letting them into the United Coalition. But for now, they were acting as allies, and we needed all the help we could get.
The next morning, I headed out back while Angel was fixing breakfast. We had both gotten up early. I slept like the dead, which surprised me after the meeting with Dormant, and woke up with my side aching far less than it had. Angel changed my bandage for me, and the wounds were starting to heal quickly, though I was still a mass of bruises.
I was wearing a loose shift again, to avoid pinching the stitches with a waistband, and a pair of flat sandals as I walked out to our side yard to check the kitchen garden. The tomatoes were ripe and hanging on the vines, the lettuce was growing like weeds—everything was flourishing. The mums were starting to flower, though the roses were almost done for the season.
I made my way over to one of the benches and sat down, breathing in the early morning air. A light breeze fluttered past, tossing my hair in its wake. I closed my eyes and tilted my head up. The sun had already risen, but it had yet to heat up the day. Light clouds drifted through the sky, a blur reminding me of a wide jet trail. But there was something beneath the August morning—something that I usually didn’t feel until later in the month. There was the slightest tang in the air, a faint prescience of autumn, still distant, but it was a hop and a skip beyond the horizon, warning me that it was on its way.
A crow landed on the bench beside me and I reached up to touch my crow necklace Morgana had given me. It signified our bond, and I wore it like an amulet. The crow let out a caw, then hopped closer, staring up at me.
“What is it? Do you have something you want to say to me?” I very slowly held out my hand. The crow regarded it for a moment, then hopped on. I held my breath, waiting, but it seemed comfortable. After a moment, I raised my hand, trying to hold it steady, and the crow remained perched on my palm. As I brought it to eye level, it met my gaze and then opened its beak and let out one raspy caw and flew away. I watched it go, wondering what that had been all about, as the crow circled me three times and then flew over to perch in the oak.
“Breakfast!” Angel called from the sliding glass door.
I gave the crow one last look, then headed back to the house.
First Avenue was humming when I pulled into the parking garage. Angel had left a few minutes before me so she could stop and pick up a package that the Parcel Service Unlimited—PSU—had inexplicably refused to deliver. As I made my way to the office, all around me were buskers and jugglers, streeps playing guitar and street artists. It was then I realized that it was Urban Street Fair week, and all over the city, artists of all sorts were hustling their services and wares.
I stopped to listen to a girl who couldn’t be more than fifteen as she sang a traditional Celtic ballad, and her voice was scintillating. Pulling out my wallet, I tossed a fiver in her guitar case and smiled, waving as I moved on. She waved back, and I wondered who she was and where she lived. I didn’t recognize her, but the streeps came and went, a continual flow of all ages.
Some slept in the alleyways, some in flophouses run by slumlords who turned over the beds on a shift-by-shift basis. Others chose to live in the tent cities that lined parts of the freeways. The city was beautiful—but Seattle was like a jewel surrounded by a tarnished setting, the grace and elegance of the port city glossing over the underside where the poor had no place to live, and even grandmothers were turned into beggars, asking for handouts because there weren’t enough jobs or affordable housing. But a fraction of the streeps were actually happy in their life style, and they tended to gather in the downtown area, forming a culture of their own.
I passed through the throng on the street, carefully dashing up the steps to the door of our building. As I pushed through into the hallway, the noise miraculously vanished. The building had been soundproofed long ago. The