A Wolf at the Door

“At the moment.” She held her hand out to me. “I think we’ve become good friends now, yes?”

Despite my inexplicable aversion to touching her, I held my hand out, and allowed her to place hers in mine.

I don’t know what I expected to happen, but nothing did. Her hands were soft, unmarred, obviously not into heavy manual labor. There was a faint tingle up the hairs on my arm, the telltale traces of magic on her skin, but nothing like Tai could produce. Hell, I’d felt stronger signs from my wife. I couldn’t even tell if this strange woman was a practitioner, or had just brushed up against something recently. And still, everything in me screamed to let her go, to put distance between me and this tiny, harmless-looking little girl.

I pricked the offered finger, releasing her as soon as the blood welled up, and she wrapped it in a tissue. “You’ll understand if I ask you to leave the pin, of course.”

“Sure, whatever you want.” I snapped it shut and tossed it her way. Practitioner, definitely. A layman would have let the safety pin go, and then I’d have had a trace of her blood if I needed it later. She knew what she was doing.

Gretchen glanced briefly at me to see if we were ready to go on, then took the rolled contract out of her purse. “We need this translated. I understand that you’re an expert with this language.” Good girl, smart girl, she displayed the paper to our new friend, but didn’t hand it over right away.

Cindy tilted her head, a small smile curving the corner of her mouth. “I don’t know that I’d say expert, but I’m familiar with it, yes. May I ask, where did you get it?”

Before Gretchen could offer up her story, I stepped in. “No. We just need to know exactly what it says, in minute detail.” With demons, every word has a dozen different possible meanings, all of which can drastically change what you think you’re agreeing to. If we were going to find this loophole, I couldn’t risk a vague translation.

The young woman held out her hand, and when I nodded, Gretchen passed the thick paper over. Cindy pursed her lips as she looked over the contract. “This is a lengthy document. It will take some time.”

“How much time?” New Year’s Eve was fast approaching. I had no idea what was supposed to happen then, but I didn’t think we had a lot of time to waste.

“A few hours? Three or four, I would think.” Her dark eyes flitted over the page as she spoke to us, and I could tell she was already translating in her mind. “There is a very good restaurant across the street if you want to get something to eat while you wait.”

That actually wasn’t a half-bad idea. I didn’t want to sit here in this oddity shop for three or four hours. “You wanna give us a price quote on the translation?”

Cindy looked up from the pages and gave me a sly smile. “I have no way of knowing that until the job is done. We’ll discuss payment when you return, all right?”

Man, I didn’t like that. It felt eerily like the favor that had gotten me into this mess in the first place. But who else did we know that could read demon script? She had us, and she knew it.

The restaurant across the street was Chinese—go figure—and was actually very good, as promised. The three of us ate with a minimum of conversation, either lost in our own thoughts or simply watching the people as they moved around us. It wasn’t the same before-Christmas hustle and bustle that I’d seen just a week ago. Now, they were people on a mission, with a destination. Going to parties, picking up supplies, spending Christmas loot. They were smiling people, people who weren’t worried about the credit card bills that would be coming next month, or anything really beyond what they were doing in the next few minutes. They had the happiness that comes with momentary blindness.

I think Gretchen picked up on it too. She seemed pensive, a faint crease drawn between her brows, and I almost asked her what she was thinking about. Almost. I wasn’t sure we were up to the touchy-feely-deepest-darkest-secrets phase of our relationship yet.

By unspoken agreement, after two hours had gone by, we all got up to return to Cindy’s little clutter shop. At least, I think it was a shop. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen a single cash register or anything there. No customers, either, except us. Maybe it was just junk she put in the way to keep people out.

The elderly woman answered the door again, escorting us back through the shelves as they swayed ominously over our heads. Cindy herself was curled up on the futon when we reached the open room, her sneakers discarded and her bare feet tucked under. She looked like a college student, hitting the books for some prefinals studying. She didn’t even glance up when we came in, typing one-handed on a small laptop as her other finger marked her place in the demonic script.

Tai and I let Gretchen take the chair, and while he stood guard over her, I explored the room a bit more.