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He doesn’t push. He just looks at me, his hands in his jacket pockets, the faint orange of his skin glowing in the dark.

“Goodnight, Tara,” he says.

I walk to the corner, turn left, and keep walking, all the way around the block, so he won’t see me double back to the lot where my car is parked behind the Club.

Chapter five

Tara

By four in the morning, I’ve been in the car for almost an hour, and I still can’t get warm.

It isn’t the freezer anymore. My hands work fine. They’re pink and tender across the knuckles, as if I’ve been washing dishes in water that was too hot. It’s that every part of me is tired at once. My feet hurt from the shift. My shoulders hurt from slamming into a steel door. The middle of my right palm still has a dull ache from the ward stone, like a bruise I can’t see.

I waited on the far side of the block until the last cars pulled out of the front, then came back down the alley. I changed into sweatpants and dry socks in the back seat, stuffed my work clothes into a grocery bag, and put the driver’s seat back as far as it goes. I kept the staff hoodie on. Kit never asked for it back.

Billy Bob has the good blanket.

It’s the fleece one with faded moose on it, the only blanket I own that’s warm, and an hour ago it was mine. Now he’s rolled himself up in it on the back seat with only his nose and one ear showing. When I reached back for a corner, he sighed at me as if I’d asked for a kidney.

So he can have it. I’ve got the hoodie and my old coat over my legs, and I’ve slept in worse.

Rain starts on the roof, light and uneven. The windows are already fogging, and the back of the Club is a dark shape through them, the loading-dock light a yellow smear on the glass.

One night. I worked a bar I didn’t know, cut off a troll, got locked in a freezer, put my hand on a magic rock at midnight, and I’m still here. Five weeks and change to go.

Three thousand dollars on Friday.

I lie there and do the math the way other people count sheep. A deposit and first month on a studio. Somewhere that takes dogs, on the ground floor, so Billy Bob doesn’t have to do stairs. A real bed with sheets. A door that locks, and my name on the mailbox.

None of that changes where I’m sleeping tonight. But it’s close enough now that I can see it, and that’s new.

I pull the coat up to my chin and turn my face into the seat. A shiver runs through me so I tuck my face further into the collar.

Somebody knocks on the window.

Three knuckles on the glass, right by my head. I jerk up so fast I bang my elbow on the steering wheel. In the back seat, the moose blanket doesn’t move.

Through the fog, there’s a huge dark shape outside the car. Two curving horns. Faint orange lines glowing where a face should be.

Merek.

I seriously consider pretending to be asleep. He’s already watched me sit up.

I wipe a hole in the condensation with my sleeve. He’s standing beside the door in the black jacket from earlier, with rain running off his horns and dripping from the tips. The ember lines along his jaw and throat are lit, and where the rain lands on them, it hisses and turns to steam.

He draws a small circle in the air with one finger. Roll it down.

I turn the key one click and put the window down four inches.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.” He bends to look through the gap. He has to bend a long way. “What are you doing?”

“Resting.”

“In the lot.”

“Before I drive. I was tired, and I didn’t want to fall asleep on the road.” It sounds reasonable. I said it too fast, which doesn’t help.