by Nash, Layla
“You’re not from a small town, are you?” I wanted to laugh, but it would have been unkind. When none of them said anything, I slid my chair back more and pushed to my feet, the scrap of paper in my hand. “Thanks for the beer, and –”
I froze as the three men stood as well, and for a long moment, we just looked at each other. I retreated a step, uncertain. “I’ll be in touch.”
Lincoln nodded and offered his hand once more. “It was very nice to meet you, Anastasia. We look forward to working with you.”
My stomach unbalanced once again as I shook his hand, the warm clasp comforting and unnerving at the same time, and I almost stammered as I answered. “Right. It’s Luckett. I’ll let you know tomorrow about the horses.”
I beat a hasty retreat to the bar, not daring to look back, though the sounds of the chairs moving made it clear the men sat back down once I’d moved away. I almost had to keep walking into the back storeroom to collect myself. I’d never been around men who believed in standing up from the table when a woman left, and the fine manners did more to throw me off my game than any enchanting looks from Lincoln and his amazing eyes.
But still the static built in the air, and I wondered what else they were hiding about themselves.
Chapter 3
I ended up hanging around the bar until Olivia showed up, still wearing her costume from the fort, and joined me at the bar. Lucia had to close, so she’d be there until at least two or three in the morning. Just as I was about to leave with Olivia, Eddie and Dave and some of the other rangers stomped through the door and brought a whole new level of energy to the otherwise complacent bar. Eddie even asked us to play pool, and so for a brief, bright moment, it felt like a normal night from before Bess went crazy.
Until the bells over the door rang again and I turned to see the tall boy with blue eyes and a rodeo championship belt buckle saunter in with some of his pals, back from the state college for the end of the summer. My heart sank and my stomach twisted when I saw him, and when his gaze drifted across the increasingly rowdy room to land on me, he just moved on like I was nothing more than a piece of furniture.
Olivia damn near turned into a snowman as she glared at him, her magic turning the air cold around her until I shivered, and Grady and his boys got up to leave. Eddie shook their hands before the ranchers disappeared out the door, and the park ranger frowned as he leaned a hip on the pool table and chalked his cue. “What’s up, Miss Olivia?”
“Some trash blew through the door is all,” she said, looking mean enough to spit poison like a real rattler.
I shook my head and handed my cue over to Dave. “I think I’ve had enough fun for the night. Thanks for the game. I’ll let you know when we leave to take the –”
The three boys—since they were definitely boys and not men—joined a group of brothers and friends near Lincoln and the strangers, though Alex with the blue eyes peeled off to the bar to order drinks. Lucia didn’t want to serve them, it was plain on her face, just like Alex knew she didn’t want to serve him and went up there just to make sure she had to. Somehow I hadn’t seen the dickish side of him when we were dating, or maybe he hadn’t been such a dick until he went away and figured out a world existed beyond Rattler’s Run.
At least Lucia pulled pints that were mostly head, and gave Alex a cold look when he raised his eyebrows in protest. He picked up the mugs and muttered, though it carried to me and all of his friends. “I guess that’s what we get for puttin’ up with witches.”
“Say that again,” Clara said, hopping to her feet, loud enough that everyone definitely heard her. Heads turned to see what was going on. Even though Clara was known as a hot head and someone who often went looking for trouble when she was bored, her squaring off with Alex when the Lucketts were around promised more entertainment than normal for a Wednesday night.
“It’s fine,” I said under my breath, ignoring the curious look from Eddie and the watchful wariness of the strangers. Just what I needed—my only paycheck disappearing because Alex wanted to look big in front of his friends. And he wanted to hurt me more, no doubt. “Clara, finish the game for me. It’s about time Liv and I took off anyway.”
“I said,” Alex said, pitching his voice louder as he stared at Clara and her narrowed eyes, “this is what we get for putting up with witches.”
Eddie didn’t wait for anyone else to react, and instead shoved forward and loomed over Alex. “Watch your mouth, young man. Take your beer and go sit down. Leave the ladies alone.”
Alex gave him a long look, surveying the burly ranger, then his attention drifted to me and his lip curled slightly. “Ladies? If you say so. But you’re right. They’re not worth it.”
He turned and retreated to where his friends waited, and it felt like the rest of the room stared at me instead. I swallowed down humiliation, since everyone in town knew that Alex broke up with me right after Aunt Bess’s storm destroyed half of his family’s farm. A year later and it still hurt just as fresh as when Alex cursed at me and called me a bitch, a witch, a hag... The vile words still echoed in my head when I was alone and it was late and there was nothing else to distract me.
Nothing like a disastrous first love to really screw up a witch.
I kept my chin up as I got my jacket from behind the bar, not daring to meet Lucia’s eyes in case her sympathy put me over the edge, and walked out without looking back. Olivia followed after me, muttering under her breath as she passed Alex’s table and making gestures with her hands like she meant to curse him—all of it meaningless, even if he didn’t know it.
It would have served him right to end up hexed. Even though Ma taught us to never use magic for evil, lest it come back to us threefold, there had been several weeks and months when I wondered if it would have been worth cursing him with something nasty. Even the lingering threat of madness in the aftermath of Bess’s death wasn’t enough to entirely deter me.
Olivia didn’t say much on the way home, and I stared out the window at the darkness bumping past. I tried to focus on everything I needed to get ready, in case the tourists still wanted to get to the Crossroads. Inevitably, any thoughts about the strangers brought me around to Lincoln and his mesmerizing eyes, and whether he’d heard what Alex said. And then I pondered the mystery of Lincoln himself, and the aura that flared green and gold around him.
Something was different about them. It was possible I’d grown accustomed to seeing the auras of people familiar to me, and assumed Lincoln and his pals were odd just because their auras were so much brighter and saturated with color. But in my heart I knew they weren’t normal folks.
“Did they look different to you, too?” I didn’t look at Olivia as she pulled the sedan onto our dusty drive and the headlights illuminated a pair of eyes far off. Probably a possum or raccoon, searching for the garbage we’d started locking up in the shed. I didn’t have to tell Olivia which “they” I meant.
“Yeah.” She frowned as she took her foot off the gas to avoid bottoming out the sedan in a pothole, also peering out the windshield. “They’re not witches, that’s for damn sure, but they’re not human. Or not entirely human, anyway. I don’t think you should go anywhere with them.”
The eyes didn’t move off the drive, and instead got bigger and a little scarier as the car wobbled closer. My soul went cold and I instinctively locked the car door. “Put it in reverse, Liv.”
She stomped on the brakes and hauled on the gear shift, but the gears ground and the engine spluttered and then died, leaving us there in the dark with not one but four pairs of eyes, getting closer.
“Well, fuck.” Olivia gripped the steering wheel with shaking hands and tried to restart the car. “Call for help?”
“Phone’s dead,” I said. Whatever was out there was magical, draining the batteries of everything around it. A knot formed in my throat. Typical. Just typical. I’d get killed right after meeting someone like Lincoln, who promised a pleasant mystery instead of a miserable one.
“Dire wolves,” she said, matter-of-fact and like it wasn’t the worst-case scenario. “This is the tenth pack this year, and it’s only September.”
I leaned so I could reach into the back seat, not daring to take my attention off the glowing eyes in the darkness as my hand searched for the rifle. “I didn’t see any sign of them earlier.”
“Must be the storm that was brewing brought them out.” She took a deep breath, trying the ignition once more. “Damn it, Sass. What are we going to do?”
We couldn’t outrun them. The dire wolves were twice as big as regular wolves, five times as fast, and ten times as smart. We had to fight and hope to kill them, but four against two wasn’t good odds, especially in the dark and with the wind blowing dust up to obscure their shadows even in the car’s watery headlights. They were like the ancient dire wolves that roamed the plains, but bolstered by magic instead of just size and cunning.
We’d never seen so many in one year, but since Aunt Bess’s little mishap, it seemed like they appeared at least once a month. Not always as a full pack together, but we’d seen pawprints in the dirt around the house, or in the garden and among the herbs that were supposed to keep them out.
Maybe Bess had woken something up out at the Crossroads, and invited something to follow her home before the magical storm killed her. Her ghost told us she meant to free the Lucketts from the Crossroads, but instead maybe she’d bound us there tighter than ever by inviting dangerous creatures back.
But we still didn’t have a plan for being caught out in the middle of the night. My fingers closed around the cold steel of the rifle, and I maneuvered it into my lap so I could check the ammunition. Dire wolves were more magic than reality, but bullets still killed them. Especially silver bullets blessed and strengthened with magic. If I could see them, I could kill them or scare them.
“Can you hit the floodlights from here? We need to see what’s out there in order to hit it.”
Olivia rubbed her hands together, briefly closing her eyes, and my skin prickled as she gathered up magic and whispered a few prayers under her breath while she did it. I didn’t comment on her shaking hands.
Olivia was the youngest and least confident in her magic, and she had a tender heart. It had always been easy to scare Liv, and I regretted it wholeheartedly as we faced down four dire wolves on our own. I wished Lucia was with us, at least because then she wouldn’t have to come home and find our dead bodies by herself if we weren’t fast enough to kill the beasts.
“Okay.” I took a deep breath to steady myself and chambered a round in the rifle. “When I say ‘go,’ hit the floodlights. I’ll shoot as many of them as I can, and you get the protection spells up as fast as possible once we’re out of the car. If we can make it to the porch, we’ll be in good shape. They can’t follow us there.”
She nodded, even if it wasn’t particularly convincing, and put the car in park. She took the keys out of the ignition and shoved them in her pocket, and reached for the door handle.
Two of the pairs of eyes shifted to the left of the car, and the other two went right. Trying to encircle us, maybe, or at least cutting us off from making it to the porch and the strong wards that protected the house. My mouth went dry and I adjusted my grip on the rifle. I’d only have one chance to get good shots at them, since the wolves could move so damn fast, and if I missed, Liv and I were pretty much goners.
I unlocked my door and reached for the handle. “Ready...”
“Wait,” Olivia said, her voice cracking, and I searched for reassuring words.
But headlights appeared bright and bold behind us, cutting through the gloom and exposing the enormous gray wolves, and we all froze, staring at each other. Then the dire wolves broke and ran, disappearing like smoke, and I could finally breathe again. I shoved the rifle down near the door as I half-turned to squint at the headlights. “Who the hell is that?”
“I don’t recognize the car, but remind me later to bake them a pie.” She whispered something else that might have been another prayer, then put the keys back in the ignition. The car wouldn’t start—the battery was probably completely drained—but at least we weren’t stranded among the dire wolves.
Someone got out of the enormous SUV behind us—another Land Rover, although newer and nicer than the park service’s trucks—and slowly approached the sedan where Olivia and I waited. The passenger door opened as well and a smaller figure got out, half-jogging up to my side of the car, and I touched the rifle to reassure myself. Just in case. We hadn’t had ghouls or demons or anything show up in the last few months, but with so many dire wolves around, it wouldn’t have surprised me a bit.
Although I didn’t think demons drove cars that nice.
My mouth went dry for the second time as I looked up and found Hazel standing next to my door and Lincoln next to Olivia’s, both of them looking concerned. Great. Just my luck I’d have even more to explain after Alex’s witch comment.
Chapter 4
Both of the tourists looked far more serious and capable of fending off the dire wolves than normal tourists would, or even the ranchers. I had no doubts that Lincoln could fight off a dire wolf with his bare hands. But that didn’t make it any easier to unlock and open my door, maneuvering around the rifle as I tried to force my legs to stand me up.
Hazel’s dark eyes were both wary and concerned, and she watched me closely as she stepped back to give me room. “Are you okay?”
“The battery just up and died,” I said. “What are you all doing this far from town?”
“Your sister asked us to follow you out here,” Lincoln said, his deep voice smooth and reassuring. “She said she had a bad feeling and wanted to make sure you were okay, but she couldn’t leave the bar. So Hazel and I figured we could take a drive.”
Lucia. Bless her heart. No doubt she felt things going screwy the same time Olivia and I recognized the danger of the dire wolves. Olivia, still shaking, leaning against the side of the sedan and stared up at Lincoln with a comically bewildered expression. “Good timing.”
He chuckled, a sound that made shivers run all the way through me, and nodded at the car. “Pop the hood and we’ll jumpstart it, so at least your battery can re-charge.”
As Olivia leaned back into the car to unlatch the hood, Hazel retreated to the still-running SUV to retrieve jumper cables and maneuver it around the sedan so the battery hookups would reach. Lincoln took his time propping the hood of the sedan up as Olivia went to thank Hazel, and he waited until we were alone to clear his throat. “You ran out of there pretty quick after that idiot showed up and started running his mouth. Everything okay?”
“Sometimes life in a small town is too claustrophobic,” I said under my breath. “Everyone knows everyone else’s business.”
He smiled with half of his mouth, pretending to pay attention to the battery and not to me. “I know what you mean. I grew up in a tiny little corner of West Virginia. Practically every other person was a cousin of some kind, and God help you if you tried to do anything with your life.”
I smiled back despite the way my heart pounded and my shirt stuck to my back with clammy sweat, shaking my head. “You expect me to believe that? You’ve got no accent at all.”
Lincoln rubbed his jaw, the stubble rasping against his palm, and when he spoke, a twang as thick as molasses dragged his words out. “I managed to rise above my raisin’, despite everything.”
I laughed, the specter of the dire wolves fading a little. He rolled his sleeves up, revealing a series of black ink designs and muscles the size of my thighs, and distracted me more as he took the jumper cables from Olivia. Heat warmed my cheeks and I retreated a few steps, pretending to search the darkness for the glowing eyes. The dire wolves didn’t usually give up so easily, not when they had us isolated and alone, but I wasn’t one to look gift horses in the mouth. And later, when Lucia got home, we’d have some heavy-duty spell casting to do to protect the house and more of the yard.
Hazel glanced at me a
s Lincoln told Olivia to get in the sedan and start the engine. “Were those wild dogs or something, when we drove up? It looked like they were hunting something.”
“Dogs, wildcats, bears, whatever.” I tried to smile again, though the chills returned. We’d have to get fresh lavender and sage from the garden; it was better picked under moonlight anyway. “Just a hazard of living out here, I guess.”
“Good-sized rifle you’ve got in the sedan, at least.” Hazel folded her arms over her chest, watching Lincoln explain to Olivia how to jumpstart the car and how long to leave it running. “Does it happen often, that the wildlife gets this close to the houses?”
She asked the question too casually for it to be believable, and I wondered again why they’d driven out from town just on Lucia’s hunch. But it wouldn’t do to let them see I suspected something was off, at least until I figured out what they wanted. “Often enough we carry rifles to deal with it. It seems like more got closer to town this summer, though. It’ll get worse when the weather turns for good and hunting gets lean.”
Hazel nodded, shoving her hands in the pockets of her jacket. Before she could go on, I added, “Maybe your research can help understand what’s driving them this way.”
“My research?” She looked at me, a hint of a question in her eyes, then her face froze into a mask of pleasant agreement. “Exactly. Our research should help figure all that out. We haven’t seen behavior like that before in similar wolf populations, so this is rather unique.”
“There’s more of them up at the Crossroads,” I said, spontaneous-like. “Make sure you bring rifles if you know how to use ‘em. You can buy some from Grady when you rent the horses. We’ll look around tomorrow morning and see if there’re any tracks to follow.”
She nodded again as Lincoln turned from the sedan as it chugged to life. “We can come back out tomorrow to make sure the car starts, and to check out any tracks left behind. Do you have another vehicle, just in case?”