Just add water! Salvador rolled a single coin over and under his knuckles. This was the coin that the masked lizard man-thing had given him as payment for his latest win in the silent auction. Twenty-five thousand gold for a date with a woman named Renna. He didn't know anything about this woman, except for some overheard testimonies about how tragically lethal she was rumored to be. He didn't particularly care to know anything about her either, but twenty-five thousand?

Sure, there had been some higher bids than that during the live auction. Such as that ridiculous sum of two point eight billion for a minotaur, and the hundred thousand paid for a date with Sin. He still had no idea who that woman was. Again, he didn't particularly care to know her either. A date was a date, just a date, and he knew better than to even marginally be concerned that his relationship was in any danger. Theirs was a "strange relationship" anyway. Most people just didn't get it.

This was the payment he hadn't quite turned in yet, but Skids name had been scratched off his list as well as Vinny's. Three down and only three more to go. But this one was still stalling him.

The masked creature's instructions had been to plant the coin in potting soil and, as it even said on the coin itself, just add water. There was no mistaking the fact that the coin was magic. He could feel the thrum and the buzz of arcane energies in his fingertips every time he fiddled with the thing. Like he was doing now while he stood there boggling at the dozen different types of potting soil available on the market.

Shopping. Next to paperwork this was his second greatest nemesis. Salvador absolutely loathed shopping. He hated the hustle and bustle of the marketplace and the fact that half the time he didn't know what he was looking at. Being mortally colorblind certainly limited his perception.

What he hated most of all about shopping in general were the great big fat smiles and overall false cheer that exuded out of every pore of the vendors and customer service representatives. The portly, balding man who waddled up to him was a prime example. "Good morning, sir! How are you today? Anything I can help you with?" Sweat rolled cheerfully between his teeth. Salvador wanted to punch him.

Resisting that urge, he rolled the coin into his palm and pointed at the heaps of packaged dirt. "People actually buy this sh*t?" Apparently there was some significant difference between potting soil and just plain dirt. It made absolutely no sense to him whatsoever.

The fat man blinked at him. Maybe because of the language. "Uh. Well." For a moment there he had lost his well-practiced professional smile. He grabbed back in a second blink. Salvador still wanted to punch him. "Why, yes, sir! Absolutely!" The rest of the words that fell out of his mouth were a blur. Some long and tiresome scripted monologue about the importance and virtues of carefully manufactured potting soil that he had clearly memorized. Salvador didn't understand half of it.

"Right. Sure. Whatever," he said when the man was done babbling at him. "Just give me one of those." He pointed at one of the smallest bags of potting soil on the stack. The clerk cheerfully pulled it down for him, and money was exchanged appropriately.

A half an hour later, Salvador strolled into Marcus's office and dropped the bag of potting soil on his desk. On top of it he placed the magic coin, with the Just add water! side face up. Without a word, he turned around and left, likely leaving the man just as baffled as he had been.

If wishes were horses, a band of thousands would have trampled Salvador Delahada a dozen miles into the earth already. Though it went without saying that he was already damned. Not in the way that Catholics count up their sins or sorcerers make deals with demons, but he was unquestionably spiritually screwed. That much had been made clear on the day he was conceived.

There had been something further fascinating about that magic coin. He, like that coin, had two oddly labeled sides. Just add water. No. On that side of his coin was printed: just add blood. He was two inevitable truths that should never be mixed together in a single entity. He was oil and water. He was the dead and the living. Not the living dead as are vampires and zombies. He was something different. He was something far deadlier. He was the disease and the cure all rolled up into one brown paper bag package. The best known treatment for cancer was to cut it out, and he was the knife that did so. He was the poison that burned it out of the body. He was a tool.

Ambrosio Enterprises used him begrudgingly, as was plain from Marcus's thoughts on his very existence. If it weren't for Sin he wouldn't have a job at all. He wouldn't have a purpose. Not even something so mundane as collecting debts. Up until now he'd never had a job so frustratingly boring.

The open manila folder on the kitchen table, just where he'd left it for days, was down to two remaining unmarred names on a single piece of paper. He had cut his nail through all but two. With the help of surprisingly reliable resource by the name of Mira, he had managed to cut out one more. But there were still two. "Audra and Lethe," he muttered sourly, staring at the names. How could two simple people be so impossible to locate and collect from?

It wasn't that Salvador cared about the orphans who were still waiting to hear how much better their lives were going to be with all that money. He didn't even particularly care about the potential fraction that the Riverview Clinic might be awarded from the excess proceeds. What bothered him the most was not being able to simply find these two girls and get the damn job over and done with. He didn't even know who they were.

Oh sure. One he had caught a glimpse of at the auction itself, but like all people he hadn't categorized as important enough to remember the image of her was fading from his memory. He should have paid closer attention.

Pulling out a chair at the table, he dropped onto the seat bitterly and flipped the scarred piece of paper over. He always kept a pencil in his pocket, chewed and used down to a nub, but it still functioned well enough to do what he needed it to do. Write. He scrawled a column of numbers down across the blank side of the page.

2,802,424,261. Two billion, eight hundred two million, four hundred twenty-four thousand, two hundred sixty-one gold. He counted it twice. Then, just to make certain, he counted it all over again a third time. Salvador's job wasn't to act as an accountant for Ambrosio Enterprises, though he could probably handle that just as well. For his own peace of mind he had counted, just to be sure.

"Those are some lucky f*cking kids," he muttered, boggling at the sum. And there was still an uncollected fifteen thousand five hundred to add to the total. He frowned. He wondered briefly if it even really mattered at this point. "It does," he told himself. For the sake of the reputation of Ambrosio Enterprises as a whole, he knew it mattered. Personally, he didn't give a damn. But this business wasn't personal.

Grumbling a sigh, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed a finger between his eyebrows. Messages attached to violets tickled through his memory. Mira had managed to successfully locate and contact one out of the three outstanding debts where he had failed. Some people in this town were just damn slippery.

Salvador was developing a headache. All because of fifteen thousand five hundred gold. And the two ridiculously impossible to locate girls who owed that combined sum. "This job sucks."

Ever try to catch a fish with your bare hands? Yeah, it had gone quite a bit like that. Among the last two people on his list to find, Audra "Dex" Dawkin had been that one annoying trout who had kept slipping through his fingers. But his determination had paid off, and eventually he had caught her. That encounter had been one of his most irritating negotiations. The woman hardly qualified as pleasant, particulary when faced with his unruly and irritable self, but in the end he got what he'd been hunting for.

15,000 gold coins.

The remaining five hundred he had yet to collect from the mystery girl Lethe seemed like such an insignificant sum compared to the new total. All his sources lead him to the conclusion that the girl had either died or skipped down. At this point he decided just to write her off as nonexistent and acquire the money some other way. Taking on one private job had paid the bill.

As far as Salvador was concerned, his job was done, even if the final payment came out of his own pocket. He was tired of playing this role. There were much more important things to worry about. Now he figured Ambrosio Enterprises could handle the rest. If they asked him to distribute the funds around, he'd have to kill somebody.

Debt collecting was finally a job he could cross off his list. He crossed off names, dropped off sums and the file at the office, and filtered through his other temporary occupations while walking the City Streets. Priority didn't seem to exist. There was just far too much to think about.

Though if priority did exist, the number one annoyance on his mind these days was how to tell Sin something he had been bound not to tell him in the first place. He was determined to break those chains. Even if it killed him. All he had to show for it was would could constitute as random acts of madness. The mural made sense to him, but probably nobody else.

Mishka's problem kept getting pushed to the back burner, but in small doses he recalled some sense of urgency regarding a White Witch. Replace one letter of the alphabet with another and the name was equally the same. They had to take care of her before things got nasty again. Salvador designed another mental chess board in his thoughts to calculate how best to deal with her.

Another issue was Fio's problem. Somehow the sinner had roped him into getting involved. Though maybe it hadn't been by Sin's doing entirely. Salvador had to admit he was curious and puzzled about her entire situation. Much talk had been had about her studio, and he wondered... He wondered what he would See apart from everyone else. He knew he still had to get in there to take a Look. Everybody seemed to think that her studio held the answers.

And those priests. More of them were cropping up these days. One of them had given him a pendant, a message intended for Sin. Time was of the essence, the man had said. With those urgent words should he be pushing that issue up to higher priority? Salvador didn't know the woman all that well. All he knew was that Sin wanted to help her, and that was enough for him.

Walking and thinking in no particular order brought him back to a reminder of something else. He was knee deep in sh*t these days and wasn't sure what issue to deal with first. There remained one more, however, that gave him an opportunity to level the playing field....

Books. Why were they so important?

Everybody wanted books for various reasons. Rekah wanted to get rid of hers, but so far every tactic he had suggested proved to be a failure. They were still following her. Sin had been looking for books; Salvador didn't know why then. Now he had a better understanding of all that mess. Rebekah needed her books returned so that she could give them to her lord, a fae lord, someone she called Eiderdown. The one time that Salvador Delahada could have ever found books useful, it was just his luck that Bastian had destroyed the ones he needed.

Sin had suggested talking to him, but Sal didn't like the man enough to bother being civil. He destroyed all his books on fae. Why? "To protect you, silly boy." That above all reasons was the one that made him not want to talk to Bastian at all. Salvador didn't need protecting, least of all from the likes of him.

The easy way out of this mess was even less of a preferred option than speaking to Bastian, and when it came to the lesser of two evils he couldn't decide which was which. If anyone knew a fae lord by the name of Eiderdown, it most likely would have been his mother. Salvador didn't want to talk to her any more than he wanted to talk to Bastian, however.

"You're just being stubborn," he told himself and the pile of books he had in front of him. There were other libraries, he knew, just as he had told Sin. These other libraries, however, weren't exactly telling him anything he needed to know. The collection of books on fairies he had in front of him had been the closest grouping he had managed to find on fae in general. There didn't seem to really be any books printed on fae in general, and that posed as a problem.

"Not all fae are fairies." This much he knew. It was engraved into his brain, etched into the very fiber of his being. His mother wasn't a fairy and nor was he. There were numerous texts on sprites and pixies, other types of fae, as well, but none of them did him any amount of good either. "Maybe I should write my own damn book," he grumbled. He knew more about the facts than the fictions, that was for sure.

At some point he had even resorted to looking up the name Eiderdown in the dictionary. That had proved just as pointless as an attempt as everything else he spent his days researching. He was pretty sure this b*tch wasn't the down of the eider duck, used as stuffing for quilts and pillows. She probably wasn't a warm napped fabric either. The word warm didn't at all seem fitting to describe her, from what he knew of fae lords.

"I'm not looking in the right places," he groaned, smearing his hands over his face. Sal was beginning to develop a headache. He had never worked so hard on literary research in his entire life. Not even when he had been assigned to write essays for some of his classes at Northedge. Of course, he hardly got high marks on any of those papers, and that probably explained a lot. Books were boring. He never could get any enjoyment out of reading them.

The more he thought on it, he knew that the best places to look were still those few places he didn't want anything to do with whatsoever. "Madre would know," he told himself. That fact alone was irritating enough because he was tired of relying on her. He shouldn't rely on her. Though he knew she would have to tell him, answer his questions honestly, he didn't want to have to deal with her at all.

He was just being stubborn. As much as he tried to tell himself that he was independent and could take care of himself, take care of his own problems, help people with theirs without having to rely on anyone else... He knew that wasn't true, and he didn't want to admit it to himself.

"If only I had something more to work with than a stupid name," he growled. The stack of books in front of him suffered his discontent when he pushed them off the table and let them carelessly tumble to the floor. He heard the librarian gasp at the sound of books being abused, and he was pretty sure she'd be coming by soon enough to scold him for treating knowledge like that. This wasn't knowledge, though. All these books were useless.

Except, perhaps, for one....

Two nights ago he had come home to find a letter propped against the door. Of course, those two nights ago he also came home bloody and bruised and with a severe headache. That's what happens when you let the rage take over, Salvador. That's what happens when the beast inside takes control.

"Wait for me. I will be home soon."

Grumbling into a sigh, Salvador bent down to scoop up the envelope. Something inside jingled dully, the old worn clink of something tiny and metallic. The walk home from the alley had taken longer than it should have, and the evening was already fading away to make way for dawn. All he saw was a dull and dingy gray, where anyone else would have seen a horizon worthy of a portrait with its dim red glow.

Stumbling sullenly through the apartment door, he tossed the envelope onto the coffee table before easing down onto the sofa with a groan. His head was pounding. That fight should have ended differently. There should have been more blood and torn flesh. For the most part Ali had just stood there and taken a beating, but the few times he had swung back... Man did he hit hard.

Once he was settled, sprawled across the cushions and using the armrest as a pillow, Salvador reached out to pluck up the envelope. The first impression his fingers could feel was the imprint of Fury's face. That image flickered before his eyes for only a fraction of a second. Without a return address, and before even opening it up to read the signature on the letter, he knew who this was from. Ripping open the envelope, he tipped it and let two small skeleton keys tumble into the palm of his hand. One of them he recognized immediately, not so much the other. Though to most people they might look identical.

Dear Salvador,

He stalled on the salutation for a time, after he pulled out the letter itself for a quick read. Quick was the operating word here. The letter itself wasn't very long anyway, but Fury's elegant scrawl creating those two simple words just seemed wrong somehow. The fact that he could be considered dear to anyone, especially this one moody Fallen, made him slightly uncomfortable. Never mind the fact that dear anyone was the most common salutation ever used in any letter ever written in the history of ever. He had never been very good with words himself.

Here is your key. Thank you. It has served its purpose.

One of two keys. He rolled the one he knew up from his palm to his fingertips and twiddled with it for a moment, thinking. Nightmares. Fury had been suffering bad dreams that kept her from sleeping. He had offered her the key to the House that Sin had given him so long ago. She used it, but now she says it has served its purpose? "Hnn." He rolled the key back into his palm with the other one and let them jingle together briefly before he switched out which one to twiddle through his fingertips.

The other is the key to my loft. Please watch over it.

Easy enough to do. Not to mention she gave him an open invitation to investigate his own suspicions. But the next line made him frown.

Feed the cat.

Just reading that line silently was enough for Kavi. Sometimes he wondered if cats were the only creatures who could read his thoughts. The big fat momma cat came skulking out from under the sofa. She looked up at him from the floor, eyes half hooded and whiskers flared. She almost seemed to be grinning. He frowned at her. He could imagine her laughing when she turned, flicked her tail near his wrist, and pranced away.

I will return. If not, see that the cat, Quinnley, is taken care of.

"Great," he muttered to the letter. "Just what we need. Another f*cking cat." Salvador decided in that instant that if by chance Fury did not return home he was going to pawn her cat off on someone else. Best not to tell Sin about it.

The post script caught his attention most of all.

Every time we choose safety, we reinforce fear.

Nothing else about the letter mattered anymore. Not even the furious scrawl that had torn a hole in the paper. He could have, if he really wanted to, pressed his will into the page and read whatever memories still lingered there. He could have closed his eyes and viewed the history of the writing, taken a glimpse of what she had meant to tell him next, but did it matter? All the clues were present and accounted for. Everything he needed to know to confirm his suspicions rested in the palm of his hand.

"Wait for me. I will be home soon."

Any investigations he had in mind would have to wait. Folding up the letter, he stuffed into a jacket pocket. The keys he slipped together into another. Sin would be home soon, and the headache he had come home with himself was really starting to make his ears ring.

"Tomorrow," he told himself, closing his eyes. With a groan, he tipped back his head, held a hand there, and waited. The last thing he should be doing right now was falling asleep, but the only one present to help keep him awake was himself, and that was the last person he ever wanted to hold a conversation with whenever he could avoid it.

"Idiots, both of them," Salvador snarled the moment he was out the door. A plague of voices were blotted out through the alley wall. He could vaguely hear them murmuring still, dozens of them, way too many people. Just when he was satisfied and comfortable with being home, this had to happen.

Ali al-Amat. Fionna Helston. Married!

"And none of us knew," he argued aloud with himself, prowling down the back alley toward darker streets. "Which makes us just as blind and stupid. How well they held their secret." He spat into a gutter, imagining their feet standing there. "What were they thinking?"

The other side chimed in with a tick of his head to one side. "They weren't thinking."

A tingle coursed up through his fingertips, a memory of, well, memories shared. Fionna's feelings. Her sadness and her joy. One small little event in their history together. He remembered and didn't like the remembering.

She had wanted to kill him, which was fine. He had wanted to kill Ali too, for being so brash and quick to jump to conclusions, for daring to poke all the right raw nerves and flip that switch. But he couldn't deny the love she felt for him. It was so strong, so vibrant, so appallingly there.

He rubbed his hands together vigorously as if maybe he could scour the memory out of his skin, but he couldn't. It stuck there like so many others. People and places, time immemorial. Things he knew that he shouldn't know, that he couldn't recall why he had ever ventured to obtain the knowing of.

"Let's just paint a big f*cking red bullseye on our backs while we're at it. Shout to the sky." And he did. Salvador tipped back his head and shouted to the stars, to the rain and the clouds. "Here I am! I know Fionna Helston! Come and get me," he declared, pausing to spread his arms wide. "You want to hurt her? Hurt everyone she loves until there's no one left for her to love but you? Well here's one right here, mother f*cker! Come out and play!"

No one came of course. His voice hardly echoed under the pitter-patter of dripping rain. It came in spurts as summer neared. Great thunderstorms that lasted little longer than thirty minutes. Small drizzles that lasted longer still. And wide gaps between where there was nothing but the residue plinking off of gutters and into puddles. He waited with his arms outstretched until he was satisfied that the danger wasn't as intense as everyone believed.

"Married," he spat, literally, again into a drain. Shaking his head with a bitter grumble, he picked up his feet and continued on. "And now Sin wants to finally go to the Palais."

That was another matter that clicked home a memory. "Son of a b*tch," he muttered at himself. Slapping a hand to his forehead and then dragging it down his face, he remembered discarding two keys in a drain. He knew he had to find them before he went back home to Sin, who would be waiting, whom he might just have an argument with for the first time in their new home.

Just when things were going so well.

September 28, 2009.

There was a notice posted outside the Red Dragon Inn. This very same notice was posted in duplicate on the bulletin board in the Arena below. If he hadn't seen it upstairs, he was likely to see it downstairs as well. Of course, it was a notice more likely to catch his attention in the basement, where he actually looked from time to time, than it was on the wall of the Red Dragon. Wherever he saw it, this one caught his attention.

The tournament to find my squire will be held on Saturday, October 10th at 10pm.

I invite the following to attend:

Among a short list of eight, there was his name. Well, he was pretty sure it was his name at any rate. He didn't know any other Sal. He signed his own name that way himself, shortened, a nickname. The first time he dueled, that was the name he'd given when asked by his opponent and the official. That's how his name was listed on the standings. It was the name he was known by, and it was only expected that it was the name some baron he didn't even know would refer to him as.

The notice was signed, after some little addendum about what to do if he didn't want to attend.

Jaycy Ashleana
Baroness of Seaside

"Seaside, huh?" Salvador snorted while his fingers contemplated ripping the notice off the wall. What a convenient opportunity. After all, he lived right down the road from that particular baronial manor. Or down the beach, to be more specific.

He must have passed it by thousands of times, only he couldn't remember precisely what it looked like. The Seaside baronial manor was just another one out of hundreds of thousands that he hadn't spared a second, let alone likely even a first, glance toward. Too many ghosts and memories choked the air, even close to the ocean, and he preferred to avoid touching any of them. Still...

"Why the hell's she inviting me to her tournament?" he grumbled in wonder. He had no idea who this Baroness was, nor did he particularly care. None of the current barons were of much interest to him at all. He thought on that a moment.

Old Temple is what Anubis had, the one he tried to take from him even though Salvador didn't want the barony anyway. Then some guy named Max finally wrested the ring from the Egyptian's hands. How many had gone into that queue after he had tried himself? Four? Five? He'd missed most of them, and go figure the one he had shown up to watch, the Egyptian lost. What a shame.

Nobody else had really been worth his interest. Well, except perhaps for Tormay. He had won New Haven from some chick he didn't know. Then he had thrown his own tournament, and now Neo was his squire. That made one. This made two. So the duels were starting to see an increase in political activity, eh? And this baroness wanted him to test him? Pit him against seven other people to see who was worthy of being her squire? He considered the names on the list.

Matt Simon. That was Rhy'Din's current governor. First time he tried Fists, as he recalled, Matt had been the official on duty. Fists. He hadn't had much time to spare to indulge himself in a little good old fashioned weaponless brawling. Nor had he really given it much thought until just now.

Koy VanDuran-Simon. That was the governor's wife. A sly grin curled up his mouth recalling her. Yeah, that's right. Chick sure liked to beat on people, and get beat on in return. He could admire her. Helped a little that she was drop dead gorgeous. Of course, in his opinion, any woman as blood thirsty as Koy was smoking hot. Hardly had anything to do with her looks at all, but they certainly helped.

Michiko. That name was familiar. If he remembered right, she was the first person who ever sparred off against him and brought him to a draw. The grin stuck, just as sly. She'd be worth going up against again.

Anya. The only Anya he knew was his doctor. The only doctor he trusted. Doctor Maranya Valkonan. He'd beaten her so many times it wasn't even funny. This baroness actually wanted to test her for a squire? Trust the doctor he did, sure, but consider her a worthy opponent? Not really. Seeing that name on the list made him snort.

Aja. Had to be that friend of the doctor's. The one who had that kid. That kid... Something about that kid he couldn't quite remember, and it made the back of his brain squirm trying to figure out what it was. Oh well. What was currently important was that he didn't really think much of her, Aja, as an opponent either. Though he couldn't recall actually having ever sparred off against her.

Wyh. He had no idea who that was. The next name on the list, however, made him stare in vaguely horrified disbelief for a long, blank moment.

Rhi Harker. Well now. That one, at least, would certainly make it worth his while.

"All right, Jaycy Ashleana," he drawled to the notice before his eyes. "Why not? Though if I win this thing, you're probably going to be sorely disappointed." In any case, it would be good practice, which is what he thought of the sport overall. It was all just good practice.