Chapter 23
Wolf Moon, waxing gibbous
It’s late the night after next when a vampire messenger appears to the sentries outside the den—because like hell would any vampire ever be invited in—and instructs them to inform Ty that his presence is needed down at one of the old timber yards in Medford.
In force.
I go with him because that sounds a lot more interesting than sitting in the grand cavern, watching my mother mete out justice and introduce consequences as she sees fit. It’s not that I think she’s doing a bad job, it’s just the childhood trauma. It does rear its head.
We run out of Jacksonville in pack formation, barreling along the overgrown roads. We cross what was once a farm until it became a sports complex of some kind and is now little more than a ruined old building with pools where various creatures who prefer to stay wet and sleek like to congregate.
We skirt that whole mess, then make it down to the old railway tracks and the log yards there. There are vampire warriors guarding the entrance, and they nod at Ty. One of them puts his hand up to me.
Ty growls. “I wouldn’t touch her if I were you.”
The vampire manages to look both arrogant and disgusted with Ty at the same time. “He won’t want her in there. His orders are very clear.”
I have never liked it when people assume that you should just know who they’re talking about. Even if I do know who they’re talking about.
That maybe colors my tone when I respond. “He can tell me that himself,” I say, then push my way past him.
I then instantly regret it because the interior of what was once a factory floor or warehouse, and is now a repository for nothing good, is overrun with the death cult minions.
All I see are red cloaks, swirling in every direction. Those terrible masks that make them all look uniform despite their differing shapes and scents. It makes everything in me go cold, same as always.
But the real mind fuck is the fact that there are so many of them.
Just in case I thought—hoped—that maybe all this stuff is nothing more than Vin?a reaching out from her temple and playing games with magic, that notion takes a hit.
This time there are even more than I remember being up on McLoughlin that night. A whole lot more than there ought to be, given how many were killed on Halloween.
“What the hell do they want?” Ty growls.
“I’m going to go out on a limb, given the whole death goddess they worship and whatnot,” I drawl. I look at him. “Death?”
Ty rumbles some more, glaring at all the minions. “You want to sacrifice yourself for some goddess who wouldn’t take a piss on you, go right ahead. What I don’t get is why I have to die because you believe in a goddess that I think is an asshole.”
Then he hurls himself into the battle.
I follow, and I’ll admit, I’m more than ready. The last time I got to well and truly mix it up was up on McLoughlin that night. It’s all been protective detail over Savi on Halloween and wolf week duties since then.
I’ve always liked a good scrap, and once I get past my distaste of my opponents tonight, I let loose.
I try to keep track of the minions I take down. As I lunge in at them I avoid their wicked knives that we can all smell are drenched in something vile. Likely some kind of poison to make death at their hands even more unpleasant.
It’s the vampires who take most of the enemy fire. Their preferred game is to go in hard, then turn to smoke as the minion attempts to strike. They usually become corporeal again a split second later when their enemy is overextended and they can easily slip a knife or a fang in deep.
That they have practiced fighting like this for more lifetimes than I will live is obvious. And impressive.
When we’ve beaten them all down, leaving only a few who managed to slip away and escape into the night, we all stand around and it’s clear that we feel the same . . . oddness. The vampires begin to move the cloaked carcasses out toward the old rail yards where boxcars still sit.
“Three humans, a couple of goblins, two gnomes, a few actual trolls, and one of those beak-faced things,” I list off. “That’s a whole lot of cultish unity amongst Kind clans who usually avoid each other.”
“Vin?a herself often appears beaked and winged,” Ariel says quietly, doing something magical to the blade he carries to rid it of blood. “Perhaps she has a special draw for others similarly equipped.”
“We don’t know why they were here,” Ty points out, looking around the warehouse. “They don’t seem to be protecting anything. Feels a lot like this was a decoy. Question is, for what?”
“For what, indeed,” Ariel mutters.
We all move back outside. Ty and I scent the air, but there are no answers. The fact that we’re near the logging yards reminds me.
“Want to grab a drink?” I ask.
When all the wolves look at me, Ty barks out a laugh. “Not you, assholes. You can be sure that my queen is not talking to your mangy asses.”
“Briar is a bartender at a bar down here,” I tell him. “It’s right down this road.”
I can feel Ariel and Ty look at each other over the top of my head. When neither one of them argues, I turn toward the road in question, assuming they’ll follow along. Yet while I can scent Ty easily enough, Ariel seems to be nowhere.
Then suddenly, he’s back and Winter is with him.
“Are we really going to a bar?” Winter asks me.
“It’s like a double date,” I say, because that’s probably the most horrifying thing I can think of to say in that moment. Ty only sighs. Ariel doesn’t dignify that with a response.
Next to me, Winter laughs.
It’s foggy again tonight, and there is still snow on the ground. We pick our way down the road, heading toward the lights we can see beaming in the distance. There’s movement on the railway, and Winter squints in that direction.
“Why are they all running?” she asks.
“Um.” I think of all the death cult dead that the vampires loaded into the boxcars. “I think there’s a buffet?”
It’s a testament to how the last few months have gone that Winter doesn’t ask any follow-up questions to that. But I’m betting she won’t curl up with an old copy of The Boxcar Children anytime soon, either.
We get closer to the bar and find the building short, flat-topped, and still painted white, the way I remember it. There are lights strewn all over it and hanging over a patio that even hardcore monsters aren’t sitting on when it’s this cold. From inside, I can hear the thumping of the music.
It almost feels like any Saturday night in Medford before the Reveal.
I’m the one who swings the heavy door open. As I do, I look back at my companions and smirk. “This is like the beginning of a joke. A vampire, two werewolves, and an oracle walk into a bar—”
“And immediately get eaten for telling stupid jokes,” Ty mutters, and moves past me to stalk inside.
The rest of us follow behind him.
To say that the sudden appearance of two of the kings of this valley causes a ripple effect is to vastly underestimate what happens inside Gold Rush.
There’s no scratch of a record. Mostly because there are no records. The music keeps blaring, a powerful woman’s voice that makes me think of flower children and whiskey. And possibly also early deaths from too much heroin.
Heroin sounds quaint to me these days.
Ty and Ariel act as if they don’t notice anything. As if they can’t see the way that every creature in the bar is frozen into place and staring at them.
They stride up to the bar, where a hedgehog shifter loses control of himself at the sight of them and has quills poking out, ripping holes in his flannel shirt and his trucker hat.
Briar, by contrast, stands behind the bar as if she might be meditating. Her arms are folded, and her trademark scowl looks welded to her face.
“Way to make an entrance,” she mutters.
“Only kind I know how to make,” Ty tells her, shifting so he can survey the whole packed establishment behind us.
Ariel sweeps a cold sort of glare from one end of the bar to the next. “A pint of O positive and a shot of AB negative. Body temperature, please.”
Briar doesn’t react to this. She turns and starts making drinks—which involve what I believe are blood bags hung on hooks at the back of the bar. I watch Winter’s mouth drop open.
“You go to bars?” I hear her ask her lover.
“Little seer,” he says, in an indulgent tone that I know by now he only uses for her, “there are very few things I have not done. Surely you know this.”
“How did I not know that there were . . . blood bars?” Winter asks.
Ariel orders her a drink. No blood involved. Ty and I order beers, because wolves aren’t fancy.
Then we all stand there, elbows on the bar, pretending that we’re not keeping an eye on the crowd.
Though we are. I watch quite a few creatures look from the group of us to the back of the bar, once or twice in rapid succession, and figure they’re checking Ariel’s reflection.
Or maybe they’re confirming that the oracle still hasn’t become a vampire herself.
After a while, conversations kick in again. No one in the bar is unaware of the fact that two kings of the valley are here, but the music keeps playing. The pool game resumes in the corner.
The four of us simply . . . hang out. And talk about things that don’t end in blood or death or horror.
I’m not pretending that we didn’t fight a battle before this.
Or that there aren’t battles yet to be fought later.
There’s just something remarkably sweet about standing between Ty’s outstretched legs in an actual bar, having a good time with the oracle and the vampire who have become our friends over the course of this life-altering season.
Real friends.
I know that if I were to say that to Ty, he would immediately dispute it. In all the history of werewolves I’ve ever been told, I’ve heard of alliances made with all kinds of other monsters—human and Kind. But never friends.