Something I Don't Know

21: underaged drinking is not a joke, kids

I shouldn't feel like this. Like there's impending doom around the corner, like I'm seconds away from eternal damnation, like I should probably run away while I still can. I'm on my way to a bar. Where there is alcohol and fun, mostly alcohol. I shouldn't feel like I'm walking into a trap.

But I do, I do feel all of these things, because my uncle has a vice-like grip on my shoulder and doesn't seem to have any intention of letting go.

He made it sound like I was showing him around the city, but by no means am I in control of this outing. He swings me up and out the subway station and then marches me right down the sidewalk, straight ahead. More than once I try to ask where exactly he's going, as it's quite far from the subway tunnel house and my loft and literally everything, but he just grins at me and says, "Sometimes you have to travel far to get the best of the best."

We're far east, nearly in Cabbagetown, when he finally slings me into an old, wood-paneled bar.

The lighting's low—in the manner that I can hardly see anything, and that the light fixtures above the wooden counter are actually low enough that Uncle Ozzie almost bangs his head into one as he sits down. There's a few other people in here: an old man, a couple that's way too much into PDA, some twenty-somethings who seem to be engaged in a contest of who can yell the loudest. Otherwise, though, it's sort of sleepy.

Uncle Ozzie waves down the bartender and orders two glasses of scotch, then turns and pulls a pack of cigs from his pocket. He offers me one, but I turn it down.

"You drink, don't you, Grey?" he asks, taking a drag. "I didn't think to ask before I brought you here."

I narrow my eyes at him, not sure which answer he wants. Does he want the good-guy answer, like the one I'd give to a cop or to Sybil? Or does he want the hell yeah, let's party answer?

He grins around his cigarette, though, and when the two glasses of scotch arrive, he curves his hand around the mouth of it and slides it in my direction. "Yeah," he says. "I thought so."

I stare down into the glass of scotch, a brown-gold liquid that sort of looks like maple syrup (if maple syrup had the consistency of a glass of water), but I know does not taste like maple syrup at all. When I take a sip of it, it burns down my throat. A good burn. An I need this burn. "Thanks," I say.

Uncle Ozzie nods at me, then taps his cigarette off in the tray. I watch the ash crumple and fall off, and when I look up again, my uncle's watching me. "We weren't going to take that friend of yours."

I swallow. The look of fear in Jamie's eyes is still bouncing around in my head. They're gonna lock me up, all over again. "You weren't?"

He shakes his head. "A former fighter? We wouldn't be able to tame him."

I wonder how he knows that, because if I remember right, Anik was the only person Jamie brought that up to, but then I decide that it's not important how he knows that. Well, more so I decide that I don't want to know how he knows that. "Tame him?"

"People want to be awed," Uncle Ozzie says, watching me carefully. "Not threatened."

For a second, all that runs through my head is how Jamie with his freckled, smiley self can be threatening at all. Then I remember the first time I saw him, sinking his fangs down into that other wolf's flank, and I guess it kinda makes sense.

I take another hesitant sip of the scotch. A bell dings towards the front of the bar as someone else walks in. "I'm still not okay with this."

"With what?"