But she does, even though—get this—she’s scared of it.” Panko’s broad face twisted up. He always had a tan, even in the dead of winter, his skin remembering years of working outside.
Clyde came in on cue, with a braying horselike laugh. Panko’s wife was a neurotic, if he could be believed.
Daisy had been scared of the dark, too. Like any reasonable person. Jeremiah took another mouthful of beer. How much would he have to drink before he could expect the hole in his chest to shrink a little?
There’s not enough booze in the world. He kept his expression neutral, despite the recurring thought that if Panko’s wife was neurotic, it was living with the man that had done it.
“Christ.” The flow of Panko’s familiar story snagged. “Would you look at that.”
He didn’t want to look. The noise in the Wagon Wheel had changed, too, a sharper edge to the sibilants, a breath of wonder. So Jeremiah raised his gaze, and saw nothing but the usual tired old mortal faces clustered around their tankards and glasses, cracked skin and frizzy hair; the entire fucking bar looked like a Brueghel painting on a Friday night.
Except her.
He almost choked on his beer. The markings up his arms sent sharp tingling bursts down to the bone, racing up until his shoulders stiffened as if he’d been struck.
Same slim outline, same shadow of dancer’s musculature on the back left bare except for the spaghetti straps of a blue silk dress. The skirt was flared, calf-length, and the calves were the same satiny paleness. The way of standing was the same, too, hip tilted, most of her weight on one foot. She was reaching across the bar, and the wrist was the same as well. But it was the mop of honeygold hair with its red tint that would only come out in sunlight, looking a bit washed-out in the bar’s half-glow, cut in an inverted V, longer as it fanned forward, taming and shaping that slight springy natural curl, that did it.
All the breath left him in a hard rush. If he hadn’t been sitting down he might have fallen. The markings on his arms burned, spiked flame spreading like oil down his entire body. But this was a cold fire, like meeting the Queen’s laughing, innocently murderous gaze.
Daisy was dead, rotting under a blanket of earth in the too-green graveyard at St. Pegasus. Hallowed ground, he’d insisted.
He couldn’t bear the thought of it otherwise.
“Huh.” Clyde let out a grunt, like he’d been punched. “Wonder where she blew in from.”
Jeremiah’s hand, freighted with beer bottle, locked halfway to his mouth. His entire body flushed hot, cold. Hot again, sweat prickling up his arms and at his lower back. He smelled of exertion, fresh air, and a faint sharpish apple-rotting because he didn’t know what Daisy did to make the clothes turn out sweet. That was a mortal chantment, and one he’d never bothered to find the secret of.
The bartender shook his head, swiping his hand back through greasy black hair and standing up a little straighter. He was a whip-thin Chicano, and his face had never held an expression other than resentful boredom the entire time Jeremiah had been drinking here. Now he looked mystified, and his mouth dropped open a little.
The woman turned to look toward the door, and the curve of her cheekbone stopped Jeremiah’s heart. The earrings were gold hoops, dwarven work, and they took a russet from her hair.
His beer bottle hit the sticky tabletop. Fortunately it was empty, so it only clattered, lost under the din. His fingers had gone numb.
“You okay?” Clyde sounded nervous for the second time that day.
Tingling ran along Jeremiah’s skin, scalp to sole. Left on the bar where the woman had leaned was a single silver circle, perfectly round, a glowing moon.
Quirpiece? Here? He pushed his bar stool back, the scraping lost. Another sound lost, too, under the rollicking of the jukebox and shrieking drunken laughter. Pool balls clattered in the long room off to one side, and Jeremiah heard a metallic thread stitching underneath a bright carpet of human noises.
A silver whistle’s cry, high ultrasonic thrill-singing. Too off-tone to be one of Summer’s forays, and in the wrong season besides, but undeniably sidhe. Since it was not All Soul’s or St. George’s, it likely wasn’t the anarchic free sidhe, either.
Which only left one possibility.
Unwinter, hunting.
The tingling turned into a prickle, stopping just short of pain. He shoved through the crowded humans. It was too