Winter Kiss Page 14

  First things first.

  Ginger threw open the door of the barn, pushing it hard against the heavy snow. It slid enough for her to enter the barn, and she left it ajar to save herself effort later. The barn was humid and warm, anyway. She was simmering with anger, but she forced herself to settle down before she approached the animals.

  They could always sense when she was agitated and the last thing she needed was a bunch of riled-up bulls giving her trouble.

  She’d already put up with enough garbage from males on this particular day.

  Ginger’s family’s farm was long established, but she had changed the focus of its business since giving up her city job and coming home. They’d always raised dairy cattle and sold the milk, Ginger’s most long-standing memory being the arrival of the silver milk tanker every single day of the year, independent of weather or holidays. She’d learned about milking and breeding and herd management from the time she could walk, listening avidly to her grandparents’ accumulated wisdom whenever possible.

  When Ginger’s grandfather had died, Gran had decided to stay on the farm but manage the workload. She’d rented the workable fields where Grampa had grown fodder, letting Silas Hargreaves at the neighboring farm till that acreage in exchange for enough fodder for the herd. The bottom land had been used for pasture and grazing, as always. And without a man around, Gran had begun to automate functions on the farm. She would never have left the farm—it was a part of her identity—so Gran found ways to stay.

  Ginger respected and admired that.

  Ginger had yearned for city life until she got there. She’d missed home every minute she’d been away—even though she loved chef’s school and adored cooking. When Gran had admitted that the dairy farm wasn’t doing well financially, Ginger headed back to Ohio as soon as she hung up the phone. Her plum restaurant job had no longer been able to compete with the allure of rural Ohio and the challenge of putting Sinclair Farms into the black. Under Ginger’s leadership, the automation had picked up speed. Ginger had negotiated better terms with Silas, and had employed his son Luke to help with the work on the dairy farm.

  Her experience as a chef had made Ginger passionate about finding local sources for food, about organic methods of production, and about preserving heritage varieties. All of those interests came together in the new Sinclair Farms. She’d inherited a prime herd of Guernseys, the established stock of Gran’s herd and a breed with an active breeding registry, and had been approached by the registry to sell semen. Ginger had since branched out to other varieties. She had three of the few Kerrys in the United States, and a small herd of Milking Shorthorns.

  She loved them all. Cows were serene, their presence giving Ginger a tranquility she’d never felt in the city. She was passionate about her breeding protocols, about ensuring quality and tracking bloodlines. Bull semen kept her farm solvent, and she’d just had a new barn built with a high-tech dairy parlor and solar panels on the roof. Tanya paid a premium for the milk from the Guernseys for making her artisan cheese, too.

  Ginger had to fight Luke over every change to the running of the farm: he was resistant to change, but she needed help with the physical work and he was close at hand. Luke was skeptical about everything she did, which meant that Ginger had yet to get more land being tilled with organic methods. Luke just wouldn’t do it.

  She simply had to persist, like Gran had always told her to do. It would have been nice, though, to have had a supportive partner instead of an obstructionist employee. It would have been nice to have been lucky like Tanya, to follow her heart and find her soul mate on the way.

  On this day of days, Ginger stepped into the barn with a sigh of satisfaction. She kicked the snow off her boots and took a deep breath of the steamy air, of the scent of manure and straw and cow. She heard the girls low to one another in announcement of her presence, and move toward the center aisle to see her.

  Then she grabbed the broom, left just inside the door. The chickens chattered in their pen, Reginald, the rooster, giving a crow of complaint. The rooster had spectacular plumage, heritage breed prize that he was, but he also had attitude to spare.

  And he defended the barn most effectively.

  Ginger, however, had zero tolerance for male territory disputes on this particular day.

  “Coq au vin!” Ginger cried as usual, lifting the broom.

  Reginald crowed, as if to argue with her. The rooster flew at Ginger, all talons and beak, his feathers spread in a majestic display. He was going for blood.

  Ginger swung the broom and connected on the first hit. If he’d been a baseball, he wouldn’t have been hit out of the park, but it was enough of a blow to be insulting. Reginald was batted into the pen where the hens were clucking. He tumbled, then squawked at the indignity. The hens moved away from his rolling path, clucking. Ginger always thought they sounded like they were laughing at him. Reginald looked so disheveled and insulted by the time he got on his feet that Ginger almost felt sorry for him.

  But not quite. He’d rip her eyes out, given half a chance.

  “Quiet, you old troublemaker,” Ginger said, “or your time in the stewpot will come sooner than expected.”

  He clucked and strutted, as if he had been the one triumphant.

  Reginald was good for one assault, then he usually gave it up. On this particular day, he was true to form—he started to peck at the ground, as if oblivious to Ginger’s arrival.

  Ginger left the broom beside the pen in case she needed it on the way out. She grabbed a couple of handfuls of feed and tossed it into the chicken pen, watching the hens scrabble and peck.

  The barn was a new building, sleek and gleaming, a major investment. The walls were made of a translucent plastic, which was tough, but admitted light to the barn. It was also made of recycled materials, which Ginger liked. The solar panels on the roof kept the lights on in the barn, and ran the coolers for the dairy equipment.

  For these six weeks, though, there was no milk. The girls were pregnant or dry, so the barn was quiet. Ginger liked this six weeks before the calving began, as it gave her schedule a bit of a break.

  Those translucent wall panels could also be slid open to improve ventilation. Some farmers left their cattle inside all the time in these new barns, but Ginger still liked to send the herd out to graze. The sunshine, Gran had always insisted, was good for them and their milk production. Ginger agreed.

  Darian, the Kerry stud in the first stall, gave his usual bellow of welcome. Ginger smiled as she reached over the bar to scratch him. He was small and black, more mellow than any bull she’d ever known. His temperament didn’t affect his ability to get the job done, though, and there were two calves sired by Darian due this spring. One pregnant Kerry was in the next stall in Ginger’s barn, while the other was in North Dakota. Darian rubbed his snout on the edge of the stall as she scratched him, showing such obvious pleasure that Ginger’s smile broadened.

  “I gotta muck out the girls first,” she told him. “You know how they are.” She grabbed some fresh hay for him and put it in his stall to keep him busy. “I’ll be back.”

  He gave a low moo, as if he understood perfectly, and stamped a hoof. His tail flicked as he lowered his head to nibble at her gift.

  The two Kerry cows, one pregnant and one not, were lying down at the back of their stalls, ruminating. Ginger left them to it.

  Ginger grabbed a shovel and strode down the center aisle of the barn, enjoying how the Guernsey girls all turned at her presence. They began to moo as they eased toward the aisle, their tails swishing. They were a tranquil breed, even for cows, and excellent milk producers. Gran had always been able to sell the Guernsey milk at a premium because of its high butterfat and high protein levels. Tanya raved about it. None of the girls were lactating at this time of year, many of their bellies rounded with soon-to-arrive calves. Others were too young to be bred and Ginger had found herself with a rare interval with a break in the twice-daily milking routine.

  In
the last stall on the right were the pregnant Milking Shorthorns. One of the benefits of this heritage breed was not only their prolific milk production but their reliability in conceiving every year. Ginger’s girls had proven that adage correct and the studs seemed smug to Ginger.

  She wondered whether the Milking Shorthorns knew any Pyr. First time, every time. Hmm.

  Ginger greeted the girls as she strode down the center aisle of the barn. Even though she had a herd of roughly a hundred cows, she named all of the calves each spring. She used Gran’s convention of naming all the ones born the same year with names that began with the same letter. The information was recorded on their microchips and ear tags, but Ginger tried to remember each cow’s name. The computer displayed their names when they entered the milking parlor twice daily, as well as the free stall barn, and that was a good prompt.

  She addressed them with names she’d used, knowing that she probably got one wrong once in a while. The girls didn’t seem to mind.

  “Hey, Jessie and Jasmine and Jessica,” she said, touching noses as she strode past.

  The daily routine was to move the girls either into the far section of the barn or the pasture, then muck out the area in which they’d spent the night. It was familiar to the cows and the girls trailed along behind Ginger as she headed for the far gate.

  Usually Luke took care of this job, but Ginger knew he wouldn’t turn up in such weather. If she was lucky, the Hargreaves would plow her driveway when they did their own. That would be plenty of help.

  If not, she’d do it herself.

  Gran had taught Ginger self-reliance beyond that of most people.

  “Germaine and Gertrude, how’s it going? Bess and Bethany, Barbara and Beulah, did you sleep well?”

  Ginger noticed that the Guernsey bulls, in individual pens at the far end, didn’t turn to watch her approach.

  That was odd. They were usually even more curious than the girls.

  “Dolores and Dorothy and Dotty and Desirée, how are my girls this morning?” Ginger kept up her greetings, her eye on the bulls. What were they watching? Their tails weren’t even swishing, they were so intent. “Nadine and Nancy and Natalie, you look beautiful today.”

  The bulls didn’t even glance her way, their gazes fixed at a point she couldn’t see, beyond the end of the last stall.

  Ginger had that bad feeling again.

  But her instincts were proving to be unreliable. Ginger shook off her feeling of dread and rationalized. It was probably a rabbit or a groundhog. And really, she couldn’t be surprised by a wild creature wanting to get out of this weather.

  The boys, though, didn’t take well to changes in their routine.

  “Teresa and Terrilyn, love those lashes.” Ginger was about three-quarters of the way down the central aisle when Thomas stamped his hoof and exhaled a puff. His stall was closest to where the bulls were staring, and he was the least tolerant of anyone in his space.

  Even bunnies.

  Thomas gave a low bellow, one that Ginger knew was filled with irritation. The other bulls echoed his complaint, lots of hooves stomping on the barn floor. Micah lowered his head and pawed one hoof on the floor.

  Uh-oh.

  The girls looked in that direction, easing away from the bulls with characteristic caution.

  Great. Now she was going to have a stampede.

  All over a cold bunny.

  Ginger strode to the end of the aisle with purpose, swinging her shovel. “Who’s there?” she shouted, not really expecting an answer. She kept talking though, assuming it would spook the bunny into flight and save her a job. “There’s no room in this barn for wild critters,” she said as she rounded the last corner.

  And stopped cold.

  A man stood there, a stranger. He was almost as tall as Delaney, but his hair was fair and his eyes were blue. He was smiling, but his smile gave Ginger the creeps. There was something about his eyes, something that made him look predatory and dangerous.

  He had a serial killer smile.

  His smile broadened at her obvious surprise. “How accommodating of you to cross the smoke boundary,” he said, and Ginger couldn’t identify his accent beyond the fact that it was foreign. “Surely your injunction against wild critters doesn’t apply to me?”

  She took a step back, wondering how he had gotten into her barn without leaving any tracks. She wondered how he’d gotten past Reginald. Her bad feeling got worse.

  “How did you get in here?” Ginger demanded, hoping she sounded tougher than she felt.

  “A little trick of the Wyvern’s that I’ve been working on,” he said, which made absolutely no sense.

  Then he laughed and it was the most malicious sound Ginger had ever heard. Thomas gave a bellow, but Ginger had other concerns.

  When the man’s body began to shimmer blue around its edges, Ginger knew exactly what was going to happen.

  She dropped the shovel and ran.

  Chapter 9

  They might as well all be cows. That was Jorge’s thought as he shifted shape and snatched for Delaney’s mate. Humans were all placid, stupid, and predictable, just like cows.

  A great many of them were also timid. Just as Delaney’s mate ran—a stupid choice, given that she could never outrun a dragon on the attack—the cows raced away from the center aisle of the barn. They jostled one another against the exterior walls, lowing and stamping, clustering at the perimeter and as far away from Jorge as possible.

  He shifted shape in one bound, savoring the extra surge of power that the Elixir sent through his veins. This last sip had made him stronger than ever.

  He was one step closer to replacing Magnus as leader of the Slayers.

  Magnus didn’t need to know that. Let him trust Jorge. Let him share his vast store of knowledge with Jorge. Let him empty his mind and what was left of his heart, and when there was nothing left that Magnus could contribute, then Jorge would eliminate the ancient Slayer.

  Theoretically, the Elixir conferred immortality. In reality, everyone had a weakness. Jorge believed that everyone could be murdered, and he was willing to test his theory. He’d seen how Magnus had come close to dying, when Erik had injured the ancient Slayer so thoroughly and left his carcass far from the healing balm of the Elixir. It had suited Jorge to make a deal to help Magnus then, but that situation might not repeat itself.

  Especially if he was the one to fell Magnus, having deemed the old Slayer useless.

  The Elixir repaired and replenished, but even those who had sipped of it always needed more. Immortality was thus dependent upon not just a permanent supply of the Elixir, but ready access to it.

  Particularly in times of injury.

  Jorge had a plan to ensure his own longevity, one that still needed some tweaking. He had time to finesse the details, time to let Magnus become bold and absorbed in his own growth of power.

  When Jorge seized the leadership of the Slayers, the role would be one worthy of his abilities.

  For the moment, though, he played the role of Magnus’s willing minion.

  He’d been sent to collect the mate.

  Jorge laughed as he snatched up the small woman in his talons, and enjoyed how she struggled against him. Her every effort was as nothing to him—he held her captive easily in one claw.

  He flew directly for the roof, bursting through it and leaving a gaping hole. He liked destroying things that humans had built and enjoyed the shout of frustration Delaney’s mate made. The snow swirled around him in a maelstrom of white, but his sense of direction was as unerring as his sense of smell. He ascended, well aware that he was being followed.

  And by whom.

  “I just had this barn built!” she cried, and kicked at him with new fury.

  Jorge laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said, and her eyes widened in dismay. “You have bigger problems right now.”

  She glared at him. “If you eat me, I’ll give you indigestion.”

  Jorge laughed again. “By tomorrow
, you’ll wish I had merely eaten you,” he said, leaving her to worry about that.

  Delaney came raging through the air behind him, precisely as Jorge had anticipated. Jorge pivoted in midair and the woman cried out in fear. Even though they were less than a hundred feet above the ground, there was nothing but flying snow visible in every direction.

  “Look familiar?” Jorge dangled the struggling mate before the livid Pyr, then tossed her to his back claw. She didn’t scream, which was disappointing. She did try to kick him when he caught her. Jorge gave her enough of a squeeze to make her gasp.

  “Leave her out of this!” Delaney shouted, but Jorge just laughed.

  He tossed the mate to his other back claw, waiting a beat longer before he caught her. She had an instant to believe that he’d let her fall, and this time, she did yelp with fear. Jorge snatched her out of the air. Delaney flew toward him and the pair locked front claws in the traditional fighting pose.

  Delaney didn’t breathe fire, probably in an effort to protect his mate, but Jorge had no such concern. Magnus had decreed only that she had to be alive. Wounds were optional, as was consciousness.

  Jorge belched a vicious stream of fire at Delaney and the Pyr winced as his shoulder was singed. His emerald scales turned dark, but Delaney pivoted and swung his tail at Jorge. He caught the Slayer across the back and Jorge spun out of range, hiding how much the blow had hurt.

  Delaney was stronger than Jorge had expected. But he had a key weakness, one present and accounted for.

  The mate.

  Jorge tossed the mate again, then just for fun, breathed a little fire at her. She yelped as her coat caught fire, then slapped at the flames even as she tumbled through the air.

  Delaney bellowed and charged. Jorge caught the mate in his talons, set her aflame on the back of her jacket, then flung her as far as he could.

  This time, she screamed most satisfactorily.

  Delaney, as anticipated, chose to save his mate. He raced after her falling form, giving Jorge a clear view of his back.