Rook

gripped my wrist, pulled me close, and whispered in my ear in a hoarse voice. Cigarette smoke and French perfume filled my nostrils, but that wasn’t what made my flesh crawl.
    “Myfanwy Thomas, bad things are headed your way. As bad as ever I have seen in my life. You will lose everything. You will end in the rain, and beyond that I cannot see. So enjoy yourself while you can.” Her eyes burned into mine, and I could see the age within her. Centuries and centuries, stretching back to an unimaginable beginning. And then she shut the door, leaving me shaking in the hallway.
    Ingrid and Anthony deposited me back home. And now I am sitting in the dark, alone except for my many, many shopping bags.
     

30
     
    R azormouth’s breath stank of chemicals, and Myfanwy jerked her head away reflexively. Something about the odor brushed a memory far in the back of her mind. She had stopped dancing, and now she tensed in preparation. Her powers were primed, but she hesitated to use them in such a public setting.
How am I going to explain this to Bronwyn?
she thought frantically. Razormouth had made no move to hurt her, and she dared a quick glance at her sister, who was still dancing obliviously with her friends.
    The guy looked normal once he closed his lips over his teeth. Well, maybe not completely normal, but certainly more normal than a lot of the people Myfanwy worked with every day. Shaved head, pointed nose, pale lips drawn back in a tight smile. She was braced for any movement, but he simply stood there, swaying slightly. Myfanwy raised her eyebrows in a question, and he gestured toward a table that was a little away from the speakers and miraculously free of people. She hesitated, and he slowly lifted up one hand, holding a mobile phone. He discreetly offered it to her so that Bronwyn and her friends could not see it. Myfanwy sighed, took it gingerly from his fingers, and followed him to the table.
    “Hello?” she hazarded. An indistinct voice came through, drowned out by the music. “You’ll have to speak up, I’m in a nightclub and they’re playing some sort of, I don’t know, fornication music.” The voice spoke louder now but was still impossible to understand. Myfanwy looked at the man with the sharp smile and made a face that indicated that she couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the phone. He rolled his eyes and made a face that indicated this hadnot been his idea and that his protests had been ignored. He jerked a thumb forcefully over his shoulder toward the exit.
    “You’ve got to be kidding!” she said loudly to him. He gestured again to the exit. She leaned close to his ear and spoke clearly. “My friends might think it strange if I leave with a man one minute after I meet him.” He looked at her blankly. “Clearly, you’re not familiar with the whole ‘girls going out as a group’ phenomenon, but unless you’re prepared to cause a scene, I’m not leaving.”
    “I am prepared to cause an
exceptionally
upsetting scene,” he whispered in her ear. He had an accent that she couldn’t quite place. European. Scandinavian?
    “I’m willing to bet I can cause an even more upsetting one,” Myfanwy whispered back. “Unless you can out-awful the idea of you plucking out your own eyes with your thumbnails.” He stepped back warily. Myfanwy raised an eyebrow at him and froze his joints. Instead of being alarmed, however, he smiled his razor smile and looked suggestively toward Bronwyn and her friends.
    “You wouldn’t dare!” she spat, and tightened her mental grasp on him, clenching her mind around his lungs. He tensed, his eyes widening, but didn’t lose his smile. Instead, he gestured with his chin back toward the girls. She turned around and saw that the girls were fine, dancing unconcernedly. Bronwyn caught her eye and waved, her eyebrows rising to ask if everything was okay. Myfanwy forced a smile and nodded. Bronwyn took another quick look at the man with the teeth (currently concealed by his lips) and made a face indicating that he was kind of cute.
    Then Myfanwy noticed with a growing sense of unease that the girls were surrounded by particularly bad dancers. Several of them were wearing clothes better suited to committing grievous bodily harm than picking up girls. Hesitantly, she cast out her awareness, trying to bind the dancers.
No good,
she admitted to herself.
The girls are in the way and everyone is moving, and I just had a beverage that had six kinds of vodka