“Well, now he’s a snake with my property deed,” I snap, sitting up. “Or at least the land under it. Which is, effectively, the same damn thing when you’re trying to stop a demolition.”
Dee slides a scone my way, not because she thinks I’m hungry, but because she knows it’s something to put between my hands. Her eyes, behind the sarcasm, are soft and steady.
“So what’s the plan, General Wynn?” she asks. “You organizing the militia? Building barricades out of sleds and pinecones?”
“I’m not letting him tear that place down. Not before the festival. Not ever, if I can help it.” I rip the scone in half and shove a piece in my mouth like I’m absorbing its determination. “Gran wanted one last winter at the lodge. She didn’t know the paperwork was being shifted out from under her, I’m sure of it. There’s no way she’d have signed that over knowingly.”
“Alright,” Dee says, nodding. “Then we make it public. Stir the pot. Remind people what that place meant. Get the whole town on your side.”
“That’ll piss off the orc.”
She grins. “And?”
I finish the coffee in three gulps, slam the mug down, and stand up. The exhaustion’s still there, but underneath it now is a familiar spark. The same one I get when a parent tries to argue with me about their kid not needing extra help reading, or when the school board threatens to cut the library budget again.
“Then let’s start a war,” I say, and Dee laughs like I just handed her the best early Christmas present of her life.
We put up the first flyer that afternoon, smack in the middle of the grocery store bulletin board, right between a lost cat and a coupon for half-off axe sharpening. Bright red letters, bold and loud:Keep Silverpine Lodge Standing – Winter Festival Belongs to Us.
Dee and I make the rounds like we’re canvassing for a cause, which I guess we are. She hands out little hand-cut paper snowflakes stamped with SAVE THE LODGE on them, like propaganda wrapped in charm, and I talk to anyone who’ll stop long enough to listen. The butcher nods grimly and tells me his parents met at a Winter Festival back in the sixties. The florist cries into her apron and promises to donate wreaths. Even grumpy old Martin with the snowplow agrees to clear the lodge’s drive himself, just this once, just for Margaret’s memory.
I get home that night to find two covered dishes on the porch and a note from Mrs. Lindh offering to help clean up the guest rooms if I need it. There’s a kind of magic in this town when it wants to be kind, and right now, it wants to be kind to me. That’s something I don’t take for granted.
The lodge, however, is a less enthusiastic partner in my crusade.
I spend two hours trying to get the old furnace to cough out something besides rusted curses. It clicks, rattles, groans, then dies again with a pitiful sigh. I’ve got two space heatersrunning in the parlor, one of them buzzing like it’s developing a personality disorder, and I keep stomping my feet every few minutes just to remind my toes they still have blood in them.
“You’d better appreciate this,” I mutter at the ceiling as I hammer a loose nail back into the staircase railing. “I could be in a heated apartment right now, watching trash television and eating leftover funeral casserole.”
A gust of wind slams into the side of the lodge like a disapproving aunt, and I laugh, tired and fraying at the edges.
The next morning, the orc shows up in town again.
I spot him as I’m coming out of Pippa’s craft shop, arms full of battery-operated fairy lights and a gallon of glitter. He’s standing across the street outside the mayor’s office, talking with that slimeball lawyer, looking like he just stepped out of a noir novel. Dark coat, dark scowl, skin the color of pine bark and tusks so polished they catch the sun.
He doesn’t see me. Or if he does, he doesn’t let on. Which somehow pisses me off more than if he’d waved.
I shove the lights into Dee’s arms as she rounds the corner. “He’s here.”
She looks. Whistles. “That is a lot of broad-shouldered irritation in one place.”
“He smells like money and moral bankruptcy.”
She laughs. “I bet he smells like cedar and cold steel. And I bet you noticed because you got closer than you want to admit.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m just saying. You’re not immune to a well-tailored villain.”
“He’s not a villain,” I say, glowering. “He’s an orc-shaped wrecking ball with a clipboard.”
“Same thing.”
“I hate him.”
“You’re aware you keep saying that in ways that suggest you’re trying to convince yourself.”
I don’t answer. Because she’s not wrong. But she’s not right either. I don’t want to want anything from that man except his signature on a surrender form. I don’t want to think about the way his eyes looked like stormclouds at dusk, or how his voice rumbled like snow sliding off a roof, or the fact that he didn’t seem surprised when I threatened him in public like maybe, deep down, he liked it.
