“Oh, yes.” She unlocked and opened the door. “Tea on Wednesday?”
“Don’t we always have tea on Wednesday?” Felicia swept out the door and down the stairs. She waited at the edge of the parking lot with an expectant look on her face.
“I’ll bring my report with me. You might have one or two things to add to it.” Maureen smiled and shook her head before relocking the museum door. She patted the door’s metal frame, then joined Felicia, and they both walked to the car with a satisfiedstep.
DATING TERRORS
by Patricia Briggs
December 1
Ruby woke up drenched in sweat, the essence of magic in her nose and mouth. She’d been dreaming again—for the last month or more, and that usually meant that a change was coming.
Her dreams were prophetic—which usually meant thataftersomething horrible happened she could figure out what the vague pictures she’d gleaned from her night terrors had been trying to tell her. This time she had an impression of dark fur and golden eyes.
The terrible thing about this dream had nothing to do with its contents. Her unconscious use of magic had undone all the good that living in the middle of Seattle had done. The protection provided by the buildings of steel and cold iron could not keep her magic from reaching out if she used it in the way the dream had made her use it. The tattoo on her wrist, both a sign of ownership and a tracking sigil, burned.
He was coming.
December 10
Goodness, our gift to you has certainly yielded unexpected results, hasn’t it? What fun we are all having!
For your information, we have decided your last date was a success for you. Congratulations! Our discussion grew heated at times, but eventually we came to an agreement. During the required two hours of your date, no one ran screaming into the night. All deaths happened after the required time, so we feel they were irrelevant. Good for you! Three down, two to go.
Your next date is scheduled for Tuesday in Seattle. Please note the attached emails between *you* and your date from the Internet site HauntedLove.com, which, they advertise, is a site for ghost hunters who want to hunt with like-minded people who are still breathing. She is worried about meeting a strange man alone, so your date will begin with a ghost hunting session with her whole team: afterward, should you both choose to do so, you can take her out to dinner. Try not to kill all of them—at least not until your two-hour goal is achieved. They may come back to haunt you, and ironic twists generally should be avoided.
We are very happy you have emerged from your hermitlike existence and feel the credit should be given to us and our gift to you this holiday season.
Merry Christmas,
Your Concerned Friends
Irrelevant. That is an interesting word for the results of the last date you arranged for me.
Inshallah.
I accept your gift which keeps on giving—though I feel itis relevantto remind you, again, that I am not a Christian. Giving me a Christmas gift seems inappropriate for this enlightened and woke era.
Asil
The gift honors the giver. And what, exactly, do you mean by “woke”?
A few wet snowflakes dropped onto Asil’s windshield, making up in mass what they lacked in frequency. Wiper squeaking, Asil drove up the narrow mountain that led nowhere but the house of the Alpha of the Emerald City pack in the wilds outside Seattle.
The log mansion sprawled half-hidden in a canopy of trees, a fair blend of practicality and beauty. He pulled in next to the only other occupant of the fair-sized parking lot, a battered Ford Bronco. The dented rust-red hood sported a layer of snow, indicating that it had been parked for a few hours but not all night.
Asil got out of his car and took a deep breath of the frigid air, testing the smells of the woods of the Cascades against the woods of his home. Against the woods of hiscurrenthome.
This forest smelled, not unpleasantly, of moist and rotting organic matter, even under its white coating. In Montana, fifteen below zero did not allow for much moisture in the air no matter how much snow was on the ground. He judged the current local temperature somewhere in the high twenties because the snow was what his young friend Kara liked to call “fighting ready” because it would be easily gathered into balls to pelt others with.
One moment he was thinking of a snowball fight Kara had initiated that had eventually enveloped most of the pack, the next he was ambushed by the scent of another wood, the unique smell of his home, his real home. A scent that now existed nowhere in the world.
