Brendon's hand came away from the lock. He kept his stance casual, slow, the posture of a man who did not want to be a threat. "You make a habit of giving strangers directions?"
"I make a habit of not getting shot," she said. There was an accent he couldn't place and an edge in her cadence that suggested she had spent a lot of time learning to be heard at the wrong end of a room. "You shouldn't be here, wolf."
He let the title slide off him like rain. "You should keep your secrets to yourself, fox."
A small, dry chuckle. "Names are currency. You have many, and I have little time to trade."
He had been hunting her for weeks in a way that lacked the dignity of a proper crusade. He had followed the rumor of her across gutters and phone lines, an itch behind his ear that never went away. Brendon had been a thief; his curiosity was a sharp thing that had never slipped off. Ninja Fox — that was what the streets called her. Ninja Fox: an urban legend who moved like rumor and struck like a ledger closed. He had wanted to find her for reasons he did not fully own: for help, for answers, maybe for the satisfaction of finding a story and holding it.
"You look light on patience," she said. "What do you want?"
"To ask. To trade. To see if you know what's in that crate," he said. He tilted his chin toward the brand. "You are accustomed to move in shadow, right? Maybe... you've seen this sign before."
For a heartbeat, her face was all shadow. Then a quick tilt of her head and a sliver of a smile. "A brand means a lot of things. It mostly means the owner wants you to think it's mundane. That never is."
"How do you know so much?" he asked. He was not supposed to ask that question aloud; it put him in the posture of an applicant seeking an invitation. But his curiosity overrode his caution. He had the kind of need for answers that had teeth.
She shrugged as if the motion were the smallest burden. "I read what men leave behind. Their haste is an honest thing. You forget to wipe where your fingers burned. You carry the scent of your hunger. No one ever thinks to hide the smell of their cruelty."
"The smell of cruelty?" He kept his tone light, a small joke that was not funny. For a moment the city seemed to hold its breath around them. A rat scuttled across a puddle and the sound was obscene.
"Slavery," she said, the word cutting the night clean. "You want to know about slavery, wolf?"
He felt it then — a new chill, not from the air but from the pull in his ribs. The word felt wrong in the mouth of anyone who lived in a city that had moved past such things. Slavery was an ugly old thing kept in the basements of myth, like fairy tales read by children who did not believe the monsters were real. He had heard whispers — rumors that had been half-turned over in pursuit of his casebooks — about people disappearing, about odd shipments that never made sense. Those whispers had the texture of something deeper. This woman spoke with a knowledge that made the hair at the back of his neck stand up.
"How do you know?" he asked.
Her eyes — quick, black, slit like a raven's — gleamed. "I don't know. I just had to find out. They burned a friend of mine for a charm when I was small. They made him sing for it. I don't forget those songs."
She said the words as if it were a private sorrow. Brendon had learned to watch weaknesses closely; pity could be a weapon if you let it. It was also a doorway. "So you have been watching Flim & Flam Enterprise too?"
She smiled then, and it was less a smile than a flash of blade. "I watch everything that smells like mystery in this town, sheriff. I watch those who think they hide in plain sight."
Sofie's voice in his ear had gone quiet for the past few heartbeats; the feed had probably slipped into a loop as she pulled more data. He nudged his comm with his thumb. "Sofie. Report."
"She's right about the crate," Sofie said, voice sharper now. "It's marked with the Brand. I cross-referenced municipal import tags. It also shows up on a ledger from an offshore mill run through Guerieo's development projects. The number's small — shell money — but it's there."
Brendon's jaw tightened. Mayor Guerieo's name was always a weight. The mayor had survived the scandals revolving Whitney's case by winking and adjusting who he stepped on. If Sofie's glimpse was true, then the whole thing smelled worse than rotten meat. He had to be careful. Politicians had friends who did favors with guns and men who liked to make examples. The last thing he needed was a funeral procession with his name on the banner.
He turned to the fox woman. "You know that brand. Who uses it?"
Her gaze flicked toward the crate and then away, like someone reading a page of a book in a language they loved and feared at the same time. "Strong ones," she said. "And weak ones. Those who wear it trade in more than flesh."
He felt the word like a small stone hitting the inside of his chest. "What are you implying?"
She made a small, tired motion with a hand. "I am implying that there are those who make charms from the wrong kind of things. Meaning that some people pay for power by buying a piece of a living thing. Meaning that mythivens — like you — find the smell of their own dying."
He didn't reply. The alley hummed. Somewhere a dog started, high and interrupted, as if someone had struck a string too hard.
Brendon had been called many things, but he had never told anyone the name of the thing he had carried inside him. He had a memory that was not a memory — a shape of a moon that had no right to be there, a taste like iron on his tongue when he was frightened, a resonance that went deeper than thought. Mythivens were a thing of half-remembered fires: folk tales, old wives' curses, the name of people who could do things the law could not measure. Brendon had kept his heritage like a coin in his shoe; he had carried it but never spent it.
To hear someone speak of charms made from living things made a cold iron chain clatter against his ribs.
"Where did you learn this?" he asked the woman. His voice had a hardness he could not fully control.
She cocked her head. "I learned a long time ago to notice the smell of guilt. And you —" she studied him for a moment that felt longer than the rest of the night — "— you are not what you pretend to be, are you?"
It was not a question. Brendon had the sense in that instant that the world had measured him and found him marginally interesting. The woman had not called him wolf out of habit; she had called him wolf because she recognized the thing beneath the badge. That recognition was dangerous. It could be an invitation or a threat. He had learned the hard way that sometimes they were the same thing.
"Keep your recognition," he said finally. "It'll save us both trouble."
She laughed softly. "Trouble is the business of the city, sheriff Wolf. We're both merchants of that."