Page 66 of Bitter Heat
“Your alpha!”
“You sure as wolf-god’s own hell are not! Would that you were!” Kerry turned on his heel, grabbing up his bag. “I have to go. I don’t have time for this right now.”
Janus followed him down the hallway. “I’m coming with you. I won’t introduce myself. I won’t be in your presence in front of them. But I’m not letting you face them alone.”
Kerry ignored him, jerked open the front door, and headed toward the outbuilding where they kept the car. Janus remained on his heels. Kerry said nothing.
As much as he hated to admit it, he wanted Janus with him. He wanted to feel safe, even if he knew it was a lie.
He wanted Janus.
Janus found thetrip down-mountain by car much faster than his initial wagon ride up. The descent was a confusing one. In his month and a half at Hud’s Basin, he’d lost his bearings and nearly forgotten that a world outside truly existed. His mental map had fractured into globs: Hud’s Basin, the city, and Virona. They all existed, yes, but as separate things that didn’t connect except through the mail.
But no, there was a serviceable town at the bottom of the mountain. Janus hadn’t even spent one night there when he first arrived before taking a wagon up. It was surprisingly bustling, and he noted that there seemed to be a whole set of new storefronts that had gone up since he’d last been through the town.
“I’ll drop you off here,” Kerry said, clutching the wheel of the car, his belly almost touching it, too. “You can’t be seen with me. The hotel is at the end of the block. Please, don’t do anything unless they try to take me.”
Janus nodded, a lump rising in his throat and a strange resistance in his muscles. He didn’t want to leave Kerry in the car, unprotected and pregnant on the streets of this strange town.
But he’d agreed to a plan of action and understood the need for it after their extensive conversation in the car on the ride down. Kerry had his reasons for lying to the Monhundys and had even played the Heelies name as a card in the game. Hopefully, he’d gotten away with it so far. Being caught out would spell doom to his desire to stay at Hud’s Basin for the birth.
On the way down, Janus had finally broached a topic of conversation that had plagued him for some time: Kerry’s plan for when the baby was finally born. Janus had long had a bad feeling about it and a strange fear that Kerry would leave Hud’s Basin with the child. But Kerry had shut down his inquiries roundly, with Kerry saying that it wasn’t any of his business and that he wasn’t ready to talk about it anyway, which sounded grim.
But given how wildly dark Kerry’s eyes were, and how pale his usually golden face had grown as they approached Blumzound, Janus had let it go. Kerry was anxious about meeting with his in-laws despite his attempt at a brave face, and if it upset Kerry to talk about what the plan was for after the birth, then it could wait.
Right now, they had to get through the day and night, make sure they allowed Kerry to return home, and in the meantime, throw off any suspicious concerns of his in-laws. That was enough.
“Janus, you have to get out here,” Kerry said more firmly, leaning over him to open the passenger side door. The scent of berries and musk rose out of his wind-tossed hair, a result of the open windows on the ride down, and Janus wanted to grab hold of his head, press it to his chest, and breathe in that scent deeply. But Kerry leaned back once he’d popped the door open and shooed Janus with his hands. “Go. Please.”
Janus got out and leaned in to ask through the open window, “Are you sure they won’t force you to go with them immediately?”
“I’m sure. They’ll see my stomach and be relieved. They’ll want to have tea in the salon of the hotel, make me squirm a bit, and then they’ll have me examined up in the hotel room they’ve reserved. After, we’ll have an awkward dinner. I’ll spend the night, endure breakfast with them, and we can return by noon.”
Janus didn’t know how Kerry could be so certain, and he doubted even that he was, given the paleness of his skin.
“Janus, let go of the car,” Kerry said rather gently. “Let me go.”
Janus gripped the car door a bit harder but then forced himself to release it and to step back onto the sidewalk, where he stood helplessly as Kerry drove on toward the hotel alone.
When he finally shook off the dread balling up in the pit of his stomach, he started walking down the sidewalk toward the hotel. The scent of freshly baked bread and roasted coffee rose up around him, and as he looked around, he took in the quaintness of the town. Horsepower was still the preferred mode of transport, with only a few cars gliding down the wide roads. Clearly, the town’s planners had accounted for the boom in automobile manufacturing in other cities and had left plenty of room for them in the future.
The sidewalks were bustling, but not crowded like in the city. There weren’t a lot of locals. Most of the men he glimpsed in shop windows or saw on the street had either moved to town to run businesses or were merely passing through on the trains.
On another day, Janus would have liked to sample the pies he saw in the window of the bakery, or visit the tailor for a new set of sturdy pants. But all he could think about was how every last person on the street was in the way of him reaching the hotel to do what he could to supervise Kerry’s interaction with his in-laws.
When he finally reached the hotel, he was a little sweaty and appalled to realize that, in his hurry to follow Kerry into the car, he’d left his presentable clothing behind. How was it possible that he’d reached town without realizing that he wore a sweat-stained white button-up shirt and a pair of dingy pants. Luckily, he did have his wallet in his pocket, having taken it that morning up to Dr. Crescent’s cabin to receive his “payment,” which amounted to a few coins and several pounds of dried deer meat.Thathe’d taken back down-mountain to Zeke where he’d informed Janus of Kerry’s situation with the Monhundys.
Janus hesitated at the hotel door, glancing down at his clothes, and then back up the road again to the secondhand clothing shop he’d passed. He didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself in the hotel, not if he wanted an opportunity to slide under the Monhundys’ radar.
A few coins later, nearly all that he’d earned from his work with Dr. Crescent, he wore a crisp shirt with a stain along the bottom hem that could easily be tucked in. He’d bought a decent-looking suit jacket and pair of matching pants that didn’t have a single thing wrong with them as far as Janus could tell, except that someone else owned them previously. He hadn’t ever shopped in a store like that before, usually having his clothes tailor-made, but it struck him as economical and smart to do so going forward. It wasn’t as if he was going out into society any time soon.
However, hewasentering the nicest hotel the area had to offer, and he at least looked clean and neat. The clerk allowed him to use the toilet in the secondhand shop where he’d washed his face and hands and smoothed down his rambunctious hair. It startled him to realize how long it’d grown. He determined that perhaps while in Blumzound, he might be able to see a barber. But for now, he’d smoothed it down into curls around his cheekbones until he looked like someone who could afford a night in the hotel, at least.
Stepping into the hotel’s lobby, he noted that it was nicer than any building he’d been in since leaving the city, but that it was still rather shabby by his former standards. Everything was gleaming and new, but it all came across as crass in the obvious attempt to cover the hotel’s rustic bones with fashionable façades.
The man behind the desk was in a far nicer suit than Janus even though its cut was several seasons out of date from when Janus had left the city a few months back. But the man didn’t blink an eye when Janus asked to reserve a room for the night.
“You’re in luck that we still have an opening. The latest train came in and dumped a pile of tourists off until the train picks them back up again tomorrow. But we’ve got one room on the uppermost floor. It’ll be quiet because the rest of the suites up there have been taken by a cityÉrosgápecouple and a doctor. They’re regulars.” The clerk rambled on as he systematically went through the paperwork of checking Janus in and taking payment via direct bank order. “They come to visit their son from time to time. I’m not quite sure what the story is there, but it’s not my place to ask.”
