by Renée Jaggér
He paused for effect, and after a second or two of silence, shifted his eyes to the stranger. “And you, sir, are free to go, on the condition that everything I just said to the young lady applies to you as well. If you stick around in Greenhearth, we’ll be watching.”
Roland nodded. “Understood, Sheriff. Thanks.” He stood and stretched his arms and legs.
Bailey stood up beside him. She wanted to grab his arm protectively but she stopped herself. “Come on, then. I’ll tell you what I have in mind while we go to meet my brothers.”
* * *
Bailey led the way into the Elk, Roland trailing behind her. She didn’t wait to see if he’d have gone out of his way to hold the door for her. She was perfectly used to opening doors herself, and she had other things on her mind at the moment.
The first thing she noticed upon stepping into the dark but cozy space was that the other Nordins were not at the bar.
“Damn,” she mumbled under her breath. She took about three steps in, then stopped.
Roland came up alongside her. “Well, it’s noonish on a weekday. Not prime time for a drinking establishment.”
“Hold on,” she chided him, “they might still be around somewhere. First though, I need to get my mouth wet.”
One of Roland’s eyebrows shot up as he looked at her.
“Don’t,” she added, holding up a finger, “take that the wrong way, you filthy pervert. Just means I want something to drink.”
He slipped out of his jacket and carried it over his left arm. “I’ll take your word for it.”
She strode up to the bar and sat down at one of the stools, waiting for Mr. Quaile or whoever else might be working by now. Using her left foot, she pushed the stool beside her out for Roland to use.
He obliged, draping his lanky frame over it and relaxing his elbows on the bar.
The bartender appeared from somewhere in back. “Back again so soon?” he inquired, his eyes jumping from her to the stranger.
“Yeah,” she acknowledged. “It’s been a thirsty day. Another beer, please.”
He nodded. “And you, sir?”
“Oh,” said Roland, “just a glass of water. And I can pay you for it; that’s no problem.”
“Coming right up.” Quaile turned to fetch their drinks.
Bailey looked at the man who was for all intents and purposes her date. “Don’t you drink? Please tell me you’re not a teetotaler or straight-edge or whatever they call it.”
He let out a soft, dry chuckle. “No, I drink. I’m just not in the mood for it right now.”
She decided that his answer was satisfying for now. “Okay, suit yourself.”
Quaile returned with a perspiring gold bottle in one hand and a clear, ice-filled glass in the other. “There you go. I’ll ring up your tabs when you’re done.”
As they settled into their drinks, Bailey noticed that Tomi and Cheryl had materialized at the far corner of the bar opposite the dance floor, and near the bend where the bar became the diner and were examining the newcomer.
This did not shock her. The two of them (or Tomi alone, before Cheryl had started) performed a detailed scientific survey of pretty much every man who came in, especially if he was obviously from a faraway land.
Still, she found that her off-hand was slowly clenching into a fist. Although she tried not to let it bother her, she felt like they ought to give it a rest, at least once.
To derail them, she decided to force them to do their jobs.
“Hey,” she called, “Tomi and Cheryl. Lunch crowd isn’t in yet, are they? I’m getting hungry. Might switch over to the diner side and order something.”
“It’s starting,” Tomi reported. “One lady came in a few minutes after you left earlier. Then two decent-sized parties; they’re finishing up though. Otherwise, right now it’s just your brothers.”
“Ah,” she commented, “so that’s where they got off to. Men, always thinking with their stomachs.”
She slid down from the stool. She’d only finished half her beer, but it would be a simple matter to take it over to a table and have it added to her bill there. “Let’s get something to eat,” she suggested.
Roland climbed down from his own perch. “If you say so. I didn’t have breakfast, so that’s not a bad idea.”
As they walked toward the bend, the waitresses remained where they were, their eyes on the tall blond gentleman.
“So,” Cheryl said, “aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”
Bailey’s jaw muscles tightened. “He can introduce himself if he feels like it.”
Apparently taking this as a prompt, Roland waved to the two women. “Hi, I’m Roland. Nice to meet you. Was just passing through, but Bailey insisted I meet her family.”
He shrugged his way past them. It hadn’t sounded like he was trying to be flirtatious, but you could never be sure with men.
She put a hand on his wrist and pulled him along, bodily moving him away from the staring duo.
He was, after all, her chance to relieve all the marriage pressure. Didn’t want anything screwing that up. She told herself that three or four times in her head as they traversed the floor into the diner. She had to protect her investment in him; that was all.
To her slight relief, a third waitress was on duty, poised to handle any new customers.
“Hey, Judy.” Bailey waved to her. “Thought we’d have some lunch. Are my brothers around? I heard they moseyed over here.”
Judy was an older lady, married, and known to be straitlaced. “They sure are. Right over there, if you wanted the table next to them.” She pointed.
Beyond a couple of clusters of four or five people each, mostly employees of the same companies taking their lunch breaks together, was a corner filled with high-backed booths. Judy had indicated the one just before the far wall. Bailey could barely make out Russell’s head hovering above the seatback.
She led Roland toward them, and Judy trudged a few feet behind. When they were almost on top of the booth, Bailey stopped before an adjacent table. Without bothering to ask for either help or permission, she grabbed the table, which was meant to seat four people, and lifted it with one hand, and pushed it up against the table in the booth.
Her brothers turned to look at her, subdued amusement on all their faces.
“Hi, guys,” she greeted them. “Mind if we join you?”
“We?” Kurt mused. He and the other two studied Roland.
Bailey gestured to her date. “This is Roland. I rescued him from whatever horrible fate the sheriff had planned for him after he caught the dumb bastard driving six over the speed limit. Let’s just say he strikes me as the friendly type.”
Russell studied the blond man with his usual smoldering neutral gaze, while Jacob and Kurt raised their eyebrows and smiled. Bailey and Roland took their seats, and Judy appeared to hand them menus.
“I see you already have drinks,” the waitress observed. “If you want anything else right away, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be back to check on you in a couple minutes.”
Roland nodded to her. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Wow!” Jacob marveled as the server hustled off. “He called Judy ‘ma’am.’ Where are you from, Roland?”
“Seattle,” he replied.
Bailey knew they’d waste time asking him all the same questions she’d already been through at the station, so she motioned for her brothers to zip it. “We’re gonna cut straight to the chase,” she informed them. “Roland has a situation, and I think we can help him, just as he can help us. Well, me, at least. Roland, tell them what you told me. No need to hold back.”
Roland seemed perturbed, as if he’d expected more formalities or privacy. It might have just been that he was concerned about how her brothers would react. The mere sight of the hulking trio gave a lot of men pause when it came to speaking too freely.
“Go on,” Bailey urged. “They can offer us advice. Well, if they can gather enough brain cells between them
to think straight.” She kicked Jacob’s boot under the table, and he gently kicked back. The other two rolled their eyes.
The Seattleite sighed and told his story, beginning with a quick summary of how Browne had pulled him over and detained him until Bailey had shown up.
Just before he got to the interesting part, Judy returned. “You ready to order?”
Bailey looked up. “Yeah, I’ll have the steak sandwich, rare, with fries. Sauce and ketchup on the side. The usual.”
While she ordered, Roland had a moment to flip open the menu. When Judy turned to him, he simply said, “I’ll have the same, but cooked medium, if that’s all right. Oh, and a cup of coffee. Cream on the side, no sugar, please.”
Judy jotted down their orders and took the menus. “I’ll get that right in for you.” She turned and left.
Jacob made a sputtering sound. “Medium.” He scoffed. “If you’d ordered it well-done, we might’ve had to throw you out.”
Bailey was about to tell him to shut up, but Roland just shrugged the comment off and took a sip of his ice water before resuming his story.
He told them everything. All that he’d told Bailey, and a little more, like that the witches were actively trailing him and were probably using magic to narrow down his whereabouts, although, of course, he had a few tricks of his own for obscuring his location.
When it was over, Jacob, who’d been shaking his head, slapped himself in the face.
“Fuck me.” He grunted. “And I might even mean that literally, because you, sir, are a bitch. I mean, really? Your so-called ‘problem’ is that a bunch of babes want to lay you? Woooooow. I’m not sure whether I want to hit you with my car or trade places with you. Maybe both?”
Judy returned with a cup of coffee just as Jacob made this comment. She furrowed her brow but didn’t interfere with the discussion. Roland thanked her and stirred creamer into his cup.
“I,” Roland retorted, “don’t see it that way.”
Bailey shot her sibling a death glare. “Maybe you could show a little goddamn understanding, considering he’s basically in the same boat as I am?”
Jacob blinked, taken aback. Kurt, too, seemed to be turning new thoughts over in his head. Russell just nodded. They’d all gotten the point, and they all cared about their sister.
Although Kurt couldn’t quite help himself sometimes.
“Maybe,” he quipped, “we could chop off his junk and feed it to a goat, like the Imp on Game of Thrones was always threatening to do.”
Everyone stared at him, variously displaying bewilderment, horror, or bemusement.
“What?” he protested. “It would work. He’d live as long as we cauterized the wound right away.” He said this in an even tone as if it were obvious. “The witches would be physically incapable of banging him, so he could just go on his merry way. Everyone wins.”
After a second or so of awkward silence, his face started to crack into a smirk that looked like the beginning of a bout of hysteria. “Even the goat would get a snack.” Then he cracked up.
Roland shuddered. “I see.” He looked at Bailey. “Is this what you call help?”
Bailey couldn’t respond immediately. Her brothers refused to take things seriously, and she didn’t want to resort to swearing loudly in their faces to make them behave.
Before she could attempt a more nuanced response, though, the side doors—the ones leading directly from the parking lot to the dining area—burst open. Bailey swung her head around, somehow sensing that she ought to be paying attention to the new arrivals.
There were four of them, all men she recognized, although, at other times, she’d seen women hanging around with them. All were large, with shaggy hair and unruly beards, and they wore long duster-style coats.
Her stomach sank.
“Ugh,” Kurt muttered. “The South Cliff Pack.”
“Yup,” Jacob sighed. “Here comes trouble.”
Chapter Four
Roland obviously had no way of knowing who the four guys were, but he picked up on the sudden tension and dismay easily enough. “Friend of yours?” he asked.
Bailey unwrapped her utensils and twirled the knife around her fingers. “Not exactly. Just hope our food gets here soon, so we don’t have to stick around too long.”
The Seattleite nodded and sipped his coffee.
Fortunately, their sandwiches arrived a moment later. No sooner had Judy set them on the table than the South Cliffs descended on a booth just across the room from the Nordins.
The tallest of them, Dan Oberlin, shouted at the waitress, “Hey! Some service over here.”
Judy, startled, turned and hustled over to them. “Hello, guys. One second, and I will get you some menus.”
“Yeah,” another of them growled.
Bailey tried to ignore them, but she knew they’d seen her group. The other diners, too, had already settled into uncomfortable resignation to their fate.
The South Cliff Pack was composed of Weres from three local families, all of whom were longtime fixtures in the community. That gave them a default respectability that led to them being tolerated, but even in such a small and homey place as Greenhearth, they weren’t what anyone would call popular.
Bailey dug into her sandwich; she hadn’t realized how hungry she’d been, and biting into some good bloody meat made her feel a hell of a lot better. To her annoyance, she saw Roland pick up a knife and fork, but relaxed once he’d cut the sandwich in half and picked up the first half to eat it the proper way.
The Nordin brothers had already finished their meals, but they stuck around, partially to continue the discussion of Bailey’s plan when they could, and partially because of the South Cliffs.
They were already getting rowdy, yelling rather than talking, and a couple of them kept standing up and brushing other people who tried to walk past them, obviously not by accident. The Nordins watched the shenanigans out of the corners of their eyes.
“No one,” Jacob lamented in a low whisper, “ever ousts them for this shit. They bully people and act like asses and just get away with it.”
The others nodded, aside from Roland, although he paid attention to their reactions.
As Bailey and the out-of-towner neared the end of their meals, a round of grumbling speech passed around the South Cliff table, and all four of them stood up at once.
Bailey didn’t turn her head, but she did focus her ears on them, paying close attention to every sound. She didn’t know what they were up to, but the vibes she was getting weren’t good.
Of course, the pack stomped over and came to a halt right next to the table where Bailey and Roland sat.
When the girl looked up at them, she saw that Roland was already doing so, his face open but neutral, dabbing a corner of his mouth with a napkin. Dan Oberlin, meanwhile, was staring down at them with a toothy shark’s grin and glittering, flinty gray eyes.
All of a sudden, the Nordin brothers had slid out of their seats and sprang to their feet. They weren’t adopting hostile postures, just interposing themselves. Dan was a little taller than Jacob or Kurt but thinner, and none of the South Cliffs were the size of Russell.
Bailey glanced up at Oberlin, and she saw the predatory grin slip off his face and dismay replace it. She looked back down at her plate, where she dabbed a steak fry into some ketchup.
“What do you want, Dan?” she asked.
By now, Dan’s cronies had advanced. If the shit hit the fan, they could spring into action quickly enough, but not in time to stop their leader from being dogpiled by the Nordins.
Dan looked back down at her.
“We heard about your situation,” he replied in his rugged baritone voice. “How time’s running out, and you’re gonna have to make a decision soon. Too bad you’ve turned off or scared away damn near all your suitors by ignoring your duties, taking cheap shots, shooting your mouth off, and being a bitch in general.”
The three brothers winced in unison as if preparing for a thunderbolt
to descend from on high.
Bailey looked back up, catching Dan’s small, mean, glinting eyes with the blazing depths of her own hazel orbs. A thunderbolt was exactly what she felt building within her, and it wanted more than anything to break free and find its mark in the middle of Oberlin’s face.
But she did nothing. She took a long draw of air in through her nostrils and clenched her abdominal muscles, then flexed her feet within her boots to localize the tension where no one would see it. The façade she presented was intense but controlled.
It was because of Roland. She hadn’t yet outed herself to him as a Were; combat between her and another of her kind would clue him in that they weren’t normal humans.
Furthermore, today was a bad day to have the cops show up again. Not only had they already been here once, but Roland had just left their tender hospitality behind, and the sheriff’s warning was still fresh in both their minds. If he was present at an ugly brawl, they’d arrest him for real.
“So, what?” Bailey sneered. “You’ve come to offer yourself as my goddamn Prince Charming? You didn’t even bring me flowers.”
Dan scowled even harder. “You’re running out of options, Nova,” he remarked, daring to use her nickname. “There ain’t a Were in this entire stretch of the mountains who’s a better prospect. Real strength, and a bloodline that’s proven to produce children who always change.”
Now she was really pissed. He had outed her, damn him.
“None of you knuckle-dragging throwbacks have enough balls between the four of you to marry me,” she snapped. “You’d all add up to about half of a husband.” She capped it off with a mirthless animal grin, all her teeth bared.
Dan Oberlin just stared, but his minions visibly bristled. One of them, a squat and jowly guy a few years younger than Dan, stepped forward and extended a hand toward her.
Suddenly Russell was there, his huge form blocking the man.
“Try it,” he rumbled, “and you’ll end up in more pieces and twisted scraps than some of those miserable wrecks Gunney tows in.” He paused; the entire diner had gone dead silent. “Even Bailey won’t be able to put the whole stinking mess back together.”