"Maybe. Maybe not. Not fighting always smarter."
"Says the militant Knight of the Cross and his holy blade?"
"I hate fighting."
I glanced at him for a second, then said, "You don’t usually hear that from someone good at it."
Shiro smiled. "Fighting is never good. But sometimes necessary."
I blew out a deep breath. "Yeah. I guess I know what you mean."
The rest of the ride to McAnnally’s was quiet. In the streetlights, my knuckles looked the same color as the rest of my hands.
McAnnally’s is a tavern. Not a bar, not a pub, but an actual, Old World-style tavern. When I went in, I stepped down three steps to the hardwood floor and looked around the place. The bar has thirteen stools at it. There were thirteen columns of dark wood, each one hand-carved with swirling leaves and images of beings of tale and fantasy. Thirteen tables had been spaced out around the room in an irregular pattern, and like the columns and bar stools, they had been intentionally placed that way in order to deflect and scatter random magical energies. It cut down on the accidents from grumpy wizards and clueless kids just discovering their power. Several ceiling fans whirled lazily, and were low enough that I always felt a bit nervous about one of them whirling into my eyebrows. The place smells of wood smoke, old whiskey barrels, fresh bread, and roasting meat. I like it.
Mac stood behind the bar. I didn’t know much about Mac. He was tall, medium build, bald, and somewhere between thirty and sixty. He had large and facile hands and thick wrists. All I’ve ever seen him wear is dark pants with a loose white shirt and an apron that somehow remained free of splatters of grease, spilled drinks, and the various other things he prepared for customers.
Mac caught my eye when I came in and nodded to my left. I looked. A sign on the wall said, ACCORDED NEUTRAL GROUND. I looked back at Mac. He drew a shotgun out from behind the bar so that I could see it and said, "Got it?"
"No problem," I answered.
"Good."
The room was otherwise empty, though normally there would be a couple of dozen members of the local magical scene. Not full-fledged wizards or anything, but there were plenty of people with a dab of magical talent. Then there were a couple of different Wiccan groups, the occasional changeling, scholars of the arcane, a gang of do-gooder werewolves, members of secret societies, and who knew what else. Mac must have put out the word that a meeting was happening here. No one sane wants to be anywhere close to what could be a fight between a White Council member and a Red Court warlord. I knew I was sane because I didn’t want to be there, either.
I walked over to the bar and said, "Beer." Mac grunted and plopped down a bottle of brown. I pushed some bills at him but he shook his head.
Shiro stood at the bar next to me, facing the opposite way. Mac put a bottle down beside him. Shiro twisted off the cap with one hand, took a modest sip, and set the bottle back down. Then he glanced at it thoughtfully, picked it up, and took a slower sip. "Yosh."
Mac grunted, "Thanks."
Shiro said something in what I guessed was Japanese. Mac answered monosyllabically. A man of many talents and few syllables is Mac.
I killed time with a couple more sips and the door opened.
Kincaid walked in, in the same outfit I’d seen that morning, but without the baseball cap. His dark blond hair was instead pulled back into an unruly tail. He nodded at Mac and asked, "All set?"
"Ungh," said Mac.
Kincaid prowled the room, looking under tables and behind columns, and checked the rest rooms and behind the counter as well. Mac said nothing, but I had the impression that he felt the precaution to be useless. Kincaid went to a corner table, nudging other tables back from it a bit, and put three chairs around it. He drew a gun out of a shoulder rig and set it on the table, then took a seat.
"Hi," I said toward him. "Nice to see you, too. Where’s Ivy?"
"Past her bedtime," Kincaid said without smiling. "I’m her proxy."
"Oh," I said. "She has a bedtime?"
Kincaid checked his watch. "She believes very strongly in an early bedtime for children."
"Heh, heh, eh-heh." I don’t fake amused chuckles well. "So where’s Ortega?"
"Saw him parking outside," Kincaid said.
The door opened and Ortega entered. He wore a casual black blazer with matching slacks and a shirt of scarlet silk. He hadn’t worn a coat despite the cold. His skin was darker than I remembered it. Maybe he’d fed recently. He carried himself with a relaxed, patient quality as he entered and surveyed the room.
He bowed slightly at the waist toward Mac, who nodded back. The vampire’s eyes landed on Shiro and narrowed. Shiro said nothing and did not move. Ortega then regarded me with an unreadable expression and gave me a very slight nod. It seemed polite to nod back to him, so I did. Ortega did the same to Kincaid, who returned it with a lazy wave of one hand.
"Where is your second?" Kincaid asked.
Ortega grimaced. "Primping."
He hadn’t finished the word before a young man slapped the door open and stepped jauntily into the tavern. He was wearing tight, white leather pants, a black fishnet shirt, and a white leather jacket. His hair was dark and hung to his shoulders in an unruly mane. He had a male model’s face, smoky grey eyes, and thick, dark eyelashes. I knew him. Thomas Raith, a White Court vampire.
"Thomas," I said by way of greeting.
"Evening, Harry," he answered. "What happened to your duster?"
"There was a woman."
"I see," Thomas said. "Pity. It was the only thing you owned that gave me hope that there might be a feeble flicker of style in you."
"You should talk. That outfit you’re wearing is treading dangerously close to the Elvis zone."
"Young, sleek Elvis ain’t bad," Thomas said.
"I meant old, fat Elvis. Possibly Michael Jackson."
The pale man put a hand to his heart. "That hurts, Harry."
"Yeah, I’ve had a rough day too."
"Gentlemen," Kincaid said, a note of impatience in his voice. "Shall we begin?"
I nodded. So did Ortega. Kincaid introduced everyone and produced a document that stated he was working for the Archive. It was written in crayon. I drank some more beer. After that, Kincaid invited Shiro and Thomas to join him at the corner table. I went back to the bar, and a moment later, Ortega followed me. He sat down with a couple of empty stools between us, while Kincaid, Thomas, and Shiro spoke quietly in the background.
I finished my bottle and set it down with a thump. Mac turned around to get me another. I shook my head. "Don’t bother. I’ve got enough on my tab already."
Ortega put a twenty down on the bar and said, "I’ll cover it. Another for me as well."
I started to make a wiseass remark about how buying me a beer would surely make up for threatening my life and the lives of those I cared about, but I bit it back. Shiro had been right about fighting. You can’t lose a fight you don’t show up to. So I took the beer Mac brought me and said, "Thanks, Ortega."
He nodded, and took a sip. His eyes lit up a bit, and he took a second, slower one. "It’s good."
Mac grunted.