She called back and woke me up about two-thirty in the morning. “Hey, what’s up?”
“I had a visitor tonight. Very photogenic. I wondered if you might recognize him from Willard’s Green.”
“Dunno. I can stop by your place on my way home.”
“And I’m just supposed to invite you to cross my threshold?” I teased.
She laughed. “See you in about half an hour.”
True to her word, she buzzed me thirty minutes later. Vampires were always very punctual.
“Sorry I can’t offer you much,” I said when I let her into my apartment. “Whiskey, red wine, or water.”
“I’ll take a glass of wine.”
I poured a glass for myself as well, and then showed her the picture.
“Yeah, that’s the guy from Willard’s Green,” she said. “He tried to break in? That’s not good.”
With the help of magical potions and creams, I was back at work after a couple of days. My leg was still stiff and sore, and I limped a bit, but Jolene said it had healed enough I wasn’t going to open the wound.
Liam had been working the day shift, and Sheila showed up to take him home about the same time I came to work. Sam’s office door was closed, and the bar was about half-full at dinnertime.
So I was surprised when Sam’s door opened and Frankie Jones emerged. She waved to me and came over to sit at the bar.
“Menu?” I asked.
“Yes, please, and a glass of red wine.”
After she ordered, she told me, “I’ve been working on the money. City Council gave me another million for personnel this year, and I have commitments from twenty-two prominent citizens to fund additional police officers. Want to be a cop?”
She caught me by surprise, and I laughed, but her expression stayed serious, and that sobered me.
“Not really.”
“You know, Erin, you’ll probably live two or three hundred years. Do you really love tending bar that much?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure being a cop is the secret to a long and happy life.” I shrugged. “I like working here, but it’s not what I want to do forever. I’m going to apply at the community college in the fall.”
“And study what?”
Images of gothic cathedrals and fantastical skyscrapers in the Middle East flashed through my mind. I had seen the plans for Michaela’s dhampir apartment building, and they were disappointingly unimaginative.
I sighed. “Hospitality management, probably. I’d like to travel someday. I looked at their other offerings, but accounting sounds boring, and I’m definitely not cut out to be a nurse. I like working with computers, but programming them or fixing them doesn’t sound very exciting, either.”
“Why the community college? Why not the university? You’re smart. I know you’d do well at anything that interested you.”
I chuckled. “I’m still waiting for the letter telling me my rich uncle I never knew about left me his estate. I can afford the community college.”
“Well, if you know someone who wants an opportunity, I’m hiring investigators for my office and additional officers for Blair. All paranormal and supernatural abilities considered.”
“Investigators for your office?”
“Yes. I don’t want to eliminate talented people just because they can’t pass the police physical requirements. Please don’t say anything until I have a chance to talk to her, but I’m hoping Jolene Carpenter will take one of those slots. Her finder abilities would be extremely useful.”
“And a necromancer?”
“Yes. I have a woman coming in next week from New Hampshire to interview. She’s well over a hundred, and I guess she’s never been physically very strong, but the recommendations I received say she’s one of the best.”
“I’ll ask around and ask Michaela to pass the word. I’m sure some of the shifters who do bodyguard and security gigs might be interested.”
Lizzy came in later and ordered dessert.
“Want to be a cop?” I asked her.
“Nope. Want to be the first faerie on Mars. Why?”
I told her about the jobs Frankie was offering.
“Fae don’t do police,” she said, “it’s a foreign concept. But I’ll let my dad know. He knows a lot of non-coven witches.”
It occurred to me that if the Hunters knew where I lived, they probably knew where I worked. I grabbed a ride with the cook after work, and he waited until I was inside my building. I still remembered the hunter who got in the building once and left me a present in the form of a vampire head in front of my door, so I stayed shielded and alert until I was safely inside my apartment and reset my wards.
“Have you heard about this crazy scheme Frankie Jones came up with?” Jolene asked as soon as she opened her door. I had gone to her house for my regular Tuesday magic lesson.
“Uh, you mean hiring more staff?”
“Yeah. She offered me a hundred grand a year to work for her full time.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of money.”
“Like I said, she’s crazy.”
Jolene led me into the kitchen, where she pulled out a bottle of wine and began removing the cork. Something told me I wasn’t going to get much of a lesson.
“What did you tell her?”
She rolled her eyes. “I told her yes, of course. She may be crazy, but I’m not.” She poured us each a glass of wine, then headed back for the living room, where she flopped down on the couch.
“What about Lost and Found?” I asked.
“That’s what she’s paying me for, to be a finder. Josh said I’d be nuts not to take it. Hell, he’s talking about becoming a cop and working for Blair. He could still go to law school part time. And you know that job Michaela pulled out of her ass for Trevor? So she could get him on her company’s insurance? She’s serious. She wants him to go work for her. Whole damned town is going bonkers.”
I laughed. “I think the town is already crazy. Frankie’s just trying to get a handle on things.”
Jolene regarded me over the rim of her glass. “You know what I think? I think the whole country has gone nuts. A witch I went to school with lives in Atlanta now. What she tells me sounds like Westport but on a larger scale. I called another friend in Seattle, and same thing there. It’s like everything is boiling over. Everyone is scared shitless that humans are going to figure it out. There’s so much chaos going on and they can’t continue to ignore it.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of celestial alignment or something,” I said.
I knew witches talked about that sort of thing, but I’d never paid any attention to it. As far as the Illuminati were concerned, astrology was superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
She froze, staring at me. “Yeah, maybe that’s it. We could be entering a new age or something. An age where paranormals and supes are out of the closet.”
My turn to roll my eyes. “Just what we need. There would probably be a return to the Inquisition with people running around burning witches.”
With a shudder, Jo took a deep drink of her wine. “Yeah, probably. I’d like to think I could have a shop and openly sell charms and spells, but that’s just a pipe dream, isn’t it?” She drained her glass and went back in the kitchen to get the bottle.
“More?” she offered. My glass was still half full, and I shook my head. She refilled her glass and set the bottle on a coaster.
“Frankie told me she’s trying to hire a necromancer from back east,” I said.
“Thank the Goddess,” Jolene breathed. “I don’t want to have to visit any more crime scenes like that one.”
After we killed the bottle of wine, I went by the community college and picked up an application, then went home and spent the rest of the day filling it out. Thankfully, I could skip all the questions about where I went to school and just fill in a different section with my GED information.
The idea of sitting in a classroom was pretty surreal. I hadn’t done anything like that in almost ten years, and m
iddle school memories were only a blur. I couldn’t even remember what my parents looked like. That sort of thing bothered me, though it never did when I lived with the Illuminati. I wondered sometimes what kind of spells they had laid on me. Maybe Roisin could figure that out for me. There was a lot about my past that I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember, though.
Chapter 20
Everyone got super excited when Winter Solstice approached. The various witch covens in the area planned big celebrations outside of the city, with bonfires and dancing followed by debauched drunken revelry.
Friends of Sam O’Grady’s delivered evergreen boughs and wheat stalks dusted with flour, along with apples and oranges that Sam told me represented the sun. The boughs were supposed to symbolize immortality, the wheat stalks portrayed the harvest, and the flour showed the triumph of light and life. We hung evergreen boughs all over the bar, with holly and ivy between them, and mistletoe branches were placed over all the doorways.
Around noon, before the festivities started, Sam hauled in a whole freaking barrel—not a keg, a huge barrel—of alcoholic spiced cider, dumped it into a massive iron cauldron, and told us to serve it free using the plastic mugs or steins, which he bought cases of and stacked in one corner behind the bar. He then set some kind of spell on the cauldron, which kept the cider warm.
The cooks set up a couple of spits in the alley in the back of the kitchen and used magical fires to roast a whole baby pig and a whole lamb. The lady who did all the baking for the bar worked almost non-stop for a week producing cookies and cakes. And all the bartenders had to learn to make a drink Sam called lamb's wool, which included ale, sugar, nutmeg, and mulled roasted apples.
Lizzy had told me she couldn’t come. She was going with her mom under the fairy mound for the Fae’s celebration of Solstice. I didn’t expect Jolene and most of the witches until after midnight, so the early part of the celebration was attended mostly by mages, non-coven witches, and Michaela’s dhampir.
The night started out rather sedately, but as the time got closer to midnight, the festivities became louder and wilder. At midnight, Sam led a toast to the Sun King, then an Irish band began playing, and people started dancing. The place was packed, and the floorspace available to dance was limited, but people stacked a few tables out of the way and made room. Seeing Sam dance—all six-foot-eight and three-hundred-plus pounds of him—was an image I knew I would never get out of my head, no matter how much I tried.
Winter Solstice was also called The Longest Night, and it certainly turned out that way for me. I showed up at noon, and the sun was rising over the mountains when Steve Dworkin dropped me off at my apartment. Alone, in spite of dozens of kisses under the mistletoe as well as good-wishes kisses at midnight. A couple of those kisses caused me to reconsider whether I should get to know a little better the men who delivered them.
But the most memorable kiss of the night came immediately after Sam’s toast to the Sun King, when Shawna grabbed me and stuck her tongue down my throat. Afterward, I stared at her in shock, and she responded with a gleeful grin.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since we first met,” she said. Then she whirled away, grabbed a young witch, and pulled him onto the dance floor.
“I didn’t know you swung that way,” Michaela’s voice broke into my brain’s stunned fog.
“I don’t,” I said, shaking my head and trying to remember what I was doing before Shawna assaulted me. “She just did that to wind me up.”
Michaela laughed. “I wonder what she was like before she was turned. I’ve certainly never met another vampire like her.”
The day after Solstice, my leg ached from standing on it so much the night before. I still hadn’t made it to a grocery store, and the weather was nasty, so I lay around my apartment, read a book, and munched on what little food I could find in the cupboards. By evening, though, I was completely out of food and very hungry. I got dressed and took the bus to Rosie’s for dinner.
I was sitting at the end of the bar near the kitchen and waitress station when someone sat down beside me. A glance at him out of the corner of my eye caused me immediately to pull energy from the ley line and shield myself even as I hopped off the barstool.
“Good evening, Scorpion,” Fritz Schottner, alias the Bear, said. “You’re looking well.”
I backed away from him, pulling as much ley magic as I could hold and building the strongest shield I could.
“Is that any way to act with an old friend? We had such good times together,” he said.
“Get out!” I screamed. “Everyone out! Nearest exit! Danger! Get out!”
Josh walked up behind Schottner and calmly said, “I think you’re bothering the lady. Perhaps you should leave.”
“Josh, shield!”
Schottner turned his head to look at Josh, giving my friend a look at his face. Josh took a couple of steps back. He had seen Lizzy’s projection at Ronald Winslow’s house of Schottner blowing up the room.
All around us, people were making for the exits—the front door, the emergency exit from the back room, and the kitchen. One thing about paranormals, they reacted correctly when danger presented itself. Natural selection, maybe. None of the magic users in the room were descended from people who froze like rabbits when the witch burners came calling.
I inched backwards and around the end of the bar, putting the bar between me and the Bear. People passed behind me into the kitchen, but I never took my eyes off my adversary.
“Everybody out!” Sam bellowed from behind me. He had heard the commotion from his office. In about three minutes, the place was empty except for Sam, Josh, and me, the Bear, and thirteen mages, holding hands in a circle on the far side of the room. I was holding as much ley energy as I could, but I could feel the circle trying to feed me more.
“Josh, he has a sword!” I said. “It’s spelled and invisible.”
Josh took another couple of steps back, and then his shield ignited. Blue and orange flames, flickering no more than a couple of inches from his body, engulfed him. I knew that some pyromancers could augment their shields that way, but I’d never seen it done.
Schottner slid off the barstool and turned so that he could see all three of us. Sam stood in the entrance of the hallway that led to his office, mumbling an incantation. Josh stood a few feet away, with the main room and the mage circle behind him. I stood behind the bar, sketching runes in my mind.
I spoke the Word to call the Sword of Uriel. At the same time, I saw swords of flame appear in Josh’s hands. Schottner drew his sword, and it became visible, flashing as it reflected the lights.
“You’ll never get out of here,” Sam said as the last of our customers disappeared through the front door. “If you kill all of us, you’ll starve to death before you get out. You see, the original wards on this place were cast by a Fae. He took the ley line that passes beneath us and tied it off. Then he gave my mum the spell to renew them, which she passed on to me. But since I didn’t cast the original wards, they won’t dissolve when I die. So, you’re trapped.”
A cruel smile grew on Schottner’s face. “You assume I’m afraid to die. My only fear is of failure, of disappointing my masters. I’ve lived a full life, and if this is my time, then so be it.”
He leaped to the top of the bar and swung his sword at me. But I wasn’t one of his usual opponents. I knew his capabilities, and I was expecting that move. His muscles bunched, and he crouched slightly to gain momentum, but I was already moving backward. I met his blow with my Sword, and just as it had done to the swords of other Hunters, it cleaved his sword in two.
He hesitated, shock showing in his eyes, and I followed my parry with a cut at his legs. Schottner leaped, and my Sword passed beneath him, but as he landed, Josh stabbed at him with his sword of flame. It didn’t breach Schottner’s shield, but he felt the blow and it distracted him, causing him to stumble on landing, fall, and slide away from us down the bar.
I followed him and chopped at his legs,
but he moved, and the Sword cut three feet deep into the bar. He rolled off on the side away from me, landing on his feet and reaching for his main gauche. Josh leaped toward him.
“Josh, no! He has another blade!”
Josh pulled up and swung his flaming sword. He had reach on Schottner, being several inches taller, and his sword was longer, but the Bear drew his dagger in time and blocked the blow. The fact that he felt he needed to do that instead of relying on his shield increased my confidence.
I pushed ley energy at him and knocked him off balance. He staggered back but recovered and sent a strong push of his own energy that hit both Josh and me.
“Don’t get too close to him,” I said. “His magic is the same as mine, and he’ll siphon the magic from your shield.”
Josh laughed. “I’d like to see him try.”
Before I could react, the Bear charged, ducking under Josh’s sword, and their shields merged. A ley line mage, such as Schottner or me, could draw ley magic from another mage as easily as from a ley line. I had often used the same trick to siphon energy from an opponent’s shield, strengthening mine while weakening theirs. Add to that, the spelled dagger Schottner wielded had the ability to negate magic and cut through weak personal shields.
But Schottner pulled more than raw ley energy from Josh’s shield. Schottner’s shield ignited. He cried out and lurched away, the skin on his face and hands blackened and his clothes smoking. I realized that Josh Carpenter was a lot more lethal than I’d ever imagined.
Seeing Schottner hurt, I vaulted over the bar and swung low. The Sword took his left leg off halfway between his knee and his hip. Blood gushed from the wound, and he fell.
Even through his shock, I could see malevolence in his eyes, and his free hand started to sketch a rune. Josh stepped forward and swung his sword of flame, slicing Schottner’s skull in half.
The silence was broken only by Josh’s and my panting. As the adrenaline flowed out of me, my healing leg let me know that I had abused it. I stumbled to the nearest chair and sat down.
Dark Dancer (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 3) Page 15
