“Really?” I stepped outside, back into the cold.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
I opened my mouth to say all the ways and reasons I could refute that, and then carefully closed it again.
“You don’t have to be so stunned either,” he said, during my pause.
“Sorry, Jakey. Just trying to walk outside and not trip in ice is all.”
“Uh-huh. So? Are you in?”
“I’m in. What time?”
“Six?”
“Sure. Want me to pick you up?”
“Sounds good.”
“Love you, Jake.”
“Love you too.”
I settled my and Gideon’s dinner into the passenger seat of my car, and carefully walked around to the driver side. The mall was two exits down, and I bet they’d be doing a brisk business in other returns today—I couldn’t have been the only one gifted the world’s most hideous belt.
The mall was a U-shaped structure around a curb-to-curb parking lot. I parked near the middle, in a space that the mall’s snowplow had cleared, prepared to walk the rest of the way in. I looked inside the box as soon as I’d gotten out of the car, to make sure the gift receipt was still at the bottom. God bless sensible Peter.
A car parked ahead of me. I closed the box and started walking for the store. The car’s driver got out and started walking quickly toward the wing of the mall behind me—not so strange, considering it was cold outside. She was bundled up against the weather in a fashionable parka with a furry hood, and she held something to her cheek, like she was talking on a phone, but I couldn’t see it.
I watched her, and I noticed she noticed me. Girls have to watch out for that sort of thing. Maybe not all girls, but I’d just checked my trunk for a vampire less than ten hours ago. My paranoia meter was at eleven. I didn’t like how close she was coming, but cell phones made people act stupidly. It was a scientific fact.
We passed another row of cars, then rounded a tiny snowdrift the snowplow had made. That’s when I saw another woman step out of the woman’s car. I stopped, and as the first turned to look at the second, and I saw that she wasn’t holding anything after all.
I turned and ran for my car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I was fumbling for my keys as they clattered behind. Some part of me still hoped I was overacting, but as I unlocked my door and caught the handle to open it, a hand grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back. One of my fingernails bent and broke inside my glove, and I hissed in pain as she shoved me to the ground.
“Fire!” I yelled, like I’d heard you were supposed to. “There’s a fire!” I scrambled to my knees and put my back against my car door. Now, inside my pocket, my badge was glowing day-bright. Hell of a time to warn me.
The two women stood there, heads cocked sideways, as if they were listening to something I couldn’t hear. “What do you want?”
Winter’s blood? Shit. Did they know? I scrabbled for my dropped purse. “Look, I’ll give it back to you—”
The first one, with the parka on, bent down, sniffing. She kept her eyes on me, breathing deeply.
“I’m sorry—my brother—you wouldn’t understand—” I sputtered.
The second one didn’t breathe at all. I saw her make a fist with a gloved hand and swing for me. I screamed and ducked lower—she hit my car instead, and I heard the door panel dent.
I crawled toward the front of my car. One of them grabbed my ankles and hauled me back. Reaching out, I put my hand into Peter’s gift box, tissue paper bleeding pink into the snow. The belt buckle rasped against asphalt as she yanked my deadweight again.
I flipped over, feeling the seams of everything that had just healed in my abdomen twist inside me, and punched out with the belt buckle by my fist. I caught the hoodless one’s jaw, and the skin there burned away. She cupped her hand to the wound, and for the first time her lips opened—to bay.
“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck—” I curled into a ball, to try to protect myself. I was going to die here over a single dot of blood, in a mall parking lot, with Chinese food cooling in my poor dented car behind me.
The baying woman looked up. There was a loud thump, and my car shook up and down. I looked up, and a trench-coated figure stood on my hood.
Dren.
“Sun’s down, girly-girl. Time to play.” He squatted on his boot heels and looked at the two other women. “You’ve started without me. Tsk.” Who would have thought this morning, when I was looking for him like he was Jimmy Hoffa, that I’d be so happy to see him now.
“Dren—they—” I panted.
His eyes narrowed, staring at them over me. “You’re not bitten—or born. I would scent you if you were. Name your pack.”
The women fell back at this, appearing disoriented and confused.
“No—” Dren leapt off my car hood and landed beside me in the muck, his good hand on his sickle.
“Who are you?” one of the women asked. Then she looked to her friend. “What is this place? Where are we?”
I didn’t want to tell them they’d just been planning to kill me. I put my back against my car.
Dren kept himself between me and them, and he waved his sickle as if clearing the air of cobwebs between us. “You can see me. You know what I am. Go.”
The women turned and ran. One fell to her knees in the ice, then scrambled back up to get away.
“I—I thought they were weres?” I said aloud.
“So did I. Stay here,” he commanded, and rushed away as though he’d never been there to begin with.
I hoped he didn’t mean stay precisely here, my ass in the snow. I got up with a groan, collected my purse and my belt, and gingerly sat inside my car. My gloves were ruined, and the back of my new coat was soaked through. I took it off, turned on the heater, and rolled the driver-side window down. I didn’t want Dren sneaking up on me outside. Dren reappeared momentarily.
“Who were they?”
“What good does it do to share my suspicions with you?” He snapped his fingers as if beckoning a dog. “Did you get me what I desire?”
“I did—and it almost got me killed!” I pressed my hand to my stomach where I’d wrenched it wrong. My broken nail was throbbing, along with most of the rest of me.
Dren shook his head. “Which way is the wind blowing, Edie?” He pulled the glove off his good hand with his teeth, tucked it in his pocket, and licked his forefinger before holding it up.
I sank back into my car seat. “Just tell me, Dren. I don’t know.”
“North. All night.” Dren put his hand inside his pocket and slipped on his glove. “Those things didn’t scent you. They were sent after you. It’s quite a different verb.”
My lips pulled into a frown. I didn’t know why any weres would currently hate me. Jorgen had seemed peeved this morning, yes, but that was his natural state—maybe Viktor? But if so, why? And why did they suddenly forget who they were when Dren appeared? That seemed more a compulsion to me.
“Solve your problems on your own time.” Dren held his hand out. “Give me the blood. Now.”
I pulled the little test strip out of my purse. He inspected it before putting it into his mouth like a strip of gum.
“Interesting. Very interesting.” He rolled it around inside his mouth like the first sip of fine wine. Then he spit it out on the ground.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“It says your brother gets to live.” Dren gave me a faint smile, hiding the calculations occurring behind it.
“Anything else?”
“Nothing you need to know right now.”
“Nothing about all of this?”
“Go home, Edith.”
“Thanks for saving my life, I guess,” I said as ironically as possible.
Dren smiled cruelly, showing fangs. “You’re welcome.”
* * *
I hopped into my car. I’d check on the dent later—nothing in the door was going to affect my power steering, w
hich was all I needed to get home right now. Before the engine took, Dren was gone. I didn’t see where to—and as long as he wasn’t riding along on my car’s roof, I didn’t care. Pulling out of the parking lot, I called Sike and got her voice mail.
“Hey. Two things that were allergic to silver just tried to kill me in a parking lot. Thought you might want to know,” I said, and hung up.
My apartment complex’s parking lot was empty, and my door was locked. I was very pleased to see the inside of my apartment again, even if that still included an eyeless aberration sitting on my couch.
“Who wants lemon chicken?” I asked as I walked in, and Gideon turned toward me. I smiled bravely, even though he couldn’t see.
* * *
I wrapped up my finger and put on the abdominal binder I’d been sent home with after my stabbing. Its tension around my waist, a feeling that I’d chafed at while wearing it originally, felt comforting now, like a squeeze from a good friend. I didn’t think I’d done any damage, but I wanted to make sure.
After the ceremony of setting out the many towels, it took a while to feed Gideon, and he was a horrible conversationalist. But it gave me a way to keep busy, even if it couldn’t entirely still my thoughts.
Who were those ladies? And why were they after me? If Dren didn’t know what pack they were from … what did that mean?
Gideon missed more food than went in, making a huge mess with each bite. Feeding a grown adult took a lot of time and reminded me of my nursing school days. Seemed like half my time was spent sitting in the rooms of elderly patients, feeding one half spoon of applesauce or pudding at a time. Sometimes those little old ladies were so hungry, and they hadn’t been properly, patiently, fed in so long, it just made you want to cry. Once people lost the ability to feed themselves, that was the beginning of the end. But not for Gideon, which made me want to cry a little, too.
I fed him until he didn’t want to eat anymore and I felt like a better person for it when I was done. At least one thing had gone right today, and for the past hour or so, no one had tried to kill me.
“Let’s find out what our fortunes are,” I said, like I did at the end of every Chinese meal, except most times I was talking to Minnie. I cracked open two cookies like walnuts and fished the slips of paper out of the cookie shards.
“Here’s yours, Gideon,” I said. “Now is not the time to circle mints.”
Gideon tilted his head at me.
“I’m so not kidding. That’s what it says. We should take it back.” I snorted and pulled out mine. “You will meet a tall, dark stranger? So original. Thanks, fortune cookie.”
I’d prefer not to meet any more strangers right now, maybe forever. I crumpled the fortune up and tossed it aside. At least it hadn’t said anything about meeting them in an alley. Or with knives.
* * *
I set our dishes in the sink along with the ones I still needed to wash from Christmas, and tried to figure out how best to occupy my time. Gideon was a couch hog, and hanging out in my bedroom with Veronica only a closet door away didn’t sound like much fun.
I decided to suck it up, take the folding chair out of my closet, and hang in the corner on the Internet. Minnie came along to agree that this suited her just fine, if only I’d magically create more lap space for her. I’d just about negotiated balancing a laptop and a cat when my phone rang.
“Sorry, Minnie.” I set her down, and put the laptop down beside her. Maybe it’d be Anna or Sike calling me back with some decent explanations. About time. I found my phone, and didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Edie, it’s Gina.”
“Hey! What’s up?” I immediately thought of everything I could have done wrong last night, when I’d been briefly in charge of Winter. “Did I screw something up?”
“Nooooo, this isn’t one of those calls.” Her voice was a little slurred. Then she was quiet.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes!” She protested. Then more silence. “No. I just had a fight with Brandon.” There was a hitch in her voice as she said his name. “I think we just broke up.”
I winced. “Oh, Gina, I’m so sorry.”
“It was the right thing to do, you know? There were extenuating circumstances but—”
“Where are you? You shouldn’t be alone.” There was the small matter of why she’d called me, instead of her other friends, assuming she had other friends, which she ought to. We couldn’t all come from the island of misfit toys. There were loud noises in the background. Voices, music. She shouted an address over them. I plunked it into Google Maps. Just twenty minutes uptown. “Okay—I’ll be there soon, all right?”
“All right. Thanks. I owe you.”
“No problem.” I’d almost gotten her killed once before. It was the least I could do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Before I left, I put on my silver-buckled belt over my older coat and silently thanked Peter. I didn’t have a printer, and my phone’s GPS was sketchy given winter clouds, so I wrote down the driving instructions instead, after doing a street view to make sure I’d recognize it when I got there. Online, it’d looked like a warehouse. In reality, it was a bar. The outside was nondescript—the only thing that gave away its barness was the presence of a single, large bouncer. I walked up to him, wondering how things were going to go.
I smiled hopefully up as he stared down. “You don’t smell like us.”
Of course. This was a were-bar. I should have thought to ask. What if the women I’d just fought off were in here somewhere? Foxes, meet chicken.
But if Gina was inside, maybe all was well. Or they’d kidnapped her and put her up to it. One of those two things. The bouncer was still giving me an eye—chances were if someone inside wanted me dead, they’d have told the muscle to let me through.
I’d taken to carrying my badge around, on the off chance I ran into any more pissed-off vampires, accident-prone weres, or promiscuous shapeshifters. I pulled it out of my purse. “I’m not. I’m here to pick up a friend.”
“Oh. Her.” He held open the door and didn’t ask to see my ID.
Either he was telepathic, or he knew who I wanted to pick up already. Not good.
* * *
Inside, the bar was divetastic. It wasn’t smoky, but my shoes stuck to the stairs, and I was glad I hadn’t dressed up. The bar occupied an island in the center of the room, with a bartender stranded inside it; there were tables on one side and a dance floor on the other. In the back of the room, very private booths hugged the wall. It wasn’t that big a place, but it was crowded. Four nights till the full moon on New Year’s, and the locals were whooping it up. There was loud music playing, even if it seemed too early for them to dance.
I descended the steps to the floor, trying to not look as out of place as I felt. I didn’t have to push through the crowd—the people standing made room for me while ignoring me. I wondered if this was what it felt like to have vampire-style look-away on.
I wove my way between clusters of people talking and drinking, with an electric feeling at my front and my back. Was this how sharks felt, swimming through the sea? I saw Gina, her head in her arms, at the bar.
I pulled up a chair. “Hey, sexy.”
She tilted her head up. I could see where her eyeliner was smudged. The weres here didn’t need to see her face to know she’d been crying—they could probably all smell the salt of her tears.
“Hey. Thanks.”
“No problem.” The bartender, from his spot behind Gina, eyed me inquisitively. I shook my head, and he went on to the next new patron. “So what happened? Want to talk?” I scooted my chair in closer.
“I ended things. It was rough.” She finished off the clear drink in front of her, slamming down the empty glass, making the ice clink inside.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Gina.”
“Don’t be. I don’t know why I ever thought things would work out between us.” She flagged the bartender d
own, and he obligingly took her glass to pour her another of whatever had been in it before. “He was so hurt, Edie. That’s what was worst.” I could smell the alcohol on her breath. “I really meant something to him. And he meant the world to me.”
I scooted my bar stool closer. “Then what went wrong?”
“He wanted me to change for him.” The bartender put down a fresh drink. “And not just lose-a-few-pounds change, but all the way change.”
“You mean—” I said, and looked around at all the other patrons of the bar. “Change, change?”
“Yeah.”
“He wanted to bite you?”
“He already did. It doesn’t have to be bites, you know. There are less violent ways.” I did not want to think of my co-worker having sex with a bear, so I kept my mind and mouth shut. “It takes a month to kick in—not a month really, but a moon. This moon coming up was supposed to be my moon. But I stopped it.”
“How?”
“We’ve got shots. And since I’m a vet, I can prescribe them for myself. The laws are different, heh.” She took hold of the drink and pounded it down. “And that was that.”
I had a lot of questions about this process—why was anyone ever bitten if they didn’t have to stay that way?—but I kept them to myself for now.
“Anyways. I’m not fit to drive.” Gina pushed herself away from the bar and teetered a bit.
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Four or five.”
“Of?”
“Vodka tonics.”
“Jesus.”
Gina gave me a morbid smile. “Perhaps also of interest to you, as my medical adviser for the evening, is that I usually abstain, and I can’t go home like this. My parents think I’m at work tonight. Can I just come home with you to your place?” Her smile got tight, and I could hear the tears just waiting to come out in her voice.
“Oh, Gina—of course.” My place was currently occupied to the gills. I ran through ideas. Credit-carded hotel rooms? The week between Christmas and New Year’s was likely to be expensive, and/or booked. I did think of one person to call. “Hang on, and stay here. I’ll be right back.” I hopped off my stool and went back to the hopefully quieter bathroom to make a call.
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