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“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes!” She protested. Then more silence. “No. I just had a fight with Brandon. ” There was a hitch in her voice as she said his name. “I think we just broke up. ”
I winced. “Oh, Gina, I’m so sorry. ”
“It was the right thing to do, you know? There were extenuating circumstances but—”
“Where are you? You shouldn’t be alone. ” There was the small matter of why she’d called me, instead of her other friends, assuming she had other friends, which she ought to. We couldn’t all come from the island of misfit toys. There were loud noises in the background. Voices, music. She shouted an address over them. I plunked it into Google Maps. Just twenty minutes uptown. “Okay—I’ll be there soon, all right?”
“All right. Thanks. I owe you. ”
“No problem. ” I’d almost gotten her killed once before. It was the least I could do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Before I left, I put on my silver-buckled belt over my older coat and silently thanked Peter. I didn’t have a printer, and my phone’s GPS was sketchy given winter clouds, so I wrote down the driving instructions instead, after doing a street view to make sure I’d recognize it when I got there. Online, it’d looked like a warehouse. In reality, it was a bar. The outside was nondescript—the only thing that gave away its barness was the presence of a single, large bouncer. I walked up to him, wondering how things were going to go.
I smiled hopefully up as he stared down. “You don’t smell like us. ”
Of course. This was a were-bar. I should have thought to ask. What if the women I’d just fought off were in here somewhere? Foxes, meet chicken.
But if Gina was inside, maybe all was well. Or they’d kidnapped her and put her up to it. One of those two things. The bouncer was still giving me an eye—chances were if someone inside wanted me dead, they’d have told the muscle to let me through.
I’d taken to carrying my badge around, on the off chance I ran into any more pissed-off vampires, accident-prone weres, or promiscuous shapeshifters. I pulled it out of my purse. “I’m not. I’m here to pick up a friend. ”
“Oh. Her. ” He held open the door and didn’t ask to see my ID.
Either he was telepathic, or he knew who I wanted to pick up already. Not good.
* * *
Inside, the bar was divetastic. It wasn’t smoky, but my shoes stuck to the stairs, and I was glad I hadn’t dressed up. The bar occupied an island in the center of the room, with a bartender stranded inside it; there were tables on one side and a dance floor on the other. In the back of the room, very private booths hugged the wall. It wasn’t that big a place, but it was crowded. Four nights till the full moon on New Year’s, and the locals were whooping it up. There was loud music playing, even if it seemed too early for them to dance.
I descended the steps to the floor, trying to not look as out of place as I felt. I didn’t have to push through the crowd—the people standing made room for me while ignoring me. I wondered if this was what it felt like to have vampire-style look-away on.
I wove my way between clusters of people talking and drinking, with an electric feeling at my front and my back. Was this how sharks felt, swimming through the sea? I saw Gina, her head in her arms, at the bar.
I pulled up a chair. “Hey, sexy. ”
She tilted her head up. I could see where her eyeliner was smudged. The weres here didn’t need to see her face to know she’d been crying—they could probably all smell the salt of her tears.
“Hey. Thanks. ”
“No problem. ” The bartender, from his spot behind Gina, eyed me inquisitively. I shook my head, and he went on to the next new patron. “So what happened? Want to talk?” I scooted my chair in closer.
“I ended things. It was rough. ” She finished off the clear drink in front of her, slamming down the empty glass, making the ice clink inside.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Gina. ”
“Don’t be. I don’t know why I ever thought things would work out between us. ” She flagged the bartender down, and he obligingly took her glass to pour her another of whatever had been in it before. “He was so hurt, Edie. That’s what was worst. ” I could smell the alcohol on her breath. “I really meant something to him. And he meant the world to me. ”
I scooted my bar stool closer. “Then what went wrong?”
“He wanted me to change for him. ” The bartender put down a fresh drink. “And not just lose-a-few-pounds change, but all the way change. ”
“You mean—” I said, and looked around at all the other patrons of the bar. “Change, change?”
“Yeah. ”
“He wanted to bite you?”
“He already did. It doesn’t have to be bites, you know. There are less violent ways. ” I did not want to think of my co-worker having sex with a bear, so I kept my mind and mouth shut. “It takes a month to kick in—not a month really, but a moon. This moon coming up was supposed to be my moon. But I stopped it. ”
“How?”
“We’ve got shots. And since I’m a vet, I can prescribe them for myself. The laws are different, heh. ” She took hold of the drink and pounded it down. “And that was that. ”
I had a lot of questions about this process—why was anyone ever bitten if they didn’t have to stay that way?—but I kept them to myself for now.
“Anyways. I’m not fit to drive. ” Gina pushed herself away from the bar and teetered a bit.
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Four or five. ”
“Of?”
“Vodka tonics. ”
“Jesus. ”
Gina gave me a morbid smile. “Perhaps also of interest to you, as my medical adviser for the evening, is that I usually abstain, and I can’t go home like this. My parents think I’m at work tonight. Can I just come home with you to your place?” Her smile got tight, and I could hear the tears just waiting to come out in her voice.
“Oh, Gina—of course. ” My place was currently occupied to the gills. I ran through ideas. Credit-carded hotel rooms? The week between Christmas and New Year’s was likely to be expensive, and/or booked. I did think of one person to call. “Hang on, and stay here. I’ll be right back. ” I hopped off my stool and went back to the hopefully quieter bathroom to make a call.
* * *
Things got louder as I went down the hall to the bathroom—maybe I’d have to exit the building to get some peace. There were the two doors for the bathrooms on my right, a saloon door for a kitchen to my left, and at the end of the hall, a larger, thicker door. Which sounded like it had a sports stadium behind it. Inside the bathroom wasn’t any better—the sound from outside came in through the wall and echoed around the bathroom’s tile.
I didn’t really want to walk past Gina and everyone I’d had to walk past on my way in and then come back inside to get her.
The sound stopped crisply, then seconds later then started again. Like driving underneath an overpass in rain. I stepped back into the bar’s hallway, changed course, and went for the bigger door.
It swung open into another crowd. The air was choked with the scent of musk and sweat. People’s attention was on something happening beyond, and none of them had a glance to spare for me. While I was tall, I wasn’t quite tall enough to see what was happening. I made my way around the edge of the auditorium until I found a gap I could elbow myself into.
They were watching a wrestling match. Two men were circling each other, hands out and low. Bruises covered both of them, and one had a cauliflower ear. One of them was huge, with red hair down to his shoulders, and then a layer of red hair almost like fur, flowing down his back, arms, and chest. The other was smaller, leaner, covered in tattoos.
I didn’t recognize him at first; I only had one of those feelings you get when you know you’ve seen someone before. It took me a moment to place him, and when
I did I said his name.
“Lucas?” The surrounding spectators ignored me, wrapped up in the match. I recognized one of them too—the piebald man I’d seen that same morning, still wearing his fedora.
Lucas’s tattoos covered his arms, tracing up from his wrists to his back where they met across his shoulders. I couldn’t make out what they were because he kept moving, pressing in, darting out. He ran in, stayed there, and the bear clubbed him down.
Lucas rolled with the impact and resurfaced lightly behind the larger man. He lunged for his neck, and was again tossed away. He bounced as he landed, whirling upright with a manic grin. He knelt for a second, then leapt back in.
I couldn’t tell who was winning—Lucas seemed on the offensive, but he appeared to be losing, repeatedly. In between attacks and defending himself, the Bear-man was overly still, like a kung fu master searching within to find inner peace. But Lucas’s willingness to get thrown around was interrupting whatever the Bear-man was trying to do—until the taller, furrier man’s skin flushed darker, and his chest widened in all directions, like an expanding barrel. Then Lucas was there again, dancing forward, only to be swatted back. Lucas rebounded and the Bear-man raged—all progress toward his animal side lost with his temper as he grabbed Lucas up and threw him to the ground. Lucas skidded across the cement floor, picked himself up, and rushed back at the Bear-man, who still hadn’t recovered from his turn.
In a flash he was a wolf. There was Lucas, who’d begun the leap, and then the wolf who’d finished it. Lucas’s change had been fluid, magical, from one form into the other. He had been a human, and now he was a wolf even larger than I was, with fur the color of rust with streaks of gray. He had paws as big as dinner plates, teeth as long as my fingers. Lucas’s wolf shoulder checked the Bear-man, knocking him to the ground, and twisted to put fangs on the Bear-man’s throat.
“No!” I cried out, but all the other people in the crowd were cheering. I pressed forward as they did, to somehow stop what I thought was going to happen next. But the Bear-man, still not fully changed, slammed his paw-like hand against the ground, and wolf-Lucas let him go. Hopping back on all fours, Lucas changed back into a man again, instantly—all man, naked. The room was quiet as he stood.