LITMIR.BIZ

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matter a damn to her. But professional pride was involved. With her last dying breath, if need be, she was going to bring that damn sawdust-stuffed equine doomsayer back in. Someday. When everything else got settled.

      The thought made her laugh, bitterly. The Cosa was in the middle of a battle for survival against enemies it hadn’t been able to identify, who were determined to wipe them out of the city. Her partner’s former employers had screwed them over and left them to hang. The Mage Council was playing their usual we-know-nothing, did-nothing game with the rest of the Cosa. All in all, “settled” wasn’t something Wren expected to see anytime soon.

      Although these past few weeks of the new year had been oddly if pleasantly calm: nobody had set a psi-bomb off anywhere near her; nobody had tried to bribe, threaten, hijack or otherwise annoy her or any of her friends; Sergei was off on a legitimate business trip for his gallery; and she was actually catching up on her filing, bill-paying, and her exercise routine. The entire city seemed to have come to a pause.

      Hell, the entire city had come to a pause, thanks to the weather.

      “It’s still snowing.” P.B. had given up staring at her, now looking out the window, one white-furred, black-clawed paw pushing aside the dark green drape. His short muzzle, which—along with the plush white fur and rounded bear-like ears—had been the cause of his nickname of “Polar Bear,” pressed up against the glass, his breath causing the window to fog over.

      “It’s been snowing for the past seven hours,” Wren said as patiently as she could manage. “This isn’t a news flash.” After two months of winter, snow of any sort wasn’t news.

      The constant curtain of white was making her stir-crazy, too, but she could live with it. Without the snow, Wren had no confidence that the agreement she helped broker—that the Eastern Mage Council and tristate lonejacks would sit down and shut up and play nice together, at least while they had murdering bigots out for their blood—would have held together longer than a week, much less the month-and-counting.

      It helped that attacks by those bigots who had been trying to “cleanse” Manhattan of anything supernatural had all but stopped. She didn’t think they were gone, though. The threat of the Cosa finally working together, in however limited a fashion, wasn’t enough to work that miracle, no matter what some of her fellow members might want to believe. No, it was far more likely that frostbite was a hell of a deterrent—as was the fact that their prospective victims were wisely staying inside, where it was warm.

      No matter. She’d take whatever reason, if it gave them a breather.

      P.B. turned away from the window and hopped down off the bench, kicking the pizza box with one clawed foot as he moved. “Hey. There’s still a slice left.”

      “Yours.”

      “I’m full,” he said, by his voice, borderline perturbed by that admission.

      “You’re full?” That got her to look up. She stood, creaking unpleasantly in the knees, and went over to look out the window, as well. “The Stomach that Digested Manhattan is full? Damn. There’s the fourth horseman, riding past.”

      “Oh, shut up,” he snarled, uncharacteristically. “I wanted kung pao chicken, remember? But you didn’t want to order Chinese. For the first time ever, speaking of the end of the world.”

      Wren didn’t snarl back at him, but only because she could feel current coil in her core, the power looking for an excuse to get funky. Control. She needed to maintain control. P.B. knew why she didn’t want Chinese food. Or he should know, anyway. With Chinese food came Chinese fortune cookies. Fortune cookies, in this city, had an unpleasant tendency to be written by actual Seers. Sometimes, not knowing what was about to fall on your head was a blessing.

      Wren counted backward from ten in English, then up again in Russian, the only thing she knew in that language except for a few useful swear words. Stay calm, Valere. He was cranky. She was cranky. Stir-crazy didn’t look good on either one of them.

      This was the third day of snow this week, snowing hard since dawn the day before, and P.B. had been bunking with her for two days of it. She would have told him to go home, but Sergei had been caught out of town when the airports shut down, and she had been glad enough for the company at that point to tell the demon that he could stay as long as he liked.

      Apparently, he liked overnight.

      Besides. She had no idea what P.B’s home was actually like, much less if it was currently livable. The law said landlords had to provide heat when it dropped below a certain temperature, but the demon was unlikely to call the tenant complaint hotline, much less appeal to a disciplinary board.

      “We need to get out,” she said. “Do something.” Something other than eat and prod unruly paperwork, anyway. She wasn’t able to focus properly on the lock schematics, so long as P.B. was restless.

      “As you just pointed out, it’s been snowing all day. There’s, like, a foot of snow out there. This, in case you missed it, is a problem for me.”

      Wren turned and looked at the demon, all four feet of him standing upright and reaching. The vision of him lost in a snowbank, only the black tips of his claws and the black tip of his nose visible, made her laugh for the first time in days. She didn’t think he would appreciate her sharing the image, though.

      “Let’s get out of here,” she said again. “Come on.”

      It only took a few minutes for Wren to lace up her boots, pull on a sweater, and grab her heaviest coat out of the closet. The cold air was like a slap against her face, after the dry heat of her apartment, and she stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake, just because she could.

      P.B. promptly went out and measured himself against the nearest plowed-in snowbank, coming out about six inches the victor.

      Her street hadn’t been plowed in hours, and the sidewalks were impassible. They trudged through ankle-deep snow in the middle of the street, watching their breath crystallize in the night air.

      Most of the population was safe indoors, watching out windows, catching updates on the television, or determinedly pretending that this latest storm Wasn’t Happening. But a few equally snow-loving souls were out and about: Wren saw a couple of teenagers building a scraggly looking snowman wearing a Yankees cap; a young gay couple walking slowly glove in glove; and at least three groups of kids, dashing about madly as though they had never seen snow before.

      Maybe they hadn’t, not on this scale. The Winter of Snows was a long time ago now, for all that she remembered it vividly, and the past few winters had been pretty dry.

      Her brow furrowed under the wool watch cap as she thought about that. Was there anything potentially worrisome about that, other than from a drought perspective? No, after the heat wave of the summer past, it would make sense they’d be due for another extreme winter. No need to assume anything more sinister—or supernatural—than that.

      Anyway, other than the occasional thunderstorming, lonejacks and Council both knew better than to mess with the weather. Mother Nature was a bigger badass than any ten Talents, and less predictable than your average blissed-out, neurotic, brain-fried wizzart.

      Spring would come. Eventually. In the meantime, she should just be thankful for the peace and quiet the storms were bringing to a city that badly needed it. Having to layer blankets at night was a decent trade, for that.

      All right, the rest of the city, unaware of what was going on, might not know that they needed it, but she did. Wren had been starting to feel worn decidedly thin by all the new demands on her: the endless Negotiating and Line-walking and Behaving when all she wanted to do was kick everyone out and lock the door behind them.

      She was not good at playing with others. Not at all. In fact—

      “Hey, Valere!” P.B. called.

      Wren turned in the direction of his voice, and got a faceful of cold white powder smack on the left side of her face.

      “Argh!” Tears came to her eyes, but she was grinning,

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