The Winter Long

“If the wards are sealed, I don’t think I can talk it into letting two people inside. Find my boys. I’ll find your son.” I didn’t wait for her to reply. I just turned and stalked across the sand, walking through the bands of concealing fog until I reached the base of the cliff. It wasn’t quite sheer, and generations of San Francisco beachgoers had been able to find their way down. I walked along the rocky wall until I found a series of shallow steps someone had taken the time to hew out of the stone. That was as close as I was going to get to an engraved invitation. I brushed a little more of the sand off myself, and started to climb.

It was a cold enough, foggy enough day that even the exertion of climbing wasn’t drying me off. My wet clothes got heavier and harder to carry with every step I took. I didn’t take any of them off. The most logical thing to lose would have been my leather jacket, and that was never going to happen. So I climbed, wet and cold and furious, pulling myself hand over hand where the steps became too shallow to be anything more than suggestions, until finally—after what felt like an eternity—the slope turned gentler, and the last ten yards became almost reasonable. I straightened as I walked up the last few steps, and then I was standing on level ground, with scrub brush and sticker-plants tugging at my calves and ankles. I turned. The San Francisco Art Museum was about two hundred yards away, sitting serene on the edge of the cliff I’d just climbed.

I paused, turning again, this time to look at the water. There were no signs of Dianda and her people—or of my boys. If Tybalt and Quentin were out there, I couldn’t see them.

Maybe I was never going to see them again.

The thought was chilling, even in comparison to the cold seawater soaking through my clothes. I forced it away as hard as I could, trying to bury it beneath the layers of my exhaustion and my determination to get into the sealed knowe. We fell because someone had locked the wards. That meant that everything which came after our fall—everything I wasn’t going to let myself think about—was that person’s fault. The more I focused on that, the easier it became to shut away the things I didn’t want to be true. Someone had done this to us. Someone was to blame. And whoever it was, they were going to regret messing with my family.

I stalked across the stubby field behind the museum until I came to the ramshackle frame of an old storage shed. It had probably been intended as a place where tools and garden supplies could be kept away from the refined eyes of museum patrons, but the landscapers hadn’t used it in decades. Some of them even said it was haunted. Yet somehow it remained, even as they kept their rakes and weed killer in safe, well-lit closets. It should have been torn down as an eyesore. The same spells that birthed the rumor of its haunting kept that from ever happening.

The door was locked, sealed with clever charms as well as a more mundane padlock. I produced a set of lock picks from inside my jacket, flicking through them until I found the pick and wrench I wanted. Holding the pick between the first two fingers of my right hand, I pressed that palm against the cool tin door.

“You remember me,” I said quietly. “I never forced you to go against your nature, or tried to wrest you away from the owners you’d chosen, and when I couldn’t be the Countess you needed, I found you someone who could play the part. I’ve tried to be a friend, when I could, and I’ve tried to do no harm when friendship wasn’t possible. Now I’m here because I need a favor. I am begging you. If you have any power over the spells that hold your wards in place, let me in. I need to know what’s going on. I need to know why the doors are locked. Please.”