Who were those ladies? And why were they after me? If Dren didn’t know what pack they were from … what did that mean?
Gideon missed more food than went in, making a huge mess with each bite. Feeding a grown adult took a lot of time and reminded me of my nursing school days. Seemed like half my time was spent sitting in the rooms of elderly patients, feeding one half spoon of applesauce or pudding at a time. Sometimes those little old ladies were so hungry, and they hadn’t been properly, patiently, fed in so long, it just made you want to cry. Once people lost the ability to feed themselves, that was the beginning of the end. But not for Gideon, which made me want to cry a little, too.
I fed him until he didn’t want to eat anymore and I felt like a better person for it when I was done. At least one thing had gone right today, and for the past hour or so, no one had tried to kill me.
“Let’s find out what our fortunes are,” I said, like I did at the end of every Chinese meal, except most times I was talking to Minnie. I cracked open two cookies like walnuts and fished the slips of paper out of the cookie shards.
“Here’s yours, Gideon,” I said. “Now is not the time to circle mints.”
Gideon tilted his head at me.
“I’m so not kidding. That’s what it says. We should take it back.” I snorted and pulled out mine. “You will meet a tall, dark stranger? So original. Thanks, fortune cookie.”
I’d prefer not to meet any more strangers right now, maybe forever. I crumpled the fortune up and tossed it aside. At least it hadn’t said anything about meeting them in an alley. Or with knives.
* * *
I set our dishes in the sink along with the ones I still needed to wash from Christmas, and tried to figure out how best to occupy my time. Gideon was a couch hog, and hanging out in my bedroom with Veronica only a closet door away didn’t sound like much fun.
I decided to suck it up, take the folding chair out of my closet, and hang in the corner on the Internet. Minnie came along to agree that this suited her just fine, if only I’d magically create more lap space for her. I’d just about negotiated balancing a laptop and a cat when my phone rang.
“Sorry, Minnie.” I set her down, and put the laptop down beside her. Maybe it’d be Anna or Sike calling me back with some decent explanations. About time. I found my phone, and didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Edie, it’s Gina.”
“Hey! What’s up?” I immediately thought of everything I could have done wrong last night, when I’d been briefly in charge of Winter. “Did I screw something up?”
“Nooooo, this isn’t one of those calls.” Her voice was a little slurred. Then she was quiet.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes!” She protested. Then more silence. “No. I just had a fight with Brandon.” There was a hitch in her voice as she said his name. “I think we just broke up.”
I winced. “Oh, Gina, I’m so sorry.”
“It was the right thing to do, you know? There were extenuating circumstances but—”
“Where are you? You shouldn’t be alone.” There was the small matter of why she’d called me, instead of her other friends, assuming she had other friends, which she ought to. We couldn’t all come from the island of misfit toys. There were loud noises in the background. Voices, music. She shouted an address over them. I plunked it into Google Maps. Just twenty minutes uptown. “Okay—I’ll be there soon, all right?”
“All right. Thanks. I owe you.”
“No problem.” I’d almost gotten her killed once before. It was the least I could do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Before I left, I put on my silver-buckled belt over my older coat and silently thanked Peter. I didn’t have a printer, and my phone’s GPS was sketchy given winter clouds, so I wrote down the driving instructions instead, after doing a street view to make sure I’d recognize it when I got there. Online, it’d looked like a warehouse. In reality, it was a bar. The outside was nondescript—the only thing that gave away its barness was the presence of a single, large bouncer. I walked up to him, wondering how things were going to go.
I smiled hopefully up as he stared down. “You don’t smell like us.”
Of course. This was a were-bar. I should have thought to ask. What if the women I’d just fought off were in here somewhere? Foxes, meet chicken.
But if Gina was inside, maybe all was well. Or they’d kidnapped her and put her up to it. One of those two things. The bouncer was still giving me an eye—chances were if someone inside wanted me dead, they’d have told the muscle to let me through.