After Hours

A faint tracery of the evening light managed to bleed in through the bar’s windows, tinting the air the color of good Barbados rum. It had started as light rum, trending into golden as the sun continued its descent. Now it was turning a dark-rum-red, which meant true night couldn’t be far behind. “Andy, go ahead and turn the gas up. Just a quarter inch, mind, and no more.”

There’s an art to properly lighting a drinking establishment—an art that’s dying fast in this vulgar age of electric lights and cheap gas. Too dark and no one sees what they’re drinking; too bright, and everyone sees what they’re drinking. Neither direction is good for business. A successful bar needs to balance mystery with secrecy, true class with shabby gentility and, most of all, obscurity with discretion. People need to feel confident that they can drink in peace, without concern that they’ll be intercepted while conducting whatever assignations they can’t expose to more direct light. That’s why, in my bar, the windows are always covered with a carefully maintained mixture of dust, soot, and coal powder, the gas is never opened past a certain mark, and there are no electric lights outside the living spaces above and the workroom below. Perhaps the time for places like mine is ending, but until it does, the lights will stay low, the windows will stay opaque, and the house whiskey will stay cheap.

I generally ask Gil to adjust the lighting, when I can’t take the time to do it myself. He has delicate hands for such a large gentleman. Sadly, I’d spent the night occupied with my studies, and he’d been forced to work the early shift behind the bar, despite having closed three nights in a row. Gil was asleep upstairs, and likely to remain so unless the building actually caught fire. That left the task to Andy, who was never the best choice for anything requiring fine attention to detail.

The few drinkers who’d arrived before sunset grumbled as Andy adjusted the lights, but subsided back into their cups once it became clear that things wouldn’t be getting any brighter than they’d been before. I nodded approvingly in his direction, and went back to polishing the bar. She’s a grand old girl, pure ash wood from England, older than me by a hundred years and likely to outlive me by at least a hundred more.

I was topping off a pint for one of the regulars when the door swung open, the sound familiar enough to attract no more than a flicker of interest. Whoever it was would either find a seat and wait for service or come over to demand it. Either way, I’d ruin the foam if I didn’t finish the pull before letting myself get distracted.

The sound of shattering glass was more than sufficient to distract me. Old Tom, sensing that his beer was about to move beyond his reach forever, broke a cardinal rule of bar etiquette and leaned across the bar to snatch the pint from my hand. I scarcely noticed. I was already turning toward the sound, shoulders rigid with fury. Realizing that I might need a weapon, I grabbed a bottle from the back of the bar, brandishing it.

I have been working in bars and public houses since I was sixteen, when my father got me a job as a waitress in the bar he tended. In that not-inconsiderable length of time, I’ve seen all manner of things displayed on bars. Gold doubloons from pirate treasure, rare artifacts from South America, rattlesnake skins, and—on one noteworthy occasion—a ship’s cat and her litter of kittens. I kept one of the kittens, and she’s done an excellent job at keeping the mice from the storeroom ever since. I did not think the dead woman was likely to perform the same service. Nor would I be inclined to keep her.

Fixing the corpse-bearer with a stern eye, I folded my arms—the gesture somewhat complicated by the bottle—and demanded, “What, sir, do you think you’re doing? This is a public house, not a funeral parlor.” As an afterthought, I added, “And you’ll be paying for those glasses.”

“I’m terribly sorry, miss, but this is an emergency.” He straightened as he spoke, and I realized for the first time how distressingly attractive he was. His hair was the color of ripe wheat, and his skin was a deep tan entirely at odds with the cut of his coat, which bespoke a man who’d never done a day’s labor in his life. Gentlemen are a rare sight in my establishment. Gentlemen carrying corpses were an entirely new experience. “I’d heard that this bar—ah.” He glanced around at the regulars, all of whom were ignoring the dead body in favor of their drinks, and at Andy, who was openly gawking. Then he lowered his voice, and said, “I’d heard that the owner was an alchemist. Please, can you fetch him for me? I can pay quite well for his time.”

I put down the bottle and thrust my hand in his direction, palm upward. “I’m Mina Norton. This is my bar, hence the name of ‘Norton’s.’ Now, sir, if you would like to depart here with both your bodies intact, you will pay me, and then explain yourself.”

“Accessible.” A large wad of bills was slapped into my palm. That attracted the attention of several regulars, who could’ve heard a coin clink half a mile away. I glared until they went back to their beers. Meanwhile, the blond gentleman was looking at me anxiously. “My name is James. James Holly. This is my wife, Margaret.”

“I see. I would claim that it’s a pleasure to meet the pair of you, but as she is dead and you have placed her on my bar, that is somewhat difficult. Did you require aid in preparing her for burial?” I allowed my attention to return to the body. Her attire was as fine as his, although I couldn’t imagine any living woman allowing herself to be corseted so tightly. “I can see why you wouldn’t want the undertaker to work any further. I have cosmetics that can easily cover the damage he’s done.” The tradition of painting bodies before burial has always struck me as ghoulish, and I’d rarely seen it taken to such an extreme. The poor girl’s skin was paper-white, and her lips were the color of blood. That might not have been so bad if she’d been blonde, but her hair was black as coal. It was like having a dead fairy-tale princess decaying gently in my place of work.

After convincing Andy to take over for me—not the easiest task, given that I employ him for his willingness to follow instructions, not his ability to think for himself—I waved James into the back storeroom. The question of what to do with his dead wife was easily resolved: he picked her up like she was made of cotton and swan’s-down, carrying her easily as he followed me. The door swung shut behind us, sealing us away from prying eyes.

“You can put her on Andy’s cot. He won’t mind.” I stepped out of the way, watching the dead woman for signs of life. There weren’t any. The alchemist’s art doesn’t require quite as many anatomical samples as, say, necromancy, but I still pride myself on being able to tell the dead from the living. Margaret was definitely among the former. “Now, sir, I’m not sure where you learned of my craft, but I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Alchemy is the art of transfiguration and transformation. This does not give me the capacity to transform the dead into the living.”

James rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “I really am terrible at this part. All right: Margaret is dead right now, but she won’t be dead in another three weeks or so. It’s just that I need her to be awake now, as we’re being pursued by some rather unpleasant people who want to have her buried before then.”

I bit my tongue and counted to ten before allowing myself to answer. It wouldn’t have been productive to say the first things that came to mind, which began with “get out” and promptly devolved into language even an alchemist wasn’t expected to be familiar with. Finally, I said, “Absolutely, how silly of me not to have seen it before. Can you wait here for just a moment?”

The tedious thing about magic is the way it insists on existing. There’s far more of it than the world’s assortment of magicians, alchemists, shamans, and sorcerers could ever make use of, and so it gads about manifesting in inconvenient places. Some people—like my father and myself—can learn to use magic. Others simply are magic, existing according to rules outside the normal boundaries of the human condition.

This includes the seasonal monarchs, once ordinary men and women who somehow, through luck, effort, or coincidence, have been chosen to live as the physical incarnations of the seasons. One human standing for Summer, one for Winter. They can live for centuries if they hold onto their thrones, and their presence prevents the seasons from getting out of balance. The world needs them to keep turning. They provide stability to an unstable system. I would have been perfectly happy to live a long and prosperous life without encountering either of them, much less both at the same time.

“And whoever heard of a Summer King, anyway?” I muttered, as I stalked behind a startled-looking Andy to grab a bottle of the best spiced rum in the house. As an afterthought, I also grabbed a glass. “Don’t they know it’s supposed to be a Summer Queen?”

Not stupid—slow. Understandable, given that I crafted him from some particularly nice boulders I found beneath the Golden Gate. He does his job well, providing Gil and I don’t change his instructions too quickly, and don’t mind when sweeping the floor takes all day. “Don’t worry, I have everything well under control. You’re going to be minding the bar for a while yet. Don’t let anyone into the back unless you hear screaming, all right?”

In the storeroom, James had taken a seat on the edge of the cot, holding Margaret’s hand in his. Now that I was looking at him properly, it was easy to see the veracity of his claim. Fair-haired gentlemen are common enough, but how many of them actually brighten a room with the faint glow coming off their person? His eyes were the color of a midsummer sky, which seemed to me to verge ever so slightly into the kingdom of “simply too much.” It even felt as if the temperature had gone up a few degrees since I left to get the rum. I fixed him with a stern eye.

James had the good grace to look faintly abashed. “I’m terribly sorry, Miss Norton. I can’t help it. If it helps at all, we’re near enough to harvest that I probably won’t make flowers start growing from the floorboards.”

“How your housekeeper must adore you.” I uncorked the rum, pouring three fingers into my glass. “Now, then. If your—let’s call it ‘indisposed’—wife is meant to wake up in three weeks, why are you here now? Can’t you simply be patient for a little while longer?”

“It’s not impatience that brought us to your door. Margaret and I are quite accustomed to our ... arrangement. It’s quite soothing, actually, having a spouse who’s dead for three months out of the year. Gives you time to remember why you married in the first place.”

“It’s Margaret’s sister, Jane. She wants to take the Winter. If she can have Margaret interred before the harvest starts the turn of seasons, then she can step up to the throne, and ascend to Winter Queen. At which point I’m in rather a lot of trouble, as Jane’s husband is a huge, strapping brute, and would simply subdue me until Winter’s ascension renders me powerless.”

There are those who insist that maintaining a business above a large hole in the earth in San Francisco is foolhardy, given the region’s propensity for earthquakes. I subscribe to the school of thought which says “earthquakes are rare, explosions, less so.” Through tempering and tampering, I had rendered the stone basement walls all but indestructible, which muffled the sound of any accidents I might have. The seals and sigils chiseled into the floor and ceiling blocked the room from almost all forms of magical viewing; useful, given some of the treasures it contained.

Three of the four walls were lined with shelves packed with alchemical ingredients and bottles of rare liquor—and if you don’t consider well-aged scotch a treasure, you’re a heathen and a fool. The fourth wall was taken up almost entirely by the twin of the upstairs bar. It was backed with a silver mirror, and held books instead of bottles. Some of those volumes were older than any tongue still spoken on the Earth. Most were alchemical in nature. Others dealt with the arcane art of bartending. They served as a personal library, and as excellent camouflage for the pride of my collection: the sacred tablet of Ninkasi, containing the original recipe for brewing beer.

“Snow White is not a good look for anyone,” I muttered, and began taking bottles down from the shelf. “I must warn you, I’ve never attempted anything like this before. I can be reasonably sure I won’t kill her, but I can’t guarantee results.”

Mixing a potion and mixing a drink are more similar than most people would think. Both require a steady hand, a firm understanding of the ingredients, and a good idea of the desired result. Just now, this was the early resurrection of the human embodiment of winter. Not as easy as pulling a pint of ale, perhaps, but a good sight simpler than turning lead into gold and getting it to stay that way.

I didn’t dare use mistletoe or quicksilver, for all that they were very “wintery” ingredients; Winter Queen or not, I had to work on the assumption that Margaret was still essentially human, and would look poorly on being poisoned. Bearing that in mind, I began with gin, for juniper berries and the smell of pine forests. The lady’s looks influenced my next ingredient: applejack, the fruit of Snow White’s downfall and a hundred harvest fairs. The resulting liquid was clear and slightly golden. I added a shot of pomegranate molasses, for Persephone’s folly, which brought about the winter to begin with. “This wants ice,” I said, and dropped a slice of crystallized ginger into the liquid, to add the bitter bite of winter. “Sit her up.”

“Either the best drink I ever mixed, or a waste of some excellent alcohol. We’ll know in a moment.” I uncorked the last bottle, adding a single shot—and with it, the ice. As soon as the liquids met, frost began to form, spreading up the sides of the glass to sting my hand. I gave the concoction a single stir with a silver spoon from my workbench, more for show than anything else, and offered it to James. “Here. Give her this.”

“How did you bottle midnight?” James took the glass from my hand, the frost melting instantly where his fingers touched. Stirring had turned the drink from clear amber with dark red at the bottom to an overall autumnleaf red. It smelled like snowfall, and like secrets.

“I see. Thank you, whatever the results.” James inclined his head solemnly toward me, and raised the glass to Margaret’s lips. It was disturbingly like watching a child playing tea party, offering drinks to stuffed rabbits and favored dolls.

Her first sips were tentative ones, still mostly asleep and acting only on instinct. Then she started drinking in earnest, back straightening, head coming up as she started to support her own weight. James released the glass, and she held it on her own, still drinking. The light coming off him was getting brighter as relief overwhelmed his ability to damp down his connection to the summertime. It failed to make a bit of difference in the overall illumination, because even as the light began to pour off of him, the dark began to radiate from her. It wasn’t true darkness, not exactly—I could see her as well as I ever could—but it was the opposite of light, all the same.

Ice clinked against her teeth as she upended the glass, emptying the last of its contents into her mouth. The sides were coated entirely with frost now, although the places James had touched seemed to have acquired a somewhat thinner coating. She swallowed. She took a breath. And the Winter Queen opened her eyes.

They were the color of deep glacial ice, so dark a blue they were almost physically painful to look at. She frowned in obvious bewilderment, turning her head as she made a slow study of the room, which became a slow study of my person. I flushed red, burying my hands in my apron and resisting the urge to curtsy. James alone had been odd, but not so odd as to warp the world around him. The two of them together, and her all out of season. . . .

“That’s beside the point. It’s August.” She shook her head, bewilderment still plain. “I can’t be awake yet. The harvest horns haven’t sounded. I’m supposed to be waiting for the winter. Why am I awake?”

“That would be my doing,” I said. I promptly regretted it, as they both turned to look in my direction. A good alchemist is ready to defend his—or her—work against an uncomprehending world, and so I cleared my throat, and said, “I mixed a tincture at your husband’s request. It appears to have worked. I may write a paper. Although I can’t imagine it to have terribly wide uses—”

“Miss Norton is an alchemist,” James said. “I asked her to wake you because Jane and Stuart are back, and this time they’ve set the authorities on us. Reported me for improper storage of a corpse in a residential neighborhood—and implied that I was using it for things which were, ah, even more improper. The police were preparing to arrest me if I didn’t agree to your removal.”

“Which reminds me,” I said, louder this time. The seasonal monarchs looked my way. “I’ve left my bar essentially unsupervised while I dealt with the two of you. If you wouldn’t mind continuing your charmingly unseasonal reunion upstairs, we can discuss the matter of my payment.”

The door to the storeroom had been blown off its hinges by impact with some large, solid object—Andy, whose body lay in shards all across the floor. I came skidding to a halt, feeling a scream of my own building in my chest. It only needed a target, which presented itself, readily, in the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who stood in the smoking remains of the doorway. Her clothing was cut to shout “expense”; it probably cost no more than Margaret’s, but proclaimed its value several times as loudly. The man next to her was attired much the same, and his hair, while also dark, had been bleached, badly, to a dead straw gold.

“—and you want to know how dare I? How dare you, sister dear. I have had quite enough. You could have gone quietly, slipping into the death you’ve avoided so long, but no. You couldn’t see the value of a gentle exit. And now, I’m afraid, this is going to be much harder.” Jane attempted an expression of sisterly affection. I’ve seen more loving looks on a rattlesnake. “On all of us.”

James stepped up to take my elbow, tugging me out of the direct line of fire. The light bleeding off him was so bright that standing next to him was like standing on Market Street at noontime without a parasol. “I apologize for what’s about to happen, Miss Norton,” he said.

I risked a glance at the other three. The dark was gathering around Margaret like the pomegranate syrup staining the gin, and as it came, so did the cold. Frost was spreading around her feet, biting and warping the floorboards. As for Jane and Stuart, they might not have had seasons to call their own, but that didn’t render them defenseless. Jane’s hands glittered with witchfire—horrible stuff, no magical practitioner worthy of the name would touch it—and Stuart, more distressingly, was holding a small tube of quicksilver speckled with red, which I recognized as one of the nastier weapons in the alchemical arsenal.

It’s true that, unprepared, I am little more use in a fight than your average bystander. I don’t dare strike anyone with my unprotected fists, as my work depends upon possession of agile hands, and I have never really trained in any of the more common weapons. It’s also true that, in a fight where all other combatants are either supernaturally powered or at least very well-prepared, I am likely to be overlooked. Taking that to my advantage, I began to creep around the edge of the room, only pausing to duck poorly aimed blasts of one thing or another. What failed to hit me frequently succeeded in hitting the storeroom shelves, and I kept a silent-but-steady accounting of the damages as I crept.

Andy’s head had rolled to a stop beneath the workbench near the door, still almost entirely intact, if somewhat chipped. I stooped to scoop it into my skirts, and stayed stooped over as I scurried out the shattered door and into the bar proper.

The place was deserted. This was something of a relief, as it proved my customers had at least the common sense of wharf rats. The screams we’d heard must have been theirs, uttered as they fled. The damage caused by Jane and Stuart’s entrance seemed confined to the storeroom door and the shelves to either side of it. That was still quite a lot of wasted liquor, but it was nowhere as bad as it could have been. Small blessings.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Andy. Did they hurt you when you blocked their way?” He nodded. “And is that when everyone screamed and ran away?” He nodded again. “There, you see? They didn’t enter the storeroom until after the screaming had started. You did exactly what I asked of you.” Almost as an afterthought, I added, “And I’ll construct you a new body as soon as this tedious business is concluded.”

A blast of cold air poured out of the storeroom doorway, and small white flowers were beginning to sprout from the floor. I sighed. “Stay there, Andy. I’m afraid I need to stop some very silly people from leveling the place.”

“Very good, Andy.” The majority of my supplies were in the basement, but I would be a poor alchemist—and an even poorer bartender—if I didn’t possess at least a small talent for improvisation. Taking a bottle of rum from the shelf, I grabbed a pitcher and began to pour.

James was the first out of the storeroom—largely, I believe, because he was flying through the air, propelled by a blast of dirty orange witchfire. He slammed into an antique table that originated in a tavern in Barbados, reducing it to splinters. I said a word even my father would have been shocked to learn that I knew, snatching Andy’s head off the bar and shoving it behind a stack of pint glasses. Crafting a new body was one thing. Crafting a new brain was something else entirely, and would be substantially more work.

“At least they’re keeping each other busy,” I muttered, remaining crouched behind the bar as I reached up and opened the register drawer. Luckily, I’m accustomed to working in the dark, and was able to find what I needed by feel.

Bottles smashed against the wall as I worked, sending debris raining down on me. Several chunks of glass grazed my arms and cheeks, and I had to stop more than once, scuttling to different points behind the bar. I didn’t like to consider how much damage they were doing. The changes in temperature alone—one moment midsummer swelter, the next midwinter freeze—were enough to guarantee that I’d be needing new windows several years ahead of schedule.

The fight was still going strong when I finished assembling a drink that would, I hoped, convey the appropriate message. A bottle of rum came flying over the bar. I grabbed it from the air and pulled the cork with my teeth, taking one swig for courage, and a second swig as a prayer to any God of Bartenders that might be listening. Thus fortified, I picked up the fruit of my labors, and stood.

The Winter Queen was backed into the corner near the window by Stuart, whose entire body was burning with a lambent white flame that seemed to be countering the effects of her frost. The Summer King, meanwhile, had his hands full dodging the fireballs Jane was flinging in his direction. More of those white flowers carpeted the floor, and mistletoe was beginning to drip down from the ceiling. I cleared my throat.

Jane laughed. “Good lord, you little slattern. Count yourself lucky that we’re willing to let you go, and run before we change our minds.” She flung another fireball at James as she spoke. He dodged to the side, looking increasingly winded. It was August. His powers were in their natural decline, and Margaret wasn’t even supposed to be awake yet. This was the time of year when they were both as close to the human norm as it was possible for them to get.

That was good. It meant they were highly likely to survive. “Lucky?” I demanded, letting my temper off its reins. “You’re demolishing my bar! You broke my assistant! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to construct a golem that can pass that well for human? Weeks of work, shattered!” All four of them hesitated, floored by the sight of a seemingly ordinary woman trying to shout a battle for supernatural dominion to a stand-still.

Jane shrieked with indignation as the liquid hit her, and the fire around her hands went out. She didn’t seem to notice. She spun in my direction, hands raised to fling a fireball at me. Nothing happened. I watched her calmly. She blinked, and repeated the gesture. Nothing continued to happen. It made a pleasant change.

Stuart, meanwhile, had noticed that he was no longer on fire, and did not seem entirely pleased by this development. Lifting a hand, he tasted the liquid dripping from his fingers. His eyes widened, and he turned to stare in my direction as he said, wonderingly, “Why, you little bitch. . . .”

I smiled. “Salt, spiced rum, three iron pennies, and a shot of the holy water Father Andrews brings me every Sunday. Oh, come now,” I said, shaking my head at Jane’s shocked expression. “Didn’t the presence of a golem behind the bar tell you I was the better alchemist? Using quicksilver as a base for your explosives, I mean, really.”

Jane and Stuart continued to stare at me. That was fine. It meant they weren’t paying attention when Margaret and James rose up behind them—the one clutching a bottle of port, the other, Andy’s left arm—and clocked them squarely in their respective heads.

In the end, we decided that the best approach with Jane and Stuart was the simplest. I fetched a memory tincture from the basement and poured liberal quantities down their throats, while James hailed a carriage to take them to the Ferry Building. They would wake miles from the bar, with no recollection of where they’d been or what they’d been doing there—and no powers, either, unless they had the foresight to jump immediately into the bath. The potion I’d mixed would continue to work until they scrubbed the last of it from their persons.

“I truly am sorry to have brought such trouble to your door,” said James, for at least the tenth time. Margaret placed a hand on his arm, smiling ruefully, before returning her attention to the enchantingly unusual experience of drinking a cup of tea without it attempting to ice over.

“As long as all damages are covered as a part of my bill, I really see no reason to be put out,” I said, continuing to collect bits of Andy from the floor. “It was quite educational, and I’d been wanting an excuse to renovate—especially with someone else supplying the funds.”

“My thought precisely.” I placed one of Andy’s feet on the bar, adding it to the heap of rubble I had already created. “I always did have a reputation for brewing stronger drinks than was strictly necessary.”

Margaret and James left shortly after midnight. I waved them out and locked the doors securely before picking up Andy’s head, walking through the storeroom, and descending the stairs to the basement. He looked around with interest, apparently enjoying the new perspective that being carried under my arm was affording him. I set him gently on the duplicate bar. “Comfortable?”

Mix gin and applejack in a highball tumbler. Add pomegranate molasses and stir. Pour a shot of midwinter (or vodka) on the top. Ice to taste, garnish with ginger. A sweet, tart taste of winter, smelling of apples and pine.

Crust the rim of a pint glass with sugar. Mix the rums and the mead in the glass. Top off with summer (or blackberry brandy), and garnish with candied orange or lemon peel. A sweet and syrupy glass of summer, smelling of sugar and harvest berries.