Page 13 of A Brighter Yellow
“Yeah, Diamond Boy, wasn’t you listening?” asked Mullet.
“Yeah, I listened. I meant, why were they chasing her in the first place?”
The other two Warlocks were silent. Ochre guessed that meant they didn’t know the answer.
“Who cares?” said the Cross Tattoo, rallying. “She’s a wolf. Bitch needs to be taught her place. And that’s under us.”
There was a snigger from the group, and Ochre contemplated smashing their faces in. Instead, he forced himself to take a bite of the polenta.
“I don’t know,” said Diamond Boy. “I mean, yeah. Of course. But doesn’t anyone else think what the boss has been doing lately is weird?” Cross Tattoo reached out and smacked the back of Diamond Boy’s head.
“Don’t question the boss,” said Mullet.
Diamond Boy looked annoyed but didn’t say anything.
“You know what?” Cross Tattoo still looked angry. “Next round is on you.”
“Fine,” said Diamond Boy sullenly and raised his hand to wave at the waitress. Ochre watched her force a smile and nod.
“You know what we ought to do,” said Diamond Boy. “Now that we know where this pack is, we need to gather up the brothers and burn them out.”
“Another round, boys?” said the waitress, but keeping well back from the table as though she were just stopping as she walked by. Ochre thought she was trying to avoid getting her ass grabbed again.
“Yeah, and hustle it up this time, babe,” said Diamond Boy, barely glancing up. She nodded and kept moving.
“There’s like ten or twelve wolves up there,” said Mullet, his voice sinking even lower. Had Ochre been human, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear them. But pointed ears came in handy for something. “We’d need a lot of people. And you know what happened to those boys in Oregon. There was only two of them and fifteen of us, and all they found were pieces and not even all the pieces.”
Ochre found himself grinning at his plate. He certainly did know what had happened tothose boys in Oregon. Azure and Rafe had happened.
“One of them was a witch,” said Diamond Boy, trying to sound confident.
“Do we know they don’t have a witch with them here?” asked Mullet.
“We don’t,” said Cross Tattoo. “Besides, the boss said we needed to grab the girl first, and we listen to the boss.” He glared pointedly at Diamond Boy, who shrugged and let the topic go.
The waitress went around the bar and began to fill another trio of beers. She set down the tray just across the bar from Ochre and turned to help another customer. Ochre glanced over his shoulder at the bikers. They weren’t looking his way. Very carefully, he extended his hand toward the beer and muttered a quiet incantation.
“Hey!” barked one of the Warlocks, and Ochre yanked his hand back as a golden glow settled over the beer and then dissipated. “Hey, bartender! Tell her to hurry up with our beers! Get your girl in order, huh?”
An angry look crossed the bartender’s face. He snatched up the tray of beers and stalked over to the table. “We have other customers,” snapped the bartender. “If you want better service, maybe you should try tipping.” He slammed each beer down with a heavy thump and walked away before they could respond.
“I ought to—” began Mullet, half-rising.
“We’re keeping a low profile,” said Diamond Boy, pushing him back down. “We don’t want to make a scene here in front of all these people with phones.”
“Yeah,” agreed Cross Tattoo. “We’ll come back tonight after closing. Deal with him and the bitchy waitress.”
The other two nodded in agreement, and Ochre tried to calculate how long it would take for his spell to kick in. Once it did, they would be glued to a toilet in one direction or another for a while, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take. Ochre paid for his meal and then considered his next move. Quickly he wrote a message on the receipt and slid across the bar.
They just said they were coming back after closing to deal with you and the waitress.
The bartender picked up the receipt and looked at Ochre.
“Thanks for the tip,” he said. “I know just how to take care of that.”
Ochre nodded and headed for the door, trying to give the table a wide berth without looking conspicuous.
Ochre left the bar and flipped up his collar against the cold wind that crept into all the crevices of his coat. He could see the Warlock bikes parked in a row on the far side of the parking lot, taking up two full parking spots. Glancing around, Ochre saw that the parking lot was devoid of human inhabitants. He walked quickly to the bikes and stopped at each one, placing a hand on each engine. Oil and metal were hard for his kind to work with, but it shouldn’t take much to encourage the metal to do what it wanted to do. He found a tiny flake of rust in each engine and thenpushedit. By tomorrow their engines would begin to have problems. It wasn’t enough to disable the bikes entirely. It would just be enough to make them run really rough for about a week and then conk out. That would have to be good enough because one thing was for certain, the warlocks hadn’t been targeting Anna on accident, and he was willing to bet that whatever the reason was, it was inside the package he had under his arm.
