Page 21 of The Alpha's Warlock
It had just been a faint frisson at first. Some instrumental version of a bad 90s pop song was playing, a cashier was ringing up a guy in a hoodie with the local community college’s logo on it. Normal enough.
But maybe not so much. There was something…and then it dawned on me. No one had looked at us for more than a second, and a middle-aged woman with a cart full of diapers and laundry detergent had turned and quickly gone the other way when she saw us coming. I mean, yeah, we weren’t exactly in a place where people exchanged cheerful greetings with all and sundry. It was more of a nod and a grunt at most. But the cashier had also glanced over without making eye contact and then stared pointedly the other way, and the couple of other shoppers we’d passed seemed to be giving us a wide berth.
It was just weird.
“Hey, Ian?” I nudged his arm with my elbow. “You get the feeling people are being weird right now?”
He turned his head to stare at me. “You mean, other than you?”
“Very fucking funny. I mean it. Like, that woman ran away from us.”
Ian frowned. “What woman?”
“The one with all the diapers.”
Now he was glaring. “What the fuck do diapers have to do with anything?”
Oh, gods give me patience. I pinched the bridge of my nose and gave my eyebrows a rub. “It’s not. About. The diapers, Ian. It’s about the woman with the diapers who turned around and…okay, forget her. What about the cashier? She was weird too, right?”
“You’re just being para— okay, yeah, maybe,” he said grudgingly, as a young guy with a basket full of ice cream and toilet paper spun on his heel and trotted away down the toothpaste aisle right as we got within ten feet of him. “Thatwaskind of weird.”
I’d started to get a very, very bad feeling about this. “Let’s just get the rock salt and get the fuck out of here. I probably have some rosemary at my apartment if the plant’s still alive, and if not we can pick some out of someone’s yard on the way back.”
“Works for me,” Ian muttered, and sped up, the cart wheels rattling loud enough to make me wince. I half-ran after him, cursing his ridiculously long legs. Not that the view of those legs and his muscular ass double-timing it in front of me was bad, or anything.
As we approached the section with the gardening and hardware stuff, a high, piping voice floated to us from the next aisle. “Are you absolutelycertainyou don’t have blue shoe polish? And larger cucumbers. These simply won’t fit.” We turned into the aisle. A shaggy-haired gnome in a neon-green faux-fur coat — and nothing else — was waving a crooked English cucumber under the nose of a slack-jawed college-aged dude in the store’s uniform vest. “My cousin’s getting married tomorrow. The ceremony won’t be complete without —” The gnome turned his head, saw us, and cut off with a squawk. “It’sthem!” he cried, tossed his cucumber into his basket, and vanished into thin air with a crack like breaking rock and a puff of ozone.
“Hey!” the kid shouted. “You need to pay for that! Did you see…” He turned to us, and his aggravated retail-scowl melted into something like panic. “Oh, shit,” he said, and began to back away. “Oh,shit.” And then he shuffled backwards, almost tripping over his own feet, and booked it down the aisle and out of sight around the corner.
Ian and I stared after him for a moment, and then slowly turned our heads and looked at each other. “I think maybe we should forget about the salt for today.”
He huffed. “Yeah, you think?”
We ditched the cart and headed for the front of the store, almost jogging but not quite. Fast enough to get out quickly, hopefully not fast enough to draw even more attention. “What the fuck is going on?” I hissed under my breath. “I mean, what the fuck?”
Ian stopped suddenly, grabbing me by the elbow to pull me up short. “We need to go out the back.”
I started to protest, even as I was scrambling to follow him as he pulled me quickly back the way we’d come, and then my unenhanced human hearing caught up to what his supernatural senses had already detected: sirens, still in the distance but approaching fast.
“What,” I gasped, wishing I was in better shape, “the fuck is this? Who called the fucking cops? Who even calls the cops here?” We ran past a huge display of Valentine’s Day-themed men’s underwear, not even trying to be discreet anymore. My too-large boots slipped on my feet, and I stumbled and knocked over a towering stack of boxers printed with grinning, copulating hearts. They cascaded to the floor behind me, and I heard someone yelp in surprise.
“Normals call the cops,” Ian said grimly, and shoved me through a door with a large sign reading ‘Employees Only.’
Three girls putting on their vests to start their shifts scattered, screaming, as we burst through. We dodged around a pile of plastic-wrapped pallets and skidded to a stop in a dead-end composed of two more stacks of pallets and a huge walk-in freezer.
We backtracked, running faster now. My breath was coming in big heaves and sweat trickled down my spine. The slaps of our feet on the concrete floor echoed like gunshots, and the sirens were loud enough now to penetrate even the depths of the cavernous stockroom and all its heaps of candy hearts and flat-screen TVs.
“There!” Ian called out, and caught me by the arm again to pull me toward the dimly glowing exit sign to our left.
“Will you — stop —tuggingon me?”
“I will when you run faster!”
We burst through the exit door, Ian slamming the metal bar hard enough to fling the door back against the exterior wall with a crash. The sudden brightness of the sunlight after the dull fluorescents of the stockroom had me blinded and blinking, and the sirens were a wall of sound. Thank the gods Ian still had my arm in his iron grip, because I was so disoriented I might have wandered off and stumbled right into the back of a police car. We pelted along the side of the building and across a fire lane, and then we were shoving our way through a thicket of bushes and skidding down a muddy incline, fast-food wrappers and old plastic bags rustling under our feet and getting caught around our shoes.
At the bottom of the hill, a small creek wound its way through clumps of straggly trees and more thorny bushes, and Ian turned to the side and squeezed through a gap in the foliage, finally stopping with his back to a boulder and his feet sinking nearly ankle-deep into the slop at the edge of the stream.
I flopped against the rock beside him. Watery mud seeped into my oversized boots, but my spiffy magical socks were keeping my feet dry and toasty. If the cops caught up to us, they’d probably confiscate my socks when their supernatural liaison officer checked me for magical objects. One more reason to get the fuck away.
