I wondered if anyone had ever gotten frostbite half a mile from their own doorstep. Quite probably, I guessed, which wasn't exactly a cheerful thought. Adding the bit where their doorstep was in the middle of Chicago, lack of cheerfulness rapidly took second place to sheer humiliation. The chances of anyone other than me with an actual doorstep to come home to having that happen to them were pretty slim. Chicago is windy, not Arctic. Well. Not usually.
Another gust of wind buffeted me, plastering my face with the icy sleet that currently passed for snow, and I tried to hunch my shoulders a bit more, to present less of a target for the predatory elements. It wasn't happening, though, not unless I suddenly developed the ability to physically pull my head down between my shoulder blades -- something that would leave me looking not quite unlike a 6-foot-plus, gangly turtle in black. As it was, I probably just looked ridiculously bent and uncomfortable, with my leather coat flapping in the wind with rather less dramatic flair and quite a bit more of tangling in my legs than I usually preferred.
I blinked to clear some of the ice crystal from my lashes, and the streetlights strobed wildly for a second when a big goop of half-melted sleet got in my eyes. It stung, and I hissed, only just managing to bite down on a curse by clinging to my manly pride. That, and also by considering the fact that if I tried to speak, I'd probably just swallow a mouthful of polluted Chicago slush. That stuff was nasty enough to be a pretty potent motivator. Besides, I wasn't sure I wanted to dwell on my manly pride right now, seeing as how it was to blame for landing me in a situation where I was contemplating the joys of frostbite a couple of blocks away from my own apartment in the first place.
Murphy would kick my ass if she knew I'd opted for the manly option of walking home instead of trying to stop someone for help when I ended up stranded on my way back from her. But it was a late night the week before Christmas, and I was a tall, dark stranger. While I imagined that certain people -- women, especially -- would find the opportunity to give someone of that description a lift intriguing on paper, the reality of things was such that I would probably freeze to death before anyone stopped for me. Add to that the fact that even if I only asked to borrow a phone, I wasn't sure it would work for long enough to get a message out. That's the thing with having technology in the close proximity of one highly annoyed wizard -- I would probably cause some sensitive piece of electronics to fizz out and die, sooner rather than later. Even getting in a car was more than I wanted to risk -- getting some poor good Samaritan stranded along with me in the middle of the night would just make things worse. Plus there was the whole thing with waiting and asking for help, when I could just suck it up and walk the rest of the way home. It hadn't seemed that far away, at the time. Of course, it hadn't seemed that cold at the time, either.
I plodded on determinedly, one soaked foot in front of the other. Hell's bells, I could recognize the buildings around here; I knew exactly where I was, and frostbite or no frostbite, I was going to make it back home without any help. I had to clench my jaw a fraction tighter to keep my teeth from clattering together, but I was on the home stretch now. No problem. Riding my trusty Blue Beetle, I would have expected to see my old apartment building up ahead any second now, but the Beetle had come down with a sudden case of the mechanical cold -- hence my own chilly, foot-bound circumstances. At least I'd managed to park it relatively safely by the side of the road before it had come coughing to a complete halt. I could call Mike tomorrow and let him know where to pick it up. Getting it fixed would make a dent in my already buckled economy, but I needed that car, and like I said. It was mine, and trusty, and I had already decided to forgive it for having a bad day. Being out here for -- how long was it now? - myself, I'd come to find myself quite sympathetic to the poor thing.
I was roused by vague musings about whether I should feel bad for leaving the Beetle out in the cold when I realized that wonderfully familiar building had materialized in the swirling snow right in front of me. Home! I noted that the lights seemed to be out everywhere that didn't have brightly colored Christmas decorations shining through the night -- it must be later than I'd thought. I picked up my pace, already brushing ineffectively at the snow clinging to my shoulders, shaking my head to send clumps of ice flying around me. I instinctively reached out with my wizard's senses, checking to see if the wards were still intact, and breathed a small white puff of relief when I felt them answer my questing touch. The way my luck had been going tonight, it wouldn't have surprised me all that much to find myself coming home to an ambush by a horde of crazed killer vampires. Really, with me, it's more likely than you might imagine.
The stairs leading down to my door were half buried in snow drifts, and I made my careful way down them, not wanting to slip on some treacherous patch of ice and break my neck now that I was almost literally on my doorstep. That would be a thoroughly embarrassing -- not to mention useless -- way to die. I threaded the command to let me in through the strong weave of magic that protected my home, and opened the door.
For a moment, all that my semi-frozen brain could process was the fact that warm = good, and there was light. Then I realized that there was also noise, and I had started to scramble for the shield bracelet on my left wrist, readying myself for whatever horrors could have penetrated all my defenses to the point where they could sneakily ambush me in the welcome warmth of my own home, when the right synapses finally fired. The ambush dissolved into one knee-high, fuzzy gray puppy greeting me enthusiastically, tail wagging, 30 pounds of unusually restrained tomcat, and Thomas. He had, at various points, fit all three descriptions of crazed, killer, and vampire, but he had usually had good reasons for it -- well, maybe not the vampire part. He'd never been given any choice about that. The fact that he was my brother made it rather easier than I'd expected to work around all that, even though there was something vaguely ambush-like about the way he flung himself from the couch and strode towards me. The noise I'd heard had been him calling my name, his tone somewhere between anxious and pissed.
"Jesus Christ, Harry, where have you been? What happened? Do you have any idea how worried --" He crowded the puppy aside, biting off the rest of the sentence as he looked me up and down, taking in my slowly dripping, soaked and chilled self. A chunk of sleet chose that moment to detach from my back, where I hadn't managed to brush it off before, and fell to the floor with a wet thud. I gave him a lopsided grin.
"Hi, Thomas. I'm home." Then I stretched down -- not a very far stretch, either -- to scratch the puppy's fluffy ears. "Hi, Mouse." He tolerated the touch of soggy leather with a certain un-puppylike dignity before giving me a happy lick, and ducking away to join Mister at a safe distance.
"Harry..." Thomas sounded exasperated. I swayed a little as I straightened back up, and he grimaced. I was probably making quite the puddle on the floor where I was standing, but I just couldn't find the energy to care about that right now. It was warm here. I smiled at Thomas, who shook his head at me. "You look like hell", he said brusquely, and reached out a hand to wipe some more icy slush off my shoulder.
"Nah. Hell's warm," I objected.
"Whatever you say, Harry," Thomas rolled his eyes at me. "Look, standing around in those wet clothes can't be good for you. You get out of them, and I'll get you something to change into, okay? And then we need to call Murphy."
That was a lot of information to take in for someone who was currently still engrossed in the philosophical debate of cold = bad; warm = good, but I managed to nod, and started fumbling with the top button of my leather coat. The fingers of my right hand were feeling kind of numb, and the black leather glove encasing them was still rather stiff with cold. The delicate maneuvering involved had the right hand a bit stumped, so I automatically raised my other hand to help. It was an 'automatically' that I'd kept mostly shut off for the past couple of months, but obviously the cold had made me stupid. Trying to force ruined fingers to do something they could no longer do as I shoved them against the button sent a jolt of pain through them all the way up to my elbow, and I made an interesting kind of strangled, wheezing sound. I didn't think it had been all that loud, but it stopped Thomas in his tracks where he was heading towards my bedroom, and he was back at my side before I could protest the attention.
"You're not hurt, are you?" he asked, studying me intently.
I shook my head, cradling my bad hand in the good one. I could see something sharp in his eyes softening, as he noticed the gesture. "Ah," was all he said.
"Yeah," I said. "Turns out freezing something that's been burned is not the best idea."
"Really?" His mouth tilted in a sarcastic grin for a brief instant, before he grew still and serious again. "Okay, we need to get you out of those clothes. Now."
I was inclined to agree with him -- I had started to shiver again, and the icy dampness of the fabric closest to my skin was acutely unpleasant. But there was the problem with the buttons. Still -- manly pride, and all that. I gritted my teeth, and raised my right hand to have another go at the coat.
A pale hand batted my gloved one away, and I heard Thomas blow out an exasperated sigh at me. "I'll get the coat for you, but then you're on your own."
I set my jaw stubbornly, but before I could utter a snappy line about my undressing skills, he started speaking again. "Seriously, Harry, what were you doing out there? There wasn't an attack, was there? We were -- we were about to head out to look for you."
Thomas eyes were on his hands, working the buttons out of the wet leather with annoyingly more grace than I had managed, so I couldn't see his expression, but there was an odd edge to his voice. That, more than anything, made me focus on his words -- and one word in particular. "We?"
"Me and Murphy," Thomas elaborated. "Here, give me your hand."
I distractedly did as he asked when he tugged at my right sleeve. Murphy. Thomas had mentioned Murphy before -- calling her. I watched as he peeled the soaking glove off my good hand, and asked "Why were you going to do that?"
With a final yank, the glove came free, and Thomas flung it to the side with a disgusted flick of his fingers. Mouse headed over to sniff at it. "Because, Harry," he said in the kind of voice most people only use for speaking to small children and pets. "We though something had happened." Though most children and animals are cute enough to avoid getting that kind of biting sarcasm aimed their way.
"Ah," I said.
"Yeah, 'ah'," Thomas answered, as he gave my left hand a thoughtful look before he obviously decided to postpone the unpleasant business of getting my crippled limb out of clingy, wet leather. Instead, he reached up to hold the back of my coat as I shrugged my way out of it.
"The car stalled," I offered, feeling delightfully light as the weight of the chilly coat slid off my shoulders to pool soggily around my feet when Thomas let go of it.
Thomas nodded. "A patrol officer spotted it by the side of the road -- that Frankenstein bug of yours is pretty easily recognizable."
"Hey!" I protested the unfortunately accurate description of the once-blue Beetle.
"Apparently this guys knows Murphy, and knows she knows you, so he decided to give her a call, just in case," Thomas went on with his explanation, ignoring my interruption. I bent down over my boots, enough feeling having returned to my fingers to tingle uncomfortably, but also make it possible to pick at the ice-crusted laces of my boots. It's possible Thomas was hovering -- he paused briefly, but when I didn't fall flat on my face, he gave me a little more space.
"She called here to check if you'd gotten back home."
I grunted. "I guess I hadn't."
"Damn right you hadn't! Harry -- that was hours ago."
"Really?" I cocked my head. Hours? Sure, it'd been a while, and I'd felt Arctic-explorer level cold and miserable, but -- I wondered if maybe I'd unconsciously raised my shield at a low level. Either that, or the whole blocking out pain thing that I had so much training in worked for cold, too. I'd never really put it to the test before.
"Really. And there's a snowstorm going on out there."
"I kind of noticed." One of my socked feet squelched as I managed to pull it out of the boot.
"Yeah, so. Since you're a scrawny wizard and not a polar bear, we were going to head out and look for you any minute."
As if on cue, the phone rang. Thomas caught my eye, and I nodded. "Go answer," I said, struggling with my other boot. Didn't want to make Murphy even more worried than she must have been already. Like I said. She would not only want to kick my ass -- she was more than capable of actually doing so.
As my brother hurried off to assure my best friend that I hadn't been eaten by snow pixies, or frozen into a Harry-cicle, or whatever they had been worried about, I worked at getting my other foot free of the boot. Mouse had gone from sniffing my discarded glove to sniffing my coat, and was pressing warmly against the leg currently supporting my weight. His tail went into wagging overdrive when I finally managed to jerk my boot off, and walked stiffly to the couch. Before I could execute a well-earned collapse, Thomas appeared in front of me with an armful of towels and blankets. I hadn't even heard him hang up, much less head into the bathroom and back. Sneaky vampire.
"Here," he thrust a big bath towel in my direction, and dumped the rest of his load on the couch. "Murphy says we need to get you warm and dry."
"Warm and dry sounds good," I agreed, rubbing my face with the towel.
"I'll get your clothes," Thomas said, leaving me some privacy to wiggle out of clothes I could have sworn had been cursed, if it wasn't for the fact that I could tell they were utterly mundane in their nature. It was just the wet and the cold making them difficult to manage. Stupid wet. Stupid cold.
I was shivering like a half-drowned kitten by the time I'd stripped down to my briefs, and my chest was heaving alarmingly. I was leaning against the back of the couch when Thomas returned with a bundle of clothes, including sweatpants, a thick knitted sweater, and the robe I usually wore down in my lab. He looked critically at me, but started slightly guiltily when he met my eyes. I wasn't really prepared for the worry in his gaze -- the last time there was worry going on with the two of us, it was me worrying that I'd lose my brother before I'd even gotten to know him properly. But that had been in the middle of battling a big, bad vampire -- all I had done now was take a cold walk home. Nothing a grown wizard couldn't handle, right? Still, glimpsing such deep concern in Thomas' gray eyes before he turned away -- I couldn't really say I minded the feeling it gave me.
"Uh," he said, eloquently. "Murphy said -- about getting warm -- I mean. I'll go out in the kitchen and -- make you something hot to drink." Then he hurried of in the direction of the little kitchen, busying himself with lighting the fire in the old-fashioned wood stove and finding a pot to put over it. I could hear him bustling about as I got rid of the last of my wet clothes, and scrubbed myself thoroughly with the towel Thomas had handed me earlier. Then I shimmied into gloriously non-wet, only slightly chilly clothes as fast as I could, before working on my layering. When I was done, I felt a bit like the Micheline man, but it was nice and warm and snug, and I fell into a slouch on the couch with a grateful sigh. I was busy bundling blankets over my lap and across my shoulders when the thought struck me that maybe I should see about helping Thomas. It felt odd to realize that I had just assumed that he would take care of things for me, as if that was the natural order of things.
"Hey," I called. "Need me to do anything?" Also, if I went over there to help him, I could hopefully keep him from burning the kitchen down around our ears. Not that it wouldn't be nice and toasty, but I preferred my hot drinks liquid, not charred.
"No, no, I've got it," came the hurried reply, and I let myself relax through the clanging of pots. I'd checked my toes and fingers for frostbite -- I didn't know exactly how it was supposed to look, but I hadn't seen anything worse than the blisters one could expect to get when walking around in shoes so wet they could probably have doubled as goldfish bowls, if the goldfish weren't too particular about the aroma of their homes. So that was good. I did have that tingling feeling that accompanies thawing up after being outside in cold weather, and in some places it was getting pretty intensely uncomfortable, but I was used to much worse.
The subject of 'much worse' made me look at my burned left hand. I had managed to get it out of the glove without making Thomas come running to investigate why I was making pathetic noises, which was good. Still hurt like crazy, though, so after gently blotting it dry, I'd simply tucked into a clean towel to get it warm again. I intended to just shift it out of sight, but found the awkward bundle of towel and hand resting on Mouse's head. He'd come to sit by the couch, watching me curiously. At the touch, his tail started swishing back and forth across the rug, and I smiled at him and rubbed him under the chin. Mister was probably in the kitchen, hoping Thomas could be persuaded to either feed him, or at least drop something tasty on the floor by mistake.
The fire was crackling cheerfully, its flickering light mingling with that of the many candles lit around the room, and there was a smell in the air, mingling with that of the woodsmoke, which was much more pleasant than what I'd come to associate with Thomas' attempts at cooking. I felt myself melting into the couch cushions like my spine had turned into chewy English toffee, my aching hand still trailing soothing patterns on Mouse's furry little head. Or. Not so little, not anymore. Had been when I first ended up with him, though. I was contemplating moving to a more horizontal position, when I heard soft footsteps pad across the assorted rugs that covered my floor, and cracked my eyes open to see Thomas gently put two steaming mugs down on the little coffee table. I sniffed, and sat up a little. Did I smell hot cocoa?
Thomas glanced at me, and finding me awake, he smiled. "Hey," he said, and there was something almost shy about the way in which he picked up one of the mugs again, and handed it to me. "Murphy said -- she told me that a cup of cocoa would be good for you. For the cold."
I accepted the mug, grabbing it by the handle, and looked curiously at its contents. It was liquid, and a rich, chocolate brown. I sniffed again. It smelled like chocolate. Delicious, warm, sweet chocolate. I couldn't resist -- I carefully took a small sip of the drink. It was almost scaldingly hot, but if there was a slight aftertaste of burnt milk, and if the cocoa powder had congealed to little bitter lumps here and there, it was still the best hot cocoa I had tasted in -- as long as I could remember. I hadn't even known I had cocoa powder in my cupboards.
"Thank you," I said. "It's really good." Some of the surprise I felt at telling the truth there must have been evident in my voice, but Thomas just met my grateful smile with one of his own, and took the other mug for himself. Then he sat down in the big, comfy armchair just next to the couch. We sipped our drinks in silence for a little while. Mister showed up, deigning to grace me with his company in the couch. Mouse had collapsed into a sprawling heap of tired puppy, and I looked around me and felt -- warm. Here I was, with my dog, my cat, and my brother who brought me hot cocoa.
Now, that was odd. And not just because my brother is a lust-sucking vampire. (With me a wizard, that sounded a bit too much like a bad sitcom, or maybe one of those games Billy and his friends liked to play. Wizard & Vampire, roommates against all odds.) No, it was the fact that I had been living on my own for most of my life, and even during that time when I was living at Justin's, there wouldn't have been any of this... coddling. Not if I'd showed up soaked and chilled to the bone, hours after I'd mentioned that I'd probably be home. Quite on the contrary -- but those dark memories were hard to dwell on in the bright glow of the warm firelight.
"So," Thomas said, tentatively. "How did it go?"
"How did what go?" I frowned.
"You know. Murphy, seeing her right before Christmas...?"
"Well, my car decided to stall on me, and I had to walk home in a snowstorm--" I started.
"Not that," Thomas said. "I know that -- and why couldn't you just have called or something?" Before I could explain my very good and manly reasons for not doing so, he'd waved the question aside. "No, I mean. Did you... talk?"
Oh. So that was what he meant. Obviously, my brother had noticed more than I thought he had. I mean, sure, we'd been living together for a couple of months now, but we still tried to keep our lives separate enough that we hadn't exactly done a lot of hanging out. I hesitated a little while before answering, staring into my cocoa. "We always talk," I finally said, rather lamely.
"But nothing more?" he cocked his head to the side.
"No. It's not like that, Thomas."
"Really?" One dark eyebrow shot up.
"Really, yes." I busied myself with the cocoa again, but I could feel Thomas' eyes on me, and I saw when he nodded.
"Okay," he said softly, and I released a breath a bit like a sigh. If it was relief that he didn't press the matter further, or because of something else entirely, I didn't know.
"So the car stalling -- that really was nothing more than bad luck?" he asked.
"Well, other than the cold, nothing tried to kill me," I said with a shrug. "Most assorted entities who wanted me dead wouldn't have wasted a situation like that on anything as trivial as blisters."
Thomas flashed me a smile. "You know, it kind of worries me that you have to qualify your enemies as 'assorted entities'," he said, letting the subject stray even further away from what he'd first asked about.
"Hey," I answered him with a lazy drawl, only too willing to let the subject of Murphy drop completely right now, especially since there might actually be more reasons than I wanted to admit for taking a midnight stroll in a snowstorm. "It comes with the territory -- territories. Of wizarding, and -- detecting."
"How about damsels in distress?" he asked, and the look on his face made me laugh before I could answer. "Do they come with the territory?"
"Oh, yeah," I said. "Let me tell you something about damsels in distress." And I did, and all the while, I could feel warmth from more than just the fire and the cocoa seeping inside me, thawing out all the cold places I had carried home with me.