I shook my head. “I don’t have it.”
“Pity. I would have enjoyed the dance.” With a motion as smooth as glass, he slid his sword from its sheath.
I hit him with a ley missile and again tried to sketch the runes I needed to call the Sword but failed again. Reaching inside my coat, I drew my main gauche.
He spoke a Word, and his blade rippled with white and blue light. I backed away, continuing to hurl ley missiles at him. As each hit him, he jerked but then came ahead.
When he drew even with one of the gas pumps, I hurled a ley missile at it, vaporizing it. He didn’t notice, but the fountain of gasoline that erupted did get his attention, bathing his shield and flooding the ground around him. A mage’s shield has to allow air to pass through it, and since I could smell the gas, I was sure the fumes he was breathing must have been overpowering.
I didn’t have an affinity for fire, but any mage could kindle a flame. Lighting a candle was one of the first exercises we learned. I sparked a small flame in my palm and tossed it away from me as I turned to run. I heard the whoosh of the gasoline igniting, and a few seconds later, there was an incredible explosion as the fire reached the underground holding tank. The force of the blast blew me off my feet, and I skidded along the pavement past the building to the back of the lot and crashed into a wall surrounding the property.
Scrambling to my feet and peering through the flames, I saw Rudolf lying out in the middle of the street. His sword lay twenty feet away from him. To my astonishment, a young girl with shoulder-length hair walked up to him and reached down. His body jerked, and when she stood, she held her hand out away from her body. She walked wide around the fire and then approached me.
“Damn! That’s as spectacular as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie,” Shawna said. “Girl, you don’t half-ass things, do you?”
Sirens screamed, both nearby and in the distance. Cars seemed to come from all directions, screeching to a stop and spilling their occupants out into the night. The blazing gas station threw flames high into the air, giving the entire scene a surreal, apocalyptic quality.
“What’s that?” I asked, gesturing to her hand. It looked like something was dripping from whatever she was holding.
She held it out. A human heart sat on her open palm, still beating. My stomach seemed to jump, and I had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up.
I looked away from her grisly trophy and recognized some of the people who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
Michaela Gallagher strode up, pistol in her hand. “Are you all right?”
I managed to nod, and saw Dan Bailey, Cindy Mackle, and Josh Carpenter running toward me.
Nothing made much sense. A million questions ran through my mind, but what came out of my mouth was, “How?”
Shawna shrugged. “I’ve been following you all night. When I saw that guy hanging around the bar, and then follow you to the bus, I figured something was off. So I hitched a ride on the back bumper of the bus until you got off. Made a couple of phone calls along the way and called in some backup. You want this?” She gestured with the heart.
“Not really.”
With a laugh, she said, “I guess it’s more of a vampire thing. You don’t mind if I keep it, do you?”
“Be my guest.”
Michaela said, “Shawna, that’s gross. Get rid of it before one of the humans sees it and you lose your job.”
I watched her tuck it into a fanny pack and shuddered. “Was he still alive?”
“Oh, yeah. Singed. Stunned,” Shawna said. “The explosion blew him thirty feet in the air. It was pretty rad. But he dropped his shield, and I figured I should do something before he recovered. I didn’t have a stake handy. Maybe I should start carrying a couple.”
Chapter 26
I wasn’t sure what to expect for New Year’s Eve, never having been out in the world for that event. It was one of the only occasions the Illuminati celebrated, and the entire City threw a party. At the Illuminati Palace, we had a large banquet with barrels of ale and casks of wine. Whole roasted deer, pigs, and fowl graced the tables, and the scene looked very similar to pictures of royal feasts from the Middle Ages I had seen in books.
At midnight, everyone toasted to our good fortune in the year past, then toasted to our continued success in the year to come. I had read in the History of the Illuminati that at one time, the New Year was celebrated as “a time of revelings, drinking bouts, and orgies.” But by the twenty-first century, midnight was the time when the Masters and Mistresses chose their bedmates to accompany them into the new year and everyone went to bed. In Master Benedict’s case, it was usually plural bedmates.
I told all that to Lizzy when she came by to see my finished costume, and she gave me a lopsided grin.
“That’s pretty much what happens here,” she said. “Sam won’t have all the roasted animals, and there will probably be a lot more drinking, but otherwise, it sounds about the same.”
I stared at her, then managed to stammer, “You mean I have to go to bed with whoever chooses me?” Some of the regulars were all-too-regular about hitting on me, and I couldn’t imagine how any amount of alcohol could make some of them appealing.
Lizzy’s peals of laughter told me that I’d said something stupid, again, and my ears heated up.
“You don’t have to,” she finally gasped. “And you can do the choosing. It’s nothing formal, and it’s not required. People just get in a partying mood, and a little too much booze makes everyone extra friendly.”
“And how is that different from a normal Saturday night at Rosie’s?”
“Sort of like the difference between a match and a forest fire.”
“More than Solstice?”
“For a lot of people,” she said, “Solstice is as much a religious or spiritual thing as a party, at least from what I’ve heard. I’ve never been to a human Solstice celebration. New Year is just a party. The biggest party of the year for everyone—humans, paranormals, and supernaturals. There isn’t a cop in town who’s allowed time off that night.”
“What about the Fae?” I asked.
Lizzy chuckled. “They’ll keep their heads down and avoid humans as much as possible. They’re still recovering from the Longest Night. The Fae know how to party. What time are you going to work on New Year’s Eve?”
“Probably around four. Why?”
“I’ll come by and drive you.” She held up the dress on its hanger and twirled it around. “I don’t think that’s very appropriate to wear on the bus.”
I had to chuckle. “Hell, it’s no weirder than what half of the people at Rosie’s wear every day.”
Lizzy came to pick me up, and I buzzed her into the building. When I opened the door, her face lit up in a huge smile.
“Spectacular! Oh, that did turn out nicely.” She walked around me and then said, “You took a number of liberties with twelfth-century style, didn’t you?” She winked at me. “I did a little research on the styles, both twelfth and fourteenth centuries.”
“A few.” The bliaut was radically cut, the neckline wide and deep, the sleeves and torso very tight and form-fitting. Master Benedict’s verdict on the dress I had sewn the previous New Year was, ‘tantalizingly immodest.’ The skirt of the current dress fell to ankle length so I could walk and work in it. My hair was brushed out and constrained only by a circlet made from a scrap of the velvet.
“What costume are you doing?” I asked.
She laughed. “I considered two different ones. What do you think about this?”
In the blink of an eye, Lizzy morphed into me, wearing the same dress, straight black hair falling down her back, and with a grin that I immediately recognized from the mirror. I gasped.
“Or, if that’s a little too much,” she said, “then I could be your lady in waiting.” As I watched, she transformed into Lizzy, but with blonde hair and wearing a traditional red bliaut with flowing trumpet sleeves over a white chemise.
“I hate y
ou a lot. Do you know how many hours I put into sewing this outfit?”
Lizzy shrugged. “Yeah, and you don’t have pink hair, either. Life just isn’t fair, but I’m resigned to suffering the envy of others. Shall we go?”
On the way over to Rosie’s, I said, “I think going as twins is awesome.”
She grinned and morphed into me. “Twins it is, although if people ask me what my costume is, I’m going to tell them I’m a mirror.” Her laughter put me in the best mood I’d felt in weeks.
She parked the car, and we made our way down the alley to Rosie’s. At that time of the year, the sun was already sitting on the horizon at four o’clock in the afternoon. We walked through the door and stopped, surveying the scene.
Liam had been filling balloons with confetti and hanging them from the ceiling all day. Evergreen boughs hung on the walls, and across the entrance to the back room was an illusion of a huge fireplace with a Yule log burning in it. As we watched, Sam walked through the illusion into the front room. He looked around with a satisfied smile on his face until his eyes fell on Lizzy and me.
“Mother Mary and Jesus,” he breathed. We smiled at him.
We ate a quick dinner before I had to start my shift, then as I gathered our dishes and prepared to go to work, Lizzy said, “By the way, any men I pick up wearing this costume, I’m keeping.”
I damned near dropped everything I was carrying, and everyone turned to look as her laughter pealed out over the room.
The back room had been reserved for two large parties. My first surprise of the evening came when Michaela Gallagher and her fifteen dhampir ‘sisters’ came in at seven and I discovered they were one of those reservations. A witches coven of twenty had the other reservation.
The evening started out slow but picked up the pace as people started filtering in from eating dinner elsewhere. By ten o’clock, things were really swinging. I had been doubtful about all the champagne Sam had laid in—some of it pretty pricey—but as I popped the last hundred-dollar bottle from one case, I was glad there were two more cases of the same brand stacked beneath it. I had also poured more top-shelf liquor in an evening than I normally did in a month.
About a third of the customers were dressed in period costumes according to the theme. I estimated that another third came in various other kinds of costumes, and a third wore normal twenty-first century clothes, ranging from formal evening dresses to blue jeans.
Lizzy barely sat down, as a seemingly endless line of men asked her to dance. The confusion over the dancing Erin and the bartender Erin was pretty funny.
Eleanor Radzinski, my landlady, was dancing with Sam, and the way they looked at each other sparked suspicions, which I tried to shove out of my mind. Michaela was on the dance floor almost as much as Lizzy, and all of her sisters seemed determined to bewitch and befuddle as many men as they possibly could. Josh spent most of the evening talking and dancing with Arabella. The change in him from when I first met him was nothing short of amazing.
Overall, there was a madcap, frenzied air in Rosie’s that night that I had never experienced before.
Sam was with me behind the bar when we heard a cheer from the direction of the pool tables. I looked up to see that one of our regulars, an aeromancer known for juggling full glasses of beer, was juggling three witches. Considering that they were all different sizes and shapes, I was pretty impressed. The witches themselves were giggling and shrieking like schoolgirls as they tumbled through the air.
“I’d better go spot him,” Sam said.
“Don’t you mean stop him?” I gasped.
“Oh, hell, no. I just don’t want to get sued if he drops one of them.” I stood and watched as he hustled around the bar and made his way across the room.
Jolene also spent most of the night dancing, but she came back to her seat at the bar and shoved an empty champagne flute at me. Lizzy slid onto her seat about that time, too. Then a man sidled up to Jolene and said something in her ear. She smiled, set the flute down, jumped off her barstool, and followed him out on the dance floor.
“Are you still down about Trevor?” Lizzy said.
What Lizzy saw sometimes was definitely unsettling. I had been thinking about Josh and his girlfriend and wondering what went wrong between me and Trevor.
“Not really,” I said. “But I wonder sometimes about why I haven’t found anyone.”
“It’s not you,” Lizzy continued. “He has a thing about needing to be the dominant one in a relationship. The wise older man who’s showing the world to a naïve young girl. And when the girl grows up, or wants to think for herself, he goes looking for a fresh, new girl to impress.”
“Is that what happened to you?” I asked.
“Yeah. He was my first boyfriend, and I’d lived all my life in the Village or under the mound. But when I started to figure out how the outside world worked, and I didn’t need him as a mentor, he flew the coop. Just like what he did with you. Naïve young farmgirl comes to the big city. But as soon as he figured out that you had a lot more experience than he thought you did, he manufactured an excuse to bail.”
That made more sense than I wished it did, but it fit what had happened between us.
At eleven-thirty, Sam and Liam started hauling the cheap champagne and plastic flutes up from the basement. That was the champagne we were giving away. One thing I always loved about Sam’s Victorian chauvinism was that, while my magic gave me the strength to carry kegs and cases around, he never asked me to.
A friend of his who was an illusionist stepped into the center of the main room and cast the most incredible illusion I had ever seen. Suddenly, the roof disappeared. Two hundred feet above us, a huge glittering ball appeared against a backdrop of stars. It hung there, twirling and sparkling.
At eleven-forty-five, the five of us behind the bar started popping corks and filling plastic flutes set out on serving trays, and ten minutes later the waitresses began circulating, passing out the champagne.
“Can we get a couple of those?” a familiar voice said from across the bar. I looked up to see Frankie Jones and Cindy Mackle standing there between Lizzy and Jolene.
“Of course. Hang on a second.” I pulled out five glass flutes and set them on the bar. Then I pulled out one of the two bottles of the expensive French champagne I had hidden away and popped the cork. Filling the five flutes, I set one in front of each of my friends and kept one for myself.
Leaning across the bar, I said to Frankie, “There’s still another bottle of this stuff I saved for Jordan. Stop by before you leave and pick it up.”
Frankie smiled and gave me a ‘thumbs up’ sign. Blair was still recuperating at an undisclosed location, and no one had been able to visit him, although I called to wish him a happy New Year earlier in the day.
“Wait for it,” Jolene cautioned, looking up. The next thing I knew, people started counting backwards, “Ten, nine, eight…” When they got to zero, everyone shouted, “Happy New Year!” and the ball dropped from the sky like a meteor, growing larger and larger. It hit the floor of the bar like a feather landing, filling all of the space and lighting the entire room with prismatic colors. All of Liam’s balloons burst at once, showering everyone with confetti.
The five of us toasted each other and drank. I was about half-lit already—what with people buying me shots all evening—but I was still able to appreciate the smooth taste of the champagne.
The ball illusion gradually faded away, and then Sam came over and stood by the bar, then turned to face the room.
“Thank you all so much for coming,” he shouted. “And now, I want to announce the winner of the costume contest. The first prize of one hundred dollars goes to,” he paused for dramatic effect, “Miss Erin McLane. Both of her.”
Lizzy barked out a laugh. I stood there stupidly blinking at him, feeling my face go from warm to burning.
Jill urged me out from behind the bar, where Lizzy and I stood together while everyone cheered. Then Sam handed each of us a hun
dred-dollar bill and said, “Absolutely incredible.”
The party continued until dawn. First Lizzy, and later Jolene, approached me and told me good night, then each left with a man they had picked up. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about Lizzy still wearing the glamour in my image.
Around sunrise, I was sitting at the bar having breakfast and a mimosa when Michaela sat down beside me.
“Need a ride home?” she asked.
I looked around and saw that her sisters were all gone. Only a few stragglers were left, and the breakfast crowd had yet to arrive.
“Everyone got lucky but you?” I asked.
She chuckled. “And you. I imagine you had your chances, the same as I did. I find I’m getting pickier in my old age.”
“Yeah, I can relate to that. Sure, if you can wait for me to finish eating.”
“Take your time. Helluva party. I think I might like living among the living.”
Chapter 27
I had always known there was a back stairway outside that led to the apartment on the second floor over the bar, but I had never known anyone to use it. My first day back at work after New Year, Sam came downstairs and told me to come with him and led me back up the stairs. I had no idea what was going on or that anyone else would be there.
I walked into the parlor and found it full of people sitting around, looking expectantly at me. Franklin Jones and two other members of the Columbia Club; the alpha of the South Bay Pack; Eileen Montgomery; Michaela; the leaders of the two largest covens in Westport; a witch I didn’t recognize—a man with white hair and a clerical collar who was introduced as Reverend White; and another witch—a man—sitting with Roisin and holding her hand. It was possibly the most unusual a gathering as I could have ever imagined.
“We wanted to talk to you about the problems we’ve encountered the last few months,” Sam said as he gestured for me to sit in a chair that completed the circle. He sat down beside me.
Dark Dancer (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 3) Page 20
