Moody as a Minotaur, page 3
I eyed him critically, memorizing what I could about him. Like most minotaurs, I was naturally gifted at noticing visual and spatial details. And over the years, I’d honed my abilities. Like most humans, Finley was shorter than me, probably about five foot nine. If I had to, I could take him down and escape.
He had brown hair that hung over his eyes, and he kept pushing it out of the way. He had a friendly smile that could easily disguise deception. His pale skin should betray his emotions, but it didn’t look flushed with the anticipation of killing. Although, I knew from experience, that could change quickly. A silver cable chain around his neck flashed as he moved. His clothes were average, nothing special. Or were they too generic?
When he’d first entered the office, he reminded me of the young romantic lead in some YA movie I’d been forced to watch at the pub one night. Jeremy, a new supe in town—and I mean new as in both new to the town and new to being a supe—had decided all the supernatural beings in Willow Lake needed to be educated about humans and pop culture. So, he’d started a series of “School the Supes” events. I tried to avoid them whenever I could. But I’d mixed up the days last time and ended up sitting through a movie about teenagers. Teenagers. I had not been a teenager for centuries. I related more to the exasperated parents than the petulant main characters. But now I suspected this Finley guy was a villain instead of a lead character.
Sweat gathered along my hairline, dampened my armpits, and slithered down my spine. Like an old relative I’d hoped never to see again, a mask slipped over my face, wiping away all emotion. It was the one I reserved just for hunters. I hated it. It’d been so long since I’d had to wear it.
But this momentary discomfort was better than the alternative of revealing too much.
I curled my hand around the room keys I’d been about to give the man. I tucked them out of sight as I scrambled to come up with a lie that’d send him and his friends on their way. Aspen Bay, the next small town down the highway, had a lot of vacancies this time of year. These people could go there. Or better yet, they could head back to the city. Lots of supes lived in the city. Let them deal with these… these hunters.
Because he may not have used that word, but I knew what he meant. I’d come face to face with his type too many times in the past. And I doubted today would be the last. But I hated it had to be this way. I wished I didn’t know anything about hunters. I wished I’d never needed to. But when people like him destroyed your life and every chance of happiness, you didn’t forget. No matter how many years passed.
I itched to grab him by the throat. To shake him. To demand answers. Although, as a hunter, he’d just spew hate and lies. But why, for the love of Magic, did humans want to hunt us? What lies had they been told? Because I—one of those so-called creatures he was so keen to find—only went bump in the night when I’d had too many ales at the pub and had to get up to piss at two in the morning.
I was too old to deal with this shit again.
Suddenly, those nebulous vacation plans I’d been making sounded a lot more appealing. No time like the present, right? All those resort getaways I’d been researching sounded fucking amazing right now. I already had a ton of places bookmarked on my computer, so this wouldn’t be a spur-of-the-moment decision. I wouldn’t be running away. Really.
A few weeks away from town would be wonderful. Refreshing. Fortifying.
I’d originally thought I needed a break from Parker and his too sexy, too tempting smile, but if a holiday got me away from the hunters too? Perfect.
Now… Where had I stowed my luggage? Wait. Did I even own any anymore? My last holiday was… Well, I didn’t know when.
“Hey, don’t panic,” the human said, leaning over as if to pat the tight fist I’d rested on the counter. His hair swung in front of his eyes.
I yanked my hand back before he could touch it. Magic zinged along my skin, but shifting forms was the last thing I should do in front of this man.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Finley assured me, combing his fingers through his hair.
“I’m not scared,” I muttered. Sure, it was a lie, but why would he think that? It’d been so long since I’d worn what I liked to call my mask of indifference. What if my face didn’t know how to do it anymore? That’d be so fucking bad.
“It’s okay, man. Sure, we investigate supernatural shit, but we haven’t found much. If something was out there, my friends would know by now. They’ve been doing this for quite a while. I joined them after I started Professor Boyle’s ‘Understanding Society’s Obsession with the Occult’ class this semester. But these people I’m with are grad students.” He spoke like they were Nobel Prize winners instead of twenty-something kids with more money than sense.
At least I figured they must be wealthy, because a graduate degree focused on the occult wouldn’t be the fastest route to financial stability.
I grunted because he appeared to be waiting for my reaction.
Finley leaned forward and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But seriously, I don’t believe in all that stuff. Preternatural creatures? What a laugh, am I right? But don’t let our YouTube followers know.”
He forced out a weird little laugh that made me think he was lying, but about what?
He winked and combed his fingers through his brown hair. Again. How many times did he do that in a day? I wanted to slap his hand down, and I’d only met him a few minutes earlier. He really needed to get a haircut, although maybe I shouldn’t be too judgmental about that. I needed a haircut too. No. On second thought—or was it my third?—I was okay with judging him. He was a hunter, after all.
I didn’t know what he saw on my face, but his grin widened, suggesting he was trying to be charming.
I was not charmed.
“What’s taking so long? Kyle is about to piss his pants. I knew we should have taken that two-liter bottle of pop away from him when we left the city,” a young woman, who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Finley, said as she marched into the reception area.
She’d yanked open the door so forcefully the bell was still jangling when she got to the counter beside her friend. She wore a tan jacket and camo pants with lots of pockets, like human hunters dressed when they went after wild game. I guess she’d decided hunting supes was the same. After all, hunters never saw us as allies or equals. They only saw us as something other. The urge to shift and ram these people with my horns until they left Willow Lake damn near overwhelmed me.
But that was a surefire way to get more eyes on me and my community.
Her dark hair was back in a ponytail. If I’d met her before I found out she was a paranormal investigator, I might have found her attractive, for a human woman. But now I was fixated on the bulge in her pocket. Was it a hunting knife? Would she rip open a supe to find out how we differed from regular humans? Had she tied her hair back so it wouldn’t get caught in the gore? I knew from experience that hunters came in all shapes and sizes. And the pretty ones or the handsome ones could sometimes be meaner than the rest.
My heart was ready to stampede right out of my chest, and I prayed to the Eternal Magic herself for my face not to give anything away.
“We’re almost done, Tammy,” Finley said. “I was just telling—What was your name again?”
I didn’t want to say. I didn’t want these people to know anything about me. At all. But what else could I do? “Levi.”
“Levi,” Finley repeated back to me with a smile, like he liked my name.
I frowned at him.
“Anyway,” he turned to his friend. “I was telling Levi here about our YouTube channel. It scared him a little, I think. I remember what it was like, hearing about this stuff for the first time.” He stared off to a point over my shoulder like he was remembering the moment as we spoke. “Wild stuff. But I reassured him there’s nothing to worry about. Right, Tammy?”
Tammy eyed me curiously. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Had she identified me as a supe? “Have you been anywhere around here where you feel uncomfortable? Where your skin tingles? Where you feel like prey?”
I shook my head and tried to swallow down my fear. I felt damn uncomfortable and prey-like right now, but I doubted that was what she meant. No, she was talking about how humans often felt uncomfortable around a lot of supes. And her knowing that told me she knew a thing or two about supes. But how much? That was the question. Finley suggested they’d never encountered anything magical. Had he been lying?
“Nothing at all?” She leaned forward. “You sure?”
“I can’t think of anything…”
“Quit terrorizing the guy, Tam. He’s obviously uncomfortable with what we do. I’m trying to put him at ease, and you come in and act all suspicious.” Finley smiled like he thought this was funny. “Can’t take her anywhere.”
I didn’t smile, and neither did Tammy. Her gaze slid over my body, at least as much as she could see with the counter between us. Then she nodded sharply and turned her attention to Fin like she’d decided I was safe. AKA not a supe. AKA mundane. AKA not nano-seconds away from dying of a heart attack because a hunter stared me in the eye.
My eyes twitched with the urge to look down and check that the protection rune tattooed on my chest, right above where my magic lived inside me, wasn’t visible through my shirt. But I knew it wasn’t. That was just my insecurities talking. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from rubbing it, as if I could feel the pattern of the ink embedded in my skin.
“You don’t need anything more from me, do you?” Finley asked.
“Uh.” I swallowed hard as I glanced down at the paperwork. I couldn’t think of a single reason to turn them away, not when I’d already told him the motel had rooms for them to rent.
“Nope. I guess we’re all done.” I reluctantly set the keys on the counter, reminding myself as I did it that the best way to survive a chance encounter with a hunter was to pretend to be human like them.
“For real? These are actual keys,” Finley said, scooping them up from the countertop.
People always remarked on the keys. I should move to keycards at some point—if only to blend in with current expectations—but the keys worked fine. And I liked the way they looked. I liked the little rhythm of their teeth and notches. I could tell you which key belonged to each room just by looking at its blade. So why should I change something if it still worked? Most people these days fixated too much on technology.
Except, standing out was never advisable. For any reason. Not with hunters around.
I made a mental note to contact a lock company on Monday. It’d have to be someone from the city, which meant I’d be inviting another stranger to town. Not all strangers were dangerous, just hunters—I knew that. But I was having trouble remembering that right now.
I dealt with humans all the time. Most of them were fine, although I never wanted to get close to any of them. Okay. That wasn’t the full truth. Parker was okay. But it was also true that I’d like him more if he wasn’t human.
If anyone knew about my feelings toward humans, they’d wonder why I owned a motel. But I saw my motel a bit like an early warning system. How else could I keep track of visitors to town? Strangers needed a place to stay. Since the bombing at the Willow Lake Inn this past summer, my motel was now the only place in town where strangers could find a room. By talking to each new arrival, I was the first line of defense.
Being a fighter or an enforcer or anything like that didn’t interest me. Not anymore. But I could do this.
That said, I hadn’t confronted a real threat for years. Decades. Centuries even. Until now.
I’d become complacent.
The man grinned as he studied the keys like they were a museum exhibit. His smile seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I was sure I’d never met this man before.
“Your rooms are on the ground floor. Rooms seven through nine. Across the parking lot,” I spit the words out over the rush of blood pounding in my ears.
When the call had come in requesting three rooms, I had been pleased. Any room rentals were welcome this time of year. Or so I’d thought. But now three people were here, all keen to snoop and poke around until they unearthed something a little less ordinary and mundane than you found in the usual human world.
If we weren’t careful, one of our local supes would end up on a viral video. Nothing good ever came from that kind of exposure.
History held countless examples of how terrible things could get when humans found out about us, like with that Sasquatch family up in the mountains. Some regular old humans caught one of them on video about ten years back. It would have been so much worse if the humans had been hunters, but even so, the entire Sasquatch settlement had gone into hiding after the incident. It hadn’t been enough. Eventually, they’d had to move. After all this time, people still went out looking for them. At least, that’s what a headline on Supenet had said last week. I should go back and read the entire article. That’d teach me to stop just skimming the headlines.
What would we do if something like that happened in Willow Lake? We couldn’t move the whole town. Gage, our local demon guardian, had bonded to the physical place earlier this summer. He couldn’t leave. So what would we do?
Now that I thought about it, shouldn’t Gage already know someone had crossed into town with the desire to kill supes? Unless these three were scouts. This could be a fishing expedition, and that might not trigger the wards. I needed to talk to the demon about this, because if that was the case, that seemed like a flaw in the magic protecting Willow Lake.
Or did these three have talismans to fool the town’s magic? The man wore a necklace. I eyed the woman and caught the telltale glint of a chain around her neck, too. Those could be magical…
Because, although hunters hated magic, they also used it for their own purposes. The fucking hypocrites.
“Finally,” the woman muttered. “We need to throw our stuff in the rooms, then get out and look around. I want to tour the town tonight and come up with a plan for tomorrow.”
Finley rolled his eyes at me before smiling at the woman. “It isn’t even seven yet. We have time.”
“Would you come on already? The sun has already set.”
I glanced outside. She was right. The streetlights had already flickered on. This time of year, the days were getting shorter every day. I missed the long daylight hours of summer, but we wouldn’t see those again for several long months. I sometimes wondered what it would be like living closer to the equator, where they didn’t have drastic changes in daylight from season to season like we did. But at this moment, I welcomed the darkness. Hopefully, the shadows would hide our supes and magic from these snoopy humans.
“Hey, could you print me a map of the town?” Finley asked. “I forgot to do that before we left, and I’d like to have something to mark up and make notes on. I could do it on my phone, I guess…”
I tried not to look at the stack of visitor maps on the side table by the door. Jasmine, my front desk clerk, had said it was good for local businesses to show visitors what was available. I knew I should have said no.
“There’s one over here,” Tammy said, swiping a copy off the top of the pile. I wanted to rip it out of her hands before she could study it. It didn’t matter if she could find the same information on her phone. I didn’t want to aid her in even the smallest way. “It has some good info marked on it, including the cemetery. We should go there first and get some spooky shots.”
“Oh, man. That’ll be awesome under the full moon and shit. Okay. We gotta get out there.” Finley grinned at the prospect of going to the cemetery in the dark.
On his way past the door, he grabbed a map, too. Damn it.
“Have a pleasant stay,” I lied as they pushed through the door and left the office. As soon as the door closed behind them, I dropped my very fake and brittle smile. “Holy Magic. This is bad.”
I marched over to the remaining stack of maps and scooped them all up. I shoved them in a drawer behind the desk before grabbing my phone. My hand shook as I unlocked it and pulled up my contact list. It’d been a long time since I’d confronted hunters. I was out of practice.
Who should I call? I stared at my phone as I considered my options. Hayden, our pack alpha, was my first choice, but he and his new mate Ryley had left yesterday to go look at pre-manufactured homes or something or other. And they were making a bit of a holiday of it as they toured the various builders for a house to buy. They were supposed to be gone all weekend.
So, Van maybe? As a hellhound and the head of the local police, Van dealt with crisis situations all the time.
Or Gage? Gage hadn’t been in Willow Lake that long, so I didn’t know him all that well, but as our demon guardian, it was his duty to protect Willow Lake, right?
Before I could call anyone, my phone rang. It was Carter. Thank fuck. He’d know what to do.
“We have a problem,” I said as soon as the call connected. My voice cracked over the words, betraying my panic. This was my first run-in with hunters in years, and I wasn’t coping very well. Given how long I’d lived, I should be better at dealing with these assholes by now. It was all a part of being a supe.
“Hey, what’s up? Aren’t you coming to the pub tonight?” Carter’s voice was deep and rumbly. He sounded like a bear in both his human and his shifted forms. “Did something happen with Parks? Did you finally make a move?”
Just hearing Parker’s name had my heart thumping a little quicker. It was ridiculous. “What’re you talking about? Why would you say that?”
“Neither of you are at the pub yet, so I thought…”
“No. I haven’t seen Parker since I got coffee at the café this morning.”
“So, what has you quaking in your hooves?”
“I think a bunch of young hunters just checked in,” I said as I stared out the office window and watched the trio locate their ground-floor rooms. The L-shaped motel wrapped around the parking lot, so I could see their rooms from the office window.
