Page 34 of Scapegoat

Billy walked over to the cool room and pulled out a tray of neatly packed sandwiches, then pushed them through the small window for the servers to take.

“So can I have one of the girls to help?” I asked.

“They’re flat out making coffees,” he said. “I need to get out there—”

“Nope, you need to help me if you want more food to go out,” I said, far more assertively than most of the human women I’d met would have, but fuck, if he was gonna spring this shit on me… I walked over to the wall, yanked down a clean apron and then flung it at him. “We’re gonna have to work together.”

“Got it. Right. Right.”

Most of the time, Billy coped just fine with the pressures of running a roadhouse. He just needed a little managing from time to time. He was from the city and, like a lot of people during the lockdowns, he’d fled to a small country town. In his case, he’d found one that had a truck stop for sale, one that needed to be built up. He’d turned it from a grimy, cockroach infested place, by all reports, to a place that sold quality coffee.

And now, hopefully, quality food.

The farming area that spread out around the town was mostly suited to sheep. Billy’s roadhouse was one of the few places in the district where people could pull up and grab a quick feed. Usually there was a steady trickle of customers all day, enough to keep us all moving. But as I ducked my head through the servery window, I saw what he meant. There were people bloody everywhere.

“Empty the freezers,” I said. “Deep fry all the fish fillets, the chiko rolls, the battered savs we have and fill the bain-maries.”

“But we usually do them fresh.”

“Looks like they won’t last long out there anyway. Keep the chips coming and push them out. At the very least people can buy a cup of chips. If you run out of deep fried stuff, start making sandwiches while I get the main meals started…” I walked into the cool room, grabbing bags of mince, vegetables, fresh herbs and some diced lamb, dropping the lot on the bench before chopping like a damn fiend.

Dice onions and potatoes, slice carrots and celery, mince garlic, my knife moved in a blur, all my wolfish strength allowing me to chop at a speed few people could match and that’s what stopped Billy in his tracks.

People assumed I was human until evidence made it clear I wasn’t. Usually that was my wolf slipping from my control, fur prickling over my skin or a low growl erupting from my chest. Billy was mesmerised by my mad knife skills, and he just stood there staring until I barked, “Billy! Chips!”

I had the celery, onion and carrot sweating in two separate pots, adding the garlic as I stirred, the starter for the two different hot meals. Then, when that was fragrant, I turned up the heat and started browning the meat. After adding some dried herbs, some beef stock, breaking up the mince into fine pieces in one pot and stirring all the other vegetables in for the stew in the other, I had the two massive pots simmering away in no time.

Pity the food couldn’t be cooked at wolf speed either.

I then moved to start peeling and chopping potatoes as fast as I could. Stew served with mashed potatoes to mop up the juices, spag bol sauce that needed pasta to make it complete. It wasn’t exactly gourmet, but it was the kind of stick-to-your-ribs food that people appreciated when they were hungry. And best of all? It smelled good. The whole kitchen was filled with the scents of meat, thyme, oregano and garlic, the umami of the beef stock rounding that out and that’s what transported me back.

Back to Mum’s kitchen, working hard to put a nice meal together for my family, trying to get it done as quickly as I could, but to her exacting standards, so I could sneak off—

“Kai? Have we got any more sandwiches?” one of the girls asked hopefully through the serving hatch. “Or some burger?”

“Burgers,” I said, pointing the knife at her, swinging into the cool room and away from my memories.

The big tub, full of the patties we made ourselves, was in there and I brought it out, slapping down burger after burger on the grill, turning the gas up until the meat began to sizzle. I then laid bread roll after bread roll all over the prep table, smearing the white bread with butter, then adding cheese.

Billy pulled away from what he was doing when the burgers were done, working to help wrap them all up in paper, the two of us stacking them neatly on the tray, right before I smelled the tell-tale scent of chips starting to burn.

“Fryers!” I snapped. “I’ll sort the rest of these.”

And I did. I wrapped the last of them, then had them all set out on the tray before walking out the swinging doors backward, my shoulder blades shoving the doors wide before I appeared behind the counter.

I didn’t serve at the front counter for a reason. Other employers had tried to place me there, seeing someone who was young, female and, by human standards, pretty enough to catch men’s eyes, thinking I’d help bring all the boys to the yard.

It didn’t work.

I couldn’t pretend like the others did, smiling, smiling, as all the fucking customers ignored your attempts to be friendly, or worse, were openly rude to your face. Humans were no different to wolves, it appeared; they had their hierarchies just like we did. But I couldn’t submit the way I was supposed to, fawn over customers, pretend I was glad for every cent they paid, and so kitchen work it was for me. So when I came out the front, I did what I normally did, moved quickly, adeptly weaving between the girls as they handed over coffees, snacks, pieces of cake to those paying, before I moved over to the bain-marie and grabbed a pair of tongs to rearrange the contents. Having sorted things enough to make space for the burgers, I moved out the empty trays to be sent through the servery window and I started to move the burgers into the trays.

“How much for the burgers?”

If smell was good at evoking memories, sound was even more effective. There’d been days I’d hear a song on the radio, blaring in one of the kitchens I’d worked in, and suddenly I’d be dragged right back to Stanthorpe.

To them.

But this? This wasn’t a song. It was a rich, deep voice, deeper than it used to be. A voice shouldn’t have been enough to upend my world, to do anything to me. I was safe, away from home, a whole fucking state away. I lived among humans. I’d run away. I’d—

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