By some miracle, Elaine picked up. Her greeting, as usual, was a direct window to her feelings.

“What?”

“Good evening to you too,” he said, trying to keep the gritted teeth out of his voice. “Or good morning?”

“Do not ******** get cute with me. You're not cute enough to pull it off.”

“Opinions differ on that one.”

“What the ******** do you want, Kay?”

“A ride. Was walking home and things went tits up, Destiny City style.”

“You lived.”

“Yeah, but I have no idea how far from home I am and I kinda think there's more tits going up in my near future. It doesn't have to be you. You can call an Uber or something. I'll pay you back Friday.”

There was a long pause, during which he did his best not to make a sound of impatient suffering. It was so ******** cold. The howling was faint but doing nothing for his nerves.

“Text me your address,” she said at last.

“I don't know it. I'll text you the nearest cross street.”

There was, again, a silence, which had an expectant quality to it.

“Thank you.”

She hung up wordlessly, and he shuffled to the first street sign he could find, dispatching a photo of it because he did not trust his hands with a text. The party had caught back up to his nervous system, wreaking havoc in tandem with the fading adrenaline, but more than that was the cold. He huddled into his coat - which felt like it may as well have been made of tissue for all the good it was doing - and shivered, his senses divided between paranoid alert and muddled haze, and waited for a text to confirm his Uber.

None came. After ten minutes and three cigarettes or so he began to suspect that Elaine was leaving him to freeze to death, having seen only a couple of cars that drove by without slowing. But the third one was hers, and he hated himself for the leap of grateful joy he had on recognizing it, standing up to stumble towards the passenger side door, only to almost fall upon it trying to get it open.

“What the ******** are you doing all the way out here?” she demanded, with a gesture at the general decency of the neighborhood.

He fumbled with numb fingers for the seatbelt. She wordlessly turned the vents towards him to give him the full advantage of the heat, but thanking her might have made him cry, so he didn't. “Gambling on the longevity of my liver,” he said, forcing cheer. It took longer than usual to get settled, but he did at last, sinking into the comfort of her heated seats and finally taking the time to look at her, only to see that she was not only as angry as he'd expected, but worried in a way he hadn't.

He knew her just well enough to know that being worried would only make her more angry, and moved to head it off before it could become a wrathful lecture. “No work tonight?” This, with a vague gesture at her sweatpants.

“I was doing Uber, ironically,” she answered. It sounded like she, too, was keeping gritted teeth out of her voice. “You owe me fare.”

“Add it to my tab,” he said, and before she could launch into a reckoning of how lengthy that tab was getting, he added: “Nasty s**t out there tonight.”

“As per usual. Human shaped nastiness?”

“None of it but me.”

She snorted. “Is this a debrief, or are you just issuing general lamentations?”

“Am I lamenting? I can't decide if that's even worse than talking shop. I mean, I could lament, if you want. I've had a few drinks.”

“No s**t.” And then, in a pointed cruelty that was not sincere invitation: “Do you want a ******** hug about it?”

He did, desperately, and did not say so. “Nighttime in the cold with some drinks in you is the ideal time for lamenting. And you're sort of like a taxi driver. The psychiatrist of the unprivileged masses. Second only to a bartender for lamenting to, if -”

She leaned forward and cranked the volume, drowning him out immediately with some of that god awful sad apocalypse doom music she was always listening to. Pretending to be annoyed and not grateful, he subsided into the cocoon of warmth now comfortably ensconcing him - which still was doing nothing for the shivering that kept wracking through him, and which Elaine was probably chalking up to his own bad decisions - and maintained his silence until she dropped him at his door. She said nothing, not even turning down the music to let him get a word in. But she stayed there, watching, until he had successfully managed his keys and stumbled inside.

He stood in the darkness, warmer than the stoop but much chillier than her car, and watched the shapes of the shadows through the blinds morphing as her headlights turned and left. In the gloom he fumbled to the corner of the room that held the microwave and mini fridge pretending to the title of a kitchen, finding almost by feel the Tylenol, wrenching it open with numb hands, and downing it with stale tap water out of a cup that probably could have stood to be rinsed out and refilled.

The adrenaline was long gone, now, and left behind only the buzzing dizziness that had gone before it. On sailor legs he made his way to the bathroom, peeling off snow-wet clothes as he went - only pausing to meticulously hang his overcoat, lest it get creased - and finally landed in front of the mirror and flipped the lights on, shivering and blinking through watering eyes.

As he'd thought. A little scrape on the arm, a couple of ragged puncture wounds just below his ribs. The uniform did not, apparently, offer much protection from magical teeth made of ice. It did not make sense that a chill could feel like fire, but it did, the skin having the unpleasant appearance of freezer burned meat. Pressing a hot towel to the larger bite brought relief but further burning with it, and he leaned on the edge of the sink, rocking up and down on his toes to try and avoid making a sound of pain, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth.

He didn't remember, of course. But it was nonetheless familiar, too, to come home and nurse his wounds in lonely silence. His body was littered with little marks of previous violence. All long-healed, though, before this one, from years of successful running.

Only now, at last, did he allow himself to consider Ekstrom, and Mel. He found himself angry at her - angry to be so trusting, angry to be so betrayed by someone not being who she'd thought. She, of all people, could have understood the futility of honesty in Destiny City, but chose to hold her grudge anyway. True, he deserved it, but what did that matter?

With the room and his head spinning he tended to himself out of a first aid kit that had been one of the pitying move-in gifts received during that brief period of Elaine's goodwill. His unsteady hands made a bit of a hash of things, but he, confident that he would not die and could avoid medical intervention, stumbled at last towards the bed, shivering violently and cranking the space heater.

He had a text message, despite the hour. An invitation for tomorrow night, from someone he'd only talked to a few times but successfully charmed. He would know almost no one there. Another night of overindulgence and endearing himself to strangers who could not give him a ride home. Another night in the cold, sick and vulnerable and full of contempt for himself.

He could already feel the fuzzy edges of tomorrow's hangover looming. Ridiculous risk to go stumbling around Destiny City alone and out of your senses as he had done tonight, and had done more than once this month. Was he even enjoying himself? Did it matter? He bounced the phone idly in his hand until the action made him inexplicably motion sick.

And he answered, at last, in a cheerful positive. Wouldn't miss it for the world, he said. All the worlds, he said, thinking of Ekstrom, of the Garde, of Maus.

Hair of the dog, he thought, and the laugh was a little jolt of pain.