Chapter Twenty

The next few weeks of Will's life were surprisingly quiet and easy-going. It was nice, and let all his partners spend some serious time getting to know one another, which was something they had all desperately needed. No outside influence, no classes getting in the way - just lots of time spend talking and fucking, sometimes even in that order.

The pack had come together with surprising cohesion, despite how makeshift it had been put together, and nobody seemed to have strong dislikes of anyone else in the group, although Lacey and Trish did butt heads a little, mostly just about who got to be the head woman, with Lacey arguing she had it by seniority and Trish arguing she had it by lycanthrope nature. In the end, they came into an agreement, and settled on having a 'challenge coin' the two could pass between them, with whoever was holding the coin getting the final say, but only if they passed the coin to the other. It seemed to be working well enough for the time being.

Dina had adopted a sort of 'den mother' attitude as well, using her age and wisdom to rope the others into setting some daily routines, trying to get them into being creatures of habit again, rather than just sort of going along to get along. April, by contrast, had settled into the role of cultural ambassador, helping Freya move from the life of a hunter into something more normal, and in helping Trish relate to people outside of the werewolf community. That said, Freya refused to let off on her hunting skills, continuing to still spend time not only at the gun range but also taking both armed and unarmed combat, in case she ever needed to use those skills again, and that opportunity came much sooner than anyone expected.

In fact, just a month later, Tommy Clarke came by to see Will, a soft smile on his face as he sat down in the booth across from him at Will's diner. The two hadn't touched base since the social where Tommy had acted as Will's second in the duel that put in the marriage arrangement with Trish. "How's the new pack getting along?" he asked as Will sat down across from him.

"Oh, we're all getting along as best we can, I suppose," Will said. "A few bumps here and there, but what new relationship doesn't have those?"

"The werewolves leaning on you to set a marriage date?"

"Not really," Will laughed with a slight shrug, and was glad he could be honest and open about it. "Clayton asked me when it was going to happen, and I told him we'd get to it when we got to it, and that seemed to settle the discussion. Trish also told him she was waiting until we were damn good and ready, so I'm thinking I've probably got a couple of years." Will picked up his glass of ice water and took a long drag from it. "I'm guessing this isn't a social call, though."

"It is and it isn't."

"That can't be good," Will said, eyeing Tommy up. The wizard certainly did look a little rougher around the edges than the last time he'd seen him, bags under his eyes. Will suspected the man wasn't getting enough sleep. "I thought we weren't supposed to mix business with pleasure."

"This is business, but it's unusual business, so you do have the option to tell me to go fuck myself," Tommy said as April came over to take his order. "Lemme get one of those meat lovers breakfast burritos you folks do so well, but go easy on the hot sauce this time. Last time I think I must've been being punished for something I said or did earlier, because it had enough spice on it to leave my ass a tattered wreckage for days."

"Well, you did say the first one you had didn't have enough spice on it," April grinned with an unapologetic shrug.

"Fine. Somewhere between Posh and Sporty, but nowhere near Scary. Not again."

Will struggled not to snort as the reference went right over April's head unrecognized. "Huh?"

"Somewhere between a 5 and a 7 on the spice level, but don't even think about hitting me with a ten again. My frail wizard body can't take it."

"You look fine--" Will started before Tommy jumped in to interrupt him.

"Green wizard is about to die! Green wizard needs food... BADLY."

"The hell is he talking about?" April asked Will.

"His life force is running out, and all his powers will be lost," Will laughed. "It's an old, old, OLD arcade game reference. Get him his burrito, will you?"

"You two are weird," April said, shaking her head as she walked back to the kitchen to put in the order. They'd gotten some new people to work the kitchen staff and had been paying them a little extra as long as they agreed to the rule that any weirdness in the diner stayed in the diner and didn't get talked about outside of it. That hadn't come up yet, but Will knew it wouldn't be too long before the sanctuary part of his diner was back in use.

"A'ight, what's this favor you wanted to ask?"

"I... well, I sort of was hoping I could borrow you, Trish and maybe even your hunter girl for a few days to help me with a regional problem," Tommy said, looking a little embarrassed. "I'm mostly just worried about the scale of the issue, and having some backup would make me feel better. It might be nothing, or it might be a coven of rogue vampires who refuse to follow the Hunter Accords."

"What happens if it's the former?"

"If it's nothing, I've taken you and the girls out on a three-day road trip for nothing through the backwater parts of upper western Nebraska, and I'll owe you a favor, which is a nice little marker to have in your back pocket for whenever," Tommy said casually as he sort of absent-mindedly adjusted the items on the tabletop.

"And what if it's the latter?"

"Then I get to dust off my combat magic skills, and I have two werewolves and a hunter to back me up, against, say, ten or twenty vampires. And I'll owe you a couple of favors. Maybe call it three."

"I'm not exactly what one would call an expert in combat, Tommy," Will said, trepidation in his voice. "I don't know how much use in a fight I'm going to be. Hell, Trish and Freya are probably more dangerous without me than they are with me."

"Kid, I saw you fight in that duel, and while you're young, that's true, you're also scrappy and determined, and that's what I need in my corner more than anything else," Tommy said as April came back to put the breakfast burrito down in front of him. "Thank God for this. I'm trying to remember the last time I ate."

"You can't be burning the candle at both ends, Tommy," Will said to him, even though the mage was probably half a decade older than he was. "You can't afford to be completely exhausted if you're a Captain in your House or whatever. You've got responsibilities and shit."

"Eh, I have my days, and some are better than others, but I'll find a way to make it work," Tommy said in between shoveling in bites into his mouth. "Besides, if you think the House is the biggest of my problems, you should meet the people in my dating life. That's way more complicated and stressful, but in a good way, I guess."

"'The people,' huh? You're part of a bigger group as well? Not a one-on-one personal connection, but a group kind of thing?"

"Something like that," Tommy replied with a dry laugh. "Consider it my pack, I suppose. But I'm trying to keep that part of my life... just mine, for the time being. I'd like it not to be something I put out on front street for a while, considering there's some risk involved. But when it comes time when I'm comfortable, when I think things are safe, I'll let it all out there."

"When's that going to be?"

"When I'm Grand Captain," Tommy laughed, rolling his eyes. "And probably not a day sooner. And the odds of that happening in my lifetime seem like they're running a little slim, but we never know how quickly the turnaround is going to be in leadership. I certainly wasn't expecting to get this job in the first place. I certainly didn't put my name forward for it. That was done against my will, for the record."

"You seem like you've taken to a duck to water, though."

"Trial by fire, more like," Tommy said, annoyance subtly lingering in his voice. "They didn't just throw me into the deep end, they tied a couple of concrete blocks around my ankles and handcuffed me, just to make the challenge on getting out of the chains that much harder. But hey, that means we don't get no slackers in the Green Wizard House. We're all cut from sterner stuff, even when we think we aren't. I made it work. I always do."

"What are the odds this is going to get out of hand?"

"If I knew for certain it was going to go south, I'd bring a heavier force, but if I brought a heavier force, then I'd know for certain things would go south, you know what I mean?"

"I get you, Tommy," Will said. "Lemme ask Trish and Freya, but I expect we can probably play the part of your goon squad for a few days."

"Excellent. I'll come by tomorrow morning and should have you back within three or four days, no problem."

"You better, otherwise you'll see what Lacey can get up to when she's got her feisty face on."

Sure enough, Trish and Freya were eager to get up to some trouble, and Will didn't have to ask them twice, so the next morning, the three of them were outside waiting with a bag each, as Tommy pulled up in front of Will's place in one of the biggest Cadillacs that Will had ever seen.

They loaded up their things and started driving east down the mountains, taking in the views. Will hadn't spent much time east of the Rockies, but the first thing he noticed about western Nebraska was that it was flat. And boring. And also flat. (He thought the flat was important enough to give it two spots in any list.)

Once they got down the mountain and off interstate 80, the drive became... a lot less scenic.

The views peeled away, and the roads narrowed down, the state itself grew less and less charming, not that it had all that much charm to begin with, and as they moved into northwestern Nebraska, the drive lost all remaining appeal and they just keep on driving into flat oblivion.

They'd lost the last thing they had to lose - elevation.

Will was a bit surprised at how remarkably empty and vacant the area seemed to be. They went miles and miles without so much as seeing another human being, mostly just fields of corn, so thick that even the farms they were attached to must've been some ways down the country roads. The gas stations became further apart, and the small town that marked crossroads couldn't have held more than a hundred people or so at a time.

It was also a little bit like travelling backwards in time, as architecture turned back the clock, with buildings looking less and less modern and more and more like they were from the 30s or 40s. Even the cars they saw next to buildings on the side looked like they couldn't have been newer than the 70s, at the latest, next to cutting edge automated farming equipment.

Will had never realized how much he took hills for granted.

It truly was possible to see dozens of miles in any direction, because there was basically nothing there beyond crops and trees.

There weren't even radio stations, and cell phone service was barely scraping by, but thankfully Tommy had a bunch of songs downloaded to his phone and an aux jack plugged into his car's stereo. That did, however, mean Tommy had total control of the soundtrack, and it seemed like the man's love for 90s grunge ran endlessly deep, although occasionally it would shift into a bit of classic rock that was more befitting the open and vacant spaces.

"What the hell would vampires be doing out here?" Will asked, intending the question for Tommy, but Freya jumped right in.

"Easy sight lines to make an escape, not a ton of cover to impede knowledge about incoming people, lots of remote farmers who won't be noticed for weeks if they go missing," Freya said. "It's certainly one option for a hunting ground."

"Eventually the food supply would run dry," Trish said, "but by that point they could've gotten ready and moved on."

Some thirty minutes off highway 385, they came across what could only be described as a tiny town, six buildings, two to a pair of corners and one on each of the others. One of them looked like a small regional post office that was attached to a gas station/auto repair shop, and it was marked with a sign that said, "Alan's Tune-Ups." Across the corner clockwise was a corner grocery store/market - nothing all that big, but enough to tend to the dozens or so farmsteads that surrounded the area for fifty miles or so. It was labeled, "Bill's Groceries." Continuing, there was a farm supply store that looked more like a converted barn than it did an actual store. It was marked, "Carl's Country Commodities." Next to it was, "Dale's Woodworking and Metalworking." Across the corner from that was a nice shop called "Erica's Etiquette," which looked like it was a clothing store for both men and women, both new and secondhand clothes. And the last building was apparently where they were heading - it wasn't alphabetically named like the rest, instead being called "Smoke & Firewater," and it looked like it was the local bar and honky-tonk.

"Smoke & Firewater" also looked like it might've been the newest of the buildings, but still didn't look at least two or three decades old. There were two fairly beatup pickup trucks in front of it, and half a dozen rather well-cared for motorcycles, all of which looked like they were Harley-Davidsons.

Off in the distance, thick and heavy clouds portended a plains thunderstorm the likes of which Will had been hearing about for most of his life. The wall of dark and inky black looked like pillows of velvet which every so often flashed an eerie, ghostly white as lightning struck off in the distance. He could even sort of see the sheets of rain drenching down off in the distance, the land was so flat.

"This must be the place," Will said as Tommy pulled the car into the opposite side of the parking lot as the bikes, the pickup trucks in the middle. According to the street signs, they were at the corner of Table Road and Kay Road, but the area looked as though it might have been miles and miles away from anything.

As they were getting out of the car, Will looked at Tommy and asked, "What's the closest actual city to here?"

"Town, you mean," Tommy laughed. "We passed Berea a while back, which I think has about fifty folks living in it, but right now we're closer to the Nebraska National Forest than we are anything else. If you want actual city, I think Hay Springs is about half an hour east by car, about 20 miles or so. They've got like 500 people or so."

"So this is where the boonies go to die."

"Something like that."

"Let's head inside before that rain hits."

In the distance, a crackle of thunder seemed to agree with them.

The four of them headed inside of the bar, and the inside of it was about as ramshackle as the outside was. There was a jukebox over the in corner playing Waylon Jennings, and a pool table that currently had three of the bikers congregated around it. Two other bikers were sitting at the bar, a television on the wall behind it broadcasting a soccer game from somewhere halfway across the world, nursing beers that looked barely touched.

The guy behind the counter at the bar looked like he might've come with the place, a certain big burly charm to him, a mountain of muscle poured into a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans that were ripped in more places than they weren't.

It looked as though the bikers were with a motorcycle club called Crossroads Reapers, and their logo was a couple of crossed streets turned into giant scythes. The bikers all looked big and burly, although one of the ones shooting pool, whose name patch said, 'Pretty Boy,' was much thinner and better looking, which was where the nickname likely came from. While Will wasn't sure, he felt like he was getting vampire vibes off of them, and he glanced over at Trish, who nodded in response to him, as if to silently confirm his suspicions.

As they entered the bar, everyone in the place turned to look at them and Will almost thought the jukebox itself was going to turn off and bring the room to a perfect standstill, but it didn't.

"Help you?" the man behind the bar asked them.

"Could be," Tommy said. "Lookin' for a fella by the name of McClarney, Mitch McClarney."

"Don't know nobody by that name," the guy behind the bar said. "Who's lookin' for him?"

"Captain Tommy Clarke."

"Oh yeah?" the guy asked, arching an eyebrow. "What branch?"

"Army," Tommy countered. "Eldritch Core."

"Ain't never heard of no Eldritch Core."

"Yeah, well, I ain't never heard of a bar called 'Smoke & Firewater' before now, and yet, here I am sittin' in it, so the world's full of new surprises, innit?" He wandered over to the bar, standing down at the other end of it from the two guys in jackets, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty, tossing it down on the countertop. Will noticed there were three drinks down at the end of the bar for only the two guys visible. "Lemme get a shot of whatever decent bourbon you got in this joint."

The bartender grabbed a bottle of something Will had never heard of before and poured a generous shot into a Tom Collins glass before picking up the twenty. "Back with your change in a sec."

"Just keep it," Will said. "As long as you'll pass along a message for Mitch McClarney, if you see him."

"Don't rightly know how I'd know fella I don't know if'n when I saw him, but say I did see this... Mitch fella," the bartender said. "What kinda message you want me to pass on to him?"

"You tell him he was supposed to meet me here today around now, and the fact that he isn't here doesn't speak too highly of him," Tommy said before downing his shot, letting the liquid burn his mouth before he continued. "I'm not the kind of man to jerk around, and the fact that he's not here now to meet me doesn't bode well for his case. I'm going to go with my friends over to Hay Springs and crash the night at the Motel Six, and then I'm going to be back here tomorrow evening, and if he's not here, then I'm going to summarily rule against him and his entire group. And that isn't what he wants, I assure you."

"That sounds a bit like a threat," the guy behind the bar said warily.

"Well, that's probably because it is," Tommy said, giving a little shrug. "The rules are there for a reason. To keep everyone safe, on both sides of the argument. And I'm here to find out whether or not he and his kin are going to follow them, or if they want to buck the system."

"And if they don't want to follow your laws, city slicker? Then what?"

"Well, then, I'll have to deal with them," Tommy replied, a casual confidence to his tone of voice. "Maybe that's a polite warning. Maybe it's a beating they can walk away from. Maybe it's them leaving my continent and becoming someone else's problem. Whatever it is, it's going to involve them respecting the Accords, and if they don't, well, then things will escalate until they do or they're forced to, one way or another."

"That sounds a lot like a threat," one of the bikers whose nameplate said 'Wight' laughed. "You honestly think you and Paul Bunyan and your two big bitches could take on someone who's flouting your rules like that?"

"I think you might want to redress how you're talking to ladies around here," Trish said, "before one of us comes over there and beats the shit out of your ass."

"I'd pay good money to watch you try, little lady," one of the bikers at the pool table said.

"Don't worry," Trish grinned at him. "After I beat the crap out of you, I can just take the money from your pocket." The biker looked a little bit less confident after that, Will thought to his own amusement, as if his confidence was failing him.

"Anyway, that's all I came in here to say," Tommy said, as he started walking back towards the door of the bar. "We'll be back here in twenty-four hours, for his last and final chance to take a meeting with me, and if he's not here, well then, I guess I have my answer and I guess I know what I have to do..."

The four of them headed out of the bar and back to the car, the place behind them carrying on as if nothing had happened. "You notice what I noticed?" Freya asked.

"The extra untended drink at the bar?" Will said. "Yeah, I clocked it. Plus one extra bike out front. I'm betting your guy was there, just hanging out in the back, trying to size you up, Tommy."

"Good for him," Tommy replied. "He knows the terms, and he knows what it means if he doesn't live up to his end. We'll be back here tomorrow and..."

Behind them, the doors of the bar opened and out walked a very large and burly man, looking far more like a werewolf than a vampire, with a great big bushy beard and arms that looked like they were used to hoisting whole motorcycles as dumbbells. He was dressed like the rest of the bikers - leather jacket over flannel shirt and ripped blue jeans. He was also holding a shotgun in one hand.

"Hey, pig," the man said. "You think you can just come around here and tell us how we have to live our lives?"

"No," Tommy said, "I'm here to make sure you're following the Accords and that you aren't attracting undue attention to yourselves. They're for your own safety."

"Well, what if I don't give a damn about my own safety?"

"Then you're putting other folks' safety at risk, and that ain't right," Tommy said. "And you ought not to be doin' that."

"You think waving a shotgun around like that's good for you?" Will asked the vampire.

"Yeah, I think we're a bit past that now, don't you?"

"Ah hell," Will grumbled to himself. "This ain't good."