“Hey,” I said. Then I scowled. “Yeah. Well. It’s just coffee. Right?”
“This time,” she said. “But I need your head in it, okay? Focused.”
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and willed my thoughts to clear.
It was possible that they reduced their opacity. Slightly.
I just needed time.
And I wasn’t going to get it.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
Chapter
Two
Chicago was closed for remodeling.
The Eye of Balor, a magical superweapon currently residing deep under my very own private spooky island of Demonreach in Lake Michigan, had inflicted the equivalent of a massive electromagnetic pulse on the whole town.
Anything with a microchip in it was history. Pretty much anything that did anything with electricity was history. Light bulbs, automobiles, televisions, radios, streetlights—and generators and batteries—all had been rendered into inert junk. Massive numbers of circuit boards, capacitors, chips, filaments, and all other manner of electronic equipment had to be replaced, and the country quite simply didn’t have enough parts to get the job done.
Less than a month after the pulse, Chicago was back in the dark ages, with a curfew of eight o’clock, and candles and chemical glow sticks provided most of the light after sundown. Emergency priority had been given to police and utility services, and they were working around the clock to get things up and running again, but Chicago being Chicago, that meant that the Gold Coast was starting to slowly light up again and most of the rest of the city got real wary at night.
All the dead automobiles were gradually being towed away, but there were so many of them that they’d had trouble finding places to store them until they could be repaired, if they ever got enough parts to get the job done—assuming you weren’t one of the unlucky ones whosecars got smashed out of the way by heavy military equipment rumbling through the pulse zone to combat “the terrorists” who had inflicted it on the good citizenry.
“The terrorists” was how everyone was talking about it on TV, Bob the Skull had reported to me. That’s how Ethniu’s attack on Chicago was being interpreted by the mortal world: as a terrorist attack. One that had leveled skyscrapers and left eight million people with medieval levels of technology.
The smell was becoming medieval, too. The sewers mostly didn’t require much in the way of electronics to function, but the treatment plants did, and so did the pumps that filled the water towers. For the most part, bathing had become something you did with bottled water, if you didn’t have access to your own nineteenth-century tech.
The only reliable way to get around town at the moment was on motorcycles that had been brought out after the pulse (since you never knew which streets would be blocked by stalled cars) or bicycles, or walking. Some of the main roads had been cleared enough to let military and FEMA support vehicles in, but in most of the town it was blind chance whether or not any given street was open.
The federal government had responded with a massive effort to go to the aid of the citizens of Chicago, and to give them credit, most people seemed to have enough bottled water—but food was tight and getting tighter. A city the size of Chicago needs its roads like a living animal needs its arteries. Despite a massive outpouring of help from the rest of the nation (everyone from the NAACP to the Red Cross was collecting canned goods and sending them our way), the real problem was that it was hard to ship food into the city, hard to do business, hard to transport things around town, hard to carry the food up the stairs to apartments.
Things were getting tense.
A million people had been displaced from their homes, either in buildings that had been destroyed or in the neighboring buildings that had been flooded with dust and smashed and damaged by debris. A large but unknown number of citizens had simply been killed in the battle, mostly as collateral damage. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, morewere dying for lack of advanced medical care caused by a combination of an overloaded system, no power, and greatly curtailed communications. Millions were trying to flee the city for areas that still had electricity and clean water and plumbing, causing even more problems along the choked roads.
Those who stayed were mostly the stubborn, the foolish, the well-prepared, those too old to flee, or those tied down with small children who couldn’t chance walking them out of the disaster zone.
Oh. And predators.
Wolves get fat in winter.
Chicago’s version of that metaphorical winter was always summertime, when it got warm enough for the violence to escalate. It was hard to get local news, what with nothing working, but word from the few friendly faces I still had in the police department was that murders and violent crime had gone up a hell of a lot more than expected. They thought. The police were having trouble even keeping track of how much violence was going on—the chaos was a giant flashing neon opportunity sign for anyone who wanted vengeance on anyone else to go out and take it.
After all, guns still worked.
I came out the doors of the castle wearing my long black leather duster and a black baseball cap over my shaggy hair. A couple of the Knights of the Bean were on guard outside the place, shotguns that would normally have been anathema in Chicago in hand, and they nodded to me in passing. I wore jeans and motorcycle boots and a black T-shirt with white lettering that readWhine Later. Suck It Up Now, because I respected the Stoics.
This was a date, so I wasn’t carrying my staff, or an assault rifle or a rocket launcher, but my blasting rod was tied to its thong inside my duster; my shield bracelet was ready.
If I needed more than that to survive a coffee date, I was kind of screwed anyway.
Outside, a carriage was waiting for me, a slim little glossy black number behind a glossy black horse. I knew the fae driving it, one of the Sidhe wearing a red driving cap. The Redcap didn’t even glance at meas he waited in the driver’s seat—his unnaturally bright eyes were scanning everything in sight all at once, somehow, his body tense and ready for action.
I didn’t speak to him, either, or show any discomfort. You don’t show weakness to the Winter Fae. They get ideas.
