Chapter 3

Ty's gaze drifted to a couple onlookers, and he calmly waited until they turned away and I was planted in my seat again.

"This is big," he said in a low voice. "Too big for fuck-ups of any kind, which is why we're here, in a public, loud place."

"I can handle it. Just like I can handle the Diamond Dogs. Just tell me what it is, and I'll get it done."

He slid his hands palms up across the table between the bowl of fennel seeds and wine as if asking for one or both of them, but his eyes didn't spark with a question. They shined with hope.

"This could end winter," he said, enunciating every word. "This could strip the Isa faes' power over us for good."

I snapped back in my seat as if he'd punched me, my mind reeling to stretch out his words and find any holes in them. Was he shitting me?

He shook his head, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "No, I'm not shitting you."

Had I asked that out loud? My mouth hung open like maybe I had. He'd always been the smart one and could've easily landed a good job inside Reykjavik where most other witches worked. Maybe he didn't want to be a peon for those who had stolen witches' power for themselves. I sure as hell didn't. Or maybe it was the FUCK YOU bow that was holding him back.

Blue flannel smothered into the seat next to me, followed by a vat of spiced cologne. I looked up into the red-rimmed eyes of a male witch I'd never seen before sitting much too close. Sugary alcoholic fumes wafted from his breath, but instead of disgusting me, they made me lean in to inhale, so close our lips almost touched. I didn't care. My insides gnawed with thirst for anything fermented and sweet.

"Come on, beautiful," the stranger said in a husky, slurred voice.

And then he took my hands and pulled.

Shockwaves stabbed up my arms with steel teeth. I cried out. The whole world tilted for half a second, and in the next instant, I shot my arm out and shoved it forward with all my might, into the back of the guy's head and slammed it down on the table.

I curled myself into the opposite corner of the booth, trying to breathe through the pain lighting up behind my closed eyelids, while Ty's voice drifted in and out. Seconds-minutes?-later, the agony, though never, ever, completely gone, faded some. I cracked open an eye.

"He's fine. He's just really tired," Ty said to a nearby table between a smile so fake, I could hear it. "Is he dead?" he asked me in a hoarse whisper. "Damn it, Hadley. What the hell?"

No, the guy wasn't dead. He was slumped over the table, his shoulders rising and falling in a steady rhythm, but blood had gathered in a small pool under his nose.

"Is he one of yours?" I asked.

"No," Ty said.

"Then pour the fennel seeds in the wine and unwrap that straw." I nodded toward the straw next to the wall.

He picked up the small bowl, doubt flickering behind those long lashes that made other guys fall all over him. "All of them?"

"All of them," I said, sitting up. "What's the job?"

"Is he really out?" His gaze kept ticking to the sleeping stranger so most of the fennel seeds now littered the table.

"He's out."

"You're looking for a man." Ty swirled the concoction around in the bottle, then unwrapped the straw and handed both to me. "A human. His name is Kason Fields."

My first sip flooded my taste buds with a sugary tang, and every long draw after that took off the edge so much I moaned.

"Hex on a broomstick, Hadley, this isn't a porno. Are you even listening?"

I sat back in the corner of the booth, the bottle tucked between my forearm and side until the alcohol had sharpened my senses enough to focus. The last known humans had died out during World War III, and none of them were supposed to have crossed through the portal into the Isa faes' Earth-mirrored world. The fae rescued as many people as they could from Earth since they fed off human energy, but once the humans crossed over, the portal did something to them-gave them magic and turned them into witches.

The joke was on the fae. Only not really, because without human energy sources to fuel their magic, fae now relied on controlling witches' power to save up their own. Only the fae supposedly didn't have a lot of magic either, so they'd frozen everything, created a literal eternal winter, to wipe out the so-called weak witches and take their magic. And now, no one was laughing at any jokes.

"A human, huh?" I clicked my tongue skeptically. "Whatever drugs you're on, I want some."

He fingered a few spilled seeds across the table toward him and nodded. "Supposedly he's in hiding somewhere in Reykjavik, and you need to find him." He glanced at my wine bottle. "Soon."

"Why does this Kason Fields need to be found?"

"Because." He brushed his hands over the neat pile of seeds and sat back in his seat. "He has the key to freeing us from the fae."

I opened my mouth to deliver a snappy retort, but the dead serious look on Ty's face slanted it into a frown instead. "How do you know all this?"

"I have it on good authority. You'll have to trust me." He fished through a pocket in his pants for his wallet and flipped it open to a printed picture wrapped in plastic, not digitized and on screen like I was used to.

The last time I saw one of these, a real photo... I cleared my throat and lasered in on the picture. Dark, deep-set eyes stared from in front of an orange fire and a red brick fireplace. A stubbled chin shadowed strong cheekbones and highlighted a perfect pair of lips. The guy looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, just a few years older than me, and he radiated so much intensity and danger that a simple photo unfurled a shock between my thighs. Maybe it was the mad dash of wine through my bloodstream, but Kason Fields needed a bow-a manly one, obviously-that had FUCK ME stamped all over it.

"Okay?" Ty said.

Even for just a human, I could tell he was still powerful, which I guessed you would have to be if you were the only human living in a world of fae and witches and eternal winter.

"Hadley?" With an exasperated sigh, Ty ripped the picture from the plastic and dropped it in the green flames by the wall. The photo curled up at the corners, warping Kason into a hellish demon before crisping him into nothingness.

"I's memorizing it, dick," I slurred.

He winked. "You were humping the table."

"How much for the job?"

"Sixty clicks now and sixty after you figure out how he can help us."

I looked down my nose at him. "I've hacked Reykjavik government employee records for more than that." That was a lie-nobody had enough spare magic clicks to pay me. So I took money. Ty likely already knew that, but this was me negotiating.

He shrugged. "That's all my contact would allow. Go to the nearest atern charging station, and your sixty will be there."

And this was me failing at negotiating. I glanced over to make sure our sleeping stranger was still out cold, then maneuvered my now half-empty bottle onto the table with my boobs and my forearm like a badass. Like a slightly inebriated badass. When I looked up again, Ty was studying me with his arms crossed, concern steeling his normally animated features.

"You sure you can handle this?" he asked.

The fact that he would even ask that question stormed a bitter betrayal through my gut that I tried to match with the force of my glare. He knew what the fae had done to me. Enough of it anyway since I hadn't invited him into my house in the last two years. Now he saw the physical and emotional aftereffects in wasted 3-D sitting right the fuck in front of him.

I slid across the seat and knocked myself into the sleeping stranger hard enough to drop him on the floor. "See you in spring," I told Ty, then strolled out of Hell Here with that promise tasting even sweeter than wine.