“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Nicola asked when she saw me tear open the top of the packet.
“Uh, these are bath salts,” I said. “It’ll help with your shoulder.”
“Are you dumb or something? You can’t put that in the hot tub. It’ll totally mess up the filtration system.”
One of these days I was going to have to find someone to teach me how to control people with my mind. I didn’t know if it was something mages could learn, but if there was even a chance I could use it to avoid having to talk my way through situations like this, it would be worth it to find out.
“Look,” I said. “Today was kind of a weird day, don’t you think?”
Nicola just stared at me with a look that said where are you going with this?
“My knee is pretty torqued,” I explained, “and I know your shoulder must be hurting like hell. I guarantee you that what’s in this little packet will go a long way towards making both of us feel better. Would you rather live the rest of your life knowing it’s about to rain because your shoulder aches so badly you can barely move it, or would you rather protect the filtration system?”
Nicola looked down at the puffy and bruised skin around her injured shoulder and thought about it.
“Fine,” she said. “But you can be the one to tell my dad why the hot tub is busted.”
Grinning smugly, I dumped the packet’s contents into the hot tub. The water took on a yellowy-green tinge and filled the air with a sharp eucalyptus tang. Each inhalation of the steamy vapors cleared my head dramatically. The pain in my knee subsided immediately, fading to a dull ache within minutes.
“Whoah,” Nicola said when the herbs took effect. “That feels amazing. Where’d you buy that?”
The packet had contained more than just garden variety herbs. I’d sourced them from a healer based in the far north of the province. In the past, I’d had to use a special bush plane courier service to collect my order for me, but lately I’d been getting the help of my kobold friend, Skreek. When I needed a refill, all I had to do was text him to do a pickup. He could teleport a thousand miles away and back again in a matter of minutes, although it always took him several hours to return from the healer’s place. I hadn’t figured out quite how to tell the difference between a stoned kobold and a normal one, but given how chatty he always was after visiting the healer, I was pretty sure he used the opportunity to indulge in a bit of personal vice.
Of course, none of that was anything I could explain to Nicola.
“A friend of mine in the city is super into naturopathy,” I lied. “She makes this for me.”
Nicola scooped water up in her hands and ran them over her hair. She massaged the injured shoulder that only minutes ago would have been too tender to even touch, stretching her neck to one side then the other as her muscles loosened and relaxed.
“She could make a killing if she sold up here,” Nicola said. “You’ve got to give me her details later. I’d order a crate full. This stuff is magic.”
“More than you know,” I said with a grin. I sunk low in the tub, letting the water soothe my aching neck.
We soaked until the skin on our fingertips was wrinkled and white. Ada came out at one point, wrinkling her nose at the strong herbal odor wafting off the surface of the water when she set down a tray with two tall smoothies. She stared at me as if she wanted to say something, then glanced at Nicola before leaving us to our soak.
When I finally climbed out of the hot tub, I felt fully restored. The cuts and scrapes on my hands and cheeks had faded away, and my knee didn’t bother me at all. Better still, the healing herbs had boosted my body’s ability to replenish my store of magic. Even partially restored, it swirled within me like my own personal furnace, waiting to be unleashed. Now that I knew the threat against Nicola was both real and considerable, I was going to need every advantage I could get. I still didn’t know what had been behind the freak storm and subsequent avalanche. First chance I got, I'd have to slip into the village to find someone who might know. No community of more than a few hundred people was without at least one person who was tapped into the local fae. If I could root them out, maybe I’d have a better idea of what I was up against.
“I feel a million times better,” Nicola said while she toweled herself dry.
She tossed me a towel, and I did the same. The brisk air was refreshing after the heat of the tub, and neither of us rushed to go back inside. I wrapped the towel around my shoulders and sat on a wooden bench beside the hot tub. It was only early afternoon, but already the sun was setting on the western horizon.
Nicola sat on the bench opposite me.
“Where exactly did you say you worked before becoming a glorified babysitter for people like me?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” I told her. “And it’s classified.”
“For real?”
I nodded. It wasn’t far from the truth. While the Conclave didn’t use words like ‘classified’, sharing knowledge of magic with non-gifted was frowned upon with extreme prejudice. It was a gray area to be sure, but there were limits to how many people I could let in on the secret without attracting the wrong kind of attention. I’d gone my entire life without letting a normie know my secret until I’d confessed to Chase. I figured it was only fair turn-around, what with him saving my life and all.
“I’ve never seen anyone pick up snowboarding so quickly,” Nicola continued. It might have just been my pride, but I swore I heard a hint of admiration in her tone. “I guess that’s from all the training you would have done at The Farm, right?”
“Nice try,” I said. “But I’m not now, nor was I ever, CIA.”
“That’s exactly what an agent would say.”
I shivered a little, prompting me to stand up.
“I guess snowboarding came naturally because I used to skate,” I told her truthfully. “Not like I was ever any good at it, but I went through a phase of hanging out at skateparks instead of going to school.”
She didn’t need to know that I’d also slept at those skateparks at night. Before I’d learned to control my gift, I’d made a bed anywhere I could hope to survive the night unnoticed by one of the many human predators roaming the streets. And that was before I’d known about the fae and humanoids like vampires and shifters. It was a minor miracle I’d made it to my twenties without being mauled in the darkness.
“Cool,” was all Nicola said in response.
We shuffled back inside and went up to our rooms to change. I put on the warmest clothing I could find, then followed the savory scent of Ada’s cooking to the kitchen. She wasn’t there, but a peek in the oven told me lasagna was on the menu. If it was half as good as what Ada had served the night before, Mr. Bloedermeyer wasn’t going to stand a chance of getting leftovers when he eventually got home.
Nicola settled into her usual spot on the couch. Instead of going back out into the front living room, I collapsed into an armchair and began searching various databases with my phone. We were a far cry from becoming best friends even after our brush with death, but the animosity between us had shrunk to a sort of tolerance on Nicola’s part. As oblivious as she was to the true nature of our afternoon misadventure, she couldn’t help but realize that the only way we’d come down from that mountain alive was by working together. I didn’t want to ruin those gains by making her think I didn’t even want to sit in the same room as her.
So she did whatever the hell it was she did on her phone, and I tried to dig up some information on what had attacked us. From my phone, I had access to hundreds of websites maintained by magic users. Using an encrypted browser designed specifically to allow me to connect to sites hidden to your regular user, I was able to access the kind of information that would have made a pre-internet mage lose their minds. If it had been recorded anywhere throughout history, someone had probably transcribed it and uploaded it onto one of these repositories.
The only problem was finding anything without any kind of search.
Chase had managed to cobble together a homebrew engine that could crawl several of the sites at the same time, but it required reprogramming for each new set of parameters. Even then, searching for something as vague as ‘evil snow spirit’ would return thousands of irrelevant results.
An hour of clicking and scrolling earned me nothing but a grumbling stomach. I practically leaped from my chair when Ada announced it was time to eat. She informed Nicola that her father would be out with investors until late, then served us up monstrous portions of lasagna so cheesy I nearly choked while trying to swallow the first forkful. I bit off a piece of garlic bread to dislodge the gooey cheese string blocking my throat. Melted butter ran down my chin, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was shove more baked pasta into my mouth, smothering the memory of my near-death experience with tomato sauce and mozzarella.
Nicola ate with near equal gusto. Her phone sat face down on the table, and she only picked it up after clearing her first plate and mopping up the remaining sauce with a hunk of garlic bread. The phone had been buzzing non-stop throughout our meal. If there’d been a long enough moment between me swallowing and then stuffing another bite into my mouth, I’d have asked her to just turn the damn thing off.
“House party tonight,” she informed me while she scanned at the fifty odd messages scrolling by on her screen. “If you need a nap or something, we’ve still got a couple hours. Doesn’t start until midnight.”
“Is there any way I can talk you out of this?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Nicola leaned back to make room for the second helping Ada dished onto her plate. She picked free a crusty edge of baked cheese, popping it in her mouth and chewing on it thoughtfully while staring me down.
“Tell me which agency you worked for,” she said. “Or, if you’ve always been a freelancer, then tell me what you really do. Are you a hitter? How many people have you killed?”
“That’s not a conversation I’m going to have with you.”
Nicola shrugged and stabbed her fork into her lasagna.
“Guess you’re coming to the party tonight then.”
Another party. Could this day possibly get any worse?
Chapter Nine
This time, at least, I was allowed to wear my hoodie. Nicola came down from her room wearing jeans and a simple sweater, giving me hope that the night wouldn’t be as wild as our previous experience at the bar. It wasn’t like I expected bowls of chips and bottles of soda pop while the girls and boys stood on opposite ends of the room trying not to stare at each other, but just maybe it would be something less than an out-of-control house-wrecker. The herbally enhanced hot tub had gone a long way towards reinvigorating my mind and body, but that didn’t mean I was up for another night of loud music and groping guys.
It was just before midnight when we left, and Nicola’s father still hadn’t come home. His daughter had come within spitting distance of losing her life that afternoon, and now she was walking out the front door to go to a party where she’d no doubt do some underage drinking. I knew her father cared about her safety since he’d hired me to keep an eye on her, but it didn’t sit right with me that he paid so little attention to what his only daughter got up to at all hours.
Nicola shoved her feet into fur lined soft suede boots then took a thick down jacket out of the closet. I slipped into my heavy flannel shirt. It’d be warm enough for a walk through the snow, but if we had to spend too much time outside, I was going to freeze my ass off. Nicola had said we were going to a house party, emphasis on house. If we were just going to hop in a car then go right into someone’s chalet, why the need for such warm clothing?
I got my answer a minute later when we went outside and around the side of the house. Sitting in a leveled patch of snow was a mutant golf cart with four miniature snowmobile treads where the wheels should have been. Nicola gestured for me to hop into the passenger seat, then she climbed behind the wheel and fired it up.
I don’t know what I expected, but the electric whine of a battery wasn’t quite it. Despite the toy car sounding engine, the snow cart lurched forward when Nicola jammed her foot down on the pedal. High powered headlights lit a narrow track ahead of us. We wound through trees and zipped upwards into higher levels of development that sprawled out and away from the main village center. The farther we went, the bigger the houses got. Few of them were as impressive as the Bloedermeyer chalet, but the exclusiveness of the neighborhoods we passed through was obvious. These were the vacation homes of the one percenters. Judging by the views I caught between gaps in the trees, they liked to look down on people both figuratively and literally.
We heard the house before we saw it. Loud music filtered through the trees, and as we came around the corner we saw a modern boxy chalet that was all hard angles and glass. There didn’t seem to be any kind of driveway leading up to the house, but several other modified ATVs and snowmobiles sat parked beside the house. When we dismounted and walked around to the main entrance, I saw something that made me blink in disbelief.
“Is that…?”
“Private gondola,” Nicola told me. “It’s not as impressive as it looks. They share it with their neighbors.”
“Oh. How pedestrian,” I snarked.
We went in and the place was as pretentious on the inside as it was from the front yard. Why anyone thought concrete floors were a good idea in a town with such consistently cold temperatures was beyond me. The furniture was the kind of stuff that people picked out for show and wasn't actually meant to be used. That didn’t stop anyone from setting their plastic cups on the back of the designer couch, though. While I wasn’t the youngest person in the room, I certainly felt like the poorest. Everyone had the kind of perfect white teeth, flawless skin, and manicured hair that spoke to a lifetime of pampering. There wasn’t a piece of clothing in the room that looked like it had been worn more than once, excluding intentionally distressed fabric like Nicola’s jeans. A guy drawing himself a beer from one of five taps set into the kitchen countertop wore a plain white t-shirt that could very well have been custom tailored for him.
“Who’s your friend, Nic?” he asked when we approached.
“This is my, uh, aunt,” she said. “My dad is making me show her around.”
I glared at Nicola. Aunt? Of all the options she’d had to choose from, she’d gone with aunt? I didn’t really look that old compared to her and her friends, did I? Personally, I’d have thought cousin might be a little more appropriate. Most of my adult life, I’d had people pointing out that I looked like a teenager. Now that I was hanging out with a teenager, I was being told I looked like someone’s aunt? It’s not fair, I tell you.
“Alex,” I said, extending my hand.
“Grayson,” he said as he shook my hand. “Can I offer you a beer? I just had a great new IPA delivered.”
I accepted the beer and noticed that Nicola declined. Maybe after everything she’d been through in the last twenty-four hours, she was in a mood to take it easy on the drinking. Then again, maybe not.
Nicola stepped around Grayson and went for the hard liquor lining the counter behind him. I watched in disgust while she filled a third of a red plastic cup with expensive vodka before topping it off with a can of Red Bull. Hand on the counter for balance, she tipped the cup back into her mouth and chugged the whole thing down. With a shudder and grimace, she slammed the cup down on the counter and began preparing another.
I stepped around Grayson and put my hand on Nicola’s shoulder so I could lean in to speak quietly enough to not embarrass her in front of her friend.
“Any chance I can convince you to take it easy tonight?”
“You fucking take it easy,” she said a little too loudly. “You may be my babysitter, but you’re not my goddam mom.”
So much for the progress we’d made during our little bonding session earlier.
Nicola poured even more vodka into the cup this time. She then grabbed another can of Red Bull and twisted free of my gri
p. She stalked off to the living room where a group of what I presumed were her friends pulled her in for a series of pouty-faced selfies. I could only watch them pose for their cell phone cameras for a few seconds before I had to look away. I could keep an eye on her just as easily from the other side of the room. If it meant not having to get close to her babbling cluster of bitch-queen looking friends, I was happy to hang out in the background nursing my beer until Nicola decided she was ready to leave.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Grayson. “We had a bit of a day on the mountain earlier. I think almost getting crushed in an avalanche kind of set her on edge.”
“Holy shit, you were up there? That slide was epic. Everyone’s talking about it. Avi control even bombed that section of the mountain before they opened the resort this morning. No one has any idea how something so big could have cut loose. You two are lucky to be alive if you were anywhere near it.”
I sipped my beer and tried not to think about how close we’d actually come to being crushed by the thousands of pounds of snow rushing down the mountain. Even the memory of it buffeting my shield was enough to make me shudder.
“Well, I think I might stay off the slopes for a while,” I said.
“I don’t blame you.” Grayson leaned back against the counter. “And I wouldn’t worry about Nic. She can be pretty standoffish when she’s in one of her moods, but it never lasts long.”
I took a closer look at Grayson. He was younger than me, but not by much. The Omega watch on his wrist was worth about ten grand, and what he’d said about the craft beer taps installed in the counter made it seem like the house was his. The way he rested against the counter with one thumb hooked in his pocket and the other swirling his beer around was far too casual for a young investment banker. If I’d had to guess, I would have pegged him as a startup founder or trust-funder.
“You know Nicola well?” I asked.
“We dated for a few months last year,” he said. Then he saw my expression. “Hey, I didn’t know she was only sixteen at the time. Nic’s a hell of a liar when she wants to be. She just showed up at a little get together I was having for a few of my better clients. No one else was under twenty-five. It didn’t even occur to me that she might be a teenager.”
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 8