“I’m going on lunch!” Andy walked away from Kyle at the counter and gave Helen a wave as she passed her on the way to the door. “Back in thirty.” The shop’s front door had a little bell above it that chimed out a little ringa-ding-ding every time it opened. Andy stepped out of DejaVoodoo and walked into the warm afternoon sun. The bell chimed and the artificially cold air slipped away, and Andy was off down main street to grab a bite to eat. The diner was a short walk from her store and it was a frequent lunch stop. The walk alone was enough to get Andy’s stomach growling in anticipation for her usual; a classic grilled cheese with soup and a pickle spear.
Friendly faces were sprinkled along the way from the shop to the diner. There were smiles and waves and nods of the head, Andy was greeted by ‘Hellos” and “How are yous” and “You’re looking nice today, Mrs. Stoddard-Barclays” and she wasn’t shy about sharing a little bit of that natural friendliness back. Andy and Claire hadn’t been in Grand Prairie for terribly long but this place was already home, these people were already her neighbors—her community—and that was something Andy never had the privilege of experiencing before. It didn’t matter what sort of horrible, no-good, very bad thing her and her family were dealing with this week. They had a home, a place to feel safe and at ease, and that made all the difference in the world.
Of course, there was a new trouble plaguing the family as of late. The anxiety crept up on Andy from time to time throughout the day, sneaking in whenever she let her guard down. It followed her to lunch but her spirits were high enough to keep it at a distance. There were tensions between Claire’s growing pack of wolves—The Northern Lights—and some of the other Alphas out there. Word got out that Claire was looking for peace between the wolves and the vampires, looking to bookend 800 years of war between the two species, and apparently some of the other Alphas were not on board with that. The threat, as far as Andy could tell, was mainly coming from the Red Wolves, the dominant pack of Eastern Europe who were most active in their animosity toward the vampires. Claire assured Andy and the rest of her pack that everything would be okay, that they were all safe as long as they stood together and protected their people and their home. Andy was behind her wife one-hundred percent, but she was not a wolf. And that left her constantly on edge.
Andy got to the diner without picking up on her tail. She was normally pretty good at noticing things like being followed, but even on high alert, she felt too safe in her new home. Grand Prairie, specifically the area right around her place of business, pacified her. She was distracted by the smiles and waves from friends and missed the leering strangers shadowing adjacent with her anxiety, lingering too far away to be noticed but close enough to be a threat. It wasn’t until she sat down at her usual booth, ordered her usual lunch from Dot—her usual waitress—that she spotted something out of the ordinary, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up at attention.
They were three tables down. The men were tall, four of them crammed into a booth made tiny by the fact that they were so large. Shoulders touched the shoulders of the man sitting beside them, knees touched the knees of the one across from them. They were more boulders than men, lean and mean and scowling in any direction other than Andy’s trying to make it look like they weren’t watching her. They had no menus. When Dot went over to take their orders they only ordered water. Andy stared long enough and got one of them to stare back. Their eyes locked for a time before the man broke and smiled, flashing a gold tooth.
Checking the exits, Andy looked out the front window. There was another peculiar-looking man posted up against a telephone pole outside. He checked his watch and looked in the direction of the diner. A sixth man, big as the others, was across the street pretending to read a newspaper on a bus bench. Andy’s pits leaked down the side of her torso. “I’m being paranoid,” she thought. “This is just your anxiety. This is just your anxiety.”
But a gut instinct was something Andy had nurtured from a young age. One didn’t survive against Chucky as many times as she had without taking extra precautions. Maybe it was her anxiety. Maybe all these strange occurrences were just strange occurrences that had nothing to do with her, or Claire, or the werewolf feud, but better safe than sorry was an expression for a reason. She worked it out in her head. If she was being followed, if these big henchmen-like mother f***ers who looked like every Russian bad guy from an 80s movie were here for her they surely had someone waiting by the back exit. She took a deep breath, calmed herself and let her blood pressure settle. This was her town, her home, and if this threat was real, she could outsmart them.
When Andy stood up, two of four at the booth across the way turned and looked at her, and the one by the telephone pole out front pulled out his cellphone. Paranoid or not, Andy was going to get the f*** out of there. The booth boys continued watching her as she pulled out her phone and went toward the bathroom. Waiting until she was on the other side of the bathroom door, she called Claire but only got her voicemail. It was Claire’s first day of work at her new job. She was a teacher now, teaching at a supernatural school—the Westenra Academy—in Necropolis. She wasn’t surprised that her wife didn’t pick up but she still mumbled a quick, “F***,” when it went to voicemail. The voicemail dinged and Andy sucked in a breath of air to leave a message.
“Something’s wrong,” Andy said. “Red Wolves. I think it’s the Red Wolves. They’re here, at the diner, they’re following me, I think, I’m not sure but I’m pretty confident that—”
Andy turned into one of the stalls where she knew there was a small rectangular window she could shimmy out of, something she could use to escape into a side alley, but when she went into the stall she bumped into a seventh man, this one clearly a Red Wolf. It was like bumping into a stone wall. He grabbed the phone out of Andy’s hand, squeezed it until it turned into bits of plastic, metal, and glass, and swung a big left hook across Andy’s face. It hit her like a can of paint tied to the end of a string, and she saw stars. Andy fell on her back and the world went blurry. “Claire,” she muttered as the shadow of the wolf lingered over her. “Claire…” but the phone was gone, and Andy slipped into unconsciousness.
***
When the world came back it returned with the smell of damp wood and powdery dust. Andy blinked and her face stung. Her eye, her lip, her cheek, any tiny movement made it all hurt. Her cheek was about to fall off—not really, but that’s what it felt like—so she tried not to move too much, or at least that was the goal until more and more of her predicament became clear. Blood was rushing out of her arms and legs, which were numb and tingly. She was horizontal but couldn’t feel the ground below her. Heavy straps cut into her back and ribs and shoulders and waist. They put her in a harness, strapped her in and hoisted her up in the air. They were in some basement somewhere, but the room was too dark to make out anything specific that could help Andy figure out where she was. Andy was trapped, stuck, a victim… and there was nothing worse than feeling like a victim.
All the worries about keeping the pain out of her cheek, jaw, and eye went out the window. Andy thrashed against her harness, shaking and twisting and screaming but it got her nowhere. She bounced in the harness that kept her suspended three feet off the ground. The thrashing and screaming, it was the only thing Andy was capable of at that moment, the only bit of power she had. It didn’t do much in ways of an escape but… power was power and she’d take whatever bit she could exercise.
When she calmed down, catching her breath a bit as her hair settled across her bruised face, the harness slowed its swinging and settled back into its benign dangle. She craned her head to the left and saw that she wasn’t alone in this dirty basement. There was a tall and lanky man in a mask. He had a tool kit with him. Beside him was a thicker bald man leaning back in a chair, drinking a beer with gloves on his meaty hands. They made eye contact and the man with the beer nodded toward Andy and said, “Privet, Mrs. Stoddard-Barclay,” with a thick Russian accent.
“Red wolves,” she whispered and the man nodded toward her. “You’re all so dead. So dead and so stupid.”
He chuckled and took a swig of his beer, and the lanky man in the mask pulled out more tools from his tool kit; hammer, screw driver, nails.
“You’re underestimating me,” Andy said. “You’re underestimating my wife.”
“Maybe,” the man said. “We’ll see. If I find I underestimate her I will apologize. If not?” He shrugged.
“You don’t look like the apologizing type, and my wife isn’t the type to give a**holes the chance to apologize.”
He shrugged again.
“What do you think you’re going to accomplish here?” Andy asked.
The man who Andy suspected to be Sergei Volkhov, the Alpha of the Red Wolves, set his beer down. “Get her to listen. To realize she’s overreaching. To realize this isn’t a thousand years ago when werewolves bowed to the Dalton line without question.”
“She’s trying to stop the fighting,” Andy barked. “She’s trying to save your people, you idiot!”
Sergei stared at her for a while and gave her another one of his shrugs. He waved a gloved finger in her direction and the masked man took his tools and moved in toward Andy. She thrashed again, wiggling against her harness, but it wasn’t about power this time. There was no more power left for her in that room, only pain.
“You can’t do this to me,” she said. “You can’t do this to me.”
