“Did you really go to Times Square for New Year’s?” Winter asks me as I come in. When I nod, she makes a face. “Was it horrible?”
“Hideous. Packed in like sardines for hours in the cold.” I shake my head in remembered outrage. “And if you bite someone it’s a felony.”
I laugh at the expression on her face, then I look around at the inside of this cottage that I never expected to see once Briar moved in. I’m expecting some kind of junkie’s nest, not that she has exhibited the faintest sign of addiction. It’s just that she doesn’t come off as a person who prizes order or neatness.
So I’m deeply surprised to find that the place is sparkling. Clean as a whistle. Shockingly spartan, even. Her music is kicking, the expected punk rock shouting and posturing. There are no particular decorations, only black curtains over her windows, which is also ... not entirely unexpected, but done in a much nicer way than I’d imagined from the outside.
I watch as Savi looks around, expressionless, though I somehow know she’s as shocked as I am.
“I was expecting a little more black sabbath,” Savi murmurs.
Winter nods. “The band?”
Savi blinks. “There’s a band?”
“Anyway,” Winter says brightly, and lifts up the bottle that she’s been holding at her side, “I brought wine. Not sparkling, sadly. Ariel claimed he could get me some if I really wanted, but it sounded very dramatic, and possibly dangerous. So plain old wine it is.”
Not to be outdone, Savi waves a hand and a plentiful charcuterie plate appears, piled high with cheeses, fruits, chocolates, and more. I can feel my mouth watering.
“Happy New Year,” she intones. “May this odd Gregorian calendar moment be meaningful for us all.”
“I didn’t bring anything,” I tell the group. “Save, of course, my boundless enthusiasm that is a centerpiece of any decent party.”
“I can’t decide if you three are the closest thing to friends that I have,” Briar says after a moment. Her rainstorm gaze touches all of us in turn. “Or if I actually hate you.”
“Fair,” I say.
Then she turns the music up, and we get festive. There’s eating. Lots of eating, because Savi can conjure up pretty much anything andwe take advantage. We drink. At a certain point, I realize that Savi is probably doing something to that wine bottle too, because it never seems to be empty. There’s nothing in this cottage but a twin bed on one wall and pillows on the floor, so that’s where we sit. I’m lounging there, thinking how odd it seems that somebody with Briar’s bare-house aesthetic also has a mandala-patterned area rug in the center of her floor.
I tell myself this is why people are interesting. This is why it’s important to try to get to know them. You never really know who anybody is.
Except, I think, Ty. He is the person I know best, aside from myself. That makes me feel warm.
Not only that, but he’s not hard to know. Hard to know well, yes. But Ty is always Ty to everyone he meets. It’s part of what makes him so powerful.
It’s part of why I love him the way I do.
The music changes from punk rock classics to something else. Something I’ve never heard before. It teases and beguiles. It’s like a seduction of sound and suddenly, I don’t feel like lounging around.
All I want to do is dance.
Stranger still, everyone else is dancing too.
If asked, I would have sworn up and down that this was a non-dancing kind of a group. But here we all are, dancing around and around in the center of that throw rug on Briar’s floor. I’m spinning and spinning, except at some point I realize thatI’mnot spinning, it’s like the room is.
Holy hangover,I think, but it doesn’t feel drunk and sickening. I don’t either. It’s wilder than any drink I might have had.
It’sinme, and I can’t stop.
I think,Stop dancing, but I don’t. I can’t. My body is moving. My hands are in the air. My feet are going this way and that like I could do this forever.
I wonder if I ought to be frightened, but I’m not. Not yet. More than anything else, I’m trying to figure out what on earth is happening.But everything is spinning and spinning, and I try as hard as I can, but I can’t seem to focus.
The only thing I can manage to focus on is Briar. She has her head thrown back, her arms spread wide, and she’s only wearing a tank top tonight. I can see that the place where she likes to put her hands on her chest isn’t an empty, normal span of skin. There’s a medallion hanging there.
That flash I saw of its chain comes back to me now, because it’s a medallion I recognize.
Winter used to wear it. Augie gave it to her. If I’m not mistaken, the purpose of that medallion is to keep the wearer’s power under wraps.
