Page 1 of A Heart of Winter
Pity Party
It was snowing again.
Great wet clumps of snowflakes swirled through the air past the window, down to the street far below, where the dark splotches that were people scurried along the sidewalk to escape the storm. Some of the clumps smacked against the glass with accusatory force.
My best friend’s face was reflected there in front of me. Her lovely dark face was surrounded by a riot of tight curls, the tips slightly bleached by the sun. Apparently, she’d been living somewhere sunny when I’d called to beg her help.
Her black eyes were silently saying “I told you so,” even if she wasn’t the type to say the words out loud. She knew well enough that I was already screaming it at myself.
Twenty years ago, when I’d started training Michael, she’d told me that it was a bad idea. That he was a terrible student. That him trying to push our relationship to another level was manipulative and shady as hell.
Me?
I’d been in love.
Michael was beautiful and clever and so very magical, and those were three of my favorite things. He’d been thirty-fivethen, still full of the optimism of being young and raised human. His sandy-brown hair always had this perfect wave in it, like it wouldn’t dare be out of place. His blue eyes were the color of the sky on a clear winter morning, and as much as I was angry with the snow right then, winter had always been my favorite season.
I wasn’t angry with the snow because I didn’t love it anymore. I was angry because I couldn’t control it.
But it was all definitely my fault.
The snowfall became so intense that the world outside whited out for a moment, and then Morwenna’s hand was on my back. “Come sit down and have some tea.”
Her voice was low and smooth as the honey she would put in my tea, and it was the first thing that had sounded good in days.
“He said I’m boring,” I told her, turning in her direction and burying my face against her shoulder. “He said we live in New York, and hiding away in myridiculous penthouseis boring and he didn’t want to do it anymore.”
She snorted, but wrapped her arm around me firmly and led me toward the sofa, where the steaming tea set was already waiting on the coffee table. I could smell the tea throughout the room—peppermint chocolate rooibos, one of my favorites.
Morwenna really was a better friend than I deserved.
Michael, on the other hand . . .
Well, maybe that was my fault too.
I wasn’t as much of a shut-in as he implied, but neither did I spend my time living the New York high life, though I could easily afford to.
I didn’t go to nightclubs or huge fancy parties. I saw the occasional show and shopped in the ridiculously expensive high end grocery store on the corner that had a collection of cheeses from almost every continent at per-pound prices that sometimes still shocked me.
Not that I couldn’t afford them, but it was a reminder of how much the world had changed. A few hundred years ago, you could buy a whole horse for a handful of dollars. Now, the same amount couldn’t even buy a pound of the good fontina.
Still, I’d always been sensible with money, and frankly, being a witch and living for hundreds of years tended to be good for a person’s accounts. Some witches were like Morwenna, who didn’t pay much attention to silly things like money, owning nothing, creating whatever she needed, and living as she liked. Some were like me, fitting myself into a place in human society, selling my services as a consultant for a wildly astronomical fee on occasion, and living in luxury because of my powers and the money they made me.
What could I say? I liked my penthouse apartment in Manhattan with its white velvet upholstered furniture, my beautiful full length cashmere overcoat, and the doorman downstairs who called me “sir.”
It was good to have fine things in one’s life.
It was important for someone who’d grown up an urchin, unwanted son of a rich man and his mistress, abandoned at five when my mother had died and my father hadn’t given a damn about me. I’d spent my whole early life treated like an inconvenience. Like the world would have been better off if I’d never been born.
Then the witch had appeared and said I was special, taking me out of the filthy alley I had been inhabiting.
She’d been a crone even then, and taken me off to her cabin in the middle of nowhere, where she was already raising and training Morwenna.
We could have been enemies and seen each other as competition, but instead, Morwenna and I had bonded. Fast friends, almost brother and sister. We’d both been from the lowest echelons of society, starving street children, when thewitch had found us. We’d both known how good an opportunity we had in learning with the old woman, and also, had always been interested in latching onto every opportunity given us.
Now, three hundred years since, Morwenna and I were still thick as thieves, though our mentor had long since passed on. We’d buried her there, in the back of her lush herb garden behind the cabin where she’d raised us, and still visited now and then.
“I can hear you obsessing,” she said, thrusting a cup of tea into my hands. “Drink.”
