“Never better.” I’m sure he can hear that my heart is pounding. I feel almost queasy.
I don’t want to admit that I saw a red cloak and my first thought was that it had to be one of the death goddess’s asshole minions right here on California Street. I can remember them much too vividly, dancing around a clearing high on Mount McLoughlin, blood everywhere, those nastymasks on their faces and that same feverish true believer shit making their eyes blank.
No matter what species they were.
It was worse up at Crater Lake on Halloween.
Ty doesn’t believe me. “Kind of looks like you’ve seen a ghost, babe.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” I tell him loftily. “Not really. It’s a way for people to talk about shit they regret, that’s all, and I don’t regret anything.”
“Not yet,” Ty drawls, and pulls me in closer to him. “It’s hard to remember, but you’re still pretty young. You have hundreds of years left to fuck shit up.”
“I was under the impression that fucking shit up was our pack motto,” I tease him. “Isn’t that right?Fight meand all?”
He laughs, and I can see the half-moon in the sky. It feels like a blessing.
By the time we get back to his bike, I’ve almost completely forgotten that I thought I saw some of Vinca’s faithful in the crowd around us. I’ve also almost forgotten that there was ever any friction between this man and me. Everything today feels so smooth. So easy.
Like fate finally stopped pushing so hard and we finally fell into place.
He swings onto his bike and starts it up. I slide into place behind him. I tuck my fingers in the back of his jeans and like the burn of his hot skin against my knuckles. I’m thinking that this unofficial but accepted queen thing kind of rocks as he takes off.
Ty shoots back up the hill and then loops around so he can take the road out of town, like we’re chasing down that half-moon. I feel the same thing he does, I’m sure of it. A restlessness. A longing. The call of the open road, because being on a motorcycle feels like flying.
I’m thinking we might ride on through the night just to see where we end up, but as we pass the old towns that were built along Bear Creek, the river that runs down the center of the valley, a flash of blinding light almost knocks us over.
Ty manages to pull the bike over to one side without injuring either one of us, though it’s a close call and it kicks up clouds of dust. I hold on to him, hard, and when the light subsides, Savi is standing there.
Though she’s notreallystanding there.
“Winter’s house,” she says, in a disembodied voice that I only realize after a moment isinsideof me.
“Fucking sorcery,” Ty barks at her. “Stupid fucking smoke-and-mirrors bullshit that’s going to get someone killed, and it was almost me, asshole.”
“Winter’s house,” intones the apparition again. “Now.”
Then the light disappears as abruptly as it came.
Ty and I stay where we are, holding on to each other there on the side of the road, while we wait for our eyesight to return to normal. For the dust to subside.
For Ty’s temper to creep back down from the red zone, not that I blame him. I’m not delighted with what just happened myself.
“I don’t like being summoned by some spooky bitch with a goddamn fetish for the theatrical,” Ty rumbles, sounding more pissed than usual. Probably because he was less in control of that bike than he likes, especially with me on it.
He’s always the most furious when he’s being protective.
“She doesn’t usually do that,” I remind him. “I think it must be bad.”
Ty blows out a breath. Then he looks over his shoulder at me, and his mouth crooks up in one corner. “It’s always bad, baby. That’s why it’s fun.”
He spins us around so fast it’s dizzying, then aims us back toward Jacksonville. We race into town, cut away from the main street before we hit the crowd, then blaze our way up the hill and into the woods to Winter’s house. When we pull up in the yard, Winter and Ariel are already there on the front porch. Savi is off to the side, looking like a piece of polished ivory that happens to be propped up by no particular visible means.
Ty growls at them all. “I don’t appreciate hologram shit in my head.”
“How about this shit?” Savi asks. “You’ll like this even more.”
She hums something, then lifts her hands up until another bright light appears between her palms. As she murmurs something else in a language far too old for me to understand, the light grows and grows.
