Chapter 6
Cold Moon, Last Quarter Half-Moon
It’s a week of more lectures in the same theme from my brothers, snide comments from pack members when I can’t avoid them in town, and Ty in one of his moods—which means a whole lot of wild sex and very little talking.
Historically, this sort of mood occurs when he knows that one of us will be unhappy with whatever conversation he’s avoiding. Also historically, the upset one is me, so I’m in no rush to push him into saying things I don’t really want to hear.
Super healthy as always, that’s us.
I focus on work. The trolls demanding tithes on the California border and hiding in the rocks that line Siskiyou Summit, pelting anyone who dares try to pass with debris and the odd explosive.
I practice for the upcoming wolf week by keeping my expression neutral—very queenly and demure—when my brothers bitch at me.
I allow random pack members to growl at me and only smile sweetly in return.
Not because I’m so diplomatic and good, as I might like to pretend, but because I know they find it annoying.
By the time Saturday rolls around, I’m ready to step away from all things pack for a minute. So I’m practically gleeful when I catch Winter in the kitchen that night.
“It’s like you barely live here anymore,” I say, leaning against the counter.
There are so many things I want to tell her.
Mostly about the dead offerings that still keep popping up.
Or the fact that I’ve had several conversations with Briar this week, all .
. . pleasant. Friendly, even. Not to mention, Winter is the only person I’d consider talking to about my experience at Savi’s house.
And the somehow startling news that she’s married.
This is kind of how I felt about my college friends, except they didn’t know what I was hiding from them.
Winter knows exactly who I am. Before this fall, I had no idea it was possible to have nonpack friends.
Real friends. We used to get warned against forming attachments to any humans in school, since nothing could ever come of them.
“Tell me about it,” Winter is saying, pulling out the bread she freezes and rations, then prying off a couple of slices with a knife.
“I had no idea that my poor grandmother was Dear Abby for every last creature that slithered out of the slime.” She remembers who she’s talking to, and her mouth curves.
“Or from a very nice, upscale den, I’m sure. ”
“Do you have to serve coffee drinks while providing prophecies?” I ask. “If so, you should charge more.”
“I’m basically one-stop shopping.” She puts her bread into the old-school toaster and presses the lever down. “Caffeine to get you peppy, cards to make you mopey, and a selection of vampire bodyguards who actually hate everyone and everything to keep us all honest. It’s great.”
“I didn’t know you had coffee-stand guards.”
“Don’t we all have guards?” Winter asks with a laugh.
I realize it’s been a long time since I thought of the various patrols that go on around these woods, and around me in particular, as guards. But of course they are. None of the powers in this valley mess around with what’s theirs.
Though I do wonder how it is that something is running around committing bloody small-mammal murders and taking the time to arrange the corpses like some grisly art project without ever coming to the notice of those guards.
I make a mental note to spend less time on my sweet, unassuming smile that no one believes anyway and more time on a few important questions when I see more of my pack members in the woods around here.
Savi comes sweeping into the back door then, dropping the temperature around her the way she always does.
Her scent is like water, crisp and cool, with a hint of something darker and colder beneath.
Winter, on the other hand, smells a little bit of that bright humanity, the distinct scent of vampires in general and Ariel Skinner himself in particular, plus something else that I suspect is whatever magic makes her the oracle.
I can pick up all of these things without even trying, here in my human form, but I can’t pick up the perpetrator who’s only been getting bolder this week.
There was a bat crucified and hung on one of Savi’s cottage windows last night.
I’m pretty sure that what I nearly tripped on two days ago was a raccoon head.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what might make Ariel move into a tiny little cottage next to a run-down house in the hills,” Winter says, gazing at Savi while the toaster hums behind her. “But he doesn’t even really like to stay in the house. Yet you do?”
Maybe she’s still coming to terms with how powerful her tenant really is.
“A marvelous thing about containing multitudes,” Savi says as she swings open the refrigerator and gazes at her shelf inside, “is that you can always make yourself comfortable wherever you find yourself. That’s real magic.”
“That and she gets an in with the oracle, obviously,” I say, and shrug when Savi lifts a brow at me. “What? It’s true. That’s exactly why you and I moved in here.”
Savi pulls out some of the strange things she claims she loves to eat, all variations on the same sort of theme. Like nuts that become milks, or worse, cheeses. “Meats” that are . . . not. “I hope I never live too long to fully enjoy the beauty of a rustic cottage.”
“It’s okay,” Winter says quietly. “I know how things work now.”
I glance at Savi, then touch my shoulder to Winter’s. “If that was the only reason we stayed here, we would have left by now.”
Winter presses against me for a moment, then busies herself with her toast as it pops back up.
“I’m glad we’re all here,” Savi says merrily as she arranges her Frankenstein food on a plate and then brings it over to the table. “Winter, we need you to look at your cards.”
“You and everyone else,” I think I hear Winter mutter. I grab myself a few things from my own refrigerator shelf and head to the table too.
“Maddox and I keep finding dead things around,” Savi announces, almost merrily.
Winter fixes herself a sandwich on her toasted bread, then joins us at the table. “What kind of dead things? That’s a pretty broad term around here these days. You could mean that the zombies are rooting around in the trash again. They better not be.”
“Little dead things,” I assure her. “Basically roadkill. Just not, you know, killed on the actual road.”
“Are you worried about this roadkill?”
“‘Worried’ is a strong word.” Savi makes a show of drinking whatever it is she has in front her. Essence of something. “We want to see what the cards have to say, that’s all. Just to make sure we’re not overlooking anything.”
“I haven’t seen any dead things,” Winter says.
“In fairness,” I drawl, “you’re sleeping with one. That might blur the vision.”
Winter laughs. She also gives me the finger. What she does not do is make any move to pull her cards out when we all know she has them on her. They follow her wherever she goes.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she says. Dismissively, I think. “It’s December. Things die.”
“That’s true,” Savi murmurs. “What they don’t normally do is eviscerate themselves and then arrange their mutilated bodies like offerings to a dark lord of one sort or another. So you see the issue.”
Winter takes a huge bite of her sandwich and then takes her time chewing. Then even longer, it seems to me, for the swallowing. “The cards and I are having a small break when it comes to any personal questions I might have,” she says, when I think she’s never going to speak again.
“Maybe that’s why your visions are muddy,” I suggest.
Winter shrugs, though I’m not sure I believe the nonchalance. “Maybe. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. The cards and I just need to get to know each other again, and not in a crisis. But I’ll be happy to look into your poor, murdered animals once we’re good.”
“How can you have a breakup with a pack of cards?” I ask her.
“You say that like they’re a pack of playing cards and I’m trying to play 52-card pickup.
” She sounds a little touchy then, and Savi’s lifted brow suggests we both think this.
Winter frowns at her sandwich. “You know perfectly well that the cards are a whole thing. Right now they only want to tell me about the overwrought romantic lives of whatever creature shows up in the coffee-stand line.”
The three of us sit there in silence. I would not describe the mood around the table as tense, precisely, but it’s definitely something. Because when Briar comes in through the back door, flinging it open as if she expected that no one would be in the kitchen, she stops dead when she sees us.
I find studying her to be an excellent diversion from an oracle who’s at odds with her cards, so I take my time with it.
Tonight’s punk-girl-goes-slightly-goth-but-lives-in-Oregon-so-is-also-crunchy ensemble involves that same hat tugged down low, her dark hair hanging down out of it and not in braids this time, and a dark flannel thrown over her skirt, ripped leggings, and combat boots.
I decide she’s adorable with her nose piercings and quite a few others placed in other strategic places on her lips and tongue and eyebrows, despite what I always thought was true about fae.
And fae-adjacent folks. Namely that one or another variety of fae has an aversion to metal.
Though I might have gotten that from a book.
Briar blinks at us. “Um. Hi?”
I watch the way she lifts her hand up to her neck, as if she’s pressing her fingers into her throat—though she actually rests her fingers a little bit lower.
“Oh, hey,” I say, and smile at her. This makes her blink again, and her fingers near her clavicle twitch.
“It’s been a minute,” Winter chimes in, which seems to confuse Briar more.