Hands griped my shoulders with a familiar strength and pulled me under the truck. The space between the undercarriage and the road was like a little cave. Heat from the engine had carved a no-snow zone, and I lay on my belly on warm, wet road. Sebastian stretched out beside me with a long hose in his hand. The hose was attached to something above us, and his fingers rested on a tiny spigot.
“Radiator drain,” Sebastian explained. “Is she coming?”
I started to explain that Fonn had been at my back a second ago when we noticed the digging. Claws scooped out huge chunks of snow, like a demonic prairie dog. Plus, I could feel her magic leeching the heat from me. Cold seeped in from the ground. My body felt heavy with ice, as if I were freezing solid.
Teeth were the first things I saw. I swore they’d grown. They now extended into grotesque spikes, like something you might see on a deep-sea creature or in your nightmares. Her face, too, was distended, almost fishlike, so she seemed to be one human-sized, extended gullet.
Sebastian’s hand began to quake. Ice rimmed his eye lashes and coated his hair. I hadn’t noticed that his fingers crimped together the hose; as the magic started to immobilize him, his fingers slipped off. A blast of heated liquid shot forward. Steam billowed everywhere. The smell of antifreeze filled the air, and I coughed, gagging.
Neon green splashed down Fonn’s gaping throat. When she startled and closed her mouth with a snap, the hot stuff squirted her right between her eyes.
Fonn yelped like a wounded dog, but there was so much steam in the cramped space I had a hard time seeing what was happening. But I certainly heard the gnashing of teeth, the snarling (which might have been Sebastian, come to think of it), and then a howl like a wounded hound of hell that nearly split my eardrums. The wind lifted the tires of the truck off the ground unevenly, so it seemed to bounce.
Then everything was quiet. Dead quiet.
Sebastian crimped the hose again. When the steam cleared, all I could see was a huge melted hole of toxic-green slush. From the front bumper, icicles dripped to sharp points like teeth.
There was no sign of Fonn. I held my breath hopefully and strained to hear anything. Sebastian scanned all around us, his fangs still bared.
I almost didn’t dare hope, but I felt the difference immediately. I still felt cold, but my limbs lightened. I no longer thought I might become a block of ice.
Sebastian put his hand on the spigot. “Do you think we got her?” he asked.
I wedged my hand between the ground and my belly. Closing my eyes, I let my consciousness rise out of my body. With Lilith’s eyes, I scanned the storm. When I didn’t sense Fonn in the immediate area, I reached my mind out further. Far off, on Highway 169, I caught the image of a woman riding bareback on a giant wolf. The vision blurred at the edges, melting into the snow, and steam streamed out of her like blood. She was running wounded. “We got her,” I said confidently.
Then I sneezed. The antifreeze smog and the cold plugged up my nose. Dirt was slowly freezing itself into the fabric of my ripped coat and dress. Sebastian screwed tight the spigot and looked over at me. Perhaps in reaction to my miserable expression, he laughed.
“I’m clearly not cursed.” He smiled.
“Oh, yeah, why not?” Although, when I said it, the words sounded a bit more like “Hi, what?”
“For one, we’re not dead,” he said, pulling the hose from the radiator drain. “Second, you’ve got a smudge of dirt on your nose that’s absolutely adorable.” He leaned over and kissed said nose, and I had to scrunch my face to hold back another wet sneeze.
I shook my head. “No, you are cursed. This was insane.”
“Come on,” he said with a laugh. “Once I get the hose back in place, we can get this baby running again.”
I guess defeating an ice demon can brighten a vampire’s day, or night, as the case may be. Feeling gross, exhausted, and tired of the cold, I wasn’t nearly as chipper as I had been at the start of our trip.
As he popped the hood, I started to wonder. I supposed the truck now could be considered a stolen vehicle. What is it when you borrow an abandoned one? Still a crime, no doubt. And, honestly, I had to wonder about whether or not Fonn owned this truck to begin with. What if, somewhere out in the snow drifts, there was a heat-sucked corpse waiting to be found and somehow linked back to us? “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Be practical,” Sebastian said as he slid me out of our warmish, wet cave under the truck. “You’ll freeze to death without the heat.”
He had a point. I was already chilled to the bone. “What about all the antifreeze?”
“The truck can run on water for a little while.”
I tried to remember if I’d seen a bottle of water anywhere in the cab. “Where are we going to get that?”
Sebastian looked around at the piles of snow and gestured with his open hands. “We seem to have an abundance of the frozen kind right here.”
I nodded. He got to work with a grin and a whistle. He seemed genuinely pleased to be fixing up the truck. I left him to it. The storm had abated to the point where I could see where I was going, so I stumbled my way back and threw myself into the passenger side of the truck. The interior stank of pepper spray, and, while I waited for Sebastian to finish, I coughed and sneezed until I had to open a window. Sebastian worked by the light of the headlights, while I sat there glumly.
In the fifteen minutes it took him to reconnect the hose and refill the radiator with snow water, the storm quit enough that I could see the occasional star through breaks in the clouds.
The truck ran hot all the way into town, but, luckily, Sebastian told me that the best way to contain that problem was to keep the heaters on full-blast.
My toes were toasty again by the time we pulled up to the darkened restaurant. “Oh, no,” I said, noticing the absence of any lights.
Sebastian just shook his head, a trace of his earlier sullenness returning. Even so, he pulled the truck into a parking spot and killed the engine. “We might as well go check it out.”
Despite myself, I felt a deep stab of desolation. The one thing I’d been fighting for—a decent night out for Sebastian’s birthday—now seemed ruined. I could feel a tear hovering at the corner of my eye. I wiped at it with a knuckle. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound hopeful, but failing even to my ears. “Let’s go check it out.”
I trudged through the courtyard, one of my favorite features of Portobello during the summer. Snow draped the barren Virginia creeper vines that twined around the walls like white-frosted lace. Where they poked through the drifts, black-eyed Susan seed heads wore dots of snow. Dried husks of milkweed and mullein stood sentry over sleeping garden beds. The cobblestone walkway had been recently shoveled, and Sebastian and I made our way quickly to the heavy wooden door. A pull on the brass handle confirmed my worst fears. It was locked. Closed.
“I’m sorry,” I blubbered. Despite my best efforts, a hot tear ran down my chill-burned cheek.
Sebastian wrapped his arms around me, and I smelled that comforting scent of cinnamon again. I breathed in deeply. “It’s okay,” he lied smoothly. “I’m just glad we’re both alive.”
Yeah, and it’s my fault we were out in the first place, I wanted to say, but I was too choked up to make my throat work. I was just about to suggest we turn around and head for my apartment, when the door swung open, nearly knocking us off our feet. A round-faced older man wrapped in a shapeless parka and a stocking hat raised his eyebrows at us hugging on the restaurant doorstep.
“Von Traum party?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, wiping at my tears. “How did you know?”
“You were our only reservation tonight,” he said. “When the blizzard hit, everyone cleared out. The storm only now just let up enough for me to get out and shovel. I was just about to head home.”