Biting Cold: A Chicagoland Vampires Novel (CHICAGOLAND VAMPIRES SERIES)

because shifters were rarely so nonchalant about intruders in their homes, alliances or not.
    “You. Come. Sit.”
    We looked over at the long wooden bar that lined the other side of the room. A heavy woman stood behind it, her formerly bleached blond hair now a vibrant shade of crimson. This was Berna, Little Red’s resident den mother and barmaid.
    I walked over to the bar. “Hi, Berna.”
    She immediately scowled at me. “Still too thin. You eat?” she asked, her voice thick with an Eastern European accent.
    “I eat constantly,” I promised.
    She shook her head and muttered something under her breath. Then she pounded a fist on the bar and stared at all of us. “You will eat now.”
    I sat down. Paige was smart enough to do the same.
    “Where’s Mallory?” Catcher asked.
    “She is not ready yet. You sit; you eat.”
    “She’s my girlfriend,” Catcher said, as if that information would be enough to change Berna’s mind.
    He was incorrect.
    The entire bar went silent, and a fog of prickly magic crossed the room. Catcher may have been a friend of Jeff’s and a friend of mine, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t a shifter, and he wasn’t a known ally. He was the boyfriend of the woman who’d unleashed evil on the city and brought them another round of trouble they hadn’t asked for.
    But Berna didn’t need the glares of the shifters at tables around the room to enforce her will. She put a hand on the bar and leaned over it, her bosoms nearly touching the counter as she stared Catcher down.
    “You sit. You eat,” she said.
    Catcher slid onto the stool beside mine while Berna, a victorious smile on her face, disappeared behind the red leather door that led to the back of the bar.
    “Good choice,” I said.
    Catcher rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t want food,” he said. “I want this to be over.”
    “I get that,” I whispered back. “But I think part of this exercise is giving up control. Mallory did what she wanted without regard for others; look where that got us. The Pack is intervening, giving her a chance they don’t owe her and she arguably doesn’t deserve. You’re letting them do the heavy lifting; let them make the rules, too.”
    Catcher made a sarcastic sound, but he didn’t walk out. I called that my own victory.
    Berna and a shifter helper I didn’t recognize brought out plates of food that she set down in front of each of us. Cabbage rolls, by the look of them, which were a particular specialty. While we unrolled paper-wrapped silverware, she poured an unmarked glass bottle of wine into three short cups, then passed those out as well.
    “I hope no one’s a vegetarian,” I said, wasting no time digging into the heady, spicy meat and cabbage. There were few things that took the edge off stress like a good, hearty meal, and I thanked the gods—Ukrainian or otherwise—that I could eat what I wanted with impunity. Sometimes, it didn’t suck to be a vampire.
    We ate quietly and with purpose while Berna watched behind the bar. She alternated between checking the amount of food on our plates and the status of the soap opera on the small, fuzzy, black-and-white television behind the bar. I didn’t know the show or the characters, but a doctor and a nurse were having an affair over the comatose body of, I think, the doctor’s stricken wife.
    When we’d cleaned our plates—Berna allowed no other option—she cleared them away, then made a low whistle.
    After a moment, Gabriel walked through the red leather door. He beckoned us to follow him into the bar’s shabby back room, where three other shifters in leather jackets sat around an old vinyl-topped table, cards in their hands and glasses of liquor within easy reach.
    I gave them respectful nods and was pleased when they nodded back. Catcher, wisely, kept his mouth shut.
    We followed Gabriel through another door into a part of the bar I hadn’t seen—the kitchen, which smelled strongly of disinfectant, meat, and well-cooked cabbage.
    A few more footsteps put us in the doorway of the back room, where a petite woman in jeans, a T-shirt, and a hairnet stood in front of an industrial sink, scouring food from dishes with a giant sprayer.
    Each time something surprised me, I was pretty sure it was the last surprising thing I’d see for a while. And it never, ever was.
    The girl with the sprayer? One Mallory Delancey Carmichael.
    “Mallory,” Gabriel said.
    She turned off the sprayer and looked over at him,