I doubted the conversation would go well, but it wouldn’t be any better in private and at least I’d have a hot drink. I trudged down the street to the coffeehouse and ordered a very large drip coffee “with room” for cream. You have to be specific, or the baristas fill the cup to the rim with the crude oil they call coffee. He’d just gotten my drink doctored with cream and sugar when Quinton joined me.

“Do you want coffee?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“It’s cold outside.”

He blinked at me. “Yeah, it’s twenty degrees out there.”

“Do you want to talk about this business in here?” I tipped my head toward one of the patrons reading a newspaper in the front window corner. To my view he was cloaked in a swirl of blackness, and I knew he was a vampire without even seeing the fangs. “Some people have friends everywhere.”

He sighed and shrugged. “OK, I’ll get some coffee and we’ll go to your office.”

My turn to shrug. I waited while he collected a cup of something hot and then we crunched along the frosty sidewalk to my office building. I had to use my key on the outer door since none of the ground floor businesses were open after six. As I unlocked, I noticed that the shadows nearby moved and reshaped themselves around furtive watchers. It appeared that Edward was keeping an eye on me, though it seemed he didn’t realize I could see his minions even when they thought they were hidden.

I’d assumed all vampires understood the Grey at least as well as I did—certainly Carlos and Wygan seemed to know a lot more—but it occurred to me that Cameron had once been surprised he was unable to hide from me by sliding into the Grey. Maybe most vampires didn’t know what I did… It was an interesting thought and it distracted me enough that Quinton had to elbow me and remind me to get inside out of the cold. I locked the door behind us and we went upstairs to my office.

It was chilly, but the space was small and would warm up quickly enough. I put my coffee on the desk and sat down behind it while Quinton took the better of the two client chairs and leaned back in it with his steaming cup cradled in both hands. He looked tired, the aura around him reduced to a small blue glow. I studied him for a few moments, wondering.

He returned a bland gaze and said nothing. Quinton was always good at silence.

Well, I thought, might as well get it over with. “Are you a werewolf, Quinton?”

He snorted a laugh, frowning at the same time. “No! Werewolves don’t exist. What would give you that idea?”

I ticked them off on my fingers. “Vampires, ghosts, monsters in the sewer, why not werewolves, too? And the mutual dislike between you and Edward—who refers to you as a ‘lone wolf’ and warns me to check into your ‘oddities.’ ”

He sipped his coffee and remained reclined in the chair. “You’ve been reading too many bad horror novels. Or playing dumb-ass RPGs if you buy the idea of a deep-seated, traditional animosity between vampires and werewolves. It’s fantasy. Werewolves don’t exist,” he repeated.

“So you say, but a year ago I’d have said ghosts and vampires didn’t exist, either. Do you have proof?”

“I have logic. And I’ve never found any evidence of real lycanthropy. Vampires, magic… yeah. Weres? No. It’s not possible. At least I think not, from observation. Maybe I missed something, but so far, no evidence to the contrary.”

I picked up my own coffee. “OK, then. Elucidate.”

“All right. Everything I’ve seen tells me that magic tends to respect the laws of physics—kind of freaky physics, but lawful physics. For total form-shifting to happen in less than, say, a couple of days, max, it would have to break conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and the laws of thermodynamics at the very least. If shape-shifting does exist, then it’s an illusion, not an actual form change—unless it happens very slowly, which doesn’t seem to be the case. If someone were to change from human to wolf, he’ll have to make a whole lot of physical changes very rapidly, shedding or gaining mass and using up a ton of energy. There just isn’t enough elasticity in the system to allow it—he’d burst into flames from the heat of the energetic change alone.

“I’ve never burst into flame that I’m aware of. Besides, you’ve been out with me plenty of times when the moon was full and I don’t even get hairy palms. QED, not a werewolf.”

He drank more coffee and gave me his bland look again.

I had to chuckle at the perverse sanity of it—and at Quinton’s expression.

There was a hint of merriment in his eyes that made me feel a touch foolish but not enough to mind. It was kind of sweet, in a way, to be gently teased after the emotional whirlwind of my failed love affair. I smiled a little as I asked, “All right, but why does Edward call you the lone wolf?”

Quinton shrugged. “You’re the one who calls him the leader of the pack. Early on he discovered I was useful, but Edward doesn’t like contractors. If you’re not one of his kind, he prefers you to be either cattle or chattel, and I won’t play that game. I’m the stranger with teeth who won’t roll over and show my belly. Since I know how to hurt him, he can’t come at me directly. So he makes a show of being unworried and immune. It raises his stock with the rest of the pack and we have a sort of uneasy truce. That doesn’t stop him from making attempts to control me, and he’s not above making trouble for me if it’s not out of his way—which is what he’s doing with you. His time scale is much longer than mine, so he doesn’t try very often, but he does try.”

“He’s persistent,” I agreed.

“Yeah.” He paused and looked at me, a half smile turning into a small, thoughtful frown. “So what about you? He’d consider you a useful piece to control. How do you keep him at bay?”

“Mostly by seeing the traps ahead of time. So far, he’s been predictable, but he’ll try harder eventually. He tried tonight and I backed him off, but it was the last card I had to play. Next time will be worse unless I learn some new tricks. It’s possible I know things about the way magic works that he doesn’t, but I’m not sure yet.”

His gaze on me was quizzical. “I know you know things—see things—I don’t, but I don’t have any idea what your life is like, how you manage this knowledge. It must be strange.”

I nodded. “It’s not easy to explain. Ben gave me a theory once, but it’s not entirely correct. But the upshot is I don’t just see ghosts, I interact with them. I see magic—the sort of energetic stuff magic comes from…” I found myself unable to go further with that thought. Someday I’d figure out why. I shook my head, frustrated, but resigned for now. “Anyhow. There’s a lot of freaky between the here and the there and I see most of it. I can even walk around in it and do a few things with it, but its not as impressive as it sounds.”

“What sorts of things? Aside from talking to ghosts and seeing magic.” He leaned forward with his cup in both hands between his knees, giving me an intent look.

I didn’t mind the scrutiny. He seemed truly interested and maybe… something more? I didn’t mind that either, but I put that aside and thought a moment. “I can… see layers of time if they happen to be in the right orientation at the right spot. I can pull a sort of shield between me and the magic stuff, sometimes. I—” I couldn’t say I could pluck energy and move it around.

Strange. I could talk about it with Carlos, but not Quinton. I filed that for future investigation. “Well, not a lot else aside from the ghosts and being able to see that some people—or things—are magical in certain ways, but I don’t know what all the signals mean.”

“That’s how you spotted the vampire in Starbucks.”

I nodded again. “Yeah. I can see he’s a vampire. They’re sort of… in both places at the same time and there’s a look and a smell to them I’ve come to recognize.”

“A smell? Aside from the bad breath?” he added, making a face.