Page 25 of Watch Me Burn

He hustles over to us. “Hi, there. I’m Mayor Lou. Mayor because I’m the mayor of the village. Lou because that’s my name. Mayor Lou. Nice to meet you.”

I tap my chest, trying not to make a face, but mygod, does the poor man stink. “Bridget.”

Elise gives him a small smile. “And I’m Elise.”

“Yes, we were expecting you. Welcome! And, please, don’t mind the smell. If it gets too overpowering, I can replace this,” he chirps, lifting up the piece of orange cardboard hanging around his neck.

Holy crap. Is that a car air freshener?

It is. It totally is. I wasn’t really paying attention to it since the eye-watering stench caught my attention first, but now that I’m looking at it, I can see the words ‘mandarin orange’ in whiteblock print in the center of the orange rectangle hanging over his jacket. A piece of elastic string is looped through the hole punched near the top, making it big enough to fit over his head.

“What smell?” asks Elise. The picture of diplomacy, the sweet vampire pretends she doesn’t notice even as her nose wrinkles adorably.

Me? I do everything I can not to gag. I don’t want to be rude, and I’m hoping that I’ll get used to it in time if I’m sticking around Dyea, so I just give him a tight-lipped smile and nod while breathing shallowly through my nose.

He chuckles warmly. “Aren’t you two very kind. It’s alright. I know how strong it can be for newcomers. Another reason why I was one of the first villagers to relocate to the sanctuary when the witches opened it up to prey shifters. At least, in Dyea, everyone understands why I smell the way I do.” And then, when it’s obvious that we don’t, he chuckles again. “I’m a skunk shifter.”

Oh.

When they said this was a place for certain supernaturals who couldn’t quite pass as human in the real world, I don’t know what I was thinking. But a man with black and white hair wearing an air freshener that does nothing to cover up the pungent odor of his skunk smell?

Yeah. He’d stick out like a sore thumb.

What about his henchman? What is he?

At first glance, he looks like any regular old lumberjack you’d see on the cover of a romance novel. At least a head taller than Mayor Lou, he has this rugged masculinity to him that would be attractive if he didn’t look like he wanted to be anywhere but where he is. He has on a faded flannel shirt, buttoned all the way to the top, though that does little to hide his muscular build. His sandy brown hair is shaggy, in need of a haircut, and his eyes…

His eyes are the weirdest shade of gold I’ve ever seen. You can’t even pretend they’re hazel. That’s liquid gold, and he’s creeping me out by not blinking them.

He’s standing a few steps away from the mayor, clearly downwind from the two warring stinks clinging to him, but when his nostrils flare and his scowl deepens, I’m pretty sure it’s not the eau de skunk that’s affecting him right now.

I resist the urge to lift my arm and sniff my pits. Sure, we’ve been traveling all night and we’re probably less than fresh—and who am I kidding, Elise probably smells like blood and roses—but no way are we as bad asthat.

He’s glaring at me. I can’t help but give him a stink face back, and it honestly has nothing to do with the poor skunk mayor.

“Don’t mind Conall,” says Mayor Lou brightly. “He’s our head of security here, but no one will ever mistake him for the welcoming committee.”

“More villagers just means more idiots I have to keep secure,” Conall grumbles.

His gaze returns to me after a moment where the mayor got his grumpy glare, and as soon as it does, my hands begin to tingle in the familiar warning that they’re about to spark and blow. Why amIthe idiot? Because I’m the supposed human accompanying the vampire they granted sanctuary to?

Or is it something different? Ishedifferent?

Shit. Can he tell thatI’m different?

Witch hunters. I haven’t been able to forget about them since that first hunter tried to grab me in Clarity. I came all the way up to Alaska because it’s the only place in the States that might be able to hide a fire witch. And I have to hide because they hunt in pairs.

Before we left Clarity, Jasper told Elise that despite the best care that the human hospital could give him, the first witch hunter died before Thorn could find out who his partner was andhow much they knew about me. I had another panic attack when I declared that I was a murder, but Elise was quick to calm me down. Turns out that it wasn’t the burns that killed him. Nope. As though he realized that he’d been caught by vampires and wasn’t making it out alive, he woke up from his sedation with enough time to use the supplies in his hotel room to kill himself.

So one day. But what about the other one?

Now, I’m not saying that Conall is that prick’s partner. If Conall has lived in the sanctuary town long enough to be head of security under Mayor Lou, I doubt he was lurking around Clarity with his partner, trying to snag any unsuspecting witches they came across.

Does that mean heisn’ta witch hunter? Probably, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a threat. In my very limited experience as a witch, whenever someone makes my palms tingle like this, they’re a threat.

Plus he definitely looks like a lurker…

Then there’s the reality that while witch hunters hunt in pairs, they’re part of an interconnected network of human fanatics. If he somehow figured out I was a witch before I even knew, did he only tell his partner? Maybe every damn hunter in the world knows that Bridget Hayes is a witch. My saving grace is hoping that they don’t know I’m a rare fire witch, but after the way I left scorch marks on Coronet Ave, I wouldn’t be surprised if the partnerdoesknow.

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