"Bit of a relief, I suppose."
    "A bit," he agreed. "But stick around, everyone's due to appear around seven. We generally order Chinese food."
    "Sounds good, I've been eating seafood for a week."
    "Where'd you go?"
    "Up to Maine."
    "Pretty country."
    "Very nice. Very relaxing. Made for a nice change of pace."
    "I think you needed it," he observed.
    "Yes." Good grief, is it that easy to tell? I wondered, reminded myself that he is a telepath, after all.
    "I have a feeling that your team is a lot more active than our team," Trent went on.
    "Well, we went for a couple months without anything much happening, and then things became a sort of slow-motion disintegration, which took a few months, and now they've gotten quiet again. At least, I haven't gotten any emergency calls that the city has exploded since I left."
    "I haven't heard anything, no one's called here," he told me. "Granted, I don't get any Boston newspapers, but...."
    "Well, if they'd burned down the city or something, you'd have heard."
    "It would have made the news."
    "I'm not going to worry about it. Well, I'd be happy to meet everybody."
    "I do have an appointment in another fifteen minutes. If you're interested, over there on the bookshelf, the rather large un-notated one, is the scrapbook Emily put together."
    "Oh. Okay."
    His appointment arrived, and I spent an interesting hour flipping through the Warriors' past exploits. He hadn't been kidding about the "scum of the earth" bit, I found. Vampyre was the worst, probably. Then there was last Halloween's wilding spree, where Pan had gone completely mad and taken the city with him. There were annotations on each right-hand page, articles on the left. The writing was a precise, calligraphic hand I assumed to be Emily's, supplemented by a messy scrawl that had to be Trent's. There was a note there that suggested they needed a long-term solution for Pan, since much of what he did was not really his fault; his peculiar and unpredictable powers are governed by astronomical alignments.
    That compassion was noticeably lacking from the Dr. Twilight entries. (Evil geneticists don't get any slack from me, either. I wonder if he's related to Zed.) This guy seems to be going through the evolutionary tree branch by branch; he spent a while with avians, producing Trent in the process, then moved on to aquatics. Had some success there, although one ended up joining the Justice Defenders. Now he's getting into insects, presumably in the hopes that they'll be less strong-willed. The last batch had been some grotesque combination of squid and crustacean; I took one glance at the photo and shuddered. A couple of people had written in to the newspaper to chastise them for printing something so obscene, and I didn't blame them for an instant.
    The patient departed. A while later I heard the door open, and Emily walked in.
    "Oh, hi," she said with a smile.
    "Hi."
    "Hi, Steel," she added.
    He was sitting on the couch on the other side of the room. I had no idea how long he had been there, although I belatedly noticed that the room had gotten colder.
    "You're very quiet," I commented.
    "When I need to be," was his cool response. "I don't think we've met."
    "Needle. Pleased to meet you."
    "I've heard good things about your work," he allowed in a guarded tone.
    "Thank you. Looks like you guys have had quite an interesting lot to deal with here," I glanced down at the book.
    "We've had our fair share."
    "Some of them are downright icky," Emily added cheerfully. "Did you see the squid-thing?"
    "Please don't discuss that," Cold Steel said. Coldly.
    "It tried to eat him," she told me.
    "Don't discuss it."
    "Sorry."
    "No need to discuss it, frankly," I said, closing the scrapbook. Nice idea; maybe we should do something like that. If only to keep matters straight for posterity.
    Cold Steel stood up; even though Emily is seven feet tall and Trent has a ludicrous level of personal attraction, he was instantly the dominant presence in the room, almost overwhelmingly so. Someone stepped through the closed door.
    "Hi, sorry I'm late." This was Xorn; he gave me a curious look, and we introduced ourselves. Everyone trooped into Trent's office and got down to business. I kept quiet and watchful, intrigued by their interactions. Emily got coffee. There was still something very Dawn-like about her mannerisms and speech; it bothered me more and more as the evening wore on.
    I knew the Warriors were a pretty loose group. The three founders, Daedalus, Xorn, and Cold Steel, had gone through a lot of rough times and fought a nearly constant war on the street for their first year, forging a tight bond between three men who ordinarily wouldn't have anything to do with one another. Emily is accepted, but not a part of this fundamental connection. I know she and Trent have some kind of relationship; how he deals with the ethical implications of being romantically involved with a patient isn't really any of my business, I suppose. It added a kind of weird dimension to the group dynamic, like bringing your girlfriend to poker night; she's more than competent, as we saw in Boston, but she's never going to be a part of that bond. If that bothers her, she didn't show it.
    Cold Steel is gruff, professional, tough as nails. Trent seems to play a role as peacemaker, as well as providing the group's public face for the media. Those two seem to trade off the leadership role, depending on the topic and the situation. Xorn is harder to figure out; obviously very smart, bookish, very well-read and scientifically informed, and perfectly content to sit back and take a follower role. He seems least involved in the team's activities. Perfectly willing to provide backup if anyone needs it, but not going out to look for trouble himself.
    They went over the past month's activities, who was around, who was up to trouble, who was out of commission. Steel's war with Kafka is still going on, although the mastermind is question is in jail at the moment and running things from there. This was obviously a long-standing conflict. The food arrived; not bad. Steel didn't eat; not sure if he doesn't need to, or wants people to think he doesn't need to. I didn't ask.
    "So what do you guys deal with in Boston?" Xorn asked. "You have a rogues' gallery put together yet?"
    "Getting there. We've only been around for six months, now...." I told them about our problems with the Coven, and with Fimbulwinter.
    "Did you find a body?" Cold Steel asked.
    "Well, no."

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