Page 8 of Moody as a Minotaur

I made a mental note to contact a lock company on Monday. It’d have to be someone from the city, which meant I’d be inviting another stranger to town. Not all strangers were dangerous, just hunters—I knew that. But I was having trouble remembering that right now.

I dealt with humans all the time. Most of them were fine, although I never wanted to get close to any of them. Okay. That wasn’t the full truth. Parker was okay. But it was also true that I’d like him more if he wasn’t human.

If anyone knew about my feelings toward humans, they’d wonder why I owned a motel. But I saw my motel a bit like an early warning system. How else could I keep track of visitors to town? Strangers needed a place to stay. Since the bombing at the Willow Lake Inn this past summer, my motel was now the only place in town where strangers could find a room. By talking to each new arrival, I was the first line of defense.

Being a fighter or an enforcer or anything like that didn’t interest me. Not anymore. But I could do this.

That said, I hadn’t confronted a real threat for years. Decades. Centuries even. Until now.

I’d become complacent.

The man grinned as he studied the keys like they were a museum exhibit. His smile seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I was sure I’d never met this man before.

“Your rooms are on the ground floor. Rooms seven through nine. Across the parking lot,” I spit the words out over the rush of blood pounding in my ears.

When the call had come in requesting three rooms, I had been pleased. Any room rentals were welcome this time of year. Or so I’d thought. But now three people were here, all keen to snoop and poke around until they unearthed something a little less ordinary and mundane than you found in the usual human world.

If we weren’t careful, one of our local supes would end up on a viral video. Nothing good ever came from that kind of exposure.

History held countless examples of how terrible things could get when humans found out about us, like with that Sasquatch family up in the mountains. Some regular old humans caught one of them on video about ten years back. It would have been so much worse if the humans had been hunters, but even so, the entire Sasquatch settlement had gone into hiding after the incident. It hadn’t been enough. Eventually, they’d had to move. After all this time, people still went out looking for them. At least, that’s what a headline on Supenet had said last week. I should go back and read the entire article. That’d teach me to stop just skimming the headlines.

What would we do if something like that happened in Willow Lake? We couldn’t move the whole town. Gage,our local demon guardian, had bonded to the physical place earlier this summer. He couldn’t leave. So what would we do?

Now that I thought about it, shouldn’t Gage already know someone had crossed into town with the desire to kill supes? Unless these three were scouts. This could be a fishing expedition, and that might not trigger the wards. I needed to talk to the demon about this, because if that was the case, that seemed like a flaw in the magic protecting Willow Lake.

Or did these three have talismans to fool the town’s magic? The man wore a necklace. I eyed the woman and caught the telltale glint of a chain around her neck, too. Those could be magical…

Because, although hunters hated magic, they also used it for their own purposes. The fucking hypocrites.

“Finally,” the woman muttered. “We need to throw our stuff in the rooms, then get out and look around. I want to tour the town tonight and come up with a plan for tomorrow.”

Finley rolled his eyes at me before smiling at the woman. “It isn’t even seven yet. We have time.”

“Would you come on already? The sun has already set.”

I glanced outside. She was right. The streetlights had already flickered on. This time of year, the days were getting shorter every day. I missed the long daylight hours of summer, but we wouldn’t see those again for several long months. I sometimes wondered what it would be like living closer to the equator, where they didn’t have drastic changes in daylight from season toseason like we did. But at this moment, I welcomed the darkness. Hopefully, the shadows would hide our supes and magic from these snoopy humans.

“Hey, could you print me a map of the town?” Finley asked. “I forgot to do that before we left, and I’d like to have something to mark up and make notes on. I could do it on my phone, I guess…”

I tried not to look at the stack of visitor maps on the side table by the door. Jasmine, my front desk clerk, had said it was good for local businesses to show visitors what was available. I knew I should have said no.

“There’s one over here,” Tammy said, swiping a copy off the top of the pile. I wanted to rip it out of her hands before she could study it. It didn’t matter if she could find the same information on her phone. I didn’t want to aid her in even the smallest way. “It has some good info marked on it, including the cemetery. We should go there first and get some spooky shots.”

“Oh, man. That’ll be awesome under the full moon and shit. Okay. We gotta get out there.” Finley grinned at the prospect of going to the cemetery in the dark.

On his way past the door, he grabbed a map, too. Damn it.

“Have a pleasant stay,” I lied as they pushed through the door and left the office. As soon as the door closed behind them, I dropped my very fake and brittle smile. “Holy Magic. This is bad.”

I marched over to the remaining stack of maps and scooped them all up. I shoved them in a drawer behind the desk before grabbing my phone. My hand shook as I unlocked it and pulled up my contact list. It’d been along time since I’d confronted hunters. I was out of practice.

Who should I call? I stared at my phone as I considered my options. Hayden, our pack alpha, was my first choice, but he and his new mate Ryley had left yesterday to go look at pre-manufactured homes or something or other. And they were making a bit of a holiday of it as they toured the various builders for a house to buy. They were supposed to be gone all weekend.

So, Van maybe? As a hellhound and the head of the local police, Van dealt with crisis situations all the time.

Or Gage? Gage hadn’t been in Willow Lake that long, so I didn’t know him all that well, but as our demon guardian, it was his duty to protect Willow Lake, right?

Before I could call anyone, my phone rang. It was Carter. Thank fuck. He’d know what to do.