Page 62 of Winter Lost

Beside me, the chair creaked as Elyna sat on it with the grace of someone who’d grown up in an era when women only wore dresses, knees and ankles together. She rubbed her hands before putting them on her thighs to still them.

She was uncomfortably close. I turned to face her and shoved myself back a couple of feet in the process.

“Mercy,” the vampire said. Then she looked away from me and blinked rapidly. Tears, I thought. But it could have been some other emotion.

“I don’t have any photos,” she said in a small voice, still turning her face away from me as if there was something fascinating about the wreath on the door. “The ones I’d had…before…were gone. I haven’t seen my husband’s face since…for nearly a century.” She looked at me then, and I couldn’t read the expression on her face at all. “Since the day I killed him, in fact.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

“I am a monster, after all,” she said. “We are all of us monsters in this room, I think.” She pointed at Adam. “Werewolf,” she said. She pointed at herself. “Vampire.” She made a whirling “somewhere” gesture and said, “Ghost.” She pointed at me and waited.

“Not a werewolf, vampire, or ghost.” I didn’t owe her my identity, and too often others’ ignorance of who and what I was had saved the day. Instead, I gave her a part of the truth, the part she already had. “Psychopomp sometimes.”

She looked blank. That was okay. It was a weird word.

“I have a knack with ghosts,” I clarified.

“Okay,” Elyna said after a moment that she used to tell me she knew I wasn’t giving her the whole truth. “Okay. That spider—”

“That was not a spider,” said Jack with emphasis.

I’d been looking everywhere but at him. I’d spent the last ten minutes searching for a spider I knew we weren’t going to find and trying to figure out what to do about Jack. More specifically, what to do about whatever I’d done to him. I worried about it. He didn’t feel the same as he had before the spider—or whatever she was—had tried eating him. He felt more solid, grounded.

There was a path dead souls were supposed to follow when they left the realm of the living. I always knew where that path was; I could feel it in the same way I knew where the sun would rise each morning. I didn’t like any of the words I’d been given for it. “Heaven” felt too small, “the light” too vague.

Jack wasn’t going there, whatever I called it, not without more help than I could provide. He felt—permanent.

I, on the other hand, felt as though I had been manipulated into doing that to him. I didn’t know why it was important for Jack to be trapped here, neither alive nor quite dead anymore, but I was pretty sure I was following the spider’s script.

“Not a spider.” Elyna corrected herself because she’d heard Jack, not because she’d read my mind.

Jack had been able to make her hear him before this. Sometimes. I was afraid it would take him a lot less effort now.

“Not a spider,” I agreed. “Or not one of the usual ones.”

“You seemed to know something about it,” she said.

Adam looked at me, too. I shrugged and decided I didn’t want to have a conversation while I was sitting on the floor. I got up and noticed there was a wet Mercy-butt spot on the polished surface. I was tired of running around in wet clothes.

“I’ve only seen that spider once before,” I told them. “Yesterday.” I glanced at the clock on the wall in the office and watched the second hand tick past midnight. “Day before yesterday now.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t say anything about a spider.”

“It was at Uncle Mike’s,” I said. “Uncle Mike had a Christmas tree”—outside of a fae-dominated bar I could call a spade a spade and a Christmas tree a Christmas tree—“that had spiders spinning tinsel-like strands. Lots of little golden spiders, and the one silver one. I didn’t tell you about it because it was at Uncle Mike’s.”

“Lots of strange creatures at Uncle Mike’s,” agreed Adam. “You are sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the Soul Taker?”

I shrugged again. Instead of telling Adam that my newly acquired weird senses didn’t think the spider tasted like the Soul Taker or its god, as I might have if we’d been alone, I said, with equal truth, “Uncle Mike hustled me away from the tree. If he thought the spider had something to do with the Soul Taker, he’d have said.”

“And he’d have known,” Adam agreed.

“Uncle Mike?” asked Elyna.

“The fae who runs our local fae bar. He’s someone who knows things,” I told her. Then to Adam I said, “The spider did seem to take an interest in me. Maybe it was because of our recent supernatural spider encounters? Or maybe she was bored and thought I was interesting.”

“So did she follow you here?” Elyna asked. “Or did she hitch a ride? Where did you drive here from?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Surely I’d have felt it, if she had been in the SUV with us. But I couldn’t be certain. I didn’t know which was worse: that I hadn’t been aware of her presence in the confined space, or that she could somehow transport herself to where I was.

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