Pinky often told me that in two centuries, with all that had changed in the world, Broadway was much the same as it had been before the Cataclysm. Back then, it had been a row of mostly bars and restaurants with live entertainment and a few shops mingled in. Now there were a few restaurants, shops, and bars that catered to paranorms, most specifically vampires. Most of the buildings that had more than one floor also housed apartments, or in the case of most of the bars, had become inns to accommodate travelers. To me, Broadway was home.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t live over Pinky’s Pub, though there was one. There had been a small, yellow house with a white fence covered with flowers and a vegetable garden. Or so my mother had told me. She had met my father, a first generation mage, at the Academy of Magic and Science. My father came from a wealthy norm family from New Nashville. My mother had grown up the daughter of mages in the magic district of Nash City. The District, with its dirty old buildings converted into apartments, was considered only barely a step above the Slums.
They were teamed up for a martial arts class and, according to my mother, it was love at first punch. She never said who punched who, but I always figured she’d done the punching. They were inseparable. My mother had gotten into the Academy because both of her parents were City Guards. It was her dream to be a Guard, and maybe a Blade. My father’s family paid for his place at the Academy, but he applied for Guard training shortly after meeting my mother.
They married after graduating the Academy. To the dismay of my father’s family, they applied for the City Guard together and were accepted. To please my paternal grandparents, they bought the little yellow house in New Nashville to be near them. My mother quit the Guard when she got pregnant with me.
My mother’s eyes always grew sad and her tone wistful whenever she told me about that time. For a while, we were a family in the little yellow house. Then, just before my second birthday, my father didn’t come home for dinner. He and his partner had been tracking a smuggling ring and walked into a trap. They were dead before they even knew the warehouse was rigged with explosives. It always seemed a little strange to me that in a world with magic, my father was killed by the most mundane of methods.
His family blamed my mother for his death. They said he never would have joined the Guard if it hadn’t been for her. I think she agreed with them. She couldn’t stand the little yellow house without my father, so she bundled me up and went to the one place she knew she would always be welcome.
Throughout generations of my mother’s family, Eric “Pinky” Pinkerton had been a constant. I sometimes wondered how sad it must be for him to see the people he loved die every few decades and yet he stayed eternally young. Most vampires move around a lot or avoid bonding with non-vampires for that very reason. Yet Pinky had been a member of my family as much as if he’d been born into it.
Pinky had taken us in, letting my mother rent the top floor of the pub building. He even helped with me when she joined the Blades.
I never saw my grandparents again until my mother died, and they tried to make me come live with them. I didn’t cooperate. After a while, they got tired of chasing me down at Pinky’s and dragging me back to the big house in New Nashville. Whatever the reason, they gave up trying to control me after three weeks and let me go back to Pinky, who gladly took me in. Of course, they never, not even once, contributed financially to my raising after that.
Pulling myself out of the thoughts of the past, I paid attention to the street as I strolled down the block towards home and bed. I let the sounds and smells, not all of them pleasant, sink into my skin. The enticing aroma of fresh-baked sweet bread wafted out of the bakery across from Pinky’s pub, and my growling stomach reminded me I hadn’t eaten a bite since early the evening before. Stopping in, I bought three sweet rolls. I ate one of the sticky buns as I crossed the street. There were a few people milling about in and out of shops and the few inns, but for the most part, it was pretty quiet.
Pinky’s Pub was located in one of only three four-story buildings on the block. The pub catered mainly to vampires. Unlike many of the bars on Broadway, the pub closed an hour before dawn and didn’t open until two hours after dusk. There had been a time when Pinky had kept the pub open twenty-four hours a day for any vampires who chose to risk the sunlight exposure to get to a dark, friendly place for a drink. But, when my sisters and I came along, he’d changed the hours so he had time to spend with us. Though we were all grown up now, Pinky found he had a love of quite alone time, so he kept the nighttime-only hours.
Since it was almost midday, the front doors were locked and barred from the inside. Knocking wouldn’t get me in because of the soundproof spells that kept the upper floors quite enough to sleep on. Besides, the only people home would be Pinky and Anya, and they both worked at the pub all night. So, I walked to the end of the block and up the alley to the back entrance instead. The security ward on the back door was keyed to my energy signature, so I didn’t have to use a key to get in. Anyone outside of the family who tried to enter would get a nasty shock and be thrown back about fifteen feet, which would slam them into the building behind us. If they were stupid enough to try it a second time, it would kill them.
Like most of the buildings up and down Broadway, the pub was narrow in width, but over half a block in length. The first half of the building was four-stories high and made of brick, but the back half was only two stories and constructed of concrete blocks and wood. Though not even Pinky had been here back when it was built, it was obvious the back half had been added on several decades after the main building.
The building was quiet as I crept through the back rooms of the pub to the back staircase. I paused on the second-floor landing to look out the window. River wasn’t in her massive rooftop garden, or at least I couldn’t see her. She could be in the jungle-like grove of potted fruit trees or inside the greenhouse, but at this time of day, she was most likely at the public market selling her produce. That meant, with Pinky asleep in his third-floor apartment and with Anya asleep in her bedroom, I’d have the washroom to myself.
Like most older buildings in Nash City, we had the bare minimum of plumbing. It had only been about fifty years or so since water delivery had been restored to most of the city via hand pumps. Flushing toilets were a luxury the older generation hadn’t had. Some buildings, mostly those in the slums, still didn’t have them. Hot running water was still elusive, though I knew from my history classes back at the Academy that once every home and most buildings had cold and hot running water and every home had a bathtub. These days, hot water that flowed from the pump required a crystal-powered heater and a second set of pipes running throughout the home. Only the very rich had hot water.
There were public bathhouses spread throughout the city where attendants were employed to heat water on coal or magic-powered heaters and kept the tubs filled. Normally, I would use the Blade bathhouse or stop at the one down the street, but I was too tired. Luckily, though it wasn’t as relaxing and convenient as a bathhouse, Pinky had rigged us a small washroom in the apartment years ago with a steel tub and a small heater. The heater had been expensive, but necessary. While warming water was a basic household spell, it took more power than most mages could expend at once to heat enough for bathing. We couldn’t immerse ourselves in a tub full of warm, scented water like we could at a bathhouse, but we could wash our hair and keep generally clean.
I put on a kettle of water and scryed Sam with my report on the morning’s activities while it was heating. I washed my hair with the first pot of water while heating a second to bathe with. Then I braided my clean, wet hair and stepped into the tub to wash the dirt and grime from my body. Once I was clean and mud free, I wrapped a towel around me and went to my room, collapsing on the bed, too tired to worry about clothes, and was asleep within minutes.