Maggie gave me the delivery with an apologetic smile and told me the regular delivery guy was sick and she needed all the help she could get. So instead of spending the drizzly day in the safety and comfort of the greenhouse, I was carting bouquets around the city and trying not to vomit as people oohed and aahed over the flowers. One woman even squealed when she saw the arrangement.

I never understood the attraction of cut flowers. They died. Like so many things in life, they were beautiful for a short time and then withered and died. Why take a living plant and chop it up to stick in a glass tube inside your house? It made me cringe a little every time I picked up one of the bouquets, since the flowers no longer felt like flowers—the magic that made them real and alive had already faded by the time I got them out of the van, and instead it was like carrying a small bundle of bones from house to office building to restaurant.

At least Maggie promised to pay me time and a half for the trouble, since she knew how much I hated having to talk to people. For her, I almost didn’t mind. She wouldn’t have asked if it hadn’t been important. That much, at least, I knew for sure.

Unlike my aunt, who asked everything without thinking of the cost.

She’d called two other coven meetings, all under the guise of protection spells and defensive charms, even though everyone was as protected and stocked up on charms as we could handle. Too much more and they would all start to influence each other and undo all the good we’d tried to do.

I felt drained more than normal and draggin’ ass, as my mom used to say, as I drove to the second-to-last address on the delivery sheet. It was in a dicey part of the city, a former industrial neighborhood whose factories were long since silent and abandoned, and the alleys were often the sites of makeshift homeless camps.

The arrangement featured Lily of the Valley and some greenery, a few more blossoms to accent the delicate white of the lily, and I frowned a little as I studied it. It was poisonous if ingested; its role as a wedding bouquet flower had always puzzled me because of it. The small white flowers were beautiful, but it seemed odd to want something poisonous in your hands for a special occasion.

Still, it wasn’t my place to judge.

I got out of the van at the address, just on the “up and coming” side of the wrong side of the tracks, and walked into the busy restaurant with an armful of someone else’s joy. It turned out to be a bridal shower in one of the fancy back rooms; the groom-to-be had sent the flowers because they were a copy of the bouquet the bride would carry down the aisle. I barely held on to my stomach as the mother of the bride signed for the flowers and everyone else fluttered around in a tizzy of white lace and streamers and tasteful little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

They did not invite me to stay.

I should have escaped out the front or even through the kitchen and called it a day, but the bar was empty and I needed a drink. It might have been only two in the afternoon, but it was five o’clock somewhere and I only had to drive the van a few blocks to the last address—a fancy-schmantzy office building downtown—before returning it to the florist shop and heading home. A little gin and tonic wouldn’t hurt, and it would take the edge off so I could face whoever ordered the giant-ass bouquet of red fucking roses.

The bartender eyed me askance with my work clothes and galoshes, but I pulled a twenty out of my wallet and handed him the whole thing as I ordered the gin and tonic. I exhaled and closed my eyes after he handed it over, letting the glass rest against my chin so I could inhale the scent.

I’d read once about a coven who only worked magic drunk, and who found a way of adhering charms and potions to alcohol. They’d merged the worlds of love potions and date-rape drugs and it turned out terribly for everyone. Several other covens banded together to get rid of them, and so the secret of linking magic into alcohol was lost. And good riddance. Too much magic or too much alcohol led to really poor decisions, so the two together... The world was better off without.

I sipped the drink, saving the expensive gin I never bothered to buy for myself, and ran my finger around the lip of the glass until the crystal rang. There were also witches who worked magic with sounds, building and layering different tones as the spell was built until it created a symphony of power. I’d wanted to study it with one of the covens in Mongolia, where they used throat singing and a beautiful cello-like instrument in a haunting and truly humbling way, but we didn’t have the money and then Mom got sick and everything we had went to medical bills.

I made a face at the gin and gulped instead of sipped. It had been a long time since I’d tried to drown my sorrows. It hadn’t worked the first two times, but maybe the third was the charm.

“Whiskey,” someone said from behind me, and I tensed. I knew that voice. It sent the same shivers through me as it had in the cemetery. The wolf.

I didn’t turn or react, though internally I groaned. What were the fucking odds? I just wanted to enjoy a drink in peace, forget all about the double life and the bullshit coven meeting I had to attend later that afternoon, and go about my business. Which included one more flower delivery.

He actually took a stool two down from me, not looking at me, and I started to hope that maybe he didn’t make the connection. The animals could track by scent from what I’d heard, but that didn’t mean he’d remember what I smelled like. Although I was wearing work clothes both times that our paths crossed. Hopefully more people than just me smelled like dirt and fertilizer; I stood a better chance of blending in in that dicey neighborhood than anywhere else in the city, at least.

The bartender returned with a whiskey, and I watched from the corner of my eye as the asshole two stools down sipped it and set it down on the bare wood of the fancy bar. With a coaster right in front of him. What a dick. What an inconsiderate asshole. And he’d called me “girl” the other night, and it still smarted a bit—mostly because it wasn’t socially acceptable to use magic to beat the shit out of him and teach him some manners. That was too prideful, and though witches didn’t have to be humble, the universe had a way of grinding down those who stood out too much. Plus it came back in threes, and I couldn’t risk getting a lesson in humility the next time I copped an attitude about something.

There wasn’t enough time or space to really get my ice-queen mantra right, but I rehearsed it in my head and got a little bit of my protective shell to the surface so whatever he decided to call me that time around wouldn’t bother me as much.

He didn’t speak right away, and the tension in my chest eased as the expectation of confrontation also waned. If he wanted to prove a point, chances were he would have done so in the first few sips, instead of working his way through half the whiskey before he took a deep breath.

“How do you know Smith?”

“How do you know Smith?” I shot back. There were some questions we just didn’t ask and definitely some we didn’t answer.

“He did me a favor once,” the wolf said. Smith had called him Evershaw, which definitely could have been a first or last name. I had no idea how the wolves named their offspring. “He’s helped a lot of people in our community, and gotten rid of some real troublemakers, as you no doubt know, since you played a part in getting him back.”

“Then it sounds like you already know how I know Smith.”

“No,” he said. “I know that someone knew enough to call you when there were no other options, but that’s not enough to understand what kind of threat you pose to... people like me.”

I shook my head as I sipped the gin. I needed a much bigger glass. “No more threat than the threat you pose to me.”

“Don’t be so quick to assume you’re impervious, sweetheart. It wasn’t so long ago that the guys who sent Smith away would have loved to get their hands on you.” He tapped the side of his glass in a signal to the bartender, and damn it all if the kid didn’t bring me another gin and tonic as well. I didn’t touch it for fear of creating a debt, but the wolf didn’t notice. “Keep your people under control. Stay out of our way. There are already too many fights over power in this city. If you start one, you’ll lose.”

“You must have me confused for someone else,” I said under my breath. “I don’t control anyone and I don’t give a shit about power or fighting.” He opened his mouth to say something quaint or insulting, but stopped as I reached for the gin he’d bought for me and flicked my finger against the side of the glass so the contents froze solid and the glass itself cracked from the cold. “And if I were that kind of person, there is absolutely fuck all you could do to stop me.”

I slammed the rest of the drink I’d paid for, shoved to my feet, and headed for the door. “Have a great day.”

It sounded more like a curse than I thought possible. But I didn’t look back to see his reaction, since I didn’t much care, but I definitely kept an eye in the rearview mirror as I drove away.