Elizabeth Ann Scarborough by The Goldcamp Vampire

Author:The Goldcamp Vampire [Vampire, The Goldcamp]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I didn’t have to fake my need for fresh air. I pawed through that last number in a fog, and when it was over bolted through the back door without bothering to pull my wool socks on over my shoes. Once the cold air hit me, I revived and cursed myself for being such an idiot. Just because some fool senator had been dumb enough to appoint a scoundrel like Drake to the consulate didn’t mean I had to freeze my feet off. I had outwitted him before and I could do so again. The trouble was, if he decided he was homesick to talk Spanish with someone, he would penetrate my masquerade with more than his eyes. His Spanish was fluent and mine was all but nonexistent. Next time I went incognito, I’d have to remember to be something a little less common, say, a Turk perhaps, or an overgrown Bantu pygmy.

I could worry about triumphing over evil later. Right now I needed the warmth of my cabin and a restoring cup of tea. At least Giselle’s cancan costume was not so thoroughly ventilated as Corazon’s rags, but I felt ill-prepared to face Drake in anything less than full costume. The clients would have to drink themselves to death without me tonight.

The back steps were crude and without a railing, and the footing was more slippery than the entire city council of San Francisco combined. Using my cancan flounces to protect my posterior, I descended the steps in a seated position. Wood smoke perfumed the air, that and the sharp tingling of the nostrils, the absence of lesser odors, that is the essence of arctic cold. The sky was hazy beyond the humps of Dawson’s guardian hills, its steel gray and navy gradations vaguely backlit with a dull wash of pulsing crimson. The crusted ice and snow outlined the buildings and made the protruding bare brush look like sheaves of bone stuck upright in the drifts. Wings flapped overhead, and something large and black swooped past me, down the alley. A raven, I thought, or an owl. Regaining my feet, I ice skated down Paradise Alley toward my little crib, which seemed to me just then to be the next best thing to the real paradise.

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