“No. The power has been cut, but the generator kicked in and we’re fine.”

My gaze jumped to the streetlights. They were on, which had to mean the grid had switched to battery backup in this portion of Deva. It was a necessity given the possibility of an Annwfyn attack, and a luxury previous generations never had. “Are there any customers?”

“The only people here are Jack and Phil, so it might be worth closing early.”

Jack and Phil were a couple of old pixies who were basically a part of the Boot family. I remembered seeing them in the booth at the back of the first-floor room as a kid, and Mom had once told me she had the same memories.

“It’s looking likely they’ll have the street sealed off for the rest of the evening, so yeah, close up. And give Jack and Phil a bottle of Dog Point to ease the pain of being sent home early.”

She laughed. “Do that, and they’ll be wanting to be sent home early every night.”

They wouldn’t, because for them, it wasn’t about the alcohol but rather the company. There were probably only a hundred or so pixies living here in Deva, and no enclaves at all, so there was little family or community support for those in their autumn years. The tavern, which had been pixie-owned for generations, had become something of a meeting point for many of our elders. We did what we could for them, but I was well aware it wasn’t enough. And petitioning the council to do more had so far produced little result.

Movement caught my attention, and I looked around. A man wearing a dark trench coat had moved out of the walkway opposite and was striding toward the crowd that had gathered to watch proceedings. No, I realized after a moment, he wasn’t heading for the crowd but rather a dark-haired, pale-faced woman standing away from the rest of the crowd. Normally that wouldn’t have bothered me, but there was something unnerving about the intensity with which he watched her. Something that had the hairs along the back of my neck rising.

The earlier premonition of trouble jumped back into sharp focus. With most of my attention still on the stranger, I said, “Ring me if there’s any problems, Ingrid.”

“There won’t be. Do you want me to open up again tomorrow?”

“Yes, thanks.” By all rights, I should be able to do it, but better to be safe than sorry, given the growing sense of alarm running across the trouble radar.

I shoved the phone away and moved after the stranger, keeping to my side of the road and a little farther back so as not to draw his attention. He stopped a few meters away from the woman, and though he continued to watch her with an intensity I found increasingly creepy, he no made no immediate move on her.

Was he waiting for something? Or someone?

I scanned the surrounding buildings and then the crowd but couldn’t see anything that pinged my instincts. The woman’s attention remained on the basement and the firemen battling to contain the blaze. Her face was pinched and pale, and her body language distressed.