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No pictures on the walls George was right Eduardo probably didn’t keep in contact with his family In fact, the house was barely furnished They probably hadn’t had a chance to get all the furniture or couldn’t afford it

The living rooular, relatively narrow space, lay across the hallway Probably a for room at one point, now it had been turned into an office, with a lone square , large enough for a person to squeeze through, but too sainst one wall, supporting a phone and a yellow book Weapons hung on the walls, mostly tactical blades Most shapeshifters used their claws A few, especially those trained specifically for coros His arsenal consisted of various short swords Twosteel maul with a wooden handle and an equally heavy axe If I tried to fight with either, it would require two hands and takethe my sword

I paused by a pair of Iberian steel falcatas, twenty inches overall, with fourteen-inch blades, single-edged, slightly curved, and convex near the point but concave near the hilt The swords that surprised the Romans in the Second Punic war

I had a pair of falcatas from the same smithy--they bore the saed froh-carbon steel and marquenched in aThere was a great deal of difference between a sword and a swordlike object I had seen very pretty blades reat until someone actually tried to use them and they snapped in half froue-resistant spring steel like 5160 Pre-Shift, people used it for truck springs It contained chrome and silicon and was expensive, but 5160 took a hell of a lot of punishood taste

I moved on to the desk The corkboard held scraps of paper Most looked like merc notes, the numbers of clients with sed snake in a tree 345 Calwood, feral dog Call Guild about Walters, 5 days late on payh it tonight Unlike the fictional detectives who solved crih investigations and I’ve learned that being thorough pays off

A stack of open e sh the stack of mail Bills All current, no past-due balances A bank states and two thousand in checking A page was pinned to the bank state a list of expenses, utilities, insurance, and so on, each with a notation by it written in a bold, wide hand The a the budget for hi letters Eduardo had written, Need more money, and underlined it twice

I checked the desk drawer Paper, pens, sticky notes, a stack of gig ticketsI leafed through it The o He s, so hiround He would take a job, finish it, return to the Guild, and sleep there until another gig cae couldn’t have known She would’vestubs aside A small wooden boxI picked it up and flicked the latch A ring rested on the cushion of velvet A big round sapphire set in a fra a lotus flower studded with tiny diaold plated with black rhodium It would’ve been expensive before the Shift; noith technology suffering, the price was crazy Shapeshifters didn’t like the feel of precious htly better Rhodiuiven a black rhodiu a craze The Pack wouldn’t shut up about it for days

I was looking at e ay too practical to ever expect a black rhodiu If I asked her, she would tell ht it for her anyway He wanted her to have the best there was, and if she ever found out how et it, she would probably kill hiht fro, as if a drop of pure seawater had so all of the color and depth of the ocean inside it The future of two people sitting here on a velvet pillow George’s words came back to nawed at me I packed it away, into the deep place inside me, and snapped the box closed Eduardo didn’t need my emotions He needed my help