Page 8 of Angel's Smoke

“You’d bag things faster if you weren’t on your phone.”

Anna paid for her items, tucked the tote under her arm, and didn’t even have it in her to belabor the point. Much. “You know,” she said as she somehow managed to propel her exhausted body toward the exit, “it’s just snow. We’ll be shoveled out an hour after it stops falling. This is New Hampshire, not Florida. We have plows and road brine vehicles, and last I checked, Aurora’s municipal budget had plenty of overtime allocated to the Department of Public Works for snow removal. It’ll all be okay. This isn’t our first rodeo.”

The woman curled her nose and wiped it with the back of her hand. The gesture didn’t need sound effects for Anna’s first-trimester nausea muscle memory to fire right up. It also didn’t need the look of abhorrent disdain sweeping back and forth beneath eyelashes the length of a mascara brush and currently sizing up Anna’s paltry purchases.

And, like,reallyunfairly judging her, too, it was important to note.

“Well, it sure looks likeyourfirst rodeo.”

“I’m not a tourist,” Anna fired back. “I know my way around snow.”

A perfectly plucked eyebrow inched toward the ballcap’s brim. “Honey, I don’t care if you know your way around a Zamboni and carve chainsaw ice sculptures in your spare time. The store’s closing in”—she squinted at the clock above the customer service desk—“a minute and a half. Some of us have our own families to get back to, you know. We don’t just take care of the town’s needs. Look, I’m glad you got your, uh, baking supplies, but the forecast isn’t getting any friendlier.”

Yeah, neither are you, lady.

“The storm isn’t supposed to start until after midnight.”

The woman narrowed her gaze. “Oh, what? Are you a meteorologist?”

“Obviously not. I just know that there’s no snow on the ground right now.”

“And I’d like to get home while that’s still the case.”

Out of gas and interest, Anna nodded her defeat and ambled past the woman. “Understood. Have a good evening.”

That was the thing with small tourist-town grocers who were stuck between the financial slog of winter commerce and the shiny spring promise of new vacationer dollars. Stress was pretty much the only thing holding them together until the short-term rentals began filling up over spring break and the money started flowing again.

Anna’s stark circumstances were more than a glowing testament to that particular plight, so could she blame the store manager for wanting to hightail it back to who or whatever was waiting for her?

Once Anna managed to tuck herself into her car andnotsnag her coat in the door, she punched the ignition, tore into the most easily accessible bag of M&Ms (peanut), and let the satisfaction of mass-produced chocolate cascade over thoughts that had grown far too punishing in their perpetuity.

As she chugged along through Aurora’s picturesque downtown, a vague awareness of blue and red emergency lights strobing out several streets in front of her did their best to impress their urgency. But her maneuvers were more rote than reactive at that point, with her foot automatically easing off the gas in response to the braking lights of the car in front of her. Soon, her brakes were firmly applied, and her Subaru became just another car in a long line of lemmings inching toward the precipice of whatever cliff life had intended them to dive off.

“Traffic. Of course. Again, I should have known.”

What she couldn’t have known was how, when she reached into the shopping bag to snatch up another fistful of M&Ms, the orange and brown bags snuggled side by side would completely erase any blue and red hues that should have been at the forefront of her mind given the emergency vehicle presence up ahead.

Instead, brown and orange melded together in her thoughts, replacing the sharp primary colors in front of her with the rich brindled gaze of a man who wasn’t real and never would be.

Chapter5

The biting cold followed Iron around through the no-business-being-this-bustling streets of Aurora, until it settled over the back of his neck like an enemy’s icy breath. On some level, he supposed that was what it was. Time. Failure. The absence of achieving his goals while the world continued to buzz around him in a kaleidoscope of taunting confusion.

A storm was coming, and that was enough of a wrench in Iron’s plans not only to sidetrack his pursuit of the woman from his dreams but make it so every fucking mortal establishment he’d relied on for answers was effectively shutting down for the time being.

Three days. For three days, he’d neither dreamed of her nor anything but her. He’d never been much of a fairness guy. Kind of hard to believe in the stuff when he’d gotten the shit end of the stick for more years than trees existed, but if he had to argue a point, it sure as hell would have been along the lines of addiction logic.

Why would the universe rob him of his months-long nightly thoughts, only for them to consume his every waking moment since and offer up no hope of ever finding her?

The harsh wind picked up to a relentless degree, a lovely side effect of Aurora being built close to the valleys long ago carved out from the White Mountains. Wind tunnels were common enough, but coupled with unseasonably low temperatures and late-winter precipitation that the downtown businesses had hoped was behind them and misery was always the result.

Regardless, his bad mood followed him around like a shroud of despondency for the damned and did nothing to counteract the cheerful scenes of the soon-to-be-dawning spring that some mortals had already adorned their businesses with.

Aurora held all the trappings of a tourist town ready to peel off its winter layer, unwrap its synthetic spring flora (because in New England, true spring was a far cry from Gregorian calendar spring), and welcome customers with the promise of pastels, new merchandise, and seasonal eats. Storefront window displays, which had upheld their commitments to comfort and coziness only a week ago, now boasted products of vibrant colors pledging vibes of rebirth and renewal. The popular boutiques offered boots with noticeably shorter calf lengths while the sports and recreation outlet across from the municipal park had swapped out its skis and winter wear for freaking pickleball rackets and eco-friendly water bottles that could make water taste like lemons or grapefruit or whatever just by adding some calorie-free powders to the water (for an additional charge, of course).

As if squeezing an actual fucking lemon wouldn’t do the same thing, but dead horses and whatnot.

While the shops sat pregnant with spring supplies and sales, the rest of the streets were a clogged congestion of mortals snuffling up last-minute items before everything shut down for the immediate future and the weather decided to make itself known. On any other night, Iron would have applauded the mortals’ efforts for putting forethought into their safety. Tonight, however, his skin itched with the overstimulation of it all: the speedy shuffling of feet on concrete, the air perfumed with the impatience of traffic exhaust, the twitchy honks of drivers both enraged and eager to move two inches from where they’d been a moment ago.

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