Chapter 3 #3
“Hey, what’s up? Aren’t you coming to the pub tonight?” Carter’s voice was deep and rumbly. He sounded like a bear in both his human and his shifted forms. “Did something happen with Parks? Did you finally make a move?”
Just hearing Parker’s name had my heart thumping a little quicker. It was ridiculous. “What’re you talking about? Why would you say that? ”
“Neither of you are at the pub yet, so I thought…”
“No. I haven’t seen Parker since I got coffee at the café this morning.”
“So, what has you quaking in your hooves?”
“I think a bunch of young hunters just checked in,” I said as I stared out the office window and watched the trio locate their ground-floor rooms. The L-shaped motel wrapped around the parking lot, so I could see their rooms from the office window.
Carter’s energy changed. I couldn’t see him, but I got the sense he’d straightened and pressed the phone closer to his ear. “Did you say hunters?”
“They called themselves paranormal investigators, but they dress like hunters. They have a YouTube channel. Pretty sure we’re all fucked.”
“Great,” he said. Weary sarcasm dripped from that one syllable. No one liked confronting hunters. “That’s the last thing this town needs. What are they doing now? Are you safe?”
“I don’t think they suspect anything, so I’m safe for now. This isn’t my first encounter with their kind.”
“Fucking hunters,” Carter muttered. “Okay. You keep an eye on them. I’ll call Van and fill him in.”
The call ended as Finley moved their vehicle closer to their rooms. I tried to memorize as much information about it as I could.
If the make and model hadn’t been in the registration form, I wouldn’t have known what it was.
I wasn’t all that interested in vehicles of any kind and, contrary to what other people thought, minotaurs didn’t have eidetic memories.
But if someone asked in the next couple of days, I would be able to tell them the color, the shape, and where the dent was on the driver’s side door.
Because who knew? Any little bit of information might be important.
I moved closer to the window and stared at the three people as they emptied their supplies.
I studied each piece of equipment they hauled into their rooms, too, but most of it was in a bag or a box, so that didn’t help. There was a lot of it, though.
A moment later, my phone rang again.
“Talk to me,” Van said.
“There are three of them. Two men and one woman.” I tried to think of what else to say.
The one flaw in my observation skills was when it came to people.
I didn’t always guess their ages correctly.
After living for so long, I usually divided people into three groups: children, adults, or seniors.
That classification system usually worked for me, but not today.
I tried to recall more information. “In their early twenties probably. One of them talked about university, so about that age. One male I didn’t see up close, but from a distance nothing stands out.
I interacted with two of them, though.” I could hear Van mumble as I spoke, and I assumed he was taking notes.
I described each person and the vehicle, too.
“This couldn’t come at a worse time,” Van said when I finished speaking.
“Why? What’s going on?” Were there more of their kind in town I needed to know about?
“Some supe teens are partying to celebrate the Hunter’s Moon. I’ve already had four complaints.”
Supernatural beings didn’t have many children, but our local supe population had grown over the last few years.
And with that, more families were moving to town.
I got it. All kids were precious, but supe kids were comparatively rare.
So, moving to a place with a lot of supernatural adults to look out for their children made sense.
The Eternal Magic connected us all, blessed us with magic, and did her best to protect us from humans.
That was also why some supes called her Mother Magic.
She provided us with a natural camouflage that we called glamour.
It helped us blend in with humans. Without that magic, everyone—hunters or not—would know we walked among them.
But even the Eternal Magic, as all-powerful as she was, had limitations.
So, for most of us, we lived by that old adage about there being safety in numbers.
And Willow Lake was thriving because of it.
We’d even seen a rise in new pregnancies in the last month since the Willow Lake Pack was re-established after Hayden, our alpha, finally accepted his role in the community.
I thought the population boom had something to do with the Eternal Magic blessing Willow Lake, but what did I know? I was just a guy who ran a motel.
But those supernatural kids needed to be protected.
Every supe in town agreed on that. We rarely worried too much about the local humans.
They—except for Parker, for some reason—shied away from places supes hung out, which created safe zones where we could be ourselves.
And since Gage had moved to town, he’d arranged for wards to be placed around the most popular spots.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t put wards up around the entire town—there were too many humans here— although I really wished we could.
Everyone, the kids included, knew where those safe zones were.
But teens liked to push boundaries and take risks.
They wouldn’t realize how deadly hunters could be.
And as for Parker, I kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t see anything he shouldn’t. I knew how humans reacted to discovering magic for the first time, and I never wanted him to look at me with fear in his eyes. That would kill me. It didn’t matter if I was technically immortal.
“We’ve got to find the teens and send them home. The humans said they are heading out soon to scope out the town. If the hunters see the teens shift or do magic…” I swallowed. “It’d be bad. Very bad.”
Unwelcome memories flitted through my head. Black curly hair wet with blood. Voices lost from too much screaming. My world shattered in one endless night.
I pushed them away. Now wasn’t the time to revisit all that. I’d come to terms with everything that happened the first time I encountered hunters all those years ago, but I’d never forgotten. I didn’t need to tell any of that to Van, though. He knew the risks as well as I did. Every supe did.
“That might be the understatement of the year,” Van muttered.