Page 53 of Tracking Snow

Before I can get closer to see if the bartenders are all hiding underneath the counter, the lights go out, plunging the bar into darkness.

Panic grips me, tightening around me. I zip through the crowd, bumping into people who let out indignant cries of protest, but I don't stop until my back is to the wall.

A crack of blue powder explodes from the stage by the tree.

The crowd erupts.

I flinch hard enough that the back of my skull connects with the wall behind me.

Get out. We need to get out of here, Seven demands with such authority I'm tempted to do what he says.

No, wait, Four says. No one else is panicking.

It could be a trap, Six points out.

A single spotlight cuts through the dark and finds a man in a powder blue top hat, coattails, and a bare chest, standing on a platform near the base of the tree.

"Good evening, my wicked little deviants." He purrs. "Tonight, I am your host and emcee, Geanie. Welcome to the only bar in Boston where the drinks are potent, the women are deadly, and your inhibitions aren't welcome."

The crowd loses their minds. The man grins, slow and wide. He reminds me of a peacock showing off his feathers. I'd once encountered them at the zoo and found them unnecessarily aggressive.

I like him, Four says.

Of course you do, Two replies.

"We all know why you're here." Geanie's voice drops. "To drink. To forget. To sin." Another surge of cheering. "And no one serves up sin better than our Lost Girls."

The bass drops.

A turquoise spotlight hits the far end of the bar, and the crowd parts enough that I can see her. Copper hair, a sleek black and chrome wheelchair, tattoos winding up one pale arm, piercings catching the light at her ears and nose. Her aquamarine eyes cut through the crowd, and a dozen people stand up straighter.

"Our girl Ariel came to Boston, a fish out of water," Geanie announces. He is somehow now draped sideways across a tree branch above the crowd, one finger trailing the bark. "But oh, how fast our girl learned to swim."

Two cords drop into her hands from somewhere above her. Weighted ends glow an electric blue-white as she begins to spin them.

The spotlight winks out.

In the dark, the cords trace light. Figure eights, halos, full orbits that expand and contract with her wrists. The crowd goes silent in a way it hasn't since I walked in. Just the bass and the cold glow of the patterns she pulls out of nothing, looping over her head, crossing at her chest, spiraling out wide on either side until the whole dark corner of the bar is mapped in moving light.

Then the spotlight floods back.

Ariel drops the cords, rolls off the platform and straight into the crowd, and they catch her. Hands go up without hesitation, the chair lifted and passed overhead in a rolling surf across the room, her copper hair streaming behind her, face tipped up to the ceiling.

The turquoise light follows her out and cuts away.

Another spotlight, this one gold, hits the other end of the bar, and a woman in pink steps into it.

Blonde, full-figured, with a wide sunny smile.

"Goldie," Geanie announces from the branch. He fans himself. "Our goddess of the golden pour. A level five siren in pink leather, and trust me, darlings, you will not even see it coming. Don't let the sweet exterior fool you. Her mixes are as bold as she is, and she has never in her life met a stranger."

Level five, Seven says from somewhere very quiet and very still.

I feel it move through all of us at once. The count. How many magic users are in this building right now? How many in this room? How many between us and the door? It presses against the back of my skull like a thumb finding a bruise.

Goldie pulls two bottles simultaneously, one in each hand, and begins to move. She crosses them, tosses the right one behind her back, catches it without looking, and sends it straight up into a full arc while the left one spins between her fingers. The crowd tracks the bottles with their heads.

She tips them both into a crossing pour, two streams hitting the same glass from opposite angles.