Chapter 17
First Quarter Half Wolf Moon
“Something happened last night,” Winter tells me, looking pale. “Something changed.”
The two of us are sitting inside her house in what was once a cozy den—in the human sense of that word—with a television that still sits there on the wall, useless. Nothing but a dark mirror these days.
Savi left with Ariel and Ty. I would have gone with them, but it was clear to me that Winter shouldn’t. Not in her more fragile state. I’m pretty sure I got the vampire king’s version of an almost-smile when I announced I’d stay. Ty only scowled, but he didn’t insult me by telling me to be careful.
He didn’t have to tell me. One thing about the oracle’s house is that it’s impenetrable. Winter kept it pretty tightly locked down, but I can smell the vampire all over it now. Not to mention sorceress warding and the werewolf patrols that I could scent myself on the way here.
I also checked the bars and steel plates over the windows when Winter let me venture deeper into the house than the communal kitchen. Something she saves for special occasions.
“Last night was the solstice,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. I’ve seen her with a Vin?a-shaped headache before. She hasn’t said that her head hurts now, but I’m betting it does. “Things always happen on the solstice. That’s the point of celebrating it.”
“I don’t mean that kind of stuff.” She rubs at her temples, but smiles. “The vampires do throw a solstice party, it turns out. And it’s true that a great many things happened there, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”
I file that away as something to ask about later, since I have a not-so-small fascination with what vampires get up to in private. Not coffins and bats, I’m guessing, though I’m holding out hope that Winter will confess to both.
Though maybe not while we’re waiting to hear if our favorite death goddess is on a new rampage.
One involving tearing her way out of someone’s rib cage.
“The creepy-ass vision,” I say, because of course that’s what she’s talking about.
“I’m sorry you have that shit in your head.
I didn’t like it in mine. I know we weren’t sure about it right after, but the magic we used on Halloween was solid.
Vin?a should be locked up tight for at least another millennium. ”
“I don’t think she is,” Winter says. In that voice that isn’t quite hers.
It reminds me of her grandmother. A regular little old lady most of the time, but when the oracle came out to play, Gran was different. Like the thing that makes them see makes its presence known in their voices, too.
Winter reaches into a low pocket on her cargo pants and pulls her cards out. As little as I want to know what’s coming for us, I have to take it as a good sign that she is apparently communicating with her cards again. That the breakup didn’t take.
She taps the deck, then flips the top card over. When she makes a humming sort of sound, it seems to connect to some kind of tuning fork in me. I don’t like it.
Her eyes shift to something far brighter than mere indigo. “It’s something in the stars,” she tells me, as if she’s looking at those stars herself. From inside this little room with covered windows. “A doorway. A window, maybe. And it’s closing, fast. But it’s not closed yet.”
“I don’t remember there being any windows in that temple,” I mutter. Not that I investigated it closely, but we all saw it hovering around in midair, practically singing with all its bad energy.
Even remembering it makes my stomach clench.
Winter shifts on the couch beside me. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, frowning down at the cards in her hands as she shuffles and then flips over another. “You have a target on your back,” she tells me. “You know that. It just got bigger.”
“I have a number of extremely cool tattoos on my back,” I contradict her. “Not a single target among them, thank you.” She lifts her head and blinks at me. “When don’t I have a target on my back, Winter? People are either going to come for me or they won’t. I’m not going to lose sleep about it.”
“I might,” Winter retorts. “I have.”
We hear the back door creak open, and then the telltale signs of Briar moving around in the kitchen. The sound of the cereal cabinet opening and shutting. The sound of cutlery in a ceramic bowl. The refrigerator door. But neither one of us calls out. Or makes any move to go into the kitchen.
We sit there in silence, watching each other, until the back door creaks shut.
It’s quiet again. I can hear Briar’s footsteps outside, and it sounds like she’s muttering to herself as she heads back in the direction of her cottage. Possibly she’s muttering about the cold out there. Or maybe she likes to move about with a mantra on her lips. Hard to say.
Winter makes a sound when I look back at her. “I don’t want to scare her.”
“Yeah.”
When we get quiet once more, I wonder if we’re both imagining what that would be like. To be ignorant of all the things going on in this valley, all the time. To be able to carve out some kind of life in these strange days that feels relatively normal.
I daydream about it a little. I think Winter does too.
We’re still sitting there when Ariel and Ty return.
I notice that Ariel is now capable of simply appearing inside Winter’s house, meaning he has that full-access invitation.
More interesting in this moment is that he did that puff-of-smoke thing he does with Ty, who looks both disgusted and faintly outraged to have been transported in this manner.
Savi is nowhere to be seen.
“The lake looks the same but feels wrong,” Ariel tells us. Ty only glares. “The sorceress has retired to her lair to see if she can find the right spells to determine what’s wrong.”
“She’s freaking out,” Ty grunts.
“We’ll run patrols,” Ariel says, exchanging a look with Ty, indicating they’ve come to some kind of agreement between them on that. “But until the sorceress can ascertain what has happened, we can otherwise only wait.”
Ty shakes his head. “It’s not right up there,” he says. He and Ariel exchange another look. “Something’s up, and it’s not good.”
I think of that early-morning shaking I felt and hold back a shiver.
There’s nothing else to be done, so Ty and I go back to the den.
I think we might forget about our troubles in one of our preferred fashions, but instead he’s called away immediately to consult on matters that I know he’ll tell me about later.
Yet protocol demands I pretend I don’t know what’s happening while it’s actually happening.
Maybe this is as close as I get to my fantasy about what Briar’s life must be like. All that blissful ignorance—but if it is, I hate it.
I lie in Ty’s bed and stare at the carved rock ceiling. I remind myself that you can’t change everything in one day. Not even on the solstice.
In the morning, what’s wrong about Crater Lake is clear, and we don’t need Savi’s spells to figure it out.
It’s flooding. And fast.
The water from the lake is draining, pouring out, and rolling downhill.
And pretty much everything is downhill from Crater Lake.
This time, the tense meeting of the valley’s three powers takes place at Ariel’s mixed martial arts school in downtown Medford.
We take the bike again. Ty navigates his way through piles of debris and shuffling zombies—both actual zombies and the crowds of drug addicts who haunt what’s left of the city center.
The same vacant eyes and imperviousness to the condition of their bodies, the weather, the danger they’re in at any given moment, and everything else.
It’s a dark, overcast day. Maybe this is why I can see that there are more lights on in the buildings downtown than I’ve seen in years.
Things are changing around here, and it’s not the sporadic gentrification projects that I remember coming in fits and starts while I was growing up.
For one thing, I doubt very much that this is human driven.
I’m not human, however. I might miss the ones I befriended in New York and quite like the one I know here who also happens to be the new oracle and maybe not entirely human any longer, but I also like the idea of us monsters taking back the cities we had to hide in for centuries.
I peer into the lit-up windows as we pass.
The little old houses that still stand. The apartment buildings that were built closer to the center.
There are far fewer bars and steel plates over the windows here than in Jacksonville.
Even more proof that it’s not humans venturing out of their few safe zones.
I’m pretty sure the slimy dens, dark caves, swamp mud, and other traditional monster-type dwellings have lost their appeal all around.
I might be a revolutionary in the werewolf pack, but I’m certainly not the only one in this valley to ask an ancient Kind clan why it is that the whole world got to change except us.
If I didn’t have fate and responsibilities and the big man in front of me to consider, I’d probably think it sounded like fun to go live up at the Manor and rave my face off.
Or move into one of the abandoned buildings down here, where the streets aren’t likely to scare me.
I’m not the kind of prey that’s hunted here. Quite the opposite.
Besides, I saw Les Misérables on Broadway while I was in New York. There’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to build a barricade, wave a flag, and sing a song. Preferably without the second act to make it all less fun.
I choose not to tell Ty any of that as we make our way around a few songless barrier piles set up on Main Street. Somehow I know that no matter how indulgent he might be feeling about me right now, musicals are not likely to be his thing.
Still, I can hear the people sing as Ty rolls his bike up to the front door of Archangel MMA and leaves it there as we walk inside.