THREE
Shivering violently, Cooper waited in Kay's office for her to come back, a feminine shawl that smelled like flowers draped over his shoulders as he practically sat on the space heater. It roared as it kicked out the heat, but he still shook with cold and shock. His shiny shoes squished with snow melt, and his slacks were soaked from it. A soft bundle of fur cowered in his lap, and he curved a hand about the little black kitten as if it was a talisman. What the hell happened? he thought, flexing his free hand to see his strength returning. He'd say he had gotten some weird drug into him and had hallucinated the entire thing if not for the changes in Kay's appearance-changes she didn't seem to know he saw.
The familiar soft sounds of her feet filled him with new foreboding, and he managed an uneasy smile as she pushed past the hanging sheets of milky plastic to hand him a cup of coffee. "Better?" she asked as she sat on the edge of her flower-decaled desk and sipped her own hot chocolate.
Cooper set the cup down, the heat from it seeming to burn his cold-soaked fingers. Kay was sitting almost as close as he was to the heater, not wearing her coat but still having her scarf around her neck to make her look kind of trendy-in a petite, preppy, sword-wielding-warrior, pet-shop-owner kind of way. "Yeah," he croaked out, feeling his throat. "Tell me that didn't happen."
The woman gave him a toothy smile. "What, you getting drunk and me having to spend your Christmas bonus on bail money? You owe me, Cooper. You owe me a week of Sundays in the store, and don't think I'm not going to take advantage of it."
Cooper's lips parted. "Jail?" he said, one hand around the kitten, the other circling the hot coffee. "I was at a dance club. They were vampires, and you broke down the door and slaughtered them." He didn't believe it, but that's what he'd seen, and he risked a glance at her, her eyes crinkled up in laughter as she sat on the desk like she was a normal person-a little closed and reserved perhaps, but normal.
Her laughter dying away, Kay brought a knee to her chin and wrapped her arms around it. "Vampires," she said as she rested her head on her knee. "That's what the cop said you were raving about. Drink your coffee," she said, glancing at it. "It will make everything all better."
A quiver went through Cooper at her words even as he lifted the mug, his grandmother's words echoing in his thoughts again. Feeling Kay's eyes on him, he dutifully brought the hot coffee to his lips, letting it touch his lips and nothing more-faking it. Sure enough, a hint of bitterness blossomed, reminding him of that sloppy, little-girl kiss that Emily had left on his lips. He hadn't eaten anything, but what if that kiss had changed him? It might explain how he got the door open and could see the changes he now saw in Kay, things that had been under his nose for three years, but he hadn't seen until now.
"Better?" she asked, all innocence and light, and he pretended to take another drink, sneaking looks at her and wanting to be sure what he was seeing was real. "You take the cake, Cooper," she said as she slid from the desk and stretched to make Cooper look away fast. "It's not every boss who will come down at two in the morning to bail out an employee. It's a good thing you got drunk enough to be hauled out, though. The place burned down an hour later. You were lucky. No one made it out. They'd bolted all the doors to keep out the riffraff, and everyone inside died. Terrible. Just terrible."
"Yeah, lucky." Looking past the clear plastic curtain, Cooper had a view of the bus stop on the opposite side of the street. Under the slatted bench was a straggly black cat with a bedraggled kitten. They'd been there for the last fifteen minutes. Felicity and Emily? Cooper had been waiting for them to do something, but all they did was stare malevolently at the store. He was not going out until they left-or had a dog with him.
He shivered, and Kay touched his shoulder. The warmth of her hand came through the blanket to feel like the sun itself. "You okay?" she asked in concern, but he couldn't look at her, afraid she might notice where his eyes were drawn to.
"Fine," he said, his gaze on the old oak floorboards. "I need to warm up before I go home."
She turned away and reached for some paperwork. "Sure, go ahead. I can take you home when I pick up the puppies."
"Mind if I pick one out?" he said, and Kay hesitated in her reach for a pencil. "I've been wanting to get a dog for a long time," he said, carefully not looking at her. "I can keep it here at the store with me in the day, and take it home at night. Besides, it will give Ember here someone to grow up with," he added, petting the kitten still curled up in a frightened ball against him. He couldn't call her Happy-that was a name of a snack cake.
"That's a great idea." Kay stuck the pencil behind her ear and headed to the front of the store with a clipboard to do the year-end inventory.
He watched her walk away, free to stare now that she wasn't looking. Next to that long pointy ear of hers is probably a really good place to wedge things, he thought as he watched her floor-length, dexterous tail push aside the grimy plastic curtain so she could go through without touching it with her hands. It wasn't that her pointy ears were especially big. Actually, they were kind of small and cute, but the little horns poking out right next to them cinched it. The pencil tucked between her ear and that cute little wedge of bone wasn't going anywhere.
And neither was he, he decided, holding Ember close and breathing her fur smelling of pine and iron.
Temson Estates
I wrote "Temson Estates" about the same time that I began working on the short that eventually became the first chapter of Dead Witch Walking. I wanted to know what a dryad might be like if the Greek and Roman visions of tree spirits were real, possibly giving a scientific reason for both their absence and possible resurgence. I played with a few ideas here that I went on to use very loosely when developing the Bis/Jenks short, "Ley Line Drifter," but I liked my dryads here better, which might be why I never took the Hollows dryads any further.
That two of the characters have the same names as my to-be editor and her assistant was just plain weird, especially since it would be another year or two until I actually knew of their existence. I thought about changing them, but sometimes you just have to let the weird things stay.
Will shifted uncomfortably in the hard-backed chair, hot in the wool suit that he'd bought yesterday in a doomed attempt to try to make a good impression. It was itchy, but he wasn't going to run a finger between it and his neck a second time. He had a feeling the man who had sold it to him had taken advantage of him, but that only proved yet again that he was totally out of place here among the rich carpets, tooled mahogany, and good manners. The young woman across from him already thought he was a crass Yank. Maybe she was right. It wasn't his fault he was here-not that she'd ever see it that way-summoned across how many time zones to sit in a foreign law office and face down these two women over something he had no control over.