On the Hunt, page 7
He leaned back in his chair and propped his boots on the corner of the desk, staring at the wall but not seeing any of it. Four days. Four days to Saturday night when they would confront the sorcerer. Maybe Dodge could lead the hunt for the bastard so Todd could stay away from the chaos the witch would no doubt create. Deirdre had been hell on any sort of structure or rule-following in the pack, especially before they moved back to her house.
He was still trying to talk himself into going to bed when someone knocked. Todd debated just ignoring it, but finally grumbled, “What?”
Andy leaned in, eyebrows raised. “What the hell are you still doing up?”
Todd gestured for him to come in, holding out the whiskey bottle. “Catching up on everything that you and Evershaw were supposed to get done.”
The younger man laughed as he walked in and took the liquor, swigging from the bottle before putting it back in the cupboard. “Come on, man. A couple of business meetings aren’t going to be the difference between the end of the world and another million in the pack’s bank accounts. When was the last time you relaxed?”
“Fifteen fucking years ago,” Todd said, snorting. “The day before I decided to link up with Miles. Every day since it’s been a goddamn roller coaster.”
Andy leaned on the back of the chair in front of the desk, blue eyes intense as he studied Todd. “Come have a drink with the rest of the pack. The call tomorrow was canceled so you can sleep in until at least six.”
Todd narrowed his eyes. “Everyone’s got jokes around here. I have to deal with Amos and Keller; those assholes have been —”
“Dealt with it,” Andy said. He tilted his head at the door. “Made ’em box for it, Amos won, and crisis averted. They’ll fight again in a couple months, I’ve no doubt, but I figured we could send one of them up to Henry’s pack if they can’t get over themselves. Come have a drink.”
He knew he should have just gone to bed. But there was just enough of him that wondered what the rest of the pack was up to that he felt his resistance caving.
Andy saw it, too, and grinned. “Come on, old man. I know you’ve got at least one beer in you.”
“Watch who you call ‘old man,’ dick,” Todd said. But he couldn’t keep a smile off his face as he shoved to his feet. “You spend more than a year working for Evershaw and you’ll look fucking ancient before your time.”
The third-in-command in the pack sauntered into the hall, completely unrepentant. “I’d shave my head instead of showing off that gray, like some people.”
“I don’t have gray hair,” Todd said, though he had to stop and consider whether so long being Evershaw’s number two had taken a harder toll than he thought. His hesitation just made Andy laugh louder, so Todd aimed a kick at his ass to hustle the kid along. “Gray hair or not, I’ll beat your ass all over the gym without breaking a sweat.”
Andy, remarkably easygoing, gave back a few easy insults, enough that Todd could almost laugh as they finally entered the group hangout area, and some of the tension returned as he caught sight of what was going on and felt the crackle in the air. The witch, grinning and apparently right at home, had set up shop at a table and was finishing the tattoo on Dodge’s chest while the rest of the pack split their attention between some stupid action flick and what she was doing.
Todd hesitated as Andy sauntered into the room and declared victory that he’d pried the beta away from his desk, and the rest of the pack roared with approval. But Todd’s throat closed and he started to rethink the plan to stay up for a beer.
CHAPTER 11
JINX
Mercy led me through the halls of the warehouse, away from Todd’s annoying attitude, shaking her head the whole way. “He means well. He does. He’s just... intense. Super responsible.”
“No business of mine,” I said. It really wasn’t. If they wanted to stick around and let a dictatorial tight-ass boss them around, that was their problem. “I’m not going to be here long enough for it to matter.”
“We really do need your help,” she said. The younger woman frowned as she led the way toward a massive common area filled with comfortable couches, a huge television and every gaming console ever invented, tables, a pool table, darts, and everything else a frat boy could have dreamed up for a drunken heaven. Mercy swung through an adjacent kitchen, retrieving two beers from the fridge. “The sorcerer wasn’t after us at first. He came here chasing after another witch—Ophelia. She and her—boyfriend, Henry, are up in Montana with his family for a little while. We thought we dealt with Rocko, the sorcerer, but he ran off before we could be sure he was done for.”
Chasing a witch. I made a thoughtful noise and sipped the beer, shaking my head when she offered a glass. No reason to dirty a dish when the bottle was good enough. “What did he want with the witch?”
Mercy led the way to a couple of overstuffed couches and flopped onto one so she could put her feet up. A few young men, some still gangly like teenagers, lingered on the other side of the room and watched us with intense focus. Two older men played a video game on the huge television, giving each other shit as they shot Nazis and blew up shit in what could have been France. The place was a regular sausage fest. I wondered if Mercy was the only woman in the pack, and how the hell she got herself stuck in that situation.
She didn’t seem to notice how outnumbered we were, her eyes half-closed. “Ophelia dated him for a little while but he turned on her, put her in a cage, used her magic for stuff. Lots of bad stuff she didn’t really talk about and we didn’t ask. She got away the first time and he caught her, dragged her back, chained her up. More bad stuff. She got away a second time and kept running, and eventually she ended up here.”
My insides went cold. A sorcerer hunting a witch. That was not the kind of thing I wanted to stick around for. Sorcerers seldom had any of their own magic and instead drew power from other things: witches, nature, animal sacrifices, the weather... Anything they could suck dry of life force and energy. Which made that creepy son of a bitch picking at his skin even more dangerous than they knew.
But I didn’t want to alarm them more. Already it sounded like Todd wasn’t inclined to let me saunter off into the sunset without helping them, and if they knew just how bad a desperate sorcerer could be... I’d find myself chained up in their basement just as surely as if the sorcerer got me.
I found Mercy studying me closely, her gaze intense with a predatory cast that reminded me very clearly that there was a wolf riding in her head. I stuffed down the immediate human response to freeze or flee and nodded sagely like I had not a care in the world. “Sure. How long was he tracking her?”
“Months.” Mercy sighed, shaking her head. “She kept moving and trying to stay ahead of him. She probably would have kept going if Henry hadn’t surprised her and gotten a bit of a shock.”
“Oh?” I didn’t want to be interested. It felt like getting entangled in someone else’s drama and messy business, and I knew from experience there wasn’t any reason to take on that burden. It just drained away my energy and distracted me from staying out of trouble on my own. Moving west was looking better and better with every passing second. But part of me was curious, like looking at a car accident on the road. “What happened?”
She groaned and shoved to her feet to get another couple of beers. “Oh my God. It was a total shit-show.”
I couldn’t swallow a smile and leaned back against the comfortable pillows. “Sounds like a good story.”
Mercy fixed me with a wide-eyed look and geared up for quite a performance. “Brace yourself.”
She unraveled a tale of this Ophelia and the wolf shifter, Henry, as they fought back against the sorcerer who wreaked havoc through the city. She only got halfway through the story before Dodge wandered in and took over with his own deeply sarcastic interpretation of events. Which only goaded Mercy into being even more optimistic and bright-eyed about true love and other nonsense, until it practically turned into a battle between who could talk louder about how their friends ended up in a confrontation with the sorcerer.
It made me feel a little better that it ended up being two witches and another female shifter who went to deal with the bastard. At least not all of the males around there insisted that the ladies required protection at all times. Of course, Mercy knew the sorcerer would underestimate women, so in the end it was just as frustrating that someone with a dick thought anyone with breasts was automatically less of a threat.
It sounded as though the sorcerer learned his lesson. Although, maybe not, if he’d chosen to walk into my shop to ask for help.
The beer helped me get over the irritation, particularly as Dodge brought out a couple bottles of whiskey, told the guys with the video game to put on a movie instead, and pulled off his shirt.
My eyebrows rose as I got an eyeful of what I’d professionally admired earlier. The man was ripped. Like, ripped. He jerked his chin at a table just behind the comfy couches where we sprawled. “All right, witch. You’re going to finish my tattoo so my wife doesn’t laugh her ass off when she sees it.”
My smile spread as I eyed him, fighting back jealousy over his wife having claimed him first. Whoever she was, Persephone was a lucky chick to go to bed with that hunk of man. “Typically I don’t let a man tell me what to do, but if you’re going to strip for me first, we can probably come to an understanding.”
He blinked, about to fire something back, then apparently he heard what I said and his brain short-circuited. He just looked at me, blank-faced, as color slowly climbed his throat and flushed his face a brilliant red.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing, but Mercy didn’t bother to choke down her howl. The other guys who’d congregated on the couches, about ten in total, started wolf-whistling and clapping. One brought out a fistful of dollar bills and hollered, “Take it off, big guy!”
I would have expected someone who looked like Dodge to storm off in a rage or start cracking heads together while bitching about everyone respecting his authority, but instead he flexed those impressive shoulders, struck a body builder pose or two, then flex-pointed me at the table. “Let’s knock it out before you get shit-faced, okay?”
As he tolerated the hoots and jabs from the other men and went to set up the table and move chairs around, Mercy watched with a bemused expression. She shook her head, on the verge of saying something, but stopped herself.
I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t my business but I couldn’t help asking, “What?”
Mercy’s attention stayed on Dodge. “It’s just really funny to see him like this.”
“Oh? How’s that? Does he usually keep his clothes on?”
“Shit, before Persephone came along, he wouldn’t even be here. He’d be off in his room by himself or drinking with Silas. He wouldn’t be laughing and he sure as hell wouldn’t tolerate anyone giving him shit about anything.” Mercy smiled and whatever it was in her eyes made me think of ‘love.’ As I watched, some of that love spilled out in a hint of moisture, and she abruptly cleared her throat and patted under her eyes. She huffed under her breath and waved her hands, turning away quickly. “Sorry. It’s just weird to see them change, you know?”
I shrugged. “Don’t apologize. Must be tough enough being the only girl.”
She glanced around, sighing. “Yeah, no kidding. I’m everyone’s little sister. Might as well live in a fucking convent.”
I could only imagine. I tapped the tongue stud against my front teeth and untangled myself from the couch cushions before one of the hungry-eyed kids headed my way to flirt or ask for a free tattoo. “Sounds like you need a wingman. Well, a wing-woman.”
“We should go out,” she breathed, pure excitement in her eyes. “Oh my God. Really? There are at least a dozen clubs I want to go to, and...”
She followed, practically tripping on my heels as I hauled myself over to the table and started setting up my stuff, and kept talking a mile a minute until I lost all sense of what she was actually talking about. But Dodge teased her and laughed until I told him to stay still or he’d end up cursed by accident, which just made him laugh harder—and then I laughed and it spiraled out of control from there. So we were all having a great time, fueled by more booze and raucous pool playing and a shitty chop suey movie, when one of the young dudes lifted his pool cue over his head and yelled, “Hey-o! It’s the boooooss!”
I glanced over and found Todd and another man, possibly named Andy if I remembered the whirlwind introductions correctly, standing at the top of a staircase leading into the common area from elsewhere in the warehouse. Andy bounced down the stairs to help himself to a bottle, winking at me as he headed for the kitchen, but Todd remained on the stairs.
Oddly, his attention seemed to have landed on me and stayed. Even as the rest of the guys whistled and clapped to encourage him to hang out, he hesitated. Weird. He couldn’t possibly give a shit whether I was there or not, since he’d seemed bound and determined to keep me at their warehouse until the damn sorcerer showed up. He couldn’t bitch about me still being there if that had been his intention all along.
He took a deep breath as I watched, then squared those serious shoulders and walked, businesslike, down the stairs. Like he was joining a meeting instead of a damn party. I snorted and turned my attention back to Dodge’s impressive chest and the magic that sizzled through the ink as I worked on the last flourish for Persephone. Hopefully Todd didn’t completely kill the vibe, or I’d have to take Mercy clubbing straightaway instead of waiting a day like I’d planned.
CHAPTER 12
TODD
He knew he couldn’t retreat when he felt the witch’s attention. Todd wasn’t about to walk away, not with her leaning over Dodge’s chest with that damn tattoo gun and the crackle of magic in the air. He should have told everyone to break up the party and go to bed, since it was past two and there was too much work to get done for everyone to sleep the rest of the day away.
But he’d started to suspect that Andy had a point and Todd had crossed over into a stodgy, boring old man. Once upon a time, Todd had actually had a life and enjoyed relaxing with the guys.
He accepted a few shots of whiskey as Andy returned with a fresh bottle and kicked back on one of the couches with a clear view of the witch. Too many of the kids watched her too closely. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like the easy way she flicked her electric rainbow hair over her shoulder to smile at someone else. His wolf side seethed.
Todd threw back the whiskey and reached for more. He couldn’t afford to get in a fight over a female, not with the young guys. He spent all of his time enforcing the rules; he couldn’t cause a dustup and expect anyone to listen to him ever again.
Jinx wiped ink off Dodge’s chest and sat back, frowning as she studied her handiwork, then nodded. She put aside the tattoo gun and ink, snapped off her gloves, and squinted at the flowing script. The witch held her palm over the name and closed her eyes. The air crackled and fizzled. Everyone’s attention went immediately to her and hackles rose in anticipation of trouble. None of them had really been around witches working magic when it turned out well for them. Usually it heralded a hell of a fight.
Then the witch shook herself and dropped her hands, looking pleased as she traced the name one last time. Then she smacked Dodge’s shoulder. “There. You owe me another two grand, pal.”
Todd choked on his next swallow of whiskey, almost spitting it out on Mercy and Andy. “What the fuck? Two grand? For a tattoo?”
“That’s a markup because he chickened out on the first session,” she said. She started cleaning the equipment, and every word sounded like a teasing joke even with her expression remaining mostly serious. “If he’d kept his ass in the chair for the full hour the first time, then I wouldn’t have had to charge him another sitting fee.”
“For the record,” Dodge said, talking louder as Andy started heckling him from across the room at the pool table. “The only reason I got up was because that fucking sorcerer showed up and you decided to answer the door. Then you went to tattoo a bunch of hairy Russian mobsters. At no point did I chicken out of anything.”
Todd had to choke back a laugh as Dodge’s explanation was drowned out by the catcalls and shit-talking from the rest of the pack. Todd actually started to relax, enjoying himself for the first time in a long time. He’d missed this. He hadn’t even known it and he’d missed it. It felt like he could finally remember why he bothered to work as hard as he did: it was for the pack. It was to make it safe and comfortable so they could kick back and absolutely roast one of the most intimidating former mercenaries in the world while drinking and playing pool and knowing that everyone they cared about was safe.
Andy tossed his pool cue to another guy and approached the witch with just a hint of stalking in his posture. Todd tensed again. The younger man grinned at her as he flipped the long hair out of his eyes. “Taking any new jobs, witch?”
“Probably not the kind of job you’re looking for,” she said, still deadpan. “But if you want a tattoo and won’t go crying to mama when I poke you, take a seat.”
Mercy giggled, still at the table next to Jinx. Todd didn’t like the open flirtation between Andy and the witch, but he felt a little better that Mercy was close by. Just in case the witch got uncomfortable with the kid’s attention or needed help.
Not that she acted like she needed help from anyone. Jinx hardly blinked as Andy pulled off his shirt. “What do you want?”
He opened his mouth and Todd’s eyes narrowed. Before Andy could say anything, though, Jinx pulled a small binder out of her bag and tossed it on the table in front of him. “I can freehand shit like that, but if you want anything more complex I’ll have to draw a stencil and that takes time and more money. If you want magic in the ink, that’s more as well.”
