by deba schrott
“PI,” Alex supplied. God, she was so good at lying it was kind of embarrassing. “Not really a cop, but chose.”
“Well, we don’t need a cop or a PT in Barlowsville, but we do need a waitress at the coffee shop. I bet you could handle it.”
“Maybe,” she allowed.
“It’s a great job for someone who’s new to town,” Cade continued. “Everyone drops by eventually. And once they know you’re working there, they’ll drop by even quicker.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’ll want to talk to you. Get to know you and let you get to know them?’ Cade opened the door, taking a step inside before glancing back. “If you’re interested, just ask for Rose.”
Alex had considered going door-to-door, or accosting people in the streets for answers. She could have made the case that she just wanted to get to know everyone, but she figured that would sound fishy. The coffee shop was the perfect cover. She could talk to people and get a peek at them. See if they had any telltale burn marks.
The owner, Rose Bianchi—not a mark on her that Alex could see—was so thrilled to have an applicant that Alex feared the woman might hug her.
“You can start today?” she asked, her fluffy, white halo of hair bobbing above cheeks the same shade as her name. “Right now?”
“I don’t know anything about being a waitress,” Alex lied. It wasn’t as if she could mention all the towns where she’d picked up a few days’ work for tips just so she could buy another box of silver bullets.
“What’s to know?” Rose asked, handing her an apron, and her own pencil and pad. “You write down what they want; then you bring it to them.”
The place smelled like every diner Alex had ever been in. Coffee and fried eggs, bacon and toast. What had she thought they’d serve? People burgers?
“What happened to your last waitress?” Alex asked.
“She’s working at the bookstore now.” Rose shrugged. “Folks switch around. After a few decades, even a job like this gets boring.” -
“Even a job like this?” Alex repeated.
“We’re always busy. Got something new on the menu every day?’
She indicated the chalkboard where the specials had
been written in a precise, curving hand. Today’s omelet contained apples, spinach, and bacon, while the pancake of the day was cranberry nut. Alex realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday. Luckily free food came with the job. She wondered if they’d care if she ordered all the specials at once.
“Always someone to talk to. Stories to hear,” Rose continued, patting Alex’s arm with a surprisingly soft, supple palm. Didn’t waitresses usually have rough skin? Although anyone that could heal a knife to the throat was going to heal dishpan hands in a jiffy. “You’re gonna love it.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Rose grinned, exposing slightly crooked but very white teeth. “I’ll be right there.” She pointed at the ancient cash register near the front.
Sometimes this town seemed like the land that time forgot. Then someone would wheel in on a snowmobile, or turn up the sound on their iPod, earbuds trailing into the pocket of their plaid flannel shirt, or share the latest Saturday Night Live skit, as the guys at the corner table appeared to be doing.
“That’s Joe behind the grill.” Rose lifted her chin to indicate the equally white-haired man flipping pancakes as he sang a song about the moon, and an eye, and a big pizza pie. He saluted them both with his spatula, but the look he leveled at Rose was pure devotion.
“Husband?” Alex guessed.
“Nearly a hundred and eighty years now.” Rose winked and headed for the register.
“A hundred and eighty years,” Alex echoed. She couldn’t imagine. She’d kill Barlow before the first year was through.
Alex jolted at her thoughts. She wasn’t going to marry Barlow. She wasn’t going to marry anyone. She was going to find the werewolf she’d come here to find, kill it, then run.
Once she got to work, Alex discovered that Rose was right. The job wasn’t hard. For a werewolf.
Alex had superior strength and amazing stamina, even in this form, so being on her feet for hours, carrying heavy trays loaded with equally heavy plates, setting them down, picking them up, and running, running, running...
Not a problem.
However, if she’d been human she’d have washed out in an hour. The place was unbelievably busy, with wave after wave of customers filling the seats. Did anyone in the entire village eat breakfast at home?
A second waitress, who introduced herself as Cyn— short for Cynthia—and appeared to have been a waitress since the dawn of time, or perhaps the mid-1950s considering her red beehive and tendency to crack gum at the end of every sentence, handled most of the booths, leaving Alex the counter.
“That way you’ve only gotta deal with one person’s order at a time,” she said as she hurried by with a tray of coffee, juice, and tea for the local bridge club.
Alex couldn’t help but stare at the table full of elderly ladies, who twittered and laughed and discussed rubbers, slams, and dummies with great animation. She had to remind herself that they were werewolves.
Then she got a flash of the same ladies sitting around the table in wolf form, pearls still encircling their hairy necks, earrings swaying from their pointy ears, tasteful pink nail polish adorning their claws as they finished a hand of duplicate.
“I bet if I painted that on velvet, it would be a surefire hit,” Alex murmured. “Bigger even than the poker-playing dogs.”
“Order up!” Joe sang.
Joe sang everything. Alex had yet to hear him simply speak, and whenever his wheel was empty, he performed songs by someone he referred to as Dino. Everyone in the restaurant went silent when that happened. Joe had a fantastic voice.
He also had both his ears and no visible scars, as did Cyn and everyone else Alex had encountered so far.
The order, for the dapper gentleman at the end of the counter, consisted of three eggs poached, sausage, bacon, cakes, and toast, as well as home fries with onions and mushrooms. Everyone at the EAT Café consumed enough food for a ravenous wolf.
Har-har.
The metabolism of a werewolf was much faster than that of a human, and without the concern of cholesterol poisoning and a nasty dose of heart disease, the possibilities were endless.
Four cheeseburgers with a side of onion rings, fries, and cheese curds? Two steaks, baked potato with melted butter and bacon, broccoli with cheese sauce? Go nuts.
Why would anyone want to go back to the way that they’d been?
Alex bobbled the tray but managed to keep all the food from sliding onto her customer’s head. Her thoughts these days didn’t seem like her own.
“Breakfast is served,” she said brightly. It hadn’t taken her long to remember that the more chirpy she was, the more tip she got. Since she’d come here with nothing but fur, Alex needed all the money she could get.
She barely managed to fit all the plates on her tray in front of her customer, considering the guy next to him had ordered an equal amount of food and had five or six plates of his own.
“Anything else I can get for you, Daniel?”
Daniel Finnegan appeared to be in his midfifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a nearly white mustache. He wore a gray tweed suit from an era long past, though Alex wasn’t sure which one, complete with a hat and shiny black dress shoes.
He’d introduced himself as soon as he’d taken his seat, refusing to allow Alex to call him by anything but his first name. “We’re all family here,” he’d said when she tried to call him Mr. Finnegan.
Everyone had the same attitude, introducing themselves as if they were sitting at Alex’s kitchen table instead of her station at the EAT.
They talked to her as if they were sitting in her home, too, as if they were lifelong friends. She should feel bad about that, but every time she started to she merely. brought up the memory of her father’s last night in the mountains
and all the guilt went away.
“I’ll take a bit more coffee when you get a chance,” Daniel said, tucking into his meal with a gusto at odds with his demeanor.
Alex made the rounds with the coffeepot, topping off the cups of all her customers and Cyn’s, too. She’d discovered years ago that to walk by someone who had only half a cup of coffee while you were carrying a full pot and not offer them any was a good way to get snarled at—and that was before she’d started waiting on werewolves.
Conversations ebbed and flowed. Alex learned quite a bit just by wandering past the tables filling those empty cups. Of course no one admitted to killing a Jäger-Suchers or snacking on an Inuit. Had she really thought they would?
“No,” she muttered. -
“No, what, dear?”
Alex had made her way back to Daniel and poured him a refill. “Just thinking aloud,” she said. “So, how long have’ you been a werewolf?”
Daniel, who had just taken a persnickety bite of bacon, choked. Then he began to cough. Alex began to worry, until the rest of the room’s lack of interest reminded her that while Daniel might be choking, he couldn’t choke to death.
Alex handed him a glass of water.
“Why would you ask that?” he managed eventually.
“Shouldn’t I?” Alex leaned over the divider that hid the workings of the restaurant from the dining room and set the pot on a burner. “Is that ‘not done’?” She made quotation marks in the air around the last two words.
Daniel sighed and took another sip of water, his sober chocolate-brown gaze contemplating her over the rim before he set it down. “All of us agreed to become like this, which meant we had one thing in common.”
“What’s that?”
“Either imminent death, or a very shitty life.”
Alex was glad she’d set the coffeepot ‘down or she just might have dropped it. Hearing shitty come out of Daniel Finnegan’s prim mouth was both shocking and slightly hilarious.
This time Alex choked, and Daniel offered her his water. She took it—no worries anymore in sharing cups, utensils, spit; germs wouldn’t hurt her—and took a swallow.
“Better?” Daniel dabbed at the pristine corners of his mouth with a napkin that did not appear to have been used at all. When Alex nodded, he went on. “We don’t ask one another how we came to be like this because we don’t want to remember what made us choose to leave behind our humanity. It’s never a pretty story.” His gentle gaze became shrewd. “Is yours?”
“No,” she said before she even thought about it.
Her life hadn’t been anything to write home about. Because she’d had no home to write to. No mother, no father, no family left at all. Her life had been death, or the distribution of it, with the certain knowledge that one day she’d find herself bleeding out from a werewolf attack just like her father.
If she’d been asked at that point—death or lycanthropy— would she have chosen this?
No. She knew what lay on the other side. Or at least she’d thought she knew.
Until she’d come here.
“You’re telling me no one chooses this life unless their other one sucks so badly they can’t wait to leave it?”
“Yes,” Daniel said.
“But. . . you like being a werewolf, don’t you?”
“I do.” He straightened his tie, adjusted his hat.
“Then why wouldn’t someone prefer to be one without the motivation of death or a really shitty life?”
He smiled at her as if she were a foolish child. To him, she probably was. “Humanity isn’t something to toss off lightly, Alex, there are things you give up that you can never get back. I hope Julian made that clear.”
Not so much, she thought.
“What things?” she asked.
Daniel contemplated Alex for several seconds, and she feared he might press her on the issue of what Julian had made clear and what he had not. She really didn’t want to lie to Daniel anymore, but she couldn’t exactly tell him that Julian had not only neglected to give her instructions, he’d neglected to give her a choice.
Eventually Daniel glanced away with a sigh. “Pets.”
Alex blinked. “Did you say pets?”
“Dogs are afraid of us. Cats hate us.”
“Cats hate everyone,” she said.
“Not the person with the can opener,” he muttered. “Unless he isn’t a person.”
Huh. Alex never would have taken Daniel for a cat lover.
“I think I can live without pets.” She’d done just fine so far.
“Children.”
What on earth would she do with one of those?
“Next,” she said.
Daniel turned to her and frowned, “I have to believe that whatever you left behind was sufficiently horrible that you chose to forfeit any chance of having a child in order to escape it.”
“Okay,” Alex said agreeably. So far she hadn’t heard anything she’d given up on this side of furry that she’d wanted in the first place.
“Peace of mind,” he said. “A pristine soul.” Except, maybe, for that.
“You better explain, Daniel.”
“You killed someone after you changed, yes?”
Alex didn’t think so, but still she nodded.
“It’s the price we pay for immortality.” Daniel laid his
hand atop hers, and Alex’s throat went thick. She must not be as over the choking fit as she’d thought. “It’s a very high price.”
“What if the guy—” Daniel lifted a brow. “—or girl you killed deserved to be dead?” A thousand times over.
“Ah, Julian’s method,” he murmured. “A very—”
Together they said, “—bad man.”
“You still killed a human being,” Daniel continued. “Your soul is no longer white.”
“It ain’t black, either.”
“Perhaps,” he said, though he didn’t sound convinced.
“You agonize over who you killed,” Alex murmured. “So you have no peace of mind.” If that was the case, it was going to be a very long eternity for Daniel.
“No,” he said. “Well, yes. I do agonize over the person who ensured my immortality, and I always will. But that isn’t the loss of peace I’m talking about.”
“What is?”
His eyes met hers and within them she saw a stark fear that gave her an unpleasant little jolt. “We’re hunted, Alex.”
“The Jäger-Suchers.”
“We can never be completely at peace because there is always someone—” He took a breath. “—many, many some-ones, and they aren’t all Jäger-Suchers, who live and breathe to kill us.”
You’d think Alex would be happy to know that she’d struck fear into the hearts of werewolves everywhere.
Strangely, she wasn’t. She felt like Godzilla, stomping on all the little racing ant-people.
“You’re safe here,” she said soothingly.
His dark gaze seemed, to bore into hers. “Are we?”
CHAPTER 18
Did he know?
That was impossible. If Daniel thought she was working for Edward, he certainly wouldn’t be this nice to her.
No one would be.
The reminder of the second reason that she was here, and what she was supposed to do once she had what she’d come for, made Alex’s stomach pitch and her skin crawl.
She had a sudden image of Edward Mandenauer and a posse of J-S agents descending on Barlowsville, shooting wolves like fish in a barrel.
Alex gave a mental wince. She should probably stop being so buddy-buddy with the enemy.
“You don’t think you’re safe?” she asked.
Daniel shrugged. “I know Edward.”
“Personally?” Alex’s voice lifted with surprise, and the older man smiled.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Alex opened her mouth to ask for this story, forgetting her resolve to stop befriending every werewolf that sat in her station, and Daniel’s smile bloomed,
happiness lighting his eyes and causing his slightly slumped shoulders to straighten. However, the expression wasn’t for Alex but for the young man who’d just walked through the door.
“Wow” was all Alex could manage before the new arrival’s gaze went to the counter, zeroed in on Daniel, and the same smile blossomed all over his face.
The guy was Calvin Klein model handsome—with feathered black hair, deep blue eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and a body that would make a werewolf jealous. Hell, she was.
He wore a blue, white, and black plaid flannel shirt over what appeared to be an extremely tight white wife beater. She had time to wish it was warm enough in here to take off the flannel before she was distracted by how he filled out his jeans.
He strode straight for Daniel, and the older man stood, waiting for him with obvious pleasure. Alex figured he was Daniel’s son, or maybe his grandson, produced before whatever tragedy had made Daniel choose to become a werewolf. Though what could have induced this specimen to become one, too—and hide himself away here in the Arctic when he could be strutting shirtless on a catwalk somewhere—Alex probably didn’t want to know. Then Hot Guy reached them, cupped Daniel’s jaw, and planted one right on his lips.
Alex blinked. Then she blinked again. Then she glanced around the coffee shop, but no one appeared as shocked by this as she was. She suspected they’d seen it before.
Eventually the new arrival stopped giving Daniel the tongue and lifted his head, meeting Alex’s eyes and winking. “Probably want to close that mouth, ma’am, ‘fore you catch flies.”
He had the most gorgeous southern accent, incongruous with the flannel shirt and heavy boots he wore, and the land of ice he’d just walked in from.
“I—uh-----yeah,” Alex returned. Why she’d thought all werewolves were straight she had no idea. In truth, she’d never thought much about werewolves beyond how she could kill them.
Daniel turned, stars in his eyes, goofy smile on his lips, and the young man reached for Daniel’s hand with a gesture Alex found very sweet. They stood there, the tall, muscular, youthful demigod and the short, skinny, dapper old gentleman, both grinning like idiots. Alex just hoped Daniel didn’t get his heart broken anytime soon. She didn’t want to be here to see it. She liked Daniel.