She stopped again just inside the entrance, and Ramona let the door swing shut and watched her take it in the way she’d once watched a first-year student encounter a genuinely old text for the first time — that specific quality of attention that meant something had landed.
She watched Zara clock it systematically — the hedge witches arguing in the corner, the elderly sisters at their Thursday table, Dennis the allegedly retired warlock at the far end of the bar — was like seeing it fresh, which she found mildly irritating.
“The fae,” Zara said quietly, nodding almost imperceptibly toward a far table. Two figures, drinks barely touched, too beautiful, too still, watching everything with the patient attention of beings who measured time differently. “They’re gathering information.”
“They always are.” Ramona steered them toward the bar. “Odette charges them double.”
Parliamentarian sat in Ramona’s usual spot, glancing toward her with an air of indifference as if to say:I won’t be moving.
Ramona, recognizing her place in the grand Grimalkin hierarchy, slid into the stool next to him.
Zara took the adjacent stool with the precise, deliberate movement she brought to all physical actions, as if posture was a professional obligation even in a bar. She was still doing her inventory of the room in her peripheral vision. Ramona could tell.
Odette appeared, turning to Zara. A pause. Brief, almost imperceptible, which meant she’d clocked exactly what Zara was and made a quiet professional note of it.
She set a second glass down. Dark, slightly iridescent, a small curl of smoke rising from the surface.
Zara looked at it. “What is this?”
“Borrowed Time” Odette said and moved away.
Zara regarded the glass for a moment. Then picked it up and took a careful, considered sip. Something moved through her expression — not quite surprise, but close. “Well,” she said.
“Well, what?” Ramona asked, sipping her own drink.
“It tastes like the first year I worked in Temptation.” She set the glass down and looked at it with an expression Ramona couldn’t entirely read. “I haven’t thought about that in quite some time.”
“The drinks do that here.”
“How?”
“Nobody knows. Odette doesn’t explain herself.”
Zara looked toward the bar, where Odette had already materialized somewhere else. “I respect that enormously.”
Parliamentarian meowed at Zara, his eyes narrowing. He watched her for a long moment, then leaned forward to sniff the air. His whiskers pulled forward, and he sat, his tail wrapping around his front feet. He closed his eyes.
“You passed,” Ramona said.
“I gathered.” Something in Zara’s expression had eased, almost imperceptibly.
They stayed for two drinks. The Grimalkin did what it always did around the second — softened the edges of things, made the ambient noise of other people’s problems feel companionable rather than intrusive. The jukebox shifted from the torch song into something with a low piano, then into something with no identifiable era, just a feeling.
Zara asked questions, as she had all day. About the sisters who came every Thursday. About Dennis and his suspicious retirement. About the orcs in the corner booth — she had opinions about supernatural mediation practices, and they were detailed and professionally informed and mildly disparaging about the methodology.
“They’ve been here longer than the furniture,” Ramona said. “Nobody knows if they came with the bar or the bar came with them.”
“Like Odette.”
“Like Odette.”
Zara turned her glass slowly on the bar. Something in her had settled in a way it hadn’t all day — the professional tension she carried like a second suit jacket slightly loosened, just around the edges. “You said since you moved in,” she said.
“What?”
“That you’ve been coming here since you moved in.” She wasn’t looking at Ramona, still doing her slow survey of the room. “You said it like somewhere that helped with something.”
Ramona looked at her drink. “It was a bad year. I found this place and it—” She paused. “It helped.”
