3. The Walls Have Ears
Chapter three
The Walls Have Ears
Fate
Foglight Tavern is not haunted.
I tell myself this as Dorian opens the door and warm noise spills out over the sidewalk: laughter, clinking glasses, human conversation, a burst of music from the old jukebox near the bar. Not unlike the jovial ambiance last time…until the shooting.
Foglight Tavern is not haunted.
It is a building. Wood, brick, brass fixtures, sticky menus, questionable bar nuts, and an ambitious number of nautical decorations for a town that already has an actual ocean.
Buildings cannot remember.
Booths cannot accuse.
Doors do not replay the moment gunfire cracked through a room and turned an ordinary night into something sharp enough to live under my skin.
The chef checks on a group of eight. I catch a flash of him sobbing in the corner over a broken bottle of Dom Perignon.
I am fine.
I am extremely good at lying to myself when other people need me to be useful.
Dorian steps in first, because of course he does.
The man has the protective instincts of a medieval castle and the emotional transparency of a locked filing cabinet.
Alistair follows with Anneliese on his arm, both of them composed enough to make this look like a tasteful late supper instead of disaster management.
I bring up the rear, which is unfortunate, because it gives me one full second to consider running.
Not running. Scampering with dignity.
The tavern’s warmth hits me in the face.
Grease, coffee, old wood, spilled beer, fried onions, wet wool, tourist perfume, and the faint coppery ghost my brain supplies even though there is no blood here tonight.
A waitress carrying a tray of burgers squeezes past a table of tourists arguing over clam chowder.
A man at the bar laughs too loudly. Someone drops a spoon.
My shoulders jerk.
Dorian’s head turns a fraction.
I smile before he can see too much.
Excellent smile. Very casual. Only slightly haunted. Suitable for civic appearances and double-dates with emotionally unavailable werewolf detectives, should anyone be keeping score.
The room notices us table by table. Mayor Hawthorne. Detective Wolfe. The reclusive painter. Me.
Fate D’Amour, matchmaker, walking into Foglight Tavern hours after her matched couple died onstage.
Fantastic.
Alistair gives the room a small, polished nod. “Evening.”
People answer softly. Too softly.
That is the problem with public steadiness. Everyone watches to see whether you wobble.
I do not wobble.
I glide.
The difference is mostly spite.
The host looks as if he wants to ask whether we prefer a table or a crisis-management bunker. His eyes bounce from Dorian’s badge to Alistair’s cane to Anneliese’s pale face to me.
“Booth?” he asks.
My stomach does a slow, horrible turn.
The booth.
Not the same booth. Probably not. Foglight has many booths. Perfectly innocent booths. Hardworking furniture with no personal agenda.
But my gaze finds it anyway.
The angle near the side wall. The view of the front door. The place where I sat before the shooting. The place where I learned sound can become a blade.
The old wood gleams under amber light.
It remembers.
No, it doesn’t.
I do.
I hear Dorian saying, “Do you have a table instead?”
I hate that he makes the assumption. I hate that he’s not wrong. I hate that he already knows enough to offer an escape without naming the wound. Mostly I hate that some terrified part of me is entirely too grateful for his protection.
The host leads us toward a table in the back.
Every step pulls memory up through the floorboards.
The door. The scrape of a chair. The sharp crack of gunfire. The way noise vanished for half a second before everyone screamed. The smell of smoke. My own hands shaking while I tried to pretend they were not.
Not during the incident, mind you. After. After the emergency was over and the bedlam was being bagged. After I realized the attack may have been an attack on my very reason for being.
Tonight, the tavern is warm. No bullets. No blood. No shattered glass beyond normal restaurant tragedy.
A waitress smiles at me. “Good to see you back, Fate.”
Back.
Such a small word. Such an irritating amount of emotional baggage.
I slide into the chair Dorian holds out for me because leaving now would feel like losing.
And Fate D’Amour does not lose to furniture.
Dorian slides into the chair to my left with his back to the wall. Alistair takes the chair on my right with his back to the door after holding out the chair across from me for Anneliese to slide in gracefully enough to make this look like normal dinner plans.
A waitress appears with four waters and the strained smile of someone who can barely contain her need to ask inappropriate questions.
“Menus?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say instantly.
Dorian looks at me.
“What? Public dignity requires fries. I was very clear about this.”
The waitress’s smile becomes real for half a second. “Fries. Got it.”
“And ketchup with emotional range.”
“I’ll see what we have in the back.”
Bless her.
When she leaves, Alistair folds his hands on the table. His face is composed, mayoral, and deeply annoying. “We made the right choice coming here.”
“Wonderful. Nothing salvages a tragedy like knowing we have achieved municipal optics.”
His pale eyes settle on me. “Fear spreads faster when people are left to imagine what leaders are hiding.”
“Technically, you are hiding several things.”
“At least.”
Anneliese does not smile. Her attention is fixed somewhere still lit by stage lamps and bodies that did not rise. At last she speaks. “Just imagine if it was one of us?”
Every part of me goes still.
Dorian’s posture changes beside me. “What do you mean?”
“What would we have done if our mate was lying there?”
“It wouldn’t have taken,” Dorian responds.
“Perhaps. But if it did, we might have had other options that Romeo…or Juliet…didn’t.”
The tavern noise swells around us—laughter at the bar, plates landing on tables, the hiss of the fryer. Human life, warm, greasy and oblivious. Cover.
It should make this conversation feel less vulnerable.
It does not.
Dorian leans forward. “What options?”
Alistair answers first. “A soul-tether, which, admittedly, requires great skill and desperation.”
My skin prickles.
“Binding his life to hers?” Dorian asks.
“Or dragging part of her death into himself,” Anneliese says. “Depending on the spell.”
Dorian considers her suggestion. “Other possibilities?”
“Blood-for-breath,” Alistair says. “Old vampire rite. Dangerous. Rarely works cleanly.”
Anneliese’s voice lowers. “Or a death-door bargain.”
The phrase slips under my ribs like cold water.
Dorian goes very still. “Those are forbidden.”
“Yes,” she says. “For reasons.”
I look between them, half-hearing, even as my mind recalls my last dinner with Mina here.
Anneliese’s tone softens. “A death-door bargain is an exchange. A life for a life. Sometimes temporary. Often not.”
The table seems too small suddenly. The tavern too loud. The old wooden walls too close.
I consider what might be worse than a tragedy. Romeo thought Juliet was dead. If Romeo had magic, he might have tried to cheat death and created monsters.
The waitress arrives with our drinks and my fries, merciful and golden, and sets them in the middle of the table like an offering to the gods of denial.
I take one because my hands need something ordinary to do.
It tastes like salt, grease, and the heroic effort of pretending I am not terrified.
Dorian looks at me. “Fate, alright?”
“I’m listening.”
His eyes say he does not believe me.
And he is mostly right.
Yet, somewhere under Anneliese’s words, one thought roots deep. Death has more doors than I knew. And love, apparently, has a terrible habit of opening them.
The fries help.
For approximately fourteen seconds.
Then someone at the bar drops a plate.
It hits the floor with a sharp ceramic crack, and my body forgets where it is.
Not all of me. That would be easier. Instead, I remain sitting in the booth at Foglight Tavern with a fry in my hand and ketchup on my thumb while some traitorous animal part of my brain bolts backward through time.
Gunfire.
The crack of it.
The ugly, impossible sound of violence interrupting a room that had been full of normal things. Forks. Laughter. The newly engaged. Someone complaining about chowder.
Then the world going white at the edges.
My hand tightens around the fry until it snaps.
Fantastic. Now even the potato is a casualty.
Dorian places his hand on my arm.
I blink.
Foglight comes back in pieces.
Amber lights. Old wood. Alistair’s pale hand near his water glass. Dorian beside me, too still. The waitress crouching near the broken plate, apologizing to people who should be apologizing to her.
I breathe in.
Grease. Coffee. Beer. Salt. Wet wool. Perfume.
No smoke. No blood. No gunpowder.
My body does not care.
Dorian does not look at me right away. Somehow that is worse. He looks at the room, at the door, at the bar, at the fallen plate, at the men near the jukebox, at the waitress rising with broken ceramic in a dustpan.
His calm attention moves over everything I am failing not to count.
Exits: front door, kitchen swing door, hallway to restrooms, side door near the back.
Hands: bartender wiping a glass, tourist scrolling phone, man in red flannel reaching into his coat pocket—no, breathe, it's just a handkerchief.
Windows: fog-dark, reflective, useless.
Corners: occupied.
My fox presses against my ribs, all claws and panic. She wants out. Rain. Alley. Forest. Teeth. Speed.
My witch is worse. My witch absorbs.
Fear from tourists near the window. Excitement from the gossiping couple pretending not to stare at us. Grief from Anneliese. Calculation from Alistair. Concern from Dorian, banked so tightly it burns blue.
And underneath it all, the tavern’s emotional residue.
The shooting left a bruise here.
Humans think emotions end when people stop feeling them. Humans are adorable. Wrong, but adorable.
Strong feelings leave fingerprints.
Someone laughs too loudly near the bar.