Chapter 19
Winter is in the kitchen when we get there, slamming pots and pans around. I leave Ty with the rest of our awkward and wildly dangerous party, spread out through the dining room and the starkly furnished living room.
“I’m here to help,” I tell her.
“Oh, don’t be deceived,” Winter says to me beneath her breath. “I’m hiding in here. Savi waved her hands around and said that a feast would appear upon requirement.”
“Is that like . . . dystopian DoorDash?”
Winter shrugs, but her indigo eyes are dancing. “I guess? Except more vegan? Also, I don’t think we have to tip.”
“I know I’m a terrible person,” I confess, happily, “but I really can’t wait to watch Ty Ceridwen contend with a vegan meal. I don’t actually know what he’ll do. Combust?”
Winter grins at that and leans back against the counter. She folds her arms and nods toward the rooms on the other side of the steel-reinforced kitchen door.
“I don’t think Briar wanted to come.”
“But she did.” I saw her when Ty and I came in, all of us using the front door now, according to the scents I picked up on the way in. Not because Winter is any less wary of the Kind being in her space but because she has a terrifying lover to keep that space safe for her.
Briar is out there now, having made a nod toward the festivities in the form of a red flannel shirt thrown over her usual black.
She is standing ramrod straight at one end of the dining room table, her hand at her neck.
Or slightly below it, as if she’s testing her own heartbeat.
Or maybe the necklace she was wearing that time.
I assume she’s standing on her own because she’s dying of awkwardness, standing out there with Ariel and Savi. A chilly convention if ever there was one—though Savi still looks . . . not quite like her smooth, pulled-together self.
“She’s here now, but she was reluctant.” Winter sighs. “I had to pound on her cottage door for a long time before she opened it. She looked horrified at the invitation, but then she just . . . smiled like it hurt her a little and said she would love nothing more than to join us.”
“I mean, that sounds a lot like Ty’s reaction, really.”
But Winter doesn’t laugh. “I had a pretty epically disgusting dream last night,” she continues, and I frown when she reaches up to rub at her temple.
“It was . . . blood. So much blood, and wolves in the night.” Her voice takes on that singsong quality it often does when she’s translating the things she sees in her head.
“A moon, not full. A trail in the dark. I was running and I was terrified, and then it was on me—” She swallows, making a face.
“I think I was a sacrifice. I could feel the knives. I could smell my own . . .” Winter laughs, and her hand is shaky as she drops it from her face. “Then she was there.”
I don’t need to name her, but I do. “Vin?a.”
“It was very gross,” Winter assures me. “There was a worm situation, but in me, and I was choking and she was laughing—” She blows out a breath. “Ariel said I was screaming in my sleep. He was not happy.”
“Did you see who was stabbing you?” I ask her quietly.
She sighs. “I couldn’t see. What’s the point of seeing all that and not getting to see the thing that matters?”
We stand there with that. Then I straighten my shoulders, thinking about the traitor in our pack and how they clearly got the packs to fight all the way up to the solstice. “Maybe it’s so you’ll suspect everyone. Like . . . all of us.”
“That’s what Savi thinks,” Winter says. “She said I should assume I’m being deliberately led astray.”
“Have you noticed that she’s . . . ?” I don’t really want to say it, but Winter nods.
“I’ve noticed.”
I tell myself that’s something.
I go back out into the dining room then, with a couple of beers in my hand and a smile on my face. Ariel and Ty are deep in conversation when I walk up to them.
“There’s no way that a goblin could beat a vampire,” Ariel is saying.
“Anyone can beat a vampire if they stand close enough to a window and can raise the shade,” Ty argues.
“Are we talking about actual combat or cheap tricks?”
“It’s all combat,” Ty says with a laugh. “You’re either fighting to survive or you’re playing a game. Me? I don’t play a lot of games.”
I hand him a beer. “Wow,” I drawl. “Apparently Reddit survived the Reveal after all.”
They both frown at me—neither one of them big on social media back in the day, I’m sure—then get back to their critical debate.
I look over at Savi, who is sitting in a wing chair that’s been shoved back against the wall, giving an excellent impression of a grand empress who appears to have wandered into the wrong empire.
Not exactly in social mode, I see. When I move past her, thinking I might explore the house, she shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t,” she murmurs. “Everything except this area is fiercely and aggressively warded.” She cuts her gaze to the vampire king, who somehow looks deeply relaxed.
For him, anyway. He’s standing in a wide stance with his hands behind his back that suggests leashed violence to me but I know is chilled out for him.
“He oversaw the warding,” Savi tells me. “With some intensity.”
I like it, and I can’t pretend I don’t. “You can’t blame the man for taking his consort seriously.”
“Indeed not. Yet I do have to wonder why it is that we are taking these measures rather than the more reasonable approach.” She glares in the general direction of the woods outside, beyond the boarded-up windows.
“Which would be setting a trap for our favorite ritualistic fox rather than waiting to see what it does next.”
“This isn’t the sort of fox who’s going to skip into a trap.” I lift a brow. “Or any one of us would have caught said slasher fox. Or at least gotten some kind of clue as to who it is and what it wants.”
I think of the escalation of entrails that I’ve seen around my cottage and it’s connected, now, to the bloody messes closer to the den, too. I don’t like how that sits in me. Slashers and sabotage and we still have no answers—
But this is supposed to be a social evening. Community, not catastrophe.
The moon knows there will be more than enough of that. And likely soon.
As if she can read my mind—and I don’t know that she can’t—Savi sighs, then waves her hand. A goblet of something sparkling appears in her grasp, and she takes a long pull.
She’s making me itchy. “What’s going on with you?” I ask her.
Across the room, Winter comes in from the kitchen.
She looks around and raises her brows at the sight of the supernatural bro situation in the corner, where Ty is currently extolling the virtues and comparative martial prowess of the average bridge troll.
Ariel is shaking his head as if he is actually in pain.
This, I like. The two of them friendly can only make things better in the valley. And in my personal life, given how tight Winter and I are.
She and I exchange a look, then Winter smiles and makes her way over to Briar, who’s still looking like she might actually be facing a firing squad.
I turn back to Savi. She is draining her goblet and when she’s aware of me watching her, she waves her hand to fill it again.
“You’re acting strange,” I tell her. “You seem . . . frantic. I’ve never seen you look anything but smooth and controlled before. Are you really that afraid of a death goddess you already neutralized once before?”
Savi laughs, but there’s an edge to it. “No.”
“Then what?”
She looks away, as if she can see through the boarded-up and steel-plated windows.
“In order to get the information we need, I had to . . . access some places that are less secure than I like.” Savi glances at me.
“Imagine libraries, of a sort. Some are open to the public. Others are closely monitored. I had to dig around in a few that I think might have set off a few alarms.”
I’m picturing the sorcery police. Flashing lights and inclement weather? Disembodied roadside holograms? It seems silly to me—but then, you can never really know someone until you know what they fear.
“I’m sure all is well,” she says, tipping her chin up. “But there is a slight chance that all the digging I had to do has exposed me to my enemies.”
I want to laugh at that, but Savi is not an overdramatic New York City college girl. She’s an ancient being of tremendous power. If she says she has enemies, she’s probably not being hyperbolic.
“Your enemies?” I ask. “Barbarian hordes? Ancient evil things I wouldn’t know how to name?”
“In a manner of a speaking.” Savi downs the contents of her goblet again and aims a tight smile at me. “My husband.”
There’s a flash of something in her gaze that lands funny in me. It hurts. It makes me wonder if she hurts, but it’s gone in an instant.
Then she’s rising and murmuring as she goes, waving a hand in front of her.
As I watch, the table arranges itself. Place settings appear.
There’s a centerpiece made of fragrant evergreen and what look like holly berries.
Another wave of her hand and the food arrives.
There are platters of things I’m not sure I can identify.
Meats, both real and clearly . . . not real.
I see Ty scowl at the vegan platter like it’s blasphemous.
There are pastries. Breaded items that smell divinely yeasty.
Vegetables that smell like the earth and butter, two of my favorite scents.
I think I understand the Christmas thing as we all sit and then pass dishes around the table. We’re all here. We’re sitting down at a pretty table making pleasant conversation, and there’s a Christmas tree beaming at us from the corner of the room.
It’s actually . . . nice.
The world is a shithole and everything seems to get worse no matter how many times you think it’s going to get better, but for a moment here, it’s just nice.