Winter Lost

I couldn’t have said how long I sat there before there was a little pop of cartilage giving way followed by a dull thump of a body hitting a hard floor.

On Bonarata’s orders, vampires were not allowed to kill their prey anymore. That didn’t mean the humans they fed upon didn’t die accidentally. They hid them in car wrecks and drownings. Sometimes they buried them in places the dead were unlikely to be found.

Evidently Bonarata did not follow his own rules. Color me not surprised.

Silence was sometimes very loud.

After a few more seconds, the caller disconnected.

I drew in a shaky breath and told myself what I’d just listened to had not been my fault. The problem was that I was well aware that might not be true. Maybe if Bonarata hadn’t decided to make my life a living hell, that girl would have lived a long and happy life. Maybe she had always been destined to be the food of vampires.

Maybe it had been a performance just for me and no one had died at all.

My fault or not, there had been nothing I could have done about it. That was truth, but cold comfort. I breathed slowly until I thought I was feeling more or less normal.

Then I got out the baby wipes I kept in all of my rigs because I never knew when I was going to get my hands covered with the mess mechanicking engenders. Baby wipes are surprisingly good at cleaning off grime. I used them now to wipe away tears and snot.

When I was sure that my face was clean—because I didn’t want to know what I’d looked like directly after that call—I pulled down the visor and popped open the mirror. I looked a little flushed—but that would fade by the time I made it to Uncle Mike’s. There was not much I could do about my reddened eyes. Hopefully the traffic on the Blue Bridge would be slow enough that they would clear up before I got to Uncle Mike’s.

I should have called Adam. But I wasn’t going to. I had things to do tonight.

I bent over and retrieved my purse. I pulled the phone out and set it screen up on the passenger seat, where I could see it. After a moment’s thought, I grabbed it, put the ringer on silent, and set it back down, screen side toward the seat.

I turned the radio up to full blast and pulled a U-turn to get back onto Columbia Drive. As I drove over the river, flowing black and deep below me, Freddie Mercury asked me if I wanted to live forever.

—

As soon as I opened the door of Uncle Mike’s, I was met with a wall of magic that forced me back out into the parking lot before I took even one full step in.

I did some deep breathing for a few minutes, watching the flakes come down. I’d had an incident with an ancient artifact a couple of months ago and it had left me with a few odd quirks that came and went, one of which left me overly sensitive to magic. Usually if I waited a couple of minutes, I’d be back to normal. Normalish.

When I got cold, I headed back in. This time, the magic wasn’t so overwhelming. There was always magic at Uncle Mike’s—it was a pub owned by a fae. There were wards to keep unaccompanied humans out. I was pretty sure there were wards that protected the building and its inhabitants, too. And there were just a lot of the kinds of beings who carried magic along with them wherever they went.

The scent of seasonal greenery outcompeted the mixed odors of alcohol and packed bodies that filled Uncle Mike’s. Music spilled from hidden speakers just loud enough that, if I wanted to, I could ignore the conversations going on around me without the music being so loud it was painful. Both the smell and the sound level were perfectly judged—as were so many things, because the proprietor took great care that they would be so. The fae take their hosting duties very seriously, and none more so than Uncle Mike.

Usually this part of the pub gave off tacky cheap-bar vibes and not winter-themed-greenhouse stage-production vibes. But now it felt like at any moment Santa would stroll in with a reindeer or two and offer naughty boys and girls peppermint schnapps.

There was a lot more obvious magic involved in the decorating than Uncle Mike usually allowed. Or maybe my recently acquired sensitivity to magic was still acting up.

I gave the vines on the wall a wary look. Were there more of them than there had been just a moment ago?

The deep green vines could have been an odd variety of ivy, or some other creeping kind of plant, but they looked like holly to me. I wasn’t a gardener, but even so, I was fairly certain that holly was usually found as a bush. Here, though, the thin willowlike withes covered in the distinctive spiky leaves and bright red berries wove through the vines to create a festive yet somehow oddly creepy air.