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.”
“Vinca 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 ofThe Boxcar Childrenanytime 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.
