Chapter 2
GRIFFITH
I should have known after the first crack of thunder that my night wouldn’t be an easy one.
Not that thunderstorms in north Georgia are uncommon in the late spring. We always have a handful roll through each season, bringing chest-rattling booms and buckets of rain that raise the level of Lake Galen. But I would swear the storms also bring out the oddities.
“Dogs ain’t allowed in your bar, I thought,” Gregor says with the touch of a slur that tells me I need to cut the old wolf off.
The previous owner of this bar—formerly Tipsy Howls, now called Local Brew—had a bad habit of over-serving patrons, especially one from the pack. Money was money to him, and he always claimed saying no to a fellow werewolf was disloyal.
But me? I want this bar to be a place where townsfolk come for fun and community. Not to drown their sorrows. Though I’m happy to lend a sympathetic ear if someone is having a bad run of it. I just won’t be serving enough to fully numb them to the world.
“Not unless they fit in a purse,” I agree, thoughts going to Delta, a local dragon who has an anxious Chihuahua I’ve allowed past the front doors a time or two because the small creature is too pathetic to turn away. The dog, not the woman.
“Then what’s that beast doing in here?” Gregor grumbles, his bushy brows so low that I can’t see his eyes.
But I follow the direction his head is pointed and find a sight I wish I could blink away.
Tall, pale, and dripping water from her blonde hair, which forms a puddle around her sneakers.
Trouble standing in the open door of my bar.
Clementine Divos.
Anyone else who left Folk Haven and stayed away for nine years I might have trouble recognizing, especially when they were only eighteen when they got gone. But not Clementine.
Not when her older brother likes to regularly shove his phone under my nose, showing off another selfie his wayward sibling sent him. For the life of me, I don’t know how Carl can be so proud of the girl who made his life miserable. But he’s forgiving like that.
I’m so overwhelmed by the first in-person sighting of her in close to a decade that I almost miss the intruder at her side.
A dog. A huge fucking maybe that’s actually a bear of a dog. The thing is shaggy with a midnight-black coat. And every inch of that fur is damp from the storm outside.
The brute is going to stink up my whole bar.
“No dogs!” I bark, my voice booming across the room, overly loud in the not-too-crowded Wednesday night showing.
Clementine’s eyes snap to mine, and there’s that eerie light blue that I can never forget. Most people I encounter, I could not tell you the shade of their eyes even if you paid me. But Clementine? It’s like ice, cutting into my brain and lodging deep.
“This place is full of dogs already,” she shouts back.
And instead of tugging the animal out the door, Clementine drops the leash she was gripping and strides right up to my bar, the dog plodding along behind her.
“What’s one more?” She comes to a stop just across from me, hands braced on the wood surface I polished this morning, smirk on her sassy mouth.
“Besides, Grimace, my dog has better manners than your pack.”
“Don’t call me that,” I growl, glaring at her.
The animosity between us feels like toxic sludge in my veins. Only Clementine can get me riled.
“Then stop grimacing at me.”
Now that she’s closer, I pick out a few more details of her appearance.
Like how her mouth taunts me, but her forehead has creases, like she’s thinking hard or she has something stressful on her mind.
And I notice a pale cast to her skin, which was normally tanned golden by spending so much time in the sun.
Plus, with her this close, there’s the tease of her scent.
She might be named after a fruit, but to me, Clementine has always smelled more like warm vanilla, mixed with hibiscus. A soft, sweet scent with an underlying hint of tartness.
The intoxicating aroma only irritates me further.
There’s a hint of sulfur, like she was near someone who lit a match, and an overlying layer of iron to the scent that I’m used to ignoring.
“No pets in the bar,” I clarify, knowing her dog comment was a jab at the fact that half the patrons in Local Brew, including me, are werewolves.
“Well then, it’s a good thing that Shrimp is my life companion. Family. Not a pet.” She rests a hand on the dog’s massive head, and the creature licks her leg.
“Clementine.” My voice is all warning.
Not that she ever listened to me. Or anyone.
“Ah. So, you do remember me.” She leans her elbows on the bar, hitting me with those intense blue eyes again.
“I don’t yell at strangers.”
“Doesn’t normally yell at anyone,” Gregor mutters from his stool, and I can feel him watching our exchange.
He’s right though. Ask anyone around town, and they’ll tell you I’m friendly. Jovial even.
But this girl … this woman? I can’t stand her.
And now she’s back, likely to cause trouble.
Why couldn’t you have kept gone?
“Like I said, Shrimp has more manners than you.”
“You named that mammoth”—I jab a finger at the canine who’s now licking a barstool—“Shrimp?”
“Yep.” She pops the P, and I grind my teeth. “And since you so clearly do not want us here, just tell me where my brother is, and I’ll be on my way.”
Fuck no, I want to growl. Leave Carl alone.
But I know if my best friend found out I’d kept his sister’s visit from him, he would be livid.
Clementine, despite all the trouble she’s caused him, is the person he loves most in the world.
Luckily, I have a valid excuse not to answer her question.
“I don’t know where he is. Don’t keep a tracker on the guy.”
“Well then, how about you text him?” She leans harder on the bar, her chest resting against the wood I sanded, stained, and finished when I took over this place. The dog whimpers and sits next to her, the big body resting against her leg.
“Why don’t you text him?” I volley back, crossing my arms in defiance as another ember of anger lights in my gut. “You do still have his number, right?”
She wouldn’t be that cruel, would she?
Clementine’s mocking expression falls into fury.
“Yes,” she snaps. “I have his number, you ass.” Her arm drops and reappears a moment later with a smartphone.
The glass screen is shattered. “But as you can see, I’m down a phone.
” She drops the device on the bar top with a clatter.
“Excuse me for thinking you might want to be just a teeny-tiny bit helpful. I guess I forgot that you’re a colossal prick.
That’s my bad.” She straightens, her teeth gritted in a snarl.
“Did you try the police station?” Gregor asks, his voice gentler than normal.
“He wasn’t there.” Clementine faces my regular, her voice strained but less hostile. “Office was locked up. And he wasn’t at the address he gave me for where he lives now.”
She went to the house? To my house?
My body feels weird at the thought of Clementine stomping up the front steps of the ranch house I’ve spent the last five years renovating.
“You could’ve waited there. At the house.” My voice is still harder than I like. But combative is my natural state with this woman.
“Forget it.” Her hands are fists now, knuckles white, her next breath a deep, bracing inhale. “I’ll just use the bathroom, then get out of your fur.”
Bathrooms are for customers only.
The words are on the tip of my tongue, but Gregor’s stare catches mine, and he gives a small shake of his head. I’m too confused by the move to make a response before she walks off toward the back hall, her dog trotting after her.
Leaving me in the stinging aftermath of that unhealthy exchange. If only there hadn’t been any witnesses.
But in addition to Gregor, the eyes of Manny and Blossom—a werewolf and witch, respectively, who are here for a date night—also watch me. I get itchy at the thought that word might spread around town how rude I was. Could hurt my business.
And even if I could give a valid reason—list all the chaos Clementine has caused—I doubt most remember her, and there are plenty of mythics who relocated to Folk Haven after she left, so they wouldn’t know her, good or bad, in the first place.
I’m the only one who still cares. Who’s still mad.
“I’m cutting you off,” I tell the old wolf.
Gregor glares. “Because I was nice to the girl when you were being a raging asshole?”
“What?” I splutter. “No! I’m cutting you off because you’ve had three whiskeys. And she started it.”
“Really?” Gregor scoffs. “So, you’re saying that you didn’t shout at her in greeting after she’d obviously been driving through a storm? That you didn’t refuse to help her get in touch with her brother?”
“I …” Fuck. I guess I did start it.
Clementine didn’t exactly know my no dogs in the bar rule. And with anyone else, I would have walked over, calmly explained the restriction, then offered to set them up with a drink and a bowl of water for their pup on the covered patio.
But, no, I saw Clementine, and I let my anger take over.
If Carl knew, he’d kill me. Or at least give me the silent treatment for a month or more.
“Did you smell the blood?” Gregor asks, voice low.
“Yeah.” Wolves can pick up on things like that, a touch of iron, but we don’t tend to mention it. “So, she’s on her period?”
He grunts, like I’m missing something.
Did Carl ever mention his sister having bad menstrual cramps? Was she in pain just now, and that dialed up her testiness?
What excuse do I have?
There’s a whimper near my hip, and I realize the dog—Shrimp—somehow snuck behind the bar and is now staring up at me with liquid brown eyes as he lets out a series of increasingly distressed whines.
“What? You looking for food or something?”
It’s not that I dislike dogs. I think they’re great. But they can be messy and destructive, and I don’t want to clean shit off the floors I spent a month refinishing.
“I don’t have any, bud.”
When I reach down to pat his head, the dog dodges my hand, bounds a few feet away, then glances back at me with another whine.
“I think he wants you to follow him,” Gregor says as everyone sitting at the bar watches the canine’s antics.
“Follow him where?” I take a step in Shrimp’s direction, and he slips under the bar top, where I can raise it to exit myself.
“My guess? To his lady so you can apologize and help her get in touch with Carl.”
All my patrons nod in agreement, and I make a production of grumbling as I follow after the pet. But inside, the guilt has started to gnaw at my gut, leaving behind the aching need to set things straight with my best friend’s sister.
I can be cordial for what is likely only going to be a short visit.
Hopefully, there isn’t too much destruction left in her wake that I need to clean up.
When I reach the back hall, Shrimp has settled his shaggy butt in front of one of the single-use restrooms. There used to be men’s and women’s rooms, but I changed the layout during renovations, so the toilets are available to all without people having to categorize themselves by their genitals.
Shrimp scratches on the door, whimpering again.
“She’ll be out in a second,” I assure him, leaning back on the wall to wait myself.
That is, until I hear another whimper. Only this one is from inside the restroom.
Then there’s a pained gasp, and an instinctual part of me takes over, to the point that I briefly black out.
When I come to, the lock is broken, door open wide, Clementine gaping at me.
She’s not wearing a shirt, is my first thought.
Then I spot the bleeding gash in her abdomen, and one word blares bright in my mind.
Trouble.