Fine, then.
I called upon Winter. Big-time. I let the endlessly empty cold fill me, subsume me, and winds rose around me as the power of Winter flowed in. I let it freeze everything—my concerns of what would happen if I failed Mab, my curiosity about what was coming next, the lust inspired by the pilots (whom I suddenly realized had probably been placed where they had precisely to test my focus and resolve).
And then I let it out.
All my life, magically speaking, I had been used to being a spinner of cobwebs of illusion and mental magic. I’d always had enormous finesse, and always lacked the kind of power I had seen my mentor wield. I’d forced myself to adjust to the idea that I would always have to be subtle, indirect, manipulative—that only indirect power was mine to command.
That was no longer true.
There was a thunder crack that thrummed from the surface of the sea as Winter’s ice froze the ocean ten feet down for half a mile in every direction. The yacht suddenly locked into place, no longer pitching and rolling.
I’d have to do the math to be sure, but I thought that little trick had taken as much energy to accomplish as fairly large military-grade munitions. The two pilots just stared at me, suddenly uncertain about what they were attempting to play with.
That’s right, pretty boys. Mess with me, I’ll hit you so hard, your children will be born bruised.
I gave them a sunny little smile, vaulted the side rail, and walked to shore through howling winds before the ice started breaking up again.
THEY ACTUALLY NAMED the town Unalaska, Alaska. Despite the appeal of an innately oxymoronic name, Unalaska struck me as something closer to a colony on an alien world than as a mortal village. It’s a collection of homes and businesses around Dutch Harbor, famous for being the central port for the fishing boats on that show about how dangerous it is to catch crabs.
(Actual crabs. Literal ones, like, in the water. Sheesh, this Winter mantle thing is so childish sometimes, because it’s definitely not me.)
The buildings are all squat, sturdy, and on the small side—the better to resist massive winds and snows and rains and frozen ocean spray that turns to coatings of ice when whipped up by a storm. The town was surrounded by looming, steep, formidable mountains devoid of human markings, and clung to the limited flat spaces at their feet like some kind of lichen stubbornly hanging on in the shade of a large stone. The icy sea filled whatever vision was not occupied by the sky or the mountains, cold and uncaring and implacable. The sky overhead was a neutral grey, promising neither sunlight nor storms yet ready to deliver both with an impartial hand and little warning.
It wasn’t a place that was inviting, kind, or merciful to mere humanity, and yet there they were.
We were. There we were.
I trudged through freezing winds and half an inch of sleet that had hardened into something between ice and snow and didn’t shiver.
Harry Dresden once warned me about lying to myself.
I tried not to think about that too hard as I walked through the endless twilight of an Aleutian autumn and into town. I threw a glamour, nothing fancy, over myself as I went. I muddled my features from stark-boned beauty down to something much plainer. I darkened my hair, my skin, both of which were paler than usual these days. I added on a few pounds, because I’d never really recovered the weight I’d lost when I was playing grim-dark superhero on the streets of Chicago, when Harry had been mostly dead. Everything about the look said unremarkable, and I added on the barest hint of an aura that I was an awfully boring person. It would be easier to move around that way.
Then I opened my senses to try to track down the elusive Fae who lived among the human population in Unalaska.
THE WIND WAS kicking up, with more rain and sleet on the way, and apparently the inhabitants of Unalaska knew it. No one was on the streets, and a few cars moved about furtively, like mice getting out of the way of a predator. I sensed a trickle of quivery energy coming from one low building, a place called the Elbow Room, and I went on in.
I was immediately subsumed in the energy of a crowded, raucous little dive. Music and the scent of beer, seared meat, and smoke flooded into my face, but worse were the sudden emotions that filled my head. There was drunken elation and drunken dread and drunken sullen anger and drunken lust; mainly, though, there were sober versions of all of those emotions as well. Threads of frustration and tension wove through the other emotions—servers, I imagined, overworked and cautious. Wariness rode steadily through the room from one corner, doubtless the bouncer, and cheerful greed hummed tunelessly under the rest, doubtless from the dive’s owner.
I’m a wizard and I specialize in delicate magicks. I’m awfully sensitive to people’s emotions, and running into this batch was like walking into a wall of none-too-clean water. It took me a moment to get my balance back, adjust, and walk inside.
“Close the door!” someone shouted. I took note of a young man, his face reddened and chapped by frigid wind. “Christ, I been cold enough to freeze my balls off for days!”
“That explains a whole hell of a lot, Clint!” shouted another man from the far side of the bar, to a round of general, rough laughter.
I closed the door behind me and tried to ignore the sullen, swelling anger radiating off Clint. There was something very off about his vibe. When it comes to emotions, people and monsters have a lot in common. It takes a very, very alien mind to feel emotions that are significantly different from those you’d find in human beings—and there’s a vast range of them, too. Throw in mind-altering substances, like hormones and drugs, and it’s absolutely unreal the variety available.
But I recognized an angry sexual predator when I sensed one.
I faked a few shivers against the cold as I wedged myself in at the bar and nodded to the bartender, a woman who looked as if she might wrestle Kodiaks for fun on her days off, if she ever took a day off. I put down some cash, secured a beer, and felt an ugly presence crawling up my spine.
I took a sip of the beer, some kind of Russian monstrosity that tasted as if it had been brewed from Stalin’s sweat and escaped a Soviet gulag, and turned casually to find Clint standing behind me, about three inches too close, and breathing a little too hard.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“Wow,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s got to be the best opening line in history,” I said, and swigged some more beer. Hairs probably didn’t start popping out on my chest, making little bing noises as they did, but I can’t swear to it. “Did you want something?”
“I don’t know you,” he repeated. His breath was coming faster, and there was a kind of glossy film on his eyes I didn’t like much. “Everyone knows everyone here. You’re new.”
“But not interested,” I said, and turned away.
He clamped a hand down on my shoulder, painfully hard, and spun me back around. “I’m talking to you.”
Once upon a time, that sudden physicality would have made my adrenaline spike and my heart pound with apprehension. Now my whole head suddenly went icy-hot with anger instead. I felt my lips pull back from my teeth. “Oh, pumpkin,” I said. “You should walk away. You aren’t going to like how this one plays out.”
“You need to come with me,” Clint said. He started to pull at me. He was strong. Wobbly on his feet, but strong.
“Take your hand off me before I lose my temper,” I said, my voice very sharp, and pitched to carry to everyone in the room, even over the noise and music.
And I got almost no reaction from the room at all.