Page 3 of Warmongers and Wands
“These feel great. Thanks, Bronwyn, as always.”
I waved his words off, happy to be of help—although I didn’t work for free. Declan made good money licensing his digital paintings and he always sent me my payment electronically. Other clients paid me in trade, or sometimes cash. Being a bit isolated here in Accident meant we’d all become creative when it came to the payment methods we accepted. For instance, I pretty much had an open tab at Pistol Pete’s so large that I doubted I’d go through it in my lifetime in return for the spell I’d cast on one of his bar rags. He’d been having trouble keeping the peace with all the various folk that liked to come by for a drink and the music and needed something to get their attention and respect. Hence the enchanted towel.
Fear the towel.
I told Declan goodbye after scheduling him for another call in six weeks, then hopped in my truck, eyeing the western sky. Normally I’d just head home, but I had one more call to make, and I’d put this off longer than I should have. With a sigh, I threw the truck into gear and headed down the road, winding my way up Heartbreak Mountain.
Normally, I didn’t mind doing work for the werewolf pack, but the last few months they’d turned into two warring packs. Which was quite a bit worse than one warring pack. There were those who supported Clinton, and those who supported Dallas. I didn’t support either of them, but out of the two I figured Dallas was the least problematic. The old wolf was a lecherous asshole, but he was old enough to be a lazy lecherous asshole, so he didn’t cause quite as much trouble as his son Clinton. Clinton was less lecherous than his father, but more than double the asshole. I’m pretty sure Dallas in his youth had been just as bad, but he must have mellowed a bit with age, because he tended to stay on the compound, outside of a few days around the full moon, and limit his asshole-ness to those in his pack. Clinton, on the other hand, liked to come into town every day and subject the rest of us to his rude temper and disregard for others’ property and rights.
My eldest sister, Cassandra, had finally gotten pissed off enough to take her rightful position as head-witch of Accident and had come down hard on the werewolf clan. But part of the joy of living in a town full of supernatural beings was knowing what to allow as a matter of culture and autonomy and what rules needed to be obeyed for the common good, no matter how much certain folk screamed and cried.
There’d been an incident. Cassie had intervened. She’d had words with Dallas and more words with Clinton. They’d grudgingly accepted her rules and for a few weeks, everyone in Accident and the surrounding area had lived with a sort of icy calm.
Then the calm had ended. Some of the werewolves sided with Clinton and some with Dallas, and the pack was split in two.
Now we had what amounted to a war on the mountain. Nothing had been set on fire, and the violence hadn’t spilled into the town proper, but there was definitely violence. Cassie felt we needed to let the werewolves sort this out for themselves, and as long as no one outside of their pack got harmed, then we should let them resolve their issues on their own.
I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. Why couldn’t we just have two werewolf packs up on Heartbreak Mountain? Or three? Why couldn’t people, or werewolves, just get along?
This war among the werewolves was one of the reasons I’d been avoiding this job. But it was August and getting on toward butchering time. The main pack had a small herd of cattle that grazed on the south side of the mountain and each fall they butchered, selling a good portion of the meat to the town and keeping the rest for the pack to eat through the winter. As much as they liked to hunt, knowing there was a freezer full of roasts and steaks to come home to made the hunt season more of an enjoyable event and less a desperate starvation-fueled one.
Those butchering sheds? They were full of equipment used to slaughter and process the cattle and anything else the werewolves wanted to eat. And evidently a swing-arm on one of the lines had snapped free, and the scaffolding used for hanging the meat had proved not adequate for the weight of the cattle. So here I came to the rescue. Bronwyn, the welder.
I called the compound as soon as I left Declan’s to let them know I was on my way. Stanley met me outside the butchering shed. The “shed” was the entire lower half of a barn, squeaky clean with drains in the cement floors and a walk-in refrigerator in the corner. It reminded me of a meticulously maintained torture chamber with all the stainless steel, the iron hooks and racks, the huge blackened cauldrons in the corner. Stanley showed me what needed to be repaired and rebuilt, and I started. The werewolf stood by, watching me as I fired up the torch and got to work on the swing-arm. It was weird having him hovering around like he expected me to steal something. What the heck was the guy’s problem? Did he think I was going to run off with a cauldron? Figure out some pack secrets and sell them to the other “team”? Maybe he had a thing for tall, thirty-one-year-old witches with muscles and a few extra inches around their midsections? If so, then he was the first.
My thoughts drifted to my sister Cassandra and her demon boyfriend. Lucien was smoking hot. I mean, when he looked like a human, he was smoking hot. I’m pretty sure when he looked like a demon, he was terrifying. Either way, I liked him. He was a good guy, which was kind of a weird thing to think about a demon. He was devoted to Cassie, and that was one of the main reasons I liked him. She’d had a tough life, and her last boyfriend had been a ‘ho of a panther shifter. Lucien made her happy, and it was good seeing her happy for once.
Good, except I couldn’t help a twinge of jealousy when I saw how she looked at the demon, and how he looked at her. They’d do cute little things when they were helping each other with dishes or cooking. There was a back-and-forth banter between them, an intimacy that revealed itself with teasing words and flushed faces and the frequent touch. I so wanted that, but in all my thirty-one years, I’d never had a boyfriend. I’d never even had a guy try to kiss me or ask me on a date. It’s like I was invisible to them as anything except an occasional drinking buddy or someone to call when the swing-arm bent in their butchering room.
I glanced over at Stanley and saw him leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest, a bored expression on his face as he stared out the window. I’ll bet if I stripped off my tank top right now and started welding in my bra, he wouldn’t even glance my way. Not that I was interested in Stanley, but it would have been nice to have someone look twice at me for once in my damned life.
But enough of the pity party. I had a job to do here. And after that, I was going to head home to warm up some pork barbeque, pull that bottle of Syrah out of the wine rack, and watch some old movies.
Maybe I should get a cat. Or two. Or a dog. I could take the dog on calls with me to keep me company. Yeah. This weekend, I’d head over to Pitswitch and see what they had at the animal shelter.
The swing-arm didn’t take me long to fix, but the hanging rack was a real bitch of a job. An hour in and the rumble of thunder in the distance was becoming more noticeable. Stanley seemed to be close to dozing off while standing, but showed no sign of leaving his post. As I was finishing up, the werewolf suddenly jerked to attention. A few seconds later, I discovered why.
A man walked through the doors—a man with long silver hair and a reddish-blond beard. He was tanned, his face lined and creased, but still attractive in an uber masculine, older-guy kind of way. He was tall with broad shoulders and walked with the sort of attitude that instinctively made people get out of his way.
Dallas Dickskin, the alpha of the werewolf clan.
Yeah, Dickskin. I kid you not, that was really their last name. And no one teased them about it. Well, at least not to their faces.
The senior werewolf ignored the younger one, made an elaborate show of checking my work, then made a more subtle show of checking me out. Dallas was an obsessive womanizer. Werewolves were sticklers when it came to the females having physical relations with anyone besides a male werewolf, but the males weren’t held to the same standards. Dallas was legendary for feeling up every woman he met and doing his damnedest to sleep with them. He even hit on Cassie, and my eldest sister was the most powerful witch Accident had seen since Temperance Perkins founded the town. In a fight between the two, Dallas would have ended up a pile of smoking ash, especially since my sister had taken up with her demon lover who acted as a sort of power amplifier for her. That still didn’t convince Dallas to keep his hands to himself. Like I said, he hit on every woman he met.
Except me.
“Almost done here?” he grumbled, the cursory once-over he’d given my physical form ending without the slightest spark of interest. The werewolf didn’t try to hug me, or touch my ass, or even shake my hand. Not that I was really lamenting not being sexually assaulted by this asshole. It just brought home to me how very undesirable I was.
Which was twisted. I probably needed therapy. I’d get right on that after I adopted a dog and a cat.
“Yep.” I checked the weld and started to pack up. “How’s the weather look out there? I heard thunder earlier.”
“Storm coming. You better hurry if you want to make it off the mountain before it hits.”
That got me moving. The roads on the mountain were dirt and rock, and the whole area was prone to flashfloods and washouts. I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to spend the night here in the werewolf compound waiting for the storm to pass and for them to repair the roads enough to get my truck through. Stanley and Dallas made no attempt to help me, watching as I put everything away and gathered my gear up. Their presence still gave me that weird feeling, as if they were making sure I didn’t steal anything. It made me wonder what the heck they were keeping in this butchering shed or what I might see that they didn’t want me to see.
Stupid paranoid werewolves. As if I gave two shits about their feuds. As long as they steered clear of the rest of the town, and as long as I got paid for my work, they were free to kill each other off.
