Page 70 of Tracking Snow

They're romance books, Six points out with disappointment.

Love is the oldest story, Three says, backing up Five’s enthusiasm.

Even One’s interest perks up at the sight of the stacked shelves.

I’m more of Six’s mind and feel like the onslaught of girly vibes is silently telling me I’m not welcome here.

The desire to phase back through the door we entered is strong, but I stick to Snow’s side.

A coffee and wine bar runs along the far wall, all brass fixtures, blush tile, hissing milk, and bottles arranged between jars of biscotti.

Pink velvet chairs sit in reading nooks under heart-shaped lamps. Paperbacks line the walls in neat rainbow stacks, their covers full of bare chests, ball gowns, fangs, claws, crowns.

A banner stretches across the larger space near the café.

Lust & Lit Book Club

Thursdays at Seven

Under it, a chalkboard near the register reads: Currently obsessed with monsters who grovel.

Snow points at it. "Educational establishment."

"I can see that," I say. Despite my shitty mood, my lips twitch with a smile remembering how she made us grovel in Poison Apple after closing hours.

My humor vanishes when I remember why we’re here.

Snow’s friend Goldie is missing.

"Goldie never misses a shift," Snow says, leading me through the Historical Romance aisle. "She's pathologically reliable. She once came in with food poisoning and made daiquiris between trips to the bathroom. Ted said she didn’t make it home from work the other day."

"Ted." I’ve heard the name but have already forgotten.

"Her husband. Big guy. Bear guy." She waves a hand. "He shifted and tried to track her from Poison Apple, since he knows her scent. He should have been able to pick her out fine. But he says the place stinks to high heaven, with so much magic crammed in one place he couldn't pull anything clean out of it. Just that she was there, and then she was gone. His brothers are canvassing the city. One of them's a hacker, but still nothing."

Snow stops and turns to look up at me. "Here's the thing I can't stop thinking about." Her eyes move back and forth between mine, focused somewhere past them. "Goldie can't be taken. Her power is…when she's in danger, real danger, she teleports. It's automatic. She doesn't even control it. A mugger flashed a knife at her last year, and she ended up on top of a parking garage in Cambridge with one shoe. So, somebody explain to me how a woman who physically cannot be grabbed is gone?" Frustration leaks through her voice.

Six takes the problem apart somewhere in the back of us, silent, gear by gear.

Nobody else is going to try to offer an answer.

Still, she stares up at me like I’m some kind of savior. Like I’m a good man she can trust.

I want to put my fist through the nearest shelf. I want to claw out of my own skin because she has no business looking at me like this. Every one of us feels it land and flinches at once, because we know what we are.

Our magic is an infection I can feel pulsing. If cutting it out of me would do a single thing, I'd borrow one of Snow's daggers and go to work right here.

The covers grin down at me. Fangs, claws, men with power bleeding off them, women crawling into their laps to get nearer to it. Women line up and pay for the same thing that pinned Snow to a wall last night.

It’s not right.

"Yeah," Snow says to my silence, and starts walking again. "That's where I keep landing too."

"So we're asking a bookstore for help?" I make sure she can hear my opinion of the plan as I shove my violent feelings all the way down into the waiting arms of Seven, who absorbs the darkness, making it his own.

"We're asking Isabelle," she stresses, then pauses. "Well. We're asking Isabelle to ask her husband for help."

"Who's her husband?"