Page 36 of Tracking Snow

No one laughs. The preacher's smile stretches thin and his eyes go small and hard.

"Snow," Ariel murmurs behind me. She’s warning me to keep a low profile.

Pretty sure that’s not an option anymore.

The mullet-preacher turns from me and scans the room as his buddies fan out. His finger starts picking out targets. A horned guy near the stage. A woman whose skin gives off a faint silver glow under the lights. A table of pixies who have gone completely still over their nachos.

"Sin," he announces, finger moving from one to the next. "Corruption. Infestation. And every human in this room drinking next to it, paying for it, smiling at it." The finger lands on Rap. "And her. A human woman. Harboring them. Profiting off them. Selling out her own species one cocktail at a time."

He stops in front of Rap, who has planted herself firmly in her spot, eyeing him with extreme dislike.

"You have ten seconds to turn around and leave," she says calmly.

"You should be ashamed."

"I'm wildly ashamed. Eight seconds."

"Boston belongs to humans." He's louder now, playing to the room, the cords in his neck standing up. "And humans are taking it back. Starting with collaborators like you."

"Five seconds."

He grabs her arm.

I'm already vaulting over the bar, but Ryder gets there first.

He’d slowly but surely migrated toward them since mullet-man got within six feet of Rap.

With lightning speed, Ryder peels the man’s hand off Rap’s arm and holds his other wrist toward his elbow, bending him over a cocktail table with his cheek pressed into an abandoned coaster and his arm pinned behind his back.

"Whoa," I breathe, impressed.

"You don’t ever touch her," Ryder says, the words quiet but deadly dangerous.

"Get off me. Get OFF me, you⁠—"

Ryder adjusts his grip and the preacher's sentence dissolves into a high, breathy sound.

"Where do you want him?" Ryder asks Rap.

Rap's mouth opens. Closes. Her eyes travel from the preacher's squashed face to Ryder's hands, then up to Ryder's face, and her cheeks flush the exact same shade they did at the interview.

"Out back," she manages with a twitch at the corner of her lips. "Dumpster's full, but he'll fit."

That's when the other four decide to join in.

The two big ones charge the bar. Neck Tattoo goes for the hooded woman beside Rap, and Mailbox Jaw peels off toward the stage end of the bar.

Where Carolee is sitting.

I throw myself at the nearest big one, pulling a dagger from the thin thigh holster under my skirt. I slash his jacket open shoulder to hip on the way past. He twists after me with a roar. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Neck Tattoo grabbing a fistful of hood.

The hood comes off, and the cloak comes with it.

Pale pink skin, pointed ears, and a dark braid whips out into the open. A blood elf. The elf moves through Neck Tattoo's grip like water, dropping her weight under his arm, hooking two fingers around his wrist as she redirects two hundred pounds of charging idiot face-first into a barstool.

Faefucks. I have never seen anybody fight like that. Every motion exact, nothing extra, like she's performed each move ten thousand times in the dark.

She plucks a coaster off the bar and flicks it. It catches Neck Tattoo in the chest as he gets up, and he sits back down, hard, blinking like somebody unplugged him and plugged him back in.