Chapter 3
WE’RE ALL FUCKED
LEVI
“You investigate what exactly?” I asked.
“All things paranormal and supernatural and occult and…” the good-looking young man on the other side of the reception desk said affably, like he didn’t know his words would strike fear in the heart of supes everywhere.
I scanned the paperwork he’d completed for more clues.
The information was limited to his name—Finley Henshaw—and his address in the city.
Damn it. My forms needed to be reworked immediately.
I needed to ask more questions— important questions—like do you have a gun with you?
Or who hurt you? Or do you believe the serial killer Buffy was a heroic character?
“You know,” Finley continued, as he grinned at me and waved his hand through the air. “All the things that go bump in the night. Ghosts, mostly. But we’re open to finding werewolves and vampires. That kind of thing too. ”
The start of our conversation had led me to believe Finley was a nice guy.
I should have known better when he’d checked in so late.
I’d assumed he was an average human out for a weekend with his friends.
Now, though? I wasn’t so sure. Did the gleam in his hazel eyes suggest he was plotting something sinister?
When had his smirk turned smug? What did he know?
I eyed him critically, memorizing what I could about him.
Like most minotaurs, I was naturally gifted at noticing visual and spatial details.
And over the years, I’d honed my abilities.
Like most humans, Finley was shorter than me, probably about five foot nine.
If I had to, I could take him down and escape.
He had brown hair that hung over his eyes, and he kept pushing it out of the way.
He had a friendly smile that could easily disguise deception.
His pale skin should betray his emotions, but it didn’t look flushed with the anticipation of killing.
Although, I knew from experience, that could change quickly.
A silver cable chain around his neck flashed as he moved.
His clothes were average, nothing special. Or were they too generic?
When he’d first entered the office, he reminded me of the young romantic lead in some YA movie I’d been forced to watch at the pub one night.
Jeremy, a new supe in town—and I mean new as in both new to the town and new to being a supe—had decided all the supernatural beings in Willow Lake needed to be educated about humans and pop culture.
So, he’d started a series of “School the Supes” events.
I tried to avoid them whenever I could. But I’d mixed up the days last time and ended up sitting through a movie about teenagers.
Teenagers . I had not been a teenager for centuries.
I related more to the exasperated parents than the petulant main characters.
But now I suspected this Finley guy was a villain instead of a lead character.
Sweat gathered along my hairline, dampened my armpits, and slithered down my spine. Like an old relative I’d hoped never to see again, a mask slipped over my face, wiping away all emotion. It was the one I reserved just for hunters. I hated it. It’d been so long since I’d had to wear it.
But this momentary discomfort was better than the alternative of revealing too much.
I curled my hand around the room keys I’d been about to give the man.
I tucked them out of sight as I scrambled to come up with a lie that’d send him and his friends on their way.
Aspen Bay, the next small town down the highway, had a lot of vacancies this time of year.
These people could go there. Or better yet, they could head back to the city.
Lots of supes lived in the city. Let them deal with these… these hunters .
Because he may not have used that word, but I knew what he meant.
I’d come face to face with his type too many times in the past. And I doubted today would be the last. But I hated it had to be this way.
I wished I didn’t know anything about hunters.
I wished I’d never needed to. But when people like him destroyed your life and every chance of happiness, you didn’t forget. No matter how many years passed.
I itched to grab him by the throat. To shake him.
To demand answers. Although, as a hunter, he’d just spew hate and lies.
But why, for the love of Magic, did humans want to hunt us?
What lies had they been told? Because I—one of those so-called creatures he was so keen to find—only went bump in the night when I’d had too many ales at the pub and had to get up to piss at two in the morning.
I was too old to deal with this shit again.
Suddenly, those nebulous vacation plans I’d been making sounded a lot more appealing.
No time like the present, right? All those resort getaways I’d been researching sounded fucking amazing right now.
I already had a ton of places bookmarked on my computer, so this wouldn’t be a spur-of-the-moment decision. I wouldn’t be running away. Really.
A few weeks away from town would be wonderful. Refreshing. Fortifying.
I’d originally thought I needed a break from Parker and his too sexy, too tempting smile, but if a holiday got me away from the hunters too? Perfect.
Now… Where had I stowed my luggage? Wait. Did I even own any anymore? My last holiday was… Well, I didn’t know when.
“Hey, don’t panic,” the human said, leaning over as if to pat the tight fist I’d rested on the counter. His hair swung in front of his eyes.
I yanked my hand back before he could touch it. Magic zinged along my skin, but shifting forms was the last thing I should do in front of this man.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Finley assured me, combing his fingers through his hair.
“I’m not scared,” I muttered. Sure, it was a lie, but why would he think that? It’d been so long since I’d worn what I liked to call my mask of indifference. What if my face didn’t know how to do it anymore? That’d be so fucking bad.
“It’s okay, man. Sure, we investigate supernatural shit, but we haven’t found much.
If something was out there, my friends would know by now.
They’ve been doing this for quite a while.
I joined them after I started Professor Boyle’s ‘Understanding Society’s Obsession with the Occult’ class this semester.
But these people I’m with are grad students.
” He spoke like they were Nobel Prize winners instead of twenty-something kids with more money than sense.
At least I figured they must be wealthy, because a graduate degree focused on the occult wouldn’t be the fastest route to financial stability.
I grunted because he appeared to be waiting for my reaction.
Finley leaned forward and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “But seriously, I don’t believe in all that stuff. Preternatural creatures? What a laugh, am I right? But don’t let our YouTube followers know.”
He forced out a weird little laugh that made me think he was lying, but about what?
He winked and combed his fingers through his brown hair.
Again . How many times did he do that in a day?
I wanted to slap his hand down, and I’d only met him a few minutes earlier.
He really needed to get a haircut, although maybe I shouldn’t be too judgmental about that.
I needed a haircut too. No. On second thought—or was it my third?
—I was okay with judging him. He was a hunter, after all .
I didn’t know what he saw on my face, but his grin widened, suggesting he was trying to be charming.
I was not charmed.
“What’s taking so long? Kyle is about to piss his pants. I knew we should have taken that two-liter bottle of pop away from him when we left the city,” a young woman, who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Finley, said as she marched into the reception area.
She’d yanked open the door so forcefully the bell was still jangling when she got to the counter beside her friend.
She wore a tan jacket and camo pants with lots of pockets, like human hunters dressed when they went after wild game.
I guess she’d decided hunting supes was the same.
After all, hunters never saw us as allies or equals.
They only saw us as something other . The urge to shift and ram these people with my horns until they left Willow Lake damn near overwhelmed me.
But that was a surefire way to get more eyes on me and my community.
Her dark hair was back in a ponytail. If I’d met her before I found out she was a paranormal investigator, I might have found her attractive, for a human woman.
But now I was fixated on the bulge in her pocket.
Was it a hunting knife? Would she rip open a supe to find out how we differed from regular humans?
Had she tied her hair back so it wouldn’t get caught in the gore?
I knew from experience that hunters came in all shapes and sizes.
And the pretty ones or the handsome ones could sometimes be meaner than the rest.
My heart was ready to stampede right out of my chest, and I prayed to the Eternal Magic herself for my face not to give anything away.
“We’re almost done, Tammy,” Finley said. “I was just telling—What was your name again?”
I didn’t want to say. I didn’t want these people to know anything about me. At all. But what else could I do? “Levi.”
“Levi,” Finley repeated back to me with a smile, like he liked my name.
I frowned at him.
“Anyway,” he turned to his friend. “I was telling Levi here about our YouTube channel. It scared him a little, I think. I remember what it was like, hearing about this stuff for the first time.” He stared off to a point over my shoulder like he was remembering the moment as we spoke.
“Wild stuff. But I reassured him there’s nothing to worry about. Right, Tammy?”