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He was no worse off.
She said they were good, and so they were good.
I haven’t lost my friend, he thought, insisting it to himself. He was afraid he’d ruined everything, though.
6:30 p.m.
ESSENCE DIDN’T USUALLY go out for happy hour, but she’d learned to adjust her schedule on Fridays in Shepherdstown.
For some unknowable, unfathomable reason, Friday nights were deadsville these days. No one was out if she came out past 8:00 p.m. So, she’d usually stop by for a drink after work. Everyone would peter out by 7:30, at which point she’d go home, telling herself a story about how she was going to cook dinner. When she’d get home, however, tipsy, cooking would seem like a terrible idea, and she’d order a pizza, berating herself for not having the forethought to have picked something up on the way home.
Tonight, she was patting herself on the back for having grabbed something from a drive-thru on the way here. Yeah, fast food was kind of gross, but after that conversation with Decker, she deserved a guilty pleasure.
“Hey, there,” said Hollis Mac as she looked through her clutch for her credit card.
“Hey, Hollis,” she said absently. Hollis was some kind of strange ancient fae thing. He was a skeleton—all bones—held together by magic, she assumed. He had antlers. She hadn’t seen him in months, although one night, he’d been the only person in the bar on a Friday, and they’d struck up a long and interesting conversation about nineties sitcoms, which had lasted until the wee hours. “Long time.”
“Has it been a long time?” He seemed genuinely curious about this. “Seems to me like we just ran into each other.”
“Yeah, in the fall.”
“Right,” he said slowly. “Right, it’s winter now.” This seemed to have just dawned on him. He went through his pockets. “I owe you a drink.”
She had just gotten out her credit card. “No, I don’t think you do.”
He nodded. “I definitely do. I remember that you bought me a drink—”
“Seven months ago or something,” she said.
“Whatever.” He pulled a set of shackles out of his pocket. She didn’t know what else to call them. They weren’t like typical modern handcuffs. They looked ancient in some way. He set those on the bar and then pulled a set of keys out of his pocket.
“Is that like a Mary Poppins pocket?” she said.
He laughed, holding up his wallet, which he’d fished out. “No, I don’t know how I ended up with these.” He touched the shackles. “I was planning on putting them back where they belong, but I must have forgotten.”
“What are they?”
“Spelled handcuffs,” he said. “I collect things sometimes. I had a lot of them at one point, and then I downsized.” He shrugged. “These are cool because of the runes.” He picked them up and tilted them so that she could see that there were runic letters carved into the inside of the handcuffs.
“What’s it say?” she said.
“Oh, let me see. It’s a little hard to translate.”
But at that point, Lucy, the bartender, who was a kelpie, appeared, smiling at the two of them. “What can I get you?”
“Bourbon on the rocks,” said Hollis. “And whatever Essence wants.”
“I don’t need you to buy me a drink,” protested Essence.
“Why are you resisting this?” Hollis seemed genuinely curious. “It’s a free drink. No strings or anything. You don’t think…” He pointed at himself with a bony finger. “I’m not even… I don’t have skin. Let alone, you know…” He trailed off meaningfully. “Anyway, incapable of anything like that, right?”
She cleared her throat, blushing again. “Right,” she said. “Uh, gin and tonic.”
“Got it,” said Lucy cheerily, as if having conversations about whether or not people had penises was a typical part of her day.
Someone appeared on the other side of the bar. It was shaped like an L, with the short part of the L at the back of the room, and the long part reaching toward the front door. Essence looked up and there was Decker.
He was looking right at her.
