Page 11 of Tracking Snow

"And you don’t want her to...see you?"

I shrug, not able to explain. My past makes my skin itch and my throat close off.

Not that Queenie would recognize me. She came and schmoozed at the home a few times, got some good photos and footage for the local news to show how generous she was.

She brought us gifts at Christmas and told us how loved we all were.

Still, I shied away from being seen by the senatorial candidate. I had unsettled feelings around the circumstances of how I left the home.

What I did wasn't exactly allowed. Not that anyone would come arrest me, but I never shook the feeling I needed to keep looking over my shoulder. I never got out of the habit of keeping a low profile.

Except for the whole patrolling the night and dancing performatively on bars in a spectacle that got people to tip me generously at my job.

But for years I was poor as shit, working shitty waitress jobs from town to town to survive, lying about my age all the while. Some of that still sticks to my bones.

A beat of silence. Ariel doesn't push. That's one of the things I love about her. She knows when I don’t want her to push. She lets it sit.

We get through the crowd, and the voice fades behind us, swallowed by traffic and distance and the ordinary noise of the city going about its afternoon.

My hood stays up for another half block before I pull it down.

"For the record," Ariel says after a while, in that even tone she uses to get us back on track, "I hope you see him again. Since you can't stop thinking about him."

I glance at her.

"Whoever this guy is, he's here." She taps her temple. "Maybe it means something."

I face forward again. The Poison Apple is two blocks up, the neon-lit apple-shaped skull and crossbones already glowing. I half expected to see some of those magic protestors, or even some of the HAM assholes out front with their dumb signs, but thankfully they were all condensed at the rally.

"I probably won't see him again. How many other people in Boston deal with their insomnia by stalking the streets in the middle of the night to help anyone who might run into trouble?"

"Sounds like that’s exactly what he was doing, so I’d say your odds of seeing him again are high." She throws out an arm as if to stop everything. "Wait, did you show him your special brand of magic?"

I scoff. "He was totally unimpressed by my floating finger trick."

"What? What a loser. That trick is objectively awesome," she says with the conviction a delusional bestie has hyping up her equally delusional bestie.

"Then he told me to leave him alone."

Ariel's mouth curves. "And yet."

I can't help the evil grin from spreading across my face. "And yet."

Chapter 4

Two Cool for You

SNOW

I'm not a stalker.

I’m more like unexpected backup.

That’s what I tell myself as I follow the mystery hoodie guy at four AM.

I've been pacing him for twenty minutes, creeping from rooftop to rooftop, far above where he strolls the city streets. It took a couple hours of concerted city sweeping before I located him.

Again, not stalking, just…uh, checking up on him.