The girl—Valentina—smiled. “I wasn’t working here a year ago,” she protested.
His lips curved, but he didn’t look at her. “That’s why it’s magic.”
Tana glanced at the racks of clothes against one wall, with open suitcases near them, each one overflowing with shirts and coats. A few mannequins had been arranged to look as though they were tied up, and those wore an assortment of sparkly dresses and hats. Oil lamps burned on several surfaces, making shadows dance.
A woman descended the stairs, her heeled shoes loud on the wood. At the sound of her arrival, Valentina pulled away from Jameson. The woman was the oldest person that Tana had seen so far inside the gates, with long, gray-streaked hair, fine enough to look like spiderwebs where it caught on her black gown. A heavy rose-gold medallion hung around her neck, and she wore bright blue earrings almost the exact color of her eyes.
“Well, don’t just stand there, Valentina,” she said to the girl. “Lock the doors behind our customers. We want everyone to have the safest possible shopping experience.”
Valentina took a few steps toward the door, before Jameson caught the knob.
“So I’m going to go,” he said, turning it and stepping out into the street. “Good luck, Tana. Bye, Valentina. Bye, Ms. Kurkin.”
“Oh, stay,” said Ms. Kurkin. “Have a cup of tea with us.”
“I can’t,” Jameson said. “But Tana is new to town. She could probably use one.”
Ms. Kurkin smiled. “Always with the strays.”
Valentina turned the locks behind Jameson with a single glance out through the barred speakeasy window. Tana wondered at his quick departure, wondered if he hated being locked in as much as she did. But given that she was the one who’d been bitten about twenty-six hours ago, she was probably more of a danger to them than they were to her. She was just glad they didn’t know it.
“Well,” said Ms. Kurkin. “So what can I do for you? Something to sell, I’m supposing. Something you stole from your mother back home? A precious little locket your grandmother gave you when you were a baby? Family heirloom?”
“Mostly I need to buy stuff,” Tana said, guessing that Hedda Kurkin didn’t much care for the kids that trooped through her store. But then Tana thought of the garnet necklace with the empty locket that Gavriel had given her, the one rattling around in the bottom of her purse, the one that made her shudder when she considered where it must have come from. She reached into her bag and pulled it out, setting it down on a glass counter that held various sparkling items, from earrings dripping with rhinestones to diamond rings. The garnets shone dully, like dozens of punctures welling with blood. “I do have one thing to sell, actually. The clasp is broken, though.”
“Hmmmm,” Hedda said, walking behind the counter and pulling out a jeweler’s loupe, holding it in front of her left eye.
“These are Bohemian garnets—from the Latin granatum, for pomegranate, because of their resemblance to the seeds. Probably from the Czech Republic, although the setting is Russian. You can see the symbol for gold.” She picked the necklace up, weighing it in her hand. “Quite lovely. Old. Sturdy. I could give you six hundred dollars for it—half cash, half credit—although it’d be worth four times that to the right buyer.”
Tana sucked in her breath abruptly enough that it made a sound.
“Unfortunately,” Hedda continued. “You’re not likely to find the right buyer inside Coldtown.”
An antique necklace from Russia. How likely was it that the Thorn of Istra had pulled that off the throat of someone in a parking lot and had it—totally coincidentally—come from the country where he was born? But if he hadn’t stolen it, then it had been something that belonged to him, something he’d brought with him all the way from Paris, something he’d owned long before that.
And he’d given it to her.
The woman gave Tana an odd look. “Or for thirty dollars, I could fix the clasp while you shop and you could wear it out on the town tonight. It’s a beautiful piece. You don’t have to sell your soul right away.”
Nodding mutely, Tana reached into her purse and handed the woman behind the counter two twenties from the odd assortment of stained bills Gavriel had given her. And like a normal shopkeeper at a normal shop, the woman tapped a few keys on the register and counted out ten dollars in change.
“I’ll start on it now,” the woman said. “Valentina will show you the rest of the store while you wait.”