Page 86 of The Wolfing Hour
“The boss was here for a few minutes two hours ago, but we haven’t seen him since,” Karen Zurka, his assistant manager, informed me when I went in.
Karen was a hard-life sixty, her body wiry, her shoulders defensive, her close-cropped black hair drizzled with gray. The rat shifter was a petite, five-foot nothing, but I wouldn’t take her on without casting a protection spell first.
“He’s probably not happy about you all gathering here,” I said.
“Yeah. He warned us about what was coming and offered to buy us all plane tickets to someplace tropical.” Her eyes pinched until they were like tiny cracks in her dark brown face. “As if we’d abandon him.”
The staff grumbled their thoughts on that, all agreeing with Karen. They milled around the pub, some stacking chairs on tables, others sweeping and mopping.
Karen went back to taking photos of the pub’s liquor inventory. “They’ll attack here. No question about it. I’m just making sure the insurance has everything they need for when we file a claim for the losses.”
I wanted to disagree, but she was right. It was a given that Floyd would come for Ronan’s business and home. Surprising he hadn’t done it already. Protection spells helped, but they could only do so much if the witch wasn’t on site to feed it constant power.
She set a dusty bottle of rum that looked like it had been chiseled out of a treasure chest at the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker on the bar, slid her phone from her pocket, took a photo, and put the bottle back. With the toe of her sneaker, she nudged a crate filled with booze-sized wooden boxes under the counter and pulled out another.
“Some of it I’m taking home for safekeeping. No sense in risking this case of The Glenlivet 21, for instance.”
“Can I help you?”
“Nah, but thanks. Alpha Lydia’s sending some rats over. They’ll knock it out quick. We’re an industrious group.”
“Can I do anything?” I shouldn’t have offered with Ida and the boys waiting in the car and charms to deliver, but I had to say something. They were all doing so much for Ronan, taking risks he’d die before asking them to take.
“Yeah, you can.”
“Anything,” I said.
She lowered her phone, looked me directly in the eye. “Do whatever you have to do to make sure you take down that son-of-a-bastard alpha leader once and for all. There are a lot of us out here risking everything. Make no mistake, we’re doing it of our own accord, but by the gods, if that wolf isn’t a pile of ashes at the end of this, no one in this city will be safe. Not a single paranormal. He and his wolves will kill us all.”
Chapter
Sixteen
Chapter Sixteen
The rest of the evening went about the same, delivering charms to people who thanked me and warned me about what they knew to be coming.
It was all a lie, though.
None of us knew what was coming.
At six o’clock, Ronan checked in briefly before heading straight back out. He’d gotten yet another tip about Rory from an anonymous source. They’d been coming in several times a day and we were pretty sure they were meant to throw us off the trail, but he had to investigate anyway, so he’d taken a few trusted wolves to check it out.
The boys and I sat at my kitchen table poring over maps of Smokethorn County with a set of runes while Black Sabbath rocked “Iron Man” and “War Pigs,” among others, on KLXX’sMetal Hour.
Our search centered mostly on the industrial areas of La Paloma. We didn’t have many, and most of the ones we had were dilapidated and long abandoned. It was as if the last stages of theIndustrial Revolution had stuck its head in our part of the world, said, “Nope, not for us,” and steam-engined itself straight back east.
I wasn’t sure we were looking for industrialized areas, anyway. Floyd’s disturbing cell room could’ve been anywhere—might not even be in the county at all.
KLXX moved on from metal and slid into top 40, which was about the time we turned the radio off to focus harder.
It didn’t work any better without the music.
Fennel, Cecil, and I took turns with the runes. The ebony chips—each with a vaguely Norse symbol pressed into the surface—worked best for Cecil, which made sense, since they belonged to him. I assumed they were from Faery, but he could’ve just as easily ordered them from Etsy. I’d given him a gift card back in March to celebrate the first day of Spring.
Two hours into our divination, with me excessively yawning, Cecil toppling over in exhaustion, and Fennel purring way too hard to be healthy, I sent them to bed.
“Let’s give the runes time to recharge,” I said.
