Lone Wolves

Chapter 1

chapter

one

“I am justice,” Alexander White announced into the grimy bathroom mirror. “I am the ax through a vampire’s neck. I am the silver chain around a werewolf’s muzzle. I come from a proud line of hunters stretching back generations, lethal and righteous—”

There was a bang on the bathroom door.

“Al,” his manager, Donna, called. “Break ended two minutes ago! Get on the floor!”

Alexander held back a groan. “Coming,” he yelled.

He took a long, deep breath and smoothed down his shirt.

No matter how demeaning this job was, he still took pride in his appearance.

He was the only employee at Burgers N’ Beats who ironed their uniform, a fact which appalled him even after he considered his coworkers’ unfortunate backgrounds.

Even if you grew up in a household that bought shoes out of a bargain bin, you should start ironing your clothes when you come into adulthood.

After Alexander had to leave his family home at sixteen and survive on his own, he made sure to keep an iron in his luggage.

In the three years since, he had suffered terrible minimum wage jobs, humiliation, and squalid apartments, and yet he still found time to make himself presentable: polishing his boots, styling his hair.

Scrubbing blood out of his clothes after hunting, hunched over in a laundromat so nobody would see the stains.

It was important to have pride in your appearance. It was equally important to make sure nobody suspected that he was a hunter. Two crucial lessons his family taught him. He might be banished, but he was not about to give up on those lessons now.

Alexander strode back behind the counter to find Donna shoving a dirty mop around the deep fryer station.

“Gotta say,” Donna admitted with an overly dramatic sigh, “I expected better from you.”

Alexander frowned. “I’m your most consistently on-time employee. That was the first time I stayed late on a break. Gemma consistently runs over because she makes out with her boyfriend in the break room, even though we’re not supposed to let anyone in who isn’t an employee.”

“I’m joking, Al. Lighten up.” Donna straightened and slapped him on the shoulder, her giant earrings jiggling with the force of it. “I was hoping you’d tell me to fuck off.”

“You’re my boss,” Alexander replied.

Donna stretched, her back clicking despite her only being in her late twenties.

She didn’t look bothered about the line gathering outside the drive-through window.

Donna rarely looked bothered about anything, which annoyed Alexander.

He didn’t respect this job any more than he respected any of the minimum wage jobs he’d had since he left home, but he still did his best.

Unlike Donna. She treated this job like an annoying afterthought she had to do before going home and playing League of Legends, a video game that Alexander only learned about against his will when Donna rambled on about it.

She was also taking up silversmithing. And tarot.

And a hundred other hobbies that she would surely ditch in a week to move onto something even more ridiculous.

“Sometimes you need to tell your boss to fuck off,” Donna advised him. She pushed the mop into his hands and pointed him toward the dining area. “Go mop the floors, some guy spilled a milkshake.”

Alexander nodded. “I’m on it.”

“Thanks, Al.”

Alexander ignored her. He hated that nickname with the power of a thousand suns.

He hated Burgers N’ Beats, a chain restaurant with eighteen locations throughout the state of Virginia.

He hated his cheap apartment with a property manager who refused to clean out the roaches until Alexander had to take matters into his own hands and almost poisoned himself in the process.

Endless strings of dirty buses and disgusting break rooms and grody gyms he showered at when he was between apartments.

Alexander longed for his ancestral home often: the spacious rooms, high ceilings, and gleaming floors, and a chain of family portraits stretching up the stairs.

But he never missed it more than when he had to mop whatever low-grade building he was working at.

Burgers N’ Beats had a layer of oily linoleum secured shoddily to the unforgiving concrete, so every time he mopped too hard, the linoleum flexed underneath him.

Every pass of the mop against the garish pink milkshake made him contemplate the awful life choices that led him to this moment, all of them stemming from one idiotic decision in North Carolina: letting those vampires go.

He never should have done it. He knew that, even then. And yet there had been something about those two girls: the way they clutched each other, how devoted they were. So different to the soulless monsters he’d been taught to hunt.

He let the vampires live. And he destroyed his life in the process.

No matter how many monsters he put down on this terrible road trip across America, financed by these shitty jobs and hot-wired cars, his family’s answer was the same: You turned your back on your family duty, why shouldn’t we do the same to you?

Alexander gritted his teeth, mopping up the last of the sticky milkshake that was somehow becoming one with the linoleum.

Everything would change tonight. He had a lead. If he pulled this off, even his staunch family wouldn’t be able to ignore it. He would prove his loyalty, and they’d finally have to take him back into that big, clean house where everything was in order, including him.

Someone grabbed his mop.

“Hey,” Alexander barked, startled. It was unusual for him to get caught off guard like this. He wrenched the mop out of their hands, whirling to ask what their problem was—then stopped, uncharacteristically stupefied. It wasn’t some irritating coworker like he had expected.

It was a regular. Alexander had dubbed him Hot Scar Guy due to the scar bisecting his lips, which were just as unfairly attractive as the rest of him: deep brown eyes, muscular build, hair so shaggy it should have been off-putting but instead made Alexander want to run his hands through it.

Hot Scar Guy grinned at him, twirling the hijacked mop. “Sorry for freaking you out. You guys seem busy, thought I’d help.”

Alexander frowned. The dining area was empty except for an exhausted mother munching on a burger as her two children battled with toy horses under the table, screeching like the banshee Alexander had put down in the last city he lived in.

He was about to point this out when Hot Scar Guy continued, “Since I made the mess and all.”

He nodded at the pink milkshake in the process of fusing to the linoleum.

Then he spun the mop with a startling dexterity that reminded Alexander vaguely of his spear training in middle school, and started scrubbing.

The milkshake cleared up much faster than it had under Alexander’s care, the mop squeaking with the force Hot Scar Guy was mounting into the linoleum.

“This is totally unnecessary,” Alexander started. Then he remembered that the typical nineteen-year-old didn’t talk like that, and he was trying to blend in. “I mean, you don’t have to. It’s my job. You don’t get anything out of this.”

Hot Scar Guy tilted his head. The gesture was cocky, self-assured, everything that Alexander tried to be.

But Hot Scar Guy had things that Alexander didn’t: ease.

Humor. Lightness. Alexander was very good at most things he attempted, but he was too serious.

That was what people told him, anyway. In Alexander’s opinion, he was taking things with the correct level of sincerity.

Everyone else was taking it too lightly.

He didn’t mind it so much with Hot Scar Guy. Not when he was smirking at Alexander like that, anyway.

“I get to make you smile,” Hot Scar Guy said.

Alexander wanted to point out that he wasn’t smiling. But he found his mouth twitching reluctantly.

“Almost,” Hot Scar Guy whispered.

Alexander scoffed, the sound becoming a mortifying giggle halfway through.

There was a tiny part of him that insisted he was being made fun of.

But while he wasn’t a social butterfly, he also wasn’t an idiot: Hot Scar Guy’s gaze had a habit of lingering on Alexander’s mouth when he took his order.

He always paid with cash, his hand brushing soft and scarred against Alexander’s.

Once, he’d even gripped his hand and brought up Alexander’s terrible circulation, rubbing blissful warmth into Alexander’s palm before he let go.

Alexander had learned a lot during his three-year stint alone. How to falsify a landlord reference. The best spots in any city to get weapons under the table. And knowing when he was being flirted with.

“You could try again sometime,” he said, and silently congratulated himself. His tone was normal and his words were exactly what he wanted to convey.

Hot Scar Guy opened his mouth, presumably to say something else that would disarm Alexander in epic proportions. But before he could speak, his breath cut off and his hands tightened around the mop. He bent over, gritting his teeth with a pained grunt.

Alexander's muscles tensed. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

Hot Scar Guy made another horrible sound. This one was more intense, but muffled from biting his lip.

Alexander scanned for injuries. There were none visible, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something under his hoodie and sweatpants.

“Where’s the pain?” Alexander asked. “What do you need?”

Hot Scar Guy huffed a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. Then he straightened, slow and pained, tears gleaming in his big brown eyes.

“Nothing you can give me,” he rasped. He shot Alexander another smile, significantly weaker than the last, and pressed the mop back into Alexander’s hand.

“I’ll take you up on that offer,” he said, strained. “But later. I gotta go see a man about a dog.”