fixed on me.
Sona sat on the sofa like she was chairing a committee meeting. Her knees together, her hands folded, her back straight. She asked me about the church raid. About the Fallen Angels in custody. About my relationship with the Gremory peerage. Her questions were precise and each one probed a different angle and I recognized the technique because I'd used it myself in my old life, at parties, when I wanted to figure someone out without them realizing they were being interviewed.
"You're not in Rias's peerage," she said.
"No."
"But you operate in Gremory territory."
"With permission."
"Under what terms?"
"Alliance. Mutual benefit. An unnamed favor."
Her eyebrow moved. A fraction. "An unnamed favor. Rias agreed to that?"
"She drives a hard bargain."
"Rias drives an emotional bargain. I drive a hard one." She studied me. Her violet eyes were flat and assessing and missed nothing. "You're interesting, Hyoudou. A human with a Longinus who refuses to join a peerage, holds three Fallen Angels in custody, and has the Gremory heiress's personal attention. That's a complicated position for a second-year student."
"I'm a complicated guy."
Behind Sona, Tsubaki adjusted her glasses. The motion was small and precise and her eyes didn't leave my face while she did it. I had the distinct impression she was recording everything.
"I don't doubt it." Sona stood. "I expect we'll be seeing more of each other, Hyoudou. Kuoh is a small town and the supernatural community in it is smaller. I like to know the variables."
"Am I a variable?"
"You're either a variable or a constant. I haven't decided which." She extended her hand. I shook it. Her grip was firm and her palm was cool and dry and she held the shake for one beat, then released.
"Pleasure meeting you, Sitri-san."
"Sona. If we're going to be working in the same territory, we should be direct."
"Sona."
She left. Tsubaki followed. At the door, Tsubaki paused and looked back at me over the frame of her glasses.
"Your stance during sparring needs work. Your left foot drops when you pivot."
Then she was gone.
Rias, who had been watching the exchange from her desk with her chin on her hand, looked at me. "She likes you."
"How can you tell?"
"She introduced herself by first name inside five minutes. Sona doesn't do that."
Evening. The barrier was in an empty warehouse on the east side of Kuoh that Akeno had sealed with devil magic and ward layers. From the outside it looked abandoned. From the inside it was a large room with concrete walls and three fallen angels sitting in a space about the size of a studio apartment, bounded by shimmering violet lines that hummed with Akeno's energy.
Raynare was sitting against the far wall. Wings folded, legs drawn up, chin on her knees. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the wall to my left, deliberately, at anything except me.
Kalawarner was sitting cross-legged near the right wall, reading a paperback. Where she'd gotten a paperback I had no idea. Her navy-blue hair covered one eye and her uncovered eye tracked me when I stepped through the barrier's entry point. She didn't stop reading.
Mittelt was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, her blonde twintails spread out on the concrete floor. Her arms were crossed over her chest and her mouth was set in a pout that would have been cute on someone who hadn't tried to kill me.
I stood at the edge of the barrier. Three Fallen Angels in a box.
"What do you want with us?" Kalawarner asked. She didn't look up from the book.
"Checking in."
"How considerate." Her voice was dry.
Mittelt sat up. "If you're going to kill us, do it already. This is boring. The food is bad. There's nothing to read except whatever Kalawarner found and she won't share."
"Nobody's dying."
"Then let us go."
"Not yet."
"Then what ARE we doing here?" Mittelt's voice had gone from petulant to loud. Her blue eyes were bright and angry and she looked like a twelve-year-old throwing a tantrum, which was misleading because she was centuries old and could throw light spears.
"I'm figuring it out," I said.
"Great plan."
Raynare still hadn't looked at me. She was staring at the wall, her jaw set, her violet eyes fixed on nothing. The blood was gone from her chin. Someone had given them water and basic supplies. Her leather outfit was wrinkled and one of the straps was torn from where I'd hit her in the church.
I looked at her. She didn't look back.
"The food will get better," I said.
I left.
Outside, the evening air was cool and the stars were coming out and a cat was sitting on the warehouse loading dock, washing its face with one paw. It looked up at me, decided I wasn't interesting, and went back to washing.
"Partner," Ddraig said, from the warmth at the back of my skull. "Your collection is growing."
"They're people, not a collection."
"I didn't say they weren't."
I walked home. Asia had left the porch light on.