Page 18 of Fiends and Familiars
I made my way carefully down the ladder, nearly jumping out of my skin when a pair of hands grabbed my waist and eased me down.
“Shit, Clinton! You nearly scared me half to death!” I scolded the werewolf alpha. As big and brawny as they were, werewolves were pretty darned light on their feet. I hadn’t even heard him approach.
“Sorry.” The werewolf grinned sheepishly. “Saw your truck by the downed tree and came to see if you needed a hand.”
“I just finished dealing with your hornet problem.” I gestured toward the nest. “Tell everyone to stay at least six feet from the nest and they’ll leave you alone. Unless you start swatting at them, that is.”
Clinton scowled. “Can’t you smoke them to sleep and move the nest? I don’t trust those things one bit. Yesterday I got stung, and I gotta say it was the most painful experience of my life. I’ve been stabbed, shot, hit over the head with a fire hydrant, and nothing hurt like that damned hornet sting.”
I grimaced, thankful that I’d never experienced a hornet sting. “They can’t vacate this late in the year, and that nest is too big and too high for me to move it. They’re really not aggressive. It’s only when they’re protecting their nest or they’re threatened that they attack. Otherwise they’re very peaceful creatures.”
“Peaceful my ass.” The werewolf glared up at the nest. “Darla and Billy are supposed to live here along with their three pups, Billy’s two brothers and Darla’s mother. None of them wants to get stung taking out the trash or sittin’ on their porch. I’m thinking we should just spray them.”
I did not want him thinking that was a solution. “You’re gonna spray that poison and have it dripping down on the ground where three pups are going to be playing?”
Clinton wrinkled his brow in worry, looking at the area under the nest. “Okay, but nobody wants to be living under a hornet’s nest. Nobody.”
I sighed and motioned for him to lean down closer to me. “Look,” I whispered. “Don’t let them know, but come November, they’ll all be dead except for the queen. She’ll hibernate elsewhere, and won’t use the old nest next year. Once winter sets in, we can take the nest down. I’ll find the queen and I’ll move her to the other side of the mountain while she’s hibernating. When she wakes come spring, she’ll start a new nest somewhere far away from your settlement.”
Clinton jerked upright, his eyes wide. “They’re all gonna—”
I reached up to slap a hand over his mouth. “Don’t say it. They don’t need to know that. It’s just that there’s no food come winter, and…you know. So just tell Darla and the others that if they’re polite and respectful for a few months, then everything will work out. Both your pack and the hornets will be happy.”
“’Cept for the dead ones,” Clinton muttered under his breath.
I glared at him. “But you agree? I made a deal that you wouldn’t bother them and they wouldn’t bother you.”
He huffed out a breath. “Fine. As the alpha of my pack, I will honor the terms of your agreement with the hornets. Now, how about the badger?”
“That’s next on my list.” I moved the ladder to the ground. “So where is this badger? I can’t sense him anywhere near here.”
Clinton shot me a narrowed side-eye look. “You can sense animals? I thought you could just talk to them.”
The werewolves had always been a little afraid of me and my abilities. Correction, alotafraid. Ever since I was a kid they’d been worried I could do some sort of mind control magic and that my abilities towards animals would also extend to them in their wolf form—and possibly extend to them in their non-wolf form. I’d never tried my magic on the shifters in Accident. It had always seemed rude and intrusive to even attempt it. So I honestly didn’t know if I could influence them or not.
“Icansense animals, but only within thirty or forty feet of me. It’s not always accurate either. If they’re sleeping or hibernating, or underwater then I can’t sense them. I need their mental activity to know they’re nearby, so that means it doesn’t work on all animals, and I only pick up a presence about seventy percent of the time.” It was still better than accidentally walking into an occupied bear den, or unknowingly stepping on a ground nest of yellow jackets.
“The badger’s got a den over this way.” Clinton turned and I followed him across the muddy compound.
Of course, as a nocturnal animal, I wasn’t likely to be sensing any badgers in the area. They were pretty reclusive, and weren’t common to this area of the country at all, so I was actually doubting that the werewolves had a badger problem at all. It probably was a skunk. Or a mink.
Imagine my surprise when Clinton pointed out a burrow that did, in fact, hold a sleeping badger. He wasn’t deep in the sett, and I could see his wedge-shaped body and a paw with some impressively long claws only about a foot inside the tunnel.
“So what exactly is your problem with this guy?” They were omnivorous, eating worms, grubs, insects and small mammals, along with fruit and roots. None of that would make them competitors for prey in the eyes of the werewolves. They were fierce when cornered, but tended to avoid contact and kept to themselves.
“He sprayed some musky shit on Bruce the other night. His wife made him take three baths in tomato juice and sleep outside on the porch.” Clinton laughed. “Sleeping on the porch didn’t bother Bruce nearly as much as taking three baths. That guy thinks once a week is too much. Three in one night? Thought he was going to die over there from all he was complaining.”
I stood up. “And what exactly did Bruce do to get sprayed?”
Clinton shrugged. “Heck if I know. Look, I get that you’re on the side of these animals, Adrienne, but this is gonna be our new home. I need my pack to feel comfortable here, or they’ll start thinking things might be better with Dallas. That means the hornets and the badger got to go. Now, I respect you witches and all you’ve done for me and my kind here in Accident. That’s why I came to Cassie and didn’t take these things into my own hands. But I can’t have hornets stinging folk. And I can’t have badgers spraying Bruce.”
I understood, but I wanted to hear this badger’s side of the story. And I wasn’t inclined to go kicking him out of his home just because he sprayed some werewolf. This was Accident, and here we all tried to get along. I know I was the only one who included animals in that mandate, but it was important to me that I didn’t evict a creature when there was another solution at hand.
Which was odd given that outside the wards, in the world of humans, evicting animals was exactly what I did. Still, I never displaced bats or rodents when they had young in a nest, and I always made sure to provide an alternate home for them. I’d put bat boxes, bird houses, and squirrel boxes all over the place. I’d relocated insect nests and made sure animals I moved had plenty of food to get them started in their new location. I just wanted everyone to get along. I wanted a win-win situation.
So I wasn’t going to evict a reclusive badger living a hundred yards from the werewolf compound just because some wolf named Bruce with poor personal hygiene had gotten himself sprayed.
I made Clinton go back to the compound, then I knelt by the sett once more, hoping this badger wasn’t overly grumpy when awakened.
